Pontificating on Pontifications

Continuing our dialogue with Ben Joseph:

“I can argue on the basis of the natural law that these acts are sinful or disordered; and whether Plato or Aristotle would agree with my arguments is beside the point, as these arguments can be evaluated according to their intrinsic merit.

I am not concerned now with presenting these arguments, but merely with pointing out the fact that they can be and have been mounted.”

I agree that a natural law argument can be mounted for the illicit character of contraception, oral sex ,and masturbation. Indeed, such arguments have been mounted.

I’d also add that a natural law argument can be mounted for the licit character of these activities.

The argument often turns on a version of Aristotelian teleology.

For the record, I do not regard contraception or masturbation as intrinsically sinful or disordered. And I have no opinion about oral sex.

I don’t plan to spend much time on this topic because I regard it as rather tangential to the main point at issue. But since Ben continues to offer these examples to illustrate his point, I’m taking the occasion to note that this is not a point of common ground where I’m concerned.

“My argument is constructed to address the question of whether we could believe that it is more probable than not that God would want us to believe that ’sola scriptura’ is true rather than that ’sola eccelsia’ is true, in a world wherein there is no more warrant for believing in ’sola scriptura’ than there is for believing in ’sola ecclesia’; and wherein there is absolutely no warrant for believing that doctrinal constructions that are worthy of the belief of Christians (and which some Christians could accordingly be obliged to believe in, by virtue of their level of intellectual sophistication and the incidence in their case of certain circumstances) could be derived otherwise than by way of being produced by rational processes (with ’sola scriptura’ functioning as the operative assumption of these processes) or else by way of being promulgated to the public by an infallible church.

It is true I haven’t yet produced an argument showing that the actual world exhibits these characteristics, but my argument would at least have value to the extent that the actual world can be shown to exhibit these characteristics.

The antecedent probabilities in question are entailed therefore by considerations which I have assumed would obtain in a world like the one that I have described above.

In other words, while I haven’t directly argued that the actual world is such a world (or that it at least approximates it in the relevant senses), I have yet tried to make clear that, given the obtainment of the aforesaid considerations in my hypothetical world, it would be more probable than not that in such a world God would bring it about that ’sola ecclesia’ should be true rather than that ’sola scriptura’ should be true.”

My problem is that I regard this preliminary step as pretty useless.

If, on the one hand, on the hand, you could produce an argument to show that this state of affairs obtains in the real world, then hypothetical is superfluous.

If, on the other hand, all you have is the hypothetical, then this doesn’t probabilify any actual states of affairs since there is more than one possible means of securing the same result.

At an epistemic level, it’s the actual world which selects for the possible world. That is to say, we only know which possible world is actual, and which possible worlds remain unexemplified, by study of the world which God chose to instantiate, being the world we inhabit.

And, from our human viewpoint, hypotheticals and counterfactuals take the real world as their standard of comparison. God’s viewpoint is different. But this is the only world we know. So this supplies the frame of reference.

Ben’s way of broaching the answer would only be of value if we had not direct evidence for where the truth happens to lie, so that we had to fall back on sheer intuition, hammered thin by modal logic or Bayesean probability theory.

In that event, our theology is no longer based divine revelation, but probabilistic reasoning.

Now, I don’t object to probability arguments, per se. And I don’t think that every belief or behavior has to be deducible from revelation.

But here’s the catch: in order for a belief or behavior to attain normative status, it must have a revelatory grounding. So there’s a trade-off.

If you want it to be mandatory, then it must be revelatory; if you want to go beyond revelation, you are free to do so (as long as you don’t go against revelation), but in that event it cannot be mandatory.

“This assumes the viewpoint of ’sola scriptura’, which my argument has been concerned to show would be unlikely to have been willed by God to be true in a hypothetical world exhibiting the aformentioned characteristics (and given the obtainment within this world of the appropriate considerations).”

i) Yes, except that I don’t think we merely “assume” the viewpoint of sola Scriptura. Rather, I think we can see that in action as God’s actual modus operandi during the OT era, Intertestamental era, and NT era.

ii) I must also challenge the whole notion that we are under some standing obligation to estimate the likelihood that God has willed one state of affairs rather than another.

