Edward Feser's Blog, page 29

Pope Francis’s scarlet letter

Consider two groups of Catholics:  First, divorced Catholics who disobey the Church’s teaching by forming a “new union” in which they are sexually active, thereby committing adultery.  And second, traditionalist Catholics attached to the Extraordinary Form of the Mass (i.e. the “Latin Mass”), some of whom (but by no means all) hold erroneous theological opinions about the Second Vatican Council and related matters.  In Amoris Laetitia, Pope Francis radically altered the Church’s liturgical practice in order to accommodate the former group.  And in Traditionis Custodes, he has now radically altered the Church’s liturgical practice in order to punish the latter group. 

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel The Scarlet Letterfamously portrays an unmerciful society in which adulterers are forced to mark themselves off from others by wearing a scarlet A on their clothing.  Pope Francis clearly would disapprove of such cruelty, and rightly so.  Yet the cruel treatment of the community of those attached to the old form of the Mass – the innocent majority of them no less than the minority with problematic theological opinions – amounts to something analogous to the affixing on them of a scarlet letter: the letter T for “traditionalist,” the one group to which the pope’s oft-repeated calls for mercy and accompaniment appear not to apply.

Accompanying adulterers?

Let us consider just how radical each of these papal moves is.  The Church has consistently taught that a valid sacramental marriage does not end until the death of one of the spouses, and has condemned as gravely sinful any sexual relationship with anyone except one’s spouse.  Hence those in such a marriage who divorce a spouse and then form a sexual relationship with someone else are guilty of grave sin, and cannot be absolved in confession without a firm resolution not to continue the sexual relationship.  This is grounded in Christ’s teaching on marriage and divorce in passages like Matthew 19:3-12 and Mark 10:2-12.

The gravity of this teaching cannot possibly be overstated.  Christ acknowledges that “Mosesallowed” for divorce.  But then he declares: “And I say to you” that divorce is forbidden.  Now, the law of Moses was given to Moses by God himself.  So who has the authority to override it?  Who would have the audacity to declare: “Moses allowed” such-and-such but “I say” differently?  Only God himself.  Christ’s teaching against divorce is therefore nothing less than a mark of his very divinity.  To put ourselves in opposition to that teaching would thus implicitly be either to deny Christ’s divinity or, blasphemously, to put our authority above even his.  It would be to declare: “Christ said such-and-such, but I say differently.”  Absolutely no one other than God himself, not even a pope (whose mandate is precisely only ever to safeguard Christ’s teaching), has the right to do that. 

If the teaching in question sounds “rigid,” blame Christ.  His own disciples thought it so, going so far as to opine that if that is how things are, it would be better not to marry (Matthew 19:10).

Now, no Catholic in a state of mortal sin is permitted to receive Holy Communion until he is validly absolved in confession.  And no Catholic can be validly absolved who is aware of the Church’s teaching on marriage and divorce, violates that teaching by having a sexual relationship with someone other than his spouse, and refuses to end this sexual relationship.  Hence no Catholic who refuses to end such a relationship is permitted to receive Holy Communion. 

This teaching too is extremely grave, grounded as it also is in scripture, specifically in the words of St. Paul in 1 Corinthians 11: 27-29.  According to St. Paul’s teaching, to take Holy Communion while refusing to end such a sexual relationship is nothing less than to profane Christ’s very body and blood and therefore to bring judgment upon oneself. 

These doctrines are as clear, consistent, and authoritative as any Catholic teaching is or could possibly be.  They are as ancient as the Church herself, are presented by her as infallible and absolutely binding, and have been unambiguously reiterated again and again and again.  This is, of course, why Amoris Laetitia was so controversial.  For it seems to allow that, in at least some circumstances, those who refuse to stop engaging in adulterous sexual activity can nevertheless take Holy Communion.  To be sure, Pope Francis has not explicitly rejected any of the teachings summarized above.  But he has also notoriously refused requests from several of his own cardinals (in the famous “dubia”) explicitly to reaffirm that traditional teaching, and thereby decisively put to rest any worries about the consistency of Amoris with that teaching. 

That the Holy Father himself is aware of how grave the issue is, and has even had his conscience troubled by it, is evident from a conversation recounted by one of his defenders, Cardinal Christoph Schönborn.  Crux magazine (not exactly a traditionalist outlet) reported:

Schönborn revealed that when he met the Pope shortly after the presentation of Amoris, Francis thanked him, and asked him if the document was orthodox.

“I said, ‘Holy Father, it is fully orthodox’,” Schönborn told us he told the pope, adding that a few days later he received from Francis a little note that said: “Thank you for that word. That gave me comfort.”

End quote.  Note that the pope himself had at least some doubt about the document’s orthodoxy – enough that he took “comfort” in being reassured about it – even after it had already been finalized and published!

My point here is not to rehearse all the details of the controversy over Amoris.  The point is simply to note the extreme lengths to which the pope was willing to go to try to accommodate the weaknesses even of those who obstinately refuse to obey the teaching of Christ and St. Paul.  Even if you think Amoris itself does not cross the line of heterodoxy with regard to that teaching, it cannot be denied that the document is extremely gentle with and accommodating to those who docross it. 

Shaming traditionalists

The contrast with the treatment of traditionalist Catholics in Traditionis Custodes could not be more stark.  Note first that, in the accompanying letter explaining his decision, Pope Francis claims that attachment to the old form of the Mass “is often characterized by a rejection… of the Vatican Council II itself, claiming, with unfounded and unsustainable assertions, that it betrayed the Tradition and the ‘true Church.’” 

The first thing to say about this is that, even if it is true that some people attached to the old form have this attitude, it is by no means true that all of them do.  On the contrary, as Pope Francis himself notes in the same document, his predecessor Pope Benedict XVI affirmed that many who are attached to the old form “clearly accepted the binding character of Vatican Council II and were faithful to the Pope and to the Bishops.”  All the same, Pope Francis’s severe restriction of the old form of the Mass punishes these innocent Catholics along with the guilty.

Secondly, we need to consider the precise nature of the purported heterodoxy and/or schismatic tendencies of which some of these traditionalists are accused.  There are, of course, some extreme traditionalists who deny that we have had a valid pope for decades (namely the sedevacantists), and others who are in some less radical way in imperfect communion with the pope (such as the SSPX).  But precisely because they are not in regular communion, the errors of these groups are irrelevant to the intended audience of Traditionis Custodes – namely, traditionalist Catholics who are in regular communion with the pope (such as the FSSP, and attendees at Extraordinary Form Masses offered at ordinary diocesan parishes). 

By definition, the latter groups are not in schism.  And though there are no doubt some among this small group within the Church who might nevertheless be said in some sense to have a “schismatic mentality,” the same is true of the untold millions of liberal Catholics who casually dismiss the pope’s authority to tell them what to believe or how to act – including the adulterous Catholics the pope accommodated in Amoris.  Clearly, the pope feels no urgency about dealing with the schismatic mentality among countless liberals.  So, why the urgency in dealing with the schismatic mentality of a small number of traditionalists?

Then there is the question of what it meansexactly to “reject” Vatican II.  Typically, with those traditionalists who are in full communion with the pope, what this means is that they reject some particular teaching of the Council, such as its teaching about religious liberty.  Now, I disagree with those who reject that teaching.  My view is that Vatican II’s teaching on religious liberty can and should be reconciled with the teaching of the pre-Vatican II popes on the subject.  (My favored way of doing so is the one developed by Thomas Pink.)  But for one thing, the teaching of Vatican II on this subject is not one that has been proposed infallibly (even if, of course, that does not entail that we do not owe it assent); and for another, how exactly to interpret it in light of traditional teaching has been a matter of controversy among theologians faithful to the Magisterium.  So, if the pope is going to be gentle and accommodating with those who obstinately defy the ancient and infallible teaching of Christ and St. Paul on marriage and Holy Communion, then how can he reasonably be less gentle and accommodating with those who have problems with a non-infallible teaching that is only a little over fifty years old?

So, the offense of which the traditionalists to whom Traditionis Custodes is addressed are accused is (a) not one of which all of them are guilty, and (b) manifestly less grave than that of Catholics who reject the Church’s teaching on marriage, divorce, and Holy Communion.  Yet those who reject that teaching are shown mercy, whereas traditionalists, the innocent as well as the guilty, are shown harshness. 

And the punishment is very harsh.  The pope aims to banish the Extraordinary Form of the Mass from ordinary parish communities, to restrict future ordinations of priests interested in celebrating it, and effectively to quarantine from the rest of the Church those communities which are still permitted to use the old form of the Mass until such time as they are prepared to adopt the new form.  As Cardinal Gerhard Müller observes, “the clear intent is to condemn the Extraordinary Form to extinction in the long run.”  The pope is essentially telling traditionalist Catholics attached to the old form of the Mass that as individuals they are suspect, and as a group they are slated eventually to disappear.  As Cardinal Müller writes:

Without the slightest empathy, one ignores the religious feelings of the (often young) participants in the Masses according to the [old] Missal… Instead of appreciating the smell of the sheep, the shepherd here hits them hard with his crook.  It also seems simply unjust to abolish celebrations of the “old” rite just because it attracts some problematic people: abusus non tollit usum.

This is bad enough when the harm done to traditionalists alone is considered.  But it is the whole Church that suffers from this decision, not just traditionalists.  For one thing, Pope Benedict XVI made it clear that the preservation of the Extraordinary Form was by no means a matter merely of catering to the needs of a certain group within the Church.  Rather, it had to do with reestablishing the connection of the Church as a whole with her own past in the liturgical context.  That is why, though Benedict too hoped that there would in the future be only a single form of the Mass, he wanted the old form to exert an influence on the new no less than the new would exert influence on modifying the old.  This was part of Benedict’s general insistence on a “hermeneutic of continuity.”  Traditionis Custodes shows no sensitivity whatsoever to this dimension of the issue.

For another thing, while the pope says that he took this decision in order to foster greater unity in the Church, it is manifestly likely to foster instead only greater disunity.  That is inevitable in any family when a father shows a double standard toward his children.  Indeed, it is precisely this double standard, and not the old form of the Mass, that has generated the disunity of recent years.  What has done more to lead some traditionalists to question Pope Francis’s orthodoxy?  The fact that they hear the Latin Mass every week?  Or Amoris Laetitia and the pope’s refusal to answer the dubia?  To ask the question is to answer it.  Traditionis Custodes will not put out the fire Amorisstarted.  If anything, it will pour gasoline on it.

He is still the Holy Father

Some will say that the pope is merely acting like the father in the parable of the prodigal son (Luke 15:11-32).  The resentful older son in the parable, on this interpretation, represents traditionalists, whereas the prodigal son represents Catholics who do not obey the Church’s teaching on marriage and divorce.

But the analogy is ridiculous.  For one thing, the prodigal son in the parable repents and explicitly declines special accommodation.  He does not say “I intend to keep living an immoral life, but I demand some of that fattened calf anyway.”  For another, the father does not treat the older son at all harshly, but rather gently reassures him that he loves him no less than he loves the prodigal son.

All the same, the pope is, when all is said and done, a father – indeed, he is still the Holy Father of all Catholics, traditionalists included.  And while the Church permits criticism of popes under certain circumstances, this cannot properly be done except with humility, respect, and restraint.  The pope is not some politician or corporate executive whom we might see fit to mock or to fire or vote out of office.  He is the vicar of Christ, and he has no superior on earth.  We may respectfully urge him to reconsider some course of action, but if he refuses, then we have to leave it to Christ to resolve the problem in the manner and at the time he chooses. 

Moreover, because he is the pope, we must in this case even more than in any other follow Christ’s command to turn the other cheek and pray for those who harm us.  We must be willing to embrace the suffering this entails and to offer it up for others – including for Pope Francis himself.

Related posts:

Pope Victor redux?

Aquinas on bad prelates

Do not abandon your Mother

The Church permits criticism of popes under certain circumstances

Papal fallibility

Two popes and idolatry

The strange case of Pope Vigilius

Some comments on the open letter

Popes, heresy, and papal heresy

Denial flows into the Tiber

Pope Victor redux?

The Quartodeciman controversy of the second century A.D. had to do with the date on which the resurrection of Christ ought to be observed.  Churches in Asia Minor preserved the custom of tying this observance to the date of the Passover, whatever day of the week that happened to fall on.  The Roman practice was instead to observe it on a Sunday, since that was the day Christ was resurrected.  The eastern practice was defended by St. Polycarp, who appealed to the authority of none other than his teacher St. John the Apostle.  Pope St. Anicetus tried unsuccessfully to convince Polycarp to adopt the Roman practice, and they agreed to disagree.

Pope St. Victor I, who came along a few decades later, was not so accommodating.  He tried to convince the eastern bishop Polycrates to adopt the Roman custom, just as Anicetus tried to convince Polycarp, and was equally unsuccessful.  But unlike Anicetus, Victor decided to force the issue by excommunicating those who refused to conform.  Whether the excommunications were ever rescinded is a matter of historical controversy.  But Victor was criticized at the time for his intolerance even by some who agreed with the Roman practice, such as St. Irenaeus.  Victor did what he did in the name of unity, yet the practice he forbade had a long precedent (indeed, one going back to the apostles themselves) and had been tolerated by his predecessors.  So why act with such severity?  Though they did not deny that Victor had, as pope, the right to do what he did, his critics questioned the wisdom and charity of his exercise of that right.

