Tag Archives: The Last Superstition

Philosophy

Introduction to Classical Christian Metaphysics – Part 2

4 Comments

Post Author: Bill Pratt

In part 1 we introduced the metaphysical principles of act and potency. In part 2 we introduce the metaphysical principles of form and matter.

Ordinary objects of our experience are composed of two metaphysical principles – form and matter.  Edward Feser explains these principles, again using a rubber ball:

The rubber ball of our example is composed of a certain kind of matter (namely rubber) and a certain kind of form (namely the form of a red, round, bouncy object). The matter by itself isn’t the ball, for the rubber could take on the form of a doorstop, an eraser, or any number of other things. The form by itself isn’t the ball either, for you can’t bounce redness, roundness, or even bounciness down the hallway, these being mere abstractions. It is only the form and matter together that constitute the ball.

The form thus determines what a thing is.  In this sense, the form of an object is sometimes called its essence or nature.  Feser explains that matter

will always have some substantial form or other, and thus count as a substance of some kind or other; . . . The notion of prime matter is just the notion of something in pure potentiality with respect to having any kind of form, and thus with respect to being any kind of thing at all. . . . [W]hat is purely potential has no actuality at all, and thus does not exist at all.

It should be noted that the Aristotelian-Thomistic notion of “form” is not the same as Plato’s notion.  Plato held that forms only exist in a realm wholly apart from the material world.  For Aquinas, the forms are instantiated in individual substances which exist in the world.  Apart from substances, forms are abstractions, but they are nonetheless real things, not mere human inventions.

Feser comments, “When we grasp [forms such as] ‘humanity,’ ‘triangularity,’ and the like, what we grasp are not mere inventions of the human mind, but are grounded in the natures of real human beings, triangles, or what have you.”

In part 3 we will look at the famous four causes.

Philosophy

Introduction to Classical Christian Metaphysics – Part 1

10 Comments

Post Author: Bill Pratt

Most Christians don’t care anything about metaphysics, and truth be told, don’t even know what it is. I hope to entice you, the reader, with a reason to learn about it. One very important reason for learning Christian metaphysics is because any Christian ethical system must be grounded in metaphysics.

You can’t generate a robust ethics without a robust metaphysics lying underneath. Philosopher David Oderberg explains that it is “impossible to know how the world ought to go, more specifically how one ought to act (or what makes a state of affairs or action good, or worthwhile, praiseworthy, etc.) without prior knowledge of how the world is.”

A realist moral theory (one that claims that there are real, objective moral values) must define/identify the source of moral values before it can get off the ground.  Metaphysics is the discipline that does the work of identifying the source of moral values, because metaphysics is the study of being, of existence.  If moral values really exist, then metaphysics must identify them.

Obviously there are other reasons for learning Christian metaphysics, but I will approach this introduction with the goal of providing a foundation to Christian ethics. What follows is largely taken from three books which I cannot recommend enough for anyone who wants to understand these issues. They are The Last Superstition and Aquinas: A Beginner’s Guide, both by Edward Feser, and An Elementary Christian Metaphysics by Joseph Owens.

Let’s begin with the metaphysical principles of act and potency. In order to explain the way change of any kind is possible, Aristotle introduced the metaphysical principles of act and potency.  Edward Feser illustrates:

Take any object of our experience: a red rubber ball, for example. Among its features are the ways it actually is: solid, round, red, and bouncy. These are different aspects of its ‘being.’ There are also the ways it is not; for example, it is not a dog, or a car, or a computer. The ball’s ‘dogginess’ and so on, since they don’t exist, are different kinds of ‘non-being.’ But in addition to these features, we can distinguish the various ways the ball potentially is: blue (if you paint it), soft and gooey (if you melt it), and so forth.

Thus the red rubber ball is in act by way of actually being solid, red, round, and bouncy.  It actually is those things.  The ball is in potency by way of potentially being blue, soft, and gooey.  It could potentially become those things.  Change occurs when a potency is brought into act, or when a potentiality for being is made actual.  There is a potential for blueness in the ball, but this potential will not become actual unless an external influence acts upon the ball.  Thus the classical Aristotelian principle emerges: whatever is changed is changed by another.

