Tim's Blog

Thoughts and Questions on Classical Metaphysics

2011-10-03T13:13:00.000-05:00

Over the past summer I have been making a new effort to understand and appreciate classical metaphysics. I just finished reading Aquinas on Being and Essence: a Translation and Interpretation by Joseph Bobick, and prior to that I read all the way through Aristotle's Physics. I learned things from each book, and cleared up a few difficulties, but I also sharpened some of the difficulties I have with the Aristotelian/Thomistic "perennial" philosophy.

From this reading of Aristotle I picked up the following:
1. Clarification: The meaning of the definition, "time is the number of motion," is that time is that aspect of motion in virtue of which it can be measured. In other words, for Aristotle time is the numerability of motion.

2. Difficulty: Why think that time is an aspect of motion, rather than motion being an aspect of time? Or to put it another way, does time presuppose motion, or does motion presuppose time? I find the latter position to be more intuitive, and I suspect many, if not most, people would agree. This would also seem to be the position of Dooyeweerd, for whom time is the "bottom layer" of created reality, underlying every kind of meaning. And Husserl as well, for whom internal time consciousness is the deepest structure of consciousness.

3. Clarification: Because Aristotle thinks of time as an aspect of motion, for him something that does not move is not in time. Thus it seems that for him, timelessness simply means immutability, and a thing can be said to be timeless even though it exists along with temporal things. So for example, his Unmoved Mover is a timeless being despite its being part of, or in immediate spatial contact with, the otherwise temporal universe. This, to me, sheds some light on Boethius's description of divine timelessness, according to which all moments of time are present to the timeless God. Althougth Boethius works with Augustine's idea of a timeless eternal present as contrasted with endless duration for his notion of eternity, perhaps he continues to think in Aristotelian terms about time itself. Contemporary philosophers have found it difficult to articulate how there might be a kind of simultaneity between all temporal events and a timeless eternal present, and perhaps this is because we do not share Aristotle's notion of time.

From the Bobick commentary I picked up the following:
1. Clarification: For Thomas, there are levels of actuality, and matter is to some extent a relative term. That is, a matter-form composite substance can be as matter to a further form. In the course I took on Aristotle's Metaphysics, I remember this being an issue that is unclear in Aristotle, with some philosophers interpreting him to ultimately imply that only living things are truly substances. But for Thomas, it is clear that matter never exists without some form, that at bottom the quantitative-spatial form of matter is the most basic substantial form, and greater actualities build on that.

2. Clarification: "Absolute" is a third kind of existence in addition to individual and universal. I had long thought that Thomas' doctrine was that God is a universal being, and that out intellectual grasp of essences is simply a grasp of universals. But Bobick says that "God is being" (as opposed to "God is a being") means that God is absolute being, and that we ordinarily consider essences as absolute (132). We consider things as universal only by means of our logical intentions.

3. Clarification: I now see that the claim that God is his existence does not contradict, but rather expresses the meaning of the claim that we cannot know his essence. To say that God's essence is his existence is not to explicate what that essence consists of, but rather it is to say that his essence is not distinguishable from his existence. It is something like Forest Gump's saying, "stupid is as stupid does." God is what he is. I better appreciate now why classical philosophers thought that this metaphysical conclusion expresses the meaning of YHWH, "I am that I am."

4. Difficulty: Bobick says that for Thomas (whether for Aristotle too I am not sure) quantified matter is three-dimensionally quantified. (This kind of matter is also designated matter and the principle of individuation.) Apparently, for Thomas, to be quantified is to be spatial, and to be spatial is to be quantified. I have great difficulty with this equation of quantification and spatiality.

To me it seems to be a conflation, for the meaning of quantity and the meaning of spatiality are readily distinguishable. Numbers are not as such spatial beings, and figures are not as such numbered--arithmetic does not require geometry, and geometry does not require arithmetic. I would say that any real thing with spatial properties must have quantitative properties, for real space does presuppose quantitative meaning, e.g. any line segment in the real world must have a determinate length. But the reverse is not the case. Numbers are not, and do not imply, spatial extensions.

For Thomas this notion seems to serve as a crucial, unargued assumption in the argument that the intelligences (angels) do not have matter. Bobick explains that since matter of itself is indivisible, if the intelligences had matter, then that matter would have to be quantified to be divisible (among different individuals), but since quantified matter is corporeal matter, then the intelligences would have to be corporeal, which everyone denies (140). For my part, I see no reason why the intelligences could not have a quantified, non-corporeal matter as part of their composition.

For me there is a further theological difficulty here as well. For Thomas, since angels are immaterial, they are also immutable, like God. But Scripture describes them engaging in all kinds of temporal activity. Indeed, I daresay there is not a hint in Scripture of this idea of immutable intelligences whose essences are their degrees of knowledge.

"The Commandments of [Government] Men"

2011-09-30T13:16:00.002-05:00

The message of the Bible is deeply political. This has become more apparent to me than ever in recent months. I have understood for a long time that the Bible speaks to politics, i.e. that some of its teachings concern the political sphere. What has become more apparent to me is how central politics is to the whole Biblical message.

This was brought home to me most recently by an NASB footnote to a well-known verse in Isaiah that Jesus applied to the Pharisees. The political aspect of this prophecy is obscured by our translations.

Jesus said of the Pharisees, quoting Isaiah 29:13,

This people draweth nigh unto me with their mouth, and honoureth me with their
lips; but their heart is far from me.
But in vain they do worship me, teaching for doctrines the commandments of men. (Mt. 15:8-9, KJV)

According to an NASB footnote, the literal translation of the second line in the orignal passage in Isaiah is "their fear of Me is commandment[s] of rulers." What the people were condemned for, then, involved not simply the commands of men, but the commands of government men.

There are two possibilities for the basis of the condemnation. (1) The people were worshipping God only because rulers required it, i.e. in the right way externally, but lacking the right motivation. This seems to be how the NASB text takes it, rendering the literal "commandment of rulers" as "tradition learned by rote." (2) The people were worshipping God in the way the rulers required, and not in the way God required at all. I favor the second of these two readings because it is weightier--it finds deeper significance in the literal wording, an approach I think is warranted by passages such as Mt. 5:18 and Ps. 12:6, and the nature of Biblical literature in general. The second reading encompasses the first, and draws out more instruction.

Here is what I mean by drawing out more instruction. The context of Isaiah 29 is God's judgment on Jerusalem. Its people observed the festivals of God's Law (v. 2), but were not instructed by it: they could not understand the prophets (vv. 10-12), they worshipped with their lips and not their hearts (v. 13a), their wise men were a sham (v. 14), they were intent on doing evil (vv. 20-21), and they erred and did not accept instruction (v. 24). From v. 13a especially, it is clearly true to say that they lacked the right motivation for keeping the festivals, as reading (1) has it. What I draw further from the literal "commandment of rulers" of v. 13b is that their wrong motivation expressed itself not only in the sins they committed apart from observing the festivals, but in the way they observed the festivals also. They did according to the commands of government men rather than God. To put it another way, their wrong motivation took a specific form: they were moved by their allegiance to human government rather than to God.

Understood this way, the passage begins to resonate with other events and prophecies in Scripture. God was to be Israel's king, but they rejected his kingship and chose a human king (1 Sam. 8:7). Psalm 146 tells us not to trust in princes, and compares what they cannot do with what God does. The gospel is an announcement of the reign of God (Is. 52:7). Here in Isaiah 29, then, we have another expression of the political dimension of the Biblical message. Man's alienation from God expresses itself in his politics: he worships, fears, loves and obeys men with political power, rather than God.

We are often blind to this reality because we think in impersonal terms. We refer to "the government" and offices in it, and to "rights" and "freedoms," and most of the time we separate "political" matters and "spiritual" matters. The Bible speaks simply of men, their power, ambitions, and allegiences. We do not see that often, "men" in the Bible means men in their political or governmental roles. When Peter told the High Priest, "we must obey God rather than men," he expressed the political aspect of the Biblical message.

This is why Jesus' alteration of the second line of Isaiah 29:13 does not change the meaning. The Pharisees whom Jesus condemned ultimately had the same political motive as the subjects of Isaiah's condemnation, and their elevation of their tradition above God's law expressed it. Though they rejected the present Roman political authority, they wanted to replace it with their own, rather than trust and obey God. They wanted for a Messiah a human Davidic king of the same kind that Israel had in Isaiah's time; they did not want a Messiah who would restore God's reign over the earth through his people apart from a geopolitical human kingship. They may have even thought that their resistance to Roman authority put them on the right side of Isaiah 29:13. Jesus exposed the fact that it did not.

We see the same thing today. Our bitter political division between right and left is like that between the Pharisees and the Romans. We can even say that both then and now, one side is in many ways much more in line with what God considers good, while the other is more openly hostile to religion. Both are condemned by God, however, to the extent that human political ambitions and allegience move them. Or, to put it another way, to the extent that governmental matters comprise their hopes and fears, and direct their energy. For to that extent, "their fear...is the commandment[s] of [government] men."

An example of this that stuck out to me recently is he way Michelle Bauchman handled Jay Leno's questions about her husband's counseling services to homosexuals. Bauchman apparently is an evangelical Christian, and is a favorite of evangelical Christian voters. Yet she would not answer Leno's questions directly. She tried to make a joke, and used obviously scripted rhetoric, but she would not or could not explain why she opposes instituting homsexual marriage. Clearly, it has become part of her political strategy at this time to avoid that issue. And so it appears that she has sacrificed witnessing to the truth, to political ambition. The instruction she is following in terms of strategy is a human derivation from political goals.

But it is easy to point the finger. We are all prone to this error, and our society is flooded with "commandment[s] of rulers." Political correctness and redifinitions of "marriage" and "hate" are only the most explicit examples of this. In truth, the components of our food, water, air, medicine, clothing, housing and more are regulated by the government, by "the commandments[s] of rulers." How often do we blindly trust the goodness or safety of these things? Just today I learned that when a food package lists "natural flavors" as an ingredient, this very likely means some form of glutamate, the toxic component of MSG, even if the same box proclaims "no MSG"--and our government has explicitly allowed this. (Excitotoxins by Blaylock)

Since the commands of government men permeate our lives today, we need to give careful thought to how we live. The greatest truth and the most important commands are God's. It is as easy as ever to give lip service to this, while following a myriad of politically-originated instructions to guide our thinking and behavior.

Our Planned Vaccine Schedule

2011-06-07T12:05:00.009-05:00

My wife and I did a lot of reading to prepare for the birth of our first son six weeks ago. One of the issues parents must consider is vaccines. I am thankful to God that our country and state (TX) does not take away parents' responsibility to make this decision for their children.

