Edward Feser's Blog, page 90

Sullivan’s cavils

I thank The Smithy’s Michael Sullivan for his two spirited further installments (hereand here) in his series of posts on my book Scholastic Metaphysics .  (I responded to the first of his posts here.)  Sullivan says some very kind things about my book, which I appreciate.  He also raises some criticisms which, though I disagree with them, are reasonable.  But unfortunately, some of his remarks are unjust and intemperate.  Let me comment on those first.In his most recent post, Sullivan accuses me of “casually dismissing” brands of Scholasticism other than Thomism, comparing my treatment of them to the superficial objections to the cosmological argument one finds in New Atheist writers and of which I’ve often been so critical.  In the course of the combox discussion that followed my previous reply to him, he also speaks of my purported “dismissal of the genuine scholastic tradition,” and accuses me of holding that “there's no point in taking non-Thomism seriously.”  He even compares me to P. Z. Myers.  And of my treatment of one area of dispute between Thomists and Scotists, he writes:

There's… really no difference between what Feser does in this instance and Bertrand Russell saying in his history of philosophy that Aquinas wasn't really a philosopher because the Church told him what to think, so we needn't bother studying him.
This is all quite outrageous.  It is true, of course, that I am a Thomist, and that my book reflects that fact and takes a Thomist position rather than a Scotist or Suarezian one on issues where there is a disagreement between the schools of thought.  It is true that I do not treat the disputes between Thomists and other Scholastics in depth sufficient to convince advocates of those other schools (since, as I explained in my previous reply to Sullivan, the book is not about intra-Scholastic disputes but rather about the dispute between Scholasticism in what I take to be its strongest form on the one hand, and modern and contemporary philosophy on the other).  But though the rival views are neither agreed with nor treated at the length that would be required to turn a Scotist or Suarezian into a Thomist, they are nevertheless discussed respectfully.  There is no polemic whatsoever against Scotist and Suarezian views, nor the least suggestion that those views are unserious or unworthy of study.  This is all in Sullivan’s mind, not on the page. 
The reason it is not on the page is that it is simply not my view of Scotism and Suarezianism.  On the contrary, though I think some of their views are seriously wrong, I regard Scotus and Suarez with reverence, and highly recommend the study of their work and that of their followers.  I gave my book the title Scholastic Metaphysics rather than Thomistic Metaphysics precisely out of solidarity with other Scholastics, including non-Thomist Scholastics -- precisely to make it clear that Aquinas is not the only great figure in the tradition.
This brings me to something else that is entirely in Sullivan’s mind.  On the one hand he acknowledges that:
Feser admits in the book that scholasticism is more than Thomism and neo-Thomism, and… does in fact claim as part of the goal of the book to discuss non-Thomist ideas to the extent that they diverge from Thomism.
and:
[I]n the very first sentence of Feser's book he recognizes that Scholasticism is that tradition of thought which includes not only Aquinas, but Scotus, Ockham, Suarez, etc etc.
But then he also says that:
Once that recognition has been made it's already tendentious to go on to say that Scholaticism = Thomism and that those other thinkers are only worthy of mention when they "depart" from Thomism.
and:
[M]y main point, which I'm going to stop repeating ad nauseum, is that it's factually untrue that scholasticism = Thomism.
and:
[I]n practice he seems to waffle between the view that scholasticism=Thomism or that Thomism is the default or the only view worth considering on the one hand, and the view that Thomism is simply the best or most convincing of the scholastic systems on the other hand, but these two views are not at all the same.
But there is no “waffling” in the book at all, because nowhere in the book do I say or imply that “Scholasticism = Thomism,” nor does Sullivan quote any passage to that effect.  Indeed, as Sullivan admits, I explicitly say that that is not the case.  Rather, I merely maintain (as Sullivan puts it) that “Thomism is simply the best or most convincing of the scholastic systems.”  Thatis what is actually on the page, and Sullivan at least sometimes sees that that is what is on the page.  But when he is unhappy about some criticism I make of Scotus or Suarez, he projects onto the page the thesis that “Scholasticism = Thomism” and then invents an inconsistency.  The waffling between these views is not mine, but his.  He shifts between seeing what is on the page and seeing the “Scholasticism = Thomism” straw man that exists only in his mind. 
I think it is clear enough what is going on.  As I noted in my previous post, every so often one finds at The Smithy expressions of annoyance at the tendency to treat Aquinas as the Scholastic gold standard.  It is obvious from the history of that (excellent) blog and from various remarks in Sullivan’s latest posts that he has had one too many encounters with Thomists who are insufficiently respectful of or knowledgeable about Scotus and other non-Thomist Scholastics, or too quick to try to settle the dispute between Thomists and other Scholastics with an appeal to ecclesiastical authority.  While Sullivan says that he is not accusing me of such Thomist “triumphalism,” I think his long-standing grievances with other Thomists have nevertheless colored his perceptions of my book, and he’s decided to use his review as an opportunity to vent.  He’s got a bee in his bonnet; he’s got a hair trigger; he’s got issues.  He comes off like Robert Conrad in that old Eveready battery commercial, apparently keen to have the chip on the shoulder replace the dunce cap as the contemporary Scotist’s accessory of choice.
The problem is not really philosophical, then, but attitudinal.  And the remedy is as dry, bracing, and agreeable to a refined palate as a page of Scotus: I recommend to Sullivan a glass or two of good Scotch, in honor of the Subtle Doctor.  I’ll buy it for him if we’re ever at the same conference or the like. 
Some substantive issues
Let me now say something about Sullivan’s other criticisms.  One of them goes like this:
One general observation is a tendency throughout to present the Thomist position on a topic while putting off actually arguing for it. Over and over again the reader encounters remarks to the effect that "my position is this, but the reasons for it depend on something I'm going to say in a later chapter"; this gives the impression of getting the run-around, as though the good deep arguments are always just around the corner. I emphasize that Feser does not always do this; but he does it enough for it to be frustrating.
Here too I think Sullivan exaggerates.  “Over and over again”?  Not really.  But I do occasionally defer a more detailed treatment of an issue until later in the book.  The reason is that given the tight interconnections between many Scholastic notions, it is sometimes necessary to do a fair bit of exposition before one can set out the complete case for some particular claim or respond to all the objections a critic might raise against it.
