Argumentum ad verecudiam literally means argument to modesty, which is what, in the event, the argument to authority turns out to be. “Not I, but someone greater that I, is my authority for this statement.” Of course, through the lowliness you can feel the surge of the ego — a besetting problem for the religious, because they do, in the end, insist on speaking for God.
This turns out to be Feser’s staple argument, as, of course, it must be, since, being a Roman Catholic, the truth is already laid down for him. His task, as an apologist — one can scarcely call him a philosopher — is to establish the rational bona fides of the faith. And since the first Vatican Council defined which philosophy was to be authoritative for the Roman Catholic Church — namely, the “philosophy” of Thomas Aquinas — and any who disagreed with its definition were anathematised — Feser had only one line of reasoning that he could, as a Roman Catholic, adopt. All others were closed to him. This is not philosophy, but religion.
As a simple example of the argumentum ad verecundiam, take Feser’s critique of Dennett. Oh, no, that’s right, it’s not Feser’s critique at all! Although the name is not mentioned in the text, we do have a footnote. It’s Tadeusz Zawidzki’s – and Michael Ruse’s too, just for good measure. And the combination of Zawidski’s saying it, and Ruse obviously in agreement, is taken by Feser as establishing that the consensus evaluation of Dennett’s work is that, while “undeniably creative and important,” it “lacks philosophical depth and is not systematic.” (79) And lest we should be in any question about this, he repeats several pages later:
And Dennett, you’ll recall, is known to these same peers as a thinker who “lacks philosophical depth and is not systematic. [94]
And this qualifies as a second instance of the original argumentum ad verecundiam. It simply does not follow from the fact that one philosopher says that this is a consensus view that it is a consensus view, even if Michael Ruse agrees.
But Feser has more fruitful uses for this handy little argument. Take the following, for instance:
I will give Dawkins this much, however: Unlike his fellow “New Atheists,” he does seem to realize that if you are going to mouth off about what a gang of idiots religious thinkers are, you had better try to make some effort actually to refute them, and especially the most eminent among them. … [And] they don’t get more eminent than Thomas Aquinas, who is widely considered, even by secular philosophers, to be the greatest philosopher of the Middle Ages, and among the greatest philosophers period — certainly the top ten, probably the top five — of all time. He is, of course, more or less the official philosopher of the Roman Catholic Church, and esteemed as the greatest Christian philosopher even by many Protestants. Hence, it can safely be said that if you haven’t both understood Aquinas and answered him — not to mention Anselm, Duns Scotus, Leibniz, Samuel Clarke, and so on, but let that pass — then you have hardly “made your case” against religion. [77]
I think you can see what a strange thing this is to have said. Quite aside from the argumentum ad verecundiam aspect of what Feser says here, I should have thought, on the whole, that if a religious institution had accepted a philosopher as their official philosopher, this says something about the standing of that philosopher’s work as philosophy. And whether esteemed or not, and by how many, it does not follow that one must answer the arguments, especialy since very few professional philosophers today take Aquinas’ arguments for the existence of God seriously. Of course, that in itself would be an argumentum ad verecundiam had modern philosophy not given any serious consideration to the arguments of Aquinas, Anselm, and other medieval theologians. But they have, and while there is still dispute about the status of these arguments, it is generally accepted in contemporary philosophy that these arguments are not successful, in themselves, in proving the existence of God.
But Feser in fact gives the game away at the very beginning of his book, when he suggests that it is
… very likely only on the classical Western philosophical-cum-religious worldview that we can make sense of reason and morality. The truth is precisely the opposite of what secularism claims: Only a (certain kind of) religious view of the world is rational, morally responsible, and sane; and an irreligious worldview is accordingly deeply irrational, immoral, and indeed insane. [5-6]
Notice how he slips from “very likely” to “the truth is” to “only a certain kind of religious view,” as though no one was watching him slip the card up his sleeve. I have already argued in my last post that the immorality and inhumanity to which Feser’s reason drives him is reason enough to question his arguments. If we are driven by our arguments to believe, for example, that there is a Jewish conspiracy to take over the world and subordinate all others to themselves, then we should go back and look at our premises. But if our premises are highly subtle and disputed claims in the philosophy of logc, as Feser’s are, and if these premises lead us to callous and inhuman conclusions, then we must revisit our premises. This is a moral obligation.
