Metaphysics

Divine Sovereignty: A Philosophical Defense

Introduction

Let’s suppose you missed a flight. This almost happened to me a few days ago, but as that entire event was unfolding, I thought to myself: How should we interpret this in light of God’s overall purposes for us? There are three possibilities – it is a blessing, a curse, or a trial. Now some may suggest that it simply happened without any divine purpose at all, but I cannot accept that. The biblical account of God’s sovereignty presents his control over every particular thing (e.g, Matt. 6:30, James 4:13–15, Acts 17:26), as well as His purposing of all things for His glory (Colossians 1:16). A Thomistic perspective entails this position as well, so it as at least rationally defensible. Unfortunately, I think our society despises God’s intricate involvement in their lives because they prefer to be left alone, or somehow think the notion itself is absurd. Why think that God is involved at all if a missed flight could be explained as a simple mistake on our parts? How does this situation benefit me, one could ask, or how could God do this to me? I do not presume to be capable of extensively answering each of these issues in a single post, for each of these questions have book length treatments in philosophy and theology. However, I do hope to illuminate and apply these principles in a way that could be insightful for our daily lives.

The Nature of God’s Power

Let’s address the first question: Why think that this is the direct work of God at all? Actually, I would qualify that question because I do not think that it is the “direct” work of God at all. This is to avoid the error of occasionalism, which is the philosophical doctrine that every created substance is of itself incapable of being an efficient cause. Every effect in creation is therefore directly caused by God. In other words, the sun that vaporizes the water does not do so of its own nature, but because God determined that this is what the effect would be. But if He so pleased, He could cause an effect to do whatever He wanted – e.g, the sun would appear to turn the water into dinosaurs for no intrinsic reason. While I’d love to refute this, I think most people would already recognize this as absurd. If that’s the case though, how could God possibly be involved? Either nature does it or God does it, right? That’s a false dilemma. It’s possible for God to cause and purpose things through nature, just as a chess player works through the rules of chess for the purpose of checkmating his opponent. Every move can be anticipated and planned accordingly without sacrificing the nature of the game.

Similarly, God perfectly anticipates every event and plans accordingly, without sacrificing the nature of things. Though this is slightly incomplete, since He decided to actualize this world with all its particularities before the foundations of the world. It’s not as if God finds Himself with a world and is forced to work with what He has. Furthermore, not only does He work before and through the nature of things, He works in the nature of things as well. By becoming a man to die on the cross, He worked in the world to shape the course of history. He does all of this for His glory and purpose, but does so without fail. Now one could ask, “How do I know that God had a specific purpose for that event? Perhaps it is not essential to His plan?”. There are indeed some aspects of reality that you could consider accidental (i.e, it’s not essential to something, not that it’s outside God’s control). For example, it would be difficult to see how a blue colored ball would thwart the entire purpose of God unless it was orange. But Scripture tells us that even the hairs on a person’s head are known by God. So the least we could say is that God knows certain “trivial facts”, but how does this lead us to purpose?

His Universal Plan

First we need to understand that not every feature in the world needs to be “essential” to God’s plan in order to have a purpose. It is possible that the blue ball is a child’s favorite color such that it is a blessing to him. This is obviously extrinsic to the ball, however, as it is not as if that specific ball itself intended to be picked up by that particular child. So extrinsic purposes are possible for particular things with accidental features, without necessarily being essential to God’s plan. Though it’s not inconceivable that something accidental could work to be at least partly essential for something like Jesus’s death – e.g, Judas could have had a silver coin as child, you never know. But even if it had no essential purpose, it could still participate in God’s plan if it fulfilled some good. For example, the Christian worldview entails the idea that God desires our flourishing as creatures (Jeremiah 29:11). Part of flourishing as creatures is experiencing joy. Thus God could work through the ball to provide that child with joy, and by consequence would be fulfilling a infinitesimal part of His greater purpose. I only say infinitesimal because it is Christ that essentially fulfills this joy in us, not the ball. That does not make the ball bad, it just makes it a lesser good.

