Showing posts with label Alexander Pruss. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Alexander Pruss. Show all posts
Monday, July 20, 2020
Thursday, January 30, 2020
The argument from beauty and the argument from numbers
Among other things, Pruss sketches two arguments for God's existence: the argument from beauty and the argument from math:
http://alexanderpruss.blogspot.com/2020/01/wilde-lectures-now-online.html
http://alexanderpruss.blogspot.com/2020/01/wilde-lectures-now-online.html
Tuesday, October 08, 2019
Life for life
One of the most moving stories in Rosenbaum’s deeply moving Holocaust and the Halakhah tells of how one can be a great moral hero even when acting out of mistaken conscience. A man in a concentration camp comes to his rabbi with a problem. His son has been scheduled to be executed. But it is possible to bribe the kapo to get him off the death list. However, the kapo have a quota to fill, and if they let off his son, they will kill another child. Is it permissible to bribe the kapo knowing that this will result in the death of another child? The rabbi answers that, of course, it is permissible. The man goes away, but he is not convinced. He does not bribe the kapo. Instead, he concludes that God has called him to the great sacrifice of not shifting his son’s death onto another. The father finds a joy in the sacrifice amidst his mourning.The rabbi was certainly right. The father’s conscience presumably was mistaken (unless God specifically spoke to him and required the sacrifice). Yet the father is a moral hero in acting from this mistaken conscience.
i) I disagree with Pruss. All things being equal, it's certainly permissible or even obligatory for the father to bribe the kapo to save the life of his innocent young son. And that principle could be extended to protecting innocent lives generally.
ii) If there are two drowning children, one of whom is yours, it's permissible or even obligatory to save your own. You have a greater duty to your own dependents, despite the tragedy to the other child.
But this hypothetical has greater moral complexity. It isn't just a question of whether the prima facie vice of bribery can be overridden. That's a separate issue. Considered in isolation, sometimes that's justifiable or incumbent. Bribery is not intrinsically wrong.
But by bribing the kapo, the father would knowingly facilitate child murder. He is collaborating with the child-killers. He becomes a part of that moral and causal nexus.
So the rabbi was most certainly wrong while the father was most certainly right. Although it would be psychologically understandable if the father did that, and there are mitigating factors, the deed remains objectively heinous.
iii) Mind you, this assumes we inhabit a moral universe where there's at least one right course of action open to us. That requires a strong doctrine of providence. If, on the other hand, reality confronts us with genuine moral dilemmas, then we're on our own.
Friday, October 04, 2019
Nature, nurture, body and soul
According to simple dualism, our immaterial souls are the bearers of our mental states and we are these souls. We have bodies, but the bodies are not parts of us. We are wholly immaterial.
I think the relationship between body and soul is analogous to the nature/nurture dynamic. Our nature, both in terms of our generic human nature as well as our individual character traits, constitute our core identity. And that's like the soul. We can survive without the body but we can't survive without the soul. The soul is a synonym for our minds, stocked with memories.
But although the soul is the bearer or repository of memory, it's not the source of memory. The source of memory is typically embodied experience.
Nurture modifies nature. Although nature isn't a blank slate, there are different ways we might turn out, depending on differing experiences. Although experiences are fed into the soul, they don't originate in the soul.
Moreover, we are, by design, engineered to function as embodied agents. That's the native medium of the soul.
To take another comparison: memories are a key feature of personal identity, yet that's a matter of degree. Up to a point we can add or lose memories without ceasing to be the same individual. But a memory wipe would reset the kind of person you are.
By the same token, we can lose our bodies but still exist. Yet the content of the soul is in part the end-result of embodied experience. Of memories and formative influences.
To take one more illustration: suppose you're a brain in a vat with minimal external stimulus. Say you can perceive the outside world, but you can't interact with the outside world. It goes one way. You're only on the receiving end. That's frustrating–even maddening. More realistically, it's like a severely disabled person whose mind and senses are intact, but they are imprisoned in a dysfunctional body. They can't communicate with others or act on their environment.
