Edward Feser's Blog, page 45

A further reply to Mullins on divine simplicity (Updated)

UPDATE 8/24: Brandon Watson and John DeRosa also respond to Mulllins.

UPDATE 8/21: Look out!  The Scotist Meme Squad has entered the fray.

At Theopolis, Ryan Mullins has now replied to those of us who had commented on his essay criticizing the doctrine of divine simplicity.  (The other commenters were Peter Leithart and Joe Lenow.)  What follows is a response to what he has to say in reply to my comments on the essay, specifically.
Mullins’ main argument
In his original essay, Mullins had in a discursive way explained what he takes the doctrine of divine simplicity to be and how it relates to the notions of divine freedom, grace, and God’s necessary existence.  Along the way he set out a sixteen step argument intended to show that divine simplicity cannot be reconciled with divine freedom.  In his latest essay, Mullins complains that “it is not clear that my dialogue partners have adequately attempted to engage with the argument,” so he repeats the argument again – this time by setting the sixteen steps off by themselves without the surrounding material, for clarity’s sake.  As he did in his original essay, Mullins challenges his critics to identify which premise, specifically, they reject.Now, Mullins writes:
My dialogue partners have not been entirely forthcoming about which premises they reject.
For example, consider Edward Feser’s reply.  Feser comments on my argument from divine simplicity to the necessary existence of the world.  This is curious because none of the premises in my argument even mention the necessary existence of the world.  This leaves me to wonder if Feser read my original essay closely. 
End quote.  But in fact, as anyone can easily verify by going back and reading my original reply to Mullins, I did explicitly identify the premise I reject – namely premise (9), which says “All of God’s actions are identical to each other such that there is only one divine act.” 
I also fail to see why it is “curious” that I “comment[ed] on [Mullins’] argument from divine simplicity to the necessary existence of the world.”  Was I supposed to ignore what Mullins said about that topic in his original essay simply because the phrase “necessary existence of the world” doesn’t appear in any of the sixteen steps of his more formal argument?
I did, in any event, make it clear in my original essay why I presented my objection to Mullins in the way that I did.  In his sixteen-step argument, Mullins emphasizes God’s freedom to refrain from giving grace, specifically, but in fact there is nothing special about that example vis-à-vis the controversy over divine simplicity.  God’s freedom with respect to giving grace is just a special case of his freedom with respect to any of his acts, such as creating the world, causing miracles, sending prophets, etc.  What all these effects of divine action have in common is that they are contingent.  Hence if the doctrine of divine simplicity implies that these effects are necessary, then it seems the doctrine also implies that divine action is not really free after all.
The way to block this outcome is, again, to reject Mullins’ premise (9).  Now, what is wrong with that premise, as I explained in my original reply to Mullins, is that it ignores what Barry Miller calls the distinction between real properties and Cambridge properties(where, as I there hinted in a footnote, this echoes Aquinas’s distinctionbetween real relations and logical relations).  Mullins writes:
To be fair to Feser, he does at least attempt to identify which premise in the argument that he rejects. Feser says,
Now, what the doctrine of divine simplicity claims—contrary to what Mullins supposes (in what he labels premise (9) of his argument)—is not that all of God’s properties are identical and thus are necessary as he is, but rather that all of his real properties are.
Feser then goes on to say that he rejects premise (9) because of a distinction between real properties and Cambridge properties.  According to Feser, God is identical to His real properties, but God is not identical to His Cambridge properties.
I find this reply from Feser curious for several reasons. 
End quote.  Mullins sure finds a lot of things “curious.”  Well, here’s something I find curious: that Mullins at first accuses me of having “not been entirely forthcoming” about which of his premises I reject, and then in the next breath conceding that in fact I identified premise (9) as the problem.  Go figure.
Anyway, Curious Ryan’s first complaint is that:
[I]t is curious because my premise (9) does not even mention the word property.  What my premise (9) actually says is, “All of God’s actions are identical to each other such that there is only one divine act.”  My actual premise (9) is something that proponents of divine simplicity explicitly endorse.  By this one act, God is said to will Himself and everything else that He has made.  Moreover, I intentionally avoided any mention of properties in the premises of my argument.  I avoided this because, as I explained in my original essay, proponents of divine simplicity explicitly deny that God has any properties, forms, immanent universals, or tropes.  As the proponent of divine simplicity, Katherin Rogers, makes clear, the simple God does not have any properties.  Instead, God is simply act.
End quote.  There are several things wrong with this.  The first is that it simply isn’t true that all proponents of divine simplicity would say that God does not have properties.  That way of talking makes it sound as if God is some sort of bare particular, and that is certainly not what the doctrine of divine simplicity claims.  What proponents of divine simplicity wouldall say is that God does not have any real properties that are distinct from the divine substance.
In any event, the word “property” is used by different philosophers in different ways, so before one makes sweeping claims about what “proponents of divine simplicity explicitly deny” one had better get clear on exactly how this or that proponent uses the term.  Now, as Mullins surely knows, the word “property” is commonly used in a very loose way by contemporary analytic philosophers, to mean just any old thing you might predicate of something.  To be sure, this is definitely not my own preferred usage, since the term has a much narrower technical sense in Aristotelian-Thomistic metaphysics.  But it is, again, a common usage among analytic philosophers.  Since analytic philosophers of religion are Mullins’ own main audience, since Miller (who I was citing) uses the term in this way, and since I had a word limit and didn’t have space in my essay to get into an explanation of the various uses of the term “property,” I decided for expository purposes to acquiesce to the common analytic philosopher’s usage. 
Now, Mullins surely realizes that that is how I intended to use the word “property” in my essay.  But given that broad sense of the term, it is quite obviously false to say that defenders of divine simplicity deny that God has “properties.”  On the contrary, defenders of divine simplicity typically hold that God has lots of “properties” in that broad sense of the term – omniscience, omnipotence, perfect goodness, and so forth.  To be sure, defenders of the doctrine also say that God’s omnipotence is his omniscience, which is his perfect goodness, and so on.  So they would say that God’s “properties,” in this broad sense of the term, are identical.  But to say that is very different from saying that he doesn’t have “properties” in the broad sense.
Now, in this broad sense of the term “properties,” God’s actionswould also be “properties” of God.  Hence the distinction between real properties and Cambridge properties is obviously relevant to evaluating Mullins’ premise (9), because we need to know whether the divine actions Mullins focuses on (such as giving grace and creating the world) are real properties or Cambridge properties – again, in the broad sense of “properties” used by analytic philosophers.  And again, Mullins surely has to realize that this is what I meant.  Mullins’ book on the divine nature is in a series devoted to analytic theology, and it cites Miller in its bibliography, so the usage cannot be unfamiliar to him.  So, Mullins’ heavy going about my reference to “properties” seems to me to amount to mere quibbling and kicking up dust.  All very curious, as Mullins would say.
Anyway, here’s the payoff.  When we get clear on the terminological issues, it is manifestly falseto claim, as Mullins does, that his premise (9) “is something that proponents of divine simplicity explicitly endorse.”  For, to use Miller’s language, defenders of divine simplicity claim only that God’s real properties are identical to each other, not that his Cambridgeproperties are.  Hence any divine action that amounts to a Cambridge property is not one that the defender of divine simplicity will identify with the divine nature.  And that is exactly what is going on with properties like “being creator of the world” and “being the source of grace.”  They are Cambridge properties.  So, the problem with Mullins’ premise (9) is that it is too sweeping.  Once one restricts the premise to God’s real properties, the revised premise will be true, but then the rest of Mullins’ argument will no longer go through.  In particular, it will no longer follow that God’s act of giving grace is identical to God and thus as necessary as he is.  And thus it will not follow that that act is not free.
Mullins tells us that a second reason he finds my reply “curious” is that I seem, in his view, to be confusing his position with that of Thomas Morris, against whom I deployed Miller’s distinction between real properties and Cambridge properties in my book Five Proofs of the Existence of God .  (More precisely, Miller himselfdeploys this distinction against Morris – I was just citing Miller’s response to Morris in my book, rather than presenting it as my own.)  Mullins says his argument is very different from Morris’s, since Morris’s focus is on the claim that divine simplicity would make God’s creation of the world necessary.  But I have already explained why this is not a difference that makes a difference.  What is doing the work in Mullins’ argument is the claim that divine simplicity makes God’s actions, in general, necessary – the same thing that is doing the work in Morris’s argument.  The fact that Mullins focuses on the specific example of God acting to impart grace, whereas Morris focuses on the example of God acting to create the world, is irrelevant.  Hence my objection applies to Mullins’ argument no less than to Morris’s.
