Avicenna’s argument from contingency, Part II

In a previous post we looked at an outline of Avicenna’s argument from contingency for a Necessary Existent.  Suppose the argument does indeed establish that much.  Is there any good reason to identify the Necessary Existent with God?  Does Avicenna spring for any divine attributes?  You betcha.  Jon McGinnis’s book Avicenna, cited in the previous post, provides a useful overview of the relevant arguments.  I will summarize some of them briefly.

The Necessary Existent, Avicenna holds, must be unique.  For suppose there were two or more Necessary Existents.  Then each would have to have some aspect by which it differ s from the other -- something that this Necessary Existent has that that one does not.  In that case they would have to have parts.  But a thing that has parts is not necessary in itself, since it exists through its parts and would thus be necessary only through them.  Since the Necessary Existent is necessary in itself, it does not have parts, and thus lacks anything by which one Necessary Existent could even in principle differ from another.  So there cannot be more than one.

He refutes you thus

In the photo at left, Justice Anthony Kennedy presents his considered response to Plato’s Laws, Aquinas’s Summa Contra Gentiles, Kant’s Lectures on Ethics, and his own Catholic faith.  Asked to develop his argument in a little more detail, Justice Kennedy paused and then solemnly added: “I got lifetime tenure, beyotch.” 

Court observers expect that Justice Kennedy’s subtle reasoning, backed as it is by a sophisticated philosophy of language and philosophy of law, puts him in the running for the prestigious Ockham Award for Catholic Statesmanship.  Competition for that prize has, however, been particularly fierce of late.

Cash for Cajuns

You might recall that Our Lady of Wisdom Church and Catholic Student Center in Lafayette, Louisiana kindly hosted me for a lecture back in March.  The amount of good work these folks do under the leadership of Fr. Bryce Sibley is enormous.  The church needs to raise money to restore its convent.  Please consider making a donation.  Details can be found here.

Extraordinarily ordinary

There are no such things as tables, only “particles arranged tablewise.”  Or so say certain contemporary metaphysicians, who in the name of science deny the existence of the ordinary objects of our experience.  In her book Ordinary Objects, philosopher Amie Thomasson rebuts such arguments.  (Her work is part of a recent salutary trend, which includes Crawford Elder’s Familiar Objects and their Shadows and Kathrin Koslicki’s The Structure of Objects.)  Thomasson is interviewed over at 3:AM Magazine.

Geach on worshipping the right God

In his essay “On Worshipping the Right God” (available in his collection God and the Soul), Catholic philosopher Peter Geach argues that:

[W]e dare not be complacent about confused and erroneous thinking about God, in ourselves or in others.  If anybody’s thoughts about God are sufficiently confused and erroneous, then he will fail to be thinking about the true and living God at all; and just because God alone can draw the line, none of us is in a position to say that a given error is not serious enough to be harmful. (p. 112)

How harmful?  Well, if a worshipper is not even thinking about the true God, then he is not really worshipping the true God, but something else.  That’s pretty serious.  (I would add to Geach’s concern the consideration that atheistic objections to erroneous conceptions of God can lead people falsely to conclude that the notion of God as such is suspect.  That’s pretty serious too.)

Mind and Cosmos roundup

My series of posts on the critics of Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos has gotten a fair amount of attention.  Andrew Ferguson’s cover story on Nagel in The Weekly Standard, published when I was six posts into the series, kindly cited it as a “dazzling… tour de force rebutting Nagel’s critics.”  Now that the series is over it seems worthwhile gathering together the posts (along with some related materials) for easy future reference.

Nagel and his critics, Part X

It’s time at long last to bring my series of posts on the critics of Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos to a close, before it becomes a lot longer than the book itself.  There isn’t, in any event, much more to say about the naturalist critics, most of whom raise objections similar to those on which I’ve already commented.  But I’ve long intended to finish up the series with a post on reviewers coming at Nagel’s book from the other, theistic direction.  So let’s turn to what John Haldane, William Carroll, Alvin Plantinga, and J. P. Moreland have said about Mind and Cosmos.

Though objecting to materialist forms of naturalism, Nagel agrees with his naturalist critics in rejecting theism.  All of the reviewers I will comment on in this post think he does so too glibly.  Naturally, I agree with them.  However, as longtime readers of this blog know, the arguments and ideas often lumped together under the “theism” label are by no means all of a piece.  Thomists and other Scholastics develop their conception of God and arguments for his existence on metaphysical foundations derived from Aristotelian and Neoplatonic philosophy.  But most contemporary philosophers of religion do not, relying instead on metaphysical assumptions deriving from the modern empiricist and rationalist traditions which defined themselves in opposition to Aristotelianism and Scholasticism.  This is a difference that makes a difference in the reviews of Nagel now under consideration.  Haldane and Carroll, like me, are Thomists, and their approach to Nagel reflects that fact.  But the objections raised by Moreland and Plantinga are to a significant extent different from the sort a Thomist would make.

Body movin’, mind thinkin’

The human body is the best picture of the human soul.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations

We recall that John B. Watson did not claim that quite all thought was incipient speech; it was all incipient twitching of muscles, and mostly of speech muscles.

W. V. Quine, “Mind and Verbal Dispositions”

We're getting down computer action
Do the robotic satisfaction

Beastie Boys, “Body Movin’”

To perceive a human being behaving in certain characteristic ways just is to perceive him as thinking.  There are two ways to read such a claim: Quine’s and Watson’s reductionist way, and Wittgenstein’s anti-reductionist way.  The Beastie Boys, of course, were putting forward a computational-functionalist variation on Quinean behaviorism.  (OK, not really.  Just pretend.  It’s a better quote than any I could have gleaned from a functionalist philosopher.)

