As you can see, my doctoral advisor, Michael Sudduth, thought to tag me.

Here was my response:

Thank you for the tag, Michael, and thank you for the compliment, Paul. Since I was always definitely B-team in all youth sports, I’m glad to finally have made the varsity squad!

However, I’m not sure if I meet the criteria for “zealous apologist for natural theology.” Here, I take it—perhaps wrongly—that you have in mind someone who thinks they can deliver the result of God’s existence in one quick and overwhelmingly persuasive shot? Something like, say, the enthusiastic new apologist who just discovered WLC videos on the Kalam or the moral argument? If so, then I definitely do not count myself as part of that squad, let alone a varsity member of it!

Admittedly, I do think there are strong (especially cumulative) reasons favoring (classical) theism over its mainstream rivals, and I have advanced those reasons in my book, peer-reviewed articles, and dissertation, should anyone want to inspect what I have to say. Certainly, I don’t think any argument of mine rests upon an obviously or uncontroversially false premise. But would I be so confident as to assume that none could appear “dubious” in the eyes of a skeptic? Probably not, especially since what appears dubious to some people—principles of explanation, the reality of change or composition, the impossibility of self-actualization, grounding or causal asymmetry, the acyclicity of causation, and so on—is something I, along with many others, take to be self-evident or near enough. (Though, naturally, I have arguments in support of such premises as well, recognizing that sophisticated philosophical objections have been raised against all of them!) Not to mention the fact that the arguments for God with the most significant (to my mind) probative force proceed from an already developed (and independently motivated) metaphysical research program that the skeptic could perhaps query endlessly in order to cast “dubiousness” onto the argument itself—something that could surely not be adequately defended in just 300 words!

In short, if you were to ask me whether I have an argument, or even a collection of arguments, for God that would convince or persuade everyone—or at least everyone holding to the standards of typical skeptics—well, I’m not so sure about that. But I’m also quite convinced that persuasion is a poor measure of a good argument to begin with.

Nevertheless, I will be very interested to see if anyone passes your test, Paul!

To which Moser replied:

Now, to follow up on this just a little—because perhaps this will be of interest, or help, to some reading—what matters to me (in natural theology or elsewhere) is not whether a skeptic finds some premise in an argument dubious. For the simple reason that an argument containing a premise a skeptic finds dubious is perfectly compatible with that argument being sound—and indeed with its being a genuinely good argument at that (more on this in a moment). Finding a premise dubious—especially in a mere 300-word presentation!—is obviously not the same thing as identifying a false premise or some other defect in the argument.

Consider, for example, two arguments.

Theistic:

If God made Pumpkin (my basset hound), then God exists.

God made Pumpkin.

Therefore, God exists.

Atheistic:

If God did not make Pumpkin, then God does not exist.

God did not make Pumpkin.

Therefore, God does not exist.

I take the following points to be obvious. Both arguments are valid. And, assuming by “God” we mean the creator of all concrete contingent things, the conditionals are true. (The second follows contrapositively from: if God exists, then God made Pumpkin.)

Finally, I take it that everyone will agree that either God made Pumpkin or God did not make Pumpkin. So one of these two arguments is sound. (Obviously, I think it is just self-evident that God made Pumpkin—I mean, look at her! But, of course, if pressed, I would venture other arguments in support of this).

Not only that, but there are any number of substitutions we could make for “Pumpkin,” yielding any number of arguments of this form. And whichever of theism or atheism is true—and one of them must be—the corresponding arguments will be sound.

Which means that there are any number of sound arguments either for or against the existence of God whose crucial premise will nevertheless be regarded as dubious by the person on the other side.

So, what’s the point of all this? Simply that a person’s finding a premise dubious, by itself, tells us something only about that person’s epistemic attitude toward the premise. It does not, by itself, tell us anything about whether that premise is false or whether the argument featuring it is unsound.

As for what actually makes a good argument? Here, I like something like James Ross’s standard (see his Philosophical Theology): a good argument is not merely a sound argument, but one that is relatively epistemically straightforward, whose premises are publicly accessible (not somehow privileged to only a few), and for which there is some determinate or methodical means of assessing those premises—which, of course, does not imply universal agreement or psychological irresistibiltiy.

To my mind, there are at least several arguments in natural theology that satisfy these conditions (and many that do not).

In a future post—once I’ve cleared several other projects—I’ll say more both about Ross’s criteria and about which arguments I take to adequately satisfy them.

Until then, there is always my book : )

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P.S. My friend Joshua Rasmussen was clearly feeling a little bolder than I was, and sent Paul the following:

A Skeptic-Friendly Argument for a Supreme Foundation

Stage One: A Foundation

1. At least some concrete realities are dependent: they exist or have their particular features because of conditions beyond themselves.

2. Explaining each dependent reality by another dependent reality does not yet explain why there is any dependent reality at all. It merely passes the explanatory task along.

3. It is reasonable, absent a positive reason to think otherwise, to expect dependent reality to have some (non-circular) explanation.

4. Therefore, there is probably a nondependent foundation of dependent reality.

Stage Two: A Supreme Foundation

5. Precise fundamental limits ordinarily invite explanation. If something has exactly this much power, knowledge, goodness, or causal capacity, we can reasonably ask: Why this limit rather than another? This modest principle does not assume that every fundamental fact needs an explanation. It says only that apparently arbitrary limits create special explanatory pressure.

6. A genuinely ultimate foundation cannot receive its basic limits from anything deeper. Otherwise, that deeper reality would be more fundamental.

7. Therefore, other things being equal, a foundation with unexplained arbitrary limits is a less satisfactory stopping point than a foundation without such limits.

8. The least arbitrary and most unified hypothesis is that the foundation is supreme: it possesses fundamental positive excellences without arbitrary limitation.

9. A supreme foundation is sufficiently close to what theists mean by God.

The argument is best understood abductively: a supreme foundation explains dependent reality with fewer arbitrary stopping points than its limited rivals.

Moser’s Response:

Thanks. Good effort but not quite there. Let me play Bertrand Russell, a familiar skeptic who has offered relevant concerns. First, let me apologize for *Why I am Not a Christian*; it really is sophomoric and naive in so many ways. Second, let me note that in my 1940s BBC exchange with Fred Copleston I asked for a good reason to suppose that we don't have contingency and dependence all the way down, with no end to that parade, ontically or explanatorily. Fred has no answer, and I don't see any hint of one here. We can't (=shouldn't) just stipulate or assume that excluding this conceptually live option is better, ontically or explanatorily, from the viewpoint of actual reality. Third, why should we assume that actual reality matches or conforms to your standard for a 'least arbitrary and most unified hypothesis'? I, among other skeptics, have plausibly asked for reasonable, non-question-begging support for this alleged conformity or correspondence, and we suggest that we are owed an answer. Otherwise, we are letting our explanatory ideals have too much epistemic and ontic clout without due needed support. We need some indication that reality cooperates in the way you assume, as the history of science shows that what we take to explanatorily ideal at a time often ends up being overthrown by reality. We note that your argument depends on such matching, but we can't ignore our intelligible and plausible question here. We see a parallel with Richard Swinburne's question-begging use of simplicity to tell his story. We'll give him his favorite notion of simplicity but then ask for reason to suppose that reality conforms, quite aside from his dubious probability assignments that serve his position. We deny that science works this way (despite some special pleading to the contrary). So, we await answers to our plausible questions. Very best, Bertrand Russell.

I jest—but only slightly.

For years, the person I have been most asked to respond to concerning objections against the existence of God, the coherence of classical theism, or the plausibility of Catholicism, has been Joseph Schmid. And, indeed, I have spilled much ink and spent many podcast hours answering objections Joe has raised—with considerable attention being devoted to his issues with classical theism or traditional proofs for God, from modal collapse to existential inertia. While I have obviously disagreed with Joe about these matters, I have always found his challenges interesting and important—not to mention, difficult. Never once did Joe strike me as a bad-faith interlocuter; rather, he always came across someone genuinely interested in trying to figure things out.

By now, I’m sure many of you have heard the news—it’s literally all-over social media—that Joe Schmid is (once again) a practicing Catholic. “Once again”, because Joe was baptized Catholic, though he fell away from the faith in his teenage years, going through a spell for atheism before spending considerably more time in agnosticism.

If you haven’t seen it, Joe has uploaded a story of his conversion to YouTube. I highly recommend giving it a watch and then staying “finely-tuned” (Joe’s joke, not mine!) for his upcoming Comprehensive Case for Catholicism. If it’s anything like Joe’s work elsewhere—and I’m sure it will be— it’s certain to be exceedingly thorough and well thought out.

Joe will also be joining me on my channel toward the end of this month.

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A description of the book can be found on both pages—which you should obviously read before deciding to pre-order.

Personally, I’ve described this book as part (very accessible, not super dense) philosophical treatise on Aquinas’s notion of the good life and part (very practical, as in immediately actionable) field manual for developing discipline across multiple domains—from your fitness routine to your prayer life.

It’s definitely a unique project and not the usual sort of thing you’ll find me writing about. I hate the category of “self-help,” so I seriously hesitate to use it to describe my book, but in a way, that’s sort of what it is. Just think self-help more along the lines of Meditations rather than the more modern and atrocious sort of stuff, like—well. Never mind. My mother always taught me that if you can’t say anything nice...

Anyway, thanks for checking it out!

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Once again, my aim is to keep this fairly—as in mostly, but not entirely—simple. I won’t treat all objections, and I won’t treat the objections I do consider in enormous detail—just enough, I hope, to get the general idea on the table and gesture toward how the complaint can be adequately resolved.

Note: and I plan to present and defend Aquinas's De Ente in a future epsiode of Summa Contra Everbody, our newly launched podcast. If you haven’t already, you might want to subscribe!

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Objection 1) Aquinas’s argument involves a “controversial” metaphysic—constituent ontology, existence as a first-level feature, etc.

