Edward Feser's Blog, page 76

Scott Ryan RIP

Longtime readers who frequent the comboxes of this blog will be familiar with Scott Ryan, who for many years was a regular commenter here.  He was also a moderator and regular commenter at the Classical Theism, Philosophy, and Religion Forum.  I was very sorry to learn that Scott died last week, apparently of a burst stomach ulcer.  I did not know Scott personally, but I always greatly valued his contributions to combox discussions, which consistently manifested Scott’s high intelligence, breadth of knowledge, sense of humor, clarity of expression, and charity toward others.  The exchanges on this blog have been of a consistently high quality in large part because of Scott’s presence.  (My recent book Neo-Scholastic Essays was dedicated to my readers.  Scott had become such a presence in the comboxes that when I wrote that dedication, and when I have thought about it in the months since, Scott’s would be the first name and face that would come to my mind.)
Recently Scott began the process of converting to Catholicism.  While reading through some of his recent posts at the Forum the other day, I came across this exchange.  It is especially poignant in light of Scott’s death, and that, together with the beauty, simplicity, and tranquility of the sentiments Scott expressed, brought tears to my eyes.
Many readers have been making their feelings about Scott known in the combox of an earlier post.  It is clear that they will miss him as much as I will.  Our prayers are with you Scott, and with your family.  RIP. 

Around the web

Busy, busy couple of weeks.  So, I’ll let others do the writing.  Here’s a large load of links:
David Oderberg on the current state of bioethics: Interview at BioEdge (reprinted at MercatorNet).
Neo-Aristotelian meta-metaphysician Tuomas Tahko is interviewed at 3:AM Magazine.   He also has recently published An Introduction to Metametaphysics . 
Michael Novak revisits the topic of Catholicism and social justice in a new book co-written with Paul Adams.  Interview at National Review Online , commentary at First Things , the Law and Liberty blog , and The Catholic Thing .At The Imaginative Conservative, Bradley Birzer analyzes Hitchcock’s Vertigo.  (I offered my own analysis here some time back.)

Modern philosophers: Stephen Mumford and Rani Lill Anjum are here to tell you that “Causation is Not Your Enemy.”  Paper here, outline here.
Daniel Mahoney on political philosopher Pierre Manent, at City Journal. 
New books: Svein Anders Noer Lie, Philosophy of Nature: Rethinking naturalness ; Ronald Baines and Richard Barcellos, Confessing the Impassible God ; Glenn Siniscalchi, Retrieving Apologetics ; Francis Beckwith, Taking Rites Seriously: Law, Politics, and the Reasonableness of Faith.
And some old books: Henri Grenier’s Thomistic Philosophy manuals are back in print.
The Los Angeles Review of Books on the reissue of Roger Scruton’s Thinkers of the New Left.
William Carroll on mind, brain, and materialism, at First Things; and on science and theology, at Public Discourse.
What influence did H.L.A. Hart have on John Finnis’s “new natural law” theory?  Santiago Legarre investigates. 
At Just Thomism, James Chastek on James Ladyman and scientism. 
Scientific American asks: Is string theory science?   Quanta Magazine addresses the same question.
Fr. James Schall on the goodness of wrath and anger.
Eva Brann revisits Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind.
New Statesman on the first atheists.
Christopher Caldwell on Bradley Birzer on Russell Kirk, in The New York Times.
At Crisis, Fr. George Rutler on German episcopal condescension toward Africa. 
Somebody had to say it: The Daily Mail explains why Star Wars sucks. 
Defender of divine simplicity James Dolezal is all over YouTube. 
At Public Discourse, philosopher Rachel Lu on women in the military.
Christopher Malloy at Thomistica.net on “new natural law” theory and practical politics.
The Guardian asks: How close are we to creating real superpowers?  (By the way, since they had to go and use a picture of him: I have always hated the character Deadpool, and, from what I’ve seen of it, the new movie is vile.)
Via YouTube, John Haldane’s lecture on virtue, happiness, and the meaning of life.
Atlas Obscura on Philip K. Dick’s last, unfinished novel.
At the Claremont Review of Books, Douglas Kries comments on J. Budziszewski’s Commentary on Thomas Aquinas’s Treatise on Law.

Review of Alexander

My review of David Alexander’s Goodness, God, and Evil appears in the March 2016 issue of Ratio.  It looks like the review is currently available for free online, so take a look (click on the “Get PDF” link).

Aquinas, Vanilla Sky, and Nozick’s experience machine

I’ve been meaning for about fifteen years now to write up something on the movie Vanilla Sky (a remake of Open Your Eyes ).  It’s a better movie than it seems -- which is fitting, since the flick is all about the unseen reality lurking beneath the sea of superficiality (moral and metaphysical) that is the life of the Tom Cruise character.  Alas, this isn’t quite the article I’ve been meaning to write, since it’s not primarily about the movie, though I’ll have reason to say something about it.  Rather, it’s about a famous philosophical thought experiment that might as well have inspired the movie even if (as far as I know) it didn’t -- Robert Nozick’s “experience machine” (from Anarchy, State, and Utopia ).Nozick considers a scenario in which we could be plugged into a machine which would give us any set of experiences we desired for the rest of our lives.  Should you plug in?  Would you?  What reason could there be not to do so, since (Nozick asks rhetorically) “what else can matter to us, other than how our lives feel from the inside?” (p. 43).

