Edward Feser's Blog, page 89

Signature in the cell?

In the combox of my recent post comparing the New Atheism and ID theory to different players in a game of Where’s Waldo?,  a reader wrote:
One can run a reductio against the claim that we cannot detect design or infer transcendent intelligence through natural processes.  Were we to find, imprinted in every human cell, the phrase "Made by Yahweh" there is only one thing we can reasonably conclude.
I like this example, because it is simple, clear, and illustrative of confusions of the sort that are rife in discussions of ID.  Presumably we are all supposed to regard it as obvious that if this weird event were to occur, the “one thing we can reasonably conclude” is that a “transcendent intelligence,” indeed Yahweh himself, had put his “signature in the cell” (with apologies to Stephen Meyer -- whose own views I am not addressing here, by the way).I. Context is everything

Well, it just isn’t the case that that is the “one thing we can reasonably conclude.”  In fact, by itself such a weird event wouldn’t give us reason at all to affirm the existence of any “transcendent intelligence,” much less Yahweh.  To see why not, compare the following parallel examples.  Suppose we found, imprinted in every human cell, a phrase like “Made by Quetzalcoatl,” or “Simulated by the Matrix,” or “Made by Steve Jobs," or “Round squares exist,” or “Kilroy was here.”  Would there be “only one thing we could reasonably conclude”?  Well, sure there would, and it would be this: Something really weird is going on, but who the hell knows what.
Here's what a scenario of this sort would not be, though: a good reason to believe that Quetzalcoatl exists, or that we are part of the Matrix, or that Steve Jobs is our creator, or that round squares are possible after all, or that Kilroy had somehow found his way into each cell.  (And who would “Kilroy” be anyway?  Some WWII-era graffiti artist?  The robot guy from the Styx album?) 
Our background knowledge just doesn’t make any of these conclusions plausible.  For example, we just know, with greater certainty than we could know any of these conclusions, that round squares are impossible.  We know that “Kilroy is here” is a stereotypical graffito, that the Matrix is a stereotypical mind-blowing science fiction scenario, and that Steve Jobs is a stereotypical tech biz whiz.  If we found in every human cell a phrase referring to Kilroy, round squares, the Matrix, or Steve Jobs, we would judge it far more likely that someone, somehow, is playing a massive joke on us than that the Matrix or round squares exist, or that Kilroy or Steve Jobs is responsible.  Nor would we judge that a “transcendent intelligence” -- if by that we mean a strictly divine one (i.e. an intellect that was infinite, purely actual, perfectly good, etc.) -- was responsible.  (Indeed, I would say that when we understand what it would be to be the divine intellect, we can see that such a frivolous action would be ruled out.)  And we might not even attribute the scenario to intelligence at all; on the contrary, you might judge that everyone’s cognitive faculties -- or maybe just your own (including your perceptions of what other people were reporting about what they’d seen in the cell) -- were massively malfunctioning and producing pop-culture-influenced hallucinations.
Now, it doesn’t take much thought to see that we’d think the same thing about finding “Made by Quetzalcoatl” imprinted in every cell.  I doubt that any Christian ID theorist would propose that “there is only one thing we could reasonably conclude” from this, viz. that we should renounce Christianity and take up Aztec religion.  More likely such an ID theorist would conclude that someone, somehow -- a New Atheist biotech cabal, maybe, or the devil -- was trying to shake everyone’s faith in Christianity.  Or he might just conclude that no intelligence at all was responsible for it, and that his cognitive faculties were massively malfunctioning.   Whatever he would conclude, though, the occurrence in human cells of the phrase “Made by Quetzalcoatl” would not by itself be doing the main work. 
But the same thing is true in the “Made by Yahweh” scenario.  The reason the reader I was quoting thinks (like many other people no doubt think) that the “one thing we can reasonably conclude” in such a case is that Yahweh put the message there, is that he already believes on independent grounds that God exists, that he is the cause of living things, that he revealed himself to the ancient Israelites as Yahweh, etc.  And those independent reasons are what's really doing the heavy lifting in the thought experiment, not the “Made by Yahweh” stuff.  Some secularist who thought he had good independent reasons to think that Yahweh does not exist might conclude instead that the whole thing was a gag foisted upon us by Erich von Däniken’s extraterrestrials, or by a cabal of Christian biotech whizzes -- or maybe that it is just a massive cognitive malfunction on his part, caused by his excessive fear of the Religious Right.
“But those wouldn’t be reasonable interpretations of such an event!” you say.  Well, maybe, and maybe not.  The point, though, is that you’re not going to know from the event itself, considered in isolation.  If we’re to judge that Yahweh, rather than extraterrestrial pranksters, hallucination, or some other cause, was behind such an event, it is considerations other than the event itself that will justify us in doing so.  In short, we could take “Made by Yahweh” to be a sign from Yahweh only if we already have, on other grounds, good reason to think Yahweh exists and is likely to send us messages by leaving them in cells.  And in that case the occurrence of the phrase in the cell would not be giving us independent reason to think Yahweh exists. 
Of course, the “Made by Yahweh” scenario is pure fiction.  The “messages” or “information” that ID theorists actually identify in the cell is, needless to say, far less dramatic than that.  It has nothing specifically to do with Yahweh at all, or with anyone else for that matter.  Indeed, whether regarding it as “information” in any literal sense is even appropriate in the first place is a matter of controversy in the philosophy of biology.  How much more, then, is the real work in ID arguments being done by considerations apart from what we actually find in the cell?  If even “Made by Yahweh” wouldn’t by itself do much to get you to Yahweh, how much less does the presence of genetic information per se do so? 
II. You keep using that word “natural”; I don’t think it means what you think it means
That brings us to a second confusion in the reader’s remark quoted above.  He speaks of “detect[ing] design or infer[ring] transcendent intelligence through natural processes.”  But the example he gives is of finding the phrase “Made by Yahweh” in every human cell.  And the problem is that the occurrence of the phrase “Made by Yahweh” simply wouldn’t be a “natural” process, certainly not from an Aristotelian-Thomistic (A-T) point of view (so that the example simply begs the question against A-T objections to ID).  Even if this occurrence happened repeatedly in every cell over the course of millennia, it wouldn’t be “natural” in the relevant sense.
The reason is the obvious one that it is purely a matter of convention that the string of shapes “Made by Yahweh” counts as a sentence in the English language, and purely a matter of convention that the sentence has the specific meaning that it has.  For an arrangement of physical marks to count as the English sentence “Made by Yahweh” is thus for it to have what Aristotelians call an “accidental form.”  But a “natural” object is one that has a “substantial form” rather than an accidental form.  And objects with accidental forms are metaphysically less fundamental than those with substantial forms.  Accidental forms presuppose substantial forms, insofar as it is only an object or collection of objects that have substantial forms that can come to have an accidental form.  The stock examples of objects with accidental forms are artifacts (watches, beds, coats, computers, etc.), and the stock examples of objects with substantial forms are those that occur in the wild (animals, plants, stones, water, etc.), though the “accidental form/substantial form” distinction doesn’t match up precisely to the “human artifact/thing-that-occurs-in-the-wild” distinction.  There are man-made things that have substantial forms (human babies, new breeds of dog, water synthesized in a lab) and things that occur in the wild that have only accidental forms (a pile of stones that randomly forms at the bottom of a hill). 
This distinction is closely related to another one, viz. the distinction between immanent teleology and extrinsic teleology.  An acorn’s “pointing to” or being “directed at” the end or outcome of becoming an oak would be an example of immanent teleology, since this “pointing” or “directedness” is grounded in the very nature of an acorn insofar as it follows from an acorn’s having the substantial form it does.  A watch’s “pointing to” of being “directed toward” time-telling is an example of extrinsic teleology, because its having that function follows from the watch’s parts having a certain accidental form imposed on them from outside. 
These are distinctions I have discussed and defended in many places -- and by far at greatest length, and in the most systematic detail, in Scholastic Metaphysics .  (If you want to criticize what I have to say on the grounds that you reject these distinctions, fine, but you really have no business doing so unless you read and can answer the arguments I develop in that book.)  Suffice it to say here that from an A-T point of view, what is “natural” is what has a substantial form and immanent teleology, and it simply makes no sense to describe what has an accidental form and extrinsic teleology as “natural.” 
Now a problem A-T writers have with Paley’s “design argument” and with ID theory is that they relentlessly blur these distinctions.  In particular, in comparing organisms and other natural phenomena to human artifacts they treat them as if they had accidental forms and extrinsic teleology, and from the A-T point of view this is just a complete muddle.  It simply makes no sense.  It gets the metaphysics of natural objects just fundamentally wrong, and it also has a tendency to lead us into getting the “designer” and his relationship to the world fundamentally wrong.  In particular, it tends to lead us into an anthropomorphic conception of the designer that is incompatible with classical theism, and a conception of his relationship to the world that is implicitly either deist or occasionalist.  (I’ve developed and defended these claims too in many places -- and by far at greatest length, and in the most systematic detail, in my Nova et Vetera article “Between Aristotle and William Paley: Aquinas’s Fifth Way.”  See also my many posts on Paley and ID theory.  Again, there really is no point to criticizing what I say about the implications of Paley’s argument and ID theory unless you’ve read and have an answer to these arguments, though I know from long experience that that won’t stop many readers from doing it anyway.) 
Now suppose someone said: “Fine, suppose we go along with all these A-T scruples.  Suppose we characterize natural phenomena in terms of substantial forms and immanent teleology, and suppose we put aside any examples the evaluation of which would be highly sensitive to context, e.g. cases like ‘Made by Yahweh’ being written in the cell.  Would you still deny that we can infer transcendent intelligence from natural processes?”
The answer is No, I would absolutely not deny it.  Those who suppose, like the reader quoted above and like so many other ID sympathizers, that we A-T philosophers “claim that we cannot detect design or infer transcendent intelligence through natural processes” simply haven’t been reading very carefully.  Neither I nor any other A-T writer I know of would make such a claim.  On the contrary, Aquinas’s Fifth Way is devoted precisely to a demonstration of the existence of the divine intellect on the basis of the existence of immanent teleology in nature.  But this argument has nothing to do with modeling natural objects on watches, outboard motors, or other artifacts; nothing to do with explaining rare or strange phenomena; nothing to do with “gaps” in current scientific explanations; nothing to do with “specified complexity” or any other kind of complexity; nothing to do with weighing probabilities; nothing to do with biological phenomena per se; and nothing to do even with “information” as such either. 
