Descartes and God

Speaking of Descartes’ philosophy of God, his contemporary Blaise Pascal said, “I cannot forgive Descartes; in all his philosophy, Descartes did his best to dispense with God. But Descartes could not avoid prodding God to set the world in motion with a snap of his lordly fingers; after that, he had no more use for God.” It has seemed to me, and also to many of his critics, that despite his avowed Roman Catholic faith Descartes’ conception of God fell more into the deist camp than the orthodox Roman Catholic one. Descartes used God to guarantee trust in our senses and the “formal reality” of the world outside our own minds, but this seems to be all God does. At the very least, Descartes’ God is a sort of generic monotheistic deity, holding all of the basic godly properties but without the added weight of the Incarnation or activity in history, much less any opinions on sin or redemption. But, it can be argued, such doctrines were not relevant to the task at hand in the Meditations, and the Catholic Church could take it from there.

The (first) Cartesian argument for God’s existence can be summed up quite simply but understood only in the context of the larger work. As Descartes writes in the third meditation, on page 101, “By the word ‘God’ I mean an infinite substance, eternal, immutable, independent, omniscient, omnipotent, and that by I myself and all other existent things, if it is true that there are other existent things, have been created and produced. But these attributes are such—they are so great and so eminent—that the more attentively I consider them, the less I can persuade myself that I could have derived them from my own nature. And consequently we must necessarily conclude from all that I have previously said that God exists.” Descartes here explicitly gives us his definition of the God he is working with: infinite, immutable, eternal, independent, omniscient, omnipotent, and the creator of everything. Notably, Descartes does not include goodness in this list. The concept of perfection, says Descartes, does not admit of deception, because all deception is a sort of lessening. We may assume that Descartes therefore subsumes goodness under the banner of perfection, something which, while not listed in the description in Meditation III, is essential to the proof in Meditation V.

Descartes’ first and most substantial proof is a form of the classic ontological argument. It rests mainly on the assumption that the magnitude of reality of the effect cannot exceed the magnitude of reality of the cause. Thus, if we have the clear and distinct idea, or effect, of an infinite being with so many “great” and “eminent” properties that we do not possess, then the cause must be at least equal to the magnitude of reality of that effect, which seems to be infinite. The idea of a thing having more or less reality than another thing is somewhat alien to readers today, but basically signifies how perfect or independent a thing is.For example, if my copy of the Meditiations were burned in a fire, the other students’ copies would survive. The copies are independent of one another. However, if my copy of the Meditations were to burn, the whiteness of the cover would not survive, because the whiteness is dependent on the substance. The “accident” of whiteness is thus less perfect than the “substance” of the book. We can say, therefore, that because the whiteness of the book has less of an independent existence than the substance of the book, it is less real.

But more than a strange conception of a thing having more reality than another thing, there underlies Descartes’ argument the assertion that the concept of the infinite predates our concept of the finite. Without this assertion, we could simply say that God is an amalgamation of other concepts, like a unicorn or Gary Busey. As Descartes writes on page 101,

And I must not imagine that I do not conceive infinity as a real idea, but only through the negation of what is finite in the manner that I comprehend rest and darkness as the negation of movement and light. On the contrary, I see manifestly that there is more reality in infinite substance than in finite substance, and my notion of the infinite is somehow prior to that of the finite, that is, the notion of God is prior to that of myself. For how would it be possible for me to know that I doubt and that I desire—that is, that I lack something and am not all perfect—if I did not have in myself any idea of a being more perfect than my own, by comparison with which I might recognize the defects of my own nature?

So we see here a two-part argument for the positive conception of the infinite: infinite substances are more real than finite substances; and the fact that there seems to exist some sort of standard by which to measure imperfection. Descartes does not attempt to prove either of these claims. But he achieves, through the argument resting on these two assertions, a basis for believing in a cause of his ideas, namely, God. Added to this, by way of the natural light, is the fact that God is not a deceiver, and Descartes has a mechanism for reasonably believing the content of his sense perception.

The statement that God is not a deceiver is somewhat akin to the statement that God is good, but it is not equivalent. God could very well not be a deceiver and still be totally unconcerned with human life. So Descartes has yet to remove himself from the generic monotheistic conception of God, and remains at this point a deist. At the end of the third meditation he allows himself a moment to reflect on the magnificence of the God he has just proved, the possessor of so many great properties and attributes. This God is, if one may say, a god of milk and water. Descartes is very careful to keep a broad enough conception of God that he does not offend the reigning Roman Catholic Church, but keeps God at enough of a distance to allow free and autonomous reign to the rationalism and humanism that prevailed in the intellectual circles of the time.

But what about the second proof? Descartes uses the concept of clear and distinct ideas to once again demonstrate God’s existence. He writes on page 120,

It is certain that I find in my mind the idea of God, of a supremely perfect Being, no less than that of any shape or number whatsoever; and I recognize that an actual and eternal existence belongs to his nature no less clearly and distinctly than I recognize that all I can demonstrate about some figure or number actually belongs to the nature of that figure or number. Thus, even if everything that I concluded in the preceding Meditations were by chance not true, the existence of God should pass in my mind as at least as certain as I have hitherto considered all the truths of mathematics. . .

In this argument Descartes adds to his conception of God that God is a necessary being, or that God’s existence is a necessary part of God’s essence. This echoes very closely Saint Anselm’s response to Gaunilo’s objections to his ontological argument. So Descartes now has a sort of shortcut to trust in sensory perception, by reasoning that a clear and distinct idea of God has a property of necessary existence, and that a God containing all perfection would not be a deceiver, and thus one can trust the senses.

Throughout all this, Descartes never makes any statements about God being personal or interacting in any historical or direct way with the world or with human beings. While it could be concluded that such concerns are not relevant to the task of the Meditations, the conception of God as it stands in the Meditations is too close to a deist one to be ignored. Descartes does not say that God does not intervene in nature, perhaps fearing reproof from the Church, but it is not a stretch to assume that this is what he believes.

Bibliography

http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/phl302/philosophers/descartes-god.html

Kant and Barth on God: Knowing and Needing

Kant’s Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics sets up two important ideas which form the basis for his philosophy of God and God’s relationship to human beings. The first is that humans naturally seek to surpass the bounds of their reason and unite all of their knowledge into a cohesive whole. This leads to conceptions beyond the pale of knowability as Kant defines it, and results in conceptions of freedom, the immortality of the soul, and the existence of God. Humans desire God’s existence, Kant says, and it is natural for us to reason towards God. The second idea is that God is essentially unknowable. Kant speaks of knowledge of a supreme being as a “dialectical illusion” (Kant 102). We require God as a way to unify our experience, but can never actually know whether God exists or not. While Kant views the idea of God (as well as acting as if God existed) to be practically necessary, the vast gulf between the noumenal and the phenomenal ensures that knowledge of God according to reason will never be attainable. Karl Barth, one of the most important and influential theologians of the Twentieth Century, can perhaps be placed in dialogue with Kant on this point. After an overview of Kant’s arguments for the two ideas mentioned above, we will examine a striking similarity, as well as a possible avenue of critique of Kant’s position, in Barth’s conception of revelation.

Kant distinguishes between the phenomenal world, consisting of the way in which things appear to us as objects of experience, and the noumenal world, consisting of the way things are in themselves, independent of our experience. Kant claims that outside of the phenomenal world and the objects of our experience, we cannot have determinate knowledge. “It is true,” he says, “we cannot provide, beyond all possible experience, any determinate concept of what things in themselves might be” (Kant 105). This holds true even for those ideas which we have always deemed most important and essential to human existence and thought: ideas of God, the immortal soul, and freedom. This is what Kant means by “idea” in his technical sense: necessary concepts whose objects are by definition outside all possible experience and thus beyond the limits of our reason to discover. But they are not therefore unnatural or wrong, Kant says. “[The ideas] are just as intrinsic to the nature of reason as are [the categories of the understanding] to the nature of the understanding; and if the ideas carry with them an illusion that can easily mislead, this illusion is unavoidable, although it can very well be prevented ‘from leading us astray’” (Kant 82).