Yet Nozick does not think most people would plug in, and suggests three reasons why they wouldn’t.  First, what we really want is to do certain things, and wanting the experience of doing them is a consequence of wanting to do them, rather than the experience being something we are seeking in itself.  Second, we want to be a certain way, and again, wanting the experience of being that way is a byproduct of wanting to be that way.  Third, we want contact with reality, rather than merely with some man-made simulacrum. 
The message of Vanilla Sky, or one of the messages anyway, seems to be the same (spoilers to follow).  David Aames (Tom Cruise) is about as shallow a man as you can imagine -- a spoiled heir who leaves others to attend to running the company he inherited from his father while he burns through money, parties, and women.  One of these women, Julie (Cameron Diaz), so as to ensure that she can keep his attention, pretends that their relationship is purely sexual and without commitment -- a pretense Aames is happy to go along with -- even though they both know she is deeply in love with him.  Even after Aames himself falls in love with another woman, Sofia (Penelope Cruz), and decides to break things off with Julie for good, he opts for one last hop into bed with her.  That is a mistake he pays dearly for, as the spurned Julie’s invitation was merely a ruse to get him into her car, which she proceeds to drive off a bridge in order to kill the both of them.  He survives but ends up horribly disfigured and in constant pain, his good looks -- and with them his life of superficial pleasure-seeking -- now gone forever, as are his chances with Sofia.
Or so it seems.  But suddenly, Sofia appears interested in renewing things with him after all, he is told by his doctors that his face can be repaired, and it appears that he will live happily ever after.  Yet there’s another twist.  As a series of increasingly surreal events unfold, Aames seems to be losing his sanity.  It is revealed that the life he has thought he was living from the point Sofia returned to him onward has all been a mere virtual reality generated by a computer to which he had voluntarily had himself hooked up, making sure that his memory of having done so was erased.  The aim was to realize artificially the life with Sofia and the restoration of his good looks that he knew would never be achieved in reality.  A breakdown in the program had led to the series of surreal experiences and the need to let him in on what was really going on.  He is told by the company that runs the virtual reality machine that the problem has been fixed, and asked whether he wants to re-start the virtual reality.  But he decides not to: “I don't want to dream anymore.  I want a real life.”  Having, in effect, plugged into Nozick’s experience machine, even a superficial man like Aames decides it wasn’t such a great idea.
So, even in a hedonistic age in which people are addicted to electronic entertainments of various sorts, contemporary philosophy and pop culture alike give expression to the idea that there is something unsatisfying and unworthy about seeking pleasurable experiences as an end in themselves and divorced from the objective actions and circumstances with which they are normally associated.
And yet… there is a reason people often confusehappiness with pleasure.  It would certainly be bizarre to think that if someone had a solid marriage, a good job, good health, well brought up children, many friends, a good moral character, was deeply religious, and so on -- but somehow still generally felt miserable and rarely took pleasure in any of these things -- that he could nevertheless intelligibly be said to be happy.  And most people find off-putting dour moralizers who regard even natural and innocent pleasures with suspicion.  (Recall Mencken’s definition of Puritanism: “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.”)  Pleasure clearly has something to do with happiness, even if (as those who, in some inchoate way, find the experience machine repellent rightly perceive) it is not identical with happiness.  But what, then?
For Aquinas, happiness is the possession of some good, where the good is to be defined in terms of the realization of a natural end.  For example, the natural end of eyes is seeing, so that it is good for us when the eyes are able to realize this end and bad for us when (as in poor vision or blindness) they are unable to do so.  Hence, insofar as they are able to realize it we will, to that extent and all things being equal, be happy; and insofar as they are unable to do so we will, to that extent and all things being equal, be unhappy.  Of course, seeing is only one part of human life, and there are many other ends that our nature directs us to pursue.  And some of those ends are more important than others.  That is why a blind person can still be happy overall, and a sighted person might still be unhappy overall.  The blind person can still realize many other ends, and higher ends, whereas the sighted person may fail to do so.
But what, specifically, these various natural ends are, how they are ordered in terms of importance, and how they relate to our overall happiness is not to the present point.  (Aquinas considers the issue in some detail, e.g. here.)  What we want to know is how pleasure is related to happiness.  Aquinas answers as follows:
[E]very delight is a proper accident resulting from happiness, or from some part of happiness; since the reason that a man is delighted is that he has some fitting good, either in reality, or in hope, or at least in memory.  Now a fitting good, if indeed it be the perfect good, is precisely man's happiness: and if it is imperfect, it is a share of happiness, either proximate, or remote, or at least apparent.  Therefore it is evident that neither is delight, which results from the perfect good, the very essence of happiness, but something resulting therefrom as its proper accident. (Summa theologiae I-II.2.6)
Pleasure or “delight,” then, is a “proper accident” of happiness.  Now, a “proper accident” or “property” of a thing, in Scholastic jargon, is not the essence of the thing, but rather something which flows or follows from the essence, as a natural consequence.  To take a stock example, the capacity to find things amusing is not the essence of human beings, but it does flow from our essence as rational animals.  Now, this “flow” can be “blocked,” as it were, which is why things don’t always manifest their proper accidents.  But they will be manifest in the normal and healthy instances of a thing of a certain kind.  A normal and healthy dog will have four legs, for example, even if some dogs will, as a result of injury or congenital defect, fail to have four legs.  (See pp. 191-92 and 230-35 of Scholastic Metaphysics for more detailed discussion of properties or proper accidents.)
What Aquinas is saying, then, is that although pleasure or delight is not the essence of happiness, it is nevertheless the natural or proper consequence of happiness, and will in the normal case be associated with it.  In that sense he takes pleasure to be necessary for happiness even if not sufficient for it:
One thing may be necessary for another… as something attendant on it: thus we might say that heat is necessary for fire.  And in this way delight is necessary for happiness.  For it is caused by the appetite being at rest in the good attained.  Wherefore, since happiness is nothing else but the attainment of the Sovereign Good, it cannot be without concomitant delight.  (Summa theologiae I-II.4.1)
Or as Aristotle puts it in Book 10 of the Nicomachean Ethics, pleasure “perfects” the activity of our natural faculties and is in that way part of happiness even if it is not itself happiness. 
Now, the distinction between the essence of a thing and its proper accidents has, like so many important distinctions and theses in Aristotelian-Scholastic thought, gone down the memory hole in modern philosophy.  And here we have an excellent example of how an error concerning what might seem to be an abstruse question of metaphysics can have catastrophic moral consequences.  Some people, rightly perceiving that there is some necessary connection between happiness and pleasure, make the mistake of reducinghappiness to pleasure.  That is the error of hedonism.  Others, rightly perceiving that pleasure is not the essence of happiness, make the mistake of separating the two entirely, and thereby suppose that pursuit of the good has nothing at all to do with pleasure.  We might call that the error of puritanism (in Mencken’s sense).  Each error tends to feed off the other, which is why individuals and societies sometimes veer wildly between hedonism and puritanism, falsely supposing that to reject the one requires embracing the other.  The correct, middle ground position is that pleasure is not the essence of happiness and is therefore not that which should be pursued for its own sake, but that it is also nevertheless a natural consequence of happiness and in that way completes or perfects it.
Nozick makes nothing like the Scholastic distinction just summarized -- nor, needless to say, does the Tom Cruise flick -- but I would suggest that both reflect an inchoate recognition that this is the right way to understand the relationship between pleasure and happiness, which is why both are by no means negative toward pleasure and yet at the same time are skeptical of the notion that a series of pleasurable experiences could by itself constitute happiness.  They perceive that the idea that plugging into an “experience machine” could generate happiness reflects the error of hedonism, or reducing happiness to pleasure.
Interestingly, Nozick -- though a libertarian with the usual libertarian position on drug legalization -- sees in the “experience machine” thought experiment a way to understand hostility to drug use:
[P]lugging into an experience machine limits us to a man-made reality, to a world no deeper or more important than that which people can construct.  There is no actual contact with any deeper reality, though the experience of it can be simulated.  Many persons desire to leave themselves open to such contact and to a plumbing of deeper significance.  This clarifies the intensity of the conflict over psychoactive drugs, which some view as mere local experience machines, and others view as avenues to a deeper reality; what some view as equivalent to surrender to the experience machine, others view as following one of the reasons not to surrender! (pp. 43-44)
Nozick suggests here that some of those who are favorableto psychoactive drug use are motivated by the idea that such use might open the door to perception of otherwise inaccessible aspects of objective reality (where a desire to maintain access to objective reality is precisely why we find plugging into the experience machine repellent).  But Nozick recognizes that someone might draw the opposite conclusion, viz. that such drug use is precisely a way of cutting oneself off from objective reality, and is repellent for precisely the same reason the experience machine is.
I would say that that is indeed exactly why many people find such drug use repellent, even if they cannot articulate their revulsion the way a traditional natural law theorist would.  They have an inchoate grasp that there is something contrary to the realization of what is good for us in separating sensory pleasure from the objective circumstances and actions that are its normal source, and making of it an end in itself.  That such drug use can be so addictive only underlines its “experience machine”-like character.  The user becomes locked into a world of pleasure-seeking and can no longer rightly perceive what is truly good for him.  He has become fixated on what is really only the proper accident of happiness, and loses sight of happiness itself.  This is why addiction is typically frustrating and miserable even apart from the physiological damage it often causes.
Needless to say, this is for the traditional natural law theorist also part of the reason why pornography and masturbation are immoral.  On a traditional natural law analysis, sexual desire is naturally directed outward, toward another human being, and the pleasure associated with its fulfillment is the proper accident of this other-directed end being realized.  Sexual pleasure is thus of its nature something to be shared between the partners; that is its natural teleology, qua the perfection of an act whose natural end is to unite the partners corporeally and psychologically.  The less perfectly the pleasure is a shared one, the less perfect is the act itself. 
Now, pornography and masturbation involve the deliberate seeking of this pleasure in a way that is not directed toward another person.  They are “experience machine”-like in the way psychoactive drug use is.  In fact, at least in one respect, they are worse than that.  The natural teleology of sexual pleasure is interpersonal, so that the pursuit of such pleasure in an “experience machine”-like way is perverse in something like the way that an archer’s directing an arrow back at himself rather than toward the target is perverse.  By contrast, the pleasures the user of psychoactive drugs is seeking might not all be of their nature interpersonal.  (For example, ordinary visual experiences -- seeing the tables, chairs, rocks, trees, etc. around you -- are not interpersonal but have as their end merely the provision of information to the person doing the seeing.  The psychoactive drug user seeking unusual visual hallucinations is thus not perverting his faculties in the specific way that the person seeking sexual pleasure apart from another human being is.)
Just as the drug addict becomes so fixated on what is only the proper accident of happiness that he loses sight of the true nature of happiness itself, so too, from the traditional natural law point of view, does habitual pornography use and masturbation make it more difficult to perceive the true, essentially interpersonal nature of sexual fulfillment.  The quest for gratification becomes so inward-looking that, even in sexual encounters with other actual human beings, the other tends to be reduced to a means to self-gratification, rather than a partner in something shared. 
Naturally, then, whatever is conducive to such self-gratification will come to seem to the self-gratifier to be good at least in principle, and that there is an objective, natural teleology of the sexual act -- and thus objectivelygood and bad kinds of sexual behavior -- will become increasingly difficult to see, and certainly something the person will be very reluctant to see.
Might pornography use be not only an effectbut also a cause where hostility to traditional sexual mores is concerned?  Gee, ya think?  What we have here is a spiral, as the “onanization” of sex makes people more unwilling and unable to see the natural ends of the sexual act, which in turn makes them more inclined to “onanize” it, which in turn makes them even more unwilling and unable to see its natural ends…   And it’s bound only to get worse when virtual reality pornography takes off.  (More on natural law and sexual morality, the effects of sexual vice, the teleology of sexual desire, etc. in the posts collected here.)
As all of that indicates, it may be that the revulsion toward the “experience machine” idea that one finds in Nozick and in Vanilla Sky, though reflective of an inchoate grasp of what is naturally good for us, is a revulsion that might decrease as Western society becomes increasingly “onanized” and otherwise addicted to electronic gadgets and entertainments of every kind.  In a future remake of the remake of Open Your Eyes, Aames might decide to plug back in after all.

Parfit on brute facts

Derek Parfit’s article “The Puzzle of Reality: Why Does the Universe Exist?” has been reprinted several times since it first appeared in the Times Literary Supplement in 1992, and for good reason.  It’s an admirably clear and comprehensive survey of the various answers that have been given to that question, and of the problems facing some of them.  (Unsurprisingly, I think Parfit’s treatment of theism, though not unfair, is nevertheless superficial.  But to be fair to Parfit, the article is only meant to be a survey.)Parfit appears to sympathize with the “Brute Fact View” according to which the universe simply exists without explanation, and that’s that.  The claim here is not that there isan explanation but that we don’t and even can’t know what it is.  It is rather that there is no explanation at all, no intelligibility, rhyme or reason to why this universe exists rather than another or rather than nothing at all.  This is, of course, implicitly to deny the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR), according to which everything does have an explanation, whether or not we can always discover what that explanation is.  I’ve defended PSR and criticized the Brute Fact View in several places, such as in Scholastic Metaphysics .  (Also in several earlier blog posts, to which you’ll find links below.) 

