Edward Feser's Blog, page 77

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.

Canine theology

In Western culture, the dog is often described as “man’s best friend,” and in Western art, the dog is often used as a symbol for faithfulness.  Suppose, then, that we compare the Catholic faith to a healthy dog.  The analogy might be useful for understanding how other religions appear from the point of view of traditional Catholic theology.  Perhaps non-Catholics will not be amused by the comparisons to follow.  But dog lovers may appreciate them.If Catholicism is like a healthy dog, then Eastern Orthodoxy -- which has valid priestly orders and thus the Eucharist, but which lacks the papacy and rejects the filioque -- might be compared to a dog whose tail has been lopped off.  Protestantism, which lacks not only the papacy, but any valid priestly orders and thus the Eucharist, and departs from Catholicism in many others ways too, is like a dog which has had both its tail and one leg lopped off.   Judaism, which lacks the New Testament, Trinitarianism, belief in the Incarnation, and the rest of distinctively Christian doctrine, but does have a genuinely revealed source of theological knowledge in the Old Testament, is like a dog missing yet another leg.  Religions which at least understand God to be the uncaused cause of the world but which lack any genuine special revelation -- Islam, purely philosophical brands of theism, and arguably the more theistic versions of Hinduism -- are like a dog missing its tail and having only one leg.  (Though insofar as Islam has derived some of its claims about God from Christianity and Judaism, perhaps we can speak in its case of one and a half legs.)

Pantheistic versions of Hinduism, other versions of pantheism, and perhaps Taoism and Confucianism, are on this analogy like a tailless, legless dog.  Agnosticism, perhaps, is like the same dog but with cancer.  Atheism is like the same dog but dead.  Eliminative materialism -- which not only denies any sort of theism or pantheism, but also that there is any such thing as mind, will, or moral value even in the case of human beings, and thus denies that even the image of God exists anywhere in reality -- is like the corpse of that dog after it has been shoved into a wood chipper, like Steve Buscemi in Fargo. 
Where does polytheism fit into this analogy?  That depends.  If it’s a brand of polytheism which affirms the existence of a divine uncaused cause of everything other than himself, but which also claims that there are various lower-case-“g” gods running around… that’s like a dog with fleas.  If it’s a brand of polytheism which denies that there is any such uncaused cause, or even any necessary being with which it identifies the world (as in pantheism)… that’s no dog at all, but just a bunch of fleas. 
Hmm, dogs with fleas, mutilated dogs, cancerous dogs, dead dogs, dogs in wood chippers -- I guess I’ve also offended the dog lovers after all.  Ah well…
Anyway, the point of the analogy, I should make clear, is to represent different levels of knowledge of the divine nature and other kinds of theological knowledge.  I don’t claim for it any relevance at all to the question of whether and how anyone attains salvation.  That’s another issue entirely.  (Perhaps I’d need to use a somewhat different analogy in order to address the question of salvation.  Make the dog a St. Bernard, complete with brandy barrel?)
One application of the analogy is this.  Some who commented on my recent post on the reference of the word “God” seem extremely reluctant to admit that non-Trinitarians can be said genuinely even to refer to the true God when they use that word.  They seem to think it’s an all-or-nothing affair -- either you are talking about the true God with complete knowledge of his nature and perfect accuracy, or you are not even talking about him at all.  That’s like saying that you’ve either got a perfectly healthy and complete dog, or you’ve got no dog at all. 
As I keep pointing out, the critics don’t take this view consistently.  (For example, for some reason, though they’ll allow that Jews and even some pagan philosophers successfully refer to the true God, they deny that Muslims do.)  And as I also keep pointing out, if they wereconsistent, then every single error that even a non-heretical Christian makes about the divine nature would undermine the possibility of successfully referring to God.  (Would they say that even the Eastern Orthodox fail to refer to the true God, on the grounds that they reject the filioque?)  As I also keep having to point out, the question has absolutely nothing to do with whether non-Christians can be saved, with whether other religions exhibit grave moral defects, and so on.  (Successfully referring to God does not entail getting oneself right with Him.)
A dog that is missing a leg or three is seriously defective, but it’s still a dog.  Similarly, a conception of God which is seriously defective does not, merely for that reason, fail even to be a conception of God at all.  Moreover, a dog which is missing all or almost all of its legs is in much worse shape than a dog which is only missing its tail or one leg.  Similarly, to say that an imperfect conception of God can still be a conception of God is by no means to say that every conception is as good as any other.  Some conceptions have, you might say, a leg up on the rest…

Christians, Muslims, and the reference of “God”

The question of whether Christians and Muslims worship the same God has become the topic du jour in certain parts of the blogosphere.  Our friends Frank Beckwith, Bill Vallicella, Lydia McGrew, Fr. Al Kimel, and Dale Tuggyare among those who have commented.  (Dale has also posted a useful roundupof articles on the controversy.)  Frank, Fr. Kimel, and Dale are among the many commentators who have answered in the affirmative.  Lydia answers in the negative.  While not firmly answering in the negative, Bill argues that the question isn’t as easy to settle as the yea-sayers suppose, as does Peter Leithart at First Things.  However, with one qualification, I would say that the yea-sayers are right.Referring to God

Let me start by rehearsing some points that should be obvious, and which others have already made, but which are crucial for properly framing the question at hand.  First, we need to keep in mind the Fregean point that a difference in sense does not entail a difference in reference.  To use Frege’s famous example, the sense of the expression “the morning star” is different from the sense of the expression “the evening star.”  But these two expressions refer to one and the same thing, viz. the planet Venus.  Similarly, expressions like “the God of the Christians” and “the God of the Muslims” differ in sense, but it doesn’t follow from that alone that they don’t refer to the same God.  By the same token, though the expression “God” is different from the expression “Allah,” it doesn’t follow that God is not Allah, any more than Stan Lee and Stanley Martin Lieber are different men. 