But Mullins’ third reason for finding my reply “curious,” he tells us, is that he does not think it really applies even to Morris’s position.  The reason, he says, is that “divine actions are intrinsic to God,” and thus cannot be Cambridge properties.  Hence my appeal to the distinction between real properties and Cambridge properties is a “category mistake” and amounts to “nothing but hand-waving.”
Well, if Mullins isn’t here waving his own hands, that’s only because he’s too busy missing the point.  To see what is wrong with his response, go back to the examples I used in my original essay to introduce the distinction between real properties and Cambridge properties.  When Socrates grows a beard, that involves the acquisition by him of a real property.  But when he becomes shorter than Plato, not because of any change he undergoes, but rather because Plato has grown taller, that involves the acquisition by Socrates of a Cambridge property.  It is, in this case, Plato rather than Socrates who acquires a real property.
Now, it is possible for something to have a Cambridge property by virtue of also having a certain real property.  To modify my example, suppose that Socrates had been Plato’s father, so that it is by virtue of his having been begotten by Socrates and inheriting Socrates’ genes that Plato eventually grew to be taller than Socrates.  Then there is a sense in which you could say that Socrates’ action, the action of begetting Plato, caused Socrates (later on) to become shorter than Plato.  Now, there is obviously a sense in which Socrates’ action of begetting is intrinsic to Socrates.  Something has to happen in him in order for the begetting to occur.  And so, something had to happen in him in order for Plato later on to grow taller, which resulted in Socrates being shorter than Plato.  But does it follow that Socrates’ becoming shorter than Plato is not a Cambridge property after all but a real one?  Of course not. 
Now in the same way, it is certainly true to say that there is something intrinsic to God himself that makes it the case that the world is created.  No defender of divine simplicity denies that.  But it simply doesn’t follow that God’s acting to create the world is not after all a Cambridge property, any more than it follows that Socrates’ growing shorter than Plato is not after all a Cambridge property.
You might characterize the situation in my revised example as Socrates acting in a way that (eventually) resulted in his becoming shorter than Plato.  But though the acting is something intrinsic to Socrates, that the acting resulted in his becoming shorter than Plato is not intrinsic to him.  Similarly, you might characterize creation as God acting in a way that resulted in the world’s existing.  But though the acting is something intrinsic to God, that the acting resulted in the world’s existing is not intrinsic to him.
You may or may not find this plausible.  But here’s the thing.  The unwary reader of Mullins’ response is likely to get the impression that my reply to him was some eccentric concoction of my own, cobbled together to rebut his novel and clever objection.  But my response is neither my own concoction nor eccentric, and Mullins’ objection is neither novel nor particularly clever.  In fact it is pretty old hat.  As I have already said, I am simply making a point made by Barry Miller, but Miller was in turn only putting a contemporary gloss on a line of argument that goes back at least to Aquinas, and that has been repeated by many Thomists since.  And all of them were responding to variations on the sort of objection Mullins gives.
The way Aquinas puts the point is, again, in terms of the distinction between a real relation and a logical relation (sometimes called a relation of reason).  A stock example is the relationship between perceiver and perceived.  If I perceive you, I bear a real relation to you.  But if you are perceived by me, you bear a logical rather than real relation to me.  Miller’s way of putting this is to say that by virtue of perceiving you, I have a real property, whereas by virtue of being perceived by me, you have a merely Cambridge property. 
Now, Aquinas’s view is that by virtue of being created by God, the world bears a real relation to him, whereas by virtue of creating the world, God bears a merely logical rather than real relation to it.  Miller’s way of putting this is to say that the world’s being created by God is a real property of the world, whereas God’s creating the world is a Cambridge property of God.  (When replying to Mullins, I decided to use Miller’s formulation because I supposed it would be less likely to be misunderstood by readers more familiar with analytic than with Thomistic jargon.  Silly me.)  One wonders whether Mullins is even familiar with this traditional Thomistic position.  If he isn’t, that would explain the, er, curious circumstance that Mullins at one point actually tries to employ Aquinas against my objection – an objection I borrow, by way of Miller, from Aquinas.
Anyway, the point is this.  The Aquinas-Miller position is not some obscure or incidental aspect of the debate over divine simplicity.  It is a standard part of it, certainly among Thomists, and has been for centuries.  Mullins does nothing to refute this position.  All he does is make assertions of precisely the kind the Aquinas-Miller position claims already to have answered.  So, while Mullins seems to think he has made some devastating new objection against divine simplicity, in fact he hasn’t advanced the discussion one inch beyond where Aquinas left it in the thirteenth century.  Maybe the Aquinas-Miller position is wrong (though obviously I don’t think it is), but if so, Mullinscertainly has done nothing to show that it is.
Analogy and dire consequences
Mullins has some equally anticlimactic things to say in response to my remarks about analogy.  He writes:
I am not entirely sure what the doctrine of analogy does for divine simplicity with regards to my argument.  Can analogical predication somehow remove a contradiction like “God is free and God is not free.”  No.  Classical theists are quite clear that God cannot be free if His actions are performed of absolute necessity.  No amount of analogical predication can make God’s free actions consistent with those actions being performed of absolute necessity.  Can analogical predication somehow make God’s contingent and necessary actions identical?  Of course not.  No amount of analogical predication can make necessity and contingency mean something completely different so as to remove the contradictions that I have pointed out.  I think what Feser is really working with is equivocation.
End quote.  Well, this is – one more time, everyone, all together – all very curious.  First, there can be no mystery about why I brought up analogy in my earlier essay, because I explicitly said why.  The reason was that in his own earlier essay, Mullins had made some glib and sweeping remarks to the effect that proponents of divine simplicity resort to “cheap” appeals to mystery, and in particular to “mysterious language.”  I was pointing out that this is an unjust characterization, because what they actually appeal to is the notion of the analogical use of terms.  This notion is neither particularly mysterious nor cheap.  It is a familiar part of both ordinary and scientific discourse, is motivated independently of any concerns about divine simplicity, and has been worked out in theoretical detail.
Second, and as should go without saying, Mullins is attacking some pretty crude straw men in this paragraph.  No defender of divine simplicity holds that God is both free and unfree, or that something can be both contingent and necessary in the same respect.  So, naturally, no defender of divine simplicity appeals to analogy in order to defend such absurd claims.
Mullins, once again, has nothing new or of interest to say here, and the other remarks he makes about analogy are just bare assertions that defenders of divine simplicity have heard and answered many times.
Finally, Mullins comments on the classical theist view, which I endorsed in my earlier essay, that to deny divine simplicity entails denying the ultimacy and uniqueness of God, and thus entails atheism.  He characterizes this as a “slippery slope” argument that “assume[s] an elaborate set of metaphysical theories that a Christian does not have to affirm in order to articulate a biblical doctrine of God.”  He then goes on to mention several of the relevant metaphysical claims, and to tell us that he finds each of them “implausible.”  He suggests that classical theism and atheism are not the only options, and he is dismissive of the classical theist’s claim that the further options reduce God to something merely superhuman but still creaturely.
Of course, these are all just more bare assertions, and question-begging ones at that.  For example, the classical theist would not agree that the relevant metaphysical considerations need not be affirmed in order to defend the biblical conception of God.  But what is really curious (whoops, said it again) is that Mullins ignores the main reasons I brought up the dire consequences in question in the first place.  In his initial essay, Mullins had given the impression that the doctrine of divine simplicity is merely the bizarre obsession of theologians too enamored of some obscure philosophical ideas, and irrelevant to anything of specifically Christian or biblical concern.  This is a common rhetorical ploy among critics of the doctrine.  And I was pointing out that in fact, what motivates defenders of the doctrine is a concern to uphold the uniqueness and ultimacy of God – both of which are, needless to say, pretty central to the Christian and biblical conception of God.  I was pointing out that in fact, defenders of divine simplicity would appeal to the ultimacy and uniqueness of God precisely as the basis of positive arguments for divine simplicity.
So, my complaint was that Mullins’ original essay failed to convey what is actually at stake in the debate over divine simplicity, and thus failed to grapple with the main arguments for the doctrine.  And that failure is recapitulated in his latest essay, insofar as all he has to tell us is that he personally finds the arguments in question “implausible” and prefers other views to classical theism.  Well, we already knew that.  What we need is an actual response to the arguments.  Once again, Mullins has failed to advance the debate over divine simplicity even an inch.