It has instead to do with there being irreducible immanent teleology of at least some sort in nature, at the very least at the level of the most primitive patterns of efficient causality.  Even if you could reduce or eliminate every other apparent instance of teleology in nature -- everything at the “macro” level from human beings down to complex inorganic chemical phenomena -- the barest efficient-causal relations at the “micro” level would still be intelligible only in teleological terms.  For as the A-T philosopher argues, there is no way for an efficient cause A regularly to generate a particular characteristic effect or range of effects B unless generating B is the “end” or outcome toward which A“points” or is “directed,” as to a final cause.  (Again, see Scholastic Metaphysicsfor detailed defense of this line of argument.)  For the Fifth Way, it’s not that there is in nature “directedness” of a complex sort (as in bodily organs), or of a semantic sort (as in “information” in the ordinary sense), that requires a transcendent divine intellect; it’s the fact that there’s any “directedness” at all that requires it, and it requires it as a matter of metaphysical necessity, not mere probability.  (Compare: A painting requires a painter not by virtue of having this or that unusual or complex elementin it, but just by virtue of being a painting at all.)
But couldn’t there also be irreducible immanent teleology at the biological level, or at some other “macro” level -- even irreducible teleology whose direct cause could only have been God himself?  Of course there could be; indeed, there is at least one example -- the human intellect, which (the Thomist argues) cannot in principle have arisen from material processes and has to be specially created every time a new human being comes into existence.  But if and wherever else there are such irreducible levels of immanent teleology, that will be by virtue of things at the “macro” level having substantial forms rather than being mere aggregates of lower level phenomena (and thus having merely accidental forms).  And if a divine cause alone could account for them, that will be by virtue of there being nothing in any natural efficient-causal precursors that contains what is in the effect either “formally,” “virtually,” or “eminently” (as the Scholastic “principle of proportionate causality” requires).  (I discussed the relevance of the latter point to disputes over the origin of life in a post from a few years ago.)
In other words, it is in terms of the A-T metaphysical categories alone that various proposed naturalistic explanations of biological and other phenomena can adequately be evaluated.  “Complex specified information” and other such theoretical tools get the conceptual territory wrong and otherwise lack the conceptual nuance of the Scholastic metaphysical apparatus.  From an A-T point of view, investigating the metaphysics of the natural world using these tools rather than the A-T ones is like investigating combustion and the like using phlogiston theory rather than modern chemistry, or studying human behavior using phrenology.  You might accidentally hit upon some insights, but it will be mixed in with a ton of serious errors, and even what you do get right you’ll describe in seriously misleading ways.  The enterprise will be a waste of time and energy at best and at worst seriously distort our understanding of the phenomena studied. 
This is why the stock responses of ID sympathizers to A-T criticisms miss the point.  “We’re not claiming in the first place that our arguments get you all the way to God; other work would be needed to do that.”   That’s like saying: “Sure, phrenology doesn’t give us a complete psychology; other work would be needed to do that” or “We never claimed phlogiston theory tells us everything about the phenomena it studies; other approaches are needed too.”  In both cases, the “otherwork” is (from an A-T point of view) doing allthe real work. 
Here’s another stock response: “How can you object to seeing the world as a product of divine design, or as God’s artifact?”  The answer is that I don’t object to that.  What I object to is blurring the distinctions between substantial form and accidental form, immanent teleology and extrinsic teleology. 
Then there’s my favorite stock response: “Why are you giving a blank check to evolutionary naturalism?  How much are your Darwinist buddies paying you?”  To which I answer: Search the text above.  I didn’t say anything about evolution.  Get off this Darwin fixation, wouldja Captain Ahab? 
III. If the facts are not on your side, pound the table; if the table’s not on your side, thump the Bible.
OK, that’s not really my favorite response.  My favorite response is this: “You demmed Thomists, letting your Aristotelianism trump scripture!  Where do you get off telling God what sorts of things he can do to reveal himself?  The Bible describes God causing all sorts of things you would characterize as having ‘accidental forms’ rather than ‘substantial forms.’  For example, it describes him miraculously speaking to us through sentences in man-made languages.  You’re letting your metaphysics determine how you read scripture rather than the other way around!”
‘Cause, you know, the really biblical thing to do would be to let Bill Dembski’s doctoral dissertation determine how we read scripture. 
But seriously.  I have never said that God cannot reveal himself through sentences, artifacts, and other things having accidental rather than substantial forms, nor does anything I have said imply that.  Of course God can cause artifacts to exist miraculously, he can cause a voice to be heard from the sky or from a burning bush, and for that matter he could also cause “Made by Yahweh” to appear in every human cell.  And of course he can, and has, revealed himself via miraculous actions like some of these.  I don’t think it has ever occurred to any Thomist to dispute any of that.  It simply isn’t what is at issue.
What is at issue is the context in which such events could be known to be divine revelations -- and, in particular, whether such events could by themselves constitute evidence for the existence of God for someone who didn’t already know that God exists.  For there are different sorts of miracles, and different sorts of context in which they might be interpreted.  Suppose God miraculously caused the English words “I, God, exist” to be written in the dust on a certain car’s windshield -- but that the car was parked on a small side street in a neighborhood where most people spoke Mandarin, nobody was particularly religious, and the words appeared in the middle of the night when no one was around to see them.  This would, needless to say, be a pretty ineffective way of revealing himself.  There would be nothing about the evidence that those who come across it would be at all likely to see as miraculous.  It would just seem to be a silly prank, unworthy of a moment’s attention.  And pointing this out has nothing to do with arrogantly imposing idiosyncratic Aristotelian metaphysical limits on what God might do to reveal himself.
Consider something more dramatic, such as God miraculously causing a voice from the sky shouting “God loves you!” above a crowd all of whom spoke English -- but where this happened at Universal Studios or Disneyland in the course of a typically busy day there.  Almost certainly, no one would think that God was acting in a special way to reassure these people of his love.  Even if they were churchgoers, they’d think it was just some goofy prank by an employee with access to the requisite equipment.  Even if the context was a more unlikely one for such an event-- a quiet neighborhood, or the desert -- these days they might just as well wonder if the CIA or extraterrestrials were responsible. 
Contrast the sorts of contexts we find with biblical miracles like the burning bush or the voice from the sky at Christ’s baptism.  The audiences in these cases were people who had no doubt that God exists -- indeed, that the God of Israel, specifically, exists -- and that he reveals himself via unusual events of this sort.  Nor, given their cultural context, would it have occurred to them to wonder whether extraterrestrials or a CIA-type organization might be responsible instead.  It is, as it were, as if they were already “waiting by the phone” for God to “call” in one of these ways, and all he needed to do was to make it happen.  Even in the case of Elijah and the priests of Baal, where some of the people involved worshipped Baal rather than the God of Israel, they were already convinced that one or the other existed.  What the miracle was intended to accomplish in this case was merely to make it clear, to people who were already willing to concede thatmuch, which of the two was in fact the true God.  If it had been instead (say) a contemporary audience of X-Files-watching atheists who’d read Chariots of the Godsand were familiar with Hollywood special effects and CIA-controlled drones raining death from above, an Elijah-and-the-priests-of-Baal type miracle might not be so effective in sending a divine message.  Again, the question isn’t whether God can cause these sorts of things.  The question is what sort of context they must occur in for them to be effective.  And that depends in part on what the specific point of the miracle is.
This is a question I addressed in my recent post “Pre-Christian apologetics.”  As I there argued, if the specific purpose of a miracle is the “general apologetics” one of establishing, for those not already inclined to believe that divine revelations occur, that such a revelation really has in fact occurred, then this cannot be accomplished via an event that is merely unusual and could in principle occur via a non-divine cause.  It has to be an event that no one other than God -- that is to say, God as classical theism conceives of him -- could in principle have caused.  Christ’s resurrection from the dead would be a paradigm case of such a miracle.  But establishing such a miracle in turn requires a lot of philosophical stage-setting.  It requires establishing God’s existence and nature, divine providence, the possibility in principle of miracles, the possibility in principle of a resurrection, and so forth.  All this groundwork has to be established before the occurrence of a miracle like the resurrection can be defended. (Again, see the post just linked to for discussion of this subject.)
Someone might object: “But in the biblical stories, no one first sets out a fancy philosophical argument for classical theism before God causes a miracle!”  Well no, of course, not, but our context is simply not at all like the one in which the people of biblical times found themselves.  The existence of the God of Israel and the possibility of divine revelations backed by miraculous interventions was in general simply not an issue.  The people involved generally took all that for granted, so that there was no need for philosophical argument.  Also, unlike the resurrection -- part of the point of which was to provide unmistakable divine confirmation of Christ’s authority and teaching, which was necessary for the foundation of the Church -- many other biblical miracles did not have such an absolutely fundamental and “general purpose” character, and thus did not need to be so dramatic.  Given a context in which it was already widely accepted that God had established a covenant with Moses, and that he sometimes spoke through prophets via special events, an unusual event which could in principle have been brought about by some agency other than God (an angel, say, or an extraterrestrial) -- but where no one in that context would have entertained such alternative explanations -- could suffice.
With this subject as with so many others, Aquinas and other Scholastic writers draw a number of careful distinctions which contemporary writers ignore at their peril.  “Miracles” in the strictest sense (a) have a publicly observable character, (b) are beyond the power of any created thing to produce, and (c) are outside the ordinary course of the created order.  These three conditions are best understood by way of contrast.  The operation of grace in the soul is not miraculous, because while only God can produce it, it is not publicly observable.  Alleged poltergeist phenomena and other purported weird occurrences often mislabeled “supernatural” would not count as miracles, because finite spirits could produce them and thus they are not beyond the power of created things.  The creation and conservation of the world is beyond the power of anything other than God to produce, but since it just is the causing of the created order it is not outside the ordinary course of the created order.  (This is one reason it would, from an A-T point of view, just be a muddle to assimilate the divine causation of some ordinary biological phenomenon to the “miraculous.”  That just doesn’t reflect a precise enough understanding of the various ways God acts vis-à-vis the world.  Bacterial flagella, for example, are -- unlike resurrections from the dead -- just ordinary everyday parts of the created order rather than something outside the usual course of the created order, and are thus not “miraculous,” whatever else one wants to say about how they came into being.) 
“Miracles” in the strict sense are thus to be distinguished from mere “wonders.”  The strictly “supernatural” must be distinguished from the merely “preternatural.”  And so forth.  But we needn’t pursue the issue further here.  Suffice it to note that although some have tried to make pro-ID hay out of a comparison of ID’s favorite examples on the one hand and biblical miracles on the other, the two topics have nothing to do with one another.  (Unless you count the nearly miraculous multiplication of red herrings which ID sympathizers have produced, including this one!)

