Maverick Philosopher

The requisites of an office are the properties that must be possessed by anything that occupies the office, if anything does occupy it. Thus, among the requisites of the office of U. S. president, there is the property of being at least 35 years of age. Among the requisites of the divine office we find the familiar omni-attributes or 'perfections,' omniscience, etc. Both the presidential and the divine offices are individual offices in the sense that, if they are occupied, then they are occupied by an individual. Note that the requisites of an individual office are first-level properties of the office-holders, if there are any.

Tichý finds two fallacies in the above Cartesian argument.

The first is that it assumes that existence is a first-level property, a property of individuals. For if existence is one of the requisites of the divine office, as it must be if existence is a perfection, then existence is a property that can be meaningfully attributed to individuals. But we have seen that for Tichý, existence is not a property of individuals but of offices. It is the second-level property of being-occupied.

The second mistake in the Cartesian argument is that it relies on the following fallacious argument-pattern:

P is a requisite of office O
Therefore
The occupant of O instantiates P.

The argument-form is indeed invalid. Let O be the office of King of France. Let P be being human. P is a requisite of O. But it doesn't follow that the occupant of the office of King of France is human. For there is no occupant. Similarly, even if existence were a requisite of the divine office, it would not follow that the occupant of the divine office exists. For the office may be unoccupied. All we can safely infer from the fact, if it is a fact, that existence is a requisite of the divine office is that, if the office is occupied, then the occupant exists.

This is a very old objection, and it strikes me as sound. The concept of God is the concept of a being possessing all perfections. Now let it be granted that existence is a perfection, a "great-making property" in Alvin Plantinga's phrase. From these premises we may validly infer that the concept of God is the concept of a being that exists, indeed, the concept of a being that is as inseparable from its existence as the idea of a mountain from the idea of a valley, to revert to a Cartesian analogy. Still, how does this get us to the conclusion that God exists? For all that this argument shows, the concept of God might fail of instantiation: there might not be anything that falls under it. If something instantiates the God-concept, then that thing has an essence which includes or entails existence. But from this one cannot validly infer that something does instantiate the God-concept, or occupy the divine office.

Of course, Tichy does not grant that existence is a perfection, a great-making property of God. For his whole point is that existence cannot be attributed to individuals. This yields a much more radical objection to the Cartesian ontological argument, an objection one finds already in Frege, but not before Frege: Kant does not anticipate Frege's exact point about existence, contrary to what many, including Tichy, think. (To establish this would require a separate post.) In The Foundations of Arithmetic, we read, "Because existence is a property of concepts, the ontological argument for the existence of God breaks down." (p. 65) This amounts to a very radical criticism since it implies that 'God exists,' interpreted as the attribution of existence to an individual is meaningless.

Now I reject this more radical Fregean objection to the ontological argument. First, it implies a theory of existence open to powerful objections, a couple of which are sketched here. Second, the argument for it is not compelling, as explained here.

The argumentative structure of this passage may be set forth as follows:

1. If God were an individual, then it would be a contingent matter whether God is benevolent.
2. It is not a contingent matter whether God is benevolent.
-----
3. God is not an individual.

(2) is readily granted, but (1) is hardly self-evident. Why can't it be the case that God is necessarily benevolent but also an individual? Tichý appears to be assuming that all individuals are 'bare,' where a bare individual is one that has the following features: (i) it lacks a nature or essence and is therefore not a substance in Aristotle's sense of prote ousia; (ii) the properties it has are not rooted in it or emergent from it but tied to it by an external tie of exemplification; (iii) the properties it has are all accidental, none are essential. Tichý's statment that "any individual is conceivably malicious" is what commits him to a doctrine of bare individuals. What he means, of course, is that any individual is possibly such as to lack any property it actually possesses, and possibly such as to possess any property it actually lacks. (To make this rigorous we probably have to add: any property that it not trivial or transcendental such as self-identity.)

Some philosophers argue that bare individuals are incoherent. But this is not at all clear since noted philosophers have plausibly defended them. Gustav Bergmann famously championed them under the moniker 'bare particulars' and David Armstrong finds use for what he calls 'thin particulars.' J. P. Moreland ably defends them in his Universals, p. 148 ff. et passim. I discuss them favorably in sections 7 and 11 of Chapter VI of A Paradigm Theory of Existence. Of course, to understand bare individuals you must not confuse them with what could be called 'nude individuals,' individuals having no properties at all. Obviously, all individuals come 'clothed' in properties. The question concerns how they have their properties. Let us provisionally grant that there are bare individuals and that all individuals are bare. The rest of Tichý's argument is as follows:

4. Either God is an individual or God is an office.
3. God is not an individual.
-----
5. God is an office.

'God,' therefore, does not name an individual, but an office, and the existence of God is not the existence of an individual, but the being-occupied of the divine office. But this is puzzling. If God is an office, then what should we call the individual that fills the office if the office is filled? No doubt, if God exists, then the divine office is filled. But filled by what? The office is obviously distinct, really distinct, from the office-holder, and the office-holder is not a mere feature or property of the office. Presumably, what Tichý must say is that the divine office, if filled, is filled by a bare individual. He cannot say that it is filled by God, for God is the divine office and this office does not fill itself. So the divine office, if filled, is filled by a bare individual.

Now this bare individual — which we cannot name — instantiates the requisites of the divine office but does so accidentally because it is bare. Among the requisites of the divine office are omniscience, omnipotence, and omnibenevolence. So the bare individual which holds, fills, or occupies the divine office is accidentally omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent. Since this bare individual is what instantiates the omni-attributes, it ought to be called 'God.' But it cannot be called 'God' if the (1)-(3)argument above is sound. And it cannot be called 'God' for the further reason that God possesses his omni-attributes essentially.

The divine office itself, of course, is constituted by the requisites of omnscience, omnipotence and omnibenevolence, but it does not instantiate them: the divine office is not omniscient any more than the office of U. S. president is a U. S. citizen. So how can God be the divine office as Tichy maintains? God is omniscient, but the divine office is not.

My conclusion is that Tichy's conception of God is incoherent. He is driven to say that 'God' does not denote an individual but an office. But if God is the divine office, then he cannot instantiate the omni-attributes: no office instantiates its requisites any more than a concept instantiates its Fregean marks (Merkmalen). (The concept bachelor, for example, has male as a mark, but no concept is male.) On the other hand, if God, as one might naturally suppose, is the office-holder of the divine office, then God is a bare individual who has his attributes accidentally, which is absurd, as Tichy himself points out.

Could God be the divine office together with its office-holder? This is not what Tichy says, and in any case it would destroy the divine unity and necessity. God is a necessary being, but Tichy cannot make sense of this. For whatever instantiates the requisites of the divine office contingently instantiates them due to the fact that any office-holder of the divine office must be a bare individual. But this is equivalent to saying that God exists contingently if he exists.

There is of course no question about where the Ten Commandments come from: they are to be found in the Old Testament at Exodus 20.1-17 and Deuteronomy 5.6-21. The question is whether the posting of the Ten Commandments (TC) promotes a particular religion. Now Judaism is one particular religion, and Christianity is another. The posting of the TC cannot be taken to promote Judaism, since the TC are common to both Judaism and Christianity: Christians do not reject, but accept the TC. And the posting of the TC cannot be taken to promote Christianity for the same reason. There is obviously nothing specifically or characteristically Christian about the TC given their Old Testament origin. But on the other hand, they have been 'taken on board' by Christianity.

This is why I say that the posting of the TC in a public place does not constitute an endorsement or promotion — let alone an establishment — of a particular religion. Note that there is no particular religion called 'Judeo-Christianity.' We may also bring Islam into the mix. It too is an Abrahamic religion, and as far as I know, Muslims accept the TC. Indeed, this Muslim site argues that Muslims alone properly heed the prohibition against graven images. Mr. Whitten writes,

The posting of such a command ["You shall have no other gods before me"] in a public school would therefore declare, by the intent and endorsement of an agent of the government, that the readers / students should only worship /serve 'Yahweh,' God of the Jewish and Christian traditions. To worship / serve any other God (Vishnu, etc.), or to worship / serve no God (Buddhism, atheism) would be declared as wrong / improper.

This passage is in tension with what Whitten said earlier. He said that Yahweh is a specific deity within a specific tradition who did specific things for the sake of a specific tribe. But now he speaks of Yahweh as the God of both the Jewish and Christian traditions. If both traditions worship the same God, as I maintain, then the posting of the TC cannot be said to endorse either tradition. No doubt the conceptions of God are different in the three Abrahamic religions, but that is consistent with the conceptions having a common referent.

Let's not forget what the precise question is: Does the posting of the TC in a public place serve to endorse, promote, or establish a particular religion? I answer in the negative: the TC are common to the three Abrahamic faiths. Therefore, the posting of the TC does not serve to promote any one of these faiths.

There is also the further point that seven of the Commandments make no mention of God at all. Here is a list. To oppose the posting of the TC serves to undermine the dissemination of moral principles humans are in dire need of for their flourishing. These principles, moreover, are not the exclusive possession of the Abrahamic tradition since Hindus, Buddhists, and others accept them. Buddhists, after all, are opposed to killing, stealing, lying, etc.

The Problem

According to Chalcedonian orthodoxy, Christians believe that God the Son, the second person of the Trinity, at a certain historical moment assumed human nature in Jesus of Nazareth, and did so without forsaking his divine nature. Orthodox Chalcedonian incarnationalism (hereafter, OCI) implies an identity thesis: the person who is the Son or Logos (Word) is (identically) the person who is Jesus of Nazareth. The Logos is believed to be one person existing in two distinct natures, the one divine, the other human. But this poses a problem, or more precisely, a trinity of tightly interconnected problems. (P1) How can one person, hence one individual, exemplify seemingly incompatible natures? (P2) How can one person exemplify seemingly incompatible non-nature properties? (P3) How can there be only one person or hypostasis if, as is arguable, the very concept of Incarnation implies that one person incarnates himself in, and as, another person?

The problems are distinct. (P1) would be solved if it were shown that the divine and human natures are compossible, i.e., possibly such as to be [Philo 85] exemplified by the same individual. But to solve (P1) is not to solve (P2). For there are properties not included in either the divine or human natures possession of which by one individual seems impossible. Among these are such modal properties as being essentially human and being accidentally human.[1] And solving (P1) and (P2) would not amount to solving (P3), since (P3) is not a problem about apparent discernibility.

The difficulty common to (P1) and (P2) may be cast in the mold of an inconsistent triad:

1. Necessarily, if two things are identical, they share all their (non-intentional)[2] properties.

2. God the Son and Jesus do not share all their (non-intentional) properties.

3. God the Son and Jesus are identical.

(1) is a version of the Indiscernibility of Identicals, which is surely very secure. (2) is true as a matter of Christian belief, since, for example, the Son is unlimited in power, but Jesus is not. But (1) and (2) jointly entail the negation of (3). So (3) is false given the truth of (1) and (2). Indeed, (3) is necessarily false on the plausible assumption that identity claims are necessarily true, if true, and necessarily false, if false.

This paper gives some reasons for thinking that (3) is indeed necessarily false, and that OCI, to the extent that it implies a claim of absolute numerical identity of the Logos and Jesus, is logically impossible. My aim is not to refute OCI, but to contribute to an appreciation of some of the challenges that a defender of OCI faces. A thorough evaluation of OCI would have to consider every extant response to the problem I am raising. This task, however, lies well beyond the scope of this article.

The Apollinarian Defense and the Ambiguity of ‘Incarnation’

Some will be tempted to circumvent the aporetic triad by downgrading the claim of absolute, formal, numerical identity in (3) to the sort of union that relates mind and body on a dualist scheme. It is not unusual to encounter adherents of OCI who succumb to this temptation. I will call this strategy the Apollinarian defense, in allusion to the heresy of Apollinaris of Laodicea. Apollinaris (310-390 A.D.) denied the existence of a rational soul in Jesus, and seems to have held that Jesus is a composite of Logos and human body, or of Logos and human body-cum-irrational soul.[3] So what the Apollinarian defender does is to interpret the Logos-Jesus relation as a special case of the mind-body relation, the case in which a divine mind manifests itself through a human body. This allows the Apollinarian defender to interpret (3) as asserting merely some sort of union of Logos and Jesus, a union shy of identity. Absolute, formal, numerical identity is totally reflexive, symmetrical, transitive, governed by the Indiscernibility of Identicals, and such that if x = y, then necessarily, x = y. Mind-body union is clearly a much ‘looser’ relation. For it is governed neither by the [Philo 86] Indiscernibility of Identicals, nor by the Necessity of Identity. One cannot show that mind and body in a particular person are not united by showing that they differ property-wise, nor by showing that the union holds only contingently.

The Apollinarian defender, therefore, evades the difficulty expressed in (1)-(3) by construing the Incarnation as a relation ‘looser’ than strict, formal, numerical identity. He also secures a second advantage. If the Incarnation is a special case of the familiar mind-body relation, then it is no more problematic than the latter. C. S. Lewis is a prominent example of an Apollinarian defender:

In what sense is it conceivable that eternal, self-existent Spirit . . . should be so combined with a natural human organism as to make one person? And this would be a fatal stumbling-block if we had not already discovered that in every human being a more than natural activity (the act of reasoning) and therefore presumably a more than natural agent is thus united with a part of nature...

...the difficulty which we felt in the mere idea of the Supernatural descending into the Natural is apparently nonexistent, or is at least overcome in the person of every man.[4]

What I take Lewis to be suggesting here is that (i) the Incarnation is a special case of the mind-body relation, the case in which the mind is self-existent spirit rather than created spirit; that therefore (ii) the Incarnation is no more problematic than the mind-body relation in us; and that (iii) the mind-body relation in us is not at all problematic since we know ourselves to be embodied minds. The problem with this, of course, is that (i) is false, as I shall further support below. The falsity of (i) also puts paid to the view of those Apollinarian defenders who argue, as I have heard it argued, that since reincarnation is a logical possibility, then so is the Incarnation.

Evidently, the Apollinarian defense draws aid and comfort from the ambiguity of ‘incarnation.’ The etymology of the term suggests a literal taking on of flesh as in John 1:14, “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” The suggestion is that a disembodied mind or rational soul or person takes on or assumes a body (together, perhaps, with the body’s irrational soul or animating principle). Talk of reincarnation reflects this (Platonic) sense of ‘incarnation’ as embodiment. But this is not what Christians who understand their doctrine mean by ‘incarnation.’ What they mean is that a certain disembodied person, the Logos, takes on a man, so to speak, thereby assuming a human (hence rational) mind or soul and a human body. The two senses of ‘incarnation’ sustain at best an analogous relation one to the other. Thus we might say that the Logos is to the man Jesus as the mind of Socrates is to the philosopher’s body. Thus a divine mind is to a human mind-body composite as a human mind is to a human body. What we cannot say is that Incarnation in the specifically Christian sense is a special case of incarnation in the Platonic sense. Incarnation is a wholly unique ‘event’; part of its uniqueness consisting in its being a relation of identity rather than some such ‘looser’ relation as union.

In sum, the difficulty presented by our aporetic triad cannot be evaded [Philo 87] by an Apollinarian defense (except on pain of heresy), since it misconstrues the nature of the God-man tie, falsely assimilating it to the mind-body relation. And it goes without saying that those who compare the Logos-Jesus identity to the marital union haven’t even begun to appreciate the difficulty.[5]

Morrisian Maneuvers

Another way around the difficulty represented by our aporetic triad is by rejecting (2), the proposition that Jesus and the Son do not share all properties, while taking (3) full strength. There are at least two quite distinct sources of support for (2), corresponding to problems (P1) and (P2). The one to be discussed in this section is the suspicion that the divine and human natures are not compossible, i.e., not possibly such as to be exemplified by the same individual. For the divine nature includes such properties as being unlimited in power and being metaphysically necessary, whereas human nature would appear to preclude such properties. How then can one person be both fully human and fully divine?

Thomas V. Morris addresses this question in The Logic of God Incarnate, and he does so by drawing three distinctions. If I am right, however, his distinctions fail to do the work cut out for them.

The first distinction is that between common human properties and essential human properties.[6] No doubt there is a distinction. All humans have spent most of their lives on the surface of the earth; but this is merely common to, not part of the essence of, humans. There is nothing in the essence of humans to require that they remain earth-bound. Similarly, according to Morris, it is no part of the essence of humans that they begin to exist in time, and no part of their essence that they are possibly such as to have never existed at all.[7] Thus there is nothing in human nature to prevent something from being both human and a necessary being! Human nature does not entail metaphysical contingency, and so does not preclude metaphysical necessity. And so Jesus Christ can be unproblematically both fully human and fully divine, one person with two distinct natures. The first tactic of Morris, then, amounts to removing from human nature all of the offending “limitation properties,” e.g., metaphysical contingency. Despite initial appearances, a thing’s having human nature does not preclude it from having divine attributes.

But this raises a problem. Such properties as metaphysical contingency, unlike living on the surface of the earth, are not only common to their possessors, but also essential to them. Thus I don't merely happen to be a contingent being, I am essentially a contingent being. This is a consequence of the S5 system of modal logic according to which modal status is necessary. But Morris tells us that human nature does not preclude being metaphysically necessary. So if it is not human nature that bars me from the elite corps of necessary beings, what does? It must be a property P that satisfies two conditions: I have P essentially; P is not included in (entailed by) human nature.[8]

At this point Morris' second distinction comes into play, the merely [Philo 88] F/fully F distinction. The property P is that of being merely human. It is this property that bars me from the corps of necessary beings. I have the property of being merely human essentially, but this property is not entailed by a thing’s being fully human. Being merely human, it is essential to me that I be contingent; but something can be fully human without being contingent. Thus it is not essential to Jesus Christ that he be contingent, for he is fully human but not merely human.

It is not clear that this response works. For, as Morris says, “To be merely human is not to exemplify a kind-nature, a natural kind, distinct from that of humanity; it is rather to exemplify humanity without also exemplifying any ontologically higher kind, such as divinity.”[9] If mere humanity were a kind-nature that included such properties as being metaphysically contingent, then my being essentially merely human would entail my being essentially contingent. But mere humanity is not a kind-nature. Thus it is not clear how my being merely human makes it impossible for me to be a necessary being. Of course, being merely human guarantees that I am not a necessary being, but the intuition that needs to be satisfied is the intuition that I am necessarily not a necessary being. On the other hand, if a thing’s being (fully) human, and the properties it entails,[10] do not make it impossible for a thing to be a necessary being, it would appear that nothing makes it impossible, and that my contingent modal status is itself contingent, contra the strictures of S5.