A pope who, in the name of unity, gravely offends much of his flock by needlessly and harshly curtailing ancient and legitimate liturgical practice that had been permitted by his predecessors.  Sound familiar?

Catholic teaching has always acknowledged that popes can make grave mistakes of various kinds when they are not exercising the fullness of their authority in ex cathedra decrees.  Usually, errant popes exhibit serious failings of only one or two sorts.  But Pope Francis seems intent on achieving a kind of synthesis of all possible papal errors.  Like Honorius I and John XXII, he has made doctrinally problematic statements (and more of them than either of those popes ever did).  Like Vigilius, his election and governance have involved machinations on the part of a heterodox party.  The Pachamama episode brings to mind Marcellinus and John XII.  Then there are the bad episcopal appointments, the accommodation to China’s communist government, and the clergy sexual abuse scandal, which echo the mismanagement, political folly, corruption and decadence of previous eras in papal history.  And now we have this repeat of Victor’s high-handedness.  Having in this way insulted a living predecessor, might Francis next ape Pope Stephen VIby exhuming a dead one and putting the corpse on trial?

Probably not.  But absolutely nothing would surprise me anymore in this lunatic period in history that we’re living through.

Related posts:

Aquinas on bad prelates

Do not abandon your Mother

The Church permits criticism of popes under certain circumstances

Papal fallibility

Two popes and idolatry

The strange case of Pope Vigilius

Some comments on the open letter

Popes, heresy, and papal heresy

Denial flows into the Tiber

Aquinas on bad prelates

What attitude should a Catholic take toward cruel and arbitrary prelates – for example, those who endlessly stir up division and then shamelessly blame the division on those who note and bemoan the fact?  In Quodlibet VIII, Aquinas makes some relevant remarks when addressing the question whether “evil prelates” should be honored.  You can find the passage in the Nevitt and Davies translation of Thomas Aquinas’s Quodlibetal Questions , from which I quote:

We can distinguish two things about a prelate: the person himself and his office, which makes him a sort of public person.  If a prelate is evil, he should not be honored for the person he is.  For honor is respect shown to people as a witness to their virtue.  Hence, if we honored such a prelate for the person he is, we would bear false witness about him, which is forbidden in Exodus 20: You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.  But, as a public person, a prelate bears an image and occupies a position in the Church… that does not belong to him but, rather, to someone else, viz. Christ.  And, as such, his worth is not determined by the person he is, but by the position he occupies.  He is like one of those little stones used as a placeholder for 100 marks on a scale – quite worthless in itself.  As Proverbs 26 says: He who gives honor to a fool is like one who puts a stone on Mercury’s heap… So, too, an evil prelate should not be honored because of who he is but because of the one whose position he holds.  The case is similar to the veneration of images, which is directed to the things depicted therein, as Damascene says.  Hence Zechariah compares an evil prelate to an idol: Woe to the pastor and idol who deserts the flock…

An evil prelate is unworthy to be a prelate and receive the honors due to prelates.  But the one whose image the prelate bears is worthy to have his vicar honored, just as the blessed Virgin is worthy to have a painted image of her venerated, although the image itself is not worthy of such respect. (pp. 70-71)

There are two key points here.  The first is that when a man is a bad prelate, we should not pretend otherwise merely because of his office.  That, Aquinas says, would be a violation of the eighth commandment – a lie.  He also compares it to idolatry.  An image of Christ or of a saint has no value in itself, but only as a pointer to something beyond it.  When we focus on the image itself we turn it into an idol.  Similarly, a bad prelate merits honor only because of the office he holds.  When we pretend his personal faults are not real, strain to attribute good motives to manifestly unjust acts or hidden wisdom to manifestly foolish utterances, we are like someone who fixates on an image and pretends that the many flaws and limitations it contains as a mere piece of matter must somehow really be divine. 

The second key point is that such a prelate nevertheless must be given the honor that attaches to his office as a vicar of Christ.  It is an insult to Christ to refuse his representative such honor – as if it is not Christ himself who is permitting such a man to be his vicar, or as if Christ does not know what he is doing in permitting it. 

As I have discussed in detail elsewhere, according to Aquinas – and according to Catholic teaching more generally – such a prelate can and ought to be criticized publicly by his subjects when he does something that endangers the faith.  But given the nature of his office, even this must be done “not with impudence and harshness, but with gentleness and respect.”  And if the prelate in question is the pope, respectful criticism is the most one can do, because he has no superior on earth.  Christ alone can, and will, resolve the problem in his own time and in the way he judges best.

What these points together entail is suffering.  And suffering, as the lives of the saints attest and as scripture teaches us from beginning to end, is the lot of the righteous man – suffering penitentially, suffering in solidarity with others, suffering in unity with Christ’s own agony.  This suffering can result from our own sins, or from the effects of original sin on the world around us, or from persecution.  And sometimes it can come even from within the Church itself.  Christ promises only that she will not be destroyed or, in her decisive pronouncements, bind the faithful to error.  Short of that, she can be and sometimes is afflicted with evil of every kind, even at the very top.  This is permitted in part precisely to illustrate the truth of Christ’s promise.  Even bad popes cannot destroy the Church. 

But Church history is not a Marvel movie, where everything works out in two hours, or at least by the next movie in the series.  As the Cadaver Synod, the Great Western Schism, and other episodes illustrate, it can sometimes take decades to resolve the problems resulting from papal folly, corruption, and mismanagement.  We modern Catholics are soft and impatient, and we need to recover the forbearance of our forebears. 

Current events make timely the recollection of some words from Pope Benedict XVI, while he was still Cardinal Ratzinger, on the event of the death of Michael Davies, the well-known traditionalist Catholic writer and stalwart defender of the Tridentine Mass.  The cardinal wrote:

I have been profoundly touched by the news of the death of Michael Davies.  I had the good fortune to meet him several times and I found him as a man of deep faith and ready to embrace suffering.  Ever since the Council he put all his energy into the service of the Faith and left us important publications especially about the Sacred Liturgy.  Even though he suffered from the Church in many ways in his time, he always truly remained a man of the Church.  He knew that the Lord founded His Church on the rock of St. Peter and that the Faith can find its fullness and maturity only in union with the successor of St. Peter.  Therefore we can be confident that the Lord opened wide for him the gates of heaven.  We commend his soul to the Lord’s mercy.

End quote.  Notice that Cardinal Ratzinger acknowledged that Davies suffered from the Church – and that nonetheless, he remained loyal to her, and thus loyal to the successor of St. Peter.  This is an example we ought to strive to emulate.  We must suffer for the Church even when – indeed, especially when – we suffer from her. 

Related posts:

Do not abandon your Mother

The Church permits criticism of popes under certain circumstances

Papal fallibility

The metaphysical presuppositions of formal logic

By “logic” we might mean (a) the rules that determine the difference between good and bad reasoning, or (b) some formal system that codifies these rules in a specific way, such as the systems of propositional and predicate logic that contemporary students of analytic philosophy learn as a routine part of their education.  These are not the same thing, and it is fallacious to confuse them. 

Most philosophers have at least a vague awareness of this.  For instance, they know from standard textbooks that traditional and modern logic differ in their interpretation of categorical propositions, the repercussions this has for their understanding of the square of opposition, and so forth.  They know that there has been much debate in contemporary philosophy over the status of modal logic, not to mention even more exotic systems like quantum logic.  They may be at least dimly aware that systems of logic were developed in the history of Indian philosophy that differ from those familiar to Western thinkers.  And so on.

All the same, contemporary philosophers tend unreflectively to utilize the formal methods they learned in graduate school, treating (b) as if it were for all practical purposes the same as (a).  In particular, they seldom consider that these methods might assume, or at least suggest, challengeable metaphysical presuppositions. 

When you think about it, it would be surprising if it were not so.  As I have argued many times (e.g. in this recent post and in greater depth in Aristotle’s Revenge), the mathematical abstractions of modern physics, for all their undeniable utility and power, can distort our conception of concrete physical reality if we are not careful.  For mathematical representations of their very nature both leave out aspects of the concrete reality they represent, and can also introduce features that are not part of that reality but rather merely reflect the mode of representation itself. 

But formal logic can do the same.  For one thing, qua formal, its aim is precisely to abstract from the specific nature of the subject matter being reasoned about.  (What is traditionally called material logic, by contrast, aims to reflect rather than abstract from that specific nature.)  At the same time, modern symbolic logic was developed precisely in a manner that would facilitate the expression of one particular subject matter, namely mathematics.  It would hardly be surprising, then, if the way that propositions concerning some other subject matter are expressed in modern formal logic might be potentially metaphysically misleading.

For example, John Bigelow has suggested that modern physics’ mathematical representations of local motion over time, together with the apparatus of modern predicate logic, tend to insinuate an eternalist rather than presentist conception of time.  For when we formulate the propositions of physical theory using predicate logic, we need to quantify over not only present events but also past and future events.  And if the existential quantifier asserts the existence of a thing, then physical theory is thereby made to seem to assert the existence of past and future events no less than present ones. 

Now, this fact does not by itself actually show that past and future events really do exist just as present events do.  For all we know just from what has been said so far, the result in question may reflect, not objective reality itself, but merely modern formal logic’s mode of representingobjective reality.  To show that the eternalist conclusion really follows, and does not merely falsely appear to do so, would require independent metaphysical argumentation.  But in that case it is precisely this independent metaphysical argumentation itself, and not the system of formal logic, that is really doing the work.  (I would suggest that the “truthmaker” objection to presentism – which, as I have argued several times, is greatly overrated – may reflect this fallacy of reading off metaphysical conclusions from what is really nothing more than predicate logic’s mode of representation.)

Humean logic?

Rani Lill Anjum and Stephen Mumford, in chapter 5 of their book What Tends to Be: The Philosophy of Dispositional Modality (which earlier appeared as a separate paper), argue that modern formal logic reflects a metaphysical bias in favor of a Humean conception of the world and against an Aristotelian conception.  In particular, it is well suited to express causal propositions understood, as Hume would, as describing merely contingent relationships holding between “loose and separate” existents.  It is poorly suited to express causal propositions understood the way Aristotelians understand them, as describing necessary connections between intrinsically related existents. 

Now, among the crucial features of modern logic in this connection are that it is extensional and truth-functional.    In the context of predicate logic, extensionality has to do with the fact that co-referring terms can be substituted for one another without changing the truth value of a statement.  For example, since the statement that Spider-Man fights crime is true, and Spider-Man = Peter Parker, then it will also be true that Peter Parker fights crime.  (Statements involving propositional attitudes don’t fit this pattern, however.  They are famously intensional rather than extensional.  For example, if it is true that Aunt May believes that Spider-Man fights crime, then even though Spider-Man = Peter Parker, it does not follow that Aunt May believes that Peter Parker fights crime.  For if she does not know that Spider-Man = Peter Parker, the second statement might not be true even though the first is.)

In the context of propositional logic, extensionality has to do with the fact that a proposition that is a component of a compound proposition can be replaced by one having the same truth value without changing the truth value of the compound proposition.  For example, if it is true that water is wet and grass is green, and we replace the second of the component propositions with the true proposition that the sky is blue, then the resulting proposition that water is wet and the sky is blue will also be true.

Truth-functionality has to do with the fact that in propositional logic, the truth or falsity of a compound statement is a function solely of the truth or falsity of its component parts.  For example, if it is true that the sky is blue and it is also true that I am drinking coffee, then the conjunctive statement that the sky is blue and I am drinking coffee will also be true. 

Now, where these features have especially interesting implications – and implications relevant to Anjum and Mumford’s point – is with respect to material conditionals, statements of the form p É q or “If p, then q.”  In propositional logic, the only case where a statement of this form is false is when the antecedent p is true and the consequent q is false.  In every other case the conditional will be true.  This has some notoriously odd results (known as the “paradoxes of material implication”).  For example, the statement that if the sky is green, then robots rule the earth is true.  The antecedent and consequent are, of course, both false, but the statement as a whole still comes out true, as anyone knows who has worked through the relevant truth table.  Also true are the statement that if the sky is green, then 1 + 1 = 2(since the consequent is true even though the antecedent is false) and the statement that if the sky is blue, then 1 + 1 = 2 (since both antecedent and consequent are true even though they have nothing to do with one another). 

Now, suppose you agree with Hume that there are no necessary connections between any things or events in the world.  Everything is, as Hume puts it, “loose and separate,” and in theory any effect or none might follow upon any cause – striking a match may cause it to turn into a cat, planting an acorn might cause a Volkswagen to grow out of the earth, and so on.  We don’t seriously believe such things will ever happen, but that has nothing to do with the natures of these things themselves.  It has instead to do only with psychological expectations on our part based on past experience, or at most with whatever laws of nature happen contingently to associate an event of one type with events of another type (where what a “law of nature” is on a Humean view is itself a problematic issue). 

In that case, say Anjum and Mumford, modern formal logic is well suited to convey any causal claim you want to make.  Weird conditionals like the examples given above are not prima facie suspect.  (True, there may be no law connecting, say, the sky’s being green with robots ruling the earth, and for that reason a contemporary Humean wouldn’t take the conditional in question to express a true causalclaim.  But that would have nothing to do with anything intrinsic to the sky’s being green – nothing to do with there being no objective necessary connection between the sky’s color and robots ruling the earth.  Again, for the Humean there are no intrinsic or necessary connections between things in the first place.)