We have made a modified schedule that we will soon be proposing to our pediatrician. To a large degree we would recommend it to other parents as well, but there are some ways in which it is unique to our situation. We look at the American Academy of Pediatrics recommended schedule as a starting point, but we've concluded that it has a number of serious flaws. You can view the AAP schedule here: http://aapredbook.aappublications.org/resources/IZSchedule0-6yrs.pdf

Here are the problems we have with the AAP schedule, in no particular order:

1. A "one size fits all" approach, with the same schedule generally recommended for every child. This is a problem because some of the diseases for which vaccinates are recommed affect only distinct populations.

2. No consideration of the toxicty of Aluminum. Aluminum is a toxic chemical linked to neurological damage and genetic mutation, and the FDA sets limits on its use in IV fluid. However, as an adjuvant in vaccines it is unregulated. The way that infant bodies process the aluminum received from vaccines has not been studied, and it is possible that it lodges in the brain and other organs. (The Vaccine Book 193-206)
It is worth considering that mercury (Thimersol) was used in vaccines without regulation for decades before public outcry led vaccine makers to remove it a decade ago. The CDC and FDA have tried to downplay the links to toxic effects and hide the discussions had by experts behind closed doors about both mercury and aluminum. (http://www.autismhelpforyou.com/Simpsonwood_And_Puerto%20%20Rico.htm)

3. No considertion of the possible link to (severe) allergies. Some vaccines contain a variety of biochemicals along with the disease components to which the body's immune system is supposed to react. It stands to reason that an immune reaction could be created to those other chemicals, setting up a life-long allergy. Of particular concern here are the egg, cow blood, and human proteins found in some vaccinces.

4. Too many vaccines scheduled at the same time. There are two potential problems with this:
(a) An infant's immune system and toxin-elimination systems are not fully developed, and might be overloaded by receiving so many disease components and other chemicals (including aluminum).
(b) Different diseases may be handled very differently by the body's immune system(s), with the result that vaccination for one may make a person more susceptible to another. (http://www.nitrf.org/gulf.html; http://www.nitrf.org/autistic.html)

5. STD vaccines recommended for children. This seems to be based on the assumption that that most teens will be sexually active without their parents' knowledge. I cannot help but suspect that this is intened by some powerful policy-makers to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

6. The flu vaccine recommended for every child. The flu is much less serious than many people think. Its mortality statistics are routinely conflated with pneumonia statistics. The flu vaccine also contains egg, and spray/mist versions still contain mercury (thimersol). Finally children who are nursed and not in group care are not likely to get the flu. (The Vaccine Book 121-123, 128, 132)

7. Disregard of the autism link to MMR. Several published studies on this are cause for alarm. (See The Vaccine Book, pp. 94-95, 257-58.) Also, if you read vaccine discussions online you will come across anecdotes from mothers about children who developed autism within days or weeks of the MMR vaccine. (See also the theoretical etiology at http://www.nitrf.org/autistic.html)

8. Human fetal cells used to culture viruses. Some of the viruses in live-virus vaccines (MMR and Varicella(chicken pox)) are grown in human cells, some of which were derived from aborted fetuses. (The Vaccine Book 87, 102).

Given all of the above problems, we have composed the following suggested schedule:

We will refuse vaccination for the following:
Rotavirus is unlikely to be contracted by a baby who is nursed and is not in group care. (The Vaccine Book 69)Hepatitis A is largely limited to certain geographic areas, and Texas is not one of them. (VB 111)
Hepatitis B is an STD and no one in our family has it.
MMR vaccine is linked to autism, and the rubella virus apprears to be cultured in human fetal cells. (The Vaccine Book 87)
Varicella (chicken pox) appears to be cultured in human fetal cells. (The Vaccine Book 102)
Flu is not as serious as many people think, and the vaccine contains egg and other chemicals, and is less likely for a child who is nursed and not in group care. (The Vaccine Book 121-123, 128, 132)
HPV is an STD, and is recommended only for girls.

Our schedule involves the following alterations from the AAP schedule:
1. No more than two shots in a single vist.
2. Delay PC and DTaP until 6 months due to the aluminum in these vaccines.
3. Only 3 doses of PC, and 3 of DTaP by 18 months, because this is all that is needed when starting these after 6 months.
4. The only reason we are doing polio is because Margie works with internationals. The disease is no longer endemic in the US.

We also want the following specific brands
1. ActHIB for HIB, because it does not contain aluminum.
2. Prevnar 13 for PC, the newest version, which covers the strain most prevelant in our area.
3. Tripedia brand of DTaP for lower aluminum. No Pentacel (combines DTaP with polio & HIB) because the polio component of this brand is grown in human cells, which could be derived from aborted fetuses. (The Vaccine Book 41)

So there it is. Our schedule is drastically pared down from the AAP schedule, be we are confident that Sammy will get what he needs, and that we are doing our best to rear him in wisdom.

Can a non-Trinitarian preach the gospel?

2011-04-14T10:34:00.005-05:00

Tuesday as I walked into the church for Bible study, my pastor asked, “can a non-Trinitarian preach the gospel?” Without a hitch, I answered, “no, they emphasize experience.” Specifically, he was referring to modalists like T.D. Jakes, who describe the Father, Son and Holy Spirit as “manifestations” of God rather than as “persons.” Another man present immediately added, “yes, Tertullian [1800 years ago!] said that modalists emphasize experience and glossolalia [speaking in tongues].”

Why is this so? How can I and the other man be so sure, and judge so quickly? Why is it Tertullian said the same thing? I remembered reading about this years ago, but I had forgotten the whole explanation, so I went back to the book that I got the insight from. That book is Worship, Community & the Triune God of Grace by James B. Torrance.

Here is the reason that the gospel requires the Trinity. The gospel says that God both gives Christ to us, and in Christ presents humanity back to himself. Christ can have this double role only by being both God and a distinct person who is related to God.

Torrance stresses that in worship—in the notions of priesthood in both the Old and New Testaments, and in the liturgy of the early church—there is this double movement. He explains, further, that Trinitarianism is the grammar of the early church’s liturgy. Christians from the beginning both prayed to Christ as God, and looked to him as a high priest who was praying for them. Arius thought this a contradiction, that Christ could not be God if he was a man praying to God. Torrance writes, “Athanasius’s reply was, ‘Arius, you do not understand the meaning of grace!’”

With modalism (also know as Sabellianism), in which Christ is thought of as a manifestation of God rather than a distinct person from the Father and Son, two consequences follow. (1) The God-man movement is preserved as a manifestation of God, but the human > God movement cannot be given to us in Christ, because he is not really distinct from the Father toward whom we must move. The gospel may continue to be a story of God’s acts to which we respond, but it cannot also be a story through which even our response is given to us through Christ the mediator.

(2) Love becomes a force, or a feeling, rather than an inter-personal relationship. The fundamental doctrine, “God is love,” cannot be interpreted in terms of a community of persons within God. Instead it has to be something expressed by the acts of manifestation of a single person, or perhaps it may be an intra-personal relationship, i.e. an attitude toward oneself.

Together, these implications of modalism lead to an understanding of salvation and worship that is individualistic and experiential rather than corporate, communal and theological. “Love” is the feeling we experience in acts of worship, in which we suppose that we are encountering the unitary “God” manifesting himself to us. Or, “love” is how one feels about oneself, based on the example of God’s self-love manifested in the Biblical record. The reality of salvation then has to be gauged by the effectiveness of the worship event in producing this experience in us. In truly Trinitarian salvation and worship, by contrast, we are made aware of what God has given us in Christ and what he continues to do in Christ for our relationship to him. Being “seated with Christ in the heavenly places” (Ephesians 2:6) is not something we experience ecstatically, but is something we grasp theologically. We are made aware of who God is and, through Christ the mediator, invited into his fellowship, which we experience with his people only when we grasp the theological reality by faith.

There is a definite sense, then, in which a modalist view of God destroys both faith and grace. Consider first Hebrews 11:1, “faith is being…certain of what we do not see.” In the modalist worship experience, faith is decidedly absent, because God is immediately manifest in the experience. The Trinitarian worship experience, however, cannot happen without faith, because the role of Christ as mediator who joins us to the community of God and the community of believers, can only be grasped by faith. Next, consider Paul’s statement in Romans 4:16, “the promise comes by faith, so that it may be by grace.” Lacking the element of faith, the modalist “gospel” invitation to knowing God is ungracious as well. As Torrance writes,

To reduce worship to this two-dimensional thing—God and ourselves, today—is to imply that God throws us back upon ourselves to make our response. It ignores the fact that God has already provided for us that response which alone is acceptable to him….

Only Trinitarians can preach the gospel of grace, because only we propose the experience-transcending reality of our humanity in Christ accepted by God the Father.

Calvin's Doctrine of the Lord's Supper

2010-07-12T08:35:00.004-05:00

It is always affirming to find that someone else has thought of something that you’ve thought of too, but struggled to express. This is no doubt most likely with to happen with experiences and ideas that are not widely understood or discussed. Once such idea for evangelical Christians is the presence of Christ in the Lord’s Supper.

I have been pleasantly surprised recently to have two different friends express to me that they think there is more to the Lord’s Supper than the symbols of Christ’s body and blood, and the remembrance of his death. They aren’t sure how to put it, but they feel that our participation involves more than normal faith plus a symbolic act commanded by God. On both occasions I have been able to say, “well, there is Calvin’s view,” knowing vaguely that Calvin affirmed the real presence of Christ in the supper while denying that Christ is joined or identified with the bread and wine. This week I happened upon Calvin’s own argument while researching something else, and found the main points more clear than I expected. So, I thought it would be beneficial to offer this brief exposition.

Calvin’s doctrine contains three main points. First, the Lord’s Supper is something given by God to his people to confirm and sustain their faith. The words of Christ, “this is my body, given for you,” mean more than that the bread symbolizes his body. The bread is not just a reminder that Christ gave his body for us, it is also itself given to us in order that we can experience receiving Christ. Christ’s atoning death sets us right before God, and the bread and wine symbolize his body and blood that were sacrificed, but the bread and wine also allow us to “feel within ourselves the efficacy of that one sacrifice.” (Institutes 4.17.1) God gave the supper to us to be a source of assurance:

The body which was once offered for our salvation we are enjoined to take and eat, that, while we see ourselves made partakers of it, we may safely conclude that the virtue of that death will be efficacious in us. (4.17.1)

I suspect that to the critical evangelical thinker, it may sound as though Calvin is telling us to put our trust in the sacrament rather than Christ himself. I would suggest that just the reverse is the case. Calvin recognizes that true faith requires, in addition to recognizing truths about God, recognizing his active relationship to the world. Calvin understands Christ’s words of institution of the supper to be a promise that God works specifically through it. He invites us to take the whole experience of eating the supper as an experience given directly by God.