Parfit describes and defends the Brute Fact View in the following passage:
[On] the Brute Fact View… we should not expect reality to have very special features, such as being maximal, or best, or having very simple laws, or including God. In much the largest range of the global possibilities, there would exist an arbitrary set of messily complicated worlds. That is what, with a random selection, we should expect. It is unclear whether ours is one such world.
The Brute Fact View may seem hard to understand. It may seem baffling how reality could be even randomly selected. What kind of process could select whether time had no beginning, or whether anything ever exists? But this is not a real problem. It is logically necessary that one global possibility obtains. There is no conceivable alternative. Since it is necessary that one possibility obtains, it is necessary that it be settled which obtains. Even without any kind of process, logic ensures that a selection is made. There is no need for hidden machinery.
If reality were randomly selected, it would not be mysterious how the selection is made. It would be in one sense inexplicable why the Universe is as it is. But this would be no more puzzling than the random movement of a particle. If a particle can simply happen to move as it does, it could simply happen that reality is as it is. Randomness may even be less puzzling at the level of the whole Universe, since we know that facts at this level could not have been caused.
End quote.  Parfit’s argument here seems to me highly implausible and problematic.  For one thing, he seems to allow at least for the sake of argument that there might be a kind of “process” which “selects” whether anything exists etc. but in a “random” way that is not ultimately explicable.  This is a very odd suggestion for a couple of reasons.  First, why bother with it?  If you’re going to commit yourself anyway to the idea that the universe is just an unintelligible Brute Fact, why not simply say that the universe just exists and that’s all that can be said and leave it at that?  Why posit, between the universe on the one hand and sheer Bruteness on the other, some intermediate “process” of “selection” which in some sense accounts for the existence of the universe but itself operates in an unintelligible way?  What’s the point of positing such a “process” in the first place if one doesn’t think that it or anything else can do any real explanatory work where the sheer existence of the universe is concerned?
Second, why call something a “process” which functions to “select” the universe if one thinks it is not something whose operation is ultimately intelligible?  Other things we call “processes” are not like that, including processes that involve an element of chance.  For example, the way a population is molded by natural selection is a kind of process, and chance plays a role, but that does not make any of its results unintelligible.  Given such-and-such a variation within a certain population (larger beaks in certain birds within a group of birds, say) under such-and-such environmental circumstances (hard seeds being the main local food source), it is perfectly intelligible why there would be a change in the population (the larger sort of beak would be much more common in later generations of birds). 
(As Aquinas argues, chance always presupposes the convergence of lines of causation which are not the result of chance.  To take a stock example, when a farmer finds buried loot while he is out plowing his field, that is a chance occurrence.  But that a robber decided to bury his loot there and that the farmer decided to plow the field that day were not chance occurrences.  All chance occurrences are like that in that they resolve themselves, at some level, into a convergence of non-chance occurrences.)
So, what we ordinarily describe as “processes” of “selection” are intelligible even when they involve an element of chance.  So why call what Parfit is describing -- something which is chance all the way down, as it were, and the operation of which is notintelligible -- a “selection process,” or indeed a “process” of any kind? 
So, the stuff about “how reality… [is] randomly selected” is one problematic aspect of Parfit’s view.  Then there is the suggestion in the second half of the second paragraph quoted, to the effect that logic itself essentially solves any apparent problem with the Brute Fact View.  Again, Parfit says: “Since it is necessary that one possibility obtains, it is necessary that it be settled which obtains. Even without any kind of process, logic ensures that a selection is made. There is no need for hidden machinery.”
To see what is wrong with this, suppose police come across a dead body and start batting around possible explanations -- murder, suicide, accident, heart attack, etc.  Suppose one of the policemen who has heretofore been silent interrupts and says: “I don’t know why you guys are wasting time considering these different explanations.  I say it’s just an unintelligible, inexplicable brute fact that this corpse turned up here and now.  Case closed, we can go home now.  Don’t raise your eyebrows!  After all, it’s necessary that some possibility had to obtain here and now, so it’s necessary that it be settledwhich one obtains.  Even without a murder, or suicide, accident, heart attack, etc., logic ensures that a selection is made. There is no need for ‘hidden machinery’ such as murder, accident, etc.”
No one would accept this for a moment, of course.  That “logic ensures” that somepossibility or other will obtain simply does not make it the least bit plausible to say that we needn’t bother asking how exactly this particular possibility -- a corpse, and this corpse, here and now -- got to be the one which obtains.  Now, Parfit gives us no reason at all to believe that this sort of move is any more plausible when we are asking “Why does the universe exist?” than it is when we are asking “How did this corpse get here?”  So, his attempt to appeal to logic in order to make the Brute Fact View believable fails.
(Indeed, it is strange that Parfit would take this suggested defense of the Brute Fact View seriously given what else he says in the article.  In particular, at the beginning of the article he is critical of attempts to dismiss the need to explain the initial conditions of the universe that allowed for stars, planets, and life, on the grounds that there had to be some initial conditions or other.  The fact that there had to be some initial conditions or other doesn’t remove the need for an explanation, Parfit argues, because the specific initial conditions that happened to have obtained are so improbable.  Now, if saying “There had to be some initial conditions or other” is by Parfit’s own admission not a plausible way to dismiss the request for an explanation of why we have a universe capable of supporting life, etc., then why is saying “Logic ensures that some selection has to be made” a plausible way to dismiss the request for an explanation of why anything exists at all rather than nothing?)
A third issue raised by Parfit’s remarks is the stuff about the random behavior of particles, and what Parfit has in mind here are, of course, claims to the effect that quantum mechanics has shown that events can occur without a cause.  I’ve discussed this issue at length elsewhere (e.g. in this post) and won’t repeat here everything I’ve said before.  Suffice it for present purposes to note that when Parfit says that “if a particle can simply happen to move as it does, it could simply happen that reality is as it is,” he is overlooking a crucial disanalogy between quantum theory and the Brute Fact View, and one that should be obvious.  No one claims that the motion of the particles in question is simply unintelligible.  They don’t say “they just move and that’s that and nothing more can be said.”  Rather, they say that (what they call) the random motion of particles is something which it makes sense to think of as occurring given quantum mechanics.   The theory provides an explanatory context that makes the behavior of the particles intelligible even if their motion is said to be in some sense “uncaused.”  (Hence the motion isn’t “random” full stop, without qualification.  If you’re giving a theoretical description of some “random” phenomenon which gives it a kind of intelligibility, then you are ipso facto using “random” in a qualified sense.)
By contrast, the Brute Fact View denies precisely that there is any larger explanatory context within which the “random” “selection” of the existence of the universe can be made intelligible.  It says that the universe just exists and that’s that and nothing more can be said.  There is no larger background theory in the context of which such a “random” occurrence makes sense.  So there just isn’t any parallel here with quantum mechanics.  Hence, whatever it is Parfit and others think quantum mechanics has established, it simply lends no plausibility to the Brute Fact View.
Finally, there is Parfit’s remark that “randomness may even be less puzzling at the level of the whole Universe, since we know that facts at this level could not have been caused.”  Those who haven’t read Parfit’s entire article might wonder whether he is blatantly begging the question when he says that “facts at this level could not have been caused.”  For isn’t the claim that such facts are caused precisely what theism says?  But Parfit is not ruling out theism a priori here.  Rather, his remark here must be understood in light of what he says at the very beginning of the article, where he says:
[T]hings might have been, in countless ways, different. So why is the Universe as it is?
These facts cannot be causally explained. No law of nature could explain why there are any laws of nature, or why these laws are as they are. And, if God created the world, there cannot be a causal explanation of why God exists.
So, Parfit is not ruling out arbitrarily the claim that God is the cause of the universe.  Rather, he is saying that even if God is the cause, God’s own existence would not have a causal explanation and thus would have to be explained in some other way.  (The traditional answer is that it is God’s nature as that which is purely actual, subsistent existence itself, absolutely simple or non-composite, etc. that explains his existence in a non-causal way.) 
So, Parfit’s point is that causal explanations, specifically, cannot be the ultimatesort of explanation, so that if there is to be an explanation of an ultimate sort it will have to be an explanation in something other than causal terms.  And he is right about that.  So, when he says at the end of his essay that “facts at [the level of the whole Universe] could not have been caused,” he is just alluding to the point made at the beginning of the essay that ultimate explanations cannot be of a causal nature specifically.
So far so good, then.  The problem is with what Parfit seems, at the end of the essay, to think follows from this point.  Again, he says that “randomness may even be less puzzling at the level of the whole Universe, since we know that facts at this level could not have been caused.”  That is to say, from the (true) premise that ultimate explanations cannot be of the causal type, Parfit appears to derive the conclusion that it is plausible that the fundamental facts about the universe might be “random.”  Well, that conclusion simply doesn’t follow from the premise.  In particular, from the premise that “X does not have a causal explanation” it simply doesn’t follow that “X is random,” or even that “X is plausibly random.”  That would follow only if the only plausible alternative to causal explanation is an appeal to randomness.  And that isn’t so.  Something that lacks a causal explanation could have an explanation instead in terms of its own nature, say, or by virtue of being a necessary truth.  The fact that 2 + 2 = 4 does not have a causal explanation but it is hardly “random” that 2 + 2 = 4.  When Thomists argue that God’s existence follows from his being pure actuality, subsistent being itself, absolutely simple or non-composite, etc., they are not saying that his existence is “random.”  On the contrary, they are saying that his existence follows necessarily from his nature so understood.  And so on.
Of course, an atheist would criticize the concepts of pure actuality, subsistent being itself, etc.; someone who denies the objectivity of mathematical truth might challenge the claim that it is in any interesting sense a necessary truth that 2 + 2 = 4; and so forth.  But none of that is to the present point.  The point is rather that the claim that ultimate explanations are not causal explanations simply does not by itself lend any plausibility at all to the Brute Fact View, contrary to what Parfit implies. 
Anyway, even apart from the problems with Parfit’s account of it, we can know the Brute Fact View is false, because we can know that PSR is true.  Again, see Scholastic Metaphysics , and the first several of the posts listed below.
Related posts:
Della Rocca on PSR
An exchange with Keith Parsons, Part IV
Can we make sense of the world?
Magic versus metaphysics
Could a theist deny PSR?
Voluntarism and PSR
Fifty shades of nothing