But suppose instead that you take the Aristotelian view that natural substances have inherent dispositions or powers by which they necessarily tend to generate effects of a certain specific kind.  Then, weird examples of conditionals like the ones in question aresuspect.  They show that the connections between things that are captured by the material conditional are simply too weak to correspond to the strong connections posited by the Aristotelian metaphysics of causal powers.  You’re not going to be able to capture the truth of a causal statement like “Striking a match generates flame and heat” or “A planted acorn will grow into an oak tree” via the material conditional.  Indeed, attempts to capture such claims in terms of conditionals, or even in terms of counterfactuals, face notorious difficulties.  (See pp. 53-63 of Scholastic Metaphysics for an overview of the main arguments.)

Now, Anjum and Mumford note that adding predicate logic to propositional logic does not solve the problem, because predicate logic builds on propositional logic’s account of the material conditional.  But even adding modal operators, as modal logic does, does not solve the problem either, because the truth-functional character of propositional logic is preserved.  You’ll still get weird results (known as the “paradoxes of strict implication”), and in particular results that are going to be suspect from an Aristotelian point of view.  For example, you get the result that anything strictly implies a necessary statement:

□ q ® (p® q)

For instance, “If it is necessary that water is H2O, then this strictly implies that the fact that tomorrow is Taco Tuesday strictly implies that water is H2O.”  That weird sort of modal statement hardly captures the kind of necessary connections in nature that Aristotelians posit when they affirm the reality of causal powers.

Now, David Lewis famously held that every possible world is as real as the actual world.  And as Anjum and Mumford point out, this provides a way to read even statements in modal logic in a Humean manner that denies any intrinsic causal connections between things.  The truth of the statement that necessarily, if p then q requires only that in every possible world where pis true, q is also true.  It does not require that there be anything intrinsic to the states of affairs described by p and q (such as causal powers that follow upon the essence of a thing) that ties them together.  Of course, most people wouldn’t agree with Lewis’s view about possible worlds, but the point is that the mere possibility of interpreting modal logic in Lewis’s terms shows that it doesn’t capture the kinds of necessary connections that Aristotelians attribute to the natural order.

There is also the fact that on the Aristotelian account, causal powers tend toward generating certain outcomes, but still may not in fact generate them, because the manifestation of a power can be blocked.  Given the nature of the sulfur in the head of a match, it tends toward generating flame and heat when struck (as opposed to frost and coldness, or turning into a snake, or what have you).  But that doesn’t entail that flame and heat will always follow, because that tendency can be frustrated (for example, if the match gets wet). 

So, things are not “loose and separate” in the manner Hume supposes (e.g. it just isn’t true that striking a match might in principle bring about any old effect at all).  But at the same time there are not going to be exceptionless correlations between events (because the operation of a power can be frustrated, so that the event of striking a match might in some cases not be followed by the event of flame and heat being generated).  Anjum and Mumford propose positing a “dispositional modality” of tending toward that lies in between mere possibility on the one hand and necessitation on the other.  More traditional Aristotelians would speak of potenciesthat are distinct from actualities but are nevertheless really there in things themselves even if they are never actualized.  But however we describe the metaphysical details, Anjum and Mumford’s point is that they are not going to be captured in standard extensional and truth-functional formal systems. 

You might say “So much the worse for the Aristotelian,” but the point is that such a judgment would have nothing to do with formal logic itself.  Rather, it has to do with independent metaphysical assumptions that might lead one to favor a certain formal system.  A formal system may be useful for certain purposes and not so useful for others.  Our metaphysical predilections might lead us to judge that there is nothing more to the world than what the formal system captures, or they may lead us to judge that it leaves important things out.  Either way, the characteristics of the formal system itselfdon’t settle anything.  As Anjum and Mumford write:

Metaphysics is First Philosophy, prior even to logic.  And from that it would follow that one should first choose one’s metaphysics and then choose one’s logic, rather than the other way around. (p. 86)

I would qualify this by saying that metaphysics is prior to logic if “logic” is understood in sense (b) described above, though not if understood in sense (a).  Naturally, we have to presuppose certain canons of reasoning when reasoning about anything, including metaphysics.  But it doesn’t follow that we have to presuppose the codification enshrined in some particular formal system – such as, for example, modern propositional and predicate logic rather than traditional Aristotelian logic, or rather than some system that tries to capture the best of both worlds (such as that of Fred Sommers). 

Again, at some level most philosophers realize this, but it can be easy to forget if you and your colleagues all routinely learn and utilize a certain formal system, and questions about its underlying philosophical assumptions are considered only by the small minority of philosophers who specialize in such things.  Anjum and Mumford speculate that, despite his famous disagreement with Mill on matters of the philosophy of mathematics, Frege picked up a set of essentially Humean empiricist prejudices about logic from Mill’s A System of Logic.  These were then passed down from Frege to Carnap, then from Carnap to Quine, and then from Quine to Lewis and contemporary philosophers in general.  (Naturally, Russell and Whitehead played a major role too.)  Whatever one thinks of this hypothesis, it is certainly true that a dogmatic conventional wisdom can take root on matters of logic no less than it can with respect to any other area of intellectual interest.

What-logic versus relating-logic

Aristotelian complaints about the metaphysical prejudices enshrined in modern formal logic are not new.  Over fifty years ago, Henry Veatch addressed the issue at length in his book Two Logics: The Conflict between Classical and Neo-Analytic Philosophy(which was recently reprinted by Editiones Scholasticae). 

Veatch notes that we can distinguish what a thing isfrom the relations it bears to other things.  Now, Aristotelians are essentialists, who hold that there are facts of the matter about what things are and that we can at least to some extent discover those facts.  Logic, as understood in the Aristotelian tradition, is a tool for helping us to discover and express what things are.  A humble categorical proposition like “All whales are mammals” does precisely that, however little such a statement tells us all by itself.

However, Veatch argues, statements formulated in terms of the formal logic hammered out in works like Russell and Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica do not and indeed cannot, strictly speaking, tell us what a thing is.  They can express only relations.  Now, one of the advantages of modern predicate logic is precisely that it can represent relations in a way that Aristotelian categorical logic cannot.  It does so using multi-place predicates.  For example, the relation “___ loves ___” would be represented by the two-place predicate L ___, ___ where the spaces would be filled by lower-case letters naming individuals.  Hence “Harry loves Sally” would be represented as: Lhs.

But even one-place predicates, Veatch notes, are treated as representing relations, viz. relations between a thing and a property.  For instance, “Fred is bald” or Bf would represent the relationship between Fred and the property baldness.  One-place predicates are essentially treated as a limiting case of relational predicates. 

For this reason, Veatch argues, modern formal logic can really only ever express the relations between things, and not what a thing is.  Before you judge that that cannot be right, it would be a good idea to keep in mind that Russell himself held that even modern physics, when formulated in the language of modern logic, gives us knowledge only of relations and not of the intrinsic natures of anything.  (I discuss Russell’s views a length in Aristotle’s Revenge.)  One could, however, take this to show, not how little physics tells us, but rather how little formal logic tells us.

As Veatch also points out, the analysis of ordinary statements into statements of predicate logic tends to suggest an ontology of bare particulars and universals.  For instance, the statement “There’s a Ferrari parked outside” comes out as something like: ($x) (Fx • Px).  Any concrete attributes that might characterize the thing being described get analyzed as predicates, leaving just a bare something of which the universals named by the predicates (being a Ferrari, being parked outside) are predicated. 

Now, the notion of a bare particular is metaphysically dubious (cf. David Oderberg’s essay “Predicate Logic and Bare Particulars”), as is the notion of a world of which we can know only relations.  Of course, someone might nevertheless want to defend such philosophical exotica.  The point, however, is that even if the utility of predicate logic might suggestsuch views, it does not actually by itself give evidential support for them.  Again, if some apparent aspect of reality is difficult to describe using the apparatus of a system of formal logic, that may indicate merely the expressive limitations of the system, rather than the absence of those aspects from objective reality.  We cannot read a metaphysics out of formal logic without first reading one into it.  Metaphysics, as Anjum and Mumford insist, is in this sense prior to logic.

Faux rigor

Such considerations lend additional force to a point I have made before, which is that the use of formal methods in philosophical analysis and argumentation by no means guarantees that the results are more rigorously established, and indeed in some cases can even make them less so. 

For example, when analyzing an argument like Aquinas’s Third Way, some commentators like to reformulate it using the formal apparatus familiar from contemporary modal logic.  The reader easily impressed by such things thinks: “Wow, this is so much more rigorous than a less formal treatment!”  But in fact, such an analysis will simply change the subject, because the distinctively Aristotelian way in which Aquinas understands the relevant modal concepts cannot (as Anjum and Mumford point out) be captured in that formal language.  And an analysis that simply fails to capture what Aquinas is talking about is hardly rigorous.

In a post from a decade ago I discussed Robert Nozick’s treatment in Philosophical Explanations of the question why there is something rather than nothing, and noted that it affords another example of how semi-formal methods can obfuscate rather than illuminate.  Nozick speaks of various possible “states N [that] are natural or privileged” (one of which might be “nothingness” itself), of various “forces of type F” (one of which might be a “nothingness force”), of an “amount” there might be of such a force, and so on, and then proceeds to consider what relations may hold between N and various quantities of F, etc.  Because the discussion is couched in terms of symbols and variables, it gives the appearance of rigor.  But it is not prefaced with any treatment of the more fundamental and indeed crucial philosophical question of whether the proposed states and forces referred to are plausible (or indeed even coherent) in the first place.  Hence the apparent rigor is bogus.

None of this is intended to suggest that formal methods have no value, or to deny that sometimes they are even necessary.  The point is rather that their utility can be oversold and their neutrality overestimated.

Schmid on existential inertia

At his blog, Joseph Schmid has replied to my recent post about his criticisms of the Aristotelian proof.  The reply is extremely long.  Now, I often write long blog posts myself.  Indeed, my previous post on Schmid was, at over 5,000 words, pretty long.  But by my count (via cutting and pasting into MS Word), Schmid’s reply clocks in at almost 40,000 words – all written up and posted within just two days after my post!  And even the cursory look I gave it shows that it raises a variety of issues that go well beyond anything I talk about in my post.  Into the bargain, it also summarizes and links to myriad otherblog posts, articles, and YouTube videos of Schmid’s which, he indicates, we ought to check out if we want to have a better idea of his views about the matters under discussion! 

Well, no offense to Schmid – who seems like a nice enough guy, and an intelligent one – but I’m afraid I can’t spend the rest of the summer, or even the rest of this week, reading and responding to this mountain of material.  And if I’m going to choose something of his to read, I have to say that a rambling and largely off-topic 40,000-word blog post banged out over two days doesn’t seem the most promising candidate.  So, it seemed to me that a workable compromise would be to press on with what I had thought to do before he posted his reply, which is to read and comment on the other of Schmid’s two published academic articles, “Existential inertia and the Aristotelian proof.”  Since the notion of existential inertia seems to be at the core of our disagreement, and since I take it to be a reasonable assumption that this article contains Schmid’s most rigorous presentation of his views on that topic (and that his latest blog post presupposes the article in any event), I take that to be a reasonable way to conclude our exchange for now.  Fair enough? 

EIT versus EET

Schmid starts out his paper by distinguishing the “Existential Inertia Thesis” (EIT) from what he labels the “Existential Expiration Thesis” (EET).  According to EIT, objects of the kind that make up the world of our experience will persist in existence unless something acts positively to destroy them.  According to the rival EET, such objects will cease to exist unless something positively acts to sustain them in being.  Hence, consider an example like the water in a certain glass at time t.  According to EIT, as long as nothing acts to destroy the water, it will continue to exist at t + 1.  Nothing has to do anything in order to make the water continue to exist.  All that is necessary is that nothing does something to knock it out of existence.  But according to EET, unless something acts to make the water continue to exist, it will not exist at t + 1.  It’s not enough that nothing does anything to destroy it.  The fact that nothing acts positively to sustain it will suffice for its going out of existence.

Arguments for God’s existence like the Aristotelian proof I defend in chapter 1 of Five Proofs of the Existence of God (and which was discussed in my previous post on Schmid) are concerned in part to show that EIT is false and EET is true.  Now, Schmid writes as if the falsity of EIT and truth of EET are presuppositionsof such arguments.  That is not correct.  Rather, a critique of EIT and defense of EET are parts of such arguments, not undefended background assumptionsof such arguments.  For example, in the course of developing the Aristotelian proof, I point out that a substance like the water in question is composite in nature, i.e. it is made up of parts.  There are different ways you could conceive of these parts – for example, in terms of substantial form and prime matter (if you are an Aristotelian hylemorphist), or in terms of essence and existence (if you are a Thomist metaphysician), or in terms of fundamental particles (if you are a metaphysical naturalist).  It doesn’t matter for the specific purposes of the argument.  What matters is only that the parts, considered just qua parts of that kind at t, are only potentially water at t, and that some additional factor is therefore needed in order to explain why this potential is actualized at t.  That they made up water at t – 1 is irrelevant, because what matters is why they continue to make up water at t, and again, nothing about the parts considered by themselves can account for that.  Hence we need to appeal to some additional factor.