All finite beings are composites of actuality and potentiality.  However, Edward Feser notes that “while actuality and potentiality are fully intelligible only in relation to each other, there is an asymmetry between them, with actuality having metaphysical priority,” for potentiality cannot exist without actuality.  “It is incoherent to speak of something both existing and being purely potential, with no actuality whatsoever.” However, it is perfectly coherent for pure actuality to exist without any potentiality.

In part 2 we will look at the metaphysical principles of form and matter. Remember that we are building a metaphysical base for Christian ethics, but you won’t be able to see how all of these metaphysical principles work together until we get to the end, so stick with me!

Atheism, Top Ten Posts of 2012

Why Don’t Atheists Want There to Be a God? #4 Post of 2012

62 Comments

Post Author: Bill Pratt

A common theme we have revisited on this blog is that the decision to believe in God or not believe in God is more than an intellectual exercise – there are always psychological and emotional factors at play as well.  This is contrary to the received wisdom of many atheists who argue that belief in God is about wish fulfillment and emotional neediness, and that atheism is arrived at primarily through rational analysis.  I have challenged this received wisdom many times on the blog, but sometimes it is helpful to review.

When thinking about this issue, it is especially enlightening to find well-known atheists in moments of candor explaining why they do not believe in God.  One such atheist is the eminent philosopher Thomas Nagel.  Edward Feser, in his book The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism, reports Nagel’s comments on the atheist “fear of religion.”  Nagel writes:

I speak from experience, being strongly subject to this fear myself: I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers.  It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God and, naturally, hope that I’m right in my belief.  It’s that I hope there is no God!  I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that.  My guess is that this cosmic authority problem is not a rare condition and that it is responsible for much of the scientism and reductionism in our time.  One of the tendencies it supports is the ludicrous overuse of evolutionary biology to explain everything about human life, including everything about the human mind.

My frequent interactions with atheists over the last 9 years has also drawn me to the conclusion that more often than not, the cosmic authority problem, as Nagel puts it, is at the root of many atheist complaints about God.  Feser picks up this point after quoting Nagel:

It is true that a fear of death, a craving for cosmic justice, and a desire to see our lives as meaningful can lead us to want to believe that we have immortal souls specially created by a God who will reward or punish us for our deeds in this life.  But it is no less true that a desire to be free of traditional moral standards, and a fear of certain (real or imagined) political and social consequences of the truth of religious belief, can also lead us to want to believe that we are just clever animals with no purpose to our lives other than the purposes we choose to give them, and that there is no cosmic judge who will punish us for disobeying an objective moral law.

Feser concludes his thoughts:

Atheism, like religion, can often rest more on a will to believe than on dispassionate rational arguments.  Indeed, as the philosopher C.F.J. Martin has pointed out, the element of divine punishment – traditionally understood in the monotheistic religions as a sentence of eternal damnation in Hell – shows that atheism is hardly less plausibly motivated by wishful thinking than theism is.  For while it is hard to understand why someone would want to believe that he is in danger of everlasting hellfire, it is not at all hard to see why one would desperately want not to believe this.

Existence of God, General Apologetics, Philosophy, Religion, Resurrection

What Are the Roles of Faith and Reason in Christianity? Part 2

18 Comments

Post Author: Bill Pratt

In part 1 of this series Philosopher Edward Feser demonstrated that reason, not faith, brings us all the way to the conclusion that Jesus is divine.  Once we arrive here, where do we go?

Feser explains:

Suppose you know through purely rational arguments that there is a God, that He raised Jesus Christ from the dead, and therefore that Christ really is divine, as He claimed to be, so that anything He taught must be true; in other words, suppose that the general strategy just sketched can be successfully fleshed out.

What would follow?  Faith, or belief, enters and takes center stage.