Debased Coynage

I had a lot to say about Jerry Coyne’s Faith versus Fact in my First Things review of the book, but much more could be said.  The reason is not that there is so much of interest in Coyne’s book, but rather because there is so little.  I was not being rhetorical when I said in my review that it might be the worst book yet published in the New Atheist genre.  It really is that awful, and goes wrong so thoroughly and so frequently that it would take a much longer review than I had space for fully to catalog its foibles.  An especially egregious example is Coyne’s treatment of Alvin Plantinga’s “evolutionary argument against naturalism” (or EAAN).Keep in mind that I have myself been critical of Plantinga’s argument.  To be sure, I think that the general style of argument of which Plantinga’s is an instance -- what Victor Reppert calls the “argument from reason,” and which has been defended in different versions by thinkers as diverse as C. S. Lewis and Karl Popper -- is very good, and very important.  But I am not a fan of Plantinga’s way of stating it.  His emphasis on the weighing of probabilities is completely irrelevant to the main point of an “argument from reason,” and muddies the waters.  He conflates teleology and design in a way no Aristotelian or Thomist would.  And the argument is not as directly relevant to defending theism (as opposed to critiquing naturalism, which is a different issue) as Plantinga implies.  (See my discussion of the EAAN in a post from a few years ago and in my First Things review of Plantinga’s book Where the Conflict Really Lies.) 

All the same, Coyne’s criticisms are cringe-makingly incompetent.  Plantinga argues that natural selection will favor adaptive behavior whether or not it stems from true beliefs, so that evolution cannot by itself account for the reliability of our cognitive faculties.  (Again, see the articles linked to for more detailed discussion of Plantinga’s argument.)  One problem with Coyne’s discussion is that he characterizes the EAAN as a “god of the gaps” argument (Faith versus Fact, p. 178).  But it is not that at all.  It would be a “god of the gaps” argument if Plantinga were claiming that some purely naturalistic process might in principle account for the reliability of our cognitive faculties, but that it is more probable that God created them.  But that is not his argument.  His argument is precisely that a purely naturalistic process cannot even in principle account for the reliability of our cognitive faculties.  (True, Plantinga speaks of probabilities, but he is not saying that it is merely probable that naturalism cannot account for the reliability of our cognitive faculties.  Rather, he is saying that naturalistic processes cannot in principle by themselves give any of our beliefs more than a fifty-fifty chance of being true.) 
Whether or not one agrees that Plantinga has really shown this, Coyne doesn’t even understand the nature of Plantinga’s reasoning.  Like other philosophically unsophisticated New Atheist types, he seems to think that every anti-atheist argument simply must be a lame “god of the gaps” argument, and thus reads that style of reasoning into Plantinga.
Second, Coyne claims that Plantinga’s position is that “humans could never have true beliefs about anything without God’s intervention” (p. 177, emphasis in the original).  But that is not what Plantinga says.  He never denies that we might have some true beliefs if naturalism were true.  Indeed, he doesn’t deny that we might have many true beliefs, maybe even mostly true beliefs, if naturalism were true.  What he says is rather that if naturalism is true, then we cannot have any reason to believe that our beliefs are true.  They may or may not be true, but we could never be justified in thinking that they are.  He isn’t saying: “Naturalism entails that all our beliefs are false.”  Rather, he is saying: “Naturalism entails that we cannot know whether any of our beliefs are true.”  The reason is that neither their truth nor their falsity would be relevant to the behavior associated with them, and it is the behavior alone which (Plantinga argues) natural selection can mold.
Third, Coyne thinks it a serious criticism to point out that even if the EAAN works, it wouldn’t establish “Plantinga’s Christian God as opposed to any other god” (p. 179).  This is a silly objection for two reasons.  First, it is an attack upon a straw man, since Plantinga does not claim that the EAAN establishes Christianity, specifically.  Second, if the EAAN works and thereby establishes the existence of some god or other, that would be sufficient to refute Coyne’s atheism.  It would be quite ridiculous for an atheist to say: “Sure, you’ve shown that a deity exists, but how does that refute atheism?  You haven’t proven that Jesus is divine, that the Bible is inspired, etc!”
Fourth, for some bizarre reason, Coyne seems to think that the EAAN is related to Calvin’s notion of a sensus divinitatis or innate awareness of God (pp. 178f.).  He quotes a line about the sensus divinitatis from a passage from Plantinga that has nothing to do with the EAAN, runs it together with material that is concerned with the EAAN, and presents Plantinga’s argument as if it were fundamentally concerned to show that our cognitive faculties can be reliable only if Calvin’s sensus divinitatis thesis is correct.  This is either embarrassingly dishonest or (more charitably) embarrassingly incompetent.  Either way, it is a travesty of Plantinga’s position.  Imagine someone first quoting a few lines from a speech on health care given by President Obama, then quoting a line or two from an Obama speech on gun control, and then claiming on the basis of this textual “evidence” that one of the central components of Obamacare is gun control.  That’s about the level of scholarship Coyne exhibits.
Fifth, Coyne spills a lot of ink arguing that many of our beliefs are false and that there are certain errors to which we are constitutionally prone -- “probably,” Coyne says, because of the way we evolved (pp. 179-80).  How this is supposed to be a problem for the EAAN, I have no idea.  For one thing, Plantinga would take the considerations cited by Coyne to be confirming evidence that naturalism cannot account for the reliability of our cognitive faculties.  But even Coyne insists (as he would have to if he is going to trust his own cognitive faculties) that they are at the end of the day “fairly reliable” (emphasis added).  For another thing, Plantinga never claims in the first place (contrary to the impression Coyne gives) that we are not prone to errors.  His point is precisely rather that naturalism cannot even account for the fact that our cognitive faculties are at least “fairly reliable.”  Plantinga isn’t saying: “Naturalism cannot account for our cognitive faculties’ being perfectly reliable.”  He is saying: “Naturalism cannot account for our cognitive faculties’ being reliable at all.”
Sixth, in attempting to defend the claim that natural selection can account for the reliability of our cognitive faculties, Coyne cites a number of tendencies we exhibit that are adaptive (pp. 181-2).  The trouble, though, is that his examples have nothing at all to do with our beliefs as opposed to our behavior; indeed, Coyne himself admits that some of what he describes are “not beliefs, really, but adaptive behaviors.”  But this misses the entire point of Plantinga’s argument, which is precisely that there is nothing for which natural selection can account that goes beyond our behavior.  The behavior will be either adaptive or maladaptive whatever beliefs happen to be associated with it, so that natural selection can only ever operate on the former and not the latter.  Hence while Coyne goes on to suggest that because the former are adaptive, the latter must be too, he has given no reason whatsoever to think so, but merely ignored, rather than answered, Plantinga’s argument, the whole point of which is to show that such an inference is a non sequitur. 
So, those are six major problems just with Coyne’s brief treatment of a single argument.  Another example of Coyne’s laughable standards of scholarship is his method of repeatedly citing the Oxford English Dictionary whenever he needs to define some key term (“religion,” “supernatural,” etc.).  The absurdity of this procedure can be seen by imagining someone writing a book on chemistry (say) and relying on OED or some other dictionary of everyday usage in order to define the key terms.  Hence suppose that he defines a chemical element as “a part or aspect of something abstract, especially one that is essential or characteristic”; that he defines a bond as a “physical restraint used to hold someone or something prisoner, especially ropes or chains”; and so forth.  Obviously this would be a ridiculous procedure, since such terms have a technical meaning in chemistry that corresponds only loosely at best to the ordinary usage captured in the usual dictionary definitions.  Now, philosophy and theology too use many terms in technical senses that do not closely correspond to ordinary usage.  Hence it is no less absurd to write on those subjects while relying on a dictionary of ordinary usage for one’s characterization of the key ideas of those fields.  But that is exactly what Coyne does.
Then there is Coyne’s account of scientific method.  He writes:
Science comprises an exquisitely refined set of tools designed to find out what is real and to prevent confirmation bias. Science prizes doubt and iconoclasm, rejects absolute authority, and relies on testing one’s ideas with experiments and observations of nature.  Its sine qua non is evidence -- evidence that can be inspected and adjudicated by any trained and rational observer.  And it depends largely on falsification.  Nearly every scientific truth comes with an implicit rider: “Evidence X would show this to be wrong.” (p. 65)
Even the most militantly atheist philosopher of science would regard this as laughably naïve and dated.  You’d never know from Coyne’s circa-1955 Children’s Encyclopedia conception of science that Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Feyerabend’s Against Method, etc. had ever been written.  You don’t need to be a relativist or anti-realist about science (and I certainly am not) to know that things are much more complicated than the long-exploded myth of the Dispassionate Men in White Lab Coats would have it.
In other ways too, Coyne’s knowledge of the philosophy of science is staggering in its nonexistence.  His glib appeal to “laws of nature” manifests little awareness of how philosophically problematic the notion is, and zero awareness of the debate over the issue that has been conducted in contemporary metaphysics and philosophy of science.  (Readers interested in finding out what the debate is about can’t do better than to start with Stephen Mumford’s Laws in Nature .) 
Coyne asserts in passing that laws are “simply observed regularities that hold in our universe” (p. 158) -- completely oblivious to the problem that this sort of account of laws threatens to strip them of the explanatory power that he needs for them to have if they are to count as even a prima facie alternative to theism.  (Suppose there is a regular correlation in nature between phenomenon A and phenomenon B and you ask for an explanation of it.  If laws just are observed regularities, then to say that it is a “law” that A is correlated with B is in no way to explain the correlation, but merely to re-label it.)  Moreover, on one page Coyne acknowledges that “the laws of physics… needs [sic] explanation” (p. 158) , but then, on the very next page, after arguing that all laws can be taken down to some level of “fundamental laws,” suddenly dismisses the claim that those fundamental laws need any explanation.  How this can be anything other than the fallacy of special pleading, he does not tell us.
Note that what Coyne is doing here is exactlywhat he, like other New Atheists, falsely accuses First Cause arguments of doing.  Their stock accusation is that First Cause arguments rest on the premise that “everything has a cause,” but then suddenly make an arbitrary exception when it comes to God.  As I have shown many times, that is nothing more than an urban legend.  No philosopher has ever given such an argument or made such an arbitrary exception.  But Coyne, like so many other New Atheists, is taking a position that commits an exactly parallel fallacy.  They are saying that all natural laws require an explanation in terms of more fundamental laws, but suddenly make an arbitrary exception when they get to whatever the most fundamental laws of physics turn out to be.
(In response to those who would appeal to God in order to explain the fundamental laws, Coyne trots out, as if on cue… wait for it… the usual amateur atheist retort “where did that God come from?” (p. 159) -- the point-missing stupidity of which Coyne has had personally explained to him many times now, most recently here.)
I could very easily go on -- Coyne’s writings are the gift-to-bloggers that keeps giving -- but bouncing rubble gets boring after a while.  We have, many times now -- e.g. here, here, here, here, and here-- seen how preternaturally bad Coyne’s musings on philosophy and religion can be when he wings it for the blog post du jour.  It turns out that he’s not one whit better when he’s got space, time, and a cash incentive to produce something more serious at book-length.  If Darwin’s Origin of Species was One Long Argument, Faith versus Fact is essentially One Long Dashed-Off Blog Post.  It adds absolutely nothing to the New Atheist literature except a further 311 pages.

