Edward Feser's Blog, page 90

New Scholastic books

The old Scholastic manuals of the first half or so of the twentieth century are often hard to find, though fortunately many are now being made available again by Editiones Scholasticae, Wipf and Stock, and TAN Books, as well as by public domain reprint publishers like Kessinger, HardPress, and Literary Licensing.  Still, many remain out of print, and many have never been translated into English.  For some reason, the large older manuals of Catholic dogmatic theology seem harder to find than the philosophy and moral theology material.
Fr. Kenneth Baker has undertaken the project of translating Joseph Dalmau’s mammoth Sacrae Theologiae Summa (or Summa of Sacred Theology), originally published in 1955, into English.  It is being published by Keep the Faith, which puts out The Latin Mass magazine.  The first volume was recently published and advertised in the magazine.  Appearing out of sequence, it is Sacrae Theologiae Summa IIA: On the One and Triune God.  At the moment I do not see it advertised on their website, but I imagine that if you contact them by email you can find out how to order a copy.   (I ordered one after seeing the magazine ad -- the price was $35 -- and it arrived yesterday.)The manual was originally published in four volumes, but given its great length Fr. Baker plans to publish the translation in eight volumes.  (The volume that just came out alone clocks in at 525 pages.)  The topics covered in the completed series of volumes will be as follows:

IA         Introduction to Theology.  On the True Religion.
IB         On the Church of Christ.  On Holy Scripture.
IIA        On the One and Triune God
IIB        On God the Creator and Sanctifier.  On Sins.
IIIA       On the Incarnate Word.  Mariology.
IIIB       On Grace.  On the Infused Virtues.
IVA       On Baptism, Confirmation, Eucharist, Penance and Anointing.
IVB       On Holy Orders and Matrimony.  On the Last Things.
In his Foreword, Fr. Baker notes that Karl Rahner -- someone who is, needless to say, not usually associated with Scholastic theology -- once expressed the opinion that the Sacrae Theologiae Summa was the best summary of Scholastic theology available, and that mastering it was essential to becoming a theologian. 
Some other new and forthcoming books of Scholastic interest: New Scholasticism Meets Analytic Philosophy , edited by Rafael Hüntelmann and Johannes Hattler, collects papers from the recent conference on the theme in Cologne.  The contributors are Rani Lill Anjum, Edward Feser, Uwe Meixner, Stephen Mumford, David Oderberg, Edmund Runggaldier, and Erwin Tegtmeier.
Richard Cross has a new book out: The Medieval Christian Philosophers: An Introduction .  So does Bernard McGinn: Thomas Aquinas's "Summa theologiae": A Biography . Jeffrey E. Brower has one forthcoming: Aquinas's Ontology of the Material World: Change, Hylomorphism, and Material Objects .   So does Brian Davies: Thomas Aquinas's Summa Theologiae: A Guide and Commentary .
The latest issue of the journal Res Philosophica is devoted to Neo-Aristotelian Themes in Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Mind.

Pre-Christian apologetics

Christianity did not arise in a vacuum.  The very first Christians debated with their opponents in a cultural context within which everyone knew that there is a God and that he had revealed himself through Moses and the prophets.  The question, given that background, was what to think of Jesus of Nazareth.  Hence the earliest apologists were, in effect, apologists for Christianity as opposed to Judaism, specifically.  That didn’t last long.  As Christianity spread beyond Judea into the larger Mediterranean world, the question became whether to accept Christianity as opposed to paganism.  Much less could be taken for granted. 
Still, significant common ground for debate was provided by Greek philosophy.  In Book VIII of The City of God, Augustine noted that thinkers in the Neoplatonic tradition had seen that God is the cause of the existence of the world; had seen also that only what is beyond the world of material and changeable things could be God; had understood the distinction between the senses and their objects on the one hand, and the intellect and its objects on the other, and affirmed the superiority of the latter; and had affirmed that the highest good is not the good of the body or even the good of the mind, but to know and imitate God.  In short, these pagan thinkers knew some of the key truths about God, the soul, and the natural law that are available to unaided human reason.  This purely philosophical knowledge facilitated Augustine’s own conversion to Christianity, and would provide an intellectual skeleton for the developing tradition of Christian apologetics and theology.In yet other cultural contexts, however -- such as the religions of the far East -- the Christian apologist could presuppose even less than what was known to the Greeks.  The seventeenth-century Jesuit missionary Roberto de Nobili sought to remedy the problem by making use of the rich conceptual apparatus provided by Hindu philosophy in order to convince learned Hindus of the truth of a Thomistic natural theology, which could in turn be used as a stepping stone to Christian revelation. 