God is quite able to make his will known to us. If God wanted us to believe something or do something, why would he not simply and clearly reveal his will?

If we have a duty to God, why would his will be so obscure that we must resort to such roundabout methods to determine, not what he will is, but what his will most likely is?

To my way of thinking, if God has frequently and specifically revealed our moral and religious duties, and if, by contrast, he’s silent on other issues, then his silence tells me something about his will; namely, that I have no particular duty to discharge in these other areas.

If I cannot infer God’s will on the basis of either his inspired general norms or else his inspired case laws, then his will is that I not know his will. In such situations, he shall guide me by providential circumstances rather than a verbal disclosure.

“But if this hasn’t been done, you won’t be able to see that the picture is made out of these pieces, and so be able, on your own premises, to tender your assent to the notion that the said picture has been made out of the said pieces.”

i) Once again, this goes back to the issue of whether systematic theology is the object of saving faith. From my standpoint, it’s sufficient for someone to believe whatever the Bible teaches wherever it teaches it, without having to piece it all together.

ii) And, as I’ve also said before, the Bible already pieces together certain things for the reader, so that we aren’t having to start from scratch.

iii) I’m not opposed to creeds. But it’s striking to note that Judaism doesn’t have creeds like Trent or Vatican II or the Westminster Confession.

The Chosen People managed to muddle through the OT era, and the Intertestamental era, and the NT era, up through the modern era, without creedalism.

Creedalism is really a very Western thing. It reflects the Aristotelian passion to understand the world by some encyclopedic classification scheme. The Summa Theologica is a textbook example.

Now, I’m an heir of the Western tradition. To this scientific and philosophical passion to analyze and classify and synthesize.

So I don’t object to that tradition.

At the same time, I’m not going to canonize my cultural bias.

“…that would not change the fact that there would still be a sense in which one can be sure whether or not it is the case that the said construct has been made out of some, at least, of the set of parts that are supposed to serve as its constructional materials.”

But of what should one be sure? Our degree of certainty should be responsive to the degree of evidence which God has left us. I’m as sure of anything in particular as God wants me to be.

My degree of certainty varies from one topic to another, whether sacred or profane. God controls the evidence. If God wanted me to be more certain about something or another, it’s within his power to make me more certain by adjusting the quality or quantity of the relevant evidence.

Take a couple of issues over which Protestants differ. One is whether we should baptize infants.

Neither side has a knockdown argument from Scripture. The same is true over the question of church polity. Should we be prelatial, presbyterial, or congregational? No one has a compelling argument from Scripture.

Now, if God wanted us to come down firmly on one side or another, it would be effortlessly easy for him to achieve that end by more clearly revealing his preference to his people. In the absence of an unambiguous disclosure, I’m indifferent because God is indifferent.

Why should an issue be more important to me than it is to God? If it’s important to God, then he’s in a perfect position to dictate our duty in such a way that no reasonable man can doubt where the true lies.

“…and therefore that if such a person were to be unable to see this, he would then lack a warrant for affirming of the said construct (in a way which would be consistent with his premises) that the said construct will truly have been put together out of what are its alleged parts.”

i) At the risk of repeating myself, I am unwarranted in seeking a higher warrant than God has warranted in his Word.

Catholicism has a problem when it comes to living with uncertainty.

Now, I respect the quest for religious certainty. I think that religious certainty is both desirable and attainable.

But only within the scope of what God has promised us.

ii) You’re also reverting to your internalism. Maybe that’s what you subscribe to.

But as I’ve already said, I prefer to locate one’s warrant in whether something is true, is demonstrably true, and has been demonstrated to be true, regardless of whether any particular believer is capable of performing that demonstration for himself.

Perhaps you disagree. If so, that’s a separate argument.

“It is true that such a person would not need to ‘reinvent the wheel’, as you have put it, and that he could have a measure of warrant for believing that the construct has been validly put together in this sense, if his church were to tell him so; but unless he believes in the authority of his church to make a statement to this effect in the same way as a Catholic would believe in the authority of the Catholic Church, he will then not be able to believe in the validity of the construct in the same way as he can believe in the validity of what are held to be its respective parts.”

