From the latest reviews of The Last Superstition

"Edward Feser... is an immensely talented Aristotelico-Thomistic philosopher, and the pages he devotes to explaining the proofs for the existence of God are as clear, cogent, and convincing as any I’ve ever read (and I’ve read many)... Feser is most helpful when he explains that the New Atheism of Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens, and Harris is not — contrary to their noisy assertions — based on physical science. It is a philosophical argument, and one that is not as strong as the argument for theism." National Review

"New Atheists Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett, and Sam Harris get their comeuppance from philosopher Feser in the spirit with which they abuse believers... [Their] factual errors, half-truths, and mischaracterization Feser highlights with contemptuous glee... With energy and humor as well as transparent exposition, Feser reestablishes the unassailable superiority of classical philosophy." ALA Booklist (starred review)

Order your copy here. (Non-self-promoting posts to resume shortly...)

Adler on intellect

I have been remiss in my blogging duties. But further posts, and in particular, posts in continuation of my series on dualism, are forthcoming shortly. In the meantime, you might enjoy this exchange (in two parts, here and here, courtesy of YouTube) between William F. Buckley, Jr. and Mortimer Adler on the occasion of the publication of Adler's book Intellect: Mind Over Matter. The Aristotelian-Thomistic position defended in that book is relevant to some of the posts to follow.

After that, you might want to search for further videos of Adler on YouTube, of which there seem to be plenty. I am well aware, of course, that many mainstream academic philosophers dismiss Adler, because he (largely) wrote for a popular audience and took unfashionable positions. But here, as in so many other cases, such people simply don't know what the hell they are talking about. (I include my younger self, who also dismissed Adler before, you know, actually reading him...)

President Herod?

Robert P. George's two recent pieces on Obama's record vis-a-vis abortion and related matters are must reading. You can find them here and here (the second being co-written by Yuval Levin). I urge all readers to distribute them widely. We are told by Obama's sycophants that too much of the rhetoric directed against their candidate is "uncivil" and "inflammatory." But there are some things that cannot be described truthfully without also being described harshly. And that that is the case here, there can be no doubt. The word is evil.

What's Wrong with the World...

...you ask? Find out at the group blog by that name, to which I will now be contributing in addition to my regular posting here. The other contributors are Paul Cella, Jeff Martin, Lydia McGrew, Steve Burton, Daniel Larison, Zippy Catholic, and Francis Beckwith. A fine group of people, some of whom you might recognize from the late, lamented Right Reason blog. Check it out.

The preposterous Christopher Buckley

By now you may have heard that Christopher Buckley, son of the late William F. Buckley, Jr., and until yesterday a columnist for his father’s magazine National Review, has declared himself an Obama supporter and resigned his position at the magazine. His reasons? McCain has “changed,” Buckley tells us, having become “irascible and snarly” in the course of a failing campaign; “his positions change, and lack coherence; he makes unrealistic promises,” and his attack ads are “mean-spirited and pointless.” Buckley also dislikes McCain’s choice of Sarah Palin as a running mate.

This is very odd indeed coming from a man who tells us he cast a write-in vote for George H. W. Bush in 2004, and who supported Bob Dole against Bill Clinton in 1996. I recall the younger Buckley telling some interviewer after one of the Clinton-Dole debates that year that he thought Dole had done well, when he quite obviously had not, and was at that point running a pathetic and inept campaign notable for a desperate last-minute tax cut proposal that went nowhere - and which was transparently politically motivated given his reputation as the “tax collector for the welfare state” (as Newt Gingrich memorably labeled Dole). (I say all this, by the way, as someone who voted for Dole, or at least against Clinton.) Bush Sr., of course, is the man who chose Dan Quayle as his running mate and ran some famously harsh ads against Dukakis in 1988. (The “Willie Horton” ad was not among them - that was run by another group, not Bush’s campaign – but Bush ran similar ads.)

Now I am not suggesting for a moment that we should accept the usual liberal tripe about Quayle, the “Willie Horton” ads, etc. But neither should we accept the current tripe about the alleged “mean-spiritedness” of McCain’s ads, which is equally groundless; and those ads are in any case pretty tame compared to the (perfectly defensible) “Willie Horton” type stuff. If Buckley had no problem with Bush's ads, what's the big deal with McCain's? If he thinks Dole was worth supporting despite his desperate flip-flopping, why not McCain? If he thinks Bush’s choice of Quayle – who, despite the injustice of the standard liberal caricatures of him, was certainly no better a VP candidate than Palin is – did not cast doubt on Bush’s judgment, why does Buckley think McCain’s VP choice casts doubt on McCain’s?

There’s got to be more to Buckley’s switch than this, then, no? And so there is. In his latest piece he (quite rightly) decries the explosion in federal spending that has occurred under the current President Bush, and the corruption represented by the likes of Jack Abramoff, regarding all of this (again quite rightly) as a departure from true conservatism. “I haven’t left the Republican party,” he tells us in a Reaganesque flourish; “It left me.” (One wonders how long he’s been saving up that line.)

Yet McCain, who is acknowledged even by liberals to be a budget cutter and foe of corruption (or at least was so acknowledged by them before it became politically expedient to deny it) is in Buckley’s view not the right man for the job. Rather, true conservatism, and in particular smaller government, restrained spending, and lower taxes, can in Buckley’s view be secured by electing… Barack Obama. And the Democrats, the party of ACORN, will give us honest government. Buckley reminds us of his father’s support for drug legalization – fittingly, given that Christo has obviously been smoking something.

Buckley’s true motives, I would guess, are hinted at by his recourse to the standard leftist smears against religious conservatives, referring as he does to the “fatwas” directed against him and to the “Right Wing Sanhedrin.” It is even more evident in his passing acknowledgment (in his first piece) that “on abortion, gay marriage, et al, I’m libertarian” and his evident disgust (as expressed in his second piece) with the efforts made by some Republican politicians to intervene in the Terri Schiavo case (that is, to keep her from being starved to death by her husband – a little detail Buckley leaves out, swallowing the camel of cold-blooded murder that he might strain out any gnat that might taint his doctrinaire “federalism”). All of this coming from a man who claims that it is the Republicans who have abandoned true conservatism, and whose father – a devout Catholic and the man who more or less defined modern American conservatism – emphasized, from God and Man at Yale onward, that the defense of the moral and religious heritage of Western civilization must always be a central part of the conservative project. Without that (I would add) contemporary “conservatism” is really just libertarianism, which is itself just a riff on liberalism and not conservative at all.

The irrationality of Buckley’s position is only accented by his frivolous appeal in his defense to how “unpredictable” and “fun” his own father was, the elder Buckley’s sometimes eccentric positions having “tend[ed] to keep things fresh and lively and on-their-feet.” The country is in the middle of two wars and facing the worst economic crisis since the Depression, and Buckley decides the thing to do is “mix it up” a bit and have some laughs. This is the true conservatism the Republicans are to be condemned for abandoning?

It seems to me that if Buckley were honest, he would acknowledge that his true reason for bolting the Republican Party and backing Obama is that he has himself abandoned (if he ever truly believed in) what conservatism has always been, and on top of that decided that his social libertarianism trumps his economic libertarianism. For there is, I submit, no other way plausibly to explain his actions: Obama is far less conservative than McCain on economics, to say nothing of the Democratic majority he would have at his command; but Obama and the Democratic mainstream are perfectly simpatico with Buckley’s views on abortion, “same-sex marriage,” and euthanasia. And it is hard not to wonder whether Buckley’s greatest beef with Gov. Palin is that her ascendency ensures that the social conservatism he apparently despises will remain at the center of the conservative movement, whether or not McCain wins in November. (Perhaps this is what he truly regards as McCain’s most unacceptable “change,” for McCain has, after all, long been distrusted by social conservatives. That he has now single-handedly revived their fortunes must be particularly galling for anyone devoted to Buckley’s brand of “conservatism.”) But then, emphasizing these things would hardly have allowed Buckley to depart from the fold with a self-righteous “more conservative than thou” flair.

