Edward Feser's Blog, page 58

Prof. Fastiggi’s pretzel logic

I’m going to take a break from the topic of the death penalty soon – I’m quite sick of it myself, believe you me – but the trouble is that critics of By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed keep saying things that demand a response.  The latest example is Prof. Robert Fastiggi, who in a series of combox remarks has replied to my recent Catholic World Report article on capital punishment and the ordinary magisterium.  Once again, he ties himself in ever more convoluted logical knots trying to justify the unjustifiable, viz. the possibility of a reversal of 2000 years of clear and unbroken magisterial and scriptural teaching.  But the attempt is well worth calling attention to, because it shows just how far one has to go through the looking glass in order to try to avoid the implications of the evidence Joe Bessette and I have set out in our book.Since one of his more oversensitive admirers has falsely accused me of gratuitous attacks on Prof. Fastiggi, I want to preface the remarks that follow by saying that they are in no way intended personally.  On the contrary, I admire Prof. Fastiggi for his unwavering dedication to the Church, for his erudition, and for the unfailingly gentlemanly way he has engaged his critics both in the debate over capital punishment and in the other, often heated, theological debates that have arisen during the pontificate of Pope Francis.  Prof. Fastiggi hits hard but he plays fair.  I am only doing the same.  (And any reader offended by the occasional joke or Photoshop image needs to get a sense of humor.)