The problem here is that you are using the authority of the church as a makeweight to create an artificial level of warrant which outstrips the actual evidence.

Assuming that a layman is sufficiently intelligent, it should be possible to take him back through the process of reasoning by which the conclusion was arrived at so that he can see the truth for himself.

He might not be able to do this on his own, but it should be possible to retrace the process for him and with him. If it isn’t possible to reconstruct the steps in the argument which yield the conclusion, then the conclusion is underdetermined by the evidence, in which case you have a form of ersatz warrant which tips the scales by the heavy-handed thumb of raw authority pressing down in the absence of sufficient exegetical evidence to sustain the result. The superstructure of belief is overbuilt on the substructure of the evidence.

This is applicable to much of what you say below. Moving along:

“i) That when it comes to the missionary enterprise, all that I would need to do in order to induce someone to believe in Nicene Orthodoxy, is to induce him to believe in the teaching authority of my Church; and that it wouldn’t therefore be incumbent upon me, once such a person will have been persuaded (say by way of a fundamental intuition) to accept that my Church is the true Church and that its teaching authority is infallible, to demonstrate to him by exegetical-hermeneutical arguments that the doctrines promulgated by my Church are not indeed ‘underdetermined by revelation’ (in whatever operative sense of that particular phrase that you might care to use it in).”

It’s true that I can have an indirect knowledge of something by having a direct knowledge of the source of information as a reliable source. If you can establish the source of your information, then that will warrant the information whether or not you can directly verify each piece of information individually.

“it would then be difficult to see how the Protestant will be able consistently to instil in the aforesaid prospective convert (who has to content himself with accepting, because of his lack of intellectual sophistication, certain theological constructs on the authority of what he has been told is a fallible institution) the same degree of confidence, in respect of such theological constructs, that he will have been able to instil in him, in respect of the divinity of the scriptures.”

This is a double-edged sword.

If the convert lacks the intellectual aptitude to follow an exegetical argument, then he will also lack the intellectual aptitude to follow a historical argument for the primacy of Rome.

“iii) That the state of affairs envisaged in ii) utterly does injustice to the way in which (by a fundamental intution) I feel that God has intended for his truth to the proposed to the public: which is that divine truth should be divinely taught (as Perry has put it).

In other words, I feel that it is in the nature of the case unacceptable (from the point of view of what I conceive is the missionary enterprise as God has intended for it to be conducted) that the missionary enterprise should be conducted along the lines envisaged in ii); and given then my sentiments on this score, it would follow therefore that I should think of it as necessary that the Church should be infallible, in order for it to be able to discharge the missionary enterprise in the way in which I think that it would be bound to do (i.e. in what I conceive of as a ‘proper fashion’).

I understand of course that if the Church isn’t infallible then its prospective converts could well be faced with the threat of being ‘locked into primitive errors’ but I really cannot comprehend how it would be otherwise possible for the missionary enterprise to be properly discharged by Christians, and that is why I feel myself bound to submit to the notion that some church must be infallible.”

With all due respect, I seriously doubt that your “fundamental intuition” is that specific. Rather, I suspect that it’s a good deal more general.

You intuit that God will guide his people.

But the method by which God will guide his people is not an intuitive datum, and more than one model of divine guidance is possible.

So even if you begin with intuition, when you come to a fork in the road, intuition will not tell you which way to turn.

“Before I mount my argument proper, I’d like to draw your attention to the followng considerations:

1) Protestants (who believe in Nicene Orthodoxy) and Catholics and members of the Orthodox communion share many beliefs in common, beliefs that might be regarded (for certain purposes) as serving as an index for what it is that a person calling himself an orthodox Christian, will be likely to say that he believes.

2) If these beliefs are to be deemed specimens of valid doctrine…”

There is an unintentional ambiguity in this claim.

When a Catholic or Protestant layman affirms the Nicene Creed (or Athanasian or Chalcedonian), what is he affirming?