Then it follows that if you are rational you will believe anything Christ taught; indeed, if you are rational you will believe it even if it is something that you could not possibly have come to know in any other way, and even if it is something highly counterintuitive and difficult to understand.  For reason will have told you that Christ is infallible, and therefore cannot be wrong in anything He teaches.  In short, reason tells you to have faith in what Christ teaches, because He is divine.

We have faith in Christ and what He teaches because of who He is.  Because He proved himself to be divine by resurrecting from the dead, we believe Him.  That is faith.

Does every Christian follow the process that Feser describes, reasoning through philosophy and historical evidence to the conclusion that Jesus is divine?  Obviously not.  Most Christians believe because they have received it on authority from someone else who does understand the arguments.

There may even be more than one link in the chain to get back to someone who understands the arguments, but this hardly matters.  What matters is that there are theologians and philosophers and other scholars who do understand the arguments, so even the person who does not understand the reasons for his faith still indirectly bases his faith on those reasons.

This is no different than anything else we come to believe in life.  For the vast majority of things we each believe we have received on authority from someone else.  Feser gives a parallel in science.  “The man in the street who believes that E=mc^2 probably couldn’t give you an interesting defense of his belief if his life depended on it.  He believes it because his high school physics teacher told him about it.”

Continuing alone these lines Feser further argues:

Most people who believe that E=mc^2, and who believe almost any other widely known and generally accepted scientific proposition, do so on the basis of faith in exactly the sense in question here.  They believe it, in other words, on the authority of those from whom they learned it.  Everyone acknowledges that this is perfectly legitimate; indeed, there is no way we could know much of interest at all if we weren’t able to appeal to various authorities.

So these are the roles of reason and faith in Christianity, a far cry from the story that atheists tell.  Some of you may be complaining at this point that you know Christians who disavow this approach, who truly do have blind faith, who say that reason has no place in their belief system.  Feser’s final words on this topic are a propos:

I do not doubt that there are and have been Christians and people of other religions whose theory and/or practice does not fit this understanding.  But I do not speak for them, and neither did Aquinas and the other great thinkers of the Western religious tradition.  And if the ‘New Atheists’ are serious about making a rational case for atheism, then, as I have said, they should be taking on the best representatives of the opposing point of view – not blabbering on for hundreds of pages about the dangers of ‘faith’ as an irrational will to believe something in the face of all evidence, when this is an attitude that the mainstream Christian theological tradition has itself always condemned.

Existence of God, General Apologetics, Philosophy, Resurrection

What Are the Roles of Faith and Reason in Christianity? Part 1

30 Comments

Post Author: Bill Pratt

A typical accusation of atheists toward Christians is that we only believe what we believe because of blind faith.  In other words, we have no rational reasons for believing in God or believing that Jesus died for our sins.  The person who believes in fairies or unicorns is no different than the Christian belief in God.

Richard Dawkins makes this point dozens of times in his book The God Delusion.  Here is one example: “Christianity . . . teaches children that unquestioned faith is a virtue. You don’t have to make the case for what you believe.”  And elsewhere: “Faith is an evil precisely because it requires no justification and brooks no argument.”

Is this a fair characterization of Christianity?  Is it totally based upon blind faith with no justification whatsoever?  As we’ve mentioned about Dawkins before, he avoids, at all costs, actually engaging with the best of Christian thought.  So, what has been the Christian answer to the question of faith vs. reason?

For this answer, we turn again to Philosopher Edward Feser.  In his book The Last Superstition he takes on this atheist misconception.  Feser describes what the traditional Christian account of the roles of faith and reason are.

First, we start with reason.  According to Feser, “Pure reason can reveal to us that there is a God, [and] that we have immortal souls.”  By using philosophical arguments, we can conclude these two things.

However, Christians claim to know much more than just that God exists and humans have immortal souls.  They claim to have actually received revelation from God.  Does faith come into the account now, after we have established by reason that God exists and humans have immortal souls?  No.  “For the claim that a divine revelation has occurred is something for which the monotheistic religions typically claim there is evidence, and that evidence takes the form of a miracle, a suspension of the natural order that cannot be explained in any other way than divine intervention in the normal course of events.”