Second, I think we’re limiting our understanding of “purpose” to either whatever is good for a person or whatever is in accord to God’s plan. This is incorrect, because it just begs the question: What if the ball was never used? What purpose would that possibly serve? This question could not be answered if we did not have a Thomistic account of purposes that will hereby be called final causes or teleology. Since the ball is a human artifact, it derives its purpose from us to be used for a child’s amusement, but of itself it would not necessarily possess that feature. We are interested in what teleology the ball has of itself, not what purpose we assign to it. By final cause then, I just mean that a ball is of its own nature directed toward a certain range of effect/s as its final cause or end just as an arrow points toward the target as its final end or goal. One of the effects that the ball is directed to is the potential to be melted into goo. This effect is present within the ball regardless of whether it gets actualized. Understood this way, all created objects would have some potential to be directed toward a certain end.

Lastly, all physical beings have final causes, but not all final causes are physical beings. The intellect is capable of final causality precisely because it is intentional by nature. Anything that intends a certain end is already exemplifying a form of teleology, except in a much different way than physical things do. At this point though, I think I’m adventuring too far into purposes that do not matter to us. Or so it seems! In reality, the purposes that are most relevant to us are those that are intrinsic to our nature. For example, it is good for us to eat food but this could not be unless it was our nature to eat. Because of the different natures of things, I think God’s purposes work in different ways for all things. A human has different ends that a ball does not have. So it becomes meaningless to ask, “Does God have a plan of salvation for balls?” because they’re simply not in need of such things. Nevertheless, I do think there is a hierarchy of purposes where the lowest forms of final causes are there to serve the higher forms. A clear example of this is water serving the plant’s need for water, and the plant serving the animal’s need for nutrition.

Conclusion

In this way, I think God works through each thing to accomplish good for beings like us. But if there so happened to be a “ball” that did not have a purpose for the greater good of rational agents, then I do not think that threatens the sovereignty of God in any way. It’s not as if every physical thing must work for our own good in order to have a purpose at all, that’s just absurd. Just by virtue of being anything at all, the ball is said to have a degree of goodness that God at every instant of its existence actualizes. Since God is goodness, every thing that has being must be analogous to this goodness in different ways. Even Satan, who has been regarded as evil personified, must have some sort of goodness insofar as he has being. The more perfect we are in relation to our natures, the more we reflect the glory of God’s being. This is why I reject the Calvinistic notion that God is most glorified when we are most damned. Or for the elect, when we are most satisfied in Him. God’s glory is not increased or diminished by any state of man, but only our reflection of His glory within our being can be increased or decreased. Now that some objections have been removed, I’ll be focusing on the practical side in my next post. Forgive me if that bored you, this post ended up being much longer than I had intended.

The Passing Nature & The Eternal God

A beautiful articulation of the Third Way that captures the excellence and mystery of creation. The existence of God should be obvious from any serious reflection, but unfortunately, some men can obfuscate the issue beyond what it needs to be. For example, the powers of the intellect are raised above the powers of reality, to the point that it can incoherently conceive of something coming from nothing. Or it appeals to something as absurd as brute facts. Ultimately, that’s what any atheistic explanation must reduce itself to because it cannot have an explanation for the universe in principle. I hope others could see this, but sometimes it just takes time. Please study this issue more guys, because I want you to find the deepest and most precious truths about the world.

In Defense of NL’s Necessity

In light of the recent discussion on my post, I have decided to provide some important clarifications for the readers here. Let’s be clear that the original article never intended to be an argument for positions within Natural Law (NL), but for its metaphysical underpinnings. Don’t feel homosexuality is immoral? Don’t feel its position on lying aligns with your intuitions? Then please take that elsewhere, this is not a discussion for girls. Label it absurd, mock it, and do whatever – just don’t act as if that makes a difference in philosophy. Part of being a philosopher is knowing what makes something absurd, not simply making an assertion that it is. Does an ethical view entail the murder of a million people for the greater good? That’s absurd! Position refuted? I think not. Instead of engaging in such trivial lines of reasoning, a philosopher must refute even that which is most obviously false. Now that may seem like a worthless pursuit, but philosophy’s intrinsic value can be found in its end for a true understanding of things. Without knowing what makes something true/false, you do not fully understand its truth. Nonetheless, I admit that intuitions are still a valuable means of guiding a philosopher’s positions and indeed you should rightly seek to justify those intuitions (cf Aristotle), but it must all be done from reason. If you’re a philosopher, it would not do to simply know it is wrong, you should seek to understand what makes it wrong.

