A lesson in illogic

Jonathan Prejean has responded to my latest post:

http://crimsoncatholic.blogspot.com/2006/12/lesson-in-logic.html

He devotes half his reply to what he regards as the requirements of an ad hominem argument. Unfortunately for him, he makes some basic mistakes:

1.

i) Although I’m a dyothelite, I personally could be a monothelite and still turn Prejean’s argument against him. For the issue is one of consistency.

As long as my opponent regards monothelitism as a heresy, then even if, ex hypothesi, I did not, I could still turn his own argument against him by showing that he has implicitly committed himself to a chain of reasoning which leads to the very thing he finds fault with in my position.

ii) Remember that this is not a debate over whether monothelitism per se is true or false.

Rather, its falsity has been taken for granted by Prejean, and he is using monothelitism to discredit a belief-system in general due to its alleged association with monothelitism in particular.

The gist of the argument is that if monothelitism is heretical, and Calvinism is guilty of this particular heresy, then Calvinism in general is thereby falsified due to its complicity with a false doctrine.

iii) Now, having framed the debate in those terms, if there is a parallel version of the argument which is applicable to Catholicism, then I could use that against Prejean regardless of where I personally stand on monothelitism, for I might be using it to discredit Catholicism generally.

Even if I regarded monothelitism as true rather than false, and even if I regarded Catholicism as implicitly monothelitic, which—ex hypothesi, I’d take to be a positive feature—I might also find many other objectionable features in Catholicism, regardless of whether I took issue with its Christology, so that—for purposes of mounting an internal critique—I could seize on its Christology to discredit the Catholic belief-system in general, by trading on the logical structure of Prejean’s own argument.

It’s a way of putting pressure on his own position. If I force him to back down, then that’s one less objection to my own position.

This only works if he happens to exercise that particular option. He may have other options open to him, and choose to exercise another option.

If so, then, assuming I were a monothelite, I’d thereupon withdraw that particular line of argument. But you don’t know how your opponent will react until you confront him. So it’s worth exploring the options.

2.

i) Another related problem with his response is that he fails to distinguish for whom or for what the ad hominem argument is meant to be valid and/or sound.

In the way I deployed it, the appeal doesn’t turn on assumptions which Prejean and I may share in common, but assumptions which Prejean and his Orthodox critics may share in common. That’s the pressure point.

ii) Remember, this is not *my* argument. Rather, it’s the argument of his Orthodox critics. I’m simply pointing the reader to an argument which they have deployed against his position, an argument which is structurally parallel to the argument which he is using against my position.

3.Yes, I—as a Calvinist—believe in determinism. This doesn’t mean I believe in just any form of determinism. Or that every form of determinism has the same consequences. As a Calvinist, not every version will do. One can be a secular determinist. Or idealistic determinist. Or pantheistic determinist.

4.For reasons I’ve already given, I don’t regard his argument as valid in application to my own position.

”I don't believe in Scotism, Banezian Thomism, OR Molinism (either the original, or per Suarez). That's part of the problem with Perry's argument. Banezian Thomism in particular is based on Cajetan's theory of analogy, which more or less everyone concedes to be a Scotist reinterpretation of St. Thomas; a similar charge could be leveled at Suarez's version of Molinism. Now that people are getting back on board with the philosophia perennis more rigorously and treating St. Thomas's doctrines of analogy, divine simplicity, and the like more rigorously, the Thomism/Molinism debate has been practically rendered obsolete as a fundamental misconception of God's metaphysical operation.”

Even if this were correct, consider the consequences:

i) Perry regards Scotism, Thomism, and Molinism as implicitly monothelitic.

ii) Apparently, Prejean doesn’t deny this charge.

iii) Prejean extricates himself from heresy by distinguish between original Thomism and Banezian Thomism.

iv) But Prejean is still a professing Catholic. Is he going to concede that Scotism, Banezian Thomism, and Molinism entail a heretical Christology?

Is he going to say that Scotus, Suarez, De Molina, and Cajetan, et al. were heretics?

Doesn’t the Catholic church regard these versions of theological determinism, however qualified, as theologically orthodox options?

“Actually, I think your exegetical method includes reckless anthropomorphism because you don't have the philosophical wherewithal to know when your claims are absurd when applied to an entity that could even possibly be God. So, for example, you believe that God has literal emotions, that God makes choices from among possible worlds, that God has knowledge propositionally, that God literally elects from among people, and all sorts of other things that can't possibly be applied to a being that could qualify as God. Personally, I'm with Augustine that you have to get your philosophy at least straight to the point of being consistent with your professed faith before you can do exegesis intelligently, so from my perspective, starting from the Bible is ridiculous on its face. You have to get your natural theology straight first before you even start trying to obtain an articulate and reasonable theology.”

i) This is a very revealing statement of Prejean’s own position. According to him, natural theology can tell us that God does not have literal emotions, that God does not make choices from among possible worlds, that God does not have propositional knowledge, that God doesn’t literally elect from among people, &c.

ii) From what version or representative of Catholic (or Orthodox) natural theology is Prejean getting his information?

iii) He’s also assuming, without benefit of argument, that revealed theology doesn’t draw sufficient distinctions between God and his creatures to distinguish literal predications from anthropomorphisms.

iv) Do I believe all these things?

a) Does God have literal emotions? Depends on what you mean.

Does God *feel* things the way we feel them? I’m not prepared to say that. And there are some senses in which it is untrue. In general, I subscribe to divine impassibility.

What I am prepared to say is that God has certain attitudes of approval or disapproval.

b) Does God make choices among possible words? Depends on what you mean.