This is something that the Roman Catholic Church cannot see and will not recognise. It cannot see its own inhumanity. The handling of the sexual abuse crisis has made this very clear. Recall that, from the church’s point of view, all that is done by the church is done in the name of God and for the salvation of souls. Recall, too, the mantle of authority that is laid on the shoulders of priests, bishops, archbishops, cardinals and popes, who are in fact the point men for eternity. Therefore, the church’s reputation for sanctity is vital to its mission. How can a merely human institution do what is required if people are to be saved? The instinct to protect its reputation is not only instinctive; it is required. The church is more important than children, and the laws that protect children cannot be permitted to interfere with the church’s great work, given to it by Christ himself.
And all this, too, is an argumentum ad verecundiam. It is inescapable. There it is: an institution, headed by someone held to be, in certain respects, infallible. Therefore, when a priest argues that women should be ordained — a question of faith — he must be opposed with all the power at the church’s command. The same applies to a priest who welcomes gay people into the church, and defends their claim to be recognised without prejudice, as whole and capable of holiness. But when a priest abuses a child, it is the reputation, not the authority of the church that is in question. It is a matter of morality, of sin and salvation, and that is, after all, what the church is all about. It can therefore be treated as a pastoral concern, as a matter for confession and absolution, whether of the offending priest or the offended child. Children are, after all, infected like everyone else by the relativistic society around them, steeped in its cesspool of vice, and so they must — mustn’t they? — send out sexual signals very early. How can priests alone be at fault? As a bishop of Antigonish once said, “Children can be very seductive, you know” — or words to that effect. These are obviously matters for the secrecy of the confessional. The church has long experience in dealing with sin and sinners.
It’s all about authority, really. It results in what Jerry Coyne has (only today!) helpfully and rather felicitously called “theological suasagery.” What is important, above all, is that the church’s authority should be buttressed and defended. And, like any large, bureaucratic institution, the church must rely on rationalisation. They will call it reason, even philosophical reason, but the truth is that it there to dress a window, to make the church seem solid, and its foundations secure, not to make them so. Therefore, it will even have its official philosopher, along with its official exorcist. It will speak generously about miracles, but it will only pretend to provide scientific support for the truth of such claims — for science is not content with “miracle” as an answer, and will seek until it finds one that can be supported by empirical reason. The church will express its approval (and apparent acceptance) of the theory of evolution, but it will withhold its approval at a crucial point, and people will praise it for its openness to reason, when the doors are really locked and barred against it.
Thus, after telling us that
The First Vatican Council famously decreed that the existence of God could be known with certainty through “the natural light of human reason,” and anathematized anyone who dissented from this judgment, [158]
Feser goes on to say that this condemnation distanced “Christianity from the sort of irrationalism and fideism that would make religious belief out to be a purely subjective and emotional affair.” (159) It did nothing of the sort. You cannot decree that something is rational, nor can you rationally condemn those who dissent. What the church did by this declaration was to place – not Christianity, but — the Roman Catholic Church squarely in the tradition of the repression of freedom of thought and belief that entered the Western tradition with the Christian emperor Theodosius in the year 381 of the Common Era (see Charles Freeman, AD 381: Heretics, Pagans and the Christian State). For reason does not license the condemnation of those who dissent from a judgement. Reason is open to question and inquiry and, indeed, dissent, and once it has closed the door to dissent, the church has closed the door to reason. Not only is this obviously an appeal to authority; it is quite clearly irrational.
Yet there is more. Feser condemns modernity as a cesspool of vice, and the secularism of the modern as “deeply irrational, immoral, and indeed insane”, (5-6) as we have just seen. One of the problems with modernity is that
This life, in both its good and bad aspects, takes on an exaggerated importance. Worldly pleasures and projects become overvalued. Difficult moral obligations, which seem bearable in the light of the prospect of an eternal reward, come to seem impossible to live up to when our horizons are this-worldly. Harms and injustices suffered in this life, patiently endured when one sees beyond it to the next life, suddenly become unendurable. [153, my italics]
When I read this I was immediately reminded of Heinrich Himmler’s speech to SS leaders in Poland after touring the killing centres there in October 1943. Although Himmler speaks of this as a chapter of history never to be written, he permitted the speech to be recorded, and this recording has survived:
Someone will tell me that this is an outrageous comparison, but I am not so sure. Of course the scale of the horror is not so great, but is the injustice and the horror any less because it happens only to a few? And when does a few become many? Is it outrageous to suggest that there is a resemblance between, on the one hand, a church that would condemn a 9-year-old girl to remain pregnant with twins, raped by her step-father, and excommunicate peremptorily those who took part in the abortion, and, on the other, the callousness of men who steeled themselves to act without mercy to fellow human beings, as the Nazis did? Perhaps nothing will ever equal the horror of the Holocaust — hopefully it will not – but the resemblance does not consist in equality of horror, but in a disregard for the humanity of others in response to the dictates of a belief in some “ideal” tomorrow, some “obvious” truth. Consider the outrageousness of the excommunication of the nun in Phoenix, Arizona, because she approved, in a Catholic hospital, the abortion of a woman whose pregnancy would have led both to the woman’s death, already the mother of children, as well as to the death of the foetus she was carrying. Is it outrageous to suggest that this is evidence of a callous disregard for human rights and dignity, based on Catholic “morality”? Himmler at least had enough sense to know that what the Nazis were doing was morally disreputable, and could never be spoken of, yet the man who stands behind these acts of Christian inhumanity, as well as many many more, is widely regarded with adulation little short of the kind of worship offered by Catholics to the God they believe in.