By reason alone, we know that if God exists, then miracles can occur, because of God’s very nature (creator and sustainer of laws governing nature).  The God that we have arrived at by reason is a God who can suspend the laws of nature.  To what miracle do Christians point?  The resurrection of Jesus.  Feser reminds us, “If the story of Jesus’s resurrection is true, then you must become a Christian; if it is false, then Christianity itself is false, and should be rejected.”

Is this where faith comes in?  No.  Feser explains that “the mainstream Christian tradition has also always claimed that the resurrection of Jesus Christ is a historical event the reality of which can be established through rational argument.”  So, the historical evidence of the resurrection of Jesus builds upon the philosophical argumentation that God exists and that humans have immortal souls.  The philosophy comes first, and the historical evidence second.  Please note that so far, we have only discussed reason, and faith has not yet entered the picture.

If the historical evidence for the resurrection is overwhelming, then there are “rational grounds for believing that what Christ taught was true, in which case the key doctrines of Christianity are rationally justified.”

Feser takes us back through the argument again, and it is worth reviewing:

The overall chain of argument, then, goes something like this: Pure reason proves through philosophical arguments that there is a God and that we have immortal souls.  This by itself entails that a miracle like a resurrection from the dead is possible.  Now the historical evidence that Jesus Christ was in fact resurrected from the dead is overwhelming when interpreted in light of that background knowledge.  Hence pure reason also shows that Jesus really was raised from the dead.  But Jesus claimed to be divine, and claimed that the authority of His teachings would be confirmed by His being resurrected.  So the fact that He was resurrected provides divine authentication of His claims.  Hence reason shows that He really was divine. . . .  At every step, evidence and rational argumentation – not ‘blind faith’ or a ‘will to believe’ – are taken to justify our acceptance of certain teachings.

In part 2 of this series, we will move to the role of faith.

Philosophy, Science and God

Why Is Scientism Self-Refuting?

132 Comments

Post Author: Bill Pratt

More times than I can count we have skeptics comment on the blog who insist that science is the only means of attaining knowledge.  If you don’t believe me, just read the comments underneath last week’s blog posts.  I have covered this topic numerous times, but it seems to surface over and over again, which tells me that we are touching upon a fundamental disagreement between two worldviews.  In other words, this is a pivotal issue for everyone to understand.

So, I call back to the stand again Professor Edward Feser and his book, The Last Superstition.  When confronted with the assertion that only scientific reasoning gives knowledge (justified true belief), how shall we respond?

There are two problems with this view (which is known as “scientism” or “positivism”).  First, if they want to take this position, they will need to defend it and not simply assert it; otherwise they’ll be begging the question against their opponents and indulging in just the sort of dogmatism they claim to oppose. 

Feser makes an important point here.  It is not enough to merely say, as skeptics sometimes do, that scientific reasoning is the only way to know things, and then just leave it at that.  This viewpoint may be fashionable among atheists and skeptics, but among the rest of the populace, it just doesn’t fly.  The vast majority of thinkers from pre-Socratic Greece to today reject the assertion that scientific reasoning is the only way to know anything.  Given that fact, we expect an argument to be made.

Second, the moment they attempt to defend it, they will have effectively refuted it, for scientism or positivism is itself a metaphysical position that could only be justified by using metaphysical arguments. 

How so?  Why can’t science argue for science without employing metaphysical arguments?

Of  its very nature, scientific investigation takes for granted such assumptions as that: there is a physical world existing independently of our minds; this world is characterized by various objective patterns and regularities; our senses are at least partially reliable sources of information about this world; there are objective laws of logic and mathematics that apply to the objective world outside our minds; our cognitive powers – of concept-formation, reasoning from premises to a conclusion, and so forth – afford us a grasp of these laws and can reliably take us from evidence derived from the senses to conclusions about the physical world; the language we use can adequately express truths about these laws and about the external world; and so on and so on.

