In my previous post I discussed, in a simple and superficial way, what is generally meant by a "free will". As Apolonio rightly pointed out in a comment, we ought not to confuse the notion of a free will with actions that are merely voluntary. I can assent to an act without willing it, and animals, in all probability, act voluntarily even though they are not, strictly speaking, free in the sense that human beings are.
Now it will be necessary to consider a concept that is of particular interest if we are to discuss the notion of free will in the context of the theology of Saints Augustine and Maximos. The term is generally rendered into English as "energy", but that is a rather unfortunate translation, since that English term carries all sorts of connotations that the Greek original does not carry. The Greek word, energeia, literally means an activity, but it has a rather long and convoluted philosophical history that requires a little discussion if we are to make any sense of its use as a theological term.
Consider the following property: "able to speak a natural language". (By "natural language" all I mean is one of the many languages that humans speak but that has not been invented ex nihilo. Examples of the former would be languages such as English, French, German, Latin. Examples of the latter would be "languages" such as Esperanto, Klingon, Quenyan.) All human beings, by virtue of their membership in the species, have this property.
"But wait!" you might say. "Infants don't possess that property. In fact, the word 'infant' means 'incapable of speech'."
Here we introduce some philosophical nuances. Plato and Aristotle used a Greek word, dunamis, to refer to a capacity to do something that is merely potential, that is, the ability to do that thing exists, but it is not being exercised. In the case of the property "able to speak a natural language" Aristotle notes that there are two different kinds of potentialities involved. At the very moment of conception every human being has a potential to speak a natural language in the sense that the human brain is, in a sense, "hard-wired" for such activity. That is, the human brain, unlike other animal brains, finds it particularly easy to pick up such languages, and you may say that humans have a facility for it that other animals don't possess, at least not to the same degree. So even an "infant" a human who cannot speak a language because he has not yet learned one, still has the potential to speak one, on condition that he eventually learn one. He possesses the property even though, at conception, he does not yet possess a brain. He does, however, potentially possess a brain, that is, he will grow one if his development is allowed to progress normally. He does not, however, possess a potential ability to fly under his own power, the way birds do, and this will be true no matter how long he lives and how much he tries to fly under his own power without artificial aid.
Once a human learns his native tongue, however, it will be possible for him to learn other languages. Suppose I know, in addition to English, Latin and Greek. Right now I am writing in English, but I could write this post in Latin. I have the potential to write in Latin because I know the language. This is a different sort of potentiality than the one the infant possesses, because the infant does not know any language, but still possesses the potential to know one, whereas I actually know a language that I am not using, but I possess the potential to use it.
Aristotle called the potentiality possessed by the infant a "first potentiality", and the potentiality possessed by the one who already knows a language but is not using it a "second potentiality". He also called the "second potentiality" a "first actuality", because that sort of potentiality is at the same time a kind of actualization of the first potentiality. When I begin to speak the language that I know, my potentialities are all fully actualized. Aristotle called this the "second actuality" or, to use his technical term, energeia.
In this early, philosophical usage, then, an energeia was merely the state that is the actualization of some potential. Aristotle, famously, defined the human soul as the first actualization of a body having the capacity for life, and the term he used for "first actualization" was prôtê energeia.
If you're wondering why we should be thinking about Aristotle at all in this context, the reason is not far to seek: Aristotle coined the word energeia: it did not exist in Greek (so far as we know) until he wrote his work called Protrepticus, a sort of motivational work designed to get people interested in philosophy. Plato had a similar distinction between potentiality and actuality, but he marked it with the words that mean "having" and "possessing" in Greek. (The word entelekheia, which is sometimes translated as "fulfillment", was also invented by Aristotle, and it may very well become relevant in this context, but I will pass over it for now.) To understand any Greek word fully requires having a very thorough acquaintance with its etymology and the history of its uses. We are rather fortunate, in a way, that the word had such a relatively late origin, since it saves us the trouble of looking through poets, historians, orators, and who knows what all, to get a sense of the term's denotation.
The theological use of the term is as follows. Certain properties are true of God, but he does not possess them in the sense of first potentialities, because that would imply that God will develop over time in a manner analogous to animal growth, and that is impossible for God who is eternal and unchanging in that sense. Nor does he possess them as second potentialities, since that implies that what is true of God now (for example, "omnibenevolent") was at some time not true of God. But that implies both that God is temporal rather than eternal and that it is true to say of God that he is not eternally omnibenevolent, which is not correct. Therefore, whatever is true of God, is true of him as a second actuality, or energeia.
In metaphysics, properties are treated in different ways depending upon one's ontological commitments. If you're a Platonist, for example, you think that every property is an entity in its own right, and that particular things only "possess" properties in the sense of being in a certain kind of relation to those entities. By contrast, if you are an Aristotelian, you will agree that properties are beings in a certain sense, but you will insist that their status as beings is ontologically dependent upon what it is for a substance, such as an individual human being or an individual horse, to be a being. If you are a nominalist, you think that property names are nothing more than names, and they do not pick out entities of any kind but refer rather to the way in which subjective observers experience the world. Many other ways of understanding properties are also possible, these are only a few. For a Christian, it is essential to assert that the being that is God transcends all other beings, regardless of what type of being they are. In other words, even if one is a Platonist, holding that properties are beings, as long as one is also a Christian one must assert that these beings, whatever their status in the sublunary realm, are ontologically dependent upon God, since God's being is fully independent of all other entities, and God is also the cause of all other beings.
So one is confronted with a special problem. Since it is difficult to conceive of any entity, let alone the Christian God, as being a being but having no properties whatsoever, it seems that there is a necessary relation of some kind between being a being and having properties, hence the being that is God would appear to be in some sort of necessary relation with his properties. Since this makes some folks a little squeamish on the grounds that they don't like to think of God being in anything like a necessary relationship with something other than himself, the idea surfaced of asserting that God and his properties are, in some sense, identical. God is love; God is compassion; God is goodness; God is omnipotence, etc. In uses such as these, the "is" turns out to be a kind of "is of identity", that is, it functions almost like a sign of equality.
Looking at the situation in this way, however, while it may comfort the Neoplatonist, makes others nervous. If the "is" here is the is of identity, then by rather straightforward logic, if God is love and God is omnipotence, then love is omnipotence, and that doesn't seem right, at least not when taken literally. Some would solve this problem by drawing a distinction between God "having" his properties" as opposed to "being" his properties. Clearly I, for example, can be an American and a male, and yet we do not think that this entails that the property of being an American is identical to the property of being a male. We do not say "I am American" and mean by that "I, the being who is Scott Carson, am identical in essence to whatever it is that is being-an-American." We mean only "I, the being that is Scott Carson, happens to have been born in the land colloquially known as 'America'."
So what, precisely, is the nature of the relation between God and his properties from an orthodox (minuscule "o") Christian perspective? This is particularly relevant to the question, What is the nature of the relationship between God and his will? One of God's properties is that he wills, and that he wills freely. Willing freely is an activity in which he engages--it is one of his energeiai. In my next installment I will begin to explore the difficulties of this question.
Sunday, January 28, 2007
Thursday, January 25, 2007
Free Will
In the next few days I plan to write about free will, particularly as the subject is treated in Saint Maximos the Confessor but more generally as a feature of Christian belief. Before I can really get going, however, it will be essential to get clear about the meaning of the key terms involved.
The will is that faculty of the human soul responsible for choice. There was a time, not all that long ago, when this faculty was thought of as the sort of thing that played a role that had once been described by Aristotle as “not without reason”, though in itself it is not a department of the rational part of the soul. In the more old-fashioned writers it is referred to as “the rational appetite”, but I doubt that such descriptions are of much use these days. What is worth noting is that it mediates, in a sense, between the rational faculty and the appetites: when guided by reason, it is the will that enables us to strive towards something that our appetites, all on their own, might not strive for. For example, if I am thirsty while lost at sea, I may desire water to drink. Given that I am surrounded by water, I might be tempted by my appetite for water to drink what is all around me. But that would be foolish, and my reason knows that it would be foolish. If my reason informs my will, I will choose not to drink the salt-water of the sea but to wait and hope against hope for a source of fresh water. If a become desperate, it may be that reason will not prevail, in which case I may surrender to my appetites and drink the sea water, with rather disastrous results.