Our minds are naturally led to posit the idea of God. Despite the fact that knowledge of God in Godself is impossible,

who does not feel compelled, regardless of all prohibitions against losing oneself in transcendent ideas, nevertheless to look for peace and satisfaction beyond all concepts that one can justify through experience, in the concept of a being the idea of which indeed cannot in itself be understood as regards possibility—though it cannot be refused either, because it pertains to a mere being of the understanding—an idea without which, however, reason would always have to remain unsatisfied? (Kant 106)

Kant also notes that the transcendental ideas serve to show us the boundaries of the pure use of reason, as well as how to determine those boundaries (Kant 107). Metaphysics, says Kant, is placed in us by nature itself (Kant 107); so in a real sense, we have an inborn desire for God and God’s rulership over the universe. God is one of the three things which satisfy and complete reason, along with the soul and an intelligible world (Kant 108).

The problem, of course, is that we can never know God as God may be in Godself. But though we cannot know, we must still assume God exists in order to unify our reason and satisfy our innate desires for answers to questions which transgress the boundaries of pure reason. Kant’s solution is, rather than attempting to know God in Godself, we should see what we can learn about God in relation to the world as it appears to us. Only when God inhabits the boundaries of our reason can we discern things about God. We can speak of God only in analogical or symbolic language, avoiding Hume’s criticism of anthropomorphism.

God’s nature can therefore be constructed in the way of an analogy like the one Kant uses at the end of section fifty-seven. As the artisan is to the watch, the commander is to the regiment, or the captain is to the ship, so is the unknown to the world. In other words,

watch : artisan :: world : ?? (God)

So Kant writes that while we are “compelled to look upon the world as if it were the concept of a supreme understanding and will” (Kant 111), we avoid the problem of thinking about God in the noumenal by not cognizing according to what things are in themselves, but “only according to what it is for me, that is, with respect to the world of which I am a part” (Kant 111).

Kant summarizes this strange tension in the following paragraph, noting that this solution bypasses Hume’s argument against theism.

We thereby admit that the supreme being, as to what it may be in itself, is for us wholly inscrutable and that it cannot at all be thought by us in a determinate manner; and we are thereby prevented from making any transcendent use of the concepts that we have of reason as an efficient cause (by means of willing) in order to determine the divine nature through properties that are in any case always borrowed only from human nature, and so from losing ourselves in crude or fanatical concepts, and, on the other hand, we are prevented from swamping the contemplation of the world with hyperphysical modes of explanation according to concepts of human reason that we have transposed onto God, and so from diverting this contemplation from its true vocation, according to which it is supposed to be a study of mere nature through reason, and not an audacious derivation of the appearances of nature from a supreme reason. The expression suitable to our weak concepts will be: that we think the world as if it derives, as regards its existence and inner determination, from a supreme reason; whereby we in part cognize the constitution belonging to it (the world) itself, without presuming to want to determine in itself the constitution of the cause of the world, and, on the other hand, we in part posit the basis of this constitution (the rational form of the world) in the relation of the highest cause to the world, not finding the world by itself sufficient thereto (Kant 113, emphasis in original).

Karl Barth’s theology rests heavily on revelation. For Barth, God is “wholly other” and impossible to know by human beings—unless God reveals Himself to human beings Himself, which is what He does. As Kant holds that humans cannot reach upwards to God because of the phenomenal/noumenal distinction, Barth holds that humans cannot reach upwards to God because of His infinite nature. But Barth couples the impossibility of a human reaching-upward with the event encompassed by Jesus of God’s reaching-downward. In Kantian language, God comes into the phenomenal world to impart truths of Himself to us.

James Kincade, in his article in the Journal of Religion, describes the similarities between Kant and Barth. He notes that Barth himself takes on a kind of “Copernican revolution,” but instead of placing our minds at the center he places Christ there. The theology of the time had been attempting to make religion palatable to the human mind, as Schleiermacher and others had done. Barth, like Kant, turned the whole system upside down, demanding that the human mind make itself compatible with God’s revelation. This revelation, according to Barth, is independent of us (or our experience as such). “It is God’s search for man which is important—not man’s search for God,” writes Kincade (Kincade 167).

Like Kant, Barth wholeheartedly rejects natural theology (Fackre 5). It is impossible to reason from experience to God in Himself. Here Barth is still within the Kantian system. However, instead of closing the book on the matter, Barth instead explains that God has Himself decided to reveal knowledge of Himself as He is to humanity. “The act of self-disclosedness in Jesus Christ is an expression of the character of God as intrinsically self-disclosive. . . While there are reaches of mystery in the divine being, God does not tell us ‘one thing in history while being something else in eternity. His secondary [or phenomenal, in this case] objectivity is fully true, for it has its correspondence and basis in His primary [or noumenal] objectivity’” (Fackre, partially quoting Barth, 5).

Does this work? Can the noumenal disclose itself to the phenomenal, or does it forever remain outside of it? Kant, by his own admission, begins with a deistic conception of God and adds predicates to it. Kant writes, “For if one only grants us, at the beginning, the deistic concept of a first being as a necessary hypothesis . . . then nothing can keep us from predicating of this being a causality through reason with respect to the world, and thus from crossing over to theism” (Kant112). This conception, almost assuredly chosen in order to respond to Hume’s arguments against theism, cuts off God’s real activity within the bounds of the world of experience. God is forever outside and never within, only acting through the intermediary of reason. God-in-Godself is never present, and we only learn of God by analogy through reason.

In Barth’s view, however, the full revelation of God-in-Himself occurs in the incarnation of Jesus, who is God in the flesh. God here takes a full and active role in the world of experience. If we are justified in believing or knowing about other human beings in the phenomenal world, we are also justified in affirming God’s existence. While it does not solve the problem of knowing anything about God-in-Godself, since even other human interactions are “filtered” through the phenomenal, we do not transgress the bounds of reason by drawing conclusions about God or God’s nature. By having God exist for a time fully in the world of experience, Kant’s tension between the unknowability of God as pure reason and the practical desire for and necessity of God’s existence are solved. This is, in a way, Barth’s solution to this Kantian antinomy.

This approach may seem odd, and perhaps alien to what Kant’s concerns were, but if we examine the concepts in play we see that Barth’s idea of revelation can actually quite easily and naturally respond to Kant’s claims. Kant says that God-in-Godself is essentially unknowable. Though humans desire to posit God as a unificatory principle for their knowledge, experiential knowledge of a being which exists outside of the world of experience (i.e. as pure reason or soul) is impossible. Barth would respond by denying that God exclusively exists outside the world of experience. By coming into the world within a body, God gives the same justification for claims of His existence as claims of other people we encounter or read about. It is a short step from claiming the incarnation and trustworthiness of Jesus, who vouches for the rest of the written revelation of God, to build Christianity within the bounds of reason.

Works Cited

Fackre, Gabriel. "Revelation." Karl Barth and Evangelical Theology: Convergences and Divergences. Ed. Sung Wook Chung. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2006. Print.

Kant, Immanuel. Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Print.

Kincade, James. "Karl Barth and Philosophy." Journal of Relgion. 40.3 (1960): 161-169. Print.

The Death of God-Language?

The way I see it, there is a major problem with theology today, and it is this: it is not theology. As is obvious, theology means instruction about God. I think it would be reasonable to assume that if I picked up a book on theology, I would find lots of God-language and, at least in a Christian context, I wouldn’t have to look too hard to find reference to Jesus Christ. But it turns out I am insane. A wide swath of theology today has divorced itself from God and rattles down the road of history without Him, like a car without an engine. And just like an engineless car, this theology will only roll downhill. God is the focus and the drive of theological study. Without Him in the mix, we are simply talking. I cannot understand how theology can be theology when the word and the propositional content are separated. But perhaps I’m old-fashioned.

Let me tell you my context: I am a white, male, middle-class American college student. I grew up in a Southern Baptist Church but am now Reformed Baptist. Some of my assumptions and commitments are that the Bible is absolutely authoritative and that it is divinely inspired. As such, I cannot speak to or about the experiences of many, many Christians. But my context does not dictate silence. I too have a voice, and though people like me have been speaking for centuries, it does not mean that I cannot speak now, and it does not mean that they were wrong then. In this paper, I want to argue that theology is only itself when it speaks of its subject, that is, God. I want to argue that the Bible has Something to say, and that the Gospel has been discarded in favor of the doctrines of humans. This position is controversial because it is traditional. It is unorthodox precisely because it defends orthodoxy. This paper is the refuse of secularism, dropped into the bag of common sense and set aflame on the doorstep of modern man. This is, in the colloquial parlance, the ding-dong-ditch of the death of God.