Let me start with Prof. Fastiggi’s strangest remark.  In my article, I cited the CDF document Donum Veritatis, which rejects the thesis that the magisterium could be “habitually mistaken” in its prudential judgments.  I argued that if the Church could not be habitually mistaken even in her prudential judgments, then a fortiori she could hardly be habitually mistaken on much graver matters of moral principle and scriptural interpretation.  Now, the Church has for two millennia taught that the death penalty is legitimate at least in principle, and done so on biblical grounds.  Hence, if she were to reverse this teaching – which Fastiggi claims is possible – then it would follow that the Church would be saying that she has after all been habitually mistaken, for two millennia, about grave matters of moral principle and scriptural interpretation.  Therefore, I concluded, the Church cannot carry out such a reversal, consistent with her claims about her own infallibility.
Here is how Fastiggi responds:
Professor Feser, in his book co-authored with Prof. Bessette, states that St. John Paul II’s position [according to which capital punishment should be applied very rarely at most] “is a mistake, and a serious one” (p. 197). This, though, means that since 1995 the magisterium has been habitually mistaken on a prudential judgment (and it’s really much more than prudential). Feser, therefore, contradicts the very passage from the CDF’s 1990 instruction, Donum Veritatis, that he cites… To suggest that the magisterium has been habitually mistaken for 23 years on the death penalty seems very problematical.  Does not Feser believe that the Church’s magisterium has enjoyed divine assistance in the last 23 years with regard to capital punishment?
End quote.  So, according to Fastiggi, it “seems very problematical” to suppose that the magisterium could have gotten a prudential judgment wrong for 23years, but not problematical to suppose that the magisterium could have gotten a matter of basic moral principle and scriptural interpretation wrong for two millennia.  What can one say about such a manifestly absurd position other than that it is manifestly absurd?  I am sorry if that sounds unkind to Prof. Fastiggi, but the offended reader should worry less about whether this judgment sounds unkind, and more about whether it is true.  And if the reader thinks it is not true, I challenge him to explain exactly howthis particular view of Prof. Fastiggi’s can be defended against the charge of absurdity.
Furthermore, I am also puzzled that someone with Prof. Fastiggi’s knowledge of Church history would think 23 years is a long time for the magisterium to have gotten a prudential judgment wrong.  By the standards of Church history, 23 years is a mere blip.  Moreover, there are many examples of bad prudential judgments that have stood for comparable lengths of time. 
Take, for example, the notorious Cadaver Synod and its aftermath, which not only involved the bizarre spectacle of Pope Stephen VI putting the corpse of his predecessor Pope Formosus on trial and then desecrating it, but also Stephen’s nullifying all of Formosus’ official acts and declaring his ordinations invalid.  Two later popes and two synods reversed Stephen’s decision, but then a yet laterpope, Sergius III, and a synod he called, reversed that decision and reaffirmedStephen’s judgments.  Sergius also had his predecessor murdered and backed up his reaffirmation of Stephen’s decrees with threats of violence.  The whole sorry spectacle was initiated by a scandalous and indeed insane public act by one pope, reinforced by gravely immoral acts by another, involved contradictory judgments made by several popes and synods, and lasted for about 15 years.  As The Oxford Dictionary of Popes notes, given that the sacraments and much of the life of the Church depend on the validity of ordinations and the reliability of official papal acts, “the resulting confusion was indescribable” (p. 119). 
Or consider the Great Western Schism, which lasted for forty years.  It was a consequence of mistakes made by Pope Urban VI, whom the Catholic Encyclopediadescribes as “obstinate and intractable” and “inconstant and quarrelsome,” with “his whole reign [being] a series of misadventures.”  It was perpetuated by further decisions made by other members of the hierarchy.  At the lowest point of the schism there were threemen claiming to be the true pope, and theologians, and indeed even figures who would later be recognized as saints, were divided on the issue.  As the Catholic Encyclopedia notes, “to contemporaries this problem [seemed]… almost insoluble.”
Further examples could easily be given, but these suffice to show that it is possible for grave prudential errors to persist for years.  In comparison with the Cadaver Synod and the Great Western Schism, the hypothesis that recent popes have been mistaken in their prudential judgment that capital punishment is no longer necessary for the protection of society is actually pretty modest.
Now, if a mistake that persists even for decades wouldn’t count as “habitual” in the sense ruled out by Donum Veritatis, then what would count as “habitual” prudential error?  For exactly how many years would the mistake have to persist?  That’s a good question, but we needn’t give a precise answer for present purposes.  We need only note that, since the Church is 2000 years old, we can be certain that a mistake that persists for 2000 years would count as “habitual” in the relevant sense.  But that is precisely the kind of mistake that Prof. Fastiggi (not me!) thinks might be attributable to the Church.  Indeed, he thinks the Church might have been wrong for that long about matters of moral principle and scriptural interpretation, and not merely about a prudential judgment.  So, how Fastiggi can maintain a straight face while suggesting that heis somehow more loyal to the teaching of Donum Veritatis than I am, I have no idea.  But I would certainly think twice before playing poker against him. 
Then there is Prof. Fastiggi’s assertion – and sheer assertion is all that it is – that Pope St. John Paul II’s teaching on capital punishment was “much more than prudential.”  Now, Joe Bessette and I devote over fifty pages of our book (pp. 144-196) to a careful analysis of the statements made on the subject of capital punishment by popes John Paul II, Benedict XVI, and Francis.  We address in detail all the arguments made by theologians who claim that the teaching of these popes counts as either a reversal or development of doctrine, and we show that those arguments fail.  We do so in a sober and scholarly manner, in no way heaping any abuse on those who disagree with us.  We claim to establish that the teaching of these popes is indeed nothing more than a prudential judgment that is not binding on Catholics. 
Not one of the critics of our book who appeals to Pope St. John Paul II’s teaching has addressed these arguments.  Hart and Griffiths assert that we are wrong, but do absolutely nothing to back up this assertion other than to fling insults.  Brugger and Fastiggi, to their credit, do not resort to insult, but they too simply make undefended assertions, without answering the arguments in the relevant section of By Man.  Since they offer no actual criticisms of those arguments, they really give me nothing to respond to.  Suffice it to say that their silence speaks volumes. 
Let’s move on to some of Prof. Fastiggi’s other comments.  In my Catholic World Reportarticle I had also appealed to the teaching of Lumen Gentium 12, which says that the entire body of the faithful cannot err when they show universal agreement on a matter of faith and morals.  Fastiggi responds:
Feser… fails, though, to mention that this universal agreement “is exercised under the guidance of the sacred teaching authority, in faithful and respectful obedience to which the people of God accepts that which is not just the word of men but truly the word of God.”  This last sentence underlines the role of the magisterium in determining whether a teaching is definitive and infallible or whether it isn’t.
End quote.  The first thing to say in response to this is that I certainly agree that the universal agreement of the faithful would have to be in harmony with the judgment of the magisterium.  Indeed, that follows trivially from the fact that the magisterial authorities are themselves included among the faithful.  So, I obviously wasn’t talking about a case where the body of the faithful think one thing and the magisterium thinks another.  Rather, the universal agreement that I was speaking of, and that Lumen Gentium is speaking of, has to do with a situation where the magisterium and the faithful at large are all in agreement on some matter of faith and morals.  And what I noted was that the magisterium and the faithful as a whole were for centuries in agreement on the legitimacy in principle of capital punishment.  Therefore, given the teaching of Lumen Gentium, that teaching cannot be erroneous.
But Fastiggi seems to think that even this centuries-long agreement is irrelevant if it ever turns out that magisterial authorities at some future date decide to reverse a teaching.  The trouble with this, though, is that it completely evacuates the teaching of Lumen Gentium 12 of any substantive content.  On Fastiggi’s interpretation, the universal agreement of the faithful cannot be wrong… except when it is wrong, because some future pope decides to declareit wrong!  And that makes the universal agreement of the faithful of no ultimate significance whatsoever.  For it is really the judgment of whoever happens currently to be pope that determines, retroactively as it were, when the centuries-long universal agreement of the faithful really counts.  In that case, though, Lumen Gentium might as well not have bothered mentioning the universal agreement of the faithful at all.  If, however, Lumen Gentium was intended to make a substantive claim about the authority of the universal agreement of the faithful (which it surely was), then Fastiggi’s position must be rejected.
Fastiggi also writes:
Trying to determine which teachings are infallible by virtue of the ordinary and universal magisterium, however, is not any easy task. In his article, it would have been good for Feser to cite Lumen Gentium, 25, which notes that the ordinary and universal magisterium is infallible when the Catholic bishops “maintaining the bond of communion among themselves and with the successor of Peter, and authentically teaching matters of faith and morals, are in agreement on one position as definitively to be held.” This sets a very high standard, for it’s not so easy to verify whether the bishops, teaching in communion with the Roman Pontiff, have come to an agreement that one position (unam sententiam) on faith or morals must be definitively held.