Answer: This is true. For Aquinas’s argument for God to run, at least some of his background scholastic metaphysical system must be in place. Obviously, for the purposes of this post, that is not something I could hope to substantively defend here.

So, just two relatively brief points.

First, it should be noted that the commitments required to run the rudimentary core of Aquinas’s De Ente argument are minimal and fairly commonsensical.1 They involve, first, the idea that what a thing is is really different from the fact that it is—that these principles of what-ness and is-ness are really distinct, at least where familiar, everyday objects, like my basset hound Pumpkin, are concerned.

The second commitment is that reality is intelligible: if something about a thing cannot be explained, or made sense of, internally, then something—or some collection of things—outside the thing can do the explaining.

To my mind, these are not only safe assumptions—namely, that existence is not “built in” to familiar, everyday objects and that their existence is not simply a brute fact—but assumptions that should be afforded something like default status.2

My second broader point is that there is no getting around doing metaphysics, and no metaphysical system is free of controversy. The benefit of Aquinas’s approach is that his argument for God naturally emerges from a metaphysical system that is independently motivated because of the critical work it does in making sense of the broadest features of reality—how things have the character they do, how they change yet persist over time, the similarities and differences among existing things (the one and the many), what causality consists in, how the laws of nature are grounded, etc., etc.

Not only that, but once deployed in cosmological reasoning and the philosophy of God, the resulting benefits themselves provide reason to commend the system, insofar as one achieves a robust yet conceptually disciplined understanding of God—one that can serve as the right sort of theoretical entity to explain everything else while also explaining, rather than causing, itself.3

Finally, let me say this. As we will hopefully see by the end of this article, this objection is, at once, perhaps the least and the most interesting. It is the least interesting whenever it is lobbed as a general, not-very-specific complaint—a sort of lazy dismissal of an argument or system of thought simply because it is controversial.

On the other hand, it is the most interesting objection because I do think that, once the metaphysical system is in place, all the other usual objections can be quite easily dispatched. The real work of objecting must therefore be done at the level of metaphysical-system comparison.

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Objection 2) Aquinas’s argument commits the fallacy of composition. Just because every individual thing whose essence is distinct from its existence has a cause, that doesn’t mean the collection of all those things does.

Answer: Again, two responses.

First, more generally, not every inference from what is true of the parts to what is true of the whole commits a fallacy of composition. This seems obvious enough: if all the bricks are red, then the wall is red too. And it is very, very plausible that, if we are considering all and only those things whose essences are really distinct from their existence, then we still need something to account for why that entire collection exists at all, since nothing within the collection is able to provide such an account.

Nevertheless, it is quite clear that Aquinas’s argument does not reason in this way in the first place. Aquinas’s cosmological argument does not employ a strategy of aggregation or reason from all such beings taken collectively. It simply runs from just one entity whose essence is really distinct from its existence—that’s it.

In other words, from just one being whose essence is really distinct from its existence, Aquinas derives, as its necessary condition, a being whose essence is really the same as its existence. From there, once it is seen that there can be only one such being, it is then inferred that all other beings ultimately derive their existence from it. But again, no worry about a fallacy of composition lurks in any of this.

Objection 3) Aquinas’s argument assumes the principle of sufficient reason—which is controversial. Sorry—CONTROVERSIAL!!!

Answer: Two responses, yet again.

First—yes, it does. At least it assumes a rather modest and highly plausible version of PSR. That is, if something is not accounted for by the essence or nature of a thing, then an outside cause accounts for it.

Aquinas is simply committed to the idea—as plausible as anything—that things that do not account for their own existence or character are not just there for no rhyme or reason whatsoever. Give that up, and I think all rationality and knowledge are lost—skepticism consumes us.

(Of course, many other positive arguments can be given for this form of PSR, but I won’t rehearse those now—see my book for more. The point is, I hardly see this as a “cost” to Aquinas. It would be a cost to deny it!)

Second, there is a way of running an argument for God from Aquinas’s commitments that does not require PSR but actually delivers it as an eventual result. For those interested in seeing how that works, see my Millerian Cosmological Argument for God.

Objection 4) Perhaps an infinite regress can satisfy his principle of explanation after all.

Answer: Clearly, it cannot.

Given the PSR Aquinas holds, stacking beings whose essences are really distinct from their existence is never going to explain how they ever became—or presently are—actual, as in really existent, in the first place.

Think again of the analogy I gave in the original post. It doesn’t matter how many white Lego blocks you have or how you arrange them: if what we need to explain is a purple tower, then you are going to need something outside the collection of purely white Lego blocks to do it.

The same goes for beings that actually exist. If what we need to explain is how they are actually included in reality, then we are going to need something beyond beings whose natures do not demand that they exist to account for why they do.

I have to be honest here: this seems as obvious to me as anything. There is nothing so special about infinity that an infinite collection of derivative actualities somehow becomes underived. Adding more recipients of existence—even infinitely many—never supplies a source of existence.

P.S. There are more technical arguments for why this sort of grounding chain cannot regress infinitely, which I explore in my Review of Metaphysics article. But this more basic point is, I think, perfectly sufficient for now.

Objection 5) The thesis of existential inertia—namely, that once something is brought into existence, it will continue existing unless and until something extinguishes it—undermines Aquinas’s argument.

Answer: It does not.

Simply put, there is no theoretical room for existential inertia within Aquinas’s system.

To see this—and here I am going to assume some familiarity with Aquinas’s background metaphysics—consider that the potency of familiar, everyday objects must be actualized by a source of actuality. This follows from the real distinction together with a basic principle of causality. Said differently, actuality does not and cannot subsist in some potency, as though it could just “hang there” like any other property inhering in a subject.4 Obviously, apart from a thing’s existence, there is no subject for existence to inhere in.

This means that existence, while remaining a first-level feature of concrete individuals, cannot inhere in individuals in the way other properties do—like, say, a color property. So, suppose someone suggests that, since we can color a chair red without anyone needing continually to dye it for the chair to remain red, perhaps existence works the same way. They would be mistaken. The reason the color can persist in the chair is, quite obviously, that the chair exists. There is already an existing subject for the color to persist in. But a thing itself persists only because that thing has existence. It therefore cannot be the case that a thing’s existence persists because the thing persists.

Recall that on Aquinas’s metaphysic, a thing—and all its properties and powers—has whatever actuality it has only by virtue of its existence, including any supposed property or power of “continuing to exist.” So, if the inertialist tries to explain a thing’s continued existence by appealing to some feature—a real property or power, say, an “inertial” principle of persistence—they have already presupposed the existence of the thing in order for it to possess that feature in the first place.5 But to appeal to something that presupposes the thing’s existence in order to explain why it continues to exist is viciously circular.

Alternatively, one might simply declare the thing’s continued existence to be brute. But then the issue is not that existential inertia is a plausible thesis within Aquinas’s system. The issue is that one is really just rejecting Aquinas’s system—in particular, his explanatory principle. EI is no longer doing the work.

The same applies if one simply wants to say that EI is viable within an alternative system. Perhaps. But again, EI is not by itself doing the work. What is doing the work is something like: “I like this metaphysical system better than Aquinas’s.” And that is clearly a different sort of objection, one related more directly to the first complaint about Aquinas’s general metaphysical scheme.

Finally, one might worry that the Thomist is simply begging the question against EI. But this is not so. Thomists—certainly not Aquinas—do not merely assume at the outset that EI is false. Rather, Aquinas offers arguments for the real distinction between essence and existence—arguments we have not explored here—and, once that distinction and the relevant causal principle are in place, the falsity of EI follows as an implication.

P.S. I offer a more technical refutation of EI in my Millerian Argument, based on the relation between essence and existence as incomplete entities within finite individuals. I won’t get into that here, but I mention it for anyone interested in a refutation of EI that does not require Aquinas’s principle of causality.

Objection 6) Aquinas’s notion of God as absolutely simple requires us to say that God’s power is identical to God’s knowledge, which is identical to God’s existence, and so forth. But this “identity of the divine attributes” thesis is clearly incoherent. So, Aquinas’s approach to God must have gone wrong somewhere.

Answer: It has not gone wrong anywhere.

However, we must distinguish between two ways in which the charge of incoherence might be understood.

The first is easier to address. Here, the claim is that, in being identical with his attributes, God must be identical to various abstract objects. God is identical to power, knowledge, goodness, existence, and so forth—but power, knowledge, and goodness are abstract objects. Therefore, God is somehow identical to a collection of abstract objects—or perhaps to just one abstract object, as the case may be—which is clearly absurd.

The reason this charge is hardly a serious one is that Aquinas rejects precisely this sort of Platonic understanding of predication. The objection assumes a theory according to which predicates correspond to abstract objects that concrete things exemplify, and that it is this exemplification relation that makes those predicates true of them.

But this is not Aquinas’s view. What makes various real—as opposed to merely relational—predicates true of a thing is always something concrete in the thing itself: ordinarily, some constituent form or, more fundamentally, the thing’s essence. This is simply part of Aquinas’s scholastic, or moderate, realism.

Thus, to say that God is identical with his goodness is not to say that God is identical with an abstract object called Goodness. It is to say that the concrete reality in virtue of which God is good is nothing other than God himself. Likewise, the concrete reality in virtue of which God is powerful, knowing, and existent is not something added to God or possessed by God. It is God himself.

This, of course, invites the second objection, which goes something like this: But look at this battery—it has power but not knowledge. Power and knowledge are clearly, really distinct. Yet you are insisting that they are identical in God?

The answer to this objection can be spelled out in different ways, but the basic thrust is this. When we say that God’s power is identical to God’s knowledge, and so forth, we are not saying that these perfections as we typically understand and encounter them—say, as participated perfections—are always identical. Clearly, that is false. Rather, we are saying that these perfections in their infinite mode—that is, as essential rather than participated perfections, or in their infinite rather than finite mode—are identical.

In other words, we are saying that something like power, as we commonly experience and understand it, is identical in God to something like knowledge, as we commonly experience and understand it. (Those who have read my previous work will know that I like to cash this out in terms of ordered series and their respective limit cases, but we don’t need to get into all that here.)

