Edward Feser's Blog, page 55

Aquinas on the meaning of life

My article “Aquinas and the meaning of life” appears in the anthology The Meaning of Life and the Great Philosophers , edited by Stephen Leach and James Tartaglia and just published by Routledge.  Lots of interesting stuff in this volume.  The table of contents and other information are available here. This is a companion volume to an earlier volume on consciousness edited by Leach and Tartaglia, to which I also contributed.

Capital punishment at Church Militant

Recently, I did a Skype interview with Michael Voris of Church Militant on the subject of By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed .  It’s available at the CM website, though it looks like you have to be a subscriber to watch the full interview. Earlier interviews about the book include those done for The World Over with Raymond Arroyo , The Dennis Prager Show , The Patrick Coffin Show , and several others.

NCR on Five Proofs

At National Catholic Register, Clare Walker kindly reviews my book Five Proofs of the Existence of God .  From the review:
Professor Edward Feser has a rare gift: the ability to make esoteric philosophical arguments accessible to lay readers. With charm and wit, Feser summarizes five arguments for the existence of God, based on Aristotle, Plotinus, Augustine, Aquinas and Leibniz. Don’t be intimidated.  Feser swept me along on the gentle current of his explanation, and I found myself understanding, for the first time in my life, various “-isms” of philosophy that in my younger years completely confused me…
For those who crave a rational basis for their faith, or want to demonstrate to their intellectual detractors that faith in God is rational, reasonable and well-founded, this book is perfect.

Gödel and the unreality of time

In 1949, in a festschrift devoted to Einstein, Kurt Gödel published a very short but profound paper titled “A Remark About the Relationship Between Relativity Theory and Idealistic Philosophy.”  It has since become well-known as a defense of the possibility in principle of time travel in a relativistic universe.  But in fact that is not exactly what Gödel was trying to show.  He was trying to show instead that time is illusory.  He was using Einstein to revive the timeless conception of reality defended historically by thinkers like Parmenides and McTaggart. Gödel had discovered solutions for the field equations of the general theory of relativity (GTR) that allow for the possibility of closed causal chains in a rotating universe, where the “backward” part of such a chain can be interpreted as an object’s revisiting its earlier self.  As Einstein acknowledged in his response to Gödel in the festschrift, in such a causal chain – in which an apparently earlier event E leads to an apparently later event L, but where L in turn leads back to E – you may with equal justice regard L as the earlier event and E the later.  The relations “earlier than” and “later than” cease to be objective features of the situation.  Now, as even the B-theory of time acknowledges, the objective reality of the relations “earlier than” and “later than” is essential to the reality of time.  Hence Gödel concluded that in a universe of the sort he describes, time is illusory.
Now, whether our universe is of the rotating kind that would allow for such causal chains depends on the distribution of matter within it, which is an empirical consideration that cannot be settled from the armchair.  But Gödel thought this irrelevant.  As Palle Yourgrau has emphasized, Gödel intended his scenario as a limit caseof GTR’s spatialization of time, which shows what follows if that spatialization is pushed through consistently.  He also thought that the existence of something as purportedly metaphysically fundamental as time could not plausibly depend on a contingent matter such as the precise distribution of matter in the universe.  Hence his judgement that the possible scenario allowed by GTR that he uncovered casts doubt on the reality of time in our world. 
Yourgrau has long rightly complained that the common tendency to present Gödel as a defender of the possibility of time travel distorts his actual intentions.  He writes:
For Gödel, if there is time travel, there isn’t time.  The goal of the great logician was not to make room in physics for one’s favorite episode of Star Trek, but rather to demonstrate that if one follows the logic of relativity further even than its father was willing to venture, the results will not just illuminate but eliminate the reality of time.
End quote.  Now, among the assumptions you have to make in order to accept Gödel’s argument is that GTR provides an exhaustivedescription of the nature of time and space.  (This is an assumption that you would not make if you gave GTR either an instrumentalist or an epistemic structural realist interpretation.)  That is to say, you’d have to assume that if GTR doesn’t capture some purported aspect of time and space, then that aspect just isn’t really there.  (You have to assume more than this too, since Gödel’s argument can also be challenged at other places.  But I’m not getting into that here.)
Now, Yourgrau notes that Gödel’s argument is in one respect interestingly parallel to, but in another respect interestingly departs from, his famous Incompleteness results in mathematics.  The parallel is this.  The Incompleteness Theorem shows that arithmetical truth is not definable within a formal system (because there will be propositions that are true but not provable within the system).  The argument about relativity, meanwhile, shows (so Gödel thought) that time, in the strict sense, is not definable within GTR.  The departure is this.  In the case of arithmetic, Gödel’s conclusion was not that there is no such thing as arithmetical truth, but rather that since there is such a thing, formal systems of the sort in question are incomplete.  But in the case of relativity, Gödel’s conclusion was not that GTR is incomplete if it fails to capture time, but rather that time must be unreal.
As Yourgrau asks, why this asymmetry in Gödel’s conclusions?  Why wouldn’t he conclude instead that GTR is simply incomplete if it fails to capture time?
Yourgrau’s answer is to suggest that there are philosophical problems with our commonsense understanding of time, and with the A-theory of time that is its philosophical expression, that might be taken independently to cast doubt on its reality, whereas there are no similarly formidable objections to the notion of arithmetical truth.  Perhaps that was part of Gödel’s motivation, though in my own view the purported difficulties with the A-theory are vastly overstated.
But I would conjecture that the deeper explanation lies in Gödel’s Platonism.  For the Platonist, the highest degree of reality is to be found in the realm of abstract objects conceived of as denizens of an eternal “third realm” over and above the spatiotemporal world of concrete particulars on the one hand and the mind on the other.  And mathematical objects are the gold standard instances of such abstract objects.  The empirical world of time and space has, on this view, only a second-rate kind of reality, and the temptation is strong to dismiss it as altogether illusory.  
If you buy this general picture, then the asymmetry in Gödel’s thinking noted by Yourgrau is quite natural.  If a formal system doesn’t capture arithmetical truth, then since such mathematical truth is the gold standard of Platonic reality, the problem must be with the formal system.  But if a mathematicized picture of nature such as GTR doesn’t capture time (as Gödel thought it did not), then since mathematics is the gold standard of reality and time is a second-rate kind of reality at best, then the problem must be with time.
Much more on time, the A-theory versus the B-theory, time travel, and related matters in my forthcoming philosophy of nature book.  Stay tuned.