Notice that none of these are claims of science, are they?  As Feser explains, “Every one of these claims embodies a metaphysical assumption, and science, since its very method presupposes them, could not possibly defend them without arguing in a circle.  Their defense is instead a task for metaphysics, and for philosophy more generally; and scientism is shown thereby to be incoherent.”

Feser ends this section with a brilliant quote of philosopher E. A. Burtt:

Even the attempt to escape metaphysics is no sooner put in the form of a proposition than it is seen to involve highly significant metaphysical postulates.  For this reason there is an exceedingly subtle and insidious danger in positivism.  If you cannot avoid metaphysics, what kind of metaphysics are you likely to cherish when you sturdily suppose yourself to be free from the abomination?  Of course it goes without saying that in this case your metaphysics will be held uncritically because it is unconscious; moreover, it will be passed on to others far more readily than your other notions inasmuch as it will be propagated by insinuation rather than by direct argument. . . . Now the history of mind reveals pretty clearly that the thinker who decries metaphysics . . . if he be a man engaged in any important inquiry, he must have a method, and he will be under a strong and constant temptation to make a metaphysics out of his method, that is, to suppose the universe ultimately of such a sort that his method must be appropriate and successful. . . . But inasmuch as the positivist mind has failed to school itself in careful metaphysical thinking, its ventures as such points will be apt to appear pitiful, inadequate, or even fantastic.

Philosophy, Science and God

Is There a War Between Religion and Science?

37 Comments

Post Author: Bill Pratt

This canard has been repeated so often that it is now part of 21st century folklore.  Contrary to this popular myth, philosopher Edward Feser, in his book  The Last Superstition, correctly points out that the “so-called ‘war between science and religion’ is really a war between two rival philosophical worldviews, and not at bottom a scientific or theological dispute at all” (emphasis in original).

On one side is the worldview derived from the “classical philosophical vision of Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas.”  The other side, that of materialistic secularism, derives its premises from the likes of Hobbes, Hume, Descartes, Locke, and Kant.

Feser presents candid comments from several modern scientists and philosophers who admit as much.

The physicist Paul Davies tells us that “science takes as its starting point the assumption that life wasn’t made by a god or a supernatural being.”  Feser further quotes Davies as saying that partially out of fear of  “open[ing] the door to religious fundamentalists . . . many investigators feel uneasy about stating in public that the origin of life is a mystery, even though behind closed doors they freely admit that they are baffled.”

Feser continues by quoting prominent contemporary philosophers.

Tyler Burge opines that “materialism is not established, or even clearly supported, by science” and that its hold over his peers is analogous to that of a “political or religious ideology”; John Searle tells us that “materialism is the religion of our time,” that “like more traditional religions, it is accepted without question and . . . provides the framework within which other questions can be posed, addressed, and answered,” and that “materialists are convinced, with a quasi-religious faith, that their view must be right”; and William Lycan admits, in what he himself calls “an uncharacteristic exercise in intellectual honesty,” that the arguments for materialism are no better than the arguments against it, that his “own faith in materialism is based on science-worship,” and that “we also always hold our opponents to higher standards of argumentation than we obey ourselves.”

One of the most famous admissions from a scientist about the war of worldviews comes from the materialist biologist Richard Lewontin.  Writing in a book review, Lewontin admits:

Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.

All of this points to the need for the public conversation to include philosophy and worldviews.  The secularist who claims that science, in and of itself, disproves God has merely smuggled in atheism from the start.  Science, in and of itself, does not disprove God.  Only when it is built on a foundation of materialism can it do that kind of work.

Philosophy, Theology

Who Is God? Part 2

31 Comments

Post Author: Bill Pratt

In part 1 of this post, we looked at Edward Feser’s first 2 gradations of conceptions of God.  In this second part, we will finish looking at the last three gradations and than talk about why this is important.

Grade 3: God is not an object or substance alongside other objects or substances in the world; rather, He is pure being or existence itself, utterly distinct from the world of time, space, and things, underlying and maintaining them in being at every moment, and apart from whose ongoing conserving action they would be instantly annihilated.  The world is not an independent object in the sense of something that might carry on if God were to “go away”; it is more like the music produced by a musician, which exists only when he plays and vanishes the moment he stops.