Such inhumanity surely calls into question the train of argument which leads to it. Having come to this point, surely the philosopher has a responsibility to go back and try to find where the error in his reasoning lies. Feser, however, does not see this. Indeed, the very hardness of heart, for Feser, witnesses to the truth of the beliefs. As Himmler says: “To have stuck it out and — apart from a few exceptions due to human weakness — to have remained decent, that is what has made us tough.” I find in Feser’s stand, and the stand of the Roman Catholic Church, very little that is in substance different from this. It may seem hard and merciless, but it is our duty. That is what is being said. These things, looked at as purely this-worldly, may seem inhuman and cold, but in the light of eternity they are for the best. I think I see where the rationale for so much tyranny comes from. The Communist looks to the brilliant future when the state has withered away, the Nazi to a world without Jews, the Roman Catholic to heaven and its rewards. Such fond hopes and silly beliefs will justify a multitude of evils.
And it is all based on the argument from authority, which Feser, and, indeed, the church he serves, continuously invokes. His whole argument is, in a sense, based upon it. As I mentioned in my last post, Feser again and again speaks of the obviousness of the premises of the metaphysical arguments, but he cannot establish this obviousness. He is not, he says, dealing with probabilistic reasoning, but metaphysical demonstration. “In each case,” he says of this demonstration, “the premises are obviously true, the conclusion follows necessarily, and thus the conclusion is obviously true as well.” (125-6) For Feser things are either obviously true or incoherent. He does not allow for the play of philosophical disagreement, for dispute and reason. Now, I know that I don’t know a lot about the philosophy of logic, a field which often seems to me as complex and puzzling as theology, but it seems to me that to base one’s life on conclusions in the philosophy of logic, which is essentially what Feser does (see his discussion of “Realism, Nominalism and Conceptualism” on pp. 39-49), is a truly hazardous undertaking. Given the moral consequences of Christian belief as Feser understands it, Pascal’s wager is a no brainer: one should choose not to believe, for one simply has to rely on too much that is simply claimed, without adequate foundation, to be “obvious” or “incoherent,” and to accept this on the basis of authority, thus risking the only life that we know on very uncertain premises.
I will return to consider Feser’s understanding of the Aristotelian arguments and what Aquinas makes of them in a later post, but I find it a disagreeable and rebarbative task, and for now will think of other things.
What a great line and what a great point. Yeah, that juxtaposition really says a lot.
The thing that annoys me about this is that if Feser thinks that there are arguments that Aquinas makes that haven’t been responded to, then he should say what they are. If the four horsemen haven’t responded to them (in the handful of books they’ve written on the subject), then I am quite sure that dozens of atheist Philosophers of Religion have in painful detail. They’ve wasted tens of thousands of hours responding to this dreck. The least the Feser could do is take the 30 minutes to actually look it up. It’s something that would be required of any student paper. Why does he think name-dropping Aquinas gets him out of that?
I don’t think you are being outrageous at all in presenting us with Himmler’s disgusting speech, although no doubt it will upset Feser (good!). It seems that some, if not many, Communist functionaries in Stalin’s Soviet Union felt sorry for the peasants whose houses and farms they searched for stored food, since they knew that without the food the peasants would starve, but, in Karl Polanyi’s words, they ‘steeled themselves with science’ (or what they thought was science), just as the Nazis did. And, really, just as the British did in the case of the Irish Famine – the fact that people were dying of starvation was less important than the principles of Free Trade (which, like God, is often capitalised)… It is this curious sticking with ‘principles’ that are thought to be absolute that encourages and accounts for so much inhumanity.