Claremont Center

The recent exchange between Bishop Robert Barron and William Lane Craig was sponsored by the Claremont Center for Reason, Religion, and Public Affairs, with which I am associated.  The Center’s website has just gone live, and will give you more information about the Center and its associated scholars and activities. Links to audio and video of the Barron-Craig events can be found here.

SES podcast on classical theism

While at Southern Evangelical Seminary last week, I recorded a podcast with Adam Tucker on the topic of classical theism and theistic personalism.  You can listen to it here. If and when the evening lecture I gave at SES is also posted online, I’ll let you know.  Stay tuned.

Cooperation with sins against prudence (and chastity)

Last month I gave a talk on the theme “Cooperation with Sins against Prudence” at a conference on Cooperation with Evil at the Dominican House of Studies in Washington, D.C.  You can now listen to the talk at the Thomistic Institute’s Soundcloud page.   Prudence is the virtue by which we know the right ends to pursue and the right means by which to pursue them.  Aquinas argued that sexual immorality tends more than other vices to erode prudence.  The erosion of prudence, in turn, tends to undermine one’s general capacity for moral reasoning.  Hence, when we facilitate the sexual sins of others, we tend thereby (whether we realize it or not) to promote their general moral corruption.  In the talk, I develop and defend this theme and apply it to a critique of the views of Fr. Antonio Spadaro and Fr. James Martin. The other presenters at the conference were Msgr. Andrew McLean Cummings, Steven Long,Fr. Ezra Sullivan, and Christopher Tollefsen.  You can find their talks at the Soundcloud page as well.

Lessons from St. Justin Martyr

My article “The Unapologetic Apologist: Five Lessons from St. Justin Martyr” appears today at Catholic World Report. You can find links to my other CWR articles here.

Best T-shirt ever

Just back from a very enjoyable visit to Southern Evangelical Seminary, where I gave a lecture last night on classical theism.  Many thanks to the very kind folks at SES for their hospitality.  And thanks also for what is probably the best T-shirt I’ve ever seen – SES’s Act and Potency T-shirt, emblazoned with an image of Aquinas together with the first of the Twenty-Four Thomistic Theses.  You can pick one up via the SES store website, where I see they also have a matching Act and Potency coffee mug and Act and Potency poster.  Amaze your friends, or at least baffle them! (Readers of p. 56 of The Last Superstition will know why this makes me feel a little like a prophet!)

Does God have emotions?