Metaphysically Beyond

To reemphasize my point here, if you are going to attack NL then you better attack its metaphysical principles, not its positions. Ethical philosophers are too focused on their thought experiments and intuitions, that it becomes the primary means of assessing the truth of an ethical theory. Their method of critique applies quite well to ethical theories that are realist because of their intuitions. Which makes sense, because you can criticize a discovery of science through scientific means, but you don’t do so by metaphysical means unless it has metaphysical implications or vice versa. In the same way, ethical theories don’t criticize each other for their metaphysical problems but for their counter-intuitive positions. If metaphysics is used, it’s usually supplemental rather than essential. NL, on the other hand, is completely invulnerable to such attacks because it starts with metaphysics. A perfect example is this: Say a scientist objected to ex nihilo nihil fit because it considers “quantum energy” a form of nothing coming from nothing. Well, the philosopher would rightly consider this ridiculous because we’re operating from different definitions/disciplines. Science cannot refute metaphysical principles, it depends on it to exist at all.

Similarly, NL starts from a different methodology known as essentialism. You cannot criticize it on the basis of intuition, that’s no better than begging the question. In fact, as I had argued in the previous post, one needs to assume NL’s principles for any ethical theory to exist at all. This frustrates philosophers, however, because they’re so adjusted to their restricted approach to ethics that any other approach is considered absurd. The other mistake is to criticize NL on the basis of your understanding of human nature. The point of my post is not dependent on a particular understanding of some species, it just makes the point that whatever a thing is, it must by necessity assume essentialism. So for example, if you think property dualism is a good explanation of rational thought, then it still has an essence and it should still be considered immoral to act contrary to that person’s nature, whatever it may be. We may arrive at different ethical conclusions, but at least we can dispute the actual nature of things, as opposed to our mere intuitions or thought experiments. And for the record, I think property and cartesian dualism is clearly false from a proper view of metaphysics (not the pseudo-philosophy of today), but I’ll have to argue for that elsewhere.

The End

Let’s be clear here. Rejecting NL is not even an option, and I’m not going to give you the opportunity to think you can be rational in doing so. The law of non-contradiction is dependent on essentialism, because a thing cannot be y and x at the same time and in the same sense. This is not some abstract law of thought that transcends the nature of things, it is derived from the nature of things. If you reject NL, you deny essentialism, and by consequence reject the law of non-contradiction – thereby leaving yourself hopelessly irrational. This is simple, it does not take a thorough refutation of all the views that I hold to (such as hylemorphic dualism) in order to accept this position. In fact, Aristotelian-essentialism necessarily entails much of the positions that I currently hold to right now. Because scholastics have an organized system of thought, unlike modern philosophy, it’s quite easy to refute all of my views with just one blow. Who will rise to the challenge? My guess is, no one will. At this point, you have no choice but to accept NL.

Plato’s Cave, Animated

For now we see in a mirror indirectly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know in part, but then I will know fully, just as I have been fully known. – 1 Corinthians 13:12

This is one of the best philosophical animations that I have seen. It explains Plato’s views very visually and simply. If we had more material like this, perhaps our generation wouldn’t be so mindless and self-indulgent on pointless entertainment. Now, I do not agree with the notion that there are platonic objects but it should not be treated lightly. Plato is half-right, but I side with Aquinas in his attempt to synthesize Aristotle and Plato. For one, it is not possible for a material object’s form to exist without its matter. Properties such as bounciness, roundness, etc are abstract concepts and cannot in themselves be a material object. Rather, prime matter is actualized more perfectly when it is compounded with existence and form. However, I do think Plato is correct in some areas because there are immaterial concepts such as triangularity that cannot be perfectly instantiated in the physical world. Thus, I hold to a position where platonic objects only exist with the divine mind since it does not make sense to assert that abstract objects can exist without one.