We have to pause for a moment, lingering on the brink of this earth-shattering epistle. Isn’t one of the primary assertions of contemporary theology (as set out in the handouts on secularism, assertions of contemporary theology, and the rise of modernism) that a conception of Christianity limited to the authority of the Bible and founded in an orthodox conception of Jesus as the historical God-Man and Savior a result of the exclusion of other voices from the discussion? Should we not listen to other, and (reportedly) equally valid, interpretations of the central meaning of the Message? Yes and no. In my erudite opinion, anyone who proposes a view of Christianity which rejects the Bible as the standard of knowledge and God’s message to the world, as well as replacing the historical and actual death of Jesus with myth-language or some sort of “higher” interpretation of what seems to me to be a common-sense reading of the text as a historical account, must examine their motives. Are they truly trying to reveal to people what they think the true message of Christianity has been all along? Or are they hijacking traditional language to mask the replacement of orthodox systems with their own ideologies in order to make it easier for the Church to swallow? I think this is what Tillich does, and I think it is ultimately dishonest. When a normal (and by normal here I mean not an academic) person on the street talks about God, they are not talking about the impersonal ground of being. Let’s not turn theology into a country club and have high and educated discussions in our ivory towers full of code words and secret meanings that the rest of the populace is oblivious to. Many contemporary theologians argue this, but does their message reflect it? If what you mean by “God” or “Gospel” is not what your audience means, are you truly communicating?

The sort of linguistic camouflage that Tillich or Hick presents is ultimately the enslavement of the universal to the particular. Culture and prevailing human thought forms, the absolute rulers of our minds, have dictated that we must reject the supernatural in favor of scientism and place absolute truth (and its supporters) in the furnace; in that place there is wailing and gnashing of teeth. And so Christianity, which does not anymore realize that it is a Message from Above rather than a human construction, blindly follows the spirit of the age which is itself the age of blindness to truth, and both fall into the pit. This spirit says that there is no universal truth, no claim to knowledge which applies to all peoples in all situations. And it is right, if it limits itself to speaking of humanity. But humanity, that limited, ignorant, pain-filled mass, is exactly where the Gospel did not come from. The Gospel is the message to the world, not the message from it. God reached down from the heavens and men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit. And He spoke universally. It is ridiculous to say that the universal message of salvation and life does not apply to some situation. All you have succeeded in saying is that you don’t understand the concept “universal.” If the Bible is universal, it speaks to you. It applies to you. Take it and use it. Your context can dictate superadded meanings to the text, but do not mistake them for the primary ones.

What about liberation theologians like Gutierrez who claim that poor and oppressed people are not concerned with abstract metaphysical claims, but rather practical and particular changes to oppressive and evil worldly systems? Well, in a certain sense I understand that pure theology is perhaps not the most pressing need of the downcast. But in another sense the Gospel of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus is of utmost importance. Let’s assume that the orthodox Christian conception of the world is correct, and that after this life there are two eternal destinations contingent upon a person’s response to the work of Jesus, namely, heaven and hell. Now, if one assumes that an eternity of happiness and fulfillment are available upon acceptance of Jesus, then that eternal reward infinitely outweighs any improvement to the conditions of this life. Does this mean that Christians should ignore social reform? By no means! I like Gutierrez and I think he makes an important point, but I think he takes it too far. What I mean is that if we focus only on preaching a message of liberation from social or worldly oppression we are denying the oppressed a much greater good—liberation from sin and the wrath of God.

While most contemporary theologians argue that the legitimacy of established Christian doctrine is less than solid (in part) because entire swaths of people were left out of its formulation, I want to argue a more practical point. I want to assert that the ecumenism of orthodox Christian creeds and doctrines are at this point irrelevant on the ground level. Key terms and ideas have been established in lay consciousness for hundreds to thousands of years, and a radical reevaluation of these concepts and a reassignment of their referents seems to me to be simply impractical. Words like ‘God’ and ‘salvation,’ the role of Jesus in the doctrine of the Christian church, these things are already defined in the public lexicon, and use of the same words with totally new referents, many of which (such as Tillich’s or Robinson’s conception of God) stand in stark contrast or outright opposition to the traditional and pre-established concepts behind those words. This strikes me as somewhat disingenuous. It is as if theologians want to capture the allegiance of unwitting laypersons with comfortable language while at the same time undertaking a secret revolution and rejection of everything those laypersons hold ‘Christianity’ to be.

So what then are we to say to theologians like Kwok Pui-lan and other syncretistic or inclusivisic writers, or to “Christian” pluralists like John Hick, or to proponents of liberation theology like Gustavo Gutierrez? Is there no place for them in the discussion? Once again, yes and no. I suggest that this more modern or liberal approach to Christianity, characterized by the reassignment of traditional language, should be given its own vocabulary. New ideas should have new ways of speaking. Old and firmly established ideas should retain the old words. Christian theology should retain traditional God-language as being about the personal, transcendent, God of the Bible as interpreted for thousands of years. New conceptions of God should be easily identifiable and fall under their own umbrella. Those who attempt theology without God should no longer claim to be continuing the course of orthodox thought, but rather depart from it to make their own world with their own history. Let the people decide which they prefer, rather than attempting to sway them with the shell of familiarity masking an alien worldview. I am not here arguing with scholars like Susan Thistlethwaite who challenge the inclusivity or appropriateness of God-language in terms of gender, etc. I am arguing with people like Hick, who call themselves Christian and depart from virtually every standard of definition for what Christianity means.

Theology without God is impossible. We have fooled ourselves into accepting it only because God-language has fallen prey to a linguistic Invasion of the Body-Snatchers, or to some other equally appropriate pop culture reference. The point is, the only reason we think it even exists is because it looks the same on the outside. But it isn’t. This is something new; this is idolatry. We worship ourselves or we worship the universe or we worship life or love or being or any of a million other things, anything to avoid worshiping the God we once knew. We have said that the traditional idea of God is irrelevant to modern society… have we ever considered that the dictates of modern society are irrelevant to God?

The point is that the idea of a transcendent and active God is only irrelevant because we have abandoned it. In our rush to seek fulfillment in individualism and self-actualization, we have made man the measure of all things, and thrown out the Ruler. And then the theologians come and say that theology must speak to the culture, and so theology must discard God. But what if theologians concerned themselves, not with “limping after reality” but with proclaiming the Reality of God? Let culture drift in the sea of relativism, and let true theology be the port that the ship of faith returns longingly to, tired of the restless waves and storms of changing cultural norms and social pressures. Theology will endure not by being water, but by being stone. Let us look to our Rock and shape our theology around Him, and not try to chisel Him small enough to fit into the box we want to give Him.

In this paper I want to sound the death knell of the death of God. Let us move beyond the declaration of God’s death at the hands of a mustachioed German iconoclast to the divine declaration of His death on a tree on the outskirts of a Middle Eastern city in 33 AD. Nietzsche said, “God is dead, and we killed him.” This was the cry of the Gospel writers, and then the triumphant Yes of “He is risen!” Let us not forget it.

The Freedom of Christianity and the Bondage of Materialism

My gratitude to G.K. Chesterton for this point.

"Free-thinking" atheism or naturalism is really nothing of the sort. By affirming naturalism/materialism (which claims that the physical is all there is) one must by definition reject many claims which a supernaturalist would be able to evaluate evidentially. Just as a determinist must reject even a single event which falls outside of strict causal laws but an indeterminist can accept any number of determined events, so a materialist must reject even a single supernatural occurrence out of hand. The supernaturalist, at the same time, can reject any number of supernatural claims, but retains the freedom to accept those which he or she has good reason to think true.

As such, there is really more intellectual freedom in supernaturalist Christianity than in atheistic materialism. For example, suppose there is a set of propositions S which consists of claims of miracles or supernatural events. Suppose there is also a set of propositions N which consists of claims of material or natural events. The materialist must evaluate set N on the basis of facts, likelihood, etc. and, perhaps, assent to propositions N1, N2, and N4 but reject N3 as having insufficient basis for belief. The materialist must, by definition reject all propositions in set S without consideration. He or she is constrained by their philosophy.

The supernaturalist must evaluate set N in the same way as the materialist, and will, say accept the same propositions N1, N2, and N4 but reject N3. But rather than uncritically reject the propositions S1...S4, he or she is free to evaluate them on the basis of evidence and accept those which seem credible. For example, to accept S1 and reject the rest.