Now, the predicates retain their distinct meanings from our side, since power is not what knowledge means, nor is knowledge what goodness means. In other words, the predicates are not semantically equivalent—which is fine, since semantic nonequivalence does not by itself require distinct ontological grounds. Indeed, on Aquinas’s view, the same infinite concrete reality grounds each of these intrinsic predications of God. (In the contemporary literature, one influential way of spelling this out is through divine truthmaker simplicity: God himself is the single truthmaker for these various intrinsic predications.)

And there is not only no reason to think that this could not be the case, but positive reason to think that it must be the case, given Aquinas’s metaphysics of participated versus essential perfections in conjunction with the conclusions of his cosmological argument.

Objection 7) Aquinas’s simple God results in modal collapse. If God is identical with his act, then God is identical with his act of creating—and so the necessity of God’s being transfers to creation, producing the seemingly false result that everything is necessary and nothing contingent.

Answer: Essentially, there are two steps to defusing modal-collapse-style objections.

First, we must distinguish between what is intrinsically predicated of God and what is predicated of God only extrinsically or relationally. The basic idea here is that an intrinsic predication is true in virtue of the way a thing is in and of itself, whereas an extrinsic predication is true at least partly in virtue of the way that thing stands in relation to something outside itself. “John is male” is an intrinsic predication. “John is taller than Sam” is an extrinsic predication—and, importantly, it could become false simply because Sam grows, even if John undergoes no intrinsic change at all. Said differently, extrinsic predications are the sort whose truth can change without the subject of the predication changing intrinsically.

Second, we must note that divine simplicity commits us only to the idea that God is really identical with the concrete reality grounding all true intrinsic predications of him. Said differently, God is identical with whatever in reality makes those intrinsic predications true of him—namely, the divine essence, which is God himself—but not, obviously, with extrinsic or relational predications whose truth depends partly upon creatures.

Once this is in place, we can see where the route to modal collapse itself collapses. “God creates this world” (or “God knows this world,” “God intends this world,” or whatever else) is indeed a true predication of God, but its truth includes an extrinsic reference to a reality beyond God—namely, the contingent world in question. Likewise, “God’s act of creating this world,” insofar as it includes reference to this particular effect, is an extrinsic—relational or Cambridge—predication. It therefore does not name some additional intrinsic reality in God with which God must be identical. Thus, had God not created this world, there need not have been any corresponding intrinsic difference in God. (This does, of course, require the classical theist to deny that every difference in effect requires some corresponding intrinsic difference in the cause. But there are good reasons—on libertarian-freedom grounds and elsewhere—to reject that principle anyway.)

Once all this is understood, we can see why the necessity of God does not transfer to the contingent world merely because “God creates this world” is truly predicated of him. If by “God’s act of creating this world” we mean an act specified partly by its contingent effect, then the predication refers to something beyond God and is therefore extrinsic—not something with which God must be identical. If, on the other hand, by “God’s act of creation” we mean simply the intrinsic act in virtue of which creation comes about, then yes, that act is identical with God. But it no longer includes reference to this world—or to anything outside God—and thus poses no threat of modal collapse. That same intrinsic act could have had a different contingent terminus, or no created terminus at all.

For more on this style of objection, see the following guest article by .

Conclusion

We have considered some of the most common and strongest objections to Aquinas’s approach to God. None of them succeeds. At most, they show that the real debate is perhaps to be had at the level of the background metaphysics itself.

Is the system Aquinas uses to run his argument for God well motivated? This is an important question—one that should be asked and answered. Obviously, I think it is. And perhaps, in a future article, I can tell you how I like to defend it.

Nevertheless, for our purposes, what should be clear is that, once that system is in place, the resources for handling the sorts of objections we have been discussing are already firmly in place as well. Many of these objections, as it were, simply come too late.

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Dumb Oxen

The Doctrine of Divine Simplicity

This post is a guest post from a fellow dumb ox and friend of Gaven Kerr and myself, the powerful Patrick Flynn of the Journal of Absolute Truth and Philosophy for the People…

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3 months ago · 32 likes · 5 comments · Patrick Flynn

Here’s the inaugural episode:

The best way to support this project is simply to subscribe, share, and engage.

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So, I was especially heartened to discover that he not only did not positively hate my dissertation, but actually had many lovely things to say about it. Of course, he also had questions and concerns—and, by far, posed the toughest challenges of anyone on the committee.

Anyway, several weeks ago, Grant emailed me with the idea of returning to the podcast but switching roles—that is, having him interview me about the dissertation and essentially pick up where the defense left off.

How could I say no?

Please enjoy!

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By proof, we mean something like a metaphysical demonstration. And by metaphysical demonstration, we mean something like this: given a certain system of metaphysical thought, we can construct a sound argument whose conclusion is the existence of God—or, more precisely, the existence of something satisfying a description that classical theists take to identify God.1

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This isn’t going to be super technical—you can read my published work or my book The Best Argument for God for more rigorous developments—but I do hope it serves as more than merely a basic introduction. Really, I hope it shows that, despite all the scholastic machinery behind the argument itself, Aquinas’s way to God is actually quite intuitive. For that reason, it should be taken seriously.

So, basically—to use Ethan Muse’s language2—we begin with the seemingly undeniable observation that there are lots of things about which nothing in what they are demands that they exist. Take my cats Twizzler and Dot or my dog Pumpkin.

None of them, just in virtue of what they are—whether a cat or a dog—needs to be included in reality. Their natures—call that their whatness—seem really different and distinct from their existence—call that their isness.

After all, we can easily conceive of these things as never having existed, and we have routine familiarity with things like them actually coming into existence and then expiring from existence. They are, to use a technical term, contingent beings: they need not have been, and they could have been otherwise.

Aquinas thinks this suggests that such beings have a complex—or, rather, composite—makeup, metaphysically speaking. There is a principle of what these things are, and then there is another principle that makes them actual. This is his famous thesis of the real distinction between essence and existence. In every contingent being, essence must be made actual by an act of existence. To be clear, Aquinas has other, more sophisticated arguments for establishing the real-distinction thesis, but we do not need to explore those here.3

Nor do we need—and, in fact, we won’t—wade into all the complicated metaphysics surrounding this thesis, such as whether existence is itself a first-order property and, if so, how that is to be understood. Again, I’ve treated these matters in many places. For now, I simply want to emphasize how intuitive the basic idea is, at least initially. There are things—lots and lots of things—that do not seem capable of accounting, on their own, for why they are included in reality. And, for that reason, we naturally look to something else to account for them.

We’re already onto the next step. If it is right that these things do not and cannot, by themselves, account for their inclusion in reality, then it makes sense to seek out something that does. The basic idea here is that if something cannot explain some feature of itself from within itself—that is, by its own nature—then we look for something else to provide that explanation.

What we are not considering a live option, at this point, is that:

1. Something cannot explain some feature of itself; and

2. Nothing else explains it either.

In other words, the feature or phenomenon under investigation is simply a brute fact. Brute facts, I take it, are bad news, and we should not declare something a brute fact when it is possible that we could instead find a genuine explanation.

As it happens, Aquinas thinks we can find such an explanation for why things that do not themselves demand to be included in reality nevertheless are. He reasons something like this. Since their existence does not follow from what they are, they must be caused to exist: existence is imparted to their essences by something extrinsic.

However, it will not do simply to invoke a cause that is itself the same sort of thing—namely, something whose nature likewise does not demand that it exist.

While such a cause might be involved in explaining how this or that particular thing came about, it would be only an intermediate cause, not the ultimate explanation, because we could simply raise the same question about it that we raised about the original thing. So, what Aquinas thinks is that, if we are going to arrive at an ultimate explanation for why anything exists that does not have to exist, we must eventually reach something that exists because it DOES have to exist.

According to Aquinas, this means reaching something whose nature is not really different or distinct from its existence, but is actually identical to it. Because this being is really the same as its existence, it would indeed have to be included in reality. It could not not exist. It would be the necessary being.4

Aquinas is not terribly bothered by infinite chains or collections. In fact, in some cases, he allows for them. Rather, he is content to stick with the simple logic that merely adding together a whole bunch of things that do not possess the relevant feature or quality in virtue of what they are is never going to magically generate it.

Just as piling up a bunch of white LEGO blocks—even infinitely—will never generate a purple tower, Aquinas takes it that an infinite chain of contingent beings is never going to produce a necessary entity or structure. Taking a bunch of things that are existentially zero by themselves and stacking them—even infinitely—is never going to amount to anything more than a whole lotta’ nothing.

Aquinas thus thinks there must be something, either within or outside the collection or series, whether finite or infinite, that is categorically different and can account for why anything that does not exist in virtue of what it is nevertheless actually exists.5 And that being is something whose nature or essence is really the same as its existence. In the simplest terms, if there were not something that exists in virtue of what it is, then there could not be anything that exists in virtue of something else. But there are things that exist in virtue of something else. Therefore, there must be something—at least one thing, perhaps more—that exists in virtue of what it is: something whose whatness is not really different or distinct from its isness.

At this point, I think Aquinas’s argument is really just drawing upon two very basic—perhaps even Moorean, or very nearly so—intuitions. Namely, there is our intuition of contingency, according to which some things exist but need not have existed, on the one hand; and our intuition of well-foundedness, according to which it is not turtles all the way down, on the other.

I say “Moorean,” or very nearly so, because these intuitions seem not only phenomenologically forceful but also commonsensical—that is, very widespread, deeply entrenched, stable, and so on. Of course, people can and sometimes do give up these intuitions. But, in my experience, this happens only after a whole lot of—if I may—wrongheaded metaphysical theorizing. It is definitely not the default starting point.