It’s all perfectly clear:
True: Dennett is wrong because Zawidski says so and Ruse agrees.
False: Aquinas is wrong because Russell says so and Baggini agrees.
True: Aquinas is true (or: God exists) because the RCC says so.
Also: Anyone who disagrees with the RCC is anathema.
Ergo: You’d be irrational and insane not to agree. Also immoral.
.
This means:
1. Belief is the first and most important requirement.
2. Belief is more important than truth.
3. Dissent from any decree, even in thought, will not be tolerated.
4. The RCC is a totalitarian regime.
So it follows that:
5. If one person matters less than the defence of belief, then so does everyone else.
6. Being an instantiation of the form of the human will not stop anyone being burnt at the stake.
7. Although the numerous holocausts of the RCC haven’t individually been as big as that of Hitler, there is no moral difference.
8. Heaven is morally equivalent to the Third Reich.
Eric,
Are you familiar with Karl Popper? Your arguments mirror his own at several points.
Deductive logic is useful only insofar as it uncovers the implicit logical consequences of our assumptions. Once these logical consequences are made explicit, it is our duty to evaluate them, and conclude, though tentative it may be, if the logical consequences obtain. If our arguments lead us to adopt the absurd, or if they prescribe unethical duties, then this says more about our assumptions than the manifest ‘truth’ of our conclusions.
For instance, if I assume that all swans are white, upon encountering a non-white swan, I could claim that ‘whiteness’ is an essential characteristic of ‘swan-ness’, or any number of ad hoc saving throws, protecting my assumption from criticism come what may. The same is true, so it seems, of Feser’s views on morality, for he refuses to permit even the possibility of any competing ethical systems.
There is a simple and effective response to anyone who claims that the principles of their argument are ‘obvious’:
“Not to me.”
Indeed. The classic response to any dubious assertion is ‘How do you know that?’. If the response is that someone in authority said so, then the reply is ‘ ‘You don’t really know, you only follow.’
I think this psychological approach (or meta discussion) to understanding the apologist is going to be far more insightful than a purely rational approach. It is–in my opinion–the correct way to deconstruct the religious mind.
It might even raise the consciousness of the apologist, and make them look at their own delusions. However, that too is a problem with us atheists–we invest far too much time and energy attempting to change minds of the apologists, when we should be changing our own minds. We should be far less respectful to religion, and stop heaping so much respect and privilege to what are ultimately ridiculous beliefs.
There is a clash of two cultures–the religious culture and the sceptical culture. The usual meeting ground for dialogue is reason. This very dialogue gives legitimacy and respectability to religion, and we don’t even realise it. This in part, explains Richard Dawkins (who has himself become an authority) call for less respect for religion in his 2002 Ted talk.
And this assumption of privilege and status, and its authority, that is responsible for the lack of compassion toward those outside religious culture and even those wthin it (those who disobey the authority) because such people are alien and other. This also explains sometimes our own lack of compassion.
It is true that authority saturates the mind of the religious, it even forms part of their identity–it gives them a sense of power and belonging, like a wall of invincibility, especially when that wall includes eternal life. Taking away that authority is a bit like taking away the parents from a child, a traumatic experience.
This trauma is still part of the sceptic community but goes unnoticed. Religion is the bad parents and the sceptic community are the naughty rebellious children, still unable to fully shrug off the parent, wanting the bad parent around rather than no parent at all. In fact, although God may not be around anymore (and never was), the state, institutions and church and privilege are still around, so in one sense, the bad parents really are still here.
I think in one way, we’ve been aiding the rationalization and legitimacy and complacency of religion by dealing with religion philosophically and rationally, which goes back right through our modern history. But the New Atheism has certainly challenged this legitimacy in a more traumatic way, by taking away this respect, and deconstructing religious morality. The backlash from the these uppity New Atheists is for the bad parent to tell us all to stop being so shrill and strident, and go back to the rational and historical discussions. We must be careful not be defined by this draconian parent, we are not bad rioting children, we are not the stereotype given to us by the religious. But we must also not obey, and go back to the complacent respectful ways of old atheism.
And of course, I fully understand your comparison Eric (and let us ignore the authority of the misinterpretations of Godwin’s Law), because they’re the same thing–group identity, group thought, authority are all the same thing. It’s how we can begin to understand the madness of religion. We can apply the same mentality to all authoritarian states such as the USSR, East Germany, North Korea and those nationalist supporters of dictators in the middle-east. It does not have to be about God or religion.
