A Christian Hart, a Humean head

Note: The following article is cross-posted over at First Things.

In a piece in the March issue of First Things, David Bentley Hart suggests that the arguments of natural law theorists are bound to be ineffectual in the public square.  The reason is that such arguments mistakenly presuppose that there is sufficient conceptual common ground between natural law theorists and their opponents for fruitful moral debate to be possible.  In particular, they presuppose that “the moral meaning of nature should be perfectly evident to any properly reasoning mind, regardless of religious belief or cultural formation.”  In fact, Hart claims, there is no such common ground, insofar as “our concept of nature, in any age, is entirely dependent upon supernatural (or at least metaphysical) convictions.”  For Hart, it is only when we look at nature from a very specific religious and cultural perspective that we will see it the way natural law theorists need us to see it in order for their arguments to be compelling.  And since such a perspective on nature “must be received as an apocalyptic interruption of our ordinary explanations,” as a deliverance of special divine revelation rather than secular reason, it is inevitably one that not all parties to public debate are going to share.

Back from Lafayette

Back today from Lafayette, Louisiana, where I gave a talk (available for viewing via Vimeo -- or, alternatively, on YouTube) at Our Lady of Wisdom Church and Catholic Student Center, adjacent to the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.  I thank my host Fr. Bryce Sibley and the other folks at the Church and Center for their warm hospitality.  The fine group of guys you see above are some readers with whom Fr. Sibley and I had a nice evening of gumbo, whiskey, and philosophical and theological discussion. 

Forgetting nothing, learning nothing

Lawrence Krauss’s book A Universe from Nothing managed something few thought possible -- to outdo Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion in sheer intellectual frivolousness.  Nor was my First Things review of the book by any means the only one to call attention to its painfully evident foibles.  Many commentators with no theological ax to grind -- such as David Albert, Massimo Pigliucci, Brian Leiter, and even New Atheist featherweight Jerry Coyne -- slammed Krauss’s amateurish foray into philosophy.  Here’s some take-to-the-bank advice to would-be atheist provocateurs: When even Jerry Coyne thinks your attempt at atheist apologetics “mediocre,” it’s time to throw in the towel.  Causa finita est.  Game over.  Shut the hell up already. 

But Krauss likes nothing so much as the sound of his own voice, even when he’s got nothing of interest to say.  A friend calls my attention to a recent Australian television appearance in which Krauss, his arrogance as undiminished as his cluelessness, commits the same puerile fallacies friends and enemies alike have been calling him out on for over a year now.  Is there any point in flogging a horse by now so far past dead that even the Brits wouldn’t make a lasagna out of him?  There is, so long as there’s still even one hapless reader who somehow mistakes this wan ghost for Bucephalus.

Noë on the origin of life etc.

UC Berkeley philosopher (and atheist) Alva Noë is, as we saw not too long ago, among the more perceptive and interesting critics of Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos.  In a recent brief follow-up post, Noë revisits the controversy over Nagel’s book, focusing on the question of the origin of life.  Endorsing some remarks made by philosopher of biology Peter Godfrey-Smith, Noë holds that while we have a good idea of how species originate, there is no plausible existing scientific explanation of how life arose in the first place:

This is probably not, I would say, due to the fact that the relevant events happened a long time ago.  Our problem isn't merely historical in nature, that is.  If that were all that was at stake, then we might expect that, now at least, we would be able to make life in a test tube.  But we can't do that.  We don't know how.

Back from Blackfriars

Back from Oxford, and exhausted.  I thank Bill Carroll and the Dominicans at Blackfriars for their warm hospitality.  (And thanks to Brother James of Blackfriars for taking the photo, elsewhere in Oxford.)  Regular blogging will resume ASAP.

The limits of eliminativism

Eliminativist positions in philosophy are a variety of anti-realism, which is in turn typically contrasted with realist and reductionist positions.  A realist account of some phenomenon takes it to be both real and essentially what it appears to be.  A reductionist account of some phenomenon takes it to be real but not what it appears to be.  An eliminativist view of some phenomenon would take it to be in no way real, and something we ought to eliminate from our account of the world altogether.  Instrumentalism is a milder version of anti-realism, where an instrumentalist view of some phenomenon holds that it is not real but nevertheless a useful or even indispensible fiction.