In Defense of Classical Logic (Continuation)

My recent post in defense of classical logic has received a kind response from Robert of Dubito Deus. While he certainly has some valid points, I do not think they’re particular relevant with regard to the objection that I had raised. I’ll quickly clarify and reinforce some of the points that I made earlier in hopes that we can come to an agreement.

“This is fine in a general sense, but as I have mentioned in my previous article, classical logic doesn’t always match up perfectly with reality (here I am taking metaphysics as a discipline to be something which attempts to describe the features of reality).”

I’d prefer to define metaphysics not as an attempt to “describe” but as an attempt to “study” being as being. It’s a subtle but substantial difference in definition. The attempt to describe features of reality is more appropriately left to those in the philosophy of language. Logic, on the other hand, is the practice of reasoning our thoughts about things in a proper structure or manner. There’s distinctions within each practice, but each one is ontologically dependent on being to be anything at all. As such, I’d argue that while metaphysics as a discipline does “describe” reality in effect, it is first and foremost a study of being.

“A third example is fuzzy logic. I’ll simply say this – I challenge Gil to solve the Sorites paradox using only classical logic.”

I do not think this is relevant because if you recall, I already admitted that “they’re useful for other purposes…and can provide the kind of distinction between ideas that we need”. Classical logic, like any other logic, is still conventional to some extent but it never is conventional to the point that it treats metaphysically necessary truths as false. I am only defending the methodology of classical logic, not its wholesale implementation of conventional rules and syntaxes. In other words, the law of non-contradiction ought not to be rejected by any form of logic if it is to be a proper (yet distinct) extension of metaphysics. I’ll admit that I am by no means a logician, but I am a metaphysician. Every discipline ought to work within the limits of what is metaphysically possible or actual, otherwise, it is completely absurd. Therefore, any form of logic that works as if this was false is already self-refuting and useless.

I know this is short, but hopefully this provides some helpful clarifications.

Debate: It Is Probable God Exists

A longtime friend of mine (who refuses to add me on FB) has an excellent debate on DDO that you can read here. He argues from a thomistic perspective and succeeds quite well, might I add. I think he successively destroys the typical appeals to quantum mechanics. I’m sorry, but if you seriously think something can come from nothing, you’re not doing science, you’re doing magic.

In Defense of Classical Logic

A recent post on Dubito Deus critiques a popular argument from presuppositionalists called the Transcendental Argument (TAG). The TAG is known for arguing from necessary principles like logic to the conclusion that God is a necessary precondition for such principles [1]. In other words, if you deny God’s existence, you deny logic and thereby commit yourself to mental absurdity. I am not a supporter of presuppostionalism as a complete methodology, but I do appreciate some of the insights it offers. In this particular instance though, I only want to defend classical logic in its metaphysical form as opposed to a more conventional form that modern philosophy has reduced it to. Formal systems of reasoning is a powerful tool for successive precision in one’s thinking but its limited to a particular set of rules, syntax, or symbols that form a set pattern for the structure of our arguments. In some cases however, I find these “non-classical” logics to be a rather superfluous (and meaningless) attempt at solving obscure problems that is best reserved for those who like technical mind games. I realize it may provide benefits in helping us formulate certain propositions more precisely but it tells us no more about reality than a programming language does.