The second point flows from the first. Christ is really present in the supper. He is not to be identified with or located in the symbols, bread and wine. Nevertheless, he is present. Calvin himself struggles to express this, describing it as “a mystery which I feel, and therefore freely confess that I am unable to comprehend with my mind.” (4.17.7) Again, he says,

as to the mode, I will not be ashamed to confess that it is too high a mystery either for my mind to comprehend or my words to express; and to speak more plainly, I rather feel than understand it. (4.17.32)

Calvin does insist, however, that Christ is present through the Holy Spirit. He rejects the Roman Catholic and Lutheran views for doing violence to the incarnation and ascension, for those teachings “draw him down from heaven” (4.17.31) to make him present bodily in the symbols. Those views, furthermore, “leave nothing for the secret operation of the Spirit.” (4.17.31) So Calvin gives the Holy Spirit a definite, though ineffable, role. Through the Spirit Christ “raises us to himself.” (4.17.31)

The third point again flows out of the second. In the Lord’s Supper, we have communion with the body and blood of Christ, that is, with his incarnate humanity. His resurrected body remains ascended in heaven, but we are spiritually raised to experience his bodily presence in the supper. We experience something of what the Apostle John describes:

That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched… (1 John 1:1)

The uniqueness of Christianity lies in the incarnation, that God became man and dwelt among us. In the Lord’s Supper, this great fact becomes more than a memory because it is made real for every believer. For Calvin this is crucial because faith must be more than “simple knowledge.” As he puts it,

For as it is not the sight but the eating of bread that gives nourishment to the body, so the soul must partake of Christ truly and thoroughly, that by his energy it may grow up into spiritual life. (4.17.5)

This hearkens back to the first point, that the experience of eating the supper is something given by God. The real effects of eating and drinking bread and wine are to help us comprehend our dependence on Christ. But in the final analysis this is only because in Christ God took on human flesh. He invites us to communion with his bodily presence so that we will live out our faith in bodily life. Because God is incarnate, we draw closest to him not in mere meditation or introspection, but in reflective taking of the Lord’s Supper.

So there are the main points: the supper is “given for you,” in it Christ is really present, and in it we have communion with the incarnate Christ. These three points are interrelated and inseparable, but I think it helpful to consider them in turn. Overall, Calvin’s emphasis on the experience of God’s presence stands out. We are to “feel the efficacy” of what Christ has done for us and to find assurance in that experience. Calvin is perhaps more aware than many modern evangelicals of the close relationship between emotion, experience and faith; of the difference between mere belief and living by faith. A friend once commented to me that he sometimes wished he could just get a hug from God. I wish I had been able to say at the time, that the Lord’s Supper is where God gives himself to us in that way.

Reason and Religious Experience

2010-06-13T16:51:00.005-05:00

A review of Knowing With the Heart: Religious Experience and Belief in God by Roy Clouser (Downers Gove: Intervarsity Press, 1999)

One of the most difficult things, for me, about being both an Evangelical Christian and a philosopher is articulating the significance of both reason and experience in my life. In my explanation of why I am a Christian I even made a few statements that I felt somewhat uneasy about, because I know that they could be used as points on which to criticize or reject my self-explanation. The difficulty is that saying belief has to be based in some way on experience seems to make it irrational. This can motivate educated people to reject faith, and people of faith to reject rational argumentation.

It should be obvious that I don’t want to be susceptible to either kind of rejection. I insisted in the earlier post that my adherence to orthodox, historical Christianity is a rational conclusion, but also that it is dependent on experience. I even wrote that the experience necessary for being a Christian “can be described in terms of self-knowledge.” What I was suggesting is that the important thing about experience is its result. The quality of the experience, what it feels like, is not important, but what matters is that it produces a new awareness, a new certainty. This certainty can be supported by rational arguments, but cannot be produced by rational arguments. Faith is never the result simply of an argument, though good reasons can pre-dispose one to faith.

What I have struggled to express about reason and experience is given brilliant exposition by Roy Clouser in his book, Knowing With the Heart. The book is written as a dialogue between himself and a religious skeptic who adheres to a vaguely Darwinist or materialist view of the world. (The interlocutor is probably a composite of the many students Clouser has had in his philosophy courses at The College of New Jersey.) Clouser breaks down the issue piece by piece, with chapters covering the meaning of religion, religious experience, certainty and belief in God. Two final chapters give responses to objections, and clarifications. The strength of the book is in the first four chapters; I disagree with certain portions of the last two.

The first point to Clouser’s argument is that we must understand religion as one’s belief about what is independently real (i.e. self-existent, non-dependent). Popular understandings of religion as active worship or beliefs about God or a higher being do not get at what is essential. These popular understandings are the result of our Judeo-Christian cultural background, and they fail to describe some of the world’s major religions (such as Buddhism). What all religions have in common is the claim that some thing “just is,” and is the source of everything else. Clouser cites a number of philosophers and theologians who have come to this conclusion about the meaning of “religion”—including Plato, Aristotle, William James, Herman Dooyeweerd, Paul Tillich, and C. S. Lewis. However, he applies this insight in a way that goes beyond most of them (except Dooyeweerd, whom he follows) when he draws the conclusion that many beliefs that claim not to be religious are, in fact, religious, in spite of what their adherents want to think. For example, the materialist conviction that matter is the source and explanation of everything, is a religious belief, despite materialists’ lack of worship or belief in a personal divinity.

Moving to religious experience, Clouser says that any experience that produces, confirms or deepens a belief about what is independently real, is religious experience. He discusses many kinds of religious experience, mostly following William James’ classic work, Varieties of Religious Experience. However, he stresses a feature of such experiences that James only notes in passing: that all such experiences have the quality of certainty. This is what I was putting my finger on when I discussed experience in terms of the knowledge produced by it. Christian religious experience produces certainty about the person of Jesus Christ and the divine origin of the Bible. Whether “chairs fly around the room,” or we seem to hear a “still, small voice” (1 Kings 19:11-13) is not important. In fact, most religious experience is probably the everyday experience of feeling that a certain way of looking at things must be correct. Again, what makes the experience religious is that the certainty attaches to the independent (i.e. divine) status of the object.

The third and fourth chapters deal with the whole question of certainty and the status of belief in God. Another way to describe an experience that has the “quality of certainty” is to say that its object is self-evident. Clouser argues that belief in God is, properly speaking, self-evident to true believers. Indeed, he claims that it is no less self-evident than the axiom of equals, which is the principle that two things equal to a third thing are equal to each other. To back up this claim, he addresses the nature of self-evidence.

First of all, he says, some things we know must be self-evident, because in order to prove anything by argument, we have to have some knowledge to start with. So we cannot pretend that all knowledge is justified by argument. Some knowledge is justified simply by appearing to be true. That is not to say that it appears true equally to all observers, for it can take training and repeated exposure to see that such things as the axioms of geometry must be true. It is also not to say that contradictory things cannot appear to be true to different people. Actually, this is often the case. The conclusion to draw, however, is not that controversial things cannot really be self-evident, but rather, that knowledge is not necessarily true. Clouser, along with other contemporary philosophers, rejects the traditional philosophical definition of knowledge as “justified true belief.” He instead uses “knowledge” in the everyday sense that we “know” things we have no reason to doubt. The upshot is that believers can be said to know Jesus Christ to be the Son of God on the same basis that a logician knows the axiom of equals, or that we all know the sun to be warm. Christian faith is knowledge, as the best theologians have always maintained.

This leads to an important distinction, between true religious believers, to whom the reality and divine status of their God is self-evident, and religious “fellow travelers” who are only loyal to a way of life, an institution or group of people. Clouser makes the insightful observation that

without the intuition of self-evidency, their “belief” is still mere acceptance, and only adds up to a hope that the belief may be true. Thus, when they are pressed about the truth of their religious belief, fellow travelers usually say something like, “Well, no one can really know that sort of thing.”

This description fits my own experience, and, I suggest, largely accounts for the difference between evangelical and other forms of Christianity. Fellow travelers can be intense in their loyalty and very hard-working, but they may also regard true believers with a mixture of jealousy, disdain and suspicion, and persecute them (the Bible is full of examples of this, as is our modern society).

It follows from Clouser’s approach that the only way to find out if a religion is true is to put oneself in the position where one is likely to have the experience of its truth. For Christianity, this means spending time with other Christians, attending church services, and reading the Bible and theologies. It is important to engage in these things with a genuine openness to the possibility that God could reveal himself through them. If we do them only out of loyalty or duty, we may experience a feeling that we are doing good, but we cannot experience the religious truth. Likewise, if rational arguments convince us that a particular religion could not possibly be true, then we cannot put ourselves in a position to have the experience of its truth. Rational arguments of the latter sort are the subject of Clouser’s fifth chapter, and also of Christian apologetics in general. I shall not delve into them here; that would best be left for another post.

In conclusion, I have found Clouser’s book to be very helpful. There is a lot to think about in what he says. It challenges the dominant way of thinking of our society, but it makes sense of things that otherwise do not have a clear explanation. I disagree with Clouser’s handling of evolution and universalism in chapters five and six, but these are beside the main point of the book. Christian faith is fully rational and dependent upon experience.

My Favorite Quotes

2010-01-21T11:38:00.004-06:00

I just put some of these up on my Facebook profile and I thought I'd share them here too. Quotes are an interesting thing. They affect us differently than most of what we read--we feel that we perceive some deeper truth in them. As I looked over the quotes below, I realized that they have taught me some of my deepest, most fundamental attitudes, beliefs and concerns. Or at least that they put these into words. For some of our deepest attitudes, I think, are inborn, i.e. given by God, and some are learned by experience over a long period of time. But both of those sorts become focused by words.

Mencius: "If a man love others, and no responsive attachment is shown to him, let him turn inwards and examine his own benevolence. If he is trying to rule others, and his government is unsuccessful, let him turn inwards and examine his wisdom. If he treats others politely, and they do not return his politeness, let him turn inwards and examine his own feeling of repsect. When we do not, by what we do, realise what we desire, we must turn inwards, and examine ourselves at every point. When a man's person is correct, the whole kingdom will turn to him with recognition and submission. It is said in the Book of Poetry,

'Be always studious to be in harmony with the ordinances of God,
And you will obtain much happiness.'"

RJ Rushdoony: "Those who deny Biblical case law, who say, 'well, the only part of the law that is still meaningful is the Ten Commandments...,' have no real knowledge of what God means when he says "Thou shalt not steal."'

Jonathan Edwards: "So that, whatever some have imagined and pretended about promises made to natural men's earnest seeking and knocking, it is plain and manifest, that whatever pains a natural man takes in religion, whatever prayers he makes, till he believes in Christ, God is under no manner of obligation to keep him a moment from eternal destruction."

Peter Kreeft: "Dullness, not doubt, is the strongest enemy of faith, just as indiference, not hate, is the strongest enemy of love."