A further reply to Mullins on divine simplicity

At Theopolis, Ryan Mullins has now replied to those of us who had commented on his essay criticizing the doctrine of divine simplicity.  (The other commenters were Peter Leithart and Joe Lenow.)  What follows is a response to what he has to say in reply to my comments on the essay, specifically.
Mullins’ main argument
In his original essay, Mullins had in a discursive way explained what he takes the doctrine of divine simplicity to be and how it relates to the notions of divine freedom, grace, and God’s necessary existence.  Along the way he set out a sixteen step argument intended to show that divine simplicity cannot be reconciled with divine freedom.  In his latest essay, Mullins complains that “it is not clear that my dialogue partners have adequately attempted to engage with the argument,” so he repeats the argument again – this time by setting the sixteen steps off by themselves without the surrounding material, for clarity’s sake.  As he did in his original essay, Mullins challenges his critics to identify which premise, specifically, they reject.Now, Mullins writes:
My dialogue partners have not been entirely forthcoming about which premises they reject.
For example, consider Edward Feser’s reply.  Feser comments on my argument from divine simplicity to the necessary existence of the world.  This is curious because none of the premises in my argument even mention the necessary existence of the world.  This leaves me to wonder if Feser read my original essay closely. 
End quote.  But in fact, as anyone can easily verify by going back and reading my original reply to Mullins, I did explicitly identify the premise I reject – namely premise (9), which says “All of God’s actions are identical to each other such that there is only one divine act.” 
I also fail to see why it is “curious” that I “comment[ed] on [Mullins’] argument from divine simplicity to the necessary existence of the world.”  Was I supposed to ignore what Mullins said about that topic in his original essay simply because the phrase “necessary existence of the world” doesn’t appear in any of the sixteen steps of his more formal argument?
I did, in any event, make it clear in my original essay why I presented my objection to Mullins in the way that I did.  In his sixteen-step argument, Mullins emphasizes God’s freedom to refrain from giving grace, specifically, but in fact there is nothing special about that example vis-à-vis the controversy over divine simplicity.  God’s freedom with respect to giving grace is just a special case of his freedom with respect to any of his acts, such as creating the world, causing miracles, sending prophets, etc.  What all these effects of divine action have in common is that they are contingent.  Hence if the doctrine of divine simplicity implies that these effects are necessary, then it seems the doctrine also implies that divine action is not really free after all.
The way to block this outcome is, again, to reject Mullins’ premise (9).  Now, what is wrong with that premise, as I explained in my original reply to Mullins, is that it ignores what Barry Miller calls the distinction between real properties and Cambridge properties(where, as I there hinted in a footnote, this echoes Aquinas’s distinctionbetween real relations and logical relations).  Mullins writes:
To be fair to Feser, he does at least attempt to identify which premise in the argument that he rejects. Feser says,
Now, what the doctrine of divine simplicity claims—contrary to what Mullins supposes (in what he labels premise (9) of his argument)—is not that all of God’s properties are identical and thus are necessary as he is, but rather that all of his real properties are.
Feser then goes on to say that he rejects premise (9) because of a distinction between real properties and Cambridge properties.  According to Feser, God is identical to His real properties, but God is not identical to His Cambridge properties.
I find this reply from Feser curious for several reasons. 
End quote.  Mullins sure finds a lot of things “curious.”  Well, here’s something I find curious: that Mullins at first accuses me of having “not been entirely forthcoming” about which of his premises I reject, and then in the next breath conceding that in fact I identified premise (9) as the problem.  Go figure.
Anyway, Curious Ryan’s first complaint is that:
[I]t is curious because my premise (9) does not even mention the word property.  What my premise (9) actually says is, “All of God’s actions are identical to each other such that there is only one divine act.”  My actual premise (9) is something that proponents of divine simplicity explicitly endorse.  By this one act, God is said to will Himself and everything else that He has made.  Moreover, I intentionally avoided any mention of properties in the premises of my argument.  I avoided this because, as I explained in my original essay, proponents of divine simplicity explicitly deny that God has any properties, forms, immanent universals, or tropes.  As the proponent of divine simplicity, Katherin Rogers, makes clear, the simple God does not have any properties.  Instead, God is simply act.
End quote.  There are several things wrong with this.  The first is that it simply isn’t true that all proponents of divine simplicity would say that God does not have properties.  That way of talking makes it sound as if God is some sort of bare particular, and that is certainly not what the doctrine of divine simplicity claims.  What proponents of divine simplicity wouldall say is that God does not have any real properties that are distinct from the divine substance.
In any event, the word “property” is used by different philosophers in different ways, so before one makes sweeping claims about what “proponents of divine simplicity explicitly deny” one had better get clear on exactly how this or that proponent uses the term.  Now, as Mullins surely knows, the word “property” is commonly used in a very loose way by contemporary analytic philosophers, to mean just any old thing you might predicate of something.  To be sure, this is definitely not my own preferred usage, since the term has a much narrower technical sense in Aristotelian-Thomistic metaphysics.  But it is, again, a common usage among analytic philosophers.  Since analytic philosophers of religion are Mullins’ own main audience, since Miller (who I was citing) uses the term in this way, and since I had a word limit and didn’t have space in my essay to get into an explanation of the various uses of the term “property,” I decided for expository purposes to acquiesce to the common analytic philosopher’s usage. 
Now, Mullins surely realizes that that is how I intended to use the word “property” in my essay.  But given that broad sense of the term, it is quite obviously false to say that defenders of divine simplicity deny that God has “properties.”  On the contrary, defenders of divine simplicity typically hold that God has lots of “properties” in that broad sense of the term – omniscience, omnipotence, perfect goodness, and so forth.  To be sure, defenders of the doctrine also say that God’s omnipotence is his omniscience, which is his perfect goodness, and so on.  So they would say that God’s “properties,” in this broad sense of the term, are identical.  But to say that is very different from saying that he doesn’t have “properties” in the broad sense.
Now, in this broad sense of the term “properties,” God’s actionswould also be “properties” of God.  Hence the distinction between real properties and Cambridge properties is obviously relevant to evaluating Mullins’ premise (9), because we need to know whether the divine actions Mullins focuses on (such as giving grace and creating the world) are real properties or Cambridge properties – again, in the broad sense of “properties” used by analytic philosophers.  And again, Mullins surely has to realize that this is what I meant.  Mullins’ book on the divine nature is in a series devoted to analytic theology, and it cites Miller in its bibliography, so the usage cannot be unfamiliar to him.  So, Mullins’ heavy going about my reference to “properties” seems to me to amount to mere quibbling and kicking up dust.  All very curious, as Mullins would say.
Anyway, here’s the payoff.  When we get clear on the terminological issues, it is manifestly falseto claim, as Mullins does, that his premise (9) “is something that proponents of divine simplicity explicitly endorse.”  For, to use Miller’s language, defenders of divine simplicity claim only that God’s real properties are identical to each other, not that his Cambridgeproperties are.  Hence any divine action that amounts to a Cambridge property is not one that the defender of divine simplicity will identify with the divine nature.  And that is exactly what is going on with properties like “being creator of the world” and “being the source of grace.”  They are Cambridge properties.  So, the problem with Mullins’ premise (9) is that it is too sweeping.  Once one restricts the premise to God’s real properties, the revised premise will be true, but then the rest of Mullins’ argument will no longer go through.  In particular, it will no longer follow that God’s act of giving grace is identical to God and thus as necessary as he is.  And thus it will not follow that that act is not free.
Mullins tells us that a second reason he finds my reply “curious” is that I seem, in his view, to be confusing his position with that of Thomas Morris, against whom I deployed Miller’s distinction between real properties and Cambridge properties in my book Five Proofs of the Existence of God .  (More precisely, Miller himselfdeploys this distinction against Morris – I was just citing Miller’s response to Morris in my book, rather than presenting it as my own.)  Mullins says his argument is very different from Morris’s, since Morris’s focus is on the claim that divine simplicity would make God’s creation of the world necessary.  But I have already explained why this is not a difference that makes a difference.  What is doing the work in Mullins’ argument is the claim that divine simplicity makes God’s actions, in general, necessary – the same thing that is doing the work in Morris’s argument.  The fact that Mullins focuses on the specific example of God acting to impart grace, whereas Morris focuses on the example of God acting to create the world, is irrelevant.  Hence my objection applies to Mullins’ argument no less than to Morris’s.