To say that this faculty is “free” means simply that my choices are not determined by anything that is beyond my own control. For example, consider the following two cases. Imagine that I am standing on a platform in a train station as a train approaches. Just as the engine pulls up, I push my neighbor into its path, killing him. Now imagine the same situation, but instead of me pushing my neighbor, someone behind me pushes me into my neighbor, and my momentum causes him to fall in front of the engine, killing him. In the first scenario, I was free to choose not to push my neighbor, and the fact that I could have acted otherwise than I did suggests that what happened was what I wanted to happen; in the second scenario, although I pushed him, I did not choose to do so and, presumably, I did not want to push him or kill him. In the first scenario I acted freely, in the second I did not. Now so far we are not talking about the will itself, but about a person whom we suppose to have a free will. What about the faculty itself? What does it mean to say that the faculty itself is free? Consider the first scenario, where I chose to push my neighbor into the oncoming train. To say that my choice was free is to say that I could have chosen otherwise. But how do we know that I could have chosen otherwise? We cannot test such a claim, since the event is not repeatable (events of the same type could be set up, of course, but the very same particular event was, of course, is confined to just that event itself). Perhaps, if we were to change the content of my desires such that I did not want to push him into the train, we might find that I did push him anyway, since my willing to do so is beyond my control and I am not free. Or perhaps I am not free in a different sense: free to act other than in accordance with my desires and appetites. If the will really is something distinct from my desires, then presumably I ought to be able to choose not to drink that sea-water even if I really want to. But if I am not free from the rule of my desires, I will drink whatever I desire to drink. So I am not free, and if I push the man off of the platform it is because I desired to do so, even though I may not have willed to do so (or we may say that desiring and willing are somehow the same in such a scenario). What is at stake here, clearly, is moral responsibility: if I do things that I do not will (in the sense that I am not free to choose to do otherwise), then I cannot justly be held morally responsible for my “choices”, since they are not really choices at all. If we are all just robots, with no free will of our own, it would have to be our programmers who are morally responsible for our actions, not us.
Hence the so-called “problem of evil.” If we are not morally responsible for our acts, but are merely proximate causes of them, then the ultimate cause, God, is morally responsible for them, even when they are evil. The Christian cannot accept this conclusion. But contemporary neuroscience appears to show that all mental activity is governed strictly by physical laws and processes, and this very much leaves one wondering where in the world free will could come from.
My particular interest, in my next few posts, will be to work out some of the details of this problem while, at the same time, sorting through some of the things that Saint Maximos the Confessor has to say about the problem. I will use, as a starting point, a relatively recent book by Joseph Farrell, but I will also explore other avenues of analysis.
After all, I don’t really have any choice in the matter. Or do I? I guess we’ll find out.
The will is that faculty of the human soul responsible for choice. There was a time, not all that long ago, when this faculty was thought of as the sort of thing that played a role that had once been described by Aristotle as “not without reason”, though in itself it is not a department of the rational part of the soul. In the more old-fashioned writers it is referred to as “the rational appetite”, but I doubt that such descriptions are of much use these days. What is worth noting is that it mediates, in a sense, between the rational faculty and the appetites: when guided by reason, it is the will that enables us to strive towards something that our appetites, all on their own, might not strive for. For example, if I am thirsty while lost at sea, I may desire water to drink. Given that I am surrounded by water, I might be tempted by my appetite for water to drink what is all around me. But that would be foolish, and my reason knows that it would be foolish. If my reason informs my will, I will choose not to drink the salt-water of the sea but to wait and hope against hope for a source of fresh water. If a become desperate, it may be that reason will not prevail, in which case I may surrender to my appetites and drink the sea water, with rather disastrous results.
To say that this faculty is “free” means simply that my choices are not determined by anything that is beyond my own control. For example, consider the following two cases. Imagine that I am standing on a platform in a train station as a train approaches. Just as the engine pulls up, I push my neighbor into its path, killing him. Now imagine the same situation, but instead of me pushing my neighbor, someone behind me pushes me into my neighbor, and my momentum causes him to fall in front of the engine, killing him. In the first scenario, I was free to choose not to push my neighbor, and the fact that I could have acted otherwise than I did suggests that what happened was what I wanted to happen; in the second scenario, although I pushed him, I did not choose to do so and, presumably, I did not want to push him or kill him. In the first scenario I acted freely, in the second I did not. Now so far we are not talking about the will itself, but about a person whom we suppose to have a free will. What about the faculty itself? What does it mean to say that the faculty itself is free? Consider the first scenario, where I chose to push my neighbor into the oncoming train. To say that my choice was free is to say that I could have chosen otherwise. But how do we know that I could have chosen otherwise? We cannot test such a claim, since the event is not repeatable (events of the same type could be set up, of course, but the very same particular event was, of course, is confined to just that event itself). Perhaps, if we were to change the content of my desires such that I did not want to push him into the train, we might find that I did push him anyway, since my willing to do so is beyond my control and I am not free. Or perhaps I am not free in a different sense: free to act other than in accordance with my desires and appetites. If the will really is something distinct from my desires, then presumably I ought to be able to choose not to drink that sea-water even if I really want to. But if I am not free from the rule of my desires, I will drink whatever I desire to drink. So I am not free, and if I push the man off of the platform it is because I desired to do so, even though I may not have willed to do so (or we may say that desiring and willing are somehow the same in such a scenario). What is at stake here, clearly, is moral responsibility: if I do things that I do not will (in the sense that I am not free to choose to do otherwise), then I cannot justly be held morally responsible for my “choices”, since they are not really choices at all. If we are all just robots, with no free will of our own, it would have to be our programmers who are morally responsible for our actions, not us.
Hence the so-called “problem of evil.” If we are not morally responsible for our acts, but are merely proximate causes of them, then the ultimate cause, God, is morally responsible for them, even when they are evil. The Christian cannot accept this conclusion. But contemporary neuroscience appears to show that all mental activity is governed strictly by physical laws and processes, and this very much leaves one wondering where in the world free will could come from.
My particular interest, in my next few posts, will be to work out some of the details of this problem while, at the same time, sorting through some of the things that Saint Maximos the Confessor has to say about the problem. I will use, as a starting point, a relatively recent book by Joseph Farrell, but I will also explore other avenues of analysis.
After all, I don’t really have any choice in the matter. Or do I? I guess we’ll find out.
Wednesday, January 24, 2007
AmChurch and Pelosi
Mike Liccione of Sacramentum Vitae often puts things very well. Today he puts the air-headed Alexandra Pelosi in her place extremely well.
Saturday, January 20, 2007
Good Dog, Sammie!
Did you ever wish that your dog could talk? Ever wonder what he would talk about if he could? I’m not sure it would really be all that interesting, since dogs have a rather limited outlook on life. One of my favorite books when I was a kid was Half Magic by Edward Eager, a story about some children who find a talisman that grants wishes, but only “half wishes” - - you have to wish for twice as much of what you want to get exactly what you want. Was Edward Eager some kind of math teacher or something? I don’t know, but the book is great. One of the children, who does not know that she has the talisman, wishes that her cat could talk, and so then the cat can half talk, half not talk, and the results are both surprising and off-putting. You cannot help but agree with both the kid in the story and the cat that it would have been better if the wish had never been made. I promise I’ll come back to this, but now for something completely different.
In a delightful essay for today’s Wall Street Journal Sam Schulman of The American avers as to how modern day proponents of atheism such as Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Sam Harris have no new arguments to offer for their position that wasn’t offered by atheists of the 19th century but they lack any of the charm of the 19th century humanist.
How can I relate this to Alec Baldwin, you may ask yourself. Well, funny you should ask. It’s not because Alec Baldwin is like some kind of cat that can half talk and half not talk, even though he is rather like some kind of cat that can half think and half not think. About two weeks ago I saw a program on the discovery channel about human evolution that was narrated by Alec Baldwin. I got to thinking about that show again today as I read this piece by Schulman. In the show actors portrayed humans at various stages in their evolutionary history and, rather more interestingly, in various stages of undress intended to correspond, I suppose, to their place in that history. The more primitive, you see, the more naked. It’s a family channel, but this is science, so you can show anything you like as long as it’s scientifically and historically accurate. But I digress - - this is not what made me think of either Alec Baldwin or Sam Schulman's essay. My real point in bringing this up is the fact that the show ascribed the end of earlier hominid lines to a lack of imaginative thinking. Because they couldn’t imagine a future that was any different from the past or the present, they weren’t able to plan ahead or make tools for changing the future or controlling the environment. Hence they were at the mercy of that environment and when it changed faster than they could they died out. Or so the just-so story goes. Like all such stories in evolutionary biology it is sheer fantasy, but it is thought-provoking fantasy. Is the capacity to imagine things really all that big a deal? Does it really mark the difference between a successful species and a failure? Neanderthal and homo sapiens share 99.5% of their genome. We’re practically kissing cousins, and yet they died out during the last ice age because they saw the world too much like Sam Harris.