Charlotte Mason: "Our aim in Education is to give a Full Life-We begin to see what we want. Children make large demands on us. We owe it to them to initiate an immense number of interests. 'Thou hast set my feet in a large room,' should be the glad cry of an intelligent soul. Life should be all living, and not merely a tedious passing of time; not all doing or thinking-the strain would be too great-but, all living; that is to say, we should be in touch wherever we go, whatever we hear, whatever we see, with some manner of vital interest. We cannot give the children these interests; we prefer that they should say they have never learned botany or conchology, geology or astronomy. The question is not,-how much does the youth know? when he has finished his education-but how much does he care? and about how many orders of things does he care? In fact, how large is the room in which he finds his feet set? and, therefore, how full is the life he has before him?"

William Whewell: "Yet even in the view of our moral constitution which natural reason gives, we may trace laws that imply a personal relation to our Creator. How can we avoid considering that as a true view of man's being and place, without which, his best faculties are never fully developed, his noblest energies never called out, his highest point of perfection never reached? Without the thought of a God over all, superintending our actions, approving our virtues, transcending our highest conceptions of good, man would never rise to those higher regions of moral excellence which we knew him to be capable of attaining. 'To deny a God,' again says the great philosopher [Francis Bacon], 'destroys magnanimity and the rising of human nature; for take an example of a dog, and mark what a generosity and a courage he will put on, when he finds himself maintained by a man; who, to him, is instead of a God, or melior natura: which courage is manifestly such, as that creature, without that confidence of a better nature than his own, could never attain. So man, when he resteth and assureth himself upon divine protection and favour, gathereth a force and faith, which human nature could not obtain. Therefore, as atheism is in all respects hateful, so in this, that it depriveth human nature of the means to exalt itself above human frailty.'"

John Calvin: "...this great subject [predestination] is not, as many imagine, a mere thorny and noisy disputation, nor a speculation which wearies the minds of men without any profit; but a solid discussion eminently adapted to the service of the godly, because it builds us up soundly in the faith, trains us to humility, and lifts us up into an admiration of the unbounded goodness of God towards us, while it elevates us to praise this goodness in our highest strains. For there is not a more effectual means of building up faith than the giving our open ears to the election of God which the Holy Spirit seals upon our heart while we hear, shewing us that it stands in the eternal and immutable goodwill of God towards us; and that, therefore, it cannot be moved or altered by any storms of the world, by any assaults of Satan, by any changes, or by any fluctuations or weaknesses of the flesh. For our salvation is then sure to us, when we find the cause of it in the breast of God. Thus, when we lay hold of life in Christ, made manifest to our faith, the same faith being still our leader and guide, our sight is permitted to penetrate much farther, and to see from what source that life proceeded. Our confidence of salvation is rooted in Christ, and rests on the promises of the Gospel. But it is no weak prop to our confidence, when we are brought to believe in Christ, to hear that all was originally given to us of God, and that we were as much ordained to faith in Christ before the foundation of the world, as we were chosen to the inheritance of eternal life in Christ."

John Tillotson: "The true ground of most men's prejudice against the Christian doctrine is because they have no mind to obey it."

Francis Bacon: "For men have entered into a desire of learning and knowledge, sometimes upon a natural curiosity and inquisitive appetite; sometimes to entertain their minds with variety and delight; sometimes for ornament and reputation; and sometimes to enable them to victory of wit and contradiction; and most times for lucre and profession; and seldom sincerely to give a true accout of their gift of reason, to the benefit and use of men: as if there were sought in knowledge a couch, whereupon to rest a searching and restless spirit; or a terrace, for a wandering and variable mind to walk up and down with a fair prospect; or a tower of state, for a proud mind to raise itself upon; or a fort or commanding ground, for strife and contention; or a shop, for profit or sale; and not a rich storehouse, for the glory of the Creator and the relief of man's estate."

Why I am a Christian

2009-11-19T01:32:00.002-06:00

Since I started this blog I've been intending to write a series on philosophy and Christianity. Indeed, one of the reasons I started the blog is because of two reactions I often get to my career path from people I meet in church settings. One is the question: do my studies challenge my faith? The other is the sentiment that study of philosophy is valuable primarily for the defense of the faith. I will address each of these questions in subsequent blogs. I have decided that it makes most sense, however, to begin this series by explaining why I am a Christian, and what that means.

So here it is, as succinctly as I can manage:
Christianity means following Jesus Christ, and this means accepting who he is, what he has done, and what he commands us to do. These things are to be found in the Bible, which is summarized in a variety of creeds and confessions. No one is born a follower of Christ or made one by the actions of others. We must become followers by coming to know him. It takes a sovereign act of God to make one a follower, but God acts through our own reason and experience. I became a Christian when I concluded that Jesus had risen from the dead, experienced his forgiving love, and surrendered my life to him. Every other belief and practice stems from how these things confirm the authority of the Bible.

And now to explicate a little:
The three words I italicize indicate that being a Christian requires a rational conclusion, an experience, and a permanently expressed decision. These may not occur at the same time, and I suppose but won’t insist that they usually will occur in the order I have listed them. What I do insist on, because I find Jesus to insist upon it, is that one is not a Christian without all three. Reason, experience and desire (yes, we decide based on our desire) come together for the disciple of Christ. In the gospels we find Jesus challenging people in regard to each (e.g. Mt 16:15, Lk 7:47, Jn 1:38).

Sometimes people claim to be Christians without having all of these, or having none at all. I would find this very strange, except that I was once in that category. We naturally base our identities on belonging to a group or engaging in a certain activity, and some churches reinforce this kind of identification by granting membership and participation in sacraments and leadership without appropriate standards of belief and desire. (Experience cannot be judged directly, but desire is adequate evidence of it. Certain things just are not desired without a first taste.) Needless to say, I think these churches to varying degrees obscure the call to follow Christ.

In more theological terms, I am describing faith and repentance. However, I have described these in terms of reason, experience and desire/decision to try to make them more clear. There are ways of taking “faith” and “repentance” that I, and Scripture, do not at all intend (along the lines of blind submission to an authority figure).

What we must conclude by reason is basically the historical facts about and identity of Jesus. He is the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy, and the Creator God taken on human flesh, who died to atone for sin and rose bodily from the dead to defeat death. Some people might call this fundamentalism and claim a more enlightened Christianity, but the Bible is very clear that Christianity stands or falls with the bodily resurrection of Christ.

What we must experience is the forgiving love of God in Christ. This is not necessarily a moment of ecstasy; though it can include that, it can be described in terms of self-knowledge as well. We must come to see ourselves as sinners against God, unworthy of his favor, and then as recipients of his forgiveness. This forgiveness is not a mere ignoring of sin or acceptance of the sinner, rather it is accomplished by the self-sacrifice of Christ. In Christ’s death we see both how bad our sin really is, and how deep God’s love for us really is.

What we must desire, and decide to pursue, is obedience, or submission, to Christ. Our culture does not like these words, but those who are firmly convinced that Jesus is God and that he defeated death, and who have experienced God’s love, will trust that God’s commands are intended for our good and are reliable. Of course, God does not give step-by-step instructions for our actions. What he gives is the Bible and his sovereign direction of all events (also known as providence). He wants us to grow by learning to apply Biblical examples and standards to our own circumstances.

Why the Bible, and why do I say that the foregoing beliefs, experience and desire confirm the authority of the Bible? Very simply, the Bible is the only authentic record of Jesus. It provides the historical facts and is itself part of the evidence that confirms those facts. In my own experience, after concluding the resurrection to be true, I began to take the claims of the Bible more seriously, and eventually God ‘opened my eyes’ to see the narrative of forgiving love, which led in turn to my desire to obey Christ. And full-circle, the Bible is where we find what Jesus said and did. But even if we were just to start with the gospel records of Jesus, we find that Jesus confirms the Old Testament and anticipates the writings of the Apostles that form the New Testament. So the whole Bible informs us about what it means to follow Christ. What about subsequent writings? The New Testament indicates a unique, foundational authority was given to the designated Apostles, those who physically saw the resurrected Jesus. It also makes reference to the importance of public preaching, which explains why we have church sermons. These and various writings are helpful to the extent that they illuminate and apply the sacred text.

What does all of this have to do with philosophy? Clearly there are claims about truth and the nature of human life and the universe involved in Christianity. I’ll be getting at those things in subsequent blogs. But please comment if anything in this one is not clear!

(I am well aware, by the way, that many of the statements I have made here are controversial for various people. They are my reasoned conclusions and I’d be happy to discuss my reasoning in more depth. Of course, I think what I have concluded is objectively true.)

Money's Two Faces (an epilogue to the philosophy of money)

2009-07-21T16:39:00.003-05:00

In my two previous posts on the philosophy of money, I mentioned at several points that money has dual consequences. I do not wish to rehearse all of these here. I would like to put forward two quotes, from different sections of Simmel's book, which set the dual character of money into sharp relief. I have no definite conclusion to draw or point to make from these two quotes, but I would suggest that they are worth thinking about, especially in regard to one's own attitude toward money. Please share your comments!

"We experience in the nature of money itself something of the essence of prostitution. The indifference as to its use, the lack of attachment to any individual because it is unrelated to any of them, the objectivity inherent in money as a mere means which excludes any emotional relationship--all this produces an ominous analogy between money and prostitution. Of all human relationships, prostitution is perhaps the most striking instance of mutual degradation to a mere means, and this may be the strongest and most fundamental factor that places prostitution in such a close historical relationship to the money economy, the economy of 'means' in the strictest sense." (377)

"It is the essence of economic transactions that one person gives up what another person desires, provided this other person acts in the same manner. The moral rule that one should do unto others as one would have done unto oneself finds the clearest example of its formal realization in the economy." (468)

The Philosophy of Money part 2

2009-07-21T15:46:00.005-05:00

After several weeks I am finally ready to post my summary of the second half of Georg Simmel's Philosophy of Money. In the first half Simmel examines what makes the economy a unique mode of human activity, with money as its basic expression. Money embodies value and becomes a tool whose power grows with the expansion of economic exchange. In the second half of the book Simmel explores the effects of money on life, particularly in regard to individual freedom, personal value, and our modern style of living.

Money tends to increase individual freedom with regard to personal relationships and with regard to objects. In personal relationships, we pay bills, taxes and fines, and even make gifts, with specific amounts of money. This allows us to meet our obligations to others while deciding for ourselves how we shall spend our time and what kind of work we shall do. We would be much less free if, as in earlier times, we were obliged to give so much wheat, or so many years of military service, or even our whole laboring life (as in slavery) to others. The freedom to pay in money has two consequences, which may be considered good or bad depending on one's point of view, but which cannot be separated. On the one hand, money payment establishes a degree of equality in relationships. On the other hand, money payment makes relationships less personal. Just as money itself becomes less substantial and more purely functional over time (as we saw in part 1, chapter 2), so our relationships with the many people we depend on in the modern world--cashiers, plumbers, landlords--become more purely functional. We are happy to have anyone, even a computer, fulfill the cashier function for us, and we hardly notice the person's name. This means, however, that anyone can use that cashier, regardless of class, race, etc. These twin effects cannot be fully separated.