But Mullins’ third reason for finding my reply “curious,” he tells us, is that he does not think it really applies even to Morris’s position.  The reason, he says, is that “divine actions are intrinsic to God,” and thus cannot be Cambridge properties.  Hence my appeal to the distinction between real properties and Cambridge properties is a “category mistake” and amounts to “nothing but hand-waving.”
Well, if Mullins isn’t here waving his own hands, that’s only because he’s too busy missing the point.  To see what is wrong with his response, go back to the examples I used in my original essay to introduce the distinction between real properties and Cambridge properties.  When Socrates grows a beard, that involves the acquisition by him of a real property.  But when he becomes shorter than Plato, not because of any change he undergoes, but rather because Plato has grown taller, that involves the acquisition by Socrates of a Cambridge property.  It is, in this case, Plato rather than Socrates who acquires a real property.
Now, it is possible for something to have a Cambridge property by virtue of also having a certain real property.  To modify my example, suppose that Socrates had been Plato’s father, so that it is by virtue of his having been begotten by Socrates and inheriting Socrates’ genes that Plato eventually grew to be taller than Socrates.  Then there is a sense in which you could say that Socrates’ action, the action of begetting Plato, caused Socrates (later on) to become shorter than Plato.  Now, there is obviously a sense in which Socrates’ action of begetting is intrinsic to Socrates.  Something has to happen in him in order for the begetting to occur.  And so, something had to happen in him in order for Plato later on to grow taller, which resulted in Socrates being shorter than Plato.  But does it follow that Socrates’ becoming shorter than Plato is not a Cambridge property after all but a real one?  Of course not. 
Now in the same way, it is certainly true to say that there is something intrinsic to God himself that makes it the case that the world is created.  No defender of divine simplicity denies that.  But it simply doesn’t follow that God’s acting to create the world is not after all a Cambridge property, any more than it follows that Socrates’ growing shorter than Plato is not after all a Cambridge property.
You might characterize the situation in my revised example as Socrates acting in a way that (eventually) resulted in his becoming shorter than Plato.  But though the acting is something intrinsic to Socrates, that the acting resulted in his becoming shorter than Plato is not intrinsic to him.  Similarly, you might characterize creation as God acting in a way that resulted in the world’s existing.  But though the acting is something intrinsic to God, that the acting resulted in the world’s existing is not intrinsic to him.
You may or may not find this plausible.  But here’s the thing.  The unwary reader of Mullins’ response is likely to get the impression that my reply to him was some eccentric concoction of my own, cobbled together to rebut his novel and clever objection.  But my response is neither my own concoction nor eccentric, and Mullins’ objection is neither novel nor particularly clever.  In fact it is pretty old hat.  As I have already said, I am simply making a point made by Barry Miller, but Miller was in turn only putting a contemporary gloss on a line of argument that goes back at least to Aquinas, and that has been repeated by many Thomists since.  And all of them were responding to variations on the sort of objection Mullins gives.
The way Aquinas puts the point is, again, in terms of the distinction between a real relation and a logical relation (sometimes called a relation of reason).  A stock example is the relationship between perceiver and perceived.  If I perceive you, I bear a real relation to you.  But if you are perceived by me, you bear a logical rather than real relation to me.  Miller’s way of putting this is to say that by virtue of perceiving you, I have a real property, whereas by virtue of being perceived by me, you have a merely Cambridge property. 
Now, Aquinas’s view is that by virtue of being created by God, the world bears a real relation to him, whereas by virtue of creating the world, God bears a merely logical rather than real relation to it.  Miller’s way of putting this is to say that the world’s being created by God is a real property of the world, whereas God’s creating the world is a Cambridge property of God.  (When replying to Mullins, I decided to use Miller’s formulation because I supposed it would be less likely to be misunderstood by readers more familiar with analytic than with Thomistic jargon.  Silly me.)  One wonders whether Mullins is even familiar with this traditional Thomistic position.  If he isn’t, that would explain the, er, curious circumstance that Mullins at one point actually tries to employ Aquinas against my objection – an objection I borrow, by way of Miller, from Aquinas.
Anyway, the point is this.  The Aquinas-Miller position is not some obscure or incidental aspect of the debate over divine simplicity.  It is a standard part of it, certainly among Thomists, and has been for centuries.  Mullins does nothing to refute this position.  All he does is make assertions of precisely the kind the Aquinas-Miller position claims already to have answered.  So, while Mullins seems to think he has made some devastating new objection against divine simplicity, in fact he hasn’t advanced the discussion one inch beyond where Aquinas left it in the thirteenth century.  Maybe the Aquinas-Miller position is wrong (though obviously I don’t think it is), but if so, Mullinscertainly has done nothing to show that it is.
Analogy and dire consequences
Mullins has some equally anticlimactic things to say in response to my remarks about analogy.  He writes:
I am not entirely sure what the doctrine of analogy does for divine simplicity with regards to my argument.  Can analogical predication somehow remove a contradiction like “God is free and God is not free.”  No.  Classical theists are quite clear that God cannot be free if His actions are performed of absolute necessity.  No amount of analogical predication can make God’s free actions consistent with those actions being performed of absolute necessity.  Can analogical predication somehow make God’s contingent and necessary actions identical?  Of course not.  No amount of analogical predication can make necessity and contingency mean something completely different so as to remove the contradictions that I have pointed out.  I think what Feser is really working with is equivocation.
End quote.  Well, this is – one more time, everyone, all together – all very curious.  First, there can be no mystery about why I brought up analogy in my earlier essay, because I explicitly said why.  The reason was that in his own earlier essay, Mullins had made some glib and sweeping remarks to the effect that proponents of divine simplicity resort to “cheap” appeals to mystery, and in particular to “mysterious language.”  I was pointing out that this is an unjust characterization, because what they actually appeal to is the notion of the analogical use of terms.  This notion is neither particularly mysterious nor cheap.  It is a familiar part of both ordinary and scientific discourse, is motivated independently of any concerns about divine simplicity, and has been worked out in theoretical detail.
Second, and as should go without saying, Mullins is attacking some pretty crude straw men in this paragraph.  No defender of divine simplicity holds that God is both free and unfree, or that something can be both contingent and necessary in the same respect.  So, naturally, no defender of divine simplicity appeals to analogy in order to defend such absurd claims.
Mullins, once again, has nothing new or of interest to say here, and the other remarks he makes about analogy are just bare assertions that defenders of divine simplicity have heard and answered many times.
Finally, Mullins comments on the classical theist view, which I endorsed in my earlier essay, that to deny divine simplicity entails denying the ultimacy and uniqueness of God, and thus entails atheism.  He characterizes this as a “slippery slope” argument that “assume[s] an elaborate set of metaphysical theories that a Christian does not have to affirm in order to articulate a biblical doctrine of God.”  He then goes on to mention several of the relevant metaphysical claims, and to tell us that he finds each of them “implausible.”  He suggests that classical theism and atheism are not the only options, and he is dismissive of the classical theist’s claim that the further options reduce God to something merely superhuman but still creaturely.
Of course, these are all just more bare assertions, and question-begging ones at that.  For example, the classical theist would not agree that the relevant metaphysical considerations need not be affirmed in order to defend the biblical conception of God.  But what is really curious (whoops, said it again) is that Mullins ignores the main reasons I brought up the dire consequences in question in the first place.  In his initial essay, Mullins had given the impression that the doctrine of divine simplicity is merely the bizarre obsession of theologians too enamored of some obscure philosophical ideas, and irrelevant to anything of specifically Christian or biblical concern.  This is a common rhetorical ploy among critics of the doctrine.  And I was pointing out that in fact, what motivates defenders of the doctrine is a concern to uphold the uniqueness and ultimacy of God – both of which are, needless to say, pretty central to the Christian and biblical conception of God.  I was pointing out that in fact, defenders of divine simplicity would appeal to the ultimacy and uniqueness of God precisely as the basis of positive arguments for divine simplicity.
So, my complaint was that Mullins’ original essay failed to convey what is actually at stake in the debate over divine simplicity, and thus failed to grapple with the main arguments for the doctrine.  And that failure is recapitulated in his latest essay, insofar as all he has to tell us is that he personally finds the arguments in question “implausible” and prefers other views to classical theism.  Well, we already knew that.  What we need is an actual response to the arguments.  Once again, Mullins has failed to advance the debate over divine simplicity even an inch.