Wednesday, August 21, 2019
Pruss on divine simplicity
Alexander Pruss is the smartest Catholic philosopher of his generation, so if anyone can successfully defend divine simplicity, he can:
The Fourth Lateran Council teaches that God is a “substantia seu natura simplex omnino”—an “altogether simple substance or nature”—and the First Vatican Council reiterated the teaching. The doctrine of divine simplicity is at the center of Thomas’s natural theology, since it is essentially involved in his attempt to show that the First Cause that he has proved to exist in the Five Ways has the appropriate divine attributes.
From a Catholic standpoint, the doctrine is partly grounded in ecclesiastical authority and partly grounded in natural reason.
The doctrine claims that there is no ontological composition in God of any sort, whether of matter and form, or of essence and accident, or of this attribute and that attribute considered as ontologically distinct. The doctrine is a traditional part of Christianity and Judaism, though I understand that Islam may have ultimately rejected it.
So that's what he's defending.
Thursday, July 25, 2019
Boccaccio's argument for the Catholic faith
There are three basic problems with the argument:
i) Why couldn't a Muslim redeploy the same argument to defend Islam? Despite all the corruption, Islam has flourished for centuries.
ii) Pruss sees continuity through rose-tinted glasses. Many observers see a dramatic lack of diachronic consistency in Catholic teaching over the centuries.
iii) It's spiritually pernicious and morally subversive to turn pervasive corruption into evidence for the true religion. The more evil it is, the truer it is. That's diabolically clever.
BTW, the combox has some interesting exchanges.
Thursday, February 28, 2019
Sunday, February 03, 2019
Catholic vampires
This is a sequel to my previous post:
Recently, Catholic polymath Alexander Pruss defended transubstantiation. I did my initial post when only the slides were available. However, an audio recording is now available:
Having heard it, I'll make some supplementary observations:
1. In reference to Jn 6, he says the symbolic interpretation means Jesus gives us symbolic eternal life. But that's confused. On the symbolic interpretation, Jesus gives us real eternal life, which is symbolized by the manna/bread/flesh/blood imagery.
2. He says that in biblical symbolism, reality symbolizes reality, a miracle symbolizes a miracle. If communion is just a symbolic consumption of Christ's body, then it's circular–symbolizing itself. He says the merely symbolic interpretation suffers from a false dichotomy. But, once again, that's confused:
i) There's the complicated question of what makes something symbolic. Symbolism involves a kind of correspondence between two (or more) things, but that can operate at different levels. Two things can be similar at the level of resemblance. Or function. Or the same kind of thing.
ii) Suppose the eucharist is a miracle (i.e. transubstantiation). Yet it symbolizes the crucifixion. But the crucifixion is not a miracle. So his comparison breaks down even if we grant the Catholic interpretation regarding the first element of the comparison.
iii) Is Jesus both a literal lamb and a symbolic lamb? A literal lion and a symbolic lion? A real vine and a symbolic vine? A real star (Venus) and a symbolic star? Is the church both a physical body and a symbolic body? Is the bride/bridegroom relation between Jesus and the church both literal and figurative? When scripture compares judgment to a winepress, is that both literal and figurative? There are so many counterexamples to Pruss's claim.
3. He interprets Mt 28:20 ("I'm with you always") eucharistically, yet there's nothing in the text or context that clues the reader into a eucharistic allusion.
4. He compares it to divine omnipresence. But even if we grant his interpretation of divine omnipresence (I don't), God isn't multiply present in the same way the physical body of Christ is said to be multiply-present.