But perhaps this credits Buckley’s decision with greater coherence and rationality than actually lay behind it. Perhaps there is nothing more here than what meets the eye: an ill-considered, muddleheaded, ungracious exercise in bandwagon punditry by an unserious man.

Guilt by association?

Anyone who has taught logic knows that once students have learned about the main logical fallacies they start seeing them everywhere – and mostly where they don’t exist. Not every use of emotional language involves the fallacy of “appeal to emotion.” Not every appeal to some authority counts as a fallacious argumentum ad verecundiam. Calling someone a name does not necessarily make one guilty of committing an ad hominem fallacy. And so forth. It takes subtlety of thought, interpretative fair-mindedness, and experience to be able to determine when some argument truly commits a fallacy, as opposed (say) to being merely incomplete or awkwardly stated, offering a mere illustration (rather than making a hasty generalization), or concluding on the basis of objective, rational grounds that such-and-such a person is morally corrupt or incompetent (rather than simply flinging around harsh rhetoric).

In particular, while fallacies are no doubt very common in political contexts, my view is that they are far less common there than is often supposed. Given the nature of democratic politics, it is difficult or impossible for any politician to make a very sophisticated case for a policy in the course of the standard political stump speech or debate, and unreasonable to expect him to. The average voter simply does not have the time, interest, patience, or expertise required to understand the relevant issues. Hence a politician seeking to persuade his audience has inevitably to rely on slogans, anecdotes, illustrations, jokes, and at most very simple arguments. He has to leave logical gaps in his presentation of his case, but gaps that could easily be filled in by the politician himself, or at least by his more skilled supporters or advisers, if the opportunity presented itself, and which a reasonable and reasonably well-informed listener would also be able to fill in for himself. This is true of conservatives and liberals alike. While it is easy and satisfying to pretend that it is the people whose politics you dislike who commit all the fallacies and right-minded people like yourself whose arguments are always complete, well-thought out, and free of error, this is a self-serving fantasy. Each side is “guilty” of presenting crude simplifications in the standard contexts (debates, political conventions, etc.) but each side (or at least the better informed representatives of each side) could also, if given the chance, make a sophisticated case for his position by appealing (say) to various technical economic or moral-theoretic considerations. One reason they do not do this in such contexts (though of course not the only reason) is that the average voter would tune out in about five seconds.

What, then, of Sarah Palin’s accusation against Barack Obama that his association with likes of William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn shows him to be a man who “pals around with terrorists”? We are assured by her critics that she has committed a fallacy of “guilt by association.” But has she? She has not. Consider first that the most clearly fallacious attributions of guilt by association are instances of the formal fallacy of the undistributed middle term, as in: Bigots oppose hate crime laws; Jones opposes hate crime laws; so Jones is a bigot. This is an attribution of guilt by association because it alleges that the fact that bigotry is associated with opposition to hate crime laws and that Jones is associated with opposition to hate crime laws shows that Jones is associated with bigotry. It is fallacious because, given that the middle term those who oppose hate crime laws is undistributed, the argument shows no such thing. The fact that bigots oppose hate crime laws doesn’t entail that all those who oppose hate crime laws, such as Jones, are necessarily bigots, any more than the fact that all cats are furry shows that all furry things are cats. Some people who oppose hate crime laws might (indeed, do) oppose them for reasons having nothing to do with bigotry; for example, they might fear that such laws could lead to restrictions on freedom of speech, or that they amount to a totalitarian attempt to punish certain politically incorrect thoughts.

Now Gov. Palin is not guilty of this sort of reasoning. Her reasoning seems instead to go something like this: Ayers and Dohrn are terrorists; Obama pals around with Ayers and Dohrn; therefore Obama pals around with terrorists. Unlike the sort of “guilt by association” embodied by the fallacy of the undistributed middle term, this argument is formally valid. Are its premises true? Well, Ayers and Dohrn certainly were terrorists, apparently by Obama’s own (belated) admission; and while they’ve now left that “line of work,” they are also apparently unrepentant about having engaged in it. So while they are no longer active as terrorists, it is arguably no less implausible to assert now that Ayers and Dohrn are terrorists than it would have been to assert in 2001 (the year before his death) that Abu Nidal is a terrorist, even though he was at the time retired and living unrepentantly in Baghdad.

Regarding the second premise, we know that Obama had a long-standing and friendly professional relationship with Ayers (and, if less directly, with Dohrn, who is Ayers’ wife). It would be silly to quibble over whether this amounts to “palling around”; if we changed the second premise to Obama has a friendly and long-standing professional relationship with Ayers and Dohrn and, accordingly, the conclusion to Obama has a friendly and long-standing professional relationship with terrorists, it would hardly be less damning.

Does the argument nevertheless commit what Antony Flew calls the “masked man fallacy”? This is the sort of fallacy committed in an argument like: Commissioner Gordon knows that Batman wears a bat costume; Batman is Bruce Wayne; therefore Commissioner Gordon knows that Bruce Wayne wears a bat costume. The argument would commit this fallacy (if at all) only if, just as Commissioner Gordon doesn’t know that Batman is Bruce Wayne, neither does Obama know that Ayers and Dohrn are terrorists. But of course Obama not only knows this now, but has known it as long as he has known them, because everyone, especially in the circles in which they and Obama both ran, knew it.

Is the force of the argument undermined by the fact that Obama no longer “pals around” with them? To think so would be to entertain another silly quibble. Their association ended only a few years ago, and evidently for political reasons; indeed, it was only because of political pressure that Obama recently distanced himself from them, just as it was only because of political pressure that he distanced himself from the repulsive demagogue Jeremiah Wright. And again, if we altered the argument to take account of this quibble, the result would hardly be less damning: Ayers and Dohrn are terrorists; Obama had a friendly and long-standing professional relationship with Ayers and Dohrn, at least until political motives led him to distance himself from them; therefore Obama had a friendly and long-standing professional relationship with terrorists, at least until political motives led him to distance himself from them.

So, quibbles aside, Gov. Palin’s accusation seems to be a straightforward statement of easily verifiable fact. But what about the objection that it nevertheless distracts us from the “real issues” (e.g. the economy)? Is she saying something true but unimportant? Surely not. As others have pointed out, were a Republican – Gov. Palin herself, say – known to have had a friendly and long-standing professional relationship with someone like an aged and unrepentant Terry Nichols (Timothy McVeigh’s accomplice), then liberals would quite rightly regard this as very serious evidence that such a Republican is unworthy of the presidency. They would (again quite rightly) have no scruples about saying that such a Republican “pals around” with terrorists, and would not pretend that pointing this out was somehow a distraction from the “real issues.”

In particular, if such a Republican not only “palled around” with the likes of Nichols, but also had a decades-long relationship with someone like David Duke, had Duke officiate at his wedding (supposing Duke got a minister’s license for the occasion), borrowed a line from one of Duke’s speeches for the title of his book, etc., then liberals would – once again, quite rightly – regard this as an outrage, and, more to the point, as very strong evidence that such a Republican secretly held very extreme views even if he portrayed himself as mild and moderate in public.