An accusation sometimes leveled by theistic personalists against the classical theism of thinkers like Augustine, Anselm, and Aquinas is that their position makes God out to be “unemotional” or “unfeeling” and thus less than personal.  Is the charge just?  It is not, as I’ve argued many times.  So, does God have emotions?  It depends on what you mean.  On the one hand, as Aquinas argues in Summa Contra Gentiles I.89, it is not correct to attribute to God what he calls “the passions of the appetites.”  For passions involve changeability, and since God is purely actual and without passive potentiality, he cannot change.  Hence it makes no sense to think of God becoming agitated or calming down, feeling a sudden pang of sadness or a surge of excitement, or undergoing any of the other shifts in affect that we often have in mind when we talk of the emotions.  On the other hand, no sooner does Aquinas say this than he immediately goes on in SCG I.90-91 to argue that there is in God delight, joy, and love.  And of course, delight, joy, and love are also among the things we have in mind when we talk of the emotions. I have discussed the sense in which God can be said to love in Five Proofs of the Existence of God (at pp. 228-29), and I won’t repeat here what I already said there.  But let’s talk about Aquinas’s arguments for attributing delight and joy to God.
Delight and joy both essentially involve the actual possession of some perceived good that one wills, with the difference, in Aquinas’s view, being that in delight the good in question is “really conjoined” to the one who is delighted whereas in joy it need not be.  Hence, suppose you and your child are both looking forward to some ice cream you have ordered on a hot summer’s day.  When you actually get it and start eating it you take delight in it insofar as it is sweet, cool, and refreshing.  Your child also delights in it, for the same reasons.  Now, as Aquinas uses the term, you don’t, strictly speaking, delight in your child’s ice cream, precisely because he (and not you) is the one who is eating and enjoying it (and is thus “conjoined” to that good).  However, you do take joy in his having the ice cream, insofar you take his possession and enjoyment of his ice cream to be good in just the way your possession and enjoyment of your own ice cream is good.
In God’s case, Aquinas says, “it is apparent that God properly delights in Himself, but He takes joy both in Himself and in other things.”  However, there are aspects of joy and delight as they exist in us that cannot be attributed to God.  Most obviously, in us joy and delight wax and wane.  We might go from being miserable to merely feeling blah to being in a moderately good mood to feeling deliriously happy and then back again to misery, or blah-ness, or mere moderately good spirits.  Since God is immutable, no such transitions can occur in him.
Another difference derives from the fact that while there are intellect and will in God, there are no sense organs in him, since he is incorporeal and impassible.  Go back to your enjoyment of the ice cream.  It occurs because certain sense organs are altered by the ice cream, and this occurs at a particular time and place.  It is this particular sweetness of this particular object that affects you and that you enjoy here and now.  And the enjoyment is associated with certain sensations in particular parts of the body.  These material, spatial, and temporal limitations do not apply to God.  His delight and joy in a thing does not have anything to do with his being altered by it, or with him having sensations in body parts, or with some particular need being satisfied in a particular way on a particular occasion.  
Critics of classical theism are apt to judge that such qualifications must entail that delight and joy can exist in God only in some thin and disappointing manner.  They are likely to suppose that God, as the classical theist conceives of him, lacks the rich delight and joy of which we are capable, and can possess only some bloodless, machine-like ersatz.  But that is exactly the opposite of the lesson they should be drawing.  In fact, our delight and joy are much less than God’s, and precisely because they are limited by the body and the senses.  God’s delight and joy never wane, and they are not limited to a succession of fleeting experiences of particular finite goods at specific times and places.  Rather, they involve the eternal and metaphysically necessary possession of an infinite good.  It is preposterous to think of that as somehow inferior to the piddling pleasures of which we poor rational animals are capable.
The theological imaginations of critics of classical theism are limited precisely because they rely on imagination, in the sense of forming mental imagery – on exercises like considering what things would seem like for them if they remained conscious and able to think but lost their sense organs and viscera, and concluding, absurdly, that that must be the kind of thing the classical theist has in mind.  In effect, they start conceiving of God as a kind of defective human being.  They are so lost in anthropomorphism that even when they think they are avoiding it they are in fact only sinking deeper into it.  Tell them that God lacks our bodily limitations and they conclude that what he has must be something less than what we have, when in fact the whole point is that it is something morethan what we have.  
Even these critics of classical theism seem not to make this mistake where the divine intellect is concerned, or at least not to make it as badly.  If you tell them that God’s intellect is not limited by having to take in information through sense organs or by having to process it through neural activity, they don’t conclude from this that God must therefore be dumber than us.  Yet for some reason they suppose that if God lacks experiential episodes like ours, then he must be less capable of joy, delight, and the like than we are!
(At pp. 215-16 of Five Proofs, I proposed a series of analogies – the conjunction of all true propositions, the way that colors are contained in a beam of white light, and the way that a variety of shapes are contained virtually in a lump of dough – as means by which to get a handle on what it means to say that there is in God all knowledge.  It might be a useful exercise for the reader to try to apply such analogies to the attempt to get a better handle on what it means to say that there is in God unlimited delight and joy.)
Related posts:
Olson contra classical theism
The divine intellect
A complex god with a god complex
Progressive dematerialization
Classical theism roundup