Edward Feser's Blog, page 80

Unintuitive metaphysics

At Aeon, philosopher Elijah Millgram comments on metaphysics and the contemporary analytic philosopher’s penchant for appealing to intuitions.  Give it a read -- it‘s very short.  Millgram uses an anecdote to illustrate the point that what intuitively seems to be an objective fact can sometimes reflect merely contingent “policies we’ve adopted,” where “the sense of indelible rightness and wrongness comes from having gotten so very used to those policies.”  And of course, such policies can be bad ones.  Hence the dubiousness of grounding metaphysical arguments in intuition.As longtime readers know, I agree completely.  But contrary to what some critics of metaphysics seem to think, the dubiousness of this method of doing metaphysics doesn’t entail that metaphysics itself is dubious.  All it entails, of course, is that that particular method is dubious.  Millgram himself is aware that this is all that follows -- he says that he doesn’t think metaphysics has to make dubious appeals to intuition, only that “a lot of it does” in fact do so.  And that is certainly true of contemporary metaphysics.

Which is odd, since it most definitely is nottrue of Aristotelian-Thomistic (A-T) metaphysics, or of a lot of other traditional approaches in metaphysics.  So why on earth do many contemporary philosophers -- whether they are sympathetic to metaphysics as a discipline or suspicious of it -- think that the resort to intuitions is essential to it?
The reason, I think, is that it is commonly supposed these days that the only thing for philosophy to be, if it is not some kind of natural science, is “conceptual analysis” -- identifying the constituent parts of a concept, explicating its relations to other concepts, and so forth.  And “conceptual analysis” is understood as the investigation of the way we happen to “carve up” the world conceptually and linguistically. 
To be sure, for the early modern rationalist, how we so “carve up” the world necessarily corresponds to the world as it is in itself, at least where our most fundamental concepts (substance, causality, etc.) are concerned.  For the Kantian, while these concepts do not correspond to the world as it is in itself, the mind nevertheless has to “carve it up” in just the ways it does.  For early analytic philosophy in its various forms (Russell’s logical atomism, Wittgenstein’s early and later philosophies, logical positivism, and so forth) the analysis of language could determine the boundaries of intelligible discourse, and decisively show certain ideas, arguments, and problems to be meaningless, confused, or in some other way conceptually unsalvageable. 
But contemporary philosophy has abandoned anything as ambitious as all that.  For many contemporary philosophers, “conceptual analysis” can at best reveal the way our minds have been contingently molded to “carve up” the world -- by evolutionary forces, say, or by the surrounding culture, or what have you.  On this view, “conceptual analysis” can reveal the deepest assumptions that underlie the way thought and language “carve up” reality, the ones abandonment of which we would have the most difficult time making sense of or adjusting to, because such abandonment would have such wide-ranging repercussions.  These are the “intuitive” elements of our conceptual scheme. 
Precisely because they are so fundamental and widely shared, the contemporary metaphysician thinks these “intuitions” well worth investigating, and something which can yield powerful premises for philosophical argument.  But because they are also widely taken to be contingent -- perhaps reflecting onlythe molding forces of evolution, history, culture, etc. rather than objective reality -- and thus in principle revisable, critics of contemporary metaphysics understandably question the significance of conceptual analysis.  They judge that any metaphysics worthy of our attention can only be that which is implicit in natural science. 
Now this bifurcation between conceptual analysis and natural science is essentially a riff on Hume’s Fork, which divides respectable propositions into “relations of ideas” and “matters of fact.”  And the two bifurcations face similar problems.  Hume’s Fork itself is neither true by virtue of the relations of the ideas expressed in it, nor by virtue of the empirically ascertainable facts.  Hence it presupposes precisely the sort of third perspective it purportedly rules out.  And the same thing is true of the distinction between conceptual analysis and natural science.  This bifurcation is not itself something arrived at via conceptual analysis, nor (unless we frontload some question-begging premises) is it something confirmed by any findings of natural science.  Hence the very attempt to maintain that philosophy can only be either a kind of natural science or an exercise in conceptual analysis itself presupposes that there is a third kind of thing for it to be.
This third kind of enterprise is what A-T philosophers and other traditional metaphysicians take metaphysics to be.  The failure to see this leads to persistent misunderstanding.  For example, Ladyman and Ross, in their influential book Every Thing Must Go: Metaphysics Naturalized , dismiss contemporary “conceptual analysis”-oriented metaphysics as “neo-scholastic.”  But the epithet is inept and ill-informed, since mere “conceptual analysis” is precisely what A-T and other Scholastic writers claim not to be doing.  Consider also the difficulty (usefully discussed by Gaven Kerr in chapter 3 of his fine book Aquinas’s Way to God: The Proof in De Ente et Essentia ) of comparing Thomist and analytic conceptions of existence, since for the Thomist the issue is irreducibly metaphysical whereas the analytic tradition has, by contrast, tended to approach it from the point of view of semantics and formal logic -- thereby in effect confining discussion, question-beggingly, to the “conceptual analysis” or “relations of ideas” side of the post-Humean divide.  The analytic critic of Thomism thus tends to talk past, rather than directly address, the Thomist’s arguments.
That the very attempt to wedge metaphysics into the Procrustean “either natural science or conceptual analysis” bed presupposes that there is something outside that bed suffices to show that metaphysics need not rest on intuition-cum-conceptual-analysis.  But there are other considerations that show the same thing.  We can see this both from a consideration of the things to which we apply the concepts the conceptual analyst analyzes, and from a consideration of the minds which do the analyzing.  In both cases, the “policies” and “habits” referred to by Millgram presuppose that which is not a product of mere policy or habit.
Consider first, then, Millgram’s examples of something’s being a road, of something’s being the right lane or left lane of the road, and of something’s being the correct lane to drive on.  These are, of course, matters of convention, and if we had deep “intuitions” to the effect that any of these is an objective matter of fact, such intuitions would (as Millgram rightly emphasizes) merely be a product of our being habituated to certain contingent polices we’ve adopted while forgetting that they are just contingent polices.  But these conventions presuppose that which is not mere convention.  That there is ground for us to build roads on is not a matter of convention, the raw materials out of which we build them are not the products of convention, the fact that cars would tend to crash into one another if there were no policy of driving on one side of the road rather than the other is not a matter of convention, and so forth.  And even if we tried to show that one or more of these factors were somehow a matter of convention, we would still inevitably be left with something that was not.  Again, the policies, habits, etc. that ground some of our intuitions always presuppose something which is not a product of mere policy or habit.  (This is one of the implications of Aristotle’s discussion of nature versus art in the Physics -- a distinction which, as I have argued many times, points to the deeper distinction between substantial form versus mere accidental form.)
Now, metaphysics, as A-T and other traditional metaphysicians understand it, is concerned precisely with the investigation of what the world must be like apart from our conventions, habits, and the like.  Of course, natural science is concerned with that too.  But natural science focuses on material reality, on the material reality that happens to exist, and on those aspects of material reality susceptible of prediction and control.  Are there, or could there be, real things that are not material things?  Could there have been a material world radically different from the sort we in fact have?  If there could have been, are there nevertheless features it would have to share in common with any other possible material world?  And are there features of material reality which are not susceptible of mathematical modeling, or of the prediction and control that natural science focuses on?  However one ends up answering such questions, they are not, or at least are not entirely, questions that natural science itself can answer.  That’s what makes them metaphysical.  And say what you will about the prospects for answering them, they are precisely not the study of how we happen intuitively but contingently to “carve up” the world conceptually, because their whole point is to find out what things must be like apart from how we happen contingently and intuitively to carve them up.
Then there are the minds which set the “policies” Millgram speaks of, which form the “habits” in question, which have the “intuitions,” etc.  Since conventions, policies, etc. presuppose the existence and operation of minds having a certain nature, the existence, operation, and natures of minds cannot themselves coherently be said to be the products of convention, policy, etc.  (Crawford Elder develops this point in chapter 1 of Real Natures and Familiar Objects .)  And when we consider not just the contingent details about what our minds happen to be like, but what any possible mind would have to be like in order to be the sort of thing which can form conventions, formulate policies, etc., we are asking a metaphysical rather than merely empirical scientific question.  And once again, whatever one thinks of the prospects for answering it, it is precisely not a question about how we merely “intuitively” happen to carve up reality.
So, those are three reasons why metaphysics need not be, and (properly understood) cannot be, mere “conceptual analysis” and “intuition”-mongering.  First, the very attempt to wedge all inquiry into either natural science or conceptual analysis presupposes that there is a third alternative.  Second, the things we produce by convention, policy, habit, etc. inevitably presuppose some rock bottom level of mind-independent phenomena which are not the product of convention, policy, habit, etc.  Third, the mind itself cannot be the product of convention, policy, habit, etc.  The first point suffices to tell us that there can be such an enterprise as metaphysics in its traditional form.  The second two points tell us what its subject matter is -- viz. the rock bottom features of mental and extra-mental reality, whatever they turn out to be, which both our contingent conceptual practices and even natural science must presuppose. 
For the A-T metaphysician, these features are described by the theory of act and potency, hylemorphism, the doctrine of the four causes, the essence/existence distinction, etc.  Of course, establishing all of that requires detailed argumentation, and of course other traditional schools of metaphysics (Neo-Platonism, idealism, Leibnizian rationalism, etc.) will disagree with it.  But none of this argumentation boils down to a mere appeal to intuition or conceptual analysis, and the evaluation of it cannot be settled by appeal to natural science.  Furthermore, the attempt to wave it all away by stomping one’s foot and insisting that natural science and conceptual analysis are the only two things metaphysics could be, simply, and massively, begs the question.  There just is no rational alternative to engaging the arguments head on. 
A lot more can be said, and is said in Scholastic Metaphysics . 

Fulford on sola scriptura, Part II

Let’s return to Andrew Fulford’s reply at The Calvinist International to my recent post on Feyerabend, empiricism, and sola scriptura.  Recall that the early Jesuit critique of sola scriptura cited by Feyerabend maintains that (a) scripture alone can never tell you what counts as scripture, (b) scripture alone cannot tell you how to interpretscripture, and (c) scripture alone cannot give us a procedure for deriving consequences from scripture, applying it to new circumstances, etc.  In an earlier post I addressed Fulford’s reply to point (a).  Let’s now consider his attempt to rebut the other two points.Elaborating upon point (b) in my original post, I noted that:

If you say that scriptural passage A is to be interpreted in light of scriptural passage B, then how do you know you’ve gotten B itself right?  And why not say instead that B should be interpreted in light of A?  Inevitably you’re going to have to go beyond scripture in order to settle such questions.
In response to this, Fulford says:
The problem with this overall objection… is that it overlooks the fact that texts are intrinsically meaningful, and that people are capable of perceiving the intending [sic] meaning of others when they communicate…  [T]here is no special problem with the interpretation of scripture that does not arise for the interpretation of any human communication, including the ex cathedra pronouncements of a putatively infallible Pope.  If reason can understand the words of such a Pope, there is no reason in principle it could not understand scriptural passage A or B.  There may be particular problems as a result of historical ignorance, but these can be resolved in principle the same way any issue of interpretation for any human text is resolved… [I]nterpreting texts in their natural [historical] context, the rule that “scripture interprets scripture” is entirely reasonable: the books of scripture are the products of authors writing closest in time and culture to other books of scripture.
End quote.  Now, the trouble with Fulford’s remarks here is that they ignore the crucial differences between texts on the one hand and the persons who write and interpret texts on the other -- thereby missing the entire point of the critique of sola scriptura.  Start with the fact that texts are quite obviously not “intrinsically meaningful,” contrary to what Fulford says.  Texts are made up of linguistic symbols, and linguistic symbols are human artifacts.  That the shapes you see on your computer screen as you read this count as linguistic symbols at all is a result of the conventions of English usage.  That they convey the specific meaning they do in this blog post is a result of those conventions together with my intentions in writing the blog post.  Apart from those conventions and intentions, the shapes would be meaningless, mere patterns of light on a screen or (if you printed this post out) patterns of ink on paper.  The linguistic symbols that make up scripture are, of course, like that too.  They bear the meanings they do because of linguistic convention together with the intentions of the authors. 
Fulford would no doubt agree with that much.  He would also evidently insist that we have evidence of a historical sort concerning the conventions and intentions in question, and he is right about that.  Just as someone who knows English and has read a number of other things I’ve written is going to be able to understand much of what I have to say in any particular blog post, so too is anyone familiar with the relevant languages and historical background going to be able to understand much of what he reads in scripture, and in any other historical document for that matter.  No one denies that.  Certainly, critics of sola scriptura are not denying that you can to a considerable extent understand scripture just by virtue of knowing the languages in which it is written, something of the historical and cultural contexts of the events it describes, etc.  They aren’t claiming that without an authoritative institutional Church, scripture would be as unintelligible as (say) Esperanto is to most people.  So, pointing out, as Fulford does, that “context,” “time and culture,” and the like can clarify the meaning of scriptural passages is not really to the point.
What is to the point is that there is, nevertheless, necessarily going to be a degree of indeterminacy in the meaning of any text, considered just by itself, even givenknowledge of linguistic conventions, historical context, etc.  This is in the very nature of texts.  I will explain why this is a problem in principle in a moment, but first let’s notice how great a problem it can be in practice even in the case of an author whose writings are numerous, well-known, and have been the object of scholarly study for centuries.  Consider, to take just one example, that the correct interpretation of Aristotle’s views on the nature of the intellect and the possibility of personal immortality is notoriously controversial and has been for centuries.  Can it be shown on Aristotelian philosophical grounds that the individual human soul survives death?  I certainly think so.  But that question is very different from the question of whether Aristotle himself took that view.  Appealing to Aristotle’s writings on the subject cannot by itself settle this exegetical question, because how to interpret those writings is precisely what is at issue.  In particular, reading Aristotle passage A in light of Aristotle passage B won’t solve the problem, because which passages should determine how the others get read is part of what is in dispute.  Interpreting all of the relevant passages in light of the larger body of Aristotle’s writings, historical and cultural context, etc. hasn’t settled things either.  And the one certain method of determining what Aristotle himself thought -- asking him -- isn’t possible because he’s dead.  Examples of this sort of problem could be multiplied by citing other well-known authors of the past.    
Now, does scripture raise exegetical issues which appeal to scripture by itself cannot settle?  The existence of myriad Protestant denominations and sects which agree on sola scriptura but nevertheless somehow disagree deeply on many matters of biblical interpretation is, I submit, pretty good evidence that it does.
Yet might not sufficient good will, along with sufficient knowledge of a linguistic and historical sort, at least in principle solve the problem?  No, they would not.  The reasons should be obvious to anyone familiar with the various indeterminacy arguments which James Ross once rightly characterized as “among the jewels of analytic philosophy,” and which I have discussed many times (e.g. here, here, and here).  The problem is that material symbols and systems of symbols -- and texts are collections of such symbols -- are, no matter how complex the system in question, inherently indeterminate in their meaning.  There are always in principle various alternative ways to interpret them, alternatives which the symbols themselves cannot adjudicate between.  This (as I and other writers have emphasized) is the deep reason why computationalist and other materialist accounts of thought cannot possibly be right.  Thought can be determinate or unambiguous in its content in a way material symbols and systems of symbols cannot possibly be.  But the system of symbols that makes up a text is no different in this regard from a purported system of symbols encoded in the brain.  By itself it can never be as determinate as the thoughts of the author of the text.
Notice that the claim is not that “anything goes.”  It is not that a text might plausibly be given just any old interpretation.  There may be any number of proposed interpretations which are ruled out.  The point is that the text cannot by itself rule out all alternative interpretations.  Notice also that the claim is not that texts are indeterminate full stop.  The claim is that a text all by itself cannot rule out all the alternatives.  Appeal to something outside the text is necessary.
Nor do we need exotic scenarios like Kripke’s “quus” example in order to make the point (though such examples are certainly relevant).  Consider instead the critique of the symbolic processing approach in artificial intelligence developed by philosophers like Hubert Dreyfus and John Searle.  The approach in question presupposes that intelligence can be embodied entirely in explicit representations and rules, such as the symbols processed by a Turing machine and the algorithms by which they are processed.  And the problem with this is that the interpretation of representations and rules presupposes an intellect which does the interpreting, so that such representations and rules cannot coherently be taken to explain the existence and operation of the intellect. 
Consider even a very simple set of rules, such as those commanding the following series of actions:
1. Walk from the back of the desk to the front.
2. Walk from the front of the desk to the back.
3. Repeat steps 1 and 2.
Almost anybody following these rules will do so by walking around the desk, but there is nothing in the rules that really requires that.  One could follow them instead by stepping up on the desk and walking acrossit.  Now these two interpretations are incompatible, at least insofar as you can’t walk around the desk and across it at the same time -- though one could decide instead to walk around it at first, and then in later applications of the rules to walk across it.  In any event, the rules themselves won’t tell you which of these three interpretations (walking around, walking across, or doing both but at different times) is the right one.
Suppose we tighten up the rules in order to clarify this.  Suppose they instead read “Walk aroundthe desk from the back…” etc.  You might think that this now makes things completely unambiguous.  And perhaps most people who follow these revised rules will proceed, in following them, to walk clockwise around the desk.  But there is really nothing in even the revised rules that requires that.  One could instead walk counterclockwise, or mix things up by walking clockwise sometimes and counterclockwise at other times.  Again, nothing in the rules by themselves determines which of these procedures is correct. 
Nor would revising the rules again in order to get around this problem eliminate all indeterminacy.  Suppose we altered them to read “Walk clockwise around the desk from the back…” etc.  Now everything would be clear and unambiguous, right?  Not from the rules all by themselves.  Should one move around the desk in a circular path?  Or should one trace out an extremely wide oval path?  Should one walk in a shuffling way?  Do a zig zag?   Are hopping and skipping allowed?  When beginning one’s walk from the front to the back, should one first leave the room and then reenter before reaching the back?  Further additions could be made to the rules to settle such questions, but however that is done, it will only leave us with a revised body of rules which will itself be susceptible of yet further possible alternative and incompatible interpretations.
Now, in real life what determines how rules get followed are people -- the people who make the rules and the people who follow them.  You ask the person who made the rules: “Do you want me to do it this way or that way?,” or you just decide yourself to do it one way rather than the other.  You may do so deliberately, or you may do so unconsciously, by virtue of certain habits you picked up in childhood or from the culture around you.   (Both Dreyfus and Searle in their different ways emphasize the aspect of intelligence that is tacit or not fully brought to the level of conscious consideration.)  Either way, it is the fact that people are intelligent that makes them capable of interpreting systems of rules and representations.  Hence it gets things the wrong way around to try to explain intelligence in terms of rules and representations.  It isn’t rules and representations that explain why intelligence exists; rather, it is intelligence that explains why rules and representations exist.
When people focus their attention on computers themselves and don’t dwell on how they got here, computers can seem self-contained.  It can seem that it’s just an intrinsic or built-in fact about them that the symbols they process have such-and-such a meaning and that they are running such-and-such algorithms.  The illusion develops that the computer is somehow doing what it’s doing all by itself, and that’s why it can seem a good model for understanding human intelligence.  But this isan illusion.  In reality, there is no fact of the matter, from the intrinsic physical facts about it alone, concerning what meaning the computer’s symbols have or what algorithms it is running.  It is only because the machine’s designers constructed it a certain way, and its users use it a certain way, that its internal physical processes count as having the significance they do.  The meaning of the symbols and the precise algorithms that it is running are determined by something outside the machine, and it is only by appeal to this externalsource of meaning that questions about the precise significance of the machine’s operations can in principle be settled.  (Cf. my previous posts on Kripke’sand Popper’s and Searle’s critiques of computationalism.)
Texts are like computers in this respect.  It is easy to focus one’s attention on the text itself so that the author, like the computer’s designers, disappears from view and the text can come to seem to have a meaning or significance all on its own, “built in” as it were.  Hence Fulford’s casual remark that “texts are intrinsically meaningful.”  But this is no less an illusion than is the computationalist illusion that there could be such a thing as a machine whose syntax and semantics are intrinsic to it rather than relative to the intentions of the designers and users of the machine.  (Feyerabend compares sola scriptura to classical empiricism.  He could just as well have compared it to the computationalist model of the mind.)
Now, for everyday purposes, it is of course not necessary to advert to the designers’ intentions when using a computer.  You just use the computer and get along well enough.  But when something goes wrong, or there is some ambiguity in how the machine is functioning (“Is it supposed to be doing this?”), the designers’ intentions alone can settle the matter.  Similarly, when reading a text, for the most part we don’t need consciously to bring to mind the fact that the text has a specific author who had such-and-such intentions in writing.  We just read the text, and for the most part we get along well enough.  But when the text is unclear, or seems to be inconsistent in places, the author’s intentions come to the fore, and can alone settle the matter.  And if the author is dead, the matter may well never be settled -- hence the problems in interpreting Aristotle’s De Anima. 
Now, where scripture is concerned, both the Catholic and Protestant sides in the dispute over sola scriptura agree that it has a divine author, who is of course not dead.  But both sides also agree that this divine author works through human instruments.  What they disagree about is whether these human instruments are all dead.  The sola scriptura position is, in effect, that they are all dead.  For it holds that God reveals what we need to know for salvation via scripture alone, and the human authors of scripture are all dead.  The Catholic position, by contrast, is that some of the human instruments in question are dead, but some are not.  For it holds that God reveals what we need to know for salvation in partvia scripture but also in part via an ongoing institutional Church which has divine guidance in interpreting scripture.  And it holds that unless there were such living human instruments, we would be stuck in something like the position we’re stuck in vis-à-vis the interpretation of De Anima-- worse, in fact, since settling the question of how to interpret De Anima is not relevant to salvation, whereas settling the question of how to interpret scripture is relevant to salvation.
You might say, then, that the scenario described by the Catholic position is comparable to a situation in which Aristotle is still alive, and while he doesn’t answer questions about the proper interpretation of De Anima directly, nevertheless does answer them indirectly, by speaking through intermediaries.  The sola scriptura position, by contrast, is comparable to a situation in which Aristotle is still alive, but neither answers questions about De Animadirectly nor speaks through intermediaries.  He just leaves you with the text of De Anima itself and lets its readers quarrel over its proper interpretation interminably.  Worse, it’s like a situation in which Aristotle allowed this and alsobelieved that getting De Anima wrong would lead to serious errors of a theological and moral sort. 
Now, Fulford insinuates that interpreting “the ex cathedra pronouncements of a putatively infallible Pope” is no less problematic than interpreting scripture.  But (with all due respect to Fulford) this is as silly as saying that in understanding De Anima, asking Aristotle himself what it means -- or rather, asking Aristotle’s representative, sent by Aristotle precisely for the purpose of answering questions about how to interpret De Anima-- is no better than just reading the text.  It is as silly as saying that in trying to find out how some computer is supposed to function, asking the technicians who represent the company that manufactured the computer is no better than just examining the computer for yourself.  Of course, what Aristotle or his representative might tell you, or what the computer technician might tell you, might itself have ambiguities of its own or raise further questions.  But precisely because these are literal, living persons, you can literally ask them for further clarification if need be.  You can’t literally ask a text or a computer anything. 
Fulford also says:
[I]f verbal statements or written texts always require further interpretations external to themselves to be intelligible, we would need an infinite series of interpreters to understand any human speech, even that of infallible Popes.
This is like saying that since what the computer technician tells you might raise questions of its own, you need an infinite series of technicians, or that since what Aristotle’s representative tells you might be ambiguous, you need an infinite series of representatives.  In fact, this doesn’t follow at all.  All that follows is that you might have follow-up questions for the same, one technician, or the same one representative.  Of course, the technician or representative in question might die, but as long as there is some new technician or representative to take his place, you can just ask for clarification from that one new technician or representative.  Similarly, you don’t need an infinite series of interpreters to understand the statements of some pope.  You just ask that one, particular pope for clarification, and if he dies you just ask the next particular pope. 
Fulford’s mistake is that he thinks the issue has to do with how many texts there are.  He says there’s one, and he thinks that what the Catholic critic of sola scriptura is saying is that there’s more than one.  And his objection is that any problems that would arise with the one text would arise also with a larger set of texts.  He’s right about that much.  But he’s wrong on two counts.  First, if the Catholic position really did differ from sola scriptura only in the number of texts it posits, that wouldn’t show that sola scriptura is right after all.  Rather, it would show that the Catholic position and sola scriptura are both wrong, and for the same reasons.  But second, the difference between sola scriptura and the Catholic position is not fundamentally about how many texts there are.  Rather, the Catholic position is that it can’t all be just texts in the first place.  Rather, we have to be able to get outside of texts, to persons who have the authority to tell us what the texts mean.
Let’s now turn briefly to point (c) of the Jesuit critique of sola scriptura cited by Feyerabend -- the idea that scripture alone cannot give us a procedure for deriving consequences from scripture, applying it to new circumstances, etc.  Fulford responds that:
[T]he objection relies on a misapprehension of what sola scriptura claims… [I]t never meant that scripture apart from the rational capacities of human beings was somehow to function as an authority in the church; Protestants recognized that individuals had to subjectively understand and appropriate the message of the Bible.
To see what is wrong with this response, consider the theological controversies that have arisen over the centuries concerning the Trinity, the Incarnation, justification, transubstantiation, contraception, divorce and remarriage, Sunday observance, infant baptism, slavery, pacifism, the consistency of scripture with scientific claims, sola scriptura itself, and a host of other issues.  Now, either scripture alone can settle these controversies or it cannot.  If Fulford says that it cannot, then he will thereby make of sola scriptura a vacuous doctrine, since if it cannot answer such questions then it cannot tell us whether it is Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, Coptic Christians, Lutherans, Calvinists, Anglicans, Mennonites, Seventh Day Adventists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons, Unitarian Universalists, or some other group entirely who has got Christianity right. 
Presumably he would not say this, though.  Presumably he would say that scripture alone can settle such issues, and certainly most sola scriptura proponents have thought so, since they tend to regard the holding of certain specific positions on at least many of these issues as a requirement of Christian orthodoxy.  But in that case Fulford will be saying something false, since scripture alone manifestly cannot settle these issues, for opposite positions on all of them have been defended on scriptural grounds. 
Moreover, what even most Protestants regard as the orthodox view on some of these issues was hammered out on grounds that are philosophical, and not merely scriptural.  For instance, it is not merely scripture, but scripture together with considerations about the nature of substance, persons, etc. that leads to the doctrine of the Trinity.  Now, the sola scriptura-affirming Trinitarian might say that you simply cannot make sense of the entirety of what scripture tells us about the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit unless you bring to bear such philosophical considerations.  Hence anyone who wants to do justice to scripture had better be a Trinitarian.  I think that is correct.  But a sola scriptura-affirming anti-Trinitarian might respond that since these philosophical considerations are not themselvesto be found in scripture, the Trinitarian doctrine that presupposes them cannot be binding on Christians or definitive of orthodoxy.  Which of these “scripture alone” affirmers is right?  Scripture alone cannot tell us.
Or consider disputes about how to reconcile scripture with the claims of science.  Should we read Genesis in a way that requires us to conclude that the universe is only a few thousand years old?  Or can it legitimately be read in a way consistent with the universe being billions of years old?  Does scripture teach that the earth does not move, so that it conflicts with a heliocentric view of the solar system?  Or should the relevant passages be read another way?  Should we regard Adam as having been made directly from the dust of the ground, or is there wiggle room here to regard Adam’s body as having been made from it indirectly, God having used as raw material a pre-human ancestor whose own ancestors derived remotely from the dust of the ground?  If Fulford were to say that scripture alone can settle these issues, he would be saying something manifestly false, since there is no passage of scripture that tells us which of the competing ways of reading the passages in question here is the correct one. 
I imagine he would not say that, though.  I imagine he would say instead that we have to look outside scripture itself in order to settle these matters.  But to admit that is to give the game away.  For an enormous amount rides on how these matters are settled.  For one thing, whether scripture is in general reliablerides on how they are settled, and therefore everything else scripture teaches rides on it.  For another thing, how we decide these matters will involve deciding upon general principles of scriptural interpretation, and those principles are bound to have repercussions for other doctrinal questions.  But if it is consistent with sola scriptura to say that the general reliability of scripture, and general principles for interpreting scripture -- matters which in turn affect everythingscripture teaches -- can legitimately come from outside scripture, then sola scriptura once again seems vacuous. 
Then there is the fact that the problem for sola scriptura raised by point (c) is inseparable from the problem raised by point (b).  For the sorts of conclusions we can draw from scripture obviously depend on how we interpret scripture.  The problems with Fulford’s response to (b) thus inevitably leak over into any attempt to respond to (c).
So, I conclude that Fulford’s response to points (b) and (c), like his response to (a) considered in my previous post in this series, fails. 
A final analogy: In the movie Memento, the protagonist Leonard Shelby loses the ability to form new memories after a blow to the head from an attacker who also raped and murdered Shelby’s wife.  Shelby attempts to track down the killer, tattooing clues onto his body so that he won’t forget them, and writing himself notes and taking photographs to remind him of where he lives, what car he drives, who the people he comes into contact with are, and so forth.  The trouble is that his inability to form new memories has also robbed him of the ability properly to understand the meanings of the tattoos, notes, and photos.  Hence he misinterprets what he has written and draws mistaken conclusions from it.  Shelby’s error is supposing that the tattoos, notes, and pictures by themselves will suffice to tell him what he needs to know.  And they do tell him quite a bit.  He is able to infer correctly that the man he is after has the first name “John” and a last name that begins with “G,” that the people in the photographs are people he knows and that the car he sees in one of them is one he has driven, and so forth.  But he nevertheless gets other, crucial things badly wrong -- for example, he continually misinterprets exactly who “John G” is, does not realize that the car in question in fact belongs to someone else, has completely forgotten the true reason one of his notes identifies a certain “John G” as the killer, and so forth.  Moreover, if Shelby thought about it, he would realize that he cannot even be sure that all of the notes and tattoos were really left by his earlier self in the first place.  Maybe someone else wrote some of the notes, or had certain things tattooed on his body while he was drugged or held at gunpoint. 
In short, Shelby is in a situation that mirrors each of the three problems with sola scriptura we’ve been discussing.  All he’s got to go on are his notes and tattoos.  But (a) the notes and tattoos by themselves cannot tell him which notes and tattoos are genuine or indeed whether any of them are, (b) the notes and tattoos themselves cannot tell him how properly to interpret the notes and tattoos, and (c) the notes and tattoos themselves cannot tell him how to derive implications from the notes and tattoos.  And just as sola scriptura advocates disagree radically among themselves about what scripture teaches, so too does Shelby come, at different points in the movie, to radically different conclusions about what his notes and tattoos mean -- at one point thinking a certain person is “John G,” at other points thinking that some totally different person is “John G,” at one point thinking that a certain motel room is his while believing at another point that he occupies a different room, and so forth.
Alas, poor Shelby sees no alternative to his incoherent “sola notes and tattoos” position.  But the Christian does have an alternative to sola scriptura, or so we Catholics maintain.