Indeed, people in the relevant literature sometimes complain that well-foundedness—the idea that chains of dependence must eventually terminate—is rarely rigorously argued for. Karen Bennett makes this point. Instead, it is often treated as obvious simply because people find it intuitively compelling.6

Of course, Aquinas has a lot of scholastic machinery at work in his argument. But, at the end of the day, that machinery is there to support and explain what I think is really the commonsense position: that contingent reality calls for explanation and that chains of causal dependence must ultimately terminate in something relevantly different—something metaphysically special. And I take it that any philosophical system capable of doing that—that is, capable of making the best sense of our strongest intuitions—is, other things being equal, to be favored.

The final challenge concerns identifying this necessary being as God. This is where Aquinas’s scholastic metaphysics does a lot of really important work. For Aquinas, the fundamental being whose essence just is its existence is also pure actuality and (by extension) absolutely simple.

According to Aquinas, this allows for a fairly straightforward conceptual unpacking of the traditional divine attributes, at least given the underlying metaphysics, insofar as a being of pure actuality—or pure existence—is absolutely ontologically simple, immaterial, eternal, omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good.

I’m not sure there is a similarly direct and intuitive shot from the bare notion of a non-contingent being all the way to God as understood by classical theists. There is, however, at least this much: it seems rather strange to identify any physical or material being—or even the physical universe as a whole—as the necessary being. People tend to find that suggestion strange, in my experience. Certainly, I find it strange.

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I have other reasons for thinking it is definitely false. But even on the face of it—yeah, strange! For my money, I have always found the atheist position that physical reality is just brutely contingent to be, for whatever reason, the more plausible of the two options. I’d rather something be contingently absurd than necessarily absurd, if you catch my drift. In other words, sprinkling necessity onto something that does not seem relevantly different appears to compound the mystery rather than reduce it.

To be clear: I don’t actually find the brute-contingency position plausible—like, at all. But whatever tiny bit of plausibility it has seems greater to me than the suggestion that physical reality, or some segment of it, exists necessarily.

But whatever.

So, here I’ll simply re-emphasize that this is where Aquinas’s background metaphysics does a lot of important work, insofar as it provides extremely useful resources for traversing the so-called gap problem—that is, the problem of making the case that the necessary being is God. (For those wanting a more technical development, in my recent article criticizing William Lane Craig’s model of God, I attempt to explain how classical theism is especially well positioned to make God’s necessary existence intelligible—indeed, to show how God exists necessarily in virtue of what He is—and thereby reduce the number of brute facts to zero.)

Very briefly—and, again, there is far more detail in my book—Aquinas holds that existence is the principle of actuality in things, and that familiar, everyday objects are metaphysical composites of principles of actuality and potency. The essence of a contingent thing stands in potency to an act of existence, insofar as its essence is not, as it were, automatically actual—which seems obvious enough.

Aquinas’s act–potency distinction is, of course, inherited from Aristotle and is used to make sense of change, composition, and the like. Again, it does important work—not merely important work, but necessary work, I would say—in the philosophy of nature and metaphysics generally. But when it comes to the philosophy of God, it has an especially large payoff.

How so? Because if there is a being whose essence just is its existence, that being turns out to be purely actual. It is not a metaphysical composite and contains no intrinsic passive potency. The upshot is that—again, internal to Aquinas’s system of thought—this being possesses the traditional divine attributes listed above.

Because it is purely actual, it is immutable, since change requires the actualization of some potency. And because it is immutable, it is eternal: time is the measure of change, so a being entirely beyond change is also outside time.

It is immaterial because matter is itself a principle of potency for Aquinas and Aristotle, and this fundamental being utterly lacks potency.

It is omnipotent because it is the ultimate necessary condition for the actualization of every possibility of being, and the actual cause of every actual being apart from itself.

Omniscience follows from Aquinas’s metaphysics of mindedness and immateriality—which we are definitely not going to get into now—together with the fact that this being is the intelligent cause of everything that exists. In other words, it knows everything there is to know by, first, knowing itself perfectly, including itself as cause, and, second, knowing all the happenings of the world precisely because it is actively bringing them about.

And it is perfectly good because of Aquinas’s metaphysics of goodness as convertible with being—again, not getting into all that now. A being that is pure existence or pure actuality will therefore also be a being of pure, unrestricted goodness.

God is the paradigmatic good.

Naturally, one might protest against the Thomistic metaphysics used to derive the divine attributes. But what should be clear is that, once the relevant metaphysics is in place, one arrives by a remarkably direct and systematic route at a robust conception of the divine—and at the conclusion that fundamental reality could be nothing other than God.

Again, this result comes by way of fairly direct implication, not by comparing probabilities or theoretical virtues that might cause one to favor—or “slightly incline” toward—some vaguely theistic hypothesis over a more naturalistic one.

To me, that is a significant advantage, especially once one realizes that metaphysics is not something one can ever really avoid doing anyway. It is simply a matter of when you are going to do it—and how well.

I’m ranting. I do apologize.

So, let’s close this thing out. My aim was to provide a simple introduction—though I fear things became a bit more complex than I originally intended, but… ah well—to Aquinas’s core approach to God as found in De Ente. Many, myself included, have suggested that De Ente provides an especially illuminating lens through which his later Five Ways should be interpreted.7 Effectively, the Five Ways can be understood as different angles into this same general kind of “existential proof”—that is, as different entry points into a particularly metaphysical form of cosmological reasoning toward a fundamental cause whose existence is established, and whose nature is conceptually illuminated, through Aquinas’s understanding of existence.

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Dumb Oxen

The Doctrine of Divine Simplicity

This post is a guest post from a fellow dumb ox and friend of Gaven Kerr and myself, the powerful Patrick Flynn of the Journal of Absolute Truth and Philosophy for the People…

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3 months ago · 32 likes · 5 comments · Patrick Flynn

4

Nor could it merely have existence as one metaphysical constituent among others, since this would reintroduce metaphysical composition and raise an insurmountable priority—or bootstrapping—problem. What accounts for the actuality and unity of this composite? Does the essence somehow account for the act of existence that makes it actual? Or does the act of existence account for the actuality of the composite of which it is supposedly only one constituent? Once either option is thought through, the results are untenable.

On the one hand, the essence would have to be operative in some sense prior to its own actuality, which is absurd. On the other hand, the existence constituent would have to actualize and unify the rest of the composite. But then it would already need to be actual and operative as some determinate reality—which is to say, as something possessing a nature of its own.

For more on God’s simplicity, see:

Dumb Oxen

The Doctrine of Divine Simplicity

This post is a guest post from a fellow dumb ox and friend of Gaven Kerr and myself, the powerful Patrick Flynn of the Journal of Absolute Truth and Philosophy for the People…

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3 months ago · 32 likes · 5 comments · Patrick Flynn

Jake invited me on to discuss my dissertation—so that’s exactly what we did. At least until we got distracted by a few other equally fun topics : )

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Back in October, I was offered another book deal. I just submitted the manuscript last month, with publication happening, hopefully, in November. The book is on discipline, understood within the virtue ethics tradition—particularly the Thomistic tradition. Really, it’s part philosophical treatise, part field manual—the publisher wanted me, effectively, to blend traditional wisdom with modern self-help. If nothing else, the book is definitely different, and I think people will enjoy it, especially because it has a ton of practical “to-dos.” Like workouts and… stuff!

Last week, I successfully defended my dissertation and, God help us, officially became Dr. Flynn. I am, however, pleased to report that in all my day of holding a PhD, I have not once corrected anyone for calling me Mr. Flynn, proving I’m not quite the Maximally Insufferable Being that one magnificently obsessed critic of mine seems to think I am.

But seriously—just Pat, if you please.

Anyway.

Since the defense, people have asked what I am going “to do” with my PhD, and the answer, so far as I’ve been able to tell, is nothing.

Really, this is because “doing” the PhD didn’t change what I was already doing—the writing and research—and “getting” the PhD isn’t changing that either. I’m just going to keep doing what I’ve been doing and that’s that.

I’ve had a number of articles accepted and/or published this year as well. I was most excited—and surprised—by my article “Simply Put: The Argument for Divine Simplicity” winning the ACPQ Rising Scholar Essay Contest, which is appearing in the next issue of ACPQ. Other articles either already out or forthcoming from this year include “Worse Than Magic: Two Answers—and One Challenge—for William Lane Craig,” “Cruel Worlds and Counterfeit Natures,” “Theistic Ethical Optimism,” “Three Problems for Triseity,” and “An Anti-Theological Argument from Suffering.” Several more are still in the peer-review pipeline, so we’ll see where they wind up, if anywhere.

There has been even more happening in my life on the non-writing/non-academic side. For those of you who follow me on other parts of the internet, you’ll likely have heard of this little Wood’r Ice venture my wife and I started. Essentially, we’re taking Philadelphia-style water ice—which I grew up with, being originally from that area—and bringing it to Wisconsin. So far, the response has been really positive, and we even got some pretty awesome PR out of the gate, including a segment on Fox 6 Real Milwaukee.

This has been a huge undertaking, of course, getting into the food business. Kind of ridiculous, actually, but whatever. It’s something we’ve wanted to do for several years and decided there was never going to be an optimal time—so, why not just go for it?

So here we are, just going for it.

As many of you know—because I obnoxiously keep force-feeding you clips—I’m in two pretty busy bands in the Milwaukee are: Top of the World, a Van Halen tribute, and Jessie Marie and the Rippers. I joined the Rippers back in November because Jessie, who sings for Top of the World, lost her guitarist and asked me to step in. Obviously, I wanted to help her out… and it was an absurd amount of work, essentially having to learn three hours of material in less than two months.

So that nearly killed me.

But things have otherwise been going really well and, despite how taxing all the rehearsing and gigs are, live performance is just something I live for. There’s really nothing quite like it.

Few other things.

I somehow acquired two cats yesterday.

Funny how this happened, too.

My daughters convinced me to go to the local HAWS shelter, you know, just to look at one.

Next thing you know, I’m filling out an application and—before you know it—two kittens are in the backseat of the van!

Isn’t that funny??

Two other things.