Yes, that’s right, Sam Harris. After all, who’s got the more prosaic and, well, Neanderthalian view of the world, Sam Harris or Gerard Manley Hopkins? These atheists, especially these fundamentalist scientistic atheists, seem to think that religion is, well “primitive” in some sense. Dawkins, in particular, has argued that it is merely an artifact of a genetic trait that is valuable in its own right because it causes the infant to develop a certain valuable sort of attitude towards its parents but that later in life is just useless and dangerous baggage. This is rather surprising talk for folks who supposedly know about evolution, but it raises an interesting question. What if the trait that allows us to believe in God is something that is valuable for other reasons? Or, even more interestingly, what if it were a trait that not everyone shared to the same extent? Some traits that are shared by more than one species are not the same in the various species. If we were to compare the eyesight of a human being with that of, say a cat, I daresay we would have to admit that each faculty is adapted to a particular function. Cats do a lot of a certain kind of hunting that requires very intense lateral acuity, and, sure enough, if you have a cat - - even one that cannot talk at all - - you will have noticed that they are much more likely to chase after a toy that is dragged across their field of vision than they are to jump into the air after a toy that you are bobbing up and down in front of them (although that’s not to say that plenty of tabbies won’t go for the bobbing toy as well - - after all, what could be more fun than jumping six feet in the air?). Humans, by contrast, hunt in a very different way and our eyesight is better at things like determining depth of field and color contrast. This does not mean that we can’t see lateral movement, only that we may not be as sensitive to it as a cat. And as for color - - well, cats, for the most part, see colors as very pale shades of pastel, if they can see them at all. And dogs - - don’t even get me started on dogs. My dog can't even see a bright yellow tennis ball that is right in front of his nose. Maybe it's because of the size of his nose that he can't see it, but you'd think he'd at least be able to smell that it was there. But anyway. Do dogs and cats care that they can’t see color as well as humans? No, of course not. No, really, they don’t. Oh please, come on, you know as well as I do that the very idea couldn’t even occur to them. So there they are, blithely going about their business as though a bright red fire truck looks just the same color as a pale Gala apple. It’s not an important difference to them, and so they don’t - - or rather they cannot - - detect it. Some human beings are also color blind, and some are even fully blind right from birth. One sometimes wonders precisely what their cognitive grasp of something like vision actually is. If someone blind from birth asserted that it is obviously incompatible with empirical evidence to assert the existence of a faculty like vision, what sort of response could we make? Would we say, “Look here, buddy, the vast majority of people can see things, so just because you can’t don’t go thinking that nobody can even if they had the right faculty.” Would they be angered by that response? Would they think us obscene for saying such things? Of course, nowadays we have a mechanistic story to tell about vision and how it works, but we didn’t always have such a story, and the blind person would have been wrong about vision even if we did not have such a story - - even if such a story were not possible in principle.
So Sam Harris doesn’t believe in God. Indeed, if one were to examine his writings closely it would become quite clear that he cannot believe in God. Though tempting, I don’t suppose that he is literally a Neanderthal, or even a member of some other species that is only 99.5% the same as homo sapiens, but I suppose that it is just this side of possible that the reason that he cannot believe in God is not so much because of the reasons that he alleges - - that such belief is irrational, or obscene, or even obviously contrary to the empirical evidence. These are the sorts of reasons that a dog would give for thinking that there’s no difference between the color of the fire truck and the Gala apple - - they are the reasons one would expect from someone who does not merely not know what he is talking about, but from someone who cannot even possibly conceive of what he is talking about. If a dog could conceive of color vision, and if a dog were a rational creature, imagine what a low opinion we would have of his rational faculty if the dog were to tell us that, because he cannot make any sense out of the idea that the fire truck is a different color than the Gala apple, it follows rather obviously that there is no such difference, and that those of us who believe that we can actually see a difference in the colors are stupid, obscene, and obviously at odds with the empirical evidence. I think we would just pat him on the head and say “good doggie” and leave it at that.
In a delightful essay for today’s Wall Street Journal Sam Schulman of The American avers as to how modern day proponents of atheism such as Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Sam Harris have no new arguments to offer for their position that wasn’t offered by atheists of the 19th century but they lack any of the charm of the 19th century humanist.
What is new about the new atheists? It’s not their arguments. Spend as much time as you like with a pile of the recent anti-religion books, but you won’t encounter a single point you didn’t hear in your freshman dormitory. It’s their tone that is novel. Belief, in their eyes, is not just misguided but contemptible, the product of provincial minds, the mark of people who need to be told how to think and how to vote - - both of which, the new atheists assure us, they do in lock-step with the pope and Jerry Falwell.
How can I relate this to Alec Baldwin, you may ask yourself. Well, funny you should ask. It’s not because Alec Baldwin is like some kind of cat that can half talk and half not talk, even though he is rather like some kind of cat that can half think and half not think. About two weeks ago I saw a program on the discovery channel about human evolution that was narrated by Alec Baldwin. I got to thinking about that show again today as I read this piece by Schulman. In the show actors portrayed humans at various stages in their evolutionary history and, rather more interestingly, in various stages of undress intended to correspond, I suppose, to their place in that history. The more primitive, you see, the more naked. It’s a family channel, but this is science, so you can show anything you like as long as it’s scientifically and historically accurate. But I digress - - this is not what made me think of either Alec Baldwin or Sam Schulman's essay. My real point in bringing this up is the fact that the show ascribed the end of earlier hominid lines to a lack of imaginative thinking. Because they couldn’t imagine a future that was any different from the past or the present, they weren’t able to plan ahead or make tools for changing the future or controlling the environment. Hence they were at the mercy of that environment and when it changed faster than they could they died out. Or so the just-so story goes. Like all such stories in evolutionary biology it is sheer fantasy, but it is thought-provoking fantasy. Is the capacity to imagine things really all that big a deal? Does it really mark the difference between a successful species and a failure? Neanderthal and homo sapiens share 99.5% of their genome. We’re practically kissing cousins, and yet they died out during the last ice age because they saw the world too much like Sam Harris.
Yes, that’s right, Sam Harris. After all, who’s got the more prosaic and, well, Neanderthalian view of the world, Sam Harris or Gerard Manley Hopkins? These atheists, especially these fundamentalist scientistic atheists, seem to think that religion is, well “primitive” in some sense. Dawkins, in particular, has argued that it is merely an artifact of a genetic trait that is valuable in its own right because it causes the infant to develop a certain valuable sort of attitude towards its parents but that later in life is just useless and dangerous baggage. This is rather surprising talk for folks who supposedly know about evolution, but it raises an interesting question. What if the trait that allows us to believe in God is something that is valuable for other reasons? Or, even more interestingly, what if it were a trait that not everyone shared to the same extent? Some traits that are shared by more than one species are not the same in the various species. If we were to compare the eyesight of a human being with that of, say a cat, I daresay we would have to admit that each faculty is adapted to a particular function. Cats do a lot of a certain kind of hunting that requires very intense lateral acuity, and, sure enough, if you have a cat - - even one that cannot talk at all - - you will have noticed that they are much more likely to chase after a toy that is dragged across their field of vision than they are to jump into the air after a toy that you are bobbing up and down in front of them (although that’s not to say that plenty of tabbies won’t go for the bobbing toy as well - - after all, what could be more fun than jumping six feet in the air?). Humans, by contrast, hunt in a very different way and our eyesight is better at things like determining depth of field and color contrast. This does not mean that we can’t see lateral movement, only that we may not be as sensitive to it as a cat. And as for color - - well, cats, for the most part, see colors as very pale shades of pastel, if they can see them at all. And dogs - - don’t even get me started on dogs. My dog can't even see a bright yellow tennis ball that is right in front of his nose. Maybe it's because of the size of his nose that he can't see it, but you'd think he'd at least be able to smell that it was there. But anyway. Do dogs and cats care that they can’t see color as well as humans? No, of course not. No, really, they don’t. Oh please, come on, you know as well as I do that the very idea couldn’t even occur to them. So there they are, blithely going about their business as though a bright red fire truck looks just the same color as a pale Gala apple. It’s not an important difference to them, and so they don’t - - or rather they cannot - - detect it. Some human beings are also color blind, and some are even fully blind right from birth. One sometimes wonders precisely what their cognitive grasp of something like vision actually is. If someone blind from birth asserted that it is obviously incompatible with empirical evidence to assert the existence of a faculty like vision, what sort of response could we make? Would we say, “Look here, buddy, the vast majority of people can see things, so just because you can’t don’t go thinking that nobody can even if they had the right faculty.” Would they be angered by that response? Would they think us obscene for saying such things? Of course, nowadays we have a mechanistic story to tell about vision and how it works, but we didn’t always have such a story, and the blind person would have been wrong about vision even if we did not have such a story - - even if such a story were not possible in principle.