Second, even a speaker’s erroneous beliefs don’t entail that he is not referring to the same thing that speakers with correct beliefs are referring to.  Consider an example made famous by Keith Donnellan.  Suppose you’re at a party and see a man across the room drinking from a martini glass. You say something like “The guy drinking a martini is well-dressed.”  Suppose, however, that the man is not in fact drinking a martini, but only water.  It doesn’t follow that you haven’t really referred to him.  Furthermore, suppose there is a second man, somewhere in the room but unseen by you, who really is drinking a martini and that he is dressed shabbily.  It doesn’t follow that you were, after all, really referring to this second man and saying something false.  Rather, assuming that the first man really is well-dressed, you were referring to that first man and saying something true about him, even though you were wrong about what he is drinking.  And thus you are referring to the very same man as people who know that he is drinking water would be referring to if they said “The guy drinking water from a martini glass is well-dressed.”  Similarly, the fact that Muslims have what Christians regard as a number of erroneous beliefs about God does not by itself entail that Muslims and Christians are not referring to the same thing when they use the expression “God.”
Having said that, it is also true that not anything goes.  As I noted some time back in a post about Peter Geach’s essay “On Worshipping the Right God,” it is possible for someone’s body of beliefs about some thing to be so thoroughly disconnected from reality that he cannot plausibly be said successfully to refer to that thing. 
But exactly when do one’s theological errors cross this line, so that he fails to refer to the true God?  Lydia McGrew says that the reason Christians and Muslims cannot in her view be said to worship the same God is that the differences in the ways they conceive of God are “important” and “sufficiently crucial.”  But this is, I think, too vague to be helpful.  Suppose someone knows that Plato was the student of Socrates but believes the legend according to which Plato was the son of the god Apollo, and also, for whatever reason, thinks that Plato wrote none of the works attributed to him but instead sold gyros and baklava from a cart in Athens.  Such a person has obviously gotten “important” and indeed “crucial” things wrong, but he hasn’t plausibly thereby failed to refer to Plato.  On the contrary, we know he is wrong in part because we take him to be referring successfully to Plato.  We don’t think: “Oh, he’s really referring to some other guy named ‘Plato,’ not the one who was Socrates’ student.”  We think that he is referring to the very same Plato we do, and for that reason that many of the things he says are importantly wrong, since they aren’t actually true of Plato.
Similarly, it is perfectly coherent to say that Muslims are “importantly” and “crucially” wrong precisely because they are referring to the very same thing Christians are when they use the word “God,” and that they go on to make erroneous claims about this referent.  That the errors are “important” or “crucial” is not by itself sufficient to prevent successful reference.  And since Muslims worship the referent in question, it follows that it also is not by itself sufficient to prevent them from worshipping the same God as Christians.
Even errors concerning God’s Trinitarian nature are not per se sufficient to prevent successful reference.  Abraham and Moses were not Trinitarians, but no Christian can deny that they referred to, and worshiped, the same God Christians do.  It might be objected that though they were not Trinitarians, this is only because they did not even knowabout the doctrine of the Trinity, whereas Muslims do know about it and positively reject it.  But this is irrelevant.  From the beginning of the history of the Church, Christians did not accuse others of worshipping a false God merely because they rejected the doctrine of the Trinity.  For example, those Jews who rejected the claim that Jesus was the incarnation of the second Person of the Trinity were not accused by the early Church of worshipping a false God.  Nor were heretics generally accused of this.  For example, at least some Arian baptisms were considered valid because of the Arians’ use of the Trinitarian baptismal formula, despite the fact that Arians held to a heretical understanding of the divine Persons.  These baptisms could not have been considered valid had the Arian understanding been so radically deficient that “Father,” “Son,” and “Holy Spirit” failed to refer to the divine Persons at all, but instead referred to false deities.