End quote.  The trouble with this, though, is that Fastiggi once again simply begs the question.  In By Man, Joe Bessette and I point out (in response to Brugger, who makes the same mistake Fastiggi is making here) that Lumen Gentium 25 is in fact giving only sufficientconditions for the infallible exercise of the ordinary and universal magisterium, not necessaryconditions.  Yes, when the bishops teach in communion with the pope in precisely the manner Lumen Gentium specifies, they are teaching infallibly.  But it doesn’t follow that that is the only way that the ordinary and universal magisterium can teach infallibly, and indeed, the texts I cite in my Catholic World Report article show that it is not the only way.  Fastiggi simply assumes, without argument, the contrary view.
The most serious problem with Fastiggi’s position, however, is enshrined in remarks like the following:
The magisterium itself is usually the best source for determining which teachings of the ordinary and universal magisterium are infallible and which are not.  When subsequent popes show they are not bound by judgments of their predecessors, that’s a good indication that those judgments were not definitive…
If the magisterium in the future declares capital punishment – even under certain conditions – to be intrinsically evil, I’ll abide by the magisterium’s judgment. This would be an indication that there was no prior definitive magisterial teaching on the subject.
Similarly, in a later comment he writes:
The fact that Pope Francis and the overwhelming majority of bishops now reject capital punishment is a sign that there never was a definitive magisterial tradition on the matter.
End quote.  The trouble with this, like the trouble with Fastiggi’s remarks about Lumen Gentium 12, is that it appears to imply a voluntarist or Orwellian conception of the papal magisterium.  No matter what scripture, tradition, and previous popes all have said, for Fastiggi none of it has any binding authority if the current pope decides that it has no binding authority, and every previous scriptural and magisterial statement means whatever the current pope decides it means.
Now, one problem with this is that it is simply incompatible with what the Church herself teaches about the authority of popes.  In By Man and elsewhere, I have cited many texts (from Vatican I, Vatican II, Pope Benedict XVI, etc.) showing that popes have no authority to introduce novel doctrines, to contradict scripture, to reject the unanimous scriptural interpretations of the Fathers, to assign novel meanings to dogmas, etc.  As in the case of Lumen Gentium12, Fastiggi’s position essentially evacuates these texts of any substantive content.  For Fastiggi, the pope cannot contradict scripture, tradition, or the consensus of his predecessors… but only because he can simply stipulate that whatever he wants to teach is, appearances notwithstanding, really in harmony with what scripture, tradition, and previous popes were teaching all along.  He’s like the Party in 1984 (“We are at war with Eastasia.  We have always been at war with Eastasia”).  Obviously, this is not what texts like the ones I have cited are saying.  Their point is precisely that “the Pope is notan absolute monarch whose thoughts and desires are law” (as Pope Benedict XVI taught).
Not only is Fastiggi’s apparent position contrary to the Catholic conception of papal authority, it also commits what logicians call the “No True Scotsman” fallacy.  No matter what text from scripture, the Fathers, or previous popes you appeal to, Fastiggi will wave it off by saying that if Pope Francis or some future pope decides to contradict it, then the text in question must not really be binding after all, or must not really have meant what everyone has always taken it to mean.   All possible counterevidence is simply redefined away.
A third and related problem is that this position completely destroys the credibility of papal authority by effectively conceding to its Protestant and atheist critics the caricature they typically present of it.  Catholic apologists constantly have to explain to critics that the pope is not a dictator who can create doctrines by fiat, that he cannot contradict or reinterpret scripture at will, etc.  Though I don’t think he intends this, Fastiggi’s position essentially entails that the critics are right and the apologists are wrong.
Let’s turn to this set of remarks by Prof. Fastiggi:
Since when is it a “cheap shot” to appeal to the authority of the Roman Pontiff over that of a private scholar?… I think Feser’s arguments are convincing to those who already favor capital punishment.  They are not convincing to me and many others… Feser could shout “error” all he wants, but his shouts could never match the authority of the Catholic magisterium.
End quote.  The first problem with this is that Fastiggi simply misrepresents the nature of the dispute between us.  It seems that Fastiggi is so enamored of arguments from authority that he has forgotten that there is any other kind.  Hence he proposes that what is in question is whether the authority of a “private scholar” like me trumps that of the Roman Pontiff.  But that is not what is in question.  It has nothing at all to do with my “authority” or lack thereof.  Rather, the question is a purely logical one, namely: Can a reversal of past teaching on capital punishment be reconciled with what the Church claims about her own infallibility?  I have shown that such a reversal logically cannot be reconciled with those claims.  And Fastiggi says absolutely nothing to show otherwise.  He simply changes the subject by throwing out the “private scholar” red herring.
It is also quite absurd to pretend that it is only “those who already favor capital punishment” who would find my arguments convincing.  For one thing, this is simply an ad hominem fallacy of poisoning the well which, if it had any force at all, could with equal plausibility be turned against Fastiggi himself by suggesting that only those who already disapprove of capital punishment would agree with hisarguments.
For another thing, Fastiggi’s claim is, as a matter of empirical fact, easily shown to be false.  In the very article to which Fastiggi is responding, I cited Archbishop Charles Chaput as an example of a churchman who is strongly opposed to capital punishment but who also agrees that the Church cannot teach that it is intrinsically immoral “without repudiating her own identity.”  Cardinal Avery Dulles also held both that capital punishment should be abolished in practice and that traditional teaching cannot be reversed.  Even Mark Shea, whose hostility to capital punishment and its defenders knows almost no bounds, has consistently admitted that the Church’s traditional teaching is irreversible.
But at the end of the day, this kind of stuff is a distraction from the main issue, which is this: If capital punishment were intrinsically evil, then the magisterium of the Church will have been teaching grave moral error and badly misunderstanding scripture for two millennia.  And that would undermine the credibility of the Church.  If she could be that wrong for that long about something that serious, why should we trust anything else she says?
I have repeatedly hammered on this point, and I find that my critics repeatedly avoid addressing it.  They do not say either: “Yes, that’s true, but here’s why it’s not in fact a problem” or: “No, it’s not true, and here’s why.”  They simply change the subject.  For example, they accuse me of being bloodthirsty, or they quote from the catechism, or they bring up slavery or the slaughter of the Canaanites, or they bemoan the cold rationalism of Thomists, or they start ranting about Donald Trump and “Republican Rite Catholicism,” or in some other way they try to dodge the question of exactly how the Church could be trusted on any other subject if she had been teaching grave moral error and badly misunderstanding scripture for two millennia.  I’d ask whythey try to dodge it, but I think I already know the answer.
The closest Fastiggi comes to addressing the problem is in the following brief remarks:
I think the 2,000 year tradition is something of a myth.  Before Pope Innocent I’s permission in 405 for public officials to use torture and capital punishment there was nothing handed down in prior tradition (as Innocent I himself states). Some of the patristic sources cited by Feser and Bessette do not really show support for capital punishment (not even in principle).
But it is no myth.  First, though Fastiggi asserts that there is “nothing” in the tradition before Innocent I, nothing could be further from the truth.  For one thing, there are, of course, all the relevant scriptural passages, which no Catholic denied supported capital punishment at least in principle until very recently.  For another thing, there are all the patristic texts Joe and I cite in our book and which I have cited in earlier responses to critics.  Even if Fastiggi were correct that some of these do not really acknowledge that capital punishment is legitimate at least in principle – and he is not correct about that (and in any case he offers no argument for this claim) – there are other patristic texts that clearly do affirm this.  So, again, the claim that there is “nothing” in the tradition before the year 405 is simply false.
Second, what Fastiggi would need in order to show that the 2000 year tradition I have been speaking of here is a “myth” is an example of a patristic writer who not only does not approve of capital punishment in practice (and I have never denied that some of the Fathers opposed it in practice) but who regards it as always and intrinsically evil even in principle.  And there are no Fathers who hold that.  Even Brugger admits that.  Indeed, even Hart seems at the end of the day to admit that the Fathers do not regard the death penalty as contrary to natural law; his point is rather to emphasize that some of them regarded it as contrary to the higher demands of Christianmorality, specifically.
Third, for the specific purposes of my argument about the ordinary magisterium in my Catholic World Report article, what matters is not what this or that writer held in his capacity as a private theologian, but rather what magisterial authorities have said when, precisely in their capacity as magisterial authorities, they explicitly address the question of what is legitimate in principle for Christians.  And even if we started just with Pope Innocent I, we have an unbroken 1600 year tradition where no pope condemned capital punishment as intrinsically immoral and many popes explicitly affirmed that it is legitimate at least in principle, even by the standards of specifically Christian morality. 
So, even by Fastiggi’s lights, that would be a 1600-year-long error, if capital punishment turned out to be intrinsically wrong.  Again, why he thinks an error of even 23 years “seems very problematical,” but an error of 1600years does not, I have no idea.