So Sam Harris doesn’t believe in God. Indeed, if one were to examine his writings closely it would become quite clear that he cannot believe in God. Though tempting, I don’t suppose that he is literally a Neanderthal, or even a member of some other species that is only 99.5% the same as homo sapiens, but I suppose that it is just this side of possible that the reason that he cannot believe in God is not so much because of the reasons that he alleges - - that such belief is irrational, or obscene, or even obviously contrary to the empirical evidence. These are the sorts of reasons that a dog would give for thinking that there’s no difference between the color of the fire truck and the Gala apple - - they are the reasons one would expect from someone who does not merely not know what he is talking about, but from someone who cannot even possibly conceive of what he is talking about. If a dog could conceive of color vision, and if a dog were a rational creature, imagine what a low opinion we would have of his rational faculty if the dog were to tell us that, because he cannot make any sense out of the idea that the fire truck is a different color than the Gala apple, it follows rather obviously that there is no such difference, and that those of us who believe that we can actually see a difference in the colors are stupid, obscene, and obviously at odds with the empirical evidence. I think we would just pat him on the head and say “good doggie” and leave it at that.
Wednesday, January 03, 2007
The Extraordinary Virtue of Ordinary People
The New York Times carried a story today about a man by the name of Wesley Autrey who leaped onto the tracks of the subway in front of an oncoming train in order to protect a man who had just fallen onto the tracks himself. Both were unhurt, though the other man had suffered a seizure. Read the whole thing here. If you are unmoved by the story then you are a stone.
People like this always say things like "I don’t feel like I did something spectacular; I just saw someone who needed help." By saying such things they make what they did even more spectacular than it already was, and demonstrate even more clearly just what it means to be virtuous. I hope Mr. Autrey is standing nearby when I have my seizure. Better yet, I hope I'm standing nearby whenever he needs some help, so that I can have the honor and privilege of doing something--anything--to be of some small service to such a person.
People like this always say things like "I don’t feel like I did something spectacular; I just saw someone who needed help." By saying such things they make what they did even more spectacular than it already was, and demonstrate even more clearly just what it means to be virtuous. I hope Mr. Autrey is standing nearby when I have my seizure. Better yet, I hope I'm standing nearby whenever he needs some help, so that I can have the honor and privilege of doing something--anything--to be of some small service to such a person.
Saturday, December 30, 2006
Sabotage by Google
There's a certain danger to making use of the "Ads by Google" feature that is available to users of Blogger and other similar services. Take for example the case of Philokalia Republic, a fine blog run by Kevin Jones who is perfectly sound, as far as I can see, in matters of faith and morals, and yet today his blog sported an ad for Illinois abortion clinics--generated at random simply by virtue of Kevin's many attacks on the morality of abortion.
Last year I noted a similar phenomenon occurring with use of the CafePress thingamajigg, which sometimes displays Catholic, sometimes anti-Catholic merchandise in its little window when used on a Catholic blog. I think that one has since been fixed, but using "Ads by Google" is clearly playing with fire.
Last year I noted a similar phenomenon occurring with use of the CafePress thingamajigg, which sometimes displays Catholic, sometimes anti-Catholic merchandise in its little window when used on a Catholic blog. I think that one has since been fixed, but using "Ads by Google" is clearly playing with fire.
Friday, December 29, 2006
Pee Wee Herman Still Holding His Own
The Associated Press today has published the results of a poll asking Americans who were the biggest heroes and who were the biggest villains of 2006. Since it was a poll of Americans, George Bush managed to take top honors in both categories, though he won the "Biggest Villain" category by a larger margin than he won the "Biggest Hero" category (25% as opposed to 13%). Osama Bin Laden came in second for Biggest Villain, but he wasn't even close, scoring a measly 8%--no need for George to worry about hanging chads in that contest. John Kerry tied for 7th place, with only 1% of the votes.
The race for biggest hero was closer, but still no contest, with the soldiers in Iraq garnering only 6%. Our Lord and Savior, the Second Person of the Trinity and Son of the Living God, Jesus Christ, tied for third with Oprah Winfrey and Barack Obama at 3%. Close on their heels was Bono, with 2%. Al Gore tied with Angelina Jolie at 1%, but John Kerry didn't make the list.
Actually, the biggest winner in the "Hero of the Year" category was "Not Sure", coming in with 27% of the vote. That's right, nine times as many people would rather say they don't know who is a big hero than say that it was, say, Jesus. Or Oprah. Whichever. As long as it's not Bono.
You can view some of the other resuslts here, but it will only serve to remind you that we live in debauched times. And in a debauched society.
The race for biggest hero was closer, but still no contest, with the soldiers in Iraq garnering only 6%. Our Lord and Savior, the Second Person of the Trinity and Son of the Living God, Jesus Christ, tied for third with Oprah Winfrey and Barack Obama at 3%. Close on their heels was Bono, with 2%. Al Gore tied with Angelina Jolie at 1%, but John Kerry didn't make the list.
Actually, the biggest winner in the "Hero of the Year" category was "Not Sure", coming in with 27% of the vote. That's right, nine times as many people would rather say they don't know who is a big hero than say that it was, say, Jesus. Or Oprah. Whichever. As long as it's not Bono.
You can view some of the other resuslts here, but it will only serve to remind you that we live in debauched times. And in a debauched society.
Wednesday, December 27, 2006
Real and Notional Assent
Early in the year 1870 Blessed John Henry (later to be Cardinal) Newman published An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent, a work that has had both many detractors and fewer, though not a few, admirers in the intervening 136 years since its appearance. In that Essay he drew a distinction between two modes of a particular operation of the mind that he called "assent". One mode he called "real assent", the other "notional assent". Notional assent is the form of assent that we give to an abstract inference, whether deductive or inductive. Real assent is the form of assent that we give to concrete realities or the truths of religion independent of any abstract inferences from which they may be derivable. His purpose in drawing this distinction was to move away from what he saw as the overly abstract philosophical theology of his day as he had encountered it in his colleagues, both Anglican and Roman Catholic, but it is essential to see that he did not intend the distinction to be between two kinds of assent, but two modes of a single operation of the mind. The difference lies not in the mental operation itself, but in the object of the operation. In the case of notional assent the object of the operation is the inferential pattern of a theological deduction; in the case of real assent the object of the operation is a truth of religion. Because there are not two different operations of the mind involved, there need be no necessary difference in kind between the truth conditions of the object of notional assent and the truth conditions of the object of real assent. Newman's purpose in the Essay was to show how it is that the mind is able to have certainty about the truths of religion even when there is no obvious theological inference leading to the certainty of notional assent associated with some particular religious truth.
For Newman there can be no opposition between these two objects or the two forms of assent that are associated with them.
The two forms of assent, requiring distinct objects of the same mental act, are not related to each other by some common set of conditions. Newman did not hold, for example, that real assent is a more valid form of assent, or that notional assent is an imperfect form of real assent. The difference between them is strictly in their objects: real assent is assent to realities (res), notional assent is assent to concepts. Possibly he thought of real assent as more vivid than notional assent, but the truths of each are on a par. In this, too, Newman is in agreement with Aristotle, who held that our apprehension of realities is more affective than our apprehension of demonstrations.
Quite importantly for my own view is another point of agreement with Newman: the view that Newman and I defend is not a rational probabilism grounded in a final appeal to faith. Religious dogma--the revealed truths of the Scriptures and Apostolic teaching--are not themselves demonstrable from prior truths. Yet this is an important kind of truth for Newman: the real assent that we give to religious dogma is not conditioned upon any kind of demonstration, but it is apprehended by intellect.