Summer open thread

It’s about time for another open thread, so here it is.  From violent crimes to medieval times to cringe-making rhymes, nothing is off-topic.  Still, as always, please keep it classy and keep it civil.
While I’ve got your attention, let me take this opportunity to make several comments about comments.  First, a few readers have complained recently that their comments are not appearing.  In fact, they are appearing.  What these readers do not realize is that after a thread exceeds 200 comments, you have to click on the “Load more…” prompt at the bottom of the comments section to see the most recent comments.  It’s easy to miss, but it’s there.  Click on it and you’ll no doubt find that comment that you thought had disappeared into the ether (and perhaps had needlessly re-posted several times). Second, with open threads like this one, everything is on topic.  But on regular posts, I urge all my readers not to post off-topic comments and not to respond to people who do post them.  I find threadjacking extremely annoying, and I delete all this stuff as soon as I see it.  (Here’s a tip: If you are inclined to start a comment with the words “This is off-topic, but…,” then don’t bother finishing it or posting it, because I will delete it while uttering some choice cuss words.)  Again, open threads are the places to raise off-topic issues.  You might also try the Classical Theism Forum.
Third, some readers occasionally find themselves exasperated at the propensity of their fellow readers to keep feeding obvious trolls.  I feel their pain.  However, as longtime readers know, I try as far as I can to moderate with a light hand, so as to facilitate free discussion and – frankly – to spare myself work I really don’t need.  I’m way too busy as it is. 
Occasionally there are trolls whose behavior is soobnoxious, disruptive, and even psychotic that I have no choice but to ban them permanently.  (With some of these people, there is more to the story than what you’d know just from what appears in the combox.  Believe me, there are some real nuts out there.)  There are others who are just jerks who don’t get the message until I ban them temporarily, but who will more or less behave themselves afterward. 
Most trolls, though, aren’t quite as bad as that and needn’t be banned.  They are merely tiresomely banal, or can’t think clearly, or are oddballs, or otherwise have nothing of real interest to say.  As long as they refrain from dumping post after post after post into the combox, they are mild pests at worst.  Unless you feed them.  So don’t.  Don’t even post a short insulting response, however merited.  Just bite your lip and ignore them.  You will be doing both me and your fellow readers a big favor.  And if instead you keep feeding them, you will be complicit in wrecking a thread that might otherwise have been worth continuing.  Think before you post, andbefore responding to what others post.
Links to previous open threads can be found here.

Contra Mullins on divine simplicity

The Theopolis Institute website is hosting a conversation on divine simplicity, with an opening essay by Ryan Mullins criticizing the doctrine and responses so far from Peter Leithart, Joe Lenow, and me.  More installments to come over the next couple of weeks.  You can read my own response to Mullins here.

McCabe on the divine nature

Herbert McCabe was one of the more important Thomists of the twentieth century, and a great influence on thinkers like Brian Davies.  Not too long ago, Davies and Paul Kucharski edited The McCabe Reader , a very useful collection of representative writings.  Among the many topics covered are natural theology, Christian doctrine, ethics, politics, and Aquinas.  McCabe’s style throughout is lucid and pleasing, and the book is full of insights.  What follows are some remarks on what McCabe has to say about one specific theme that runs through the anthology, and about which he was especially insightful – the divine nature. What God is not
What is God?  McCabe’s answer is that God is that which accounts for why there is anything at all.  “God is whatever answers our question ‘How come everything?’” (p. 10).  What he has to say about the divine nature is largely the working out of the implications of this basic idea.
Some readers are bound to misunderstand McCabe even at this starting point.  They might suppose that he is taking for granted some detailed and specifically Christian conception of God – as having revealed himself through the prophets, inspired scripture, become incarnate in Christ, and so on – and then going on to identify God so conceived with that which accounts for the existence of the world.  But that is precisely what he is not doing.  Of course, as a Catholic, he believes all that.  But that is not what he has in mind when he says that God is that which answers the question about why anything exists. 
What he is saying, in effect, is that when we start trying to think about God’s nature, we should begin by putting out of our minds everything but the idea that God is that which accounts for there being anything at all.  “What we meanby ‘God’ is just whatever answers the question” (p. 11, emphasis added).  That must be the governing conception, and only after we work out its implications can we properly understand the various specifically Christian claims we might make about God.
Now, the next thing to say, in McCabe’s view, is that if this is what God is, then he must be radically unlike the things whose existence we are accounting for by reference to him:
For one thing, whatever would answer our question could not itself be subject to the question – otherwise we are left as we were, with the same question still to answer.  Whatever we mean by ‘God’ cannot be whatever it is that makes us ask the question in the first place. (pp. 11-12)
In particular, any aspect of a thing that makes its existence stand in need of explanation by reference to something else cannot be attributed to God.  For example, since spatio-temporal objects require causes, God cannot be a spatio-temporal object.  For if he were, then he would require a cause and therefore he just wouldn’t bethat which accounts for why anything exists at all.  He would himself just be one more thing among all the others whose existence we are trying to account for.
The things we are trying to account for haveexistence, but only insofar as they receiveit from something else.  They have it yet might have lacked it.  God cannot be like that, or he wouldn’t be that which accounts for why anything at all exists.  He cannot be merely one existent alongside the others whose existence we are trying to account for when we appeal to God.  “If God made everything, God cannot be included in everything.  God can’t be one of the beings that go up to make everything” (p. 37).
That God makes it the case that anything exists at all is what is meant by creation.  But just as God’s being that which accounts for why anything exists at all rules out his being a spatio-temporal object, so too does it rule out any understanding of creation as a kind of manipulation of raw materials, or as a spatio-temporal process that we might observe as it unfolds.  For any such materials, and any such process, are themselves among the things the existence of which we are accounting for by reference to God:
So creation is making, but not making out of anything.  When X is created there is not anything that is changed into X.  Creation is ex nihilo… The fact that things are created does not make the slightest detectable or undetectable difference to them, any more than being thought about makes a difference to things. (pp. 38-39)
You might say that if you can perceive it, then it is not God and it is not God’s creative act, but rather just one further effect of God’s creative act.
All of this leads McCabe to a heavy emphasis on negative theology.  Theological terms cannot properly be understood unless we subtract from them the implications and connotations we associate with their applications to ordinary things, and carrying out this exercise in subtraction is essential to understanding.  There is no shortcut by which we can simply state a definition of a theological term without having to go through this exercise:
To say that ‘creation’ is ‘making’ with-a-new-mode-of-meaning is to talk, I think, about the whole intellectual process by which you get to the word: the whole process and not just the end of it.  I mean: you start by saying ‘God made the world’ and then you add various qualifications, all qualifications of a certain systematic kind, all qualifications, if you like, in a definite direction.  And by the time you have finished, the notion of making has been whittled away… You yourself have to go through the slow killing of the verb ‘to make’.  There is no separable end product, no finally refined concept, which is the meaning of the verb ‘to create’… Theological understanding, such as it is, comes just as the meanings elude our grasp. (pp. 36-37)
Among the things we need to delete from our conception of divine action is the idea that it amounts to an “interference” with what happens in the world.  Creation is not a matter of God tinkering with the natural order so as to make it do what it otherwise would not do.  It is a matter of his making it the case that there is any natural order at all.  McCabe writes: “God cannot interferein the universe, not because he has not the power but because, so to speak, he has too much” (pp. 10-11).  His point is that modeling divine action on the way an engineer or builder alters preexisting materials trivializes it, reducing it to the sort of thing one part of the created order does to another.  God is not one cause alongside the others, but rather is that which makes it the case that there are any causes at all in the first place.  
As I’ve sometimes put it, God qua creator is not like one character in a novel alongside the others, who performs more impressive actions than they do.  He is rather like the author of the novel.  One character in a novel might interfere with what the others do or with natural processes going on in the story.  But the authorcertainly does not “interfere” with what happens in the novel, precisely because, as McCabe puts it, he “has too much” power over the story intelligibly to be said to be interfering with it.  His relation to the events of the story is of a radically different order from the relation the characters bear to them, and McCabe’s point is that God’s relation to the world is no less radically different from our relation to it.
Some applications
McCabe is very good at showing how such philosophical points illuminate various theological issues.  Consider his discussion of prayer.  McCabe defends petitionary prayer against those who think it necessarily superstitious or otherwise less respectable than prayers of thanksgiving:
If we are allowed to see what has already happened as God’s free gift, and to thank him, what is wrong with seeing what has not yet happened as his free gift also, and asking for it? (p. 154)
But he also emphasizes that petitionary prayer should not be understood as a way of manipulating God, of trying to change him or bring about an effect in him.  That makes no sense, since God is, again, that which accounts for there being anything at all, including my prayer.  Hence my request itself, no less than what I am requesting, is the effect of God:
My prayer is not me putting pressure on God, doing something to God; it is God doing something for me, raising me into the divine life or intensifying the divine life in me.  As Thomas Aquinas puts it, we should not say: 'In accordance with my prayer: God wills that it should be a fine day'; we should say: 'God wills: that it should be a fine day in accordance with my prayer.’  God brings about my prayer just as much as he brings about the fine day, and what he wills, what he has willed from eternity, is that this fine day should not be, so to say, just an ordinary fine day.  It should be for me a significant fine day, a sign, a communication from God.  It should be a fine day that comes about through my prayer. (p. 155)
McCabe sums up his position in striking remarks like: “Our praying is as much God’s gift as is the answer to it,” and “if you want to be forgiven, that is because God is forgiving you” (p. 25).  Our prayers and repentance are not precursors to God’s loving action but precisely a manifestation of it.
McCabe also has some illuminating things to say about the Trinity, in the course of expounding Aquinas’s views on the subject.  Here too he takes the philosophical points made above to be crucial to a proper understanding of theology.  He begins by noting:
There are people who think that the notion of God is a relatively clear one; you know where you are when you are simply talking about God whereas when it comes to the Trinity we move into the incomprehensible where our reason breaks down. To understand Aquinas it is essential to see that for him our reason has already broken down when we talk of God at all – at least it has broken down in the sense of recognizing what is beyond it.  (p. 269)
Again, because God is that which accounts for there being anything at all, what is true of the things we are accounting for by reference to God cannot be true of God himself.  Hence we have a clearer grasp of what God is not than we do of what he is.  He is already mysterious to us even before we consider the doctrine of the Trinity, so that the difficulties we have in grasping the latter should hardly be surprising.
In other ways too, negative theology is in McCabe’s view essential to approaching the doctrine of the Trinity.  Here he draws an analogy with physics.  The physicist is pushed to describe certain micro-level phenomena both in terms that apply to particles and in terms that apply to waves.  This sounds contradictory, but it is not, because the aspects of ordinary physical objects which would preclude their being both wave-like and particle-like don’t apply to the micro-level phenomena the physicist is describing.  That leaves us with a largely negative conception of the micro-level phenomena and thus with a high degree of mystery.  We can say that the phenomena are in some way both wave-like and particle-like and also that whatever might make these ascriptions contradictory cannot be true of the phenomena, but it is much harder to give further positive content to our description. 
Similarly, the doctrine of the Trinity tells us that there are three Persons in one God, and negative theology tells us that whatever would make such an assertion contradictory cannot be true of the divine nature.  But that leaves us with a largely negative conception of the Trinity.  As with wave-particle duality, it is easier to grasp what the Trinity is not than what it is.
Still, we can say something further, though here too negative theology plays a crucial role.  McCabe points out that on Aquinas’s philosophy of mind, to have an intellect is essentially to have the capacity to possess form without matter.  For example, when you understand what a dog is, your intellect takes on the form or nature of a dog but in a way that abstracts it or divorces it from the matter in which it is embedded in the case of a given particular individual dog.  Now, when this account is worked out it has the consequence that something is an intellect if and only if it is immaterial.  Intellects are necessarily immaterial and immaterial substances are necessarily intellects.  Naturally, all this raises questions, but McCabe’s point in his essay on the Trinity is not to defend Aquinas’s philosophy of mind but to show how it gets applied in an analysis of the Trinity.
Now, negative theology tells us that God is immaterial, since he is that which accounts for why anything exists at all, including material things.  He must be distinct from the material world that is among his effects.  But if being immaterial entails being an intellect, then we have to conclude that God is an intellect, albeit one from which we have to subtract all the limitations that apply to human intellects.  There is also the fact that even when it comes to the human intellect, our conception is largely negative.  It is easier to say what the intellect is not than what it is.  So, attributing intellect to God, while it adds content to our conception of him, is itself largely a further application of negative theology.
Still, it is one that is especially relevant to the doctrine of the Trinity, because it opens the door to the traditional analysis of the Persons of the Trinity on the model of the intellect (which corresponds to the Father), the intellect’s idea of itself (which corresponds to the Son), and the intellect’s willing of that idea (which corresponds to the Holy Spirit).  Once again, negative theology is crucial, because we have to subtract from our understanding of this model any of the limitations that apply to finite intellects like ours. 
Among the things we have to subtract is the notion that God’s idea of himself is a kind of accident or modification of God, the way that our ideas are accidents or modifications of our intellects.  For this would make God composite, and among the conclusions of negative theology is that God is non-composite or simple.  Divine simplicity is sometimes claimed to be in tension with the doctrine of the Trinity, but as McCabe shows, in fact it is essential to understanding the Trinity.  Divine simplicity entails that whatever is inGod is God, and thus God’s idea of himself, and his willing of that idea, areGod – exactly what we should expect given the Trinitarian insistence that the Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Spirit is God, and yet they are not three Gods.
Simplicity is also essential to understanding the idea that the Persons of the Trinity are to be understood as relations.  For example, the Father is said to generatethe Son and the Son to be generated bythe Father.  But we have to subtract from these notions any supposition that the relations in question are accidents of God, the way that a human father’s relation to his son is a kind of accident.  Again, whatever is in God is God.  Hence God the Father doesn’t have a relation, he is a relation.  This is mysterious, McCabe acknowledges, but then, God is mysterious anyway, even apart from the doctrine of the Trinity.
McCabe has much else of interest to say about the divine nature (as well as the other topics in the anthology referred to above) but I have been emphasizing the remarks that involve application of the idea that God is fundamentally that which accounts for why anything exists at all.
Again, McCabe heavily emphasizes the ways in which this entails a negative theology.  In my opinion, he sometimes overdoes this a bit.  Theological language cannot be construed in an entirely negative way.  The most basic of theological assertions – that God exists – is at bottom an affirmative assertion, however many negative theological qualifications we put on it.  And talk of the divine attributes would have no content or motivation at all if we took their content to be entirely negative.  Negative theology is an essential corrective to theological misunderstanding, but it is not a complete account of theological language, and sometimes McCabe says things that seem to give the opposite impression.  All the same, these days the greater danger is to go to the opposite extreme of crudely anthropomorphizing God, and McCabe does a great service in exposing the folly and theological shallowness of doing so.