He is affirming what the words mean to him, in ordinary usage, in some translation, consistent with his religious affiliation.

That is very different from the way in which a patrologist would affirm the creed.

So, although everyone is superficially affirming the same creed, there is a subtle substitutionary process at work as each reader decodes and reencodes the key ideas according to his individual command of the receptor language along with his cultural or subcultural conceptual scheme.

So, at deeper level, every reader is affirming an idiosyncratic creed.

I’m not saying that this reduces to sheer equivocation. But it’s not the same thing as univocity.

“2) Jason’s objection that the bible doesn’t plainly state that an infallible church exists is undercut by the view that a formal statement to this effect doesn’t need to be present in the bible in order for it to be the case that we could have reason to believe that an infallible church exists, and that the non-existence of an infallible church can only be ‘plainly’ demonstrated from the bible if there were a formal statement within the bible declaring positively the non-existence of such an entity.”

I don’t believe that this is Jason’s position. Nor is it mine.

A logical inference will do. But your problem is twofold:

i) Scripture is explicitly as well as implicitly silent on some of the key ingredients of Catholic and/or Orthodoxy ecclesiology.

ii) Scripture also illustrates the ways in which God has directed the life of the covenant community without recourse to the machinery of Catholicism or Orthodoxy.

Beyond the above:

i) Where do we affix the burden of proof? The onus is not on the Evangelical to disprove Catholicism in the absence of positive evidence in its favor.

Rather, the onus is on the Roman Catholic to prove or probabilify Catholicism in the absence of positive evidence in its favor.

ii) At the risk of repeating myself, God doesn’t have to leave us in a state of doubt. If the proposition is dubious, that’s because the Lord has chosen to leave us in a state of doubt. And that, of itself, is an indication of where his will lies.

“This is what Thomas Aquinas says about the authority of the universal Church to publish symbols and to propose to the belief of all men, the truth of the scriptures (according to its own ‘right understanding of them’, to quote Aquinas), and why this is needful.”

It’s unclear to me how this functions in your overall argument. Are you merely citing Aquinas as a historical witness to the self-understanding of Medieval Catholicism? No doubt he’s a reliable witness is that regard, but this does nothing to verify the correctness of the Medieval Church’s self-understanding.

Or are you citing Aquinas for the quality of his supporting arguments? Since Aquinas was a great theologian, he is certainly entitled to a respectful hearing. But how good are his arguments?

As taken from ST II-II Q1, A9:

“The universal Church cannot err, since she is governed by the Holy Ghost, Who is the Spirit of truth: for such was Our Lord’s promise to His disciples (John 16:13): “When He, the Spirit of truth, is come, He will teach you all truth.” Now the symbol is published by the authority of the universal Church. Therefore it contains nothing defective.”

Aquinas jumps straight for a divine promise made to the Apostolate to the Roman Catholic church. There are many missing steps in that argument. Unless you can fill in the blanks, there are more gaps than actual argument.

““The truth of faith is contained in Holy Writ, diffusely, under various modes of expression, and sometimes obscurely, so that, in order to gather the truth of faith from Holy Writ, one needs long study and practice, which are unattainable by all those who require to know the truth of faith, many of whom have no time for study, being busy with other affairs. And so it was necessary to gather together a clear summary from the sayings of Holy Writ, to be proposed to the belief of all. This indeed was no addition to Holy Writ, but something taken from it. ”

While there’s some truth to this, let us also remember that Judaism never had the sort of centralized religious instruction that Aquinas takes for granted. You had a Temple. You had some synagogues. You had rabbis representing various schools of thought.

““Now the formal object of faith is the First Truth, as manifested in Holy Writ and the teaching of the Church, which proceeds from the First Truth.”

This looks like an ecclesiastical version of the cosmological argument. Instead of causal chain between the Prime Mover and the world, you have a causal chain between the First Truth and the Church.

This is a very loose analogy indeed.

I’d add that Aquinas was a nobleman by birth. It was natural for him to think of the church as sacred counterpart to feudalism. Very hierarchical: everyone had his socially assigned station in life, from top to bottom.