Of course, given that I am non-divine, and non-abstract, it follows necessarily that I am a contingent being. But it does not follow that I am necessarily a contingent being. The necessity of the consequence is not the necessity of the consequent. We must distinguish

4. Necessarily, if x is merely human, then x is metaphysically contingent

from

5. If x is merely human, then, necessarily, x is metaphysically contingent.

I detect the confusion of (4) and (5) in Morris' text. He writes:

If contingency, coming into existence, and possibly ceasing to exist were essential human properties, the doctrine of the Incarnation would express a metaphysical, or broadly logical impossibility...

It may be that these, or at least two of these, properties are essential to being merely human. Any being which exemplifies human nature without also exemplifying divine nature would then have [my emphasis] to exemplify them...[11]

No doubt any being that exemplifies human nature without also exemplifying divine nature would exemplify metaphysical contingency, to take one of the properties mentioned. But it would not have to exemplify it unless being human entailed being metaphysically contingent, which Morris denies. “Contingency is ‘essential to being merely human’” — an [Philo 89] assertion which may be ascribed to Morris on the basis of the passage just quoted — is ambiguous as between (4) and (5). All Morris is entitled to assert is (4), and (4) is compatible with my being contingently metaphysically contingent, just as ‘Necessarily, all bachelors are unmarried’ is compatible with Klimosauskas the bachelor's being contingently unmarried. Let us not forget that being merely human is not a natural kind.

The difficulty may be summed up as follows. Being (fully) human, says Morris, does not entail being metaphysically contingent. So it is not in virtue of being (fully) human that I am metaphysically contingent, but in virtue of being merely human, which is to say: in virtue of not being divine. Now if I am essentially metaphysically contingent, as S5 demands, this must be chargeable to the account of my essentially not being divine. But this negation must be grounded in something positive. I am essentially non-divine because my essence precludes my being divine and thus entails my being contingent. If this isn't my human kind-essence, what is it?

This brings us to Morris' third distinction, that between kind-essences and individual-essences. Having excluded the limitation properties from the human kind-essence, he suggests that "Such properties may partially comprise our respective individual essences..."[12] But what work does this third distinction do? The limitation properties derive from our creature status. Now being a creature, if not a kind-essence, is surely a general essence. So individual essences are beside the point. In any case, being a creature includes the property P we were looking for, the property that ordinary humans have essentially and that includes the limitation properties.

But this issues in a dilemma. If God the Son assumes human nature without assuming any of the limitation properties, then the Son assumes human nature without assuming creature status. This horn is unacceptable, since as Morris points out, to take on human nature is to "take on a human body and a human mind," it is to "take on a created, contingent body and mind..."[13] But if the Son assumes creature status, then the original problem has not been solved. How can one person be both uncreated and created? Morris says in effect that the Son takes on a "contingent, created body and mind" without becoming a "created, contingent being."[14] How can this be, if the Son and Jesus are identical?[15]

So despite Morris' distinctions, it remains unclear how the two natures can be compossible. (P1) thus remains unsolved.

A Modalized Discernibility Objection

I said that there are two sources of support for (2), the proposition that God the Son and Jesus do not share all their (non-intentional) properties. The one just discussed is the putative noncompossibility of the divine and human natures. The other source of support for (2) is the topic of the present section. Setting aside the animadversions of the preceding section, let us irenically assume that (i) the two natures are compossible, that (ii) it is possible for one person to have two natures, and that (iii) there is no difficulty [Philo 90] with a person having one of its natures accidentally. If the divine and human natures are compossible, then perhaps no discernibility argument invoking unmodalized properties can be sound. But there are also arguments invoking modalized properties to contend with, e.g.:

6. God the Son is accidentally human.

7. Jesus is essentially human.

Therefore

8. God the Son is not identical with Jesus.

(6) is a commitment of orthodoxy since the Incarnation is a free, and indeed supererogatory act of divine agape and therefore an event that might not have occurred. (7) seems plainly true, since if Jesus is a human being, a 'true man' as the Chalcedonian definition has it, then he is essentially a human being. So the argument seems to show that the Son and Jesus cannot be numerically the same individual.

To defeat this argument, the proponent of OCI would have to reject (7) and hold that Jesus is accidentally human. But could this be done without begging the question? That depends on what it is to beg a question. By my lights, an argument begs the question if the propounder of the argument must know or have good reason to believe the conclusion to be true in order to know or have good reason to believe one or more of the premises to be true. So it seems to me that the argument from (6) and (7) to (8) does not beg the question against the proponent of OCI since even though (7) cannot be true unless (8) is true, one can have good reason to believe (7) to be true quite independently of (8). How? Well, if one believes, as is surely reasonable, that Jesus of Nazareth has a human nature, then one is entitled to infer that he has this nature essentially on pain of his not being fully and truly human.

On the other hand, the argument from (6) and the negation of (8) to the negation of (7) would beg the question against the critic of OCI. For the only reason one could have to believe anything as counterintuitive as the negation of (7) — Jesus is accidentally human — would be if one antecedently believed the negation of (8), to wit, God the Son is identical with Jesus.

Supposing the proponent of OCI does indeed beg the question against the critic, all this means is that he is in no position to persuade the critic, violating as he has a rule of ‘dialectics.’ It does not mean that the proponent's position is logically inconsistent or otherwise incoherent. The proponent is perhaps within his doxastic rights to enforce the indiscernibility of Logos and Jesus on the strength of his antecedent acceptance of the Logos-Jesus identity.

The Asymmetry of Incarnation and the Doctrine of Anhypostasia

So a further step is needed. To dislodge the proponent of OCI, the critic needs to uncover an incoherence internal to his position. I propose to do this by a bit of analysis of the concept of Incarnation. In so doing I address (P3), the problem of how there can be only one person or hypostasis.

The very intelligibility of the concept of Incarnation demands that we [Philo 91] distinguish between the agent and the locus of Incarnation. For if we did not make this or some cognate distinction, we would not be able to distinguish, as we must, between Jesus is the Incarnation of the Logos and The Logos is the Incarnation of Jesus. So in making the agent/locus distinction I beg no questions; I merely unpack what is implicit in the concept of Incarnation.

The agent is God the Son, the one who incarnates himself, and does so freely. The locus of Incarnation is the one in whom the Son incarnates himself. Now either the Son incarnates himself in himself, in which case agent and locus are identical, or he incarnates himself in another, in which case agent and locus are distinct. The first disjunct clearly makes nonsense of the very concept of the Incarnation. For the concept implies inter alia that a purely spiritual being enters into the material world. Hence a purely spiritual being cannot incarnate himself in himself, where ‘cannot’ expresses a conceptual impossibility. This leaves the second disjunct: The Son incarnates himself in another. This implies that the agent and the locus of Incarnation cannot be identical. Since in our world, the actual world, Jesus is the locus of Incarnation, it follows that God the Son and Jesus cannot be identical.

It follows that the proponent of OCI cannot support the rejection of (7) — Jesus is essentially human — by appeal to the identity of the Son and Jesus. For not only does such appeal beg the question against the critic, it also has the much more serious defect of violating the result of the last paragraph: to understand the concept of Incarnation is equivalent to understanding that agent and locus of Incarnation are necessarily distinct.

One might object to the last stretch of argumentation by claiming that it is a false alternative to suppose that either the Son incarnates himself in himself or incarnates himself in another. It might be said that in the Incarnation the Son assumes human nature without thereby identifying himself with a human individual. That is, in the Incarnation God the Son becomes man, but not a particular man. There is exactly one hypostasis and that is the Logos. This anhypostasia doctrine, as it is called, was first set forth by Cyril of Alexandria (376-444) in controversy with Nestorius. Nestorius was accused of dividing Christ into two persons. According to D. M. Baillie,

Against this [Nestorian] position Cyril worked out the idea, which passed into Catholic dogma, that there was no man Jesus existing independently of the Divine Logos: the human element in the Incarnation was simply human nature assumed by the Second Person of the Trinity. Thus there was no human hypostasis or persona: the persona was the Divine Son, while the human nature was anhypostatos — ‘impersonal humanity.’[16]

But if the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, this can only mean that the Word became an individual concrete human being, and not a human being in the abstract. Surely nothing can become man without becoming a man. God can become man only by becoming a particular man. So the point stands: God the Son incarnates himself in, and as, another.

Indeed, this must be the doctrine if it is to avoid both Docetism and Appolinarianism. For if the Logos becomes man without becoming a man complete with a human personality, then either he is only apparently, but [Philo 92] not really, a man (Docetism), or he is a divine being in a human body (Appolinarianism).

Further Modalized Discernibility Objections

It is clear that modalized discernibility objections are easily generated. Here is a second example. The explanation and defense of this argument is the same mutatis mutandis as for the argument from (6) and (7) to (8).

9. The Son has the property of divinity-in-all-worlds.

10. Jesus does not have the property of divinity-in-all-worlds (because Jesus does not exist in all worlds).

Therefore

11. The Son and Jesus are not the same individual.

Finally, it appears that the Morris strategy lacks the resources to defuse this very simple and very compelling argument:

12. If a is identical with b, then necessarily, a is identical with b.

Therefore

13. If it is possible that a is distinct from b, then a is distinct from b.

14. It is possible that God the Son is distinct from Jesus.

Therefore

15. God the Son is distinct from (is not identical with) Jesus.

This argument is plainly valid in point of logical form: (13) follows from (12) by Contraposition, and (15) follows from (13) and (14) by Modus Ponens and Universal Instantiation. Is it sound? Well, (14) is a commitment of orthodoxy: if God the Son is contingently human, then there are possible worlds in which he is distinct from every human being, and therefore distinct from Jesus, which amounts to (14). So it all comes down to (12), the principle of the necessity of identity. This is but a consequence of the Indiscernibility of Identicals,[17] so (12) is true and the argument is sound.

To defeat this argument, the proponent of OCI must reject (14); but he cannot do so consistently with other things he must hold. For to reject (14) would be to accept its negation, Necessarily, God the Son is identical with Jesus. But given that the Incarnation is a contingent event, the 'identity' of God the Son and Jesus must also be contingent, which implies the falsity of Necessarily, God the Son is identical with Jesus.

This may also be seen in terms of our earlier distinction between the agent and locus of Incarnation. Necessarily, God the Son is identical with Jesus implies that agent and locus are the same individual. Given that the agent is a necessary being, it follows that the locus is as well. But this implies that the Incarnation occurs in every possible world — in contradiction to orthodoxy's commitment to the contingency of the Incarnation. [Philo 93]

Endnotes

[1]. Thus the property of being accidentally human is not included in (entailed by) human nature, since if x instantiates human nature, it does not follow that x is accidentally human.

[2]. An example of an intentional property is that of being believed by George W. Bush to be a philosopher. Jesus has this property, but I take it that the Logos does not. But discernibility in respect of this property surely does not show that Jesus and the Logos are two and not one.

[3]. Cf. Harry Austryn Wolfson, The Philosophy of the Church Fathers, vol. I (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1956), pp. 433-444. Some sources show the variant spelling, 'Apollinarius.'

[4]. C. S. Lewis, Miracles: A Preliminary Study (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1978), p. 110.

[5]. I mention this only because a professor of philosophy once tried to convince me of the possibility of the Incarnation using just this hopeless analogy.

[6]. Thomas V. Morris, The Logic of God Incarnate (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), p. 62 ff. Cited hereafter as ‘LGI.’

[7]. LGI, p. 65.

[8]. Property P entails property Q just in case there is no metaphysically possible world in which P is exemplified and Q is not exemplified.

[9]. LGI, p. 66.

[10]. Among these I would count being an animal and being a material thing.

[11]. LGI, p. 65.

[12]. T. V. Morris, "The Metaphysics of God Incarnate," in Trinity, Incarnation and Atonement: Philosophical and Theological Essays eds. Ronald J. Feenstra and Cornelius Plantinga, Jr. (University of Notre Dame Press, 1989), p. 117. Cited hereafter as ‘MGI.’

[13]. MGI, 118.

[14]. MGI, 118

[15]. Morris may be presupposing the anhypostasia doctrine discussed below in section 5.

[16]. D. M. Baillie, God was in Christ: An Essay on Incarnation and Atonement (London: Faber and Faber, Limited, 1956), p. 86.

[17]. See Saul Kripke, "Identity and Necessity" in Identity and Individuation, ed. Milton K. Munitz (New York: New York University Press, 1971), p. 136.

1. I reject the opposition in question whether it be formulated in terms of Athens versus Jerusalem, or in terms of the God of the philosophers versus the God of Abraham et al. Where irrationalists and fideists see opposition and mutual exclusion, I see complementarity, or rather, I want to be able to see complementarity. (The natural drift of my mind is towards the mediation of opposites.) When I say I reject the opposition, I mean I reject the necessity of embracing one term to the exclusion of the other. No doubt there is a very serious tension between reason and faith, between Greek philosophy and the Bible. But it is a fruitful tension, and part of the explanation of the vitality of the West. Part of the explanation of the inanition of the Islamic world is the absence of this creative tension.

2. I don't want to 'paper over' the difficulty of mediating the forces in opposition. Perhaps in the end they are irreconcilable, in which case we are confronted with a Kierkegaardian Either/Or, and must de-cide by coming down on one or the other side. Leo Strauss helps us appreciate the problem. For Strauss, ". . . Western civilization consists of two elements, or has two roots, which are in radical disagreement with each other." ("Progress or Return?" in The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism, p. 245) These two elements are the Bible and Greek philosophy, Jerusalem and Athens. The "whole history of the West" is an attempt at harmonizing this radical disagreement. But the various attempts at harmonization were doomed to fail for the following reason:

. . . each of these two roots of the Western world sets forth one thing as the one thing needful, and the one thing needful as proclaimed by the Bible is incompatible, as it is understood by the Bible, with the one thing needful proclaimed by Greek philosophy, as it is understood by Greek philosophy. To put it very simply and therefore somewhat crudely, the one thing needful according to Greek philosophy is the life of autonomous understanding. The one thing needful as spoken by the Bible is the life of obedient love. The harmonizations and synthesizations are possible because Greek philosophy can use obedient love in a subservient function, and the Bible can use philosophy as a handmaid; but what is so used in each case rebels against such use, and therefore the conflict is really a radical one. (Ibid., p. 246, emphasis added.)

3. I make no bones about the fact that I find Tertullian, Luther, Kierkegaard, Shestov, and the rest of the irrationalists exceedingly repellent. But to be precise: it is their irrationalism that I find repellent, not their concern with the "existing individual," to use Kierkegaard's phrase. I share their concern with the existing individual. I too am an existentialist in the sense of one who believes that the whole point of philosophy is, to use Karl Jaspers' word, Existenzerhellung, the clarification of one's Existenz: one's life as an individual subject of experience. But then Plato and Spinoza and Schopenhauer and so many other greats were existentialists in this sense. They did not see philosophy as an academic game, as an empty conceptual jugglery. Nor did they see it as a flight from the plight of the existing individual.

4. Why should existentialism, broadly defined as above, entail the denigration of reason? That is a question I would put to the irrationalists. But they are a mixed bag. Focusing on Shestov, what is his objection to reason? I hope to pursue this in a subsequent post.

That the afterlife is a garden of sensuous delights, a world of goodies with none of the bad stuff endemic to our sublunary sphere, is a puerile conception. It is a conception entertained not only by Muslims but also by many Christians. And even if many do not think of it in crassly hedonistic terms, they think of it as a prolongation of the petty concerns of this life. This, however, is not what it is on a sophisticated conception:

. . . the eternal life promised by Christianity is a new life into which the Christian is reborn by a direct contact between his own personality and the divine Spirit, not a prolongation of the 'natural' life, with all its interests, into an indefinitely extended future. There must always be something 'unworldly' in the Christian's hopes for his destiny after death, as there must be something unworldly in his present attitude to the life that now is. (A. E. Taylor, The Christian Hope for Immortality, Macmillan 1947, p. 64, emphasis in original)

The epitaph on Frank Sinatra's tombstone reads, "The best is yet to come." That may well be, but it won't be booze and broads, glitz and glamor, and the satisfaction of worldly ambitions that were frustrated this side of the grave. So the believer must sincerely ask himself: would I really want eternal life? At funerals one hears pious claptrap about the dearly departed going off to be with the Lord. In many cases, this provokes a smile. Why should one who has spent his whole life on the make be eager to meet his Maker? Why the sudden interest in the Lord when, in the bloom of life, one gave him no thought? If you have loved the things of this world as if they were ultimate realities, then perhaps you ought to hope that death is annihilation.

In any case, it is the puerile conception with which some mortalists and atheists want to saddle sophisticated theists. (A mortalist is not the same as an atheist, but most of the one are the other.) But is there a non-puerile, a sophisticated conception of the afterlife that a thinking man could embrace? The whole trick, of course, is to work out a conception that is sophisticated but not unto utter vacuity. This is a hard task, and I am not quite up to it. But it is worth a try.

Our opponents want to saddle us with puerile conceptions: things on the order of irate lunar unicorns, celestial teapots, flying spaghetti monsters, God as cosmic candy man, and so on; but when we protest that that is not what we believe in, then they accuse us of believing in something vacuous. They would saddle us with a dilemma: you either embrace some unbelievable because crassly materialistic conception of God and the afterlife or you embrace nothing at all. I explore this at length in Dennett on the Deformation of the God Concept.

Self-professed mortalist and former Jesuit Peter Heinegg writes, "It was and is impossible to conceive of an afterlife except as an improved version of this life (harps, houris, etc.), which doesn't get us very far." (Mortalism, p. 11) Granted, the harps-and-houris conception is a nonstarter. But is it really impossible to conceive of an afterlife except as an improved version of this life?