As you say, the scale of horror and evil is great, but if we understand the process we can do something about it, and stop ourselves from falling into this trap. It is group identity that both makes the community believe it is a righteous, while also taking away their morality, their compassion for others.
This is why this madness can be perfectly rational, and rationalizes its own justifications for its madness. And it has it’s own sense of morality or immorality (it’s own form of justice) which is the universal righteosness of the persecuted. It all begins from the sense of being persecuted by outsiders, and once the group becomes powerful, those outsiders become insiders or scapegoats. (This process can also explain our overreaction and lack of understanding toward the UK rioters.)
But this is not morality, morality is about compassion and caring for others, especially those different to us. That is why morality risks being removed from the religious person’s mind, unless they are ordered to be compassionate.
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Aha. That’s it.
I’ve been suspicious of this distinction between atheism and New Atheism. Never really thought there was a distinction to be made there. Your 7th paragraph convinces me otherwise.
Others have suggested that the difference was the respect given by atheists old and new to religion. I’ve never seen this as more than a methodological difference. As you explain it, though, it becomes clear that it’s more than that. There’s a substantial difference after all.
Others may have made this point but it’s just now, with your comment, that it’s clicked for me. So, FWIW, thanks Egbert.
Thanks AR, hope my analysis is helpful, even if people disagree.
Ah, yes, the Nazis had a very highly developed moral code. It was just that so very much of it was twisted and turned on its head. I have a book about that somewhere around here (it may be packed in the garage, and I didn’t include it my database), but it describes in some detail the Nazi moral code, and how sensitive it was about some matters, and how clear the hatred of Jews figured, not just as a kind of yob bigotry, but very clearly enunciated principles and concerns, and yet the whole scheme was a mad as a hatter’s. The only way, in the end, to defeat that sort of thing is ridicule. Feser is not going to be convinced by argument, since for him the premises of his argument are obvious and the conclusions follow from those premises. It’s a tight ship ready for sea, and yet if you really tried to float it it would sink like a stone.
Nice take. I will say that it took me a long while. For many years, I was as accommodationist as you get. I didn’t realize that when we ask,
we’re really asking,
It was an inability to see that most believers do not come to their belief by rational choice, and that it is no form of respect to buttress delusions imposed upon people. Still, these are not reflections that I share publicly, though I am one (quoting Mills) whose bread is already secured.
Coincidentally, I only just learned the word Fuhrerprinzip: the notion that one’s leader has absolute authority, and that your duty is simply to do what your leader tells you promptly and unquestioningly. This seems to me to perfectly describe the relationship with God that Christians tell me they have.
I give them more credit than they give themselves, but I haven’t been able to convince any of them yet.
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Very good stuff.
I was recommended this book by a theist who I often spa with on the internet, and whose opinion I respect – even if I do disagree with him. I do intend to get it, though now that I’ve seen some of the content in it I’m not really looking forward to it anymore.
I agree that ridicule, or at least humour, have an important role to play. (Churchill knew this and encouraged songs like “[Fart] in the Fuehrer’s Face”).
That is one good reason the church has retreated from the “Old Man with a Long Whilte Beard” though Michaelangelo painted Him in all seriousness. Jesus ‘n’ Mo and Mr Deity may be doing more good than we imagine. We now need to tackle the sophisticated God of modern theology. I suggest that the Ground of All Being is really just another kind of Turtles All The Way Down.
The Ground of All Being? That’s what the turtles stand on.
Egbert, you seem here to be balanced precariously on the edge of something — I’m not sure what — that leads you to say at the same time that religious people are, on the one hand, mad, but on the other hand, rational. I do not agree with you that you can be mad and rational at the same time, at least in that respect in which you are mad. Indeed, I find it profoundly unhelpful, because it is at once an ad hominem dimissal of religious believers, and yet suggests that there are arguments that can defeat them. If they are rational they should at least be able to see the cogency of the arguments opposing them, even if, in the end, they believe that they have shown those arguments incorrecct or indecisive.
That is why Dawkins’ word ‘delusion’ is much more helpful, because it suggests a determination to believe something in the teeth of the evidence, and that seems to me to be much more accurate. Most rational religious people that I know (and I do know a few!), can see the arguments, and are either (i) unconvinced by them, (ii) believe that the arguments are less effective than is thought, or (iii) believe themselves to be in possession of additional evidence — either in terms of revelation or experience — that nullifies the supposed effectiveness of the arguments.