There are multiple programming language (e.g, C , BASIC, Java, Objective-C, etc) that offer certain solutions to different operations within a computer. However, these varying means of preforming a function do not tell us about the function itself as much as it tells us how we actualize that function. Each language can do so in different ways, but the nature of that function should remain the same. For example, one language could use “PRINT ”Hello World!”“ and another could use ”printf( “hello worldn” );“ but each one should ultimately do the same thing – namely, output the words ”Hello World!“ into a window. One language could be simpler and another could be more complex in order to provide more precise control over things. You can debate all day over which one of these is better but it all depends on the kind of applications you want to develop. BASIC may be better suited for developing simple programs like calculators but C could be superior for gaming. However, just because these languages use different syntaxes does not make the function itself conventional. A language could even create a contradictory syntax and strangely arrive at some ”coherent” function but at that point, it just gets ridiculous.

If that’s all “conditional logics, relevant logics, paraconsistent logics, free logics, quantum logics, fuzzy logics” do then I think they’re useless in telling us what reality is. They’re useful for other purposes, to be sure, and can provide the kind of distinction between ideas that we need but without a metaphysical foundation, such things are simply absurd. Paraconsistent logic, for example, is said to allow for contradictions by removing the disjunctive syllogism and “proof of LNC” rules of inference [2]. At this point, I cannot help but think this is simply semantic sophistry. If you want to avoid some linguistic problem (such as liar paradoxes) by creating an ad hoc system of logic then be my guest, but this is not what classical logic is about. Logicians have separated themselves from metaphysics today, but sometimes, when discussing the law of non-contradiction for example, their “conventional” understanding of logic is used to dismiss it or worse, is used to tell us that contradictory essences can exist in reality. Classical logic, on the other hand, is a metaphysical discipline of the intellect that is directed toward grasping the essences of things through the proper distinctions and the proper reasonings in a structural form. The means by which we understand these essences must itself be in response to a metaphysical understanding of reality, not as a trivial response to a linguistic problem.

Language itself ought to reflect essences and is itself a form of logic as far as it communicates our thoughts about things into a conventional form. Nonetheless, it is not the language itself by which we understand the essences of things, it is simply a creation of words and sounds that provide reference to the objects or actions in question. Insofar as language is understood in this manner, I think our attempts in being precise and distinct is good but not if it comes at the expense of our metaphysical foundation. Arguably, you could change “cat” to mean “jdfodo” just as the law of non-contradiction can be rendered meaningless in paraconsistent logic, but doing so does not removes how things are. For Aristotle, a denial of the law of non-contradiction amounts to the denial of essentialism [3]. It’s like saying essence x and essence y are both the same and not the same in the same sense and at the same time. Either x is y or it is not. This conclusion is not dependent on some abstract rules of the elite, it just depends on whether it corresponds to reality and how well it coheres with our intellect or common sense [4].

Whatever is true of a proposition must be true to the degree by which the intellect truly grasps a universal, essence, or thing. Each instance of a kind will participate in that kind to varying degrees, depending on how perfectly that instance instantiates that kind. For instance, if we compare a poorly drawn triangle to a carefully drawn triangle, we’ll immediately notice that one is more “true” to how a triangle ought to be than the other [5]. The intellect is capable of extrapolating a more perfect understanding of a thing by understanding its kind without necessarily seeing the perfect triangle. I may not be able to imagine a 1000 sided polygon, for example, but that by no means implies that I do not understand the concept. The same applies here. Even approximations are instances of a triangle and as such, provide the immediate basis from which our intellect extrapolates a universal to the conceptualization of a perfect triangle. This may be physically impossible to actualize, but it is not impossible for our intellect. Having said all of this, I think any rejection of classical logic must explicitly deny essentialism and thereby commit itself to utter stupidity. No metaphysical construct can hope to rescue any sort of logic that claims contradictions are metaphysically possible. You can redefine logic to refer to something else, but I’ll stick with a more classical approach because it is metaphysically relevant, rational, sophisticated, and in accord with common sense.

