Edward Feser's Blog, page 18

Quantum mechanics and the laws of thought

It isn’t news that much pop philosophy nonsense is peddled in the name of quantum mechanics.  Perhaps the best-known example is the claim that quantum mechanics refutes one or more of the traditional “laws of thought.”  The arguments are fallacious, but stubbornly persistent. 

The laws of thought are three:

1. The law of non-contradiction (LNC), which states that the statements p and not-p cannot both be true.  In symbolic notation: ~ (p • ~p)

2. The law of identity, which says that everything is identical with itself.  In symbolic notation, a = a

3. The law of excluded middle (LEM), which states that either p or not-p is true.  In symbolic notation: p V ~p

As philosophers often point out, the laws can be stated either in logical terms (i.e. in terms of propositions and their logical relationships) or in ontological terms (i.e. in terms of the things that propositions are about and their metaphysical relationships).  But the difference is irrelevant to the points I will be making, so I’ll ignore it for present purposes.

Skeptical silliness

The reason these are characterized as laws of thought is that reason, it is claimed, would not be possible at all if they were not true.  They are first principles of rationality in the sense that they are so basic to it that they are more obviously correct than any argument that could be given either for or against them.  Hence, it is claimed, even someone who claims to have reason to doubt or deny any of them must implicitly presuppose them in the very effort to question them.

Take LNC, which is commonly taken to be the most fundamental of the laws.  The traditional defense against would-be skeptics is that it simply cannot coherently be denied.  As Aristotle points out in the Metaphysics, to assert anything at all is to put it forward as true, and therefore not false.  But that includes the skeptic’s own statement that LNC is false.  In making this assertion, the skeptic is claiming that it is true, and therefore not false, that LNC is false.  If he weren’t, there’d be no disagreement between him and the defender of LNC.  But this itself presupposes LNC, so that the assertion is self-undermining.

Note that it misses the point to allege that the defender is begging the question by presupposing what is at issue.  For the point isn’t that the defender is presupposing what is at issue.  The point is that the critic himself is presupposing what is at issue.  It isn’t that the critic can coherently deny LNC even though the defender affirms it.  It is rather than the critic himself, no less than the defender, cannot avoid commitment to LNC.

Another way to see the incoherence of denying LNC is via the principle that from a contradiction, anything follows.  Here’s a common way to explain how.  Suppose that LNC is false, so that two propositions p and ~p are both true.  Then, by the rule of addition in propositional logic, we can infer from p that either p or q (i.e. p V q), where q can be any proposition at all (including the proposition that the denial of LNC is false).  By the rule of disjunctive syllogism, p V qand ~p will then together give us q.  Hence, from the denial of LNC, you can derive the falsity of the denial of LNC.  You will thereby have shown that the skeptic can be refuted from his own premise.  Again, skepticism about LNC is incoherent.

Things are a bit trickier with LEM, and there are also technical arguments by which some have nevertheless tried to challenge LNC.  I’m not going to get into all of that here.  Having given a sense of the traditional approach to defending the laws of thought, I’ll focus just on the objections from quantum mechanics, specifically.

Quantum conundrums

Consider the wave-particle duality phenomena exhibited in the famous double-slit experiment.  The same particles, the experiment shows, behave in both a wave-like manner and a particle-like manner.  But doesn’t this violate LNC?  In particular, doesn’t it show that something can be both a particle and at the same time a non-particle (because it’s also a wave)?  Or doesn’t it violate LEM, insofar as it shows that it is not true that something is either a particle or not a particle?  Or consider the famous thought experiment involving Schrödinger’s cat.  Doesn’t it violate LNC insofar as it shows that a cat can be both alive and dead at the same time?  Or doesn’t it violate LEM insofar as it implies that it is false to maintain that either the cat is alive or it is not alive?

Thus, it is claimed, modern physics shows that we need to revise classical logic, insofar as quantum mechanics has refuted these laws of thought.  Mind-blowing!

Well, not so fast.  The first point to make in response is that, here as in other contexts, people speak quite sloppily when they assert that “Quantum mechanics shows that...”  As philosopher of physics Peter Lewis notes in his book Quantum Ontology, when discussing quantum mechanics and its implications, we need to distinguish between (1) quantum phenomena, (2) quantum theory, and (3) alternative possible interpretations of quantum theory.  The phenomena observed in the two-slit experiment would be an example of quantum phenomena.  The mathematical representation of the physical systems central to quantum phenomena together with the laws said to govern those systems and the way their states are measured comprise quantum theory.  And Bohr’s Copenhagen interpretation, Bohm’s pilot wave interpretation, Everett’s many worlds interpretation, etc. would be alternative possible interpretations of quantum theory and quantum phenomena.

Now, if we’re talking about what quantum mechanics can actually be said to have shown, that is confined to categories (1) and (2).  We know that there are these odd phenomena, and the mathematical representation quantum theory gives us is the best description we have of the systems associated with those phenomena.  But the breathless pop philosophy claims made in the name of quantum mechanics typically appeal instead to ideas in category (3) – all of which are controversial at best.  None of them can be said to have been shown, or proved, or established by physics.

That includes claims to the effect that quantum mechanics has refuted the laws of thought.  It has done no such thing.  There is nothing in either quantum phenomena or quantum theory that entails that.  Rather, what has happened is that some people have proposed interpreting quantum phenomena and quantum theory in a way that gives up one or more of the laws of thought.  That’s all.  And even then, the interpretation is not a purely “scientific” interpretation of quantum mechanics, because none of the competing interpretations in category (3) is purely scientific.  All of them involve bringing certain philosophical assumptions to bear on the interpretation of quantum mechanics.  (For example, Bohr’s interpretation famously takes for granted an instrumentalist philosophy of science.)

The upshot of this is that revisions to the laws of thought can be read out of quantum mechanics only if they are first read into it.  And thus quantum mechanics itself does nothing at all to establish the plausibility of such a revision.  For anyproposed interpretation in category (3), we need to ask: What philosophical assumptions are independently known to be the most plausible, and thus suitable to guide us in deciding how to interpret quantum mechanics?  The traditional metaphysician would answer that the laws of thought are among these assumptions.  Those who would reject one or more of these laws would disagree, but the point is that they cannot appeal to quantum mechanics as a reason for doing so without begging the question.  Hence arguments from quantum mechanics for rejecting the laws of thought are ultimately circular. 

To address the specific examples cited, consider first Schrödinger’s famous thought experiment.  The first thing to say is that it is only a thought experiment, intended to call attention to some puzzling questions raised by the notion of a quantum superposition.  That’s it.  Anyone who says “Quantum mechanics shows that a cat can be alive and dead at the same time!” doesn’t know what he’s talking about.  You could try to argue that the cat would be both alive and dead at the same time.  Or you could try to argue that it would be neither alive nor dead.  But you could instead, with no less justification (indeed, I would say with far greater justification), argue that neither of these interpretations makes any sense.  And that is exactly what the traditional metaphysician argues, on the grounds that LNC and LEM cannot coherently be denied.  Absolutely nothing in “the science” itself shows otherwise. 

Same with the two-slit experiment.  What we can say with confidence is simply that there are some weird phenomena here.  But how to interpret them is another story.  Yes, there is something here that in some respects behaves in a wavelike way and in other respects in a particle-like way.  But by no means does that entail that it is, say, both a particle and not a particle at the same time, or that it is neither a particle nor a non-particle.  Here too, you could try to make the case that we should interpret what is going on in a way that rejects either LNC or LEM.  But you could with no less justification (indeed, I would say with far greater justification) hold instead that any such oddball interpretation is just a non-starter.  And once again, “the science” itself gives no reason whatsoever to doubt the soundness of this traditional metaphysical judgment.  (I discuss the philosophy of quantum mechanics in more detail in chapter 5 of Aristotle’s Revenge.)

Related posts:

Koons on Aristotle and quantum mechanics

Heisenberg on act and potency

Schrödinger, Democritus, and the paradox of materialism

Color holds and quantum theory

Causality and radioactive decay

Fallacies physicists fall for

 Why are (some) physicists so bad at philosophy?

Cartwright on theory and experiment in science

Nancy Cartwright’s A Philosopher Looks at Science is a new treatment of some of the longstanding themes of her work.  It is written in her characteristically agreeable style and full of insights.  The book is devoted to criticizing three widespread but erroneous assumptions about science: that science is essentially just theory plus experiment; that in some sense everything science tells us is reducible to physics; and that science reveals that everything that happens, including human action, is determined by the laws of physics.  In this post I’ll discuss what she says about the first of these claims, which is the subject of the first and longest chapter in the book.  I may devote a later post to the other claims.