The Documentary Hypothesis and Biblical Inerrancy

The idea of multiple authorship of the Pentateuch is a somewhat heated point of contention between conservative, usually evangelical, Christians and more liberal academics, some of whom do not adhere to the faith they study. As such, the debate is usually characterized as educated scholars and experts versus lay Church members and naïve pastors. As with all religious and doctrinal contentions, the issue is more complicated than it may first appear. While the idea of multiple authorship of separate “strands” within the first five books of the Old Testament began to go out of vogue among biblical scholars in around the 1970s (in favor of a more complex vision of redaction, editing, and gradual development), the most famous iteration of source criticism remains the Documentary Hypothesis associated with Julius Wellhausen. In it, Wellhausen (among several others) attempts to identify the voices of the separate authors of the Pentateuch, and to speculate on their reasons for writing, worldview, and time of composition. But what are the difficulties this presents for conservative views of biblical inerrancy, and why does it matter so much to so many people?

It is, admittedly, almost impossible to make a strong case for biblical inerrancy without assuming divine revelation. Without the doctrine of God’s superintendence of the writing, composition, and compilation of the Bible, passages such as Genesis 1-11 must become virtually entirely fictional or legendary. Even assuming the traditional account of the Pentateuch’s composition by Moses, hundreds to thousands of years pass between “Let there be light” and “Let My people go.” Without God’s revelation to Moses (or any author) there would seem to be no way to know what happened in the world’s infancy. A tantalizing hint of an antediluvian scroll or record is given in Genesis 5:1, “the scroll of the generations of Adam,” which, given new discoveries of writing appearing as early as 3400 BCE among the Sumerians (Kaiser 58), may mean that the author of Genesis compiled the book from other written material. This is, however, not conclusive.

But for evangelical Christians who hold to the doctrine of plenary inspiration and inerrancy, the revelation of Holy Scripture is a presupposition already made, and thus justification of accounts in the early chapters of Genesis is quite simple. God was there, and He narrated it to Moses. This is, of course, an easy solution, but one cannot justify the inerrancy of the Bible by saying that God wrote it, and that we know God wrote it because the Bible is inerrant. This is obvious, though pious, circular reasoning.

The true basis for the inerrancy of scripture rests in faith. Unless one assumes the absolute truth of the Bible, one cannot trust it completely, and if one cannot trust it completely, one cannot trust its account of the perfect life, propitiatory death, and physical resurrection of Jesus Christ. If the Bible is not completely errorless, then there are (necessarily) errors in some of it. If there are errors in some of it, for example, the numerous claims of the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch, then there is no way to know that the account of the resurrection of Jesus is not also in error. It is an all or nothing game. The basis of all Christian belief is called into question the moment the Bible descends from Logos to literature. Admittedly, the claims of God’s work in the lives of believers would remain were the Bible to fall, but the knowledge of the nature and demands of that God would be gone.

It is because one must trust the Bible completely that evangelical Christians resist the theory of multiple authorship of the Pentateuch. Throughout the Old and New Testaments, and from the mouth of Jesus Himself, Moses is called the author of the Torah. For example: Ex 17:14, 24:4, 34:27; Nm 33:1,2; Dt 31:9,11 within the Pentateuch itself, Jos 1:8, 8:31,32; 1 Kg 2:3; 2 Kg 14:6; Ezr 6:18; Neh 13:1; Dn 9:11-13; Mal 4:4 in the rest of the Old Testament, and Mt 19:8; Jn 5:46,47; Ac 3:22; Rm 10:5 in the New Testament (Block 158). If Christians are to take the Bible as truth, they must reckon with this mountain of claims to Mosaic authorship. Only through a sort of lexical gymnastics, going against the plain meaning of the text, can a view of multiple authorship be supported by one claiming biblical inerrancy. However, the text does record that Joshua added somewhat to the Mosaic corpus, presumably after Moses’ death, which would explain statements such as that recording Moses’ humility (Numbers 12:3), and the account of his death.

While it may be argued whether biblical inerrancy is a “modern” development, it certainly has a basis, at least for evangelical Christians, in theological necessity. Without a completely trustworthy account of God’s work, Christianity is severely crippled, if not killed. It has been shown that the Bible makes a myriad of claims to Mosaic authorship, which entails the exclusion of claims to multiple authorship. No other person besides Joshua is said to have added anything (Joshua 24:26). This especially excludes the Documentary Hypothesis, which would not match up with Biblical claims in authorship or even date of composition. Thus, the concepts of biblical inerrancy and multiple authorship seem to be mutually exclusive. Evidence for multiple authors, such as that provided above, would need to be accounted for, but it should be the policy of Christianity to take the authority of the Bible as absolute, and to hold to it even in the face of contradictory scholarship, in sure and certain faith that the Bible will be justified in the end. So while the doctrine of biblical inerrancy may be disagreed with due to source critical scholarship, it should not be dismissed or labeled as simple ignorance.


Works Cited

Block, Daniel J. "Who Wrote the Pentateuch and When Was It Written?." Apologetics Study Bible. Ed. Ted Cabal, Chad Owen Brand, E. Ray Clendenen, Paul Copan, J.P. Moreland. Nashville, TN: Holman Bible Publishers, 2007. Print.

Kaiser, Jr., Walter C . The Old Testament Documents: Are They Reliable and Relevant? Downer's Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 2001. Print.

G.K. Chesterton--Science and the Savages

This short essay from Chesterton's book Heretics deals with the fallacies of scientific anthropology and the likelihood of myth becoming fact. One can see a clear influence on C.S. Lewis' argument about Jesus Christ as the "true myth." I've been challenged quite a bit recently on the veracity of ancient Israelite stories in the Bible as similar to other Mesopotamian myths. The conclusion is, of course, that the Biblical narratives are therefore untrue. Chesterton masterfully demonstrates the falsity of such a line of reasoning, with his customary wit and humor.

A permanent disadvantage of the study of folk-lore and kindred subjects is that the man of science can hardly be in the nature of things very frequently a man of the world. He is a student of nature; he is scarcely ever a student of human nature. And even where this difficulty is overcome, and he is in some sense a student of human nature, this is only a very faint beginning of the painful progress towards being human. For the study of primitive race and religion stands apart in one important respect from all, or nearly all, the ordinary scientific studies. A man can understand astronomy only by being an astronomer; he can understand entomology only by being an entomologist (or, perhaps, an insect); but he can understand a great deal of anthropology merely by being a man. He is himself the animal which he studies. Hence arises the fact which strikes the eye everywhere in the records of ethnology and folk-lore — the fact that the same frigid and detached spirit which leads to success in the study of astronomy or botany leads to disaster in the study of mythology or human origins. It is necessary to cease to be a man in order to do justice to a microbe; it is not necessary to cease to be a man in order to do justice to men. That same suppression of sympathies, that same waving away of intuitions or guess-work which make a man preternaturally clever in dealing with the stomach of a spider, will make him preternaturally stupid in dealing with the heart of man. He is making himself inhuman in order to understand humanity. An ignorance of the other world is boasted by many men of science; but in this matter their defect arises, not from ignorance of the other world, but from ignorance of this world. For the secrets about which anthropologists concern themselves can be best learnt, not from books or voyages, but from the ordinary commerce of man with man. The secret of why some savage tribe worships monkeys or the moon is not to be found even by travelling among those savages and taking down their answers in a note-book, although the cleverest man may pursue this course. The answer to the riddle is in England; it is in London; nay, it is in his own heart. When a man has discovered why men in Bond Street wear black hats he will at the same moment have discovered why men in Timbuctoo wear red feathers. The mystery in the heart of some savage war-dance should not be studied in books of scientific travel; it should be studied at a subscription ball. If a man desires to find out the origins of religions, let him not go to the Sandwich Islands; let him go to church. If a man wishes to know the origin of human society, to know what society, philosophically speaking, really is, let him not go into the British Museum; let him go into society.