Fulford on sola scriptura, Part I

At The Calvinist International, Andrew Fulford replies to my recent post on Feyerabend, empiricism, and sola scriptura.  You’ll recall that the early Jesuit critique of sola scriptura cited by Feyerabend maintains that (a) scripture alone can never tell you what counts as scripture, (b) scripture alone cannot tell you how to interpret scripture, and (c) scripture alone cannot give us a procedure for deriving consequences from scripture, applying it to new circumstances, etc.  Fulford says that these objections “essentially rely on a caricature of the teaching,” and offers responses to each point.  Let’s consider them in order.In response to point (a), Fulford cites some arguments made by 17th century Protestant theologian Francis Turretin which, Fulford claims, “[explain] how Christians can rationally come to know that the Bible is divinely authoritative.”  The interested reader is advised to consult Fulford’s post to read in their entirety the passages from Turretin that Fulford quotes. Here I’ll quote what seem to be the most relevant lines.  First, Turretin says:

The Bible proves itself divine, not only authoritatively and in the manner of an artless argument or testimony, when it proclaims itself God-inspired... The Bible also proves itself divine ratiocinatively by an argument artfully made… from the marks which God has impressed upon the Scriptures and which furnish indubitable proof of divinity. For as the works of God exhibit visibly to our eyes by certain marks the incomparable excellence of the artificer himself and as the sun makes himself known by his own light, so he wished in the Bible… to send forth different rays of divinity by which he might make himself known…
[B]efore faith can believe, it must have the divinity of the witness to whom faith is to be given clearly established and certain true marks apprehended in it, otherwise it cannot believe. For where suitable reasons of believing anyone are lacking, the testimony of such a witness cannot be worthy of credence.
And what exactly are these reasons Turretin says make scripture worthy of credence?  Fulford adds:
Turretin provides extensive arguments from historical evidence for the reliability of the apostles and Moses as historical witnesses; this established, when they testify to miraculous confirmation of their message, and then claim to be divinely inspired, they are credible witnesses to this divine confirmation of their claim to inspiration. They thus provide a rational basis for belief in the divine authority of their own writings.
End quote.  The overall argument, then, seems to be this:
1. Historical evidence shows the reliability of the writings of Moses, the apostles, etc. 
2. Among the things which Moses, the apostles, etc. report are miracles.
3. So these miracle reports are reliable.
4. These writings also claim to be divinely inspired, a claim which would be supported if backed by miracles. 
5. So the claim to divine inspiration is reliable.
6. Faith in testimony as divinely inspired is well grounded when supported by evidence of the sort in question.
7. So faith in these writings as divinely inspired is in fact well grounded.
Now, there are grave problems with this considered as a response to point (a) of the Jesuit critique.  First and foremost is that it simply is not really even a prima facie response at all, because it changes the subject.  The subject is the question of exactly which writings are to be counted as part of scripture; what Turretin and Fulford are addressing instead is the different question of what defense can be given of the divine inspiration of certain specific writings typically claimed to be scriptural. 
Hence, suppose we ask questions like: Are what Catholics call the deuteroncanonicals (and Protestants call the Apocrypha) to be counted as part of the Bible?  Should purportedly non-canonical books like the Gospel of Thomas, the Acts of Paul and Thecla, etc. also have been included?  Should purportedly canonical works like Esther, the Epistle of James, and the Apocalypse have been left out?  Is the Quran divinely inspired?  How about the Book of Mormon?
The Turretin-Fulford argument doesn’t answer such questions at all, as is evidenced by the fact that both Protestants and Catholics could accept the specific points Turretin makes in the passages cited and still disagree about the deuterocanonicals.  Mormons could also agree with the Turretin-Fulford argument, as could advocates of books like Thomas and the Acts of Paul and Thecla.  They would just add that there are yet other books that Catholics and Protestants should accept.  Even Muslims could accept the Turretin-Fulford argument with qualifications.  They could say that Moses, the apostles, etc. really were divinely inspired and their words backed by miracles, and that the writings Christians regard as scriptural reflect these facts.  They would just add that those writings include errors mixed in with the historical facts they report, and that the Quran corrects the record where these errors have crept in. 
Suppose there’s a room full of piles of what is purportedly U.S. currency, some of which is genuine and some of which is counterfeit.  Suppose different people take bills from different piles and stuff them into bags.  Each person claims his own bag of cash contains only genuine money and that other people’s bags contain either all counterfeit money or a mixture of genuine and counterfeit money.  Suppose some particular person claims to be able to show that his bag is the one that contains only genuine cash.  He supports his claim by taking a few bills from the bag and arguing that they show certain marks of genuineness.  Obviously he will not thereby have shown what he claims to have shown.  He will at best have proven the genuineness only of those particular bills, and will not have shown either that his own bag contains only genuine bills or that other people’s bags are wholly or partly counterfeit. 
The Turretin-Fulford argument has the same problem.  At best it would show that certain specific writings (such as those associated with Moses and the apostles) are divinely inspired.  It would not tell us whether or not otherbooks are scriptural.  And, crucially, it certainly would not show that scripture itself tells us which books are scriptural.  Yet that was the issue that point (a) of the Jesuit critique of sola scriptura cited by Feyerabend was addressing: Exactly which writings count as scripture, and how could scripture alonetell us?  The Turretin-Fulford argument doesn’t even address this problem with sola scriptura, much less solve it.
So the Turretin-Fulford argument would fail as a response to point (a) even if it sufficed to establish the scriptural status of the specific writings it discusses.  But another problem is that it does not suffice to establish even that.  Suppose a skeptic agreed that the books traditionally associated with Moses and the apostles contained solid evidence about various historical events, including even miraculous events, and about the teachings of the prophets who performed the miracles.  Such a skeptic could still ask, in a way that is perfectly consistent with that acknowledgement: How does that show that those books are themselves divinely inspired, infallible, etc. in their entirety? 
Suppose Christ appeared to me today -- that I was not hallucinating, etc. but that it really happened -- performed certain miracles in my presence, and revealed certain future events to me and certain teachings of a moral and theological nature.  Suppose some of these events would take place decades from now, but that among the things revealed was who would win the 2016 U.S. presidential election, what would be the exact state-by-state tally of electoral votes, etc.  Suppose I recorded all this as an entry in a daily diary I keep as a file on my computer, alongside the other events I recorded for that day.  And suppose that there was solid evidence afterward that all this had happened.  For example, suppose that there were credible witnesses who reported observing Christ’s appearing to me and performing miracles, that the events of the 2016 election turned out exactly as predicted, etc.   Certainly we’d have good evidence in that case that I had really witnessed a divine revelation and certainly we’d have reason to believe that everything Christ said to me was infallible. 
But would this show that all the files on my computer -- the various blog posts, journal articles, book manuscripts, etc. -- are divinely inspired?  Would it show even that just the diary as a whole is divinely inspired?  Indeed, would it show even that the entire single entry for that particular day is divinely inspired (including the events recorded from earlier in that day, which involved me giving such-and-such financial advice to a friend, such-and-such moral advice to one of my children, etc.)?  How exactly would it show any of that?  Indeed, how would it show even that I’d gotten Christ’s words exactly right?  Maybe I recorded the part about the 2016 election correctly, but made certain mistakes when recording what Christ said about the other matters.
By the same token, how would establishing that the writings associated with Moses and the apostles are accurate in their record of such-and-such miraculous events, their record that certain prophets and apostles taught such-and-such, etc. show also that the writings themselves -- as opposed to some of the events and teachings they record -- are in their entiretydivinely inspired and thus scriptural?  Perhaps instead (a skeptic might suggest) they contain accurate information about certain miracles that actually occurred and certain teachings that really were divinely revealed, but in such a way that various errors are mixed in with this otherwise accurate reporting.  Maybe (the skeptic continues) it isn’t really the writings themselves which have divine backing, but rather only certain events and teachings reported by these otherwise flawed documents that have it.
Hence the Turretin-Fulford argument fails even to show that the specific scriptural writings it deals with (Exodus, John’s gospel, etc.) are in their entirety divinely inspired -- let alone showing that every book Fulford and Turretin would regard as scriptural is divinely inspired.  And the argument certainly fails to show that scripture alone suffices to show us that these books really are divinely inspired.
Which brings us to a third problem with the Turretin-Fulford argument.  Suppose the argument could be developed in a way that would get around the first two problems.  How would that show us that scripture alone suffices to tell us what counts as scripture, or that scripture alonesuffices to tell us even that the writings associated with Moses, the apostles, etc. count as scripture?  For the Turretin-Fulford style of argument makes use of historical evidence, criteria for evaluating such evidence, general logical principles, etc. which are not found in scripture itself. 
Now, sola scriptura tells us that scripture alone suffices to tell us what we need to know in matters of faith and morals.  Well, the question of whether a certain book is scriptural is itself certainly a matter of faith and morals.  But the Turretin-Fulford argument, in making use of historical evidence, criteria for evaluating such evidence, general logical principles, etc. -- evidence, criteria, and principles which cannot themselves be found in scripture -- in order to settle this matter, thereby violates sola scriptura in the very act of defending it.  For it uses extra-scriptural information and principles in order to settle a matter of faith and morals.  In other words, it does precisely what the Jesuit point (a) cited by Feyerabend says a defender of sola scriptura implicitly has to do.  So how exactly does the Turretin-Fulford argument constitute even a prima facie answer to point (a), or show that (a) is aimed at a “caricature”?
Notice that I am not denying that the specific writings the Turretin-Fulford argument makes reference to are divinely inspired.  I think they are divinely inspired.  But I think that in arguing for their divine inspiration, it is a mistake to start with scripture itself.  Rather, what comes first in the order of apologetics is an argument for the necessity of an infallible and authoritative institutional Church.  We know that such-and-such purportedly scriptural writings are in fact infallible and authoritative only if we first know that there is an infallible and authoritative institutional Church, and that this Church has herself judged those writings to be infallible and authoritative.  As St. Augustine wrote, “I would not believe the Gospel unless the authority of the Catholic Church moved me.”
Of course, Fulford will disagree with this position, but neither this post nor the previous one are about the reasons for the Catholic position.  What they are about is the problems with sola scriptura, and those problems remain whatever one thinks of the Catholic alternative.   Some readers of my post on Feyerabend responded to the Jesuit criticisms Feyerabend cites by criticizing the Catholic position.  This is fallacious for two reasons.  First, I was not trying to give an exposition and defense of the Catholic position in the first place.  That’s a separate topic.  Second, even if the Catholic position were wrong, that would not show that sola scriptura is correct.  It might only show instead that both positions are false.  So, critics of the points summarized by Feyerabend should try to answer those points, rather than changing the subject by attacking the Catholic view.
Anyway, Fulford does try to answer the Jesuit points.  However, as we have just seen with respect to point (a), he does not do so successfully.  Neither does he succeed in answering points (b) and (c), as we’ll see in a follow-up post.