5. He says there's no philosophical consensus on what it means to be present, so it can't be said that transubstantiation is contradictory. But that's a self-defeating way to defend transubstantiation:
i) If we don't know what it means for something to be present, then Catholics have no clear idea of what they're affirming when they profess transubstantiation. Words without a definable concept behind the words. In that event, they don't profess anything. They say something, but there's nothing in the mind which the words represent.
ii) The Bible can rely on a coarse-grained, common sense notion of presence. A pretheoretical concept drawn from paradigm examples in human experience. That will suffice to provide a concept that backs up the verbal claim. But unfortunately for the Catholic, the real presence is nonsensical on a common sense definition. So the dilemma remains.
6. Pruss has some interesting comparisons between Christian theology, which accentuates the importance of the body (e.g. Incarnation, resurrection, sexual mores) and modern gnostics who think sexual morality is reducible to feelings and psychology. Who hope to achieve immortality by uploading consciousness into a computer and leaving the body behind. Digital immortality. He thinks the real presence reflects a contrary outlook.
Yet the real presence is a counterproductive way to showcase the importance of the body. By his own reckoning, the real presence is imperceptible and indetectable. An empirical illusion. It drives a wedge between appearance and reality. Our eyes, hands, and tongue tell us one thing while the underlying reality is deceptively different.
7. He uses a time-travel thought-experiment, where, if I could to back in time, I could shake hands with my younger self. Perhaps, but that depends on particular theories of time and personal identity. Do I still exist in the past? Am I chronologically separable into multiple selves that can exist apart from each other and come into contact with each other? Can temporal stages of me, separated by intervening phases, skip over the intervening phases and circle back? Even if I exist all along the continuum, does that mean I can also exist discontinuously, so that one stage of me can coexist with another stage of me, from different parts of the continuum? Surely that's not something Pruss is entitled to posit, without a detailed argument.
Thursday, December 13, 2018
Monday, November 19, 2018
Eating God
Alexander Pruss recently gave a talk at the Thomistic Institute defending transubstantiation:
Pruss is probably the most brilliant Catholic philosopher of his generation, so this is the best defense of the real presence that you're likely to encounter. It's always good to evaluate the strongest case for something. In fairness, only the slides are available, so some of his supporting arguments may be missing, but I can only comment on what's available.
He likes to discuss transubstantiation because it's philosophically challenging, which appeals to his ambidextrous mind. There is, though, the danger of misplaced ingenuity.
He likes to discuss transubstantiation because it's philosophically challenging, which appeals to his ambidextrous mind. There is, though, the danger of misplaced ingenuity.
Thursday, July 12, 2018
Friday, December 08, 2017
Pruss on God's simplicity
Some modern-day Calvinists are touting Thomistic simplicity. I'd like to partially interact with a sophisticated defense of divine simplicity:
The Fourth Lateran Council teaches that God is a “substantia seu natura simplex omnino”—an “altogether simple substance or nature”—and the First Vatican Council reiterated the teaching.
So faithful Catholics have to defend divine simplicity. Good thing Protestants aren't saddled with that precommitment.
The doctrine of divine simplicity had better not say that mercy and justice, in general, are one and the same property. For that would make meaningless a claim that a friend of ours had exhibited more mercy than justice in some situation.
i) I agree. However, it's hard to see how Pruss's denial in this regard differentiates his position from critics of simplicity like Frame, Craig, Plantinga, and Feinberg. Although he's defending simplicity, what he says here is consistent with what critics say.
ii) His position seems to be different from how simplicity is typically formulated by exponents. From what I've read, it's, in part, an inference. They infer that if God is identical with his attributes, then his attributes are mutually identical. The inference seems to be that if B is identical with A, and C is identical with A, then B is identical with C.
Pruss is at liberty to dissent from that inference or formulation and strike out on his own, but in that respect he appears to be defending simplicity by taking issue with how that's typically expounded.