Suppose that a bunch of young adolescents were to claim that it is impossible to conceive of adulthood except as an improved version of adolescence. These boys and girls imagine adulthood to be adolescence but with the negative removed: no pimples, no powerlessness, no pestering parents, no pecuniary problems, no paucity of facial hair or mammary deficiency, etc. They simply cannot conceive of anything beyond the adolescent level. If you were to try to convince them that their horizon is limited and that there is more to life than adolescent concerns you would not get through to them. For what they need is not words and arguments; they need to grow up. The notion of growing up, though it entails persisting in time, is distinct from it: it involves the further notion of maturation. They need to shed false beliefs and values and acquire true ones.

In this life, we adults are like adolescents: confused, unsure of what we really want, easily led astray. We have put away many childish things only to lust after adult things, for example, so-called 'adult entertainment.' We don't read comic books, we ready trashy novels. We don't watch cartoons, we watch The Sopranos and Sex in the City. We are obviously in a bad state. In religious terms, our condition is 'fallen.' We are not the way we ought to be, and we know it. It is also clear that we lack the ability to help ourselves. We can make minor improvements here and there, but our basic fallen condition cannot be ameliorated by human effort whether individual or collective. These, I claim, are just facts. If you won't admit them, then I suggest you lack moral discernment. (I am not however claiming that eternal life is a fact: it is a matter of belief that goes beyond what we can claim to know. It is not rationally provable, but I think it can be shown to be rationally acceptable.)

Contrary to what Heinegg says, I am able, employing analogies such as the foregoing, to conceive of a radical change that transforms us from the wretched beings that we presently are into beings who are genuinely and wholly good. (I concede, though, that conceivability is no sure guide to real possibility; but the issue at the moment is conceivability.) What is difficult and perhaps impossible is to conceive the details of how exactly this might come about. As I said, it can't be achieved by our own effort alone. It requires a divine initiative and our cooperation with it.

It won't occur in this life: I must pass beyond the portal of death, and I must somehow retain my personal identity through the passage. Much will have to be sloughed off, perhaps most of what I now consider integral to my selfhood. As noted, the transition is a transformation and purification, not a mere prolongation. Will anything be left after this sloughing off? I suggest that unless one is a materialist, one has reason to hope that the core of the self survives.

And this brings us back to what Schopenhauer called the 'world-knot,' the mind-body problem. If materialism could be demonstrated, then the foregoing speculations would be mere fancies. But materialism, though it can be assumed, cannot be demonstrated: it faces insuperable difficulties. The existence of these difficulties makes it reasonable to entertain the hope of eternal life.

One can imagine a naturalist conceding arguendo that our lives do not end with bodily death, but then proceeding to question the bearing this could have on the meaning of life. For how could an extension of life beyond the grave give meaning to life this side of the grave? Wouldn't the same problems about existential meaning that arise on this side also arise on the far side? If this is so, then the postulation of an afterlife would accomplish nothing towards giving life a meaning.

Suppose one dies and goes to heaven. Might not a heavenly being wonder about the point of its existence in the same way an earthly being does? It might even be urged by the naturalist that heavenly existence would exacerbate the problems of existential meaning. Earthly delights are brief, unreliable, and often hard to obtain, but this prevents them from being boring. Endless heavenly delights, however, without any admixture of pain or difficulty in their acquisition might prove unbearably boring. You might imagine that endless disporting with 72 black-eyed virgins would be the ultimate in bliss — until you had your fill of it.

A Twilight Zone episode from 1960, A Nice Place to Visit, illustrates the theme. A two-bit thug, shot to death by the police, wakes up on the far side. Given his life of crime, he is puzzled to find himself in what he takes to be heaven: a penthouse of Pascalian divertissement has been provided for him in which he can sate his every sensuous appetite. The supply of booze and broads is endless, and he can't lose at the gaming tables. But soon enough our man tires of the 'good life' and heads for the door — which is locked. Turning to his host, played wonderfully by Sebastian Cabot, the thug complains that he'd rather be in the other place. "This is the other place!" the host demonically laughs.

Indeed, it might be urged by the naturalist that it is precisely the brevity of life that lends it meaning and value: just as gold is precious because rare, life is precious because short. Life interminable would be life without meaning.

The naturalist argument for decoupling meaning and immortality might be summed up as follows. There is no connection between the meaning of a life and its temporal duration. So even if life did extend beyond the grave, this would not ensure its meaningfulness. And if there were a connection between the meaning of life and its temporal duration, it would be brevity, not longevity, of life that would ensure meaningfulness.

What are we to say to this? Note first of all that the naturalist presumes to know what the afterlife will be like. (Of course, he does not believe in it himself, but he presumes to know what the immortalist must mean by it.) It will be more of the same, but with the negatives removed. His conception is likely to be crassly materialistic, as materialistic as the popular Islamic conception. But no sophisticated immortalist thinks of the afterlife as more of the same, but with the negatives removed. He does not think of it as a mere continuation of the present life, as a temporal extension of this life. He thinks of it as a qualitative change, a transformation and purification of the selfish self of this life into a godlike self: ". . . it is deiformity, not mere endless continuance, which is held out to man as the prize of his calling." (A. E. Taylor, The Faith of a Moralist, vol. I, 256) The life to come on a sophisticated conception is a sharing in the divine life which completes and perfects the individual soul while at the same time harmonizing it with other souls. Immortality is a divine gift rather than something that naturally occurs. And although it is a gift, it is something that must be earned. For the soul can be lost as well as gained. This life takes on meaning as a "vale of soul-making" in Keats' phrase.

This is a very rough sketch of a sophisticated conception of immortality such as one finds in A. E. Taylor's The Christian Hope of Immortality (Macmillan, 1947). Armed with such a conception, the immortalist will have no trouble turning aside the naturalists' objections as follows:

1. The postulation of an afterlife is unavailing because the same problems about existential meaning that arise in this life will also arise in our post-mortem existence. Response: This is not the case. Immortality is not a mere surivival of the present self, but a tarnsformation of the self whereby the self participates in the divine life. Since that just is the meaning of existence, no further questions can arise about it.

2. The afterlife would be one of unbearable ennui. Response: This objection presupposes that the afterlife would be just more of the sort of thing that transpires here below. It is not, so that puts paid to the objection.

3. Far from immortality ensuring life's meaningfulness, it precludes it: life is meaningful and valuable precisely because our days are numbered. Response: This objection again presupposes that the afterlife is just an extension of this life, albeit with the negative removed. If this is what it is like, then a finite life would be preferable. But on a sophisticated conception, the afterlife is not more of the same, but a scarcely imaginable participation in the divine life.

A. The issue came up recently in my dialogue with Zev Golan in an earlier thread. We were discussing the meaning of life in a theistic context. I was arguing that life has meaning only if it has an objective meaning, and that one way life can have an objective meaning (purpose) is if this meaning derives from God. But I was also urging that the objective purpose, to be objective, must be available to all. I was urging, in other words, that it must be possible for all to share in life's objective purpose, whatever it is. For as it seems to me, it is not enough for a purpose to be objective that it be exogenous; it must also be universal in the sense of available to, subjectively appropriable by, all. Here is where Zev disagreed. He pointed out that many have no possibility of sharing in life's objective purpose, and that he didn't see why this is inconsistent with God's being the source of life's purpose. Zev's position, if I understand it, could be set forth in terms of the following argument:

1. Life has an objective, God-given, purpose
2. Not all are able to share in this purpose
-----
3. An objective purpose needn't be one in which all are able to share.

My position, by contrast, can be summed in this argument:

~3. An objective purpose must be one in which all are able to share
1. Life has an objective, God-given, purpose
2*. Not all here below are able to share in this purpose
-----
4. We must assume immortality as a sort of Kantian practical postulate if we are to maintain that life has an objective purpose and that the purpose is God-given.

At this point in the dialog, Zev made a sort of Pascalian move:

We [ i.e., you] are saying God must operate along our lines of rationality and goodness, and for our benefit, while the former means that just like Kant we are not really talking about God, but about a concept we create to allow us to complete the rationality we seek to construct, and the latter makes God serve us rather than us serve Him . . . .

What I take Zev to be objecting is that I am putting a philosopher's God in place of the true and living God, the God of Abraham and Co. Moreover, this God of the philosophers is not God at all, but a mere concept we create for our purposes, to secure the rationality our minds crave. This has the effect of making God serve us rather than the other way around.

B. Let me begin my response with a simple-minded point: there cannot be two or three gods. God is one. Zev will surely agree with me on this point. And yet we may reasonably use the phrases, 'God of philosophy (reason),' 'God of faith' and 'God of mysticism.' Properly understood, these phrases do not imply that there are three gods, but that there is one God approachable in three different ways. You can approach God by (discursive) reason, as Thomas Aquinas does in his quinque viae. You can approach God by the path of faith and devotion as Kierkegaard does. You can approach God by the mystical path of direct nonsensible intuition.

Aquinas is an instructive example since he was a first-rate logic-chopper and dialectician (discursive reasoner), but he was also a man of faith and a mystic to boot, though I should point out that his mystical experiences put an end to his philosophical and theological writing which he thereafter regarded as so much "straw." And with good reason. Is it not better to eat the meal than to try to discern what the meal is like by studying the menu? Is it not better to taste and enjoy than to merely believe what the meal is like on the basis of someone's testimony? Mystical intuition, a foretaste of the visio beata, surely trumps mere faith and roundabout reason.

Now suppose the doctor angelicus were before us now in the flesh, and we put the question to him: 'Are there three gods or one God? I'll bet he would respond: 'The God I believe in on the basis of revelation is the very same God I tried to demonstrate in my Five Ways, and of this same God I was granted direct experience, by the grace of God.'

In sum: not two or three gods, but one God aprroachable by different routes. Once this point is appreciated, it becomes clear that it is an egregious mistake to think that the God of the philosophers is a mere concept. No doubt the philosopher has a concept of God, but one ought not confuse the concept of X with X. I have the concept chair, but what I am sitting on is not a concept but a chair.

It is important to see this. If a philosopher reasons about X, that does not transform X into an ens rationis. If I think about the earth, the earth does not become a thought. If I reason about God, that does not turn God into a mere object of reason. If I conceptualize God, that does not transform God into a mere concept.

I therefore find it senseless to oppose the God of the philosophers to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as Pascal seems to do in the passage quoted. It is the same God 'accessed' in two different ways. Here is an analogy to help nail down the point.

Do I have two wives, one about whom I know things by inference and a second one about whom I know things directly? Of course not. I have exactly one wife accessible in two ways. Suppose I infer that she is in the house from certain facts (her car's in the garage, her purse is in it usual place and she never leaves home without it, etc.). It would be absurd were someone to say that the object of my inferential knowledge is a mere concept. I am not married to a concept. The object of my inferential knowledge is the very same flesh-and-blood individual that I can also come to know via sense-perception as when I see her sitting at her desk.

There is much more to be said, of course. Suppose I convince you that philosophizing about God does not reduce God to the status of a mere concept, and that is senseless to oppose the God of the philosophers to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. There remains the question whether reason is entitled to impose constraints on what God can be like. I say it is, because I hold that reason is not merely our reason. But here lurk deep and vexing questions at the crossroads of Athens and Jerusalem . . . .

2. The nature of gratitude. Let us first note that it exhibits a triadic structure. To feel grateful is to feel grateful to someone for something. If I receive a gift, I am grateful to the donor for the gift. 'To whom?' and 'For what?' are both questions it is appropriate to ask in ordinary cases of gratitude. And as the grammar of 'To whom?' suggests, the donor must be a person. I cannot be grateful to a vending machine for disgorging a can of Pepsi upon the insertion of a few coins. Here too we have a triadic relation: the machine gave me a can of soda. But I cannot be grateful to a machine, though I could be grateful to its installer or manufacturer. It would be a case of incorrect or inappropriate emotion were one to feel grateful to a vending machine. I hold, with Brentano, that one can distinguish between correct and incorrect emotion.

Note also that what one is grateful for, the gift, must be gratuitously given. I can be appropriately grateful only for that which is freely given, which implies that the agent is both a free agent and an uncoerced free agent. If Robin Hood forces you to give me your money, I cannot be appropriately grateful to you, though I may be to Robin Hood. For there to be gratitude, there must be a donor, and it is necessary that the donor be a person; but it is not sufficient that the donor be a person.

If I am grateful to a person P at time t does it follow that P exists at t? Suppose someone likes what I write and mails me a check as a gift for my blogging endeavours. Unbeknownst to me, the donor dies before I receive the check. I am grateful to him for the check even though at the time of receiving the check and feeling the gratitude he no longer exists. This suggests that gratitude to a person P does not entail the present existence of P. And certainly it does seem that gratitude to past persons is appropriately felt. A child, student, philosopher might appropriately feel gratitude in respect of his deceased parents, teachers, predecessors.

Can one appropriately feel grateful to a nonexistent person? A child, for example, feels grateful to Santa Claus for her Christmas presents. This looks to be a genuine case of gratitude despite the nonexistence of the person to whiom the child feels grateful. But note that for the child the existence of Santa Claus is an epistemic possibility. If the child were convinced of the nonexistence of the fat guy, then she couldn't feel grateful to him.

3. Metaphysical gratitude. What Ryan is talking about, however, is not ordinary gratitude - gratitude to some intramundane person for some intramundane object -- but what we might call metaphysical gratitude or what he calls "deep gratitude": gratitude for the existence of the world and our lives within it. Now if this is a genuine case of gratitude, it seems appropriate to ask to whom we feel grateful. This person can only be God, as Ryan realizes, since only God could bestow the gift of the world's existence. So it would seem that a metaphysically grateful person is grateful to God. A theist might try to argue from gratitude to God as follows:

a. We are appropriately grateful for the existence of the world
b. To be grateful is to be grateful to someone
c. The only person to whom one can be appropriately grateful for the existence of the world is God
-----
d. God exists.

4. Ryan's rejection of this argument. Ryan will of course reject this argument by rejecting premise (b). He maintains:

P: There is no entailment from the proposition that one feels gratitude to the proposition that there is someone to whom one feels gratitude.

That is, from the mere fact that one feels grateful, it does not follow that the person to whom one feels grateful exists. (Compare the Santa Claus example above. The child is grateful to someone, namely, Santa Claus; but it does not follow that Santa Claus exists.) So from the mere fact that one feels grateful for the existence of the world, it does not follow that God exists, even in the presence of the auxiliary premises that gratitude is by its very nature gratitude to a person, and the only possible donor of the world is God.

This seems right and refutes the (a)-(d) argument. But it raises an interesting question. Suppose the following: subject S is grateful for some object O; O can only be the gift of some person P and S knows this to be the case; S either knows or else is subjectively certain that P does not exist. Are these suppositions consistent? Can I be grateful to a person I am subjectively certain does not exist? Ryan is subjectively certain that God does not exist. How then can he feel grateful for the existence of the world given that he knows that gratitude is by its very nature gratitude to a person and that in the present case the person can only be God?

5. Gratitude and Gladness. I say that Ryan cannot be grateful that the world exists. For if he is grateful, he is grateful to someone, and this someone can only be God given that the object of the gratitude is the existence of the world. I grant that gratitude for the existence of the world does not prove the existence of God. But the gratitude to be gratitude must allow the existence of God: the existence of God must be epistemically possible for the subject of gratitude. But Ryan's 'gratitude' is blended with subjective certainty of God's nonexistence: the existence of God is not an epistemic possibility for Ryan. So I say that what Ryan feels is not gratitude. Ryan concludes,

Atheists can feel deep gratitude, as well, however. When we construe the emotion as deep gladness and modesty, the personal object (God) drops out. One is simply glad that this universe exists and that one lives in it. There need be no one to whom one is grateful. So, the error theory doesn't cast any aspersions on deep gratitude. It is perfectly consistent with holding, as I do, that deep gratitude is indeed part of proper functioning for human beings.

I deny that atheists can feel deep (metaphysical) gratitude, gratitude for the very existence of the world and our lives in it. An atheist is one who explicitly denies the existence of God. For such a person it is not epistemically possible that there be a person to whom to be grateful for the existence of the world. Since the existence of God is a priori ruled out, what the atheist feels cannot be gratitude. Gratitude by its very nature is gratitude to a person. Granted, the existence of the person is not guaranteed by the presence of the emotion; but it can't be excluded by it either. It is incoherent to feel gratitude to a person one knows does not exist. Ryan can no more feel gratitude for the existence of the world than I can feel gratitiude for Christmas presents whose existence could only be explained by Santa's having dropped them down my chimney.

An atheist can be glad that the world exists, but gladness is not gratitude.

So if by 'deism' is meant the doctrine that God is a mere metaphysical cause of the universe's beginning to exist who is thereafter uninvolved in its continuing to exist, then the God of the Declaration is non-deistic.

The other two references are in the final paragraph. There we find the phrase, “...Supreme Judge of the World for the Rectitude of our Intentions....” near the beginning of the paragraph, and near the end, “...a firm Reliance on the Protection of divine Providence....” Now if God is the Supreme Judge, then he is more than a mere metaphysical cause responsible for the universe’s beginning to exist; he is also the supreme moral arbiter. And since he endows human beings with rights, as opposed to being merely a judge of rights antecedently possessed, then it seems we may infer that God is the source of moral distinctions (as opposed to a mere judge of them).

The reference to divine providence is further evidence that the conception of God in the Declaration is non-deistic. For if God provides and protects, then God has an ongoing involvement with the world and its inhabitants such as would be ruled out by a deistic view. It should also be obvious that talk of providence (from the Latin, pro-videre) implies divine foreknowledge which implies intelligence and perhaps omniscience on the part of the deity. The God of the Declaration is not a blind metaphysical cause posited to explain why the universe began to exist, but a being with such attributes as moral goodness and intelligence.

Showing that the God of the Declaration is not deistic, however, does not show that he is the God of Christianity. The God of Christianity is triune, but there is no hint of the doctrine of the Trinity in the Declaration, nor any hint of the specitfically Christian notion that God reveals himself to man in the person of Jesus Christ. Note also that God's ongoing involvement with the created world does not imply any miraculous intervention in its functioning, where 'miraculous' implies contravention of natural laws. 'Vertical' continuous creation does not imply 'horizontal' interference in the causal chains that make up nature's internal workings.

So although the concept of God in the Declaration is not deistic, it is not specifically Christian either.