The supposition that science amounts to theory plus experiment is, Cartwright observes, widespread among laymen, scientists, and philosophers alike.  The mathematically expressible kind of scientific theory, familiar from modern physics and enshrined in equations like F = ma, is taken to be the gold standard.  From such equations, it is thought, specific observable consequences are predicted, and the point of experimentation is to test these predictions.  And that’s basically it.  Except, as Cartwright shows, that isn’t it, not by a long shot.  In addition to theory and experimentation, there are models, narratives, diagrams, illustrations, concrete applications, and so on.  None of these is reducible to theory or experiment, and neither are they any less essential to the practice and content of science.  And when we take account of them, both science and the world it describes are seen to be far more complicated than the common conception of science and its results implies.

Theoretical concepts

Cartwright begins her analysis by noting that any theory is expressed in concepts, and that science aims for concepts with content that is both unambiguousand empirical.  As all philosophers of science know, it turns out to be very difficult to come up with a general account of how this is achieved.  Cartwright summarizes the familiar difficulties.  First of all, explicit definitions of theoretical terms are obviously of limited help when the definition is itself couched in yet further theoretical terms.  At some point we need to arrive at terms with clear empirical content.  But exactly how does that work?

Operationalism held that the solution was to define a theoretical concept in terms of some operation by which the scientist could measure the empirical phenomenon captured by the concept.  But there are several reasons why this won’t work.  For one thing, it entails reductionist analyses that we can independently know to be false.  Cartwright offers the example of behaviorism, which was an application of operationalism to psychology.  The behaviorist would define anger, for example, in terms of the observable behavior on the basis of which we would attribute anger to someone. 

Note that the implication of operationalism here is not just that we can know someone is angry by way of observing his behavior.  It is that there is nothing more to anger than the behavior.  Now, one problem with this claim is that it simply isn’t true.  A person could be angry without exhibiting the usual behavioral signs of anger, and could also exhibit those signs without actually being angry.  Hence anger is something more than the behavior.  Another problem is that it turns out even apart from that to be impossible entirely to analyze anger or any other mental state in entirely behavioral terms.  Suppose we say that “John is angry” means “John is disposed to raise his voice, frown, stomp his feet, etc.”  The trouble is that this sentence will be true only if John does not desire to hide his feelings.  But if we add a reference to the absence of this desire to our definition, we’ve now got a further mentalistic concept – desire – that needs to be given a behaviorist analysis.  And it turns out that to carry out such an analysis, we need to make reference to yet furthermental states, with those now needing a behaviorist analysis, and so on ad infinitum.  Hence the operationalist analysis cannot actually be carried out. 

A second problem with operationalism is that it has the false implication that there cannot be different empirical tests for the same concept.  For again, operationalism holds that there is nothing more to a concept than the operation by which we test its application.  Hence, if we have two different tests, we must be dealing with two different concepts.  But that’s absurd.  Take, for example, the concept of being round.  I can test whether something is round either by looking at it or by feeling it, and obviously it is one and the same concept I am applying in both cases.

A third problem, as Cartwright emphasizes, is that in actual scientific practice it often takes a lot of hard work and argumentation to show that a certain empirical test plausibly measures the reality captured by some scientific concept.  That could not be the case if there were nothing more to the concept than the empirical test.  It follows that there is more to theoretical concepts than what is captured by such tests, in which case operationalism is false.

Logical empiricism, as Cartwright notes, was another failed attempt to solve the problem.  The “logical” component of logical empiricism had to do with its application of modern formal logic to the formulation of scientific theories, e.g. as axiomatic systems from which theorems could be deduced.  The “empiricism” component had to do with the idea that the claims of a theory could be verified by observation.  Here too there are several problems. 

For one thing, exactly what counts as an observation?  Only what can be perceived by the naked eye (or the naked ear, the naked nose, etc.)?  Or do observations made using instruments count?  Furthermore, what exactly is it that we are observing – mind-independent physical objects, or sense data?  And are all scientific claims really verifiable in this way in the first place?  (See pp. 139-51 of my book Aristotle’s Revenge: The Metaphysical Foundations of Physical and Biological Science for detailed discussion of the intractable problems facing verificationism.)

It turns out that, just as the content of theoretical concepts outstrips what can be captured in an operational definition, so too, more generally, does it outstrip what is observable.  The content of concepts is given instead by the axioms of the theory in which they are embedded.  But the problem now, as Cartwright notes, is that such axioms are never sufficient to determine exactly what it is in the empirical world a theory is about.  Consider, again, the equation F = ma.  Considered just by itself, it tells us nothing more than that one quantity is equal to the product of two others.  And as Cartwright observes, this is true not only of the force, mass, and acceleration of a material object, but also of the area of a rectangle with respect to the length of its sides.  There is nothing in the equation itself that tells us which of these is its subject matter.  Of course, we could add further items to our set of axioms, such as Newton’s law of universal gravitation.  But no matter how many we add, there will always be alternative possible interpretations. 

(This issue is closely related to the epistemic structural realist thesis that physical theories reveal to us only the abstract structure of the physical world and not its intrinsic nature.  See chapter 3 of Aristotle’s Revenge for detailed discussion.)

Of course, in practice, scientists and the laymen who are familiar with their work don’t worry about such problems.  The reason is that, for one thing, when encountering an equation like F = ma, most people have at least in the backs of their minds the ordinary language usage of terms like “force,” “mass,” and “acceleration,” and thus naturally interpret the variables in light of them, even if they know that the variables aren’t meant to correspond exactly to our commonsense notions.  For another thing, they often apply the equation as a tool for carrying out very practical tasks, such as figuring out the speed of a ball hit by a tennis player (to borrow an example of Cartwright’s). 

But all of this comes from outside the theory itself, at least if we take the mathematics alone to be what is essential to theory as such.  Moreover, as Cartwright emphasizes, this utility of theory in practical applications does not entail that the world really is exactly the way the abstract theory represents it as being.  (She gives the well-known example of phlogiston theory, which was very useful predictively and technologically despite the fact that it turns out that there is no such thing as phlogiston.) 

I would emphasize a further point.  It is commonly assumed that scientific theory gives us a richer and more accurate representation of the world than common sense does, and indeed ought to replace the commonsense description of phenomena.  But as Cartwright’s argument indicates, this is the reverse of the truth.  For one thing, scientific theory in fact cannot even be given a determinate interpretation without some connection to the ordinary linguistic usage from which its concepts ultimately derive, and the concrete applications to which theory is put.  For another thing, what theory describes are really only abstract features of the world of common experience rather than that world in all its rich complexity.  That doesn’t necessarily entail that scientific theory should be given an instrumentalist rather than realist interpretation.  But it does support the epistemic structural realist view that, while what theory describes is really there in nature, it is very far from capturing everything that is there in nature.  (See Aristotle’s Revenge for detailed exposition and defense of this view.)

Beyond theory

Now, because of the way the actual applications of a theory often unconsciously determine how we interpret it, we can be blind to how much work is being done by the application and how little by the theory considered in isolation.  In particular, when we consider a theory in isolation, just in terms of its mathematical formulation, its concepts can seem very precise.  But a concrete application of the theory may nevertheless involve an interpretation of those concepts that is not so precise.  Yet it may retain its utility nonetheless, and retain it precisely because the concepts are being applied in a way that goes beyond the content of the theory itself.

The consequence of this is that scientists often end up supposing that precision is possible where really it is not.  Or, because a concept’s application may be susceptible of precision in one, limited domain, scientists can fallaciously suppose that it must be equally capable of precision when extended beyond that domain.  This is, Cartwright argues, especially likely in social science.  She gives as an example the notion of probability.  When we consider simple examples like pulling cards from a fair deck, the probabilities of various possible outcomes can be determined with precision.  But it simply doesn’t follow that we can meaningfully assign probabilities to events in general, and Cartwright thinks there are good reasons to suppose that this is not in fact possible. 

In particular, she notes that probabilities are determined relative to what Ian Hacking calls “chance set-ups.”  These are circumstances where both the possible outcomes and the processes that might lead to them can be fully specified, and where there are probabilities built into the situation at the start from which the probabilities we wish to calculate fall out logically.  Again, pulling cards from a fair deck would be an example.  But much of what happens in nature does not amount to a chance set-up in this sense.  For example, in the real world (as opposed to what Cartwright calls the “small world” representations that social scientists make use of) there often simply isn’t one relatively simple and fixed set of variables that might influence possible outcomes.

For this reason, Cartwright judges that much of what is said by social scientists about “effect sizes” when evaluating alternative policy proposals is poorly founded.  (Cartwright doesn’t mention the relevance of all this to arguments for various pandemic policies, criminal justice reforms, “equity-conscious” educational proposals, and other currently trendy issues, but it is obvious.  I leave the specifics as homework.)