Rather, the claim is that God’s mercy and God’s justice are the same ontologically. What makes it be true that Socrates is just? Surely it is something about Socrates, something that we might reasonably denote by “Socrates’ justice”, id est “that in virtue of which Socrates is just”. Socrates’ justice is not the same as Plato’s justice, because if they were the same, then the same thing would make it be true that Socrates is just as would make it be true that Plato is just. But if that were so, then it would follow that, necessarily, if Socrates is just, then that in virtue of which Plato is just exists, and hence Plato is just.The claim that God’s being merciful and God’s being just are identical is, I take it, the claim that the ontological basis of God’s being merciful is identical with the ontological basis of God’s being just. Or, in the above terminology, it is simply the claim that God’s justice is identical with God’s mercy. This does not entail that Cato’s justice is identical with Mother Teresa’s mercy, or even that Mother Teresa’s justice is identical with Mother Teresa’s mercy.
i) That's a coherent distinction. However, critics of simplicity could draw the same distinction. So I don't see how his distinction differentiates his position from those who deny simplicity. His explanation appears to be equally consonant with denying simplicity.
ii) In fact, I don't see how his distinction is even related to the claim that "there is no ontological composition in God of any sort, whether of matter and form, or of essence and accident, or of this attribute and that attribute considered as ontologically distinct."
Even if his distinction is consistent with divine simplicity, how is that relevant to the question at hand? After all, his own analogy involves comparing attribute-agreement in and between composite beings: Plato and Socrates, Cato and Mother Teresa. How does his distinction demarcate an incomposite God from a composite God like Zeus? Couldn't a Greek polytheist say Zeus's justice is not the same as Cato's justice?
If Curley freely chooses to take the bribe, then there is some time at which it was causally possible that he not take the bribe if offered it. Moreover, there is a time after which this is no longer causally possible—the choice has been made. Let t be the earliest time with the property that after t it is no longer causally possible that Curley take the bribe. There is such a time. Before this time, Curley’s rejection of the bribe is causally open and after this time it is causally closed. Moreover, I will assume that this time t is associated with Curley’s decision to take the bribe. The decision happens at t. This is an assumption that might not hold, for it might be that at t Curley made some earlier libertarian-free decision, for example a decision to do whatever it takes to get ahead financially, which causally necessitated that he eventually make a causally determined decision to take the bribe. In that case, the bribe-taking arguably inherits its freedom from the freedom of that earlier decision. But if we are to avoid a vicious regress, we will come to some decision with the property that the decision is made precisely at a time t such that after that time some deed is causally determined as far as Curley is concerned and before it it was not. This might not in fact be the decision to accept the bribe, but for simplicity I will assume it is.Thus, at t there was a branching. Before t it was possible for Curley still to reject the bribe and after t this was no longer possible. There are now two models of free will. On the first model, one accepted by Nuel Belnap among others, at t the branching has not yet happened: it is still causally possible for Curley to reject the bribe. It is only at t+d (for any d>0) that this is no longer possible. The time t is the last time at which matters are still open. On the second model, at t the branching has already happened: t is the first time at which matters are no longer open. I could give the argument for both cases, but that would make this talk unduly long. Instead, I will assume the first version to be correct, and for the purposes of making the talk self contained, I will say that for aught that we know, the first version is correct, and that should be all I need for my conclusions. Anyway, similar arguments apply in the second case, but are more complicated.Thus, at t Curley is deciding, but it is not yet true that he has decided. Let S be Curley’s state at t, i.e., the conjunction of all of Curley’s purely intrinsic properties at t (or, if we wish, the conjunction of all purely intrinsic properties occurrent up to and including time t). This state S occurs both in the actual world where Curley takes the bribe and in a possible world where he refuses it—I will call such a world “the alternate world”. Now, at any moment of time after t, the actual and the alternate worlds have already diverged. Curley has already done something: something he is morally responsible for. Perhaps his hand has not yet reached out for the money; maybe his enraged voice has not begun to refuse the bribe. But he is now in a state such that he is set to take or is set to refuse the bribe. (I am simplifying of course by assuming he can’t also temporize.) A deed has been done: his will has set into motion a causal chain leading up to the taking or the refusing of the bribe. Now the important thing to note is that the cause of the two different causal chains, the one in the actual world and the one in the alternate world, is the same as concerns intrinsic properties. Or the cause is Curley at t in state S. Since this state contains all of Curley’s intrinsic properties at t, and these are the same in the actual and the alternate world, it follows that we have one and the same person in one and the same intrinsic state being in one world responsible for setting into motion one causal chain and in another, another.But this seems to severely undercut the objection to divine simplicity based on the contingency of what God chooses. For we now see that one and the same person in one the same state could be in a position to initiate either of two incompatible causal chains. Moreover, note that Curley’s actual deciding was at t. During the deciding itself there was no difference in his intrinsic properties between the actual and the alternate worlds. The difference only appeared extrinsically to the decision, though as a result of the decision.
