Edward Feser's Blog, page 87

Could a theist deny PSR?

We’ve been talking about the principle of sufficient reason (PSR).  It plays a key role in some arguments for the existence of God, which naturally gives the atheist a motivation to deny it.  But there are also theists who deny it.  Is this a coherent position?  I’m not asking whether a theist could coherently reject some versions of PSR.  Of course a theist could do so.  Ireject some versions of PSR.  But could a theist reject all versions?  Could a theist reject PSR as such?   Suppose that any version of PSR worthy of the name must entail that there are no “brute facts” -- no facts that are in principle unintelligible, no facts for which there is not even in principle an explanation.  (The “in principle” here is important -- that there might be facts that our minds happen to be too limited to grasp is not in question.)  Could a theist coherently deny that?I don’t think so, certainly not on a Thomistic or other classical theist conception of God.  For suppose there are “brute facts.”  Either they would be facts about God or they would be facts about something other than God.  But surely no facts of the latter sort could be “brute facts” if theism is true.  For if some fact about something other than God was a brute fact, that would entail that it had no cause, no explanation, no source of intelligibility of any sort.  That would entail, among other things, that it did not have Godas a cause, explanation, or source of its intelligibility.  Hence it would be something which does not depend on God for its being.  And that would conflict with the classical theist position that (as the First Vatican Council puts it) “the world and allthings which are contained in it, both spiritual and material, were produced, according to their whole substance, out of nothing by God” (emphasis added).

But couldn’t a theist hold that while there are no brute facts concerning anything other than God, there are brute facts concerning God himself?  Could he not say that God’s existence is a brute fact, or that God’s having a certain attribute is a brute fact? 
Again, not on a classical theist conception of God.  Suppose God is, as Aristotelians hold, pure actuality with no potentiality; or that he is, as Thomists hold, subsistent being itself.  Then he exists of absolute necessity, and thus has his sufficient reason in his own nature, and thus is not a “brute fact.”  So, to make God’s existence out to be a brute fact, one will have to deny that he is pure actuality or subsistent being itself.  That entails that he is a mixture of actuality and potentiality, and of an essence together with a distinct “act of existence” (to use the Thomist jargon).  But that in turn entails that he is composite rather than absolutely simple.  And that is incompatible with the classical theist position that divine simplicity is essential to theism, as well as with the de fide teaching of the Catholic Church (declared at the First Vatican Council as well as at the Fourth Lateran Council) that God is simple or non-composite.  Even to say that while God exists necessarily, his having some particular attribute is a “brute fact,” would also conflict with divine simplicity.  For if his having the attribute is a brute fact, then he does not have it necessarily but only contingently.  (If he had it necessarily, it would follow from his nature and for that reason would not be a brute fact.)  But if he is necessary while the attribute in question is contingent, then it is distinct from him and thus he is composite and not simple.
Nor, as it cannot be emphasized too strongly, is divine simplicity some eccentricity the classical theist arbitrarily tacks on to theism.  It is at the very core of the logic of theism.  If God were composite then it would make sense to ask how it is that his component parts -- act and potency, essence and existence, substance and attributes, or whatever -- happen to be combined together to form the composite.  It would make sense to ask “What caused God?,” in which case we would not really be talking about God anymore, because we would no longer be talking about the ultimatesource of things.  Even if it were suggested that “God” so conceived has no cause and that it is just a “brute fact” or a matter of sheer chance that the composite exists, we will for that very reason be talking about something that couldin principle have had a cause and might not have existed.  Why anyone would want to call that “God” I have no idea; certainly it bears no relationship to what classical theists mean by “God,” and by virtue of being composite, contingent, etc. it would in fact be the sort of thing classical theists would regard as creaturely rather than the Creator.  You might as well worship the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
So, just as PSR leads to theism, theism leads to PSR.  There is no circularity here, because one could accept PSR even if he didn’t think it leads to theism, and it takes additional premises to get from PSR to theism in any case.  But there is a natural affinity between the views, and this affinity shows how very far away from reality is the stupid caricature of theism as somehow irrationalist.  On the contrary, to see the world as intelligible or rational through and through is implicitly to be a (classical) theist, and to be a (classical) theist is implicitly to see the world as intelligible or rational through and through.  And by the same token, despite the rhetoric of its loudest contemporary proponents, atheism is implicitly irrationalist insofar as it must deny PSR so as to avoid theism. (More on these themes in some of the posts linked to at the end of the previous post.)

Della Rocca on PSR

The principle of sufficient reason (PSR), in a typical Neo-Scholastic formulation, states that “there is a sufficient reason or adequate necessary objective explanation for the being of whatever is and for all attributes of any being” (Bernard Wuellner, Dictionary of Scholastic Philosophy , p. 15).  I discuss and defend PSR at some length in Scholastic Metaphysics (see especially pp. 107-8 and 137-46).  Prof. Michael Della Roccadefends the principle in his excellent article “PSR,”which appeared in Philosopher’s Imprintin 2010 but which (I’m embarrassed to say) I only came across the other day.

Among the arguments for PSR I put forward in Scholastic Metaphysics are a retorsion argument to the effect that if PSR were false, we could have no reason to trust the deliverances of our cognitive faculties, including any grounds we might have for doubting or denying PSR; and an argument to the effect that a critic of PSR cannot coherently accept even the scientific explanations he does accept, unless he acknowledges that there are no brute facts and thus that PSR is true.  Della Rocca’s argument bears a family resemblance to this second line of argument.Della Rocca notes, first, that even among philosophers who reject PSR, philosophical theses are often defended by recourse to what he calls “explicability arguments.”  An explicability argument (I’ll use the abbreviation EA from here on out) is an argument to the effect that we have grounds for denying that a certain state of affairs obtains if it would be inexplicable or a “brute fact.”  Della Rocca offers a number of examples of this strategy.  When physicalist philosophers of mind defend some reductionist account of consciousness on the grounds that consciousness would (they say) otherwise be inexplicable, they are deploying an EA.  When early modern advocates of the “mechanical philosophy” rejected (their caricature of) the Aristotelian notion of substantial forms, they did so on the grounds that the notion was insufficiently explanatory.  When philosophers employ inductive reasoning they are essentially rejecting the claim that the future will not be relevantly like the past nor the unobserved like the observed, on the grounds that this would make future and otherwise unobserved phenomena inexplicable.  And so forth.  (Della Rocca cites several other specific examples from contemporary philosophy -- in discussions about the metaphysics of dispositions, personal identity, causation, and modality -- wherein EAs are deployed.)

Now, Della Rocca allows that to appeal to an EA does not by itself commit one to PSR.  But suppose we apply the EA approach to the question of why things exist.  Whatever we end up thinking the correct answer to this question is -- it doesn’t matter for purposes of Della Rocca’s argument -- if we deploy an EA in defense of it we will implicitly be committing ourselves to PSR, he says, because PSR just is the claim that the existence of anything must have an explanation.

In responding to these different examples of EAs, one could, says Della Rocca, take one of three options:

(1) Hold that some EAs are legitimate kinds of argument, while others -- in particular, any EA for some claim about why things exist at all -- are not legitimate.

(2) Hold that no EA for any conclusion is legitimate.