What Sullivan does not do is offer an example of where I fail to make good on a promise later on to revisit the reasons for some claim.  The closest he comes is complaining that I do not provide arguments for all the many distinctions I draw in the section on “Divisions of act and potency” (subjective versus objective potency, first act versus second act, etc.).  That is true, but I also don’t promise to provide arguments for all of those distinctions.  The reason is that many of them are irrelevant to the specific metaphysical issues that the book does focus on and the debate between Scholastics and analytic philosophers that is its main concern.  That section is merely intended to give the reader a sense of how complex the theory of act and potency is when fully worked out.  You could write a book just on the divisions of act and potency, but my book, which has a lot of other ground to cover, is not that book.  (It is worth noting that, as it is, I went significantly over the page limit that the publisher proposed when inviting me to write the book.)
Here again Sullivan can’t seem to decide what he wants to see on the page.  On the one hand he acknowledges that we need to “[keep] in mind that it is an introduction and that we shouldn't expect an exhaustive treatment of any given topic.”  But on the other, he criticizes me in this instance for not providing a more exhaustive treatment than is called for given the specific aims of the book.  Once again I think his manifest annoyance with certain other Thomists is leading him into an uncharitable reading.  He isn’t attacking a straw man this time, but he is nitpicking.    
More interesting is Sullivan’s criticism of the structure of the book:
In my opinion there are also some structural problems. For instance, in my opinion the treatment of causality is pretty seriously defective… [Feser begins] his discussion of causality with final vs efficient causes, which is a misstep. Material and formal causality are put off until the following chapter, under the discussion of substance. The result is that the nature and force of the reasons for accepting the reality of final causality always remain somewhat obscure, because final causality is unintelligible without formal causality… The proper way to get back to final causality is to reinstate the robust notion of form; and this is, by the way, the order the causes are treated in in the standard neo-Thomist manuals I'm familiar with. In taking things backwards I think the clarity and rigor of Feser's exposition suffers.
End quote.  Note first of all that whereas elsewhere Sullivan complains that I too slavishly follow “the standard neo-Thomist manuals,” here I am to be blamed for departingfrom them.  I can’t win!
There are, in any event, reasons why I covered things in just the order I did.  It was quite deliberate.  Consider first that it is, after all, final cause and not formal cause which Aquinas regards as “the cause of causes.”  And there is a good reason for that.  Though the substantial form of a thing is the ground of its finalities, a thing’s finalities are in turn essential to understanding its substantial form.  For a thing’s substantial form is the intrinsic principle of its operations or activities.  But for the Scholastic, operations or activities are understood in terms of the ends toward which they are directed.  Moreover, substantial forms are best explained by contrast with accidental forms, and accidental forms are most easily understood in terms of the extrinsicnature of the ends with which they are associated.  Hence my frequently used example of a liana vine, which has a substantial form insofar as it is intrinsically directed toward operations like taking in water and nutrients; and of a hammock made out of liana vines, which has an accidental form insofar as the end of serving as a comfortable place to take a nap is extrinsic or imposed from without.  The distinction between substantial and accidental forms thus seems to me best explained once the notion of finality, and the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic finality, have already been hammered out.
For another thing, it seems to me that contemporary analytic philosophers have come farther in the direction of recovering the notion of final causality than they have in recovering the notion of substantial form.  The contemporary analytic literature on powers and dispositions is enormous, and much of it at least takes seriously the idea that powers are “directed toward” their manifestations in a manner that is described as “physical intentionality” or “natural intentionality.”  This is very close to the Scholastic idea of intrinsic finality, and many contemporary writers see the connection.  By contrast, while there is also talk of natures and essences in contemporary analytic philosophy, the link to Scholasticism is not as clear.  There is a greater tendency to connect this sort of talk to notions that Thomists would have serious reservations about, such as the idea of possible worlds. 
So, approaching formal causality by way of final causality rather than the other way around seemed to me the best way to go.  Of course, a reasonable person could disagree with this approach.  But it is not the simple “misstep” Sullivan says it is, and he completely fails to consider that I had reasons for doing things the way I did.
Scotism versus Thomism
Naturally, Sullivan also has specifically Scotist complaints about some of what is in the book.  Regarding my characterization of Scotism, Suarezianism, et al. relative to Thomism, he says:
To represent the thought of Scotus, Ockham, etc., as "departures from Thomism" is total bunk. It assumes that Thomism is normative and the default position without having to do any work to establish it. In my pretty wide experience it's a good bet that anyone who thinks this way has not made any serious effort to read and understand any non-Thomistic scholastics on their own terms… Gilson also had to revise his views on Scotism as a critique and departure from Thomism once he learned something about the actual sources of Scotus' views. Hint: Scotus was usually not even thinking of Aquinas at all.
Once again I’m afraid that Sullivan seems to want to have his cake and eat it too.  On the one hand he protests, against what I said in my previous reply to him, that he “specifically said that a historical treatment was unnecessary.”  Yet here he complains that I do not pay sufficient attention to whether, as a matter of historical fact, Scotus was reacting against Aquinas, specifically.  So which is it?
After all, nowhere in my book do I make any claim about what Scotus had before his mind when he formulated (say) the notion of the formal distinction.   When I talk about “departures from Thomism” I am not making a historical claim to the effect that Scotus consciously thought: “I now hereby depart from what Aquinas said.  Here goes…!”  I’m talking about conceptualrelations between the ideas in question, not historical ones.  Compare the fact that historians of philosophy have disagreed about whether Parmenides was responding to Heraclitus or Heraclitus was responding to Parmenides, or whether they were writing independently -- and that at the end of the day it really doesn’t matter substantively.  Scholastic writers often treat Parmenides and Heraclitus as representing two extremes and Aristotle as having found the sober middle ground between them.  Parmenideans and Heracliteans might not agree with this approach, but quibbling over whether one was responding to the other as a matter of historical fact is neither here nor there.  Same with the dispute between Thomists and Scotists. 