Nor is it that hard to find common ground here.  Hinduism affirms a single self-existent and unchanging divine reality, even if this reality is usually conceived of in pantheistic rather than theistic terms; and there are explicitly theistic strands too in the Hindu philosophical tradition.  Hinduism also has a notion of the soul, even if its doctrine of reincarnation takes the idea in a direction foreign to Christianity.  In its affirmation of an objective moral order that operates like a law of nature rather than an arbitrary divine command, the notion of karma parallels that of natural law (though of course there are radical differences too).  In the Chinese context, Taoism, Confucian ethics, and Neo-Confucian metaphysics also provide a rich set of conceptual resources by which a discussion of natural theology and natural law might proceed.
But in the modern West, even less than that can be taken for granted.  The Buddhist critic of Hindu metaphysics at least thinks the debate is well worth having.  Though in substance his views are yet farther still from Christianity than those of the Hindu, he is at least at the philosophical level more or less in the same conceptual universe.  But as I noted in my recent TAC talk calling for a return to Scholastic apologetics, the typical modern Western secularist doesn’t regard theism, much less Christianity, even worth the bother of refuting.  And he is often as dismissive of philosophy itself as he is of the theology the traditional apologist would ground in philosophical arguments.   It is, not always but often, empirical science alone that he will take seriously.  Given this scientism, you need first to show him why he needs to take metaphysics seriously, and then go from there to natural theology, before you can finally turn to the defense of Christian revealed theology.  (Not that that first task is hard to accomplish if one’s interlocutor is intellectually honest.  Scientism is not hard to refute.  For the refutation, see chapter 0 of Scholastic Metaphysics .  For the ocean of metaphysics any possible natural science presupposes, see the rest of the book.)
The trouble with contemporary apologetics
So, the modern apologist has his work cut out for him.  Though Christianity did not arise in a vacuum, it currently finds itself, at least in the contemporary Western context, in something approximating a vacuum.  The religious and philosophical milieu within which Christian revelation is intelligible -- and thus within which an intellectually serious and compelling Christian apologetics must be situated -- has largely been forgotten.  And unfortunately it is not only secularists who have forgotten it, but Christians themselves, including self-described Christian apologists. 
I have often complained that it is not just New Atheist types, but too many contemporary Christian thinkers, who are operating with a seriously deficient conception of God and a seriously deficient set of background metaphysical assumptions.  That is part of the problem I have in mind here.  A sound apologetics must be formulated in terms of classical theism and classical (Aristotelian, Neoplatonic, Scholastic) metaphysics.  But there is more to it than that.  We need also to rediscover the depth, scope, and rigor of apologetics as it was understood in the Neo-Scholastic tradition.  Rightly understood, apologetics is not a grab bag of ad hocmoves designed merely to win over converts by whatever means are at hand.  It is not a kind of rhetoric.  It is a kind of science, in the broad sense of a systematic body of objective knowledge.  It has a philosophical foundation and a logical structure, a proper ordering of topics integrated into a theoretically coherent whole.  It contains no gaps that require that the chain of logical argumentation suddenly be interrupted, and the intellect turned off so that will or emotion can take the reins.  And if it is not treated this way -- as a serious intellectual enterprise -- it will not be taken seriously by most intelligent people, and will not deserve to be. 
One problem with too much contemporary apologetics is that it reflects little awareness of this theoretical structure of the discipline and the proper ordering of its subject matter.  Consider approaches which jump straight to the Resurrection of Jesus as an argument for Christianity, or even as an argument for theism.  This might be effective with some people who have no strong convictions either way vis-à-vis Christianity or theism, or with a theologically conservative Jewish interlocutor who already affirms the truth of Abrahamic religion and just needs convincing that Christianity represents its correct development.  But considered as a completely general “opening move,” suitable for immediate deployment against naturalists and atheists of any stripe, this approach is in my view seriously wrongheaded.  A sophisticated naturalist supposes that he has good reason to think events like resurrections just can’t happen, and good reason to think the body of religious teaching associated with this particular resurrection story is a priori implausible.  So unless this set of general background assumptions is first undermined, he will understandably think himself perfectly justified in shrugging his shoulders and dismissing even the strongest evidence for the Resurrection as just one of several odd pieces of data we find here and there in history -- a curiosity perhaps, but not something that could by itself undermine what he takes to be an otherwise well-established naturalism. 
Of course, some apologists would at least preface a treatment of the Resurrection with an independent argument for God’s existence.  But even that is not, by itself, an adequate prolegomenon.  For one thing, not every argument for God’s existence will get you to the specific conception of God needed in order to establish the plausibility of a resurrection.  For another, the existence of God is by no means the only piece of background philosophical knowledge which can and should be put in place before a specifically Christian apologetic begins.  I will return to this issue below.
Another problem with too much contemporary apologetics is that it takes a “kitchen sink” approach that seems more interested in persuading the listener than in presenting the truth.  Hence an apologist will sometimes dump out onto the page a bevy of arguments that have been or could be given for some claim, leaving it vague whether he actually accepts all of them himself.  This is the apologist-as-salesman, happy as long as you walk out of the store with something, and not too particular about what it is.  Welcome to 31 Theological Flavors!  Come on in and sample our wide array of proofs for God’s existence.  See one you like?  Excellent choice, shall I box it up for you or will you be wearing it right away? 
The trouble here is not that one or more of the arguments might not in fact be good, and sincerely believed by the apologist to be good.  And of course, if an argument really is good, it remains so even if you throw a bunch of questionable arguments in with it.  The point is rather that uncritically putting forward anything that might help “make the case” dilutes the intellectual seriousness of the enterprise, and reinforces the false perception of apologetics as mere rhetoric rather than true philosophy.
At this point I need to anticipate an obvious objection.  Surely, the atheist or secularist critic will say, any apologetics must of its nature be merely rhetorical rather than truly philosophical or scientific in spirit.  For the apologist (so the objection continues) is engaged in putting forward reasons  for conclusions which he has already decided beforehand are true, conclusions he originally believed for reasons other than the ones he now puts forward in his role as an apologist (for example, on the basis of what parents and religious authorities told him when he was younger).  And that sort of task is intellectually unserious, even intellectually dishonest.
So many a secularist will say.  But if he is honest with himself, the secularist will see that he doesn’t really believe this.  Consider that almost everyone who believes what modern science has to tell us does so on the basis of what some authority has told him -- parents, teachers, makers of science documentaries, writers of pop science books, and the like.  Very few people are capable of carrying out the study necessary to master even a single scientific discipline, and no one can master all of them.  Most people have to rely on the expertise of others to know what they know of a scientific nature.   But no secularist considers this irrational or dishonest.  No secularist would say that you can only rationally believe what science says if you have worked it out for yourself, and done so from first principles, without parents and teachers having first taught you the conclusions before you learned the arguments.
Consider also books like Richard Dawkins’ The Blind Watchmaker, Philip Kitcher’s Abusing Science, Michael Ruse’s Darwinism Defended, and Jerry Coyne’s Why Evolution Is True.  It is undeniable that these are works of apologetics -- Darwinian apologetics.  They are in no way tentative and dispassionate explorations of their topic, but written precisely to convince the reader that Darwinism is true and to defend it against its critics.  And while Darwinians are happy to acknowledge that such books, like all books, might be wrong on this or that point of detail, they will be very, very upset if you do not firmly agree with the overall thrust of the books. 
Such books, and science books more generally, also set forth arguments few or none of which their authors actually knew of when they first accepted the conclusions the arguments are meant to support (e.g. when they accepted them in school, on the basis of their teachers’ authority, or at best on the basis of simplified and sometimes mistaken explanations that their teachers gave them).  Nor were the arguments that are summarized in such books actually discovered by anyone elsein a way that mirrors the order of presentation in the book itself.  In science, what Hans Reichenbach called the “context of discovery” is much, much messier and haphazard than the “context of justification” would indicate.  Scientific textbooks give you the “finished product,” and their arguments and order of exposition don’t necessarily mirror the way in which the knowledge was actually arrived at historically. 
Now, secularists do not consider any of this in any way objectionable.  Though science textbooks and works of Darwinian apologetics are essentially giving you after-the-fact justifications for conclusions that were originally accepted by their authors on the basis of authority -- and justifications that do not entirely reflect the reasoning that historically led to the acceptance of the conclusions by the wider scientific community in the first place -- no secularists will for that reason dismiss such works as mere “rationalizations” of “prejudice.”  Nor does the fact that the conclusions are presented in a way that is far from tentative, with critics dealt with dismissively or even polemically, lead the secularist to regard such works as mere rhetoric rather than true science.
In that case, though, the secularist cannot consistently dismiss works of theological apologetics a priori as per seintellectually unserious or contrary to a truly philosophical or scientific approach to their subject.  He must acknowledge the possibility that such works are relevantly parallel to scientific textbooks or to books defending scientific theories against skeptics -- that they are, like science textbooks, systematic presentations of ideas and arguments that were historically arrived at in a more haphazard and unsystematic way.  He must consider the arguments on their own merits, and cannot reasonably try to short-circuit debate by dismissing the genre in which they are found. 
The proper order of apologetics
So, what is the correct order of topics in a philosophically rigorous apologetics -- the kind I have attributed to Neo-Scholastic writers?  The key point to emphasize here is how much must be, and can be, established by purely philosophical arguments before one even gets to addressing the claims of Christianity specifically.  A rich system of “natural apologetics,” as it is sometimes called, must precede specifically Christian apologetics if the latter is to have its proper intellectual foundation.  And arguing for the existence of God is only one part of this task.  Let me sketch out the order of topics I have in mind.  (Mind you, I am not stating the arguments of natural apologetics or Christian apologetics here.  That would take a book.  I am sketching out what a complete system of apologetics would involve, and does involve in the best authors on the subject.)
I. Metaphysical prolegomena
“Natural apologetics” presupposes a number of basic metaphysical assumptions.  So too, at the end of the day, does specifically Christian apologetics, and indeed the whole system of Christian dogmatic theology when given a rigorous intellectual articulation.  Specifically, I would argue, these background assumptions include the key elements of Scholastic metaphysics: the theory of act and potency, the Scholastic theory of causal powers, the principle of causality, the principle of finality, formal and material causes, the Scholastic account of substance, the distinction between essence and existence, and so forth.
To some extent the notions in question can be introduced and defended in the course of giving this or that argument in “natural apologetics.”  For example, you could at least introduce the theory of act and potency in the course of setting out the argument for the existence of an unactualized actualizer (i.e. “unmoved mover”).  And you typically won’t find, in old Neo-Scholastic works on apologetics and natural theology, a section or chapter devoted specifically to metaphysical prolegomena.  One reason is that the metaphysical background assumptions in question were perhaps somewhat more widely known and less controversial in those days.  Another is that there were in any event a great many Neo-Scholastic works devoted entirely to metaphysics and philosophy of nature.  The interested reader could easily be directed to such works if he had questions about the background metaphysics.
These days, however, there is so much ignorance and misinformation regarding the metaphysical underpinnings of Scholastic arguments in “natural apologetics” that I think a prolegomenon devoted to those underpinnings is necessary.  (That is why you have to plow through 50 pages or so of abstract metaphysics in The Last Superstition and Aquinas before you get to natural theology, philosophical anthropology, and natural law.  There are still book-length treatments available too.)
II. Natural theology
Natural theology involves, of course, arguments for the existence of God.  But it involves a lot more than that.  For one thing, the key arguments of natural theology -- the sort I have defended in many places (e.g. here, here, here, and here) -- do not merely get you to somedeity or other.  They get you to nothing less than the God of classical theism, specifically.  That is to say, they get you to a cause of the world which is pure actuality rather than a mixture of actuality and potentiality; subsistent being itself rather than merely one being or existent among others; absolutely simple or non-composite; absolutely necessary; immutable and eternal; and something which could not in principle have had a cause of its own but is self-existent.  They get you to a God who is, accordingly (and contra pantheism), necessarily utterly distinct from the world (since the world is temporal, changeable, composite, a mixture of actual and potential, etc.).  They get you to a God to whom we must attribute intellect, will, omnipotence, omniscience, and perfect goodness.  They also show that God causes the world not merely in the sense of having gotten the ball rolling 13 billion years ago, but in the more fundamental sense that he conservesthe world in being at every instant.  They show that if he were not continuously causing the world, the world would instantly collapse into nothingness. 
Natural theology also establishes that there is a natural order of “secondary causes” that is both distinct from but depends upon God as primary cause.  Natural, secondary causes are real causes (so that occasionalism is ruled out), but they can act only insofar as God imparts causal power to them (so that deism is also ruled out).  This is the idea of divine concurrence with natural causes.  When worked out it entails, on the one hand, that there is a natural order of things that can be known and studied whether or not one affirms the existence of God.  Given just that natural order, certain things are possible and certain things are impossible, and the “laws of nature” revealed by natural science tell us which is which.  But on the other hand, the doctrine of divine concurrence tells us that since this entire natural order operates only insofar as the divine primary cause concurs with it, there is also the possibility of a supernatural order of things -- an order of things over and above the natural order, for the sake of which the latter might be suspended.  (Notice that “supernatural” here has a technical meaning that is unrelated to the sorts of things popular usage of the word suggests.  It has nothing to do with vampires, werewolves, zombies, and the like -- which, if they existed, would be part of the “natural” order in the relevant sense, rather than supernatural.)
Now both of these ideas -- that some things are impossible given just the natural order of secondary causes, but that the divine primary cause might act in a supernatural way -- entail the possibility of miracles.  For a miracle in the strictest sense is impossible in the natural order, and thus can only be caused by what is supernatural, which means it can only be caused by God.  (Note that the natural order of things broadly construed includes angels, which, like us, are creatures which must be preserved in being by God and whose actions require divine concurrence.  Hence a miracle in the strictest sense could not be caused even by an angel, since it is a suspension of the order to which even angels are subject.  Obviously, “miracles” in the looser sense of remarkable events outside the ordinary course of things could be caused by beings other than God, but these would be preternatural rather than strictly supernatural.) 
Natural theology also establishes divine providence, which entails that God provides the means by which the things he has created can attain the ends for which they exist, and that he allows evil in the world only insofar as he draws greater good out of it.
So, a completed system of natural theology, at least as developed in the Scholastic tradition, tells us quite a bit.  It establishes the existence and key attributes of the God of classical theism, the doctrines of conservation, concurrence, and providence, and the possibility of miracles.   It thereby tells us not only that there is a God but that he is not a lame “watchmaker” god of the Paley sort (which Hume and Dawkins rightly think would require a cause of his own), that he is notan impersonal Absolute or identical with the world (as pantheism claims), and (given conservation, concurrence, providence, and the possibility of miracles) that he is not an absentee god of the deist sort.  A necessary condition for any of the world religions being true, then, is that it is consistent with all of this.  That rules out, among other candidates, Buddhism and pantheist forms of Hinduism.
III. Philosophical anthropology
That’s just the beginning of what “natural apologetics” tells us.  Let’s turn to human nature.  The Scholastic argues that the human soul is to be conceived of as the substantial form of the living human being, related to the body as form to matter.  The intellectual and volitional powers of the soul are, it is argued, essentially immaterial, operating without direct dependence on any bodily organ.  This in turn leads to the conclusion that the human soul is naturally immortal.  For since the intellect and will do not directly depend on the body when a human being is alive, they do not perish with the death of the body.  Hence the human soul, reduced to its intellectual and volitional powers, carries on after the loss of our corporeal functions.  (I’ve defended these claims in various places, e.g. hereand here.)
A consequence of this view is that the soul, because of its immaterial powers, cannot have a natural cause.  Each individual human soul requires a special divine creative act, an act which goes beyond divine conservation of, and concurrence with, the ordinary course of nature. 
Another consequence is that a disembodied soul is not a complete human being, but, as I have said, only a human being reduced to its intellectual and volitional powers.  For the complete human being to be restored would require that the corporeal functions be restored; that is to say, it would require a resurrection from the dead.  Now there is nothing in the natural order of things that can accomplish this.  Like the coming into existence of a new individual human soul, a resurrection would, the Scholastic argues, require a special divine act.
Though not naturally possible, such a resurrection is nevertheless supernaturally possible because the human soul is immortal.  If there were nothing that persisted between the death of an individual human being and his resurrection, the resurrected human being would not really be the same human being, but only a duplicate.  (This is why a non-human animal cannot be resurrected.  Since such animals have no immaterial operations, there is nothing left of the individual after the death of its body.  The most that could come into being after Rover’s death is an exact duplicateof Rover, but not Rover himself.)
Your soul, on this analysis, is also the form of your body, specifically.  It is, on the Scholastic analysis, metaphysically impossible for a human soul to be reincarnated in the body of another human being, much less a non-human animal.  It is only ever your body that could come once again to have your soul.  That entails that the standard reincarnation doctrines are not correct accounts of human nature -- a major strike against all forms of Hinduism and Buddhism.
Among the other things that all of this tells us is that the divine cause of the world, who conserves it in being at every instant and concurs with every exercise of natural causal power, takes a special interest in human beings insofar as he acts in a special way, beyond his ordinary conserving and concurrent activity, when a new individual human soul comes into being.  Moreover, what he creates thereby is something immortal -- something which persists not only well after the brief three score and ten years allotted to most of us, but forever.  But in the natural course of things, it only exists in a complete way (i.e. together with the body) for a short span of time. 
This tells us that if any religion is true, it cannot be one which denies either the special significance of human beings or personal immortality.  Philosophical anthropology also at the very least strongly indicates that if any of the allegedly revealed religions is true, it will be one which teaches a doctrine of the resurrection.  For while a resurrection is not strictly required given our nature and the special interest God evidently take in us, it is especially fitting given our nature and the special interest God takes in us.
IV. Natural law and natural religion
The mainstream Scholastic position is that the binding force of morality, and at least the broad outlines of its content, can be known via natural reason.  Among the many other things about the natural law that we can establish through philosophical arguments is that our highest end is God, that individually and socially we owe him worship, and that religion is therefore absolutely essential to healthy moral and social life.  What all this entails in detail is spelled out in standard Scholastic manuals of ethics.  A necessary condition of the truth of any religion (or of any non-religious view of things, for that matter) is that it be consistent with what the natural law tells us about the content and binding force of morality.
However, human experience also tells us a few other crucial things about the moral life.  First of all, while it is possible for unaided human reason to discover a great deal in the way of natural theology and natural law, in practice very few people have the leisure or intelligence to do it, and even those who do tend to do so very imperfectly.  As with natural science, the acquisition of a rigorous and systematic body of knowledge of a “natural apologetics” sort is very difficult and is the work of many generations.  Though there is, in different cultures, always some knowledge of a natural theological and natural law sort, given the limitations of our nature it is in practice invariably mixed with greater or lesser amounts of error.  Hence in practice our knowledge even of our natural moral and religious obligations is often severely deficient.
Furthermore, even when we are aware of our moral obligations we tend to find them very difficult to fulfill.  This is in part because of the strong pull of our passions against our reason even in the best of circumstances, and also because in the course of actual human life there is often a dramatic mismatch between moral virtue and this-worldly rewards.  In practice the good often suffer and the evil go unpunished, and this, needless to say, can be extremely demoralizing. 
Now as I have said, the arguments of natural theology and philosophical anthropology establish that God takes a very special interest in us, that our highest end is to know him, and that we have a destiny in the hereafter.  Natural law arguments also tell us what we need to do in order to achieve our natural end.  Yet though it is in principle possible for us to know all this through unaided reason and to live in accordance with the natural law, in practice it is very difficult to do so.  This makes it a priori fitting and indeed highly plausible that God would provide special assistance, beyond what our very limited natural faculties provide.  That is to say, it makes it a priori highly plausible that he would provide a special revelation.
The only means by which we could know with certainty that such a revelation has actually occurred, though, is if it is backed by a miracle in the strict sense of a divine suspension of the natural order.  Anything less than that -- anything that could have been produced by natural or even by preternatural causes rather than a truly supernatural cause -- would, for all we know, be bogus.
V. Christian apologetics
It is only at this point that a specifically Christianapologetics properly begins.  “Natural apologetics” tells us to look for a special divine revelation.  It tells us that this revelation will have to be backed by a miracle in the strict sense -- something that only God could in principle have caused.  And it tells us that this revelation will have to be consistent with everything we know from natural theology, philosophical anthropology, and natural law.  As we have seen, given what we know from those fields, that rules out quite a lot.  In fact, among the great world religions, it rules out the religions of the far East and tells us to look instead to the Abrahamic traditions.  The reason is in part that the content of the religions of the far East is too greatly out of harmony with what we know from natural theology and philosophical anthropology, and in part because it is in the Abrahamic religions rather than the far Eastern ones that we even find in the first place claims to a divine revelation backed by miracles.
Now while there are miracle stories in the Islamic tradition, and even the occasional attribution of a miracle to Muhammad, it is remarkable how little emphasis is placed on the miraculous in Islam compared to Judaism and Christianity.  Indeed, the chief miracle attributed to Muhammad is supposed to be the Qur’an itself.  But of course, whether the Qur’an is even preternatural, or indeed even something naturally improbable -- let alone something that could not in principle have come about except through a supernatural, divine cause -- is, to say the very least, highly doubtful.
When we turn to Judaism we find that there are no significant miracles affirmed by it that are not also affirmed by Christianity.  Hence, suppose it were established beyond any doubt that (say) the miracles attributed to Moses really happened.  That wouldn’t establish the truth of Judaism as opposed to Christianity, since the biblical passages telling us about these miracles are considered scriptural in bothreligions. 
Now the Resurrection of Jesus Christ is something else altogether.  For one thing, if it really happened, it cannot possibly have had a natural or even preternatural cause.  Only God himself could have caused it.  And if it really happened, it decisively establishes Christianity as opposed to Judaism, and indeed as opposed to any other religion.  This is why Christianity has historically staked everything on this particular miracle.  “If Christ is not raised,” St. Paul tells the Christian, “your faith is worthless.”  But if he wasraised, then the Christian faith is rationally established. 
So, was he raised?  Here, I maintain, is where the work of the most formidable scholars of the Resurrection -- of a William Lane Craig, say -- should enter the picture.  If a skeptic is convinced of the truth of naturalism, and you present him with no reason to doubt his naturalism except the defense of the Resurrection developed by a writer like Craig, then it seems to me perfectly understandable why such a skeptic would regard that defense as inconclusive at best.  However, suppose instead that the claims of natural theology, philosophical anthropology, and natural law sketched above can all be independently established.  Seen in that context, I maintain, the arguments of writers like Craig are compelling.
That is by no means to deny that there are important considerations other than the Resurrection.  For example, I would argue that it is only in light of the Incarnation, of God in the flesh suffering with us, that the problem of evil can be dealt with in a practically and emotionally satisfying way (as opposed to a bloodlessly intellectually satisfying way).  And it is highly plausible that, given his special concern for us, God would will to answer the needs of our emotional nature, so as to make absolutely evident his love for us.  (Notice that I am not fallaciously “appealing to emotion” here; I am not saying “Proposition p is emotionally satisfying, therefore p is true.”  Rather, I am appealing to what God would plausibly will as conducive to our well-being given that we are by nature creatures of emotion as well as of reason.)  I would also argue that the supernatural end revealed by Christianity -- the beatific vision -- does greater justice to our rational nature than do the natural ends posited by other purportedly revealed religions.  (Since I say this as a critic of Henri de Lubac, this is a claim I would obviously want to formulate very carefully in a fuller treatment!) 
Obviously much more could be said.  But this is not a post about Christian apologetics per se, and it is a post that is already too long.  The point is that the full power of distinctively Christian claims about God and man can only be appreciated within the context of a fully developed “natural apologetics.”  Scholastic writers of a previous generation understood this.  You will find the approach I advocate followed in old books like Paul Glenn’s Apologetics , Anthony Alexander’s College Apologetics , Michael Sheehan’s Apologetics and Catholic Doctrine , John McCormick’s Natural Theology, and in many multi-volume works of dogmatic or fundamental theology in the Neo-Scholastic period.  The trouble with such works (other than the fact of their often being out of print and hard to find) is that, being old, they do not address the sorts of objections a contemporary analytic philosopher or a contemporary skeptical biblical scholar might raise.
Hence there is an urgent need for Catholic theologians and philosophers to return to the task of writing works of apologetics with the depth, breadth, analytic rigor, and systematic character prized in the Scholastic tradition.  (It is only fair to note that the Eastern Orthodox philosopher Richard Swinburne is something of a model, having produced over the decades an apologetic oeuvre of remarkable depth, breadth, analytic rigor, and systematic power.  If only he were a Scholastic, and if only he weren’t a theistic personalist!) 