In any event, in natural science and social science alike, Cartwright argues, theory is only ever brought to bear on the world by way of various intermediaries.  First of all, there are the idealized models by which we bring abstractions like the laws of physics to bear on concrete reality.  For example, when we apply Newton’s laws to the solar system, we do so by modeling the latter (in terms of a system of point masses orbiting a larger point mass, and so on).  In this way, our application of abstractions is mediated by further abstractions.  There are also the concrete narratives by which all of these abstractions are made intelligible.  (Think of the way that, in order to understand even a simple system like the solar system, we still have crudely to visualize large objects moving through space over time around other large objects; that in order to understand the implications of special relativity, we tell stories about twins traveling on rocket ships; and so on.)  Cartwright notes that diagrams, graphs, and illustrations also deeply influence how we interpret and apply theory.  Nor are these various intermediaries dispensable.  We simply couldn’t understand or make use of theories without them.

Finally, experimentation too, Cartwright argues, is a much more complex affair than is implied by the common notion that “science = theory + experiment.”  Experiment is often treated as if its only point is to test theory.  But that is not the case.  Sometimes experimentation is carried out even in the absence of any well-worked out theory, in an exploratory way that aims simply to see what will happen under various circumstances.  Sometimes experimentation createsnew phenomena that would otherwise not be observed – where, precisely because they have not otherwise been observed, no theory yet exists to account for them.  Sometimes experimentation reconstitutes phenomena in the sense of deeply altering our understanding of them, even in the absence of theoretical considerations.  And in all these cases, experimentation, like theory, depends on fixing the content of concepts, on models, and so on.

“Science ain’t an exact science”

I’ve mentioned already one of the implications I see in Cartwright’s discussion, viz. support for an epistemic structural realist interpretation of modern physics.  Here’s another.  It is a commonplace of modern philosophy of science that theory is underdeterminedby empirical evidence.  What that means is that for any body of empirical evidence, there are always alternative possible theories that are incompatible with each other but consistent with that evidence.  That does not entail that all theories are equally good, but only that considerations independent of both theory and empirical evidence are ultimately necessary in order to choose between theories.  Philosophers of science like Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend have also shown how extra-scientific considerations (of a philosophical sort, for example) play a crucial role in determining the outcome of scientific investigation.

The considerations raised by Cartwright greatly reinforce these judgments.  In particular, they reinforce the underdetermination of theory by evidence insofar as it isn’t just alternative theories that are compatible with the same empirical evidence.  There are also the alternative possible models, narratives, diagrams, etc. which mediate between theory and evidence.  And as with theories, so too with models, narratives, diagrams, etc., philosophical considerations no less than empirical ones can influence our judgments about what is within the range of respectable options, what is plausible all things considered, and so forth.

By no means does this entail that science is not a rational enterprise, any more than philosophy is not a rational enterprise.  What it does entail, though, is that the boundary between science and philosophy is much less sharp than is commonly supposed.  As I have argued at length elsewhere (including in Aristotle’s Revenge), much of what is today assumed to be “scientific” – the refusal to countenance irreducibly teleological explanations, the primary/secondary quality distinction, and so on – are really just contentious philosophical assumptions masquerading as empirical results.  And it is not possible to do science without making philosophical assumptions of some kind, which are bound to be controversial.

To borrow a line from the movie 12 Monkeys, “science ain’t an exact science.”  To be sure, there is an exactness in its purely mathematical aspects, but that is precisely because mathematical representations simply leave out all aspects of reality that don’t fit that exact mode of representation – which turns out to be quite a lot.  There are not only more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of by scientists, there is more to science itself than is dreamt of by them.

Related reading:

Dupré on the ideologizing of science

Scientism: America’s State Religion

The particle collection that fancied itself a physicist

Fallacies physicists fall for

One Long Circular Argument

Science and Scientism

Blinded by Scientism

Rosenberg roundup

Benedict XVI, Cardinal Pell, and criticism of Pope Francis

In the wake of the deaths of Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI and Cardinal George Pell, it has emerged that each of them raised serious criticisms of aspects of Pope Francis’s teaching and governance of the Church.  How might the pope respond to these criticisms?  As I have explained elsewhere, the Church explicitly teaches that even popes can under certain circumstances respectfully be criticized by the faithful.  Moreover, Pope Francis himself has explicitly said on several occasions that he welcomes criticism.  It seems clear that the criticisms raised by Benedict and Pell are precisely the kind that the pope should take the most seriously, given the teaching of the Church and his own views about the value of criticism.

First, what are the criticisms?  In the case of Benedict, we know about them via the new book written by Archbishop Georg Gänswein, who was the late pope’s longtime aide.  For one thing, Benedict had reservations about Pope Francis’s controversial exhortation Amoris Laetitia, and in particular was concerned that “a certain ambiguity had been allowed to hover in that document.”  And he was surprised that Pope Francis never answer the dubiaissued by four cardinals who were seeking to resolve these ambiguities.  For another thing, Benedict thought the restrictions imposed on the celebration of the Latin Mass by Pope Francis’s Traditionis Custodes were “a mistake” that “jeopardized the attempt at pacification” of traditionalists within the Church.  He also thought that Francis had misstated Benedict’s own intentions in giving wider permission for the Latin Mass in Summorum Pontificum.  Gänswein has said that Traditionis Custodes caused Benedict heartache. 

Cardinal Pell was far more blunt.  In the last article he wrote before his death, he criticized the current Synod on Synodality’s working document as “one of the most incoherent documents ever sent out from Rome,” a “toxic nightmare” full of “neo-Marxist jargon” and “hostile in significant ways to the apostolic tradition.”  But it has also been revealed that Pell was the author of an anonymous memo that circulated among the cardinals during Lent last year, critical of the current state of the Church.  Summing up teaching and governance under Pope Francis, the memo asserts that “commentators of every school, if for different reasons… agree that this pontificate is a disaster in many or most respects; a catastrophe.”  It then goes on to address in detail various doctrinal controversies, financial scandals, failures to support loyal Catholics and human rights in China and elsewhere, and needless alienation of traditionalists and others within the Church.

As I document in the article I referred to above, both the tradition of the Church and the recent teaching of the magisterium show that the clearest sort of case where a Catholic might respectfully raise criticisms of some papal statement or action is when it appears to conflict with binding past teaching.  Pope Francis can hardly disagree with this, for he has expressed a willingness to hear out challenges even to Church teaching itself.  In particular, in the exhortation Gaudete et Exsultate, he says that “doctrine, or better, our understanding and expression of it, is not a closed system, devoid of the dynamic capacity to pose questions, doubts, inquiries.” 

Now, if the faithful can raise questions, doubts, and inquiries even where expressions of Catholic doctrine are concerned, then a fortiori they can raise questions, doubts, and inquiries where apparent conflictswith Catholic doctrine are concerned.  For example, they can do so with respect to the problematic “ambiguity” in Amoris Laetitia referred to by Benedict XVI.  How could this possibly not be permissible, by Pope Francis’s own lights?  That is to say, how could it be permissible to “pose questions, doubts, inquiries” about perennial Catholic teaching on marriage and the Eucharist, but not permissible to pose them about a passage in a recent exhortation that fails clearly to reaffirm that traditional teaching?

Pope Francis has also more than once explicitly said that he personally can legitimately be criticized.  In 2015, in response to criticisms raised against some of his remarks on economic matters, the pope said:

I heard that there were some criticisms from the United States.  I heard about it, but I haven't read about it, I haven't had the time to study this well, because every criticism must be received, studied, and then dialogue must be [sic] ensue.  You ask me what I think.  If I have not had a dialogue with those who criticize, I don't have the right to state an opinion, isolated from dialogue, no?...

Yes, I must begin studying these criticisms, no?  And then dialogue a bit with this.

Similarly, in 2019, when asked about criticisms raised against him by American Catholic laymen, churchmen, and media outlets, Pope Francis said:

First of all, criticisms always help, always, when one receives a criticism, immediately he should make a self-critique and say this: to me, is it true or is it not true, until what point?   Of criticisms, I always see the advantages.  Sometimes you get angry, but the advantages are there…

Criticism is an element of construction and if your critic is not right, you [must be] prepared to receive the response and to dialogue, [to have] a discussion and arrive at a fair point…

A fair criticism is always well received, at least by me.

And through Vatican spokesman Matteo Bruni, the pope made it clear that “he always considers criticisms an honor, particularly when they come from authoritative thinkers.” 

The reference to “authoritative thinkers” calls to mind canon 212 of the Church’s Code of Canon Law, which affirms the right of Catholics publicly to express their opinions about matters affecting the Church, especially when they have relevant expertise.  The canon states:

The Christian faithful are free to make known to the pastors of the Church their needs, especially spiritual ones, and their desires.

According to the knowledge, competence, and prestige which they possess, they have the right and even at times the duty to manifest to the sacred pastors their opinion on matters which pertain to the good of the Church and to make their opinion known to the rest of the Christian faithful, without prejudice to the integrity of faith and morals, with reverence toward their pastors, and attentive to common advantage and the dignity of persons.

