Edward Feser's Blog, page 46

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.

Interview on Aristotle’s Revenge

Recently Michael Egnor interviewed me about my book Aristotle’s Revenge for the Discovery Institute.  The interview will be posted in three parts, spread across the Institute’s ID the Future and Mind Matters podcasts, and today the first part has been posted.  (I’m critical of Intelligent Design theory in the book, so the Institute is showing good sportsmanship in hosting the interview!) Links to other interviews and the like can be found at my main webpage.

The metaphysics of the will

Last month, at a conference at Mount Saint Mary’s College in Newburgh, NY on Aquinas on Human Action and Virtue , I presented a paper on “The Metaphysics of the Will.”  You can listen to audio of the talk at the Thomistic Institute’s Soundcloud page. The outline for the paper that I refer to during the talk is as follows:
I. Introduction
II. Substances and their powers
III. Rational substances
IV. Against voluntarism
V. Freedom of choice
VI. The postmortem fixity of the will
You can find audio of my other Thomistic Institute talks here.  Audio and video of other talks and the like can be found at my main webpage.

Speaking (what you take to be) hard truths ≠ hatred

Suppose I was driving past you and you stopped me to warn that a bridge was out up ahead and that I was risking my life by continuing in that direction.  Suppose I reacted indignantly, accusing you of hating me and hoping that I drove off the bridge to my doom.  This would no doubt strike you as a most bizarre and irrational response.  Obviously, there is nothing whatsoever in what you said that entails any ill will toward me.  On the contrary, if anything, what you said is evidence of concern for me.  Let’s add to the scenario.  Suppose that I knew that you were wrong about there being a bridge out ahead, and also knew you to be, in general, an ill-informed and irrational person prone to making strange warnings.  Would that justify my nasty reaction to you?  Obviously not.  It would justify me in rolling my eyes at you and perhaps even in showing some impatience, but it would still do nothing to justify accusing you of hatred or of wishing me harm.  An irrational or ill-informed person is not ipso facto a malicious person.
Consider a very different scenario.  Suppose you tried to convince me to follow a moral principle that I regarded as deeply irrational, such as an extreme version of fruitarianism according to which it would be wrong to eat anything except fruit that had already fallen from a plant.  Suppose you gave me arguments for this view that I judged to be sheer sophistries.  Suppose that in this case too I accused you of hating me, on the grounds that the way of life you were asking me to adopt would make me miserable, being contrary to deep seated desires, extremely difficult to follow, and likely to damage my health. 
Once again the charge would be silly.  You would indeed be mistaken in trying to get me to adopt your strange moral views, and maybe even irrational, but it would be unreasonable for me to accuse you of harboring hatred for me or of wishing me ill.  On the contrary, you would, in your own strange way, be trying to help me by encouraging me to follow what you sincerely believed would be a morally better way of life.
That is all obvious and no doubt uncontroversial, at least when the context has to do with warning a driver of dangerous road conditions or recommending an odd dietary morality.  Strangely, though, many people make exactly these sorts of bizarre accusations of hatred in other contexts.  For example, suppose a theologian warns people that eternal damnation is real and pleads with them to repent so that they will avoid it.  He is liable to be accused of sadism – of wantingthere to be such a thing as hell and of wanting people to go there.  This is no less silly than accusing a person who warns you that a bridge is out of wantingthe bridge to be out and of wanting you to fall to your death.
Of course, there might be a person who wants the bridge to be out, and there might be a person who wants there to be a hell.  But it doesn’t for a minute follow merely from the fact that a person believes that hell is real that he wants it to be real, any more than it follows from the fact that a person believes that the bridge is out that he wants it to be.  And notice that it makes no difference to the point whether you think belief in eternal damnation is ridiculous and irrational, any more than in the case of the bridge. 
Or suppose that the subject is sexual morality rather than dietary morality.  Suddenly people who hold that certain practices are immoral are accused of hating those who engage in those practices.  This is as stupid as accusing fruitarians of hatingthose who eat meat or who drink milk or who otherwise fail to abide by their austere moral standards.
Once again, the rationality or irrationality of the beliefs in question is irrelevant.  Let fruitarianism be as irrational and difficult to practice as you like, it simply doesn’t follow that it is motivated by hatred.  And by the same token, even if traditional sexual morality really were as irrational and difficult to practice as its critics claim it is, it doesn’t follow for a moment that its adherents are motivated by hatred.
You needn’t believe in hell or traditional sexual morality to see the point.  Consider the case of Australian rugby player Israel Folau, who was recently sacked for sending an Instagram message to the effect that “drunks, homosexuals, adulterers, liars, fornicators, thieves, atheists, and idolaters” are in danger of hell.  Philosopher Peter Singer, though famously an atheist and a defender of the morality of homosexual behavior, came to Folau’s defense.  In his column at Project Syndicate, Singer wrote:
[Folau’s] post no more expresses hatred toward homosexuals than cigarette warnings express hatred toward smokers.
If that analogy seems implausible, that’s because you do not take Folau’s beliefs seriously.  Granted, for anyone outside that particular faith, it’s hard to take such beliefs seriously.  But try putting yourself in the position of someone with Folau’s beliefs.  You see people on a path toward a terrible fate – much worse than getting lung cancer, because death will not release them from their agony – and they are blind to what awaits them.  Wouldn’t you want to warn them, and give them the chance to avoid that awful fate?  I assume that is what Folau believes he is doing.  He even tells homosexuals that Jesus loves them, and calls on them to repent so that they can avoid burning in hell for eternity.  That doesn’t sound like hate speech.
End quote.  Why, then, is the “hatred” canard so common?  Largely, of course, because it is so useful as a political tactic – as some activists quite frankly admit, as I discussed in a post from a few years back.  And given the shrillness and venom with which the charge of “hatred” is usually flung, what the psychologists call “projection” is surely playing a role too – where the hatred that the projector projects is one of the daughters of lust identified by Aquinas.

Norman Geisler (1932 – 2019)

I am sorry to report that philosopher and theologian Norman Geisler has died.  Geisler stood out as a Protestant who took a broadly Thomist approach to philosophy and theology, and as an evangelical who vigorously defended the classical theist conception of God against the currently fashionable anthropomorphism he aptly labeled “neo-theism” (and which Brian Davies calls “theistic personalism”).  Those of us who sympathize with these commitments are in his debt. The first philosophical or theological event I ever attended was a debate between Geisler and the process theologian John Cobb in Claremont, California in the late 80s.  I vividly recall his emphasis on upholding the tradition of “Augustine, Anselm, and Aquinas” against theological innovators like Cobb.  It was only years later that I really understood what was at stake in this dispute, but I was impressed by the depth of the philosophical issues that arose in the course of the debate – issues that usually don’t occur to the average believer, but have implications for him all the same.
Geisler’s many important books include his introduction to Aquinas and his critiques of neo-theism Creating God in the Image of Man? and the co-authored The Battle for God .  RIP.