You may or may not agree with this argument.  (In my previous post on Schmid, I defend it against an objection he raises against it.)  But it is precisely an argument against EIT and for EET.  For it entails that the water will not continue to exist from t – 1 to t unless something acts to keep it in existence.  Hence Schmid is wrong to say that the Aristotelian proof (of which this argument is a component part) merely assumes EET.  (Moreover, the whole point of my ACPQ article is to show that, properly understood, Aquinas’s Five Ways – the first of which is a version of the Aristotelian proof – are arguments against EIT.  Schmid cites this article in his own paper, which makes it is especially odd for him to write as if my arguments simply assume the falsity of EIT.)

Schmid also claims that the rejection of EIT does not entail accepting EET.  Consider again the example of the water.  If we reject EIT, Schmid thinks, all that follows is that the water will not of necessity continue to exist without a sustaining cause.  But it doesn’t follow that it will of necessity go out of existencewithout one.  It might simply happen to carry on without one.

This too is not correct.  If the water continues to exist from t – 1 to t, then something must account for this fact, and it will have to be something either intrinsic to the water or extrinsic to it.  Now, if EIT is false, then it is not something intrinsic to the water; and if there is no sustaining cause, then it will not be something extrinsic to it either.  But then there will be nothing to account for its continuing to exist from t – 1 to t, in which case it will not continue to exist.  Which is precisely what EET claims.  So, if we reject EIT, then we must indeed affirm EET.

A critic might respond that this presupposes the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR).  Well, since I think PSR is true and have defended it at length in several places, I hardly think that is a problem.  But in fact the argument does not presuppose PSR – or to be more precise, it doesn’t presuppose PSR any more than any other explanation does.  Homicide detectives, insurance investigators, and forensic engineers never take seriously the suggestion “Maybe it just happened for no reason!” when considering the phenomena they are trying to understand, and that is so whether or not they are committed to the principle that absolutely everything has an explanation.  Similarly, we needn’t appeal to such a principle in order to judge that the rejection of EIT should lead us to embrace EET.  (Not that we shouldn’t embrace such a principle.  And as everyone knows, few people seriously quibble about PSR until they start to worry that it might force them into accepting theism.)

A third claim Schmid makes about EIT and EET is that neither has a presumption in its favor, so that we ought initially to be agnostic about which is correct.  A priori, they are evenly matched.  This too, I would argue, is mistaken.  To take an example I have often used, suppose you explain, to someone who has never heard of them before (a young child, say), the nature or essence of a lion, of a Tyrannosaurus Rex, and of a unicorn.  Then you tell him that, of these three animals, one exists, one used to exist but has gone extinct, and the other never existed and is fictional.  You ask him to tell you, based on his new knowledge of the essences of each, which is which.  Naturally, he couldn’t tell you.  For there is nothing in the essence or nature of these things that could, by itself, tell you whether or not it exists.  Existence is something additional to the essence of a contingent thing.  It doesn’t follow from such a thing’s essence.

This is, of course, an argument Aquinas gives for the Thomistic doctrine of the real distinction between essence and existence (which I develop and defend in chapter 4 of Five Proofs).  The point for the moment is this.  If nothing about the essence or nature of a thing entails that it exists at allin the first place, then it is hard to see how anything about its essence or nature could entail that will persist in existence once it does exist.  In short, the very nature of a contingent thing qua contingent makes it implausible to attribute to it a feature like existential inertia.  In which case, EET is, contra Schmid, a priori more plausible than EIT.

In summary, then, in the first, stage-setting part of his paper, Schmid makes three dubious claims: that the falsity of EIT and truth of EET are simply taken for granted by the Aristotelian proof (not true); that the falsity of EIT does not give us reason to believe EET (not true); and that EIT and EET are equally plausible a priori (not true).  So unpromising a beginning does not portend well for the rest of the paper, and indeed further serious problems with it arise immediately.

The metaphysics of existential inertia

Schmid next considers two possible ways of spelling out EIT.  The first account goes like this: Consider the water in our earlier example.  Its existence at some time t is sufficiently explained by (a) the state and existence of the water at an immediately preceding time t – 1 together with (b) the absence of anything acting to destroy the water.

Now, an objection that might be raised against existential inertia thus understood (and one I have raised in my exchanges with Graham Oppy and in my previous reply to Schmid) is that it is viciously circular.  Existential inertia would be a property or power of the water.  So, the water’s persistence from t – 1 to t would, on this account, depend on this property or power.  But properties and powers depend for their reality on the substances that possess them.  So, we seem to have a situation where the water’s persistence depends on that of a property or power which in turn depends on the persistence of the water.

Schmid considers something like this “circularity” objection (though his exposition of it seems to me to be quite murky, so it is possible that he has something else in mind).  In response to it, he says that if the objection had any force, it would have force against any account of the persistence of the water, including an account that attributes its persistence to God.  For if we suppose that God causes the water to persist from t – 1 to t, then we will be presupposing that it is possible for it to persist from t – 1 to t, and thus won’t be giving a non-circular explanation of how it is possible for it to do so.  And if the theist replies that God gives the water the ability to persist, then this will only push the problem back a stage insofar as it will presuppose that God has the ability to do so.

I find this to be a very odd response, and I confess that I’m not sure I even understand what Schmid is going on about.  The circularity objection has nothing do with presupposing that it is possible for something to persist, or with presupposing that things have abilities, or anything like whatever Schmid is talking about.  Rather, it has to do with the fact that properties and powers are ontologically dependent on substances, so that substances cannot without circularity be said to be ontologically dependent on properties or powers.

Again, perhaps that is not the objection Schmid is talking about.  But if it isn’t, then I’m not sure what he is talking about.  Certainly he doesn’t seem to be talking about (a) an objection that any critic of EIT has actually given, or (b) an objection that is interesting. 

Anyway, Schmid goes on to discuss a further possible objection to this first way of spelling out EIT, one grounded in a presentist theory of time.  The objection would be that what happens at t – 1 cannot explain what happens at the present moment t, because (according to presentism) past moments like t – 1 no longer exist, and what does not exist cannot be the explanation of anything.  Schmid responds to this possible objection by setting out several arguments in defense of the claim that past events can play a role in explaining present ones.

Schmid does not attribute this objection to anyone, and as he rightly notes, presentists in fact do not in general claim in the first place that past events play no role in explaining the present.  So what is the point of devoting several pages to an argument no presentist has given or is likely to give?  I’m not sure, and I don’t myself have anything to add to what Schmid says in response to it.  Certainly the fact that the past is relevant to explaining the present gives (contrary to what Schmid seems to think) no support to EIT.  For what is at issue in the debate over EIT and EET is not whether what happens at t – 1 is part of the explanation of what is true of the water at t, but rather whether it is by itself sufficientto explain what is true of it at t.

(I have to say that I wonder what kind of rhetorical effect this kind of stuff has on Schmid’s readers, some of whom – judging from my combox – seem very impressed by it.  Schmid’s discussion of this first interpretation of EIT occupies almost five pages of analysis, with the standard bells and whistles that we analytic philosophers pick up in grad school and from reading academic journal articles – semi-formal formulations, the entertaining of various hypotheticals, and so on.  Other things Schmid has written, such as the article addressed in my previous post on Schmid, have a similar character.  Untutored readers, especially those whose knowledge of philosophy is largely drawn from blog posts, Reddit discussions, and the like, are bound to think: “Wow, this is so technical and rigorous!”  Yet in fact the analysis is sometimes not terribly clear, and in this case it is devoted to criticizing claims that no critic of EIT has actually made or is likely to make in the first place!  So it seems to me that some of the rigor is specious.)

Schmid considers a second possible account of EIT, according to which existential inertia is simply a basic or primitive feature of reality.  He suggests that one way of reading this claim, in turn, is that it is a necessaryfeature of reality that things have existential inertia. 

But there are two obvious problems with this.  The first is that there is no reason to believe it.  (I’ll come back to that.)  The second is that there is positive reason to disbelieve it.  Again, with lions, Tyrannosauruses, water, etc., there is simply nothing about their natures or essences that entails that they exist at all.  So how could it be just a basic and necessary feature of a world comprised of such things that they persistin existence? 

Schmid also suggests that the thesis that it is a necessary feature of reality that lions, water, etc. have existential inertia is no less plausible a terminus of explanation than the thesis that God, qua pure actuality, exists of necessity.  Both theses, he claims, posit something “primitive,” but EIT is more parsimonious. 

But this is quite absurd.  As I argue in Five Proofs and in my article on existential inertia (both of which Schmid purports to be responding to in the present article), the reasoncontingent things are contingent is that they are composed of parts, and in particular that they have potentialities as well as actualities.  So, when we say that God is absolutely simple rather than composite and that he is pure actuality devoid of potentiality, we have given an explanation of his lacking contingency – that is, of his existing of necessity.  By contrast, Schmid’s proposal is that the world is made up of things that are contingent, composite, and have potentialities as well as actualities – and yet for all that it is still somehow just a necessary fact about the world that these things have existential inertia! 

This is not a case of being presented with a choice between two alternative possible ultimate explanations, the Thomist’s and Schmid’s.  Rather, it is a case of being presented with a choice between an explanation and an unexplained and indeed counterintuitive brute fact. 

Theoretical vices

This naturally brings us to Schmid’s claim that EIT enjoys several “theoretical virtues” (i.e. virtues of a kind that a good theory ought to possess).  He starts his discussion in this section of the paper by suggesting that the reason things exist at all may be that it is metaphysically necessary that something or other exists.  And in the same way, he suggests, the reason things persist in existence may be that it is simply metaphysically necessary that they do so.  EIT thus provides an explanation of a familiar fact of our experience, viz. that things persist.

To see what is wrong with this, consider the following dialogue:

Bob: Why did Ed start to drink that martini?

Fred: Hmm, maybe it was metaphysically necessary that he do so?

Bob: Wow, that’s an interesting explanation!  And why do you think he kept drinking it once he started?

Fred: I’ve got it – maybe that was metaphysically necessary too!

Bob: Brilliant!  You should write a paper.

I take it you agree with me that Fred’s explanation is not in fact that brilliant.  For why on earth would anyone think it even prima facie plausible that it is necessarythat I start to drink a martini?  True, my nightly routine might for a moment make you wonder, but after a moment’s reflection you’d realize that there are many factors that would prevent it from being necessary – I could run out of gin, or the kids could hide the bottles, or I could opt for a Scotch instead, or whatever.  And if it is not prima facie plausibly necessary that I start drinking, it is hardly any more prima facie plausible that I will of necessity keep doing so. 

But the existence and persistence of everyday objects (lions, water, etc.) are in the same boat.  Again, there is nothing in the essence of any of these things that entails that they exist; they are composed of parts, and thus depend for their existence on these parts being combined; they have potentialities which need to be actualized in order for them to exist; and so on.  That is why they are contingent.  So, if there is nothing more to reality than things of that sort, how could it be metaphysically necessary that there be things of that sort?  And if it is not prima facie plausibly metaphysically necessary that things of this sort exist at all, how could it be any more prima facie plausibly metaphysically necessary that they must persist in existence? 

Of course, that doesn’t entail that there is nothing of which it could be said that it is metaphysically necessary that it exists and persists in existence.  Certainly, this could plausibly be said of something that is absolutely simple and devoid of potentiality (precisely since to be something of that sort is to lack the features that make a thing contingent).  But of course, that’s precisely the sort of thing Schmid wants to avoid positing.

So, Schmid’s proposed “explanation” is really no more interesting than Fred’s.  If we ask “Why does God have existential inertia?” the theist can offer a response: “Because he is non-composite and devoid of potentiality, and thus lacks the features that entail contingency or possible non-existence.”  But if we ask “Why do ordinary contingent things like lions, water, etc. have existential inertia?” all Schmid can say in response is: “I don’t know, but maybe it’s just a necessary fact about them that they have it – wouldn’t that give us a cool explanation of why they persist?”  (Talk about your proverbial “dormitive virtue” explanation!)

Now suppose someone said: “Hey, let’s not be tooquick to dismiss Fred’s explanation.  Consider its theoretical virtues, such as parsimony…”  Would you stick around to listen?  Probably not.  There’s no point in considering such theoretical virtues if the “explanation” is already independently known to be a non-starter.  That’s true of Fred’s explanation, and (for all he has shown) it is, for the reasons I’ve given, true of Schmid’s as well. 

There are other problems with Schmid’s discussion in this section of his paper.  For instance, commenting on my example in Five Proofs of the existence of the water in a cup of coffee being explained in terms of the existence of its parts, he notes that it could plausibly be said instead that the parts in fact depend for their existence of the whole.  Indeed, as he notes, that is what I myself have said elsewhere.  He insinuates that there is, accordingly, an incoherence in my position. 

But there is no such incoherence, and Schmid ignores what should be clear from the context of that discussion in Five Proofs, viz. that I am speaking there in a “for the sake of argument” way.  As I said in the book and in my previous post on Schmid, there are several possible ways one could spell out the metaphysics of the water as it exists at a time t: (a) in terms of substantial form and prime matter, after the fashion of Aristotelian hylemorphism, (b) in terms of essence and existence, as a Thomist would, (c) as an aggregate of particles, as a reductive naturalist might, or (d) in yet some other way.  It doesn’t matter for the specific purposes of the argument, and for the sake of ease of exposition and the naturalistic scruples of many readers, I went with (c) even though my own predilection is for (a) and (b).