Now, apart from the pope himself, Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI and Cardinal Pell had about as much “knowledge, competence, and prestige” vis-à-vis ecclesiastical matters as it is possible for anyone in the Church to have.  Moreover, they had special expertise with respect to the specific matters they commented on.  Benedict was one of the most eminent Catholic theologians of the age, had been the longtime Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and, of course, had been pope himself.  He had also, in his younger days, flirted with the more liberal position on Holy Communion for the divorced and remarried that some think is reflected in Amoris, only to change his mind about it.  His opinion on that particular theological matter thus carries enormous weight.  So too does his opinion about liturgical matters and Vatican relations with traditionalist groups in the Church, about which he also had a longtime interest and special expertise, and which he dealt with extensively as head of CDF and as pope. 

Cardinal Pell, meanwhile, had a doctorate in church history, years of experience as an archbishop, and was a member of Pope Francis’s own Council of Cardinal Advisors.  He could be expected to know the current state of the Church, and how it compares to previous eras in Church history, as well as anyone.  He had also for years been Francis’s Prefect for the Secretariat for the Economy.  Thus, no one could speak with more authority about the financial matters addressed at length in the secret memo which he has now been revealed to have authored.

In short, if ever there were criticisms that Pope Francis and his defenders ought to take seriously and consider prayerfully, it would be those leveled by Benedict and Pell.  Let us pray that the Holy Father does so.

Related posts:

The Church permits criticism of popes under certain circumstances

Aquinas on St. Paul’s correction of St. Peter

When do popes teach infallibly?

Papal fallibility

More about All One in Christ

The latest on my book All One in Christ: A Catholic Critique of Racism and Critical Race Theory : I was interviewed about the book by Carl Olson on the Ignatius Press Podcast.  I was interviewed by Cy Kellett on Catholic Answers Focus.  I was interviewed by Ken Huck on the Meet the Author radio program.  Reviewing the book at Catholic World Report, Gregory Sullivan writes: “Among its many virtues, All One in Christ is a work of genuine argumentation.  Meticulous and temperate in stating the case he is critiquing, Feser dismantles CRT with his characteristic rigor.”  The Spectator included the book on its list of the best books of 2022.  The book is available in German translation, and was reviewed favorably by Sebastian Ostritsch in Die Tagespost.  Other reviews of and interviews about All One in Christ can be found here, here, here, and here.

Koons on Aristotle and quantum mechanics

My review of Robert Koons’s excellent new book Is St. Thomas’s Aristotelian Philosophy of Nature Obsolete? appears at Public Discourse. 

The wages of gin

My review of Jane Peyton’s The Philosophy of Gin appears in the Christmas 2022 issue of The Lamp magazine.

On the death of Pope Benedict XVI

I’m not sure when I first became aware of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who was later to become Pope Benedict XVI.  During my high school years in the early 80s, I had only a vague awareness of the doctrinal controversies roiling the Church.  I then knew little more than that they had something to do with liberal theologians and their opposition to Pope John Paul II.  My first clear memory of Ratzinger himself is from the very end of that decade, when I had left the Church and was on my way to becoming an atheist.  I read a magazine article about him and his work as the pope’s chief doctrinal officer.  The impression it left me with was of a man of deep learning and gravitas.  For some reason, what stood out especially was a remark of his quoted in the article, to the effect that a sound theology “cannot… act as if the history of thought only seriously began with Kant.”  (I later learned that this came from a lecture of his since reprinted as the third chapter of God’s Word: Scripture – Tradition – Office .)

There were, as this indicated, serious minds in the Church who affirmed the continuing validity of the premodern philosophical and theological worldview I was then questioning.  It would take more than a decade for me to see that they were right.  But when I did, Ratzinger proved a helpful guide.  His interview book Salt of the Earth was something I read when I began to consider coming back to the Catholic faith.  That and the earlier interview book The Ratzinger Report (which appeared in the middle of the 1980s but is still depressingly relevant) made clear what was going on in the Church.  They also made it clear that the pope had made a very wise decision in naming Ratzinger the Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.  On the one hand, he was highly intelligent and cultured, well-read in the modern ideas that informed contemporary hostility to Catholic teaching, and keen as far as possible to address them by way of rational persuasion.  On the other hand, he also had deep knowledge of and love for the tradition of the Church, and saw that the Church was nothing if she did not preserve and pass on that tradition whole and undefiled.

This combination of traits informed many of the policies and documents for which he was responsible as head of CDF and, later, as pope.  Donum Veritatis reaffirms in no uncertain terms the duty of Catholic theologians to teach in conformity with the tradition of the Church and the binding statements of the Magisterium.  At the same time, more than any previous official teaching document, it makes clear that there can be cases in which non-infallible magisterial acts can be deficient, and in which a faithful theologian can, accordingly, respectfully raise criticisms.  Given the ambiguities of several magisterial statements of recent years, the timing of Donum Veritatis seems providential.  In any event, and as I have discussed elsewhere, as head of CDF and as pope, Ratzinger was in reality the opposite of the “Panzer Cardinal” of self-serving liberal myth.  Disciplinary action was for him always a last resort, and mild even then.  His preferred approach was to engage even the Church’s harshest critics at the level of rational argumentation.

Again, though, fidelity to tradition was non-negotiable, and Ratzinger saw that only what he famously called a “hermeneutic of continuity” was consistent with the basic claims of Catholicism.  This hermeneutic even led him gently to criticize the direction the hierarchy had taken the Church in recent decades.  Though very much a man of Vatican II, he thought Gaudium et Spes too optimistic about the modern world.  He had reservations about Pope John Paul II’s interreligious prayer meeting in Assisi in 1986.  While condemning Archbishop Lefebvre’s disobedience in consecrating bishops without papal approval, Ratzinger acknowledged that those who followed Lefebvre had understandably been scandalized by the changes in the Church since the council.  He urged his fellow churchmen to take the concerns of traditionalists seriously:

[I]t is a duty for us to examine ourselves, as to what errors we have made, and which ones we are making even now…

[S]chisms can take place only when certain truths and certain values of the Christian faith are no longer lived and loved within the Church… It will not do to attribute everything to political motives, to nostalgia, or to cultural factors of minor importance…

For all these reasons, we ought to see this matter primarily as the occasion for an examination of conscience.  We should allow ourselves to ask fundamental questions, about the defects in the pastoral life of the Church, which are exposed by these events…

[W]e want to ask ourselves where there is lack of clarity in ourselves…

The Second Vatican Council has not been treated as a part of the entire living Tradition of the Church, but as an end of Tradition, a new start from zero.  The truth is that this particular council defined no dogma at all, and deliberately chose to remain on a modest level, as a merely pastoral council; and yet many treat it as though it had made itself into a sort of superdogma which takes away the importance of all the rest.

This idea is made stronger by things that are now happening.  That which previously was considered most holy – the form in which the liturgy was handed down – suddenly appears as the most forbidden of all things, the one thing that can safely be prohibited...

All this leads a great number of people to ask themselves if the Church of today is really the same as that of yesterday, or if they have changed it for something else without telling people.

His emphasis on combining fidelity to tradition and rational engagement with those who disagree continued after Ratzinger became Pope Benedict XVI, and is reflected in two of the great documents of his pontificate.  His homily of May 7, 2005 emphasizes that papal teaching authority exists for the sake of protecting the deposit of faith, rather than giving the man who happens to hold the office a means for implementing some personal theological agenda:

The Pope is not an absolute monarch whose thoughts and desires are law.  On the contrary: the Pope's ministry is a guarantee of obedience to Christ and to his Word.  He must not proclaim his own ideas, but rather constantly bind himself and the Church to obedience to God's Word, in the face of every attempt to adapt it or water it down, and every form of opportunism…

The Pope knows that in his important decisions, he is bound to the great community of faith of all times, to the binding interpretations that have developed throughout the Church's pilgrimage.  Thus, his power is not being above, but at the service of, the Word of God.  It is incumbent upon him to ensure that this Word continues to be present in its greatness and to resound in its purity, so that it is not torn to pieces by continuous changes in usage.

At the same time, in his famous 2006 Regensburg address, Benedict emphasized the centrality of reason to the Catholic faith and to the Christian conception of God, contrasting it sharply with the voluntarist tendency to see God as an unfathomable will who issues arbitrary commands.  He approvingly quotes Byzantine emperor Manuel II Palaeologus’s remark that “whoever would lead someone to faith needs the ability to speak well and to reason properly,” and endorses the emperor’s view that (as Benedict paraphrases Manuel) “not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God’s nature.”  The pope added:

[T]he faith of the Church has always insisted that between God and us, between his eternal Creator Spirit and our created reason there exists a real analogy… God does not become more divine when we push him away from us in a sheer, impenetrable voluntarism; rather, the truly divine God is the God who has revealed himself as logos… Consequently, Christian worship is… worship in harmony with the eternal Word and with our reason.

Needless to say, all of this makes for a sharp contrast with recent years in the Church, which have seen policies and magisterial statements whose continuity with tradition has in some cases been unclear, and which are backed not by any attempt at rational persuasion but rather appeal to the raw power of ecclesiastical office.