Dominicans Interactive reviews Aquinas

Dominicans Interactive is a new online initiative of the Irish Dominicans.  (Check out their Facebook page and website.)  Today the website reviewsmy book Aquinas .  From the review:
The chapter on natural theology deals with all five of Aquinas’s proofs for the existence of God… as well as containing a short treatment of the divine attributes (God’s simplicity, perfection, goodness, immutablity, and so on).  The reader will encounter in this chapter one of the most robust defences of the validity of every one of the arguments for the existence of God (Five Ways) available in the English language… This chapter is a tour de force and bears witness to Feser’s deserved reputation as a master of natural theology.  Both students and established scholars ought to acquire a copy of the book for the sake of this chapter alone.
Very kind!  The review also warns: “[A] note of caution: Feser’s book, while it ought to be required reading for any introductory course on Aquinas’s philosophy, is nonetheless very challenging for the neophyte.”  That’s worth emphasizing.  The book’s subtitle “A Beginner’s Guide” is a bit misleading.  It was not part of the original title when the book was contracted, and writing a “beginner’s guide” was not something I had in mind when working on it.  What happened is that after the book was finished the publisher decided to fold it into their “Beginner’s Guides” series.  In fact most readers will find it more challenging than The Last Superstition , though not as challenging as Scholastic Metaphysics .

Miracles, ID, and classical theism

The esteemed Lydia McGrew, a friend of this blog, wonderswhether my defense of classical theism and criticisms of “Intelligent Design” theory can be reconciled with some of the miracle stories one finds in the Bible.  Her concerns are twofold.  First, such stories clearly attribute personal characteristics to God; yet classical theists reject what they call “theistic personalism.”  Second, the miracle stories in question involve effects which could at least in principle (Lydia claims) have been caused by something other than the God of classical theism; yet I have criticized ID theory precisely on the grounds that it cannot get you to the God of classical theism.
Neither “a person” nor impersonal

Lydia’s first objection, I’m sorry to say, rests on a pretty basic (albeit annoyingly common) misunderstanding.  Contrary to the impression she gives in her post, I have never denied that God is personal, nor do classical theists in general deny it.  On the contrary, like classical theists in general, I have argued that there is in God intellect and will, and these are the defining attributes of personhood; and as a Catholic I also affirm that there are in God three divine Persons.  So, I hardly regard God as impersonal.