We Thomists also tend to think of Thomism as the best way of synthesizing what was of lasting value in the Aristotelian and Neo-Platonic traditions that preceded it, and that Bonaventurean, Scotist, and Suarezian approaches are inferior and have elements that tend to lead to the dissolution of what the various Scholastic schools have in common.  Again, we are not making a claim about how, historically, people in fact tended to see things.  History is always much messier than the conceptual relationships between systems of ideas are.  We are well aware that other Scholastics did not see themselves merely as either precursors or successors to Aquinas.  We know that most thinkers didn‘t regard themselves as mere guest stars or extras on The Thomas Aquinas Show.   We’re talking about what we think is in fact the relative weight of the various systems of ideas. 
Bonaventurean, Scotist, and Suarezian mileage will of course vary.  But as I have said, the aim of the book was not to settle various intra-Scholastic disputes.  The aim of the book was to present what I take to be the most powerful form of Scholasticism and pit it against contemporary analytic philosophy.  Nor, contrary to what Sullivan implies, is there anything the least arbitrary about calling the book’s position Scholastic rather than merely Thomistic.  Sullivan says that “when you separate [Thomism, Scotism, etc.] out you see that ‘scholasticism’ includes a lot of positive theological content they all share, and practically no philosophical content they all share.”  But that’s just silly.  The Scholastics are all operating within a conceptual landscape defined by essentially Platonic and Aristotelian boundaries.  The landscape is very broad and some thinkers fall far to one side of it rather than to the other; some even appear to end up falling off this or that edge of it.  But that this landscape constitutes their common framework distinguishes them from the moderns, who have all decided to step out of it.  (To be sure, some of the moderns stick a toe or even a foot back into it, but they do so from a position essentially outside the framework.) 
Hence when I characterize the position of my book as “Scholastic” and not merely “Thomistic,” I am, again, indicating precisely that I am trying to bring what all or at least most Scholastics have in common to bear on contemporary disputes in analytic metaphysics -- albeit with a strongly Thomistic emphasis and despite the fact that I agree with the Thomist position when it differs from the other Scholastic views.  I mean precisely to include the other Scholastic positions in the debate, not exclude them.  And I can certainly imagine someone like Sullivan writing a book with the exact title mine has and more or less the same organization too, but with Scotism taking the starring role and Thomism given secondary status.  While I would of course disagree with many of the details, I would not be offended about the title or the approach.  Indeed, it would be very useful if Sullivan or some other Scotist wrote such a book. 
Finally, Sullivan is very critical of my treatment of the dispute between Thomists and Scotists vis-à-vis the theory of distinctions.  He accuses me of attacking caricatures of the Scotist position and of inconsistency and begging the question in defending the Thomist view.  Yet his own response involves inconsistency, caricature, and begging of the question.  For example, he writes:
Feser says that it's hard to see how the formal distinction can avoid collapsing into either a real distinction or a virtual or logical distinction. The short answer to this is that Thomists play a shell game with the notion of real distinctions: sometimes they act as though separability is an obvious criterion and sometimes as if it isn't. The Scotist position is that a fully real distinction in general is one to which the separability criterion applies (with a very few special exceptions) , and that the formal distinction is a species of lesser real distinction to which the separability criterion does not apply. It's not a virtual or logical distinction because, to take Feser's example, animality and rationality are really non-identical prior to and aside from any consideration of the intellect. (Emphasis added.)
If Sullivan wrote this with a straight face, that can only be because that chip on his shoulder got too heavy for him to crack a smile.  If a Thomist “sometimes… act[s] as though separability is an obvious criterion and sometimes as if it isn't,” that, we are told, is a “shell game.”  But if a Scotist says that “in general… the separability criterion applies” but that there are “a very few special exceptions” and that there is a “lesser real distinction to which the separability criterion does not apply,” then that, we are assured, is nota “shell game.”  Get it?  Me neither, but then we can’t all be Subtle Doctors.
But do Thomists really play the “shell game” in question?  Well, no, they don’t.  They don’t say that “sometimes separability is an obvious criterion and sometimes it isn’t.”  It’s always an obvious criterion; if A and B are separable, then they are really distinct.  It’s just not the onlycriterion.  That’s a very different claim.  Nor is the distinction between the claims very subtle, which is perhaps why Sullivan the Scotist misses it.
Then there is the fact that the claim that “animality and rationality are really non-identical prior to and aside from any consideration of the intellect” is precisely something the Thomist would deny, in which case Sullivan can hardly appeal to it as a premise in a criticism of the Thomist account of distinctions.  Like “shell games,” begging the question is apparently OK when Scotists do it.
Sullivan goes on at length about the dispute between Thomists and Scotists concerning real, logical, and formal distinctions, and its relevance to issues like the relationship between essence and existence.  And what he has to say is hardly lesstendentious than what I have to say about these matters in my book.  He surely realizes that Thomists would simply not agree with the assumptions that lie behind his arguments, nor with his insinuation that they have no principled but only ad hoc grounds for rejecting those assumptions.  Yet Sullivan writes as if the burden of proof were on me or other Thomists to establish the superiority of our position to the Scotist one, rather than on Scotists to establish the superiority of theirs.
It’s hard to see how such a presumption in favor of the Scotist view could be justified.  It is, after all, hardly as if the Scotist position, with its famous (some would say notorious) subtlety and abstraction, were somehow more intuitive or obvious than the Thomist one.  But put that aside.  The main point is that while it would be reasonable to expect me to have pursued these matters at greater length if my book had been intended as a neutral account of intra-Scholastic debate, in fact -- as I keep saying -- that is not what the book is about.  It is, again, intended rather to bring analytic philosophy into conversation with what I take to be the strongest version of Scholasticism (while noting some of the key disputes among Scholastics along the way).
At the end of the day, Sullivan’s beef is that he just doesn’t agree with me that Thomism is the strongest version of Scholasticism.  Well, fine.  He should write his own book.  I’d buy it. 