I know a lot of you also follow my fitness content—which is, in fact, far more popular than my philosophy content. Anyway, I’m pretty proud of where I am fitness-wise. Despite everything going on, I’m still getting the workouts in.

If you’re curious about my appraoch, see my book Strong ON!

Sorry, I need to plug at least some of my stuff, sometimes!

Last thing.

Christine is pregnant again. : )

God willing, Flynn baby #7 arrives in February.

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If you’ve followed me for a while, you probably already know that it has something to do with the doctrine of divine simplicity. So far, that’s correct.

Essentially, my dissertation looks at how the traditional, “full-throated” Thomistic doctrine of divine simplicity resolves a host of issues across a number of areas: philosophy of God, metaphysics, metaethics, epistemology, philosophical anthropology, and more.

As I’ve emphasized in many places, this understanding of divine simplicity can only be properly appreciated as it is embedded within, and emerges from, a wider constituent ontology and realist metaphysical program. So, the first part of my dissertation articulates this program and provides some defense of the more controversial bits—for example, that existence is a first-level property of concrete individuals, that essences are real, numerically distinct configuring principles of being, and that they are really distinct from the existence element within contingent entities.

The second part of my dissertation defends what has come to be known as “strong” divine simplicity. I think this is a sort of silly term—either something is simple in the sense that it is not built up out of components more basic than it, or it is not—and much of this section shows that the proposed alternatives to DDS either result in rendering God a caused or derivative entity, suffer from some incoherence otherwise, amount to un-wholly wholes, or else just collapse back into the strong form of simplicity anyway.1

Aside from providing a master argument for the traditional notion of divine simplicity—which I contend follows from rather straightforward conceptual truths—I survey and critique the main alternatives on offer today. Ultimately, I argue that only the strong form of simplicity these alternatives seek to reject is capable of securing God’s status as metaphysically ultimate, ontologically independent, and self-sufficient. This section of my dissertation, with slight modification, won the ACPQ Rising Scholar Essay Contest this year and will be published in their next issue under the title “Simply Put: The Argument for Divine Simplicity.”

I then turn to look at how DDS solves issues in different areas of philosophy, some more specific than others. My first area of interest concerns priority issues within constituent ontology, from which I contend that metaphysical composites are either all grounded entities or else contradictory structures. For those who’ve read my article “The Millerian Cosmological Argument,” you will have a strong idea of what is going on in this section of my dissertation, as it substantially builds upon what I first developed there.

Skipping the complicated details for now, I propose that such a constituent ontology can only ultimately be stabilized—that is, avoid contradictory implications—by positing a being that itself has no constituents that go into making up what it is, such that all composites are ultimately grounded in that which is absolutely simple.

Of course, there is another important element here, which concerns whether grounding chains must terminate. I spend considerable time arguing that, in fact, they do—indeed, that such chains are necessarily terminating, insofar as they either must terminate or they fail to be explanatory, or in any sense causal, in the first place. This section develops a line of thought that was originally teased in my Review of Metaphysics article, “Is Grounding Essentially Ordered Causation?”

Of course, I contend that the above considerations function as a powerful cosmological argument for the existence of the absolutely simple God, insofar as everyday familiar objects (EFOs, oh no!)—which are metaphysical composites—are deeply caused to exist and must ultimately be caused to exist by that which is absolutely simple: namely, the being whose essence just is its existence.

My attention then turns toward the nature of explanation, where I propose that only this sort of being is the right sort of thing to be suitably auto-explicable, or genuinely self-explanatory. Here I am attempting to resolve difficulties surrounding the nature of the principle of sufficient reason and whether it can be driven all the way through, such that we can say reality is, in fact, fully intelligible—namely, that there is an adequate answer to every coherent question to be asked about why something exists or has the character it does, even if we do not have direct access to that answer. My answer is in the affirmative, and that DDS—and only DDS, as situated within the metaphysical program I’ve been at pains to defend—can make sense of this. In fact, I argue that everything I have defended up to this point is itself an argument for the PSR, insofar as it establishes everything needed for a robust version thereof, without at any point requiring the PSR as a premise in the argument.

After all this time spent in metaphysics, I then turn my attention to metaethics, where I argue that DDS—again, as understood through the broadly Thomistic metaphysic—is an impressively well-suited paradigm for securing the core desiderata of robust moral realism. Namely, that there are moral facts, that they are stance-independent, that they are under substantive constraints, and that we have reliable, justified cognitive access to them. Again, I won’t spoil the details here, but I show how DDS quite easily secures all of these without ad hoc additions to the theory—itself an extremely promising reason to consider this doctrine favorably. (Two other forthcoming papers were developed out of this section of my dissertation: “Cruel Worlds and Counterfeit Natures,” forthcoming in International Philosophical Quarterly, and “Theistic Ethical Optimism,” forthcoming in TheoLogica.)

The final chapter of my dissertation offers several programmatic sketches of areas where I think DDS offers helpful resources, but which I did not have the space to develop fully. Originally, it was my intent to do so, but, as is often the case, one begins with ambitions that are simply larger than what is ultimately manageable or reasonable. In other words, I had hoped to devote entire chapters to how DDS helps with issues in epistemology, skepticism, philosophical anthropology, libertarian freedom, and so on. Instead, I had to rest content with compressing these into a single chapter, where I provide my primary contentions, obviate a few objections, and point to where the conversation might be further pursued.

Overall, I’m quite happy with how my dissertation has turned out so far. While it isn’t exactly the original vision I had, it’s actually pretty darn close—and, if nothing else, a very good start toward what I had originally intended, which, of course, I can continue to work on afterward. Perhaps if I decide to turn it into a book on DDS.

But I should avoid getting ahead of myself. After all, I still have my defense to pass first, and I certainly don’t want to take anything for granted.

So until then…

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Dumb Oxen

The Doctrine of Divine Simplicity

This post is a guest post from a fellow dumb ox and friend of Gaven Kerr and myself, the powerful Patrick Flynn of the Journal of Absolute Truth and Philosophy for the People…

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3 months ago · 22 likes · 5 comments · Patrick Flynn

A fellow—very intelligent, no doubt—had argued his way into Catholicism at a rather young age. But then, eventually, this fellow became very stuck on a particular doctrine; a doctrine, ironically, I find to be demonstrably true, which concerns God’s absolute simplicity.

He could not see a way through certain difficulties—difficulties that, if you ask me, admit of quite plausible solutions—and eventually decided this was enough to depart the faith. I told him how ironic it was that the very thing that drove him away from the faith was, in very large part, the very thing that drove me toward it.

I will refrain from rehearsing the details of my conversion story here—which are, to be sure, many and complicated (see my conversation with )—but suffice it to say that I have always found this doctrine extremely attractive, not least because I saw it to be true. But I also told him there was something seriously wrong with this methodology, that this could not possibly be how religion, especially the Catholic faith, is to be genuinely or fully entered into.

Naturally, he agreed, though his status as a Catholic is still something of a question.

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Quite obviously, the Lord leads people to faith in many ways, often according to their particular abilities and interests and concerns. The intellectuals are often brought along intellectual paths (but not always), the aesthetics along aesthetic paths (but not always), the Scriptural along scriptural paths (but not always), and so on.

And there is nothing, necessarily anyway, wrong with this. Intellectual considerations may indeed lead one toward the faith. In my own case, they certainly did. But there is a potential danger in all this—and perhaps this danger will prove to be the prevailing theme of this article: the danger of making faith contingent upon some particular analysis, or, more precisely, upon ongoing analysis. It is to take what should be faith seeking understanding and turn it into understanding seeking faith.

Which, as it happens, is not really faith at all.

Naturally, I am not saying one cannot, nor should not, be led to faith by intellectual considerations. I am simply pointing out that there is an important difference between being led toward the faith by such considerations and supposedly entering the faith while keeping the whole thing perpetually suspended upon one’s own ongoing intellectual analysis.

If one approaches faith in this latter way, then even if he decides to convert to Catholicism, that conversion may not stick. It may not amount to the reception of genuine faith at all. Rather, he may have simply put on a philosophical worldview—one always suitable for further revision or, as the case may be, abandonment—and nothing more.

This story has played out many times. The philosophically minded person, with—for example—the machinery of Bayes, determines, at one point in his life, that the credence he should assign to Catholicism is significant enough, based upon his current assessment of a large array of evidences, that he should join up. OCIA begins, he starts breathing in incense at Mass, and things, at least for a while, are going good. He even starts saying “Holy Mother Church” in ordinary conversation. But his intellectual assessment continues and (inevitably) more teachings and difficulties enter the equation. At some point, he finds difficulties that he is not able to fully or adequately resolve—not to say there is no full or adequate solution—rather, he has just not been able to locate the solution, himself. The Bayesian machine begins returning a more negative output.

And so, though he may have entered the Church externally, his true lord still bears the name of P(H|E) = P(E|H)P(H) / P(E) rather than Christ.

Eventually, he leaves the pews altogether.

This point does not specifically concern the doctrine mentioned earlier, the doctrine of divine simplicity. One could just as easily swap this out for any Catholic teaching, really. The point is just that, given the sheer number of binding Catholic teachings, the complex ways people can conceptualize these issues, and the difficulty—if not impossibility—of independently adjudicating all of them, especially the more abstract philosophical and theological questions, it is clearly not reasonable to think that this is how God wants people to come to faith—at least not faith in its full and proper sense—let alone maintain it. If this were the case, then God would be asking the impossible, which God does not do. The task of independently evaluating and affirming all that the Catholic faith teaches surely outstrips our rational capacities.

Nevertheless, how often one hears holdups to the Catholic faith along these lines: I would be Catholic—boy, oh boy, I would be the most Catholic that ever Catholic’d, tell ya’ what!—if it just weren’t for that pesky teaching on contraception, or the Immaculate Conception, or Hell, or the heretical status of modalism, or whatever else. If only I could be Catholic and accept modalism, that would surely do it!

