Quantum Catholicism

Some Catholics cope with Pope Francis by taking the position that even if he's a heretic, that's not too big of a deal so long as his heretical views are just his private option rather than dogma.

But of course, that poses a dilemma. What if Francis makes his heresies official? Then they cease to be heretical. Yesterday's heresy can be tomorrow's orthodoxy while yesterday's orthodoxy can be tomorrow's heresy. 

Catholicism is akin to theological voluntarism in that respect. According to voluntarism, nothing is intrinsically right or wrong. It depends on God's arbitrary fiat.

In Catholicism, something isn't heretical unless it's officially heretical. It's heretical if an ecumenical council condemns it. 

Catholicism is like Schrödinger's cat, suspended in a state of superposition where it's both dead and alive until someone opens the box and peers inside. 

Francis is a heretic until he make it official, at which point it becomes dogma. 

Voluntarism and absolutism

The whole point of religious commitment is that it is ultimate commitment. There are things to which one has given one's whole self, things to which one is absolutely committed. Christianity, as taught not just in verses about not denying Jesus but throughout the whole fabric of the New Testament (and Judaism in the Old) is similarly about absolute commitment of oneself. To the Christian, God, as revealed in the Son, Jesus Christ, is the ultimate value. If we don't have Him, we have nothing. We are therefore willing to die for him, to suffer for him. Nothing else is more important. Literally nothing. Nothing can compete with Him, nothing can take His place.

Posted by Lydia McGrew 

http://whatswrongwiththeworld.net/2017/02/moral_absolutes_and_apostasy.html

Like Anselm says, if God told you not to look in a particular direction, even though by looking you could save the whole world from destruction, you still ought not to look. We are never commanded to love our neighbor by denying God, even only formally, which is a grave sin.

Posted by: Steven Nemeș 

http://maverickphilosopher.typepad.com/maverick_philosopher/2017/02/the-ethical-dilemma-of-sebastian-rodrigues.html?cid=6a010535ce1cf6970c01b7c8d209f0970b#comment-6a010535ce1cf6970c01b7c8d209f0970b

One of the ironies of the reaction to Scorsese's Silence is that some critics, in the name of moral absolutism, take a position on religious duties which borders on theological voluntarism. For instance, we need to be circumspect about using hypotheticals in moral theology. It's child's play to concoct morally outrageous hypotheticals. So the question is how seriously we should take hypothetical scenarios about total devotion. You can make God command or forbid anything in a hypothetical. But that doesn't correspond to actual obligations. Here's one example: "Suppose God ordered you to rape a little girl, cut her tongue out, and set her on fire". 

If I have an unconditional obligation to obey God, then I'm duty-bound to heed that command, right? That's my sacred duty. After all, religious commitment is ultimate commitment. God has an absolute claim on my allegiance. The little girl can't compete with my unrivaled duty to honor God before before all else. 

Problem is, these hypotheticals are just a reflection of human imagination. The fact that we can dream up a divine command doesn't mean it's a pious requirement for me to submit to that injunction if "God" enjoined me to do it, for the God imposing that obligation on me is the God of the hypothetical. A hypothetical God issuing hypothetical commands. That doesn't necessarily or even presumptively map onto a realistic conception of religious duties. 

God's authority isn't absolute in the voluntaristic sense. To the contrary, God's authority is qualified or characterized by his moral attributes. By his wisdom and goodness. That's what makes divine authority a moral authority, rather than sheer dominion. It's striking that even in the limiting case of Abraham and Isaac, God didn't make Abraham go through with it. 

Some critics of Silence are appealing to moral absolutes to decry a symbolic act of desecration, yet they've driven such a wedge between fidelity to God and justice or compassion for the innocent that they subvert the principle that anything is intrinsically right or wrong. Beginning with moral absolutism, the critics wind up defending moral relativism. 

Was Van Til a voluntarist?

(Posted on behalf of Steve.)

Jeremy Pierce 1/17/2016 12:12 AM

I haven't read any Van Til directly, so I don't know where it is, but people I know who have studied him at length have said that he held to the Cartesian view that God created the laws of logic and mathematics and that even the truths we take to be necessary God could have made false. God could have made true contradictions and so on. Voluntarism about ethics follows from that, I think, although I don't know if he explicitly held that. I'm pretty sure Descartes' voluntarism about logic and mathematics is what influenced Locke to hold to voluntarism about ethics. So Van Til is my guess about where this is coming from, anyway, if it's legitimate at all.