  1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcendental_argument_for_the_existence_of_God#The_argument  ↩
  2. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logic-paraconsistent/  ↩
  3. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-noncontradiction/#5  ↩
  4. http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2012/04/fine-on-metaphysics-and-common-sense.html  ↩
  5. Feser, Edward. Aquinas: A Beginner’s Guide. Oxford: Oneworld, 2009. pg 33.  ↩

Perverted Function

(Guest Post by Tim Hsiao. Tim is a philosophy major at the Florida State University)

“The men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in themselves the due penalty for their error.” – Romans 1:27 (ESV)

“For instance, sexual intercourse between males is contrary to the sexual union between male and female, which is natural to all animals, and is in a special sense called a vice contrary to nature.” – St. Thomas Aquinas

Perhaps the most common argument against homosexual behavior is that it is unnatural – a perverse use of our sexual powers. But what do we mean by unnatural? Are cars, eyeglasses, and medicine also unnatural? And what about activities such as shaving, wearing earplugs, or applying antiperspirant? These examples of seemingly innocuous unnatural acts have made the perverted faculty argument a favorite whipping post of moral philosophers who defend the legitimacy of homosexual behavior. Even conservative philosophers within the natural law tradition – namely, proponents of “new” natural law – have come to criticize the argument on this basis. In this post I will sketch briefly a defensible version of the perverted faculty argument that is immune from such criticisms.

What is the Perverted Faculty Argument?

Most moral philosophers within the natural law tradition have used the perverted faculty argument to argue against all sorts of sexual acts which are essentially non-procreative. St. Thomas Aquinas used it against not only against homosexual acts, but against bestiality and masturbation as well. Its applications extend well beyond sexual morality and into issues such as lying and killing.

To understand the perverted faculty argument, we first have to understand the natural law theory on which it is based. According to natural law ethics, morality is grounded in natural facts about what constitutes proper functioning for rational agents. Morality is about living excellently. This is achieved when our acts align with how we ought to function given the kind of being we are. Consider a knife. Because it is the kind of thing whose proper function is cutting, we call it good if it cuts well and bad if it doesn’t. The conditions for its flourishing are set by its nature. Likewise, because the heart is a type of thing oriented toward pumping blood as its purpose, a heart which pumps blood well is a good heart, whereas one that is impaired is bad. The kind of substance that something is gives us an objective standard of goodness by which we can evaluate its performance. Key to natural law theory is thus the presence of a proper function or telos that our bodily faculties have.

Of course, all of the aforementioned examples involve some non-moral good. We don’t hold knives morally responsible for failing to cut properly. But, insofar as human persons are free agents capable of rationally choosing whether or not to pursue their flourishing, this becomes moral goodness. Knives are incapable of rational deliberation and free action, but people are. We hold a liar morally responsible because he should have known and done better.

We can already see that the meaning of “natural” in the context of the perverted faculty argument is going to relate to the proper function of a given faculty. Given this, the objection that cars, eyeglasses, and medicine are unnatural is simply irrelevant. This objection falsely equates unnaturalness with being a man-made artifact. If anything, these actually enhance the functions of what they are directed at. Cars enhance the transportative power of the feet, eyeglasses enhance and correct the seeing power of the eyes, and medicine corrects bodily malfunctions.

Now according to the perverted faculty argument, an act involving a bodily faculty is wrong if it is actually directed to a purpose other than the one it should take by nature. Put another way, we frustrate the natural purpose of a given faculty if, when engaging its powers, we direct them to an end other than its inherent purpose. Thus, because the function of our sexual organs is to procreate, directing their powers to an end other than the creation of new life frustrates their purpose and is thus immoral. The sexual powers should be directed toward procreation, but are actually directed to some other end (pleasure) in homosexual acts. By the same token, masturbation, bestiality, and contraception are also immoral. This is not to say that all sex must be had with the express purpose of procreation in mind, only that actions involving our sexual faculties must be consistent with this purpose.