And what I am suggesting is that, no—that would almost certainly not do it. While modalism might be the particular holdup today, there will very likely be another holdup tomorrow. It will be Hell, or the Trinity, or contraception, or something else.

The problem, I submit, is not finally the particular teaching. The problem, if I may say so, is twofold: first, with the methodology one is using to approach religious adjudication and faith itself—namely, a form of rationalism; and second, with something nobody likes to hear mentioned, but which surely must be mentioned: a disposition of the will. And this disposition, at least in some cases, seems configured by pride—by thinking more highly of one’s own intellectual abilities than one ought.

Please do not misunderstand me. I am definitely not saying that Catholic teachings are not rationally defensible—nor am I advocating for the opposite heresy of rationalism, which is fideism. Of course, I think all of what the Church definitively teaches is true, and that powerful cases can be made in support of these teachings from philosophy and history and Scripture and all the rest. Nor, as I shall clarify shortly, am I suggesting that things—particularly matters of faith—should be believed lightly, as in credulously.[1]

It no doubt impressed me, enormously, just how rationally credible all the Catholic teachings I was initially skeptical of, prior to my conversion, could be made: from Aquinas’s articulation of the doctrine of the Trinity in relation to divine simplicity—extremely difficult and nuanced stuff there—to prohibitions on fornication from Scripture and natural law, to typological arguments for the Marian dogmas. Moreover, perhaps even more impressive, was the deeper interconnectedness of Catholic dogma and doctrine; how teachings in one area informed, or were informed by, teachings in another area, and how they constrained, or were constrained by, teachings elsewhere.[2]

There is a beautiful systematic logic in the whole of Catholic theology that becomes increasingly impressive the more one studies it. At a glance, it seems a pile of messy, almost haphazard commitments; as one digs further in, however, what emerges is an elegant web of impressively harmonized and reinforcing beliefs. Very frequently, as one seeks understanding in these areas, one encounters that genuine, “Oh, now I see. So that’s why they teach that.”

It builds one’s confidence.

But let me return to the point.

The danger I am highlighting is one in which a person comes to think that getting and sustaining faith requires independently solving every particular doctrine—or at least some sufficiently large subset of them—first from the outside, and then forever from within. His faith remains contingent upon the latest favorable output of his own private analysis. He becomes, as it were, a permanent intellectual auditor, with the faith always on trial and always under obligation to furnish answers fully satisfying to his own intellect.

This is ludicrous.

First, as a matter of time, there is no feasible way this could ever be accomplished, given the sheer number and complexity of Catholic teachings. Second, as a matter of probability, we are, quite obviously, fallible beings. The odds of one being correct in such an assessment across all these highly complex matters is vanishingly—indeed, laughably—low. Nobody should put that much confidence in his own abilities.

Third, Catholic doctrine does not function probabilistically in this way anyhow, or at least it should not be assessed in this radically individualistic, logically independent manner.

Think of it like this.

Jesus taught many things, but the number of things Christ taught is not especially relevant, as if Jesus were just some fallible human teacher like the rest of us. It is not as if the likelihood of everything Jesus taught being true decreases just on the assumption that Jesus taught more rather than fewer things. This might be true of us, given our fallibility. If I teach ten things, perhaps I am less likely to be right about all of them than if I teach only two. And if I teach one hundred billion things, well, then yes: it is extremely, overwhelmingly likely that the whole of what I teach contains error.

But one of the core claims about Jesus is that Jesus is God. And if that claim is true, and Jesus cannot err on such matters, then it does not matter whether Jesus taught ten things, two things, or one hundred billion things. The question is not ultimately how many things Jesus taught. The question is who Jesus is.

Is Christ the incarnate Logos, or isn’t He?

The same, of course, is to be said of the Catholic Church, at least with respect to her definitive dogmatic pronouncements, given the teaching of indefectibility, which extends to infallibility. If the core claim of Catholicism is true here, then it does not matter whether the Church teaches ten things, two things, or one hundred billion things.

The question is not ultimately how many things the Catholic Church teaches, nor whether I can independently verify each of those things from the outside. The question is what the Catholic Church is.

Is she the divinely founded, infallibly protected Church she claims to be, or isn’t she?

But now aren’t we in a conundrum?

For how are we to know whether the Church is as she claims if we can’t first assess and see that she is right on all of her claims? That is, how are we to check for her infallibility if we first can’t see that she has all of her teachings right, and that this gives us, at least inductively, some reason to think all this is true?

But notice the problem here.

What is really assumed to be infallible—or at least generally more reliable—in such an instance is not the Church, but you. It is against your understanding of things that the Church is ultimately judged. And surely, if that is the methodology at work, something has gone seriously wrong. (To anticipate the obvious: the problem is not that you are using your own understanding, per se. Of course you are. You have to. Indeed, in one sense, your understanding is final in discerning the true Church, since nobody else can perform that act of judgment for you. But that is not the same thing as your understanding being final in adjudicating every doctrine taught by the Church. As I am about to argue, the former is not beyond our ordinary epistemic paygrade; the latter most certainly is.).

Note the parallel: almost no one would think it reasonable to affirm the divinity, or even simply the infallibility, of Christ by first having to independently verify everything Christ taught—or even some sufficiently large subset of what Christ taught. Rather, one looks for more accessible motives of credibility, particularly miraculous signs, by which Christ’s identity and authority may be recognized. A parallel, as we shall see, can soon be made with the Church.

Indeed, I have several things to say here—points I have argued at length elsewhere and discussed with Ethan, as well—but will just briefly rearticulate now. First, I will say something by way of background concerning reasonable belief formation and the, for the most part, well-understood limits of our rational capacities. Second, I will explain how this relates to discerning the true Church.

First, we already know that we are not epistemically autonomous; that is to say, supremely capable of adjudicating all issues just by our own rational capacities. Our lives are replete with epistemic authorities. We defer to people and institutions constantly to help us avoid falsehoods and come to more truths.

Moreover, it is obvious, with this fact in view, that our rational capacities are quite suited for discerning: 1) when some higher epistemic authority is needed; 2) who the relevant authority might be; even when 3) our rational capacities are not suited for coming to know what those authorities know.

Think here of something very common, like medicine.

We know there is something we do not know, but that authorities do. Yet we do not need to know what the authorities know to know that we need an authority, and who the appropriate authorities are. This is an ordinary capacity for us.

But now imagine that, before deciding who the appropriate authority is—before entrusting ourselves to his authority and receiving his medical advice or treatment—we must first independently evaluate everything he believes, teaches, and practices. Only then could we trust his authority.

This is irrational on its face. And it plainly reverts to the idea that the only actual authority is oneself.

Notice, as well, that in saying we are not epistemically autonomous, I am not saying that we don’t ever have to use our own heads. The fact that we must use our own heads in figuring these matters out is what I would call trivial self-reliance.

No matter what, we must use our own reason and make certain judgments, whether with respect to appropriate authorities in medicine or concerning what the true religion is. Trivial self-reliance is not the problem. The problem is when one is expecting and asking more of our ordinary rational capacities than what is reasonable and responsible to ask.

Everybody must use his own head to make decisions. But it is obviously the wrong use of one’s head to think that every decision is one he is qualified to make. Sometimes the most rational decision is to see that certain decisions are beyond one’s epistemic paygrade and thus to defer to an appropriate authority.

And of course one can discern an appropriate authority without first having to come to know everything that authority is supposed to know, and only then determining whether that authority actually is one. The key point—which I think is painfully obvious—is this: the ability to identify authority is not the same as the ability to replace authority.

Indeed, there can be general and quite accessible motives of credibility—and often, in fact, there are. In medicine, these might include a physician’s track record, quality of training, institutional affiliations, testimonials, accreditations, and so on.

In religion, the Catholic faith has long appealed to the marks of the Church—her unity, holiness, catholicity, and apostolicity—and to various motives of credibility, miracle accounts in particular: various, we might say, accessible epistemic access points that help verify her as the true and most trustworthy authority in matters religious.

See, for example, my recent conversation with

Here we move from matters of obscure philosophical debate surrounding, say, the doctrine of divine simplicity and modal collapse, or whether the post-mortem state of the individual who dies in mortal sin can involve a will permanently oriented toward evil, to rather more straightforward confirmations—like the Virgin Mary appearing and then predicting a colossal, doctrinally-confirmatory miracle witnessed by tens of thousands of people in Fatima, Portugal.

The sort of thing that, once one appreciates the relevant details and just how powerful such miracle accounts are, should heavily outweigh the obscure philosophical or theological objections one might have to Catholicism.

It simply comes down to the eminently plausible principle that the obscure should be judged in light of the clear, not the clear overthrown by the obscure.[3]

In other words, whatever you want to say about the difficulty of the traditional doctrines of God’s simplicity or Hell—areas utterly replete with highly complex philosophical and theological disagreement—if the Virgin Mary literally appears and, through a massive miracle, confirms the Catholic faith in which these doctrines are taught, and if that miracle cannot be afforded any plausible naturalistic hypothesis, nor plausibly written off as demonic—and good luck with either maneuver, I say—then the appropriate epistemic position is something like this:

I do not know exactly what to think about Hell, aside from the fact that it must be a real possibility, given the facts at hand. It is time to get my affairs in order, it seems.

And this is just one such case. Lourdes, Guadalupe, countless miracles related to the lives of the saints, the sheer endurance and reach of the Catholic faith—the list continues quite impressively. With the ordinary use of their rational capacities, people can quite easily come to see why the Catholic Church has marks of vindication that no other religion—not merely no other Christian denomination, but no other religion—can plausibly claim in the same way.

Let me reiterate: no other religion, so far as I can tell—and I invite the comparison—has anything close to the Catholic Church when it comes to both the quantity and quality of doctrinally vindicatory miracles. By that I mean miracles not merely alleged as generic healings or wonders, but miracles saturated with specific doctrinal and ecclesial content: Marian apparitions, Eucharistic miracles, miracles through the saints, calls to conversion—specifically to Catholicism as the proper object of religious conversion—fulfilled prophecies, and events otherwise bound up with specifically Catholic sacramental and devotional life, such as praying the Rosary, consecration to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, and the like.