The latest on Catholicism and capital punishment

Is there still anything left to say about the death penalty?  Yes, plenty.  In the debate generated by By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed , the focus has been on questions about the interpretation of various individual scriptural passages, and the level of authority of various papal statements considered in isolation.  But the critics have failed to consider the sheer cumulative force of two millennia of consistent ordinary magisterial teaching.  Some of them have also wrongly supposed that, even if capital punishment is legitimate under natural law, the higher demands of the Gospel might nevertheless rule it out absolutely.  In a new article at Catholic World Report, I show that the ordinary magisterium has taught infallibly that the death penalty is legitimate in principle even as a matter of specifically Christian morality.  No reversal is possible consistent with the indefectibility of the Church.  There’s a fair amount of new material in the article that goes beyond what Joe Bessette and I say in the book.Meanwhile, in the letters section of the February issue of First Things, Joe and I reply to Paul Griffiths’ nasty and question-begging review of the book, and Griffiths responds by doubling down on the nastiness and begged questions.

While you’re at it, take a look at Michael Pakaluk’s recent essay at Public Discourse criticizing the “new natural law” critique of capital punishment.  Christopher Tollefsen replied to Pakaluk at PD, and Pakaluk then responded to Tollefsen at Facebook.

Barron and Craig in Claremont (Updated again)

Last night at Claremont McKenna College, Stephen Davis and I moderated an exchange between Bishop Robert Barron and William Lane Craig.  You can watch a video recording of the event at Bishop Barron’s Facebook page.  (It looks like you don’t need to be signed in in order to view it.)  Michael Uhlmann is the gentleman you'll see introducing the participants, and Joe Bessette and Brandon Vogt organized the whole thing. The event was sponsored by the Claremont Center for Reason, Religion, and Public Affairs, with the assistance of Bishop Barron’s Word on Fire Catholic Ministries and Prof. Craig’s Reasonable Faith.

UPDATE: Photos from the afternoon symposium have now been posted at Bishop Barron's Facebook page.  The post also indicates that audio from the symposium will be posted soon.  I will update this post again when it is.

UPDATE 1/17: Audio from the afternoon symposium has now been posted at the Word on Fire website (scroll down).

Five Proofs on television and radio (Updated)

UPDATE 1/12: You can now watch the EWTN Live episode on YouTube or at the EWTN Live web page.

This Wednesday, January 10, I will be on EWTN Live with Fr. Mitch Pacwa to discuss Five Proofs of the Existence of God .  I will also be taping an episode of EWTN Bookmark for future airing. 
Also forthcoming is an interview about the book on Lauren Green’s Lighthouse Faith at Fox News Radio.Other recent interviews about the book include those on The Ben Shapiro Show , The Andrew Klavan Show , The Dennis Prager Show , The Michael Medved Show , The Patrick Coffin Show , Pints with Aquinas with Matt Fradd , Unbelievable? with Justin Brierley , CrossExamined with Frank Turek , and many others.  Further media appearances forthcoming.  Stay tuned.

Reelin’ in the links

At Catholic World Report, my co-author Joseph Bessette on the death penalty, recent popes, and deterrence.
The New Yorker on the late Jerry Fodor and his critique of Neo-Darwinism.
Physicist Sabine Hossenfelder announces her forthcoming book Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray.  She also has a blog.Rolling Stone interviews Donald Fagen about his late partner Walter Becker and the future of Steely Dan.