This total misunderstanding of the real nature of ceremonial gives rise to the most awkward and dehumanized versions of the conduct of men in rude lands or ages. The man of science, not realizing that ceremonial is essentially a thing which is done without a reason, has to find a reason for every sort of ceremonial, and, as might be supposed, the reason is generally a very absurd one — absurd because it originates not in the simple mind of the barbarian, but in the sophisticated mind of the professor. The learned man will say, for instance, “The natives of Mumbojumbo Land believe that the dead man can eat and will require food upon his journey to the other world. This is attested by the fact that they place food in the grave, and that any family not complying with this rite is the object of the anger of the priests and the tribe.” To any one acquainted with humanity this way of talking is topsy-turvy. It is like saying, “The English in the twentieth century believed that a dead man could smell. This is attested by the fact that they always covered his grave with lilies, violets, or other flowers. Some priestly and tribal terrors were evidently attached to the neglect of this action, as we have records of several old ladies who were very much disturbed in mind because their wreaths had not arrived in time for the funeral.” It may be of course that savages put food with a dead man because they think that a dead man can eat, or weapons with a dead man because they think that a dead man can fight. But personally I do not believe that they think anything of the kind. I believe they put food or weapons on the dead for the same reason that we put flowers, because it is an exceedingly natural and obvious thing to do. We do not understand, it is true, the emotion which makes us think it obvious and natural; but that is because, like all the important emotions of human existence it is essentially irrational. We do not understand the savage for the same reason that the savage does not understand himself. And the savage does not understand himself for the same reason that we do not understand ourselves either.

The obvious truth is that the moment any matter has passed through the human mind it is finally and for ever spoilt for all purposes of science. It has become a thing incurably mysterious and infinite; this mortal has put on immortality. Even what we call our material desires are spiritual, because they are human. Science can analyse a pork-chop, and say how much of it is phosphorus and how much is protein; but science cannot analyse any man’s wish for a pork-chop, and say how much of it is hunger, how much custom, how much nervous fancy, how much a haunting love of the beautiful. The man’s desire for the pork-chop remains literally as mystical and ethereal as his desire for heaven. All attempts, therefore, at a science of any human things, at a science of history, a science of folk-lore, a science of sociology, are by their nature not merely hopeless, but crazy. You can no more be certain in economic history that a man’s desire for money was merely a desire for money than you can be certain in hagiology that a saint’s desire for God was merely a desire for God. And this kind of vagueness in the primary phenomena of the study is an absolutely final blow to anything in the nature of a science. Men can construct a science with very few instruments, or with very plain instruments; but no one on earth could construct a science with unreliable instruments. A man might work out the whole of mathematics with a handful of pebbles, but not with a handful of clay which was always falling apart into new fragments, and falling together into new combinations. A man might measure heaven and earth with a reed, but not with a growing reed.

As one of the enormous follies of folk-lore, let us take the case of the transmigration of stories, and the alleged unity of their source. Story after story the scientific mythologists have cut out of its place in history, and pinned side by side with similar stories in their museum of fables. The process is industrious, it is fascinating, and the whole of it rests on one of the plainest fallacies in the world. That a story has been told all over the place at some time or other, not only does not prove that it never really happened; it does not even faintly indicate or make slightly more probable that it never happened. That a large number of fishermen have falsely asserted that they have caught a pike two feet long, does not in the least affect the question of whether any one ever really did so. That numberless journalists announce a Franco-German war merely for money is no evidence one way or the other upon the dark question of whether such a war ever occurred. Doubtless in a few hundred years the innumerable Franco-German wars that did not happen will have cleared the scientific mind of any belief in the legendary war of ‘70 which did. But that will be because if folk-lore students remain at all, their nature win be unchanged; and their services to folk-lore will be still as they are at present, greater than they know. For in truth these men do something far more godlike than studying legends; they create them.

There are two kinds of stories which the scientists say cannot be true, because everybody tells them. The first class consists of the stories which are told everywhere, because they are somewhat odd or clever; there is nothing in the world to prevent their having happened to somebody as an adventure any more than there is anything to prevent their having occurred, as they certainly did occur, to somebody as an idea. But they are not likely to have happened to many people. The second class of their “myths” consist of the stories that are told everywhere for the simple reason that they happen everywhere. Of the first class, for instance, we might take such an example as the story of William Tell, now generally ranked among legends upon the sole ground that it is found in the tales of other peoples. Now, it is obvious that this was told everywhere because whether true or fictitious it is what is called “a good story;” it is odd, exciting, and it has a climax. But to suggest that some such eccentric incident can never have happened in the whole history of archery, or that it did not happen to any particular person of whom it is told, is stark impudence. The idea of shooting at a mark attached to some valuable or beloved person is an idea doubtless that might easily have occurred to any inventive poet. But it is also an idea that might easily occur to any boastful archer. It might be one of the fantastic caprices of some story-teller. It might equally well be one of the fantastic caprices of some tyrant. It might occur first in real life and afterwards occur in legends. Or it might just as well occur first in legends and afterwards occur in real life. If no apple has ever been shot off a boy’s head from the beginning of the world, it may be done tomorrow morning, and by somebody who has never heard of William Tell.

This type of tale, indeed, may be pretty fairly paralleled with the ordinary anecdote terminating in a repartee or an Irish bull. Such a retort as the famous “je ne vois pas la necessité” we have all seen attributed to Talleyrand, to Voltaire, to Henri Quatre, to an anonymous judge, and so on. But this variety does not in anyway make it more likely that the thing was never said at all. It is highly likely that it was really said by somebody unknown. It is highly likely that it was really said by Talleyrand. In any case, it is not any more difficult to believe that the mot might have occurred to a man in conversation than to a man writing memoirs. It might have occurred to any of the men I have mentioned. But there is this point of distinction about it, that it is not likely to have occurred to all of them. And this is where the first class of so-called myth differs from the second to which I have previously referred. For there is a second class of incident found to be common to the stories of five or six heroes, say to Sigurd, to Hercules, to Rustem, to the Cid, and so on. And the peculiarity of this myth is that not only is it highly reasonable to imagine that it really happened to one hero, but it is highly reasonable to imagine that it really happened to all of them. Such a story, for instance, is that of a great man having his strength swayed or thwarted by the mysterious weakness of a woman. The anecdotal story, the story of William Tell, is as I have said, popular, because it is peculiar. But this kind of story, the story of Samson and Delilah of Arthur and Guinevere, is obviously popular because it is not peculiar. It is popular as good, quiet fiction is popular, because it tells the truth about people. If the ruin of Samson by a woman, and the ruin of Hercules by a woman, have a common legendary origin, it is gratifying to know that we can also explain, as a fable, the ruin of Nelson by a woman and the ruin of Parnell by a woman. And, indeed, I have no doubt whatever that, some centuries hence, the students of folk-lore will refuse altogether to believe that Elizabeth Barrett eloped with Robert Browning, and will prove their point up to the hilt by the, unquestionable fact that the whole fiction of the period was full of such elopements from end to end.

Possibly the most pathetic of all the delusions of the modern students of primitive belief is the notion they have about the thing they call anthropomorphism. They believe that primitive men attributed phenomena to a god in human form in order to explain them, because his mind in its sullen limitation could not reach any further than his own clownish existence. The thunder was called the voice of a man, the lightning the eyes of a man, because by this explanation they were made more reasonable and comfortable. The final cure for all this kind of philosophy is to walk down a lane at night. Any one who does so will discover very quickly that men pictured something semi-human at the back of all things, not because such a thought was natural, but because it was supernatural; not because it made things more comprehensible, but because it made them a hundred times more incomprehensible and mysterious. For a man walking down a lane at night can see the conspicuous fact that as long as nature keeps to her own course, she has no power with us at all. As long as a tree is a tree, it is a top-heavy monster with a hundred arms, a thousand tongues, and only one leg. But so long as a tree is a tree, it does not frighten us at all. It begins to be something alien, to be something strange, only when it looks like ourselves. When a tree really looks like a man our knees knock under us. And when the whole universe looks like a man we fall on our faces.

How Could We Not Sin in Heaven?

I've often wondered how God will bring it about that we will not sin in heaven. If God can bring it about that we not sin and yet retain our free will, then why did He not make it that way from the beginning? I think I've hit upon a partial solution, or perhaps a complete one. But first it is important to note that there is a distinction to make. In heaven, it will not simply be the case that we will not sin, but that we will be unable to sin. Does this crucial point mean that our choices will be somehow restricted, or even taken away altogether? How can we be free and obey God without the possibility of disobedience?