First of all, I agree that God is a metaphysically necessary being (one that exists in all metaphysically possible worlds) and also a concrete being (one that is causally active/passive, though on some theories God is impassible: active but not passive). You seem also to be assuming that God is an individual, perhaps in the sense that he has properties but is not himself a property. As I understand the ontological (as opposed to epistemological) problem of individuation, it is the problem of specifying what is it about an individual that makes it numerically distinct from all other individuals, if any. And I take you to mean by an individuating property a property possession of which by an individual x would make x distinct from every other individual y in the actual world and from every other individual y in every possible world in which x exists.

Now God, who exists in every world, creates a universe only in some worlds. (Let's stipulate that a universe is a totality of contingent concreta, whether minds or bodies.) God's creating a universe in only some possible worlds is a consequence of the divine freedom construed in a robust 'could have done otherwise' sense. So in some worlds God has the property of creating a universe, and in the rest of the worlds he exists but lacks this property. So the property in question is an accidental property of God.

Assuming I understand your problem, it can be put in the form of an inconsistent tetrad:

1. God exists in all worlds. (Because he is a necessary being)
2. God creates a universe in only some worlds. (Because he is libertarianly free)
3. If P is an individuating property of x, then x has P in every world in which x exists. (Your understanding of 'individuating property')
4. Creating a universe is an individuating property of God. (Because it distinguishes God from all else)

But (3) and (4) entail

5. God creates in every world in which he exists.

And (5) in conjunction with (1) entails

6. God creates a universe in all worlds.

But (6) contradicts (2), which shows that the tetrad is inconsistent.

Well, if this is your problem, then I solve it by rejecting (4): creating a universe is not an individuating property of God in the sense of 'individuating property' that is requisite to make (3) true. For although creating a universe distinguishes God from all else in a given world such as the actual world, it is not a property God has in every world.

I think you are becoming confused though a failure to distinguish two senses of 'individuating property.' If Seldom Seen Slim is the meanest man in the Superstition Mountains, then this is a property that individuates him in the sense that nothing else in the actual world has it. But there are worlds in which Slim exists but lives in the Goldfield Mountains and is the meanest hombre there. The property of having sprung from a certain sperm cell S and a certain ovum O, however, is a property that individuates Slim in every world in which he exists. (Assuming the essentiality of origin.) Thus we ought to distinguish:

A. P is an accidentally individuating property of x =df x and nothing distinct from x instantiates P in some but not all of the worlds in which x exists.

B. P is an essentially individuating property of x =df x and nothing distinct from x instatiates P in every world in which x exists.

In other words: creating a universe is an accidentally, but not an essentially, individuating property of God. Hence there is no incompatibility as between God's being a necessary being and God's being a free creator.

It looks as though the theistic hypothesis is an empirically refutable one, so that theism becomes a refuted scientific theory. The argument goes: (1) If God exists then there is no evil, (2) There is evil, therefore (3) It is not the case that God exists. Premiss (1) seems to follow from our characterization of God as an omnipotent, omnsicient and benevolent being. (2) is empirical. We can hardly reject (2). It seems therefore that the theist has to find something wrong with (1) and this is not easy. (J. J. C. Smart and J. J. Haldane, Atheism and Theism, Blackwell 2003, 2nd ed, p. 60)

Smart's argument from evil is plainly valid, being of the form modus tollens. But for an argument to be probative, other conditions must be met. One of these conditions is that the premises be true. Another is that the argument involve no 'informal fallacy' such as equivocation.

So let us ask: how would 'evil' in (1) have to be construed so that (1) comes out true? I suggest that 'evil' must be short for 'gratuitous evil.' But then, to avoid equivocation, we would have to replace 'evil' in (2) with 'gratuitous evil.' The result would be:

1*. If God exists, then there is no gratuitous evil.
2*. There is gratuitous evil.
---
3. It is not the case that God exists.

The resulting argument is valid, and (1*) is plainly true, unlike (1) which is not plainly true, but false. That (1) is false can be seen from the fact that an omniqualified God could easily permit the existence of an evil that was necessary for the attainment of a greater good. So it is just false to say, 'If God exists, then there is no evil.'

But (1*) is plainly true. Now it may be — it is epistemically possible that --(2*) is also true. The reformulated argument would then be sound. A sound argument, by definition, is a deductive argument that is both valid in point of logical form and whose premises are all of them true. And for the record, a proposition p is epistemically (doxastically) possible for a subject S if and only if p is logically consistent with what S knows (believes).

But note that a sound argument will be probatively worthless if it begs the question, if it is such that one cannot know a premise to be true without already knowing the conclusion to be true. So let us ask a very simple question: How does one know that (2*) is true? Smart tells us that (2) is empirical. 'Empirical' is a term of epistemology. It is applied to those propositions that are known from experience, by observation via the senses and their instrumental extensions (microscopes, telescopes, etc.) Now I am willing to grant that (2) — There is evil — is an empirical truth. (2), however, is not what Smart needs to make his argument work. He needs (2*). But is (2*) an empirical truth? Can one know from experience (whether inner or outer) that there is gratuitous evil? Is gratuitousness an empirical attribute of the evils one experiences?

Consider the evil of intense pain. I am acquainted with pain by 'inner sense.' And I am willing to grant arguendo, though it is not quite obvious, that I am acquainted empirically with the evil of intense pain. But I am surely not acquainted empirically with the gratuitousness of experienced evils. Gratuitousness is no more an empirical attribute than the createdness of the natural world. It is not evident to the senses that nature is a divine creation. Similarly, it is not evident to the senses that instances of evil are gratuitous. Is it not epistemically possible that they are all non-gratuitous?

To say that an evil is gratuitous is to say in effect that it is an evil inconsistent with the existence of the omniqualified God. It is to say that it is an evil that no such God could have a morally sufficient reason for permitting. Clearly, one cannot 'read off' such a complex relational attribute from any instance of evil.

The conclusion I am driving towards is that Smart's argument supra is question-begging. For in order to know that premise (2*) is true, I must know that the conclusion is true. That is, to know that there are gratuitous evils, I must know that God does not exist. For if God exists, then then there are no gratuitous evils.

Smart tells us above that the theistic hypothesis is empirically refutable. But I say Smart is mistaken: he needs (2*) for his argument to work, but this proposition -- There is gratuitous evil -- is not empirical. It may be true for all that, but it is not knowable by experience. You may be convinced that it is true, and I won't blame you if you find it much more plausible than the truth of 'God exists'; but it is not an empirical truth, if it is a truth. It is an interpretation imposed upon the data. It is as metaphysical as 'God exists.'

1. If religious faith offers the only real basis for morality, then atheists should be less moral than believers.

2. Atheists are not less moral than believers.

Therefore

3. Religious faith does not offer the only real basis for morality.

The problem with this argument lies in its first premise. It simply doesn't follow that if religious faith offers the only real basis for morality, then atheists should be less moral than theists. This blatant non sequitur trades on a confusion of two questions which it is essential to distinguish.

Q1. Given some agreed-upon moral code, are people who profess some version of theism more 'moral,' i.e., more likely to live in accordance with the agreed-upon code, than those who profess some version of atheism?

The answer to this question is No. But even if the answer is Yes, I am willing to concede arguendo to Harris that it is No. In any case (Q1) is not philosophically interesting, except as part of the run-up to a genuine philosophical question, though it is of interest sociologically. Now contrast (Q1) with

Q2. Given some agreed-upon moral code, are atheists justified in adhering to the code?

The agreed-upon code is one that most or many atheists and theists would accept. Thus don't we all object to child molestation, wanton killing of human beings, rape, theft, and lying? And in objecting to these actions, we mean our objections to be more than merely subjectively valid. When our property is stolen or a neighbor murdered, we consider that an objective wrong has been done. And when the murderer is apprehended, tried, and convicted we judge that something objectively right has been done. Let's not worry about the details or the special cases: killing in self-defense, abortion, etc. Just imagine some minimal objectively binding code that all or most of us, theists and atheists alike, accept.

What (Q2) asks about is the foundation or basis of the agreed-upon objectively binding moral code. This is not a sociological or any kind of empirical question. Nor is it a question in normative ethics. The question is not what we ought to do and leave undone, for we are assuming that we already have a rough answer to that. The question is meta-ethical: what does morality rest on, if on anything?

There are different theories. Some will say that morality requires a supernatural foundation, others that a natural foundation suffices. Here you can read the transcript of a debate between Richard Taylor and William Lane Craig on this topic. I incline toward the side ably defended by Craig. Although I respect Taylor very much as a philosopher and have learned from his work, he seems to me to come across in this debate as something of a sophist and a smart-ass.

But the point of this post is not to take sides on the question of the basis of morality, but simply to point out that Sam Harris has confused two quite obviously distinct questions. For if he had kept them distinct, he would have seen that the question whether morality requires a basis in religion is logically independent of the question whether theists are more moral than atheists. He would have seen that invoking the platitude that atheists can be as morally decent as theists has no tendency to show that morality does not require a supernatural foundation. He would have seen that (1) is false.

See Is Religion the Problem? for further criticism of Sam Harris.

My quietism ended when current events taught me the dangers of religion. I had always known how religions, including Christianity, led to wars in the Middle East, Ireland, and so on. Many wars, of course, are not based on religion. Even religious wars result from non-religious forces as well. Nonetheless, it is hard to deny that many wars have been and continue to be fueled in large part by religious beliefs. It is no coincidence that terrorists are so often motivated by religion, since it is hard to get non-religious people to volunteer as suicide bombers. (76)

It is true that people holding religious beliefs have used, and are using, their religious beliefs to justify war, terrorism, and such other evils as forced conversions and inquisitions. No reasonable person can deny this. But what Sinnott-Armstrong (S-A) says above in the second sentence is that religions lead to wars. Does he really want to say that all religions lead to wars? Buddhism? I understand that there are some Buddhist terrorists. But surely a professional philosopher such as S-A can see the difference between (i) Some Buddhists are terrorists and (ii) Buddhism causes war and terrorism. If a Buddhist is a terrorist, this is an accidental fact about him; there is nothing in the essence of Buddhism that enjoins terrorism. No Buddhist qua Buddhist is a terrorist. It escapes me how the doctrines, precepts and practices of Buddhism cause war, terrorism and kindred evils. Similarly for Christianity. Plenty of atrocities have been committed by people who identify themselves as Christians. But that is not to say that the characteristic doctrines, precepts and practices of Christianity cause war, terrorism and the like. It is rather the opposite: when the doctrines and precepts of Buddhism and Christianity are acted upon they tend to mitigate human savagery.

And then there is the case of Gandhi whose principle of ahimsa (no-harm) derives from his Hinduism. Hinduism as understood and practiced by him surely did not lead to war and terroism. Did he perhaps not understand the principles of his religion? So it cannot be religion as such that causes war and terrorism.

A second obvious point that needs to be made is that even if (some? all?) religious beliefs cause wars and other evils, or rather are part of the motivational framework of individuals who are bellicose and terroristic, this is also true of other belief-systems, belief-systems that are anti-religious. Communism, Fascism, and National Socialism are examples. According to the Black Book of Communism, Communists in the 20th century murdered close to 100 million people. Now Communism is virulently anti-religious. It is a political ideology that is committed to the destruction of religions as to the destruction of an 'opiate' in Marx's famous simile, one that keeps people from realizing the worker's paradise here on earth.

So my question to Sinnott-Armstrong et al. is: If you oppose religion because of its tendency to cause bloodshed, why do you not oppose political ideology as well and for the same reason? Indeed, if you believe that religion is the problem, why do you not hold that belief as such is the problem, or all belief that transcends matters of obvious empirical fact? After all, people fight bitterly over all sorts of beliefs religious and non-religious. (Some believe in wealth redistribution, other do not; some believe in anthropogenic global warming, others do not, etc.)

If one opposes a religion such as Christianity because it causes wars despite its preaching of 'Thou shalt not kill' and 'Love thy neighbor,' but does not oppose anti-religious political ideologies like Communism that also cause wars but which preaches that any end is justified including murder if it leads to the socialist paradise, then the 'reason' proffered for rejecting religion is bogus. It is simply no argument against religion to say that some people use it for murderous ends; for it is also the case that some people use anti-religious ideologies for murderous ends. A good reason for rejecting religion cannot be a reason that would also apply to non-religions and indeed to any belief-system that inspires contention and could be used by someone to kill and commit kindred evils. It is absurd to say: I object to religion because it leads to bloodshed but I have no problem with non-religious belief-systems that also lead to bloodshed.

Sinnott-Armstrong senses the difficulty in his position for he goes on to say:

Of course, atheists kill, too. Russian and Chinese Communist governments are famous examples. However, these atheists killed in the name of communism, not atheism. (p. 76)

The difference, then, is that theists who kill kill in the name of theism, whereas atheists who kill do not kill in the name of atheism. Now surely this is an example of special pleading. For although it is true that some theists kill in the name of theism (e.g. some Christians kill in the name of Christ; some Muslims kill in the name of Allah, etc.), it is also true that some atheists kill in the name of atheism: there are cases of atheists who have tortured and crucified Catholic priests in order to show them that there is no God. These atheists tortured in the name of atheism, whrether they were Communists or Nazis.

To say or imply that no atheist kills in the name of atheism is blatant special pleading. It amounts to saying that atheism is by definition a belief-system that cannot be misused by anyone, and if anyone were to misuse use it that would show that he is not an atheist! If a Communist crucifies a priest to prove to him the nonexistence of God, one cannot reasonably say that it was the Communism but not the atheism of the torturer that was responsible for the crime.

Now the point I want to make is that, just as we ought to distinguish between generic theism and specific theisms, we ought to distinguish between the generic problem of evil and specific problems of evil. The generic problem of evil is the problem faced by the generic theist of reconciling his belief in a God possessing the standard omni-attributes with the existence of evil in the kinds and amounts encountered in the actual world. A specific problem of evil, on the other hand, is the problem a specific type of theist has in reconciling the existence of God with the existence of evil.

We need to examine whether the problem a theist of a specific stripe has in reconciling God and evil is easier to solve or perhaps harder to solve than the problem a generic theist has.

To see what I am driving at, imagine a version of theism — call it version A — that affirms God, immortal souls, and the eventual blissful communion of all souls with God. On this version of theism there is purgatory, but no hell defined as a state of everlasting separation from communion with God. Thus on this version of theism there is post-mortem evil, the pain of purgatory, but this purgatorial evil is instrumental for the achieving of a higher good and is to that extent redeemed by this higher good.

Now compare this theism-A with a theism-B which affirms God but denies post-mortem existence whether in the form of immortal souls or in the form of resurrected bodies. On this alternative the God of the generic theist (defined above) exists, but for human beings this life is all there is: at death a human being ceases to exist utterly. Now does it not seem that the theist-B faces a much tougher problem than the theist-A when it comes to reconciling a good God with the fact of evil?

For the theist-B, the horrendous evils of this life are not compensated for by any life to come. But for the theist-A, the transient evils of this short life are as nothing compared to the endless bliss of the soul's communion with God and with other purified souls. Thus gratuitous evil for the theist-A is a vanishing quantity.

Most atheists share the very strong intuition that the probability of this world's containing the amount of evil it does is much greater on the hypothesis that God does not exist than it is on the hypothesis that God exists:

Prob(E/~G) >> Prob(E/G).

But to properly evaluate this inequality, how can one leave out the rest of what most theists believe? The amount and kinds of evil in this world enters the calculation, no doubt. But the absence of gratuitous evil, and the presence of unending bliss in the next world, are also relevant if the question concerns reconciling God and evil within theism-A.

To sum up:

1. Real live theists are not generic theists, but theists of some particular stripe or other. Generic theism is an abstraction.

2. The problem of evil, if it is to be a genuine existential conundrum and not a mere logic puzzle, is the problem of reconciling the existence of the God of a particular religion with the fact of evil as evil is understood from within this religion.

3. A theism that affirms God, post-mortem existence, and the eventual unending blissful communion of all souls (or resurrected persons) with God does not face the same problem of evil as a version of theism which denies post-mortem existence.

4. It is dialectically unfair for atheists to argue against all (classical) theists from the fact of the evil in this world when (i) not all theists are generic theists, and (ii) some theists believe that the transient evils of this short life are far outweighed by the unending bliss of the world to come.

5. It is arguable that there is no insoluble problem of evil for theists-A. Suppose this world is a vale of soul-making in which human beings, exercising free will, make themselves worthy, or fail to make themselves worthy, of communion with God. Combine this soul-making idea with post-mortem existence, and the existence of purgatory but not hell, and we have perhaps the elements of a solution to the problem of evil. (Cf. John Hick, Evil and the God of Love, Part IV)

Let me conclude by noting that a theism-C which holds to eternal damnation for some may exacerbate the problem of evil. Here I refer you to David Lewis' posthumous "Divine Evil" in Louise Antony, ed., Philosophers Without Gods, Oxford 2007, pp. 231-242. Lewis, may God rest his soul, maintains that the usual logical and evidential arguments from evil are a "sideshow" compared to a "simpler argument, one that has been strangely neglected" (p. 231) that focuses not on the evils that God fails to prevent, but on the one's he perpetrates. And then he goes on to speak of hell and eternal torment. You can guess what conclusion he comes to.

We shall have to examine Lewis' simpler argument from evil in a separate post. But I am happy that he in effect concedes one of my points, namely, that a serious discussion of the problem of evil must address the whole of a theistic position and not focus merely on God and his attributes.

Other members of the Dawkins Gang as I call them, including Richard Dawkins himself, see here, often employ this piece of silliness. The idea is that since we are all atheists about some god or goddess, we should be atheists about all gods. A howling non sequitur, of course. Consider this parallel 'argument':

We are all anti-scientific about some scientific claim or other in the sense that all of us deny some scientific claim or other and with justification. Thus I deny, and I hope you do as well, Dalton's assertion that water is HO and the pre-Michaelson and Morley contention that light requires for its propagation a medium, the so-called luminiferous ether. Examples could be multiplied indefinitely. But presumably no one will think that one ought to be anti-scientific about every scientific claim.

No one thinks that because many once well-established scientific assertions have been abandoned as false that all scientific assertions ought to be abandoned as false or will be. No one takes the Hitchens-Dawkins 'further step' when it comes to scientific claims. Why should it be any different in matters of religion?

"Because religion is buncombe from start to finish!"