They are, I believe, deluding themselves, but it is important that we not think of the religious as somehow belonging to a separate culture. Recently, I suggested to someone that they read Antony Flew’s God and Philosophy as still one of the best short introductions to the philosophy of religion. In that book Flew comments on something said by Becker in his book, Heavenly city of the 18th C Philosophers. Becker suggests that we cannot meet Aquinas on his own gtround, we are too culturally removed from him. However, Flew replies that: (i) he thinks he has met and defeated Aquinas on his own ground, and (ii) traveliing in time as well as in space is supposed to broaden the mind.
By hiving the religious off into their own little backwater (of course, some have already done this effectively by refusing to accept any of the general findings of science) — which is what we do when we speak of them as mad or as belonging to a separate culture — we have effetively put them on notice that we are unable to respond to their arguments or their political appeals for attention except by way of abuse. Those appeals have a deadly effect, and by refusing to meet with them on their own ground, we have in fact ceded the ground to them, for they have a far larger public footprint than we do. This is politically unwise.
We do not show respect for religion by arguing that their beliefs are mistaken, and their leaders deluded and deluding. Indeed, precisely the reverse is the case. Darwin, despite his high regard for his wife and acute sensitivity for her feelings, went ahead with his project, because it was almost certainly true, not because he thought his wife was mad, though she no doubt felt diminished by what he was doing.
None of this means that I think we should never use ridicule, but we should use it sparingly and carefully, as PZ Myers does, for example. For the rest, we should attempt to meet the religious on their ground, and defeat them. This is something that the many books of the philosophy of atheism does well, and does often. No atheist need be familiar with all the argumentation, since atheism is a position of disblief, and therefore is accompanied by no burden of belief, but opposing religion is going to take a cultural revolution. It s underway. We can either be a part of it, or shout from the sidelines. I think the best place for thsoe who are really concerned with the effects of religion is in the middle of the argument. It’s winnable, and the number of people bleeding from the religions is proof that it can be done.
Of course, as you point out, the psychological part of the argument is an important one, especially as it undercuts the religious claim to confirmation in experience. Thompson and Aukofer’s summary of the scientific findings so far is an important contribution to this task, and it is not a onerous duty for atheist to read and try to understand the arguments. But never forget that, despite the outcry at the success of recent books on nonbelief, for every book of a nonbeliever out there there are literally hundreds of books by believers. Despite the millions of The God Delusion that were sold, the spiritual pabulum available out there is bought by millions more. It’s a big hurdle to jump, and we have to be ready to do some high jumping.
I should add here that I actually disagree with very little that you said, but I do find the idea of dismissing the religious as simply mad a bit worrying. I think it misunderstands the enemy, and the enemy is religion.
One great a-ha! moment for me came when I discovered the various psychological studies linking religious belief with authoritarianism — that is, the kind of personality which values strict rules and firmly established authority figures. At the risk of massive overgeneralisation you can say that some people are actually programmed to submit themselves to authority, and — if they can’t find one in real life — will actively seek out (or invent) a suitable authority to submit to.
Of course, there’s still a lot to find out about how much this is influenced by environment and peer group pressure. But I think it does help to explain why some bright people seem so inexplicably welded to the idea of a Sky Daddy.
You can find some of the studies here:
http://scholar.google.com.au/scholar?q=authoritarianism+and+religion&hl=en&as_sdt=0&as_vis=1&oi=scholart
I’d still read it, Kel… as I generally take the line that a proper understanding of A is not best obtained by reading someone who opposes A, as there’s a realistic chance that they may not accurately portray A.
Unfortunately, that seems to be the case here.
… the surge of the ego — a besetting problem for the religious, because they do, in the end, insist on speaking for God.
Well phrased and disconcertingly true – an incredible arrogance on their part, the psychology of which causes no end of grief: “that way madness lies” – W.C. Fields said something to the effect that religious hysteria has driven more people insane than alcohol. Although I think most, or many, of the religious are merely “accessories to the crime” and don’t realize that, absent proof for god, that is what their quotes of god really amounts to. None so blind …
This is something that the Roman Catholic Church cannot see and will not recognize. It cannot see its own inhumanity. …. [the] evidence of a callous disregard for human rights and dignity, based on Catholic “morality” … “It may seem hard and merciless, but it is our duty.” That is what is being said.