Where’s God?

Here’s an analogy that occurs to me as a way of thinking about some of the main issues debated here on the blog over the years.  Suppose you’re looking at a painting of a crowd of people, and you remark upon the painter’s intentions in producing the work.  Someone standing next to you looking at the same painting -- let’s call him Skeptic -- begins to scoff.  “Painter?  Oh please, there’s no evidence of any painter!  I’ve been studying this canvas for years.  I’ve gone over every square inch.  I’ve studied each figure in detail -- facial expressions, posture, clothing, etc.  I’ve found plumbers, doctors, dancers, hot dog vendors, dogs, cats, birds, lamp posts, and all kinds of other things.  But I’ve never found this painter of yours anywhere in it.  No doubt you’ll tell me that I need to look again until I find him.  But really, how long do we have to keep looking without success until people like you finally admit that there just is no painter?”Needless to say, Skeptic, despite his brash confidence, will have entirely misunderstood the nature of the dispute between you and him.  He would be making the crudest of category mistakes.   He fundamentally misunderstands both what it means to say that there is a painter, and fundamentally misunderstands the reasons for saying there is one.

But now consider another onlooker, who rushes to your defense.  Let’s call him Believer.  “I think you’re overlooking crucial evidence, Skeptic,” Believer says.  “I agree that you’re not going to find evidence of the painter on any cursory examination, or in most of the painting.  But consider that in the upper left corner, among the other figures, there’s a policeman leaning at about a ninety degree angle, yet whose facial expression gives no indication that he feels like he’s going to fall over.  Now it’s possible that he’s leaning on something -- a mailbox perhaps -- but that seems very unlikely given that we see no mailbox, and a mailbox would be too big for part of it not to be visibly sticking out from behind one of the other figures standing around.  No, I think that the best explanation is that there is an invisible figure standing next to the policeman, or at least an invisible force of some kind, which is operating at that spot to hold him up.  And an invisible cause like that is part of what we think the painter is supposed to be, no?  Also, you’ve said that you’ve gone over this painting square inch by square inch.  But we’ve got techniques now to study the painting at the level of the square centimeter or even the square millimeter.  Who knows what we’ll find there?  In fact it seems there are some really complicated patterns at that level and it doesn’t seem remotely probable that any of the figures we do see in the painting could have produced them.  But an invisible painter could have done so.  In fact the patterns we find at that level show a pretty high level of cleverness and artistic skill.  So, when we weigh all the evidence, I think there’s just a really strong case for the existence of a painter of some sort, in fact of a really skillful sort!”
Needless to say, Believer, despite his chipper earnestness in the cause of arguing for the existence of the painter, is in fact as clueless as Skeptic is.  If you are trying to explain to Skeptic the error of his ways, Believer is no help at all.  In fact he’s only getting in the way, muddying the waters, and indeed reinforcing Skeptic’s error. Like Skeptic, he’s treating the painter as if he were essentially some part of the picture, albeit a part that is hard to see directly.  And like Skeptic, he’s supposing that settling the question of whether the painter exists has something to do with focusing on unusual or complex or hard-to-see elements of the painting -- when, of course, that has nothing essentially to do with it at all.  In fact, of course, even the most trivial, plain, and simple painting would require a painter just as much as a complicated picture of a crowd of people would.  And in fact, the painter is not himself a part of the picture, and therefore, looking obsessively within the picture itself at various minute details of it is precisely where you won’t find him. 
You know where I’m going with this.  Skeptic’s and Believer’s shared conception of the painter is like the conception of God one finds both in New Atheist writers like Richard Dawkins on the one hand and in “theistic personalism” or “neo-theism” on the other; whereas the correct conception of the painter is like the conception of God one finds in classical theism.  (See the posts collected herefor discussion of the difference between these views.) 
Skeptic’s and Believer’s shared conception of how to determine whether the painter exists is like the dispute over whether William Paley or ID theory provide sufficient “scientific evidence” for a “designer”; whereas the correct conception of how the painting points to the painter is like the conception of God’s relation to the world one finds in the cosmological argument rightly understood -- understood, that is, the way Aristotelian, neo-Platonic, and Thomist and other Scholastics understand it.  It is not a question of natural science -- which, given the methods that define it in the modern period, can in principle only ever get you from one part of the world to another part of it, and never outside the world -- but rather a question for metaphysics, which is not limited by its methods to the this-worldly.  (See the posts collected herefor what’s wrong with “design inferences” as usually understood.  See the posts collected herefor what the cosmological argument, rightly understood, has to say.)
To change the analogy slightly, it’s as if the New Atheist on the one hand and his “theistic pesonalist” and “design inference” opponents on the other are playing a pseudo-theological variant of Where’s Waldo? (also known as Where’s Wally? )  The New Atheist thinks that the problem is that too many people refuse to admit that Waldo is nowhere to be found in the picture.  The theistic personalist and the ID theorist think the problem is that the New Atheists refuse to see how strong is the evidence that Waldo is at such-and-such a place in the picture (hiding behind a bacterial flagellum, perhaps).  The classical theist knows that the real problem is that these guys are all wasting enormous amounts of time and energy playing Where’s Waldo instead of talking about God.
We hear in these debates about “open theism,” “process theism,”  “onto-theology,” “neo-theism” and so on.  Perhaps we need a new label for the essentially creaturely or anthropomorphic conception of deity that gets endlessly hashed over in pop apologetics and pop atheism while the true God -- the God of Athanasius and Augustine, Maimonides and Avicenna, Anselm and Aquinas -- gets ignored.  Call it “Wally-theism” or “Waldo-theology.”