But of course this response simply begs the question against the theist. Anyone who just assumes that the crudest forms of polytheism and the most refined forms of monotheism are on a par simply disqualifies himself from being taken seriously in a discussion like this. Was Democritean atomism the last word in atomic theory? What people like Daniel Dennett, another key Dawkins Gang member, cannot get through their heads is that religion might be subject to development and refinement just as science is. Such people cannot understand development of the God concept as anything different from deformation. They think, quite stupidly, that the crudest anthropomorphic conceptions are those with which religion must remain saddled. But they would never say something similar with respect to science. Why the double standard? See Dennett on the Deformation of the God Concept.

One is no doubt free to adopt a scientistic metaphysics -- which, nota bene, science does not and cannot justify -- but then one ought to admit that one thereby (i) adopts a metaphysical stance not entailed by science proper, and (ii) begs the question against theists.

The chapter on Science and Religion in A. N. Whitehead's Science and the Modern World is relevant here. He sees that "religious thought develops into an increasing accuracy of expression, disengaged from adventitious imagery [and that] the interaction between religion and science is one great factor in promoting this development." (p. 170)

1. Evil exists.
2. God exists.
3. God possesses the standard omni-attributes (omniscience, omnibenevolence or moral perfection, and omnipotence).

The auxiliary premises specify what it is to be omnipotent, omniscient and morally perfect. Thus one of the auxiliaries is something like:

4. If a being is morally perfect, then it eliminates or prevents every evil that it is aware of and can eliminate.

Since the soundness of LAFE requires the truth of (4) or rather the truth of (4)'s necessitation -- Necessarily, if a being is morally perfect, etc. -- theists have questioned whether (4)'s necessitation is true. It seems not to be since it is surely possible that a mother, for example, be morally perfect but not prevent her child's suffering from a painful medical treatment in circumstances in which the outcome of not subjecting the child to the treatment would be far worse than the treatment. A theist who argues in this way against (4) assumes the principle Lupu labels 'PMP,' Pike's Moral Principle, and formulates as follows:

PMP. Under certain circumstances it is justified for any moral agent to permit preventable suffering, and even to bring it about, provided there are legitimate moral reasons for doing so, the person knows about such reasons, and permits (or brings about) suffering only for such reasons.

I concede for now that if (PMP) is false or incoherent, then the standard theistic objection to LAFE is untenable. But Lupu has an argument against (PMP) and a related principle (PMP*). The argument seems to proceed as follows

5. Every instance of evil is an instance of suffering.
6. Every instance of suffering is an instance of wrongful suffering.
Therefore
7. 'Wrongful suffering' must be substituted for 'suffering' in each of the latter's occurrences in (PMP).
8. The result of this substitution is incoherence, for under no circumstances is it justified for a moral agent to permit preventable wrongful suffering.

Now Lupu can tell me whether or not this is a fair representation of what he is arguing. If it is, then I reject the argument by rejecting both of (5) and (6). My argument against (5) was given in a previous post wherein I gave examples of evils that do not in any way involve the suffering of sentient beings. There was the 'cliff dwelling' example in the main post, and the 'Reefer Man' example in the Comments. Note that Lupu needs (5) in order to make (PMP) relevant to the problem of evil.

As for (6), it strikes me as false that every instance of suffering is morally objectionable. Suffering is an unavoidable concomitant of athletic performance as well as a means to the end of getting oneself into good physical shape; but sufferings of either of these two sorts which a person inflicts upon himself are not morally objectionable.

Revelation is the continuation of creation since man as the rational and moral being comes into being, i.e., is constituted, by revelation. Revelation is as little miraculous as creation. (Leo Strauss, Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy, U. of Chicago Press, 1983, p. 237.)

This is an extremely interesting suggestion in that it gives us a way to make sense of the notion that God creates man in his image and likeness but without interfering in the evolutionary prcoesses which most of us believe are responsible for man's existence as an animal. Man as an animal is one thing, man as a spiritual, rational, and moral being is another. The origin of man as an animal came about not through any special divine acts but through the evolutionary processes common to the origination of all animal species. But man as spirit, as a self-conscious, rational being who distinguishes between good and evil cannot be accounted for in naturalistic terms. In Adam and Inerrancy, I explained this in greater detail: As animals, we are descended from lower forms. As animals, we are part of the natural world and have the same general type of origin as any other animal species. Hence there was no Adam and Eve as first biological parents of the human race who came into existence directly by divine fiat without animal progenitors. But although we are animals, we are also spiritual beings, spiritual selves. I am an I, an ego, and this I-ness or egoity cannot be explained naturalistically. I am a person possessing free will and conscience neither of which can be explained naturalistically. What 'Adam' refers to is not a man qua member of a zoological species, but the first man to become a spiritual self. This spiritual selfhood came into existence through an encounter with the divine self. In this I-Thou encounter, the divine self elicited or triggered man's latent spiritual self. This spiritual self did not emerge naturally; what emerged naturally was the potentiality to hear a divine call which called man to his vocation, his higher destiny, namely, a sharing in the divine life. The divine call is from beyond the human horizon.

But in the encounter with the divine self which first triggered man's personhood or spiritual selfhood, there arose man's freedom and his sense of being a separate self, an ego distinct from God and from other egos. Thus was born pride and self-assertion and egotism. Sensing his quasi-divine status, man asserted himself against the One who had revealed himself, the One who simultaneously called him to a Higher Life but also imposed restrictions and made demands. Man in his pride then made a fateful choice, drunk with the sense of his own power: he decided to go it alone. This rebellion was the Fall of man, which has nothing to do with being expelled from a physical garden located between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Original Sin was a spiritual event, and its transmission is not by semen, pace the Pauline passages cited above [in Adam and Inerrancy].

If we take some such tack as the above, then we can reconcile what we know to be true from natural science with the Biblical message. Religion and science needn't compete; they can complement each other -- but only if each sticks to its own province. In this way we can avoid both the extremes of the fundamentalists and the extremes of the 'Dawkins gang' (Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens, Harris, et al.)

Returning to Hermann Cohen's suggestion above, as mediated by Leo Strauss, we can say that the divine-human encounter whereby the animal man becomes spirit is God's revelation to man. God's revealing himself is at the same time a creation of man as a spiritual being. In Heideggerian terms, at the moment of encounter moment man becomes Dasein, the Da of Sein, the site where Being achieves finite self-understanding. But there is nothing ontically miraculous in this, no contravention of any law of nature.

Revealing himself to man as Being itself -- Exodus 3:14 "I am who am" -- God creates man as understandor of Being.

It seems therefore that this unfortunate state [the one brought about by the infirmity of reason] is the most proper one of all for convincing us that our reason is a path that leads us astray since, when it displays itself with the greatest subtlety, it plunges us into such an abyss. The natural conclusion of this ought to be to renounce this guide and to implore the cause of all things to give us a better one. This is a great step toward the Christian religion; for it requires that we look to God for knowledge of what we ought to believe and what we ought to do, and that we enslave our understanding to the obeisance of faith. If a man is convinced that nothing good is to be expected from his philosophical inquiries, he will be more disposed to pray to God to persuade him of the truths that ought to be believed than if he flatters himself that he might succeed by reasoning and disputing. A man is therefore happily disposed toward faith when he knows how defective reason is. (206, emphasis added)

Now how is this a solution to the alleged infirmity of reason? A Christian fideist, acquiescing in pure blind (purblind?) faith, accepts the Trinity while a Muslim fideist, equally subjectively certain of his faith, rejects the Trinity while intoning that God is one. Blind conviction butts up against blind conviction of the opposite kind and all too often strife and bloodshed is the upshot.

Admittedly, reason is weak and inconclusive. But fideistic faith is blind: the certitude it provides is merely subjective. For if the Christian's subjective certitude of the Trinity were also objective, then the same would hold for the Muslim's subjective certitude of the opposite, with the result that one and the same proposition would be both objectively true and objectively not true. To avoid this result one would have to throw out the Law of Non-Contradiction. But then one would have taken one step too far.

Although there is scholarly debate as to what exactly Pierre Bayle's ultimate philosophical position is, the following argument can be attributed to him (cf. Richard H. Popkin, "Pierre Bayle's Place in 17th Century Scepticism" in Paul Dibon, ed. Pierre Bayle: Le Philosophe De Rotterdam, Elsevier, 1959, pp. 1-19):

1. Reason is too weak and confused to discover the truth about the world and how we should live in it.

Therefore

2. One must rely on faith as the guide to, and divine revelation as the measure of, the truth about the world and how we should live in it.

This is a non sequitur for a couple of reasons. First, one response to the supposed truth of (1) might be a universal epoché (εποχη) of all contention-inspiring beliefs and a resolve to stick to the mundane and follow the customs of one's time and place, and in the relaxed manner in which worldly people do this: one goes along to get along without getting too worked up over anything. Among meat-eaters one eats meat, among vegetarians vegetables only. Above all, one does not dogmatize about the evils of factory farms, the health dangers of red meat, etc. Second, the argument gives one no reason to accept the Christian faith and the Christian revelation as opposed to, say, the Muslim faith and revelation. (See the Bayle quotation above.)

My tentative conclusion, then, is that the infirmity of reason, though a fact, does not straightaway license any embrace of fideism which, for present purposes, can be characterized roughly as reliance on pure blind faith in matters of religion. (Kierkegaard (1813-1855) is a good 19th century example of a fideist.) Fideism comes in different varieties. There is Wittgensteinian fideism, to mention just one variety.

What are our options? Perhaps only these:

A. Rationalism: Put your trust in reason to deliver truths about ultimates and ignore the considerations of Sextus Empiricus, Nagarjuna, Bayle, Kant, and a host of others that point to the infirmity of reason.

B. Fideism: Put your trust in blind faith. Submit, obey, enslave your reason to revealed truth while ignoring the fact that what counts as revealed truth varies from religion to religion, and within a religion from sect to sect.

C. Skepticism: Suspend belief on all issues that transcend the mundane if not on all beliefs, period. Don't trouble your head over whether God is or is not tripersonal. Stick to what appears. And don't say, 'The tea is sweet'; say, 'The tea appears sweet.' (If you say that the tea is sweet, you invite contradiction by an irascible table-mate.)

D. Reasoned Faith: Avoiding each of the foregoing options, one formulates one's beliefs carefully and holds them tentatively. One does not abandon them lightly, but neither does one fail to revisit and revise them. Doxastic examination is ongoing at least for the length of one's tenure here below. One exploits the fruitful tension of Athens and Jerusalem, philosphy and religion, reason and faith, playing them off against each other and using each to chasten the other.

I recommend (D). Or are there other options?

1. Revelation is the communication to man by God of truths the knowledge of which is not possible to man without divine initiative. Whether or not God exists, and whether or he reveals anythiing to man, this is what we mean by 'revelation.' Philosophy cannot establish either the fact or the content of revelation. But philosophy can and must reflect on the concept, the possibility, and the intelligibility of revelation and its relation to other modes of knowledge.

2. According to a standard way of thinking, miracles are violations of laws of nature. This approach has an impressive pedigree. Thus Thomas Aquinas writes, in the Summa Theologica (Q. 110, art. 4, respondeo), "A miracle properly so called takes place when something is done outside the order of nature." Thomas also alludes (in Reply Obj. 2) to a distinction between miracles ontically and epistemically construed. This is not his terminology. He speaks of miracles "absolutely" considered and miracles "in reference to ourselves." Something that occurs by a power unknown to us may appear miraculous to us and yet not be miraculous absolutely.

A miracle ontically construed is a violation, contravention, "transgression" (Hume's word) of a law of nature. A number of great thinkers have questioned whether there can be miracles in the ontic sense and have proposed epistemic theories of miracles. Augustine is one and Spinoza another:

. . . the universal laws of nature are decrees of God following from the necessity and perfection of the Divine nature. Hence, any event happening in nature which contravened nature's universal laws, would necessarily also contravene the Divine decree, nature, and understanding; or if anyone asserted that God acted in contravention to the laws of nature, he, ipso facto, would be compelled to assert that God acted against His own nature — an evident absurdity. (A Theologico-Political Treatise, tr. Elwes, Dover, p. 83)

It follows from this that miracles are to be construed epistemically:

Further, as nothing happens in nature which does not follow from her laws, and as her laws embrace everything conceived by the Divine intellect, and lastly, as nature preserves a fixed and immutable order; it most clearly follows that miracles are only intelligible as in relation to human opinions, and merely mean events of which the natural cause cannot be explained by a reference to any ordinary occurrence, either by us, or at any rate, by the writer and narrator of the miracle. (p. 84, emphasis added)

In sum, since the course of nature, being ordained by God, cannot be contravened, miracles ontically construed, for Spinoza, are impossible. Talk of miracles, therefore, is simply talk of events we cannot explain. Miracles are thus parasitic upon our ignorance. They are natural events that simply surpass our limited human comprehension. To a perfect understanding nothing would appear miraculous.

3. We now have a tolerably clear idea of what we mean by 'revelation,' 'ontic miracle' and 'epistemic miracle.' Now from the definition of 'revelation' it follows that revelation is something supernatural: its agent is God and God is a supernatural being. But if revelation is supernatural, does it not straightaway follow that revelation is miraculous? Not obviously. It depends on what is meant by 'supernatural.'

The supernatural is that which is above, beyond, or transcendent of nature. But what is nature? Nature is the system of space-time-matter. A natural entity is one whose being is exhausted by its occurrence in nature. (One of David Armstrong's immanent universals is therefore a natural entity since its entire being is exhausted by its occurrence in nature; a Platonic unexemplified universal is not a natural entity.) A supernatural entity, then, is one that is either not in nature at all, or, if manifested in nature, not such that its being is exhausted by its manifestation in nature.

Clearly, God (as classically conceived) is not a natural entity by the above definitions. So he is a supernatural entity. But that is not to say that God's existence is ontically miraculous: God's existence does not violate any natural law. Nor is it a law of nature that only nature exists. It is a mistake to confuse the supernatural with the (ontically) miraculous. It is a mistake that Dennett makes.

4. God, a supernatural being, is not a miraculous being. It is not a miracle that God exists since God's existence does not contravene any law of nature. Nor is it obvious that the action of God must be miraculous. God can act on nature without intervening in nature. He could sustain it in being 'vertically' without interfering with any of the causal chains that occur 'horizontally' in nature. So it is false that God's action must involve the violation of natural laws.

5. But if God reveals the Ten Commandments to Moses, say, imparting to his mind the content of the Decalogue, then this is not an acting on nature as a whole, but an imparting of epistemic contents to a mind in nature, the mind of a prophet or mystic. Nevertheless, it is not clear that this need involve the violation of any natural law. A mind in nature need not be a natural entity since a mind in nature need not be an entity whose being is exhausted by its occurrence in nature. Suppose substance dualism is true. Then the creature's mind is a supernatural entity, and it is not clear that a divine supernatural mind communicating with a creaturely supernatural mind need involve any violation of a law of nature.

Another sort of case to be examined is the mental grasping of so-called abstract objects. They are supernatural; but their grasping is presumably non-miraculous.

6. In Exodus 3:2 God gets Moses' attention with a burning bush that is not consumed in its burning. This is a miracle, whether ontic or epistemic. Then in 3:14 God reveals himself to Moses as "I am who am," as Being itself. My point is that this profound revelation needn't be construed as involving any miracle, and could have occurred without the miraculously burning bush. My tentative conclusion, then, is that there are or can be cases of revelation that do not involve violations of laws of nature.

. . . if God should really speak to man, man could still never know that it was God speaking. It is quite impossible for man to apprehend the infinite by his senses, distinguish it from sensible beings, and recognize it as such. But in some cases man can be sure that the voice he hears is not God's; for if the voice commands him to do something contrary to the moral law, then no matter how majestic the apparition may be, and no matter how it may seem to surpass the whole of nature, he must consider it an illusion. (115)

A footnote to this paragraph reads:

We can use, as an example, the myth of the sacrifice that Abraham was going to make by butchering and burning his only son at God's command (the poor child, without knowing it, even brought the wood for the fire). Abraham should have replied to this supposedly divine voice: "That I ought not kill my good son is quite certain. But that you, this apparition, are God — of that I am not certain, and never can be, not even is [read: if] this voice rings down to me from (visible) heaven." (115)

Here is what I wrote the other day:

Which is more certain, that I should not kill my innocent son, or that God exists, has commanded me to kill my son, and that I must obey this command? That I must not kill my innocent son is a deliverance of our ordinary moral sense. But wouldn't a command from the supreme moral authority in the universe trump a deliverance of our ordinary moral sense? Presumably it would — but only if the putative divine command were truly a divine command. How would one know that it is?

Kant's argument, put as concisely as possible, is that:

1. It is certain that one ought not kill one's innocent son.
2. It is not certain that a seemingly divine command to kill one's innocent son is truly a divine command.
Therefore
3. One ought to trust one's moral sense and not the putative divine revelation.
Therefore
4. ". . . if it [a scriptural text] contains statements that contradict practical reason, it must be interpreted in the interests of practical reason." (65)

Whether or not one accepts this argument that I am attributing to Kant — you are invited to note that I cobbled it together from disparate passages — you must, if you are rational, see that there is a problem here, one that cannot be ignored, namely, the problem of adjudicating between putative personal and Biblical revelation, on the one hand, and (practical) reason on the other. Something has to give. My judgment is that Kant is right in the passage just quoted, and that our sense of the moral law trumps any contra-moral personal revelation (e.g. a voice commanding an immoral act) and also any Bible passage that seems to endorse the acquiescence in a personal revelation that commands an immoral act.

But why not say that the Bible passage trumps our sense of the moral law? The short answer is that our sense of the moral law has superior epistemic credentials. If we know anything about morality, we know that we ought not kill our innocent children. If we don't know that, then we don't know anything about morality. But a voice commanding one to kill an innocent child has no claim on our belief.

1. The problem here is epistemological and is an aspect of the more general problem of revelation. The problem concerns the criteria whereby we judge whether a putative bit of revelation such as a putative divine command is a genuine bit. 'Putative' is from the Latin, putare, to think. So a putative bit of revelation is a deliverance that is supposed to be or thought to be a bit of revelation, but might in fact not be a bit of revelation at all. Thus 'putative' is an alienans adjective: if x is a putative F, it does not follow that x is an F. (The general problem of revelation is itself a special case of the still more general problem of the validation of any source of knowledge whatosever, whether it be sense-perception, testimony, memory, inference, whatever. But let's stick to the problem of revelation.)