I would like to begin by making an analogy that will perhaps explain a bit of the situation. Each person, though all totally corrupted by sin (Romans 3), has differing desires for sin. I, for example, have no desire to indulge in drunkenness, though for others it is a serious temptation, and all have their own weaknesses. It could be the case that just as I have no desire to become drunk on my own, and that if anyone offered me the opportunity, I would reject it, in heaven this would be the case for all sins. Our inclinations would be such that if offered the chance to sin, we would freely reject it. But we can go even further. Only the righteous/saved will dwell with God in heaven (Revelation 21). Just as I will not only not choose drunkenness if it is offered to me, but will also not offer the choice to another (because of my own inclinations), no one in heaven will offer temptation to anyone else, because no one will be inclined at all toward any sin. So not only would we freely choose every time not to sin on our own, but the choice or temptation will never even be offered because no one will have sinful inclinations.

Does this capture the inability to sin, or is it simply a very strong form of the ability not to sin, which Christians (and only Christians) possess right now? I think that while the above may be helpful in imagining our state of mind in heaven, it does not quite capture our total inability to sin before God. Lenny Esposito points out (http://www.comereason.org/phil_qstn/phi039.asp) that God is unable to sin, though no one doubts He is totally free. Therefore it is indeed possible to be free and have an inability to sin. It could be that just as I (as a Christian not bound by my sin nature) am totally free (in the Sartrian sense of never being totally unfree), I do not have the ability to fly unaided. This does not essentially restrict my freedom (since we are not claiming a sort of radical freedom).

Granted, though, flying and making moral choices are not quite the same. For a complete understanding we must look to the Bible. 1 John 3:5-6, 9 state :

You know that He appeared in order to take away sins; and in Him there is no sin. No one who abides in Him sins; no one who sins has seen Him or knows Him. … No one who is born of God practices sin, because His seed abides in him; and he cannot sin, because he is born of God.

It is our partaking in the nature of God that provides us with the inability to sin, because God cannot go against His own nature, namely, absolute holiness. Esposito writes:

Because we have two natures that are at odds with each other, there is an inner struggle that exists in every believer. Romans 7 is dedicated to showing this struggle. However, upon death, the old man will pass away leaving only the new, divine nature. One of the most important passages to understanding this is found in Romans 6:4-7:

Therefore we have been buried with Him through baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life. For if we have become united with Him in the likeness of His death, certainly we shall also be in the likeness of His resurrection, knowing this, that our old self was crucified with Him, in order that our body of sin might be done away with, so that we would no longer be slaves to sin; for he who has died is freed from sin.

The last verse is key - "he who has died is free from sin." When we're saved and choose to be baptized, we die to ourselves and receive a new nature. This nature is in conflict with our old fleshly nature. When our bodies die, that old nature perishes completely as well, leaving the divine nature alone.

Now we return to one of the big questions I raised at the beginning: If God can bring it about that we not sin and yet retain our free will, then why did He not make it that way from the beginning? There is no easy answer to this question, and in the end we must trust God's wisdom. But Christian philosopher William Lane Craig writes that perhaps the only way heaven could exist would be as a result of our life on earth (http://www.origins.org/offices/billcraig/docs/craig-bradley0.html). He says:

Heaven may not be a possible world when you take it in isolation by itself. It may be that the only way in which God could actualize a heaven of free creatures all worshiping Him and not falling into sin would be by having, so to speak, this run-up to it, this advance life during which there is a veil of decision-making in which some people choose for God and some people against God. Otherwise you don't know that heaven is an actualizable world. You have no way of knowing that possibility.

There is also the very old concept of the felix culpa, or the happy fault. This idea, briefly stated, is that God allowed the Fall in order to bring about a greater good through the Incarnation of Christ and the salvation of our souls. As Aquinas writes in his Summa Theologica,

But there is no reason why human nature should not have been raised to something greater after sin. For God allows evils to happen in order to bring a greater good therefrom; hence it is written (Romans 5:20): "Where sin abounded, grace did more abound." Hence, too, in the blessing of the Paschal candle, we say: "O happy fault, that merited such and so great a Redeemer!" (http://www.newadvent.org/summa/4001.htm#3)

We see in the world that God allows some evil to occur in order to bring about a greater good, and so it can be inferred that if our relating to Christ in the way that we do now is the greatest and ultimate good, God might permit the entry of sin into the world in order to accomplish it.

Is There Truth in Beauty?

The relationship between truth and beauty is in some ways similar to that of beauty and goodness. But when we ask ourselves whether there is truth in beauty, we are usually saying not that beauty is a signpost to truth, as is the case with goodness, but that the higher principle (truth) is in some sense contained within the concept of beauty. Therefore the relationship between truth and beauty is not identical to that of goodness and beauty, but is if anything more intimate. Beauty and truth may be related in two ways, each of which depends on the metaphysics with which we deal with beauty. Is beauty a property of a thing, or a reaction to that thing? That is, is it objective or subjective? While it seems as if most philosophers would come down on the side of subjectivity, it can be beneficial to consider both sides of the issue.

If beauty is a property, then the truth contained within it is truth about the world. At the very least, the beauty which is evident demonstrates the truth of itself. Beauty, if a property, becomes demonstrable in the very fact that it exists and is experienced, and so through the very fact of experience it reveals truth about the beautiful object. The truth “this is beautiful” is communicated in the same instance that we recognize the beauty in the object. Much the same as the truth “this is red” or “this is nine inches wide,” beauty-as-property contains the minimum of truth in the demonstration of itself, thus communicating a fact about the object being experienced.

Beauty-as-property means that beauty is objective. It is, by its very definition, not something which exists in our minds but something which exists in the object. We then recognize that property we call beauty in the object, that is, in the universe outside our own heads (or in a specific part of that universe). As a result of this, any truth contained within the beautiful is a truth about the world, as stated above. What we find to be true in the beautiful exists, as it were, independently of our experience of it. What sorts of truths would we then find?

Delving into philosophy of religion, we find a common conception of God as possessing three “transcendental properties:” truth, goodness, and beauty. Peter Kreeft, in his essay “Lewis’s Philosophy of Truth, Goodness and Beauty” writes: “Our minds want not only some truth and some falsehood, but all truth, without limit. . . Our desires, imaginations, feelings or hearts want not just some beauty and some ugliness, but all beauty, without limit. . . For these [truth, goodness, and beauty] are the only three things that we never get bored with, and never will, for all eternity, because they are three attributes of God” (Baggett 23).

It seems, therefore, that the truths we find in beauty could be truths about God. God is revealed through His attributes. God, the Truth of all truth, that which is more true than any other thing and which would be true were all other things false, is God, Beauty of all beauties, beside which all other beautiful things are ugly and the source and reflection of beauty in all lesser things. The experience of beauty-as-property could therefore be an experience of God, and if it is an experience of God then it is also an experience of truth, and quite possibly of absolute truth.

If beauty is a reaction, the truth within beauty is subjective, and is truth about ourselves. We experience an object and do not see it to be beautiful, but see it to be beautiful. That which we experience does not possess the property ‘beautiful,’ but engenders the reaction within the subject which is identified as an experience of beauty. Therefore the aesthetic experience occurs not between an object and subject, where the subject identifies facts about the object, but instead within the subject’s consciousness, with the object acting as a catalyst or spark through which to undergo the beautiful reaction.

This means that, if beauty is a reaction, when and if we experience truth in beauty, we are not given access to truths that exist anywhere but inside our own minds. There is nothing about the object which admits of the descriptor “beautiful,” and so whatever truth we see within it is either a truth about the reaction taking place, i.e. “I am having an experience of beauty,” or contained and directed toward our own consciousness, which is the ultimate source of the reaction to the object. Note that if beauty is a reaction, there is nothing beautiful without human experience of it. An object’s beauty is dependent upon our evaluation of it. There is no proposition “This is beautiful;” there is only “I think this is beautiful.” When the “I think” of the statement is removed (or before it arrives) objects merely exist without aesthetic properties. The first sunrise over a newly-formed Earth and the wheeling of undiscovered galaxies are not beautiful, because we never experience them.

It would seem that beauty-as-reaction lends itself to the expression of truths such as “I enjoy x” or “y is aesthetically pleasing to me,” but those truths are intensely subjective, and are in point of fact more like opinions than meaningful truth claims. To put it simply, we may discover truths about ourselves through beauty-as-reaction, but those truths will be only facts about our preferences. An aesthetic experience will amount to a recognition of the world as a lens through which our minds impose meaning upon the universe, assigning values of beauty and pleasure to objects totally devoid of such attributes, truly shaping the way we view existence.