Back from Berkeley

Got back last night from the very fine DSPT conference on the relationship between philosophy and theology in Berkeley.  The main presenters were Msgr. Robert Sokolowski, Linda Zagzebski, Fr. Michael Dodds, John Searle, Fr. Michał Paluch, Allred Freddoso, John O’Callaghan, and me.  Responses to these talks were given by Fr. Richard Schenk, Fr. Bernhard Blankenhorn, Fr. Simon Gaine, Steven Long, Fr. Michael Dodds, Matthew Levering,Fr. Thomas Joseph White, and Fr. Michael Sherwin.  There were also many excellent talks given during the breakout sessions.   

My paper was titled “From Aristotle to John Searle and Back Again: Formal Causes, Teleology, and Computation in Nature.”  Some photos taken during the talk can be found here.  Photos from the other talks can be found by scrolling down here.  My understanding is that conference papers will be published in a forthcoming volume.  Fred Freddoso’s paper “The Vindication of St. Thomas: Thomism and Contemporary Anglo-American Philosophy” is available at his website (along with a great many other works by Fred that you should read).  Many thanks to the Dominicans for their warm hospitality!

I link, therefore I am

This week: DSPT conference on philosophy and theology in Berkeley.  See you there.
John Searle, who will be speaking at the conference, is interviewed by Tim Crane.
Does Darwinism eliminate teleology and intentionality, or does it explainteleology and intentionality?  Some major naturalist philosophers hash it out in a new anthology reviewed at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews.
Philosopher Stephen Mumford tweets that he is “really enjoying” and “finding it hard to put down” my book Aquinas .  Thanks, Stephen!  (Stephen’s book Laws in Nature , to which he refers in one of the tweets, is highly recommended.)
Less than three weeks left until Guardians of the Galaxy.  Here’s the extended trailer.  And the flick’s got a cool soundtrack.  (But it’s not all fun and games.  Check out “The Glory and Tragedy of Rocket Raccoon” for the sad story of Rocket’s co-creator Bill Mantlo, who could use all the help his family can get.)John Gray on Michael Oakeshott, in Literary Review.

Franciscan University of Steubenville will be hosting a conference on “The Power of Beauty” this October.  Roger Scruton is the plenary speaker.
Adam Bellow, founder of the Liberty Islandwebsite, on the subject of conservatives and pop culture in National Review.  Liberty Island asks for your support.
Philosopher and Aristotle scholar James Lennox has posted many of his articles at Academia.edu.
Henry Koren’s An Introduction to the Philosophy of Animate Nature is perhaps the best of the old Neo-Scholastic manuals treating metaphysical questions concerning the nature of life, evolution, and the like.  It has long been out of print, but is now being reprinted by Editiones Scholasticae. 
Mark Anderson, author of Pure and of the forthcoming Plato and Nietzsche , has also authored a work of philosophical fiction: The Thinker-Artist.  Details here.
Prof. Peter Adamson is presenting a “History of Philosophy without any gaps” in a series of podcasts.  Details here.
In The New York Review of Books’ letters section, Marcia Cavell and Colin McGinn discuss McGinn’s recent exchange with Patricia Churchland.

Clarke on the stock caricature of First Cause arguments

W. Norris Clarke’s article “A Curious Blind Spot in the Anglo-American Tradition of Antitheistic Argument” first appeared in The Monist in 1970.  It was reprinted in his anthology The Creative Retrieval of St. Thomas Aquinas: Essays in Thomistic Philosophy, New and Old , which was published posthumously in 2009.  I only just read the essay, and I did so with embarrassment and gratification.  Embarrassment because I found that something I’ve been harping on for a few years now had already been said by Fr. Clarke over 40 years ago.  Gratification because I found that something I’ve been harping on for a few years now had already been said by Fr. Clarke over 40 years ago.The stock caricature in question is, of course, the “Everything has a cause, so the universe has a cause” argument.  As I’ve pointed out many times (e.g. hereand here), no major proponent of the idea of a First Cause ever actually defended this stupid argument.  Indeed, all the major proponents of arguments for a First Cause would reject the claim that “everything has a cause,” and on entirely principled rather than ad hoc grounds.  Hence the stock retort to this caricature has no force whatsoever against their actual arguments.  That stock retort is of course to ask “If everything has a cause, then what caused God?” and then to suggest that if God need not have a cause, then neither need the universe have a cause.  Maybe, those who attack this caricature suggest, it is the universe itself (or the event that gave rise to it) that is the first or uncaused cause.