Schmid’s discussion ignores this, and makes it sound like I am contradicting myself.  Once again, the untutored reader who has read his article (but not Five Proofs) might think he’s raised some devastating criticism, when in fact he has simply failed to read what I wrote carefully. 

Schmid suggests that another virtue of EIT over the thesis that God sustains things in being is that it better accounts for how physical objects maintain their identity over time.  Indeed, he says that “it is unclear that [the latter thesis] can even account for diachronic identity in the first place,” and he goes on to devote two and half pages to developing this theme.

But who on earth ever suggested in the first place that the thesis that God sustains things in being explains the identity of things over time?  Not me, and not anyone else as far as I know.  That’s simply not a question that the thesis is trying to address.  You might as well object “But the thesis that God sustains things in being doesn’t account for Feser’s martini habit!”  Who said it did? 

So, why would Schmid think to raise this issue?  The reason is apparent from this passage:

On Feser’s account, God does not act ona previously existent concrete object to conserve it in existence, preserving its original constituents.  Instead, God wholly reconstitutes concrete objects from utter non-being at each and every moment. 

This makes it sound like my view is that things are annihilated and recreated at every moment.  But I have never said such a thing, and it is not my view.  Conserving things in being is not the same thing as recreating them after they have been annihilated.  Indeed, the whole point is that God keeps them from being annihilated.  And Aristotelian-Thomistic metaphysicians don’t explain diachronic identity in terms of divine conservation, but rather in terms of factors intrinsic to substances, such as substantial form and designated matter.  (Cf. my discussion of that issue in Scholastic Metaphysics, Oderberg’s in Real Essentialism, etc.)

Here too Schmid trots out the standard analytic philosopher’s hoo-hah – semi-formal exposition, oddball thought experiments, etc. – developed in the service of a gigantic red herring.  The unwary reader thinks he’s being treated to a really rigorous critique of my arguments, when in fact he’s being led on a wild goose chase.

Note that I am not accusing Schmid of deliberate misrepresentation, and I am not decrying the use of such analytic methods when appropriate (I was, after all, trained as an analytic philosopher myself).  My point is that in several cases they give a false appearance of rigor to Schmid’s criticisms, which I suspect accounts for some readers’ being (judging from by combox) overly impressed by them.

Now, Schmid does consider the possibility that I might reply by saying that the previous state of an object at t – 1 together with divine action is what accounts for its existence and state at t.  But he objects that “it’s unclear that there is any independent motivation for this move apart from a prior acceptance that things require sustaining causes of their existence.”

Well, of course that’s the motivation, but there’s nothing wrong with that.  Again, Schmid’s discussion here falsely supposes that divine conservation is intended to be an explanation of diachronic identity.  And in that light, one might think it a good objection to ask why, if factors intrinsic to a substance explain diachronic identity, we need to bring in divine conservation.

But again, divine conservation is not in the first place being brought in to explain diachronic identity.  That application is a figment of Schmid’s imagination.  There are two issues here: what accounts for a thing’s identityover time, and what accounts for its persistence in being.  Divine conservation is intended to deal with the second issue; again, the first issue is dealt with instead in terms of factors like substantial form, designated matter, etc.  (True, God conserves those in being too, like he does everything else.  But the point is that divine conservation is not brought in to explain diachronic identity per se.)

An argument against EIT

Finally, Schmid addresses an argument against EIT that I gave in the ACPQ article referred to above.  It goes like this:

1. A cause cannot give what it does not have to give.

2. A material substance is a composite of prime matter and substantial form.

3. Something has existential inertia if and only if it has of itself a tendency to persist in existence once it exists.

4. But prime matter by itself and apart from substantial form is pure potency, and thus has of itself no tendency to persist in existence.

5. And substantial form by itself and apart from prime matter is a mere abstraction, and thus of itself also has no tendency to persist in existence.

6. So neither prime matter as the material cause of a material substance, nor substantial form as its formal cause, can impart to the material substance they compose a tendency to persist in existence.

7. But there are no other internal principles from which such a substance might derive such a tendency.

8. So no material substance has a tendency of itself to persist in existence once it exists.

9. So no material substance has existential inertia.

Schmid raises four objections against this argument.  First, he suggests that the defender of EIT could simply reject hylemorphism on the grounds that, if my argument is correct, hylemorphism would conflict with EIT.  Which is true, but not terribly interesting if I have independent arguments for hylemorphism – as, of course, I do.  But it wouldn’t be reasonable to expect Schmid to present a general critique of those arguments in a journal article devoted to another topic, so for present purposes we can put this issue to one side.

Second, Schmid notes that the Principle of Proportionate Causality (of which premise 1 above is one formulation) allows that there are several ways in which what is in an effect may preexist in its cause.  And he suggests that a tendency to persist in existence may preexist in a material thing’s metaphysical constituents in a more subtle way than I consider.  In particular, he suggests that even if neither prime matter nor substantial form by themselves have a tendency to persist in existence, maybe in combination they will produce something that does have such a tendency – just as two colorless chemical constituents might be combined in a way that generates something that is red.

One problem with this is that, just left at that, it doesn’t really amount to much of an objection.  For in the case of the chemical constituents, there are chemical facts we can point to that explain exactly why they will together generate something red.  But Schmid does not tell us exactly what it is about prime matter and substantial form that would (or indeed could), when they are combined, generate a tendency to persist in existence. 

Another problem is that even if substantial form and prime matter would together yield something with existential inertia, that would just leave us with another version of the circularity problem discussed above.  Existential inertia, as a power or property of the whole substance, would depend for its existence at any moment on the parts of the substance (prime matter and substantial form) being combined; and the parts of the substance being combined at any moment would depend on its power or property of existential inertia.  (As I have said before, there really is no way around this sort of problem for anything that is composed of parts.  Only an absolutely simple or non-composite thing can have existential inertia.)

Now, toward the end of his paper, Schmid does say something that might seem to provide a solution to this circularity problem.  He says that it is the parts of a substance at time t – 1 that explain the whole’s existence at t.  But there would be vicious circularity only if it were the parts at time t that were claimed to explain the whole’s existence at t.

But this simply ignores the sub-argument of the Aristotelian proof, referred to above, which claims that even considered at time t, the parts of the water (or of any other physical substance) considered just qua parts of the kind they are(particles, prime matter and substantial form, essence and existence, or whatever) are merely potentially water, so that some additional factor active at t must be brought in to account for why they are actualized as water at t.  What happened at an earlier time t – 1 is not sufficient to account for that.  But if the additional factor is some other part of the water itself, then we will be back with the circularity problem.

Schmid’s third objection to my argument is directed at step 7.  He says that, for all I have shown, existential inertia itself might be a further internal principle of a substance.  Hence, he claims, the premise begs the question.

To see the problem with this objection, consider an EIT-rejecting reductive naturalist who argues as follows:

The physical world consists of nothing more than fermions and bosons and the laws that govern them.  But there is nothing in the nature of fermions and bosons or the laws that govern them that entails that they have existential inertia.  Hence, there is no such feature in the physical world.

Whatever you think of such an argument, would it beg the question?  Not if the speaker has independent grounds for being a reductive naturalist.  Hence, in response to such a reductive naturalist, a defender of EIT would either have to give some argument against reductive naturalism, or show that the conclusion does not follow from the premises.  It would not be enough merely to accuse the speaker of begging the question.  But by the same token, my argument does not beg the question if I have independent grounds for being a hylemorphist, which I do.  Hence, even if Schmid had other good reasons to reject the argument, accusing step 7 of begging the question is not a good one.

Schmid’s fourth objection to my argument claims that if it succeeded, it would take down EET as well as EIT.  For why would a material substance’s substantial form and prime matter give it a tendency to expire any more than they give it a tendency to persist?  But Schmid’s objection misunderstands the position of those who reject EIT and endorse EET.  Their claim is not that material substances have an intrinsic tendency to go out of existence.  It’s rather merely that they lack any intrinsic tendency to continue in existence. 

Schmid considers this response, and says in reply that it presupposes that the falsity of EIT gives us reason to believe EET, which, he claims, it does not.  But I have already explained above why he is wrong about that.  The falsity of EIT does in fact give us reason to endorse EET.  Schmid also suggests that if I agree that things do not have a positive intrinsic tendency to go out of existence, then that would be enough to vindicate EIT.  But that doesn’t follow at all.  Again, the lack of a tendency to persistin existence is by itself sufficient to undermine EIT. 

(Compare: If there is nothing intrinsic to me that allows me to see as far as a mile, then I am simply not going to see as far as a mile, unless some additional factor – such as a telescope – is brought into the picture.  The mere absence of some factor that prevents me from seeing that far – such as a barrier – is not going to suffice for me to see that far.  Similarly, the mere absence of a positively self-destructive tendency is not going to suffice to ensure that I continue in existence.  If there is nothing intrinsic to me that positively ensures that I do continue in existence, then I am simply not going to continue in existence, unless some additional factor – an external sustaining cause – is brought into the picture.)

Well, I’m approaching 6,000 words this time, and I think that’s enough.  I’m afraid I have no time or inclination to read all the other stuff Schmid has written, or to view his YouTube videos, etc.  But since readers have been asking me to comment, I have tried to be fair to him by taking on his arguments in their strongest form, focusing as I have on what he has said in his two academic articles (which are presumably where the arguments have been given their most careful formulation).  Yet as we have now seen in two detailed posts, those arguments are seriously problematic – being sometimes unclear in their formulation, begging the question, and, in some cases, beholden to straw men and red herrings.  But as I have said, Schmid is an intelligent fellow and he certainly tries to engage his opponents’ arguments in a serious and civil way, and for that I thank him.

Schmid on the Aristotelian proof

A fellow named Joseph Schmid has written a number of articles and blog posts critical of various ideas and arguments of mine, such as the Aristotelian proof defended in chapter 1 of my book Five Proofs of the Existence of God .  Until this week, I hadn’t read any of this material, though for some time now I’ve been getting an increasing number of requests that I comment on it.  Many of these have been anonymous and weirdly insistent or adulatory toward Schmid, which made me suspect sock puppetry rather than genuine widespread interest.  My attention in recent months has, in any event, been focused on the book on the soul that I am working on and which is way behind schedule (as well as on other existing writing commitments, most of which have deadlines).  I also have an article forthcoming in Religious Studiesresponding to Graham Oppy’s objections to the Aristotelian proof, and after working on that I was inclined to give the topic a rest for a while.  Hence my neglect of Schmid.  But the squeaky wheel gets the grease.  So, in hopes of appeasing the Schmid enthusiasts, this week I read his recent article “Stage One of the Aristotelian Proof: A Critical Appraisal.”  Let’s take a look at it.

Schmid develops three main lines of criticism.  The first is directed at my claim that for an ordinary substance to persist in being at any moment requires that something actualize it at that moment.  The second is directed at what I say about essentially ordered causal series.  The third is directed at my claim that the unactualized actualizer or first cause of the existence of things must be purely actual.  I’ll reply to these in turn.  I’m not going to repeat everything I say in Five Proofs or everything that Schmid says in his article.  So, what follows will presuppose that the reader is familiar with that material.

Concurrent actualization

Consider any ordinary substance that is a compound of actuality and potentiality, such as the water in a certain glass.  I claim in Five Proofs that “the existence of [such a substance] at any given moment itself presupposes the concurrent actualization of [its] potential for existence” (p. 35).  I note that there are several ways one could conceive of this actualization.  One could, in Aristotelian hylemorphist fashion, think in terms of prime matter’s potential to be water being actualized by the imposition of the appropriate substantial form.  Or one could, in Thomistic fashion, think in terms of the essence of the water having existence conjoined to it.  Or one could, in reductive naturalist fashion, think in terms of the particles that make up the water being made to constitute water, specifically, rather than some other substance.  For the purposes of this part of the Aristotelian proof, it doesn’t matter which of these models one goes with.

For expository purposes, let’s go with the last model, and think in terms of a collection of particles of type Pwhich, considered just by themselves, could potentially constitute (a) water, or (b) separate quantities of hydrogen and oxygen, or (c) some other substance or aggregate of substances.  (I say “particles of type P” rather than making reference to atoms, quarks, bosons, or whatever, so as avoid getting sidetracked on questions about the particular physical and chemical facts, which are not relevant to the specific issue being addressed here.)

The basic idea is this.  Consider a collection of particles of type P which constitute water at time t.  Though they actually constitute water at t, there is nothing in the particles qua particles of type P that suffices to make them water rather than one of the other alternatives mentioned.  Again, qua particles of type P they have the potential to constitute water, or separate quantities of hydrogen and oxygen, or some other substance or aggregate of substances.  So, there must at t be something distinct from the collection which actualizes its potential to be water, specifically.

In response to this, Schmid writes:

Feser claims that it is the matter’s potential to exist as water that is presently ‘being actualized’. But ‘being actualized’ is arguably a notion of causal actualization.  Instead of claiming the matter’s potential is presently being actualized, then, a neutral description would say that the matter’s potential to exist as water is presently actual.

But not all actualities consist in or involve reductions of potency to act.  There are things that are (i) actual but (ii) whose actuality is not an actualizedone – that is, not one consisting in the (concurrent) reduction of potency to act (by some causal actualizer).  For Feser, one example of this would be God… For those who do not already accept… that substances are concurrently reducing from potency to act in respect of their actual (substantial) existence – one example of an actuality that is an unactualized actuality may very well be the present existence of the water...