Failure of reference
This brings me to an example which does involve error of a sort sufficient to make successful reference to the true God doubtful.  In the post on Geach linked to above, I cited the 2001 decision of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith that Mormon baptisms are not valid even though they seem at first glance to make use of the correct Trinitarian formula.  The reason for the decision is that the Mormon conception of God is so radically different from the Catholic one that it is doubtful that the words truly invoke the Trinity.  It is not Trinitarianism per se that is the issue, though, but rather the radical anthropomorphism of the Mormon conception of God.  As an article in L'Osservatore Romano summarized the problem at the time:
[T]he Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, according to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, are not the three persons in which subsists the one Godhead, but three gods who form one divinity. One is different from the other, even though they exist in perfect harmony… The very word divinity has only a functional, not a substantial content, because the divinity originates when the three gods decided to unite and form the divinity to bring about human salvation… This divinity and man share the same nature and they are substantially equal.  God the Father is an exalted man, native of another planet, who has acquired his divine status through a death similar to that of human beings, the necessary way to divinization… God the Father has relatives and this is explained by the doctrine of infinite regression of the gods who initially were mortal… God the Father has a wife, the Heavenly Mother, with whom he shares the responsibility of creation.  They procreate sons in the spiritual world.  Their firstborn is Jesus Christ, equal to all men, who has acquired his divinity in a pre-mortal existence.  Even the Holy Spirit is the son of heavenly parents.  The Son and the Holy Spirit were procreated after the beginning of the creation of the world known to us… Four gods are directly responsible for the universe, three of whom have established a covenant and thus form the divinity.
As is easily seen, to the similarity of titles there does not correspond in any way a doctrinal content which can lead to the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. The words Father, Son and Holy Spirit, have for the Mormons a meaning totally different from the Christian meaning. The differences are so great that one cannot even consider that this doctrine is a heresy which emerged out of a false understanding of the Christian doctrine. The teaching of the Mormons has a completely different matrix. We do not find ourselves, therefore, before the case of the validity of Baptism administered by heretics, affirmed already from the first Christian centuries, nor of Baptism conferred in non-Catholic ecclesial communities…
End quote.  The Mormon conception of deity, then, makes of God something essentially creaturelyand finite, something which lacks the absolute metaphysical ultimacy that is definitive of God in Catholic theology and in classical theism more generally.  Even Arianism does not do that, despite its grave Trinitarian errors.  To be sure, Arianism makes of the second Person of the Trinity a creature, but it does not confuse divinity as suchwith something creaturely.  On the contrary, because it affirms the full divinity and non-creaturely nature of the Father, it mistakenly supposes that it must deny the full divinity of the Son.  It gets the notion of divinity as such right, and merely applies it in a mistaken way.  Mormons, by contrast, get divinity as suchfundamentally wrong.  Hence their usage of “God” is arguably merely verbally similar to that of Catholics, Protestants, Jews, et al.  They can plausibly be held not really to be referring to the same thing as the latter, and thus not worshipping the same God as the latter.
Now, say what you will about Islam, it does notmake of God something essentially creaturely.  That God is absolutely metaphysically ultimate, is that from which all else derives, that which not only does not have but could not in principle have had a cause of his own, etc. is something Muslim theology understands clearly.  Hence from a Christian point of view Muslims clearly must be regarded as like Jews and Arians rather than like Mormons.  They are in error about the Trinity, but not in error about divinity as such. 
Now, being absolutely metaphysically ultimate, being that from which all else derives, being that which does not have and in principle could not have a cause of its own, etc. -- in short, being what classical theism says God essentially is -- is, I would say, what is key to determining whether someone’s use of “God” plausibly refers to the true God.  If someone affirms these things of God, then there is at least a strong presumption in favor of the conclusion that he is referring to, and thus worshipping, the true God, even if he also says some seriously mistaken things about God.  If someone does not affirm these things of God, then there is at least serious doubt about whether he is referring to and worshipping the true God.  And if someone positively denies these things, then there is a strong presumption that he is not referring to or worshipping the true God.  As Richard Gale once wrote:
The character played by Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront said that he could have been a contender, even the champion; but it would be a violation of the meaning of God for him to have said that he could have been God or for God to say that he might have been a two-bit enforcer for the mob.  (On the Nature and Existence of God, p. 5)
Anything that could have been a two-bit enforcer for the mob could not possibly be God.  And anything that is less than metaphysically ultimate, or which is not the source of all things other than himself, or which could have had a cause of his own, could not possibly be God.  If it turned out that what we’d been calling “God” was something which is less than metaphysically ultimate, had a cause of his own, etc., it wouldn’t follow that God really is all these things after all.  Rather, what would follow is that there really isn’t a God after all.
Trinitarianism and reference
But shouldn’t a Christian hold that some reference to the Trinity or to the divinity of Jesus is also at least necessary, even if not sufficient, for successful reference to the true God?  Doesn’t that follow from the fact that being Trinitarian is, from a Christian point of view, also essential to God?   No, that doesn’t follow at all, and any Christian who says otherwise will, if he stops and thinks carefully about it, see that he doesn’t really believe that it follows.  Again, Christians don’t deny that Abraham and Moses, or modern Jews, or Arians and other heretics, refer to and worship the same God as orthodox Christians, despite the fact that these people do not affirm the Trinity or the divinity of Jesus. 
Or consider the following scenario.  Suppose there is a cause of everything other than himself who is one, eternal, immaterial, necessary, omnipotent, omniscient, perfectly good, etc.  But suppose also that it turned out that the Resurrection of Jesus never occurred, that the apostles perpetrated a hoax, etc.  Would this be a scenario in which atheism turns out to be true?  Of course not, and no Christian would say so.  It would be a scenario in which God exists but did not become incarnate in Jesus, did not cause the Church to be founded, etc.