Conservative philosopher Robert Koons has a column at Newsmax.
At Project Syndicate, economist Robert Skidelsky calls attention to some inconvenient truths about migration.  John O’Sullivan on Europe and Muslim immigration, at the Claremont Review of Books.
Commentary on the thirtieth anniversary of Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities.
The Dictator Pope is reviewed by Robert Royal at The Catholic Thing, Dan Hitchens at Catholic Herald, and Philip Lawler at Catholic World Report.  Hitchens, Ed Condon, and Damian Thompson discuss the book in a Holy Smoke podcast.
This summer, The Berkeley Institute will be hosting a seminar for students on the theme of sexuality and gender.  The seminar will be led by Candace Vogler and Neville Hoad.
In defense of St. Junipero Serra, at First Things.
Vanity Fair uncovers the secrets of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and presents an oral history of how the Marvel movie juggernaut got started.  But the New Republic thinks bringing Marvel and Fox together will be a disaster.
Meanwhile, at Marvel’s publishing arm, progressive politics collides with market reality.
Aeon on Philippa Foot’s critique of modern moral philosophy.
At the Los Angeles Review of Books, Peter Harrison on the dialogue between science and religion.
Sociologist Mark Regnerus on sex scandals and sex differences, at Public Discourse.
The Weekly Standard talks to philosopher Roger Scruton about conservative environmentalism, Brexit, and his farm.
Something to bring all Trump haters and Trump fans together.  Except for the ones who don’t like Talking Heads.
At Free Inquiry, Susan Haack asks whether philosophy can be saved.
Anthony Gottlieb on the correspondence between Descartes and Princess Elisabeth on the mind-body problem, at Lapham’s Quarterly.
Vulture ranks every episode of Black Mirror.   Electric Dreams doesn’t necessarily stick closely to Philip K. Dick’s original stories.  The Punisher is reviewed at Forbes.
Han Thomas Adriaenssen’s Representation and Scepticism from Aquinas to Descartes is reviewed by Dominik Perler at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews.
From armchair to reality?  Thinking about thought experiments, at Aeon. 
“But the pope said so!”  Philosopher Peter Kwasniewski on what not to say on Judgment Day. 
David DeGrazia and Lester Hunt debate gun control in a new book reviewed at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews.
The National Interest on dictators and the intellectuals who love them.
The Atlantic on the lazy filmmaking of Woody Allen.
At The Washington Post, Alan Lightman on Karl Sigmund’s new book on the Vienna Circle.
The Atlanticreviews David Bentley Hart’s new translation of the New Testament.  So does First Things.
City Journal on the man who ran the Strand.
Jerry Coyne does not like A. N. Wilson’s new book on Darwin, at The Washington Post. 

The best New Atheist book?

The New Atheism, one hears from time to time (e.g. here, here, here, and here), is dead.  Maybe.  It depends on what you mean by “New Atheism.”  I would say that its key marks are three: first, an unreflective and dogmatic scientism; second, an extremely shallow understanding of religion; and third, an obnoxious, evangelical fervor.  The third probably has by now worn out its welcome.  Even many secular people are tired of hearing the ever more unhinged rants and calls to action of the likes of Richard Dawkins and P. Z. Myers, and appalled by the lemming-like behavior of the kind of people who show up at a Reason Rally or Jerry Coyne’s combox.  As a self-conscious movement the New Atheism might be a spent force.On the other hand, the first two marks of the New Atheism seem to me to be by no means on the wane.  Many, and indeed I would say most, secular people do not have a very deep understanding of the religious ideas they reject, and neither do they have a very sophisticated understanding of the philosophical problems inherent in the scientism they take for granted.  Unlike Dawkins, Myers, Coyne, and Co., they are not shrilly and militantly dogmatic and ignorant.  But they are politely and complacently dogmatic and ignorant. 

What would be interesting and remarkable would be a secularism whose best intellectual expressions were typically as sophisticated as, say, Walter Kaufmann, J. L. Mackie, or William L. Rowe, to cite three writers I admired in my own atheist days.  These were thinkers who recognized the intellectual and/or moral attractions of religious ideas and who also tried to grapple with the moral and intellectual problems posed by atheism.  They respected their opponents even when they disagreed with them vehemently – not out of mere politeness to the other side, but rather out of an informed perspective on it.  These thinkers are, of course, still known and their works still in print.  But even most (though of course not all) civil and educated atheists these days seem to lack their depth.
Anyway, if a postmortem on the New Atheism is in order, we might start by asking if anything of intellectual interest ever came out of it.  And the answer, I would say, is: Not much, but not quite nothing either.
One of the remarkable features of philosophy is that it is possible for a philosophy book to be well worth reading even if it gets things wrong, and even very badly wrong.  To take just four famous examples from early modern philosophy, Spinoza’s Ethics, Leibniz’s Monadology, Berkeley’s Principles of Human Knowledge, and Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature each put forward philosophical positions that are, frankly, nuts.  And yet every philosopher considers them classics, and for good reason, because each of these works is brilliant and worthy of careful study.  For though each starts from erroneous premises (in my view, anyway), each also makes the premises seem plausible, and also plausibly draws out their (often bizarre) implications. 
You can learn a lot from this sort of thing.  For one thing, if certain premises can be shown to have absurd consequences, that of course gives us reason to rethink those premises.  But there is more to the study of works like the ones in question than merely the caution against error that they afford.  A thinker who falls into a deep error can also sometimes see certain truthsthat others miss.  Why?  Precisely because he often focuses obsessively on some aspect of reality.  His mistake is that he exaggerates its significance, but precisely because he pays it far more attention than a more balanced thinker would, he notices things the more balanced thinker doesn’t.
Then there is the mundane fact that it is difficult for an intelligent thinker to go totally wrong, even when he is beholden to serious errors.  He is bound to get something right, even if it is not always what he thinks he is getting right.  For example, Hume’s account of the mind is ridiculous if applied to human minds, but it can be an illuminating way to begin to think about animal minds. 
A truly bad philosophy book, or a bad book of any kind for that matter, is one that not only gets things wrong, but fails to be interesting in any of the ways just described.  It simply has nothing going for it.  Now, a lot of New Atheist work is like that.  Consider, for example, Jerry Coyne’s Faith versus Fact, which I reviewed for First Things and commented on further here at the blog.  For the reasons I set out in those places, it is possibly the worst of the New Atheist books.  The only thing that is interesting about it is that there is nothing at all interesting about it, and that fact – the fact that an otherwise intelligent man could produce so worthless a piece of work – is alone worth pondering. 
You might think I am just being abusive out of some animus toward Coyne, but that is not the case.  For one thing, I certainly don’t deny that Coyne is worth reading when he writes about something he actually knows about, such as biology.  For another thing, if I have been hard on Coyne, I have also been very hard on other New Atheists, such as Lawrence Krauss and Daniel Dennett.  But I would not say about their New Atheist volumes what I say about Coyne’s.
For example, while Krauss’s A Universe from Nothingis cringe-makingly bad as an argument for atheism, it has some value as a pop science summary of some current ideas in cosmology.  I’ve often pointed out how ill-informed and dishonest is Dennett’s treatment of theistic arguments in Breaking the Spell, but that book too is not entirely without interest, because of Dennett’s account of the cognitive science of religious belief.  The theory is not plausible at the end of the day, but it is at least a theory, with substantive claims and arguments that are worth evaluating.  It is not a complete waste of time to read these books, the way reading Coyne’s Faith versus Fact is a complete waste of time (other than as a source of blog fodder, anyway).
Unfortunately, most New Atheist stuff is closer to Coyne’s book in value rather than to these other books.  For example, what is probably the best-known New Atheist book, Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, is a step or two up from Coyne, but not as good as Dennett, say. 
None of the books named so far is really a goodbook, though.  Some are just less bad than the others, that’s all.  None of them is really much worth reading all things considered, and that is true of almost everything in the New Atheist genre. 
I would make one exception, however.  Alex Rosenberg’s The Atheist’s Guide to Realitycertainly counts as a New Atheist book, at least if we take the three marks identified above as definitive of the New Atheism.  But it is also of real intellectual interest, and worth reading and thinking about.  Like the books by Spinoza, Leibniz, Berkeley, and Hume, the philosophical position it defends is nuts.  Indeed, it is far more crazy even than anything those writers have to say.  That is because it draws out the extreme, eliminative materialist implications of scientism far more consistently than other New Atheists do.  And though it is semi-popular in style, its arguments are also more philosophically interesting (however badly wrongheaded) than those of other New Atheist books.
That is not to say it ranks with the classics by Leibniz, Hume, et al. mentioned above.  Few books reach that status.  Nor is it to say that its arguments are very challenging.  They aren’t.  I did, after all, devote a long series of blog posts several years ago to cataloguing its failings.  However, it was worth examining in such depth because it very clearly and systematically articulates certain common errors, and shows how they, and even more radical consequences, follow from yet other and more fundamental common errors.  And it does so with much more sophistication than most other books informed by scientism.  It is in many ways a work that is representative of the intellectual pathologies of our age, and its study helps one to understand our age.  It is probably the only New Atheist book that might still be read years from now, and it is certainly the only one that will deserve to be read.
So, in my opinion, Rosenberg’s book stands out as clearly the best book in the New Atheist genre.