Upcoming Thomistic workshops

Today is the feast day of St. Thomas Aquinas, and thus a good time to draw attention to several forthcoming Aquinas-related summer workshops.
Mount Saint Mary College in Newburgh, NY will be hosting the Sixth Annual Philosophy Workshop on June 2-5, 2016, on the theme Aquinas on Politics. The presenters will be James Brent, OP, Michael Gorman, Steven Long, Dominic Legge, OP, Angela Knobel, Edward Feser, Thomas Joseph White, OP, and Michael Sherwin, OP.
The Albertus Magnus Center for Scholastic Studies will be holding its 2016 Summer Program in Norcia, Italy from July 10-24.  The focus of the program will be St. Paul's Epistle to the Hebrews and St. Thomas’s commentary on it.
The Witherspoon Institute will be hosting the 11th annual Thomistic Seminar in Princeton, NJ, on August 7-13, 2016, on the theme Aquinas and the Philosophy of Nature.  The faculty will be John Haldane, Sarah Broadie, Edward Feser, Robert Koons, and Candace Vogler.

Review of Coyne

In the February 2016 issue of First Things, I review Jerry Coyne’s Faith versus Fact: Why Science and Religion are Incompatible .

Islam, Christianity, and liberalism again (Updated)

Hope you won’t mind submitting to one more post on Islam (the last for a while, I hope).  What follows are some comments on some of the discussion of Islam and its relationship to Christianity and to liberalism that has been going on both in my own comboxes and in the rest of the blogosphere in the weeks since I first posted on the subject.
Referring to God and worshipping God
In my recent post on the debate about whether Christians and Muslims worship the same God, I made it clear that all that I was there addressing was the philosophical question of whether Christians and Muslims succeed in referring to one and the same thing when they use the word “God.”  In other words, I was discussing an issue in the philosophy of language.  That’s it.  In response, lots of people wanted to get into a debate about the merits of Islam as a religion, the consequences of Muslim immigration into Western countries, universal salvation, political correctness, etc.  All of that is simply irrelevant.  Someone could take an extremely negative attitude about Islam and still agree, consistently with that, that Christians and Muslims are, despite their deep disagreements about the divine nature, referring to the same thing when they use the word “God.”