(3) Hold that all EAs, including any EA for a claim about the sheer existence of things, are legitimate kinds of argument.

Now, the critic of PSR cannot take option (3), because that would, in effect, be to accept PSR.  Nor could any critic of PSR who applies EAs in defense of other claims -- and the EA approach is, as Della Rocca notes, a standard move in contemporary philosophy (and indeed, in science) -- take option (2).

So that leaves (1).  The trouble, though, is that there doesn’t seem to be any non-question-begging way of defending option (1).  For why should we believe that EAs are legitimate in other cases, but not when giving some account of the sheer existence of things?  It seems arbitrary to allow the one sort of EA but not the other sort.  The critic of PSR cannot respond by saying that it is just a brute fact that some kinds of EAs are legitimate and others are not, because this would beg the question against PSR, which denies that there are any brute facts.  Nor would it do for the critic to say that it is just intuitively plausible to hold that EAs are illegitimate in the case of explaining the sheer existence of things, since Della Rocca’s point is that the critic’s acceptance of EAs in other domains casts doubt on the reliability of this particular intuition.  Hence an appeal to intuition would also beg the question.

So, Della Rocca’s argument is that there seems no cogent way to accept EAs at all without accepting PSR.  The implication seems to be that we can have no good reason to think anythingis explicable unless we also admit that everythingis.

Naturally, I agree with this.  Indeed, I think Della Rocca, if anything, concedes too much to the critic of PSR.  In particular, he allows that while it would be “extremely problematic” for someone to bite the bullet and take option (2), it may not be “logically incoherent” to do so.  But this doesn’t seem correct to me.  Even if the critic of PSR decides to reject the various specific examples of EAs cited by Della Rocca -- EAs concerning various claims about consciousness, modality, personal identity, etc. -- the critic will still make use of various patterns of reasoning he considers formally valid or inductively strong, will reject patterns of reasoning he considers fallacious, etc.  And he will do so precisely because these principles of logic embody standards of intelligibility or explanatory adequacy.

To be sure, it is a commonplace in logic that not all explanations are arguments, and it is also sometimes claimed (less plausibly, I think) that not all arguments are explanations.  However, certainly many arguments are explanations.  What Aristotelians call “explanatory demonstrations” (e.g. a syllogism like All rational animals are capable of language, all men are rational animals, so all men are capable of language) are explanations.  Arguments to the best explanation are explanations, and as Della Rocca notes, inductive reasoning in general seems to presuppose that things have explanations.

So, to give up EAs of any sort (option (2)) would seem to be to give up the very practice of argumentation itself, or at least much of it.  Needless to say, it is hard to see how that could fail to be logically incoherent, at least if one tries to defend one’s rejection of PSR with arguments.  Hence, to accept the general practice of giving arguments while nevertheless rejecting EAs of the specific sorts Della Rocca gives as examples would really be to take Della Rocca’s option (1) rather than option (2).

Della Rocca also considers some common objections to PSR.  In response to the claim that PSR is incompatible with quantum mechanics, Della Rocca refers the reader to Alex Pruss’s response to such objections in his book The Principle of Sufficient Reason , but also makes the point that appealing to QM by itself simply does nothing to rebut his own argument for PSR.  For even if a critic of PSR thinks it incompatible with QM, he still owes us an answer to the question of where we are supposed to draw the line between legitimate EA arguments and illegitimate ones, and why we should draw it precisely where the critic says we should.  (For my own response to QM-based objections, see pp. 122-27 and 142 of Scholastic Metaphysics.)

Della Rocca also considers an objection raised by philosophers like Peter van Inwagen and Jonathan Bennett to the effect that PSR entails necessitarianism, the bizarre claim that all truths, including apparently contingent ones, are really necessary truths.  Della Rocca thinks van Inwagen and Bennett are probably right, but suggests that the defender of PSR could simply bite the bullet and accept necessitarianism, as Spinoza notoriously did.  And in that case, to reject Della Rocca’s argument for PSR on the grounds that necessitarianism is false would just be to beg the question.

Here again I think Della Rocca concedes too much.  As I argue in Scholastic Metaphysics(pp. 140-41), objections like the one raised by van Inwagen and Bennett presuppose that propositions are among the things PSR says require an explanation, and that for an explanans to be a sufficient reason for an explanandum involves its logically entailing the explanandum.  But while rationalist versions of PSR might endorse these assumptions, the Thomist understanding of PSR does not.

Della Rocca also remarks: 

I suspect that many of you simply will not see the force of the challenge that I am issuing to the non-rationalist. (I speak here from long experience, experience that prompted me to call my endeavor here quixotic.)  Philosophers tend to be pretty cavalier in their use of explicability arguments -- using them when doing so suits their purposes, refusing to use them otherwise, and more generally, failing to investigate how their various attitudes toward explicability arguments hang together, if they hang together at all.  We philosophers -- in our slouching fashion! -- are comfortable with a certain degree of unexamined arbitrariness in our use of explicability arguments.  But my point is that a broader perspective on our practices with regard to explicability arguments reveals that there is a genuine tension in the prevalent willingness to use some explicability arguments and to reject others. 

Amen to that.  As with the urban legend about First Cause arguments resting on the premise that “everything has a cause,” the notion that the PSR is a relic, long ago refuted, is a mere prejudice that a certain kind of academic philosopher stubbornly refuses to examine.  It doesn’t matter how strong is an argument you give for PSR; he will remain unmoved.  He “already knows” there must be something wrong with it, because, after all, don’t most members of “the profession” think so? 
Why, it’s almost as if such philosophers don’t wantthe PSR to be true, and thus would rather not have their prejudice against it disturbed.  Can’t imagine why that might be, can you?

Some related posts: 

Marmodoro on PSR and PC
An exchange with Keith Parsons, Part IV [on “brute facts”]
Can you explain something by appealing to a “brute fact”?
Nagel and his critics, Part VI [on rationalism, PSR, and the principle of causality]
Magic versus metaphysics
Can we make sense of the world?
Fifty shades of nothing
Why is there anything at all?  It’s simple

Meta-comedy

While we’re on the subject of Steve Martin, consider the following passage from his memoir Born Standing Up .  Martin recounts the insight that played a key role in his novel approach to doing stand-up comedy:
In a college psychology class, I had read a treatise on comedy explaining that a laugh was formed when the storyteller created tension, then, with the punch line, released it... With conventional joke telling, there's a moment when the comedian delivers the punch line, and the audience knows it's the punch line, and their response ranges from polite to uproarious.  What bothered me about this formula was the nature of the laugh it inspired, a vocal acknowledgment that a joke had been told, like automatic applause at the end of a song...These notions stayed with me for months, until they formed an idea that revolutionized my comic direction: What if there were no punch lines?  What if there were no indicators?  What if I created tension and never released it?  What if I headed for a climax, but all I delivered was an anticlimax?  What would the audience do with all that tension?  Theoretically, it would have to come out sometime.  But if I kept denying them the formality of a punch line, the audience would eventually pick their own place to laugh, essentially out of desperation.  This type of laugh seemed stronger to me, as they would be laughing at something they chose, rather than being told exactly when to laugh.