Or consider another scenario.  Suppose it turned out that there is no such thing as a cause of everything other than himself who is one, eternal, immaterial, necessary, omnipotent, omniscient, perfectly good, etc.  But suppose also that there really was a powerful being who sent Moses to deliver the Law to Israel, who sired Jesus and sent him as a prophet, who imparted preternatural powers to him and to the apostles so that they might found a Church, etc.  But suppose that this powerful being was an extraterrestrial and that the events recorded in the Bible were all caused in something like the way Erich von Däniken describes in Chariots of the Gods .  Suppose this extraterrestrial called himself “the Father” and that he had two lieutenants who called themselves “the Son” and “the Holy Spirit.”  Would this be a scenario in which Christian theism turns out to be true?  Of course not, and (I hope!) no Christian would say so.  It would be a scenario in which atheism is true. 
Notice that the first scenario is metaphysically possible even though God is necessarily a Trinity.  For even though God is a Trinity, he could have refrained from becoming incarnate in Jesus, could have refrained from causing the Church to be founded, could have refrained from revealing his Trinitarian nature to us, etc.  Even on the first scenario, God would (the Christian must affirm) be Trinitarian, but we would not know this about him.  Yet this would not prevent us from successfully referring to him or worshipping him.
Now, the (first, atheistic part of the) second scenario is. I would say, not in fact metaphysically possible (even if it is epistemically possible -- that is, we could find ourselves in a situation where we falsely believe that the scenario holds).  The reason it is not metaphysically possible is that it could not turn out (or so I would argue) that there is no such thing as a cause of everything other than himself who is one, eternal, immaterial, omnipotent, omniscient, perfectly good, etc.  God, if he exists at all, exists necessarily rather than contingently.  Atheism, if false, is necessarily false rather than merely contingently false.  But this has nothing to do with Trinitarianism per se.  And that is true even though God is essentially Trinitarian.  For it is not by virtue of knowing that God is a Trinity that we know that, if he exists, then he exists necessarily rather than contingently.  Rather, it is by virtue of knowing that he is pure actuality, that he is subsistent being itself, that he is absolutely simple or non-composite, etc., that we know that, if he exists, then he exists necessarily rather than contingently. 
What all this shows is that we need to distinguish between how God has to be and how we have to conceptualize God.  What the doctrine of the Trinity entails is that God could not possibly be other than three divine Persons in one substance.  But it does not entail that we cannot conceptualize God other than as three divine Persons in one substance.  To suppose that, because the doctrine of the Trinity entails the former, it must also entail the latter, is to confuse metaphysics with epistemology.
None of this should be surprising given that, as Christianity itself traditionally teaches, the doctrine of the Trinity is not something which human reason could have arrived at on its own, but can be known only via special divine revelation.  We can know that God is Trinitarian only if we first know that he exists and has revealed certain truths (via a prophet, scripture, tradition, or the teachings of the Church).  Naturally, then, we must be able to conceptualize him in a non-Trinitarian way, otherwise we couldn’t ever get to knowledge of the Trinity.   (Note that this does not entail that he could have failed to be Trinitarian.  Again, to suppose otherwise is to confuse metaphysics and epistemology.)
Aquinas on referring to God
As always when looking for philosophical guidance on matters of theology, we cannot do better than to turn to Aquinas.  On reference in general, he writes:
In the significance of names, that from which the name is derived is different sometimes from what it is intended to signify, as for instance, this name "stone" [lapis] is imposed from the fact that it hurts the foot [laedit pedem], but it is not imposed to signify that which hurts the foot, but rather to signify a certain kind of body; otherwise everything that hurts the foot would be a stone… (Summa theologiae I.13.2)
and again:
Whence a name is imposed, and what the name signifies are not always the same thing.  For as we know substance from its properties and operations, so we name substance sometimes for its operation, or its property; e.g. we name the substance of a stone from its act, as for instance that it hurts the foot [laedit pedem]; but still this name is not meant to signify the particular action, but the stone's substance. The things, on the other hand, known to us in themselves, such as heat, cold, whiteness and the like, are not named from other things. Hence as regards such things the meaning of the name and its source are the same. (Summa theologiae I.13.8)
Aquinas’s example of the stone is, unfortunately, not as clear to modern readers of English as it would have been to his contemporaries.  The idea is that the etymology of lapis (“stone”) derived (so Aquinas wrongly supposed) from its hurting the foot (when it is dropped on the foot, say, or when the foot kicks it).  The literal meaning of lapis (again, so Aquinas supposed) is “that which hurts the foot,” but what we intend to signify thereby is not just any old thing which might hurt the foot -- dropped hammers, bear traps, clumsy dance partners, etc -- but rather stones, specifically.  A modern example might be “housefly.”  What we intend to signify by this expression is not any old thing which might fly around the house -- moths, escaped parakeets, the remote-controlled toy helicopter my youngest son got for Christmas, etc. -- but rather a certain specific kind of insect.