Objections

But what about shaving, wearing earplugs, or applying antiperspirant? None of these actions frustrate the powers associated with the various faculties because they do not involve the active use of those faculties. Shaving does not frustrate the purpose of hair because we are not actively engaging the powers associated with hair to some contrary end. Neither do we frustrate the purpose of our sweat glands when applying antiperspirant because we are not actively directing using the sweat glands to some contrary end. The same is true of hearing: we are not actively directing our hearing to some contrary end. All of these examples involve passive as opposed to active frustration. As Stephen Jensen indicates, “[n]ot every instance of inhibiting some natural function, therefore, counts as a voluntary error. We must voluntarily use some power that directs to some end or some material, but we divert that power to some other end or material.” (1)

What about cases where we actively direct the powers associated with some faculty to a seemingly contrary end? Aquinas considered one such example when he spoke of walking on our hands. But I would answer that our hands admit of a plurality of functions. Similar to a multitool, their purpose is to be used in various ways conducive to both the good of our other faculties and the whole person. So there’s nothing inherently wrong walking on our hands.

What about the dreaded fact-value distinction? According to Hume’s famous fork and Moore’s naturalistic fallacy, one cannot derive an “ought” from an “is.” But this is plainly false. Given a teleological account of human nature, there is no fact-value distinction, for value is built in to fact from the very beginning. If the purpose of eyes is that they see, then it follows straightforwardly given their telos that eyes which see well are good eyes. Nature is not merely descriptive, but also prescriptive.

The final objection that I will consider asks why we should think that the only purpose of our sexual organs is reproduction. Can’t things have more than one function? Indeed, our reproductive organs also function to eliminate waste. So why not suppose that pleasure is another purpose of sex?

This is mistaken. Pleasure exists not as an end in itself, but as a means to some other end. Eating is pleasurable, but we would not want to say that pleasure is a purpose of eating. Rather, pleasure itself is purposed toward motivating us to eat for the final purpose of nutrition. There are many things which taste pleasurable to us but which harm the body with respect to nutrition. Pleasure thus is subservient to the primary function of the faculty it is associated with. Similarly, the pleasure associated with sex serves to motivate us to procreate. It is not to be sought after as an end in itself, lest we both instrumentalize our bodies and frustrate the purpose of sex.

Much more could be said about the perverted faculty argument and its application to other issues beyond sexual morality. But this much is evident: the perverted faculty argument clearly implies that homosexual acts are immoral.

1. Stephen J. Jensen, Good and Evil Actions: A Journey Through Saint Thomas Aquinas (Catholic University of America Press: 2010) pg. 245-246

Classical Theism vs. Neo-Theism I: Divine Simplicity

In contemporary debates about the existence of God it is common to hear reference to ‘the traditional divine attributes.’ These include properties like omniscience, omnipotence, omnibenevolence, immateriality, eternality, and personality. It is supposed that if God exists he ‘exemplifies all of these great-making properties’. This is the ‘orthodox’ conception of God in contemporary philosophy of religion and philosophical theology as heard from Craig, Plantinga, Swinburne, and most others.

Unfortunately, right from the get-go, there is a perfectly good sense in which this conception of God is unorthodox. According to the Fourth Lateran and First Vatican Councils of the Catholic Church, the doctrine that God is a perfectly simple being–one without any composition–is defined as infallible, binding dogma, denial of which amounts to heresy. Hence, the doctrine has some degree of pedigree in that it has been held by billions of Christians to be a very important doctrine. But even aside from this I would argue that the contemporary view–what I will call ‘neo-theism’–is directly contrary to the truly ’classical theistic’ view of God’s nature. Classical theism has been the majority opinion for thousands of years. It is the view of the great pagan philosophers like Aristotle and Plotinus, the Christian Saints Athanasius, Augustine, Anselm, Bonaventure, Thomas Aquinas, and Bl. Duns Scotus, as well as other monotheistic thinkers like Maimonides, Averroes, and Avicenna. Such classical theists would deny that God is ‘personal’ or ‘perfectly good’ or ‘eternal’ in the sense that neo-theists take God to be. Distinctively classical theistic doctrines which are unpopular among the neo-theists of today include divine immutability, timelessness, and simplicity. I will focus on this last doctrine as an example of a fundamental difference between the two views, and argue that the classical theist view maintains God’s perfection in a way which the neo-theist view does not.