But of course, this is exactly parallel to what we know of Obama – and yet Obama’s supporters expect us to disregard his associations with Ayers, Dohrn, Wright, et al., and take his public nice-guy persona at face value. It seems to me there can be only two reasons for this attitude, one irrational, the other worse than irrational: either Obama’s supporters, who have so much invested in him politically and emotionally, simply cannot face the ugly implications of his associations; or they do not care about these implications, and perhaps even sympathize themselves with the despicable and extreme views held by these associates of Obama. I have no doubt that a great many of Obama’s supporters, indeed probably most of them, fit the first description. But it is hard not to worry that a significant number of them fit the second.

Finally, some might object – indeed, some have objected – that Gov. Palin’s remarks are inflammatory. Even if they are, that doesn’t show that they are not true. And if they are true, as they certainly seem to be, then if people fear the possibility of an Obama presidency as a result of them, that is Obama’s fault, not Palin’s. Surely voters have a right to know whether a candidate has such associates – whether on the extreme right or the extreme left – and are right to believe that such associations constitute serious (if of course not infallible) evidence concerning the candidate’s true views, and concerning the soundness of his judgment. Again, suppose a Republican were known to have associated himself with the likes of Nichols and Duke, in the manner described above. If liberals were to make a fuss over this, as they would be right to do, then people would, rightly, come to fear such a Republican. And the Republican himself would be to blame in such a case, not the liberals. If a politician does not want people to fear and loathe him, he should not do things to make himself seem worthy of fear and loathing.

Ironically, if anyone has committed a fallacy of guilt by association in this connection, it is Obama’s defenders. Rep. John Lewis recently disgracefully insinuated that Sen. McCain and Gov. Palin are comparable to the segregationist George Wallace, apparently on the basis of the following sort of reasoning: McCain and Palin have stirred up fear; racists like Wallace stirred up fear; therefore McCain and Palin are racists like Wallace. Note that this argument is of the same structure as the “Bigots oppose hate crime laws” example given above, and just as fallacious. As is so often the case with left-wing criticism of conservatives, what we have here seems to be an instance of what the pop psychologists call projection.

The interaction problem

Aristotle and the Scholastic tradition influenced by him famously held that to understand a thing required knowing each of its four causes: its material cause, the stuff out of which it is made; its formal cause, the specific form or essence that stuff has taken on, and which makes it the kind of thing it is; its efficient cause, that which brought it into existence; and its final cause, the end or purpose toward which it is directed. Modern thought is largely defined by its rejection of two of Aristotle's four causes. For the moderns, there are no such things as substantial forms or fixed essences, and there are no ends or purposes in nature. There are just brute material elements related by purposeless, meaningless, mechanical chains of cause and effect.

As I have emphasized in my series of posts on dualism, this “mechanical” conception of nature, insofar as it stripped matter of anything smacking of either goal-directedness or sensible qualities as common sense understands them, and relocated these features into the mind, more or less automatically entailed a Cartesian form of dualism on which intentionality and qualia are immaterial as a matter of conceptual necessity. But it also automatically entailed that this form of dualism would suffer from the notorious “interaction problem.”

For the moderns, all causation gets reduced to what the Aristotelians called efficient causation; that is to say, for A to have a causal influence on B is for A either to bring B into being or at least in some way to bring into existence some modification of B. Final causality is ruled out; hence there is no place in modern thought for the idea that B might play an explanatory role relative to A insofar as generating B is the end or goal toward which A is directed. Formal causality is also ruled out; there is no question for the moderns of a material object’s being (partially) explained by reference to the substantial form it instantiates. We are supposed instead to make reference only to patterns of efficient causal relations holding between basic material elements (atoms, or corpuscles, or quarks, or whatever).

Thus, if the mind considered as immaterial is to have any explanatory role with respect to bodily behavior, this can only be by way of some pattern of efficient causal relations – to put it crudely, in terms of a Cartesian immaterial substance (or perhaps various immaterial properties) “banging” into the material substance (or material properties) of the brain like the proverbial billiard ball. How exactly this is supposed to work is notoriously difficult to explain. We’ve got two independently existing objects (or two independently existing sets of properties) somehow interacting the way physical particles or billiard balls do, or perhaps the way waves or fields of force do – except that one of these objects (or sets of properties) is utterly devoid of any of the material features that make it possible for something to count as a particle, billiard ball, wave, or field of force. Add to this considerations like the conservation of energy and interaction between the material and immaterial realms comes to seem ruled out in principle by our current understanding of the way the material world works.

But from an Aristotelian-Scholastic point of view, this whole picture of the mind-body relationship is hopelessly wrongheaded from start to finish. It is wrong to think of the soul (of which the intellect is for Aristotelians but a part, not the whole) and the body as independent objects in the first place. The soul is rather a form that informs the matter of the body and the body is the matter which is informed. As with the form and matter of a stone, tree, or earthworm, what we have here are not two substances interacting via efficient causation, but rather two metaphysical components of one substance related by formal causation. As the form of the stone is to the matter making up the stone, the form of the tree to the matter making up the tree, and the form of the earthworm to the matter that makes up the earthworm, so too is the human soul to the human body. There is in principle no such thing as the matter of a stone, tree, or earthworm apart from the form of a stone, tree, or earthworm respectively, and no such thing as the form of any of these things existing apart from their matter. The form and matter don’t “interact” as if they were two distinct objects; rather, the form constitutes the matter as the (one) kind of object it is in the first place.

Similarly, there is in principle no such thing as the matter of a living human body without a human soul and there is in principle no such thing as a human soul which is not the soul of some body. (This does not entail that the soul cannot survive the death of the body, only that it could not have existed in the first place unless it was united to some body; but this is a topic that can be bracketed off for present purposes.) The soul doesn’t “interact” with the body considered as an independently existing object, but rather constitutes the matter of the human body as a human body in the first place, as its formal (as opposed to efficient) cause.

As I move my fingers across the keyboard, then, what is occurring is not the transfer of energy (or whatever) from some Cartesian immaterial substance to a material one (my brain), which sets up a series of neural events that are from that point on “on their own” as it were, with no further action required of the soul. There is just one substance, namely me, though a substance the understanding of which requires taking note of each of its formal-, material-, final- and efficient-causal aspects. To be sure, my action counts as writing a blog post rather than (say) undergoing a muscular spasm in part because of the specific pattern of neural events, muscular contractions, and so forth underlying it. But only in part. Yet that does not mean that there is an entirely separate set of events occurring in a separate substance that somehow influences, from outside as it were, the goings on in the body. Rather, the neuromuscular processes are by themselves only the material-cum-efficient causal aspect of a single event of which my thoughts and intentions are the formal-cum-final causal aspect. There is simply no way fully and accurately to describe the one event in question without making reference to each of these aspects. Just as there is no such thing as the matter of a stone or tree apart from the form of a stone or tree, there is no such thing as the “physical” side of my action apart from the “mental” side. To make reference to the “physical” side alone would simply be to leave out half of the story, and indeed the most important half, just as describing the word “cat” in a way that makes reference to the shapes of the letters, the chemicals in the ink in which it is written, and so forth, while never saying anything about the meaning of the word, would leave out the most crucial part of that story.

As psychologist Jerome Kagan emphasizes in his recent book An Argument for Mind (my review of which can be found here) the trouble with trying to pick out some particular pattern of neural or other physiological events and identify some mental event with it (or in any other way attempt entirely to explain the mental in terms of the physiological) is that the same physiological pattern can underlie different mental events and the same mental event can be associated with different physiological patterns. This is a problem well-known to students of the history of the mind-brain identity theory (cf. Davidson’s anomalous monism), though it seems to me that many philosophers do not appreciate just how deep the problem goes, and how thoroughly devastating it is to materialism. As writers like James F. Ross have argued, at least some of our mental states are determinate in a way that no material process or set of processes can be even in principle, so that the hope of making mental states out to be identical with or supervenient upon physical states is an illusion. Without formal and final causes, it is inevitable that the project of assigning some specific, determinate mental content to this or that material substrate will come to grief. (Thus does the interaction problem arise in a new form even for materialists themselves, under the guise of the “mental causation problem.”)

