Apologetics

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Anselm & Job

And as Jesus passed by, he saw a man which was blind from his birth. And his disciples asked him, saying, Master, who did sin, this man, or his parents, that he was born blind? Jesus answered, Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents: but that the works of God should be made manifest in him.

John 9:1-3

It could be argued that Saint Anselm’s greatest discovery was not his famous Ontological Argument – which is far and away the most important and most controversial argument in philosophical history – but rather the Anselmian Definition of God (the AD) upon which, as its first premise, that argument hangs. The God of the Anselmian Definition (the GAD) is that than which no greater can possibly be conceived: aliquid quo nihil maius cogitari possit.

The AD does not specify greatness. Nor does it specify the sort of mind that might or might not be able to conceive of something greater than GAD. On the AD, even GAD cannot possibly conceive of a greater than himself. The genius of the AD is in the fact that, on any specification S of the greatness of a being, whatever it might be, then howsoever great it be, if it is possible for any mind whatever to conceive of a greater than S, on any specification of greatness, then S is not GAD.

GAD is logically unsurpassable, along every conceivable dimension of greatness.

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I Am a Romantic Christian … Traditional Orthodox Nicene Reactionary

The self styled Romantic Christians I have so far read lay great, proper emphasis on the inescapable, insuperable authority of personal, intuitive discernment of the intellect (which, it is trivial to say, and as all men have ever recognized, is dispositively suasive over the whole being) – and therefore on the illegitimacy and thus the inherent error of any other putative exogenous authority (as, e.g., of scripture, tradition, church, fact, logic, you name it).

The conclusion does not follow from the premises. From the supreme authority – the veto power – of endogenous intuitive discernment, it does not follow that there can be no other authorities. After all, were there no exogenous authorities of any sort, there would be nothing for endogenous intuition to discern. There would be no data, no experience, as grist for the mill of intuitive discernment.

On the basis of my experience, I intuitively discern that my intuitive discernment is not omniscient; that indeed, as prone to honest error in service of my selfish parochial partiscient preferences, it is fallible; and that I ought then in prudence to consult what the intuitions of other men have revealed to them in their converse with each other, and with extrahuman reality, over the millennia. Which among the many notions they have discussed have stood millions of tests of time, logic, argument, and circumstance? Of such notions, which on the other hand have been refuted, or do not cohere, or have perished after a season, or as implemented have led often to social or personal disaster (e.g., Marxism)?

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Naturalism is Circular

It’s really that simple. No amount of obfuscation can surmount it.

The circularity of naturalism is a special case of the more general phenomenon of the circularity of explaining contingents by recourse to contingents.

The circularity of all such “explanations” entails their repudiation. The natural *must* be explained supernaturally, or else not at all. Likewise, the contingent *must* be explained ultimately – which is to say, by what is absolute, necessary, and eternal – or not at all.

If there is a supernatural ultimate, then – and only then – can explanation, or then understanding, so discourse, conversation, in the limit culture, proceed. Otherwise, not.

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Trinity from Omniscience

Theologians and philosophers have generally thought that the Trinity cannot be demonstrated, but must rather be given to us via divine revelation. I’m not so sure. I came recently to think that the Trinity is implicit in the notion of omniscience; that, if God is omniscient, it follows that he must be a Trinity; that indeed he cannot be omniscient, or therefore ultimate, or then God, properly so called, if he is not three Persons in one being.

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Theism is More Parsimonious than Atheism

Promoted (as slightly edited) from a comment on a previous post.

Apologists for atheism often argue that theism is intellectually costly; that, i.e., atheism postulates less, and is therefore less vulnerable to Ockham’s Razor. Isn’t it simpler, they ask, to suppose that there is nothing but the cosmos, than to suppose that there is the cosmos and its creator and sustainer?

But theism is far more parsimonious – categorically more parsimonious – than atheism.

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The Dire Sequelae of Radical Ontological Pluralism

Radical Ontological Pluralism (ROP) is the notion that there is no Absolute, no One – and thus, neither the God of classical theism nor the Ground of Being found in almost all the great religions (e.g., Brahman in Hinduism, the Primordial Suprapersonal Godhead of Christianity, and so forth) and metaphysical philosophies, but rather only and always a Many. Its strongest form urges that each of that Many is eternal. Those who espouse these ideas generally go on to suppose that our ordered cosmos is the product of what might be characterized as a cosmic democracy or market or evolution, in which the free interactions of the beings of the Many arrive somehow at some coordination.

That sounds a bit like the chaos of Lucretius, in which the random collisions of atoms in the void just happen (for no reason) to glom together now and then in what seem like ordered patterns – people, winds, rocks, etc. – but are really just … random collisions of atoms in the void. ROP doesn’t want to go quite that far, because most advocates of ROP suppose that the ordered patterns of the cosmos are real – that, i.e., there is really a cosmos.

But that won’t work. There are insurmountable problems with ROP.

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The Argument from Evil Simpliciter

If God is not ultimate – is not fundamentally and ineluctably dispositive of all others, being of them all their first principle – why then Satan is not wrong in any way. He has with God in that case rather only and no more than a difference of opinion. For, if God is not ultimately dispositive in his very nature of what is good or bad, right or wrong, true or false, ugly or beauteous, and so forth, then no being can possibly say (as God said in Genesis 1), or then tell, what is truly and absolutely good, bad, right, wrong, true, false, ugly or beauteous – or even, what is real or unreal.