None of the concepts we apply to things in the world, including to ourselves, apply to God in anything but an analogous sense.  Hence, for example, we may say that God is “personal” insofar as He  is not less than a person, the way an animal is less than a person.  But God is not literally “a person” in the sense of being one individual thing among others who reasons, chooses, has moral obligations, etc.  Such concepts make no sense when literally applied to God.

According to Feser, “Grade 3 is the conception of classical philosophical theology: of Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas, and other such thinkers.”  Grade 3 captures Aquinas’s doctrine of analogous language to describe God.  “God is not personal, or good, or powerful, or intelligent in the same sense in which a human being is, but He can nevertheless correctly be described in these terms if they are understood analogously.”

Grade 4: God as understood by someone who has had a mystical experience of the sort Aquinas had.

Here, Feser is referring to an experience that Aquinas reported late in life where he experienced God in a deeply profound way that made him feel like all his previous conceptions of God were totally inadequate.

Grade 5: God as [those in heaven] know him now, i.e., as known in the beatific vision attained by the blessed after death.

Feser adds that grades 4 and 5 are only attainable if “granted supernaturally by God,” while grade 3 is “about the best we can do with unaided reason.”

So where does this leave us?  I think I want to address two audiences.  First, since Grade 3 is the highest Christian conception of God without being granted a supernatural vision from God, it follows that Grade 3 is the conception that skeptics should address when they are challenging the attributes of the Christian God.  A skeptic who is constantly challenging grade 1 or grade 2 is not dealing with the best of Christian philosophy and theology; he is ducking the fight to score easy points.

Second, since Grade 3 is the highest Christian conception of God without being granted a supernatural vision from God, it follows that Grade 3 is the conception that every Christian adult should attempt to understand.  Merely stopping at grade 1 or grade 2 is an intellectual cop-out.  Grade 3 stretches human reason about as far as it can go and so it represents the apex of Christian theology.  That’s where all Christians should want to be, at the apex.

Philosophy, Theology

Who Is God? Part 1

3 Comments

Post Author: Bill Pratt

Is God a bearded old man living in the sky somewhere or is he completely unknowable?  Both of these conceptions of God are held by various religious believers.  When presenting a Christian conception of God on this blog, we have striven to follow the traditional, mainstream views of the church as elucidated by Augustine, Aquinas, Anselm, and similar thinkers.  If I were a skeptic of Christianity and wanted to critique the Christian conception of God, this is the conception I would address.

Edward Feser, in his book The Last Superstition, laments that very often skeptics do not even attempt to engage the traditional conception of God, but a much simpler conception.  To help readers understand his point, he offers five gradations of conceptions of God, from simple to more complete.

Grade 1: God is literally an old man with a white beard, a kind if stern wizard-like being with very human thoughts and motivations who lives in a place called Heaven, which is like the places we know except for being very far away and impossible to get to except through magical means.

Feser notes that Grade 1 “represents a child’s conception of God, and perhaps that of some uneducated adults.”  This does not mean that Grade 1 is totally without merit.  “Some individuals, and certainly young children, find it difficult to understand God in anything but grade 1 terms, and such imagery can be more or less useful in giving them at least a rudimentary idea of Him.”

Grade 2: God doesn’t really have a bodily form, and his thoughts and motivations are in many respects very different from ours.  He is an immaterial object or substance which has existed forever, and (perhaps) pervades all space.  Still, he is, somehow, a person like we are, only vastly more intelligent, powerful, and virtuous, and in particular without our physical and moral limitations.  He made the world the way a carpenter builds a house, as an independent object that would carry on even if he were to “go away” from it, but he nevertheless may decide to intervene in its operations from time to time.

Feser explains that “Grade 2 represents the conception of some educated religious believers, of popular apologetics, and of arguments like Paley’s ‘Design argument.'”  Grade 2 is better than Grade 1 because it eliminates the “limitations inherent in physical imagery, which cannot apply to God.”

There are are three more grades to go and we will cover them in part 2 of the post.