New ACPQ article

My article “Kripke, Ross, and the Immaterial Aspects of Thought” appears in the latest issue of the American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly.  Here is the abstract:

James Ross developed a simple and powerful argument for the immateriality of the intellect, an argument rooted in the Aristotelian-Scholastic tradition while drawing on ideas from analytic philosophers Saul Kripke, W. V. Quine, and Nelson Goodman.  This paper provides a detailed exposition and defense of the argument, filling out aspects that Ross left sketchy.  In particular, it elucidates the argument’s relationship to its Aristotelian-Scholastic and analytic antecedents, and to Kripke’s work especially; and it responds to objections or potential objections to be found in the work of contemporary writers like Peter Dillard, Robert Pasnau, Brian Leftow, and Paul Churchland.

Around the net

I’m a bit “Nagel-ed out” at the moment, but before long I’ll be writing up at least one or two more installments in my series of posts on Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos and its critics.  In the meantime, The New York Times has covered the controversy over the book, H. Allen Orr has reviewed the book in The New York Review of Books, and Mohan Matthen has reviewed it in The Philosopher’s Magazine.  In the blogosphere, we have commentary from Keith Burgess-Jackson and from Wes Alwan at The Partially Examined Life.  I’ll comment on some of this myself soon.

Stan Lee meets F. A. Hayek

Recently I’ve been reading Sean Howe’s terrific Marvel Comics: The Untold Story.  The broad outlines of the history of the company -- its origins in 1939 as part of Martin Goodman’s pulp magazine empire, its rise to dominance of the field beginning in the 1960s under writer and editor Stan Lee and his co-creation (with Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, and other artists) of now famous characters like the Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, the Avengers, and the X-Men, the company’s declaration of bankruptcy in the 1990s, its rebound and recent incorporation into the Disney empire -- have been recounted before.  But Howe’s book gives us a wealth of fascinating details (fascinating not only from a comic book geek point of view, but from a business point of view) that you won’t easily find elsewhere.

Upcoming lectures

As I announced last month, next week I’ll be in Oxford speaking on the theme “Aquinas and the Immaterial Aspects of Thought,” as part of the Blackfriars Aquinas Seminar.

On Saturday, March 2 I’ll be speaking in Lafayette, Louisiana at Our Lady of Wisdom Church and Catholic Student Center, near the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.  The title of the talk is “An Aristotelian Proof of the Existence of God.”  More information is available here.

Craig versus Rosenberg

Theist philosopher William Lane Craig debated atheist philosopher Alex Rosenberg at Purdue University on February 1.  You can watch the debate here.  I put forward my own detailed critique of Rosenberg’s book The Atheist’s Guide to Reality in a ten-part series of posts, of which you can find a roundup here.  As I’ve said before, one of Rosenberg’s strengths is that he is willing consistently to follow out the implications of scientism (however absurd and self-defeating, as we saw in the series of posts just referred to) in a way many other atheists do not.  Another is that, as this event indicates, he has (as a certain other prominent atheist famously appears not to have) the courage and intellectual honesty to debate the most formidable defenders of theism.

Metaphysical middle man

As I’ve noted many times (e.g. here), when a thinker like Aquinas describes God as the First Cause, what is meant is not merely “first” in a temporal sense, and not “first” in the sense of the cause that happens to come before the second, third, fourth, fifth, etc. causes, but rather “first” in the sense of having absolutely primal and underived causal power, of being that from which all other causes derive their efficacy.  Second causes are, accordingly, “second” not in the sense of coming later in time or merely happening to come next in a sequence, but rather in the sense of having causal power only in a secondary or derivative way.  They are like the moon, which gives light only insofar as it receives it from the sun.