The way that God’s attributes are defined in contemporary philosophy of religion as above implicitly contradicts divine simplicity from the start. According to the contemporary view, when we predicate perfect moral goodness of God as in the sentence ‘God is good’, the referent of the term ‘God’s goodness’ is the property of goodness. Likewise, if we say ‘God is omniscient’, the referent of the term ‘God’s omniscience’ is the property of omniscience, and similarly for omnipotence, immateriality, and so on. However divine simplicity says that the referents of all intrinsic predications about God are identical, for to say otherwise would be to introduce metaphysical complexity into God. Hence, it is common to hear classical theists saying that God’s goodness IS his omniscience, which IS his omnipotence, and so on. But it would seem to follow that omnipotence and goodness are the same property, which is clearly false; indeed, it would follow that God is himself a property!

Obviously the classical theist doesn’t want to commit himself to such seemingly absurd claims, and it would be stupid to suppose 2,000 years of great thinkers were simply willing to accept a manifest falsehood. The more reasonable inference is that contemporary and classical thinkers are working with very different metaphysical presuppositions, and this is correct.

One neo-theist assumption is the Platonist, relational ontology within which Plantinga phrases the objection presented above. For Plantinga and other contemporary detractors reality consists of concrete individuals, platonic properties, and relations of exemplification. The platonic properties are abstract objects, which means they lack efficient causal power, while the causally efficacious concrete individuals exemplify these properties. Clearly God is an individual, since as creator of the universe he possesses causal power, in which case it follows he could not be an abstract object; hence he could not be identical to any of his properties, and thus divine simplicity is false. But certainly none of the classical presenters of simplicity accepted this ontological framework. Rather, following Aristotle, they would take a thing’s features to be ontological constituents of a subject. This is the picture found in Aristotle’s Categories for instance, where accidents such as color or size are said to be ‘present in’ a subject. Among contemporary philosophers D.M. Armstrong’s theory of universals seems to be an example of a constituent ontology as well. Within such a framework it’s not obviously incoherent to suppose that God is identical with his constituents so long as we can admit the idea of an improper constituent (analogous to an improper part or improper subset), since it doesn’t follow from the very meaning of the term ‘ontological constituent’ that the constituent in question is a property; ‘ontological constituent’ is a category-neutral term, and doesn’t necessarily imply Plantinga’s relational ontology.

More generally though we can make sense of divine simplicity in terms of truthmakers. The neo-theist assumes that the referents of abstract singular terms like ‘Alfredo’s audacity’, or in our case ‘God’s goodness’, are platonic properties. This is what makes it impossible for God’s to be identical with his goodness, for this to be identical to his omniscience, and so on. However, those who embrace divine simplicity can deny this account of predication. Rather, a classical theist will accept a truthmaker account, where an intrinsic predication of the form “a is F” is true, then a’s F-ness exists, where this entity is to be understood as the truthmaker for “a is F” and state that God is identical with the truthmakers for each of his predications. This makes sense because a truthmaker is an entity in the world in virtue of which a proposition is true. Clearly by this understanding truthmakers need not be properties (they can sometimes be). They can also be substances, as is the case with God–to deny this would at least have to be argued for and such a denial is on the face of it implausible. Hence, it is perfectly coherent to say God is his omniscience, which is his omnipotence, and so on. All this is saying is that God is identical to that in virtue of which he is omnipotent, that he is identical to that in virtue of which he is omniscient, and so on; and moreover, by the transitivity of identity, these things are each identical to each other. This picture shows that divine simplicity is not obviously contradictory and deserves much more than the charges of ‘unintelligibility’ and ‘incoherence’ ignorantly thrown at it today.

With these charges of absurdity put to one side we can see that divine simplicity is at least prima facie coherent. Certainly we will need to be given better arguments than Plantinga’s cavalier dismissal of 2000 years of philosophy based on the presupposition of his own anachronistic ontology. But to argue something is logically coherent isn’t to argue that it’s true. In another post I will provide an argument to the effect that only a  simple God can truly be said to exist of himself and thus be perfect.

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