While his analysis is interesting in its own right, I don't see how that solves the problem. Doesn't a different result require a differential will? So we have to take the explanation back a step.
Wednesday, August 30, 2017
Wednesday, December 21, 2016
Thieves and crocodiles
Alice has tools in a shed and sees a clearly unarmed thief approaching the shed. She knows she is in no danger of her life or limb—she can easily move away from the thief—but points a gun at the thief and shouts: “Stop or I’ll shoot to kill.” The thief doesn’t stop. Alice fulfills the threat and kills the thief.Bob has a farm of man-eating crocodiles and some tools he wants to store safely. He places the tools in a shed in the middle of the crocodile farm, in order to dissuade thieves. The farm is correctly marked all-around “Man-eating crocodiles”, and the crocodiles are quite visible to all and sundry. An unarmed thief breaks into Bob’s property attempting to get to his tool shed, but a crocodile eats him on the way.Regardless of what local laws may say, Alice is a murderer. In fulfilling the threat, by definition she intended to kill the thief who posed no danger to life or limb. (The case might be different if the tools were needed for Alice to survive, but even then I think she shouldn’t intend death.) What about Bob? Well, there we don’t know what the intentions are. Here are two possible intentions:
- Prospective thieves are dissuaded by the presence of the man-eating crocodiles, but as a backup any that not dissuaded are eaten.
- Prospective thieves are dissuaded by the presence of the man-eating crocodiles.
If Bob’s intention is (1), then I think he’s no different from Alice.
I disagree with Pruss that Bob is guilty of murder under that scenario. I don't know if Pruss draws that conclusion based on Catholic moral theology or his own moral intuition. If intuitive, I don't share his intuition.
Indeed, I think this might illustrate how God can be the remote cause of something without being culpable.
The thief attempts to steal the tools at his own risk. Surely there's no obligation to make thievery safe. Surely Bob is under no obligation to protect the thief from harm. The set-up by itself doesn't put the thief in mortal danger. Rather, the thief puts himself in mortal danger by assuming a risk. In that respect it's different from a mantrap, which the unwary don't detect until it's too late. They never knew what hit them. But in this case, the hazard is in plain sight, and they defy the hazard, at their own cost.
Wednesday, September 23, 2015
Wednesday, May 20, 2015
Friday, February 20, 2015
Wednesday, May 14, 2014
Simplicity is complicated
Alexander Pruss has been commenting on a post of mine. I'll reproduce our exchange, then respond to his latest comment, as well as a follow-up post of his:
Alexander R Pruss
Even on Calvinism we have the problem of how God knows what he decided to do. God's decisions are contingent. Do they affect God? Then we seem to get a violation of immutability or at least simplicity. An extrinsic model of divine beliefs, on which his beliefs about contingent things are partly constituted by the contingent truths, solves all the problems.
steve
If those contingent truths are dependent on what humans will freely do (in the libertarian sense), then isn't God's knowledge (of those contingent truths) affected by our choices (pace impassibility)?
Seems to me that you're now resorting to an idiosyncratic definition of impassibility. That's why I quoted from Brian Davies (the 3rd ed. of his intro to the philosophy of religion, p5).