The “curious blind spot” Clarke is referring to is contemporary Anglo-American philosophers’ amazing inability or unwillingness to see that in routinely trotting out this objection they are attacking a straw man that bears no interesting relationship whatsoever to what writers like Aristotle, Aquinas, Leibniz, et al. actually said. 
In previous posts, I’ve given many examples of philosophers who attack the straw man First Cause argument.  They include Bertrand Russell, Steven Hales, Nigel Warburton, and (as I showed in a post discussing several examples at once) Daniel Dennett, Robin Le Poidevin, Graham Priest, Michael Martin, Simon Blackburn, Jenny Teichman and Katherine Evans.  Clarke offers several further examples from philosophy textbooks of the mid twentieth century, including John Hospers’ widely used An Introduction to Philosophical Analysis.  As Clarke indicates, Russell’s Why I Am Not a Christian may be the source from which many subsequent writers learned this caricature and the stock reply to it.  Clarke also notes that Russell in turn seems to have gotten the idea from John Stuart Mill, who in turn got it from his father James Mill.  Clarke thinks that David Hume, who in the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion attacks something like the stock straw man First Cause argument, may be the first well-known writer to do so.  Clarke writes:
Let it first be agreed without qualification that if one does admit the principle “Every being has a cause,” then the refutation is inescapable and devastating.  But the very ease of this refutation, if nothing else, should have aroused some suspicions in the minds of its users, one would have thought, as to whether their supposed opponents were actually using this principle.  And it is in itself a highly suspicious fact that no one among the many in this Hume-Russell tradition whom I have read ever quotes any specific theistic philosopher who does make use of it.  So constant is this pattern, in fact, that I am willing to wager that this family trait is found also in those I have not yet run across. (p. 55, emphasis added)
As I have noted in the earlier posts cited, the pattern in question certainly has continued in the 40 plus years since Clarke wrote.  Critics regularly attack the straw man without citing anyone who has ever defended it.  (Le Poidevin even admits that no one has actually defended it!)  After falsely accusing proponents of the First Cause argument of contradicting themselves by denying that God has a cause, Hospers smugly writes:
Many people do not at once see this because they use the argument to get to God, and then, having arrived at where they want to go, they forget all about the argument… (quoted by Clarke at p. 52)
But who exactly are these “many people”?  The critics do not tell us.  It’s tempting to conclude (paraphrasing Hospers) that these critics do not see that no one has ever really defended the straw man they attack because, having arrived at where they want to go -- a way of dismissing Aristotle, Aquinas, Leibniz, et al. tout court and thereby avoiding commitment to a divine First Cause -- they forget all about what these writers actually said.  Says Clarke:
We can only conclude, then, that the Hume-Russell tradition of anti-theistic argument, on this point at least, somehow got off to a bad start by completely misunderstanding and misrepresenting the very argument it was trying to refute, and that it has continued to repeat itself ever since, talking only to itself, and without ever bothering to inquire whether the supposed other party to the debate was still there at all, or had ever been there.  In a word, it has become a tradition in the worse sense of the word, truly in a rut and apparently unaware of it. (p. 59)
Confirming evidence of this is provided by Steven Hales’ response to my recent criticism of him for peddling the straw man.  Prof. Hales wrote:
I do find it surprising that Professor Feser chooses to hang his hat on the Cosmological Argument of all things, an argument that the vast majority of contemporary philosophers consider risible, but I suppose that no interesting philosophical argument is ever truly dead.
But of course, the reason “the vast majority of contemporary philosophers consider [the argument] risible” is precisely because what they know of it is the stupid straw man version peddled in books like Hales’ rather than what proponents of the cosmological argument have actually said!  It’s a vicious circle.  “We know the cosmological argument in general is too stupid to be worth taking seriously because the version we learned from the textbooks is so easily refuted; and we know there aren’t any other versions worth looking into, because the cosmological argument in general is too stupid to be worth taking seriously.”  This tells you nothing about the value of the cosmological argument, and everything about the value of the conventional wisdom in academic philosophy.
In fact, as Clarke notes, Aquinas explicitlydenies that everything has a cause.  He held that “to be caused by another does not appertain to a being inasmuch as it is being; otherwise, every being would be caused by another, so that we should have to proceed to infinity in causes -- an impossibility…” (Summa Contra Gentiles II.52.5).  For writers like Aristotle, Plotinus, and Aquinas and other Scholastics, it is not the fact of something’s existence as such, or of its being a thing per se, that raises causal questions about it.  It is only some limitation in a thing’s intrinsic intelligibility that does so -- for example, the fact that it has potentials that need actualization, or that it is composed of parts which need to be combined, or that it merely participates in some feature, or that it is contingent in some respect.  Hence these writers would never say that “everything has a cause.”  What they would say is that every actualization of a potential has a cause, or whatever is composite has a cause, or whatever has a feature only by participation has a cause, or whatever is contingent has a cause.  
Accordingly, when they arrive at God via a First Cause argument, there is no inconsistency, no sudden abandonment of the very premise that got the argument going.  Rather, the argument is that the only way to terminate a regress of actualizers of potentials is by reference to something which is pure actuality, devoid of potentiality, and thus without anything that needs to be or even could be actualized; or it is that a regress of causes of composed things can be terminated only by something which is absolutely simple or non-composite, and thus without any parts whose combination needs to be or indeed could have been caused by anything; or that the only way to terminate a regress of things that cause other things to participate in being is by reference to that which just is being itself rather than something which merely has or participates in being, and thus something which neither needs nor could have had a cause of its own being; or that the only way to terminate a regress of causes of contingent things is by reference to something absolutely necessary, which by virtue of its absolute necessity need not have and could not have had something impart existence to it; and so forth.
Whatever one thinks of these sorts of arguments, there is no inconsistency in them, nor any ad hoc exceptions to general principles.  The only way to accuse them of either fault is by reading into them the silly straw man argument that their proponents would reject.
How did the Hume-Russell straw man tradition ever get started in the first place?  I noted in another recent post that Descartes’ “preservation” argument, an eccentric and now little-known variation on the cosmological argument, implies that there is a sense in which everything has a cause -- though it does not explicitly appeal to that claim as a premise, and it does not make an exception in the case of God since it regards Him as self-caused.  Clarke discusses this argument in some detail and shows that while Descartes’ development and defense of the argument in the Replies is complicated and confusing, at the end of the day even he does not appear to be saying quite the sort of thing that the Hume-Russell straw man attributes to First Cause arguments.  What Descartes is saying is something closer to a version of the principle of sufficient reason (PSR), on which everything has an explanation.  And in the case of cosmological arguments that appeal to PSR (like Leibniz’s), the Hume-Russell style objection cannot get off the ground, because these arguments do not and need not make any exception in the case of God.  They hold that absolutely everything has an explanation.  In the case of contingent things, the explanation lies outside the thing, and in the case of a necessary being, the explanation lies in the thing’s own nature.  Again, whatever one thinks of such arguments, there is no inconsistency in them, nor any ad hoc exception to a general principle.
Clarke suggests that Descartes blurred the distinction between a cause and a sufficient reason, and that Spinoza (who also thought of God as self-caused) did the same.  What they really meant was something like “Everything has an explanation,” where they make no exception in the case of God.  But since they use the language of “cause,” it sounds like they are saying that “Everything has a cause” in the usual sense of an efficient cause which is distinct from its effect.  And of course that is the sort of cause that God is traditionally said not to have, and which Descartes and Spinoza themselves would deny that he has (even if they think he does have a “cause” in the sense of a sufficient reason).
Clarke suggests that what Hume did was essentially to confuse these two senses of “cause,” taking the rationalist claim that “everything has a ‘cause’-in-the-sense-of-a-sufficient-reason” to be identical to the claim that “everything has a ‘cause’-in-the-sense-of-an-efficient-cause-distinct-from-itself. “  In fact no defender of the cosmological argument ever made the latter claim, but since Descartes and Spinoza made the former claim it seemedto Hume as if someone had made it.  He then essentially made the further step of attributing this thesis to proponents of the cosmological argument in general.  And then, since proponents of the cosmological argument in general do deny that God has a ‘cause’-in-the-sense-of-an-efficient-cause-distinct-from-himself, the claim that proponents of the argument were contradicting themselves seemed to have force.  But as Clarke says:
Thus the First Cause argument for the existence of God which the Hume-Russell tradition so devastatingly attacks is indeed an inviable metaphysical monster.  But it is a monster of their own fabrication, not that of any reputable theistic philosopher.  It is actually a kind of hybrid of both the traditional Scholastic and Cartesian rationalist traditions, which would make sense in neither and be repudiated by both.  (p. 62)
Clarke goes on to note that while Hume may have had some excuse for this error given the confusing nature of Descartes’ terminology, “it is much harder to excuse his successors in this tradition, with all the resources of historical scholarship and linguistic analysis at their disposal, for perpetuating this confusion” (p. 62).  And again, Clarke wrote this over 40 years ago.  In the decades since, lip service to and indeed genuine knowledge of the history of philosophy has dramatically increased within Anglo-American analytic philosophy, and still this absurd caricature of the cosmological argument (not to mention many other equally stupid caricatures of traditional arguments for the existence of God, the immateriality and immortality of the soul, and natural law conclusions in ethics) are routinely and matter-of-factly peddled by academic philosophers.  By people who will, of course, assure you that intellectual dishonesty is all on the side of religious believers. 
And unfortunately, the Hume-Russell straw man has so deeply distorted general understanding of the cosmological argument that even some theists -- indeed, even some sympathizers with the cosmological argument -- feel they have to treat it as if it had something to do with the arguments of Aristotle, Aquinas, Leibniz, et al.  Consider Alex Pruss’s article “The Leibnizian Cosmological Argument” in The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology.  In general it is (as, of course, Alex’s work typically is) excellent.  But Alex says that “a typical cosmological argument faces four different problems,” one of which he describes as follows:
The third difficulty is the Taxicab Problem, coming from Schopenhauer’s quip that in the cosmological argument, the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR) is like a taxicab that once used is sent away.  The difficulty here is in answering what happens when the explanatory principle… gets applied to the First Cause.  A popular formulation is: “If God is the cause of the universe, what is the cause of God?”  Typical solutions argue that the case of the First Cause is different in some way that is not merely ad hoc from the cases to which the explanatory principle was applied. (pp. 24-25)
Alex goes on to argue that this “problem” can indeed be solved, but I think he should never have treated it as a “problem” for the argument in the first place.  Suppose critics of Darwinism routinely asserted that Darwinians claim that a monkey gave birth to the first human baby, and also routinely went on to ridicule this claim as evidence of the “risibility” of Darwinism.  Would it be a good idea for a defender of Darwinism to say that “a typical Darwinian argument faces four different problems, one of which is the Monkey Problem,” and then go on to offer a solution to this “Monkey Problem”?  Of course not, because the “Monkey Problem” is a complete fabrication that no version of Darwinism ever needed a “solution” to.  The proper response would be relentlessly to hammer this point home, not to dignify the objection by treating it as if it were something other than an attack on a straw man.  That only reinforces the misunderstanding in question in the very act of trying to resolve it.  But the same thing is true of the bogus “Taxicab Problem.”  (I think something similar could be said, for that matter, of the other three “problems” Alex refers to in the article.  They all concern issues that defenders of cosmological arguments are typically addressing head on from the start, not “problems” that remain to be solved after the arguments have been given.)
I’ll give Fr. Clarke the last word, by quoting a passage that I think conveys the correct attitude to take toward those who attack the Hume-Russell straw man.  I think a willingness to assent to what Clarke says here provides a useful test of the competence and intellectual honesty of any atheist and of any professional philosopher:
[W]e are here in the presence of a philosophical tradition that is truly in a self-repetitive rut, a tradition that has long since ceased to look outside of itself to check with reality and see whether the adversary it so triumphantly and effortlessly demolishes really exists at all… [I]t would seem to be high time that those who still follow this particular tradition of antitheistic argument should have the grace and humility to acknowledge that their argument is dead, and let us get on with more substantive problems with regard to philosophical argument for and against the existence of God.  (pp. 62-63)