There are some important areas in which I disagree with Newman. He devotes chapter 8 of the Essay to a discussion of "Inference", and it is quite clear that he has a rather different conception of the nature of inference than I do. His conception is clearly Aristotelian in broad outline, because he goes so far as to say that all deductive inference is properly syllogistic by nature and, hence, requires general terms throughout. He even explicitly excludes from the realm of deductive inference the very example of a valid deduction that I used in my previous post, the deduction grounded in the disjunctive syllogism. Newman was writing at a time when truth-functional logic had not been developed, and his unwillingness to consider sentential logic of the sort defended by the Stoics is probably due more to his lack of experience with those writers than to any systematic rejection of the sentential formalization. Having been trained in the Anglican tradition he was most familiar with the categorical logic employed by Aristotle and the Fathers, and he was not as deeply immersed in the logic of the Schools and he seems to have had no exposure at all to the work of those working in mathematical logic in his own century. These are not necessarily shortcomings, since I think that much contemporary logic is ultimately reducible to syllogistic; but it is a mistake to assert that an inference that is not in syllogistic form is not a deductive inference. One can forgive him for this error because he balances it out with the very valuable insight that not all inferences are propositional in character, an insight that is not fully grasped by everyone even today.
I must also disagree with Newman in his characterization of what ordinarily leads to categorical certainty in our beliefs. The examples that he gives are intended to suggest something like an inductive process, but in fact they are nothing more than collections of random observation statements, and he does not give a proper account of how it is that these collections of observations lead to the sort of certainty that he ascribes to conclusions that he thinks we draw from them. To take just two of his own examples, he asserts that we have certainty about the following two propositions: that Great Britain is an island; and that the works of Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Plautus, Livy, and Tacitus are not 13th century forgeries. It may very well be the case that we have certainty about such things, but he does not bother to address the question of what it is, precisely, that warrants this certainty, if indeed anything does--instead he gives us a rather discursive description of the process by means of which he thinks we develop a feeling of certainty within ourselves that our judgments about these things are correct. Now it is important not to be unfair here--I have already remarked that Newman was not trained in analytic philosophy, so the failure to distinguish between what gives rise to a psychological state of feeling certain and what actually warrants with certainty is perhaps not an egregious error, but it leaves some rather important questions unanswered.
Surely Newman is right, though, when he complains that what often passes for "proof" is nothing more than the feeling that something is likely given what has happened in the past. He appears to endorse Hume's critique of such reasoning: we ought not have certainty that the future will be like the past, and yet we do. Much of what we accept as proof is really something very personal:
In this chapter he insists, quite rightly, I think, that "it is the mind that reasons, and that controls its own reasonings, not any technical apparatus of words and propositions." This is an idea that is thoroughly Platonic in its origins and can be found not only in Aristotle but in the Fathers as well. The idea that all reasoning is fundamentally propositional in nature has had its defenders, but this is not necessarily the case, even if it is possible to represent any particular inference by means of a formal system imposed upon it. Sadly, Newman again fails to give a clear account of precisely how this "illative sense" actually works and what are its normative foundations, preferring instead to give loose analogies and descriptions. Possibly this is an artifact of the protreptic nature of the work, but it is also probably an inevitable consequence of the cultural milieu in which he lived and worked. In an interesting move, he compares the illative sense to Aristotle's concept of phronêsis, practical wisdom, as given in the Nicomachean Ethics. Just as the phronimos, or practically wise person, has an innate sense of what his duty is, a sense that arises from habituation, so, too, in a general way, we come to be certain about those sorts of things that we have experienced again and again in such a way as always to have the same outcome. But whereas Aristotle gives a rather detailed picture of how phronêsis works, Newman offers no similarly detailed account of the illative sense. What he has given us is nothing beyond what Aristotle attempted to give, namely, an account of human cognition in terms of the structural components of the rational faculty, but he falls short of Aristotle's explanatory detail.
These problems in detail, however, do not lessen the importance and originality of Newman's work, written, as it was, 136 years ago and anticipating in some interesting ways some aspects of contemporary Aristotelian scholarship. In particular I am impressed with his willingness to grapple with that aspect of cognition that is surely at the heart of any epistemology: the capacity of the human mind to settle upon the best starting points, the most useful first principles. Although his account is ultimately unsatisfying, it is only because it is incomplete, not because it is fundamentally wrong-headed. There is much more work to be done in this direction, but anyone who undertakes to do that work would not go wrong to take Newman's Essay as his starting point.
For Newman there can be no opposition between these two objects or the two forms of assent that are associated with them.
A dogma is a proposition; it stands for a notion or for a thing; and to believe it is to give the assent of the mind to it, as it stands for the one or for the other. To give a real assent is an act of religion; to give a notional, is a theological act. It is discerned, rested in, appropriated as a reality, by the religious imagination; it is held as a truth, by the theological intellect.It is worth noting that Newman thinks of propositions as standing either "for a notion or for a thing". By "notion" here I assume he must mean something either semantic or conceptual; by "thing" I cannot imagine what he could mean other than a state of affairs. As I remarked in my post of yesterday, Newman was not trained in analytic philosophy, so his use of technical terms is somewhat non-standard.
Not as if there were in fact, or could be, any line of demarcation...between these two modes of assent....As intellect is common to all men as well as imagination, every religious man is to a certain extent a theologian, and no theology can start or thrive without the initiative and abiding presence of religion.Newman's view is not markedly different from that of Saint Thomas Aquinas--with whom he was intimately familiar even before his conversion but who was obviously at the heart of the scholastic theology that dominated much Catholic discussion of the time. In the Summa Theologiae (I.1.8) Aquinas held that theology starts from its own first principles and argues from them to prove something else, but these first principles are held to be true--they are not proven true by theology, they are, rather, the fundamental articles of faith, the precepts of revealed religion. It was to this distinction--between demonstrable truths and non-demonstrable necessary first principles--that I compared Aristotle's treatment of our apprehension of first principles in the Posterior Analytics.
The two forms of assent, requiring distinct objects of the same mental act, are not related to each other by some common set of conditions. Newman did not hold, for example, that real assent is a more valid form of assent, or that notional assent is an imperfect form of real assent. The difference between them is strictly in their objects: real assent is assent to realities (res), notional assent is assent to concepts. Possibly he thought of real assent as more vivid than notional assent, but the truths of each are on a par. In this, too, Newman is in agreement with Aristotle, who held that our apprehension of realities is more affective than our apprehension of demonstrations.
Quite importantly for my own view is another point of agreement with Newman: the view that Newman and I defend is not a rational probabilism grounded in a final appeal to faith. Religious dogma--the revealed truths of the Scriptures and Apostolic teaching--are not themselves demonstrable from prior truths. Yet this is an important kind of truth for Newman: the real assent that we give to religious dogma is not conditioned upon any kind of demonstration, but it is apprehended by intellect.
There are some important areas in which I disagree with Newman. He devotes chapter 8 of the Essay to a discussion of "Inference", and it is quite clear that he has a rather different conception of the nature of inference than I do. His conception is clearly Aristotelian in broad outline, because he goes so far as to say that all deductive inference is properly syllogistic by nature and, hence, requires general terms throughout. He even explicitly excludes from the realm of deductive inference the very example of a valid deduction that I used in my previous post, the deduction grounded in the disjunctive syllogism. Newman was writing at a time when truth-functional logic had not been developed, and his unwillingness to consider sentential logic of the sort defended by the Stoics is probably due more to his lack of experience with those writers than to any systematic rejection of the sentential formalization. Having been trained in the Anglican tradition he was most familiar with the categorical logic employed by Aristotle and the Fathers, and he was not as deeply immersed in the logic of the Schools and he seems to have had no exposure at all to the work of those working in mathematical logic in his own century. These are not necessarily shortcomings, since I think that much contemporary logic is ultimately reducible to syllogistic; but it is a mistake to assert that an inference that is not in syllogistic form is not a deductive inference. One can forgive him for this error because he balances it out with the very valuable insight that not all inferences are propositional in character, an insight that is not fully grasped by everyone even today.