Feyerabend on empiricism and sola scriptura

In his essay “Classical Empiricism,” available in Problems of Empiricism: Philosophical Papers, Volume 2 , philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend compares the empiricism of the early moderns to the Protestant doctrine of sola scriptura.  He suggests that there are important parallels between them; in particular, he finds them both incoherent, and for the same reasons.  (No, Feyerabend is not doing Catholic apologetics.  He’s critiquing empiricism.)To understand Feyerabend’s comparison, we need to be clear on what “empiricism” is.  (Here and when commenting on sola scriptura I’ll be going a bit beyond what Feyerabend himself says, since some of his remarks are sketchy and merely suggestive.)  In the generic sense, empiricism is of course the view that all knowledge derives from experience.  But there are different ways to interpret that thesis, and the empiricism of Aristotle and Aquinas is by no means the same as that of Locke and Hume.  For the Aristotelian, Feyerabend says, “experience [is] the sum total of what is observed under normal circumstances (bright daylight; senses in good order; undisturbed and alert observer) and what is then described in some ordinary idiom that is understood by all” (p. 35).  It also involves interpreting what is currently perceived in light of “tradition” or “preconceived opinion” (p. 37).  Hence ordinary, everyday statements like “The gunman was wearing a ski mask” or “This apple is stale” -- which presuppose that we already know, from past experience, what a gunman typically looks like, what stale apples taste like, etc. -- would for the Aristotelian provide examples of the sorts of things we know immediately via experience.

But they are decidedly not the sorts of thing empiricism as it developed from Locke to the logical positivists regards as immediately knowable via experience.  Developing as it did in the shadow of Cartesian skepticism, modern empiricism holds that since you might be dreaming or hallucinating the gunman or the apple, what is immediately knowable from experience must instead be something that would remain true even if you were dreaming or hallucinating.  A first suggestion might be that what you know is that “It seems to me that there is a gunman wearing a ski mask” or “It seems to me that I am eating a stale apple.”  But this will not do, because even these statements presuppose all sorts of things which might be doubted. 
For example, they presuppose memory of recent events in light of which what you are experiencing now is best described in terms of a gunman or an apple.  But maybe where you now think you see a gunman, you thought, a few moments ago, that you were looking at your friend playing the part of a gunman in a play you are watching, and you have now forgotten about this context (under the influence of a Cartesian demon, say).  Or maybe a moment ago it was a circus clown that you thought was standing where the gunman now seems to be, and you have forgotten about that context (because of the LSD that someone put in your drink and that has just kicked in).  So why say “It seems to me that there is a gunmanwearing a ski mask,” as opposed to something like “It seems to me there is a person (who may be a gunman, or my friend playing the role of a gunman, or a clown who for some reason suddenly looks like a gunman) wearing a ski mask”?  Indeed, why speak in terms of a person, since maybe instead it was a shoe or a ham sandwich you thought you saw there a moment ago (and then suddenly forgot about it under the influence of LSD, or a Cartesian demon, or whatever)?
So, the modern empiricist analysis of experience proceeds by abstracting out more and more of what common sense and Aristotelian empiricism alike regard as “experience.”  On this view, it isn’t statements like “This apple is stale” that we know immediately from experience, but rather something like “There is currently a reddish patch in the center of my field of vision” or even “I am being appeared to redly,” or some other bizarre sort of proposition, that we know immediately.  And to describe what it is that we know from these basic propositions, we cannot use our ordinary concepts but need to develop a new technical vocabulary and talk of “sense data,” “protocol sentences,” and the like.  Everyday statements like “This apple is stale” have to be somehow derived from or reconstructed out of these purportedly more basic statements -- as do all the propositions of science and whatever else we can truly be said to know.
Notoriously, attempts to reconstruct everyday knowledge and scientific knowledge from such purportedly more basic statements all fail.  Not only could modern empiricists not derive everyday and scientific statements from the purportedly more basic ones, they couldn’t agree on what the basic ones were supposed to be.  For the Aristotelian -- and for other critics of modern empiricism like the later Wittgenstein -- this is exactly what we should expect, for the whole project is incoherent.  Statements like “There is currently a reddish patch in the center of my field of vision” are not more basic than statements like “This apple is stale,” but less basic.  The notion of a reddish patch in the center of one’s field of vision (to stick with that example) is parasitic on the notion of everyday experience of objects like apples, an abstraction from such ordinary experiences.  We talk of reddish patches and the like precisely to describe experiences that are abnormal, cases where the ordinary course of experience has in some way broken down.
In effect, the modern empiricist takes the most aberrant possible cases of “experience,” tries to find out what they have in common with all other cases, and makes of that lowest common denominator the baseline from which to reconstruct all experience.  It’s like a psychologist taking the thought processes of the most insane person he can find, teasing out whatever it is those thought processes might have in common with those of all other people, and then attempting to reconstruct a notion of “rationality” in terms of that.  The whole procedure is perverse, a matter of letting the tail -- indeed, a diseased, gangrenous tail -- wag the dog.  The correct procedure in the case of rationality is, of course, to start with paradigmatically rational thought processes and evaluate the various kinds of irrationality in light of those.  And the correct procedure where experience is concerned is to take the ordinary cases as paradigmatic and evaluate the aberrant cases in terms of those, rather than the other way around. 
Now, just as you are never going to derive everything that is constitutive of rationality merely from an analysis of the thought processes of which the most insane person is capable, neither are you ever going to derive everything that is constitutive of ordinary experience merely from the desiccated ingredients -- color patches in fields of vision, etc. -- to which the modern empiricist tends to confine himself.  There is simply far more to ordinary experience than that, and if you refuse to allow in anything but what can be constructed from the desiccated bits, you will inevitably undermine the very notion of empirical knowledge and end up in total skepticism (as Hume does).  And if you don’t end up in total skepticism, it is because you will surreptitiously be smuggling in elements to which you are not entitled given a modern empiricist conception of “experience.”
Thus, though hardly a philosophical traditionalist, Feyerabend judges that:
Aristotelian empiricism, as a matter of fact, is the only empiricism that is both clear -- one knows what kind of thing experience is supposed to be -- and rational -- one can give reasons why experience is stable and why it serves so well as a foundation of knowledge.
For example, one can say that experience is stable because human nature (under normal conditions) is stable. Even a slave perceives the world as his master does.  Or one can say that experience is trustworthy because normal man (man without instruments to becloud his senses and special doctrines to becloud his mind) and the universe are adapted to each other; they are in harmony.
This rational context which enables us to understand the Aristotelian doctrine and which also provides a starting point of discussion is eliminated by the ‘enlightenment’ of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
…It is characteristic of this enlightenment that it constantly mentions new and undiluted foundations of knowledge… while at the same time making it impossible ever to identify these foundations and to build on them. (p. 35)
Feyerabend’s own main interest is not in what modern philosophersmade of empiricism, though, but what early modern scientists like Newton made of it.  And he argues that, like any modern empiricism that does not dissolve into skepticism, the empiricist scruples of scientists like Newton were applied selectively and inconsistently. 
But what does this have to do with sola scriptura?  The idea is this.  Summarizing an early Jesuit critique of the Protestant doctrine, Feyerabend notes that (a) scripture alone can never tell you what counts as scripture, (b) scripture alone cannot tell you how to interpretscripture, and (c) scripture alone cannot give us a procedure for deriving consequences from scripture, applying it to new circumstances, and the like.  Let’s elaborate on each and note the parallels with modern empiricism.
First, there is no passage in any book regarded as scriptural that tells you: “Here is a list of the books which constitute scripture.”  And even if there were, how would we know that that passage is really part of scripture?  For the Catholic, the problem doesn’t arise, because scripture is not the only authoritative source of revealed theological knowledge in the first place.  It is rather part of a larger body of authoritative doctrine, which includes tradition and, ultimately, the decrees of an institutional, magisterial Church. 
This larger context -- tradition and Magisterium -- is analogous to the larger context within which both common sense and Aristotelianism understand “experience.”  Experience, for common sense and for the Aristotelian, includes not just sense data -- color patches, tactile impressions, etc. -- but also the rich conceptual content in terms of which we ordinarily describe experience, the immediate memories that provide context for present experience, and so forth.  Just as modern empiricism abstracts all this away and leaves us with desiccated sense contents as what is purportedly just “given,” so too does sola scriptura abstract away tradition and Magisterium and present (what it claims to be) scripture as if it were just given.  And just as the resulting experiential “given” is too thin to tell us anything -- including what counts as “given” -- so too is scripture divorced from its larger context unable to tell us even what counts as scripture.  The modern empiricist inevitably, and inconsistently, surreptitiously appeals to something beyond (what he claims to be) experience in order to tell us what counts as “experience.”  And the sola scriptura advocate inevitably, and inconsistently, surreptitiously appeals to something beyond scripture in order to tell us what scripture is.
Second, even if what counts as scripture could be settled, there is still the question of how to interpret it.  Nor is it any good to claim that scripture itself interprets scripture.  If you say that scriptural passage A is to be interpreted in light of scriptural passage B, then how do you know you’ve gotten B itself right?  And why not say instead that B should be interpreted in light of A?  Inevitably you’re going to have to go beyond scripture in order to settle such questions.  Similarly, even if the modern empiricist can settle the question of which contents count as “experience” -- again, color patches, tactile impressions, or whatever -- there is still the question of what significance to attach to these contents.  Should we interpret them as properties of externally existing physical objects?  Should we interpret them instead in a phenomenalist way?  Is there some “natural” set of relations they bear to one another, or are all the ways we might relate them sheer constructs of the human mind?  However we answer such questions, we will be going beyond anything “experience” itself, as the modern empiricist construes it, could tell us.
Third, even if you can settle the questions of what counts as scripture and of what each scriptural passage means, scripture itself cannot tell you how to infer anything from scripture.  For example, when applying scriptural principles to scientific issues and practical problems, which background empirical, historical, and philosophical assumptions about the world should we employ?   In drawing inferences, should we use a traditional Aristotelian system of logic, or a modern Fregean one?  Which system of modal logic should we use?  What should we think about quantum logic, free logic and other such exotica?  Scripture itself obviously offers no answers to such questions.  Again, in drawing inferences from scripture we will be going beyond anything scripture itself says.  Similarly, “experience” as the modern empiricist construes it tells us nothing about how we are to infer anything from experience, so that in doing so we will thereby be going beyond experience.
Hence, just as Feyerabend thinks Aristotelian empiricism superior to the modern form, so too, on the question of how to understand scripture, he remarks: “We see how much more reasonable and human the Roman position has been” (p. 37).  But as I have said, he is not doing Catholic apologetics, but philosophy of science.  His point is that since sola scriptura is problematic, so is the classical empiricism in terms of which modern science was for so long interpreted.  Clearly, though, the sword cuts both ways.  If the parallels are as Feyerabend sees them, someone who already thinks sola scriptura problematic but is sympathetic to modern empiricism should re-think the latter.  (Cheekily, Feyerabend characterizes Baconian empiricism as “the second great fundamentalist doctrine of the seventeenth century” (p. 37))  But someone who is sympathetic to sola scriptura but already thinks that modern empiricism is problematic should re-think the former. 
Why, if these views are so clearly self-undermining, do their partisans not see this?  In answering this question, Feyerabend devotes much of his article to a discussion of the details of the history of the debate over Newton’s theory of color.  His aim is to provide an illustration of how the purported “success” of the empiricist interpretation of science -- which might seem to confirm that interpretation, despite its conceptual problems -- involves selective and inconsistent application of empiricist scruples, question-begging assumptions, ad hoc hypotheses, and so forth.  And once again he sees parallels with sola scriptura.  In both instances, Feyerabend thinks, partisans of the doctrines in question claim “success” by focusing their attention on cases they think confirm the “rule of faith” while dismissing problematic cases as relatively insignificant puzzles raised by heretics and other oddballs.  Though question-begging, this procedure seems reasonable to them because they are surrounded by a “community… which is already committed to a certain doctrine” (p. 38) and which thereby reinforces their perception that the doctrine is the one that is accepted by all reasonable people.  These communities inculcate a “party line” (p. 39) which determines how one perceives the weight of various objections, the significance of the relevant pieces of evidence, etc.  Hence the doctrines in question -- classical empiricism and sola scriptura -- “although logically vacuous, [are] by no means psychologically vacuous” (p. 38). 
(I’ve noted before -- for example, during the debate over Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos-- how contemporary appeals to the “success” of science as an argument for naturalism or scientism are similarly question-begging, but also have similarly powerful psychological support via the kind of groupthink Feyerabend is criticizing.)
Now, a critic might ask: Wouldn’t the Jesuit critique of sola scriptura apply to the Catholic position as well?  And wouldn’t Feyerabend’s proposed application of it to classical empiricism apply also to the Aristotelian conception of experience?  Indeed, wouldn’t this style of criticism undermine anyproposed epistemological criteria, leading to a radical skepticism?  No, no, and no.  
Note first that there is no “sola” prefixed to the Catholic and Aristotelian positions, nor to many other possible epistemological positions.  Sola scriptura and early modern empiricism were both self-consciously revolutionary doctrines, intended decisively to rein in what their proponents thought to be epistemological excesses.  Hence they were formulated precisely so as to lay down an unambiguous line the crossing of which is strictly forbidden, thereby to take down in one fell swoop enormous bodies of doctrine (Catholic theology in the one case, Scholastic and rationalist metaphysics in the other).  They were, you might say, “weaponized” theses from the start.  That isn’t what is going on with positions like the Catholic one and the Aristotelian one.  To be sure, both clearly rule many things out, but neither was formulated with such polemical intent, and thus neither takes the form of a crisp and simple thesis that might lend itself to a charge of self-refutation -- of a weapon which might be wrestled from the wielder’s hand and immediately aimed back at him.  They aren’t trying to boil everything down to some tidy epistemological thesis which might be deployed as a cudgel against opponents, but rather trying precisely to capture the complexity of our epistemological situation, including the complexity inherent in appeals to revelation or experience.  Thus, if someone is going to accuse either position of somehow undermining itself, it will take considerable work to show exactly how it does so.
For another thing, there is a crucial feature of the sola scriptura and early modern empiricist positions that makes them open to the Jesuit/Feyerabend attack, but which the Catholic and Aristotelian positions lack -- namely, commitment to a “myth of the given,” as it has come to be called in discussions of empiricism.  In the case of early modern empiricism, the myth in question is the supposition that there is some basic level of sensory experiences whose significance is somehow built-in and graspable apart from any wider conceptual and epistemological context (as opposed to being intelligible only in light of a body of theory, or a tradition, or the practices of a linguistic community, or what have you).  Aristotelian epistemology not only does not commit itself to such a “given,” it denies that there is one.  In the case of sola scriptura, the myth is the supposition that there is a text whose exact contents and meaning are somehow evident from the text itself and thus knowable apart from any wider conceptual and epistemological context (as opposed to being intelligible only in light of a larger tradition of which the text is itself a part, or an authoritative interpreter, or what have you).  The Catholic position not only does not commit itself to such a scriptural “given,” it denies that there is one.
Now, the reason sola scriptura and early modern empiricism get themselves into trouble is that they purportedly limit themselves to the deliverances of a “given,” but where the existence of the purported “given” in question and the imperative to limit ourselves to it are not themselves knowable from the “given.”  This entails a kind of self-refutation to which doctrines that do not posit such a “given” in the first place are not subject.
Bas van Fraassen, commenting on Feyerabend in his article “Sola Experientia? Feyerabend’s Refutation of Classical Empiricism” (available in John Preston, Gonzalo Munévar, and David Lamb, eds., The Worst Enemy of Science? Essays in Memory of Paul Feyerabend ), writes:
[T]he Jesuit argument does not lead to skepticism but only to a rejection of any position that posits a foundation representable as a text.  For we cannot draw on a text in any way without relying on something else, if only on our own language.  This is true equally whether we regard the text as being in our own language or as translated into our language.  But what we rely on is not itself representable as a text or body of information, so the same questions do not arise. (p. 33, emphasis added)
If either the Catholic position or the Aristotelian one “posit[ed] a foundation representable as a text,” then they would be open to the Jesuit/Feyerabend objection.  But that is precisely what they do not do.  The Aristotelian epistemological view does not conceive of “experience” in terms of a sensory “given.”  And the Catholic position does not merelyposit a larger text or set of texts (one that would add the deuterocanonicals, statements found in the Church Fathers, decrees of various councils, etc.).  The trouble with texts is that you can never ask them what exactly they include, or what they mean, or how they are to be applied.  But you canask such questions of an authoritative interpreter who stands outside the texts.  And such an interpreter -- in the form of an institutional Church -- is exactly what the Catholic position posits.
Anyway, I imagine Feyerabend might have sympathized with Ralph McInerny’s quip that “modern philosophy is the Reformation carried on by other means.”