I don’t think I will be one to argue that you have embarked on an “outrageous comparison” – I might be more tempted to commend you for being “meek and gentle with those butchers” of logic and reason and humanity – principles and persons. It reminds me of a quote of Hitler – in the World at War series with Sir Lawrence Olivier – following the debacle at Stalingrad to the effect of “What does the death of one person or a thousand matter; it is only the race that matters”. As you and a number of other posters have suggested, when absolutists of all – or virtually all – stripes are at the helm humanity and humans tend to get lost in the shuffle.
However, I also think it possible to go too far in condemning duty and sacrifice and utopianism. For instance, the sacrifices of many in putting an end to the depredations of Hitler and company, of those in Afghanistan seeking to end the barbaric treatment of women there, even those who “gave the last full measure of devotion” in the cause of democracy. Not quite sure what the deciding difference is but it seems to be a case of retaining some focus on the individual human instead of focusing exclusively on the collective – of one sort or another.
Remember – good philosophical writing – requires many hyphens – and interrupted sentences – and generally bad hyphening – and slandering one’s opponent rather than entertaining their arguments.
Eric, we do in fact agree more than disagree, and I am very encouraged that you have taken into consideration the psychological part, which for me at least is now the dominant explanation for religion and other mass delusions.
I think many people are uncomfortable with some of the things I’ve been saying recently, and it’s a lonely and alienating experience, especially when my criticism aims towards my fellow atheists. But I hope you understand why I’ve been saying them, and why I still hold that religion is a great evil, among many evils that I would like to see banished.
First, Feser makes those claims on pages 5-6 as an illustration in the introduction about one of the main themes of the book. He then writes that “these are bold claims, and they will be defended at length in the pages to follow” (p. 6).
Second, to claim that since he opens the book with his conclusion means that he has already made up his mind is patently ridiculous. You could say that about any book that has an introduction that summarizes the book. I doubt that you reject every book that presents its main conclusion at the beginning. What about putting it on the back cover? Is that equally indicative of bad faith?
Third, if the whole book was just one big argument from authority, then why did he bother going through the arguments in detail? He wanted to show that his positions are rational and supported by logic and reason. This is the opposite of an argument from authority. Yes, he mentioned some authority figures in the course of his text, but what book doesn’t cite any authority figures? I notice that you failed to engage ANY of his arguments, but only nitpick on the fact that you dislike his conclusions and that he cited authority figures that you dislike. That’s a pretty poor criticism.
It seems as if you are approaching his work with a huge double standard.
jonjermey,
There is plenty of literature on the subject by various writers but no single discipline so far on the phenomenon.
Some interesting works I’ve come across are–The Crowd, A Study of the Popular Mind by Gustave Le Bon; Crowds and Power by Elias Canetti; Violence and the Sacred by Rene Girard; The Human Condition by Hannah Arendt; The Sane Society by Erich Fromm; The Authoritarian Personality by Theodore Adorno; Propaganda by Edward Bernays.
And yes, it was an “a-ha!’ moment for me too, a greater realization of what’s going on, and I am struggling to understand it.
Well, you know, I’m coming to the arguments, but the problem with the arguments is that he tends to take them in isolation from everything else that has been or is being written on the same subjects, so that while they claim to be arguments, they are much more in the nature of assertions. At so many points in the arguments he simply says something to the effect that this or that is obvious, as though there is no more to be said. There is a reason that Feser is teaching at a small college. He’d get a bit more comeback were he to work in a context where his kind of argumentation would be challenged more. And it’s obvious, just from reading the man, that he’s one of those “philosophers” who overpower those who engage him with shouted rejoinders. Underneath the whole thing … is the resort to authority. He hasn’t much choice, really. Like John Haught, who Jerry Coyne is going to debate later this year, Feser simply takes the Aquinian line for granted, and so he can simply dismiss others as, as he says, immoral and insane. Once you take this step, you’ve really dismissed the argumentation of others, and have fallen back on authority. I will show this in greater detail, but it seemed worthwhile to get this kind of thing out of the way at the start, since it is such a predominant part of what he does.
Egbert, you won’t get an argument from me about the great evil of religion, something that becomes clearer day by day. There is, however, a dimension to religion which at least makes a claim to rationality. I think it is imperative to give the rational or rationalising part of religion the closest attention, because, in the end, we are, I think, as Aristotle says, rational beings, and it is the rational part, or the apparently rational part, that gives religion its public standing, at least in the West, and it is therefore this part that needs to be opposed with some close argumentation. That’s very hard to do on a blog, since it requires more space and patience, so it seems to me imperative that, while we pay close attention to the psychological part, we also do not forget that the history of religion in the West has been accompanied by a long philosophical tradition as well, and dismissing people who try to argue in defence of religion on philosophical grounds must, at least, be answered. I suppose it’s more to hope for than anyone can expect, but taking people at their word, we should assume that they will be ready at some point to see reason. This is especially true of liberal Christians and Jews, who have taken great strides away from traditional religion, and they need all the support that they can get to see that their alliance with their fellow “believers” is a very unstable one, and that they really belong in the fellowship of nonbelievers, no matter how much reinforcement they get from the cultural drama of religion.