With regard to objects, money increases our individual freedom by making us independent of particular objects. This means that we can exchange anything for money and money for anything. Simmel writes, "Just as all roads lead to Rome--Rome being conceived as lying beyond every local interest and as standing in the background of every individual action--so all economic roads lead to money. Just as Irenaeus called Rome the compendium of the world, Spinoza called money the omnium rerum compendium [compendium of all things]." (307) Again there is a further consequence: our personalities are less dependent on our possessions. Artisans and farmers tend to be shaped by the material they work with, whereas the salesman is not shaped by the product he sells, nor the business manager by the process of production. Money thus creates another paradox, for while money brings all objects closer to us by making them more accessible, it also increases our distance from them, by making our personalities more independent. Psychologically, this can produce the most profound sense of freedom and power, or the darkest sense of alienation. Socially, it has produced such things as professionalization (through which non-economic criteria are used to evaluated a field of work); individualism; and associations for planned purposes, such as corporations, clubs, and charitable organizations.

The chapter on personal value deals with phenomena such as blood money, slavery, fines, religious atonement, payment as form of penance, dowries, marriage by purchase, marriage for money, and bribes. In these matters, cultures tend to develop first in the direction of measuring the worth of persons by money, and then away from this equivalence, toward seeing personal worth as absolute and priceless. These movements result from two contrasting movements that both stem from the development of society. (Simmel also observes that Christianity and the Bible have played a significant role in cultural recognition of the absolute worth of persons.) On the one hand, people become more differentiated as social roles and work become more refined and specialized. On the other hand, money becomes less differentiated in its uses as it becomes more important in a society. Equating personal value with an amount of money makes sense only within cultures where money is used to a limited extent and where people are not very different from their peers, at least economically.

Simmel concludes his book by examining how the money economy influences how we live. Although he wrote 100 years ago, his observations are just as accurate today. First of all, the money economy elevates the importance of intellect, especially calculating thought, over emotion. Through money we quantify values and calculate our decisions. This aspect of money leads on the one hand to equality, because quantifying value makes it equally measurable and valid for all people, but on the other hand it leads to inequality, because the possessor of money can do almost anything with it. The money economy also contributes to such features of modern life as material or technological progress at the expense of social and spiritual refinement; division of labor; distance in genuine relationships and proximity in external relationships (e.g. living 1500 miles from family while not knowing my neighbors, or making a local phone call to order Chinese food); the domination of life by technology and the urgent at the expense of the important; general restlessness; interruption and leveling of the natural rhythms of life in favor of increasing regularity and symmetry; the tension between classical liberalism and socialism; an increase in the pace of life; and greater mobility of property and people. These effects stem from features of money already indicated, including its universal validity, its relative insubstantiality, its nature as a tool, and its dual character as both a measure of value and an object of value.

One final word. Throughout the book, Simmel mostly refrains from making moral judgments. He shows that many of the effects I have tried to summarize can either be seen in a good light or in a bad light, or that they are balanced by contrasting effects. His philosophy of money does not conclude that money is good or bad. Rather, it helps us to understand money and its relationship to a wide range of social and psychological phenomena. We should at least learn that whether these are good or bad can be complex question, and that our judgment should be prepared to accept its implications.

The Philosophy of Money part 1

2009-05-29T10:00:00.003-05:00

I took a course this spring on Georg Simmel's Philosophy of Money. Several of my friends have been interested to hear what it was all about, so I have decided to write up a synopsis here.
Simmel explains the philosophy of money as that which surrounds the science of economics. On the one end, philosophy examines the pre-conditions of economics. These are psychological, social and logical facts that make economic activity a distinct phenomenon with a given nature. On the other end, philosophy examines the relation of economics to life as a whole. Money has psychological and cultural effects, and economic development parallels changes in society and the way individuals experience life. In accordance with this two-fold division, Simmel divides The Philosophy of Money into two parts. Each of these parts has three chapters.

In the first chapter we learn that money quite literally embodies the relativity of value. Value is something assigned to things by people, it is a judgment we make. The value we place on something is based on our desire for it and its "distance" from us (the difficulty of acquiring it). Values become economic when we establish (fix) such distances by comparing them through exchange. Exchange involves a reciprocal determination of value between two objects. For example, if your orange is worth as much to me as my apple is to you, then in our economy, one orange is worth one apple. Economic value, therefore, objectifies our subjective valuations by filtering them through the process of exchange. The value of an object remains relative to human desire, but that desire is expressed only through another object exchanged for the desired object. This means that the relative values of things to each other in an economy become objective facts. Money is the concrete and objective means for expressing these relative values. "Money is the reification of exchange among people," Simmel writes.

The second chapter deals with the substantiality of money. Money has a definite function as a common denominator of value, but the question can be raised whether this function must be rooted in a substance with intrinsic material value. Historically, all kinds of substances have been used as money, for example, cows, shells, hoes, furs, even cigarettes. Things begin to be used as money because they are intrinsically valuable, i.e. they have a material use. Usually this material use is something highly valued in the particular society (e.g. furs for coats in northern Russia). For the object to function as money, however, its material use must be renounced so that it can be held for exchange. With the renunciation of its material use, the monetary substance tends to become increasingly symbolic over time (e.g. furs come to be replaced by stamped strips of leather). There is a development of money from substance toward pure function. Simmel argues, however, that money can never become a pure function, represented only by worthless symbol. In order for money to function as measure of value, it must itself be an object of value, and for this it must be materially scarce. Without material scarcity we would have runaway inflation and a loss of confidence in the equity of exchange. Simmel thought that paper money must be backed by gold, the only metal that remained sufficiently scarce in his time. Gold is also incorruptible and easily divisible, qualities that enhance the usefulness of a money substance.

The third chapter examines money's role as a means by which we reach ends. Money, says Simmel, is "the purest example of the tool," because it is always a means to acquiring something else. Further, there are unlimited possibilities for the use of money. There are several consequences of these features of money. Money is a source of power and status. It is especially attractive to people and social groups who lack other forms of social standing. (This is one reason why rap music glorifies money.) The significance of money also increases exponentially in relation to its quantity. There is an "unearned increment" of honor and privilege that comes with greater wealth. There is also a "threshold of economic awareness," a level of value beneath which people take no notice. (E.g. we don't bother to pick up pennies.) Since money is a pure and universal tool, it also exhibits in an extreme form the problem of means becoming ends. Greed makes having money an end in itself, extravagance makes spending money an end in itself. More subtly, the predominance of money in the life of an individual or society tends to reduce all other values to economic value. This leads to the attitudes of cynicism (expressed in slogans like "everyone has his price," or "the almighty dollar") or what Simmel calls "the blasé attitude," a numbness and indifference toward non-economic values (such as virtue, honor, beauty, contentment, etc.).

We can see that already in the third chapter Simmel begins to touch on the relation of money to life as a whole. I shall reserve the second part of his book for my next blog.

Physics Cannot Explain Everything (short version)

2009-04-20T14:31:00.000-05:00

For my next philosophical problem I present here the general theme of my philosophy of mind term paper. I have decided to present this short version as well as a long version (the long version is still half the length of my term paper). I have listed references at the end of the long version. If you would like to challenge anything I say, please read the long version first. I welcome questions on either.

My paper dealt with a principle known as "the causal closure of the physical" (hereafter “CC”). CC says that all physical effects have physical sufficient causes. A less technical way to say this is that physical causes fully explain physical effects, such that nothing physical requires a non-physical explanation. In philosophy of mind this principle is used to argue that mental causes are actually physical, which is a step toward saying that the mind is nothing more than the brain. More broadly, the principle of causal closure relates to the question of whether physics can ultimately explain everything. I accept causal closure, but I do not think the mind is just the brain or that physics can explain everything. Here’s why.

CC enjoys wide support among contemporary philosophers, and I think it is easy to see why. It has intuitive plausibility, that is, it sounds like something that should be true. We expect, for example, that if a candle moves, then there must be some physical force that makes it move. It would be unscientific, perhaps even superstitious, to think otherwise.

Nevertheless, many people believe that there are non-physical causes that affect the physical world. I find this claim to be intuitively plausible as well. It need not have anything to do with superstitious causes such as a ghost moving the candle. Consider, instead, the chairs around my dining room table. They are undoubtedly physical objects in a physical arrangement. However, they would never have been shaped as chairs and arranged as they are were they not produced to be purchased, with a view toward civility and hospitality. Here we have economic and ethical causes of what seem to be physical effects.

So we have a dilemma: both CC and not-CC are plausible. The way to resolve this is to try to justify each side in a stronger way. When we do this, however, the conflict disappears. It turns out that CC can be true even though non-physical causes are necessary to explain my chairs.

The best justification I know for CC is in terms of the conservation laws of modern physics, such as the conservation of mass/energy and conservation of momentum. Let us define physical causation as the exchange of conserved quantities, and a physical effect as a variation in conserved quantities in a thing (e.g. if the cause is my hand transferring its momentum to a candle, then the effect is the candle’s change in momentum). Then, according to whatever conservation law may come into play, physical causes must involve a reciprocal variation in conserved quantities (my hand loses the momentum that it transfers). This necessary reciprocal variation is a physical sufficient cause for the physical effect—and so we have a strong basis for CC.

Notice, now, that we have clarified physical effects as changes in conserved quantities. This means that concrete things like my table and chairs are not, strictly speaking, physical effects. While we may refer to my chairs as physical things in everyday language, we have to recognize that as chairs they are not the kind of physical effects to which CC applies. CC applies only to properties of the chairs like their mass.

This has an important consequence: there is no obvious reason why things with physical properties may not also have other properties, and obey other laws. My chairs clearly obey the law of conservation of energy, but they might also obey the law of supply and demand at the same time.

We now need to look at the other side of our dilemma. Could other kinds of properties and laws be necessary to explain my chairs—that is, in a way that cannot be reduced to the physics of conserved quantities?

The answer is “yes.” Dynamical systems theory explains how a complex pattern of activity (a “dynamical system”) can direct its components in such a way the pattern is necessary for its results in a way that no individual components is.

The key to understanding dynamical systems is that every cause requires certain background conditions to produce an effect. (An example is that in order for flipping a switch to turn on my light, my home must be properly wired.) What makes a system “dynamic” is that the structure or pattern of the system can maintain and direct itself with a range of possible components. It does this by arranging background conditions based on the available components. A simple example is that whether I eat fat or sugar, my body will convert it to the same form of energy chemical energy (ATP). Living things are the outstanding examples of dynamical systems: they keep a constant internal state and reproduce themselves while the molecules making them up constantly change.

The ability of dynamical systems to produce their effects with a range of possible components by altering background conditions means that the system is necessary for its effects over a broader range of background conditions than any particular component is. The components of a dynamical system retain their own nature, but they become captive to the “higher-level” pattern of the system. This means that the properties of the system are necessary to explain its effects in a way that cannot be reduced to the physics of the components. We have, then, the answer to our question.