[A]mong the things we know about God via natural theology, at least from an Aristotelian-Thomistic (A-T) point of view… are that His attributes include intellect and will.  But since possession of intellect and will is definitive of persons, it follows that God cannot correctly be referred to as an “it” or in any other impersonal terms.
In a post from October of 2010 I wrote:
[F]or the classical theist, theistic personalism is bad philosophy and bad theology… [T]hat does not mean that God is impersonal, since according to classical theism there is in God something analogous to what we call intellect and will in us, and other attributes too which presuppose intellect and will (such as justice, mercy, and love – where “love” is understood, not as a passion, but as the willing of another’s good).
In a post from September of 2012 I argued:
[W]hile one might be tempted to conclude… that God’s intellect and knowledge must be decidedly sub-personal compared to ours, that is precisely the reverse of the truth…
His intellect is not inferior to our conscious thought processes (as a stone, gravity, or even the unconscious informational states of a computer are to that extent inferior to our conscious states) but on the contrary beyond and higher than them, just as divine power is beyond and higher than the relatively trivial capacities in created things that we characterize as ‘powers.’  “My thoughts are not your thoughts” (Isaiah 55:8).
In a post from October 2013 I wrote:
[C]lassical theists, in general, by no means regard God as impersonal.  They typically argue that when the notion of the ultimate cause of all things is fully developed, it can be seen that there is a sense in which we must attribute to this cause intellect and will.
I could go on -- you’ll find similar quotes in various books, articles, and other blog posts I have written -- but that suffices to make the point.  I not only have never said that God is impersonal but have repeatedly denied it, and repeatedly affirmed that God has personal attributes.
I have also said that from the point of view of classical theism it is a mistake to characterize God as “a person.”  But as I’ve put it before, the trouble is not with the word “person” so much as with the word “a.”  (I’ve also said that it is not correct to characterize God as “a being,” but no one accuses me for that reason of attributing non-being or non-existence to God.  Yet when I say in the very same context that God is not “a person” and explicitly say that I do not mean by this to deny that he is personal, some readers nevertheless conclude that I regard God as impersonal.  Very strange.)
The point is that God is not (contrary to what theistic personalism entails) a mere instance of a kind, not even a uniquely impressive instance, whether the kind in question is person or any other kind.  Just as he is Being Itself rather than something that merely has or participates in being, so too is he Intellect Itself rather than something that merely has or participates in intellect and other personal attributes.  That no more makes him impersonal than characterizing him as Being Itself entails that he is unreal.  (The problem with treating God as an instance of a kind is that this is incompatible with the doctrine of divine simplicity, and divine simplicity is an absolutely non-negotiable part both of sound philosophical theology and of Catholic orthodoxy.  You can find a sketch of the reasons why here.)
So, when Lydia notes that the miraculous events attributed to God in the Bible are characterized as “done intentionally and for a purpose,” as “the acts of an Intelligence,” etc., she is not calling attention to anything I have ever denied or would deny, nor to anything my position commits me to denying.  Since the classical theist not only allows but insists that there is will and intellect in God, naturally we can characterize his effects as reflecting purpose and intelligence.  This is simply a non-issue.
The trouble with ID
Lydia’s other objection, I’m afraid, also rests on a basic misunderstanding of my position, though the extent to which she misses the point in this case takes a little more spelling out.  Lydia seems to think that my beef with ID is merely that ID arguments only get you to some designer or other, where this designer might be the God of classical theism but might instead be some lesser, purely creaturely artificer.  She then suggests that to be consistent I would have to say the same thing about whatever generated effects like the fire that consumed the priests of Baal during Elijah’s famous encounter with them.  She writes:
Think about this for a minute: Sending fire from heaven is the kind of thing that one can easily conceive it to be possible for a mere demigod to do. There is nothing per se about sending down fire from heaven that reveals that God is Being Itself… In fact, the prophets of Baal had some reason to hope, since they believed that Baal was real, that Baal would send down fire and consume their sacrifice. It didn't happen because there is no real god Baal, not because sending fire out of the sky is the kind of thing that is logically impossible for a mere god (small g), a mere super-being, to do.
Another example she gives is New Testament passages that describe God the Father speaking from the heavens.  Of all such cases, she writes:
[T]hese events reveal the actions of God in ways that it is logically possible were the result of the action of some being who was not God and therefore, by definition, less than God. I want to stress that by "it is logically possible" I do not mean "would have been reasonable to conclude." It would have been unreasonable to conclude that these events were caused by a demigod or an angel or alien. The point merely is that that possibility is not excluded, by the nature of the event itself, as an absolute logical impossibility.
So, Lydia concludes, if my objection to ID is that the evidence it appeals to doesn’t point conclusively to or strictly entail the God of classical theism, specifically, then to be consistent I would have to raise the same objection against the biblical stories in question; but if I do not object to them, then neither should I object to ID.
The trouble is that that is simply not my objection to ID.  My complaint is not that ID arguments are merely probabilistic and don’t get you conclusively to the God of classical theism.  And as with my repeated, explicit affirmation that God is personal, this is something I have made clear many times.  For example, in a post from April of 2010 I wrote:
The A-T critique of Paley and of ID theory… has nothing to do either with any objection to probabilistic arguments for God’s existence per se.
In a post from May of 2010 I wrote:
When A-T philosophers criticize the arguments of Paley or ID theorists for being probabilistic… it is not at bottom the appeal to probabilities per se that they object to...
In a post from March of 2011 I wrote (with emphasis in the original):
The Thomist’s problem with the arguments of Paley and ID theory is not – NOT (See that?  It says “not”) – that they are merely probabilistic, or that they don’t get you all the way to the God of classical theism.  There’s nothing wrong with that.  The problem with these arguments is rather that they don’t get you even one millimeter toward the God of classical theism, and indeed they get you positively away from the God of classical theism. 
In another post from that same month I wrote:
I have always been very specific about the respects in which ID conflicts with A-T philosophy and theology.  It has nothing to do with Darwinism, nothing to do with whether God in some sense “designed” the universe (of course He did), and nothing to do with a rejection of probabilistic arguments per se.
So, once again Lydia has simply misunderstood my position.  What I dosay -- as that second to last quote indicates -- is that ID and related arguments like Paley’s design argument not only do not entail or even make probable classical theism, but are positively at odds with classical theism.  How so?
I’ve explained this many times (again, see my ID related posts, and, for my fullest and most systematic statement, my recent Nova et Vetera article “Between Aristotle and William Paley: Aquinas’s Fifth Way”).  Briefly, the main points are:
1. Paley and ID theory predicate attributes of God and of creatures univocally, whereas for Thomists these predications are to be understood analogously.  The problem here is that in the view of Thomists, predicating intellect, power, etc. of God and creatures univocally -- in exactly the same sense rather than analogously -- implicitly makes of God a mere instance of a kind, and is thus incompatible with divine simplicity.  (Scotists dispute the incompatibility of univocal predication with divine simplicity, but Thomists regard their position as unstable.  See Scholastic Metaphysics , pp. 256-63, for discussion of some of these issues.)
2. ID theory presupposes -- whether in an unqualified way or at least for the sake of argument -- a conception of the natural world that is “mechanistic” in the sense of denying that there is any teleology or final causality immanent to or inherent in natural substances qua natural (as we Aristotelians claim there is).  Any teleology or finality would for ID have to be in nature only extrinsically or in a way that is entirely imposed from outside, after the fashion of artifacts like watches and other machines.  Now there are a couple of grave theological problems with this view, one of which is this: If there is no teleology or “directedness” of any sort inherent in natural things, then there is no potency or potentiality (in the Aristotelian sense) inherent in them either; for a potency is always a potency for some outcome, toward which it is directed.  And that means that natural things are not really composed of act and potency, but in some sense just are entirelyactual and devoid of potency.  In that case, though, they do not need actualization from anything outside them, in which case they do not need a sustaining cause.  That in turn entails deism at best and atheism at worst. 
(Aristotelian final causality is thus necessarily linked to the theory of act and potency, and thus in turn to the very possibility of natural theology.  This is a theme of my 2011 Franciscan University of Steubenville talk "Natural Theology Must Be Grounded in the Philosophy of Nature, Not Natural Science," which you can find on YouTube.  As I discuss in the course of that talk, there is a parallel here to Berkeley’s famous point that the early moderns’ conception of matter was implicitly atheistic.)
3. A second problem following from this denial of intrinsic or immanent final causality is this: Since (as the Thomist argues) efficientcausal power presupposes that causes are “directed toward” their effects as toward a final cause, if we deny intrinsic finality or “directedness” to things we are also implicitly denying intrinsic efficient causal power to them.  That would mean either that nothing has genuine causal power at all (a Humean position which is incompatible with arguing causally from the world to God), or that only God has any real causal power (which is occasionalism).  In addition to being bad philosophy, these positions are theologically unacceptable.
Hence any theology committed to a “mechanistic” or non-Aristotelian conception of nature is an unstable one, tending to collapse into either deism or occasionalism.  But deism in turn tends to collapse into atheism, and occasionalism into pantheism.  Unsurprisingly, this is pretty much what happened historically, as the watchmaker god of the “design argument” came to seem first a remote “god of the gaps” needed only to wind up the universe, and then an unnecessary fifth wheel; while Malebranche’s occasionalism gave way to Spinoza’s Deus sive Natura. 
Obviously these are large and controversial claims; again, I’ve developed these arguments in detail elsewhere.  (And please don’t bother commenting on all this until you’ve read what I’ve said about it elsewhere.  I’m really, really tired of having to repeat myself over and over and over again on the ID issue to correct the errors of people who can’t be bothered to read what I’ve actually said before commenting on it, and who pass their misrepresentations of my views on to others.)  The point for present purposes is just that the Thomist has deep philosophical and theological reasons for rejecting any view which, like ID theory, presupposes a “mechanistic” conception of nature (again, in the specific sense of “mechanistic” given above).  And these reasons have nothing to do with ID arguments being merely less than conclusive.
Needless to say, there is nothing in the biblical passages Lydia cites that has anything whatsoever to do with a univocal theory of predication, a mechanistic conception of nature, or anything else that we Thomist critics of ID object to.   Thus, Lydia’s alleged parallel between ID claims and the passages in question is completely spurious. 
Arguments from miracles
So, I’m afraid that Lydia’s critique is in those two respects aimed at a straw man.  Her remarks are also problematic in another respect.  Lydia says of the biblical passages she cites that “these events reveal the actions of God in ways that it is logically possible were the result of the action of some being who was not God and therefore, by definition, less than God.”  Now there is a sense in which this is true.  If we describe what happened with the priests of Baal as fire coming down from the sky, then there is certainly nothing in thatwhich strictly requires a divine cause.  Other things certainly could cause fire to come down from the sky, and could even do so in such a way that the source of the fire wasn’t obvious.  For example, an angel might cause this to happen, or an extraterrestrial might, or perhaps a stealth aircraft could make it happen.
Now a miracle in the strict sense, at least as Scholastic writers use the term, is something which of its nature could not in principle be caused by anything other than God.  This doesn’t mean that the fire from heaven in the Elijah story was not miraculous, because such a fire would have to have had a divine cause if all natural and preternatural causes were excluded.  An event characterized as fire coming down from the sky could have a non-divine cause; but an event characterized as fire coming down from the sky which was not caused by any natural or preternatural cause could only have had a divine cause.  Naturally, given the context, I think a divine cause was the source of the fire in the case of the priests of Baal.
Obviously, though, the inherent ambiguity of the event of fire descending from the sky makes it problematic as a kind of “all purpose” miracle.  In the specificreligious and cultural context in question, it was adequate to the divine purpose.  But in different contexts it would not be.  For example, suppose there were a culture in which the people believed in a pantheon of trickster gods who frequently answered prayers addressed to other gods, often gave misleading signs, etc.  Obviously in that case it would be useless to appeal to fire from the sky as evidence that one of these gods in particular was real and the others all frauds.  A skeptic could say: “Oh come on, that could have been any of the gods.  It doesn’t prove anything.”  Or imagine that we develop stealth technology that is so good that the U.S. military regularly incinerates terrorists with fire that descends from invisible, silent drones.  It would be useless in that sort of context to appeal to fire from the sky as evidence of divine intervention.  For we couldn’t have any confidence that the obvious alternative explanation could be safely ruled out.
A miracle that could reasonably be expected to be compelling evidence of a divine revelation across different cultures and historical periods would have to be something much more dramatic and unambiguous than that, something that could not in principle have any cause other than God (which means, of course, the God of classical theism).  Fire coming down from the sky doesn’t fit the bill.  But I would submit that a man known for certain to be dead coming back to life does fit the bill.  (Obviously I mean literally and unambiguously dead, not merely “brain dead,” or “having flatlined,” or the like.)
Thoroughly explaining why a resurrection is not even in principle possible via natural causes requires some background in philosophical anthropology.  I’ll say more about that, and about miracles more generally, in a forthcoming post.  Suffice it for present purposes to note that if Lydia is saying that there are some miraculous interventions which involve events which under some descriptions might have a non-divine cause, then I think she is correct.  But if she is saying that all miracles involve events which under any description could in principle have had a cause other than God, then I think that is seriously wrong.  That would undermine the very possibility of knowing that a divine revelation has ever actually occurred. 

A second exchange with Keith Parsons, Part II

Prof. Keith Parsons has posted his own opening statement in our second exchange, which is devoted to the topic of atheism, naturalism, and morality.  (An index of the posts in our first exchange can be found here.)  As it happens, there is a remarkable amount of agreement between what Keith says in his newest post and what I said in my opening post.  Both of us take a broadly Aristotelian approach to ethics, grounding the good for human beings in the biology of human nature.  Unsurprisingly, though, there is also disagreement.  I have argued that human biology can have moral import only if interpreted in light of an Aristotelian metaphysics.  Keith argues that it ought to be interpreted in light of a purely naturalistic metaphysics.  He would interpret the biological functions that ground what is good for us, not as instances of immanent teleology of the sort the traditional Aristotelian affirms, but rather in terms of Darwinian natural selection.  As Keith indicates, in this regard his views parallel those of Larry Arnhart.Let me begin by noting that evolution per se is not what is at issue between us.  Given Aristotelian-Thomistic (A-T) essentialism, questions about a natural substance’s nature or essence -- and thus its natural ends, and thus what is good for it -- are metaphysically and epistemologically independent of questions about its origin.  Interested readers can find a useful discussion of the relationship between essence and origins in David Oderberg’s Real Essentialism (see especially pp. 170-76 and 214-24), but it is important to emphasize that you don’t need to be an Aristotelian or a Thomist to think that questions about the nature and function of a thing are independent of questions about its evolutionary history.  As Jerry Fodor once put it, “you don’t have to know how hands (or hearts, or eyes, or livers) evolved to make a pretty shrewd guess about what they are for.”