Of course, there was that confusing and confused piece from Scot McKnight recently that simply confused Calvinism with voluntarism. It just occurred to me that it might have something to do with that mess.

A few observations:

1. A friend of mine said he only knows one sentence is Van Til's voluminous output which might possibly suggest the Cartesian position:

   The law of contradiction, therefore, as we know it, is but the expression on a created level of the internal coherence of God’s nature. An Introduction to Systematic Theology.

   Even in that case, he doesn't say the law of contradiction is created, but rather, the law of contradiction "as we know it" is created. Seems to me his qualifier is just a variation of the Clark controversy, where Van Til denied that man's knowledge is identical at any point with God's knowledge. So I take the qualifier to be in reference to the human understanding of logic, and not logic itself.

2. Even if Van Til were a Cartesian possibilist, I don't think that would entail ethical voluntarism unless it was combined with divine command theory. On natural law theory, there'd still be right and wrong because human social ethics and individual ethics are, in no small measure, grounded in God's design for human nature. To that extent, ethics is contingent, because human nature is contingent, but it's not relativistic.

   In theory, there could be different ethics for extraterrestrials if their nature (physiology and psychology) is sufficiently different. But it wouldn't be cultural relativism or moral relativism. Given the same nature, the same morality would always be in force. Universal in time and place for that kind of creature.

3. Finally, I ran this by John Frame, who replied:

   I’m quite sure that VT was not a voluntarist.

   There are three alternatives: (1) logic is above God, (2) logic is created by God, and (3) logic is an aspect of the divine nature.

   In his various polemics, VT often opposed (1).

   He was less clear on (2), but he was critical of the classic “voluntarist” philosophers like Duns Scotus. His basic picture was that (1) is rationalist, (2) is irrationalist, leaving (3) as the biblical alternative.

   Of course, he didn’t want to say with Clark that “logic is God,” so his witness to (3) was blunted somewhat.

   [JF: better to say that yes, logic is God; but mercy, justice, wisdom, eternity, are also God—i.e. God from various perspectives.]

   He should have been more careful in his thinking on this matter which was, unfortunately, distorted by intra-Reformed polemics.

Calvinism, voluntarism, and the same God debate

On Lydia McGrew's "same God" post for TGC, I notice at least a couple of commenters asserting that "a substantial school of Calvinist thought employs moral voluntarism"–or words to that effect. Now, it's common for opponents of Calvinism to make that charge, but how do these commenters define voluntarism? What makes them think Calvinism is voluntaristic? Calvin himself was a critic of voluntarism. For instance:

http://paulhelmsdeep.blogspot.com/2008/02/will-of-calvins-god-can-god-be-trusted.html

Was Calvin A Voluntarist?

Over at Vic Reppert's blog, he and others often lob this charge against Calvin and Calvinists alike.

In this paper, Michael Sudduth blows this charge out of the water.

Sudduth quotes Calvin:

Calvin writes:

That Sarbonic dogma, therefore, in the promulgation of which the Papal theologians so much pride themselves, “that the power of God is absolute and tyrannical,” I utterly abhor. For it would be easier to force away the light of the sun from his heat, or his heat from his fire, than to separate the power of God from His justice. Away, then, with all such monstrous speculations from godly minds, as that God can possibly do more, or otherwise, than He has done, or that He can do anything without the highest order and reason. For I do not receive that other dogma, “that God, as being free from all law Himself, may do anything without being subject to any blame for doing so.” For whosoever makes God without law, robs Him of the greatest part of His glory, because he spoils Him of His rectitude and justice. Not that God is, indeed, subject to any law, excepting in so far as He is a law unto Himself. But there is that inseparable connection and harmony between the power of God and His justice, that nothing can possibly be done by Him but what is moderate, legitimate, and according to the strictest rule of right. And most certainly, when the faithful speak of God as omnipotent, they acknowledge Him at the same time to be the Judge of the world, and always hold His power to be righteously tempered with equity and justice.[24] (Emphasis Sudduth's)