Now, notice that once we alter the phrasing to the neutral ‘the matter’s potential to exist as water is presently actual right now,’ we cannot straightforwardly infer the need for a concurrent, sustaining efficient cause of the water’s existence.

End quote.  Now, there are three problems with this.  First, Schmid is wrong to claim that my characterization of the situation is not neutral.  The implication is that no one who did not already agree with my argument would characterize what is going on as the potential of a collection of particles of type P to be water “being actualized” at t – because this would entail that there is a cause of this actualization, which is precisely what is at issue.

But that is not true.  Someone (a Humean, for example) could agree that the potential in question is being actualized at t, and still go on to claim that there is no causeof this actualization – that it just happens without anything making it happen.  To be sure, I don’t for a moment think that this would be a plausible claim (for the reasons I give in the book when criticizing Hume, defending PSR, and so on).  But that is beside the present point, which is that someone who does not already agree with the overall argument could nevertheless concede the claim that Schmid is criticizing.

A second problem is that Schmid’s proposed alternative way of characterizing the situation is incoherent.  For the claim that “the matter’s potential to exist as water is presently actual right now” (emphasis added) suggests that the collection of particles of type P is both potentially water and actually water in the same respect and at the same time.  But it is a well-known Aristotelian-Thomistic thesis – one which is famously given expression in Aquinas’s First Way, and which Schmid does not challenge – that nothing can be both potential and actual in the same respect and at the same time. 

My own characterization of the situation, unlike Schmid’s, does not imply otherwise.  Again, what I say is that at t, the collection of particles of type Pconsidered just in respect of being particles of type P is only potentially water (and potentially other things too).  The collection is actually water only when considered as particles of type P together with the actualization of the potential in question (which, I also claim, requires a cause to make it happen – though, again, that is an additional thesis).  So, while I say that the particles are potential and actual at the same time, I do notsay that they are potential and actual at the same time and in the same respect. 

Again, though, Schmid’s formulation incoherently suggests that they are potential and actual at the same time and in the same respect.  In particular, it suggests either (i) that considered just qua particles of type P, the particles are both potentially water and actually water, or (ii) considered qua particles of type P together with the actualization of the potential in question, the particles are both potentially water and actually water.  But neither of these makes sense.  If, as in (i), we consider the particles just qua particles of type P, then while they are potentially water, they are not actually water.  If instead, as in (ii), we consider the particles qua particles of type P together with the actualization of the potential in question, then they are actually water, but not potentially water.  (By the way, I am well aware that the last couple paragraphs might need to be re-read a couple of times in order to understand them!  Some of Schmid’s paragraphs are like that too.  That’s just in the nature of the subject matter we are debating and the subtle distinctions it involves, sorry.)

To avoid incoherent formulations like (i) and (ii), Schmid needs to put his point some other way.  The natural way to do it is to characterize the situation as one in which the collection considered just qua particles of type P is merely potentiallywater, but where the collection considered qua particles of type P together with the actualization of the relevant potential is actuallywater.  But that way of putting it would really amount to returning to my formulation after all, rather than offering an alternative formulation.

The third problem with Schmid’s criticism is in his glib suggestion that if God can be actual without being actualized, then – for all I have shown – the water too might be actual without being actualized.  For the view of Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophers (like me) is, of course, not that it is possible in principle for things in general to be actual without being actualized, but rather that it is possible only for something of a very specific type to be actual without being actualized – namely, for something that is purely actual and thus without any potentials standing in need of actualization.  Water is obviously not like that. 

So, whereas Schmid seems to be appealing to some point of common ground between us as the basis for his objection, in reality he is doing no such thing.  His objection presupposes that something other than what is purely actualmight be actual without being actualized – a presupposition no Thomist would accept and for which he has given no justification.  So, the objection simply begs the question.

Schmid makes some further points in response to replies he imagines I might give to his objection.  Since, for the reasons I’ve just given, that objection fails, his further points are moot.  But I’ll briefly say something about some of them anyway.

He imagines, for example, that I might appeal to PSR as grounds for holding that the existence of the water at t requires some cause at t.  But in response he says that what happened prior to t plausibly explains the water’s existence at t.  Now, I am happy to concede that what happened prior to tis part of the explanation of the water’s existence at t.  But what is in question is whether what happened prior to t is by itself sufficient to explain the water’s existence at t.  Schmid says nothing to show that it would be sufficient.  Meanwhile, I argue in Five Proofsthat it is not sufficient, and (as we have just seen above) Schmid’s attempt to undermine that argument fails.

Schmid also appeals in passing to the idea of “existential inertia” as a purported alternative explanation of the existence of the water at t.  But I have criticized atheist appeals to existential inertia at length (e.g. in this article and more briefly in Five Proofs at p. 233) and Schmid says nothing in reply to those criticisms.  (At least, he does not do so in the present article, which is the only one I’ve read.  But he ought to say something about them in the present article, since the article will beg the question otherwise.)

As I pointed out in one of my recent exchanges with Oppy, one problem with the kind of existential inertia scenario he and Schmid favor is that it is viciously circular.  Existential inertia would be an attribute of any substance that has it.  But attributes are ontologically dependent on substances.  So, Schmid’s proposal amounts to saying that the water’s existence at t depends on its attribute of existential inertia, and that its attribute of existential inertia depends on the existence of the water at t – a metaphysical merry-go-round.  (Only in the case of something in which there is no distinction between substance and attributes – that is to say, something strictly simple or non-composite – does this circularity problem not arise.  That is why God alone can have existential inertia.)

Schmid also quotes a passage in Five Proofs where I speak of the existence of the coffee in a certain cup as being “actualized” by the existence of the water that makes it up, where the existence of the water in turn depends on the existence of the particles that make it up, etc.  Here, he suggests, I am dubiously characterizing what are in fact the constituents of a whole as if they were the efficient causes of the whole.

I can see why Schmid would say this, given an uncharitable reading of the passage in question, which perhaps I ought to have phrased more carefully.  But that he should have read it more charitably is, I think, clear from the fact that I there said that the potential existence of the coffee is actualized “in part” by the existence of the water.  Naturally, the constituents of a thing qua constituents are not efficient causes, but material causes.  But what I meant in that passage is that the existence of the coffee is explained by the presence of its constituents together with something that actualizes the potential of those constituents to be coffee, specifically, as opposed to some other kind of thing.

Essentially ordered causal series

A causal series ordered per se or essentially is one in which the members other than the first have their causal power only in a derivative or borrowed way.  A stock example would be a stick that can move a stone only insofar as someone is using the stick as an instrument to move it.  The stick is a secondary cause insofar as it can do its causal work only if there is a primary cause – a cause with built-in or underived causal power – working through it.  The notion of this kind of causal series plays a crucial role in the Aristotelian proof. 

Schmid claims to offer an alternative account of the notion of an essentially ordered causal series which would not have the implications the Aristotelian proof says it has.  He suggests that a necessary condition on essentially ordered series is that there is some natural tendency or causal power toward a certain outcome that the primary cause operating through the secondary causes is counteracting.  He has in mind cases like the one in which, because of the gravitational pull of the earth, a stick would fall to the ground and lie there inertly unless a person comes along to counteract this gravitational influence by picking up the stick and using it as an instrument to move the stone.

But this is simply wrong.  What Schmid is describing is at most a contingent feature of certain specific examples of essentially ordered causal series.  It is not a necessary condition of all essentially ordered series as such.  For Bto be a merely secondary cause of C, all that is required is that B lack any intrinsic power to produce C.  There needn’t be (though of course in some cases there could be) a countervailing factor (whether some tendency within B or some causal power external to B) positively acting to prevent B from producing C.  There need merely be the absence in B of any positive tendency to produce C.  A primary cause A need merely impart to B the needed causal power.  Aneedn’t, either alternatively or in addition, counteract something that prevents B from exercising the needed power. 

Why would Schmid want to suggest otherwise?  (And suggest is all he does.  He does nothing to show that the counteracting of some opposite tendency is a necessary feature of any essentially ordered causal series.  The most he does is to propose that this is a plausible way of interpreting certain specific examples.)

The reason is that Schmid wants to suggest in addition that the existence of something like the water in our earlier example will need a cause standing at the head of an essentially ordered series only if there is some factor positively acting to knock the water out of existence – a factor which the primary cause in an essentially ordered series would have to counteract.  And the presence of such a destructive factor is, Schmid says, something I do not establish – so that (given his analysis of essentially ordered series) my conclusion wouldn’t follow.

Schmid’s own alternative account of what is going on with the water is this: The water which exists at time t – 1 will, in the absence of some factor positively trying to destroy it, simply carry on existing at t.  A primary cause standing at the head of an essentially ordered series would be needed only if there were some destructive factor that needed to be counteracted.  Since there isn’t such a destructive factor, there is no need to appeal to such a series.

The problem with this, though, is that it once again simply assumes Schmid’s “existential inertia” model of the continued existence of the water – something which, again, I have argued against in the book and elsewhere, and which Schmid does nothing to defend in the present article.  In particular, Schmid will have to assume that model in order to make sense of the suggestion that the water will continue to exist at t in the absence of any destructive factor working positively to knock it out of existence.  So, yet again he simply begs the question.

It is important to emphasize that there is indeed a burden on Schmid to defend his existential inertia model, in order for his objections in the current article to have any force.  He seems to think that it is enough for him that I have not proved that there is a destructive factor positively working to knock the water out of existence.  And indeed I have not proved that, but I have not tried to, because it is irrelevant.  What I have done is argue against the existential inertia model, and if my arguments are correct, then the sheer existence of the water at twill need a cause even in the absenceof anything positively working to destroy it. 

Schmid also claims that I have failed to show that, in the case of the sheer existence of a thing at some time t, the essentially ordered causal series that accounts for it is to be understood according to my analysis of essentially ordered series rather than Schmid’s analysis (where, again, the latter involves the claim that such series necessarily involve the counteracting of some tendency opposite to that of the actual outcome).

But in fact my critique of existential inertia does double duty here.  If the water lacks existential inertia, then it simply will not exist even for a moment, including at t, without a sustaining cause at t.  No factor needs positively to act to try to knock it out of existence; the mere lack of existential inertia will suffice for its failing to exist at t if there is nothing causing it to exist then.  So, if something does cause the water to exist at t, then this won’t be a matter of its having to counteract some factor that is trying to knock the water out of existence (along the lines of Schmid’s model of essentially ordered series).  Rather, it will be a matter of the cause actualizing something (the water) that simply would not otherwise exist at t whether or not there is a factor that needs to be counteracted.  In other words, this will be a scenario that fits my model of essentially ordered series, not Schmid’s.

Now, suppose the water does have a sustaining cause C, and that this cause too lacks existential inertia.  Then Cis ontologically in the same situation as the water.  It toowill simply not exist at t – and thus will not be able to cause the water to exist at t – unless it too has a sustaining cause of its own.  And once again, there need be no destructive factor that this further sustaining cause is counteracting (as in Schmid’s model).  Now suppose that what causes C to exist at t is B, and that B too lacks existential inertia.  Then the same problem will arise yet again.  And once again we will have a case where (contrary to Schmid’s model of essentially ordered series) the need for a sustaining cause has nothing to do with there being some countervailing force that the sustaining cause is counteracting.

Indeed, in the case of the sustaining causes of things which lack existential inertia, we have perhaps the clearest possible example of an essentially ordered series fitting my description of how such series operate rather than Schmid’s description.  Hence to rebut his existential inertia model suffices to rebut what he says about essentially ordered causal series.

(By the way, Schmid’s objections so far seem to me similar to the ones Oppy raised in his own critique of the Aristotelian proof, and which I responded to in our two online debates and deal with more systematically in my forthcoming Religious Studies article.  So, the hoopla of Schmid’s fans notwithstanding, it doesn’t seem to me that there is much in Schmid’s first two objections that really adds much to the exchanges online and in print that I have already had with Oppy.)

One last matter before we get to Schmid’s third and final line of criticism.  Schmid proposes in passing that there is a tension between the Aristotelian account of causation as the actualization of potential, and the classical theist understanding of creation.  Prior to creation, nothing exists other than God.  So how, Schmid asks, can creation be a matter of actualizing potential?  For prior to creation there is nothing there, distinct from God, with potentiality waiting to be actualized.  And God himself, being purely actual, doesn’t have potentialities waiting to be actualized either.  So how can creation involve the actualization of potential?  Schmid says that this is not a problem for classical theism as such, but rather for reconciling classical theism with the Aristotelian proof.

But Schmid’s mistake here is his implicit assumption that causation as such requires some preexisting substrate that is altered in the act of causation.  And that is, of course, precisely what the doctrine of creatio ex nihilodenies.  Hence if Schmid’s alleged problem really were a problem, it would indeed be a problem for classical theism as such (since classical theism is committed to creatio ex nihilo) and not just for Aristotelian versions of it.

But in fact it is not a problem.  Certainly no Thomist would agree that it is, given the Thomist account of creation as the conjoining of existence to essence, where the latter, considered by itself, is merely potential until the former actualizes it.  Now, this is not a matter of altering some preexisting substrate, since prior to creation there is no substrate.  When we draw hydrogen and oxygen out of water, there is something already there – the water – in which the things we are drawing out preexist in a virtual way.  But creatio ex nihilo is a more radical kind of causation than that.  Actualizing the very essence of a thing by conjoining existence to it is analogous to actualizing matter’s potential to be hydrogen or oxygen, but it is not exactly the same sort of thing as that.  We need to extend our use of the relevant terms (“potentiality,” “causation,” etc.) beyond their application to the sorts of case in which the terms were originally applied (i.e. cases in which a preexisting substrate is altered).  There is nothing unique to Thomistic natural theology about this.  It is precisely the sort of thing we do in physics when, for example, we extend our use of the term “curvature” to apply to space itself (whereas in its original usage, it applies only to the objects that occupyspace). 