Judging a book by what it doesn’t cover

In his encyclical Aeterni Patris , Pope Leo XIII called for a “restoration of Christian philosophy.” He was quite specific about what he had in mind:
[D]aily experience, and the judgment of the greatest men, and, to crown all, the voice of the Church, have favored the Scholastic philosophy.
Indeed, he was even more specific than that:
Among the Scholastic Doctors, the chief and master of all towers Thomas Aquinas…
We exhort you, venerable brethren, in all earnestness to restore the golden wisdom of St. Thomas, and to spread it far and wide for the defense and beauty of the Catholic faith, for the good of society, and for the advantage of all the sciences… Let carefully selected teachers endeavor to implant the doctrine of Thomas Aquinas in the minds of students, and set forth clearly his solidity and excellence over others.  Let the universities already founded or to be founded by you illustrate and defend this doctrine, and use it for the refutation of prevailing errors.Other popes have echoed the theme.  For example, Pius X, in Pascendi Dominici Gregis, wrote: “[L]et Professors remember that they cannot set St. Thomas aside, especially in metaphysical questions, without grave detriment.”

Before certain readers start hyperventilating, I should pause to note that my point is not to argue from papal authority for the superiority of Aquinas.  If you think Leo, Pius, et al. were wrong -- for example, if you think Scotus is a better guide to metaphysical questions, or if you think Scholasticism in general is wrongheaded, or if you couldn’t care less in the first place about what the popes have to say -- well, for present purposes none of that is either here or there.  My point is rather to explain how the term “Scholastic” came to have a certain connotation.  In the decades after Leo’s encyclical appeared, the Neo-Scholastic movement sought to implement his program.  One key feature of this movement was that its representatives tended to treat Thomism as normative for Scholastic thinking more generally.  Scotist and Suarezian positions were taken seriously and sometimes adopted, but the default position tended to be Thomistic.  Another key feature was that the Neo-Scholastics were keen to emphasize that Scholasticism is not a museum piece but a living tradition that offers a serious response to modern assumptions in philosophy.  Accordingly, the emphasis in Neo-Scholastic works was not on historical scholarship but rather on articulation of the structure of the Scholastic system and application to contemporary problems.
These tendencies by no means reflected a blind submission to papal authority.  The Neo-Scholastics had arguments for the view that Scholastic, and in particular Thomistic, positions were superior to those of the modern systems of thought (rationalist, empiricist, idealist, etc.) that had supplanted Scholasticism.  And they had arguments for the view that the departures from Thomism represented by writers like Scotus, Ockham, and Suarez were often harmful to the integrity of the Scholastic system, and inadvertently contributed to the dissolution of the Scholastic synthesis and rise of the modern systems.  A reasonable person can disagree with these views, but they represent a coherent and well thought out philosophical position.
It is one I happen to agree with, and my book Scholastic Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction is very much written in the spirit of this approach.  It is not an exercise in antiquarianism.  It is not written for historians of philosophy, or for Latinists, or for those who are interested in the minutiae of intra-Scholastic debate over the centuries.  It is written for people interested in understanding the framework of Scholastic thinking about fundamental metaphysical questions, and how it relates to controversies in contemporary analytic philosophy.  So, if you are the sort of anal retentive academic historian of philosophy who thinks that (say) a definitive history of the early 14th century dispute over universals must be written before we can begin tentatively to think about gesturing towards a recovery of the point of view from which the question of contemporary application might someday be asked… well, my book is not for you. 
The book is also written from a decidedly Thomistic point of view.  I discuss the views of Scotus, Ockham, and Suarez where they disagree with Aquinas, because the reader should know where and why Scholastic metaphysicians differ with one another.  But the book is not about these intra-Scholastic disputes, and it does not attempt to settle them to the satisfaction of Scotists, Ockhamists, and Suarezians.  Rather, the book is about the dispute between, on the one hand, what I take to be the strongest version of Scholasticism, and on the other hand the various metaphysical views which prevail within modern philosophy, and within analytic philosophy in particular.
I am quite explicit about these aims of the book, and it is in light of those aims that the book should be judged.  Now, Michael Sullivan of the Scotist blog The Smithy (and, I think, a friend of this blog), has just posted the first in a series of posts reviewing my book.  He more or less acknowledges its specific aims, and assures us that “a book review ought to evaluate a book on the basis of its own goals, not our expectations for what a different sort of book might have been had the author cared to attempt it.”  Unfortunately, the then goes on to evaluate the book precisely on the basis of his expectations for what a different sort of book might have been had I cared to attempt it.
In particular, Sullivan is irritated that I do not have more to say about Scotus, Ockham, and Suarez, that I rely on English translations rather than Latin originals, and that I’m too beholden to relatively recent Neo-Scholastic works.  He develops his complaint at some length, though he has (so far, anyway) nothing to say about what is actually in the book, only about what is not in it.  Had I been writing a neutral historical account of all the various thinkers and arguments that have fallen under the label “Scholastic,” Sullivan’s complaints would have been reasonable.  But as Sullivan himself is well aware, that is not what I was trying to do.  And given the actual aims of the book, Sullivan’s complaints seem to me to be rather silly. 
Sullivan says that my book is not “scholarly.”  By that he means that it does not emphasize primary sources, does not cite works in the original languages, is not historically comprehensive, etc.  And that is indeed the kind of thing that characterizes a “scholarly” work of history, say.  But there is another sense in which a work might be “scholarly,” which is operative in works of philosophy that are not primarily concerned with history.  It has to do with knowing the current state of discussion, mastering the relevant literature, adhering to academic standards of argumentational rigor rather than aiming for a “pop” audience, etc.  I submit that my book, judged by its actual aims, is very much a scholarly one in that sense. 
That is a kind of scholarship I commend to Sullivan and other non-Thomist Scholastics.  Every so often at The Smithy one finds expressions of annoyance at the tendency to treat Aquinas as the Scholastic gold standard.  That’s understandable.  Scotus, Ockham, and Suarez were thinkers of genius and certainly deserve more attention than they get.
But here’s the thing.  Thomists have, for over a century and with renewed vigor in recent decades, been putting forward Scholastic arguments in the context of contemporary mainstream debates in metaphysics, natural theology, philosophy of mind, ethics, and other areas.  They have made it clear that these are arguments with contemporary relevance, not mere museum pieces.  Naturally, given that they are Thomists, their brand of Scholasticism has been Thomistic.  And naturally, they have been less concerned with history-of-philosophy spectacle-cleaning than with presenting an argument in its strongest possible form, regardless of whether this or that Scholastic presented it exactly that way.   If many people think of Aquinas and Thomism when they think of Scholasticism, that’s a big part of the reason. 
If Scotists and Suarezians really want non-Scholastics to take their own heroes as seriously as they take Aquinas, they need to do more of this sort of thing themselves.  They need to get out of the library stacks and into the debate.  They need to avoid getting so absorbed with doing “scholarship” that they forget about doing philosophy.  They need to worry less about the history of Scholasticism and more about the future of Scholasticism.  That would seem to be a more productive use of their time than complaining that Thomists haven’t been adequate publicists for Scotus and other non-Thomists. 

Review of Gray etc.