Carroll on laws and causation

People have been asking me to comment on the remarks about causation made by atheist physicist Sean Carroll during his recent debate with William Lane Craig on the topic of “God and Cosmology.”  (You’ll find Craig’s own post-debate remarks here.)  It’s only fair to acknowledge at the outset that Carroll cannot justly be accused of the anti-philosophical philistinism one finds in recent remarks by physicists Stephen Hawking, Lawrence Krauss, and Neil deGrasse Tyson.  Indeed, Carroll has recently criticized these fellow physicists pretty harshly, and made some useful remarks about the role of philosophy vis-à-vis physics in the course of doing so.It is also only fair to note that, while I have enormous respect for Craig, I don’t myself think that it is a good idea to approach arguments for a First Cause by way of scientific cosmology.  I think that muddies the waters by inadvertently reinforcing scientism, blurring the distinction between primary (divine) causality and secondary (natural) causality, and perpetuating the false assumption that arguments for a divine First Cause are essentially arguments for a “god of the gaps.”  As I have argued many times, what are in my view the chief arguments of natural theology (i.e. Aristotelian, Neo-Platonic, Thomistic and other Scholastic arguments) rest on premises derived from metaphysics rather than natural science, and in particular on metaphysical premises that any possible natural science must presuppose.  For that reason, they are more certain than anything science itself could in principle ever either support or refute.  Arguments like Aquinas’s Five Ways, when properly understood (as, these days, they usually are not), no more stand or fall with the current state of play in scientific cosmology than they stand or fall with current gastroenterology or polymer research.  (See chapter 3 of Aquinas , my ACPQ article “Existential Inertia and the Five Ways,” my Midwest Studies in Philosophy article “The New Atheists and the Cosmological Argument,” and many other articles and blog posts.  Or, since we’re linking to YouTube, see my lectures “An Aristotelian Proof of the Existence of God” and “Natural Theology Must Be Grounded in the Philosophy of Nature, Not Natural Science.” )