To test my idea, at my next appearance at the Ice House, I went onstage and began: “I’d like to open up with sort of a ‘funny comedy bit.’ This has really been a big one for me... it's the one that put me where I am today.  I'm sure most of you will recognize the title when I mention it; it's the Nose on Microphone routine [pause for imagined applause].  And it's always funny, no matter how many times you see it.”
I leaned in and placed my nose on the mike for a few long seconds.  Then I stopped and took several bows, saying, “Thank you very much.”  “That's it?” they thought.  Yes, that was it. The laugh came not then, but only after they realized I had already moved on to the next bit. (pp. 111-12)
Well, this kind of thing either works for you or it doesn’t.  No doubt Martin’s facial expressions and body language helped make it work on the occasions when it did.  But Martin evidently thought his unorthodox approach to relieving comic tension might play well on the printed page too.  A good example comes from his 1979 book Cruel Shoes .  The piece is titled “Sex Crazed Love Goddesses” and here it is in its entirety:
Little Billy Jackson had to go to the store for his mother to pick up some postage stamps.  When he got there, he found the stamp machine to be out of order, and decided to walk the extra three blocks to the post office.  On the way there, he passed a hardware store, a variety store and a lamp shop.  The line was short at the post office and he got the stamps quickly and returned home.  His dog, “Spider,” bounded out to greet him as his mom waved from the porch.  Billy’s mother was pleased at the job he did and congratulated him on having enough sense to go to the post office when he found the stamp machine broken.  Billy had a nice dessert that night and went to bed. (p. 55)
I know what you’re thinking, but the story is actually better in the book, because it runs to the bottom of the page and it isn’t clear until you turn the page that that was it. 
Well, again, this kind of thing either works for you or it doesn’t.  It got a laugh out of me but it probably helps that I’ve got a taste for the abstract and the absurd.  The joke will be either blindingly obvious to you or utterly opaque.  Either way, here it is: Even though you know it’s a gag piece in a Steve Martin book, the title “Sex Crazed Love Goddesses” cannot fail to raise in your mind the expectation that something salacious is to follow.  Hence as you read this utterly banal and irrelevant narrative about a kid buying stamps, etc., you feel sure that the story is going to shift gears at any moment.  Then it suddenly ends without having done so.  The comic “tension” Martin speaks of breaks precisely when it hits you that it’s never going to break, and that’s what gets the laugh.
In making a joke out of what we expect a joke to be or out of what we expect a story to be, Martin is doing something we might call meta-comedy.   Comedy itself and its conventions become the subject matter.  Notice how the “Nose on Microphone” bit can work only insofar as Martin gets his audience explicitly to think to themselves: “OK, here we all are watching a comedian, and we’re about to hear a really funny comedy bit.  Here it comes…”  Thatis the set-up of the joke, rather than something internal to the joke itself (“A priest and a rabbi walk into a bar…”), as we’d normally expect.  It is only when we become self-conscious about what we thought the joke would be and how it didn’t meet that expectation that the “payoff” can be delivered.  Normally we become “lost in” a joke, just as we become lost in the action of a movie or play and don’t constantly think to ourselves “These are actors, none of this really happened but they are trying to make it convincing” etc.  Martin’s joke works precisely by not letting us forget that “This is a stand-up comedian, and he is trying to make us laugh by telling us jokes,” like a movie or play that “breaks the fourth wall.” 
Similarly, in the case of the Cruel Shoes piece, the joke can work only insofar as we are notlost in the story, but instead start thinking about the conventions of story titles and how they relate to the content of a story: “Why would a story with a title like ‘Sex Crazed Love Goddesses’ be about something as mundane as a kid buying stamps?  Oh wait, that mismatch is the joke…”
Martin’s act during his stand-up days relied on this kind of thing to a very great extent, even if not entirely.  A big part of his shtick required that the audience have it at the forefront of their minds that this guy is a famous comedian who is here to entertain us.  (Consider this bit and this bit from The Tonight Show, as well as various clips of stand-up material you can find on YouTube.) 
Meta-comedy is essentially an instance of what, in a post from several years ago, I called “meta-art” -- art the theme of which is art itself, and the method of which involves a self-conscious stretching of art’s boundaries.  Martin was to stand-up comedy what Duchamp was to visual art, Schoenberg to classical music, and Ornette Coleman to jazz.  Meta-art, art gone self-conscious, is theory-driven in a way just-plain-old-art-without-the-“meta”-thank-you-very-much is not.  (It cannot be a coincidence that Martin was a philosophy major and has long been an art collector!)
This comparison of Martin’s stand-up comedy to other instances of meta-art prompts two reflections.  First, as I indicated in the post just linked to, while meta-art can be interesting, it can also be arid and repetitive and descend into self-parody.  Martin did not rely on meta-comedy entirely, and where he did the results do not always hold up well.  (Most of Cruel Shoes does not hold up well.  I’m not sure how well some of it held up in 1979.)  As he makes clear in Born Standing Up (which is a very good book), Martin was burned out by the early 80s.  The following passage is telling:
The act was still rocking, but audience disruptions, whoops and shouts, sometimes killed the timing of bits, violating my premise that every moment mattered.  The days of the heckler comebacks were over.  The audiences were so large that if someone was calling or signaling to me, only I and their immediate seatmates could hear them.  My timing was jarred, yet if I had responded to the heckler, the rest of the audience wouldn't have known what I was talking about. Today I realize that I misunderstood what my last year of stand-up was about.  I had become a party host, presiding not over timing and ideas but over a celebratory bash of my own making.  If I had understood what was happening, I might have been happier, but I didn't.  I still thought I was doing comedy. (p. 185)
Martin does not put it this way, but it’s as if the meta-comedy had, without his realizing it, gone meta-meta.  People no longer showed up to hear meta-comedy anymore, let alone comedy.  They showed up to see the guy who was famous for doing the meta-comedy.  This couldn’t last, and Martin wisely made a transition into movies -- and, with them, a more conventional brand of comedy.
A second thought, though, is that it is quite remarkable how popular Martin’s stand-up then was given its often esoteric and “meta” character.  Meta-art is typically characterized by its lack of mass appeal.  Indeed, as Born Standing Up recounts, Martin’s act was by no means an overnight success.  But eventually it caught on in a big way.  Why?
One reason, of course, is that, as I have said, Martin’s stand-up comedy was not all of the surreal Cruel Shoes type.  It was a departure from the usual thing, but not a total departure.  (Thelonious Monk perhaps provides a better jazz analogy for Martin’s stand-up than Ornette Coleman does -- I compared Monk and Coleman in another earlier post.)  
A second reason is that the intentional absurdity of some meta-art, while a stumbling block to a popular audience in the case of visual arts, literature, and music, can have mass appeal in the case of meta-comedy because of its similarity to slapstick.  If you present the man on the street with Duchamp’s Fountain readymade as art or an Ornette Coleman piece as music, he will be offended by it.  But if you present it to him as comedy -- say, in a Three Stooges episode where the fellas are hired as musicians and start playing like Coleman, or try sculpture but produce only a urinal -- then he’ll probably love it.  Meta-comedy is just the next step.  “Sure it’s absurd, but then this is supposedto be comedy, so…” And Martin mixed old-fashioned slapstick in with his meta-comedy in any event (both onstage and via movies like The Jerk).  To a popular audience it all might have seemed more like Moe Howard than artistic modernism.
Finally, there is, possibly (especially in light of Martin’s “celebratory bash” remarks), what we might call the “Money for Nothing” factor.  Just as the average guy might both resent and admire the pop star for his ability to attract fame, wealth, and women with (so he assumes) little effort, so too might he be as drawn to, as annoyed by, a guy who acts goofy onstage for a couple of hours and gets tons of money for it.  The stand-up comic in a suit, chatting with Johnny Carson on TV, can have a sex appeal that the sullen and impoverished avant-garde painter or novelist does not.  Meta-comedy is not pretty, but boy its rewards are!