Readers of the Claremont Review of Books may want to look for my review of John Gray’s book The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths in the Spring 2014 issue.  At the moment the review is behind a pay wall, but subscribing will fix that problem.
On another matter, readers keep asking me how to get hold of Scholastic Metaphysics , which was released on April 1, somewhat ahead of schedule.  Apparently the book sold out very quickly because supply could not meet all the pre-orders and Amazon has been out of stock for some time.  I have been told that a new shipment arrived at the U.S. distributor’s warehouse a week or so ago and that the book should once again be available from Amazon this week.  So, sit tight, and many, many thanks for your patience and interest.While you’re waiting, you could always pick up a copy of my book Locke , which, as I recently learned, Prof. Joseph Pappin III very kindly reviews in Vol. 22 of the journal Studies in Burke and His Time .  Readers wanting to understand how modern philosophy moved away from what once was the Aristotelian-Scholastic mainstream will find the book of interest.  From Pappin’s review:

Edward Feser’s Locke is not only an outstanding introduction to the full range of John Locke’s philosophy, it is also a penetrating interpretive work, presented with clarity and conciseness.  One of its strengths is stated by Feser in Chapter One: “Locke straddles the medieval and post-modern worlds, the age of faith and the age of skepticism and secularism.”  Feser’s book is in large part framed by this tension he finds in Locke’s corpus.
Locke is divided into six distinct chapters, with individual chapters of considerable length devoted to the Essay Concerning Human Understanding and another on the Second Treatise of Government.  Preceding these chapters is a sustained examination of the Aristotelian-Scholastic background to Locke’s thought while setting before the reader “The Lockean Project” … Feser justifies this approach “because,” as he declares, “nothing less would serve as an appropriate introduction to the intellectual background against which Locke was reacting”…
This reviewer highly recommends Feser’s tome as an ideal introduction… [and] successful interpretation of the strengths and inherent weaknesses of the “Lockean project.”

Sexual cant from the asexual Kant

Kant never married and apparently died a virgin.  He is sometimes described as having had a low opinion of sex, on the basis of passages like this one from his Lectures on Ethics:
[S]exuality is not an inclination which one human being has for another as such, but is an inclination for the sex of another… The desire which a man has for a woman is not directed towards her because she is a human being, but because she is a woman; that she is a human being is of no concern to the man; only her sex is the object of his desires. Human nature is thus subordinated. Hence it comes that all men and women do their best to make not their human nature but their sex more alluring and direct their activities and lusts entirely towards sex. Human nature is thereby sacrificed to sex. (Louis Infield translation, p.164)“Sexuality, therefore,” Kant concludes, “exposes mankind to the danger of equality with the beasts.”  He qualifies the claim, but just barely:

Sexual love can, of course, be combined with human love and so carry with it the characteristics of the latter, but taken by itself and for itself, it is nothing more than appetite. Taken by itself it is a degradation of human nature; for as soon as a person becomes an Object of appetite for another, all motives of moral relationship cease to function, because as an Object of appetite for another a person becomes a thing… (p. 163)
I think the account of sexual desire implicit here is seriously wrong both metaphysically and phenomenologically -- that is to say, both in terms of what the natural end or telos of sexual desire actually is, and in terms of how this desire is typically felt and its end typically perceived.  Kant is correct that sexual desire is not aimed at another human being merely quahuman.  But it is wrong to say that the end is or is perceived to be merely the sexof the other as such.  Kant makes it sound as if a man’s sexual desire is “aimed” at femaleness per se, and a woman’s sexual desire “aimed” at maleness per se -- as if it could in principle equally well be satisfied by a female or male of any species.  That is definitely not the case where the natural end of human sexual desire is concerned.  (Naturally, in affirming the existence of a “natural end” I’m looking at the subject from a Thomistic natural law point of view, which I’ve developed and defended elsewhere.)  Nor is it true phenomenologically either, except in those rare individuals tempted to bestiality. 
As I argued in an earlier post and a NCBQ article, a man’s sexual desire is aimed by nature toward a womanand a woman’s sexual desire is aimed by nature toward a man.  And that is also how it is typically experienced, though of course as everywhere else in the natural order there are imperfections and aberrant cases.  What a man wants, even when his intentions are not honorable, is not “a human being” but neither is it merely “a female.”  He wants a woman, and a woman is of course simultaneously human and female.  And what a woman wants is a man -- who is of course both human and male -- and neither “a human being” nor “a male.”  Kant abstracts out “being human,” “being female,” and “being male,” and seems to think that if the object of sexual desire isn’t the first, then it can only be one of the latter.  (For Kant, it seems, we’re all like George Michael.)  But the true object of sexual desire is what you had before you abstracted these things out.
As I indicated in the earlier post, it is important to keep in mind how true this is even in most immoral sexual encounters.  Conservative moralists often speak  as if sexual immorality were essentially a matter of dehumanizing or animalizing the sexual act, but that is not quite right.  Casanova and Don Draper are womanizers, not “femalizers.”  Nor is it merely that they want females of the species Homo sapiens.  They want their sexual partners to have the reason and volition that distinguish human beings from other animals.  The womanizer wants a woman to admire and surrender to him, and only what can think and choose (as non-human animals cannot) can do that sort of thing.  You can’t seducea non-human animal.  That is not to say that there aren’t perverts who really do desire something non-human or formerly human (as in bestiality or necrophilia) but that is rare and so very far from the paradigm case that even many people otherwise unsympathetic to the natural law understanding of sex can see that there is something warped about it.
It is also just mistaken to say that “all men and women do their best to make not their human nature but their sex more alluring” and that the “Object of [sexual] appetite… becomes a thing.”  It is true that men and women trying to attract members of the opposite sex do not try to enhance what they have in common as human beings, but neither do they try to reduce themselves merely to maleness or femaleness understood as that which they have in common with non-human animals.  A man tries to enhance his masculinity and a woman her femininity.  Non-human animals are male or female, but they are not masculine or feminine.  To be masculine is to be (to that extent) an excellent specimen of a male human being, and to be feminine is to be (to that extent) an excellent specimen of a female human being.  Humanness as such is not emphasized, but neither is it abstracted out.  The man trying to attract a woman is not saying “Look at what a human being I am” but neither is he saying “Look at what a male animal I am”; he is saying “Look at what a man I am,” where a man is both human and male at once.  Similarly, a woman trying to attract a man is saying “Look at what a woman I am,” where to be a woman is to be neither merely human nor merely female but both at once.
So, while it is understandable why Kant would be suspicious of sexual desire if it really had the teleology he seems to think it does, I think he just gets the teleology wrong.  To be sure, Kant does not say that the gratification of sexual desire is inherently immoral.  He allows that it is morally permissible in marriage.  But the reasons he gives are instructive:
The sole condition on which we are free to make use of our sexual desire depends upon the right to dispose over the person as a whole... If I have the right over the whole person, I have also the right over the part and so I have the right to use that person’s organa sexualia for the satisfaction of sexual desire. But how am I to obtain these rights over the whole person? Only by giving that person the same rights over the whole of myself. This happens only in marriage… Matrimony is the only condition in which use can be made of one’s sexuality. If one devotes one’s person to another, one devotes not only sex but the whole person; the two cannot be separated. (pp. 166-67)
With sex as with everything else, morality for Kant boils down to respect for “the person.”  It is because in marriage two “persons” are united -- not a man and a woman, mind you, but “one’s person” and “another [person]” -- that the gratification of sexual desire becomes morally permissible.  (Whyis not clear.  If sexual desire as such involves treating another person as a mere animal or as a thing, how can it ever be permissible on Kantian terms to gratify it?  Why wouldn’t the ideal Kantian marriage be sexless?)
We seem to have implicit here a kind of Cartesianism.  There’s the body, which is either male or female but as such a merely animal and inhuman sort of thing; and then there’s “the person,” which is a bloodless, sexless, rational and willing agent hidden behind the body.  Menand women disappear.  It’s as if for Kant, the ideal human beings would all be like the androgynous Pat and Chris from the old Saturday Night Live “It’s Pat” sketches. 
Not (to be fair) that Kant explicitly says this or would want to say it.  And Kant himself inadvertently gives the reason why this would be a mistaken view of human nature when he writes:
The body is part of the self; in its togetherness with the self it constitutes the person; a man cannot make of his person a thing… (p. 166)
Exactly right.  But that means that since Harry’s body is part of himself and it is a man’s body, then being a man, specifically, is part of what it is to be Harry, and thus Harry’s being seen and sexually desired as a man is precisely notto be seen and desired as a thing.  Similarly, since Sally’s body is part of herself and it is a woman’s body, then being a woman, specifically, is part of what it is to be Sally, and thus Sally’s being seen and sexually desired as a woman is precisely not to be seen and desired as a thing.  Where real human beings (as opposed to angels and as opposed to SNL’s Pat) are concerned, to be a person just is to be either a man and thus male, or a woman and thus female.  It just is to be of one sex or the other.  And to desire someone sexually just is a way of desiring a kind of person, namely the human kind.  Your sex is not contingent and extrinsic to you but rather intrinsic and essential to you.  (That is why, for Aquinas, though sexual intercourse will not exist in the hereafter, sex -- being a man or being a woman -- will exist forever.)
But then, Kant’s discussion of sexual morality in the Lecturesis not clear or carefully worked out in the first place.  For example, his account of marriage makes crucial use of the notion of having mutual property rights in one another, yet just a couple of pages earlier (at p. 165) he had argued that a human being cannot properly be thought of as a kind of property, not even his own property.  Presumably he would regard the “property” talk in the passage about marriage as metaphorical, but how exactly do we cash out the metaphor in a way that will preserve the force of the argument?
Given that he very strongly condemns homosexual behavior in the Lectures, Kant would no doubt have been horrified by the notion of “same-sex marriage.”  Yet what he says about marriage could certainly be developed in a way that would allow for it.  If marriage is essentially a union of human persons, and maleness and femaleness are extraneous to being human persons (as what he says about sexual desire seems to imply, whether or not he would want to draw the conclusion), then why couldn’t a marriage exist between any two human persons? 
As I have noted before, while Kantian personalist talk has in recent decades become popular among some conservative Christian moralists, it is something of which they ought to be wary.   It is conceptually sloppy and tends toward conclusions that are (at least from the point of view of the traditional natural law theorist) either too rigorist or too lax.  Yes, human beings are persons, but so are angels.  What is distinctive about human morality is what sets us apart from the angels.  That is one reason why the traditional Aristotelian-Thomistic conception of human beings as rational animals is superior to the Kantian approach.  Our animality -- and thus our being either men or women, either male or female -- is as essential to us as our rationality, not something extraneous or tacked-on.  For the Thomist, “It’s Patrick” or “It’s Patricia.”  It ain’t “Pat.”