If Satan is not wrong in any way, then he isn’t bad in any way. Nor is anything else.

Thus if God is not ultimate, then there is no such thing really as evil. There is per contra only what this or that being wants, such wants differ, and that’s just how the cookie crumbles (come to think of it, that’s the reason there is entropy). The Satanists have always said this. Whoever says anything like it is implicitly a Satanist, whether or not witly.

So, if you think there is evil, you have to think that God is ultimate – and, thus, by the definition of ultimacy, that he is perfect, infinite, eternal, omniscient, omnipotent, our Creator, Lord, and Savior, and so forth. Also, that he must be concretely real: for what is real is ulterior to what is not, and what is necessarily real is ulterior to what is contingently real.

The syllogism is simple. Let P = God is ultimate; let Q = there is evil. Then:

  1. ¬ P → ¬ Q
  2. ¬ ¬ Q
  3. ¬ ¬ P

In English:

  1. If God is not ultimate, then there is no evil.
  2. It is false that there is no evil.
  3. It is false that God is not ultimate.

Much else follows from divine ultimacy. E.g.: what creates ex nihilo is ulterior to what orders pre-existent matter; what creates freely is ulterior to what creates conditionally; what is personal is ulterior to what is impersonal; what can participate its creation is ulterior to what cannot; and so on.

In fact, the entire system of classical theological metaphysics hangs on divine ultimacy. This was Anselm’s great discovery.

There is yet more; for, literally everything hangs on divine ultimacy, inasmuch as if God is not ultimate, so that there is ultimately no truth, beauty, order, fact, and so forth, why then when you get right down to it, nor is there ultimately any reality. And in that case, not even the nihil at which one has arrived is real.

Like the proposition that there is no truth, the proposition that nothing is real is autophagous. Both those propositions refute themselves.

Because there is obviously reality, we could just as well then argue from reality to divine ultimacy:

  1. If God is not ultimate, there is nothing real.
  2. It is false that there is nothing real.
  3. It is false that God is not ultimate.
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Philosophical Skeleton Keys: Bodies

Bodies are not solids. They are, rather, extensively distributed instantiations of the forms of their substances. E.g., my body is distributed across vast empty spaces and times, that distinguish my foot from my heart and my eye at age 14 from my eye at age 50. All the particles participant in me partake my body, but they do so, not on account of proximity in time or space, but on account of formal similarity, and so of participation. Their spatiotemporal relations hang upon their formal agreements.

Local extensive proximity supervenes formality; is indeed a type thereof.

So the substantial Presence and action of Jesus in widely distributed eucharistic hosts is no big deal; no bigger, anyway (and, NB, no less), than the substantial presence and action of Kristor in widely distributed atoms of his body. So likewise the Body of Jesus as present and active in every member of his Church is no big deal. So likewise the integrity of the Mystical Body – which is, of course, the Church, the Body of Jesus – of all the Saints in Heaven and on Earth, is again no big deal (hey there, Zippy, and you too, Lawrence and Tom! (see you soon!)).

That’s it. That’s what makes this notion a Philosophical Skeleton Key. What follows is no more than a riff thereupon.

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The Efficacious Christian Faith of Children

Some in our ambit have worried that a faith that can be comprehended only by way of years of study on abstruse theological and metaphysical topics cannot eo ipso be efficacious for ordinary people who have no time or inclination for such things; have suggested that, surely, God would have opened the portal of salvation even to those ready only for spiritual milk (I Corinthians 3:2), or even only for pap. They have on these grounds criticized classical Christian theology of God (as eternal, omniscient, and so forth), arguing that such notions as omnipotence are beyond the ken of most believers.

As indeed they seem to be. Does that matter to Christian theology? What is far more, does it matter to Christian life? I.e., is Christian theology beside the point, or worse, ruining the project of salvation in Christ?

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An Archon of Right Liberalism Takes the Turn to Orthogony

John C. Wright has long been one of the most intelligent and effective writers at the Right end of the political spectrum. He has been a great defender of the Constitution, the Enlightenment, the private sector as against the state, of traditional customs, mores and values, and so forth; and, in particular, of Christianity. He is one of the more competent, clever and entertaining Christian apologists now writing online.

He’s prolix, even compared to such as I. But his writing is always sprightly, and fun to read … so long as one has a half hour or so to spare for it each day. He’s a lawyer, so his comments on current affairs are well grounded in the tradition of English Common Law, in its down to earth common sense. And he’s also a competent and successful writer of science fiction novels, so he is able, ready and indeed eager to explore novel notions, and consider imaginatively how they might work out in practice.

A formidable guy, altogether. And what is more rare in these latter days of cultural antagony and deliquescence, sweet tempered and irenic withal. He is valuable and discerning wit.

Having grown jaundiced upon it myself circa 2009, it had bugged me for some years that despite all that, he had been so far still convinced of the Enlightenment as a natural and just evolution of Christian culture, rather than a divagation therefrom.

Well, I am pleased to report that he has recently suffered – nay, enjoyed – a paradigm shift of an orthogonal sort.

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