Thomas Aquinas, Henry Adams, Steve Martin

In his conceptual travelogue Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres -- first distributed privately in 1904, then published in 1913 -- historian Henry Adams devoted a chapter to Thomas Aquinas.  There are oversimplifications and mistakes in it of the sort one would expect from a non-philosopher interested in putting together a compelling narrative, but some interesting things too.  Adams rightly emphasizes how deep and consequential is the difference between Aquinas’s view that knowledge of God starts with sensory experience of the natural order, and the tendency of mystics and Cartesians to look instead within the human mind itself to begin the ascent to God.  And he rightly notes how important, and also contrary to other prominent theological tendencies, is Aquinas’s affirmation of the material world.  (This is a major theme in Denys Turner’s recent book on Aquinas, about which I’ve been meaning to blog.)  On the other hand, what Adams says about Aquinas and secondary causality is not only wrong but bizarre.Most important for present purposes, though, is Adams’ motif of drawing parallels between theological tendencies and medieval structures.  The view of those who see the relation between God and man in terms of force is compared by Adams to Mont-Saint-Michel.  The view that the relation is best seen in terms of faith, he compares to Chartres Cathedral.  And he compares Aquinas’s appeal to reason to the cathedrals at Beauvaisand Amiens.  Writes Adams:

The architects of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries took the Church and the universe for truths, and tried to express them in a structure which should be final.  Knowing by an enormous experience precisely where the strains were to come, they enlarged their scale to the utmost point of material endurance, lightening the load and distributing the burden until the gutters and gargoyles that seem mere ornament, and the grotesques that seem rude absurdities, all do work either for the arch or for the eye; and every inch of material, up and down, from crypt to vault, from man to God, from the universe to the atom, had its task, giving support where support was needed, or weight where concentration was felt, but always with the condition of showing conspicuously to the eye the great lines which led to unity and the curves which controlled divergence; so that, from the cross on the flèche and the keystone of the vault, down through the ribbed nervures, the columns, the windows, to the foundation of the flying buttresses far beyond the walls, one idea controlled every line; and this is true of St. Thomas’ Church as it is of Amiens Cathedral.  The method was the same for both, and the result was an art marked by singular unity, which endured and served its purpose until man changed his attitude toward the universe.
In his book of surrealist humor Cruel Shoes -- first distributed privately in 1977, then published in a longer edition in 1979 -- comedian and onetime philosophy major Steve Martin devotes one of the best pieces in the volume to a fanciful recounting of the “Demolition of the Cathedral at Chartres.”  Here it is in its entirety:
Mr. Rivers was raised in the city of New York, had become involved in construction and slowly advanced himself to the level of crane operator for a demolition company.  The firm had grown enormously, and he was shipped off to France for a special job.  He started work early on a Friday and, due to a poorly drawn map, at six-thirty one morning in February began the demolition of the Cathedral at Chartres.
The first swing of the ball knifed an arc so deadly that it tore down nearly a third of a wall and the glass shattered almost in tones, and it seemed to scream over the noise of the engine as the fuel was pumped in the long neck of the crane that threw the ball through a window of the Cathedral at Chartres.
The aftermath was complex and chaotic, and Rivers was allowed to go home to New York, and he opened up books on the Cathedral and read about it and thought to himself how lucky he was to have seen it before it was destroyed.  (pp. 19-20)
Suppose we depart from Adams a little by identifying Aquinas’s system with Chartres Cathedral instead, and then read Adams’ analogy in light of Martin’s absurd scenario.  What do we get?
What we get, perhaps, is a parable for the nouvelle theologie revolution as described by Rusty Reno in a First Things article a few years ago, which I quoted at length in a recent talk at Thomas Aquinas College.  In the wake of the nouvelle theologie critique of Neo-Scholastic Thomism, Reno writes, “the old theological culture of the Church has largely been destroyed,” while the nouvelle theologie thinkers themselves “did not, perhaps could not, formulate a workable, teachable alternative to take its place…”  Indeed, their own work is not intelligible except within the context of the system they found inadequate, a context they swept away.  Hence, judges Reno, “the collapse of neoscholasticism has not led to the new and fuller vision [they] sought… It has created a vacuum filled with simple-minded shibboleths.”  Some of the nouvelle theologie thinkers -- such as Balthasar and de Lubac -- deplored this simple-mindedness, and the heterodoxy that has come with it.  But it was an unintended consequence of their own theological revolution.  They’re a little like Steve Martin’s Mr. Rivers, wistfully contemplating the loss of a glorious structure they had themselves demolished. 
So thoroughly has the nouvelle theologiecaricature of Neo-Scholasticism and traditional Thomism permeated the intellectual life of the Church that you will hear it parroted in the most unexpected contexts.  For instance, during lunch at a conference some time ago, a couple of well-meaning conservative Catholic academics matter-of-factly remarked how awful the Neo-Scholastic manuals were, how you couldn’t learn Aquinas from Thomists, etc. -- even as they praised my own work and the high-octane Thomism I was defending during the conference!  I thought: “Where the hell do you think I got it from?”
Whenever I encounter this kind of cluelessness, I reach for my copy of Cruel Shoes.

DSPT Symposium

God, Reason and Reality is a new anthology edited by Anselm Ramelow.  In addition to Fr. Ramelow, the contributors include Robert Sokolowski, Robert Spaemann, Thomas Joseph White, Lawrence Dewan, Stamatios Gerogiorgakis, John F. X. Knasas, Paul Thom, Michael Dodds, William Wainwright, and Linda Zagzebski.  The table of contents and other information about the book can be found here.
The Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology in Berkeley, CA will be hosting a symposium on the book on November 8, 2014.  The presenters will be Fr. Ramelow, Fr. Dodds, and me.  Further information can be found here.

Review of Jaworski

My review of William Jaworski’s Philosophy of Mind: A Comprehensive Introduction appears in the latest issue (Vol. 88, No. 3) of the American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly .  You can find a preview of the review here, though unfortunately most of the article is behind a paywall.  (I also say a bit about Jaworski’s approach to hylemorphism, and related contemporary approaches, in Scholastic Metaphysics .  See especially pp. 187-89.)

Q.E.D.?