Naturally, there are crucial assumptions here – concerning the Thomistic metaphysics of essence and existence, the Thomistic theory of the analogical use of terms, and so on – that require further elaboration and defense.  The point, though, is that Schmid is hardly raising some issue that no one ever thought of before.  On the contrary, there’s a mountain of stuff written on it that Schmid’s remarks simply ignore.  Hence those remarks hardly constitute a serious objection.

(Compare: Suppose I remarked, in an article critical of materialism, that it is difficult to see how consciousness could be explained in materialist terms, and left it at that.  Would that be an interesting objection?  Of course not.  A materialist could justifiably respond: “Well, maybe so and maybe not, but surely you realize that there’s been an enormous amount written on how such an explanation might go!  Do you have anything to say in response to it?”  That’s how Schmid’s remarks on creation are bound to sound to a Thomist, or indeed to any defender of creatio ex nihilo.)

The purely actual actualizer

Schmid’s final main objection is to claim that, even if it is granted for the sake of argument that the sheer existence of the water at t requires a sustaining cause, it doesn’t follow that this cause would be purely actual rather than a compound of actuality and potentiality.  In particular, he claims that all I am entitled to conclude is that there is a first actualizer at t whose own existence is not in fact being actualized by something else.  But that is consistent with the supposition that the existence of this first actualizer could in principle be actualized by something else.  And if it could be, then it would have potentiality, even if it is potentiality that is not being actualized at t.

But this simply makes no sense.  Naturally, if the first actualizer is operating at t, then it must actually exist at t, and not merely potentially exist at t.  But in that case, then (if it is not purely actual) how can it have some potentialto exist that is not being actualized at t?  For if such a potential were there but not being actualized at t, then the first actualizer would not exist at t, and thus not be causing (or doing anything else) at t.  Yet if such a potential is being actualized at t, then we are not really talking about the firstactualizer after all, since in that case there would be something distinct from it that is actualizing its potential to exist (and that other thingwould be the true first actualizer). 

Or is Schmid saying that the first actualizer’s potential to exist at t is actualized, but that there is no cause that is doing the actualizing?  That can’t be right, because in this third objection, Schmid is, at least for the sake of argument, conceding the principle that the actualization of potential requires a cause.  (Or, if instead he rejects this principle, that would really just take us back to his firstobjection to the Aristotelian proof, rather than constituting a third line of criticism.)

So, the objection seems to me to be a muddle.  The subsidiary points Schmid makes in the course of developing it aren’t much better.  For example, he says that, even if the first actualizer were purely actual with respect to its existence, it might still have potentialities in other respects (for example, with respect to changes it might undergo).  But the problems with this suggestion should be obvious from other things I say in Five Proofs.  For one thing, if the first actualizer has potentialities even of the sort Schmid suggests, then it will be composite rather than simple.  But, Thomists argue, anything composite requires a cause, in which case this actualizer will not after all be purely actual even with respect to its existence.  For another thing, the Scholastic principle agere sequitur esse (“action follows being”), which I defend in the book, entails that the manner in which a thing acts reflects the manner in which it exists.  Hence, if something acts only by way of actualizing potentialities, then it would exist only by way of actualizing them; or, if instead it exists without the actualization of potentialities, then so too it actswithout actualizing them.  No doubt Schmid would disagree with all this, but the point is that his objections simply presuppose that it is wrong, and do nothing to show that it is.

Schmid also oddly claims that my own position unjustifiably “presupposes the impossibility of changeable necessary beings” (emphasis added).  But in fact my position presupposes no such thing.  Rather, it claims to demonstrate the impossibility of changeable necessary beings.  (It seems to me that there may be a kind of unintentional rhetorical sleight of hand in Schmid’s remark.  If someone claims to show that X is impossible – whether X is a round square, two plus two equaling five, a changeable necessary being, or whatever – a critic could always say: “Well, your argument is correct only if X is indeed impossible.”  Which is true, but trivial.  It hardly entails that the argument presupposes that X is impossible!)

Now as Schmid acknowledges, the charge that a firstactualizer need not be a purely actualactualizer is in fact one that I anticipate and respond to in Five Proofs (at pp. 66-68).  He quotes a remark I make there to the effect that “the first actualizer in the series is ‘first’, then, in the sense that it can actualize the existence of other things without its own existence having to be actualized… in order for it to exist” (p. 66, emphasis added).  Schmid responds that his scenario is not one in which a first actualizer has some potentiality that has to be actualized in order for it to exist.  Rather, he is simply claiming that it is one in which a first actualizer needn’t in any sense be purely actual.  For example, it might have at t a potential with respect to its existence that is not in fact actualized at t. 

But this simply misses the point I made above.  If a first actualizer has at t a potential with respect to its existence, then it simply will not exist at tunless that potential is actualized.  Hence its potential wouldindeed have to be actualized in order for it to exist.  Again, Schmid’s scenario simply makes no sense.

I appreciate Schmid’s interest in the argument and his attempt to engage with it seriously.  However, on close inspection the attempt seems to me to be riddled with confusions, begged questions, and missed points.

A whole lotta links

At Substack, philosopher Michael Robillard explains how he left academia, and how academia left him.

Anna Krylov warns of the growing politicization of science, in the Journal of Physical Chemistry.  Nautilus on the sometimes contradictory scientific literature. 

At Rolling Stone, hear David Crosby sing Donald Fagen’s new song “Rodriguez for a Night.”

The Spectator on a new biography of Kurt Gödel. 

At the Claremont Review of Books, Joseph M. Bessette on Barack Obama’s latest memoir.

Neo-Aristotelian Perspectives on Contemporary Science, edited by William Simpson, Robert Koons, and Nicholas Teh, is now available in open access.

Joseph Trabbic reviews a recent translation of Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange’s Philosophizing in Faith: Essays on the Beginning and End of Wisdom, at Catholic World Report.

The New Criterion on the triumph of Thomas Sowell.

Prospect on why George Berkeley was less radical than he seems.

The Guardian reports on a lost memoir that paints an unflattering portrait of John Locke.

Larry Chapp on D. C. Schindler on liberalism and integralism, at Catholic World Report.

Mark Regnerus on the privatization of marriage, at Public Discourse.  At The Spectator, Mary Harrington argues that a sexual counterrevolution is on its way.

Collider on the thirtieth anniversary of The Rocketeer.

Tyler Cowen says that economics is failing us, at Bloomberg.

The crises of the West.  At Substack, N. S. Lyons reflects on the upheaval in France and raises four big questions for the counter-revolution. 

The Guardian reports that Richard Dawkins has lost his Humanist of the Year title over trans comments.  Alexander Riley on the war on sex, at The American Mind.  Mary Eberstadt on the trans-kid craze, at the Claremont Review of Books.

The Intercollegiate Studies Institute rounds up some reviews of Sohrab Ahmari’s The Unbroken Thread.

Meet the new Journal of Controversial Ideas.  Daniel Kaufman commentsat The Electric Agora. Also, Kaufman on twenty-five things everyone used to understand.

The latest at John DeRosa’s Classical Theism podcast: Christopher Tomaszewski on the immateriality of the intellect and modal collapse; W. Matthews Grant on free will and divine causality; Matthew Minerd on Garrigou-Lagrange and the principle of finality; and much more.

At Quadrant, James Franklin reconstructs Jesus Christ’s PhD dissertation. 

Michael Pakaluk on John Rawls and the rejection of truth, at Law and Liberty.

At YouTube, Gaven Kerr discusses classical theism and divine simplicity and Kerr and Ryan Mullins debate the divine nature.

The haunted imagination of Alfred Hitchcock, at the New Republic.

Philosopher Charlie Huenemann on the twilight of the idols of good writing.

Robert Royal on the late Jude Dougherty, at The Catholic Thing.

At Philosophical Studies, Ben Page on power-ing up neo-Aristotelian natural goodness.

On Pints With Aquinas, Janet Smith and Fr. Gregory Pine debate the ethics of lying.

David Noe and Jeff Winkle carry out an ongoing discussion about classical civilization atthe Ad Navseam podcast.

“When you measure, include the measurer.”  The Spectator reports that MC Hammer defends philosophy against scientism. 

At Public Discourse, Matthew Berry on nominalism, nihilism, and modern politics.  Patrick Deneen on Michael Sandel and a tyranny without tyrants, at American Affairs.

Curiosity damned the cat

Aquinas tells us that curiosity is a vice.  Before you clutch your pearls, dear village atheist reader, know that Aquinas was notcondemning the pursuit of knowledge as such.  On the contrary, he refers to such pursuit as “studiousness,” and he regarded it is a virtue, not a vice.  “Curiosity,” as Aquinas uses the term, refers instead to intellectual pursuits that are disordered in some respect.  (Compare: The sin of wrath is not anger, but the indulgence of disorderedanger; the sin of lust is not sexual desire, but the indulgence of disordered sexual desire; and so on.  In each case, it’s not the thing, but the abuse of the thing, that is condemned.)

Facilitating wrongdoing

In what cases might the pursuit of knowledge be disordered?  Perhaps the most obvious case is when one’s aim in acquiring knowledge is to facilitate evildoing.  If doing X is morally wrong, and you are trying to learn about Y for the sake of enabling you to do X, then your pursuit of knowledge about Y is wrong.  Of course, that leaves it open that pursuing such knowledge for some other reason might be legitimate.  (For example, if you are doing research on firearms because you are trying to figure out how to commit a certain crime, then you are doing something wrong.  But if you are doing such research because you are trying to figure out how to defend yourself against criminals, then you are not necessarily doing something wrong.)

The easy access to information afforded by the internet has opened the door to unprecedented occasions for this particular kind of curiosity.  Knowledge relevant to carrying out identity theft, finding partners for illicit sexual encounters, organizing a riot, doxing political enemies, and other immoral activities is just a few clicks away.

Manifesting pride

A second way that the pursuit of knowledge can be disordered is when it is motivated by the sin of pride.  The pursuer is, in this case, less concerned with knowledge than with the glorification of self that such knowledge might provide.  Obviously, someone who knows a lot precisely because he wants to be seen by others as knowing a lot would be guilty of this.  But there are other ways that pride can manifest itself in the pursuit of knowledge, which are especially evident in contemporary intellectual life, not least in my own field of academic philosophy.

One of them is the desire to be seen as clever.  Manifestations of this might include developing abstruse lines of argument, with feigned earnestness, for positions one does not really take seriously and one’s readers are not likely to take seriously either; the use of logical symbolism and other technical apparatus in cases where it is not necessary in order to make one’s point; a predilection for one-upmanship and argumentativeness; and, in general, a tendency to treat intellectual life as a kind of game or mental onanism.  (In a recent post, we saw that the Neo-Scholastic philosopher Thomas Harper labeled this tendency the “unreality of thought.”)

Another way pride manifests itself in intellectual matters is in the attitude of the sort of intellectual who takes delight in destroying the convictions of ordinary people, so as to facilitate his feelings of superiority over them.  We see this in the tiresome “everything you think you know is wrong” style of pop science writing, and in the “hermeneutics of suspicion” style of philosophy and social science that purports to “unmask” ordinary innocent beliefs and values as “really” “nothing but” the manifestation of some hidden and sinister motivation (economic class interests, subconscious neuroses, the promptings of selfish genes, the will to power, racism, sexism, etc. etc.).

Trivial pursuit

A third way the pursuit of knowledge can be disordered is when it reflects an excessive interest in matters that are not of ultimate importance.  The highest sort of knowledge concerns the divine first cause and last end of our existence, and of how to prepare our souls so that they might be united to him forever.  The further one’s intellectual pursuits take one from interest in and knowledge of these ultimate matters, the more disordered they are. 

Now, one can certainly pursue scientific or philosophical knowledge in a manner that distracts one from these highest matters.  To be sure, scientific and philosophical inquiry, at least when done well, do put one in some contact with the natures of things and with objective reality in general, even if not always in a way that is oriented to the very highest realities.  But one of the pathologies of modern intellectual life, alongside the ones already mentioned, is a tendency toward hyper-specialization that makes one so doggedly oriented toward a narrow aspect of reality that one’s view of larger matters becomes positively distorted or obscured altogether.  That can cause grave spiritual harm.

Outside of academic life, a similar excessive focus on matters of at most secondary importance is exhibited by those who are hyper-enthusiastic about travel, cuisine, and the like.  And the most absurd manifestation is the rise of “geek culture” – of people who devote enormous amounts of time and energy to learning and thinking about the minutiae of fictional universes from movies, comics, and games, or who obsess over the work and personal lives of favorite actors, musicians, bands, etc.  My point, as longtime readers know, is by no means to disparage such things per se.  But for many people today, such trivial pursuits have gone well beyond a point that is spiritually healthy, and have become a kind of substitute religion. 