So while the truth contained within beauty is far more limited than the truths received through ordinary experience, they are in a certain sense more unassailable. When beauty is a property, we may indeed mistake our awareness of something for an awareness of beauty, but the fact is firmly planted in the outside universe and independent of our experience of it. However, if beauty is a reaction, our sense of the beauty of something is always true, and we cannot be mistaken. Just as one cannot be mistaken that they are in pain (only perhaps confused regarding language), one cannot be mistaken in regards to subjective beauty. In other words, beauty-as-property can be doubted/mistaken by the subject, but true independent of that subject; while beauty-as-reaction cannot be doubted/mistaken by the subject, but is only true as long as the subject experiences that reaction.

Values in Light of Eternity: The Language of Death

We often speak about death as an ending, or a cessation of life. I would wager that death as an end is what we are referring to in over 90 percent of the instances in which we talk about it. And it's understandable. Our most present example of death is physical death. And the most evident property of physical death is its physical effect, and the (apparent) cessation of consciousness. But according to Christianity, that is not the whole story. In fact, there is no instance in which a person ceases to exist in Christian theology. We must reformulate our language of death.

There are in general three types of death (I do not take credit for these categories or definitions, though I don't remember whose they are): spiritual death, physical death, and eternal death, also called Hell. In none of these deaths does a person cease to exist. Death is instead a separation, whether from the body or from God. Only the third is permanent. All of these deaths result from sin, and without sin we would not experience any of them.

Death as separation rather than cessation obviously has implications for how we live our lives. But what are they? We are all eternal entities, so there is really no such thing as death-as-cessation. An unbeliever suffers all three deaths-as-separation. Christians, however, are cured from one kind of death (spiritual), saved from another (eternal), and conquerors of the last (physical). Christ's atoning death on the cross turned the greatest fear of this world into the gateway to the next one. Death is no longer a punishment for sin, but a method of uniting with Christ (see Grudem, Systematic Theology, chapter 41). The separation of our spirits from our bodies becomes the uniting of our spirits with God. We therefore subsume death into Life.

To a Christian, there is no form of death over which we do not have victory. However, the absence of death-as-cessation means that what we choose in this life does not end at physical death, but carries on into eternity. While believers will be perfected no matter what they do in this life, this consequence means that non-believers are left to grow in their sin for eternity, as their faults and iniquities grow gradually larger and larger. It is obviously essential that they be saved and so be removed from death.

Christians, though, can be encouraged and say with I Corinthians 15:54-55, "Death has been swallowed up in victory. O Death, where is your victory? O Death, where is your sting?"

Examining Presuppositions of Kierkegaard's Existentialism

I originally posted this on the Rhodes Existentialism blog, found here. I decided to re-post it along with the comments it received.
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Perhaps I am not familiar enough with the school, but it seems to me that there may be an underlying presupposition to existentialist thought that I would like to examine. Why is the individual more important than the collective? Why is it important that we are free? Are we so sure that meaning must be created and not found? It seems that some people may, in their eagerness to rid themselves of Hegel and his System, swung to the opposite extreme and not considered the reasons for the assumptions that they make. Then again, perhaps I am simply missing an obvious point, or I have yet to come across it. I would appreciate any clarification.

I do, as a matter of fact, think that the individual is more important than the government, or the state, or most collective groups, because it is my belief that the individual will exist forever, and to the life of a single soul the history of states is a passing dream, but I would not be so quick to discount all collective interests. For me, the Christian church would be an instance in which sometimes (and perhaps many times) the interests or desires of an individual should be subjugated to that of the collective. Personal autonomy may be a good thing, but it is not the only thing, and our freedom is not for me our highest good.

But again, I have an extremely limited knowledge of existentialist thought, and would appreciate correction.

Values in Light of Eternity: Introduction

As the mood strikes me, I will periodically post an installment in this series, Values in Light of Eternity. What this series aims to do is reconsider what we deem important in light of the fact that we live forever. Certain things will take on far more gravity, and some things which we think crucial now will seem trivial. As far as I am able, I will provide Scriptural backing for why we should reconsider these things.

The first installment will most likely be posted tomorrow, and will deal with body image and physical appearance.

How Can I Know Souls Exist?

A poll was taken in class today as to whether we believed in something in us that is not simply our bodies (a soul, or something similar). A large number of people raised their hands to indicate that they didn't believe they had an immaterial soul. The question of how one can know if one has a soul or not was, I thought, a good one to write about.

The gospel is coming up against some rather unusual attacks in recent decades. One finds, more and more, that people do not believe themselves to be sinners, and that if they do, they don't admit it. It is a serious problem for the presentation of the gospel as a means of life if people don't believe they're dead. But another criticism of what was once presupposed to be self-evident is physicalism.

Physicalism simply means that the physical is all there is, and that all there is can be explained in terms of physical means. The consequence of this is elimination of souls (sometimes minds) and the supernatural in general. How can a Christian defend against this?

I think the first thing to do is to present the physicalist with some examples of things which are self-evidently true without physical instantiation, or things which must be true in all possible worlds. For example, the fundamental laws of logic are not only true in this world, but must be true in any possible world. They require no physical evidence for us to see their truth, and do not depend in any way on the physical world for their truth. Once you admit that something cannot exist and not exist at the same time and in the same sense, you will have established that there are things which exist independent of the physical universe (and if you take the case of mathematical propositions, an infinite number of things, at that).

So we are agreed that the soul is immaterial, and that immaterial things exist. But what exactly is a soul, and how do we know that that particular immaterial thing exists? I would define the soul as the (immaterial) seat of reason, intelligence, and personality. Some would argue that all of these can be explained physically, but Lewis shows in his argument from reason that rationality cannot be purely explained by physical causes without removing the basis for rationality itself. I do not have the space here to make a full account of his argument, but it can be found throughout his book Miracles.

I am not saying that there is no physical element in the explanation of these properties, only that it is not the full explanation. If we can even only establish that reason or our capability to comprehend truth cannot (and never can be) fully explained in terms of physical causes we have a large hole in our view of self, something which the Christian faith (and others) offer to fill.

Christianity gives us a theory regarding that gap in our selfhood, and at that point the question becomes probabilistic to a certain extent. If there are no other satisfying explanations, and Christianity (or any other religion) offers an account which provides one, we must weigh which of these accounts seems most likely, and we will be epistemically justified in believing that account.

Is There Objective Beauty?

As I mentioned in my previous post, I am currently taking a class on aesthetics, which, for those of you not familiar, is the philosophy of beauty (more or less). As I also mentioned, I've never taken a course in this area before and it's raising some very interesting questions. For example:

The Bible says in Colossians 1:15 that Christ is the "image of the invisible God, the firstborn of every creature." Is an image necessarily inferior to the thing being represented? Or should we reject the ancient Greek notion of mimesis altogether and hold that images do not have to have implied referents? What does that mean for this verse?

Why does beauty transcend language? Dr. Kyle Grady says that at the same time that beauty compels us to speak it robs us of our words. Can we find a justification for this in Christian thought?

Is there such a thing as objective beauty? From whence would it be derived, and how could we know it? What does Christianity have to say about this?

I'll be responding to each of these questions in upcoming posts, but I want to begin with the last one, which in a way rather shows my hand in regards to my personal philosophy of beauty.

I believe that beauty is indeed objective, though it comes to us subjectively. Beauty is an attribute of God, and as all Divine attributes is eternal, absolute, and universal. God's other attributes (truth, goodness, justice, power, etc.) are all the source from which we draw our conceptions of these things in the world, and I think it is the same with beauty. Just as all of these other attributes have an absolute (and thus objective) reality or fulfillment in God, so absolute (and thus objective) beauty can also be found there.

We see reflections of this perfect beauty in the world, in varied and diverse places, all of which give us a glimpse of that true, perfect beauty beyond this world (forgive me for sounding Platonic), in God. So the different reflections of this attribute, each impacting us in different ways and to different degrees, are all facets of ultimate and objective beauty. So while it may seem that beauty is subjective on one level, of we "zoom out" and consider God, we can see that objective beauty exists because it finds its absolute in Him.

Something About the Tone/ Pro-Life Dialogue

I just wanted to let readers know that not all of my posts are going to be quite as academic as the last one. I will periodically be posting some of my papers which I think most appropriate for this blog, and those may have a bit more verbose or technical language than more casual posts. They will also be rather longer, so don't feel like you have to free up your calendar to read this blog.