I must also disagree with Newman in his characterization of what ordinarily leads to categorical certainty in our beliefs. The examples that he gives are intended to suggest something like an inductive process, but in fact they are nothing more than collections of random observation statements, and he does not give a proper account of how it is that these collections of observations lead to the sort of certainty that he ascribes to conclusions that he thinks we draw from them. To take just two of his own examples, he asserts that we have certainty about the following two propositions: that Great Britain is an island; and that the works of Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Plautus, Livy, and Tacitus are not 13th century forgeries. It may very well be the case that we have certainty about such things, but he does not bother to address the question of what it is, precisely, that warrants this certainty, if indeed anything does--instead he gives us a rather discursive description of the process by means of which he thinks we develop a feeling of certainty within ourselves that our judgments about these things are correct. Now it is important not to be unfair here--I have already remarked that Newman was not trained in analytic philosophy, so the failure to distinguish between what gives rise to a psychological state of feeling certain and what actually warrants with certainty is perhaps not an egregious error, but it leaves some rather important questions unanswered.
Surely Newman is right, though, when he complains that what often passes for "proof" is nothing more than the feeling that something is likely given what has happened in the past. He appears to endorse Hume's critique of such reasoning: we ought not have certainty that the future will be like the past, and yet we do. Much of what we accept as proof is really something very personal:
I think it is the fact that many of our most obstinate and most reasonable certitudes depend on proofs which are informal and personal, which baffle our powers of analysis, and cannot be brought under logical rule, because they cannot be submitted to logical statistics.In passing from formal inference, to informal inference, to what he called "natural inference", Newman tried to get at the cognitive foundations of this inner sense of conviction about the truth of "things", by which, again, I assume he means something along the lines of states of affairs. The rational faculty responsible for this cognitive state he calls the illative sense, which is also the subject of the subsequent chapter of the Essay.
In this chapter he insists, quite rightly, I think, that "it is the mind that reasons, and that controls its own reasonings, not any technical apparatus of words and propositions." This is an idea that is thoroughly Platonic in its origins and can be found not only in Aristotle but in the Fathers as well. The idea that all reasoning is fundamentally propositional in nature has had its defenders, but this is not necessarily the case, even if it is possible to represent any particular inference by means of a formal system imposed upon it. Sadly, Newman again fails to give a clear account of precisely how this "illative sense" actually works and what are its normative foundations, preferring instead to give loose analogies and descriptions. Possibly this is an artifact of the protreptic nature of the work, but it is also probably an inevitable consequence of the cultural milieu in which he lived and worked. In an interesting move, he compares the illative sense to Aristotle's concept of phronêsis, practical wisdom, as given in the Nicomachean Ethics. Just as the phronimos, or practically wise person, has an innate sense of what his duty is, a sense that arises from habituation, so, too, in a general way, we come to be certain about those sorts of things that we have experienced again and again in such a way as always to have the same outcome. But whereas Aristotle gives a rather detailed picture of how phronêsis works, Newman offers no similarly detailed account of the illative sense. What he has given us is nothing beyond what Aristotle attempted to give, namely, an account of human cognition in terms of the structural components of the rational faculty, but he falls short of Aristotle's explanatory detail.
These problems in detail, however, do not lessen the importance and originality of Newman's work, written, as it was, 136 years ago and anticipating in some interesting ways some aspects of contemporary Aristotelian scholarship. In particular I am impressed with his willingness to grapple with that aspect of cognition that is surely at the heart of any epistemology: the capacity of the human mind to settle upon the best starting points, the most useful first principles. Although his account is ultimately unsatisfying, it is only because it is incomplete, not because it is fundamentally wrong-headed. There is much more work to be done in this direction, but anyone who undertakes to do that work would not go wrong to take Newman's Essay as his starting point.
Monday, December 25, 2006
Back to the (for me) Source
In the course of working through some of the issues involved in doctrinal development I have been reminded again and again of Blessed John Henry Newman's contribution to this topic in his An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent. A commenter on one of my earlier posts complained that it sometimes seems as though Roman Catholics take Newman's views about doctrinal development to be themselves instances of irreformable doctrine. While that strikes me as too strong, I nevertheless agree that discussions of doctrinal development sometimes take the foundations of the idea too much for granted.
While not wanting to privilege too much Newman's view of things in this matter, I must confess that Newman has been particularly formative for me, and in trying to deal with some of the harder questions that have been posed for me by some of my readers, I have found recourse to the Essay again and again. Like many converts from Anglicanism, Newman has served as a kind of model for me, but I must also admit that, unlike many Anglicans, I am not as steeped in his writings as I ought to be. I have read such standards as the Apologia, the Parochial and Plain Sermons, and, of course, Tract 90, but the work with which I am most intimately familiar is the Essay. My copy of it, which I picked up at a used bookstore nearly 25 years ago in Chapel Hill, is now literally disintegrating from constant use and consultation. I know to my sorrow that reading and re-reading a certain text over many years has nothing to do with guaranteeing anything like a competent grasp of the ideas contained in that text, but to the extent that familiarity facilitates discussion, I am prepared to discuss that text in this context.
Folks who have done me the courtesy of perusing my earlier entries on this topic will remember that I have been defending a kind of two-stage process in the development of doctrine, and that the stages as I have described them are loosely based on Aristotle's description of a realist epistemology and philosophy of science as found in his Prior and Posterior Analytics. To recapitulate briefly: I see doctrinal development beginning from "theological axioms", that is, theological propositions that are known to be necessarily (and, thus, irreformably) true on the grounds of the Church's own indefectibility as guaranteed by Our Lord. From these beginnings, theological speculation, over time, can give rise to further propositions which, if they are found to be logically consistent with the axioms, can safely be added to the body of doctrine that is to be believed de fide, since the deductive process guarantees the truth of these propositions. On my account, much of the "theological speculation" that gets absorbed in this process is clarificatory in character, though it may contain some speculation that goes beyond mere clarification. Ultimately, however, anything that is accepted as de fide will have some deductive proof following from other irreformable doctrines and the theorems that can be derived from them.
What appears to be most controversial about my picture is my insistence on this second stage of doctrinal development: the logical testing of theological speculation. I have asserted that doctrine may only develop in such a way as to allow this sort of testing, otherwise new and untestable theological claims may appear to have the full endorsement of the Magisterium itself. There are two assumptions behind this view. First, I assume that the Church does indeed have a Divine Charism such that she can teach authoritatively, not merely in the sense of deserving obedience but in the sense of having fullness of truth. Second, I assume, along with Saints Augustine and Vincent, and with Blessed John Henry Newman, that there is nothing patent in the Church's teaching at any time during her history that was not latent from the beginning: Jesus Christ just is the fullness of revelation, and all theological truth must be traceable back to him and what he taught and what was handed down by his Apostles. I sense that these two assumptions are not shared by all of my critics, so in this post I will offer a few comments about these assumptions and what is at stake in accepting or rejecting them. In a subsequent post I will explore some of Newman's assertions in chapters eight and nine of the Essay. Chapter eight, entitled "Inference", draws distinctions among three types of inference related to the acceptance of the truth of propositions; chapter nine, called "The Illative Sense", is Newman's attempt to provide a model of how it is that we grasp the truth of propositions. Newman's model is not particularly original or rigorous--he was neither a dogmatic theologian nor an analytic philosopher--but he provides something that every Christian needs: an epistemology that is neither empiricist nor anti-realist.
First, however, I must explain my two assumptions. Let me begin with the assumption that the Church can teach authoritatively. This is an assumption that will be familiar to both Roman Catholics and Orthodox. It will even be familiar to many Anglicans, who explicitly endorse something that they call "tradition" in addition to the scriptures as a source of our knowledge of God. My own experience within Anglicanism, however, was that there tend to be different perspectives on just what this "tradition" is and just what is the nature of its authority. Some Anglicans appear to think that "tradition" is nothing more than a set of interpretive stances taken over time that are, indeed, "traditional" in the sense of being old and widely accepted but by no means irreformable. Others appear to endorse a view very much like the Orthodox view, that the "tradition" properly understood represents the teachings of the Apostles, a teaching that is not open to substantive change over time. I take this latter view to be very close to the Roman Catholic understanding of the church's Magisterium: a body of doctrine that is regarded as settled truth and that cannot be rejected by any Christian. That there must be such a body of doctrine seems indisputably clear to me, since it is both logically and temporally prior to the Christian scriptures themselves (I have more to say on this topic in my post on the idea of sola scriptura; for a very strange and ultimately unsuccessful defense of sola scriptura and an attempt to show the Catholic idea [along with just about every other Catholic idea] to be circular, I invite you to peruse the bizarre world of this blog). What is ultimately at stake here? If you reject the idea that at least one of the Church's teachings is irreformable, then ultimately you cannot defend any Christian teaching at all. Jesus may or may not be the son of God or the Second Person of the Trinity; indeed, God may or may not be Trinitarian; God may or may not exist. Without the authority to teach these things authoritatively--including the authority to enshrine some of these teachings in the form of scriptures that are themselves to be regarded as definitive and authoritative--then nothing is authoritative and anything may be believed.