The Catholic Church makes some bold claims about what can be known about God via unaided reason.  The First Vatican Council teaches:
The same Holy mother Church holds and teaches that God, the source and end of all things, can be known with certainty from the consideration of created things, by the natural power of human reason…
If anyone says that the one, true God, our creator and lord, cannot be known with certainty from the things that have been made, by the natural light of human reason: let him be anathema.
In Humani Generis , Pope Pius XII reaffirmed this teaching and made clear what were in his view the specific philosophical means by which this natural knowledge of God could best be articulated, and which were most in line with Catholic doctrine:
[H]uman reason by its own natural force and light can arrive at a true and certain knowledge of the one personal God, Who by His providence watches over and governs the world…[I]t falls to reason to demonstrate with certainty the existence of God, personal and one… But reason can perform these functions safely and well only when properly trained, that is, when imbued with that sound philosophy which has long been, as it were, a patrimony handed down by earlier Christian ages, and which moreover possesses an authority of an even higher order, since the Teaching Authority of the Church, in the light of divine revelation itself, has weighed its fundamental tenets, which have been elaborated and defined little by little by men of great genius.  For this philosophy, acknowledged and accepted by the Church, safeguards the genuine validity of human knowledge, the unshakable metaphysical principles of sufficient reason, causality, and finality, and finally the mind's ability to attain certain and unchangeable truth.