A lexicon for the capital punishment debate

This year, readers of this blog have been subjected to a long, heated, and sometimes confusing series of debates on the subject of Catholicism and capital punishment.  To help you take stock, here’s a guide to the key terms and concepts, in the spirit of Daniel Dennett’s famous Philosophical Lexicon :
harty, adjective.  Gratuitously vituperative, especially toward straw men.  “David is so erudite.  Why does he have to be harty all the time?”
sheameless, adjective.  Harty to the point of spittle-flecked incoherence.  “Mark has been harty ever since the Iraq war, but these days he’s absolutely sheameless.”

bruggered, adjective.  Hopelessly lost in a novel theological construction of one’s own invention.  “It’s so sad.  Chris showed such promise, but he’s gotten bruggered senseless.” 

megivern, adjective.   Portmanteau of meshuga and forgiven.   Taking mercy to an extreme that defies common sense.  “Good grief, that’s the most megivern argument against the death penalty I’ve heard yet.” 
Swetland, proper noun.  An imaginary magical realm where a reversal of doctrine counts as a development of doctrine.  “Father means well, but I’m afraid he’s bought a one way ticket to Swetland.” 
imbergoglio, noun.  A pointless, entirely avoidable doctrinal mess.  “Hmm, by my count that makes seven imbergoglios this year alone.”
peters, plural noun.   Eminent canon lawyers.  “Good luck refuting my book.  I’ve got all the peters on my side.”
flannery, noun.  Praise from a distinguished theological authority.  “Even flannery will get you nowhere with some people.”    
schall, noun.  An uneasy mood created by flannery for an unpopular theological opinion.  “The unexpected flannery the book received cast a schall over the whole discussion.”
royal, noun.  Flannery disseminated by way of mass media.  “After the book got the royal treatment, the schall was bound to spread far and wide.”
long, verb.  To yearn for a return to theological sanity. “Steve longed day and night for a neoscholastic revival, and the more baroque the better.”
longnecker, noun.  Someone thought to long in private, but who in public theological controversies tends to look on with detachment.  “Fr. Dwight is something of a longnecker.” 
Petri dish, noun.  Dominican device for reviving dormant theological truths.  Used in seminaries and study centers. “Fr. Thomas carefully placed the thesis in the Petri dish, but sometimes it takes a decade or two to see results.”
griffeth, verb.  Archaic form of griff, to engage an opponent with unjustifiable condescension.  “O friend Paul, methinks thou dost griffeth too readily.”
grisez, adjective.  Portmanteau of griff and blasé.  Excessively confident in the consistency of a novel view with orthodoxy.  “Germain casually waves aside millennia of consistent Catholic teaching, which strikes me as grisez.”
finnis, noun.  The end result or inevitable consequence of adhering to a grisez school of thought.  “When John caved in on capital punishment, he crossed the finnis line.”
tollefson, noun.   A docile student or follower of a grisez school of thought.  “The Master declared the death penalty contrary to a basic good, and all of his tollefsons have fallen into line.”
armstrong, verb.  Boldly but casually to insinuate a falsehood in the hope that others will go along with it.  “Dave tried to armstrong me into a debate.  Can you believe that guy?”
bessette, adjective.  Overwhelmed by the force of evidence and argument for an unpopular thesis.  “I hoped I could find a way around the arguments for capital punishment, but I soon found myself bessette on all sides.”
feser, verb.  Relentlessly to drive home a point that should be obvious.  “Dude, I get the point already.  Stop fesering it!”
MORE COMEDY GOLD IN THEM THAR ARCHIVES:
Pick-up lines from the philosophers
Very informal fallacies
The metaphysics of the martini
Pop culture roundup

Five Proofs on CrossExamined

Recently I was interviewed by Frank Turek for his show CrossExamined on the subject of my book Five Proofs of the Existence of God .  You can now listen to the podcast at the CrossExamined website.Other recent interviews about the book include those on The Ben Shapiro Show , The Andrew Klavan Show , The Dennis Prager Show , The Michael Medved Show , The Patrick Coffin Show , Pints with Aquinas with Matt Fradd , Unbelievable? with Justin Brierley , and many others.  Further media appearances forthcoming.  Stay tuned.

A Hart that pumps bile

Strangely, as David Bentley Hart has gotten more gratuitously nasty and unhinged in his attacks on me, I find myself less offended, or even having much of an affective reaction at all.  It’s like dealing with a mental patient or a surly neighborhood dog.  You simply navigate the situation, aware that there is no point in getting angry with someone or something that isn’t rational.   It’s too bad.  Our last contretemps, on the subject of eternal damnation, ended with a pleasing amicability in the combox here at the blog.  I had real hope that our future exchanges could be more positive.  Alas, fast forward a few months and Hart is suddenly spitting venom at straw men again in his review of By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed in Commonweal (to which I recently replied at Catholic World Report).  And now, at Church Life Journal Hart doubles down on the vitriol and the caricatures.  Perhaps he can’t help it – just as, when reading Hart, I can’t help thinking of the fable of the scorpion and the frog.What comes out of the mouth proceeds from Hart, and this defiles a man