So you're shifting ground from your original argument.
The fact that God's knowledge of his own decisions is "contingent" on his own decisions is entirely consistent with God being unaffected by the *world*.
And in what sense would he be *affected* by knowing what he decided to do? It's not as if there's a shift between prior ignorance and subsequent knowledge. If God is timeless, it's not even that he knew what he was going to decide before he made his decision. Rather, there was no prior state or prior moment of indecision in the first place. So God hasn't undergone any change by that relation.
How is a violation of simplicity equivalent to a violation of impassibility?
On the face of it, doesn't your statement that God's decisions are contingent violate divine simplicity? Given divine simplicity, aren't God's decisions as essential or necessary as God in himself?
- It's true that those who are Calvinists in the strongest sense of thinking that we have no alternate possibilities ever (one could be a Calvinist in a weaker sense of thinking that we have no alternate possibilities with respect to salvation, but we have alternate possibilities with respect to less significant actions) don't have the impassibility problem. But Calvinists still have the problem that they have to admit that there is an order of explanation in God, even if not of time: first in the order of explanation comes a contingent divine decision (unless one takes Edwards' view that God's own actions are determined--which leads to trouble for omnipotence and God's sovereignty over his own actions) and then comes his belief that he has so decided.
- Likewise, Calvinists who, like Calvin and Turretin, believe in divine simplicity -- and there is certainly good reason for them to do so -- will still have the problem.
steve
I disagree with Edwards on that point. However, doesn't simplicity have the same consequences?
If God is actus purus, if there's no unrealized potentialities in God, then aren't all divine decisions and actions necessary/necessitated?
Likewise, if even divine decisions or actions are identical with God's essence, then God has no contingent relations, but only essential relations. So, once again, aren't all divine decisions and actions necessary/necessitated?
Alexander R Pruss5/12/2014 10:09 AM
It's true that those who are Calvinists in the strongest sense of thinking that we have no alternate possibilities ever (one could be a Calvinist in a weaker sense of thinking that we have no alternate possibilities with respect to salvation, but we have alternate possibilities with respect to less significant actions) don't have the impassibility problem.
i) Pruss has now conceded that his original argument, based on impassibility, fails against Calvinism.
ii) BTW, what he calls "strong Calvinism" just is Calvinism. That every event is predestined is normative, mainstream Calvinism.
There are some scholars like Muller and Crisp who are trying to broaden the definition of Calvinism. But I think their personal sympathies betray them into historical revisionism.
iii) Just to be clear, Calvinism doesn't deny alternate possibilities. What it denies is that humans can access alternate possibilities. That's not to deny that there are alternative possibilities which inhere in God, possibilities which God could access, had he so chosen.
But Calvinists still have the problem that they have to admit that there is an order of explanation in God, even if not of time: first in the order of explanation comes a contingent divine decision (unless one takes Edwards' view that God's own actions are determined--which leads to trouble for omnipotence and God's sovereignty over his own actions) and then comes his belief that he has so decided.
I don't see how that's a problem. There's a sense in which some divine beliefs are logically dependent on other divine beliefs. It's a necessary truth that every blue object is a colored object. Is that timeless order of explanation theologically problematic? If that's not a problem of necessary truths, why is that a problem for contingent truths?
iv) In your post, moreover, you admit that "Thomists, and presumably some Calvinists as well, can reduce (3) to (2): God's decision is identical with his knowledge of his decision." So doesn't that dissolve the (allegedly) problematic distinction?
v) There are some philosophers who deny that God even has beliefs. They have a specialized conception of what it means to have beliefs.
Likewise, Calvinists who, like Calvin and Turretin, believe in divine simplicity -- and there is certainly good reason for them to do so -- will still have the problem.
We need to unpack simplicity:
i) God has no spatiotemporal parts.
ii) There is no essence/existence distinction in God.
iii) God is not an instance of his attributes. God is the exemplar. He doesn't exemplify abstract properties.
iv) There is no potential/actual distinction in God.
v) There is no metaphysical complexity in God. Each attribute is identical with every other attribute.