It is surely for this reason, along with many others, that—as the kids these days like to put it—the Catholic Church has serious “main character energy.” Her signs are not the sort that can be easily or initially dismissed. They are too large, too wonderful, too visible. And, perhaps even more importantly, they are the sort of signs whose initial impressiveness is not only not weakened, but in fact seriously strengthened, the more one looks into them.

To put it in simple terms: the Catholic Church is not just big, though she is certainly that. She is big and old—indeed, very old—and, most importantly, apostolic, tracing herself back to the first witnesses of Christ; quite literally, her central basilica is built over the grave of Peter. She is big and old and everywhere. She is big and old and everywhere, and yet somehow still one thing: one Church, recognizably continuous across centuries, nations, languages, and cultures—united in creed, worship, sacramental life, and visible governance—and somehow impossible to kill, despite so many attempts. She is holy—not because all her members are holy, God knows, but because she so clearly possesses the means of sanctification, having produced, century after century, the most astonishing saints. And then, as if all that were not already enough to make her rather difficult to ignore, she is a literal geyser of miracles, historically surrounded by an enormously impressive array of vindicatory signs—signs that seem, again and again, almost perfectly suited to their circumstances, as though given precisely to help people recognize her veracity.

But here again I must be cautious.

For I should not want one to think that, in order to be Catholic, he must now go on an ages-long research project verifying every detail of every miracle account. While I believe such a project would prove favorable to Catholicism—indeed, immensely so—it would also miss the more general point.

Motives of credibility must be allowed to function as motives of credibility.

That is, they are not meant to replace the act of faith, nor are they meant to become some impossibly long evidential checklist whereby the individual must personally investigate and adjudicate every relevant detail before he is permitted to submit. That would simply reintroduce the very problem I have been trying to avoid: making the individual, once again, the epistemic end-all-be-all, which is surely the wrong result.

Think again of medicine. When one seeks a doctor, one does not ordinarily conduct an exhaustive investigation into every detail of his education, every patient he has treated, every study behind every procedure he performs, every institutional accreditation attached to his practice, and every testimonial ever given on his behalf. No, one looks—and should look, lest he fall into the hands of some legitimate quack—reasonably enough, for signs of credibility: training, credentials, reputation, institutional standing, experience, testimony, track record, and so on.

In other words, one gives these signs some reasonable level of inspection, of course—enough to see that the whole show, as it were, is not obviously bogus, but merits serious consideration indeed. Credulity is not the point; in fact, it should be avoided. But then one allows these signs to do the work they are meant to do—namely, to identify the relevant authority.

So too here.

The marks of the Church and motives of credibility are not offered so that every person is invited, and subsequently required, to become a world-class historian, theologian, philosopher, and miracle investigator prior to faith. They are offered as public signs by which the true authority may be reasonably—and fairly swiftly—recognized.

To refuse to let these signs function in this way—to insist that one must first personally master every detail before making the act of faith—is not some salutary form of intellectual responsibility. It is the old rationalism under another name and, contrary to its pretensions, a deeply irrational position: indeed, an impossible one. It is to make oneself, once again, the supreme adjudicative authority, which no fallible individual is capable of being.

And we know this to be true since we naturally rely on authorities all the time, for matters big and small. Moreover, we come to recognize and trust such authorities without deep, perpetual audits of everything they know, teach, or do. Indeed, the more important and the more complex these matters are, the more such authorities are required.

Revelation is, presumably, of the utmost importance. It is also extremely complex, often delivered in times far removed from us, clothed in languages and embedded in cultural contexts with which we have little to no familiarity. Moreover, theology develops over time. It builds upon previous understandings and interpretations. Entropy has a way of entering everything, and if error creeps in at some point, it will surely have a massively corrupting influence toward the end. Think here, crudely but not unhelpfully, of the game of telephone.

It is easy enough for reason to recognize these points. But once they are recognized, it should be easy enough for reason to recognize how much not just an authority is needed in matters of preserving and transmitting revelation, but, necessarily, an authority protected from error in its definitive teaching—one that can ensure such errors do not enter into the deposit of faith.

This becomes all the more obvious once we realize that revelation is not like medicine, where we can correct course through certain scientific approaches. If medicine gets something wrong, further observation, experimentation, testing, and revision can often help set matters right.

But if revelation goes off the rails, the only correction would seem to be further revelation.

And that, in particular, is a problem—certainly, at least, for Christians.

Because Christians, at least historically orthodox Christians, do not believe that God’s definitive revelation in Christ is to be replaced by some later corrective revelation. Muslims do accept something like this, of course, since Islam presents itself as a later correction of Jewish and Christian corruption. But Christians cannot take that route. For Christians, Christ is not one prophet among others, later to be corrected or completed by another. He is the definitive Word of God.[4]

So the answer must be something else.

The answer must be a system that ensures the apostolic deposit is not finally corrupted: a system that allows genuine clarification, development, and more precise articulation—in language accessible to the people at hand, and appropriate to the time at hand—without veering into error. It must be a system that preserves revelation, one that does serious justice to the overall logic of revelation itself, without requiring new public revelation to repair the damage.

That system—if “system” is not too bloodless a word—is Catholicism.

What has just been set forth is, I propose, the holistic and far more appropriate manner of coming to Catholic faith—or, to be blunt, of discerning the true Church—at least along certain intellectual lines. The faith is not to be believed lightly. Again, credulity is not a virtue, and faith is of the highest significance and seriousness. But neither could it be the case that, in order to determine the true religion, God asks of us something literally impossible: namely, the independent verification of every revealed doctrine—or even of some sufficiently large and difficult subset of revealed doctrines—prior to faith.

Finally, let us not fail to appreciate this: everything said so far is itself reason—very strong reason, I think—to believe Catholicism is true. For reflection upon the nature of revelation, the limits of our rational capacities, the need for epistemic authority, and why, in matters of revelation, something like infallibility must be at work, already gives us something very much like the Catholic paradigm, at least at the level of structure.[5]

And then, as it turns out, the empirical facts confirm the thing. The Main Character in religion just is the Catholic Church: the one body in history surrounded by so many marks and motives of credibility bearing witness to her authority.

Reason, in other words, shows us the need for something very much like Catholicism; history then shows us Catholicism answering to that need.

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[1] Faith, after all, is not mere opinion, nor is it simply the conclusion of a private evidential calculus. It is, as Congar puts it, a welcoming openness to the initiative of God, whereby, moved by grace, we take our stand upon God’s own veracity and faithfulness. And if that is what faith is, then something has gone wrong if one’s “faith” remains perpetually contingent upon one’s successful adjudication of every doctrine God has revealed, or that the authority established by God has taught.

The point should be obvious enough. How much does a husband trust his wife if he believes what she says only after conducting an independent and thorough investigation into each of her claims? Worse still, how much does he trust her if, even after marrying her, his trust remains contingent upon a continual audit of everything she says? Nobody would call this trust. We would recognize it as unreasonable, and probably as something worse than unreasonable. A husband should trust—or not trust—his wife on the basis of more accessible signs: her character, his familiarity with her, the testimony of others, her history of reliability, and so forth. Trust is not ordinarily formed, nor is it maintained, by independently verifying every proposition uttered by the one trusted.

[2] Again, the Marian teachings here are a wonderful example, insofar as so much of what Catholics say about Mary is informed and contained by what Catholics believe about Christ. In the Davidic Kingdom, the queen was often the king’s mother, not his wife. Christ is the Davidic Messiah-King; ergo…

[3] At some point, one really does have to ask: who do you trust? The enormous body of witnesses surrounding a colossal, doctrinally vindicatory Catholic miracle—and there are many such cases to speak of? Or the fact that you, having read three articles and half a footnote on divine simplicity, still cannot quite figure out how to make sense of modal collapse? The point—again, please don’t misunderstand!—is not that such questions are uninteresting or unimportant. The point is just that they should be put in their proper epistemic place.

[4] Here one might object: was there really anything like an infallible magisterium in the Old Testament? And didn’t things get along, more or less, well enough without one?

But the relevant difference is this: revelation was then ongoing. When Israel went astray, God could and did offer correction. He raised up prophets who, when speaking as prophets, spoke with divine authority and were protected from error in what God gave them to proclaim. Different in form, yes, but still a divinely guaranteed mode of protection and correction.

But now, if public revelation is complete in Christ, and there is to be no later corrective revelation, the mode of protection must differ. More on this point can be found in my article Private Judgment, Public Authority, linked below.

[5] Here I should like to briefly address a very common but very bad objection: namely, that there is no point in having an infallible authority, given that we are not ourselves infallible. There is much to say about what is wrong with this sort of objection, but the simplest response is this: infallibility is not primarily meant to eliminate our fallibility as receivers. It is meant to preserve the object received.

Of course I can misunderstand the Church. I can misunderstand a doctor, too; that hardly makes doctors useless. This is especially so since doctors—and, analogously, the living magisterium—can clarify as needed, making successful reception quite possible, indeed likely, assuming the ordinary use of our capacities under ordinary conditions. The real issue is not whether fallible people can receive things fallibly. Of course they can; we do all the time. The issue is whether revelation itself can become so distorted/corrupted/obscured over time as to become effectively effete.

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I hope you enjoy it—I certainly did.

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Reviewed Article

Note from the editor: The following article is a guest contributition from .

Naturalistic Parents Should Hope God Exists

Suppose that you have looked at the theistic arguments—cosmological, design, moral, and so forth—and concluded, as a matter of intellectual interrogation, that the case for theism is too weak to be believed (and you adopt naturalism, the view that physics is all there is to reality, instead). You are not hostile to religion, but you find the evidence to be underwhelming. And suppose you also have a child. Here I want to argue that, in this common situation, you have a reason to do something that may at first seem to make no sense at all, namely, to hope that God exists, even if the evidence is pretty weak. Why hope? Hope and belief are distinct attitudes that are governed by different norms. Justified and rational belief requires strong evidence, whereas, hope only requires epistemic possibility, i.e., for all anyone knows something could be true. In this gap between strong evidence and epistemic possibility, there is room for a position that I have termed aspirational theism: a disciplined, evidence-sensitive hope that God exists, held by someone who does not believe that God exists. My claim is that loving parents have a reason, a solid even if not decisive reason, to adopt aspirational theism.