Aquinas tells us that curiosity can be a byproduct of the cardinal sin of acedia or apathy toward the pursuit of the highest spiritual goods.  Modern popular culture and its dizzying variety of entertainments have to a large extent become precisely this – a drug that so thoroughly immerses people in fantasy life that they are distracted from pursuing what is necessary for the eternal wellbeing of their souls.

Arrogant amateurs

Aquinas sees an additional manifestation of the vice of curiosity in people who pursue matters that they lack the wherewithal to understand.  I don’t think that what he has in mind here is the sort of person who finds it interesting to learn something about a subject he could never master himself, such as the non-expert who reads popular works of philosophy, science, etc.  That seems to be not only harmless, but an exercise of the virtue of studiousness.  What Aquinas has in mind, I would suggest, is instead the sort of person whose confidence in his opinions about such matters is out of proportion to his actual knowledge or ability.  The problem here is a lack of intellectual humility.  (The difference from the sort of prideful person discussed earlier is that that sort of person typically doeshave the requisite intellectual ability.) 

The internet and social media have afforded unprecedented occasions for this particular manifestation of the sin of curiosity.  Anyone with access to Wikipedia, or even just to the Twitter or Facebook feeds he peruses every day, fancies himself possessed of such expertise on matters of politics, science, and philosophy that he is justified in shrilly denouncing all who disagree with him.

Occult knowledge

Aquinas also classifies interest in divination as a species of curiosity.  Here the idea is that demons are of their nature unreliable sources of knowledge, driven as they are solely by the aim of corrupting souls.  But a disordered interest in the occult in general would plausibly be classified as a kind of curiosity in Aquinas’s sense.  I say “disordered” because not all inquiry into such matters is bad.  For example, Aquinas himself has a lot to say about the nature and activities of demons, and the topic is of both intellectual and spiritual interest.  What I have in mind is rather an interest in the occult that is disordered in that one is attracted to the study of evil powers precisely insofar as they are evil.

For example, there are in modern society subcultures that are excessively fascinated, and indeed titillated, by the demonic, the deviant, and the macabre in their various forms – in satanic symbolism and other forms of sacrilege and blasphemy, in the lives and mindsets of serial killers and the grisly details of their crimes, in pushing ever further out the boundaries of sexual license, and so on – precisely because these things are deeply subversive of normal sensibilities and taboos.  Some people of this type may not believe in the literal existence of the demonic, but are nevertheless drawn to what it represents.  This love of what is subversive qua subversive is gravely disordered, so that the pursuit of knowledge that is driven by that love is also disordered.

When one considers these varieties of the disordered pursuit of knowledge – again, those which facilitate wrongdoing, manifest pride, obsess over trivia, foster aggressive and arrogant ignorance, or evince delight in the demonic and subversive – it is evident that curiosity, as Aquinas uses the term, is not only a sin but an extremely common one.

Indeterminacy and the comics

When I was seventeen, I wanted to be Al Williamson, the legendary science-fiction and adventure strip comic book artist.  Williamson is best known for his work on titles like Weird Science and Weird Fantasy for EC Comics in the 1950s, though in his later years he would be associated with the Star Wars newspaper strip and comic books.  (That was a tough one for me, since I love Williamson but can’t stand Star Wars.)  The uncolored original art for the classic opening panel from EC’s “Space-Borne!” (which you see to the left) gives a good sense of the Williamson style – elegant, lush, heroic.

For a larger sample of Williamson’s work , you might check out his adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s “A Sound of Thunder” for EC’s Weird Science-Fantasy; the amusing “The Success Story” from Warren’s Creepymagazine; his adaptation of the movie Blade Runnerfor Marvel Comics; and “The Few and the Far” from Pacific Comics’ Alien Worlds.  A new book, Al Williamson: Strange World Adventures, offers a pleasing overview of the cartoonist’s career, with a great many pages of original art reproduced on large pages in black and white so that the details of Williamson’s pen and ink work are all visible.

How can I excuse a post on Williamson at a blog devoted to philosophical and theological topics?  The answer is that the book provides (without intending to do so, naturally!) a couple of choice examples of the phenomenon known to contemporary analytic philosophers as the indeterminacy of meaning.  The basic idea, as longtime readers know, is this.  Consider any thought, any spoken or written words or sentences, any symbols, pictures or other representations, and in general anything with any sort of meaning or representational content.  There is nothing about the collection of physical facts concerning such things – for example, facts about the size or shape of written letters, facts about the brain or behavioral patterns, facts about the causal relations between a person and his environment – that can by themselves determine exactly what meaning is to be attributed to a thought or conveyed by an utterance, picture, or other representation.  For any set of physical facts, there will always be alternative possible interpretations one might assign to them.  Physical representations are therefore systematically ambiguous or indeterminatein their content.

This thesis, most famously associated with philosophers like Quine and Kripke, is of interest because of the dramatic conclusions philosophers have drawn from it – albeit different philosophers draw different dramatic conclusions.  Suppose you take the materialist view that there are no facts over and above the physical facts.  Then you will be tempted to draw the conclusion that there just is no fact of the matter about what any of our thoughts and utterances mean.  Suppose instead that you hold that there is and must be a fact of the matter about what at least some of our thoughts and utterances mean.  Then you will be tempted to draw the anti-materialist conclusion that the physical facts are not all the facts there are – and in particular that thought cannot be identified with anything material.  (The latter conclusion, as I have argued in this paperand in several follow-up pieces, is the correct one to draw.)

Here is one example from Williamson’s work that wonderfully exemplifies the phenomenon of indeterminacy.  In 1954, Williamson produced an especially beautifully-illustrated eight page story for The Amazing Adventures of Buster Crabbe.  But the series was cancelled before the story saw print.  About ten years later, comic book artist Wally Wood decided he wanted it for the first issue of his magazine Witzend.  But, while preserving the art, Wood came up with an entirely new story and dialogue for it, publishing it in black and white under the title “Savage World.”  Over fifteen years after that, the story was once again rewritten (this time by comics writer Bruce Jones), and published in Alien Worlds in a colorized version under the title “Land of the Fhre.” 

So, we have exactly the same series of images, but with three different narratives – three different ways of interpreting the significanceof the images.  There is nothing in the images themselves that determines exactly who the characters are or what they are doing, what the larger background context is in terms of which we should understand the eight-page series of images, and so on.  Something outside the images, namely the intentions of the writer, has to determine all that.

Notice that this does not by itself entail that the images are entirely indeterminate.  At least given the general background context – the general conventions of art, the fact that we are dealing with a comic book story, that it is appearing in a science fiction magazine, etc. – we know that the images represent people and places, that the characters in the later panels in the story are the same as the characters in the earlier panels, and so forth.  (Though torn entirely from that larger context too, the physical attributes of the art wouldn’t by themselves suffice to determine even that much.)

This is a point worth making given an issue related to indeterminacy that arises in the theological context (and which arose in the comments section of a recent post).  As the history of Christian theology demonstrates, the same biblical passages can be interpreted in different ways, and stitched together into theological systems as unlike as the different stories assigned to the same Williamson artwork in my example.  Catholics and Protestants disagree over whether an authoritative institution like the Church is therefore necessary in order to assign to scripture a proper interpretation. 

But the Catholic position in this dispute is too often understood in a cartoonish manner (unfortunately, sometimes even by well-meaning but uninformed Catholics themselves).  The Catholic Church does not maintain that scripture cannot be understood at all apart from the authoritative interpretation of the Church.  She is not making the absurd claim that the words on the page are strictly unintelligible gibberish until the Church tells us what they mean (as if ordinary readers of Hebrew, Aramaic, or Greek couldn’t make heads or tails of it until some Church official came along to tell us what it was saying!)  Obviously, the general sense of most passages is clear enough.  Rather, what is at issue is how to settle the interpretation of passages that are ambiguous, how to determine exactly what principle lies behind the teaching of this or that passage, how to apply it to concrete or unforeseen circumstances, and so on.

For example, when the Fifth Commandment says “Thou shalt not kill,” the Church is not claiming that this is no more meaningful than “Blah blah blah” until an authoritative interpreter comes along.  Obviously, that would be a ridiculous claim.  The general meaning is clear enough.  But is all killing ruled out?  What does the command imply with regard to self-defense?  The killing of animals?  Capital punishment?  Abortion?  Euthanasia?  Other biblical passages can help to a considerable extent, but they can't settle every single question of this type.  That is why (Catholics argue) an authoritative interpreter is necessary.

Another reason that the Catholic position cannot entail that biblical passages are utterly unintelligible before an authoritative interpreter comes along is that such a suggestion would render meaningless the Church's claim that she only ever teaches in a way that is consistent with scripture.  That obviously entails that there is at least some general meaning to scriptural passages that can be grasped by the reader even before the Church puts forward an authoritative decision on ambiguous cases, application to unforeseen circumstances, etc. Otherwise we'd have a ridiculous and Orwellian situation where the Church can always claim to be consistent with scripture, but only for the trivial reason that she can always just arbitrarily stipulate what scripture means.

An analogy would be the Supreme Court's claim to be the authoritative interpreter of the U.S. Constitution.  No one claims that the Constitution is strictly unintelligible until the court tells us what it means.  The general sense is clear enough.  Rather, the question is how to interpret ambiguous passages, how to determine what general principle underlies this or that part of it, how to apply it to new cases, etc.  That's why the court is needed.  (The difference between the court and the Church is that the court has no special divine guidance and therefore is not infallible – very far from it, obviously!)

Anyway, the “Savage World”/”Land of the Fhre” example provides a nice analogue to this more narrow sort of indeterminacy.  Given the general background conventions of art, the conventions of comic book art specifically, and so on, the attributes of the Williamson artwork are sufficient by themselves to tell us that what we are looking at are people, places, and buildings, that this is an adventure story of some type, that there is some sort of conflict between the characters, etc.  This is analogous to the fact that given the general conventions of the biblical languages, general background knowledge of human life, etc., the general sense of scriptural passages is clear enough (e.g. we know that the Ten Commandments tell us not to kill, steal, or commit adultery, we know at least in a general way what killing, stealing, and committing adultery involve, etc.).

At the same time, the specific details of the plot of the story, the motivations of the characters, etc. cannot all be read off from the artwork alone.  Something outside the artwork – the intentions of the writer and the story he imposes on the images – is needed in order to determine that.  This is analogous to the fact that the precise nature of the general principles expressed in scriptural passages, their application to new cases, what scripture implies vis-à-vis very technical and abstruse theological matters and issues that never arose at the time the Bible was written, etc.  cannot all be read off from scripture alone.  To that limited extent, the precise meaning of scripture is indeterminate apart from the reading given it by an authoritative interpreter. 

Here is another example from Williamson’s career, and recounted in Al Williamson: Strange World Adventures.  Williamson famously collaborated in his early work with a number of artist friends who would also become well-known, such as Frank Frazetta, Angelo Torres, and Roy Krenkel.  Their influence can be felt in Williamson’s 1950s-era work especially, including the examples I’ve linked to.  Now, Williamson was not keen on drawing superhero tales, and one publisher was not happy with the work he did on one such story.  The publisher hired Torres to do another story, in the process telling Torres how little he thought of Williamson’s work.  As a gag, Torres had Williamson do the job, without telling the publisher – and when it was turned in, the publisher praised Torres for it and told him how much better it was than Williamson’s work!

I would suggest that this episode illustrates another theme related to indeterminacy – what philosophers of science call the theory-ladenness of observation.   The idea here is that there is no such thing as observational or experimental evidence that can be described entirely independently of any background theoretical assumptions.  We are always making some theoretical assumptions when we interpret some piece of scientific evidence, and those assumptions can in principle be wrong or at least be open to challenge from incompatible alternative assumptions.  To take a stock example, whether I describe what I observe at sunset as the sun moving relative to the earth or the earth moving relative to the sun depends on which theoretical assumptions I bring to bear on the observation.  And ordinary observation, outside of scientific contexts, is like this too.

The relationship to indeterminacy is, perhaps, obvious.  What is observed does not by itself suffice to tell us its entire significance.  It is indeterminate between different possible descriptions reflecting different possible theoretical background assumptions.  (Note that here too, one needn’t hold that the indeterminacy is complete.  For example, I can know that I am looking at a large, round yellowish-orange object of some kind whether I interpret it as the sun moving relative to the earth, a stationary object relative to which the earth is moving, or for that matter an artificial sun like the kind in the movie The Truman Show.)

The Torres/Williamson episode nicely illustrates the idea.  The publisher evaluated the artwork in light of the background assumption that it was produced by Torres and not by Williamson.  Had he instead assumed from the start that he was looking at a piece of Williamson artwork, he may well have given it a more negative evaluation.  Note that that does not entail that there is nothing in what he is observing that does not reflect the publisher’s background assumptions.  There are images in ink on the paper, people and places and buildings represented there, and so on, entirely apart from the publisher’s assumptions.  But whether he is inclined to notice certain aesthetic and stylistic features, to overemphasize certain weaknesses in the drawing or certain of its strengths, etc. does reflect the assumptions he is making about who drew it.

Related reading:

Pop culture roundup [other philosophical posts on comics, movies, music, etc.]

Five Proofs in Spanish

My book Five Proofs of the Existence of God is now available in a Spanish translation.  It has for some time been available also in German.

For anyone interested in other translations of my books: The Last Superstition has been translated into Portuguese, French, and German.  Philosophy of Mind is available in German.  A book of some of my essays is available in Romanian.