Hence there can, on an Aristotelian-Scholastic view, be no question of some uniquely identifiable set of physiological events with which an independently identifiable set of mental events needs somehow to be correlated in efficient causal terms. There is just the one event of writing the blog post, of which the formal, material, efficient, and final causal components are irreducible aspects. The question of "interaction," in the relevant sense, simply cannot even get off the ground. As is so often the case with objections raised against modern defenses of traditional philosophical views (such as theism and natural law ethics), the interaction problem facing Cartesian forms of dualism arises precisely because these forms of dualism are modern, precisely because they take on board certain modern (especially mechanistic and/or nominalistic) assumptions which they (like theists and natural law theorists) ought instead to repudiate.

I have said much more about all of this in Philosophy of Mind and (especially) The Last Superstition, and I will say more about some of these issues in further posts to come in my series on brief arguments for dualism. The point for now is just to highlight that what we have here is yet another respect (among a great many others that I describe in detail in TLS) in which the early modern philosophers’ transition away from Aristotelianism to a mechanical understanding of nature constituted not an advance but a regression, a willful forgetting of crucial distinctions and categories the drawing and elucidation of which had been one of the great achievements of Scholasticism, and a conceptual impoverishment that inevitably created problems rather than solved them. The interaction problem was by no means the least, or last, of these problems.

Conservatism and libertarianism

I used to be a "fusionist," someone who held that conservatism could be harmonized with libertarianism. I no longer believe that. You can be a conservative who sympathizes with certain ideas associated with libertarianism -- the market economy, limited government, and so forth -- but (as I now think) you cannot be both a conservative and a libertarian, in any interesting sense of the word "libertarian." So much the worse for libertarianism. Some of the reasons for this change in view are summarized in my article "The Conservative Critique of Libertarianism," which I wrote for the new Encyclopedia of Libertarianism, edited by Ronald Hamowy. A preview of the Encyclopedia can be found here on Google Book Search, and includes my article. It can be found at pp. 95-97.

Some brief arguments for dualism, Part III

In the previous post in this series, I argued that the “mechanistic” conception of the natural world adopted by the early modern philosophers more or less entails a kind of dualism insofar as its banishment of final causes from the material world effectively makes intentionality necessarily immaterial. Intentionality, of course, is one of two features of the mind to which contemporary philosophers of mind have paid special attention. The other is consciousness, and in particular the “qualia” that are said to make consciousness uniquely difficult to explain in material terms. There is a good reason for this difficulty – indeed, impossibility – and it is the same reason why intentionality is impossible to explain in materialistic terms. It lies in the mechanistic conception of matter itself.

The early modern philosophers and scientists were obsessed with quantification. There were several reasons for this, one of them being their desire to reorient intellectual efforts toward the improvement of life in this world and away from the otherworldliness of the ancients and medievals. This entailed a new emphasis on technology and more generally on the control and exploitation of the natural world in the interests of bettering man’s material condition. Since quantification would facilitate this, those aspects of nature that could be described in purely mathematical terms took on a special importance, and those which could not came to seem, from the point of view of this new, worldly approach to learning, irrelevant at best and a distraction at worst. Thus did final causes, hidden powers, substantial forms and the like go out the window. So too did the qualitative aspects of nature. Colors, odors, tastes, feels, sounds, and the like, at least as understood by common sense, vary from observer to observer – think of old philosophical chestnuts like the room temperature water that feels warm to one hand and cool to the other, colorblindness, and so forth – making them a poor fit for a science looking to make nature subject to human prediction and control. Out the window with them too, then. The physical world would be redefined as comprised of colorless, odorless, tasteless particles in motion; and color, temperature, and the like would be redefined entirely in terms of the quantifiable relations holding between these particles (e.g. heat and cold in terms of molecular motion). What about color, odor, taste, and so forth as common sense understands them? They in turn were redefined as entirely mind-dependent “secondary qualities” (or rather, ideas of secondary qualities), the ancestors of the contemporary philosopher’s concept of qualia. On the view in question, they do not exist in the physical world as it is in itself, but only in our perceptual representation of that world.

It should be obvious, then, how, as with intentionality, the notion that qualia are incapable of materialistic explanation is not some desperate attempt to avoid the implications of modern science, but is rather precisely a consequence of modern science. The mechanistic conception of matter that underlies science (or rather underlies what, since the 17th century, is allowed to count as science) itself entails that qualia (as we call them today) are immaterial or non-physical. Many early modern thinkers – Descartes, Cudworth, and Locke, for example – saw this, which is part of the reason they were dualists. Given the mechanistic conception of matter, these thinkers concluded that “secondary qualities,” “sensory qualities,” “qualia,” or whatever else you want to call them are necessarily immaterial, precisely because matter got (re)defined by the mechanical philosophy by contrast with these qualities.

Some contemporary naturalists – Joseph Levine, Thomas Nagel, and John Searle, for example – have more or less recognized this, acknowledging that there is nothing more to the contemporary materialist’s concept of matter (which derives from the 17th century “mechanical” conception) other than its contrast with the “qualitative” (and intentional) features of our experience of the world. Precisely for this reason, all three of these thinkers have (in their different ways) regarded modern materialism as deeply conceptually problematic, though they have also stopped short of embracing dualism. But other contemporary naturalists – Dennett and the Churchlands, for example, not to mention countless lesser lights of the sort who write crude atheist pamphlets and pop neuroscience books – cluelessly suggest that there is no good reason to think that the mind will fail to yield to the same sort of reductive explanation in terms of which everything else in nature has been accounted for.

In fact there is a very good reason why the mind should be uniquely resistant to such “explanation,” and it precisely because everything that doesn’t fit the mechanistic-cum-quantificational picture of the natural world has not been “explained” by science at all, but simply swept under the rug of the mind and treated as a mere “projection.” This is true in particular of anything in nature that seems to smack of final causality or to have an irreducible qualitative (as opposed to quantitative) character. It is conceptually impossible that the mind itself should be “explained” in the same way – that is to say, by further sweeping – which is why modern philosophy has a “mind-body problem” of a sort that did not exist before the mechanistic revolution, and why all materialist attempts to “explain” the mind are really disguised versions of eliminative materialism. The tiresome canard that “everything else has already been explained in materialistic terms” is thus a gigantic shell game, pure sleight of hand, a complete fraud from start to finish. (This is a theme I first explored in my book Philosophy of Mind and develop at length in The Last Superstition.)

In any case, we have now a third brief argument for dualism, which can be summarized as follows: Given the materialist’s own (mechanistic-cum-quantificational) conception of matter, colors, odors, tastes and the like as we experience them do not exist in the material world itself; but these qualities do exist in our perceptual representations of the material world; therefore, there exist features of the world – namely these sensory qualities or “qualia” that characterize our perceptual experiences – that are not material or physical features.