Like so many others, I was elated when Ratzinger was elected pope.  And like so many others, I was crestfallen when he abdicated.  Such a move was so grave that I felt certain at the time that his death must be imminent.  For why would he shirk his paternal responsibilities, unless he feared incapacitation of a kind that would make him strictly incapable of fulfilling them?  Yet as the years passed and he remained intellectually active, it became clear that that was not in fact what was going on.  And that made his decision not only more baffling, but also more heartbreaking.  In his inaugural sermon, Benedict famously asked Catholics to pray for him, that he would “not flee for fear of the wolves.”  And yet it has come to seem to many that that is precisely what he ended up doing.

I have always stopped short of making that judgment myself, simply because I don’t know all the facts and don’t know his heart – and because I have long had a deep affection for the man that makes me want to think the best.  Still, in my view, the story of our times, both in the world and in the Church, is more than anything else a story of men failing to live up to their duties as fathers, providers, protectors – and of the catastrophic consequences that follow when they fail.  And like many others, I find it difficult to evade the conclusion that the state into which the Church has fallen over the last decade would have been avoided had Benedict remained our spiritual father until death.

But again, I do not know that it is fair to blame him.  Even if it is, great men can have great flaws and still remain great men.  And Benedict XVI was a great man, who did enormous good for the Church.  Let us give thanks for him, and pray for his eternal rest.

Why did the Incarnation occur precisely when it did?

Why did the second Person of the Trinity become man two thousand years ago – rather than at the beginning of the human race, or near the end of the world, or at some other point in history?  The Christmas season is an especially appropriate time to consider this question.  And as is so often the case, St. Thomas Aquinas provides guidance for reflection.  He addresses the issue in the last two Articles of Question 1 of the Third Part of the Summa Theologiae.

No sin, no Incarnation

In order to understand his explanation, it is important to consider what he says earlier in the Question, in Article 3, about the issue of whether God would have become incarnate had the human race not fallen into sin.  Aquinas answers in the negative.  Though God could have done so, Aquinas says, he would not have.  Scripture so emphasizes the theme that the Incarnation occurred as a remedy for sin that the natural conclusion to draw, in Aquinas’s view, is that there would have been no need for it otherwise.  Elaborating on the point, Aquinas says that in falling into sin, man “stooped to corporeal things” instead of rising up to God, and that this is what made it fitting for God to become corporeal so as to raise man back up again. 

Now, why exactly is this fitting?  Yet earlier in the Question, in Article 1, Aquinas emphasizes that “the very nature of God is goodness… [and] it belongs to the essence of goodness to communicate itself to others.”  And out of his goodness, says Aquinas, God “did not despise the weakness of His own handiwork.”  The idea seems to be that sin has exposed us to the weaknesses entailed by corporeality (from which we would have been protected had our first parents obeyed).  To restore us to strength, God in his goodness imparts himself to us by becoming a member of the human race and thereby taking on corporeality. 

Exactly how this strengthens us is elaborated on in turn in Article 2, wherein Aquinas makes a number of points.  For one thing, the Incarnation aids us in disentangling ourselves from the evil in which we’ve become enmeshed.  For that God has taken on our nature and the devil has not helps us to come to prefer the former to the latter.  And by underlining the dignity of human nature, the Incarnation prompts us to avoid sullying that nature with further sin.  Moreover, Christ’s innocence encourages us away from the sin of presumption, and his humility encourages us away from pride.  And of course, his sacrifice on the cross makes satisfaction for our guilt.

For another thing, the Incarnation positively aids us in pursuing what is good, in several ways.  By speaking to us directly, as a human being himself, God makes the truths of revelation better known to us, thereby fostering the theological virtue of faith.  By taking on our nature he also shows the depth of his love for us, thereby fostering the virtue of hope.  Insofar as this prompts us to love God in return, it also fosters in us the virtue of charity.  By living a perfect life, Christ sets an example of how we ought to live.  By uniting divinity and humanity in himself, he reveals something of the supernatural end of the beatific vision, which also involves such a union (albeit not in exactly the same way).

Not too soon

In these ways, then, the aim of the Incarnation was to remedy the sin into which the human race has fallen.  But now Aquinas goes on to argue that to realize this aim, it was best that the Incarnation occurred just when it did, rather than closer to either the beginning or the end of human history.

In Article 5, he proposes several reasons why it was not fitting for the Incarnation to occur soon after the fall of our first parents.  First of all, in order for human beings to understand the need for the Incarnation, it was necessary for them to perceive the inadequacy of their natural powers and their desperate need for special divine assistance.  And only when “the disease gained strength” was that possible.  The idea here is that the dire ramifications and intractability of sin are fully manifest only after many generations have passed.

Second, we tend (by nature, Aquinas seems to be saying) to arrive at perfection only from imperfection, and to understand the spiritual only after understanding the natural.  Putting the Incarnation at the beginning of human history rather than later in the story would be contrary to this order of things.  Third, with the Incarnation as with the arrival of the merely human dignitaries we are familiar with in everyday experience, it is fitting that the event be preceded by heralds.    

Aquinas does not elaborate, but it seems to me that what he is driving at is the need for what is traditionally referred to as the praeparatio evangelica or “preparation for the Gospel.”  The Incarnation could not properly be understood just at any old time or location.  Rather, the right cultural preconditions had to be in place.  Consider that, as St. Paul famously noted, the notion of God incarnate dying on the cross was a stumbling block for the Jews, and seemed foolishness to the Greeks (1 Corinthians 1:23).  To be sure, it is not in fact foolishness and should not have been a stumbling block.  But there is a sense in which it is precisely because the Jews and many of the Greeks had a proper understanding of the divine that it seemed to be both.

It is clear enough why a Jewish audience of the day would be scandalized by the doctrine.  A commitment to God’s unicity and absolute distinctness from the creation had been cemented into the psychology of the people of Israel over the course of centuries, as a long series of prophets and divine punishments gradually purged the nation of any vestige of idolatry.  The claim that there are three Persons in the one God, and that one of them took on flesh and died on a cross, was therefore bound to be shocking.  But these ideas would not have been properly understood if they were not shocking.  If God is one, how can he be tripersonal?  If he is the creator of the material world, how could he take on flesh?  It was essential that the Jewish people, the first recipients of the Gospel, understood that however these doctrines are to be spelled out, they are not to be interpreted in terms of the idea that the God of Israel is merely part of some pantheon of corporeal deities – as they very easily would have been interpreted had a horror of idolatry not taken deep root among the Jewish people by the first century AD.  And inculcating such a horror was part of the point of the establishment of the ancient nation of Israel and the law given through Moses.

Now, the Gentiles too needed a proper conception of the divine nature if they were correctly to understand the central claims of Christianity once it was propagated beyond its original Jewish context.  Suppose your understanding of the divine were molded entirely by stories about the gods of Olympus, or by myths about dying deities like Adonis, Attis, Osiris, or Dionysus.  Then the Trinity will sound like just another pantheon, the virginal conception of Jesus will be interpreted as comparable to Zeus’s impregnation of various mortal women, and the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus will be reminiscent of a dying and rising fertility god.  In other words, they will seem to be mere variations on familiar pagan themes.  However, if instead you conceive of God as the purely actual prime unmoved mover of the world (as in Aristotelianism), or as the non-composite One from which all else derives (as in Neo-Platonism), then the claims of Christianity will sound as shocking as they did to the Jews of the first century.  How could that which is pure actuality take on flesh and suffer?  How could that which is utterly simple or non-composite be three divine Persons? 

Again, these central claims of Christianity, properly understood, are in fact neither scandalous nor foolish.  The point, though, is that they are so subtle and difficult – and indeed, they are mysteries in the sense that we could not have learned of them apart from special divine revelation – that a proper initial understanding of them shouldbe jarring.  If it were not, that would likely reflect some serious misinterpretation (as the later Christological heresies do).

A last consideration Aquinas gives in Article 5 is that faith and charity tend to wane over time, and indeed it is foretold that they will wane especially in the last days.  Hence it was important that the Incarnation not occur too early in human history, lest its benefits become inaccessible too soon.  But this brings us to Aquinas’s treatment of the question of why the Incarnation did not occur later in history.

Not too late

In Article 6, Aquinas explains why the Incarnation was not put off until the end of the world (as it might seem it should have been, given the considerations adduced in the previous Article).  Once again he makes several points, and the first is, I think, most easily explained in terms of the language of efficient and final causes (though Aquinas himself does not here use those terms).  As he said in the previous article, because with human beings imperfection precedes perfection, it was fitting that the perfection of the Incarnation be preceded by the imperfection of human history between the fall of our first parents and the time of Christ.  Now, you might think of the Incarnation as the final cause or end toward which that history pointed.  And in our experience, the realization of an end or final cause comes later in time than the processes that lead to it.