Returning to the dilemma, we can see that although CC is justified, it does not mean that physics can explain everything. Physics explains the physical aspect of all things, but there is just more to reality than that. My chairs simultaneously obey CC, the law of supply and demand, and standards of hospitality. While it is true that there would be no economy if there were no objects with physical properties, it is also true that the economy determines what happens with “physical” objects like my chairs in a way that physics does not.

Physics Cannot Explain Everthying (long version)

2009-04-20T14:17:00.005-05:00

For my next philosophical problem I present here an abbreviated and somewhat altered version of my philosophy of mind term paper. (I am also posting an even shorter version, which you may want to read first.) My paper dealt with a principle known as "the causal closure of the physical." The principle says that all physical effects have physical sufficient causes. A less technical way to say this is that physical causes fully explain physical effects, such that nothing physical requires a non-physical explanation. In philosophy of mind this principle is used to argue that mental causes are actually physical, which is a step toward saying that the mind is nothing more than the brain. More broadly, the principle of causal closure relates to the question of whether physics can ultimately explain everything. I accept causal closure, but I do not think the mind is just the brain or that physics can explain everything. In this blog I explain why.

The argument that mental causes are really physical causes involves three premises:
Causal closure (CC): Every physical effect has physical sufficient causes.
Mental causation (MC): Some physical effects have mental causes.
No overdetermination (NO): There is no overdetermination of physical effects.
Conclusion (C): Mental causes are physical causes.

The argument works as follows. In NO, "overdetermination" refers to a situation where more than one cause of the same effect would have produced the effect on its own. For instance, overdetermination occurs when a man is fatally shot by two assassins at the same time. NO means that the two bullets did not have the same physical effect, e.g. each put its own hole in the man's head. In the argument above, NO means that there can't be mental causes that run parallel to physical causes. That is, mental phenomena (e.g. conscious choices) can't be causes where there are already physical sufficient causes. CC says that there will always be physical sufficient causes for physical effects. It follows that any effects in the body must come from physical causes, i.e. the body or its physical environment. According to MC, we do attribute some effects in the body to the mind. (These would be things like my arm moving because I decide to move it.) These effects, then, must be explainable in terms of the physical brain. Another way to say this is that there can be no “top-down” causality of brain or body states by the mind.

As I indicated above, I accept CC but not the conclusion that mental causes are physical causes. The flaw I find in the argument concerns the meanings of “physical cause” and “physical effect,” and the relationship between CC and MC. Essentially, MC is strictly true only on a definition of physical cause and effect on which CC cannnot be justified. I shall have nothing further to say on NO, which I consider a sound principle. The rest of this blog addresses the justification of CC and MC.

CC enjoys wide support among contemporary philosophers, and I think it is easy to see why. It has intuitive plausibility, that is, it sounds like something that should be true. We expect, for example, that if a candle moves, then there must be some physical force that makes it move. It would be unscientific, perhaps even superstitious, to think otherwise.

Nevertheless, many people believe that there are non-physical causes that affect the physical world. I find this claim to be intuitively plausible as well. It need not have anything to do with superstitious causes such as a ghost moving the candle. Consider, instead, the chairs around my dining room table. They are undoubtedly physical objects in a physical arrangement. However, they would never have been shaped as chairs and arranged as they are were they not produced to be purchased, with a view toward civility and hospitality. Here we have economic and ethical causes of what seem to be physical effects.

So we have a dilemma: both CC and not-CC are plausible. The supporter of CC might answer this dilemma by saying that the economic and ethical considerations have to do with meaning or purpose that only exists in our minds. We simply add meaning and purpose to the physical objects in our thinking about them, while the physical objects themselves are due to only physical causes. On the other hand, the non-supporter of CC would respond that were it not for the economic and ethical causes, there would never be chairs around my table. No doubt the chairs were physically constructed and moved, but that is not sufficient to explain what they are and where they are. I agree with the point made by the non-supporter of CC here, but not because I reject CC. Rather, I think at this point both the supporter of CC and the non-supporter of CC misunderstand what CC ought to mean.

The dilemma stems from thinking of “physical” as a class of concrete things, such as candles and chairs, or even energy. The supporter of CC reasons that if a thing is physical, and CC is true, then physical causes (causes produced by other physical things) must be sufficient to explain it. So ethics and economics are superficial, or subjective, in relation to my chairs. The non-supporter of CC sees that physics is not sufficient to explain my chairs, so he rejects CC. Neither questions that my chairs are physical objects, and that their arrangement is a physical fact.

If we try to justify CC with this idea of “physical,” we run into problems. First of all, we cannot base CC on a principle like “everything must be explainable in terms of physics,” for that is what CC is used to establish. CC must be a generalization, or inference, based on what we observe in the world. The problem then becomes that we must define what, out of all the things we observe, counts as physical. This has proved very difficult. For instance, one philosopher defines physical as whatever can be studied in the physical sciences, plus whatever interacts causally with phenomena studied in the physical sciences. This does not work because everything interacts with things that can be studied in physics. Another approach is to define physical simply as “non-mental.” This fails because it presumes we have some independent way of deciding what is mental. So neither of these approaches enables us to distinguish what is and is not physical. This means that neither approach gives us a meaningful interpretation CC. CC becomes just the principle that everything is sufficiently caused, and this does not tell us much.

A way in which CC can be meaningfully justified is by appeal to the conservation laws of modern physics, such as the conservation of mass/energy and conservation of momentum. Let us define physical causation as the exchange of conserved quantities, and a physical effect as a variation in conserved quantities in a thing (e.g. if the cause is my hand transferring its momentum to a candle, then the effect is the candle’s change in momentum). Then, according to whatever conservation law may come into play, physical causes must involve a reciprocal variation in conserved quantities (my hand loses the momentum that it transfers). This necessary reciprocal variation is a physical sufficient cause for the physical effect—and so we have CC. Causal closure, here, does not derive from any particular conservation law, but rather from a precise definition of physical causation that is suggested by the empirical discoveries of conserved quantities in modern physics.

With this understanding of physical cause and effect, it should be clear that “physical” in CC cannot refer to concrete things. Rather, it refers to specific properties of things, or the fact that things obey certain laws. So, while we may refer to my chairs as physical things in everyday language, we have to recognize that as chairs they are not the kind of physical effects to which CC applies. CC applies only to properties of the chairs like their mass.

This has an important consequence: there is no obvious reason why things with physical properties may not also have other properties, and obey other laws. My chairs clearly obey the law of conservation of energy, but they might also obey the law of supply and demand at the same time. The question then becomes, is there a way to explain how my chairs could obey other laws without violating CC?

To address this point I want to return to the mind-brain relationship, and MC. MC says that mental causes have physical effects. In everyday language this is obvious, but as we have defined “physical effects” for which CC is justified, it can’t be true. It would require, for example, my mind to create momentum in my bicep, or at least in my brain which then signals my bicep, without any reciprocal loss of momentum, as the law of conservation of momentum requires. This is why I said above that MC is not true on the definition of physical on which CC can be justified.

There is a way, however, to explain how the mind can affect the body, which also suggests how things like chairs can simultaneously obey CC and other laws. These things occur through dynamical systems. A dynamical system is a pattern or structure of activity. When a dynamical system is complex enough, its structure can occur, and even maintain and reproduce itself, with a range of possible components. Living things are the outstanding examples of dynamical systems: they keep a constant internal state and reproduce themselves while the molecules making them up constantly change.

Dynamical systems work based on the principle that any cause requires certain background conditions in order to produce a particular effect. (An example is that in order for flipping a switch to turn on my light, my home must be properly wired.) Dynamical systems are structured to adjust the background conditions under which their parts function in order to produce whatever result the system so directs. Furthermore, complex dynamical systems can seek and sort out the components they need to achieve particular states. The components of the system retain their own nature, but they become captive to the “higher-level” pattern of the system. So the molecules in a living cell can obey CC while functioning within the cell only as the cell directs.

At the level of complexity of the brain, this enables the system to think and choose. The mind, then, is basically a dynamical system that exists through the brain, so to speak. This does not mean that the mind just is the brain, for the mind is the pattern of activity, while the brain is the material that the pattern operates in. The key is that although the mind requires the brain, the mind—the pattern of brain activity—is necessary and sufficient for many brain states over a broader set of background conditions than any components of the brain are. By virtue of this fact the mind exercises “top-down” causality on the brain when it changes the brain’s state in a way that is not determined by the cells and chemicals making up the brain, even though these obey CC.

So we have a way to understand how things can obey non-physical laws without violating CC. What works for the mind-body relationship also works for my dining room chairs. Economic and ethical properties do ultimately depend on human minds and hence the brain, just as the mind depends on the brain, but they are able to produce “top-down” effects on things like my chairs. They are necessary and sufficient for my chairs over a broader set of background conditions than the particular wood and metal of which my chairs are made. The physics of the chairs would never be able to determine why they are what they are, where they are. Physics cannot explain everything.

To summarize, the argument given at the outset fails because CC and MC cannot refer to the same thing when they speak of “physical effects.” The mind moves the arm by controlling conditions within the brain so that it fires neurons that activate muscles. The energy transfers in this process are the truly physical effects, and CC describes them. MC is not true because the mind is not a thing that transfers energy. Instead, the mind is a system that conditions which energy transfers take place. We could say that the moving arm is just as much a mental effect as a physical effect, for it is a fulfilled intention of the mind as well as result of energy transfer. In the same way, the chairs arranged around my dining room table are the result of economics and ethics as well as physics.

The following works informed my argument:
Clouser, Roy. “A Sketch of Dooyeweerd’s Philosophy of Science.” In Facets of Faith and Science, vol. 2, edited by J. M. van der Meer. Lanham: The Pascal Center for Advanced Studies in Faith and Science/University Press of America, 1996. <http://www.allofliferedeemed.co.uk/Clouser/A%20Sketch%20of%20Dooyeweerd.pdf>

Dooyeweerd, Herman. A New Critique of Theoretical Thought. Vol. 3. Philadephia: The Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company, 1957.

Ellis, Ralph D. “Can Dynamical Systems Explain Mental Causation?” The Journal of Mind and Behavior 22, no. 3 (2001): 313-331.

Goudzward, Bob. "Economic Theory and the Normative Aspects of Reality." <www.allofliferedeemed.co.uk/Goudzwaard/BG113.pdf>

Lowe, E. J. An Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind. Cambridge: Cambridgue UP, 2000.

Spurret, David, & David Papineau. “A note on the completeness of ‘physics.’” Analysis 59, no. 1 (1999): 25-28.

Verbrugge, Magnus. Alive: An Enquiry into the Origin and Meaning of Life. Vallecito: Ross House Books, 1984.

