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.

Beauty as a Property: Exploring God’s Role in the Beautiful

I have attempted all semester to lay out a convincing case for the objectivity of the beautiful. It has encouraged me to discover that I am not alone in my opinions, and that great philosophers and aestheticians like Hegel and Schelling also believe in beauty as an objective property of the object. And while I believe that a somewhat cogent argument can be made from a purely philosophical position for the objectivity of beauty, an entirely new and useful set of tools and evidences is opened up when we look at beauty through its place in philosophy of religion, or theology generally. I will therefore attempt to explore the existence of beauty through an assumption that God exists. If this assumption is true, what is the significance for the beautiful? Does God’s existence necessitate beauty’s role as objective or subjective, as property or reaction? Philosophical arguments in the mode of Hegel are generally undertaken from a position which, if not atheistic, is at least not based within a theistic worldview. It is my hope that through an evaluation of the characteristics of God I can demonstrate the objectivity of the beautiful and show that in a theistic universe beauty must be seen as a property.

Before we can attempt to answer questions about the role of the beautiful, we must first discuss what we mean when we speak of God. Generally, within the realm of philosophy of religion and in practical, street-level discussion, God is envisioned as “omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent,” shortened to “3-O.” This of course means that God is absolutely powerful, all-knowing, and perfectly good. This fits in well with the conception of God in any of the major monotheistic religions. I would expand on this definition and state that God is, as Kierkegaard defines Him, the absolute. He is the eternal source of all things and the Creator of the universe. He is at the same time personal and not a vague force or principle. This still falls within the generic monotheistic framework, but excludes deist gods and the anthropological gods of many modern theologians and philosophers. We will take this God as our starting point.

If God is the absolute, and the source of all that is good, as well as the creator of the universe, then it stands to reason that any and all good things find not only their source in Him, but their maximization. As Anselm of Canterbury states, God is “that-than-which-nothing-greater-can-be-thought.” As a Person, God possesses certain attributes of character and qualities of being. Falling under the heading of absolute goodness, we find that God possesses qualities such as justice, mercy, love, peace, happiness, majesty, wisdom, and (most important for us) beauty, all of which are found in their maximal state. Since God exists forever, and has always been God, we can therefore see that He has always possessed these properties, and that they were never technically created, but existed from eternity in the attributes of God. Beauty, as an attribute of God, has therefore existed forever, independent of humanity’s experience of it. We will revisit this later.

If God is the possessor and absolute exemplar of all good-making properties, then God must be absolutely beautiful. This implies two things: that whoever looks upon God must recognize and feel Him to be beautiful, and that beauty is made up of degrees. Taking the first point first, we must now ask the question, “If there is an object (even if it be the only object) which all agree to be beautiful, then does this prove that the object has what we would call objective beauty?” And in response to the second point, we can ask, “If beauty admits of degrees, possessing an absolute maximum and an absolute minimum (nothing at all), is this the sort of thing we would expect to find were beauty a subjective reaction?”

If every single person experiencing a particular thing considers it to be beautiful, we could reasonably conclude that there must be something that all of these experiences have in common. If beauty were merely subjective, it would be almost statistically impossible for every single person to have ever lived to have the exact same sort of reaction (I do not say the exact same reaction, for reasons I will discuss below). There will always be those like Hegel who see the majesty of the Swiss Alps and are unfazed. But my intuition is that upon seeing God, one would be justified in stating, “He is objectively beautiful.” I would argue that the thing held in common, the thing that unites all beings in the recognition of the object as beautiful, is in fact the recognition of the property of beauty within the object.

Addressing now the second question, I would assert that a thing with a maximum and minimum, and gradations in magnitude between the two, is more readily described as a property than as a reaction. Reactions are subjective, and are quite similar to feelings, in that one cannot assign truth or falsity to its possession. One does not say, “I am incorrect in having such and such a reaction,” as one would say, “I am incorrect in identifying such and such a property.” Reactions (fright, nervousness, disgust) do not have points at which they could not be more than they are. However, properties (brightness, hardness, generosity) have definite maximums. This leads me to believe that beauty is a property and not a reaction.

It is therefore understood in what way beauty must be objective. But how are we to account for the widely varying tastes and aesthetic judgments which we see in the world? We can again look to God in order to provide an answer. God, as has already been established, is infinite and absolute. It is impossible for any single human being, with their limited capacity for reflection and understanding, to comprehend the totality of God’s existence. We can only begin to grasp the tiny portion of His character which He has demonstrated in our own lives, and (for any of the major monotheistic religions) trust in the communication of His attributes through direct revelation.