2. It is important to understand that the having of an experience does not guarantee the veridicality of the experience had. Suppose you are having an out-of-the-body experience right now. You see yourself lying on the couch from the point of view of the ceiling. (I am not using 'see' as a verb of success whereby that which is seen eo ipso exists; I am using it in the phenomenological sense which allows that that which is seen may or may not exist.) Your having of the experience will be indubitable to you. But the indubitability of the experience is no guarantee that you are in fact out of your body. The having of the experience is consistent both with being out of your body and being in your body. The same goes for an experience of being commanded by God to do something. A person who has such an experience cannot doubt that he is having it while he is having it. It does not follow, however, that the experience is veridical. So the subject of the experience can and should question whether the experience is of anything real.

3. But why should one question the veridicality of the experience of being commanded by God or otherwise spoken to by God or by any supernatural being? The answer should be obvious if we reflect on the story of Abraham and Isaac. Abraham has an experience of a command by God to kill Isaac. Now it could be that the experience is veridical: it could be that God really exists and is really commanding Abraham to kill his son, and that somehow it is morally obligatory that Abraham kill Isaac. But since the content of the command directly contradicts the ordinary moral deliverance that it is always and everywhere wrong to kill innocent children, a deliverance that is also in line with the presumably divine command "Thou shall not kill," there is an excellent positive reason to doubt that the experience is veridical.

4. I suggest that our immanent moral sense must serve as a check on religion with its propensity for excess and fanaticism. We need revelation, but we also need to evaluate whether it be true revelation. With respect to putative divine commands, is it not self-evident that we must check their source? Perhaps we need to subordinate ourselves, submitting ourselves to the Higher, and perhaps without such 'Islam' (submission) there is no religion at all; but not in such a way as to abdicate our autonomy and responsibility.

One can see that there is a tension here. How balance our autonomy and our creatureliness? It is but another form of the tension between Athens and Jerusalem. The tension between morality and religion shows once again the unavoidability of philosophy. For only philosophy can mediate this dispute.

1. Concern for Salvation as Essential to Religion. It is very difficult to define religion, in the sense of setting forth necessary and sufficient conditions for the correct application of the term, but I agree with Royce's view that an essential characteristic of anything worth calling religion is a concern for the salvation of man. (The Sources of Religious Insight, Charles Scribner and Sons, 1912, p. 8) Religious objects are those that help show the way to salvation. The central postulate of religion is that "man needs to be saved." (8-9) Saved from what? ". . . from some vast and universal burden, of imperfection, of unreasonableness, of evil, of misery, of fate, of unworthiness, or of sin." (8) In an earlier post on Simone Weil I spoke of generic wretchedness. It is that we need salvation from.

2. The Need for Salvation. "Man is an infinitely needy creature." (11) But the need for salvation, for those who feel it, is paramount. The need depends on two simpler ideas:

a) There is a paramount end or aim of human life relative to which other aims are vain. (12)

b) Man as he now is, or naturally is, is in danger of missing his highest aim, his highest good. (12)

To hold that man needs salvation is to hold both of (a) and (b). I would put it like this. The religious person perceives our present life, or our natural life, as radically deficient, deficient from the root (radix) up, as fundamentally unsatisfactory; he senses or glimpses from time to time the possibility of a Higher Life; he feels himself in danger of missing out on this Higher Life of true happiness. If this doesn't strike a chord in you, then I suggest you do not have a religious disposition.

3. Religious Insight. Royce defines religious insight as ". . . insight into the need and into the way of salvation." (17) No one can take religion seriously who has not felt the need for salvation. But we need religious insight to show that we really need it, and to show the way to it.

4. Royce's Question. He asks: What are the sources of religious insight? Of insight into the need and into the way of salvation? Many will point to divine revelation through a scripture or through a church as the principal source of religious insight. But at this juncture Royce discerns a paradox that he calls the religious paradox, or the paradox of revelation.

5. The Paradox of Revelation. Suppose someone claims to have received a divine communication regarding the divine will, the divine plan, the need for salvation, the way to salvation, or any related matter. This person can be asked, "By what marks do you personally distinguish a divine revelation from any other sort of report?" (22-23) How is a putative revelation authenticated? By what marks or criteria do we recognize it as genuine? The identifying marks must be in the believer's mind prior to his acceptance of the revelation as valid. For it is by testing the putative revelation against these marks that the believer determines that it is genuine. One needs "a prior acquaintance with the nature and marks and, so to speak, signature of the divine will." (p. 25) But how can a creature who needs saving lay claim to this prior acquaintance with the marks of genuine revelation?

The paradox in a nutshell is that it seems that only revelation could provide one with what one needs to be able to authenticate a report as revelation:

Faith, and the passive and mysterious intuitions of the devout, seem to depend on first admitting that we are naturally blind and helpless and ignorant, and worthless to know, of ourselves, any saving truth; and upon nevertheless insisting that we are quite capable of one very lofty type of knowledge -- that we are capable, namely, of knowing God's voice when we hear it, of distinguishing a divine revelation from all other reports, of being sure, despite all our worthless ignorance, that the divine higher life which seems to speak to us in our moments of intuition is what it declares itself to be. If, then, there is a pride of intellect, does there not seem to be an equal pride of faith, an equal pretentiousness involved in undertaking to judge that certain of our least articulate intuitions are infallible?

Surely here is a genuine problem, and it is a problem for the reason. (103)

Is it a genuine problem or not? Can the church's teaching authority be invoked to solve the problem? Suppose a point of doctrine regarding salvation and the means thereto is being articulated at a church council. The fathers in attendance debate among themselves, arrive at a result, and claim that it is inspired and certified by the Holy Spirit. By what marks do they authenticate a putative deliverance of the Holy Spirit as a genuine deliverance? How do they know that the Holy Spirit is inspiring them and not something else such as their own subconscious desire for a certain result? But this is exactly Royce's problem.

I offer the following, from an earlier post, as a partial unpacking of the Weil quotation:

Man's wretchedness is 'structural': man qua man is wretched. Wretched are not merely the sick, the unloved, and the destitute; all of us are wretched, even those of us who count as well off. Some of us are aware of this, our condition, the rest hide it from themselves by losing themselves in divertissement. We are as if fallen from a higher state, our true and rightful state, into a lower one, and the sense of wretchedness is an indicator of our having fallen. We are in a dire state from which we need salvation but are incapable of saving ourselves by our own efforts, whether individual or collective.

An interesting thing about the Red Virgin is that, though she remained a virgin until death, she came to see though the illusions of the Left. This begs raises the question whether strictu dictu speaking strictly there could be a religious Left. To tackle this question properly, however, would involve explaining what ought to be meant by 'religion,' what ought to be meant by 'Left,' and then arranging a confrontation of their respective denotata.

Q1. What is the scope of the universal quanitifier in 'All is vanity?'
Q2. What exactly is vanity?
Q3. Why does universal impermanence, and in our case death, argue vanity? (Why does the fact of death render futile all our endeavors?)
Q4. Does death argue vanity whether or not God exists?
Q5. If yes to (Q4), what role does God play? Is the existence of God unconnected to the meaning of human existence? (If death is the absolute end, why should it matter whether or not God exists?)
Q6. Why was this absurdist/Epicurean tract judged canonical?

I have addressed and partially answered the first two questions in the previous installment. The other questions remain open.

Chapter 3 offers us the famous litany of opposites that Pete Seeger crafted into the song "Turn, Turn, Turn" here sung by Judy Collins and made famous in the mid-60's by the folk-rock band, The Byrds. Being born/dying; sowing/reaping; killing/healing; . . . loving/hating; making war/making peace. What is the point of this litany of opposities, and what does it have to do with the overarching theme of vanity which is sounded yet again in this chapter at 3:19?

One idea is that the interdependence of opposities is being suggested as argumentative support for the ultimate emptiness and insubstantiality of all finite things. If each member of a pair of opposites is what it is only by not being its other in that pair, then nothing is truly substantial: each thing is what it is only in relation to what it is not. All finite things being ultimately insubstantial, they are ultimately unsatisfactory: they do not satisfy our infinite longing for such things as eternal life (as opposed to a life that ends in death and is tied to death as a necessary condition of its being life), true love (as opposed to the love fickle and fleeting which can easily turn into its opposite), and true peace, the peace that surpasseth all understanding (as opposed to the peace which is the absence of war and lasts only as long as potentially warring parties deter each other from aggression).

God comes in again at 3:10 but the emphasis on vanity remains. Man and beast share the same fate, death. Man enjoys no advantage, "for all is vanity." His breath or spirit does not ascend upwards at death, but dissipates into the earth like that of a beast. (3:19) In an allusion to Genesis 3:19, we are told that everything is from dust and will return to dust. In what sense, then, will God judge the righteous and the wicked? (3:17) It is not as if the righteous always prosper and the wicked always suffer. How can there be divine judgment if death spells the absolute end, if man dies like a dog? Is not immortality in some sense (whether Platonically or via resurrection of the body) a necessary presupposition of divine judgment, and thus of the ultimate triumph of justice, which is in turn connected with the meaningfulness of human life?

Chapter 3 leaves us wondering what role God plays in the Preacher's scheme of things. If all is vanity because death is an absolute termination, then God would seem to have no connection either with the meaning of human life or with any judging of the righteous and the wicked. There seems to be a rather uneasy fit between the Preacher's theism and his conviction of the universality of vanity.

We are all weak relative to a standard of true strength. We are weak in body, in mind, in will. We vacillate in our affections. A body that can lose its strength in a split-second due to a brain aneurysm, say, is only relatively, contingently, and temporarily strong. Such strength is nothing to crow about. Or is Ventura’s strength so awesome that it is proof against every contingency? Can he maintain it indefinitely? Is he causa sui? If not, then why is he so proud of his prowess?

The great religions teach the simple truth about our weak and indigent condition. (Whether these religions provide a genuine solution to it is another question.) The proper counter to Ventura is to point out to him that the sense in which he thinks that religious people are weak is not the sense in which they know that we are all weak. Religion is not a projection of the merely contingent weakness of some of us, but a sober recognition of the necessary weakness of all of us. Religion doesn’t exist to make good the deficiencies that we can and must make good by our own efforts, but to ameliorate the deep-going deficiencies that none of us can ameliorate individually or collectively by our own efforts.

What Žižek is saying here is that the Christian universalism expressed by "All men are brothers" excludes non-Christians from the class of human beings. Žižek supports this surprising assertion with an argument. Made explicit, the argument is that

1. All men are brothers.
Therefore
2. All who are not my brothers are not men.
But
3. All who are not Christians are not my brothers.
Therefore
4. All who are not Christians are not men.

Having made Žižek’s argument explicit, we can easily see what is wrong with it. The problem is (3). Without (3), one cannot validly infer the conclusion (4) from the premise (1). But (3) is false: no Christian holds that all who are not Christians are not his brothers; they are his brothers whether or not they accept Christianity. For whether or not they accept Christianity they are sons of a common Father, God. Or if you insist that (3) is true, I will say that there is an equivocation on ‘brother’ as between (2) and (3). In one sense, two people are brothers if they have a common father. In this sense, all men are brothers if they have a common father, i.e., God. In a second sense, two people are brothers if they are members of a common organization or religion. Two teamsters, for example, are union brothers even if they do not share a common earthly father. The same goes for two members of the Muslim Brotherhood.

In sum, Žižek makes a highly dubious assertion and then tries to support it with a worthless argument.

It is important to see that he really is giving an argument in the above passage, but that, like many Continentals, he argues in a slipshod, half-baked way. It’s as if he wants the advantage of an argument without having to do the hard analytic work. In this regard, the above passage is characteristic of a lot of Continental philosophy.

Does the 'all' in 'All is vanity' cover nature? This is an interesting question that I will leave undecided. But the contrast in 1:2 suggests that nature lies outside the scope of the universal quantifier: "A generation goes and a generation comes/But the earth remains forever." Reading 'earth' as standing for the physical cosmos, then it is plausible to restrict 'All is vanity' to human existence. Whether or not it is restricted to human existence, 'All is vanity' clearly applies to human existence.

What does 'vanity' mean? The vain is the empty, the insubstantial, that which seems to be something, but is nothing, that which lacks true reality and ultimate importance, that which ultimately doesn't matter. The author (authors?) convey this insubstantiality with the metaphor of a striving after wind as in 1:14. Man, a bit of dust in the wind, strives after wind.

All things are insubstantial and because they are insubstantial they are unsatisfactory. (Compare Pali Buddhism: all things are anatta, hence dukkha.) "All things are wearisome . . . The eye is not satisfied with seeing/Nor is the ear filled with hearing." (1:8) Desire is insatiable. It promises, but never fulfills. All satisfactions are deceptive and ultimately unsatisfactory. There is nothing new under the sun; what is old is forgotten, and what will be, will one day be old and forgotten.

The vanity of things is connected to their temporal character. The past is no longer; the future is not yet; the present alone is. But the present is fleeting, and so ultimately is not. It is and is not and so is vain, empty, ontologically substandard. Only the present is real, but it is not truly real since it passes away: its very being is a passing-away.

2. Chapter 2 begins by reminding us that pleasure and laughter are vain and futile. For what does any pleasure accomplish? (2:2) Now either you feel the force of this question or you don't, and if the latter, then I doubt that I can help you. But perhaps F. H. Bradley can help you. In "Pleasure for Pleasure's Sake" in Ethical Studies, Bradley asks, "Why is it that pleasure-seeking as the search for my pleasure is declared vain, and pleasure itself impalpable and misleading . . . We must look for an answer to the nature of pleasure." (37) He continues:

Pleasure and pain are feelings and they are nothing but feelings. It would perhaps be right to call them the two simple modes of self-feeling; but we are not here concerned with psychological accuracy. The point which we wish to emphasize and which we think is not doubtful is that, considered psychically, they are nothing whatever but states of the feeling self. This means that they exist in me only as long as I feel them, and only as I feel them, that beyond this they have no reference to anything else, no validity and no meaning whatsoever. They are 'subjective' because they neither have, nor pretend to, reality beyond this or that subject. They are as they are felt to be, but they tell us nothing. In one word, they have no content; they are as states of us, but they have nothing for us. (37, emphasis added)

This passage supports my earlier contention that there are non-intentional mental states. It also captures an intuition I have (in my better moments) of the meaninglessness of pleasure, especially sensual pleasure. In the words of the Preacher, pleasure doesn't accomplish anything. It doesn't get us anywhere. Or as Bradley puts it, pleasure does not refer beyond itself. It is in that sense meaningless. Bradley, of course, is not commenting on Ecclesiastes; he is mounting an attack on hedonism, the doctrine that the only thing good in itself is pleasure. But it is clear to both the Preacher and Bradley that the puruit of pleasure is vain.

Not only pleasure but also wealth are vain (2:4-8). All activities are vain and profitless, including the pursuit of wisdom. Wisdom is better than folly, but both the wise man and the fool die. What is the point of being wise, learned, knowledgeable if in a few short years I will be a maggot-infested corpse? The fact of death proves the vanity, the nullity, of human existence. There is no ultimate point if all ends in death. (2:14-16)

At 2:14-16 we have a sort of argument for the vanity of human existence. Human existence is vain because it ends in death. Existence in general is vain because all things must pass away. I accept this argument, but I can easily understand how others would not. Why should impermanence argue vanity and unreality? This is one of the thorny questions Ecclesiastes raises.

The preacher despairs. Having children is no solution. Leaving a legacy is no solution. Your children too will die, and before they do they may squander or otherwise misuse their legacy. The vanity of your existence cannot be made good by procreation, for that too issues in vanity. Piling vanity upon vanity does not lead one to reality.

At 2:24 God makes his first appearance in the Book of Ecclesiastes. The suggestion seems to be that, in the face of universal vanity, all one can do is eat and drink and tell himself that his labor is good and that these things are from God. The chapter concludes with the thought that God rewards the good while punishing the sinner. But "this too is vanity and striving after wind." (2:26) The world's "moral equilibrium," to use Peter Lupu's phrase is itself vanity. This conclusion is puzzling. God exists, but his existence does not alleviate the vanity of human life.

Thus at the end of Chapter 2 we are left with the thought that death proves vanity whether or not God exists. What then is God's role if his existence has no bearing on the meaning of human life? This is a question we must keep in mind as we read the subsequent chapters.

I have another God & Evil option for you. I've tossed it out jokingly before, but I think it should be taken seriously in theodicy. We can have an omnipotent God co-existing with evil, or at least with terrible suffering, if that suffering is just, presumably just punishment. This is different, you will agree, from option 3, which frames all apparent evil as necessary -- necessary ultimately for our salvation. [My option 3 reads, "One might argue that evils are all of them instrumentally good: they are needed as means to goodness."]

My option asks what if we are already damned for our wickedness and consigned to the place of punishment (Is this a form of "ultra-Calvinism" in which we aren't just destined to be damned, we already are?) Our suffering, as the suffering of the justly damned, would then cause no problem for God's omni-attributes. We had the chance for salvation, but as free agents blew it, and so we have earned our fates.

You don't remember the wickedness that condemned you? It's not necessary that you remember. Hell is not a place of rehab. The apparent suffering of infants and other innocents is going to need some special explanation, but several options are open.

I know this option sounds like a very strange view -- maybe too strange to post -- but I can't find a reason why it can't be true. Is there any way to be sure or to prove that this isn't Hell and the sufferings we experience are not just? You would think there would be something like the equivalent of a Cartesian cogito on this score: I can do X, therefore I am not damned.

Welcome to the Twilight Zone! Now this is something I hadn't thought of. Phil raises the epistemological question, How can I prove that I am not in Hell now? But this is not essential to what he is saying. Even if I can't prove that I am not in Hell now, I might still be. Well, suppose we all are. Then the evils we suffer are not gratuitous but justly inflicted upon us because of earlier misdeeds. The evils involved in divine punishment are of course no threat to the divine goodness. Indeed, a wholly good and just God must punish misdeeds.

The only answer I can think of is that Phil's suggestion is subsumable under my #4, the Free Will Defence: a world containing free agents is better than one without them, and free agents sometimes choose incorrectly. Accordingly, we are in Hell now (assuming we are) because we freely chose to do evil. But then why did God create beings that he knew would freely do evil and deserve punishment?