However, the Incarnation is also an efficientcause of our perfection.  And in our experience, efficient causes typically come beforetheir effects (even if, as the metaphysician knows, some efficient causes operate simultaneously with their effects, and God’s causality is altogether atemporal).  Hence, in order for us to be able to understand the Incarnation as a final cause, it was fitting that it not occur too early in human history.  But in order for us to be able to understand it also as an efficient cause, it was fitting that it not occur too late in human history – that we be able to observe its effects in the foundation of the Church and spreading of the Gospel in the centuries after the time of Christ.  (Anyway, this is, again, my own explanation of what Aquinas is getting at in his first point.)

Another point Aquinas makes (his third, actually, but I’ll treat them out of order) is that it is fitting that human beings be saved by faith in something past as well as by faith in something future.  He does not elaborate, but I’d propose doing so as follows.  Faith involves trusting the testimony of divine authority concerning matters that are usually not otherwise knowable to us.  Now, sometimes things are not knowable to us because they are in the future, to which we have no access.  But sometimes they are not knowable to us because they are past, and the past is also something to which we have no access, or at least no direct access.  Hence, Aquinas seems to be saying, it is fitting that faith involves matters of the latter sort as well as the former sort.  And the Incarnation’s being a past event (which it could not have been if it occurred at the end of the world) makes it possible for it to be among the things we know by faith in what God has done in the past.  (For those who lived before the Incarnation, of course, it would have been something they would know by faith in what is future.)

The remaining (and in my view more interesting) point made by Aquinas is this.  There is a tendency toward decline in human history, such that “men's knowledge of God [begins] to grow dim and their morals lax.”  This is why God had to send a succession of prophets to restore things, such as Abraham and Moses – and, finally, Christ, who effected a much greater restoration precisely by virtue of his Incarnation.  “But if this remedy had been put off till the end of the world,” Aquinas says, “all knowledge and reverence of God and all uprightness of morals would have been swept away from the earth.”

The idea seems to be that the effects of original sin are so profound that without the Incarnation, even a succession of prophets would provide only temporary respite, and the human race would eventually sink into complete darkness and depravity unprecedented even in the history of the world prior to Christ.  As it is, Christian teaching is that a period of such darkness and depravity will indeed occur prior to the end of the world.  But it will occur precisely as a result of apostasy from the faith.  And Aquinas’s point seems to be that it would have occurred sooner, or would have occurred without the intervening period of illumination provided by Christian teaching, had the Incarnation not happened when it did.

Just how bad things would have been is indicated by another remark Aquinas makes, to the effect that God “came when He knew it was fitting to succor, and when His boons would be welcome.”  Perhaps what Aquinas means is that had the Incarnation occurred much later, then the human race would have become so extremely corrupt that the Incarnation would simply not have been accepted.  Of course, prophets are typically resisted, but not by everyone, which is why they go on to be revered and their message has an impact at least after their deaths.  But the implication of Aquinas’s remarks may be that had the Incarnation been put off too long, human minds and wills would have been so thoroughly corrupted that it would have been of no effect.  A chilling thought, that – and also an indicator of how depraved human beings will become in the great apostasy predicted for the last days.

Further reading:

Putting the Cross back into Christmas

Christmas every day

The still, small voice of Christmas

When do popes teach infallibly?

It is well-known that the Catholic Church teaches that popes are infallible when they speak ex cathedra or exercise their extraordinary magisterium.  What that means is that if a pope formally presents some teaching in a manner intended to be definitive and absolutely binding, he is prevented by divine assistance from falling into error.  The ordinary magisterium of the Church, and the pope when exercising it, are also infallible when they simply reiterate some doctrine that has been consistently taught for centuries.  (Elsewhere, I’ve discussed the criteria for determining whether some such doctrine has been taught infallibly.)  Even when papal teaching on faith and morals is not presented in a definitive and absolutely binding way, assent is normally required of Catholics.  (The rare exceptions are something I’ve also addressed elsewhere.)

Is papal teaching on faith and morals alwaysinfallible, even when not presented either ex cathedra or as a mere reiteration of teaching independently known to be infallible?  The Church has not only never claimed this, but deliberately stopped short of claiming it when affirming papal infallibility at the First Vatican Council (despite the fact that some at the time were pushing for this stronger claim).  Hence, that popes are not infallible when not teaching in the manner I’ve described is commonly acknowledged by theologians and churchmen (and, it is worth noting, by traditionalists, conservatives, and liberals alike).  Yet in recent years, some overenthusiastic admirers of Pope Francis, keen to defend his more controversial remarks, have argued for the stronger claim.  For example, Stephen Walford and Emmett O’Regan have asserted that all papal teaching on faith and morals is protected from error, even when not presented in a definitive manner.

But there are two problems with this view.  First, there are no good arguments for it.  Second, there are decisive arguments against it.  Let’s consider these points in turn.

Walford’s and O’Regan’s confusions

In defense of the stronger claim, Walford appeals to several papal statements.  But none of them shows what he claims it does.  For example, he cites a passage from a homily of Pope Benedict XVI that describes papal authority in a very general way, but does not even address the question of whether a pope always speaks infallibly.  He cites a passage from Pius IX that affirms that Catholics ought to submit to papal teaching even when it is not presented in a definitive manner, but Pius too does not there even address the question of whether a pope always speaks infallibly.  Whether a teaching is infallible and whether it is owed assent are, again, separate questions.

The closest Walford gets to a papal remark that might seem to support his case is Pope Innocent III’s statement that “the Lord clearly intimates that Peter’s successors will never at any time deviate from the Catholic faith.”  But Walford himself immediately goes on to admit that it cannot literally be the case that popes “will never at any time” teach error, and cites the famous example of the medieval pope John XXII’s having taught error vis-à-vis the particular judgment.  Walford emphasizes that John held these erroneous views in his capacity as a private theologian (though it is important to note that John did express them publicly in sermons).  What matters for present purposes, though, is that by Walford’s own admission, Pope Innocent’s remark needs qualification.  Now, as already noted, the standard qualification would be that popes can err when neither speaking ex cathedra nor, in their ordinary magisterium, merely reiterating teaching already independently known to be infallible.  And Walford gives no argument for qualifying it in some other way.

Walford also cites this remark from Pope St. John Paul II:

Alongside this infallibility of ex cathedra definitions, there is the charism of the Holy Spirit’s assistance, granted to Peter and his successors so that they would not err in matters of faith and morals, but rather shed great light on the Christian people.  This charism is not limited to exceptional cases.

But this passage too simply fails to show what Walford thinks it does.  John Paul merely says that infallibility can extend beyond the exceptional case of ex cathedra statements, and as I have already acknowledged, a pope’s exercise of the ordinary magisterium can also be infallible when it involves reiterating doctrines consistently taught by the Church for centuries.  But John Paul II did not say, and it does not follow, that infallibility extends to absolutely every statement a pope makes about faith or morals.

O’Regan’s case is, in anything, even weaker than Walford’s.  His opening paragraph appears to suggest that popes are “protect[ed]… from erring in matters pertaining to faith and morals” even in “non-definitive, non-infallible teachings of the ordinary Magisterium.”  This would amount to the thesis that non-infallible teaching is infallible, which is, of course, a self-contradiction.  Not a promising start. 

O’Regan’s argument is that even if the Church’s explicit teaching on papal infallibility does not by itself entail that absolutely every papal statement pertaining to faith and morals (even non-ex cathedraones) must be free of error, this conclusion nevertheless follows from another Catholic doctrine, namely the teaching on the indefectibility of the Church.  He quotes from the Catholic Encyclopedia’s exposition of this doctrine, which says, among other things, that the Church “can never become corrupt in faith or in morals” and that “the Church, in defining the truths of revelation [could not] err in the smallest point.”

But, like the passages cited by Walford, this one simply does not show what O’Regan thinks it does.  What the Catholic Encyclopedia says is that the Church cannot err when “defining” a truth of revelation.  What this means is that it is protected from error when it puts forward some teaching in a solemn and definitive manner (as it does in the decrees of an ecumenical council, or through an ex cathedra papal definition).  The claim is not that absolutely every magisterial statement, including those of a less solemn and definitive nature, will be free of error.  Nor does the doctrine of the Church’s indefectibility imply that.  Certainly O’Regan does nothing to show otherwise (as opposed to merely assertingotherwise).

Like Walford, O’Regan draws fallacious inferences from the passages from Innocent III and John Paul II referred to above.  And like Walford, O’Regan quotes at length from various magisterial passages that expound on papal authority in a general way, but simply do not address the specific question at hand, viz. whether papal statements on faith and morals must in absolutely allcircumstances be free of error.  Worse, O’Regan’s rambling article also contains remarks that undermine his case.  He writes:

It is necessary for the ordinary Magisterium to be ready to meet the ever-changing needs of the Church throughout the vicissitudes of history… As such, the ordinary Magisterium is permanently open to refinement and doctrinal development, and is not limited to merely repeat judgments which have been fixed firmly in the past. This confusion seems to arise from a failure to distinguish between the infallible teachings of the extraordinary and ordinary and universal Magisterium (which are in themselves irreformable), and the everyday non-infallible teachings of the ordinary Magisterium, which by their very nature, must remain reformable in order to meet whatever different circumstances may arise throughout the constantly shifting environments of Church history.