Now, what Aquinas is saying is that in some cases, we refer to things by way of some property they have, or some contingent characteristic they have, or some effect they cause, rather than by way of their essence.  To hurt the foot is not the essence of stone, even if we refer to stones as “that which hurts the foot,” and flying around the house is not the essence of houseflies, even if we call them “houseflies.”  What we intend to refer to by “that which hurts the foot” is whatever has the essence of stone, and what we intend to refer to by “housefly” is whatever has the essence of a housefly.  There is a distinction to be drawn in these cases between that by virtue of which we refer to something and that to which we refer.  (As Christopher Martin notes in the chapter on reference in his book Thomas Aquinas: God and Explanations , here Aquinas anticipated a distinction Saul Kripke makes in Naming and Necessity .) 
In other cases, though, we refer to a thing by virtue of its essence.  Aquinas gives heat, cold, and whiteness as examples, and (as Martin also notes) the use Kripke makes in Naming and Necessity of the example of “pain” might be similar to the point Aquinas is making.  Kripke’s idea is that “pain” refers to the sort of sensation we associate with pain, and that the essence of pain just is to be a sensation of that sort.  The sensation is not something that merely follows from pain or is contingently associated with pain.  Presumably Aquinas was saying something similar about heat, cold, and whiteness -- e.g. that being white not only involves having a visual appearance of a certain sort but that this is the essence of whiteness.  (Aquinas’s examples are bound to be controversial in light of the modern physics of temperature and color, but the specific examples are not essential to the point he is making, which is that sometimes we refer to something by virtue of its essence rather than by virtue of some characteristic or effect it has.)
Now, where God is concerned, in Aquinas’s view we refer to him in the first sort of way rather than the second:
Because therefore God is not known to us in His nature, but is made known to us from His operations or effects, we name Him from these… hence this name "God" is a name of operation so far as relates to the source of its meaning.  For this name is imposed from His universal providence over all things; since all who speak of God intend to name God as exercising providence over all… [T]aken from this operation, this name "God" is imposed to signify the divine nature. (Summa theologiae I.13.8)
The idea is that, in this life, we do not have the immediate knowledge of God, or beatific vision, that those in heaven enjoy.  Our knowledge of God is not like our knowledge of pain (if Kripke is right about that) but rather more like the layman’s knowledge of stone or of a housefly, insofar as the layman knows them only by their effects or contingent characteristics rather than (as a chemist or biologist might) by virtue of their essences.  In particular, we know God as that which has universal providence over all things -- that which creates them, sustains them in being at every moment, imparts to them at every moment their power to operate, and so forth. 
Of course, we also know that God’s nature is Trinitarian, because this fact has been specially revealed to us.  But that does not entail that we have immediate knowledge of that Trinitarian nature, the way we have immediate knowledge of the nature of pain (again, if Kripke is right).  We do nothave such immediate knowledge.  To borrow a distinction made famous by Bertrand Russell, we might say that we know God’s Trinitarian nature only by description, not by acquaintance.  Hence, even given divine revelation, the Christian no less than the non-Christian has to refer to God by way of his effects rather by way of direct knowledge of his essence.  And where the most general of those effects are concerned (e.g. God’s creation and conservation of the world in being, as opposed to his causing of miracles), non-Christians can in principle know those as well as Christians can.  Hence non-Christians can refer to God just as well as Christians can.  As Aquinas writes:
Hence it is evident that a Catholic saying that an idol is not God contradicts the pagan asserting that it is God; because each of them uses this name GOD to signify the true God. For when the pagan says an idol is God, he does not use this name as meaning God in opinion, for he would then speak the truth, as also Catholics sometimes use the name in the sense, as in the Psalm, "All the gods of the Gentiles are demons" (Psalm 95:5)…
Neither a Catholic nor a pagan knows the very nature of God as it is in itself; but each one knows it according to some idea of causality, or excellence, or remotion... So a pagan can take this name "God" in the same way when he says an idol is God, as the Catholic does in saying an idol is not God.  But if anyone should be quite ignorant of God altogether, he could not even name Him... (Summa theologiae I.13.10)
The idea here is that it is precisely becausethe pagan in question, no less than the Catholic, can understand that “God” signifies that which is the cause of the world, etc. that the Catholic and pagan can genuinely disagree about whether a certain idol is God.  If the pagan meant by “God” nothing morethan “this particular idol,” then there would be no disagreement.  That is to say, if the pagan were using the word in this idiosyncratic way (i.e. if, as Aquinas puts it, he were “us[ing] this name as meaning God in [merely the] opinion [of the pagan]”), then he would be speaking the truth if he said “This particular idol is God,” because that would amount to saying nothing more than “This particular idol is this particular idol.”  It is because the pagan means more than that by “God” that the Christian can say: “No, that idol can’t be God, given what you and I both know God to be.”
Now, if even an idolatrous pagan can successfully refer to the true God when he uses the name “God” -- that is to say, he really is talking about God even if he has gravely erroneous beliefs about God -- then obviously Muslims, who are as well aware as any Christian is that God cannot be identified with an idol, can successfully refer to the true God, despite their gravely erroneous rejection of Trinitarianism.  And since they worship that to which they refer, it follows that they worship the true God.