Aristotle’s four causes versus pantheism

For the Platonist, the essences or natures of the things of our experience are not in the things themselves, but exist in the Platonic “third realm.”  The essence or nature of a tree, for example, is not to be looked for in the tree itself, but in the Form of Tree; the essence of a man is not to be looked for in any human being but rather in the Form of Man; and so forth.  Now, if the essence of being a tree (treeness, if you will) is not to be found in a tree, nor the essence of being a man (humanness) in a man, then it is hard to see how what we ordinarily call a tree really exists as a tree, or how what we call a man really exists as a man.  Indeed, the trees and men we see are said by Plato merely imperfectly to “resemble” something else, namely the Forms.  So, what we call a tree seems at the end of the day to be no more genuinely tree-like than a statue or mirror image of a tree is; what we call a man seems no more genuinely human than a statue or mirror image of a man is; and so forth.The implication is that trees, men, and the like are not true substances.  Only the Forms are true substances.  The world of experience is insubstantial, Heraclitean, a realm of confused reflections and shadows of the true, Platonic world.  When we add to this the Neo-Platonic/Augustinian thesis that the Forms are really just ideas in the divine intellect, then that divine intellect becomes the true substance.  And the insubstantial world of our experience becomes a confused reflection or shadow of God.  There is a thin line between such a view and pantheism.

Avoiding such a result requires putting treenessback into trees, humanness back into men, and in general the forms or essences of things back into the things themselves.  It requires, in other words, an Aristotelian rather than Platonic conception of form -- form as formal cause, and in particular as substantial form, an immanent or “built in” principle rather than an extrinsic one.  Removing formal cause out of the world and putting it elsewhere removes substance out of the world and relocates it elsewhere. 
I’ve discussed many times (e.g. here) how a similar result follows when efficient cause is entirely removed from the world and relocated in God, as in occasionalism.  Since agere sequitur esse (“action follows being” or “activity follows existence”), if nothing in the world of our experience really does anything and God does everything, then nothing in the world really has any being, and only God has it.  What we think of as the world is really just God in action.  Again, pantheism.
I’ve also discussed many times (e.g. here) how removing final cause from the world and relocating it entirely in God -- as Paley-style design arguments essentially do -- has the same effect.  For efficient cause (the Aristotelian-Thomistic metaphysician argues) presupposes final cause.  Remove the latter and you thereby remove the former.  And if you relocate them in God you’re implicitly back in an occasionalist position, with pantheism as the sequel -- whether or not you actually draw the inferences.  (For further discussion of final causality, efficient causality, and occasionalism, see my essays “Between Aristotle and William Paley: Aquinas’s Fifth Way” and “Natural Theology Must Be Grounded in the Philosophy of Nature, Not in Natural Science, “ both available in Neo-Scholastic Essays .) 
So, avoiding occasionalism and thus pantheism also requires affirmation of immanent causal power and immanent teleology -- again, Aristotelian efficient and final causes.
Entirely removing material cause from the world is the most obvious road to pantheism.  The material cause of a thing is, to put it crudely, what it’s made of.  When you say, as Spinoza and other pantheists do, that the things of our experience are really modes of God, you are in effect making God their material cause.  Thus, if instead you say that things have a material cause that is distinct from God and internal to the things themselves, you are thereby rejecting pantheism.
To do that, though, you need (once again) to affirm the other three Aristotelian causes too.  Matter without substantial form is pure potentiality, and thus in no way actual.  So, for things really to have a material cause immanent to them, they also need an Aristotelian formal cause.  They need, as well, immanent teleology or finality, since a potentiality (and thus matter) is always a potentiality forsome outcome or range of outcomes (an extremely wide one in the case of prime matter or pure potentiality for reception of form).  And they need also immanent efficient causal power, since (again) agere sequitur esse, so that a material thing that could do nothing would benothing.
The bottom line is that the Aristotelian doctrine of the four causes is essential to avoiding pantheism and views which tend to approximate pantheism (such as Gnosticism). 
Why is it important to avoid such views?  Well, for one thing, they’re false.  The arguments that show that God exists also show (we Aristotelian-Scholastic types claim) that he is utterly distinct from the world.  And there are theological dangers in blurring this distinction.  Such blurring tends, naturally, either to divinize the world or to secularize God.  It divinizes the world to the extent that the blurring leads one to ascribe divine attributes to the world (e.g. ultimacy, holiness, perfect goodness, etc.).  It secularizes God to the extent that it leads one to ascribe the world’s characteristics to God (e.g. changeability, temporality, composition of parts as opposed to simplicity).  The proximate implication of both tendencies is idolatry; their remote implication is atheism. 
Idolatry results either when one directs toward the world attitudes appropriately directed only toward God (as in the nature worship characteristic of extreme environmentalism), or when one’s conception of God is so deficient that one essentially makes of God a creature (as in theological views that attribute to the divine nature a material body, or changeability, or metaphysical parts, or ignorance of future events).  (As I’ve argued before, some conceptions of God can be so deficient that even the believer who uses the language of classical theism may in fact be directing his worship toward something other than God.) 
One way atheism can result is when the pantheistic “collapse” of God into the world goes so far that the characteristically divine elements of the picture drop out.  If it is really the world that is the ultimate reality anyway, then why bother with the “God” stuff?  It’s simpler just to speak of the world and leave it at that.  Another way atheism can result is when God ends up seeming so creature-like that he ceases to seem God-like.  If God is changeable, can learn things like we do, is made up of parts, etc., then he’s really different from us only in degree.  He’s like a wizard, or an extraterrestrial, or a superhero, or a ghost or other spirit.  And in that case he’s really just another part of the natural world broadly construed -- not really God at all, as traditionally understood -- and the question whether he exists is no more relevant to the truth of naturalism than is the question whether wizards or extraterrestrials exist.  (As I’ve argued before, atheism can be a reasonable response to anthropomorphic and otherwise vulgarized conceptions of God.) 
Given their theological dangers, then, it is no surprise that the Catholic Church condemns pantheism and related doctrines as heretical.  There are also moral dangers.  Recall the Scholastic doctrine that being is convertible with goodness.  They are really the same thing considered from different points of view.  (See my essay “Being, the Good, and the Guise of the Good,” also available in Neo-Scholastic Essays.)  A view which denies the reality of some aspect of the world of our experience is thus bound to deny also its goodness. 
To be sure, and as I’ve indicated, if your emphasis is on the theme that the material world is really God, then you are bound to exaggerate the goodness of the material world, to the point of idolatry.  However, if your emphasis is instead on the theme that the material world per se is unreal, then you are bound to minimize or even deny the goodness of the material world.  (As I’ve noted before, views which collapse distinctions tend to be like this -- they can be taken in radically divergent directions.)  Now, denigration of the material world is morally disastrous, since it is untrue to human nature.  Notoriously, it tends to lead to excess either in the direction of rigorism or in the direction of laxity.  For if matter, and thus the body, is unreal, then you might conclude that all indulgence of bodily appetites is gravely evil, since it locks you into unreality; but you might also conclude that all such indulgence is morally trivial, since what happens in the body -- which is unreal -- cannot affect the real you.
So, the implications of getting things wrong in metaphysics can be very far-reaching indeed, contra those fideists, nouvelle theologietypes and other opponents of Scholasticism who dismiss such concerns as just so much hair-splitting.  As usual, the Scholastics knew what they were doing.  And as usual, their critics do not.

Caught in the net

Some of the regular readers and commenters at this blog have started up a Classical Theism, Philosophy, and Religion discussion forum.  Check it out.
Philosopher Stephen Mumford brings his Arts Matters blog to an end with a post on why he is pro-science and anti-scientism.  Then he inaugurates his new blog at Philosophers Magazine with a post on a new and improved Cogito argument for the reality of causation.
Speaking of which: At Aeon, Mathias Frisch discusses the debate over causation and physics.
The Guardian asks: Is Richard Dawkins destroying his reputation?  And at Scientific American, John Horgan says that biologist Jerry Coyne’s new book “goes too far” in denouncing religion.More Catholics defend capital punishment: Moral theologian Fr. Thomas Petri, O.P. is interviewed by Catholic News Agency; and Matthew Schmitz argues, at National Review, that the death penalty is just and merciful.

New paper from Fred Freddoso: “Actus and Potentia: From Philosophy of Nature to Metaphysics.”
David Oderberg’s Philosophical Investigationspaper “All for the Good” is now available online.  So is his American Philosophical Quarterly paper “Being and Goodness.”
And a new paper from Tuomas Tahko in Mind: “Natural Kind Essentialism Revisited.”
At Times Higher Education, Richard Smith argues that peer review is based on faith rather than evidence.
John Searle’s new book on perception is reviewed in the Los Angeles Review of Books.
They don’t make public intellectuals like they used to.  P. J. O’Rourke on William F. Buckley, Jr. and Norman Mailer.
At Thomistica.net, Steven A. Long on the Supreme Court and “same-sex marriage.”  Fr. James Schall on the same subject at Catholic World Report.  And Ryan Anderson asks “What next?” in a new book. 
At The New Criterion, Anthony Daniels reflects on To Kill a Mockingbird.
Is there a crisis at the edge of physics?  Physicists Adam Frank and Marcelo Gleiser opine at The New York Times.
On the pope’s new encyclical: Fr. George Rutler at Crisis, Fr. James Schall at Catholic World Report, and William M. Briggs at The Stream.
Siris on Nigel Warburton’s list of the five greatest women philosophers.  (As you’ll see, Warburton is a moron.  But you knew that already.) 
Philosopher Mark Anderson on Moby Dick as philosophy . 