Hayek’s Tragic Capitalism

Those who weren’t able to read it when it was behind a paywall might be interested to know that my recent Claremont Review of Booksessay “Hayek’s Tragic Capitalism” is now accessible for free.
As I noted before, the essay is a companion piece of sorts to my recent Heritage Foundation lecture on “Socialism versus the Family.”  My recent post on post-liberal conservatism is relevant too.
At Catholic Culture, Thomas Mirus comments on my views on libertarianism.

Debate with Graham Oppy

Yesterday on Cameron Bertuzzi’s Capturing Christianityprogram, I had a very pleasant and fruitful live debate with Graham Oppy about my book Five Proofs of the Existence of God .  The debate lasted about an hour and a half (and was followed by a half-hour Q and A for Capturing Christianity’s Patreon supporters).  You can watch the debate on YouTube.

Review of Tallis

My review of Raymond Tallis’s excellent recent book Logos: The Mystery of How We Make Sense of the World appears in the July 26 issue of The Times Literary Supplement.  Links to other book reviews can be found at my main website.

The latest on Five Proofs

Tomorrow, Thursday July 25, Cameron Bertuzzi’s Capturing Christianity program will be hosting a live discussion between atheist philosopher Graham Oppy and me about my book Five Proofs of the Existence of God . 
Philosopher Stephen L. Brock briefly reviews the book in The Review of Metaphysics.  From the review: It is hard to imagine how such difficult ideas and arguments could be set forth more digestibly. The tone is academic but lively, and certainly not diffident…
Plenty of particular objections are addressed in the first six chapters, but the last one takes up objections to natural theology as a whole. There are sixteen of them, drawn from a multitude of authors... Feser is at his best in disputation, and, for my money, this is the book’s most effective part.
End quote.  Five Proofs was also recently reviewed in the Homiletic and Pastoral Review by theologian Fr. John Cush.  From the review:
Feser’s text… will prove to be a helpful addition to natural theology classes in seminaries and undergraduate classes in the English-speaking world…
I cannot stress enough how good it is in its explanations and illustrations and those who teach philosophy will surely find it to be a tremendous resource.  I highly recommend this book to teachers and students and I know that in Five Proofs of the Existence of God I have found a text that I trust for seminarians beginning their study of natural theology.
End quote.  In the July/August 2019 issue of Faith magazine, theologian Christina Read also reviews the book.  From the review:
Edward Feser has written a very useful book on five proofs of the existence of God…
[Feser’s] approach helps make ‘God’ arguments accessible to an audience formed in an agnostic, materialistic/ atheistic worldview, whilst [his] methodology… opens the topic to the lay reader without neglecting a more formal philosophical treatment and the engagement in scholarly debate which pushes forward Feser’s contributions to academic reflection on this topic.
In all this he demonstrates striking explicatory skill, indicative of an effective teacher.