Classes start tomorrow, and I'm fairly excited to be learning more about existentialism and aesthetics, two fields in which my knowledge is somewhat limited.

My roommates and I were talking today about the abortion controversy. We agreed that one of the reasons the two sides of the debate have such trouble talking to one another is the divergence in definition of certain terms, namely: life, person, body.
Pro-choice advocates feel as if they have a right to choose what happens to them and to their own bodies. Pro-life proponents would most likely agree with that simple idea, but disagree on the referent. To a pro-life person, the fetus is a person, not a part of the mother. It is not a question of what the mother is doing to her own body, but what she is doing to the other inside of her.

John said that he thought the pro-life position was more suited to the liberal side than the conservative, by the fact that protecting the helpless/defenseless is a defining trait of the leftist camp, and opposing abortion is simply carrying the idea further. Something interesting to think about, but it still comes down to the definition of terms. A respectful explanation of what each side means by certain words may help a little in conversations between the two groups.

Agent Causation and Frankfurt-Type Examples

In his article, “Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility,” Harry Frankfurt presents his argument that the principle of alternate possibilities is false. This principle, simply put, states that for a person to be held accountable (morally responsible) for an action, they must have been able to do otherwise. This seems to hold in the event that a person is coerced into an action, or that that action was the only one available to them, or that they were in some other way “forced” into that action. However, Frankfurt presents what has come to be known, appropriately, as a “Frankfurt-type” example, in which he seems to demonstrate that a person should at the same time be held morally responsible while being unable to do otherwise. Frankfurt, being a compatibilist, wishes to show that determinism and free will can coexist. But what happens to the principle of alternative possibilities if we are not compatibilists? What if we are instead proponents of agent causation? Does Frankfurt’s example still hold? It is my contention that while Frankfurt does indeed prove that the law of alternative possibilities is not logically necessary, an agent-causation view of free will creates problems for Frankfurt’s example.

Let us first examine Frankfurt’s example and what it shows before altering it to fit our purposes. In the most appropriate iteration of his Jones case, Frankfurt has a certain unsavory character named Black hiding in the background, waiting to intervene in Jones’s life if Jones does not do as Black desires. Once Jones begins to seem as if he will perform a certain action that Black is opposed to, then Black will intervene in whatever way necessary to bring it about that Jones does as Black desires. The way in which Black intervenes is not important; it could be anything from magic to neurosurgery. Whatever the method, the success of the intervention is guaranteed. When the fateful choice is made, though, Jones instead decides on his own to choose that outcome which Black desires, and therefore Black does not intervene at all. This example is supposed to show that Jones is morally responsible for his action because he performed it based on his own choices, though at the same time he could not have done otherwise because of the Black’s intervening in the event that Jones seems as if he will choose differently.

This example obviously demonstrates that it is logically conceivable that there can be a case in which a person is morally responsible and yet at the same time unable to do otherwise. Let us set aside the problem of how Black determines when Jones will decide on a certain action and simply take it for granted that Jones does indeed decide on his own to do as Black wishes. We can very easily conceive of such a situation’s coherence, and thus the point that Frankfurt is trying to prove becomes logically possible. All it takes is conception.

Let us now consider an alternate example, one in which a formulation of agent causation comes into the picture. Let it also be the case that the agent is immaterial, for example a soul. Black desires that Jones performs a certain action, and will do whatever it takes to make certain that the desired action does indeed come about. At the moment of choice, Black prepares to intervene if necessary, but Jones decides on his own initiative to do as Black wishes, and so Black does not do anything. The example seems, on the surface, to be exactly the same.

But let us look more closely at the moment of choice. At that moment, Jones-as-Agent deliberates on the options and comes to a decision based, in part, on his character as it exists. In the agent’s consideration, there are alternative possibilities, each of which is decided against in favor of the one the agent does in fact choose. As such, the agent assents to be held accountable to the choice it makes, from the very fact that it makes a positive choice against other actions. Zooming out a bit, though, we find that in fact Black stands ready to force the choice upon the agent in some inexorable manner.

If the agent does not become aware that Black is prepared to intervene, then the choice-making process runs as described above, in which the agent makes a positive choice against alternative possibilities and for others. But if the agent is in fact aware of Black’s plan, then the ability to make a positive assent toward a certain choice and against others is removed. The agent must, as it were, simply carry out the action as if scripted. And even if the agent still decides to perform the action Black wishes, that decision is impacted by the fact that its options are limited to that one action. What does the agent assent to? It conceives of itself as only having one option (let us say that Black will intervene in the case that the agent also decides to refrain from acting). The possibility of choice is gone. Whether the agent would have decided on its own to carry out the action Black wished is irrelevant at this point. Its hand is forced, and it cannot assent or refrain, only act in the specific manner proscribed. There can be no moral responsibility here. In short, the example fails if the agent becomes aware of the intervention. One must at least believe there to be other options for moral responsibility to be given.

But we can go even further. It is not clear whether something can compel an immaterial agent in any other way than intellectually, in the manner of some sort of threat. If that is the case, then the agent has no choice but to be aware of the intervention. As a result, given an immaterial agent such as a soul, it seems as if we must inevitably conclude that the Frankfurt-type example fails.

What if we modify the example to include some sort of self-forming action or character-defining decision such as those which Kane proposes? Let us say that Black is far more dedicated than we thought, and that rather than waiting until the moment the act takes place Black arranges that during Jones’s youth he is presented with certain choices that form in Jones a certain character which is more likely to decide in a certain instance in the way Black wishes. Let us assume that Black succeeds in shaping in Jones a certain character which is likely to choose to act in the way Black wants. However, as an added precaution, Black also plans to watch Jones and intervene at the moment of choice if necessary. As it turns out, Jones does in fact act according to Black’s wishes, and so Black does not intervene at that moment.

Is Black still controlling Jones’s decisions? Jones-as-Agent is in fact acting according to his character, but that character has been formed by Black’s machinations. The agent, it appears, is still being controlled. But because he is acting in accordance with his character, is Jones morally responsible? It appears to me that while in the previous example there is no moral responsibility, because there is no possibility of choice with the knowledge of compulsion, in this example Jones is at least partially morally culpable.

While the responsibility is mitigated, because Jones makes the decision on his own, he should be held partially accountable. Despite the fact that Black has formed Jones’s character, the agent still assents to the choice and as such must be held responsible to some degree. If Jones were to find out that Black had formed his character in the past, it would then be up to Jones whether to follow his character, which would mean that he would be following Black’s conditioning, or to act outside of his character. Would acting outside his character in this instance be considered free, because it is not under Black’s control?

Now let us assume that Jones is not only aware of Black’s character-forming actions in the past, but is also aware that Black plans to intervene at the moment of decision, in order to force Jones to act. In this instance, Jones loses moral responsibility as stated above because he cannot assent to the particular choice over other choices. Not only this, though, but Jones is actually not able to assent to following his own character. If he follows his character and acts on his own as Black wishes, he is not fully free; if he does not follow his character Black intervenes and forces the choice. Either way, Jones is not free. In the previous example Jones did not have moral responsibility. In this one, he does not have alternative possibilities.

To conclude, while Frankfurt showed in his example that moral responsibility and alternative possibilities are not logically necessarily connected, it seems as if the example only holds if we do not accept agent causation. The principle of alternative possibilities still holds true in an incompatibilist universe.



Works Cited

Frankfurt, Harry. “Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility.” The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 66, No. 23. (Dec. 4, 1969), pp. 829-839.

Obligatory Introductory Post

Hello all, and welcome to my little piece of the internet. I've been urged to start up a blog on apologetics, so I thought I would oblige. This blog will incorporate Christian theology, apologetics, philosophy, and good old opinion into what I hope will be a cohesive and engaging whole. It may or may not be updated regularly, so we'll see how that goes.

A little about me for those who don't know: I am, as of this writing, a junior at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee. I am double-majoring in Religious Studies and Philosophy, and I plan on perhaps pursuing a professorship [Alliteration Bonus +10!] someday. My passion is for Christian apologetics, engaging and discussing the important ideas and beliefs of the system and pointing out what I see to be flaws in our thinking.

C.S. Lewis, more than any other (non-biblical) thinker, has influenced me the most, and for those of you familiar with his thought you will assuredly see echoes in my writing. It is my hope and prayer that Christians will find this blog a source of confidence and encouragement, and that non-Christians will find it challenging and engaging.