Of course this philosophy deals with much that neither directly nor indirectly touches faith or morals, and which consequently the Church leaves to the free discussion of experts.  But this does not hold for many other things, especially those principles and fundamental tenets to which We have just referred…
If one considers all this well, he will easily see why the Church demands that future priests be instructed in philosophy "according to the method, doctrine, and principles of the Angelic Doctor," since, as we well know from the experience of centuries, the method of Aquinas is singularly preeminent both of teaching students and for bringing truth to light…
End quote.  Similarly, in his address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences of November 22, 1951, Pius XII says:
[T]he human intellect approaches that demonstration of the existence of God which Christian wisdom recognizes in those philosophical arguments which have been carefully examined throughout the centuries by giants in the world of knowledge, and which are already well known to you in the presentation of the "five ways" which the Angelic Doctor, St. Thomas, offers as a speedy and safe road to lead the mind to God.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church reaffirms the teaching of Vatican I and of Pius XII that God’s existence can be known with certainty by the natural light of human reason, and even teaches, more specifically, that we can “attain certainty” about God’s existence via “proofs” which begin “from movement, becoming, contingency, and the world's order and beauty.”  Most of these are, of course, among the approaches taken by Aquinas’s Five Ways.  In Fides et Ratio , Pope St. John Paul II also reaffirmed the teaching of Vatican I and Pius XII on the power of human reason in theological matters:
[T]he First Vatican Council… pronounced solemnly on the relationship between reason and faith. The teaching contained in this document strongly and positively marked the philosophical research of many believers and remains today a standard reference-point for correct and coherent Christian thinking in this regard…
Against the temptations of fideism… it was necessary to stress the unity of truth and thus the positive contribution which rational knowledge can and must make to faith's knowledge…
Surveying the situation today, we see that the problems of other times have returned…
There are… signs of a resurgence of fideism, which fails to recognize the importance of rational knowledge and philosophical discourse for the understanding of faith, indeed for the very possibility of belief in God…
[M]odes of latent fideism appear in the scant consideration accorded to speculative theology, and in disdain for the classical philosophy from which the terms of both the understanding of faith and the actual formulation of dogma have been drawn. My revered Predecessor Pope Pius XII warned against such neglect of the philosophical tradition and against abandonment of the traditional terminology…
Pope Leo XIII… revisited and developed the First Vatican Council's teaching on the relationship between faith and reason, showing how philosophical thinking contributes in fundamental ways to faith and theological learning.  More than a century later, many of the insights of his Encyclical Letter have lost none of their interest from either a practical or pedagogical point of view—most particularly, his insistence upon the incomparable value of the philosophy of Saint Thomas.  A renewed insistence upon the thought of the Angelic Doctor seemed to Pope Leo XIII the best way to recover the practice of a philosophy consonant with the demands of faith.
End quote.  To be sure, the Church has not officially endorsed any specific formulation of any particular argument for God’s existence.  All the same, in her authoritative documents she has gone so far as to speak of God’s existence as something susceptible of “certainty,” “demonstration,” and “proof”; has commended “classical philosophy” specifically as providing the best means of showing how this is possible; and has held up Aquinas and the general approaches taken in his Five Ways as exemplary.  Pius XII even went so far as to imply that the “metaphysical principles of sufficient reason, causality, and finality” -- to which formulations of arguments like Aquinas’s typically appeal -- are not only “unshakable” but are so connected to matters of faith and morals that they are not among the things to be left to “free discussion” among theologians. 
Quod erat demonstrandum?
Needless to say, many modern readers find all of this baffling.  They find it baffling that anyone could be so confident that God’s existence is demonstrable, and baffling that anyone could think it demonstrable in the specific way in question -- via arguments like Aquinas’s Five Ways and metaphysical principles like the principle of causality, the principle of sufficient reason, etc.  Indeed, they think it obvious that God’s existence is not demonstrable, and obvious that arguments like the ones in question do not work.
Though this attitude is common and even held with great confidence, there is no good justification for it.  There are three main problems with it.  The first is that those who exhibit it typically do not even understand what writers like Aquinas actually said, and aim their dismissive objections at crude caricatures.  I have documented this at length in several places, and will not repeat here what I’ve already said elsewhere (such as in my book Aquinas , in my Midwest Studies in Philosophyarticle “The New Atheists and the Cosmological Argument,” and in blog posts like this one, this one, and others).  Suffice it to say that if a skeptic assures you that cosmological arguments essentially rest on the premise that “everything has a cause,” or supposes that Aquinas was trying to prove that the world had a beginning in time, or suggests that Aquinas never explains why we should suppose a First Cause to have divine attributes like unity, omniscience, omnipotence, etc., that is an absolutely infallible sign that he is utterly incompetent to speak on the subject. 
A second problem is that those who are dismissive of the very idea that the existence of God might be demonstrable typically hold arguments for God’s existence to a standard to which they do not hold other arguments.  For instance, the mere fact that someone somewhere has raised an objection against an argument for God’s existence is commonly treated by skeptics as showing that “the argument fails” – as if an argument is a good one only if no one objects to it but all assent to it upon hearing it.   Of course, skeptics do not treat other philosophical arguments this way.  That an argument for materialism, or against free will, or whatever, has its critics is not taken to show that those arguments “fail.”  The attitude in these cases is rather: “Well, sure, like any philosophical argument, this one has its critics, but that doesn’t mean the critics are right.  At the end of the day, the objections might be answerable and the argument ultimately correct, and we need to keep an open mind about it and consider what might be said in its defense.”  In general, even the most eccentric philosophical arguments are treated as if they are always “on the table” as options worthy of reconsideration.  Mysteriously, though, arguments for God’s existence are refused this courtesy.  The mere fact that Hume (say) said such-and-such two centuries ago is often treated as if it constituted a once-and-for-all decisive refutation. 
Related to this is a tendency to approach the subject as if a successful argument for God’s existence should be the sort of thing that can be stated fairly briefly in a way that will convince even the most hardened skeptic.  Again, no one treats other arguments this way.  If a fifty page article on materialism, free will, utilitarianism, etc. fails to convince you, the author will say that you need to read his book.  If the book fails to convince you, he will then say that the problem is that you have to master the general literature on the subject.  If that literature fails to convince you, then he will say that the issue is a large one that you cannot reasonably expect anyone decisively to settle to the satisfaction of all parties. 
By contrast, if you suggest that the existence of God can be demonstrated, many a skeptic will demand that you accomplish this in an argument of the sort which might be summarized in the space of a blog post.  If such an argument fails to convince him, he will judge that it isn’t worth any more of his time, and if you tell him that he would need to read a book or even a large body of literature fully to understand the argument, he might even treat this (bizarrely) as if it made it even less likely that the argument is any good! 
Then there is the common tendency to suggest that defenders of arguments for God’s existence have ulterior motives that should make us suspicious of their very project.  Once again, the skeptic does not treat other arguments this way.  He doesn’t say: “Well, you have to be very wary of arguments against free will or for revisionist moral conclusions, because their proponents are no doubt trying to rationalize some sort of activity traditionally frowned upon.” Nor does he say: “Atheist arguments are always suspect, of course, given that people would like to find a way to justify rejecting religious practices and prohibitions they find onerous.”  For some reason, though, the very fact that a philosopher defends an argument for God’s existence is treated as if it should raise our suspicions.  “Oh, he must have some religious agenda he’s trying to rationalize!”
Now there is no good reason whatsoever for these double standards.  They reflect nothing more the unreflective prejudices of (some) atheists and skeptics, and in some cases maybe something worse – a dishonest rhetorical tactic intended to poison otherwise fair-minded people against taking arguments for God’s existence very seriously.  But I submit that these unjustifiable double standards play a major role in fostering the attitude that there is something fishy about the very idea of demonstrating the existence of God. 
A third, and perhaps not unrelated, problem with this attitude is that those who take it often misunderstand what a thinker like Aquinas means when he says that the existence of God can be “demonstrated.”  What is meant is that the conclusion that God exists follows with necessity or deductive validity from premises that are certain, where the certainty of the premises can in turn be shown via metaphysical analysis.  That entails that such a demonstration gives us knowledge that is more secure than what any scientific inference can give us (as “science” is generally understood today), in two respects.  First, the inference is not a merely probabilistic one, nor an “argument to the best explanation” which appeals to considerations like parsimony, fit with existing background theory, etc.; it is, again, instead a strict deduction to what is claimed to follow necessarily from the premises.  Second, the premises cannot be overthrown by further empirical inquiry, because they have to do with what any possible empirical inquiry must presuppose.
For example, Aristotelian arguments from motion begin with the premise that change occurs, together with premises to the effect that a potential can be actualized only by what is already actual (the principle of causality) and that an essentially ordered series of causes cannot regress to infinity.  The first premise is in a sense empirical, which is why the argument is not a priori.  We know that change occurs because we experience it.  However, it is not a premise which can be overthrown by further empirical inquiry, because any possible future experience will itself be a further instance of change.  (We can coherently hold, on empirical grounds, that this or that purported instance of change is unreal; but we cannot coherently maintain on empirical grounds that all change is unreal.)  The other premises can be defended by various metaphysical arguments, such as arguments to the effect that the principle of causality follows from the principle of sufficient reason (PSR), and that PSR rightly understood can be established via reductio ad absurdum of any attempt to deny it.  (See Scholastic Metaphysics for detailed defense of the background principles presupposed by Thomistic arguments for God’s existence.)
Now, the problem is this.  Contemporary philosophers tend to work within a conceptual straightjacket inherited from the early modern philosophers.  In particular, and where epistemological matters are concerned, they tend to think in terms inherited from the rationalists, the empiricists, and Kant.  Hence when you put forward an argument that you claim is not an inference of empirical science, they tend to think that the only other thing it can be is either some sort of “conceptual analysis” (essentially a watered-down Kantianism) or an attempt at rationalist apriorism.  And since arguments for God’s existence are obviously attempts to arrive at a conclusion about mind-independent reality itself rather than merely about how we think about reality or conceptualize reality, the assumption is that if you argue for God’s existence in a way that does not involve an inference of the sort familiar in empirical science, then you must be doing something of the Cartesian or Leibnizian rationalist sort.
As I argue in Scholastic Metaphysics, this is simply a false choice.  Thomists reject the entire rationalist/empiricist/Kantian dialectic, and maintain an epistemological position that predated these views.  But modern readers who are unfamiliar with this position, and falsely suppose that it must be an exercise in rationalist metaphysics, sometimes come to expect the trappingsof rationalist metaphysics.  In particular, they will expect geometry-style proofs, highly formalized arguments from axioms and definitions, which can be stated crisply in the course of a few pages and be seen either to succeed or fail upon a fairly cursory examination.  When a Thomist does not put forward an argument in this style, the skeptic supposes that he has failed to produce a true demonstration.  But this simply mistakes one kind of demonstration for demonstration as such, and begs the question against the Thomist, who rejects rationalist epistemology and methodology.  (Students of the Neo-Scholastic period of the history of Thomism will be familiar with Thomist criticisms of “essentialism” -- in Gilson’s specialized sense of that term, which is different from the way I or David Oderberg use it -- and of “ontologism.”  These are essentially criticisms of the Leibnizian rationalist approach to metaphysics and natural theology.)
Presenting theistic arguments in this pseudo-geometrical formalized style can in fact inadvertently foster misunderstandings, which is why I tend to avoid that style.  You can, of course, set out an argument like the Aristotelian argument from motion in a series of numbered steps, as I do in my ACPQ article “Existential Inertia and the Five Ways.”  However, the argument contains a number of crucial technical terms -- “actuality,” “potency,” “essentially ordered,” etc. -- which are not explained in the argument thus stated.  Even if you somehow worked definitions of these key terms into the formalized statement of the argument, that would simply push the problem back a stage, since you would have to make use of further concepts not defined in the formalized statement of the argument.  The idea that such an argument (or any metaphysical argument) could be entirelyformalized is a rationalist fantasy.
The trouble is that by presenting such semi-formalized arguments -- “Here’s the proof in ten steps” -- you risk encouraging the lazier sort of skeptic in his delusion that if such an argument is any good, it should be convincing, all by itself and completely removed from any larger context, to even the most hostile critic.  Naturally, it will never be that, because it will not properly be understood unless the larger conceptual context is understood.  But the lazy skeptic will not bother himself with that larger context.  He will simply take the brief, ten-step (or whatever) semi-formalized argument and aim at it any old objections that come to mind, thinking he has thereby refuted it when in fact he will (given his ignorance of some of the key background concepts) not even properly understand what it is saying.  (That is why a reader of a book like my Aquinas has to slog his way through over 50 pages of general metaphysics before he gets to the Five Ways.  There are no shortcuts, and I do not want to abet the lazy or dishonest skeptic in pretending otherwise.) 
Now, I submit that when we take account of these three factors underlying the common dismissive attitude toward the very idea of demonstrating God’s existence – the widespread misconceptions about what the traditional arguments for God’s existence actually say; the arbitrary double standard to which these arguments are held; and the common misunderstanding of what a “demonstration” must involve – we can see that that attitude is simply not justified.   Meanwhile, the approaches to demonstrating God’s existence represented by arguments like the Five Ways in fact are -- when fleshed out and when correctly understood -- convincing, as I have argued in several places (e.g. in Aquinas and in the ACPQ article). 
The Church’s insistence that the existence of God is demonstrable is not, in any event, an attempt to settle a philosophical issue by sheer diktat.  It is rather a carefully considered judgment about what must be the case if Christianity is to be rationally justifiable.  What the Church is doing is distancing herself from fideism by affirming the power of unaided reason and affirming the duty of Christians to provide a rational justification of what Aquinas called the “preambles” of the Catholic religion.  (I’ve discussed the crucial role that proofs of God’s existence and other philosophical arguments play in Christian apologetics here and here.)  It is not an expression of blind faith but precisely a condemnationof blind faith. 
So, something Catholics and New Atheists can agree on.  Isn’t that nice? 