Speaking for myself, I grant (i-iii).
(iv) needs to be finessed to preserve divine freedom. For instance, God is actually omnipotent, but the exercise of divine omniscience is selective. Hence, there are unrealized potentials. Unexemplified possibilities.
I'm dubious about (v). For one thing, the distinction between justice and mercy is essential to Calvinism.
(v) is in prima facie tension with divine freedom, and with the Trinity. There's also the question of whether it's even coherent.
The appeal of (v) is that it automatically yields other values like divine timelessness. However, one can have divine timelessness without the baggage of simplicity.
Moreover, that raises the question of whether simplicity really makes a distinctive contribution to the discussion. Is it something over and above the attributes it conglomerates? Or is it just an umbrella term?
Even if we make both of these controversial moves, we still have the distinction between God's essential nature and his contingent decisions (which are then identical with his knowledge of the decisions and his knowledge of creatures' responses thereto).
Isn't that distinction necessary to maintain divine freedom?
For those Christians who are unimpressed by the strength of the traditional commitments (in the pre-Reformation tradition, but also in people like Calvin and Turretin) to divine simplicity, and the arguments for divine simplicity, the natural solution will appear to be to deny divine simplicity, and then not worry about the problem.
Several issues:
i) We need to distinguish between Reformed distinctive and Reformed essentials on the one hand, and Reformed traditions which are a carryover from the pre-Reformation church. Because Calvinism is historically conditioned, like every theological tradition, some elements of the traditional Reformed package are "historical accidents." They are not essential (much less unique) to Calvinism.
ii) So it's a question of theological priorities. If, say, simplicity is in tension with divine freedom, what gives? In the web of Calvinism, what is central and what is peripheral? In my opinion, divine freedom is more important than divine simplicity. If a Calvinist were to sacrifice divine simplicity (i.e. God is devoid of metaphysical complexity), I don't think he's lost anything essential to Calvinism. Divine simplicity is not, from what I can tell, a revealed truth. And it's not a sine qua non of Calvinism.
Calvinism largely overlaps with classical theism, but that package isn't logically tight in every respect.
They should still worry about the problem. For if one denies divine simplicity and holds that God has at least the two distinct constituents: his essential nature, N, and his contingent decisions, D, then one has to say something about the relationship between these two. Clearly, D is in some way explained by N: God acts as he does in part because of his essentially perfectly good character. The explanation is not a grounding-type explanation—to make it be a grounding-type explanation would be to hold on to a version of a divine simplicity explanation. In creatures, the corresponding explanation of decisions would be causal: the character causes (deterministically or not) the decision. So it seems that we have something very much like a causal relationship between N and D. And this in turn makes D be very much like a creature, indeed perhaps literally a creature. Since D is a constituent of God, it follows that a constituent of God is very much like a creature, perhaps literally a creature. But this surely contradicts transcendence!
Now perhaps one can insist that the relationship between N and D while being akin to causation is sufficiently different from it that D is sufficiently different from a creature that we have no violation of transcendence. Maybe, but I am still worried.
So if I am right, even if one denies divine simplicity, a version of the problem remains. And so the problem may not be a problem specifically for divine simplicity.
i) I think this analysis has it backwards. If simplicity is true, God's decision is identical with his knowledge of his decision. However, even if simplicity is false, it can still be the case that God's decision is identical with his knowledge of his decision. I don't see that particular claim requires simplicity in general.
ii) There's a difference between God acting consistent with his goodness and his goodness necessitating his action. To say God can't act contrary to his goodness is not to say his goodness singles out one particular course of action.
iii) Must a dependence relation be cashed out in terms of causation? A triangle is dependent on its three-sideness. But it would be eccentric to claim the three sides cause a triangle. Although a triangle is constituted by its three-sideness, that's not a causal relation, that I can see.