The moon really does give light, though, and secondary causes really do have causal power.  To affirm God as First Cause is not to embrace the occasionalist position that only God ever really causes anything to happen.  Alfred Freddoso helpfully distinguishes between occasionalism, mere conservationism, and concurrentism.  Whereas the occasionalist attributes all causality to God, mere conservationism goes to the opposite extreme of holding that although God maintains things and their causal powers in being, they bring about their effects all by themselves.  Concurrentists like Aquinas take a middle ground position according to which secondary causes really have (contra occasionalism) genuine causal power, but in producing their effects still only ever act together with God as a “concurring” cause (contra mere conservationism).  To borrow an example from Freddoso, if you draw a square on a chalkboard with blue chalk, both you as primary cause and the chalk as secondary cause are joint causes of the effect -- you of there being any square there at all, the chalk of the square’s being blue.  God’s concurrence with the secondary, natural causes he sustains in being is analogous to that.

God and man at HuffPo

Over at The Huffington Post, Rabbi Adam Jacobs defends the cosmological argument for the existence of God, kindly citing yours truly and The Last Superstition.  Give it a read, then sit back and watch as the tsunami of clueless objections rolls into the combox.

Mumford on metaphysics

In another in a series of excellent interviews with contemporary philosophers, 3:AM Magazine’s witty and well-informed Richard Marshall talks to analytic metaphysician Stephen Mumford.  Mumford is an important and influential contributor to the current revival of interest in powers and dispositions as essential to understanding what science reveals to us about the natural world.  The notion of a power or disposition is closely related to what the Scholastics called a potency, and Mumford cites Aristotle and Aquinas as predecessors of the sort of view he defends.  Mumford’s notion of the “metaphysics of science” is also more or less identical to what modern Scholastic writers call the philosophy of nature.  But Mumford’s interest is motivated by issues in philosophy of science and metaphysics rather than natural theology.  The interview provides a useful basic, brief introduction to some of the issues that have arisen in the contemporary debate about powers.

Schliesser on the Evolutionary Argument against Naturalism

I commented recently on the remarks about Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos made by Eric Schliesser over at the New APPS blog.  Schliesser has now posted an interesting set of objections to Alvin Plantinga’s “Evolutionary Argument against Naturalism” (EAAN), which features in Nagel’s book.  Schliesser’s latest comments illustrate, I think, how very far one must move away from what Wilfred Sellars called the “manifest image” in order to try to respond to the most powerful objections to naturalism -- and how the result threatens naturalism with incoherence (as it does with Alex Rosenberg’s more extreme position).

Around the web

Still busy trying to meet a looming deadline and prepare for a conference next week, so expect posting to be light for a few more days.  In the meantime here some things worth checking out elsewhere.

Over at Forbes, science writer John Farrell, longtime friend of this blog, hails the “return of teleology” evident in Terrence Deacon’s recent book Incomplete Nature.  

3:AM Magazine interviews Cambridge philosopher Tim Crane, an atheist who discusses the positive role his Catholic upbringing had on his becoming a philosopher; the need for atheists to tolerate, try to understand, and even give special privileges to religion; the difficulties with physicalism; the Aristotelian notion of substance; the work of Jerry Fodor; Burkean conservatism; Stephen Hawking, physics, and philosophy; and lots of other interesting stuff.

Oerter on inertial motion and angels

Last week I linked to my paper “The Medieval Principle of Motion and the Modern Principle of Inertia,” which appears in Volume 10 of the Proceedings of the Society for Medieval Logic and Metaphysics.  The paper addresses the familiar claim that Newton’s law of inertia has undermined the argument of Aquinas’s First Way, which rests on the principle that whatever is in motion is moved by another -- or, to state it more precisely, the principle that any actualized potency is actualized by something already actual.  I argue that when Newton’s principle and Aquinas’s are properly understood, it is clear that the objection has no force and that those who raise it have not even managed to explain exactly what the conflict between Newton and Aquinas is supposed to be.

Blackfriars Aquinas Seminar

Readers in England might be interested to know that on February 14 I will be speaking at Blackfriars, Oxford University, as part of the Blackfriars Aquinas Seminar.  The title of the talk is “Aquinas and the Immaterial Aspects of Thought.”  Information about the Seminar can be found here.