The trouble, from the A-T point of view, is in interpreting evolution and human nature within a naturalist metaphysical framework.  For given such a framework, there can be no irreducible teleology in nature, and therefore (as I argued in my opening post) there can be at most only “as if” teleology (as opposed to either “intrinsic” or “derived” teleology).  And if it is only “as if” teleology exists (if I can channel Alicia Silverstone in Clueless), then it can be only “as if” natural goodness exists, and thus only “as if” morality exists.  Morality can in this case be at most a useful fiction.
In my view, the lack of a traditional Aristotelian metaphysical foundation prevents Keith from successfully rebutting the objection that his position cannot account for the categorical force of moral imperatives.  To be sure, I agree with him that morality has a hypothetical component.  Much of it can be captured in propositions of the form: If you want x, you ought to pursue y; andif you want y, you ought to pursue z.  But this does not suffice for moral obligation.  Suppose it is true that if I want to see the movie from the beginning, I’d better get to the theater by 3 pm; and if I want to get to the theater by 3 pm, I’d better leave now.  The imperative Leave now will be rationally binding on me only if the imperative See the movie from the beginning is rationally binding on me.  But of course there are few situations, if any, in which that particular imperative has the binding nature that moral imperatives are supposed to have.
So, if a series of hypothetical imperatives is to have rationally binding force, it has to trace ultimately to some imperative at the head of the line that has categorical force.  It is only if I regard some imperative of the categorical form Pursue x is binding on me that I will be rationally obliged to pursue y and thus z.  With that much it seems Keith would agree.  But where can we find such imperatives?  Keith’s position is essentially that there are certain imperatives that most people will in fact treat as categorical.  An example of such an imperative implicit in what he says is Pursue happiness (in the Aristotelian sense of eudaimonia).  Keith considers the following potential objection:
[W]hat do you say to those who reject the antecedents of your hypotheticals?  What, for instance, would you say to Dostoevsky’s Underground Man who rejects happiness, including his own, and prefers to act out of spite?  In general, if someone does not already value one of your “natural goods,” how do you get them to recognize your moral norms? Why not just be spiteful if that is what you want?
In response, he says:
If the Underground Man genuinely scorns happiness, including his own, then there is not much that [my view] can say to him.  But then there is not much that any ethical perspective can say to him. Kant might tell him that he is being unreasonable or Christians might tell him that he is going to hell, but he will just scorn that too. Sheer defiance is not a rational act and so cannot be addressed by appeals to reason.
Now I think this is correct as far as it goes.  If someone is simply stubbornly determined to be irrational, we are not likely to reach him by appealing to reason.  The question, though, is whether someone who rejects an imperative like Pursue happiness, or any other purportedly categorical imperative – and continues to reject it no matter how hard we try to talk him out of doing so -- really is, necessarilybeing irrational.
From the A-T point of view, the answer is: “Yes, he is per se irrational.”  But from the Humean point of view, the answer is: “No, he’s not necessarily irrational; he’s just different from most other people, that’s all.”  As Hume famously wrote:
'Tis not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger. ‘Tis not contrary to reason for me to chuse my total ruin, to prevent the least uneasiness of an Indian or person wholly unknown to me. ‘Tis as little contrary to reason to prefer even my own acknowledg'd lesser good to my greater, and have a more ardent affection for the former than for the latter. (Treatise of Human Nature 2.3.3.6)
Now, if, contra the Aristotelian, there were no such thing as irreducible teleology immanent to the natural order, then it is hard to see how Hume’s position could be avoided.  For in that case nothing would be inherently foranything, would not be of its nature directed toward any particular end.  Thus practical reason would not be inherently directed toward the good, so that there would nothing per se contrary to reason in refusing to choose the good.  And of course, as I have already argued, nothing would in that case really be good in the first place.  It would only be “as if” there were goodness.  And since as a matter of statistical fact most people tend to want to pursue their happiness and tend to agree at least in a very general way about what is good and bad, it would be “as if” their practical reason were directed at the good.  Hence it would be “as if” there were such a thing as morality.  But there wouldn’t really bemorality, and if everyone knew that it was merely “as if” there were morality – that morality was at best a useful fiction – then even the pretense of morality couldn’t long survive.
On the other hand, if the Aristotelian is right to hold that natural substances, powers, and processes are inherently directed toward certain ends, and in particular that practical reason is inherently or of its nature directed toward the pursuit of the good, then there would be something contrary to reason in choosing against the good, and thus (given that happiness in the sense of eudaimonia is constitutive of the good for us) something contrary to reason in choosing against one’s own happiness.  For the Humean, someone who really at the end of the day doesn’t want the good or his own happiness is just statistically unusual, but that’s all.  For the Aristotelian, by contrast, such a person is necessarily irrational.  And to the extent his irrational desires are so deep-seated that he doesn’t even feel the attraction of the good or of happiness, he is as objectively disordered or defective an instance of the kind rational animal as a dog with three legs is a disordered or defective instance of its kind, or a tree with sickly, weak roots is a disordered and defective instance of its kind, or an eye covered over with cataracts is a defective or disordered instance of its kind.
Since Keith is a naturalist, I imagine that at the end of the day he will say that the Humean metaphysical picture is the correct one.  In that case, though, I would argue that he cannot coherently maintain the neo-Aristotelian position in ethics he wants to defend.  To be sure, given an Arnhart-style reinterpretation of Aristotelian function talk in Darwinian naturalist terms, he can certainly make the case that human nature is such that it is “as if” an Aristotelian system of morality, specifically, were true.  But what he cannot coherently do is hold that it is in fact true.  An Aristotelian moral theory necessarily requires an Aristotelian metaphysical foundation; a naturalist metaphysical foundation can only ever get you a simulation, and not the real McCoy.
So that is one criticism I have of Keith’s version of neo-Aristotelian ethics.  Another is this.  Morality, from the A-T point of view, is something intelligible only for rational creatures.  It is because we are rational animals that we are moral animals.  As I indicated in my opening post, there is a sense in which a tree or a lioness can be a good or bad tree, a good or bad lioness, but it is not a moral sense, since trees and lionesses lack intellect and will and thus cannot understand or freely choose either what is good or what is bad for them.  Keith seems to take a different view when he writes:
There is one way… that the Darwinian developments must alter ethical naturalism deeply.  We now know, as Aristotle did not, that we humans are kin—not just metaphorically but in an absolutely literal sense—to all other living things… Advancing research shows that non-human animals share many of our feelings, even our “moral” feelings, and display a remarkable range of cognitive aptitudes. These developments have rendered the definition of ethics as concerned only with human life too narrow and parochial. We must expand our understanding of natural goods to encompass, at least, the well-being of sentient non-human animals…
I’m not sure exactly what conclusions Keith would draw from this, but in response I would make several points.  First, I think it is incorrect to say that Darwinism tells the Aristotelian anything new of a morally relevant sort about our relationship with other animals.  It would, after all, not have been news to Aristotle, Aquinas, or any other pre-modern Aristotelian that human beings are, like dogs and dolphins, a kind of animal.  On the contrary, they defined human beings as animals of a sort, viz. rational animals.  In their view, our animality, since it is part of our nature, is relevant to our moral lives, but only because it is in us conjoined to rationality.  Naturally they were aware that other animals are sentient -- indeed, their being sentient is part of what makes them animals in the first place (as opposed to merely vegetative forms of life) -- but this did not in the traditional Aristotelian view suffice to make them moral agents.  It is hard to see why our having non-human animals as ancestors would make any difference.  The traditional Aristotelian view is that non-rational animals cannot be moral agents, precisely because they are non-rational(not because we are not related to them in other ways).  How exactly does our having inherited genetic material from such animals change that?
Second, while Keith does say that “non-human animals share many of our feelings, even our ‘moral’ feelings, and display a remarkable range of cognitive aptitudes,” this does not, for the traditional Aristotelian, show what he seems to think it shows.  When the A-T philosopher talks about “intellect,” “rationality,” “will,” “choice,” and the like, he has something very specific in mind.  Intellectual or rational powers involve the capacity to form abstract concepts, to put them together into propositions, and to reason logically from one proposition to another.  And willing and choosing have to do with pursuing ends in light of what intellect grasps.  Now, the A-T philosopher agrees that, like us, non-human animals have all sorts of complex internal representational and affective states -- perceptual experiences, mental imagery, feelings, appetites, etc. -- but none of this amounts to intellect or volition as the A-T philosopher understands those notions.  Hence the research Keith cites, which I think would not in fact have been surprising to an Aristotle or an Aquinas, does not in the traditional Aristotelian view really change anything.  And even if it turned out that certain non-human animals such as apes had genuine rationality, that would mean they are really “human” after all in the traditional Aristotelian sense, i.e. they would in that case be rational animals.  (Not that I believe for a moment that this is remotely plausible.  Like Noam Chomsky and Steven Pinker, I think the “evidence” for ape language is bogus.) 
Third, on the traditional A-T natural law account of rights, rights essentially follow from duties.  It is because I have an obligation to pursue what is good for me given my nature that I have a right to pursue it; rights are safeguards to our ability to fulfill our obligations under natural law.  Hence if a creature cannot intelligibly be said to have obligations, it cannot intelligibly be said to have rights.  (To forestall a potential objection, this does not entail that human fetuses and infants cannot have rights.  While qua fetuses or infants they are not yet capable of understanding or following obligations, they are nevertheless immature instances of creatures of the kind which can do so.  Similarly with severely brain damaged people -- they are damaged instances of a kind of creature which canunderstand and follow obligations.  Non-human animals, by contrast, cannot understand or carry out moral obligations even when mature and in good working order.  For A-T, it is the mature and normalinstance of a kind that determines what is natural and good for the kind in general.)
Now, even someone who wants to attribute more impressive cognitive abilities to non-human animals than A-T philosophers do would surely agree that it is odd, to say the least, to think of non-human animals as having moral obligations.  What exactly would it mean to attribute moral duties to apes and dolphins, let alone to dogs, pigeons, snakes, or goldfish?  How exactly would we hold them to their obligations?  (Shaming?  Jail time?  Should we get the U.N. to sanction tigers and other predators for animal rights violations?)  Yet if it makes no sense to attribute moral duties to animals, why would it make sense to attribute rights to them?
Now perhaps Keith would not go so far as to attribute rights to animals, but is merely claiming that there are other moral reasons why we ought not to do absolutely any old thing we feel like doing to them, however cruel or wasteful.  But the traditional A-T natural law philosopher will agree with him about that much.  He would just deny that the reasons have anything to do with animals having rights, or with Darwinism. 
These are large issues which cannot be settled here.  (For a traditional A-T natural law account of the source of rights, see David Oderberg’s Moral Theory , chapter 2.  For a traditional A-T natural law account of the morality of our treatment of animals, see Oderberg’s Applied Ethics , chapter 3.)  Suffice it to say that it does not seem to me that Keith has shown that Darwinism requires us to “alter ethical naturalism deeply” (as he puts it).
Anyway, I would like once again to thank Keith (and our moderator Jeff Lowder at Secular Outpost) for a very fruitful set of exchanges.  It has been particularly interesting to see just how much significant agreement there is between us on various issues, despite our deep differences.  One further area of agreement is evident at the end of Keith’s latest post, where he writes:
I think that Alasdair MacIntyre was right when he… claimed that the extreme dysfunction of ethical discourse in our society—with opposing sides rapidly reduced to strident rhetoric and ad hominem abuse—is due to the comprehensive failure of what he calls “the Enlightenment Project” in ethics. He argues that the Enlightenment philosophers attempted to base ethics only upon reason and failed, leaving a de facto subjectivism in place. He thinks that the only way back from our current desolation is to return to the Aristotelian idea of humans as having a natural telos, a potential for mental and moral excellence—humans as they could be rather than how they so often are. I think he is right.
Naturally I concur.  I would only add that I think that the confusion MacIntyre identifies in modern moral philosophy is paralleled by confusion in modern metaphysics and modern theology.  And in my view the remedy in the latter cases is the same as in the former -- a reconsideration of classical philosophy, especially the Aristotelian variety. 
The last word is yours, Keith!

School’s out forever?

John Farrell, Forbes science blogger extraordinaire (and friend of this blog), comments on my recent talk at Thomas Aquinas College, over at his own personal blog.  As you know if you’ve read or listened to the talk, I call for a return to Scholasticism within Catholic intellectual life as essential to sound theology and apologetics.  John has some kind words about my talk, for which I thank him, but he also expresses skepticism about the prospects of the metaphysics of the School and its Schoolmen (to use the jargon of the good old days).  Writes John:
My own sense is that Scholasticism can't work now because it presupposes an Aristotelian philosophy of nature that is simply not adequate to support what modern science has uncovered about the natural order.  Which is not to say it is no longer valid, but rather that it is too limited. [No one says Newtonian physics is wrong, but it only addresses a limited aspect of a much wider, broader nature.]He qualifies these remarks in an update to the post as follows:

I think what fascinates me most is not the degree to which science has moved on--and that was a poor analogy on my part if that is how it came across. But rather, to the degree that Aristotle's philosophy of nature was itself inspired to some degree by his science (in particular his observations as a biologist), in what ways could a modern philosophy of nature be inspired by science now? And could it be useful in apologetics? 
End quote.  So, the School’s out forever?  Naturally, I beg to differ, and if John is channeling Alice Cooper I guess I’ll have to play Rodney Dangerfield in Back to School.    
I’m a bit puzzled by John’s statement that “Scholasticism presupposes an Aristotelian philosophy of nature that is simply not adequate to support what modern science has uncovered about the natural order,” since I and other writers whose work John knows and respects (e.g. William Carroll) have argued that there is no conflict between an Aristotelian philosophy of nature and modern science.  Indeed, we argue that the latter is best interpreted in light of the former.  I’m pretty sure John is familiar with those arguments in at least a general way, so it would be interesting to know exactly what he thinks is wrong with them.  Unfortunately, he not only doesn’t tell us, but doesn’t give the reader an indication that the arguments even exist! 
I’m also puzzled by the rhetorical question about how an Aristotelian philosophy of nature might be useful in apologetics, given that I never shut up about how crucial the theory of act and potency is to causal arguments for God’s existence, how crucial immanent teleology or final causality is to Aquinas’s Fifth Way, the role hylemorphism plays in the Third Way, etc.  (I’ve explained all this at length in Aquinas and in various academic articles, and of course here at the blog.)
Since I deal with the question of the compatibility of modern science and Aristotelian philosophy at some length in Scholastic Metaphysics , and since David Oderberg does the same in Real Essentialism -- to cite just two sources (there’s also, of course, the work of Bill Carroll, William A. Wallace, James Weisheipl, Charles De Koninck, and others) -- I’ll direct the interested reader to those books. 
It is also worth reminding the reader that it is not just Scholastics like me who think that a broadly Aristotelian philosophy of nature is, not only “adequate,” but indeed necessary in order to account for what we know from modern science.  For example, we find a recapitulation of the Aristotelian notion of causal powers in the work of non-Scholastic philosophers of science like Nancy Cartwright, John Ellis, Anjan Chakravartty, and Rom Harré and in the work of non-Scholastic metaphysicians like Stephen Mumford, Rani Lill Anjum, C. B. Martin, John Heil, George Molnar, and U. T. Place.  (You’ll find a primer on this recent work in Scholastic Metaphysics, and some of the important work being done in the mini Aristotelian revival currently underway in analytic philosophy can be found in anthologies like Tuomas Tahko’s Contemporary Aristotelian Metaphysics , Ruth Groff and John Greco’s Powers and Capacities in Philosophy: The New Aristotelianism , Daniel Novotný and Lukáš Novák’s Neo-Aristotelian Perspectives in Metaphysics , and my own Aristotle on Method and Metaphysics .)
It also needs to be emphasized that it is simply not the case that modern scientists have thought through the philosophical issues raised by their work and have found a non-Aristotelian way to answer them.  The truth is rather that they have in general become so hyper-specialized that they have largely lost sight of the most fundamental philosophical issues, and do not realize how amateurish, naïve, and conceptually sloppy their remarks often are when they do deign to address them.
To take just one example, consider that most fundamental notion of modern science, that of a “law of nature.”  It is routinely tossed around as if it were obvious what it meant for something to be a law of nature, and as if it were obviously unproblematic to think of scientific explanation as a matter of appealing to laws of nature.  In fact the 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, whose essay “Universe from Bit” (in Paul Davies and Niels Henrik Gregersen, eds. Information and the Nature of Reality: From Physics to Metaphysics), I happen to have been reading a few days ago.  Davies there 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 philosophy of nature and bad theology (insofar as it tends toward occasionalism).  I want rather to make the following two points.  First, when scientists like Stephen Hawking, Lawrence Krauss, and Victor Stenger confidently proclaim that we can explain such-and-such in terms of the laws of physics rather than God, they show only how comically clueless they are.  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. 
Second, the original, explicitly theological Cartesian-Newtonian notion of “laws of nature” was intended precisely as a replacement for the Aristotelian-Scholastic philosophy 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 Scholastic view at all, but merely to peddle an uncashed metaphor.  So, “science has moved on” from Scholasticism (as John puts it) only in the sense that it has not only chucked out Scholasticism but has also chucked out its initial proposed replacement for Scholasticism, and has offered nothing new in its place.  This is hardly a problem for the Scholastic; on the contrary, it is a problem for anyone who wants to resist a return to Scholasticism.
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 philosophy of nature.  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 case that 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 explainanything, but only re-describes it in a different jargon. 
There is, of course, more to the story, and I discuss these issues in detail in Scholastic Metaphysics.  The point for the moment is just that whatever the right view of laws of nature turns out to be, contemporary scientists seem to be mostly unaware that there is even a problem here.  And that’s just one area where modern science raises philosophical problems that its practitioners mostly neither perceive nor try to solve.  As Paul Feyerabend once complained:
The younger generation of physicists, the Feynmans, the Schwingers, etc., may be very bright; they may be more intelligent than their predecessors, than Bohr, Einstein, Schrödinger, Boltzmann, Mach, and so on.  But they are uncivilized savages, they lack in philosophical depth… (See Imre Lakatos and Paul Feyerabend, For and Against Method, p. 385)
Needless to say, Hawking, Krauss, Stenger, and Co. are even worse than the generation Feyerabend was complaining about. 
As if calling in reinforcements, a reader alerts me today to philosopher of biology John Wilkins’ recent remarks about the Aristotelian hylemorphism implicit in the free use physicists and biologists make of the notion of “information” and related notions.  This is a point I’ve been making for years, e.g. in The Last Superstition and in earlier posts like this one and this one.  (James Ross has made a similar point as well.)  Wilkins is, accordingly, suspicious of “information” talk, whereas my view is that in at least some cases it does track what Dennett would call “real patterns” in nature, and thus points to the reality of immanent formal and final causes.  (In re: what Wilkins says about atomism and hylemorphism, see Scholastic Metaphysics, chapter 3, especially pp. 177-84.)  Either way, it reinforces the point that, the standard “heroic age of science” narrative notwithstanding, the Aristotelian philosophy of nature is by no means the historical relic John and so many others suppose.

Corrupting the Calvinist youth [UPDATED]

Some guy named “Steve” who contributes to the group apologetics blog Triablogue informs us that “Feser seems to have a following among some young, philosophically-minded Calvinists.”  (Who knew?)  “Steve” is awfully perturbed by this, as he has “considerable reservations” about me, warning that I am not “a very promising role model for aspiring Reformed philosophers.” And why is that?  Not, evidently, because of the quality of my philosophical arguments, as he does not address a single argument I have ever put forward.  Indeed, he admits that he has made only an “admittedly cursory sampling” of my work -- and, it seems, has read only some blog posts of mine, at that -- and acknowledges that “this may mean I'm not qualified to offer an informed opinion of Feser.”  So he offers an uninformed opinion instead, making some amazingly sweeping remarks on the basis of his “admittedly cursory” reading.  (Why that is the sort of example “aspiring Reformed philosophers” should emulate, I have no idea.)
Normally I ignore this sort of drive-by blogging, but since Triablogue seems to have a significant readership among people interested in apologetics, I suppose I should say something lest “Steve” corrupt the Calvinist youth by his rash example.“Intelligent Design” theory

So, what’s “Steve’s” beef?  The first of his by-his-own-admission-uninformed objections to my work is this:
[Feser]'s a vociferous critic of intelligent-design theory. Now, ID-theory is fair game. However, it's philosophically unenlightening when philosophers like Feser (and Francis Beckwith) criticize ID-theory because it isn't Thomism. Unless you grant that Thomist epistemology and metaphysics should be the standard of comparison, that objection is uninteresting. 
Now, he’s right that I’m a critic of ID theory.  But his philosophy-by-power-browsing method has failed him badly if he thinks that my criticisms boil down to: “Well, it isn’t Thomism, ergo…”  First of all, as I have emphasized many times, I have two main problems with ID theory.  First, I hold that it presupposes, even if just for methodological purposes, a seriously problematic philosophy of nature.  Second, I hold that it tends to lead to a dangerously anthropomorphic conception of God that is incompatible with classical theism.  (See the posts linked to above for detailed exposition of these lines of criticism.)
Now, to take the second point first, lots of classical theists are not Thomists.  And I imagine there are lots of people who might find it worthwhile inquiring whether classical theism and ID theory are compatible whether or not they are classical theists, or Thomists, or ID theorists for that matter.  For knowing how various ideas cohere or fail to cohere with one another is part of the philosophical task.  So, surely it can be “philosophically enlightening” to consider the arguments of those who hold that classical theism and ID theory are incompatible, no? 
To come to my other line of criticism of ID, it is true that my reasons for rejecting the philosophy of nature that underlies ID theory are Aristotelian reasons, and Thomists are Aristotelians.  However, this in no way entails that these reasons should be regarded as “philosophically unenlightening” to those who happen not to be Thomists.  For one thing, you don’t need to be a Thomist to find it of interest whether ID theory is compatible with Aristotelianism.  Not all Aristotelians are Thomists -- for example, many contemporary neo-Aristotelian metaphysicians and philosophers of science are not Thomists -- so that if ID theory is incompatible with Aristotelianism, it isn’t just Thomists who will reject ID’s underlying philosophy of nature.  And as with the relationship between classical theism and ID theory, the relationship between Thomism and ID theory should be of philosophical interest in itself.  (For example, if it turns out that Thomism and ID theory really are incompatible, surely this can be “philosophically enlightening” for those who are drawn to Thomism but don’t know what to make of ID theory, or who are drawn to ID theory but don’t know what to make of Thomism.)
Finally, I have, of course, given arguments -- at length, in depth, and in various books and articles -- for the various aspects of the Aristotelian philosophy of nature.  I don’t say: “If you just happen by arbitrary preference to be a Thomist like me, then you should reject ID theory.”  I say:  “Here are the arguments for why you should accept the Aristotelian position vis-à-vis act and potency, substantial form, final causality, etc.; and since ID theory is incompatible with all that, you should reject ID theory.” 
“Steve,” despite his touching concern for the sound formation of “aspiring Reformed philosophers,” does not answer, or indeed even seem to be aware of, any of these philosophical arguments.  But when a Thomist [or a Leibnizian, or a naturalist, or whatever] offers arguments for a position, it is no good for an “aspiring philosopher” to say: “Well, I’m not a Thomist [or a Leibnizian, or a naturalist, or whatever], so I don’t find all that ‘philosophically enlightening.’”  An “aspiring philosopher” should respond to the damn arguments.  Awful luck for those who would prefer to limit their philosophical investigations to the “admittedly cursory” kind, but there it is. 
I absolutely love this addendum by “Steve,” by the way:
[T]he problem is compounded by the fact that Feser's understanding of Paley and ID-theory have both been challenged. Consider the running debates between his blog and Uncommon Descent.
That’s it.  That’s all he says about the matter.  Do you hear that, “aspiring Reformed philosophers”?  Feser’s views have been challenged!  That never happens to serious philosophers.
“Doctrinaire” Thomism
“Steve’s” second by-his-own-admission-uninformed objection to me is that my Thomism is “doctrinaire,” “purist,” etc.  We shouldn’t be concerned with “expounding or repristinating Aquinas, but in advancing the argument,” sniffs “Steve.”  For “ultimately, philosophy is about ideas.  It doesn't matter where you get your ideas.”  (Unless they’re from Feser, naturally.) 
The funny thing is that “Steve” never actually cites a case where I claim that something is true merely because Aquinas or some prominent Thomist like Cajetan said it, or where I have rejected a claim merely because it deviates from Aquinas or from the Thomist tradition -- which he couldn’t have done even if he’d bothered to give my work more than an “admittedly cursory” reading, because I have never said such a thing.
“Steve” piously avers, as if he were saying something I would disagree with:
From an intellectual standpoint, a misinterpretation can be more useful than a correct interpretation. Suppose you improve on Aquinas by unintentionally imputing to him a better theory than he held. That's bad exegesis, but good philosophy.
Yet compare this passage from my book Scholastic Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction :
No great philosopher, no matter how brilliant and systematic, ever uncovers all the implications of his position, foresees every possible objection, or imagines what rival systems might come into being centuries in the future.  His work is never finished, and if it is worth finishing, others will come along to do the job.  Since their work is, naturally, never finished either, a tradition of thought develops, committed to working out the implications of the founder’s system, applying it to new circumstances and challenges, and so forth.  Thus Plato had Plotinus, Aristotle had Aquinas, and Aquinas had Cajetan – to name just three famous representatives of Platonism, Aristotelianism, and Thomism, respectively.  And thus you cannot fully understand Plato unless you understand Platonism, you cannot fully understand Aristotle unless you understand Aristotelianism, you cannot fully understand Thomas unless you understand Thomism, and so on.  True, writers in the traditions in question often disagree with one another and sometimes simply get things wrong.  But that is all the more reason to study them if one wants to understand the founders of these traditions; for the tensions and unanswered questions in a tradition reflect the richness of the system of thought originated by its founder.  (pp. 7-8, emphasis added)
But to be fair, “Steve” can’t have been expected to see passages like that, since it would require actually bothering to read someone’s work before criticizing it; and that, it seems, is not an approach to research he would commend to “aspiring Reformed philosophers.”  Apparently, it is Jerry Coyne to whom young Calvinists should be looking for methodological guidance.
“Steve” compares me unfavorably to other Catholic philosophers.  After all, “Geach… did groundbreaking work on Frege” and “Pruss doesn't hesitate to synthesize Aristotelian and Leibnizian insights.”  Since Idon’t try to assimilate Aquinas to Frege, that simply must be because my method is to stick my fingers in my ears and chant: “If Aquinas himself didn’t say it, it isn’t true!”  It can’tbe because I have actual philosophical reasons for thinking that there is more to the notion of existence than is captured by Frege (see Aquinas, pp. 55-59 and Scholastic Metaphysics, pp. 250-55).  And if I am critical of the Leibnizian approach to possible worlds, that must be because I couldn’t find it in the index to the Summa.  It definitely isn’t because I think the Aristotelian conception of modality is actually superior on the philosophical merits (Scholastic Metaphysics, pp. 235-41).
Then there’s all that non-existent work of mine synthesizing Aristotelian and Kripkean insights; synthesizing Aristotelian insights and insights drawn from Karl Popper; defending the principle of sufficient reason, despite its origins in Leibnizian-Wolffian rationalism, against Gilsonian Thomists who reject it as a foreign import (Scholastic Metaphysics pp. 138-40); defending the classification of Aquinas as a kind of dualist despite the fact that many Thomists strenuously disavow that label; and bringing Scholastic thought and analytic philosophy into dialogue (see Scholastic Metaphysics, Aquinas, and indeed most of what I’ve written for the past ten years).  Again, none of that exists.  Or, to be more precise, none of it showed up on “Steve’s” iPhone when he was doing research for his blog post on the subway to work Monday morning.
“Isn't Feser basically a popularizer?” asks “Steve.”  And it’s a reasonable enough question for him to ask, given that he hasn’t actually read any of my academic stuffbut only a couple of blog posts, and thus doesn’t know that the answer is: “No, he isn’t.  Haven’t you read any of his academic stuff?  What did you do, just read a couple of blog posts?” 
Not being a mere popularizer, it seems, involves tossing off half-baked blog posts of your own putting forward sweeping judgments based on what you acknowledge to be a cursory knowledge of the facts.  Ecce blogger, aspiring young Reformed philosophers!  