My second assumption will be more controversial, even among the sane. My second assumption is that whatever the Church teaches, at any time in history, will be logically compatible with everything else the Church has ever taught, or ever will teach, at any point in her history. The way I put it above was actually not quite so strong, but it is compatible with what I have just written: what is patent in the Church's teachings now has always been at least latent from the beginning. The importance of this assumption cannot be overstated. If we assume that there is such a teaching authority as laid down in the first assumption, then all of its authoritative must be logically consistent for a very simple reason: from a logical contradiction, anything and everything follows. If you're not familiar with this logical principle, let me explain what I mean.
Suppose the Church teaches two things that are logically incompatible. Let call the two propositions P and Not-P. Now, if the Church teaches these things, then we can combine them as a conjunction: (P & Not-P). I've used the sign "&" to symbolize the conjunction, and I put the two propositions in parentheses to illustrate the fact that the two of them are being asserted together: P AND Not-p. Some might dispute this move--they might say that the Church does not teach P AND Not-P, but rather, she once taught p but now teaches Not-p, and they will claim that this is not a contradiction. In a certain sense it is not, but we are restricting the discussion here to just those propositions that the Church teaches authoritatively in accordance with the first assumption. Either the Church has that authority, or she does not. If she does not have that authority, as we have seen, then nothing about Christianity ever need be believed by anybody. If she does have that authority, then those things that she teaches with it are true all of the time, not merely at the specific point in time at which she teaches them. A more difficult question is the question precisely which propositions put forward by the Church are in fact taught authoritatively, but I will save that question for another day. At present, we simply assumes that she can teach authoritatively, and now we will see that she cannot teach different things at different times.
So, we have the conjunction of incompatible teachings, (P & Not-p). If the conjunction of the two things is true, then each individual conjunct must also be true, so we may separate the conjunction into its component parts. In other words, the following deductive inference is valid:
Suppose I say to you, "Today is either Monday or Tuesday, but it's not Tuesday." Surely you will agree that it follows immediately from this that "Today is Monday." That is, if what I said is really true, if it really is either Monday or Tuesday but in reality it really is not Tuesday, then it must be true that today is Monday. Now consider our sample argument. It asserts "Either P or X" in (4), and proposition (3) says "Not-P". So we may make the following valid deduction:
Now think of the Church's teachings as being like premises in an argument. If any two teachings contradict each other, then we have a situation in which the Church is teaching (P & Not-P), hence, if we agree that the Church teaches this, then we can prove that the Church also teaches that the moon is made of green cheese, because this follows logically form what the Church explicitly does teach.
This kind of case only handles contradictions. What about cases where what the Church teaches is not a contradiction of any other teaching, but is rather a new teaching? Someone might assert that the Church is not teaching anything like (P & Not-p), but does teach (P & Q), where Q stands for some proposition that was never taught by the Church in the past. This is where the nature of the development of doctrine becomes very important, because now we must explore in what sense has Q never been taught? Clearly if Q is logically consistent with some proposition Not-P, then we have the logical equivalent of teaching a contradiction. If Q represents something that, let's say, nobody in the Church ever thought of before, then what is the harm in teaching it? Why can't we just say, "Well, now we've thought of it, and everybody has to believe it." There are two related problems here. The first is the question why didn't anybody ever think of it before. If there is no way to show its relation to earlier teachings then one must question whether it was ever intended to be taught by Our Lord, whom we regard as in himself the fullness of revelation. If, on the other hand, it can be shown to be related somehow to other, earlier teachings, teachings that do go back to Our Lord or his Apostles, then what is the nature of that relation? What I have been suggesting is that, however that new teaching, Q, is discovered, whether through induction, theological speculation, or just plain old brainstorming, it must be related to earlier teachings in such a way as to be proven to be such. The Church could, of course, just assert any old thing that she likes and demand assent, if her authority is literally unlimited. But my first assumption does not assert that the Church's authority to teach is literally unlimited, only that she has the authority to teach. Part of my suggestion in these posts is that her authority is limited by certain constraints, and I have been portraying those constraints as logical in character. I will argue, in further posts, that these logical constraints are limited to deductive relations.
In my next post, I will dip into Newman's Essay with these assumptions as my background conditions.
While not wanting to privilege too much Newman's view of things in this matter, I must confess that Newman has been particularly formative for me, and in trying to deal with some of the harder questions that have been posed for me by some of my readers, I have found recourse to the Essay again and again. Like many converts from Anglicanism, Newman has served as a kind of model for me, but I must also admit that, unlike many Anglicans, I am not as steeped in his writings as I ought to be. I have read such standards as the Apologia, the Parochial and Plain Sermons, and, of course, Tract 90, but the work with which I am most intimately familiar is the Essay. My copy of it, which I picked up at a used bookstore nearly 25 years ago in Chapel Hill, is now literally disintegrating from constant use and consultation. I know to my sorrow that reading and re-reading a certain text over many years has nothing to do with guaranteeing anything like a competent grasp of the ideas contained in that text, but to the extent that familiarity facilitates discussion, I am prepared to discuss that text in this context.
Folks who have done me the courtesy of perusing my earlier entries on this topic will remember that I have been defending a kind of two-stage process in the development of doctrine, and that the stages as I have described them are loosely based on Aristotle's description of a realist epistemology and philosophy of science as found in his Prior and Posterior Analytics. To recapitulate briefly: I see doctrinal development beginning from "theological axioms", that is, theological propositions that are known to be necessarily (and, thus, irreformably) true on the grounds of the Church's own indefectibility as guaranteed by Our Lord. From these beginnings, theological speculation, over time, can give rise to further propositions which, if they are found to be logically consistent with the axioms, can safely be added to the body of doctrine that is to be believed de fide, since the deductive process guarantees the truth of these propositions. On my account, much of the "theological speculation" that gets absorbed in this process is clarificatory in character, though it may contain some speculation that goes beyond mere clarification. Ultimately, however, anything that is accepted as de fide will have some deductive proof following from other irreformable doctrines and the theorems that can be derived from them.
What appears to be most controversial about my picture is my insistence on this second stage of doctrinal development: the logical testing of theological speculation. I have asserted that doctrine may only develop in such a way as to allow this sort of testing, otherwise new and untestable theological claims may appear to have the full endorsement of the Magisterium itself. There are two assumptions behind this view. First, I assume that the Church does indeed have a Divine Charism such that she can teach authoritatively, not merely in the sense of deserving obedience but in the sense of having fullness of truth. Second, I assume, along with Saints Augustine and Vincent, and with Blessed John Henry Newman, that there is nothing patent in the Church's teaching at any time during her history that was not latent from the beginning: Jesus Christ just is the fullness of revelation, and all theological truth must be traceable back to him and what he taught and what was handed down by his Apostles. I sense that these two assumptions are not shared by all of my critics, so in this post I will offer a few comments about these assumptions and what is at stake in accepting or rejecting them. In a subsequent post I will explore some of Newman's assertions in chapters eight and nine of the Essay. Chapter eight, entitled "Inference", draws distinctions among three types of inference related to the acceptance of the truth of propositions; chapter nine, called "The Illative Sense", is Newman's attempt to provide a model of how it is that we grasp the truth of propositions. Newman's model is not particularly original or rigorous--he was neither a dogmatic theologian nor an analytic philosopher--but he provides something that every Christian needs: an epistemology that is neither empiricist nor anti-realist.