Psychoanalyzing the sexual revolutionary

When someone makes a claim or presents an argument and you pretend to refute it by calling attention to some purported personal shortcoming of his (such as a bad character or a suspect motive), then you’ve committed an ad hominem fallacy.  The reason this is a fallacy is that what is at issue in such a case is the truth of the claim or the cogency of the argument, and you’ve changed the subject by talking about something else, namely the person making the claim or argument.  But as I explained in a post from a few years ago, not every criticism of a person making a claim or argument is an ad hominemfallacy, because sometimes the topic just isthe person himself.  For instance, when a person is prone to committing ad hominemfallacies and persists in them despite gentle correction, it is perfectly legitimate to note that he is irrational and maybe even morally defective in certain ways – for example, that he is in thrall to the vice of wrath, or has a willful personality, or is guilty of a lack of charity toward his opponents. Or that he is in thrall to sins of lust.  I noted in a recent post the tendency of critics of traditional sexual morality to demonize its defenders and attack their motives rather than address their arguments.  The tendency has become more widespread and relentless as the sexual revolution has gone to ever greater extremes.  (Read Rod Dreher’s blog to keep up to date on the latest permutations.)  When I was a teenager, people with looser morals in the area of sex tended to characterize those with more conservative attitudes as prudes or killjoys.  The attitude was that of the frat boy who pities the nerd or bookworm who doesn’t know how to have a good time.  Nowadays the mentality is instead like that of a Bizarro-world Cotton Mather, or perhaps a mashup of Hugh Hefner and Mao Zedong.  Critics of the sexual revolution are treated as agents of the devil or enemies of the people – bigots, haters, oppressors who must be hounded and silenced.
What accounts for this weird transformation?  Of course, the sexual revolutionaries in question would claim that it reflects deepening moral understanding on their part.  But that presupposes that traditional sexual morality is mistaken, which it is not.  But this post is not about defending traditional sexual morality, because I have done that in many other places.  What I am asking is: What accounts for this weird transformation, given the truth of traditional sexual morality? 
There is a kind of Stockholm Syndrome among conservative religious believers of a certain mindset, which treats these developments as the regrettable but understandable excesses of well-meaning wounded souls who’ve been done wrong by overzealous and insensitive defenders of traditional morality.  In my opinion, this is delusional.  If it were true, you’d expect that the shrillness of the revolutionaries would decreaseas the rhetoric of tolerance, compassion, and respectful coexistence with those who reject traditional sexual morality has become more prevalent among conservatives and religious believers.  Instead, the shrillness has also increased, and dramatically.  The more ass-kissingthat religious conservatives do, the more what they get in return is ass-kicking. 
An analysis of the situation informed by the traditions of natural law ethics and Christian theology – by Plato and Aristotle, St. Paul and St. Augustine, St. Peter Damian and St. Thomas Aquinas, et al. – will reveal that there is something much more sinister going on.  I would argue that there are at least three psychological factors underlying the increasing extremism and nastiness of those with “progressive” views on matters of sex:
1. The daughters of lust: In Summa Theologiae II-II.153.5, Aquinas identifies eight “daughters of lust” or malign effects on the intellect and will that tend to follow upon sexual vice.  For our purposes, the most important are what he calls blindness of mind and hatred of God.  As Aquinas notes in another context, “lust…is about the greatest of pleasures; and these absorb the mind more than any others.”  Sexual pleasure is like the pleasure of alcohol use in being perfectly innocent in itself, but also very easy to abuse.  Hence, even in someone with otherwise normal sexual desires, a preoccupation with matters of sex has a tendency to cause him to act foolishly in various ways – to exaggerate the importance of sex, to pursue it in ways that are detrimental to his own well-being and that of people who depend on him, to construct rationalizations for such foolish pursuit, and so forth.
In someone with abnormal sexual desires, the effect is even worse.  For what determines the good use of a human faculty is the end or purpose toward which it is directed by nature.  Hence a healthy moral psychology requires a firm intuitive grasp of what is natural and what is contrary to nature’s purposes.  Repeatedly taking sexual pleasure in activity that is directly contrary to nature’s ends dulls the intellect’s perception of nature, to the point that the very idea that some things are contrary to the natural order loses its hold upon the mind.  The intellect thereby loses its grip on moral reality. 
Suppose that some people had a strange psychological deformation that led them to take intense pleasure in entertaining the thought that 2 + 2 = 5.  Repeated indulgence of the desire to contemplate this proposition would make such contemplation addictive, and the very idea that there is such a thing as an objective arithmetical truth to the effect that 2 + 2 = 4 would lose its hold on such a person.  He might judge that it is objectively true instead that 2 + 2 = 5, or he might reject altogether the idea that there is such a thing as objective truth where arithmetic is concerned.  Either way, his intellect will have been blinded.  That is analogous to the blindness of mind that can follow upon ingrained sexual vice.
Such a person is also likely to become hostile to those who try to convince him that 2 + 2 = 4 and that he is simply in the grip of a delusion to think otherwise.  He might take this as a personal attack on him, on what he is.  “I can’t help but believe that 2 + 2 = 5!  That’s just the way nature made me!  Why are you so hateful?”  Other people might pity him and start to think it cruel to teach arithmetic as it has always been understood, since it will seem to be an implicit marginalization of those who have the odd predilection in question.  They might go along with schemes to alter the mathematics curriculum so that it affirms the legitimacy of such alternative arithmetical beliefs, encourage people to affirm and even celebrate the predilection, and so forth.
The conception of God as having created the natural order according to eternal and immutable mathematical truths would also come to seem odious, as would any religion that incorporated this conception.  Indeed, the entire cultural tradition that had incorporated traditional mathematics would appear oppressive and something to be torn down.  All of this is analogous to the hatred of God, as author of the moral order, that Aquinas says follows upon ingrained sexual vice.  Religion comes to be either rejected altogether, or replaced by an idolatrous ersatz more hospitable to the vice.
It gets worse.  In Summa Theologiae II-II.53.6, Aquinas teaches that disordered sexual desire is the chief source of sins against the cardinal virtue of prudence, which governs practical reason in general.  Similarly, in Summa Theologiae II-II.46.3he says that foolishness as a general moral vice arises chiefly from sexual sin.  He isn’t saying that sexual sins are of themselves the worst sins – obviously there are worse sins, such as murder – but rather that they have a special tendency to dull general moral understanding, like the first domino that knocks down the others.  A person or society which has become highly corrupted in matters of sex is especially likely to become morally corrupt full stop. 
Hence, return once again to my arithmetic analogy.  In a person or society which started to think in terms of a revisionist arithmetic that made space for the legitimacy of holding that 2 + 2 = 5, the corruption of the intellect would not be confined to arithmetic alone.  General capacity for sound reasoning could not survive such a deformation of the intellect, because it would implicitly undermine the most basic logical principles (such as the law of non-contradiction).
Similarly, in a person or society dominated by sexual vice, it isn’t just moral understanding in matters of sex that would be undermined, but moral understanding in general.  For the general idea of human faculties having natural purposes is unlikely to survive when the natural purposes of our sexual faculties, specifically (which are about as obvious as natural purposes can be), are obscured.  And the capacity for a coolly dispassionate critical evaluation of our contingent desires in light of nature’s purposes cannot survive in minds that are in thrall to sexual passions, which are the most intense of passions.  But an awareness of natural purposes, and the capacity for dispassionate and critical evaluation of desire, are prerequisites to morality in general. 
The infection is bound to leap from the individual, to the culture at large, to the political sphere.  In the Republic, Plato suggests that egalitarian societies tend to become dominated by lust, and have a tendency to degenerate into tyrannies.  For souls dominated by lust are least able to restrain their appetites or to tolerate disapproval of them, which leads to general moral breakdown and an increase in the number of individuals with especially disordered and ruthless temperaments.  Tyranny results when such individuals take advantage of the social chaos and impose their wills on the rest.  In Plato’s view, nothing locks you into the allegorical Cave and its world of illusions, fanatically held on to, like sexual immorality. 
I have discussed the daughters of lust at greater length in several earlier posts (here, here, and here), and have discussed the way that sexual sins can destroy prudence at greater length in a lecture on cooperation with sins against prudence.  The point to emphasize for present purposes is that the analysis of the effects of disordered sexual desire offered by thinkers like Plato and Aquinas suggests that we should expect such desire to become ever more extreme in its manifestations, and that those in thrall to it will become ever more shrill and hateful toward those who resist them.  And that is exactly what we are seeing today.