Naturalism in the news

On the subject of naturalism, Raymond Tallis opines in The Guardian, Massimo Pigliucci reports at Philosophy Now, and Daniel Dennett is interviewed at 3:AM Magazine.  James Ladyman, co-author of the influential Every Thing Must Go: Metaphysics Naturalized, gets a prominent mention in each piece.  Which gives me an excuse for some photoshopping fun (with apologies both to Ladyman and to Tim Meadows).

Mackie’s argument from queerness

In his book Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong, J. L. Mackie famously put forward his “argument from queerness” against the objectivity of moral values.  The argument has both a metaphysical aspect and an epistemological aspect.  Mackie writes:

If there were objective values, then they would be entities or qualities or relations of a very strange sort, utterly different from anything else in the universe.  Correspondingly, if we were aware of them, it would have to be by some special faculty of moral perception or intuition, utterly different from our ordinary ways of knowing everything else. (p. 38)

Mackie’s claim is that we simply have no good reason to believe either in such odd entities as objective values or in an odd special faculty of moral knowledge.  We can explain everything that needs to be explained vis-à-vis morality by analyzing values in terms of our subjective responses to certain events in the world, and Ockham’s razor favors this approach to the alternative given the latter’s “queerness.”

Hugon’s Cosmology

Editiones scholasticae is publishing an English translation of Cosmology, an important manual written by the Thomist philosopher and theologian Édouard Hugon (1867-1929).  The translation was made by Dr. Francisco Romero Carrasquillo (who also runs the blog Ite ad Thomam, a useful resource for those interested in Thomism).  The publisher’s description of the book can be found here.

Avicenna’s argument from contingency, Part I

The medieval Islamic philosopher Ibn Sina or Avicenna (c. 980 - 1037) is one among that myriad of thinkers of genius unjustly neglected by contemporary philosophers.  Useful recent studies of his thought include the updated edition of Lenn Goodman’s Avicenna and Jon McGinnis’s Avicenna.  More recent still is McGinnis’s essay “The Ultimate Why Question: Avicenna on Why God is Absolutely Necessary” in John F. Wippel, ed., The Ultimate Why Question: Why Is There Anything at All Rather than Nothing Whatsoever?  Among the topics of this essay is Avicenna’s version of the argument from contingency for the existence of a divine Necessary Existent.  Let’s take a look.

Neither nature alone nor grace alone

Since therefore grace does not destroy nature but perfects it, natural reason should minister to faith as the natural bent of the will ministers to charity… Hence sacred doctrine makes use also of the authority of philosophers in those questions in which they were able to know the truth by natural reason…

St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I.1.8

Here’s one way to think about the relationship between nature and grace, reason and faith, philosophy and revelation.  Natural theology and natural law are like a skeleton, and the moral and theological deliverances of divine revelation are like the flesh that hangs on the skeleton.  Just as neither skeleton alone nor flesh alone give you a complete human being, neither do nature alone nor grace alone give you the complete story about the human condition.

Nagel and his critics, Part IX

Returning to my series on the critics of Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos, let’s look at the recent Commonweal magazine symposium on the book.  The contributors are philosopher Gary Gutting, biologist Kenneth Miller, and physicist Stephen Barr.  I’ll remark on each contribution in turn.

Commonweal on Nagel

Commonweal magazine has published a symposium on Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos, to which physicist Stephen Barr, biologist Kenneth Miller, and philosopher Gary Gutting have contributed.  It’s temporarily available for free on the Commonweal website, here. 

Context isn’t everything

Natural law theory holds that a large and substantive body of moral knowledge can be had apart from divine revelation.  Natural theology holds that a large and substantive body of theological knowledge can be had apart from divine revelation.  Yet both secular and religious critics of natural law theory and natural theology sometimes accuse them of smuggling in the deliverances of revelation.  For example, theologian David Bentley Hart, in his recent attacks on natural law theory (to which I responded here, here, and here), seemed to take the view that natural law arguments implicitly presuppose revealed or supernatural truths.  Secular critics routinely accuse natural law theorists of rationalizing conclusions that they would never have arrived at if not for the teachings of the Bible or the Church.  Critics of the Scholastic tradition in philosophy sometimes accuse it of constructing metaphysical notions ad hoc, for the sake of advancing theological claims.  (My friend Bill Vallicella has made this complaint vis-à-vis the Scholastic notion of suppositum.)  In every case the objection is that if an idea has an origin in a purported source of divine revelation, its status as a purely philosophical thesis or argument is ipso facto suspect.

One of the problems with such objections is that they overlook the distinction between what Hans Reichenbach called the “context of discovery” and the “context of justification” -- a distinction he applied within the philosophy of science, but which has application in other contexts too.

Epstein on conspiracies

No one denies that conspiracies exist.  They occur every time two thugs decide to rob a liquor store together.  When people dismiss “conspiracy theories,” what they are dismissing is not the idea that bad people conspire, or that they do so in secret, or that these bad people are sometimes government officials.  Typically, what they are critical of is the sort of theory that postulates a conspiracy so overarching that the theory tends implicitly to undermine its own epistemological foundations, precisely by undermining the possibility of any sociopolitical knowledge at all -- something analogous to Cartesian skepticism in the sociopolitical context.

The theology of Prometheus

I’m afraid I’m very much a latecomer to the pretentious commentary party vis-à-vis Ridley Scott’s Prometheus, since I only saw the flick after it came out on Blu-ray and even then have been too preoccupied with other things of late to comment.  But it’s better than the reviews led me to believe, and worth a philosophical blog post.  Plus, I need to do something to keep this site from becoming The Official Thomas Nagel and David Bentley Hart Commentary Page and Message Boards.