Marriage and The Matrix

Suppose a bizarre skeptic seriously proposed -- not as a joke, not as dorm room bull session fodder, but seriously -- that you, he, and everyone else were part of a computer-generated virtual reality like the one featured in the science-fiction movie The Matrix.  Suppose he easily shot down the arguments you initially thought sufficient to refute him.  He might point out, for instance, that your appeals to what we know from common sense and science have no force, since they are (he insists) just part of the Matrix-generated illusion.  Suppose many of your friends were so impressed by this skeptic’s ability to defend his strange views -- and so unimpressed by your increasingly flustered responses -- that they came around to his side.  Suppose they got annoyed with you for not doing the same, and started to question your rationality and even your decency.  Your adherence to commonsense realism in the face of the skeptic’s arguments is, they say, just irrational prejudice.No doubt you would think the world had gone mad, and you’d be right.  But you would still find it difficult to come up with arguments that would convince the skeptic and his followers.  The reason is not that their arguments are rationally and evidentially superior to yours, but on the contrary because they are so subversive of all rationality and evidence -- indeed, far more subversive than the skeptic and his followers themselves realize -- that you’d have trouble getting your bearings, and getting the skeptics to see that they had lost theirs.  If the skeptic were correct, not even his own arguments would be any good -- their apparent soundness could be just another illusion generated by the Matrix, making the whole position self-undermining.  Nor could he justifiably complain about your refusing to agree with him, nor take any delight in your friends’ agreement, since for all he knew both you and they might be Matrix-generated fictions anyway.

So, the skeptic’s position is ultimately incoherent.  But rhetorically he has an advantage.  With every move you try to make, he can simply refuse to concede the assumptions you need in order to make it, leaving you constantly scrambling to find new footing.  He will in the process be undermining his own position too, because his skepticism is so radical it takes down everything, including what he needs in order to make his position intelligible.  But it will be harder to see this at first, because he is playing offense and you are playing defense.  It falsely seems that you are the one making all the controversial assumptions whereas he is assuming nothing.  Hence, while your position is in fact rationally superior, it is the skeptic’s position that will, perversely, appear to be rationally superior.  People bizarrely give him the benefit of the doubt and put the burden of proof on you.
This, I submit, is the situation defenders of traditional sexual morality are in vis-à-vis the proponents of “same-sex marriage.”  The liberal position is a kind of radical skepticism, a calling into question of something that has always been part of common sense, viz. that marriage is inherently heterosexual.  Like belief in the reality of the external world -- or in the reality of the past, or the reality of other minds, or the reality of change, or any other part of common sense that philosophical skeptics have challenged -- what makes the claim in question hard to justify is not that it is unreasonable, but, on the contrary, that it has always been regarded as a paradigm of reasonableness.  Belief in the external world (or the past, or other minds, or change, etc.) has always been regarded as partially constitutive of rationality.  Hence, when some philosophical skeptic challenges it precisely in the name of rationality, the average person doesn’t know what to make of the challenge.  Disoriented, he responds with arguments that seem superficial, question-begging, dogmatic, or otherwise unimpressive.  Similarly, heterosexuality has always been regarded as constitutive of marriage.  Hence, when someone proposes that there can be such a thing as same-sex marriage, the average person is, in this case too, disoriented, and responds with arguments that appear similarly unimpressive.
Like the skeptic about the external world (or the past, or other minds, or change, etc.) the “same-sex marriage” advocate typically says things he has no right to say consistent with his skeptical arguments.  For example, if “same-sex marriage” is possible, why not incestuous marriage, or group marriage, or marriage to an animal, or marriage to a robot, or marriage to oneself?  A more radical application of the “same-sex marriage” advocate’s key moves can always be deployed by a yet more radical skeptic in order to defend these proposals.  Yet “same-sex marriage” advocates typically deny that they favor such proposals.  If appeal to the natural ends or proper functions of our faculties has no moral significance, then why should anyone care about whether anyone’s arguments -- including arguments either for or against “same-sex marriage” -- are any good?  The “same-sex marriage” advocate can hardly respond “But finding and endorsing sound arguments is what reason is for!”, since he claims that what our natural faculties and organs are naturally foris irrelevant to how we might legitimately choose to use them.  Indeed, he typically denies that our faculties and organs, or anything else for that matter, are really for anything.  Teleology, he claims, is an illusion.  But then it is an illusion that reason itself is really for anything, including arriving at truth.  In which case the “same-sex marriage” advocate has no business criticizing others for giving “bigoted” or otherwise bad arguments.  (Why shouldn’t someone give bigoted arguments if reason does not have truth as its natural end?  What if someone is just born with an orientation toward giving bigoted arguments?)  If the “same-sex marriage” advocate appeals to current Western majority opinion vis-à-vis homosexuality as a ground for his condemnation of what he labels “bigotry,” then where does he get off criticizing past Western majority opinion vis-à-vis homosexuality, or current non-Western moral opinion vis-à-vis homosexuality?   Etc. etc.
So, the “same-sex marriage” advocate’s position is ultimately incoherent.  Pushed through consistently, it takes down everything, including itself.  But rhetorically it has the same advantages as Matrix-style skepticism.  The “same-sex marriage” advocate is playing offense, and only calling things into doubt -- albeit selectively and inconsistently -- rather than putting forward any explicit positive position of his own, so that it falsely seemsthat it is only his opponent who is making controversial assumptions. 
Now, no one thinks the average person’s inability to give an impressive response to skepticism about the external world (or about the reality of the past, or other minds, etc.) makes it irrational for him to reject such skepticism.  And as it happens, even most highly educated people have difficulty adequately responding to external world skepticism.  If you ask the average natural scientist, or indeed even the average philosophy professor, to explain to you how to refute Cartesian skepticism, you’re not likely to get an answer that a clever philosopher couldn’t poke many holes in.  You almost have to be a philosopher who specializes in the analysis of radical philosophical skepticism really to get at the heart of what is wrong with it.  The reason is that such skepticism goes so deep in its challenge to our everyday understanding of notions like rationality, perception, reality, etc. that only someone who has thought long and carefully about those very notions is going to be able to understand and respond to the challenge.  The irony is that it turns out, then, that very few people can give a solid, rigorous philosophical defense of what everyone really knows to be true.  But it hardly follows that the commonsense belief in the external world can be rationally held only by those few people.
The same thing is true of the average person’s inability to give an impressive response to the “same-sex marriage” advocate’s challenge.  It is completely unsurprising that this should be the case, just as it is unsurprising that the average person lacks a powerful response to the Matrix-style skeptic.  In fact, as with commonsense realism about the external world, so too with traditional sexual morality, in the nature of the case relatively few people -- basically, traditional natural law theorists -- are going to be able to set out the complete philosophical defense of what the average person has, traditionally, believed.  But it doesn’t follow that the average person can’t be rational in affirming traditional sexual morality.  (For an exposition and defense of the traditional natural law approach, see “In Defense of the Perverted Faculty Argument,” in Neo-Scholastic Essays .) 
Indeed, the parallel with the Matrix scenario is even closer than what I’ve said so far suggests, for the implications of “same-sex marriage” are very radically skeptical.  The reason is this: We cannot make sense of the world’s being intelligible at all, or of the human intellect’s ability to understand it, unless we affirm a classical essentialist and teleological metaphysics.  But applying that metaphysics to the study of human nature entails a classical natural law understanding of ethics.  And that understanding of ethics in turn yields, among other things, a traditional account of sexual morality that rules out “same-sex marriage” in principle.  Hence, to defend “same-sex marriage” you have to reject natural law, which in turn requires rejecting a classical essentialist and teleological metaphysics, which in turn undermines the possibility of making intelligible either the world or the mind’s ability to understand it.  (Needles to say, these are large claims, but I’ve defended them all at length in various places.  For interested readers, the best place to start is, again, with the Neo-Scholastic Essays article.) 
Obviously, though, the radically skeptical implications are less direct in the case of “same-sex marriage” than they are in the Matrix scenario, which is why most people don’t see them.  And there is another difference.  There are lots of people who believe in “same-sex marriage,” but very few people who seriously entertain the Matrix hypothesis.  But imagine there was some kind of intense sensory pleasure associated with pretending that you were in the Matrix.  Suppose also that some people just had, for whatever reason -- environmental influences, heredity, or whatever -- a deep-seated tendency to take pleasure in the idea that they were living in a Matrix-style reality.  Then, I submit, lots of people would insist that we take the Matrix scenario seriously and some would even accuse those who scornfully rejected the idea of being insensitive bigots.  (Compare the points made in a recent post in which I discussed the special kind of irrationality people are prone to where sex is concerned, due to the intense pleasure associated with it.)
So, let’s add to my original scenario this further supposition -- that you are not only surrounded by people who take the Matrix theory seriously and scornfully dismiss your arguments against it, but some of them have a deep-seated tendency to take intense sensory pleasure in the idea that they live in the Matrix.  That, I submit, is the situation defenders of traditional sexual morality are in vis-à-vis the proponents of “same-sex marriage.”   Needless to say, it’s a pretty bad situation to be in.
But it’s actually worse even than that.  For suppose our imagined Matrix skeptic and his followers succeeded in intimidating a number of corporations into endorsing and funding their campaign to get the Matrix theory widely accepted, to propagandize for it in movies and television shows, etc.  Suppose mobs of Matrix theorists occasionally threatened to boycott or even burn down bakeries, restaurants, etc. which refused to cater the meetings of Matrix theorists.  Suppose they stopped even listening to the defenders of commonsense realism, but just shouted “Bigot!  Bigot!  Bigot!” in response to any expression of disagreement.  Suppose the Supreme Court of the United States declared that agreement with the Matrix theory is required by the Constitution, and opined that adherence to commonsense realism stems from an irrational animus against Matrix theorists. 
In fact, the current position of opponents of “same-sex marriage” is worse even than that.  Consider once again your situation as you try to reason with Matrix theorists and rebut their increasingly aggressive attempts to impose their doctrine via economic and political force.  Suppose that as you look around, you notice that some of your allies are starting to slink away from the field of battle.  One of them says: “Well, you know, we have sometimes been very insulting to believers in the Matrix theory.  Who can blame them for being angry at us?  Maybe we should focus more on correcting our own attitudes and less on changing their minds.”  Another suggests: “Maybe we’ve been talking too much about this debate between the Matrix theory and commonsense realism.  We sound like we’re obsessed with it.  Maybe we should talk about something else instead, like poverty or the environment.”  A third opines: “We can natter on about philosophy all we want, but the bottom line is that scripture says that the world outside our minds is real.  The trouble is that we’ve gotten away from the Bible.  Maybe we should withdraw into our own faith communities and just try to live our biblically-based belief in external reality the best we can.”
Needless to say, all of this is bound only to make things worse.  The Matrix theory advocate will smell blood, regarding these flaccid avowals as tacit admissions that commonsense realism about the external world really has no rational basis but is simply a historically contingent prejudice grounded in religious dogma.  And in your battle with the Matrix theorists you’ll have discovered, as many “same-sex marriage” opponents have, that iron law of politics: that when you try to fight the Evil Party you soon find that most of your allies are card-carrying members of the Stupid Party.
So, things look pretty bad.  But like the defender of our commonsense belief in the external world, the opponent of “same-sex marriage” has at least one reliable ally on his side: reality.  And reality absolutely always wins out in the end.  It always wins at least partially even in the short run -- no one ever is or could be a consistent skeptic -- and wins completely in the long run.  The trouble is just that the enemies of reality, though doomed, can do a hell of lot of damage in the meantime. 

There’s no such thing as “natural atheology”

In his brief and (mostly) tightly argued book God, Freedom, and Evil , Alvin Plantinga writes:

[S]ome theologians and theistic philosophers have tried to give successful arguments or proofs for the existence of God.  This enterprise is called natural theology… Other philosophers, of course, have presented arguments for the falsehood of theistic beliefs; these philosophers conclude that belief in God is demonstrably irrational or unreasonable.  We might call this enterprise natural atheology.  (pp. 2-3)
Cute, huh?  Actually (and with all due respect for Plantinga), I’ve always found the expression “natural atheology” pretty annoying, even when I was an atheist.  The reason is that, given what natural theology as traditionally understood is supposed to be, the suggestion that there is a kind of bookend subject matter called “natural atheology” is somewhat inept.  (As we will see, though, Plantinga evidently does not think of natural theology in a traditional way.)
Start with the “theology” part of natural theology.  “Theology” means “the science of God,” in the Aristotelian sense of “science” -- a systematic, demonstrative body of knowledge of some subject matter in terms of its first principles.  Of course, atheists deny that there is any science of God even in this Aristotelian sense, but for present purposes that is neither here nor there.  The point is that a science is what theology traditionally claims to be, and certainly aims to be. 