We can understand that God has many characteristics, each one of which is maximally present. We can have propositional knowledge of this, but experiential knowledge is problematic at best. God’s beauty can therefore be thought of as a great multi-faceted jewel, each side of which reflects light in a different and unique way. Humans are positioned all around this jewel so that there is a facet most easily visible to each person, and through which the light interacts and reflects to give an experience of the jewel. The experiences of each person looking at the jewel will be different, because each one sees a different facet of the great and cohesive whole.
In the same way, viewing some facets from a certain position may not be optimal, so that while the person positioned for one facet cannot fully enjoy or even appreciate another facet, viewed from the right perspective it becomes properly beautiful. Beauty remains objective, but the experience of it can differ wildly depending on the aspect of ultimate and perfect beauty which one is oriented toward. The aesthetic experience is then an intensely subjective reaction, manifested in a feeling, but triggered by an objective property. The experience of the beautiful is indeed subjective, but that subjectivity is a response to something that is really there.
Much of the arguments towards beauty as subjective lie in the equation of the experience of the beautiful with the beautiful itself. Many of our reactions to things such as properties which objectively exist can vary widely. For example, I dislike the taste of cheese, but I know many people love it. The taste is objective, even to the point of being scientifically reproducible, but my reaction to it is completely different than my brother’s. However, by equating the taste of the cheese with my reaction to that taste, I would be making a mistake. The taste remains the same and exists independently of my reaction to it. The same is true of beauty. Subjective reactions are engendered by objective impressions.

Some may object that beauty cannot be defined or rearticulated as other objective properties can. I would argue, though, that there are numerous objective properties which cannot be independently articulated or defined, but the insufficiency of language to account for an object does not in any way affect whether that object continues to exist outside of our perception of it. One would be hard-pressed to define being, for instance, at least not without devolving into a Heideggerian jumble of deliberate syntactical gymnastics. This does not make being subjective. There are simply some things which one is directly aware of, and are so obvious and pervasive that attempting to attach words to them becomes a challenge.

A final argument against the subjectivity of beauty is one I have made before, but believe to have some merit, if solely as a method of testing our intuitions about what we call beautiful. As stated above, if beauty is an attribute of God it has always existed. If beauty is a subjective reaction within the mind of a human being, then without human beings there would be no such thing as beauty. And since we have already established that beauty has always existed, and so existed before humans, beauty cannot simply be humanly subjective. God could, it may be argued, experience His own beauty, but I am hesitant to assign such a close parallel between human subjectivity and the Absolute of all that exists. In any case, beauty as reaction occurs not in the world but inside a mind. Without a mind, there is no reaction, and therefore no so-called beauty. If a flower blooms in the forest and no one sees it, is it beautiful? The answer would have to be no. It would of course have the potential to trigger a reaction within a mind, but until a mind experiences it the flower remains passive, aesthetically neutral.

My intuition revolts against this concept. The flower should be beautiful whether anyone sees it or not. And that is just the sort of occurrence that would arise if beauty were a property of things and not simply a mental reaction. The flower, or the mountains of a distant planet, or the face of God, all of these things are beautiful independent of human experience of them. This rings true to me, and I find it fits well within the preexisting theory of the objectivity of beauty.
In conclusion, there are points which, taken together, make what I believe to be a reasonable case for the objectivity of beauty: (1) Beauty is an attribute of God and is therefore an implied property; (2) beauty has existed eternally in God and therefore cannot simply be a human reaction; (3) there is something which everyone would admit to be beautiful once seen, namely, God (implying objectivity); (4) beauty admits of an absolute maximum and minimum, in the way reactions do not; (5) beauty and the experience of beauty are not identical, but the experience of beauty is the subjective reaction to an objective property; and (6) the inability to clearly articulate beauty does not rule out its objectivity. If one then see beauty as an attribute of God, one can argue for the objectivity of beauty in ways which pure philosophical discourse is unable to utilize.

Why Would an All-Powerful God Care About Me?

It has often been contended that it is rather arrogant of us to assume that God, the Creator of the universe, should be interested at all in the life or problems of an insignificant mote in the eye of existence such as a single human being, or even humanity as a whole. However, it can easily be shown that this concern is unfounded and even contains within it the seed of its own demise.

An all-powerful God, which He must be if He exists (otherwise He is no God, but simply a very powerful being), should also be One of infinite intelligence and infinite powers of observation. He could comprehend at once the arrangement of every particle in the universe, and still have infinite mental power left over with which to perform any and all mental processes, separately or even all at once.

If such is the case, it is completely understandable that God should be intimately concerned with the 44,675,883rd grain of sand in the Sahara Desert, much less a rational being such as a human. This becomes even more the case when we remember that we are the only beings we know of with such powers of rational thought. God could of course concern Himself with humans, as it would be no exertion on His part whatsoever. Why should He not care about us?

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.

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.