Vicente, Augustin. “On the Causal Completeness of Physics.” International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 20, no. 2 (2006): 149-167.

Why think God is timeless?

2009-03-23T16:43:00.007-05:00

This will be my first in an ongoing series of posts presenting philosophical problems, and solutions where I am able to give them. My friend Jacob suggested I writes some posts like this in keeping with the stated aims on this blog of preseting what I do as a philosopher. I should mention that my the program at UD is more historically oriented than analytical, which means that in my classes we typically focus on understanding what an important thinker was trying to say rather than on the analysis of particular conundrums apart from a text. That being said, I think I will be able to present a few problems from my courses or papers that will be interesting and accessible.

Following is an excerpt from my yet-to-be completed M.A. thesis on time and eternity. In this passage I am explaining the argument that God must be timeless because he created time. I have replaced the footnotes with parenthetical references for quotes, and a couple of general references at the end.
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The philosophical argument for created time was first given by Augustine in the Confessions book 11, chapters 12-15. There he deals with a Manichean objection to the Christian doctrine of creation, which says that the world has a beginning. “What was God doing before he made heaven and earth?” asks Augustine’s objector. At issue is the apparent change of will involved in God’s decision to create at a definite time in the past, and the question aims to force the Christian into the following dilemma. Either creation is co-eternal with God because God eternally wills creation, or the eternal God changed his will in order to create at a definite time. The former horn is non-Christian because it denies that God created heaven and earth “in the beginning” (Gen. 1:1); the latter is absurd because an eternal being would not change.

The premise that an eternal being would not change requires some justification. If by eternity the objector meant timelessness, then it would be clear that eternal change is incoherent, for without the passage of time, no change can take place. This does not appear to be the operative thought in the objection, however, because in a prayerful aside (chapter 13) Augustine faults his objector for not appreciating the fixedness of eternity, in which no time passes. The objector seems to have everlastingness in mind when he speaks of eternity, but he considers everlastingness to imply changelessness. He does not try to demonstrate the point, but instead he asks two rhetorical questions that suggest it is absurd to suppose an everlasting being changes. First, he asks for a reason why God would not continue to rest if he were resting before creating. I understand the problem here to be with God’s apparent arbitrariness, which calls his rationality and venerability into question. Consider a God who suddenly at some arbitrary time chooses to create. Should we suppose that he had not previously made up his mind to create? Such a God would be less self-aware and decisive than we would hope for in a deity. But if God is omniscient, as Christianity teaches, such that he everlastingly foreknew his creation and even his will to create, then the question becomes, what reason could he possibly have for everlastingly delaying creation? A God who everlastingly wills and foreknows creation and yet delays creating for innumerable ages seems to lack wisdom or continence, and this is absurd, for how can an omniscient being lack wisdom, or an everlasting will be incontinent? The objector’s next question develops the point. He asks where the change in will comes from if indeed God did begin to will creation. The immediate problem here seems to be infinite regress. That is, if we say that God created when he did because at that time he willed to create, then we only push the problem back a step. What gives rise to a change in will? A further act of will? In order to avoid an infinite regress we must grant that God’s will precedes creation and belongs to his very substance. That is, God’s will is everlasting. The only way to explain creation in time, then, is to attribute an absurd delay to God. The objector thus draws us into the dilemma sketched above: either creation is eternal, or God’s will has changed, which is absurd.

Augustine’s answer to the objection is to affirm that God created time itself, so that there is no time before creation in which God could change. It follows that God does not delay in carrying out his will. The absurdity is in the objector’s question. It is a mistake to ask what God was doing before creation, because “there was no ‘then,’ where there was no time” (Confessions 11.15). To back up his claim that God created time, Augustine expounds a doctrine of divine timelessness. God precedes the beginning of the world not by a span of time, but “by the sublimity of ever-present eternity.” Life in the “ever-present” eternity is simultaneous for Augustine, just as for Boethius: “All of your years stand at the same time, because they stand; nor are departing years thrust out by those that come, because they do not go by” (Confessions 11.16). In conclusion, Augustine affirms divine timelessness on account of the creation of time.

Notes:
Scriptural arguments can be made for the creation of time, though they are not my concern in this paper. See William Lane Craig, “Timeless & Omnitemporality,” in Greg Ganssle, ed., God and Time: Four Views (Downers Grove: Intervarsity Press, 2001), 129-132; and Roy Clouser, “Is God Eternal?” <http://www.allofliferedeemed.co.uk/Clouser/RC-IGE.pdf> 1-4.

On the problem of delay before creation see Craig, “Timelessness & Omnitemporality,” 153-156, and “Response to Critics,” in Ganssle, 181-182.

What I have done as a philosopher

2009-01-27T14:24:00.006-06:00

To continue explaining what I do, I want to briefly describe the courses I have taken and the papers I have written. I intend to update this blog as I complete more courses and write more papers. My courses are listed here in the order in which I took them.

Philosophy of Religion. This course focused on the relationship between faith and reason. We read four major historical thinkers who each represent a different position on whether faith or reason leads to truth.

Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274): both faith and reason (reason cannot prove faith but can defend it)
Benedict Spinoza (1634-1677): reason, not faith (any teaching of faith other than to love each other and submit to the government is just superstition)
Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855): faith, not reason (faith is an ability to relate directly to God beyond reason)
Friedrick Nietzsche (1844-1900): niether faith nor reason (all truth-claims are merely assertions of power)

I had to write a short paper on each thinker, but my best were on Spinoza and Kierkegaard. I argued that Spinoza cannot account for Christians being martyred by a government that tries to impose its own superstitions (e.g. the ancient Christians who were killed for refusing to burn incense to Caesar). On Kierkegaard, I argued that Kierkegaard used irony to show that faith can always have the last laugh against reason.

Medieval Philospohy. A survey of a historical period. My paper concerned Aquinas's claim that so far as reason can tell God could have made an eternal world--in other words, that we only know that the world had a beginning in time by faith. I argued that Aquinas's position overcomes a problem with the idea of creation implied by Moses Maimonides (1135-1204). Maimonides implied that we can only have scientific knowledge if the world is eternal. Basically, by making the fact that time began knowable only by faith, Aquinas validated both scientific knowledge and the Christian view of creation. (This may sound like it involves evolution vs. creation, but it actually doesn't. It involves the ground of necessity, the status of imagination, and the concept of time having a beginning.)

Recent Philosophy. A survey of philosophy from Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) to the present. I wrote two papers: a review of Herman Dooyeweerd's (1894-1977) Transcendental Problems of Philosophic Thought, and an analysis of Henri Bergson's (1859-1941) Laughter. In the latter I concluded that "the production of and indulgence in comedy for its own sake is a sign of the post-modern condition."

Descartes. In-depth study of Descartes's (1596-1644) philosophical writings. Descartes is usually considered the first modern philosopher. I wrote a short paper arguing that Descartes did not change his method from an early work to a later one, and a larger paper on the issue of circular reasoning in his Meditations on First Philosophy.

Philosophy of History. A survey of philosophies of history from ancient to modern times. My paper examined the implications of Protestant covenant theology for the meaning of history.

Phenomenological Tradition. An introduction to phenomenology, a 20th century philosophical movement that emphasises careful description of the logical features of conscious experience. My paper examined Dooyeweerd's critique of phenomenology.

Asian Thought. A survey of Chinese and Indian philosophy. I wrote on Mencius (or Meng-zi, 372-289 B.C.), a disciple of Confucius, arguing that his intuitive argumentation can be understood as a condensed form of what Aristotle (384-322 B.C.) called practical knowing (phronesis).

Duns Scotus: Metaphysical Themes. An overview of Scotus (1266-1308). My paper built on my previous paper for Medieval Philosophy, arguing that Duns Scotus's treatment of creation better prepared for modern science than Aquinas's.

Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau. A study of three of the most important political philosophers of the enlightenment. (Locke in particular was an important source of ideas behind the American Revolution and Declaration of Independence.) I wrote two papers on natural law, one on Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) and one on John Locke (1632-1704). I argued that Hobbes's doctrine of natural law is very close to Aquinas's; and that Locke presents natural law in a way calculated to motivate us to think through political questions for oursevles, because our individual use of reason is the true ground of our liberty.

Hegel, Nietzsche, Dostoevski. A study of G. W. F. Hegel's (1770-1831) Philosophy of Mind (or "Spirit"), Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and Dostoevski's (1821-1881) The Brothers Karamazov. A summarizer of Western tradition, a poetic philosopher, and a philosophical poet. My paper compared Hegel and Nietzsche on the transition from youthful idealism to mature work. Hegel emphasizes integration into society, while Nietzsche emphasizes developing one's unique strengths.

Philosophy of Mind. A survey of contemporary philosophy of mind, i.e. the relationship between body or brain and mind, and the nature of consciousness. I wrote on the principle of "the causal closure of the physical," which states physical events must have only have physical causes. I argued that on a precise definition of "physical," causal closure does not rule out higher level causes that condition how physical components of a (living) system exercise their causality. Conscious choices can be understood as such "higher-level" causes, such that the mind can determine physical actions without violating the laws of physics.

Homer and Vergil. A study of Homer's Illiad and Odyssey, and Vergil's Aeneid, which deal with the Trojan war, and the establishment of Greek and Roman civilization. My paper examined the fortuitousness of Penelope's decision to initiate an archery contest among her suitor's with Odysseus's bow. Although she did not know Odysseus was present, the bow became his means of slaughtering the suitors and reclaiming his household. I argued that Homer's plot and characters are coherent even though the fortuitousness resists complete explanation, and that this is true to life.

Aristotle's Metaphysics. In-depth study of Aristotle's Categories and Metaphysics. I wrote on book Zeta of the Metaphysics, which is dedicated to the question, "what is substance." My argument dealt with the structure of the book, and Aristotle's dismissal of the compound of form and matter from his inquiry in chapter 3. He dismisses it because he is concerned not with what kinds of things are substances, but rather with what makes substances to be substances.

Georg Simmel. A study of Simmel's (1858-1918) Philosophy of Money. I have put up three blogs (here and here) summarizing this book because so many people were intrigued by the title. My paper for the class examined Simmel's critique of Socialism. Socialism has a paradoxical basis in abstract economic rationality and a primitive emotional preference for community. It can only be beneficial in tension with individualism because either ideal alone would be much worse. Further, Marx's theoretical account of labor value and exploitation is flawed, as is the theory that economic equality will lead to social equality.

Plato and Aristotle. A study of Plato's Republic and Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. My paper on Plato argued that Socrates's censorship of poetry in the ideal city answers to his argument that only the best adults should be introduced to dialectic (philosophical argumentation) because both poetry and dialectic require grasping the whole through its parts. An Aristotle paper is forthcoming.