The straw man that will not die

What’s more tiresome than reading yet another brain-dead atheist attack on the “Everything has a cause” straw man?   Having to write up a response to yet another brain-dead atheist attack on the “Everything has a cause” straw man (as I did not too long ago).  It’s like being Sisyphus on a treadmill stuck in reverse.  It’s like that annoying Alanis Morissette song.  It’s like that annoying parody of the annoying Alanis Morissette song.  It’s like swimming through a sea of confusion, on a dead horse you’re flogging with a hoe in a tough row of run-on mixed metaphors.  ‘Til the clichés come home.I noted recently that Fr. Norris Clarke, S.J. was making pretty much the same complaint (sans the YouTube link) over 40 years ago.  Turns out even he was late to the pity party by at least 75 years -- and indeed, beaten to it by another Fr. Clarke, S.J.  Dear reader, I give you the third edition of Fr. Richard F. Clarke’s textbook Logic, from the year 1895:

The reader will observe that the Law of Causation does not state (as some modern writers most unfairly would have us believe) that Everything that exists has a cause. In this form it is quite untrue, since God is uncreated and uncaused.  If it were worded thus, the objection, that we first formulate our universal law and then exclude from it Him on Whom all existence depends, would be perfectly valid.  But this is entirely to misrepresent our position.  It is one of the unworthy devices of the enemies of a priori philosophy.  (pp. 78-79)
Yes, you read that right: 1895.  (And that’s the third edition.)  Yet Steven Hales, Nigel Warburton, Bertrand Russell, Daniel Dennett, et al. still haven’t gotten the memo. 
The Church thinks in centuries.  The “skeptic” takes centuries to think.  If he ever does.  I think I’ll have my youngest son legally renamed “Fr. Clarke, S.J.” so he’ll be ready circa 2050 to offer yet another gentle reminder. 

Try a damn link

An Aristotelian Realist Philosophy of Mathematics , James Franklin’s recent book, is reviewed at The New Criterion.
Mike in/on motion: Michael Flynn is working through the Aristotelian argument from motion at The TOF Spot, with three installments so far (here, here, and here).  (Some bonus coolness: Mike Flynn covers from Analog.)
“New Atheist” writer Victor Stenger has died.  Jeffery Jay Lowder of The Secular Outpost recounts his disagreements with Stenger. 
What was the deal with H. P. Lovecraft?  John J. Miller investigates at The Claremont Review of Books.
At Philosophy in Review, Roger Pouivet (author of After Wittgenstein, St. Thomas ) reviews Robert Pasnau’s Metaphysical Themes 1274-1671 .  (You can find the current issue here and then scroll down to find a PDF of the review.)Roger Scruton’s The Soul of the World is reviewed at Spiked.

Hilaire Belloc on Islam: A reminder from Bill Vallicella.
Elmar Kramer’s Analysis of Existing: Barry Miller's Approach to God is reviewed at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews.  (The review does not seem to me entirely fair to Miller, but is worth reading anyway.)
At Public Discourse, Chris Tollefsen explains how pornography is like incest. 
A workshop inspired by Alvin Plantinga’s well-known unpublished notes on “Two Dozen (or so) Theistic Arguments” will be held next month at Baylor University. 

Symington on Scholastic Metaphysics

At Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, philosopher Paul Symington kindly reviews my book Scholastic Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction .  From the review:
Edward Feser demonstrates a facility with both Scholastic and contemporary analytical concepts, and does much to span the divide…
The final chapter [is]… a nice example of the service that Feser renders to the task of enhancing points of commonality between scholastic and analytic thinkers.  In this chapter, Feser defends a realist form of essentialism as well as argues for a real distinction between essence and existence.  As is characteristic of the book as a whole, Feser brings in contemporary views in way that makes good use of, and is charitable to, contemporary developments in metaphysics…
In all, Feser's new book is a welcome addition for those interested in bringing the concepts, terminology and presuppositions between scholastic and contemporary analytic philosophers to commensuration. In fact, I would contend that Feser's book will constitute an important piece in its own right for guiding the research program for contemporary Thomistic metaphysicians into the future.Prof. Symington also raises a couple points of criticism.  Among the topics dealt with in chapter 3 of my book is a defense of the hylemorphist view that micro-level parts like quarks, elements of compounds like the oxygen and hydrogen in water, etc. are in the wholes of which they are parts virtually rather than actually.  (Readers unfamiliar with this thesis should read the chapter -- there’s no way I can summarize the arguments for it here.)  Now, as I indicate in the book (at pp. 183-84), hylemorphism as such does not strictly requiresuch a view.  A hylemorphist could inprinciple hold that it is only at some micro-level that we have irreducible composites of substantial form and prime matter, and that what exists above those levels are merely composites of accidental forms and secondary matter.  Thus the hylemorphist could in theory allow that (say) everything is reducible to atoms in something like the sense affirmed by Democritus, but hold that the atoms themselves are compounds of substantial form and prime matter; or that oxygen and hydrogen do after all exist actually rather than virtually in water, with water being just an accidental form of the aggregate of oxygen and hydrogen (each considered as having a substantial form even while united in the water); and so forth.  However, hylemorphic analysis considered together with the actual empirical facts tells against such concessions to reductionism.  In fact (so some of us hylemorphists claim, anyway) regarding the parts in question as in the wholes only virtually rather than actually best makes sense of what we know from modern science when interpreted in hylemorphic terms.