Carroll’s remarks are largely directed at the question of whether scientific cosmologists should regard theism as a good explanation for the sorts of phenomena they are interested in, given the standard criteria by which models in physics are judged.  Since I don’t find that a terribly interesting or important question, I have nothing to say about his criticisms of Craig on that score.
Having said all that, Carroll’s remarks, where they touch on philosophical matters, are pretty shallow, and he does clearly think that what he has to say somehow poses a serious challenge to theism in general, not just theistic arguments grounded in scientific cosmology.  So those remarks are worth a response.  The key passage concerns Carroll’s criticism of Craig’s claim that “If the universe began to exist, then there is a transcendent cause which brought the universe into existence.”  Carroll says:
The real problem is that these are not the right vocabulary words to be using when we discuss fundamental physics and cosmology. This kind of Aristotelian analysis of causation was cutting edge stuff 2,500 years ago. Today we know better. Our metaphysics must follow our physics. That’s what the word “metaphysics” means. And in modern physics, you open a quantum field theory textbook or a general relativity textbook, you will not find the words “transcendent cause” anywhere. What you find are differential equations. This reflects the fact that the way physics is known to work these days is in terms of patterns, unbreakable rules, laws of nature. Given the world at one point in time we will tell you what happens next. There is no need for any extra metaphysical baggage, like transcendent causes, on top of that. It’s precisely the wrong way to think about how the fundamental reality works.  The question you should be asking is, “What is the best model of the universe that science can come up with?” By a model I mean a formal mathematical system that purports to match on to what we observe. So if you want to know whether something is possible in cosmology or physics you ask, “Can I build a model?”
End quote.  Now, it would take a book to explain everything that’s wrong with this.  And as it happens, I’ve written such a book; it’s called Scholastic Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction .  Since I’ve already said so much about these issues both in that book and elsewhere, I’m not going to repeat myself at length.  Let me just call attention to the key begged questions, missed points, and non sequiturs in Carroll’s remarks.
Carroll tells us that explanation in physics proceeds by way of building a “model” that describes a “mathematical system” reflecting “patterns, unbreakable rules, laws of nature.”  Fine and dandy; I’ve pointed this out many times myself.  If Carroll’s point were merely that, to the extent that theism can’t be formulated in such mathematical terms, it just isn’t the sort of thing the physicist will find a useful explanation for the specific sorts of phenomena he’s interested in, then I wouldn’t necessarily have any problem with that.  That’s not what classical theism, properly understood, is all about in the first place.
But Carroll goes beyond that.  When he says that once you’ve hit upon the best mathematical model, whatever it turns out to be, “there is no need for any extra metaphysical baggage… on top of that,” he evidently means not just that you don’t need anything more for the purposes of physics, specifically, but that you don’t need anything more than that, period.  For he says that asking for more is “precisely the wrong way to think about how the fundamental reality works” and that “our metaphysics must follow our physics.”  The idea seems to be that once you’ve answered all the questions in physics, you’ve answered all the questions that can be answered, including all the metaphysical questions.  There’s nothing more to be done, not just nothing more for the physicist to do.
Now, why should anyone believe that claim (which is essentially just a version of scientism)?  Carroll gives no argument for it at all; he just asserts it with confidence.  This is a step down from Alex Rosenberg, who in The Atheist’s Guide to Reality did give an argument for a similar claim -- an argument which, as we saw, is extremely bad, but is at least still an argument. 
Nor could there be a good argument for Carroll’s scientism, because scientism is demonstrably false.  For one thing, “scientism” is more poorly defined than Carroll claims theism is.  However we tighten up our definition of notions like “science,” “physics,” and the like, the resulting scientism is going to be either self-refuting (since it will turn out that scientism cannot itself be established via the methods of physics or any other natural science), or completely trivial (since, to avoid the self-refutation charge, “science,” “physics,” etc. will have to be defined so broadly that even the metaphysical notions Carroll wants to dismiss will count as “scientific”). 
For another thing, to suppose that since physics confines itself to mathematical models, it follows that there is nothing more to reality than is captured by such models, is fallaciously to draw a metaphysical conclusion from a mere methodological stipulation.  The problem is not just that, if there are features of reality which cannot be captured in terms of a mathematical model, then the methods of physics are guaranteed not to capture them (though that is bad enough).  It is that there must in fact be more to reality than is captured by those methods, in part because (as Bertrand Russell noted) physics gives us only structure, and structure presupposes something which hasthe structure and which a purely structural description will of necessity fail to capture. 
I develop these points in detail in Chapter 0 of Scholastic Metaphysics.  I also show, in that chapter and throughout the book, that the appeal to “laws of nature” so routinely and glibly made by naturalists like Carroll, simply does not and cannot do the work they suppose it does, and papers over a mountain of begged metaphysical questions.  In fact the very notion is fraught with philosophical difficulty, as writers like Nancy Cartwright and Stephen Mumford have shown.  As I have noted many times, the notion of a “law of nature” was originally (in thinkers like Descartes and Newton) explicitly theological, connoting the decree of a divine lawmaker.  Later scientists would regard this as a metaphor, but a metaphor for what?  Most contemporary scientists who pontificate about philosophical matters not only do not have an answer but have forgotten the question.
One contemporary scientist who does see the problem is physicist Paul Davies, who, in his essay “Universe from Bit” (in Paul Davies and Niels Henrik Gregersen, eds. Information and the Nature of Reality: From Physics to Metaphysics), writes:
The orthodox view of the nature of the laws of physics contains a long list of tacitly assumed properties.  The laws are regarded, for example, as immutable, eternal, infinitely precise mathematical relationships that transcend the physical universe, and were imprinted on it at the moment of its birth from “outside,” like a maker’s mark, and have remained unchanging ever since… In addition, it is assumed that the physical world is affected by the laws, but the laws are completely impervious to what happens in the universe… It is not hard to discover where this picture of physical laws comes from: it is inherited directly from monotheism, which asserts that a rational being designed the universe according to a set of perfect laws.  And the asymmetry between immutable laws and contingent states mirrors the asymmetry between God and nature: the universe depends utterly on God for its existence, whereas God’s existence does not depend on the universe…
Clearly, then, the orthodox concept of laws of physics derives directly from theology.  It is remarkable that this view has remained largely unchallenged after 300 years of secular science.  Indeed, the “theological model” of the laws of physics is so ingrained in scientific thinking that it is taken for granted.  The hidden assumptions behind the concept of physical laws, and their theological provenance, are simply ignored by almost all except historians of science and theologians.  From the scientific standpoint, however, this uncritical acceptance of the theological model of laws leaves a lot to be desired…(pp. 70-1)
Now the naïve atheist reading this blog for the first time may suppose that at this point I am going to exclaim triumphantly that there cannot be law without a lawgiver and proclaim victory for theism.  But in fact, like Davies I don’t accept the theological account of laws.  I think it is bad metaphysics and bad theology (insofar as it tends toward occasionalism).  I want rather to make the following two points.  First, when scientists like Carroll confidently proclaim that we can explain such-and-such in terms of the laws of physics rather than God, what they are saying, without realizing it, is: “The explanation isn’t God, it’s rather the laws of physics, where ‘law of physics’ originally meant ‘a decree of God’ and where I don’t have any worked-out alternative account of what it means.”  Hence the “alternative” explanation, when unpacked, is really either a tacit appeal to God or a non-explanation.  In short, either it isn’t alternative, or it’s not an explanation.  The utter cluelessness of this stock naturalistic “alternative explanation” would make of it an object of ridicule if it were not so routinely and confidently put forward by otherwise highly intelligent, educated, and widely esteemed people.
Second, the original, explicitly theological Cartesian-Newtonian notion of “laws of nature” was intended precisely as a replacement for the Aristotelian-Scholastic metaphysics of nature.  The Scholastics held that the regularities in the behavior of natural phenomena derived from their immanent essences or substantial forms, and the directedness-toward-an-end or immanent teleology that followed upon their having those forms.  In other words, regularities reflected the formal and final causes of things.  The early moderns wanted to get rid of formal and final causes as immanent features of nature, and thus replaced them with the notion of “laws of nature” conceived of as externally imposed divine decrees.  To keep talk of “laws of nature” while throwing out God is thus not to offer an alternative to the Aristotelian-Scholastic view at all, but merely to peddle an uncashed metaphor.  So, whereas Carroll glibly asserts that “now we know better” than the Aristotelians did, what is in fact that case is that Carroll and other contemporary naturalists have not only chucked out Aristotelian metaphysics but have also chucked out the early moderns’ initial proposed replacement for Aristotelian metaphysics, and have offered nothing new in its place.  This is hardly a problem for the Aristotelian; on the contrary, it is a problem for anyone who wants to dismiss Aristotelian metaphysics.
Like other contemporary Aristotelians, I would say that the right way to interpret a “law of nature” is as a shorthand description of the way a thing tends to operate given its nature or substantial form.  That is to say, “laws of nature” actually presuppose, and thus cannot replace, an Aristotelian metaphysics of nature.  (Again see the discussion of the metaphysics of laws of nature in Scholastic Metaphysics.)  There are other accounts of laws, such as Platonic accounts and Humean accounts, but these are seriously problematic.  Platonic accounts, which treat laws of nature as abstract entities in a Platonic heaven, push the problem back a stage.  To appeal to such-and-such Platonic laws as an explanation of what happens in the world only raises the further problems of explaining why it is those laws rather than some others that govern the world, and what makes it the casethat any laws at all come to be instantiated.  Humean accounts, meanwhile, interpret a law as a statement that such-and-such a regularity holds, or would have held under the right conditions.  But in that case an appeal to laws doesn’t really explain anything, but only re-describes it in a different jargon. 
Consider, in light of these points, what Carroll says about causation later on in the debate:
Why should we expect that there are causes or explanations or a reason why in the universe in which we live? It’s because the physical world inside of which we’re embedded has two important features. There are unbreakable patterns, laws of physics -- things don’t just happen, they obey the laws -- and there is an arrow of time stretching from the past to the future. The entropy was lower in the past and increases towards the future. Therefore, when you find some event or state of affairs B today, we can very often trace it back in time to one or a couple of possible predecessor events that we therefore call the cause of that, which leads to B according to the laws of physics.  But crucially, both of these features of the universe that allow us to speak the language of causes and effects are completely absent when we talk about the universe as a whole.  We don’t think that our universe is part of a bigger ensemble that obeys laws.  Even if it’s part of the multiverse, the multiverse is not part of a bigger ensemble that obeys laws.  Therefore, nothing gives us the right to demand some kind of external cause.
End quote.  Now in fact it is Carroll who has said absolutely nothing to establish his right to dismiss the demand for a cause as confidently as he does.  For he has simply begged all the important questions and completely missed the point of the main traditional classical theistic arguments (whether or not he has missed Craig’s point -- again, I’m not addressing that here).  One problem here is that, like so many physicists, Carroll has taken what is really just one species of causation (the sort which involves a causal relation between temporally separated events) and identified it with causation as such.  But in fact, the Aristotelian argues, event causation is not only not the only kind of causation but is parasitic on substance causation.
But put that aside, because the deeper problem is that Carroll supposes that causation is to be explained in terms of laws of nature, whereas the Aristotelian view is that this has things precisely backwards.  Since a “law of nature” is just a shorthand description of the ways a thing will operate -- that is to say, what sorts of effects it will tend to have -- given its nature or substantial form, in fact the notion of “laws of nature” metaphysically presupposescausation. 
Furthermore, what “allows us to speak the language of causes and effects” has nothing essentially to do with tracing series of events backwards in time.  Here again Carroll is just begging the question.  On the Aristotelian-Scholastic analysis, questions about causation are raised wherever we have potentialitiesthat need actualization, or a thing’s being metaphysically composite and thus in need of a principle that accounts for the composition of its parts, or there being a distinction in a thing between its essence or nature on the one and its existence on the other, or a thing’s being contingent.  The universe, however physics and scientific cosmology end up describing it -- even if it turned out to be a universe without a temporal beginning, even if it is a four-dimensional block universe, even if Hawking’s closed universe model turned out to be correct, even if we should really think in terms of a multiverse rather than a single universe -- will, the Aristotelian argues, necessarily exhibit just these features (potentialities needing actualization, composition, contingency, etc.).  And thus it will, as a matter of metaphysical necessity, require a cause outside it.  And only that which is pure actuality devoid of potentiality, only what is utterly simple or non-composite, only something whose essence or nature just is existence itself, only what is therefore in no way contingent but utterly necessary -- only that, the classical theist maintains, could in principle be the ultimate terminus of explanation, whatever the specific scientific details turn out to be. 
Carroll has not only not answered these sorts of arguments (which, again, I’ve only alluded to here -- see the various sources cited above for detailed defense).  He doesn’t even seem to be aware that this is where the issues really lie, and that they have nothing essentially to do with scientific cosmology.  But that’s not entirely his fault.  As I have indicated, in my view too many people (and not just Craig) put way too much emphasis on scientific cosmology where the debate between theism and atheism is concerned.  That just opens the door to objections like Carroll’s, since it makes it sound (wrongly, but understandably) like theism as such is essentially in competition with the sorts of models Carroll pits against Craig.
That is not, by the way, to knock the kalāmcosmological argument.  For (as Craig himself has emphasized) that argument need not appeal to scientific cosmology, but can be defended instead by way of appeal to more fundamental metaphysical premises.  (I have not had much to say about that argument myself because it is in my view less fundamental than the arguments I have focused on -- such as the Five Ways -- and there are, in any case, already many people writing about it.  If you’re looking for a Thomist’s defense of the kalām argument, you can’t do better than the relevant articles on the subject by David Oderberg.)

SCOTUS and Oderberg

Today, with Burwell v. Hobby Lobby , the Supreme Court of the United States has partially redeemed itself after its disgraceful 2012 Obamacare ruling.  Readers of this blog will be particularly interested to learn that the work of the esteemed David Oderberg (specifically, his article “The Ethics of Co-operation in Wrongdoing”) is cited in footnote 34 of the decision.  Also cited are two other, older works of traditional Thomistic natural law theory: Thomas Higgins’ Man as Man: The Science and Art of Ethics and Henry Davis’s Moral and Pastoral Theology.