First, however, I must explain my two assumptions. Let me begin with the assumption that the Church can teach authoritatively. This is an assumption that will be familiar to both Roman Catholics and Orthodox. It will even be familiar to many Anglicans, who explicitly endorse something that they call "tradition" in addition to the scriptures as a source of our knowledge of God. My own experience within Anglicanism, however, was that there tend to be different perspectives on just what this "tradition" is and just what is the nature of its authority. Some Anglicans appear to think that "tradition" is nothing more than a set of interpretive stances taken over time that are, indeed, "traditional" in the sense of being old and widely accepted but by no means irreformable. Others appear to endorse a view very much like the Orthodox view, that the "tradition" properly understood represents the teachings of the Apostles, a teaching that is not open to substantive change over time. I take this latter view to be very close to the Roman Catholic understanding of the church's Magisterium: a body of doctrine that is regarded as settled truth and that cannot be rejected by any Christian. That there must be such a body of doctrine seems indisputably clear to me, since it is both logically and temporally prior to the Christian scriptures themselves (I have more to say on this topic in my post on the idea of sola scriptura; for a very strange and ultimately unsuccessful defense of sola scriptura and an attempt to show the Catholic idea [along with just about every other Catholic idea] to be circular, I invite you to peruse the bizarre world of this blog). What is ultimately at stake here? If you reject the idea that at least one of the Church's teachings is irreformable, then ultimately you cannot defend any Christian teaching at all. Jesus may or may not be the son of God or the Second Person of the Trinity; indeed, God may or may not be Trinitarian; God may or may not exist. Without the authority to teach these things authoritatively--including the authority to enshrine some of these teachings in the form of scriptures that are themselves to be regarded as definitive and authoritative--then nothing is authoritative and anything may be believed.
My second assumption will be more controversial, even among the sane. My second assumption is that whatever the Church teaches, at any time in history, will be logically compatible with everything else the Church has ever taught, or ever will teach, at any point in her history. The way I put it above was actually not quite so strong, but it is compatible with what I have just written: what is patent in the Church's teachings now has always been at least latent from the beginning. The importance of this assumption cannot be overstated. If we assume that there is such a teaching authority as laid down in the first assumption, then all of its authoritative must be logically consistent for a very simple reason: from a logical contradiction, anything and everything follows. If you're not familiar with this logical principle, let me explain what I mean.
Suppose the Church teaches two things that are logically incompatible. Let call the two propositions P and Not-P. Now, if the Church teaches these things, then we can combine them as a conjunction: (P & Not-P). I've used the sign "&" to symbolize the conjunction, and I put the two propositions in parentheses to illustrate the fact that the two of them are being asserted together: P AND Not-p. Some might dispute this move--they might say that the Church does not teach P AND Not-P, but rather, she once taught p but now teaches Not-p, and they will claim that this is not a contradiction. In a certain sense it is not, but we are restricting the discussion here to just those propositions that the Church teaches authoritatively in accordance with the first assumption. Either the Church has that authority, or she does not. If she does not have that authority, as we have seen, then nothing about Christianity ever need be believed by anybody. If she does have that authority, then those things that she teaches with it are true all of the time, not merely at the specific point in time at which she teaches them. A more difficult question is the question precisely which propositions put forward by the Church are in fact taught authoritatively, but I will save that question for another day. At present, we simply assumes that she can teach authoritatively, and now we will see that she cannot teach different things at different times.
So, we have the conjunction of incompatible teachings, (P & Not-p). If the conjunction of the two things is true, then each individual conjunct must also be true, so we may separate the conjunction into its component parts. In other words, the following deductive inference is valid:
1. (P & Not-P)Now, this deduction leaves us with our two incompatible teachings asserted individually, each being true. Now there is an inferential rule, called "addition", that says that we may take any true proposition and add another one to it so as to leave a disjunction. For example, if it is true to say that today is Christmas, then it is also true to say that "Today is either Christmas or it is Easter." Indeed, the proposition that we add may say anything at all, even something silly: "Either today is Christmas or the moon is made of green cheese." The idea here is that a disjunction is true whenever at least one of its disjuncts is, and since in the previous two examples we know that one of the disjuncts is true, we also know that the whole disjunction is true. So let us use the letter X to stand for something quite silly, like the proposition "The moon is made of green cheese." I will use the letter "v" to stand for the logical relation "either...or", and so turning back to our sample deduction, we have:
2. P
3. Not-P
1. (P & Not-P)Proposition (4) is warranted by the logical rule of addition. It says "Either P or X", and we know that the disjunction itself is true because we know that P is true. It doesn't matter whether X is true or not. But here is where things get very interesting.
2. P
3. Not-P
4. (P v X)
Suppose I say to you, "Today is either Monday or Tuesday, but it's not Tuesday." Surely you will agree that it follows immediately from this that "Today is Monday." That is, if what I said is really true, if it really is either Monday or Tuesday but in reality it really is not Tuesday, then it must be true that today is Monday. Now consider our sample argument. It asserts "Either P or X" in (4), and proposition (3) says "Not-P". So we may make the following valid deduction:
1. (P & Not-P)If you have been following carefully you will note that we have just proven that the moon is made of green cheese, and we did it with a valid deduction. What permitted this ridiculous inference? It was the presence, in the first premise, of a contradiction. Because the letter X here can stand for literally anything we like, we have just seen that any argument that contains contradictory premises can be used to prove literally anything, even utter nonsense.
2. P
3. Not-P
4. (P v X)
5. X
Now think of the Church's teachings as being like premises in an argument. If any two teachings contradict each other, then we have a situation in which the Church is teaching (P & Not-P), hence, if we agree that the Church teaches this, then we can prove that the Church also teaches that the moon is made of green cheese, because this follows logically form what the Church explicitly does teach.
This kind of case only handles contradictions. What about cases where what the Church teaches is not a contradiction of any other teaching, but is rather a new teaching? Someone might assert that the Church is not teaching anything like (P & Not-p), but does teach (P & Q), where Q stands for some proposition that was never taught by the Church in the past. This is where the nature of the development of doctrine becomes very important, because now we must explore in what sense has Q never been taught? Clearly if Q is logically consistent with some proposition Not-P, then we have the logical equivalent of teaching a contradiction. If Q represents something that, let's say, nobody in the Church ever thought of before, then what is the harm in teaching it? Why can't we just say, "Well, now we've thought of it, and everybody has to believe it." There are two related problems here. The first is the question why didn't anybody ever think of it before. If there is no way to show its relation to earlier teachings then one must question whether it was ever intended to be taught by Our Lord, whom we regard as in himself the fullness of revelation. If, on the other hand, it can be shown to be related somehow to other, earlier teachings, teachings that do go back to Our Lord or his Apostles, then what is the nature of that relation? What I have been suggesting is that, however that new teaching, Q, is discovered, whether through induction, theological speculation, or just plain old brainstorming, it must be related to earlier teachings in such a way as to be proven to be such. The Church could, of course, just assert any old thing that she likes and demand assent, if her authority is literally unlimited. But my first assumption does not assert that the Church's authority to teach is literally unlimited, only that she has the authority to teach. Part of my suggestion in these posts is that her authority is limited by certain constraints, and I have been portraying those constraints as logical in character. I will argue, in further posts, that these logical constraints are limited to deductive relations.
In my next post, I will dip into Newman's Essay with these assumptions as my background conditions.
Die 25 decembris, octavo Kalendas ianuarii, luna 5.
Innumeris transactis saeculis a creatione mundi, quando in principio Deus creavit caelum et terram et hominem formavit ad imaginem suam; permultis etiam saeculis, ex quo post diluvium Altissimus in nubibus arcum posuerat, signum foederis et pacis; a migratione Abrahae, patris nostri in fide, de Ur Chaldaeorum saeculo vigesimo primo; ab egressu populi Israel de Aegypto, Moyse duce, saeculo decimo tertio; ab unctione David in regem, anno circiter millesimo; hebdomada sexagesima quinta, iuxta Danielis prophetiam; Olympiade centesima nonagesima quarta; ab Urbe condita anno septingentesimo quinquagesimo secundo; anno imperii Caesaris Octaviani Augusti quadragesimo secundo; toto Orbe in pace composito, Iesus Christus, aeternus Deus aeternique Patris Filius, mundum volens adventu suo piissimo consecrare, de Spiritu Sancto conceptus, novemque post conceptionem decursis mensibus, in Bethlehem Iudae nascitur ex Maria Virgine factus homo: Nativitas Domini nostri Iesu Christi secundum carnem.
Friday, December 22, 2006
Take Back What is Ours
There is a movement afoot to get Holy Wisdom returned to the Christians (see the website here). It's tilting at windmills, but it's a great idea, and one cannot help but hope and pray for it, even while knowing that the Turks will never let it happen.
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