Obviously this argument raises questions about how these immaterial features relate to the material ones – Are they basic or emergent? How can they causally interact with the material ones? Do they inhere in a physical or a non-physical substance? – but the fact that it raises them has no bearing on the cogency of the argument itself. My own view is that the standard (Cartesian) dualist answers to such questions are problematic precisely because they buy into the same mechanistic conception of matter to which materialists are beholden. The right approach is to challenge that conception of matter, and return to the Aristotelian-Scholastic picture it replaced. But whether I am right about this or not is also irrelevant to the argument just given, which does not assume any Aristotelian-Scholastic premises, but simply draws out the consequences of the very conception of matter to which materialists themselves are committed. Whatever the deficiencies of Cartesian dualism, they do not approach the sheer incoherence and cluelessness of contemporary materialism.

Vallicella on intentionality and potentiality

Over at Maverick Philosopher, Bill Vallicella takes note of some important analogies between, on the one hand, the potentialities and dispositions we find in material world, and on the other hand, the intentionality that Brentano famously took to be the mark of the mental. I pretty much endorse everything he says; indeed, Bill’s observations dovetail nicely with some of what I say in the second of my recent posts on dualism.

Still, in reply to that post, Bill today comments:

“What is less clear to me is whether intentionality strictly speaking is to be found in the material world, as Ed suggests in the first paragraph, or whether it is only something analogous to intentionality, a sort of proto-intentionality, that is found in the material world. My recent defense of the Potentiality Argument against the moral acceptability of abortion commits me to holding that there are irreducible potentialities in nature below the level of conscious mind. And perhaps this should soften me up for hylomorphic dualism, which is Ed's preferred solution to the mind-body problem. But I find some difficulties with hylomorphic dualism.”

In response, I would say, first of all, that I suppose it depends on what one means by “intentionality.” The Brentano-inspired definition Bill makes use of in his original post makes reference only to “aboutness” or directedness toward an object. And if that is all that intentionality entails, then it seems to me that the position I endorse, but also the position Bill defends, does indeed imply that intentionality exists in the material world below the level of consciousness, wherever potentialities and dispositions (or “potencies” and “powers” as we Aristotelian Scholastics would say) are found. Interestingly, this is a view that is coming to be taken seriously by thinkers well outside the orbit of either the Aristotelian-Thomistic-Scholastic family of views to which I am partial, or the more general blend of traditional metaphysical views to which Bill is sympathetic. David Armstrong, for example, has suggested that dispositions manifest a kind of “proto-intentionality.” The late George Molnar argued that causal powers cannot be understood except as instances of what he called “physical intentionality,” to distinguish it from the sort of intentionality mental states exhibit. The biologist J. Scott Turner argues that we must attribute a kind of “intentionality” to certain biological processes if we are to make sense of the distinction between the normal development of an organism and aberrant growth patterns. These are just a few examples; and in my view they support the conclusion that the Aristotelian-Scholastic notions of potencies, powers, and final causes are not only defensible today, but are in fact surprisingly widely defended today, even if those doing the defending often do not realize (given differences in jargon and certain false assumptions about what the Scholastics believed) that that is what they are doing. (I discuss this issue at length in The Last Superstition.)

Of course, given its typical usage, the term “intentionality” does smack of mentality, so that the idea of “intentionality below the level of consciousness” might seem jarring. And the medievals from whom Brentano derived the term did indeed use “intentional” as a way of characterizing the objects of the intellect. (To describe the phenomena Bill, along with Armstrong, Molnar, Turner, et al. are interested in, the medievals would just have spoken of potencies, powers, final causes, and the like, not intentionality.) So it is certainly defensible to suggest that “intentionality” be reserved to describe the kind of directedness that is associated with grasping something with the intellect (as we do but physical objects manifesting potentialities, dispositions, etc. do not), and perhaps more generally to describe the sort of directedness that animals exhibit in their various states of conscious awareness (as even creatures without intellects can do). In short, it seems to me that if there is a difference between Bill and me over the existence of intentionality below the level of mind, it is probably a verbal one.

Regarding hylomorphic dualism (or “hylemorphic” dualism, as it is sometimes spelled), I suppose someone could in theory accept the existence of irreducible dispositions, final causes, and the like without going the whole hog for Aristotelian hylemorphism and the sort of dualism thinkers like Aquinas would build on it. So we can bracket that question off for now. Still, it does seem to me that once one concedes the existence of inherent potentialities, powers, etc., then since these potentialities, powers, and the like are the potentialities, powers, etc. of certain kinds of thing (such embryos and acorns, to use Bill’s examples), one is also well on the way to conceding something like Aristotelian essentialism, which brings the question of hylemorphism onto center stage. But, again, that is a matter for another time.

Free speech in Los Angeles?

Not if "progressive" vandals, and the city government, have anything to say about it, according to this story. I live not too far from the house pictured at the left, and have always wondered whether they got any trouble over their (gigantic, and -- here in lefty-dominated L.A. -- refreshing) McCain sign. Now I know. (Hat tip: The Corner.)

Some brief arguments for dualism, Part II

Following Aristotle, the Scholastic tradition famously held that final causes – goal-directedness, purposiveness, natural ends – permeate the natural world. Contrary to a popular misconception, this does not mean that they thought that everything in the world has a purpose or function in the sense that biological organs have purposes or functions. Hence it is no good to accuse them of thinking, absurdly, that piles of dirt, asteroids, mountain ranges, and the like simply must play some role within the universe as a whole that is somehow analogous to the role hearts and kidneys play in the body. Functions like the kind bodily organs play constitute only one, relatively rare, kind of final causality. Nor did they think that final causality is generally associated with anything like consciousness. For an Aristotelian to say that a plant by virtue of its nature “wants” to grow is just a figure of speech. Literally speaking the plant does not, of course, want anything at all, since it is totally unconscious. It is only in us, and in certain other animals, that final causes are associated with conscious awareness.

What the Scholastics did have in mind is summed up in Aquinas’s dictum that “every agent acts for an end,” otherwise known as the “principle of finality.” By an “agent” he means that which brings about or causes some effect. And what he is saying is that when a certain cause generates a certain effect or range of effects in a law-like way (as we would say today) that is only because it naturally “points to“ or is “directed towards” that effect or range of effects as its proper end. For example, a match when struck will, unless prevented (e.g. by being water damaged), generate flame and heat – and flame and heat specifically rather than frost and cold, or the smell of lilacs, or no effect at all. It has an inherent causal power to bring about that effect specifically. What Aquinas and the other Scholastics argued is that unless we acknowledge the existence of such inherent powers, unless we recognize that whenever a certain efficient cause A generates its effect B that is only because the generation of B is the final cause or natural end of A, then we have no way of making intelligible why it is exactly that A generates B specifically rather than some other effect or no effect at all. The existence of final causes is, in this sense, a necessary condition for the existence of efficient causes – of, that is to say, causation as modern philosophers tend to understand it. This is one reason Aquinas held the final cause to be “the cause of causes.”

Now modern philosophy, and in particular modern philosophy’s conception of science, is defined more than anything else by its rejection of final causes. Indeed, as philosophers like William Hasker and David Hull have pointed out, at this point in the history of science, what remains of the “mechanistic” picture of the natural world which we have inherited from the early moderns is really nothing but this rejection. As I argue in The Last Superstition, there has never really been any serious philosophical case for this rejection; it was, and still is, more ideologically than intellectually motivated. Moreover, there are in my view (and, again, as I argue in TLS) overwhelming reasons to think it was a mistake. One of them is that, as Hume’s famous puzzles illustrate, causation has indeed become seriously problematic in modern philosophy in exactly the way Aquinas’s analysis would lead us to expect it to, given the abandonment of final causes.