A qualification
As I said at the beginning, while I think it is correct to say that Christians and Muslims worship the same God, I would add a qualification to that claim.  The qualification is this.  What I have said in this post applies to Christianity and Islam in the abstract and to Christians and Muslims in general.  But it is nevertheless still possible that there are particular individualChristians and particular individualMuslims whose personal conceptions of God differ in such a way that they do not plausibly worship the same God.  To develop a possible example, let’s consider something else Lydia McGrew says in the post of hers linked to above.  She writes:
Christians believe… that the same Being caused the origins of Judaism -- the promises to Abraham, the Exodus, etc. -- and the origins of Christianity -- the resurrection of Jesus, etc.  In that sense, the Christian says that the God of Abraham is the same entity as the God we worship…  But no Christian should believe that the God whom Jesus represented is the same entity who caused the origins of Islam!  On the contrary, we as Christians should emphatically deny this…  [This] distinguishes what the Christian claims about the relationship of Christianity to Judaism from what the Christian believes about the relationship of Christianity to Islam. The point is not that only a Trinitarian can be in some sense worshiping the true God.  Abraham was not a Trinitarian but was worshiping the true God.  But Abraham, we believe, really was in touch with the true God.  The true God really was the source of Abraham's revelations.  The true God was not the source of Mohammad's.
End quote.  Now, I certainly agree with Lydia that a Christian should not regard Muhammad as having had a genuine revelation from God.  But this fact doesn’t do the work she thinks it does.  She is arguing that Christians and Jews worship the same God even if (she claims) Christians and Muslims do not.  Her argument seems to presuppose that by “God,” Jews mean “the source of Abraham’s revelations, etc.,” Christians mean “the one who raised Jesus from the dead, etc.,” and Muslims mean “the source of Muhammad’s revelations, etc.”  Now if that were all that Jews, Christians, and Muslims respectively meant by “God,” then her argument would have force.  For in that case, since Christians hold that the same God both revealed himself to Abraham, etc. and raised Jesus from the dead, etc., but think that God did not give any revelation to Muhammad, they could not regard their God as the same as what Muslims mean by “God.”  The problem is that that is simply not all that Jews, Christians, and Muslims mean by “God,” at least not most Jews, Christians, and Muslims.  For by “God” they also mean “the uncaused cause of everything other than himself, who is omnipotent, omniscient, perfectly good, etc.”  And because there is this considerable overlap in their conceptions of God, it is possible for them to refer to, and worship, one and the same God despite their disagreements, for the reasons given earlier.
However, suppose that some particular Jew, Christian, or Muslim did use the word “God” in the very narrow way Lydia’s argument presupposes.  Suppose, for example, that some particular Muslim said: “No, actually, I don’t much care about all that other stuff.  What I mean by ‘God’ is ‘the source of Muhammad’s revelations,’ and that’s all I mean by the word, and I would still worship God so understood even if it turned out that this source was not the omnipotent, omniscient, perfectly good uncaused cause of the world, but something else.”  In that case, I think you could say that that particular Muslim did not worship the same God that Christians do.
But I think you’d be very hard pressed to find a Muslim who would ever say such a thing, just as I think you’d be very hard pressed to find a Christian who would say that he would still believe the Bible even if it turned out to have been written by one of Erich von Däniken’s extraterrestrials.  But perhaps there are Muslims (and Christians and Jews, for that matter) who are so attached to certain contingent claims about God made by their religion that they would rather give up belief in some essential divine attribute than give up those contingent claims.  In that case there could be the sort of conceptual distance between believers that would entail that they are not worshipping the same God.  So to that extent I would qualify the claim defended in this post.  But the possibility does seem to me fairly remote and academic. 

Goodill on Scholastic Metaphysics and Wittgenstein

In the January 2016 issue of New Blackfriars, David Goodill reviews my book Scholastic Metaphysics .  From the review:
Feser[‘s]... purpose... is in bringing Scholastic metaphysics into conversation with contemporary metaphysics... The contemporary partners Feser chooses to converse with are analytical philosophers...
This engagement with contemporary philosophy ensures that the book is more than just an introduction which rehearses the arguments of others. Feser demonstrates a mastery of both the Scholastic tradition he draws upon and the writings of contemporary thinkers, which he uses to provide telling and insightful analyses of key metaphysical notions...The value of Feser’s book is in its contribution to the[se] debates... and the analytical clarity with which he illuminates contemporary debate by using principles developed in scholastic thought.

While allowing that “inevitably with any work of such broad scope not every perspective can be included, nor can every debate be entered into,” Goodill suggests that there are two issues I might have pursued further.  First, he says:
Feser rejects Wittgenstein’s rejection of metaphysics and his return to the ordinary.  Along with this he also argues that: ‘the Scholastics would not agree that it is to “grammar” that we must look to resolve (or dissolve) metaphysical problems’ (p. 221).  Here Feser stands in opposition to those analytical philosophers who have drawn a line of continuity from Plato through the scholastics to Wittgenstein’s grammatical remarks.  Most notably, G. E. M. Anscombe draws attention to the intimate relationship in Plato between the development of metaphysics and grammar, and argues that Frege and Wittgenstein stand within this tradition.  More recently William Charlton has argued that grammar is central to metaphysics.  An engagement with such views would be helpful in substantiating Feser’s claim that grammar did not figure when the scholastics sought to resolve metaphysical questions.
This is an interesting response to my remarks in the book about Wittgenstein, and I agree that those remarks should be qualified.  So let me do so here.