Take the Scholastic theologian’s procedure.  First, arguments are developed which purport to demonstrate the existence of a first cause of things.  Next, it is argued that when we analyze what it is to be a first cause, we find that of its essence such a cause must be pure actuality rather than a mixture of act and potency, absolutely simple or non-composite, and so forth.  Third, it is then argued that when we follow out the implications of something’s being purely actual, absolutely simple, etc. and also work backward from the nature of the effect to the nature of the cause, the various divine attributes (intellect, will, power, etc.) all follow.  Then, when we consider the character of the created order as well as that of a cause which is purely actual, simple, etc., we can spell out the precise nature of God’s relationship to that order.  (For Aquinas this entails the doctrine of divine conservation and a concurrentist account of divine causality, as opposed to an occasionalist or deist account.)  And so forth.
Even someone who doubts that this sort of project can be pulled off can see its “scientific” character.  The domain studied is, of course, taken to be real, and its reality is defended via argumentation which claims to be demonstrative.  Further argumentation of a purportedly demonstrative character is put forward in defense of each component of the system, and the system is very large, purporting to give us fairly detailed knowledge not only of the existence of God, but of his essence and attributes and relation to the created order.  Moreover, the key background notions (the theory of act and potency, the analysis of causation, the metaphysics of substance, etc.) are tightly integrated into a much larger metaphysics and philosophy of nature, so that natural theology is by no means an intellectual fifth wheel, arbitrarily tacked on for merely apologetic purposes to an already complete and self-sufficient body of knowledge. 
Rather, its status as the capstone of human knowledge is clear.  The natural sciences as we understand them today (physics, chemistry, biology, etc.) are grounded in principles of the philosophy of nature, whose subject matter concerns what any possible natural science must take for granted.  Philosophy of nature in turn rests on deeper principles of metaphysics, whose subject matter is being as such (rather than merely material or changeable being, which is the subject matter of philosophy of nature; and rather than the specific sort of material or changeable world that actually exists, which is the subject matter of natural science).  Natural theology, in turn, follows out the implications of the fundamental notions of philosophy of nature and metaphysics (the theory of act and potency, etc.) and offers ultimate explanations. 
Again, you don’t have to think any of this works in order to see that what it aspires to is a kind of science.  By contrast, what Plantinga calls “atheology” could not possibly be any kind of science, and doesn’t claim to be.  For the “atheologian” doesn’t claim to be studying some domain of reality and giving us systematic knowledge of it.  On the contrary, his entire aim is to show that there is no good reason to think the domain in question is real.  You can have a “science” only of what exists, not of what doesn’t exist.  Otherwise “aunicornology” would be just as much a science as ichthyology or ornithology is.  Ichthyology and ornithology are sciences because there are such things as fishes and birds, and there is systematic knowledge to be had about what fishes and birds are like.  “Aunicornology” is not a science, because there is in the strict sense no such thing as a systematic body of knowledge of the nonexistence of unicorns, or of the nonexistence of anything else for that matter.  Suppose someone denied the existence of fishes and tried to offer arguments for their nonexistence.  It would hardly follow that he is committed to practicing something called “aichthyology” in the sense of a systematic body of knowledge of the nonexistence of fish.
Note that I am not saying anything here that an atheist couldn’t agree with.  The claim is not that one couldn’t have solid arguments for atheism (though of course I don’t think there are any).  The point is rather that even if there were solid arguments, they wouldn’t give you any kind of “science” in the sense of a systematic body of knowledge of some domain of reality.  Rather, what they would do is to show that some purported domain of reality doesn’t really exist.
So, it is inept to think that if there is such a thing as theology, then there must be some bookend subject matter called “atheology” -- again, at least if we are using “theology” the way it has traditionally been understood.  Now let’s turn to the “natural” part of natural theology.  “Natural” as opposed to what?  Well, the usual answer, of course, is “natural as opposed to revealed.”  The idea is that whereas some knowledge about God and his nature is available to us because he has specially disclosed it to us through (say) the teachings of a prophet whose authority is backed by miracles -- where such knowledge constitutes “revealed theology” -- there is other knowledge about God and his nature that is available to us just by applying our natural powers of reason to understanding the world, say by reasoning from the existence of contingent things to a necessary being as their cause (or whatever).  That’s where “natural theology” comes in.
So, if that’s what natural theology is, what would “natural atheology” be?  “Natural” as opposed to what?  As opposed to “revealed atheology”?  But of course, the idea of “revealed atheology” would be absurd.  It makes no sense to say that there is such a thing as knowledge of the non-existence of God which has been revealed to us by God.  The “natural versus revealed” distinction simply doesn’t apply to anything an atheist might affirm, the way it does apply to what the theist would affirm.  So, again, it is inept to suppose that if there is such a thing as natural theology, then there must be some bookend field of study we might label “natural atheology.” 
To be sure, there is another possible reading of the “natural” in natural theology.  We might think of it on analogy with the “natural” in natural law.  The idea of natural law, of course, is the idea that what is good or bad and right or wrong for us is grounded in our nature, and that knowledge of good and bad and right and wrong can therefore be derived from the study of that nature.  So, perhaps we might also think of natural theology as knowledge of God that is available to us given our nature.  In particular, we might say that since the natural end or final cause of reason is to know the causes of things, and the ultimatecause of things is God, the ultimateend of reason is to know God.  Indeed, Scholastic thinkers like Aquinas would say exactly this.
Could there be such a thing as “natural atheology” in some parallel sense?  But that would entail that “atheology” -- denial of the existence of God -- is in some sense the natural end of reason.  And certainly no Scholastic would say that.  Plantinga himself, though he is no Scholastic, would not say that.  Indeed, I can’t think of any proponent of natural theology or revealed theology who would say that denying God’s existence is or could be the naturalend of reason.  (I suppose some of them might say that fallen reason tends toward atheism, but that’s a very different idea from the claim that the natural tendency of reason is toward atheism.)  So, once again, it’s hard to see what it could mean to describe something as “natural” atheology. 
So, the expression “natural atheology” is inept.  But is this a big deal?  Well, I don’t know if it’s a big deal, and, if so, how big exactly.  But it’s not insignificant.  Because the problem is not just that the expression is, for the reasons given, semantically awkward.  There is also a substantive issue implicit in what I’ve been saying.  The expression “natural theology” is, as what I’ve said indicates, rich in meaning.  Historically, it conveyed, and was meant to convey, something important about our knowledge of God -- again, that that knowledge is scientific in the sense described above, and that much of it can be had apart from revelation.  Plantinga’s neologism obscures all that.  Consider what else he says in the passage quoted earlier:
The natural theologian does not, typically, offer his arguments in order to convince people of God’s existence… Instead the typical function of natural theology has been to show that religious belief is rationally acceptable.  (p. 2)
The idea here seems to be that natural theology is essentially a grab bag of moves one might make in order to counter atheist accusations to the effect that belief in God is irrational.  Its point is essentially defensive, rather than something that makes a positive and fundamental contribution to human knowledge. 
Now, this might be an accurate description of the Alvin Plantinga approach to natural theology.  But it is most definitely notan accurate description of the approach taken to natural theology by pagan philosophers like Aristotle or Plotinus, medieval philosophers like Maimonides, Avicenna, and Aquinas, modern rationalists like Leibniz and Wolff, or most other proponents of natural theology historically -- who thought that the key arguments of natural theology could and should be convincing even to someone who does not initially believe that God exists, and who thought that natural theology does provide a positive, fundamental contribution to the body of human knowledge.
Now, if you think that “natural theology” is nothing more than a label for the religious believer’s unsystematic grab bag of apologetic arguments, then it is clear why you might also think that “natural atheology” is an apt label for an atheist’s own grab bag.  But from the point of view of those who endorse the traditional and much more robust understanding of natural theology, you will thereby perpetuate a mistaken understanding of what natural theology is, and obscure that older conception.  (You will also encourage the pop apologist in his bad habit of deploying any old argument he thinks might win converts, whether or not it’s actually a good argument at the end of the day -- thereby helping to perpetuate the mistaken idea that apologetics is essentially an intellectually dishonest form of rhetoric rather than genuine philosophy.  I criticized this kind of apologetics in an earlier post.)
While I’m on the subject of God, Freedom, and Evil, I might as well note a couple of other peeves.  In the introduction to the book, Plantinga alludes to:
supersophisticates among allegedly Christian theologians who proclaim the liberation of Christianity from belief in God, seeking to replace it by trust in “Being itself” or the “Ground of Being” or some such thing. (p. 1)
This appears to be a reference both to the then-trendy “Death of God theology” and to the existentialist theology of Paul Tillich.  Naturally, like Plantinga, I am not a fan of either one.  However, the derisive reference to “’Being itself’ or the ‘Ground of Being’ or some such thing” is telling.  The “some such thing” makes it sound as if “Being itself” and related notions are flakey novelties introduced by modernist theologians.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  Indeed, that God is “Subsistent Being Itself” rather than merely one being alongside others is at the heart of classical theism as expressed by thinkers like Aquinas and other Scholastics.  (As I discussed in an earlier post, while Tillich’s use of these notions is highly problematic, he is merely borrowing this language, perfectly innocent in itself, from the classical tradition.)  In fact it is Plantinga’s own “theistic personalism” (to borrow Brian Davies’ label for Plantinga’s view), which rejects the core doctrines of classical theism, which is the novelty.  (I’ve discussed the stark differences between classical theism and theistic personalism in a number of posts.) 
Then there is Plantinga’s discussion in God, Freedom, and Evil of Aquinas’s Third Way.  He is very critical of the argument, but in my view badly misunderstands it.  Plantinga wonders whether, by a “necessary being,” Aquinas means one that exists in every possible world; puzzles over what it could possibly mean to say that something derives its necessity from another; accuses Aquinas of committing a quantifier shift fallacy; and so on.  As I show at pp. 90-99 of my book Aquinas , when one reads the Third Way in light of the background Aristotelian-Scholastic metaphysics Aquinas is working with, it is clear that all of this is quite misguided.  (Even J. L. Mackie’s discussion of the argument in The Miracle of Theismis in my view better than Plantinga’s treatment here.  Though in fairness to Plantinga, he offers a more substantive treatment in God and Other Minds.) 
None of this is meant to deny the importance of the central themes of God, Freedom, and Evil -- namely, Plantinga’s distinctive treatments of the ontological argument and of the problem of evil -- which are, of course, very clever and philosophically interesting.  But even here, Thomists and other classical theists will find much to disagree with, and it cannot be emphasized too often that the basic philosophical assumptions that inform much contemporary philosophy of religion are radically different from those that guided the greatest philosophical theists of the past.
(See also my post on Plantinga’s ontological argument, my review of his book Where the Conflict Really Lies, and my remarks on his review of Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos.) 

Love and sex roundup

Current events in the Catholic Church and in U.S. politics being as they are, it seems worthwhile to put together a roundup of blog posts and other readings on sex, romantic love, and sexual morality as they are understood from a traditional natural law perspective. 
First and foremost: My essay “In Defense of the Perverted Faculty Argument” appears in my new anthology Neo-Scholastic Essays .  It is the lengthiest and most detailed and systematic treatment of sexual morality I have written to date.  Other things I have written on sex, romantic love, and sexual morality are best read in light of what I have to say in this essay.A brief summary of its contents might be useful.  The essay has five sections.  After the first, which is the introduction, the second section provides an overview of traditional natural law theory and its metaphysical foundations.  The third section spells out the general approach that traditional natural law theory takes toward sex and romantic love, and shows how the key claims of traditional sexual morality vis-à-vis adultery, fornication, homosexuality, etc. follow from that approach.  As I also explain there, however, understanding certain specific aspects of traditional sexual morality (such as the absolute prohibition of contraception) requires an additional thesis, which is where the perverted faculty argument -- which is (contrary to the usual caricatures) not the whole of the traditional natural law approach to sex, but rather merely one element of it -- comes into play.  Section four provides a detailed exposition and defense of that argument, answering all of the usual objections.  Along the way, there is substantive discussion of questions about what is permitted within marital sexual relations, and it is shown that the perverted faculty argument is not as restrictive here as liberals and more rigorist moralists alike often suppose.  Finally, in the fifth section, I argue that purported alternative Catholic defenses of traditional sexual morality -- personalist arguments, and “new natural law” arguments -- are not genuine alternatives at all.  Invariably they implicitly presuppose exactly the traditional natural law “perverted faculty” reasoning that they claim to eschew.  Moreover, the “new natural law” arguments have grave deficiencies of their own.