No one has ever accused Hart of rhetorical subtlety, but passages like this one do make one wonder whether there has been an outbreak of rabies in his vicinity:
[Feser’s] book… is, to put the matter simply, an exorbitantly bad book, one that contains not a single compelling or solvent argument… [I]ts uses of scripture, theology, and the Church Fathers are almost fantastic in their awkwardness and crudity…It is also a book whose moral coarseness borders at times on the surreal… Hence the poor, or at least lukewarm, reviews the book has tended to receive.
Yikes.  To start with the latter claim, it is discouraging to see that Hart can’t go three paragraphs without once again succumbing to the temptation to play fast and loose with the truth.  In fact, almost all of the reviews so far – those of Janet Smith in the Claremont Review of Books, Daniel Lendman in the American Academy of Religion’s publication Reading Religion, James Jacobs at Crisis magazine,  William M. Briggs at One Peter Five, and Christopher Manion at The Wanderer – have been strongly positive.  Even the mixed review by David McClamrock at Today’s Catholic made some very positive remarks about the book.  Furthermore, as anyone who has looked at the back cover of the book knows, it has received warm endorsements from many prominent scholars and writers: theologians Steven Long, Fr. Kevin Flannery, and Fr. Thomas Petri; canon lawyers Edward Peters and Fr. Gerald Murray; philosophers Fr. James Schall, Michael Pakaluk, and J. Budziszewski; professor of criminal justice Barry Latzer; and Robert Royal, Fr. George Rutler, and Fr. Robert Sirico (this despite Fr. Sirico’s personal opposition to capital punishment). 
Then there are the further positive notices about the book at Catholic Herald , Catholic Culture , Fr. Dwight Longenecker’s blog, and elsewhere.  And as regular readers of this blog are aware, the book has also gotten a fair amount of attention on radio, television, and other media, and been the subject of a recent academic panel discussion.  Naturally, not everyone who has commented on the book in these contexts has agreed with it, but the general tendency by far has been to treat it as serious and worthy of respectful engagement. 
Meanwhile, the only “poor” reviews have been those of Hart himself and of Paul Griffiths – who, not coincidentally, is as notoriously cantankerous as Hart.  A Thomist getting a bad review from either Hart or Griffiths is about as surprising as Hart or Griffiths getting a bad review from Jerry Coyne or Richard Dawkins.  And it tells you about the same vis-à-vis the actual quality of the book under review, viz. absolutely nothing.  (I replied to Griffiths in the same article in which I responded to Hart). 
It is also true that E. Christian Brugger and Christopher Tollefsen – prominent Catholic opponents of capital punishment, whose views are subjected to detailed criticism in the book –have replied to that criticism.  But it would be tendentious to call their replies “reviews” of the book, much less “poor” reviews.  For one thing, their concern was primarily to respond to what the book says about their own work, rather than to comment one way or the other on its other contents or its general merits.  For another, where they do comment on the book, they by no means trash it, but simply express polite and scholarly disagreement.  In any event, it would, of course, be rather silly to take the disagreement of two scholars who are themselves major targets of attack in By Man as an objective indicator of the quality of the book.  (I replied to Brugger and Tollefsen at Public Discourse.) 
So, Hart is simply badly misrepresenting the reception the book has been getting.  But then, he knows that most readers sympathetic to his position and hostile to mine won’t bother to fact-check his assertions.  Hart isn’t one to let a scrupulous concern for accuracy get in the way of a useful rhetorical trick.
As to the alleged “moral coarseness” of the book, Hart tries to justify this characterization by once again fulminating at length about the excesses of Giovanni Battista Bugatti – the 19th century executioner for the Papal States, to whom Joe and I briefly allude a couple of times in By Man.  Bugatti looms vastly larger in Hart’s two articles about the book than he does in the book itself, for reasons that are, once again, transparently rhetorical.  Since, in my Catholic World Reportpiece, I already said everything that needs to be said about this red herring, I’ll leave Hart to his Bugatti fixation and move on. 
Coming to the overheated stuff about the book lacking “a single compelling or solvent argument,” etc., this would cause eyes to roll even if Hart were able to develop a single compelling or solvent objection to the arguments of the book.  Which, as it happens, he is not.  For when one looks past the invective to the substantive criticisms Hart raises, one finds that in nearly every case Hart either misses the point or begs the question. 
Because he does so at tedious length, the unwary reader is bound not to see this.  As his longtime readers know, prolixity is one of Hart’s stock rhetorical techniques.  Another is showy scholarship. (To quote from Hart’s widely consulted Rules for Rhetoricians: “Rule 3: Impress the rubes with some Greek.  If you really want to wow ‘em, leave it untransliterated.”)  Hart counts on his fans being so impressed with his erudition that they overlook the fact that his entire case rests on premises which he has not defended, and which only people who already agree with his conclusions would accept.  A Hart essay is like an elegant and solidly constructed chandelier that someone has hung from a paperclip.  You’re so distracted by the light and all the shiny baubles that you don’t see it crashing down at your feet until it’s too late.
What part of “Catholic” didn’t you understand?
Here’s the main problem.  Late in his article, Hart makes a concession which – though, amazingly, he does not realize this – gives away virtually the entire game.  He writes: “It is perhaps easier for me as an Orthodox Christian than it is for a Catholic to dismiss Feser’s arguments.” 
Bingo.  Hart speaks as if this were an incidental point, when in fact it is the whole point.  Perhaps Hart’s copy of By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed was missing the subtitle, but here it is: “A Catholic Defense of Capital Punishment.”  Perhaps he also failed to notice that it was published by a Catholic press, Ignatius.  To be sure, there is much in the book that a non-Catholic should find of interest, such as its purely philosophical arguments and its treatment of the social scientific evidence.  Even some of the theological material will be of interest to non-Catholic readers who take evidence from scripture and/or Christian tradition seriously.  All the same, Joe Bessette and I do not expect many of the theological arguments to be compelling, at the end of the day, to non-Catholics.
In particular, the theological arguments in the book presuppose a Catholic approach to the interpretation of scripture, a Catholic understanding of the authority of the Fathers and Doctors of the Church, and a Catholic conception of the authority of the popes and the magisterium.  Of course, these presuppositions stand in need of justification, but since you can’t do everything in one book, we take that much for granted and go from there.  The reason this procedure is legitimate is that the book is primarily aimed at a specifically Catholic audience and concerned to address current controversies in Catholic theology.  Joe and I are defending one side of an intra-Catholic dispute.  Non-Catholics are of course welcome to look on, but we aren’t trying to convince themin the first place.
Hart almost entirely ignores this crucial context.  He’s like a guest who shows up at a funeral and loudly complains about the absence of birthday gifts and party hats.  Take, for example, remarks like the following:
Feser is incorrect in saying that what the Pope demanded from the Waldensians was assent to a “doctrinal” point(at least, if the Enchiridion Symbolorum is to be trusted)…
“Orthodoxy,” “doctrine” … these are fairly unequivocal terms.  Yet neither is actually appropriate.  There is in fact not a single dogma of the Catholic Church that requires the liceity of the death penalty.  The Pope could tomorrow declare all capital punishment sinful and incompatible with Catholic teaching ex cathedra, and he would not be contradicting a single recognized doctrine.  If you doubt this, tolle, lege any copy of Denzinger .  And the current catechism of the Church bears this out.
End quote.  Now, as his remarks and links to Denzinger illustrate, Hart is here using the term “doctrine” very narrowly, as a synonym for “dogma.”  But that is not how Joe and I or other Catholic writers use the term.  As we explain at length in our book (building on Cardinal Avery Dulles’s discussion of the CDF document Donum Veritatis), there are five categories of magisterial statement in Catholic theology.  “Dogmas” (such as the Trinity and the Incarnation) are the first category, but two other categories of statement would also count as “doctrinal” in a broader sense (while the last two categories are “prudential” statements of varying types). 
Why does Hart ignore this explicit explanationthat we gave of our usage?  Here is what he has to say about the section of the book in question:
Feser complains that Griffiths and I do not deal with the fifty pages of arguments he and Bessette devote to their procrustean attempt to blunt the catechism’s piercingly unambiguous statements on the matter.  But that was a mercy on our parts.  To refute those arguments it is enough to recite them.
End quote.  I would say that this is shockingly dishonest and frivolous, except that after much bitter experience, nothing about Hart shocks me anymore.  If Hart has actually read the pages in question, then he knows that we there make it crystal clear how we are using the term “doctrine,” in which case he is deliberately misleading his readers about what we meant when we characterized the Waldensian-related statement as “doctrinal.”  If he has not read the pages in question, then he is once again guilty of breathtakingly sloppy scholarship.  The only third alternative is that, in addition to his manifest “anger management” issues, Hart is suffering from a memory disorder. 
In any event, it should go without saying that to dismiss fifty pages of scholarly, non-polemical argumentation with a single bitchy remark like “to refute those arguments it is enough to recite them” is the kind of stuff one expects from a Facebook pissing match or Jerry Coyne’s combox – not from a man some people seem to fancy a veritable St. David Bentley Chrysostom. 
Then there is Hart’s response to what I said in my Catholic World Report article about Christ’s teaching in the Sermon on the Mount.  Hart appeals to what he claims to be “Christ’s repeated prohibitions against retributive justice,” and asserts that a distinction between “public and private morality for Christians” is “a ridiculous anachronism” when applied to the Sermon, “as any good scholar of the New Testament or of late antiquity could tell [Feser].”  Hence, he alleges, I have failed to reconcile capital punishment with Christ’s moral teaching.
But all of this simply begs the question.  Yes, in the context of first-century Judea, people didn’t draw a sharp line between the public and private spheres.  So what?  They also didn’t use words like homoousios, or pray with icons.  Now, Hart would acknowledge that the latter are perfectly legitimate extensions and applications of the Christian teachings and practices of the first century, or are at the very least perfectly compatible with those principles. 
But traditional Catholic moral theology would say the same thing about distinctions like those Hart either ignores or dismisses.  “Retribution” can mean either (i) the infliction by public authority of a deserved penalty on an offender, or (ii) a private individual taking the law into his own hands or someone punishing out of hatred rather than justice.  Rightly understood, what Christ’s teaching in the Sermon rules out is “retribution” in sense (ii), not in sense (i).  Similarly, the way mercy is shown differs depending on whether the person showing it is a public official responsible for preserving social order, or private individuals in their everyday dealings with each other. 
These are just standard, longstanding principles of Catholic moral theology, and they are explicitly spelled out in By Man.   If Hart wants to argue against them, fine.  But instead Hart simply asserts, without argument that they are wrong, and writes as if Joe and I hadn’t already considered and responded to claims like the ones he makes.  In any event, since they are longstanding ideas in Catholic moral theology, they are available for deployment in the intra-Catholic debate that Joe and I are concerned with, whatever non-Catholics like Hart think of them.
Nor is it remotely reasonable for Hart to be so dismissive of these ideas, given another concession he makes in his latest article.  In my Catholic World Reportresponse to his review, I noted that Hart’s interpretation of the Sermon on the Mount would, if consistently applied, entail giving up all punishments (not just capital punishment), which would be incompatible with even the most rudimentary social order.  In response, Hart is at first flippant, writing:
[N]onsense.  Twaddle.  Dare I say, Balderdash?... [T]here is no dilemma here to resolve.  Forgiveness precludes the principle of retribution, but not every form of punishment or coercion… It is quite possible that there is such a thing as force that is purely non-retributive in intent...