“Grammar,” in the technical Wittgensteinian sense, has to do with those implicit rules of language which determine the bounds of meaningful usage.  These rules are normative rather than merely descriptive, and a proposition which expresses a rule is therefore to be distinguished from an empirical proposition.  The proposition that stones are material objects would be a “grammatical” proposition in this sense, whereas the proposition that stones can be found in riverbeds would be an empirical proposition.  To deny that stones can be found in riverbeds would be to say something false, but it would nevertheless be to say something perfectly intelligible, something which could have been true.  But to deny that stones are material objects would, in Wittgenstein’s view, not be intelligible.  It would be nonsensical, insofar as the proposition that stones are material objectsis for him partially constitutive of the proper use of the term “stone.”  We know that stones are material objects, not by virtue of empirical investigation (as with the proposition that stones can be found in riverbeds) but rather just by virtue of mastering the use of the word “stone.” 
“Grammatical” rules in this sense are thus like the rules of a game.  To say, in the context of a game of checkers, that a game piece with another stacked on top of it is a King is to give expression to one of the rules of the game.  It is not like saying that player A’s King is on a red square.  Falsely to say the latter (when the King is actually on a black square, say) is to make an empirical mistake.  But to deny that a game piece with another stacked on top of it is a King is not to make an empirical mistake.  It is simply to misunderstand what checkers involves. 
Now, for Wittgenstein, a metaphysical theory like Berkeley’s idealism is like that.  When Berkeley denies that a stone is a material object and says that it is actually a collection of perceptions, he is, in Wittgenstein’s view, making a “grammatical” error.  He is like someone who denies that a checkers game piece with another stacked on top of it is a King.  “Grammar” in the sense of the study of the constitutive rules of language can for the Wittgensteinian thus help us to expose the errors made by bad metaphysical theories.  As Wittgenstein says, “essence is expressed by grammar” and “grammar tells what kind of object anything is” (Philosophical Investigations §§371, 373).
There are at least three ways to read what Wittgenstein is up to here, which I will call the anti-realist, realist, and neither anti-realist nor realistreadings.  They can be described as follows:
1. Anti-realist: On this reading, Wittgensteinian “grammar” merely describes how we happen linguistically and conceptually to “carve up” reality.  In principle, though, we might carve it up in some radically different way.  “Grammar” captures necessary features of reality only in the sense that, giventhe language and conceptual scheme we happen to have, certain ways of describing things are ruled out as nonsensical.  However, our language and conceptual scheme as a whole is contingent, and could in theory be replaced by some alternative and incommensurable language and conceptual scheme.
2. Realist: On this reading, Wittgensteinian “grammar” captures not merely how we happen, contingently, to “carve up” reality, but how reality itself must be.  It tells us not just what is necessarily the case given our conceptual scheme, but what is necessarily the case full stop.  We cannot so much as even make sense of the idea of a radically different and incommensurable conceptual scheme, because we cannot so much as make sense of reality being any different than the rules of “grammar” tell us it is.
3. Neither anti-realist nor realist: On this reading, the anti-realist and realist readings of Wittgenstein are themselves precisely instances of the sort of thing Wittgenstein is trying to overcome.  For both involve a dualism of language and conceptual scheme on the one hand and reality on the other, and disagree merely about whether the former corresponds necessarily to the latter.  But this kind of metaphysical picture is itself a product of what Wittgenstein would regard as “grammatical” confusion.  In our ordinary linguistic usage and “form of life,” the question of whether language and conceptual scheme as a whole “correspond” to reality doesn’t even arise.  Wittgensteinian philosophy is about getting us back to this state of pre-metaphysical innocence (as it were), and not about taking sides on any version of the metaphysical realist/anti-realist dispute.
Now, people who think that Wittgenstein is a kind of relativist, or that his criticisms of various metaphysical theories are a matter of “conceptual analysis” which takes for granted mere “folk” notions which might end up being overthrown by science, are adopting interpretation 1.  But this interpretation, I would say, badly misreads Wittgenstein, and I think most Wittgensteinians would agree that it badly misreads him.
In fact, I think that Wittgenstein and most of his followers intend interpretation 3.  In my view, though, the trouble with interpretation 3 -- or to be more precise, with the position that interpretation 3 rightly attributes to Wittgenstein --  is that it is unstable and tends to collapse into either the position described by interpretation 1 or the position described by interpretation 2.  There is just no such thing as returning to a state of pre-metaphysical innocence (short of a lobotomy, anyway) because metaphysical speculation is not some pathology that arises when language “goes on holiday,” but is rather the natural manifestation of our essence as rational animals.  Give man sufficient time and leisure, and he will become a metaphysician.  The only question is whether he will do it well or badly.
If there is any value in Wittgenstein’s “grammatical” investigations, then -- and I certainly think there is -- then they will in my view have to be construed in terms of interpretation 2.  Now, again, there are good ways and bad ways of doing metaphysics.  I would say that what Wittgenstein was primarily reacting against were some bad ways -- namely, the ways represented by continental rationalist metaphysics, “naturalized” metaphysics of the sort inspired by British empiricism, idealism, Kantianism, etc. -- and that he mistook them for metaphysics as such.  But all these approaches, which share certain key post-Cartesian assumptions, differ greatly from the classical approaches represented by Platonism, Aristotelianism, and the Scholastic thinkers who built on those traditions.