Now, if a teaching is “reformable,” then it must be possible for it to be erroneous.  In which case, O’Regan is here acknowledging that errors in at least some kinds of magisterial teaching are compatible with the Church’s claim to indefectibility.  But in that case, the appeal to indefectibility can hardly by itself show that papal statements pertaining to faith and morals are guaranteed to be free of error in absolutely all circumstances (rather than only when a pope speaks ex cathedraor reaffirms traditional teaching independently known to be infallible).

The actual teaching of the Church

So, Walford and O’Regan fail to make their case.  Meanwhile, the case for the contrary view – to the effect that it is possible for popes to err when neither teaching ex cathedra nor reiterating the consistent teaching of centuries – is, I maintain, decisive.  There are three main sets of considerations that show this:

1. The qualifications on infallibility:

When the First Vatican Council solemnly proclaimed the dogma of papal infallibility, it confined itself to asserting that popes are infallible when teaching ex cathedra, specifically.  It did not go beyond that, even though some at the time favored its doing so.  Similarly, the Second Vatican Council, in Lumen Gentium, says that popes are infallible when putting forward some teaching in a definitiveway.  Some might note that the relevant passages don’t explicitly deny that papal teaching on faith and morals is infallible even apart from ex cathedra or definitive statements, but that is beside the point.  What matters is that the Church does not herself teach the extreme position that Walford and O’Regan affirm.  It is at best a theological opinion, rather than a doctrine in any way binding on Catholics.

Moreover, taking the view that papal error is indeed possible outside of ex cathedra statements is permitted by the Church, and is explicitly taught in approved theological works of undeniable orthodoxy from the period before Vatican II.  For example, Van Noort’s Dogmatic Theology, Volume II: Christ’s Church, after noting the qualifications on papal infallibility, says:

Thus far we have been discussing Catholic teaching.  It may be useful to add a few points about purely theological opinions – opinions with regard to the pope when he is not speaking ex cathedra.  All theologians admit that the pope can make a mistake in matters of faith and morals when so speaking: either by proposing a false opinion in a matter not yet defined, or by innocently differing from some doctrine already defined.  Theologians disagree, however, over the question of whether the pope can become a formal heretic by stubbornly clinging to an error in a matter already defined.  The more probable and respectful opinion, followed by Suarez, Bellarmine and many others, holds that just as God has not till this day ever permitted such a thing to happen, so too he never will permit a pope to become a formal and public heretic.  Still, some competent theologians do concede that the pope when not speaking ex cathedra could fall into formal heresy. (p. 294)

Similarly, Ott’s Fundamentals of Catholic Dogmastates:

With regard to the doctrinal teaching of the Church it must be well noted that not all the assertions of the Teaching Authority of the Church on questions of Faith and morals are infallible and consequently irrevocable.  Only those are infallible which emanate from General Councils representing the whole episcopate and the Papal Decisions Ex Cathedra... The ordinary and usual form of the Papal teaching activity is not infallible.  Further, the decisions of the Roman Congregations (Holy Office, Bible Commission) are not infallible.

Nevertheless normally they are to be accepted with an inner assent which is based on the high supernatural authority of the Holy See… The so-called "silentium obsequiosum," that is "reverent silence," does not generally suffice.  By way of exception, the obligation of inner agreement may cease if a competent expert, after a renewed scientific investigation of all grounds, arrives at the positive conviction that the decision rests on an error. (p. 10)

Some will no doubt respond by pointing out that works like Van Noort’s and Ott’s are not themselves official magisterial documents.  That is true, but beside the point.  What matters is that such works were ecclesiastically approved and widely used for the education of priests and theologians in an era when the Church’s emphasis on papal doctrinal authority was perhaps stronger than it ever had been.  Yet they explicitly reject the extreme position later defended by writers like Walford and O’Regan.  They could not have done so if the Walford/O’Regan view really were the teaching of the Church.

(It is worth adding, by the way, vis-à-vis Van Noort’s remarks about Bellarmine and Suarez, that those eminent theologians did in fact allow that a pope’s falling into even formal heresy when not teaching ex cathedra could at least in theory occur.  They simply judged this too extremely improbable to consider it a live possibility.)

2. Magisterial teaching that contradicts the Walford/O’Regan view:

As it happens, though, it isn’t just that the Church does not teach what Walford and O’Regan say it does, and that the opposite view is permitted.  There are also magisterial statements that positively conflict with the view defended by Walford and O’Regan.

For example, Donum Veritatis, issued under Pope St. John Paul II, explicitly allows that there can be cases where non-definitive magisterial statements “might not be free from all deficiencies” and in some cases may even be open to respectful and tentative criticism by theologians.  (I have discussed this document in detail elsewhereand won’t repeat here what I’ve already said there.)

We saw above how Walford and O’Regan appeal to a statement by Pope Innocent III in defense of their position.  But that particular pope also taught something that points in precisely the opposite direction, when he said: “Only on account of a sin committed against the faith can I be judged by the church” (quoted in J. Michael Miller, The Shepherd and the Rock: Origins, Development, and Mission of the Papacy, at p. 292).  Now, to sin against the faith would be to teach error on some matter of faith or morals.  Hence Innocent III was teaching that it is possible for such error to occur (when a pope is not teaching in a definitive way).  Here Innocent was simply acknowledging a principle already recognized in Gratian’s codification of canon law, and as Christian Washburn has noted in a recent article, two later popes (Innocent IV and Paul IV) made similar statements.

Now, if Walford and O’Regan accept this teaching of Pope Innocent, then they will have to give up their position.  But suppose they hold instead that Innocent was simply mistaken about this.  In that case too, they will have to give up their position.  For if Innocent was wrong to hold that a pope could err when teaching non-definitively on some matter pertaining to faith and morals, then this would itself be an error on his part on a matter pertaining to faith and morals!  In which case, Walford and O’Regan will have to admit that popes can commit such errors when speaking in a non-definitive way.  So, whether they accept Innocent’s teaching or reject it, either way they will have to give up their own position.

There’s yet more irony.  Pope Francis teaches in Gaudete et Exsultate that “doctrine, or better, our understanding and expression of it, is not a closed system, devoid of the dynamic capacity to pose questions, doubts, inquiries.”  Now, if it can sometimes be legitimate to question and doubt doctrines or expressions of doctrine, then that entails that there can be at least some cases where doctrine or its expression could be in error.  For how could it ever be legitimate to doubt or question it otherwise?  But then Pope Francis’s own teaching contradicts the extreme position Walford and O’Regan put forward precisely in his defense!  Hence, if they accept that teaching, they will have to give up their position.  But suppose that Walford and O’Regan were instead to judge that Pope Francis was mistaken here.  In that case too, they would have to give up their position.  For if the pope is mistaken here, then it is an error pertaining to faith and morals.  And in that case, Pope Francis’s teaching would itself be an instance of a pope teaching such error when not speaking ex cathedra.  Either way, then, Pope Francis’s own teaching refutes the position taken by Walford and O’Regan.

3. Historical examples of erroneous papal statements:

But it gets even worse than that for Walford and O’Regan.  For it’s not just that popes might, in theory, err on a matter of faith or morals when not speaking ex cathedra.  It’s that this has in fact happened, albeit in only a handful of cases.  As already noted, even Walford admits that John XXII erred (and Walford fails to explain why the qualification this requires him to make to his position does not entirely undermine it).  But the most spectacular example is that of Pope Honorius, whose ambiguous words at the very least gave aid and comfort to the Monothelite heresy.  And two papally-approved councils of the Church accused him of worse than that, insofar as they condemned him for holding to this doctrinal error himself.  (I have discussed the case of Honorius in detail hereand here.)

Now, if Walford and O’Regan accept these councils’ characterization of Honorius’s views, then they will have to give up their position, since that would be to acknowledge that popes can err when not speaking ex cathedra.  But suppose instead that Walford and O’Regan were to claim that the councils in question erroneously characterized Honorius’s position.  Then, in that case too, they will have to give up their position.  For, again, the councils in question were ratified by popes.  The popes in question thus implicitly affirmed that a pope (such as Honorius) could err when not speaking ex cathedra.  If these popes were wrong about that, then they erred.  Either way, then, Walford and O’Regan will have to give up the position that popes cannot err even when not speaking ex cathedra. 

So, not only are there no good arguments for the extreme position defended by Walford and O’Regan, but it turns out to be incoherent.  To get around the various pieces of counterevidence I’ve set out, Walford and O’Regan would have to attribute error to popes precisely in the course of trying to show that popes can never err.