End quote.  There is a serious problem with this position, though, which Joe and I already set out in the book (in yet another passage that Hart simply ignores without answering).  As C. S. Lewis pointed out, when retributive justice is entirely left out of consideration, punishment necessarily becomes unmoored from desert.  The sequel is that, in principle, offenders might be given little or no punishment for heinous crimes, and extremely harsh punishments for minor infractions, if we decide that this is conducive to getting them to do what we want them to.  Offenders cease to be free and responsible moral agents, and become instead cases to be managed or objects of social engineering.  Hart would, presumably, be as horrified at such a prospect as Lewis, Joe, and I are, but if so he says nothing to show how to avoid it. 
He is also once again missing the point, since Catholicteaching certainly insists that retributive justice must always be part of the story where punishment is concerned, even if it is not the whole story.  Again, that is all that matters for the intra-Catholic debate Joe and I are engaged in, whether Hart agrees with this teaching or not.
And yet, no sooner has Hart made the “balderdash” remark than he goes on to write:
That said, and perhaps somewhat shockingly, I am willing to grant that here Feser has at least raised an interesting point…
I confess too that my understanding of Christianity (at least, that of the earliest centuries) is far more otherworldly and socially irresponsible than Feser’s is.  On the whole, he assumes that Christianity must be compatible with a well functioning society, and that therefore Christianity in some larger neutral sense “works” as a way of promoting the social good.  But perhaps Christianity, as presented in the New Testament, does not “work” very well at all, or at least would not do so if it were consistently applied to life in this world…
[I]t seems likely that a genuinely Christian social order [as Hart understands it]… might be impossible in practice, and therefore unimaginable in theory.  I really do not know.  I do not pretend to have any clear sense of whether a Christian social order could ever flourish this side of the Kingdom.
End quote.  Now, how what I said can be both “nonsense, twaddle, and balderdash” and at the same time “an interesting point” is a puzzle I leave for the Hart adepts to solve.  Suffice it for the moment to note that the Catholic moral tradition that ended up interpreting the Sermon on the Mount the way Joe and I do was concerned precisely to address the difficulty Hart admits not having an answer to.  Since that tradition at least has an answer and Hart by his own admission does not, you would think that he’d show a little more humility when evaluating it.  Or rather, you would do so if you could stop laughing once you’ve put the words “Hart” and “humility” together in the same sentence.
What part of “intrinsically” didn’t you understand?
Over and over again in our book, Joe Bessette and I emphasize that there are two fundamental questions that we are addressing.  First, can a Catholic hold that capital punishment is always and intrinsically wrong, wrong even in principle?  Second, even if capital punishment is legitimate at least in principle, does Catholic teaching allow it to be applied in practice, and if so, under what conditions?  Some of what we have to say is meant to address the first question, and some of it is meant to address the second, and we try always to be clear about exactly which of them we are addressing at any particular moment.
The reason the first question is so important is that a large and influential school of thought in contemporary Catholic theology and philosophy – the “new natural law” theory represented by Germain Grisez, John Finnis, and Robert P. George, as well as Brugger, Tollefsen, and many others – has taken the extreme view that capital punishment is contrary to natural law and thus always and intrinsically wrong, wrong even in principle, wrong for everyone and at all times and not merely wrong for Christians or in contemporary society.  The “new natural lawyers” would like the Church to adopt this novel position, and writers like Grisez and Brugger have exerted much effort to try to make such a doctrinal reversal plausible.  This is a matter of great controversy in Catholic circles, because in the view of the critics of the “new natural law,” such a doctrinal change would contradict the clear and consistent teaching of scripture, the Fathers and Doctors of the Church, and two millennia of papal teaching.  It would thereby undermine the credibility of the Church and have a ripple effect across the entire body of Catholic teaching. 
I set out this crucial context very clearly in my Catholic World Report response to Hart’s review, because in that review he ignored it, especially when commenting on what Joe and I have to say about the Fathers of the Church.  I explained that when we cite the Fathers, we do not deny but indeed explicitly acknowledge that many of them were strongly opposed to Christians actually making use of the death penalty.  Rather, our concern was to emphasize that even the Fathers who oppose capital punishment in practice affirm that it is legitimate at least in principle, that it is not per se contrary to natural justice.  Hart had alleged that Joe and I claim that the Fathers are agreed in supporting capital punishment, and that we are therefore guilty of poor patristic scholarship.  As I explained, this allegation rests on an ambiguity.  We do notclaim that the Fathers all support the actual infliction of capital punishment.  We claim only that they are agreed that capital punishment is not intrinsicallyevil.
Bizarrely, and exasperatingly, in his latest article Hart once again ignores all of this, and simply repeats, at tedious length and with even higher dudgeon, the same false allegation that I have already refuted.  For example, he attributes to Joe and I the thesis that “Origen is willy-nilly on the side of capital punishment” and then castigates us for holding such a ridiculous view.  Yet what we actually say in the book is:
To be sure, like other Church Fathers in the pre-Constantinian period, Origen and Cyprian also teach that Christians should avoid bloodshed.  But the right of the state to execute criminals is not denied.  In holding Christians to a more rigorous standard than the (as yet unconverted) governing authorities, these Fathers do not claim that the latter’s resort to capital punishment is inherently wrong.  (p. 114)
There is no way an intellectually honest person could read that and then attribute to us the ridiculous view that “Origen is willy-nilly on the side of capital punishment.”  Hart also misrepresents what we say about St. John Chrysostom and other Fathers.  And all this despite the fact that Hart himself seems to allow that the Fathers did not regard capital punishment as intrinsicallycontrary to natural law.  In other words, on the very narrow issue that Joe and I appeal to the Fathers to help settle, Hart appears actually to be in agreement with us.  And yet he pretends that we are guilty of howlers of patristic scholarship!
How does one explain such weird behavior?  Several hypotheses suggest themselves.  First, I honestly am not certain that Hart actually readsan entire book or article before dashing off a vituperative response to it.  Like Don Quixote, Walter Mitty, or Jerry Coyne, Hart seems always to have some fantasy enemy in view – a manual-wielding Neo-Scholastic Thomist, say – and simply hurls his stock insults and objections at that phantom, certain that he has thereby refuted whatever happens to be there on the pages he can’t be bothered actually to read.
Second, Hart appears to be so enamored of his patented “Trust me, I’m a patristic scholar” shtick that he is hell-bent on somehowconvicting me of getting the Fathers wrong.  Since I am not in fact guilty of that, all he can do is flail at the same straw men in a louder voice and with extra invective thrown in.  He’s like Richard Dawkins: He really knows only one thing (evolution in Dawkins’ case, the Fathers in Hart’s) and he’ll be damned if he isn’t going to make every dispute he gets into a dispute about that one thing.
Third, Hart once again shows a tin ear for the contemporary intra-Catholic debate that Joe and I are primarily addressing.  He writes:
It may be that the greatest problem with Feser and Bessette’s book is that their central argument is not so much false as irrelevant.  They expend a great deal of energy on trying to prove that the death penalty is a just requital for certain crimes, and that both scripture and Catholic tradition acknowledge as much.  But this is not the issue.  Part of the confusion, I imagine, is that they have taken their disagreements with certain proponents of the “new natural law theory” (who do indeed argue that capital punishment is inherently unjust) as applying to the more specific question of whether Christians are allowed to impose or support capital punishment.  But the question of justice has never been a matter of much contention.
End quote.  The trouble with this, of course, is that the question of justice very much is a matter of contention in contemporary Catholic circles, as anyone knows who has actually kept up with the debate.  Again, even some of the most influential “conservative” voices in recent Catholic moral theology – Grisez and his followers – claim precisely that capital punishment is intrinsically contrary to natural justice.  The whole point of the most significant abolitionist work in recent Catholic moral theology – Brugger’s book Capital Punishment and Roman Catholic Moral Tradition – is precisely to facilitate the making of this novel view of Grisez’s into the official teaching of the Catholic Church.
If Hart is uninterested in this debate, fine.  But since that is in large part what our book is about, it is quite absurd for Hart to dismiss that debate’s significance when reviewing the book.  In effect, what Hart attacks in his review and follow-up article is some book he thinks we should have written, not the one we actually did write.
When in Rome
Finally, Hart revisits the issue of how to interpret Romans 13:4 (“He does not bear the sword in vain,” etc.), and repeats his linguistic arguments to the effect that the sword-bearing referred to here has to do with the general use of violence by state authorities, rather than a specific reference to capital punishment.  He then comments:
Feser grants that I may be right in my interpretation of the passage, but then cites a host of New Testament scholars (some of whom are indeed very fine scholars) who say otherwise, and so dismisses my observations as debatable.
End quote.  Actually, I never granted what Hart says I did.  He is not right in his interpretation of that passage, and he would not be right even if one were to agree with his remarks about the literal meaning of the Greek words translated “carry” and “sword.”  For one thing, as some of the New Testament scholars I cited point out, even if St. Paul intended a general reference to the state’s power to use violence, that would by no means exclude a reference to capital punishment.  On the contrary, such a reference would – especiallyin the Roman context that Paul had in view – be included, implicitly as one of the several ways the state uses violence.  An indirect reference is not a non-reference.
For another thing, here too it is crucial to keep in mind the specifically Catholic approach to interpreting scripture, according to which an interpretation endorsed by the Fathers and Doctors of the Church carries great weight, especially when they are unanimous.  (See By Man for discussion of the authority the Church attributes to these sources.)  Now, as I noted in my Catholic World Report response to Hart, the Fathers who comment on the subject agree that Romans 13 refers to capital punishment and that it teaches that it is legitimate at least in principle, as a matter of natural justice.  (Remember, contrary to what Hart keeps falsely alleging, I am notusing the patristic evidence to make a larger claim than that.)
The Doctors of the Church who address the subject also agree.  (On top of that, several of them cite Romans 13 in support of the legitimacy of capital punishment even among Christians.  One finds this position in St. Bernard of Clairvaux, St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Robert Bellarmine, and St. Alphonsus Liguori.)
Now, from the point of view of Catholic theology, if the Fathers and Doctors of the Church are unanimous on some point of scriptural interpretation, then that interpretation cannot be mistaken.  But they are unanimous that Romans 13 refers to capital punishment, and that it teaches that the practice is legitimate at least in principle, as a matter of natural law.  The matter is settled, then, whatever creative reinterpretation this or that 21st century New Testament scholar tries to cobble together.
As I keep saying, what Joe and I are doing in the book is showing what follows from the premises to which Catholics, specifically, are committed.  And as Hart himself admits, “it is perhaps easier for me as an Orthodox Christian than it is for a Catholic to dismiss Feser’s arguments.”  If Hart had only meditated a little on the implications of that concession, he could have saved us all a lot of time. 

At last, another open thread!

Long overdue (sorry), it’s the latest open thread.  Talk amongst yourselves.  Unlike Linda Richman, I won’t give you a topic.    From Aquinas to Quine, Cheap Trick or fine wine, bad puns and lame rhymes – the field is wide open.  Though, you know, maybe capital punishment is a little played at the moment…As always, keep it civil, keep it classy, no trolling or troll-feeding.