The abandonment of final causes has also crucially contributed to the creation of the “mind-body problem,” something that did not exist, certainly not in anything like the form familiar to contemporary philosophers, prior to the moderns’ rejection of the Aristotelian-Scholastic metaphysical framework. For to insist that the material world is utterly devoid of final causes – devoid, that is to say, of anything that inherently “points to” or is “directed toward” anything beyond itself – is implicitly to deny that intentionality could possibly be material, for intentionality, of course, is just the mind’s capacity to point to or be directed towards something beyond itself, as it does in thought. (See my previous post in this series.) Hence to insist that the material world is devoid of any inherent final causes while at the same time acknowledging the existence of intentionality is implicitly to commit oneself to dualism. Indeed, this is surely one reason why Descartes, one of the fathers of the “mechanistic” revolution in science, was a dualist. Far from being a kind of pre-scientific holdover, dualism of the broadly Cartesian sort is a logical consequence of the turn to mechanism that defined the scientific revolution.

The only way to hold on to the mechanistic conception of nature while rejecting dualism is thus to deny the existence of intentionality. And that is why, as John Searle has argued, all extant forms of materialism do indeed implicitly deny its existence, and thus (I would say) amount to disguised forms of eliminative materialism. This is halfway admitted by Jerry Fodor when he writes, as he does in Psychosemantics, that “if aboutness [i.e. intentionality] is real, it must be really something else.” That is to say, intentionality per se simply cannot be real given the mechanistic conception of the material world that Fodor, like all materialists, has inherited from the early modern philosophers. Hence the most the materialist can do is try to substitute for it some physicalistically “respectable” ersatz. But this is simply eliminative materialism in “folk psychological” drag; and eliminative materialism, however you dress it up, is simply incoherent. (Yet again, see TLS, and in particular chapter 6, for the details.)

We have, then, another brief argument for dualism, which can be summarized as follows: If materialism is true, then (given that it is committed to a mechanistic conception of the material world), there are no final causes, and thus nothing that inherently “points to” or is “directed at” anything beyond itself; and in that case, there can be no such thing as intentionality; but there is such a thing as intentionality; therefore materialism is not true.

This is an argument for dualism, I should say, at least if one admits that the material world exists in the first place (which, of course, everyone other than a few adherents of idealism would admit), because it implies that there are features of the world other than its material features. The only way to avoid the dualistic consequences (other than opting for eliminativism or idealism) would be to acknowledge that the Aristotelians were right after all, and that final causes are a real feature of material reality. But that would, of course, be to abandon the entire modern mechanistic-cum-materialistic interpretation of science. Nor would it really stave off dualism for long, for it would simply open the door to the Thomistic or hylemorphic (as opposed to Cartesian) version of dualism. But that is a story for another time – a story which, like other details of the argument sketched here, can be found (if I might be forgiven one more shameless plug) in The Last Superstition.

Some brief arguments for dualism, Part I

It is unreasonable to expect even the best argument for a controversial philosophical position to be capable, in one fell swoop and all by itself, of convincing the most skeptical opponent – or, indeed, even to move him slightly in the direction of reconsidering his position. That is (usually, anyway) simply not how the human mind works. A dispute over some particular argument for the existence of God, mind-body dualism, or traditional sexual morality (to take just three examples) can reflect a tacit disagreement about fundamental metaphysical assumptions that is so deep and unconscious that the parties to the dispute (or at least one party, usually the skeptical or “naturalist” one) are barely aware that it exists at all, and often talk past each other as a result. What seems like an obvious objection to an argument can often constitute in reality a failure to see the point of the argument, and in particular a failure to see that what the argument does is precisely to call into question the intelligibility or rational justifiability of the objection itself. While the argument in question can in many cases be stated fairly simply and straightforwardly, pages and pages, indeed an entire book, might be required in order to set the stage so that its terms and basic assumptions are properly understood, and that countless point-missing objections might patiently be swept away like so much intellectual rubbish standing in the way of understanding.

Some common objections to dualism are like this. They falsely assume, for example, that any argument for dualism must be something analogous to a “God of the gaps” argument – a “soul of the gaps,” as it were – which seeks to exploit some current lacuna in our knowledge of the brain and to suggest that the “hypothesis” of an immaterial substance might explain what neuroscientists have so far been unable to. It is then objected that such an explanation would violate Ockham’s razor, that neuroscience has already “explained” x, y, and z and thus can be expected to explain everything else, etc. etc. I hear these objections frequently. They are often presented by people who mean well, and who are not entirely uninformed about some of the arguments presented by both materialists and anti-materialists in the philosophy of mind. But they nevertheless reflect a very shallow understanding of the debate. For the main arguments for dualism do not have this structure at all. They are not quasi-scientific “explanatory” “hypotheses” which “postulate” the existence of this or that as one way among others (albeit the most “probable”) of “accounting for” “the evidence.” They are intended rather as strict metaphysical demonstrations. They either prove conclusively that the mind is immaterial or they prove nothing. And if they work, there can be no question of the materialist looking for other possible ways to explain “the data.” For the existence of an immaterial mind, or an immaterial aspect to the mind, will, given such a proof, simply have itself to be taken as a piece of data for which any acceptable theory has to account.

Again, this doesn’t mean that one should judge such arguments based on one’s immediate reaction to a first reading; to prove something conclusively doesn’t mean to prove it instantly, to the immediate satisfaction of the most hostile and stubborn skeptic. Even properly understanding an argument, especially in metaphysics, can require a great deal of effort and sustained thought. Still, some dualist arguments are straightforward enough that at least their basic thrust can be put fairly succinctly, even if a complete treatment would require various further explanations of this or that premise or key concept. In this post and several succeeding ones I want to present some of these arguments, in as brief a form as possible. (Further elaboration can be found in my books Philosophy of Mind and The Last Superstition.)

One aspect of the mind that philosophers have traditionally considered particularly difficult to account for in materialist terms is intentionality, which is that feature of a mental state in virtue of which it means, is about, represents, points to, or is directed at something, usually something beyond itself. Your thought about your car, for example, is about your car – it means or represents your car, and thus “points to” or is “directed at” your car. In this way it is like the word “car,” which is about, or represents, cars in general. Notice, though, that considered merely as a set of ink marks or (if spoken) sound waves, “car” doesn’t represent or mean anything at all; it is, by itself anyway, nothing but a meaningless pattern of ink marks or sound waves, and acquires whatever meaning it has from language users like us, who, with our capacity for thought, are able to impart meaning to physical shapes, sounds, and the like.

Now the puzzle intentionality poses for materialism can be summarized this way: Brain processes, like ink marks, sound waves, the motion of water molecules, electrical current, and any other physical phenomenon you can think of, seem clearly devoid of any inherent meaning. By themselves they are simply meaningless patterns of electrochemical activity. Yet our thoughts do have inherent meaning – that’s how they are able to impart it to otherwise meaningless ink marks, sound waves, etc. In that case, though, it seems that our thoughts cannot possibly be identified with any physical processes in the brain. In short: Thoughts and the like possess inherent meaning or intentionality; brain processes, like ink marks, sound waves, and the like, are utterly devoid of any inherent meaning or intentionality; so thoughts and the like cannot possibly be identified with brain processes.

You can, as I have implied, look at this as just a “puzzle” for materialism – one which might be solved by developing a complex functional analysis of mental states, or by framing materialism in terms of the concept of “supervenience” rather than identity or reduction, or whatever. Or you can see it as a very simple and straightforward statement of an objection that, while it can also be formulated in much more sophisticated and technical terms and in a way that takes account of and preempts the various objections materialists might try to raise against it, nevertheless goes to the core of the problem with materialism, and indeed shows why materialism cannot be true. This latter view is the one I endorse. I maintain that the problem for materialism just described is insuperable. It shows that a materialist explanation of the mind is impossible in principle, a conceptual impossibility. And the reason has in part to do with the concept of matter to which materialists themselves are at least implicitly committed. Some of the further posts in this series will develop this suggestion. Along the way we will see (among other things) that the common materialist claim that “everything else has been explained in materialist terms” is an urban legend, based on nothing more than conceptual sleight of hand coupled with historical ignorance. Stay tuned.