Pagden on the Enlightenment

Prof. Anthony Pagden’s recent book The Enlightenment: And Why It Still Matters has much to say not only about the Enlightenment itself but also about the Scholasticism against which it reacted.  My review of the book appears today at Liberty Fund’s Online Library of Law and Liberty website.

The last enemy

There are two sorts of people who might be tempted to think of death as a friend: those who think the nature of the human person has nothing to do with the body, and those who think it has everything to do with the body; in short, Platonists and materialists.  Protestant theologian Oscar Cullmann summarizes the Platonist’s position in his little book Immortality of the Soul or Resurrection of the Dead? as follows:
Our body is only an outer garment which, as long as we live, prevents our soul from moving freely and from living in conformity to its proper eternal essence. It imposes upon the soul a law which is not appropriate to it. The soul, confined within the body, belongs to the eternal world. As long as we live, our soul finds itself in a prison, that is, in a body essentially alien to it. Death, in fact, is the great liberator. It looses the chains, since it leads the soul out of the prison of the body and back to its eternal home… [T]hrough philosophy we penetrate into that eternal world of ideas to which the soul belongs, and we free the soul from the prison of the body. Death does no more than complete this liberation. Plato shows us how Socrates goes to his death in complete peace and composure. The death of Socrates is a beautiful death. Nothing is seen here of death’s terror. Socrates cannot fear death, since indeed it sets us free from the body. Whoever fears death proves that he loves the world of the body, that he is thoroughly entangled in the world of sense. Death is the soul’s great friend. So he teaches; and so, in wonderful harmony with his teaching, he dies… (pp. 19-21)
Cullman sharply contrasts the death of Socrates with the death of Christ, and Plato’s attitude toward death with the Christian attitude:

In Gethsemane He knows that death stands before Him, just as Socrates expected death on his last day… Jesus begins ‘to tremble and be distressed’, writes Mark (14:33). ‘My soul is troubled, even to death’, He says to His disciples… Jesus is afraid, though not as a coward would be of the men who will kill Him, still less of the pain and grief which precede death. He is afraid in the face of death itself. Death for Him is not something divine: it is something dreadful… He was really afraid. Here is nothing of the composure of Socrates, who met death peacefully as a friend… [W]hen He concludes, ‘Yet not as I will, but as thou wilt’, this does not mean that at the last He, like Socrates, regards death as the friend, the liberator. No, He means only this: If this greatest of all terrors, death, must befall Me according to Thy will, then I submit to this horror. (pp. 21-22)
For the Christian, death, as St. Paul famously put it, is “the last enemy” (1 Corinthians 15:26).  And victory over it comes with the resurrection. 
Now, Cullmann overstates the contrast between the two ideas referred to in his title.  He speaks of “the Greek view of death” when what he’s really talking about is a Greek view, the Platonic view.  It is not the same as the view of the Aristotelian, for whom the human soul is the form of the body -- or, more precisely, the form of something which has corporeal as well as incorporeal operations.  Hence, while a human being is not annihilated at death -- his intellect, which is incorporeal and operates partially independently of the body even during life, is not destroyed when the bodily organs are -- he persists only in a radically diminished state.  That the soul persists as the form of this radically reduced substance is what makes resurrection possible, because there needs to be some continuity between the person who dies and the person who rises if they are to be the sameperson.   But until the resurrection actually occurs, it is not the dead person who in the strictest sense survives, but only a part of him, albeit the highest part.  As Aquinas says (contra the Platonist), “I am not my soul.”  Thus, to Cullmann’s question “Immortality of the soul or resurrection of the dead?”, Christian Aristotelians like Aquinas answer: “Both.” 
In a blog post not too long ago, I responded to an objection to the effect that a Cartesian view of human nature (which is a modern riff on the Platonic view) is better in accord with the Bible than the Aristotelian-Thomistic view.  The critic in question even quoted St. Paul, of all people, in defense of this claim.  In that post I explained at some length what is wrong with this suggestion, and one problem with it is that it cannot account for why death is, in scripture, indeed an enemy, and why St. Paul puts so much emphasis on the resurrection.  This is intelligible only if the body is integral to human nature in a way the Platonic-Cartesian view cannot account for.  Death is your enemy and resurrection your hope because you are radically incomplete without your body -- so incomplete that there is a sense in which you are gone after death and return only with the resurrection.  (Thus does Aquinas suggest that if we were to speak strictly, we would say “Soul of St. Peter, pray for us” rather than “St. Peter, pray for us.”)
The way in which the materialist might see death as a friend is, of course, very different from the Platonist’s way.  Indeed, it might seem that the materialist would be even more inclined than the Christian to see death as an enemy, since he rejects even the Aristotelian-Thomistic conception of the soul -- not to mention the resurrection -- and thus (short of some science-fiction style upload of the “software” of the mind onto a new “computer”) regards death as the end, full stop.  (“Christian materialists” would accept the resurrection, but I will put their odd view to one side for present purposes and confine my attention to atheistic materialists.)   
But on reflection it is easy enough to see how a materialist might look at death in positive light.  If he’s lived an immoral life and is even mildly troubled at the thought that all that damnation stuff could turn out to be true, the idea of annihilation might bring relief.  Or, just as atheists often operate with too crudely anthropomorphic a conception of God, so too do they often operate with too crudely this-worldly a conception of what an afterlife would be like.  Hence, like Bernard Williams, a materialist might conclude that immortality would be a bore and judge death a rescue from endless tedium.  To Cullmann’s two exemplars we could therefore add David Hume, reclining cheerfully on his deathbed, as famously recounted by Boswell.
Then there is the suffering that often attends death.  As I noted in a recent post, for Christian apologists of the Neo-Scholastic stripe, it is not just God’s existence but also divine providence which can be known via purely philosophical arguments.  Hence, even apart from special divine revelation, we can know that God allows evil in the world only insofar as he draws greater good out of it.  These truths of natural theology are crucial to a complete natural law argument against the permissibility of suicide and euthanasia.  (See e.g. the account of the immorality of suicide and euthanasia in Austin Fagothey’s always useful Right and Reason .) 
To be sure, I think the traditional natural law theorist’s account of the good suffices to show that it cannot be good intentionally to end one’s own life or that of another innocent person, quite apart from questions of divine providence.  But even if one sees the power in these arguments, if one is also convinced that there is neither a soul that persists beyond death nor a God who can draw a greater good out of any suffering, the arguments can seem awfully dry and theoretical compared to the intense suffering that can attend death.  There will seem to be no upside to enduring the suffering other than respect for abstract principle.  Hence the temptation in such cases to regard death as a friend, whose arrival one should intentionally hasten.
As always, the Aristotelian-Thomistic philosopher’s talent for finding the sober middle ground saves the day.  The body is integral to you while not being the whole of you.  By avoiding both the Platonist’s error and the materialist’s error we see death for the enemy that it is.

Summer web surfing

My Claremont Review of Books review of John Gray’s The Silence of Animals is now available for free online.
Keith Parsons has now wrapped up our exchange on atheism and morality at The Secular Outpost.
The latest from David Oderberg: “Could There Be a Superhuman Species?”  Details here.
Liberty Island is an online magazine devoted to conservatism and pop culture.  Music writer extraordinaire (and friend of this blog) Dan LeRoy is on board. 
James Franklin asks “What is mathematics about?”  (See also his new book An Aristotelian Realist Philosophy of Mathematics .)
Mary Midgley’s new book Are You an Illusion? takes aim at scientism and eliminativism.  Some praise from The Guardian and an interview in Financial Times.

The archives of Laval theologique et philosophiqueare available online.  Take a look at the Charles de Koninck material.
Our buddy Mike Flynn on science fiction writer Thomas Disch and Catholicism.
Is there anything that couldn’t be a mere social construct?  Yes: causation, says metaphysician Stephen Mumford.
Hilary Putnam has a blog.
A reader recently called my attention to Kenneth Sayre’s new history of the philosophy department at Notre Dame.  For us Catholic philosophy geeks, it’s a page turner.
Speaking of geeks, The Atlantic and The Guardian fret over Marvel’s forthcoming Dr. Strange movie.  But The Independent is jazzed. 
At The New Criterion, Steven Hayward on conservatives and higher education.
There’s been a lot of talk on this blog of late about classical theism versus theistic personalism and Aquinas versus Scotus.  Marilyn Adams combines the themes in “What’s Wrong with the Ontotheological Error?”
Churchland vs. McGinn at The New York Review of Books.  (HT: Bill Vallicella.)