That should be obvious from what I said in my later post on liberalism and Islam, wherein I discussed Hilaire Belloc’s view, developed in his book The Great Heresies, that Islam is a kind of Christian heresy.  Because Belloc regards Islam as a Christianheresy, he thinks that Muslims are talking about the same God Christians are, even if they go on to say false things about his nature.  Because Belloc regards Islam as a Christian heresy -- and he develops his interpretation in the context of what is essentially a book of Catholic apologetics -- he is by no means taking a positive view of Islam, any more than he takes a positive view of any of the other heresies he discusses in the book.  You can consistently say that Christians and Muslims refer to the same thing when they use the word “God” -- despite their differences over the doctrine of the Trinity -- and then go on to criticize Islam harshly, just as you can consistently say that Catholics and Arians refer to the same thing when they use the word “God” -- despite their differences over the doctrine of the Trinity -- and then go on to criticize Arianism harshly.
Notice that Belloc, who was writing in the 1930s and whose work is popular with Catholic traditionalists, can hardly be accused of political correctness, theological liberalism, belief in universal salvation, etc.  Nor was he saying anything that would have been considered the least bit remarkable in his day.  Consider what the 1911 Catholic Encyclopedia -- not exactly a liberal document -- has to say when it discusses the God of Islam.  In its article on “Monotheism,” it says:
The Allah of the Koran is practically one with the Jehovah of the Old Testament… The influence of the Bible, particularly the Old Testament, on Mohammedan Monotheism is well known…
In its article on “Allah,” the Encyclopedia says:
It is certain, however, that before the time of Mohammed, owing to their contact with Jews and Christians, the Arabs were generally monotheists.
The notion of Allah in Arabic theology is substantially the same as that of God among the Jews, and also among the Christians, with the exception of the Trinity, which is positively excluded in the Koran…
In response to doubts about whether the nomadic tribes of Arabia were truly monotheistic, the article remarks:
It is preposterous to assert… that the nomadic tribes of Arabia, consider seriously the Oum-el-Gheith, “mother of the rain”, as the bride of Allah and even if the expression were used such symbolical language would not impair, in the least, the purity of monotheism held by those tribes.
And in its article “Mohammed and Mohammedanism,” the Encyclopediasays that though “to the doctrines of the Trinity and of the Divine Sonship of Christ Mohammed had the strongest antipathy,” nonetheless “the doctrines of Islam concerning God -- His unity and Divine attributes -- are essentially those of the Bible.” 
Overall, the Encyclopedia’s treatment of Islam is hardly positive or politically correct.  Indeed, it is very critical.  But it never occurs to its authors to suggest that “Allah” must be the name of some false, pagan deity or that Muslims fail to refer to the true God when they use the word “God.”  The reason this doesn’t occur to them is that it simply does not at all follow from the critical things the Encyclopedia does say about Islam. 
Consider also that St. Thomas Aquinas is able both to find great value in what Muslim philosophers have to say about matters of philosophical theology -- Aquinas’s doctrine on essence and existence, which plays a central role in his account of the divine nature, was famously influenced by Avicenna -- while at the same time saying some extremely harsh things about Islam.
Really, the point isn’t difficult to see.  It seems that one of the things some readers get hung up on, though, is the word “worship.”  They seem to think that if you say that Christians and Muslims worship the same God, then you are insinuating that Christianity and Islam are both salvific, or that the differences between Christian and Muslim theology and ethics are not very important, or something along those lines.  But none of that follows at all.  To “worship” something as divine is to acknowledge that it has the highest possible status or dignity and consequently to give it the highest reverence, devotion, or adoration.  To say that Christians and Muslims worship the same God is merely to note what follows from the facts that (a) they refer to the same thing when they use the word “God,” and (b) they both worship that to which they refer.  Nothing at all follows about whether Muslim worship is sufficient for salvation, whether it is mixed with egregious theological and moral errors, etc.
Why any Christian would find this mysterious or puzzling, I have no idea, because the New Testament itself makes it clear that it is possible for a person to worship the true God and still be so deep in theological and moral error that his salvation is in jeopardy.  For example, in chapter 7 of Mark’s Gospel, Christ quotes Isaiah against the Pharisees, saying: “In vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the precepts of men.”  He doesn’t say: “Well, since you’re a brood of vipers and a bunch of whited sepulchres, you don’t really worship the true God at all.”  Rather, he says that even though they do worship the true God, their worship is “in vain,” because of their grave moral defects.
So, there simply is no necessary connection at all between, on the one hand, saying that Christians and Muslims worship the same God, and, on the other, taking a politically correct attitude toward Islam, affirming universal salvation, etc.  Some people have such difficulty seeing the point, or even acknowledging, much less answering, the arguments for it, that it is hard to avoid the conclusion that their thinking here (or lack thereof) is driven by non-rational factors.  It’s pretty clear with some of them that their hatred of Islam is so visceral that they desperately want it to be the case that “Allah” is the name of some demon, pagan god, or idol.
This is intellectually dishonest, pointless, and harmful.  It is intellectually dishonest because it simply isn’t true to the facts.  It is pointless because acknowledging that Christians and Muslims worship the same God in no way whatsoever commits one to political correctness, to universal salvation or theological liberalism, to taking a positive view of Islam, etc.  And it is harmful because it gives aid and comfort to those who want to shut down even the most sober and dispassionate critical thinking about Islam by shouting “bigot.” 
Conversion from Islam?
Bill Vallicella links to Alain Besançon’s excellent 2004 Commentary article “What Kind of Religion is Islam?” (an article I’ve cited myself several times over the years).  The whole thing should be read, especially by those who want to explore further the nature of Islam’s philosophical and theological departures from Christianity.  But there are two passages to which I want to draw special attention.  First, Besançon notes that:
[T]wo facts about Islam… always astonished medieval Christians… : the difficulty of converting Muslims, and the stubborn attachment to their faith of even the most superficially observant. From the Muslim point of view, it was absurd to become a Christian, because Christianity was a religion of the past whose best parts had been included in and superseded by Islam. Even more basically, Christianity was anti-natural: … its moral requirements exceeded human capacities, and its central mysteries defied reason.
End quote.  Belloc, in The Great Heresies, also commented on the difficulty Christianity has had historically in converting Muslims, and on the tremendous “marketing” advantage Islam’s simplicity gives it over Christianity.  But properly to understand the significance of these points requires attention to another observation made by Besançon:
Even if we decline to credit the Qur’an as an authentic revelation, we are still obliged to account for its unique sense of virtue; and especially the “virtue of religion”... What complicates this task is that, under Islam, and notwithstanding what I said earlier about the moderateness of the [Islamic] religious life, the domain of one’s duties can be pushed beyond what biblical religion considers appropriate.
In the latter, man is responsible for conducting his affairs within the framework of a universe -- natural, social, political -- that operates by internally consistent rules. The performance of one’s religious and moral duties is thus confined to a rationally definable area.  In Islam, by contrast, the will of God extends, as it were, to the secondary causes as well as to the primary ones, suffusing all of life.  Religious and moral obligation can thus take on an intensity and an all-encompassing sweep that, at least in Christian terms, would be regarded as trespassing any reasonable limit…
End quote.  What Besançon is talking about here is in part what I described in my post on liberalism and Islam as Islam’s absorption of the natural order into the supernatural.  And the moral and theological simplicity of Islam cannot properly be understood except in light of this absorption.  As Besançon notes, the Islamic ethos is earthy or sensual compared to the Christian moral ethos, which is at least by comparison ascetic.  But that earthy or sensual ethos is nevertheless seen as having an essentially supernatural foundation rather than a natural one.  Hence though Islamic morality is in a sense less demanding in terms of its content, its imperative force is nonetheless at the same time felt more strongly insofar as it is taken to come straight from God rather than through nature, and insofar as every aspect of life is seen entirely in the light of revelation rather than reason, the supernatural rather than the natural. 
Now, here’s one implication of this combination of views.  Our buddy Matt Briggs notes in a recent post at his own blog that Western progressives are prone to the delusion that Muslim immigrants are likely to succumb to the lures of secular consumer society, just as so many Christians have.  The idea is that over time, Muslim immigrants will, like even most conservative Catholics and Protestants, become so absorbed in acquiring the latest cell phones, watching the latest movies, ordering lattes at Starbucks, chatting with their secular friends about the latest episode of Modern Familyby the office water cooler, etc., that after a generation or two they won’t care so much about converting non-believers, much less working to make the laws of Western countries conform to the moral code taught by their religion.  
The reason many liberals are proneto this delusion is that they often foolishly suppose that religious people are pretty much all the same, so that if Christians commonly succumb to the lure of secular liberal consumerist society, so too will other religious believers, including Muslims.  The reason this is a delusion is that the Christian and Islamic systems simply differ radically, and in a way that makes Christians more liable to succumb to the lures in question than Muslims are.
In particular, Christians are far more likely to be tempted by liberal secular society for three reasons.  First, what is distinctive in Christian morality is relatively ascetic and otherworldly, and liberal secular society promises a release from its demands.  Second, Christianity nevertheless does affirm the existence of a natural order distinct from the supernatural order.  Thus, as I noted in my previous post, Christianity itself allows that at least some measure of moral behavior and political justice is possible even apart from Christian revelation.  Hence, a Christian is liable to be tempted by the thought that he can still be a morally decent person, or decent enough anyway, even if he forsakes some of the demands of traditional Christian morality.  Third, liberal secular society was an outgrowth (even if, as I noted in that previous post, essentially a “heretical” outgrowth) of Christian civilization.  Hence succumbing to the lures of secular liberal society can seem to Christians a natural transition rather than the adoption of something alien. 
None of these factors are present in Islam.  First, since Islamic morality is not in the first place as ascetic or otherworldly as Christian morality -- even if it is still austere by liberal standards -- there is much less temptation for the Muslim to seek to be liberated from its demands.  Second, since for Islam there is no clear basis for morality outside divine revelation, a Muslim is much less likely to be tempted by the thought that he can still live a morally decent life if he forsakes the traditional moral demands of his religion.  Third, since liberal secular society arose outside the Islamic context and has made inroads in Islamic countries only when imposed from outside, the Muslim is much more likely than the Christian to see it as something alien and hostile, whose mores he cannot adopt consistently with maintaining his religion.
Hence, if liberals believe they are more likely than Christians have been to succeed in converting Muslims to their point of view, they are gravely mistaken.  Certainly their position, where not grounded in basic misunderstandings about the nature of Islam or in fallacious generalizations from a few secularized Muslims they can think of, appears to be “faith-based” rather than supported by actual evidence. 
Natural versus supernatural
Bonald, at the blog Throne and Altar, commentson my post on liberalism and Islam.  Though he agrees with much of it, he suggests that since (as I there argued) liberalism and Islam both collapse the distinction between the natural and the supernatural orders, they are not quite opposites, as I claimed they are, but “really are closer to each other than either is to Christianity.”  Writes Bonald:
Christianity posits two orders, each largely defined by the opposition of the other.  Liberalism takes one, Islam the other, but if you’re just left with one order which covers everything, does it matter so much what you call it?  It’s just like we know whenever somebody starts going around teaching that everything is sacred, one knows with certainty that anyone who believes it will promptly lose his sense of the sacred entirely, since the sacred only exists for us in opposition to the profane.  Or take the idea of a “theocracy”.  What’s the difference between a priest declaring himself king and a king declaring himself priest?  We call the first “theocracy” and the second “Erastianism” and label them opposites, but they are the same thing.
I think Bonald is mistaken, though, and that what he overlooks is the way in which (as I have argued many times before) reductiveclaims are always implicitly really eliminative.  His analysis would be correct only if this were not so.
Hence, consider, for example, the claim that mind and matter are identical.  You could read this as saying that what we call mind is really something essentially material.  Or you could read it as saying that what we call matter is really something essentially mental.  The former is a materialist reading of the claim, the latter an idealist reading.  Now, materialism and idealism are hardly the same view.  To say that matter alone is real and that what is irreducibly mental is an illusion, and to say that mind alone is real and what is irreducibly material is an illusion, are incompatible claims.  Hence, those who identify mind and matter are not all saying the same thing, because what they mean by this claim is very different.  One side is really saying something like “Matter alone is real, and mind doesn’t exist” while the other is saying “Mind alone is real, and matter doesn’t exist.” 
Or consider the claim that God and the world are identical.  You could read this as saying that what we call God is really just the physical universe.  Or you could read it as saying that what we call the physical universe is really God.  The former is an atheist reading of the claim, while the latter is a pantheist reading.  Now, atheism and pantheism are no more the same view than materialism and idealism are.  Atheism essentially says that the contingent, finite, material world is all that exists, so that (from this point of view) if someone claims that God is identical to that world, then he is therefore implicitly saying that God (who is essentially necessary, infinite, and immaterial) does not really exist at all.  Pantheism, meanwhile, essentially says that God as the necessary, infinite, immaterial ground of all being is all that exists.  In claiming that the world is identical to God, then, pantheism is really implicitly saying that the world (which is essentially contingent, finite, and material) does not truly exist at all.  (Hence the tendency in pantheistic religion to regard the empirical world as illusory.)  Those who identify God and the world are thus not all really saying the same thing.  One side is saying something like “The world alone is real, and God doesn’t exist,” whereas the other is saying “God alone is real, and the world doesn’t exist.”
This sort of result follows whenever someone tries to identify two things, A and B, which are in fact distinct.  He will always implicitly either be affirming A and denying B, or affirming B and denying A.  And someone who affirms A and denies B is taking a position which is definitely incompatible with, and opposite to, that of someone who affirms B and denies A.  The fact that they may both say “A = B” simply doesn’t entail that they are really at the end of the day saying the same thing, because each of them means something radically different by this. 
So, from the fact that liberalism and Islam both collapse the natural and the supernatural, it simply doesn’t follow (as Bonald seems to think) that at bottom they are really just riffs on the same view and not clearly opposites.  That’s like saying that materialism and idealism are really at bottom the same view, or that Richard Dawkins’ atheism and Hindu pantheism are really at bottom the same view.  For the natureof the collapse is in each case radically different.  Liberalism (to oversimplify) essentially collapses the supernatural into the natural, and thus implicitly denies the supernatural.  Islam, meanwhile, essentially collapses the natural into the supernatural, and thus implicitly denies the natural.  These positions are as opposite and incompatible as materialism and idealism, or Dawkins’ atheism and Hindu pantheism.