An excerpt from this essay appeared under the title “The Role of Nature in Sexual Ethics” in The National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly in 2013.  A longer excerpt was presented under the title “Natural Law and the Foundations of Sexual Ethics” in the talk I gave at the Princeton Anscombe Society in April of this year.  But those interested in seeing the complete essay should get hold of Neo-Scholastic Essays.  (I also presented some of the relevant ideas in The Last Superstition, at pp. 132-53.  But the new essay goes well beyond what I had to say there.) 
Over the years I’ve addressed various aspects of these issues here at the blog.  Here are the main posts:
The metaphysics of romantic love [A discussion of sexual desire and romantic longing from the point of view of natural law and Catholic theology]
The metaphysics of Vertigo [A philosophical and theological reflection on the nature of romantic obsession, with Hitchcock’s Vertigo as a case study]
What’s the deal with sex? Part I [On three aspects of sex which clearly give it special moral significance, contra contemporary “ethicists” like Peter Singer]
What’s the deal with sex? Part II [A discussion of the effects of sexual vice on one’s character, whether the disorder be one of excess -- which results in what Aquinas calls the “daughters of lust” -- or one of deficiency, which involves what Aquinas calls a “vice of insensibility”]
Sexual cant from the asexual Kant [On the trouble with Kantian and personalist approaches to sex and sexual morality]
Alfred Kinsey: The American Lysenko [A 2005 article from the online edition of City Journal]
I’ve also written several posts over the years about controversies over sexual morality as they have arisen in the U.S. political context, and in the Catholic context:
Some thoughts on the Prop 8 decision [On the “same-sex marriage” controversy, its unavoidable connection to deeper disagreements about sexual morality, and the phoniness of liberal neutrality]
Contraception, subsidiarity, and the Catholic bishops [On the way in which the failure of Catholic bishops to uphold Catholic teaching on contraception and subsidiarity facilitated the U.S. federal government’s attempted contraceptive mandate]
Hitting Bottum [On the incoherence of conservative Catholic writer Joseph Bottum’s attempt to justify capitulating on “same-sex marriage”]
Nudge nudge, wink wink [How some churchmen’s ambiguous statements on homosexuality, divorce, etc. inevitably “send the message” that Catholic teaching on these matters can and will change, whether or not these churchmen intend to send that message]
The two faces of tolerance [On “same-sex marriage,” the sexual revolution more generally, and the totalitarian tendencies of egalitarianism]
Though the natural law defense of traditional sexual morality is the most fundamental defense, there are other approaches to defending it.  One of these is the appeal to the wisdom embodied in tradition in general, as that idea has been spelled out by writers like Edmund Burke and F. A. Hayek.  In my 2003 Journal of Libertarian Studiesarticle “Hayek on Tradition,” I expound and defend this approach to tradition and discuss how it applies to questions about sexual morality.
Finally, for you completists out there, some additional golden oldies.  Ten years ago, at the long defunct Right Reason group blog, I wrote up a series of posts on natural law and sexual morality, which can still be accessed via archive.org:
Natural ends and natural law, Part I                                 
Natural ends and natural law, Part II
The posts got a fair amount of attention.  Andrew Sullivan politely and critically responded to them in his book The Conservative Soul, and I offered a reply to Sullivan here:
Reply to Sullivan on natural law
I wouldn’t now formulate some of the key metaphysical points exactly the way I did in those decade-old posts, however, so -- again -- see “In Defense of the Perverted Faculty Argument” in Neo-Scholastic Essays for an up-to-date treatment.

Cross on Scotus on causal series

Duns Scotus has especially interesting and important things to say about the distinction between causal series ordered accidentally and those ordered essentially -- a distinction that plays a key role in Scholastic arguments for God’s existence.  I discuss the distinction and Scotus’s defense of it in Scholastic Metaphysics , at pp. 148-54.  Richard Cross, in his excellent book, Duns Scotus , puts forward some criticisms of Scotus’s position.  I think Cross’s objections fail.  Let’s take a look at them.First, a brief review of the distinction.  As longtime readers are aware, the key difference between the two kinds of causal series has to do with whether their members have their causal power in a derived or underived way.  Consider the causal sequence: x → y → z.  The series is essentially ordered if, in the very act of causing z, y borrows from x the power to do so.  Hence, in the stock example, the stick pushes the stone only insofar as it derives from the hand the power to push it.  A series is accidentally ordered if, in the act of causing z, y does not borrow from x the power to do so.  Hence, in the stock example, a son can beget a son of his own whether or not his own father is still alive.  (I’ve discussed this distinction at greater length in earlier posts, such as this one, and in various books and articles.  Again, see Scholastic Metaphysicsfor detailed discussion.)

Cross labels an essentially ordered series of causes an “E-series,” and an accidentally ordered series of causes an “A-series.”  His main criticism of Scotus’s use of the notion of an E-series is contained in the following passage:
In the late Reportatio (closely paralleled in the Ordinatio) Scotus argues from the following premise: “In essentially ordered causes… each second cause, in so far as it is causing, depends upon a first.”  Put in this way, it follows straightforwardly that there must be a first member of an E-series.  But the premise is question-begging, and I can see no reason for wanting to accept it.  It requires that a first cause is necessary as well as sufficient for any effect in an E-series.  But this is not so… [I]n any causal series there is a sense in which the existence of earlier causes is necessary for the existence of later causes.  But we cannot infer from this that a first cause is necessary for some effect.  There are sometimes many different ways in which the same effect can be produced.
Taking account of this objection, we could loosely reformulate the premise as follows: “In essentially ordered causes, any later cause, in so far as it is causing, depends upon an earlier cause.”  Put thus, the premise looks wholly plausible.  But there would be no problem with an infinite E-series thus construed.  Howsoever many prior causes there were, any one of them would be logically sufficient for any later effect. (p. 19)
There are several things to say about this.  To begin with, note that there are two senses in which something might be characterized as “first.”  We might mean that it comes at the head of some sequence.  This is what we have in mind when we say that Fred was first in line for the movie, or that Ethel was the first to arrive at the party.  We mean first as opposed to second, third, fourth, fifth, etc.  Let’s use “firsts” when what is intended is this sequential sense of the word.  But we might mean instead, when we characterize something as “first,” that it is in some way more fundamental or essential relative to other things, or that in some respect it has a higher status.  This is what we have in mind when we characterize something as being “of the first rank,” when we describe someone as “first among equals,” or when we give the title “First Lady” to the wife of the President of the United States.  We mean first in the sense of principal or primary as opposed to secondary.  Let’s use “firstf” when what is intended is this sense of the word, which involves some kind of fundamentality or eminence.
Now, something can be firsts without being firstf, and something can be firstf without being firsts.  The U.S. Army Chief of Staff would be the firstf soldier in the Army even if he were not the firststo join the Army, indeed even if he were the last to join.  And in theory a certain Army private could be the firsts soldier insofar as he joined before any other living soldier did, even though he has never gotten any further in rank and thus is far from being firstf.  The FirstfLady of the United States is obviously not the firsts lady ever to have lived in the United States.  Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy is not concerned with the firsts philosophy ever devised by a philosopher (Thales, say) but rather with firstfphilosophy, i.e. that branch of philosophy which deals with the most fundamental philosophical issues.  When First Comics was founded in the 1980s, the company was not claiming to be the firsts comic book company, but rather aspiring to be the firstf comic book company.  And so forth.
Now, suppose that when Scotus or some other Scholastic says that “in essentially ordered causes… each second cause, in so far as it is causing, depends upon a first,” what is meant is firsts.  Then it is easy to see why Cross would raise the objections he does.  For why should a second (or third, or fourth) cause require a firsts?  If Scotus were just stipulating that you couldn’t have a second, third, fourth, etc. cause without a firstscause, then he would be begging the question (as Cross accuses him of doing), since Scotus’s critic doesn’t see why a firsts cause is needed and hasn’t been given a reason to change his mind.  And if Scotus reformulates his position as the claim that “in essentially ordered causes, any later cause, in so far as it is causing, depends upon an earlier cause,” then (as Cross indicates) even if this is true, it will not entail that there is a firsts cause. 
The problem, though, is that this is simply notwhat Scotus and other Scholastics mean.  In the proposition that “in essentially ordered causes… each second cause, in so far as it is causing, depends upon a first,” what is mean is firstf, not firsts.  In particular, the claim is that in essentially ordered causal series, causes which have their causal power in a merely secondary or derivative way require a cause which has its causal power in a primary or underivative way.  And there is nothing question-begging about that, even if the point needs greater spelling out than Scotus gives it in that one quoted sentence considered in isolation. 
When I point out that a stick cannot move a stone by itself but requires something else to impart to it the power to move stones and other things, I am not begging any questions but rather saying something that no one would deny, not only because we all know from experience that sticks don’t move stones by themselves but also because it is evident from the nature of sticks that the reason they don’t in fact move other things by themselves is that they can’t do so.  For they simply don’t have the built-in power to do so.  Neither am I begging any questions when I point out that the same thing is true of the arm which movies the stick.  Like sticks, arms all by themselves not only never do move other things but couldn’t do so given their nature. 
Nor am I begging any questions when I go on to conclude that such a series of causes requires something which imparts the power to move things without deriving it from anything else -- for example, a human being, who can use his arm to move the stick to move the stone, without the need for someone else to pick him up and move him while he does so.  Here too I am saying something which is not only obvious from experience, but also evident from reflection on the natures of the causes involved.  For one thing, human beings have by nature a built-in power of movement that sticks, stones, and arms do not.  For another thing, in general what is derivative presupposes that from which it is derived.  Even Scotus’s critic would have to admit that the stick’s movement of the stone cannot be accounted for unless we appeal to something from which the stick derives its causal power, such as the arm.  And the critic would have to admit that accounting for the arm’s movement requires a similar appeal, for the same reason.  But any further member we posit which, like the stick and the arm, lacks built-in power, will just raise the same problem all over again.  So, we cannot account for the motion we started out with -- that of the stick as it moves the stone -- until we get to something which does have built-in or underivative causal power.
Positing an infinite regress of derivative causes is no alternative.  Suppose I owe you money, you demand that I pay up immediately, and I offer you an IOU instead.  Suppose you refuse to accept it on the grounds that you doubt I’ll ever be able to back it up with real money.  Suppose that, in order to ease your doubts, I offer you a second IOU to back up the first.  Naturally, you refuse that IOU too, and on the same grounds.  Now it would be absurd to suppose that if I go on ( Dumb and Dumber style ) to offer you an infinite series of IOUs, each backing up the previous one, then you will suddenly have a reason to abandon your doubts and accept my IOUs.  Similarly, it is absurd to suppose that positing an infinite regress of causes having merely derivative causal power somehow solves the problem that positing one, two, three, etc. derivative causes was unable to solve. 
In any event, even if someone were for some reason to try to resist this line of argument, there is nothing question-begging about it, and neither does it fail to offer a reason for thinking that there must be a cause with built-in or underived causal power.  So, Cross’s charge that Scotus either begs the question or fails to give any reason for supposing that an E-series requires a first member cannot be maintained, at least if what Scotus has in mind (as he surely does) is a firstfcause and not merely a firsts cause.
What about Cross’s point that “we cannot infer… that a first cause is necessary for some effect [since] there are sometimes many different ways in which the same effect can be produced”?  The idea here seems to be that even if in the case of the stick moving the stone (say), the stick does so only because a person moves the stick with his arm, there are nevertheless other ways in which the stick might be moved.  For example, it could be tied to some machine which moves it about, and by which it is able to move a stone.  But the problem with this objection is that it shows only that, in the E-series in question, this or that particularfirstf cause is not necessary.  It does not show that some firstfcause or other is not necessary in any E-series.
Cross raises a couple of further objections in an endnote.  First, he suggests that:
We might be inclined to argue that, if there were no first cause to an E-series, we could not find the real cause of any effect… Richard Swinburne notes that this argument falls victim to what he labels the ‘compIetist fallacy’: if y causes z, then it really does explain the existence of z, even if y itself requires explanation. (pp. 161-62; Cross is referring to remarks made by Swinburne in the second edition of his book The Existence of God)
The trouble with this objection is that to say that something is not a “complete” cause is simply not the same thing as to say that it is not a “real” cause, and to say that something is not a “complete” explanation is simply not the same thing as saying that it is not a “real” explanation.  Does the stick in our example reallymove the stone?  Of course.  Does its motion really explain the motion of the stone?  Yes indeed.  But is the stick the completecause of the motion of the stone?  Of course not.  And neither does its motion completely explain that of the stone, precisely because it would have no power to move the stone at all if it did not derive it from the person who uses it to move the stone. 
Finally, Cross says:
Scotus's argument is made more complicated by his claim that even if per impossibile there were an infinite series of causes, each one would have to depend on some first cause that was outside the series… But this just blurs the distinction between an E-series and an A-series.  On Scotus's initial definitions, an E-series will be self-sufficient; it will not depend on any cause outside itself. (p. 162)
The reason Cross thinks this blurs the distinction between an E-series and an A-series, it seems, is that Scotus and other Scholastics hold that an A-series need not have a first member, whereas an E-series must have one.  But Scotus’s allowing for the sake of argument that an E-series might regress infinitely will seem to blur the distinction between an E-series and an A-series only if we fail to keep in mind the distinction between a firsts cause and a firstfcause.  When Scotus allows for the sake of argument that an E-series might regress infinitely, he is not saying, even for the sake of argument, that an E-series might lack a firstfcause.  Rather, he is allowing for the sake of argument that it might lack a firsts cause, and saying that even if it lacked one, it would still require a firstf cause. 
For example, suppose the stone was being pushed by a stick, which was being pushed by another stick, which was being pushed by yet another stick, and so on ad infinitum.  Such a series would not have a firstsmember.  But there would still have to be a firstf member outside the series to impart motion to it, because of themselves a mere series of sticks, however long, would have no power to move at all.
So, Cross’s objections all fail.  But someone might still wonder how all this supports an argument for God’s existence.  For of course, Scotus, like Aquinas and other Scholastics, intends to argue for a single and divine first cause.  Yet a person who moves a stone with a stick is only one firstf cause alongside many others, and a non-divine one at that. 
But pointing out that an E-series must have a firstf member, and illustrating the idea with the stick example, is by no means the whole of a First Cause argument for God’s existence.  It is only part of a much larger line of argument.  For one thing, while a person who moves a stone with a stick is a firstf cause relative to that particular series, it does not follow that he is a firstf cause absolutely, full stop.  Indeed, relative to other E-series, he will himself be an effect.  For example, his existence at any moment depends upon the existence and proper configuration of his micro-level material parts.  And in a metaphysically more fundamental way, it depends on his substantial form being conjoined with prime matter, and his essence being conjoined with an act of existence.  The regress this entails will be vicious unless it terminates in a cause which is purely actual and thus need not be actualized by anything else.  And a purely actual cause turns out on analysis to have the divine attributes.
But that’s a whole other story (for which see chapter 3 of Aquinas and several of the essays on natural theology in Neo-Scholastic Essays ).