Related reading:

The Church permits criticism of popes under certain circumstances

Aquinas on St. Paul’s correction of St. Peter

Papal fallibility

The error and condemnation of Pope Honorius

Can Pope Honorius be defended?

The strange case of Pope Vigilius

Two popes and idolatry

Pope Victor redux?

Denial flows into the Tiber

Is God’s existence a “hypothesis”?

Over at Twitter I’ve caused some annoyance by objecting to the phrase “the God hypothesis.”  The context was a discussion of Stephen Meyer’s book Return of the God Hypothesis: Three Scientific Discoveries That Reveal the Mind Behind the Universe .  My view is that to present theism as a “hypothesis” that might be confirmed by scientific findings is at best irrelevant to actually establishing God’s existence and at worst harmful insofar as it insinuates serious misunderstandings of the nature of God and his relationship to the world.  Since Twitter is not a medium conducive to detailed and nuanced exposition, here is a post explaining at greater length what I mean. 

First, what is a hypothesis?  Wuellner’s Dictionary of Scholastic Philosophyprovides a useful first approximation:

hypothesis, n. a conditional or provisional explanation of observed facts or of their connection with each other; a tentative explanation suggestive of further experiment and verification.

“Conditional,” “provisional,” and “tentative” are crucial terms here, but I hasten to emphasize that I am not objecting to someone’s taking a conditional, provisional, or tentative attitude as such.  Suppose, for example, that someone said that he was contemplating Aquinas’s First Way or Leibniz’s cosmological argument, and so far was willing to accept them provisionally or tentatively but was not certain that they were successful proofs.  Am I claiming that such a person must be guilty of a misunderstanding of the nature of God or his relationship to the world?  Not at all, even though I personally think both those arguments happen to be successful demonstrations of God’s existence.  Again, it is not tentativeness as such that I am objecting to.

The problem is with the specific way that a hypothesis is provisional or tentative, and that way is indicated by Wuellner’s reference to the need for “further experiment and verification.”  But it is brought out better by another definition of our term, this time from John Carlson’s Words of Wisdom: A Philosophical Dictionary for the Perennial Tradition:

hypothesis (n.): As used in the natural sciences, a predictive judgment about an empirical event that will occur under a describable set of conditions.  (Hypotheses are sometimes generated by more general theories; if the predicted events in fact occur, the hypotheses are said to be confirmed, and this in turn provides additional rational support for the theories in question.)  Also: “hypothetical” (adj.), “hypothetically” (adv.).

Now, I am citing works in the Scholastic tradition to reflect the point of view from which I approach these matters, but on this particular issue I don’t think Wuellner’s and Carlson’s account differs in any relevant way from what your average non-Scholastic philosopher or scientist would say.  The idea is, first, that a hypothesis is a tentative explanation of some empirical event that will occur under certain conditions.  Hence, suppose some effect E occurs under certain conditions of type T.  We might hypothesize that a cause of type C is responsible, and then go on to test this by bringing about an instance of Cunder conditions of type T and seeing whether an instance of Efollows.  If it does not, we might form some new hypothesis, to the effect that it is another sort of cause (of type D, say) that is responsible.  But even if our prediction is confirmed, it is possible in principle that it is nevertheless not really C that is producing E, but some other causal factor that is merely correlated with C.  So we’d need to do further testing to rule that possibility out.  And in any event, if there really is some causal connection between C and E, only such empirical investigation is going to reveal it, because the causal relationship between them, even if real, is going to be contingent.  Again, it will be possible that something other than C is the cause, so that the most that further testing can do is render this supposition improbable(even if, perhaps, highlyimprobable).

Now, this sort of relationship between C and E is simply not like the relationship between God and the world as that is understood by classical theism.  God’s creating the world is not a matter of making it the case that this specific thing happens in the world rather than thatspecific thing.  Rather, creation is a matter of making it the case that there is any world at all.  Moreover, theism holds that the fact that there is any world at all is something that could not even in principle have obtained in the absence of divine creative action.  For classical theism, if we’re talking about a view according to which the world mighthave existed apart from God, but simply happensnot to do so, then we’re not really talking about theism but rather about something that only superficially resembles it.

Of course, the atheist will deny that the world has this character, and I’m not denying for a moment that showing that the atheist is wrong about that requires argumentation.  The point is that the kind of argumentation involved will not be a matter of forming empirical hypotheses and then testing them (using Mill’s Methods, or appealing to probability theory, or whatever).  That’s just a category mistake.  It is instead going to involve metaphysical reasoning that begins with much deeper facts about the world – for example, the fact that the things that make it up are compounds of essence and existence or of actuality and potentiality – and arguing that nothing that is like that could exist even for an instant without a sustaining cause that is not composite in such ways.  (Longtime readers will understand what I am talking about, but for the uninitiated, these are examples of concepts appealed to in Thomistic and Aristotelian arguments for God’s existence, which I have expounded and defended at length elsewhere.)

Certainly it would be absurd to suppose that such reasoning is like the hypothesis formation and testing familiar from natural science.  For example, it would be absurd to suggest that something whose essence and existence are distinct might in principle be sustained in being by something other than ipsum esse subsistens, and that we need to come up with some empirical test to show that this is unlikely.  That would be as absurd as, say, a Platonist arguing that something other than the Form of the Good might in principle be responsible for things having whatever measure of goodness they have, but that this is improbable given the empirical evidence.  Or it is as absurd as a mathematician proposing that there is solid confirming empirical evidence that makes it probable that 12 x 48 = 576.  The point isn’t that we don’t need to provide an argument for the claim that 12 x 48 = 576, or for the claim that there is such a thing as the Form of the Good, or, again, for the claim that the world could not exist even in principle apart from God.  The point, again, is that the kind of argumentation we would have to give would not involve forming hypotheses and then coming up with ways to test them empirically.  That simply would not reflect the nature of mathematical facts, or the nature of the Form of the Good (if such a thing exists) and its relation to particular instances of goodness, or the nature of God and his relationship to the world.

Of course, someone might claim that there are no good arguments other than those that involve empirical hypothesis formation and testing.  (Good luck making sense of mathematics on that supposition.)  But whether that really is the case is precisely part of what is in dispute between classical theism and atheism of the kind inspired by scientism.  Hence, without an independent argument establishing that such arguments are the only respectable ones, such an objection would simply beg the question.

Now, someone might also object that an argument need not get you all the way to God to get you partof the way.  And that is perfectly true.  Suppose, for example, that some version of the argument from contingency (such as those defended by Avicenna, Aquinas, and Leibniz) really does demonstrate the existence of an absolutely necessary being.  That would certainly do much to establish classical theism, even if one did not go on to show that this necessary being had further divine attributes such as omnipotence and omniscience.  For necessity itself is one of the divine attributes, which radically differentiates God from everything else, so that to establish that something exists of necessity is a crucial step on the way to a complete argument for theism.

Could it be said, then, that even if arguing via empirical hypothesis formation and testing does not get us all the way to God, it can still be useful in getting us part of the way?  Well, to be fair, I’d be happy to consider a specific purported example to see exactly what such an objector has in mind.  But if the reasoning involved is like that described above, then I would answer in the negative. 

Suppose I kept finding leaves in my yard near a certain tree, and hypothesized that my neighbor was intentionally dumping them there.  Suppose you pointed out that the number and arrangement of the leaves is perfectly consistent with their having fallen there from the tree as a result of the wind, or because squirrels or other animals are knocking them off the branches.  Suppose I responded: “Sure, my argument doesn’t go all the way to establishing that my neighbor is responsible, but the evidence gets me at least part of the way there.”  You would no doubt be unimpressed.  Sure, my neighbor could have put the leaves there, but there is simply nothing in the evidence that requires such a distinctively human cause (as opposed to an inanimate cause like the wind, or a non-human animal).  So the support the presence of the leaves gives my hypothesis is negligible at best.

Similarly, hypothesis formation and testing like the kind described above, whatever else might be said for it, simply doesn’t deal with phenomena that require positing a divine cause, specifically.  And the reason, again, is that such hypothesizing deals only with questions about why some natural phenomenon is this way, specifically, rather than that way, whereas divine creative activity has to do with why such phenomena exist at all; and that it posits causes which merely could be, but need notbe, responsible. 

The point I am making is essentially the same as the one Kant famously made when he argued that what he called “physico-theological” arguments (an example of which would be Paley’s design argument) cannot in the nature of the case get us to God, but only to a kind of architect of the world.  The reason is that they explain at most why the world is arranged in a certain way, but not why it exists at all, and thus do nothing to establish causality of the strictly creative kind that is distinctive of God.

That is by no means to deny that such arguments might pose serious challenges to certain purported materialist or naturalistic explanations of this or that phenomenon.  But to undermine some particular naturalistic explanation, however important, is not the same thing as establishing theism.  The relationship between the two sets of issues is more complicated than that.