UPDATE 1/17:  I noted above that, long before Vatican II, Catholic writers who by no means took a “politically correct” or otherwise positive view of Islam nevertheless did not deny that there is a sense in which Muslims worship the true God.  Reader Br. Matthew kindly calls my attention to a couple of other texts relevant to this issue.  In the 1908 Catechism of Pope St. Pius X we read:
 
Infidels are those who have not been baptised and do not believe in Jesus Christ, because they either believe in and worship false gods as idolaters do, or though admitting one true God, they do not believe in the Messiah, neither as already come in the Person of Jesus Christ, nor as to come; for instance, Mohammedans and the like.
Note that Pope St. Pius X -- not exactly a liberal, a modernist, an indifferentist, a fan of interreligious dialogue, etc. -- here distinguishesMuslims from those who worship false gods, and labels them “infidels,” not because they worship a false god but rather because, though they “admit one true God,” they deny that Jesus is the Messiah.
Pope Leo XIII’s Satis Cognitum (1896), after addressing Protestants, goes on to address non-Christians and says:
Our soul goes out to those whom the foul breath of irreligion has not entirely corrupted, and who at least seek to have the true God, the Creator of Heaven and earth, as their Father. Let such as these take counsel with themselves, and realize that they can in no wise be counted among the children of God, unless they take Christ Jesus as their Brother, and at the same time the Church as their mother.
Note that though he says that they cannot be counted as truly among the children of God if they remain outside the Church, nevertheless he allows that they do indeed “at least seek to have the true God, the Creator of Heaven and earth, as their Father.”  Obviously, then, Pope Leo did not suppose that a rejection of Trinitarianism prevents non-Christians from even referring to the true God when they use the word “God.”  That they at least know God as “Creator of Heaven and earth” makes it possible for them to seek Him as their Father despite their grave theological errors.

Islam, Christianity, and liberalism again

Hope you won’t mind submitting to one more post on Islam (the last for a while, I hope).  What follows are some comments on some of the discussion of Islam and its relationship to Christianity and to liberalism that has been going on both in my own comboxes and in the rest of the blogosphere in the weeks since I first posted on the subject.
Referring to God and worshipping God
In my recent post on the debate about whether Christians and Muslims worship the same God, I made it clear that all that I was there addressing was the philosophical question of whether Christians and Muslims succeed in referring to one and the same thing when they use the word “God.”  In other words, I was discussing an issue in the philosophy of language.  That’s it.  In response, lots of people wanted to get into a debate about the merits of Islam as a religion, the consequences of Muslim immigration into Western countries, universal salvation, political correctness, etc.  All of that is simply irrelevant.  Someone could take an extremely negative attitude about Islam and still agree, consistently with that, that Christians and Muslims are, despite their deep disagreements about the divine nature, referring to the same thing when they use the word “God.”