Lupu urges an interpretation of the Book of Job some key elements of which, in my words, are:

A. There is a moral world order.
B. The moral world order is not captured by (MET).
C. The moral world order is not inscrutable or indiscernible.
D. The rationale for acting morally "must come from an internal disposition that is altogether decoupled from the satisfaction of one’s desires and needs."
E. The message of the Book of Job is (A)-(D).

The possibility and desirability of decoupling morality and human flourishing, virtue and happiness, is a topic for a separate series of posts. But for now I want to make an observation and raise a question.

The observation is that Lupu's interpretation of the Book of Job puts it in radical tension with the Book of Proverbs which, as one can verify for oneself, promotes the point of view of (MET). Job, an innocent man who suffers great calamities, is impossible from the point of view of Proverbs where the message is that the righteous prosper and suffering and misfortune are proofs of unrighteousness.

Question: if the Bible were a divine revelation, pure and simple, inerrant in all details, why would Job and Proverbs contradict each other? My view is that neither is the Bible solely from God, nor is it solely a human product. I explain what I mean in Four Slants on Scripture. On my view, then, the Bible is neither simply divine revelation, nor inerrant.

You say that the books in question don't contradict each other? Then you have to turn aside Lupu's interpretation and make a case for their compatibility. But in making this case you are thinking, bringing your creaturely intellect to bear on the problem, and the result of your thinking is most assuredly not a solely divine deliverance. The Bible as you thoughtfully interpret it is in part a human creation.

How can one avoid this conclusion? And given that one cannot avoid it, how can one reasonably maintain that the Bible is inerrant? It must contain a sizeable admixture of error for the simple reason that it is, in part, a human product, both in its actual writing and in its interpretation. To err is human. It will no good to claim that the church fathers at the councils at which points of doctrine were refined were inspired by the Holy Spirit. I don't deny that they were. But the Spirit's influence had to be mediated and processed by the finite mortals who attended the meetings. And so the problem arises again. The inspiration. once processed by those who received it, was not pure, but a product of divine-human interaction.

We must decide which books are canonical, and we must decide what they mean. There is no passage in Scripture which tells us which writings are canonical and which are not. One obviously cannot rely on sola scriptura when the very identity of the Scripture depends on decisions that are extra-scriptural. And no part of the Bible interprets itself. We must accept the responsibility, and live with the consequences, of thinking for ourselves.

1. One might argue that evil is an illusion. Whether or not this has ever been maintained in pure form(Christian Science?), it is a complete nonstarter for reasons painfully elaborated in Why Evil Can't Be an Illusion.

2. One might argue that evil, though not an out-and-out illusion, is merely negative, an absence, lack, or privation of good. Powerful arguments against this privatio boni doctrine were presented here and here.

3. One might argue that evils are all of them instrumentally good: they are needed as means to goodness. This is not a promising line to take since surely not all evils are instrumentally good.

4. One might argue that a world containing free agents is better than one without them, and that free agents sometimes choose incorrectly. This, in nuce, is the classical free will defense. It is a promising line of argument but it faces a serious objection which we ought to discuss in a separate post: Why could not God have created a world in which free agents always choose correctly? I do not assume that this objection cannot be answered.

5. One might argue that God's ways are not our ways, that God and man have different understandings of goodness. But then God is not benevolent as we understand the term. Consider the case of Job lately discussed in these pages. God allows Satan to visit upon poor Job every calamity short of death. But Job is a righteous man, an innocent man. And when Job asks why he suffers unjustly, God answers him by saying in effect, "I am the All-Mighty and I can do whatever I want!" (See Job 38 ff.) That might-makes-right answer, of course, is no answer at all. Job gives in, asks no more questions, and his benefits are restored. But there is no answer here to the question of how a good God can permit an innocent man to suffer. For such a God is not good in any human sense of the term.

6. One might argue that God exists but is not wholly good. Robert Koons calls this dystheism.

7. Roderick Chisholm, basing himself on Brentano, suggests that "Some of the evil in the world is necessary for the enhancement of goodness. And the rest of the evil is defeated." (Brentano and Intrinsic Value, Cambridge UP, 1986, p. 100) But to explain the relevant concept of defeat is a task for a separate post.

I. THE STONE AND THE VIRGIN

Can God create a stone so heavy he can't lift it? The short answer to this schoolboy objection is that omnipotence is not the power to do anything, but the power to do anything that it is possible to do. Now one constraint on possibility derives from logic and its law of non-contradiction. If a state of affairs either is or entails a logical contradiction, as the creation of a divinely unliftable stone does, then not even God can actualize it.

So there are logical limits on divine power without prejudice to divine all-power. But there are also non-logical limits.

The Medievals spoke of a modality they called necessitas per accidens, accidental necessity. For example, Socrates' drinking of the hemlock was a logically contingent event: he might not have drunk the stuff. There was no logical or metaphysical necessity that the event occur. But it happened (never mind how we know this). Given that it happened, it now has necessitas per accidens in the sense that nothing can change the fact that it happened. Not even God can change the fact that it happened. Thus there are limits on divine power beyond narrowly logical limits. As Aquinas says somewhere, not even God can restore a virgin to his or her intact state even though the lapsus — if you want to call it that — was a logically contingent event. The reason is that the lapsus has necessitas per accidens. And if you think of the Fall of Man as originating in a particular event in the past, as when Eve took a bite out of a famous apple, then that event too, though logically contingent, is accidentally necessary.

If this is right, then there are two sorts of limits on divine power, logical and non-logical. God is limited by logic in that he cannot bring about a contradictory state of affairs. God is also limited non-logically (or extra-logically) by events that he cannot interfere with, including past events and events brought about by free agents.

II. THERE ARE TRUE PROPOSITIONS THAT CANNOT BE KNOWN BY GOD

Just as there are logically possible actions that God cannot perform, there are true propositions, indeed known true propositions, that God cannot know.

Patrick Grim gives something like the following argument which I exploit for my own purposes. What I know when I know that

1. I am making a mess

is an indexical fact that no one else can know. At most, what someone else can know is that

2. Bill Vallicella is making a mess

or perhaps, pointing to BV, that

3. He is making a mess.

Just as no one except BV can refer to BV by tokening the first-person singular pronoun, no one except BV has access to the indexical fact that, as BV would put it to myself, I am BV. Only BV is privy to this fact; only BV knows himself in the first-person way.

Now an omniscient being, on a natural understanding of the term, knows everything that can be known. But there is at least one proposition that I know — namely (1) — that is not known by any other knower, including an omniscient knower. So an omnisicent being is impossible: by its very definition it must know every fact that can be known, but there are indexical facts that it cannot know. God can know that BV is making a mess but he cannot know what I know when I know that I am making a mess. For any subject S distinct from God, the first-person facts appertinent to S are inaccessible to every mind distinct from S, including God's mind.

That is what I take to be Grim's argument. Let me see if I can respond to it by making a distinction between two senses of 'omniscience.'

A. X is omniscient₁ =df X knows every fact knowable by some subject or other.

B. X is omniscient₂ =df X knows every fact knowable by some one subject.

What indexical facts show is that no being is or can be omniscient in the first sense. No being knows every indexical and non-indexical fact. But a failure to know what cannot be known does not count against a being's being omniscient in a defensible sense of this term any more than a failure to do what cannot be done counts against a being's being omnipotent. A defensible sense of 'omniscience' is supplied by (B). In this second sense, God is omniscient: he knows every fact that one subject can know, namely, every non-indexical fact, plus all facts pertaining to the divine subjectivity.

What more could one want? Since no being could possibly satisfy (A), (A) is not the appropriate sense of 'omniscience.' Compare omnipotence. An omnipotent being cannot be one who can do just anything, since there are both logical and non-logical limits on what any agent can do. So from the fact that it is impossible for God to know what is impossible for any one being to know, it does not follow that God is not omniscient.

III. ARE THERE LIMITS ON DIVINE GOODNESS?

To say that God is all-powerful is not to say that he can do just anything: he cannot actualize contradictions, he cannot undo the past, and he cannot interfere with the free actions of created agents. And to say that God is all-knowing is not to say that he knows everything. Surely no one can know a false proposition, and there are true propositions that not even God can know. So we need to explore whether there are limits on divine goodness.

I don't have much to say about this, but I will throw out one suggestion. God limits his own power by (a) creating a world in which there is time, and (b) creating free agents. But if God does not have the power to prevent the crimes of free agents (since to prevent them would be to interfere with their freedom), then God's not eliminating the resultant evils does not argue God's lack of goodness. God is under no obligatiopn to do that which he cannot do. I am not saying anything new; I am but rehashing the Free Will Defense, or a part of it.

Yes indeed, man is wretched and only man is wretched. Man's wretchedness is 'structural': man qua man is wretched. Wretched are not merely the sick, the unloved, and the destitute; all of us are wretched, even those of us who count as well off. Some of us are aware of this, our condition, the rest hide it from themselves by losing themselves in divertissement. We are as if fallen from a higher state, our true and rightful state, into a lower one, and the sense of wretchedness is an indicator of our having fallen. We are in a dire state from which we need salvation but are incapable of saving ourselves by our own efforts, whether individual or collective.

Well, suppose you don't accept a word of this. And suppose you don't lapse into nihilism either. What option is left? The illusions of the Left and the notion of the perfectibility of man by his own doing? Then I recommend this passage from Reinhold Nienuhr also quoted by Oakes:

The utopian illusions and sentimental aberrations of modern liberal culture are really all derived from the basic error of negating the fact of original sin. This error . . . continually betrays modern men to equate the goodness of men with the virtue of their various schemes for social justice and international peace. When these schemes fail of realization or are realized only after tragic conflicts, modern men either turn from utopianism to disillusionment and despair, or they seek to place the onus of their failure upon some particular social group, . . . [which is why] both modern liberalism and modern Marxism are always facing the alternatives of moral futility or moral fanaticism. Liberalism in its pure form [that is, pacifism] usually succumbs to the peril of futility. It will not act against evil until it is able to find a vantage point of guiltlessness from which to operate. This means that it cannot act at all. Sometimes it imagines that this inaction is the guiltlessness for which it has been seeking. A minority of liberals and most of the Marxists solve the problem by assuming that they have found a position of guiltlessness in action. Thereby they are betrayed into the error of fanaticism.

I refuse to lapse into nihilism and I refuse to be suckered by the illusions of the Left, which illusions have been amply refuted by the horrors of the 20th century. That is why I take Original Sin seriously. But I reject Biblical literalism with its tale of a first man and a first woman in a garden. And of course I reject the idea that I am guilty because of what some other people did. So this leaves me with the task of articulating the doctrine of Original Sin/Ignorance in a way that is philosophically respectable.

1. We begin by noting that if two or more propositions are true, then they are logically consistent, though not conversely. (I explain logical consistency in detail here and distinguish it from two other kinds of consistency.) So if God exists is true, and Evil exists is true, then they are consistent, and, pace proponents of the argument from evil, there cannot be any problem of reconciling the existence of God with the existence of evil. Thus if you knew that both propositions are true, that would be all you would need to know to know that they are logically consistent. But of course we do not know that God exists is true, and it is not clear that we know that Evil exists is true, where objective evil is at issue. Nevertheless, one can make a rational case for the existence of God and an even stronger rational case for the existence of objective evil. To the extent that it is reasonable to believe that both propositions are true, it is reasonable to believe that they are logically consistent even if one cannot explain how it is possible that they be consistent.

The bolded clause conveys my main point. Suppose someone comes along with an argument whereby he derives God does not exist from Evil exists with the help of some supplementary premises. He trots out the standard argument from evil that one finds in Hume and J. L. Mackie and countless others. My point is that the theist's inability to refute the argument and explain how it is possible for God and evil to coexist does not give the theist a good reason to abandon his theism.

2. The same dialectical pattern appears in other contexts. Suppose that one has thoroughly studied the philosophy of mind literature and that one can make a rational case for substance dualism. But how is such dualism compatible with the fact, assuming it is one, of mind-body interaction? The occurrence of mind-body interaction is like the existence of objective evil: not quite self-evident, but very hard to deny. But numerous philosophers have argued against substance dualism by alleging that if it were true, interaction would be impossible. (See here.)Thus we have the following parallel:

• The existence of natural and moral evils of the types and in the amounts we encounter in this world is incompatible with the existence of the classical omni-qualified God.

• The occurrence of mind-body interaction is incompatible with the truth of substance dualism.

In both cases there is an alleged logical incompatibility, but should theist or dualist be troubled? I don't think so. Both theist and dualist have an array of arguments that render rationally acceptable their respective positions. And since both have excellent reason to accept the facts or putative facts of evil and interaction respectively, both have reason to believe in the logical consistency of the positions they occupy. In both cases, the inability to answer the 'How is it possible?' question does not provide good reason to reject the view maintained. The theist is entitled to say this: Although I have no really good explanation of the existence of evil, there must be an explanation given that (as I reasonably believe) both God exists and Evil exists are true; this is a problem I will continue to work on. And the dualist is entitled to say: Although I have no really good explanation of how interaction is possible, there must be an explanation given that (as I reasonably believe) both substance dualism is true and interaction occurs; this is a problem I will continue to work on.

The theist is rationally entitled to stand pat in the face of the 'problem of evil' and point to his array of arguments for the existence of God whose cumulative force renders rational his belief that God exists. Of course, he should try to answer the atheist who urges the inconsistency of God exists and Evil exists; but his failure to provide a satisfactory answer is not a reason for him to abandon his theism. A defensible attitude would be: "This is something we theists need to work on."

Atheists and naturalists ought not object to this standing pat since they do the same. What materialist about the mind abandons his materialism in the face of the various arguments (from intentionality, from qualia, from the unity of consciousness, from the psychological relevance of logical laws, etc.) that we anti-materialists marshall? Does the materialist give in? Hell no, he stands pat, pointing to his array of arguments and considerations in favor of materialism, and when you try to budge him with the irreconcilability of intentionality and materialism, or qualia and materialism, or whatever, he replies, "This is something we materialists need to work on."

Possible Atheist Response:

I don't believe in God or in an objective good and evil. Good is whatever satisfies an organism's wants or desires and evil is whatever thwarts them. So if one animal has another for breakfast, then what is good for the eater is evil for the eaten, so that there can be no talk of an objective or non-relative good and evil. The fact that nature is "red in tooth and claw," that life is at the expense of life, is just a value-neutral fact, neither good nor evil. Good and evil exist only relative to conative/desiderative beings. (See here.) But I will grant you that if there is objective good and evil, then God exists, and conversely. Now you are granting me for the sake of our little discussion that the kinds and amounts of evil in our world are inconsistent with the existence of God as classically understood. So if objective evil exists, then there is no God, and if there is no objective evil, then, as you maintain, there is no God. Therefore, there is no God! I am not presupposing the existence of God. On the contrary, given our mutual concessions, I have demonstrated the nonexistence of God!

Let E = Objective evils, moral and natural, in the kinds and amounts encountered in our world, exist, and let G = God exists. Then the argument can be set forth as follows:

1. E --> ~G
2. ~E --> ~G
-----
3. ~G.

This argument is clearly valid in point of logical form. Either E or ~E, by Excluded Middle. If E, then ~G, and if ~E, then ~G. Therefore, ~G. I am granting (1) to my atheist interlocutor, and he is granting (2) to me. But now it looks as if he wins our little debate. Far from presupposing the existence of God, he seems to have shown his nonexistence.

Theistic Rejoinder

On second thought, there may be a fly in the ointment. The argument above is valid only if there is no equivocation on 'E.' Note that there is a difference between objective evils and the property of being objectively evil. Evils, as instances of the property of being objectively evil, are not to be confused with this property. The property can exist whether or not there are any instances of it. (We may think of the properties of being objectively good and objectively evil as concepts in the divine mind.) Now I grant arguendo that if objective evils exist, then God does not exist. And I maintain that if the property of being objectively evil does not exist, then God does not exist. Letting E* = the property of being objectively evil exists, the argument sine equivocatione may be displayed as follows:

0. E --> E*
1. E --> ~G
2. ~E* --> ~G
-----
3. ~G

But this second argument is invalid! In order to validly infer (3) what we need is not (0), but its converse

0'. E* --> E.

But the converse is false: it is false that if the property of being objectively evil exists, then objective evils exist.

My conclusion, then, is that an atheist who sets out to demonstrate the nonexistence of God from the fact of evil, and who grants the biconditional The properties of objective good and evil exist if and only if God exists can be justly taxed with presupposing the existence of God. He presupposes the existence of God by presupposing the properties of objective good and evil. The existence of these properties is presupposed by (and thus entailed by) the existence of objective goods and evils, a fact he needs for his argument to get off the ground. Our atheist interlocutor's position is self-contradictory:

4. There are objective evils. (atheist starting point)
5. There is the property of being objectively evil. (from 4)
6. God exists. (from 5, given the atheist's biconditional concession supra)
7. If there are objective evils, then God does not exist. (atheist argument)
8. God does not exist. (from 4, 7)
9. God does and does not exist. (from 6, 8)

Since from a contradiction anything follows, the theist may calmly conclude that God exists and that our atheist's argument from evil fails.

3. But it may be that the objective approach is radically mistaken. Is it an objective fact that God (or rather the second person of the Trinity) is identical to a particular man in the way it is an objective fact that the morning star is identical to the planet Venus?

Perhaps we need to explore a subjective approach. One such is the mystical approach illustrated in a surprising and presumably 'heretical' passage from St. John of the Cross' The Ascent of Mount Carmel (Collected Works, p. 149, tr. Kavanaugh and Rodriguez, emphasis added):

. . . when a person has finished purifying and voiding himself of all forms and apprehensible images, he will abide in this pure and simple light, and be perfectly transformed into it. This light is never lacking to the soul, but because of creature forms and veils weighing upon and covering it, the light is never infused. If a person will eliminate these impediments and veils, and live in pure nakedness and poverty of spirit . . . his soul in its simplicity and purity will then be immediately transformed into simple and pure Wisdom, the Son of God.