Same thing with logical implication. The conclusion is dependent on the premises. But that's not a causal relation.
Pruss might object that I'm using abstract objects to illustrate my point, whereas he's referring to truth of fact rather than truths of reason.
To begin with, since contingent relations are the point in dispute, I'm using abstract objects in contrast to contingent relations because we need a different kind of comparison to avoid the issue in contention. And I'm using that to make the point that a dependence relation is not inherently causal.
iv) One issue is whether causation involves time. Even if the cause is timeless, the effect is temporal. If, however, the relation is timeless, is it still meaningful to define it as causal?
v) Take the teleology of the divine decree. If vicarious atonement is a precondition of divine forgiveness, then you have a means-ends explanatory order. Forgiveness is contingent on vicarious atonement. A dependence relation. Specifically, a teleological relation. But the teleological order isn't, itself, causal, even if it will be implemented in a cause/effect relation.
vi) Take the Father's knowledge of the Son? Isn't that dependent on there being a Son to know? Does the object of the Father's knowledge cause the Father's knowledge?
vii) Finally, as a friend of mine pointed out, faithful Catholics are committed to the eternal generation of the Son and the eternal procession of the Spirit. But by Pruss's argument, doesn't that dependence relation make the Son and Spirit "creatures" of the Father?
BTW, there are Calvinists (e.g. Warfield, Helm, Frame) who reject the monarchy of the Father.
Saturday, May 10, 2014
Pruss on God's knowledge of the past
Commenting on a post of mine, Dr. Pruss draws attention to an interesting symmetry between God's knowledge of the future and the past:
Alexander R Pruss5/09/2014 6:00 PM
I think it is deeply puzzling how God knows our future free choices. But it is no more puzzling than the deeply puzzling question of how God knows our past free choices. The problem in both cases is this: How can our actions affect the beliefs of a transcendent being? Whether our actions are in the past or in the future makes no difference here.
(Now, granted, on growing block theories there is a difference, in that past actions and past persons (if there are any persons who don't exist forever) are real and future ones aren't. But on both presentism and eternalism there is ontological symmetry between past actions/persons and future actions/persons. And growing block is false. :-) )
http://triablogue.blogspot.com/2014/05/when-smoke-clears.html?showComment=1399672858245#c296346453717369103
I believe he's alluding to divine impassibility, which Brian Davies defines as "not able to be causally modified by an external agent," "God cannot be altered by anything a creature does."
To flesh this out, I think Pruss is suggesting a paradoxical trilemma:
i) Humans have libertarian freedom
ii) God is impassible (i.e. can't be affected by the world)
iii) God knows our past and future choices
I say that's a paradoxical trilemma because Pruss presumably affirms the truth of all three propositions.
In reponse:
1. A Calvinist will relieve the trilemma by denying (i).
From my perspective, it's a false trilemma.
2. Jerry Walls will relieve the trilemma by denying (ii-iii).
3. Where revealed truths generate an apparent contradiction, I think appeal to mystery or paradox is legit. That's an argument from authority (revelation), which is legit so long as the authority is legit.
But I don't think human libertarian freedom is a revealed truth. At best, it's a philosophical construct. So it can't take refuge in an argument from authority. It stands or falls at the bar of reason.
Worse, I think human libertarian freedom contradicts revealed truths regarding predestination, meticulous providence, divine hardening, &c.
In Calvinism, God knows our past and future choices because he predestined them. That doesn't generate any tension with impassibility, for God is affecting the creature, rather than vice versa.
In Calvinism, God knows our past and future choices because he predestined them. That doesn't generate any tension with impassibility, for God is affecting the creature, rather than vice versa.
Monday, May 05, 2014
Pruss on ID theory
It's striking to compare the knee-jerk animosity of some Catholic philosophers and scientists to ID theory with the nuanced assessment of Catholic philosopher Alexander Pruss:
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