2. It takes a morality to beat a morality: People are naturally reluctant to talk about even the most normal and healthy of their sexual desires and activities, given the deeply personal nature of sex.  The subject is simply embarrassing, even for the average person with liberal attitudes about it.  He wouldn’t dream of casually discussing his predilections with a stranger, or with his mother, or at a dinner party.  This goes double for sexual desires and activities that one takes in some way to be aberrant.  A special sense of shame attaches to them, both because of their perverse nature and because of the way the pull of sexual desire can subvert what is most distinctively human, namely our reason and will.  Sexual vice is experienced as dragging one down to the animal level, and when it involves what is contra naturam it is experienced as something even worse.
Or at any rate, it is experienced that way to the extent that at least a general and inchoate sense of the natural order of things endures in one’s consciousness.  Even a person who comes to embrace sexual desires traditionally regarded as disordered, and publicly to define his identity in terms of them, will often feel a residual sense of shame and guilt – and this despite the fact that attitudes about sex have liberalized, and the fact that many sympathize with him and are keen to reassure him of his virtue and status as a victim of prejudice.  An Augustine or Aquinas would attribute this to the voice of conscience.  Knowledge of the natural law, they would say, is never entirely destroyed even in the person most in thrall to vice.  It is only ever papered over with layer upon layer of rationalizations.  And sometimes the truth still shines through, albeit dimly.
The sexually “liberated” person refuses to accept that, and not only because he is in love with his vices.  He has dug himself into a hole.  If he initially felt shame about those vices, the shame will only be worse if he decides to embrace them, openly proclaims his attachment to them and even defines himself in terms of them – and then, after all that, later has a re-think and comes to acknowledge that they really were vicious and shameful after all.  The prospect is utterly humiliating, so that it is psychologically that much more difficult to turn back from the path of embracing sexual vice once one has taken it.
Now, nothing counteracts lingering feelings of shame and moral failure the way that feelings of pride and self-righteousness can.  The former can be masked if one can work oneself into the latter.  One can tell oneself: “It is those who call what I do shameful who should be ashamed.  They are the bad people – they are bigots, haters, oppressors.  And Iam doing something noble in rejecting their opinions and fighting against them!  Yes, that’s it!”  By a kind of psychological alchemy, vice is transformed into virtue and virtue into vice, and one’s self-esteem is thereby salvaged and even enhanced.
It may seem odd for the natural law theorist to recruit Nietzsche to this analysis, but he is, of course, the great diagnostician of egalitarian transvaluations of values.  Moralistic egalitarian rhetoric is, on Nietzsche’s analysis, a mask for resentment and envy – a way that those with a deep sense of failure and weakness can secure revenge against those who uphold the virtues they can’t measure up to.  Of course, the way Nietzsche develops this sort of analysis is problematic.  For example, he applies it to a critique of Christian morality, but his target is really a caricature of Christian morality.  But the basic idea that transvaluations of values can reflect envy, resentment, and the desire for revenge is plausible, and it is as plausibly applied to liberationist views in the sexual context as it is to the kinds of egalitarianism Nietzsche himself had in mind.
It is also worth noting that as the sexual revolution has progressed, it has led to claims ever more bizarre and manifestly preposterous – such as the claim that the biological distinction between male and female is bogus and an expression of mere bigotry.  How could anyone seriously believe such nonsense?  The motive for wanting to believe it is not mysterious, since one might have gotten oneself locked into sexual vices so extreme that their rationalization requires such an absurd thesis.  But how could one fool oneself into actually believing it?  Here too a kind of Bizarro-world moralism rides to the rescue.  If one can whip oneself up into a self-righteous frenzy that directs attention away from the absurdity of one’s belief and onto the purported bigotry of those who deny it, then the belief can (perhaps just barely) be sustained.  And the more manifestly absurd the belief, the more moralistically shrill will be the rhetorical defense of it, because rhetorical force has to make up for the lack of any rational basis. 
We might call this the law of compensatory moralism: The more manifestly shameful or absurd one’s sexual vices, the more shrilly moralistic one will tend to be in attacking those who object to them, so as to compensate psychologically for one’s own deep-down awareness of this shamefulness and absurdity.
3. Counter-Pharisaism: But why do so many people who do not share such vices go along with this compensatory moralism?  Why do even many people whose personal sexual behavior is relatively conservative nevertheless strongly object to any insistence that such conservatism ought to be normative? 
In part this is simply a consequence of the lazy relativism and sentimentalism that tend to prevail in egalitarian societies.  The very idea that any one way of life is better than another, and the prospect of someone’s feelings being hurt if one were to suggest otherwise, become intolerable.  (Again, see Plato’s analysis of democracy in the Republic.)  Hence even those who prefer to live more conservative lives often won’t let themselves commit the thought-crime of believing that it is morally betterto do so.    
But I would suggest that there is more to it than that.  Consider the following analogy.  The Pharisees are often described as having built a “fence” around the Mosaic Law, so as to make it as unlikely as possible that anyone will violate it.  The fence consisted of a set of secondary prohibitions, respect for which was meant to ensure that one wouldn’t even get close to offending against the primary ones.  For example, if you do not allow yourself even to pick grain on the Sabbath, then you will be sure to avoid anything that might more clearly constitute working on the Sabbath. 
Now, what I am suggesting is that tolerance of more recherché sexual vices allows those whose vices are more humdrum to build a “fence” of permissibility around them.  It’s a kind of Bizarro-world parody of Pharisaism.  If even really extreme things are not prohibited, then it is less likely that more mundane things will be prohibited.  For example, traditional sexual morality condemns fornication as well as transsexualism, but it regards the latter as more directly contrary to nature than the former.  Hence if even the latter comes to be seen as permissible, it will be that much easier to justify the former. 
So, Pharisaism expands the boundaries of what is impermissible so as to safeguard the prohibitions that the devout person really cares most about.  And the counter-Pharisaism of the “bourgeois bohemian” progressive expands the boundaries of what is permissible to safeguard the milder sexual vices that are what he really cares about. 
* * *
I am not saying that the three psychological tendencies I’ve identified – the daughters of lust, the law of compensatory moralism, and Bizarro-world Pharisaism – are at work in absolutely everyone with more liberal views about sexual morality, or that they are equally strong in everyone in whom they are at work.  But they are a big part of the story, and an increasingly big part as the sexual revolution metastasizes. 
Nor, of course, am I saying for a moment that identifying these psychological factors suffices to refute the claims or arguments of those with liberal views about sexual morality.  That would be an ad hominem fallacy.  Those claims and arguments need to be (and can be) answered on their own terms, entirely independently of the motivations of or psychological influences on those who make them.
Still, it is important to consider these psychological influences.  For one thing, bad ideas and arguments often have a hold over people even when the logical problems with them are laid bare.  It can be useful for someone in thrall to such errors to consider the non-rational influences that might be leading him to give them more credence or consideration than they deserve.
For another thing, those who would defend traditional sexual morality need to have a realistic understanding of the cultural situation.  As I have said, some conservative religious believers lack this.  For example, even contemporary Catholic churchmen, on the rare occasions when they talk about sexual morality at all, often do so only in the vaguest and most inoffensive way.  They will bend over backwards to attribute good motives to their opponents and to concede the alleged injustice and insensitivity of past upholders of Christian morality, even though such courtesies are never reciprocated by the liberal side.  And they will deemphasize the importance of sexual morality relative to, say, questions of social justice.
The great churchmen and saints of the past would regard all of this as breathtakingly delusional.  In reality, there cannot possibly be true social justice without sound sexual morals, because the family is the foundation of social order and the family cannot be healthy without sound sexual morals.  The sexual revolution is the cause of millions of children being left fatherless, with the intergenerational poverty and social disorder that that entails.  Nor is there any greater manifestation of the deep selfishness that makes social justice impossible than the callous willingness of millions to murder their own children in the womb.  Talk about social injustice that ignores the fundamental role of the sexual revolution in fostering such injustice is mere chatter – unserious, sentimental, and prone to make modern people comfortable in their sins rather than telling them what they really need to hear.  The warrior for true social justice must be an uncompromising reactionary in matters of sex.
And not the least of the reasons for this is the role that sexual immorality plays in undermining moral understanding in general, as Aquinas teaches us.  We are not dealing with a mere intellectual mistake made by well-meaning people but nothing less than a culture-wide psychosis.  As the twelve-steppers say, the first step is to admit the problem.