As I’ve explained on other occasions, I don’t regard a possible world as an item from a mail-order catalogue from which God chooses a world to instantiate.

Rather, God knows himself. In his self-knowledge, he knows what he is capable of doing. And the actual world does not exhaust what he is able to do. A possible world is an instance of what God could possibly do.

In this respect, I agree with Peter Geach.

c) Does God have propositional knowledge? Depends on what you mean.

God has beliefs. True beliefs.

d) Does God literally elect individuals? Yes.

v) What makes any of this anthropomorphic? Unless Prejean is going to take the position that God and man have nothing in common, then the Biblical ascription to God of certain attributes or actions analogous to man does not, of itself, amount to anthropomorphic language.

vi) And, as I said before, Scripture also distinguishes God from man in a variety of ways.

“You have to get your natural theology straight first before you even start trying to obtain an articulate and reasonable theology.”

Is that how the covenant community operated in OT times? Did the priests and prophets, scribes and lawyers begin with natural theology before exegeting the OT? Is that how Jesus and the Apostles reasoned with 1C Jews?

“First, I don't think that presenting philosophical arguments automatically discharges me of responding to exegetical arguments. What it does is render Calvinism infeasible as an alternative for the people I am trying to convince, which are those who consider the historical condemnation of monothelitism authoritative.”

And so, to be consistent, you also apply the historical condemnation of monothelitism to broad swaths of Catholic tradition as well, viz. Scotism, Molinism, & Banezian Thomism, which implicates the Franciscan and Jesuit orders a system of heresy.

Seems to me that that’s more of a problem for Catholicism than Calvinism.

“Frankly, I just use you as examples of what happens when you aren't careful and rigorous in your thinking, and particularly, when you don't have multiple checkpoints in reality for your beliefs. This is why I consider the methodology of putting ‘exegetical theology’ ABOVE ‘philosophical theology’ or ‘historical theology’ necessarily suspect.”

Other issues aside, you do the same thing in reverse by demoting exegetical theology. So your “multiple checkpoints in reality” are not coequal. Revelation takes the hindmost.

“If you can't independently come up with consistent results using all indicia for truth that you consider reliable.”

Reliable for what? If reliable at all, *different* sources of information are reliable consistent with what makes them differ from one another. They are not always equally reliable on the *same* subject, otherwise they wouldn’t be different.

“Second, my argument at Calvinism is targeted against people who would become Calvinists by mistakenly thinking that it was consistent with their beliefs. If someone wants to accept the concept knowingly, if they want to take this concept of Biblical authority, then there is little I can do about it. Lots of people have figured out that their belief in Calvinism was inconsistent with the rest of their beliefs, so that's my target audience.”

So, on your view, our prior beliefs are immune to correction. Revelation should never be in a position to challenge our preconceptions.

“There is no way of identifying what the divine goodness is in your regime other than what God does. You simply affirm, presumably on the strength of revelation, that whatever God reveals to be good is good, but there is no ontological support for the claim, no natural theology as it were. To say that what God does is in accordance with his nature is tautology in your formulation; it's something you affirm without giving any additional content.”

You’re confounding the order of knowing with the order of being. Even if it were tautologous at the epistemic level, that hardly renders it tautologous at the ontological level. So the divine will would not be an arbitrary fiat.

“I point out that Calvin himself rejected the distinction.

i) Calvin did not reject a distinction between the potentia absoluta and the potentia ordinata. What he rejected was theological voluntarism.

ii) And I’d reiterate that Reformed theology is not the sum-total of whatever Calvin believed. “Calvinism” is merely a conventional label for one theological tradition. Calvin is a major representative of Reformed theology, but Calvin is not our Magisterium. Scripture is.

Supposing that another theologian could improve on his formulations, so what?

“Then you ought to have no qualms either with the statement that God's freedom is libertarian (i.e., that he could have done other than He did) and that God not being able to work evil is not a limit on God's omnipotence, since there is no possible world in which God works evil. Good luck explaining how your view allows multiple possible worlds.”

i) I merely distinguish between the power of contrary choice (i.e. between good and evil) and the power of alternative choice (i.e. greater or lesser goods, incommensurable goods). God has the latter, but not the former.

ii) Yet traditional debates over libertarianism include both brands of freedom. And this debate extends to the sphere of divine action. For example, one of the libertarian objections to divine impeccability is that God cannot be praiseworthy unless his liberty includes the power of contrary choice:

http://www.nd.edu/~afreddos/papers/mp.htm

http://www.anselm.edu/library/SAJ/pdf/11Rogers.pdf

http://comp.uark.edu/~efunkho/Omnipotence.pdf

This is why it’s artificial for you and Robinson to excise peccability from the libertarian lexicon.

“Also, I don't reply to Calvinist exegetical arguments because I don't accept the Calvinist position on Scriptural authority, and quite frankly, I don't know why anyone does.”

http://triablogue.blogspot.com/2006/12/prejean-in-bind.html#comments

i) Calvinism doesn’t have a distinctive position on Biblical authority. Rather, it simply codifies the classic Protestant position on Biblical authority—something it shares in common with confessional Lutherans, Evangelical Anglicans, Fundamentalists, and other conservative Evangelicals.

ii) The Reformed doctrine of providence does undergird our doctrine of Scripture in a way that’s not the case with more libertarian traditions.

iii) I’d add that our hermeneutical approach is not essentially different from contemporary Catholic Biblical scholarship, viz., Brown, Fitzmyer, L. T. Johnson.

Where we come to a parting of the ways lies not with the basic methodology (i.e. the grammatico-historical method), but with the authority of the exegetical results.