That should be obvious from what I said in my later post on liberalism and Islam, wherein I discussed Hilaire Belloc’s view, developed in his book The Great Heresies, that Islam is a kind of Christian heresy.  Because Belloc regards Islam as a Christianheresy, he thinks that Muslims are talking about the same God Christians are, even if they go on to say false things about his nature.  Because Belloc regards Islam as a Christian heresy -- and he develops his interpretation in the context of what is essentially a book of Catholic apologetics -- he is by no means taking a positive view of Islam, any more than he takes a positive view of any of the other heresies he discusses in the book.  You can consistently say that Christians and Muslims refer to the same thing when they use the word “God” -- despite their differences over the doctrine of the Trinity -- and then go on to criticize Islam harshly, just as you can consistently say that Catholics and Arians refer to the same thing when they use the word “God” -- despite their differences over the doctrine of the Trinity -- and then go on to criticize Arianism harshly.
Notice that Belloc, who was writing in the 1930s and whose work is popular with Catholic traditionalists, can hardly be accused of political correctness, theological liberalism, belief in universal salvation, etc.  Nor was he saying anything that would have been considered the least bit remarkable in his day.  Consider what the 1911 Catholic Encyclopedia -- not exactly a liberal document -- has to say when it discusses the God of Islam.  In its article on “Monotheism,” it says:
The Allah of the Koran is practically one with the Jehovah of the Old Testament… The influence of the Bible, particularly the Old Testament, on Mohammedan Monotheism is well known…
In its article on “Allah,” the Encyclopedia says:
It is certain, however, that before the time of Mohammed, owing to their contact with Jews and Christians, the Arabs were generally monotheists.
The notion of Allah in Arabic theology is substantially the same as that of God among the Jews, and also among the Christians, with the exception of the Trinity, which is positively excluded in the Koran…
In response to doubts about whether the nomadic tribes of Arabia were truly monotheistic, the article remarks:
It is preposterous to assert… that the nomadic tribes of Arabia, consider seriously the Oum-el-Gheith, “mother of the rain”, as the bride of Allah and even if the expression were used such symbolical language would not impair, in the least, the purity of monotheism held by those tribes.
And in its article “Mohammed and Mohammedanism,” the Encyclopediasays that though “to the doctrines of the Trinity and of the Divine Sonship of Christ Mohammed had the strongest antipathy,” nonetheless “the doctrines of Islam concerning God -- His unity and Divine attributes -- are essentially those of the Bible.” 
Overall, the Encyclopedia’s treatment of Islam is hardly positive or politically correct.  Indeed, it is very critical.  But it never occurs to its authors to suggest that “Allah” must be the name of some false, pagan deity or that Muslims fail to refer to the true God when they use the word “God.”  The reason this doesn’t occur to them is that it simply does not at all follow from the critical things the Encyclopedia does say about Islam. 
Consider also that St. Thomas Aquinas is able both to find great value in what Muslim philosophers have to say about matters of philosophical theology -- Aquinas’s doctrine on essence and existence, which plays a central role in his account of the divine nature, was famously influenced by Avicenna -- while at the same time saying some extremely harsh things about Islam.
Really, the point isn’t difficult to see.  It seems that one of the things some readers get hung up on, though, is the word “worship.”  They seem to think that if you say that Christians and Muslims worship the same God, then you are insinuating that Christianity and Islam are both salvific, or that the differences between Christian and Muslim theology and ethics are not very important, or something along those lines.  But none of that follows at all.  To “worship” something as divine is to acknowledge that it has the highest possible status or dignity and consequently to give it the highest reverence, devotion, or adoration.  To say that Christians and Muslims worship the same God is merely to note what follows from the facts that (a) they refer to the same thing when they use the word “God,” and (b) they both worship that to which they refer.  Nothing at all follows about whether Muslim worship is sufficient for salvation, whether it is mixed with egregious theological and moral errors, etc.
Why any Christian would find this mysterious or puzzling, I have no idea, because the New Testament itself makes it clear that it is possible for a person to worship the true God and still be so deep in theological and moral error that his salvation is in jeopardy.  For example, in chapter 7 of Mark’s Gospel, Christ quotes Isaiah against the Pharisees, saying: “In vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the precepts of men.”  He doesn’t say: “Well, since you’re a brood of vipers and a bunch of whited sepulchres, you don’t really worship the true God at all.”  Rather, he says that even though they do worship the true God, their worship is “in vain,” because of their grave moral defects.
So, there simply is no necessary connection at all between, on the one hand, saying that Christians and Muslims worship the same God, and, on the other, taking a politically correct attitude toward Islam, affirming universal salvation, etc.  Some people have such difficulty seeing the point, or even acknowledging, much less answering, the arguments for it, that it is hard to avoid the conclusion that their thinking here (or lack thereof) is driven by non-rational factors.  It’s pretty clear with some of them that their hatred of Islam is so visceral that they desperately want it to be the case that “Allah” is the name of some demon, pagan god, or idol.
This is intellectually dishonest, pointless, and harmful.  It is intellectually dishonest because it simply isn’t true to the facts.  It is pointless because acknowledging that Christians and Muslims worship the same God in no way whatsoever commits one to political correctness, to universal salvation or theological liberalism, to taking a positive view of Islam, etc.  And it is harmful because it gives aid and comfort to those who want to shut down even the most sober and dispassionate critical thinking about Islam by shouting “bigot.” 
Conversion from Islam?
Bill Vallicella links to Alain Besançon’s excellent 2004 Commentary article “What Kind of Religion is Islam?” (an article I’ve cited myself several times over the years).  The whole thing should be read, especially by those who want to explore further the nature of Islam’s philosophical and theological departures from Christianity.  But there are two passages to which I want to draw special attention.  First, Besançon notes that:
[T]wo facts about Islam… always astonished medieval Christians… : the difficulty of converting Muslims, and the stubborn attachment to their faith of even the most superficially observant. From the Muslim point of view, it was absurd to become a Christian, because Christianity was a religion of the past whose best parts had been included in and superseded by Islam. Even more basically, Christianity was anti-natural: … its moral requirements exceeded human capacities, and its central mysteries defied reason.
End quote.  Belloc, in The Great Heresies, also commented on the difficulty Christianity has had historically in converting Muslims, and on the tremendous “marketing” advantage Islam’s simplicity gives it over Christianity.  But properly to understand the significance of these points requires attention to another observation made by Besançon:
Even if we decline to credit the Qur’an as an authentic revelation, we are still obliged to account for its unique sense of virtue; and especially the “virtue of religion”... What complicates this task is that, under Islam, and notwithstanding what I said earlier about the moderateness of the [Islamic] religious life, the domain of one’s duties can be pushed beyond what biblical religion considers appropriate.
In the latter, man is responsible for conducting his affairs within the framework of a universe -- natural, social, political -- that operates by internally consistent rules. The performance of one’s religious and moral duties is thus confined to a rationally definable area.  In Islam, by contrast, the will of God extends, as it were, to the secondary causes as well as to the primary ones, suffusing all of life.  Religious and moral obligation can thus take on an intensity and an all-encompassing sweep that, at least in Christian terms, would be regarded as trespassing any reasonable limit…
End quote.  What Besançon is talking about here is in part what I described in my post on liberalism and Islam as Islam’s absorption of the natural order into the supernatural.  And the moral and theological simplicity of Islam cannot properly be understood except in light of this absorption.  As Besançon notes, the Islamic ethos is earthy or sensual compared to the Christian moral ethos, which is at least by comparison ascetic.  But that earthy or sensual ethos is nevertheless seen as having an essentially supernatural foundation rather than a natural one.  Hence though Islamic morality is in a sense less demanding in terms of its content, its imperative force is nonetheless at the same time felt more strongly insofar as it is taken to come straight from God rather than through nature, and insofar as every aspect of life is seen entirely in the light of revelation rather than reason, the supernatural rather than the natural. 
Now, here’s one implication of this combination of views.  Our buddy Matt Briggs notes in a recent post at his own blog that Western progressives are prone to the delusion that Muslim immigrants are likely to succumb to the lures of secular consumer society, just as so many Christians have.  The idea is that over time, Muslim immigrants will, like even most conservative Catholics and Protestants, become so absorbed in acquiring the latest cell phones, watching the latest movies, ordering lattes at Starbucks, chatting with their secular friends about the latest episode of Modern Familyby the office water cooler, etc., that after a generation or two they won’t care so much about converting non-believers, much less working to make the laws of Western countries conform to the moral code taught by their religion.  
The reason many liberals are proneto this delusion is that they often foolishly suppose that religious people are pretty much all the same, so that if Christians commonly succumb to the lure of secular liberal consumerist society, so too will other religious believers, including Muslims.  The reason this is a delusion is that the Christian and Islamic systems simply differ radically, and in a way that makes Christians more liable to succumb to the lures in question than Muslims are.
In particular, Christians are far more likely to be tempted by liberal secular society for three reasons.  First, what is distinctive in Christian morality is relatively ascetic and otherworldly, and liberal secular society promises a release from its demands.  Second, Christianity nevertheless does affirm the existence of a natural order distinct from the supernatural order.  Thus, as I noted in my previous post, Christianity itself allows that at least some measure of moral behavior and political justice is possible even apart from Christian revelation.  Hence, a Christian is liable to be tempted by the thought that he can still be a morally decent person, or decent enough anyway, even if he forsakes some of the demands of traditional Christian morality.  Third, liberal secular society was an outgrowth (even if, as I noted in that previous post, essentially a “heretical” outgrowth) of Christian civilization.  Hence succumbing to the lures of secular liberal society can seem to Christians a natural transition rather than the adoption of something alien. 
None of these factors are present in Islam.  First, since Islamic morality is not in the first place as ascetic or otherworldly as Christian morality -- even if it is still austere by liberal standards -- there is much less temptation for the Muslim to seek to be liberated from its demands.  Second, since for Islam there is no clear basis for morality outside divine revelation, a Muslim is much less likely to be tempted by the thought that he can still live a morally decent life if he forsakes the traditional moral demands of his religion.  Third, since liberal secular society arose outside the Islamic context and has made inroads in Islamic countries only when imposed from outside, the Muslim is much more likely than the Christian to see it as something alien and hostile, whose mores he cannot adopt consistently with maintaining his religion.
Hence, if liberals believe they are more likely than Christians have been to succeed in converting Muslims to their point of view, they are gravely mistaken.  Certainly their position, where not grounded in basic misunderstandings about the nature of Islam or in fallacious generalizations from a few secularized Muslims they can think of, appears to be “faith-based” rather than supported by actual evidence. 
Natural versus supernatural
Bonald, at the blog Throne and Altar, commentson my post on liberalism and Islam.  Though he agrees with much of it, he suggests that since (as I there argued) liberalism and Islam both collapse the distinction between the natural and the supernatural orders, they are not quite opposites, as I claimed they are, but “really are closer to each other than either is to Christianity.”  Writes Bonald:
Christianity posits two orders, each largely defined by the opposition of the other.  Liberalism takes one, Islam the other, but if you’re just left with one order which covers everything, does it matter so much what you call it?  It’s just like we know whenever somebody starts going around teaching that everything is sacred, one knows with certainty that anyone who believes it will promptly lose his sense of the sacred entirely, since the sacred only exists for us in opposition to the profane.  Or take the idea of a “theocracy”.  What’s the difference between a priest declaring himself king and a king declaring himself priest?  We call the first “theocracy” and the second “Erastianism” and label them opposites, but they are the same thing.
I think Bonald is mistaken, though, and that what he overlooks is the way in which (as I have argued many times before) reductiveclaims are always implicitly really eliminative.  His analysis would be correct only if this were not so.
Hence, consider, for example, the claim that mind and matter are identical.  You could read this as saying that what we call mind is really something essentially material.  Or you could read it as saying that what we call matter is really something essentially mental.  The former is a materialist reading of the claim, the latter an idealist reading.  Now, materialism and idealism are hardly the same view.  To say that matter alone is real and that what is irreducibly mental is an illusion, and to say that mind alone is real and what is irreducibly material is an illusion, are incompatible claims.  Hence, those who identify mind and matter are not all saying the same thing, because what they mean by this claim is very different.  One side is really saying something like “Matter alone is real, and mind doesn’t exist” while the other is saying “Mind alone is real, and matter doesn’t exist.” 
Or consider the claim that God and the world are identical.  You could read this as saying that what we call God is really just the physical universe.  Or you could read it as saying that what we call the physical universe is really God.  The former is an atheist reading of the claim, while the latter is a pantheist reading.  Now, atheism and pantheism are no more the same view than materialism and idealism are.  Atheism essentially says that the contingent, finite, material world is all that exists, so that (from this point of view) if someone claims that God is identical to that world, then he is therefore implicitly saying that God (who is essentially necessary, infinite, and immaterial) does not really exist at all.  Pantheism, meanwhile, essentially says that God as the necessary, infinite, immaterial ground of all being is all that exists.  In claiming that the world is identical to God, then, pantheism is really implicitly saying that the world (which is essentially contingent, finite, and material) does not truly exist at all.  (Hence the tendency in pantheistic religion to regard the empirical world as illusory.)  Those who identify God and the world are thus not all really saying the same thing.  One side is saying something like “The world alone is real, and God doesn’t exist,” whereas the other is saying “God alone is real, and the world doesn’t exist.”
This sort of result follows whenever someone tries to identify two things, A and B, which are in fact distinct.  He will always implicitly either be affirming A and denying B, or affirming B and denying A.  And someone who affirms A and denies B is taking a position which is definitely incompatible with, and opposite to, that of someone who affirms B and denies A.  The fact that they may both say “A = B” simply doesn’t entail that they are really at the end of the day saying the same thing, because each of them means something radically different by this. 
So, from the fact that liberalism and Islam both collapse the natural and the supernatural, it simply doesn’t follow (as Bonald seems to think) that at bottom they are really just riffs on the same view and not clearly opposites.  That’s like saying that materialism and idealism are really at bottom the same view, or that Richard Dawkins’ atheism and Hindu pantheism are really at bottom the same view.  For the natureof the collapse is in each case radically different.  Liberalism (to oversimplify) essentially collapses the supernatural into the natural, and thus implicitly denies the supernatural.  Islam, meanwhile, essentially collapses the natural into the supernatural, and thus implicitly denies the natural.  These positions are as opposite and incompatible as materialism and idealism, or Dawkins’ atheism and Hindu pantheism.