Linked in

Two new papers from David Oderberg: “Is Form Structure?” and “The Metaphysics of Privation.”
Donald Devine and I have been debating the merits of John Locke for years.  Don offers his latest thoughts at The Federalist in “The Real John Locke -- And Why He Matters.”
Stratford Caldecott -- Catholic writer, G. K. Chesterton Research Fellow at St. Benet’s Hall, Oxford, and Marvel Comics fan -- has cancer.  Marvel has stepped up to grant him a dying wish, and the stars of the Marvel movies have given him a touching tribute.  Fr. Z has the story, as do The Independent and the Catholic Herald .
Terry Teachout’s new biography of Duke Ellington is reviewed at The Weekly Standard.
Is resistance to “same-sex marriage” futile?  Over at National Review Online, Ryan T. Anderson argues that it is not.

Also at NRO, Thomas Hibbs watches Mad Men while reading Dante.
Straussian political philosopher Steven B. Smith is interviewed at 3:AM Magazine.  So is metaphysician John Heil.
Guitarist Jon Herington is interviewed about touring with Steely Dan and other stuff.
At The American Spectator, John Derbyshire reports on the “Toward a Science of Consciousness” conference in Arizona.  (Behind a pay wall, I’m afraid.)
If you haven’t yet seen the new Guardians of the Galaxytrailer, here it is.  Director Edgar Wright has quit the Ant-Man flick.
So whaddaya think of Wikipedia?  Spiked expresses what will perhaps forever be the main complaints.  (Whoever did my entry has made some… kind of odd choices.  Plus for some reason they still have me teaching at LMU and visiting at Bowling Green.  Weird.)

This is philosophy?

This is Philosophy is a new introduction to the subject by Prof. Steven Hales.  A reader calls my attention to the book’s companion website, which contains links to some lecture slides keyed to topics covered in the book, a dictionary of terms, exercises, and so forth.
I’ve got a little exercise of my own for the reader, which has three steps.  Here’s how it goes:
 Step 1: Read this blurb from the website:
The text’s scholarship is as noteworthy as its hipness. Hales clearly explains important philosophical ideas with a minimum of jargon and without sacrificing depth of content and he consistently gives a fair and accurate presentation of both sides of central philosophical disputes.
Step 2: Read this set of lecture slides on the cosmological argument, holding before your mind the highlighted words from the blurb while doing so.
Step 3: Try not to laugh.
Ha!  Knew you couldn’t do it!  Me neither.Yes, my friends, it’s the “Everything has a cause” Straw Man That Will Not Die.  And no, things don’t get any better in the book itself, which Amazon and Google books will let you read the relevant pages from.  Hales hits all his marks with aplomb:

1. He assures us that the argument rests on the premise that everything has a cause.
2. He says that the argument is concerned to trace the series of causes back through time to a first moment.
3. He attributes this argument to Aristotle and Aquinas.
4. Naturally, he thinks “What caused God?” is a devastating objection.
5. He also tells us that there is no reason to suppose that a first cause would be God.
6. He suggests that the Big Bang theory shows that there is no need to affirm a divine cause.
In short, it’s a complete travesty.  If you’re looking for a 1,234thpop philosophy regurgitation of all the tired caricatures of the cosmological argument rather than an account of what Aristotle, Aquinas, and Co. actually said, Hales really gives you your money’s worth.
If you’re someone to whom it isn’t already obvious how thoroughly Hales has ballsed things up, you might look at my post “So you think you understand the cosmological argument?”  If that piece is too polemical for you and you want something more politely academic, you might look at my Midwest Studies in Philosophy article “The New Atheists and the Cosmological Argument” or at chapter 3 of my book Aquinas .  (More on the cosmological argument can also be found here.)
I note that Hales also devotes considerable space to refuting what he calls “The argument from scripture.”  This is an argument to the effect that God exists because the Bible says so -- the obvious circularity of which can be pointed out in a single short sentence, though for some reason Hales goes on for pages about the subject.  I suppose this would be well worth doing in a philosophy book, except for the fact that I can’t think of a single person who has ever actually given the argument Hales attacks.  Perhaps These are Straw Men would have been a better title for his book.
I also notice that in his “Annotated Bibliography” Hales recommends Dawkins’ The God Delusion as follow-up reading.  Wrap your mind around that.  Kids, when you get done with this introductory book and you want to pursue these matters at greater depth, try Dawkins!
But hey, Hales’ book does have “hipness.”  So there’s that.

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.