The Son of God, the Logos, the Second Person of the Trinity, is 'born,' 'enters the world,' is 'incarnated,' in the soul of any man who attains the mystic vision of the divine light. This is the plain meaning of the passage. The problem, of course, is to reconcile this mystical subjectivism with the doctrinal objectivism according to which the Logos literally became man, uniquely, in Jesus of Nazareth when a certain baby was born in a manger in Bethlehem some 2000 years ago.

4. A somewhat less mystical but also subjective approach is suggested by an analogy that Josef Pieper offers in Belief and Faith, p. 89. I will explore his analogy in my own way. Suppose I sincerely and thoughtfully say 'I love you' to a person who is open and responsive to my address. Saying this, I do not report an objective fact which subsists independently of my verbal avowal and the beloved's reception of the avowal. There may be objective facts in the vicinity, but the I-Thou relation is not an objective fact antecedent to the address and the response. It is a personal relation of subjectivity to subjectivity. The reality of the I-Thou relation is brought about by the sincere verbal avowal and its sincere reception. The lover's speaking is a self-witnessing and "the witnessed subject matter is given reality solely by having been spoken in such a manner." (Pieper, p. 89) The speaking is a doing, a performance, a self-revelation that first establishes the love relationship.

5. The Incarnation is the primary instance of God's self-revelation to us. God reveals himself to us in the life and words of Jesus -- but only to those who are open to and accept his words and example. That God reveals himself (whether in Jesus' life and words or in the mystic's consciousness here and now) is not an objective fact independent of a free addressing and a free responding. It depends on a free communicating and a free receiving of a communication just as in the case of the lover avowing his love to the beloved. God speaks to man as lover to beloved. In the case of the Incarnation, God speaks to man though the man Jesus. Jesus is the Word of God spoken to man, which Word subsists only in the free reception of the divine communication. Thus it is not that a flesh and blood man is identical to a fleshless and bloodless person of the Trinity -- a putative identity that is hard to square with the discernibility of the identity relations' relata -- it is that God's Word to us is embodied in the life and teaching of a man when this life and teaching are apprehended and received as a divine communication. The Incarnation, as the prime instance of divine revelation, is doubly subjective in that subject speaks to subject, and that only in this speaking and hearing is the Incarnation realized.

6. Incarnation is not an objective fact or process by which one thing, the eternal Logos, becomes identical to a second thing, a certain man. Looked at in this objectivizing way, the logical difficulties become insuperable. Incarnation is perhaps better thought of as the prime instance of revelation, where revelation is, as Aquinas says at Summa Contra Gentiles, 3, 154, "accomplished by means of a certain interior and intelligible light, elevating the mind to the perception of things that the understanding cannot reach by its natural light." Revelation, so conceived, is not an objective fact. Incarnation is a mode of revelation. Ergo, the Incarnation is not an objective fact.

7. This is admittedly somewhat murky. More needs to be said about the exact sense of 'subjective' and 'objective.'

On the night in question, Smith had an intense intuition that the fact of predation is profoundly evil. The evil, however, is not moral evil since no free agents are involved. So predation, if a case of evil, is a case of irreducibly natural evil. One might distinguish natural and moral evil without holding that natural evil is irreducibly natural. Alvin Plantinga (God, Freedom and Evil, p. 8) gives as examples of natural evils "earthquakes, tidal waves, and virulent diseases." Natural evil is "Evil that can't be ascribed to the free actions of human beings." (57) This implies that moral evil is evil that can be ascribed to the free actions of human beings. This understanding of moral evil leaves open the possibility of understanding natural evil as originating from nonhuman agents. Plantinga seems to endorse this Augustinian notion when he writes, "So the natural evil we find is due to free actions of nonhuman spirits." (58) This implies that natural evil is a species of moral evil -- the species in which the agent is nonhuman -- and thus that natural evil is not irreducibly natural or irreducibly nonmoral.

Now whether the existence of irreducibly natural evils can be used to prove or render probable the nonexistence of God is not my main concern in this series of posts. My main concern is with the very notion that there are naturally evil states of affairs.

Such a state of affairs is one that ought not be. So it seems that here we have a clear example of a non-agential ought, or rather, a non-agential ought-not. It ought not be that sentient life can exist only at the brutal expense of other sentient life. This is a state of affairs that is axiologically impermissible despite the fact that there is no moral agent responsible for it. We are not responsible for it, and God is not either — for the simple reason that he doesn't exist.

My point is that an atheist who gives an argument like that of Smith's in the article cited must presuppose that there are non-agential oughts, oughts-to- be and oughts-to-not-be that do not involve agents and their acts. He is committed to the following propositions:

1. God does not exist.
2. The fact of predation is a natural evil.

And since presumably

3. No agent other than God could be responsible for predation given its universal scope and law-like nature

it seems to follow that

4. The fact of predation is an irreducibly evil state of affairs

and that therefore

5. There are axiologically impermissible states of affairs that are not narrowly deontic

where 'narrowly deontic' means involving the notions of the agentially obligatory, permissible, and impermissible.

But now we notice something very interesting. Commitment to the non-narrowly- deontic axiological modalities seems to imply a commitment to Platonism or neo-Platonism of a sort. The commitment is broadly Platonic in the sense that some states of affairs are axiologically permissible, impermissible, etc. in splendid isolation from the acts, act-omissions, commands, demands, wants, needs, thoughts, etc. of any moral agent. Isn't this commitment to Platonism as controversial as commitment to theism?

One might argue as follows. The whole Platonic menagerie (unexemplified universals, Bolzanian-Fregean propositions, mathematical sets, numbers, values, and whatnot) is sustainable if (and only if) it is all located in the mind of God as an infinite array of divine thought-accusatives. But then no argument from evil that begins from states of affairs that non-agentially ought not be can be successful. If this argument could be developed it might show that the very starting points of Smith's argument presuppose the existence of a divine mind.

So a quick way of countering the above argument is by claiming that locutions of the form 'X ought to exist' and 'X ought not exist' are meaningless, and that talk of 'oughts' and 'ought nots' is legitimate only in locutions of the form, 'X ought to be done' and 'X may not be done' and the like. This sounds reasonable if we take 'deontic' narrowly as pertaining to obligations, permissions, duties and the like. Surely it sounds absurd to say that the universe, or things in general, or God, or Socrates, has a duty to exist or a moral obligation to exist. We have duties with respect to ourselves, including, presumably, the duty to not commit suicide, but surely we have no duty to exist. (Since my existence is logically prior to my having duties, how could I have a duty to exist?) And yet it is presumably good that I exist, or a value that I exist. If you disagree with that, then you may agree with the proposition that it is good, it is a value, that Mother Theresa exists, or perhaps that that advocatus diaboli, Christopher Hitchens, exists. One might hold, and I imagine that the atheist Hitchens does hold, that it is good that contrarians and skeptics exist, and that he would hold this even if no one, including said contrarians and skeptics, is responsible for this state of affairs. (Perhaps skeptics are born not made.)

What I am driving toward is the proposition that there are forms of requiredness that are deontic in a broad sense. There are 'oughts-to-be' and not just 'oughts-to-do.' The idea is not new, one can find it in Max Scheler. But perhaps we should drop Kordig's term 'deontic' tied as it is to duty and cognate concepts, and introduce the term 'axiological.' Accordingly, the thesis to be examined is whether or not there are forms of requiredness that are axiological but not narrowly deontic.

But what could that mean? Consider a possible world W in which there are no moral agents, but there are sentient beings who are in a constant state of pain. It seems reasonable to say that W ought not exist, that its nonexistence is an axiological requirement. Or consider our world with its nature red in tooth and claw and in which life lives at the expense of life. If may be false, but it seems meaningful to say that this world would be better if it did not exist. The metaphysical pessimist may be wrong, but he is not talking nonsense when he exclaims, "Better nothing at all than this sorry state of things!" On the other hand, there are those who are struck by the sheer existence of things and are moved to exclaim, "It is good that there is something rather than nothing!"

The sense of these exclamations does not seem to depend on the existence of moral agents with power sufficient to bring about or prevent the mentioned states of affairs. That something rather than nothing exists could be good even if it is no one's duty to bring it about and no one's responsibility if it obtains. That a world of uncompensated and unalleviated misery is bad does not depend on some free agent's moral failure.

John Leslie in Universes (Routledge 1989, p. 168) quotes A. C. Ewing's suggestion in Value and Reality (London 1973) that God would have an existence "necessary not because there would be any internal contradiction in denying it but because it was supremely good that God should exist." There are two ideas here that we should distinguish:

A. Since the necessity of God's existence cannot have a narrowly-logical ground, the necessity of the divine existence is grounded in the axiological requiredness (Leslie would say 'ethical' requiredness) that God exist.

B. It makes sense to speak of axiological/ethical requiredness in contexts that are not narrowly deontic.

(A) is a tantalizing suggestion whose exfoliation and critique will consume a separate series of posts. Here I am concerned merely to explain and preliminarily defend (B) upon which (A) rests.

So what's my argument for (B)? Since it is merely the sense of talk of axiological requiredness that I am presently concerned to defend, it seems I can invoke Ordinary Language. We say things like, 'It is good that a cosmos of such order and beauty exists.' And one can imagine an environmentalist wacko saying, 'It would have been better had man the despoiler of nature never come into existence.' Deeper analysis might show that these apparently meaningful claims are really incoherent at bottom; but they are innocent until proven guilty.

Glance back now at (4). This could be rephrased as

4*. It is axiologically required that a maximally perfect being exist.

(5) then becomes

5*. Whatver is axiologically required is possible.

We then conclude:

6* A maximally perfect being is possible.

All of the foregoing notwithstanding, you will be forgiven if you still find talk of non-narrowly-deontic axiological requiredness queer in a Mackiesque sort of way. More later.

There is certainly a difference between a religious approach to religion and a naturalistic approach. And Hick is right that it is a major difference. But I suggest that the bolded passage needs correction. It is not that religious definitions of religion presuppose the reality of the intentional object of religious thought and experience, it is rather that they do not foreclose on the possibility of the reality of the intentional object.

When I study religion 'religiously,' what I do is take seriously religion's claim to be about something transcendent of our ordinary experience. Thus when I study Christianity religiously, I take seriously its claim to be a divine revelation both in and through its Scripture and in and through the person of Jesus of Nazareth. I hold myself open to the possibility of divine revelation. But this is not to say that I presuppose the reality of the triune God. I simply do not rule out the possibility of the existence and self-revelation of this God in the manner of the naturalist who, from the outset, assumes that religion is and can be nothing but a natural phenomenon, and therefore cannot be revelatory of anything beyond nature.

To put it another way, when I study religion 'religiously' as opposed to 'naturalistically,' I take seriously its claim to be in some measure true. I don't view it merely as just another natural or cultural phenomenon, which of course it also is. To study religion religiously is to study it in a manner analogous to the way we study science. I can of course concern myself with the sociology of scientific knowledge, with the psychology of scientists, and even with the phenomenology of scientific experience. But few think of natural science as merely a cultural artifact or a psychological product. For most of us, much of (current) science is either true, or a very good approximation to truth. We take physics, for example, to be revelatory of something beyond man and his physics, namely, the natural world which is what it is and has the properties it has whether or not we exist and whether or not we theorize about it. Few would get it into their heads to try to debunk science by explaining it genetically in terms of human fears and interests, the need for some to develop an arcane language-game whereby they can exclude and dominate others, etc. Few would claim that it is nothing but a human product. It is a human product, of course, but it is more: it is knowledge of the natural world.

To study religion religiously is then like studying science scientifically: it is to take the respective truth-claims seriously. But there is an important difference. In the case of science it does seem to be the case that when we study it scientifically (as opposed to viewing it as just another symbolic form or cultural product) we do presuppose the reality of nature. For one thing, nature is massively given to the senses -- hyperskeptical worries aside. How could we not presuppose it? But "a reality that transcends ourselves and our world," in Hick's phrase, is not given or at least it is not unambiguously given. (Mystical givenness is an ambiguous givenness.) This is why I say that when we study religion religiously we do not presuppose the reality of the intentional object of religious thought and experience; rather, we do not foreclose on the possibility of the reality of the intentional object.

Grade II: The next grade up is petitionary prayer for spiritual benefits. At this level one is not asking for one's daily physical bread, but for acceptance, equanimity, patience, courage, and the like in the face of the fact that one lacks bread or has cancer. "Thy Will be done." One asks for forgiveness and for the ability to forgive others. One prays for a lively sense of one's own manifold shortcomings, for self-knowledge and freedom from self-deception. One prays, not to be cured of the cancer, but to bear it with courage. One prays for the ability to see one's tribulations under the aspect of eternity or with the sort of detachment with which one contemplates the sufferings of others.

Grade III: Higher still, I should think, is prayer that is wholly non-petitionary. At this level one asks neither for material nor for spiritual benefits. One form of this is prayer is sheer gratitude for what one has. Prayer as thanskgiving. Beyond this there is prayer as pure aspiration, as a straining of the soul upwards. A pure spiritual seeking, ascending, soaring. One seeks to elevate oneself above one's perceived infirmity and wretchedness. One seeks to rise above the paltriness, crudity, baseness of one's usual thoughts and emotions. Not a petitioning, but a self-elevating and a leaving of oneself behind. Prayer as aspiration may then lead on to forms of meditation proper and perhaps infused contemplation. At the stage of meditation the soul enters mental silence and rests there having abandoned all petitioning and aspiring. Oneis no longer working but resting in mental silence. Within this silence one perhaps receives mystical grace which comes from without the mind.

Grade I, I would argue, has nothing to do with religion properly understood. But if I were to make this argument, I would run smack into the "Our Father," which, in the fourth of its six petitions, appears precisely to endorse Grade I, petitionary prayer for material benefits. The other five petitions are either clearly or arguably Grade II. The fourth petition, "Give us this day our daily bread," translates the Biblia Vulgata's Panem nostrum quotidianum da nobis hodie which occurs at Luke 11:3.

At Matthew 6:11, however, we find Panem nostrum supersubstantialem da nobis hodie, "Give us this day our supersubstantial bread." 'Supersubstantial' suggests a bread that is supernatural. To ask for this bread is to ask for a 'food' that will keeps us spiritually alive. For Simone Weil, "Christ is our bread." We can have physical bread without eating it; we cannot have spiritual bread without 'eating' it: the having is the 'eating' and being nourished by it. This nourishing is the "union of Christ with the eternal part of the soul." (Waiting for God, p. 146) The fourth petition of the Pater Noster, then, is the request for the union of Christ with the eternal part of the soul. It has nothing to do with a crass and infantile demand to be supplied with physical food via a supernatural means.

The Greek word translated as quotidianum in the Luke passage and as supersubstantialem in the Matthew passage is epiousios. I am not competent to discuss the philology of this Greek word, which may be a hapax legomenon. (Nor am I competent to assess the correctness of the two Wikipedia entries to which I have just linked; so Caveat lector!) But if any philologist or Biblical exegete were to tell me that epiousios cannot be understood in terms of 'supersubstantial,' (with the latter implying 'supernatural'), then I would say that that person is either wrong, or the text is corrupt, or the original sources do not record what Jesus actually said.

Philosophically, the fourth petition, if it is to fit with the others, and is not to represent a crass and infantile and quite absurd demand, must be interpreted spiritually, not physically. Otherwise, you play into the hands of the 'Dawkins Gang.' If it is physical bread you want, go to the store and buy some, or learn the art of the baker.

Simplified version: if God is possible, then God is actual. God is possible, therefore God is actual.

The problem, of course, is to give a good reason for thinking that God is possible. The fact that one can conceive of God without contradiction does not establish that God is possible. Conceivability (thinkability) without contradiction is no sure guide to real, extramental, possibility. The following modal ontological argument, then, though valid, and perhaps sound, is not probative unless we can give a good reason for supposing that a maximally perfect being is possible:

1. If a maximally perfect being is possible, then it is actual.
2. A maximally perfect being is possible.
Therefore
3. A maximally perfect being is actual.

What we need is an argument for (2). Here is one:

4. A maximally perfect being ought to exist.
5. Whatever ought to exist, is possible.
Therefore
2. A maximally perfect being is possible.

This is a valid argument, and the premises are very plausible. A maximally perfect being is deontically perfect and so ought to exist. If you deny that, then you are saying that a being can be both perfect in every respect but also either such that it ought not exist (which would be absurd) or such that it neither ought to exist, nor ought not exist. Either way, a greater can be conceived, namely a being that ought to exist.

(5) is also exceedingly plausible. If you were to deny it you would be saying that there are things or states of affairs that both ought to exist and are impossible.

Now putting the deontic subargument and the ontological subargument together we get a deontic ontological argument that is not only valid but appears probative. So a maximally perfect being exists, "and this all men call God." So far, I have presented something similar to the argument Carl R. Kordig gives in "A Deontic Argument for God's Existence," Nous, vol. 15, no. 2(May 1981), pp. 207-208)

But wait a minute! Is premise (4) really self-evident? Could one not argue, with an equal show of plausibility, that God (the maximally perfect being) ought not exist? And that as a result God does not exist? As follows:

6. Everything is such that it ought not exist.
Therefore
7. God is such that he ought not exist. (From 6)
Therefore
8. It ought to be the case that God does not exist. (From 7)
9. If it ought to be the case that p, then it is possible that p.
Therefore
10. It is possible that God does not exist. (From 8, 9)
11. If it is possible that God does not exist, then God does not exist. (A corrolary of Anselm's Insight)
Therefore
12. God does not exist. (From 10, 11)

The (6)-(12) argument is a deontic ontological disproof. It is valid. The crucial premise is (6). You will tell me that we have no reason to accept the nihilist premise, (6), and I will be inclined to agree with you. But do we have reason to accept the presupposition on which the deontic ontological proof rests, namely, that to exist is good? The proof assumes that necessary existence is better than contingent existence. But if so, then existence is good. As a scholastic might put it, ens et bonum convertuntur. Would Schopenhauer and Sartre find that self-evident?

The conclusion I am steering toward is that the proof and the disproof cancel each other, and that therefore neither is conclusive. Each is valid, and both make use of the apparently unexceptionable principles that God is a necessary being and that whatever ought to be the case is possibly such that it is the case. They differ in that the proof rests on the fundamental assumption that to exist is good, while the disproof rejects this assumption.

Unless we can somehow justify the assumption that to exist is good, or its negation, we are left with neither a genuine proof nor a genuine disproof. We end aporetically.