Prof. Symington is not so sure.  He suggests:
Say someone accepted that basic material particles each in themselves have an intrinsic directedness to realize a certain range of ends -- like the attraction between an electron and a proton -- even if a given end is not actually being realized. Then, it would be these particles that would be substances in Feser's understanding of the term and would be actual and not virtual. I don't see why someone couldn't merely hold that there is no existing composite entity, only individual elemental particles that are complexes of actualized and unactualized potencies in themselves. That is, there are no unique actualities and potencies (causally or otherwise) that the composed entities have over and above the actualities and potencies of its parts. That water can extinguish a flame instead of combusting will not have to do with properties that the water has, but rather on the actualities and potentialities that the elements of the water each themselves have instead. To put it another way, instead of claiming that the unified subject of actualities and potentialities are the composite entities, it is the elements that are said to be the unified subjects of actualities and potentialities.
End quote.  In other words, Symington seems essentially to be saying that the kind of position I allow for as an abstract possibility -- namely, that hylemorphic analysis holds true at the level of basic particles, say, but not at the level of composites of these particles (which composites would be reducible to or eliminable in favor of basic particles, hylemorphically construed) -- is one that the hylemorphist has not given us a good reason to reject.  On this view, while the hylemorphist has shown that we need the distinctions between actuality and potentiality, and substantial form and prime matter, at the level of basic particles, he has not shown that we need them at higher levels, and thus has not shown that we need the doctrine that micro-parts are in the wholes only virtually rather than actually.
But it seems to me that this objection misses the force of some key points developed in the book, which I can only briefly summarize here.  First (and as David Oderberg has emphasized) since the properties (in the technical Scholastic sense of “properties”) of a kind of thing flow from and point to the presence of its essence, the complete absence of the properties indicates the absence of the essence, and thus the absence of the kind of thing in question.  For example, since we should be able to burn hydrogen if it were actually present in water, but this property of hydrogen is absent, it would follow by this reasoning that the essence of hydrogen is also absent, and thus that, strictly speaking, hydrogen itself is absent.  Thus, though there is of course a sensein which hydrogen is present in water, it can (hylemorphists like Oderberg and I argue) be present only virtually rather than actually given the absence of some of its properties.
Symington alludes to this argument, but it doesn’t seem to me that he answers it.  Perhaps he would say that the essence of hydrogen, and thus hydrogen itself, is actually present but that the “flow” of the properties is being blocked by the presence of oxygen, just as a human being’s properties of risibility and linguistic ability might be blocked by brain damage.  But this cannot be right.  The properties that naturally flow from an essence can be blocked, but such blockage is not the normal course of things.  Occasionally there are human beings completely incapable of laughter or language use, but of course this is not the case for the vast majority of human beings.  That indicates that the “flow” of the properties is merely being blocked in the aberrant cases, rather than that the essence is absent.  But it is not merely occasionally the case that the hydrogen that is purportedly actually present in water cannot be burned.  That indicates that the essence is not there at all, rather than that it is there and the properties are merely being blocked.
A second point is that the mainhigher-level divisions in nature traditionally posited by the hylemorphist are no closer now to a successful reductionist analysis than they ever were.  These are, first, the division between rational and sub-rational but sentient forms of life; second, that between sentient forms of life and non-sentient forms; and third, that between non-sentient forms and inorganic phenomena.  It is often casually asserted that modern science has “shown” that these divisions mark, contra the Aristotelian, mere differences in degree rather than kind, but (as I have argued many times and in many places) this is a complete illusion, and one that is in no way grounded in empirical science but is rather the expression of a dogmatic metaphysical naturalism.  The intractability within contemporary philosophy of the problem of providing a naturalistic account of the propositional attitudes shows how illusory is the suggestion that the division between rational and sub-rational but sentient forms of life has been dissolved; the intractability of the “qualia problem” shows how illusory is the suggestion that the division between sentient forms of life and non-sentient forms of life has been dissolved; and the intractability of the “origin of life” problem shows how illusory is the suggestion that the division between rudimentary forms of life and inorganic phenomena has been dissolved. 
A third point is that reductionist and eliminativist analyses even of inorganic phenomena face grave difficulties, such as Peter Unger’s “problem of the many,” and Crawford Elder’s objection that a reductive or eliminativist analysis of a stone (say) cannot provide a principled way of explaining why it is exactly this collection of particles (or whatever) -- no more and no fewer -- to which we are supposed to reduce the stone, or in favor of which we are to eliminate the stone.  (These issues are all discussed in the book, to which the interested reader is directed.)
Prof. Symington also raises a second potential criticism, this time of my claim that the predictive power and technological success of modern science give us no reason to accept scientism.  He agrees that certain defenses of scientism along these lines are too facile, but wonders whether a more sophisticated argument for scientism might be based on the technological and predictive successes of science.  In particular, and if I understand him correctly, he wonders whether a proponent of scientism might argue as follows:
1. The predictive power and technological applications of science are unparalleled by those of any other purported source of knowledge.
2. So science is a reliable source of knowledge.
3. Science has undermined beliefs derived from other purported sources of knowledge, such as common sense.
4. So science has shown that these other purported sources of knowledge are unreliable.
5. The range of subjects science investigates is vast.
6. So the number of purported sources of knowledge that science has shown to be unreliable is vast.
7. So what science reveals to us is probably all that is real.
Now, Prof. Symington does not endorse this argument; he’s just suggesting that it is an argument that a sophisticated proponent of scientism might endorse.  But it does not seem to me to be a good argument.  For one thing, the examples Prof. Symington cites of beliefs which have been undermined by science do not seem to me very convincing.  He writes:
For example, although common sense tells us that a biological organism acts in an autonomous way and is not reducible to its parts, the law of conservation of energy via science suggests that the exchange and direction of energy is fully accounted for at the basic level of material elements. In other words, what determines how the energy is exchanged is determined ultimately at the elemental level. There are other beliefs that we hold that also seem undermined by the claims of science, such as the dissonance between what we think is motivating us to do x and the "true" motivations for action x obtained from psychological, evolutionary or economic analyses.
The trouble with the first example is that it isn’t clear that common sense takes organisms to be autonomous and irreducible in the specific way that Symington says is undermined by the law of conservation of energy.  The trouble with the second example is that it is, to say the very least, by no means uncontroversial that science really has shown that the true motivations for our actions are (in general) other than what we think they are.  (In fact this sort of view tends, I would argue, toward incoherence, for “argument from reason”-style reasons.)  Hence, of Symington’s two examples, one is a claim undermined by science that wasn’t a commonsense belief in the first place, and the other is a commonsense belief that isn’t really undermined by science. 
But even given better examples, the proposed argument still doesn’t work.  For premise (3) simply doesn’t give us good reason to believe step (4).  To see why not, suppose we replace “science” with “visual experience” in these two steps of the argument.  Visual experience has of course very often undermined beliefs derived from other sources of knowledge.  For example, it often tells us that the person we thought we heard come in the room was really someone else, or that when we thought we were feeling a pillow next to us it was really a cat.  Does that mean that visual experience has shown that auditory experience and tactile experience are unreliable sources of knowledge?  Of course not.  To do that, it would have to have shown that auditory experience and tactical experience are not just often wrong but wrong on a massive scale and with respect to a very wide variety of subjects.  And it has done no such thing.  But neither has science shown any such thing with respect to common sense.  Hence (3) is not a good reason to conclude to (4).
(4) and (5) also don’t give us good reason to believe (6).  Suppose we label the range of subjects science covers with letters, from A, B, C, D, and so on all the way to Z.  Even if science really did show that other purported sources of knowledge were unreliable with respect to domains A and B (say), it obviously wouldn’t follow that there were no reliable sources of knowledge other than science with respect to domains C through Z.
In short, the argument Symington proposes that a defender of scientism might put forward seems to rest on a massive overgeneralization from a small number of examples, and examples that are dubious in any case.
In any event, a theme that is developed at length throughout my book is that there are absolute limits in principle to the range of beliefs that science could undermine, and these are precisely the sorts of beliefs with which metaphysics is concerned.  The book aims in part to set out (some of) the notions that any possible empirical science must presuppose, and thus cannot coherently call into question. 
Anyway, I thank Prof. Symington for his kind review and for his politely and usefully critical comments.