Philosophy and polemics

Readers of The Last Superstition will find that it is as polemical as it is philosophical. But shouldn't philosophy be non-polemical? No, not always, as I argued in a post at the now defunct Conservative Philosopher group blog which Bill Vallicella kindly archived at his own (highly recommended) site some time back. In light of the publication of TLS it seemed to me a good time to call attention to that post once again, since if anyone has been crying out for a simultaneously polemical and philosophically rigorous response, it is the "New Atheists."

Don't have enough to read?

For those readers who might be interested, archives of many of my past articles, posts to the now defunct group blogs Conservative Philosopher and Right Reason, and some unpublished pieces can be found at my main website.

Pre-Socratic natural theology

Western philosophy begins with the Pre-Socratics. So too did my own interest in philosophy, which was sparked by an encounter with Thales, Heraclitus, Parmenides and company in a course on Greek literature I took as an undergraduate, over twenty years ago now. These thinkers are endlessly fascinating. I am currently teaching a course on ancient philosophy and will have significantly fallen behind schedule by the time we move on to Socrates himself, loath as I am to rush too quickly through the ideas of his predecessors.

It is a commonplace that the defining characteristics of Western philosophy and science can be found in embryo in the Pre-Socratics. Thales and other Ionian monists give us the first attempts to reduce all the diverse phenomena of nature to a single material principle, and their methods (so far as we can determine on the basis of usually scanty evidence) seem to have been largely empirical. Pythagoras and his followers inaugurate the emphasis on mathematical structure as the key to unlocking nature’s secrets. In Parmenides and Zeno we see the first attempts to provide rigorous demonstrations of far-reaching metaphysical theses. The distinction between appearance and reality, the tension between rationalist and empiricist tendencies of thought, and the rational analysis and critique of received ideas are all evident throughout the Pre-Socratic period. It would go too far (to say the very least) to suggest that we go Alfred North Whitehead one better by making all of Western philosophy out to be a footnote to the Pre-Socratics rather than Plato. But it might not be too much of a stretch to say that at least the seeds of what was to come during the next two and a half millennia can all be found in their work.

What is perhaps less widely remarked upon is the extent to which the Pre-Socratics set the stage for the later development of natural theology. To be sure, that Xenophanes criticized the anthropomorphism of Greek polytheism and that Anaxagoras got into trouble for characterizing the sun as a hot stone rather than a god are widely regarded as great advances in human thought. But the usual reason they are so regarded seems to be because these moves are considered steps along the way to a completely atheistic, or at least non-theistic, account of the world. That Xenophanes wanted to replace polytheism, not with atheism, but with monotheism, and that Anaxagoras regarded Mind as necessary to an explanation of the world, are often considered less significant – as if these ideas were not as essential to their thought as the skeptical elements, and as if these thinkers, and the Pre-Socratics generally, lacked the courage of their convictions, and could not bring themselves completely to let go of superstition. This is certainly the impression that Christopher Hitchens (for example) leaves in his brief and characteristically amateurish discussion of early Greek philosophy in God is not Great, which assures us that the early atomists’ ignoring (rather than explicitly denying) the gods for explanatory purposes was “at the time… as far as any mind could reasonably go.” Had the Greeks been able politically and psychologically to push their rationalism through to its logical conclusion, then (so we are to believe) they would all have been atheists.

The truth, though, is that the advances made by the Pre-Socratics, when consistently worked out, no more point in the direction of atheism than they point in the direction of skepticism about the external, physical world. If you want to talk the way Paul Churchland and other eliminative materialists do (something you should not want to do, but never mind), you might say that what the Pre-Socratic thinkers (or some of them, anyway) saw is that in the light of reason, “folk physics” – our crude, commonsense understanding of the workings of the physical world – ought to give way, not to no physics at all, but rather to scientific physics. Similarly, “folk theology” – the crude anthropomorphisms of polytheism and superstition – ought to give way, not to no theology at all, but rather to rational theology, to what has since come to be known as natural theology. Indeed, as was once common knowledge among Western philosophers, as David Conway has recently reminded us in his The Rediscovery of Wisdom, and as Lloyd Gerson documents at length in God and Greek Philosophy, the great Greek thinkers, including many of the Pre-Socratics, regarded theism as essential to a complete scientific account of the world.

Those vulgar atheists (“new” and otherwise) who purport to find in the Greeks the seeds of their own position fail to perceive the centrality of theism to the Greek tradition for several reasons. First, they quite stupidly assume (there is no way to put it that is both kinder and still accurate) that monotheism is just like polytheism only more economical, as if the God of classical philosophical theology (and of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam for that matter) were just like Zeus or Odin, minus the entourage. Since polytheistic gods are typically conceived of in crudely anthropomorphic terms, it is concluded that the God of classical philosophical theology must at bottom be just the same sort of being – stripped of some of the more blatant anthropomorphisms, perhaps, but essentially like the other “gods” except for there being only one of him. Thus does Sam Harris assure us that for the President of the United States to appeal in public to God should strike us as just as outrageous and absurd as a presidential invocation of Zeus or Apollo would be.

Of course, one has to be extremely ignorant of the history of religion, theology, and philosophy to think that philosophical theism, or theism in general, is in any way comparable to crude polytheism; and culpably ignorant too, for the New Atheists, who style themselves as well-educated and sophisticated enlighteners of the ignorant masses, could easily apprise themselves of the facts if they really wanted to. Yet Harris, Hitchens, and Co., in an amazing feat of intellectual Jiu-Jitsu, have somehow made their opponents out to be the ignorant and dishonest ones. In any event, if one really thinks that to regard theism as essential to science is like regarding belief in Pan or the Tooth Fairy as essential to science, then it is not surprising that one will fail to see how the great Greek philosophers, brilliant as they were, could possibly have regarded theism as the capstone of the scientific enterprise.

Then there is the crude scientism of vulgar atheists, according to which “scientific method” as they learned it in high school constitutes the only true route to knowledge – notwithstanding that such a claim is itself a philosophical one and not scientific (by their own standards, anyway) at all, and that what counts as “scientific method” is itself a philosophically complex and controversial subject. Beholden as they are to a cartoonish just-the-observable-facts-ma’am picture of what science involves, they cannot fathom how anyone could regard anything super-empirical as within the range of scientific knowledge. Hence they cannot understand how the theological tendencies of the Greek philosophers could have been part and parcel of their scientific advances, rather than a deviation from them.

As Christopher Martin shows in Thomas Aquinas: God and Explanations, you cannot fully understand Aquinas’s arguments for God’s existence (or their Aristotelian precursors) unless you understand how they fit in to the Aristotelian conception of what science is, and that they are intended to be (and indeed are) perfectly respectable scientific arguments given that (still perfectly defensible) conception. (Note that I am saying that it is the Aristotelian conception of what a science is that is still defensible – not this or that specific scientific claim made by Aristotle, many of which have of course been refuted.) Regardless of whether the Aristotelian conception of what counts as science is correct, though, empirical science as practiced today is only possible given certain philosophical assumptions, especially about the nature of causation. As I argue at length in The Last Superstition, these assumptions entail, when worked out consistently, the existence of a divine First Cause. And I mean entail: The classical tradition in natural theology does not suggest, after the fashion of William Paley and his successors in the “Intelligent Design” movement, that something kinda-sorta like the God of traditional theism is “probably” behind this or that specific complex feature of the world. It holds that the existence of the God of traditional theism is necessary, and rationally unavoidable, given the existence of any causation at all in the world, even of the most simple sort. And as Gerson shows, it is evident from what we know of at least some of the Pre-Socratics that they had more than an inkling of this. That is to say, they saw (or some of them did) that it is theism rather than atheism that is the logical outcome of a rationalist approach to the world.