Begin with the thought that hope can be morally evaluated. Start by imagining someone—call them Robert—whose private life is filled with hopes that members of certain ethnic groups will be killed, dispossessed, humiliated. He also happens to be a good citizen who treats people well regardless of race, despite his morally horrid hopes. Is anything wrong with him? It would seem that the answer must be in the affirmative. The racist hopes that Robert has, and fails to expel, are a serious moral problem.

Why should hopes be evaluable in this way, when nothing follows from them? Three reasons converge on the answer. The first is that private attitudes leak into our actions and our lives. The lifelong work of therapists, spiritual directors, and meditation teachers consists in part of helping people surface the hopes they did not know they had, because those hopes turn out to have been steering the boat. The second is that what one hopes for is partly constitutive of who one is; the moral life is not just a sequence of decisions but a shape of attention and hopes do a great deal of the shaping. The third is the simplest, namely that some mental attitudes—like racist and sexist beliefs and hopes—are simply morally objectionable and a poor reflection of one’s moral character.

So why should parents hope God exists? Parents are subject to a more demanding moral regime than they would have had they not become parents. Becoming someone’s parent is the paradigm case of taking on a relationship that generates new and weighty obligations like practical ones (feed, protect, educate) and attitudinal ones. A parent who privately hoped for the worst for his child, even while doing all the right things, would be failing at parenthood in a way the right things cannot redeem. Conversely, certain hopes are part of what it is to love a child at all: that she will flourish, that the harms done to her will be answered for, that whatever she suffers will not, in the end, be wasted. Parents are morally supposed to be partial to their children if for no other reason than they either brought them into existence or took on their responsibility.

It is the last of these hopes—namely that the suffering of one’s children will not, in the end, be wasted—that opens onto our subject. For its satisfaction depends on what the universe happens to be like. Whether children’s suffering can finally be answered for is not a fact about the parent, the child, or anything within the family’s reach, but rather a fact about the nature of the world.

That being said, before asking whether theism is the right thing to hope for, we should ask what hoping is, exactly. Hoping that something is the case requires three things: first, the thing hoped for must be epistemically possible, that is, it could be true despite everything the one who hopes knows about the world. Second, her mental attitude is rightly oriented by moving her to sharpen her attention to it. That last condition is what distinguishes hope from despair. The despairing person desires the outcome and cannot rule it out but is paralyzed by the thought that it may not happen. The wishful thinker, by contrast, has crossed into believing more than the evidence supports. Rational hope is animating without being blinding or distorting.

Now we turn to the third piece of the argument. Why theism specifically? Why not karma, an impersonal cosmic justice, or simply a benign naturalism, where children’s suffering eventually finds its accounting? Part of my answer is that I am not, in fact, ruling those out. The argument here offers a weighty reason to hope for theism, but hardly a decisive reason. If karma turns out to do the same job as theism, a parent has reason to hope for karma too. The point here is that theism, if true, offers creatures like us with a metaphysical guarantee against pointlessness, where God will ensure, in some form or fashion, that our suffering is not pointless.

If God exists with the standard attributes — perfect knowledge, power, love — then God will not permit pointless suffering. Philosophers have spelled this out in two principal ways. On the first, God permits a given instance of suffering only when that instance is necessary for some greater good, or for averting some worse evil, that could not be secured otherwise. On the second, due chiefly to Marilyn McCord Adams, God permits suffering only on the condition that it is, in the long run, defeated by means of compensation whereby the sufferer herself, in full possession of the facts, would affirm the whole. The two readings differ in important ways but converge on the relevant point that in a theistic universe no horror is pointless.

Place that beside what loving parents already, and properly, hope for namely that their children flourish, that the wrongs done to them are eventually answered, and that whatever their children suffer is either prevented or redeemed. A theistic universe, by its very nature, delivers on these hopes. So a parent who finds theism epistemically open—who is not so confident in atheism as to think it knowable—has, simply in virtue of loving the child, a reason to hope theism is true because, if true, is good news about the prospectives for their children.

That is the argument and the remaining work is anticipating objections. The first objection runs that the argument proves too much. If parents have a weighty reason to hope for whatever it is that benefits their children, the hopes proliferate without limit, and the parental imagination becomes a casino. However, despite the initial appeal, the objection misreads the scope because the hope I defend here tracks something parents have especially strong reason to want that is basic and fundamental to a well-lived life. Not only that, but their reason to hope that theism is true is constrained by competing duties. A parent who hoped for theism so hard she neglected her child would be doing something morally wrong. The argument licenses a quiet attitudinal posture, not a withdrawal from the world or abandoning basic parental duties.

A more interesting objection challenges the inference itself. Suppose I hope my daughter finds a lifelong friend at university. That gives me no reason to hope she meets a kind Argentinian, even though meeting a kind Argentinian is one way the hope could be satisfied. So why should the hope that suffering is not pointless give me reason to hope for theism, just because theism is one way that hope could be satisfied?

This objection is initially serious, but it disperses on inspection. The Argentinian case fails as a proper analogy because the connection between the means and the end is accidental: nothing about being Argentinian makes someone the sort of person who becomes a lifelong friend. The connection theism has to non-pointless suffering is not like that. A perfectly loving and all-powerful being could not allow gratuitous suffering because it is essential to the nature of God not to allow such things. And that is what distinguishes theism from a naturalism (the view that reality is exhausted by physics and nothing more) that happens, by some structural luck, to deliver the same result. The naturalist’s guarantee, if any, is fragile, riding on the contingent furniture of the world. The theist’s guarantee, by contrast, rides on the essential nature of God. Where the stakes are this high, the difference between an essential and an accidental guarantee is not negligible.

The fourth objection cuts the deepest. The philosopher Guy Kahane argues that we should not hope theism is true, because the universe theism describes is one where horrendous evils—the Holocaust, the worst things that have happened to children, the list goes on and on—are not pointless precisely because they are required by the moral calculus. They are the necessary cost of greater goods, written into the fabric of things, and so, argues Kahane, it would be better if they were pointless and not backed into the metaphysical fabric of the world.

The objection has force, and I do not want to ignore it. However, the objection’s force depends on identifying theism with a specific response to the problem of evil, namely the instrumental response, on which God permits evil as the only means to an otherwise unobtainable greater good, e.g., if you allow the good of freedom, people will sometimes choose evil. That response is genuinely vulnerable to Kahane’s worry, but it is not the only response on offer, and not the one that fits most naturally with the language of hope. The defeat-and-offset model holds that any suffering God permits can, and will, ultimately compensate the victims with goods so great, and so intimately bound to the sufferer’s own flourishing, that the sufferer herself would, with full understanding, embrace her life entire. Gabriel Citron has illustrated the structure with the analogy of a nightmare: the terror was real, the fear no illusion, and yet, on waking, the whole episode collapses into something one is glad to have left behind. Pair this with a view on which God does not micromanage every horror in advance—where the future is open, but where God nonetheless guarantees in the final analysis that no suffering will be gratuitous—and Kahane’s objection loses much of its grip.

If this is correct, then the hypothetical parent at the start of the paper—the one who knew about the arguments for theism but found them unconvincing--has a weighty reason, simply in virtue of her love for her child, to hope the universe is a theistic one, not out of deception or wishful thinking, but because it would be a better world for it, and the atheistic case is less than convincing. This rational hope requires that she hold open the possibility—actively and attentively, but without avoiding contrary evidence and without confecting evidence in its favor—an aspirational theism for naturalistic parents.

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About Jimmy

Jimmy Alfonso Licon is a philosophy professor at Arizona State University working on ignorance, ethics, cooperation and God. His forthcoming book, Better Not to Know: Why Knowing Less is Sometimes Best, is with Peter Lang Publishing. Before that, he taught at University of Maryland, Georgetown, and Towson University. He lives with his wife, a lawyer, at the foot of the Superstition Mountains.

You can follow Jimmy on Substack, here:

Uncommon Wisdom

Philosophy made uncommonly simple

By Jimmy Alfonso Licon

P.S. Some of you may recall I wrote an extended article on this several weeks back. If you enjoyed that, you’ll surely enjoy my conversation with Ethan.

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These days, I’m lead guitar for the Van Halen tribute band Top of the World and the “cassette-era rock band” Jessie Marie and the Rippers.

This weekend, The Rippers opened Dan Jansen Fest, and someone in the audience caught some pretty good clips of three tunes: “Ain’t Talkin’ Bout Love,” “MMMBop,” and “I Hate Myself for Lovin’ You.”

Another camera was set up and caught some additional tunes—“You Really Got Me,” “Crazy Train,” and “Sin City”—though the actual video angle isn’t quite as great. Nonetheless, I’m posting those as well for anybody interested.

Also, for those interested, here is my current rig.

Guitars: Friedman Cali and Washburn N4.
Amp: Friedman PTV2.
Pedals: Hall of Fame Reverb, Echoplex, MXR Flanger, and MXR Phase 90.

And… that’s it. Quite minimalist!

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Ain’t Talkin’ Bout Love — Van Halen

MMMBop — Hanson

I Hate Myself for Lovin’ You — Joan Jett

You Really Got Me (extended guitar solo version : ) — Van Halen

Crazy Train — Ozzy

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Oh—and I’d also like to call attention to an interview I gave last week on arguments for God more generally, and on some of my work on Barry Miller in particular.

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Of particular interest to me were the questions Dr. Derek raised with respect to meta-ethics and subjectivism, and how certain atheistic objections that can seem quite forceful against some conceptions of God clearly have little to no force against the classical conception.

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