Machiavelli, Bacon, Descartes. This course was designed to show that modernity is both a political and a philosophical project. I wrote a review of The Bible, Protestantism and Modern Science by Peter Harrison, a book that connents the modern scientific approach to nature with the Protestent approach to the Bible (i.e. literal/historical reading rather than symbolic and allegorical). My term paper is forthcoming.

Rationalism and Empricism. Primarily a study of Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding and Leibniz's (1646-1716) New Essays on Human Understanding, with other readings from Descartes, Spinoza, David Hume (1711-1776) and Christian Wolff (1679-1754). My paper will deal with Locke's critique and doctrine of substance.

What a philosopher does

2009-01-21T14:04:00.006-06:00

To me there are two basic ways to describe what philosophy is and what a philosopher does.

Philosophers ask questions. The great model of a questioner is Socrates, the 4th century B.C. Greek who was put to death in Athens for "corrupting the youth." Socrates asked questions mostly about human life, or what we would consider ethics. He wanted to know what things like justice, goodness, piety, and love really are. His questions aroused the hatred of Athenians because he called on them to justify their actions, and most of the time they could not do it. Like most of us, they never questioned a great deal of what they were taught as children or how they decided to live early on in their lives. Socrates's persistent questioning showed them that they were not really as just, good, etc. as they thought they were. Understandably, they convicted him of corrupting the youth because young people picked up on his questioning and began to reject the assumptions of their elders.

It is not that Socrates was trying to corrupt the youth, or to be the sort of person who only raises questions to try to show how he is superior to others. Socrates was neither arrogant nor a skeptic in the sense of one who doubts everything. In his own defense he explained his questioning as an admission that he did not have knowledge. He wanted to find someone who did, someone who could really teach him. He did not try to turn the youth away from the traditions of the community, he only tried to find out consistent meaning in those traditions. He did not question just to question, rather, he attempted to find truth through conversation and thorough examination of topics.

Philosophers continue in the work of Socrates by asking about the things we say and do. Philosophy could be described as the discipline of raising questions. Having a sense of the right and best questions to ask is skill that can be developed. Often the best questions are aimed at identifying assumptions or parts of what we believe that are illogical. Philosophers thus work at analysis of arguments and concepts. The whole process of analysis, questioning, and conversation is known as Socratic dialectic, and philosophers have sometimes been called dialecticians.

The motivation for asking questions in the Socratic manner can be to find sure knowledge and to clarify thinking, but probably the deepest motivation is wonder. Everyone at some point asks some questions about why things are as they are, but philosophers are driven by wonder to make this pursuit their life's work. Another ancient Greek, Aristotle, described philosophy this way. Heidegger, a 20th century German, followed him in describing how "the task of thinking" stems from our wonder at the fact of existence, that there should be anything rather than nothing at all.

So far I have not said anything about a type of thing studied in philosophy, and this may be frustrating to some people. It is easier to understand that chemists work with chemicals, pyschologists work with the mind, and administrators work with administration. Philosophers don't even work with questions and statements per se, in the way that linguists, literary scholars, and speechwriters do. So far I have only defined philosophy as an activity, but philosophy can also be defined as a subject.

There are a few possibilities for what the subject of philosophy is. We could say that philosophers study concepts. When we ask questions and analyse arguments, we are searching for clear concepts and the relationships between concepts. This definitions is informative, but I don't think it says enough. Concepts can be of anything, and so if philosophers study concepts, then they just study everything. In our modern world, however, we have specialists to study every imaginable thing. These specialists know far more about the things they study than anyone who tries to study everying ever could. Is a philosopher just a generalist, a dabbler?

Aristotle pursued knowledge of almost every subject imaginable, from politics to biology to drama to God. In the ancient world, before specialization, this was more possible than it is today. Even Artistotle, though, did not really study everything. Of all of the productive arts, which we would today call art, engineering and craftsmanship, he only studied those dealing with language: rhetoric and drama. So even Aristotle had his limits.

There is also a historical problem with the idea that philosophers study everything. Throughout Western history, especially in modern times, one discipline after another has been spun off from philosophy: first physics, then chemistry, then geology and biology, then economics, mathematics sociology, psychology, and politics. If at one time a philosopher could study everything, that time is surely past. At least, the time is past when a philosopher can study everything in the same way that a scientist studies his or her particular field.

There are just a few fields of study left for philosophers: ethics (the study of right and wrong), epistemology (the study of knowledge and truth); logic (the study of arguments); aesthetics (the study of beauty); and metaphysics (the study of ultimate causes and realities beyond physics). Of these, I think that logic seems to fall under epistemology, and that aesthetics is relatively minor and perhaps secondary to the others. So maybe there is only ethics, epistemology, and metaphysics. Or even less. Some philosophers today say that all metaphysics can do is affirm and explain science, since science tells us about all of the causes and things in the world. If science explains everything, though, then maybe it can provide us with ethics as well. All that would be left is epistemology. Within epistemology, today's logic could perhaps be claimed as a branch of mathematics. That leaves us just about where we started, with the analysis of concepts as the activity of a philosopher. If we understanding analysis of concepts in this way, with all of the other topics removed, then philosophers can't do much more than analyse the way we use language, which in fact is what a great deal of contemporary philosophy is about.

I do not subscribe to this, shall we say, reduced view of what a philosopher does. There is another way to say that philosophy studies concepts and studies everything. Philosophy is the architectonic discipline according to Herman Dooyeweerd, which means that philosophers study the relationships between all kinds of things. Although we cannot study with the breadth of Aristotle, philosophers should aim to be informed about the principles of each discipline and the nature of each subject matter. Our work may also provide guidance of insight to other disciplines. I would say that, rather than viewing the history of science as a progressive taking of ground that formerly belonged to philosophy, we should view the history of science as so many special fields of inquiry identified by philosophy. Philosophy, through its Socratic activity, discovered many topics that required more focused attention.

In this way of understanding philosophy, metaphysics is of primary importance and cannot be replaced by specialized sciences. Metaphysics deals with the nature of reality as a whole. It is often more difficult and controversial than scientific fields, which concentrate on the concrete world and practical results, but it is nevertheless a worthwhile pursuit. In metaphysics we pursue larger "why" questions than the sciences can answer, and we try to harmonize all of the different wonders of existence.

So what does a philosopher do? Driven by wonder, he asks questions and tries to make sense of the world. All of us do this to some extent, but the philosopher, well, does it professionally. In my next post I plan to discuss my graduate term papers, in order to give examples of the kind of work I have tried to describe here, and to explain what I myself have been doing as a philosopher.

Hello

2009-01-08T15:12:00.005-06:00

Hello to my friends and random visitors. This blog is going to contain philosophical reflections and information about my work in philosophy. I have decided to make a blog for two reasons.

First, I keep getting asked about what I do as a philosopher. Family and acquaintances often want to know what my graduate training involves and what its goal is. More than that I am preparing to teach, I sense that people want to understand what kind of work I do or am going to do. This question has many facets, I think. People want to know who I am. Who we are, what kind of person we are, is measured in part by what kind of work we do. God created us to work, to serve him, so it only makes sense that are identity is, in part, formed by our work. Also, we are called to complete particular work. Christ himself assessed his life in terms of his work. He prayed, "'I have brought you glory on earth by completing the work you gave me to do. And now, Father, glorify me in your presence with the glory I had with you before the world began.'" (Jn 17:4-5) Thus he asked to be received into heaven because he had finished his work on earth. What is my work? Well, obviously it is not so well-defined as the work of Christ in the gospels. Discerning God's call can be a long process, and the particulars only become apparent along the way. For now, I can only say I am preparing to work in the field of philosophy. What that means will be the subject of another post.

People also want to evaluate, somewhere in the back of their minds, I think, whether I am really working. The question of what one is doing implies this. Am I just postponing committment to a career, hiding in school from the real world? I have wondered this about other people, so I'm sure some have wondered it about me. I think it is a legitimate question, although it is not a polite one to ask openly. Again, we are made for work. Someone who does not take his place in the concrete world and work in some way is falling short of the meaning of human existence. To be perfectly clear, falling short is another way to say for sinning. So there is an ethical element in the question. For most questioners, I think, the ethical element would not be framed so much in terms of human excellence or God's calling, but rather in terms of providing for one's self and family, and making one's contribution to society. These concrete measures are just as important, and the Apostle Paul sums up God's standard in the matter: "He who has been stealing must steal no longer, but must work, doing something useful with his own hands, that he may have something to share with those in need." (Eph 4:28)

People also want to know whether I am happy. Again, we are made for work. It follows that we shall not be fully satisfied with life unless we are doing our work. "'My food,' said Jesus, 'is to do the will of him who sent me and to finish his work.'" (Jn 4:34) I think if we are sufficiently self-aware, we will sense either satisfaction or condemnation and anxiety depending on whether we have worked diligently on a normal day. I know I do. When I waste time during the day, I have a hard time relaxing at night; when I should be enjoying time with my wife I feel the urge to work on schoolwork. I would be better off imitating Jesus. (Lord, have mercy on me!) When people ask about my work, then, they are concerned that I find happiness in life. When we care even a little about anyone, we want them to be happy. Talking with someone about his work is a way of sharing the joy of successful living, and also it can be an encouragement to one who is doubting his work. I have often doubted both the value of my work, and my ability to do the work before me. When others take interest in it, or otherwise value it, my mood can change. Thus asking about work is a gesture of love.

People also want to know how to rank me. The question of work is a social question, for we do rank people according to their work. Different kinds of work, and in general different fields, have different levels of prestige. Indeed, prestige is a significant motivator for many people in the choice of a career. This ranking blends with the ethical question to some degree, because we expect people to attain to do work that fits their ability. My mother always said, "the world needs ditchdiggers as much as it needs doctors," but my father also said that I should not take a job too easy for me, because I would be taking it from someone for whom it would be challenging. The flipside is worth considering too: the world would be a better place if there wasn't so much covering up incompetence in high places. All this is to say that social ranking is a real part of the question of one's work. The question, again, has immediate personal consequences, for when we answer, then we are tacitly ranked. Aside from the ethical angle already mentioned, rank determines respect and esteem. In polite company, among family or close friends, this may be muted or suppressed, but in other company it may not be.

My second reason for making a blog is to sort out my own thoughts on what I am doing. I intend in my first few posts no only to explain what a philosopher is and why I am/want to be a philosopher, but also to explain what I have already done in my graduate studies. This will help to show what I do, but it will also help me to think about what I having been doing and where I am going to take it all. Further, it will be a first step in making my schoolwork into just plain work. What I mean by that is that in this blog I will be beginning to publish my ideas, my philosophical work. The two main activities of academics are teaching and publication. Some day, perhaps in the near future, I will deliver papers at conferences and publish papers in refereed journals. For now, I want to share my ideas with friends and interested parties informally through this blog.

My next post, perhaps next week some time, will be on what a philosopher does. After that I will post about the term papers I have written, and then I intend to address a series of questions I have been asked more than once about Christianity and philosophy.