UPDATE 4/30:  Some readers are wondering why I put quotation marks around “Steve’s” name.  The reason is that “Steve” is evidently not a real person but a spambot, and not a very sophisticated one.  That was obvious enough from “Steve’s” original post, and in a follow-up post and in various spambot-generated combox remarks beneath it, the telltale signs are all there -- oddly robotic repetition of statements that have already been refuted, failure to address what an interlocutor actually said, non sequiturs, etc.  (Triablogue guys, get some better AI software, huh?)

A second exchange with Keith Parsons, Part I

I’d like once again to thank Keith Parsons, and moderator Jeffery Jay Lowder, for the very fruitful first exchange we had a few weeks ago.  You can find links to each installment here.  Per Jeff’s suggestion, our second exchange will be on the topic: ”Can morality have a rational justification if atheism or naturalism is true?”  Jeff has proposed that we keep our opening statements to 2500 words or less, and I will try to rein in my logorrheic self and abide by that limitation.  That will be difficult, though, given that my answer to the question is: “Yes and No.”
Let me explain.  I’ll begin by making a point I’m sure Keith will agree with.  Many theists and atheists alike suppose that to link morality to religion is to claim that we could have no reason to be moral if we did not anticipate punishments and rewards in an afterlife.  I am sure Keith would reject such a line of argument, and I reject it too.  To do or refrain from doing something merely because one seeks a reward or fears reprisals is not morality.  I would also reject the related but distinct claim that what makes an action morally good or bad is merelythat God has commanded it, as if goodness and badness were a matter of sheer fiat on the part of a cosmic dictator who has the power to impose his will on everyone else.  This too would not really be morality at all, but just Saddam Hussein writ large.So, I reject crude divine command theories of morality.  That is one reason I think it is not quite right to claim that there can be no justification of morality if atheism were true; or at least, what (probably) most people understand by that claim is, in my view, false.  Crude divine command theories simply get morality wrong.  They get God wrong too.

More on that, perhaps, later in this exchange.  But first, another reason the claim in question is not quite right -- or at least way too quick -- has to do with what actually is the foundation of morality, or in any event the proximate foundation.  Like Philippa Foot, I would argue that goodness and badness are natural features of the world.  In particular, they have to do with a thing’s either realizing or failing to realize the endstoward which it is directed given its nature.  For example, a tree, given its nature, is directed toward ends like sinking roots into the ground, carrying out photosynthesis, and so forth.  To the extent it realizes these ends it is a good tree in the sense of a good specimen or instance of a tree, a healthy or flourishing tree.   To the extent it fails to do so, it is a bad tree in the sense of a bad specimen, a sickly or defective tree.  Similarly, a lioness is directed by her nature toward ends like hunting, moving her cubs about, and so forth.  To the extent she does so she is a good or flourishing specimen of a lioness, and to the extent she fails to do so she is a bad or defective specimen.  And so on for other living things.
Now so far this is a non-moral sense of “goodness” and “badness,” but moral goodness and badness are just special cases of the more general notions.  In particular, moral goodness or badness is the sort exhibited by a rationalcreature when he chooses either to act in a way conducive to the realization of the ends toward which his nature directs him, or to act in a way that frustrates those ends.  The goodness or badness of a plant or non-human animal is sub-ethical because they cannot understand what is good for them or will to pursue it.  Our goodness or badness is of an ethical sort because we canunderstand and will these things.  And it is irrational for us not to try to understand and to will them insofar as practical reason is by nature directed toward discerning the good, and the will is by nature directed toward pursuing the good. 
This is just a brief summary of the Aristotelian-Thomistic (A-T) natural law conception of the good, and obviously it raises many questions.  I have developed and defended this conception at greater length elsewhere (such as in chapter 5 of my book Aquinas , in the first half of my Social Philosophy and Policy article “Classical Natural Law Theory, Property Rights, and Taxation,” and in my article “Being, the Good, and the Guise of the Good,” in the volume Neo-Aristotelian Perspectives in Metaphysics , edited by Daniel Novotný and Lukás Novák).  Keith would no doubt disagree with a lot of what the A-T position has to say, but the point for the moment is to emphasize something else with which Keith might agree.  Just as what is good or bad for a tree or lioness is grounded in the natures of those things, so too is morality grounded in human nature.  Moral goodness, like these other kinds of goodness, is in that way what Foot calls “natural goodness.”  But human nature is something a person can know and understand whether or not he believes in God, just as he can understand the nature of an oak tree or a lioness whether or not he believes in God.  Hence there is a sense in which one could give a rational justification of morality even if he were an atheist.
I say that Keith might agree with this not just for the obvious reason that he is an atheist, but also because, if I understand his views correctly, he is sympathetic to the broadly neo-Aristotelian approach to ethics represented by Foot.  So, if I understand him correctly, there is a pretty significant amount of common ground between us on this issue.  Now let me explain where I think we differ.  First of all, while there is a sense in which morality might be rationally justifiable if atheism were true, I would say that morality could notbe rationally justified if naturalism were true.  The reason is that morality presupposes the existence of what Foot calls “natural goodness,” and natural goodness in turn presupposes the reality of natural teleology, of natural substances being inherently directed toward the realization of certain ends.  And naturalism is simply incompatible with the reality of natural teleology.
To forestall a possible misunderstanding, the reason I say that naturalism and natural teleology are incompatible is not because naturalists deny “intelligent design.”  I am not saying that natural objects are like watches or other artifacts which have functions only insofar as those functions have been imposed by an artificer, so that affirming that they have functions requires affirming an “intelligent designer” of the William Paley or ID theory sort.  That would make the teleology of natural substances extrinsic to them, as the time-telling function of a watch is extrinsic to the metal bits out of which it is made.  From an A-T point of view, that just gets natural teleology fundamentally wrong.  Natural teleology is natural precisely because it is intrinsicto a thing, following from its nature or substantial form.  And you can know the nature of a thing, and thus determine its teleological features, whether or not you believe in God.
(That does not mean that natural teleology does not ultimately entail a divine ordering intelligence.  I think it does.   But the reason why it does -- a reason which Aquinas sets out in his Fifth Way -- is more complicated and less direct than Paley and ID theory suppose.  It has nothing to do with complexity, probability calculations, analogies to artifice, etc.  In my view, ID theory has succeeded only in kicking up a gigantic cloud of dust that has badly obscured the proper understanding of natural teleology and its relationship to natural theology.  I have discussed this issue in a number of blog posts, in chapter 3 of Aquinas, in my Philosophia Christi article “Teleology: A Shopper’s Guide,” and at greatest length in my Nova et Vetera article “Between Aristotle and William Paley: Aquinas’s Fifth Way.”)
The reason is rather that naturalism is committed to the “mechanical world picture” (to use Tim Crane’s apt phrase) that the philosophers and scientists of the 17thcentury put at the center of modern Western thought.  Not every element that was originally part of that picture has survived, but the core of it has.  And that core is the idea that there is in the natural order no irreducible teleology of the sort affirmed by Scholastics and other Aristotelians.  All genuine explanations must, on this view, either be non-teleological or, if they make use of teleological notions, still be “cashable” in non-teleological terms. 
Now, if I may digress for a moment: The idea that the natural order is fundamentally non-teleological is often characterized as if it were a finding or result of modern science, but it is not that at all.  It is rather a methodological stipulationabout what will be allowed to countas “scientific.”  It’s like the rule against traveling in basketball.  It would be preposterous to argue: “In every basketball game played so far, traveling has not been allowed.  So, the history of basketball gives us overwhelming empirical evidence that there can be no legitimate traveling in basketball.”  That traveling isn’t allowed isn’t some inference we’ve drawn, but rather is just part of the rules of the game.  The reason you don’t see legitimate cases of traveling in actual basketball games is that they’ve been ruled out by fiat from the start.  Similarly, the reason you don’t find explanations in modern science that make use of irreducibly teleological notions is not that “science has shown” that there is no irreducible teleology.  It is rather for the completely trivial reason that appeals to irreducible teleology have been ruled out by fiat as “non-scientific.”
Hence the “argument from science” against irreducible teleology, though often tossed out matter-of-factly as if it were obviously correct -- for instance, by Alex Rosenberg, to take a recent example -- is in fact utterly fallacious.  Whether there is such a thing as irreducible teleology in nature is not a question for empirical science to settle, but rather a question for metaphysics and philosophy of nature.  And as I have argued many times, we cannot make sense either of our own thought processes, or of the irreducible causal powers of different natural substances, or indeed of the very possibility of there being any efficient causation at all, unless we affirm irreducible finality or teleology in nature.  (See e.g. chapter 6 of The Last Superstition , chapter 2 of Aquinas, my article “Between Aristotle and William Paley: Aquinas’s Fifth Way,” and chapter 2 of Scholastic Metaphysics .) 
But again, that is a digression, because whether there really is irreducible teleology in nature is something we need not settle for present purposes.  The point for now is just that if there is no irreducible teleology in nature, then there can be no “natural goodness” either and thus no morality.  Here I imagine that Keith would disagree.  I presume -- and Keith, please correct me if I am wrong -- that Keith would say that teleology can be given a naturalistic reduction, perhaps after the fashion suggested by writers like Ruth Millikan.  Hence (the argument would continue) natural goodness, and thus morality, can be given a naturalistic foundation. 
Atheist philosopher and blogger Daniel Fincke has defended a view like this, but as I argued a couple of years ago in a post criticizing his position, it will not work.  To see why not, consider a distinction between kinds of teleology inspired by John Searle’s distinction between intrinsicintentionality, derived intentionality, and as-if intentionality.  Derived intentionality is the sort that the ink marks and sounds we call words have.  The meaning or intentionality of words is real, but in no way intrinsic to the ink marks and sounds themselves.  Instead it derives from the intrinsic or “built-in” intentionality of thought.  As-if intentionality is what is in play when we describe things as if they had intentionality, e.g. when you say of a marble you’ve dropped that it “wants” to roll away.  Of course, it doesn’t really want to roll away, because it is not the sort of thing that can wantanything.  As-if intentionality is not really intentionality at all, but just a useful fiction.
Now if there were no intrinsic intentionality (as an eliminative materialist might claim) then there could not be any genuine intentionality at all.  For derived intentionality can exist only if there is intrinsic intentionality from which non-intrinsic intentionality might be derived; and as-if intentionality isn’t real intentionality in the first place. 
But now consider a parallel distinction between intrinsic, derived, and as-if teleology.  Intrinsic teleology would be the sort that Aristotelians attribute to natural substances, an inherent or “built-in” directedness toward an end.  Derived teleology would be a “directedness toward an end” that a thing does not have intrinsically, but only insofar as it is imparted to it by something else.  The purposes of watches and other artifacts would be teleology of this sort.  As-if teleology would be what is in play when we find it useful to describe a thing as if it were directed toward an end. It is not genuine teleology at all, but at most just a convenient fiction. 
Now, the naturalist claims that there is no intrinsic teleology in the sense just described.  That means that all teleology must somehow be either derived or as-if; in particular, a Millikan-style reductionist account of natural teleology would have to say that the teleology of any substance is either derivative from the teleology of something else, or mere as-if teleology.  Yet if there is no intrinsic teleology for things to derive their non-intrinsic teleological features from, then they cannot really coherently be said to have derived teleology.  Their teleology must be mere as-if teleology.  In particular, Millikan-style reductions of teleology in terms of natural selection are really just ways of attributing as-if teleology to biological phenomena. 
But as-if teleology isn’t really teleology at all, any more than as-if intentionality is genuine intentionality.  It is at most merely a convenient fiction.  Accordingly, accounts like Millikan’s don’t really imply that teleology is real but reducible, but rather at best that it is not real, but a useful fiction.  (Searle has made a similar point about views like Millikan’s.)  And in that case you cannot really get natural goodness, and in turn morality, from a naturalistic account of teleology.  The most you can do is argue that it is as if there were teleology in nature, and as if there were goodness in nature, and as ifthere were such a thing as morality.  But to say it is as if morality existed is, needless to say, not to give a justification of morality.  It is at best a justification for pretending that there is morality.  (And could even the pretense of morality long survive if we all knew it to be mere pretense?  To ask the question is, I think, to answer it.) 
So, even if there is a sense in which atheism is consistent with there being a rational justification of morality, naturalism is not consistent with there being such a justification.  But then, most modern atheists are probably atheists because they are naturalists.  And in that case, their atheism is not consistent with there being a rational justification of morality.  Only a non-naturalistic atheism -- whatever that would look like -- would be consistent with it. 
But even that is true only with qualification.  For I would argue that even intrinsic teleology (and by extension natural goodness and thus morality) is ultimately, when a complete metaphysical analysis of teleology is given, intelligible only in light of classical theism.  The reasons, as I indicated above, are those given in the Fifth Way, properly understood and developed.  (Again, see my book Aquinas and my Nova et Vetera article for the full story.)  There is a parallel here with efficient causality.  You can know that things have causal powers, and what those causal powers are, whether or not you believe in God.  Still, as the Scholastic argues, when a completed metaphysical analysis of causation is carried out, it turns out that a thing could not even for an instant exercise the causal power it has -- the power to actualize potentials -- unless there were a purely actual uncaused cause which continuously imparts to things their causal power.
All that raises lots of questions, of course, but I have already gone a little over the word count.  (Feel free to do the same, Keith!)  Maybe we can return to some of these issues later in this exchange.  (I addressed the relationship between theism and morality in an earlier post a few years ago, and addressed the Euthyphro objection in yet another post.  Interested readers are directed to those posts, but for now I must shut up!)