That some of them were as willing as they were to thumb their noses at Greek polytheism, even to the point of suffering persecution, only reinforces the point. As Gerson emphasizes, there is nothing whatsoever of the apologetic motive in the thinking of philosophers like Xenophanes and Anaxagoras. They were not rationalizing some prejudice or received idea, for they rather loudly rejected the received ideas, and their theism (or proto-theism) was itself a novelty. They thereby give the lie to one of the favorite slanders of the vulgar atheist, to the effect that philosophical arguments for God’s existence are only ever dishonest attempts to bolster comforting illusions rather than reflective of a sincere pursuit of the truth.

In the work of the Pre-Socratics we find precursors of some of the key elements of the classical theism of Augustine, Anselm, and Aquinas. In Anaximander’s notion of the apeiron or “unbounded” we have an anticipation of the insight that that which ultimately explains the diverse phenomena of the world cannot itself be characterized in terms that apply to that world (or at least not univocally, as the Thomist would add). From Parmenides we get the principle that ex nihilo nihil fit (out of nothing comes nothing), which foreshadows the Scholastics’ “principle of causality” and the argument to the First Cause that rests on it. We derive from him too the discovery that ultimate reality must be Being Itself rather than a being among other beings, unchanging and unchangeable, and necessarily one rather than many. In Anaxagoras we find the realization that the cause of things must be a Mind rather than an impersonal absolute. It would take the work of later thinkers – Plato to some extent, Aristotle to a great extent, and the Scholastics to a greater extent still, culminating in Thomas Aquinas and the Thomistic tradition deriving from him – to work these insights out in a thorough and systematic way. But as with Western science and philosophy more generally, the seeds are there already in the Pre-Socratics; in particular, they made the decisive break with anthropomorphism in thinking about God.

The New Atheists, then, with their crude straw man conception of God, are less advanced intellectually than those pioneers of two and a half millennia ago. But to be fair to them, this is not entirely their fault. For contemporary popular apologetics, and even some contemporary philosophy of religion, has been infected with an anthropomorphism which, while less crude than that of ancient polytheism, nevertheless opens its adherents up to objections that have no force against the likes of Aristotle, Augustine, Anselm, or Aquinas, not to mention their Pre-Socratic precursors.

Brian Davies has usefully distinguished between classical theism – which dominates the great mainstream tradition in natural theology, as represented by figures like those just mentioned – and “theistic personalism,” which he detects in the thinking of contemporary philosophers of religion like Richard Swinburne and Alvin Plantinga, and which I think can also clearly be found in William Paley (who models God on human designers), in the contemporary “Intelligent Design” movement, among adherents of a currently fashionable view known as “open theism,” and in countless works of popular apologetics. Classical theism’s conception of God begins with the idea that God is the sustaining cause of the world and thus utterly distinct from it. “Theistic personalism” (also known as “Neo-theism”) begins with the idea that God is “a person” alongside other persons, only without the limitations characteristic of the persons we are most familiar with (namely us). Whereas classical theism typically arrives at a detailed conception of God by determining what such a cause of the world would have to be like – and famously arrives at a God who is very radically different from us indeed (outside time and space, pure actuality, being itself, etc.) – “theistic personalism” develops its conception of God by progressively abstracting away the characteristics typical of us as finite persons. Hence it makes God out to be a person sort of like us, only without a body, without our moral weaknesses, without the barriers to knowledge and power we have, and so forth. The conception of God that results is, to be sure, very different from Zeus, Apollo, or Pan. But it is also clearly anthropomorphic, even if somewhat rarefied.

As Davies points out, many of the objections leveled by skeptics at theism and at the traditional theistic arguments really have force only against “theistic personalism,” and not against classical theism. (Davies has developed this idea most fully in relation to the problem of evil. See his book The Reality of God and the Problem of Evil.) Given the New Atheists’ bizarre obsession with Paley (as if he were the only person ever to give an argument for God’s existence), and that their acquaintance with other thinkers probably extends no further than a quick thumbing-through of some popular apologetics tract, it is perhaps not surprising that they would think that theism is essentially more-or-less anthropomorphist. Again, this does not excuse them: Anyone evincing the sense of moral and intellectual superiority that Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, and Hitchens do had better damn well do his homework and grapple seriously with the mainstream theistic tradition represented by Aristotle, Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas, and Leibniz, just to name a few; and (as I demonstrate in The Last Superstition) none of the New Atheists comes anywhere close to doing this. Still, the explicit or implicit “theistic personalism” of Paley and his successors and of certain contemporary philosophers of religion has muddied the intellectual waters considerably and (in my view) unwittingly given aid and comfort to the enemy.

Here as elsewhere in human life, the remedy is to return to and learn from our forbears, including those fathers of philosophy, science, and natural theology, the Pre-Socratics.

Postscript 1: For those interested in Pre-Socratic philosophy, Raymond Tallis’s new book on Parmenides looks very interesting indeed. Unfortunately, it is also frightfully expensive. But a free précis can be found here.

Postscript 2: My reference to “vulgar atheists” naturally raises the question of whether I would acknowledge that there are non-vulgar atheists. The answer, of course, is yes. I would like to think that my former self would be one example. (I was an atheist for many years, before I became convinced that the traditional theistic arguments, when properly understood – that is to say, when the stupid caricatures and worthless objections peddled by the New Atheists and their ilk are swept aside – are compelling. People who say that philosophical arguments never lead anyone to God don’t know what they’re talking about.) More important examples of serious or non-vulgar atheists are J. L. Mackie, J. J. C. Smart, and Quentin Smith.

The Last Superstition

I am pleased to announce that my book The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism will be published this October by St. Augustine's Press. Information about the book can be found here. I am honored to learn that it will receive a starred review in the October issue of Booklist. From the advance reviews:

"Anyone who comes away from The Last Superstition thinking that potboiler atheism has anything to recommend it, or that belief in God is irrational, will not be convinced by anything... If Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, and Hitchens were at all interested in a serious rebuttal, they now have it." David Oderberg, Professor of Philosophy, University of Reading

"A thoughtful and theologically sophisticated sally into the ranks of the New Atheism. Feser has written a lively and well-informed polemic... serious and passionately engaged..." Roger Kimball, co-editor and publisher, The New Criterion

"Feser provides persuasive arguments that show that God is knowable and that what is knowable is larger than the set of that which is empirically detectable. This is a tour de force that should be in the library of every thinking citizen, believer or unbeliever." Francis J. Beckwith, Professor of Philosophy and Church-State Studies, Baylor University

"Feser gives the 'New Atheists' a dose of their own polemical medicine, but with a difference: Unlike them, he knows what he is doing. This rollicking counter-attack is learned, carefully reasoned, and philosophically astute." J. Budziszewski, Departments of Government and Philosophy, University of Texas at Austin, author of What We Can't Not Know: A Guide

SPPC conference on Ownership and Justice

I will be presenting a paper on "Classical Natural Law Theory, Property Rights, and Taxation" at the conference on Ownership and Justice to be held at the Social Philosophy and Policy Center in Bowling Green, Ohio from Sept. 18-20. Conference details can be found here.