Aristotelianism in particular (and systems which incorporate it, like Thomism) take there to be a profound continuity between common sense and metaphysical speculation.  Metaphysics goes well beyond common sense but it does not subvert it, at least not in any radical way.  This continuity puts Aristotelian metaphysics much closer to Wittgenstein and his concern for ordinary language and the “form of life” it represents than other metaphysical systems are.  Because of this closeness, I think that Aristotelians and Thomists are bound to find useful insights in Wittgenstein and his followers, and that Wittgensteinians are bound to find the work of Aristotelians and Thomists more congenial than that of other metaphysicians.  It is unsurprising, then, that there are thinkers who have drawn inspiration from both traditions (e.g. Anscombe, Anthony Kenny, P.M.S. Hacker).
Now, when I said what I did in Scholastic Metaphysics about Wittgenstein, I had interpretation 3 in mind.  And since that section of the book was not about Wittgenstein per sebut rather about defending Scholastic metaphysics against a certain kind of objection, those remarks sufficed for my purposes.  But they certainly don’t represent the entirety of my views about Wittgenstein, and Goodill is correct that it would be quite wrong to claim that Wittgenstein has nothing to offer the Scholastic. 
Finally, Goodill also writes:
Furthermore, although this is a work in metaphysics, some account of the relationship between metaphysics and logic in scholastic thought would both aid thisHere too I agree with Goodill.  I do briefly touch on such matters at the end of the book, where I discuss analogy, but much more could be said.  Doing so, however, would require treatment of issues in philosophy of language and logic that would go far beyond the aims I had in mind in writing the book; indeed, it would require a book of its own.
There are several issues here to be disentangled.  First there is the general question of the relationship between modern logic and the traditional logic presupposed by older Scholastic writers.  Writers of an earlier generation such as Henry Veatch had something to say about this, but the subject really needs an up-to-date Aristotelian-Thomistic treatment that engages in depth with contemporary analytic philosophy.  (David Oderberg has made a start in his anthology on logician Fred Sommers.)
Second, there is the gigantic topic of Aquinas’s position on the analogical use of language -- how properly to understand it (a matter of dispute among Thomists), the critiques by Scotists and others, and how all this relates to work in contemporary philosophy of language.  Important work on these issues has been done by writers like Joshua Hochschild.
Third, there is the question of how specific Scholastic ideas and arguments in metaphysics reflect distinctive logico-linguistic assumptions.  Gyula Klima has perhaps written more on this subject than any other contemporary philosopher.
What is really needed, though, is book-length work that ties all this together in a systematic way.

Yuletide links

End-of-semester grading, Christmas shopping, and the like leave little time for substantive blogging.  So for the moment I’ll leave the writing to others:
Times Higher Education on the lunatic asylum that is Jerry Coyne’s combox.
Crisis on campus?  The president of Oklahoma Wesleyan University speaks truth to pampered privilege: “This is not a day care. This is a university.”
At Public Discourse: Samuel Gregg on David Bentley Hart and capitalism; and Jeremy Neill argues that the sexual revolution will not last forever.
Traditional logic versus modern logic: What’s the difference?  Martin Cothran explains.  (Also, an older post by Cothran on the same subject.)
Spiked interviews Roger Scruton about politics, marriage and Islam.
The millennials are lost to liberalism, right?  “Not so fast” say Don Devine at The American Conservativeand Jamelle Bouie at Slate.
“A master without a masterpiece”: Woody Allen, according to Stefan Kanfer at City Journal.
After the Synod, what will Pope Francis decide?  At the Catholic Herald, Fr. Raymond de Souza recommends that we listen to what the pope’s friends are saying.  At First Things, Ross Douthat describes the crisis of conservative Catholicism. 
Thomas Pink and Martin Rhonheimer debate religious liberty and how to interpret Vatican II’s Dignitatis Humanae.
A Q&A with Candace Vogler on virtue, happiness and the meaning of life.
The National Catholic Register’s Edward Pentin asks: How Islamic are Islamic terrorists?
At the Boston Globe, Niall Ferguson compares the attack on Paris and the sack of Rome.
Stephen L. Brock’s The Philosophy of Saint Thomas Aquinas: A Sketch has recently been published.
Catholic philosopher Dennis Bonnette on Adam and Eve and modern biology.
“Nice ‘n’ Sleazy”: Terry Teachout on Frank Sinatra, at Commentary.
New books reviewed at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews: Nicholas Jolley’s Locke's Touchy Subjects: Materialism and Immortality ; David Svoboda’s Aquinas on One and Many ; and Hanoch Ben-Yami’s Descartes' Philosophical Revolution: A Reassessment .
Philosophers and frequent co-authors Stephen Mumford and Rani Lill Anjum on how to write collaboratively.
It’s been 35 yearssince the release of Steely Dan’s Gaucho-- and since the accidental erasure of the lost, lamented, legendary track “The Second Arrangement,” which now exists only in a demo version or two, along with a recent live version.