God’s wounds

The God of classical theism -- of Athanasius and Augustine, Avicenna and Maimonides, Anselm and Aquinas -- is (among other things) pure actuality, subsistent being itself, absolutely simple, immutable, and eternal.  Critics of classical theism sometimes allege that such a conception of God makes of him something sub-personal and is otherwise incompatible with the Christian conception.  As I have argued many times (e.g. here, here, here, and here) nothing could be further from the truth.  In fact, to deny divine simplicity or the other attributes distinctive of the classical theist conception of God is implicitly to make of God a creature rather than the creator.  For it makes of him a mere instance of a kind, even if a unique instance.  It makes of him something which could in principle have had a cause of his own, in which case he cannot be the ultimate explanation of things.  It is, accordingly, implicitly to deny the core of theism itself.  As David Bentley Hart writes in The Experience of God(in a passage I had occasion to quote recently), it amounts to a kind of “mono-poly-theism,” or indeed to atheism.
But it is not only generic theism to which the critics of classical theism fail to do justice.  It is Christiantheism specifically to which they fail to do justice.  One way in which this is the case is (as I have noted before, e.g. here) that it is classical theism rather than its contemporary rival “theistic personalism” that best comports with the doctrine of the Trinity.  But to reject classical theism also implicitly trivializes the Incarnation, and with it Christ’s Passion and Death.Theistic personalists are, as I have said, explicitly or implicitly committed to regarding God as an instance of a kind.  Their core thesis, to the effect that God is “a person without a body” (Swinburne) or that “there is such a person as God” (Plantinga), seems to give us something like the following picture: There’s the genus person and under it the two species embodied persons and disembodied persons.  Disembodied persons is, in turn, a genus relative to the species disembodied souls, angelic persons, and divine persons.  And it’s in the latter class, it seems, that you’ll find God.  Perhaps he is for the theistic personalist a unique instance of this kind, though how this relates to the doctrine of the Trinity is not clear.  (Is God, for the Christian theistic personalist, three persons in one person?  Presumably not.  What, then?  Are there actually three instances, though only three, of the species divine persons?  No wonder Swinburne’s position on the Trinity seems to amount to a kind of polytheism.  Some thoughts on Plantinga and the Trinity from Dale Tuggy here -- be sure to read the comment by Dale in the combox.) 

For the theistic personalist, then, the biblical assertion that “the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us” seems to amount to something like “a certain instance of a species within the genus disembodied persons acquired a body.”  Now, when you think about it, that’s essentially the plot of Ghostbusters II.  Not as bad as the critics took it to be, I suppose, but hardly the Greatest Story Ever Told.   And it doesn’t get much better if you add that the “person without a body” in this case “exemplifies” “great-making properties” like omnipotence, omniscience, etc.  What you’ve got then is at most something like a sequel that ups the ante, the Incarnation as a movie pitch:
Fade in: We meet God, a divine person who’s at the top of the game.  Think Olivier in Clash of the Titans, but invisible and with something even cooler than the Kraken: we call it ‘maximal greatness.’  I think we can get Anthony Hopkins, though maybe he’ll worry about typecasting after the Thor movies.  Anyway, God’s an Intelligent Designer too, like Downey, Jr. in Iron Man but with angels.  We’ll show him making bacterial flagella and stuff -- CGI’s pretty good now, so it’ll look realistic.  Now, here’s the twist: He takes on a human body and comes to earth!  It’s The Ten Commandments meets Brother from Another Planet.  We gotta go for 3D on this…
Well, we’ve seen that movie a hundred times.  Horus was incarnate in the Pharaohs, Zeus changed into a swan, the Marvel Comics version of Thor took on the human guise of Donald Blake, and so on.  If God were, as theistic personalism claims, “a person” and “a being” alongside all the other persons and beings that populate the world, then he would differ only in degree from these other gods.  His Incarnation would be more impressive than theirs only in something like the way having the president of the United States show up at your costume party would be more impressive than having a local city alderman show up. 
Now for the classical theist, God is not “a being” -- not because he lacks being but on the contrary because he is Being Itself rather than something which merely “has” or “possesses” being (in “every possible world” or otherwise).  Nor is he “a person” -- not because he is impersonal but on the contrary because he is Intellect Itself rather than something which merely “exemplifies” “properties” like intellect and will.  (As I have put it before, the problem with the sentence “God is a person” is not the word “person” but the word “a.”)  Describing God as “a being” or “a person” trivializes the notion of God, and it thereby trivializes too the notion of God Incarnate. 
For the classical theist, what the doctrine of God Incarnate entails is that that which is subsistent being itself, pure actuality, and absolutely simple or non-composite, that in which all things participate but which itself participates in nothing, that which thereby sustains all things in being -- that that “became flesh and dwelt among us.”  That is a truly astounding claim, so astounding that its critics often accuse it of incoherence.  The accusation is false, but those who make it at least show that they understand just how extremely strange and remarkable the claim is -- and how radically unlikethe “incarnations” of the various pagan deities it is.  You can plausibly assimilate the incarnation of the “God” of theistic personalism to those of Horus, Zeus, et al.  You cannotso assimilate the Incarnation of the God of classical theism.  It is sui generis.
For this reason it is superficial in the extreme to think that the story of Christ’s Passion, Death, and Resurrection bears any interesting relationship to the various dying-and-rising deities of pagan mythology.  The story of Christ is as different from theirs as classical theism is from belief in one of the various pagan pantheons.  Hence, to think that calling attention to these myths is an embarrassment to Christianity is as frivolous and point-missing as the “one god further” objection to theism in general is. 
Thus do we see yet again how crucial classical theism is to a sound Christian apologetics.  But its significance is no less crucial for Christian spirituality.  The “God” of theistic personalism was already “one of us” -- an instance of our genus if not of our species -- before he took on flesh.  The God of classical theism most definitely was not.  Indeed, unlike the “God” of theistic personalism, the God of classical theism, the only God worthy of the name, is immeasurably different from any creature -- “Wholly Other,” in the apt phrase popularized by Rudolf Otto.  And yet he became one of us anyway.  It is because of this -- because Christ is so radically unlike us in his divinenature, so “Wholly Other” -- that his having become so much like us in his human nature is so incomparably profound and moving.  We will not understand the Incarnation, and we will not understand the divine lovefor human beings that it evinces, if we conceive of that divine nature in anthropomorphic terms.  Is God’s love for us like the self-sacrificing love of a father for his children or the love between brethren or friends?  Indeed it is -- except insofar as it is incomparably greater, incomparably more self-sacrificial, than those merely human sorts of love.
Nor does even the thought of God’s having become man -- mind-boggling enough as that thought is when properly understood -- entirely capture the depths of that love.  For the second Person of the Trinity did not take on the body of an Adonis, or of an emperor.  He was a carpenter in a backwater province of the empire, having “no form nor comeliness… no beauty that we should desire him,” who suffered and died as other human beings suffer and die.  He not only lived as a man, but lived as most men have to live, with all their weaknesses and defects, albeit without sin.  As Aquinas writes, he did so in part precisely to make it evident that he really was God become man:
It was fitting for the body assumed by the Son of God to be subject to human infirmities and defects…  in order to cause belief in Incarnation.  For since human nature is known to men only as it is subject to these defects, if the Son of God had assumed human nature without these defects, He would not have seemed to be true man, nor to have true, but imaginary, flesh, as the Manicheans held.  And so, as is said, Philippians 2:7: "He… emptied Himself, taking the form of a servant, being made in the likeness of men, and in habit found as a man." Hence, Thomas, by the sight of His wounds, was recalled to the faith… (Summa theologiae III.14.1)
In his book Our Idea of God , Thomas Morris notes how, according to some philosophical theists, God is too grand even to know about the humbler parts of reality:

There is one ancient view according to which it would seem beneath the dignity of a perfect being to even bother to attend to certain details in the world.  On this conception, it would be inappropriate for a being of God’s exalted status to acquaint himself intimately with dirt, hair, mud and filth, to cite only a few standard examples…  [T]he fastidious deity of Plato’s Timaeus… must have lesser gods interposed between himself and the squalor of this world as buffers to guard his eminence from any taint of cognitive pollution. (pp. 85-86)
Now classical theism, when worked out consistently, in fact should lead us to reject such a view.  For classical theism entails that nothing -- most certainly including dirt, hair, mud and filth -- could continue in being even for an instant if God were not sustaining it.  He can hardly be said not to know about these things, then.  But the doctrine of the Incarnation goes far beyond that.  It asserts that God not only knows about “dirt, hair, mud and filth,” but out of love for us took on human flesh -- with its hair, and with its susceptibility to getting dirty, muddy, filthy. 
Nor does even that entirely capture the depths of his love.  For Christ did not take on human flesh only to get rid of it as soon as he could; nor did he even restore that flesh to perfect integrity as soon as he could.  He retains the flesh with its wounds perpetually.  As Aquinas writes (quoting Bede), among the reasons for this are:
"that He may convince those redeemed in His blood, how mercifully they have been helped, as He exposes before them the traces of the same death" (Bede, on Luke 24:40). (Summa theologiae III.54.4)
He who is Being Itself, pure actuality, and divine simplicity -- has, now as on the Cross, holes in his hands, holes in his feet, a gash in his side.  With these wounds, Christ says to us: I am one of you, now and always.  They are a valentine to the human race, given to us on Good Friday, on Easter, and forever.
For some other posts related to the Easter Triduum, see:
The meaning of the Passion
The meaning of the Resurrection
Putting the Cross back into Christmas

What We Owe the New Atheists

Last week I gave a lecture at Thomas Aquinas College in Santa Paula, CA, on the theme “What We Owe the New Atheists.”  You can read the text and/or listen to the audio of the lecture at TAC’s website.  The faculty, students, and guests who attended were a wonderful bunch of folks and I thank them for their very kind hospitality.