Show me where I have slandered the good Dr. Feser. As for dashes, not hyphens, they help to break up complex thoughts, and I find them helpful. But this is not about style, but about substance. Once again, where is the slander?
Eric:
>> the problem with the arguments is that he tends to take them in isolation from everything else that has been or is being written on the same subjects, so that while they claim to be arguments, they are much more in the nature of assertions. At so many points in the arguments he simply says something to the effect that this or that is obvious, as though there is no more to be said.
I don’t think that fairly captures his writing at all. You make it sound as if he quotes Aristotle and Aquinas, and no-one else. In fact, he cites numerous ancient, medieval, modern and contemporary philosophers in the course of his discussion, and certainly takes into account the newer arguments in several fields of philosophy, such as metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of mind, ethics and theology. In fact, he explicitly makes this point in his book on the philosophy of mind, saying that one cannot speak to a single philosophical issue without dragging in the entire field of philosophical discourse in its wake, because one issue touches upon all issues to a certain extent.
Perhaps I will await your comments upon his actual arguments and not upon his overall abrasive style and your intense dislike of his conclusions, which I actually share to a large extent, being a liberal atheist myself. I think that in any argument, there must be some referral to basic premises that are supposed to be intuitively obvious, and I cannot find fault in him for doing what every philosopher has ever done in the past.
>> Like John Haught, who Jerry Coyne is going to debate later this year, Feser simply takes the Aquinian line for granted, and so he can simply dismiss others as, as he says, immoral and insane. Once you take this step, you’ve really dismissed the argumentation of others, and have fallen back on authority.
The question is WHY does Feser buy into Thomism? Is it because somebody told him to? That would be falling upon authority. However, he explicitly denies that he did this, even in the introduction to TLS. He says that it was the arguments that convinced him. Do you really object to someone who has thought long and hard about some issues and found the reasoning of someone authoritative, because the arguments are compelling and adequately meet reasonable objections? That just seems unfair, and more rooted in your dislike of who Feser finds compelling, i.e. Aquinas, and more to the point, the Catholic Church that you find objectionable.
And as for his comments on the immorality and insanity of the modern age, this does actually follow if you buy into his arguments. Similarly, the quantum world is utterly bizarre and foreign to our macroscopic experience, but that is not enough to refute it, because it is a well-validated scientific theory. Perhaps Feser would argue something similar? In other words, just because his conclusions are radically at odds with the contemporary cultural scene, does not imply that his conclusions are wrong, especially if one cannot find fault with the reasoning itself?
I think that his overall thrust is that Aristotelian-Thomism is not only well-supported by philosophical argumentation, but it also avoids many modern philosophical puzzles, such as mind-body dualism, causation, intentionality, rationality, and so on. In addition, the rejection of the A-T system was more a matter of taste than philosophical refutation, and it was rejected, because its conclusions were so distasteful to the liberal and anti-religious sentiments of prominent thinkers of the modern and contemporary age.
There are reasonable responses to all of these claims, but I’m afraid that I haven’t seen you make them, at least yet.
Take care.
dguller,
Feser’s arguments are a joke. If you take the time to slog through the acres of obscure verbiage to uncover what the premises are, you learn that his premises are either (1) falsified by physics or (2) naked assertions.
Of course, Feser would reply that he is arguing “metaphysics”, so physics has nothing to contribute. But by making that move, he is just shifting (1) to (2).
As MacDonlad has said, his argument boil down to assertions. Feser has all the hallmarks of a crank.
Fesser is renowned for claiming the only reason anyone could disagree with Aquinas or the Cosmological argument is because they do not understand them and must read more. Arguments from authority have their place, but not as the cornerstone of every response to any criticism.
The quotes in this article were very demonstrative of the criticisms Eric laid out. To disregard the reliance on authority Fesser displays strikes me as remarkably obtuse.
I guess I was wrong about Feser — he must be a great philosophical writer after all. Check out the first paragraph by Feser quoted by Eric above. Dashes and ad homs, just like you said!
“The question is WHY does Feser buy into Thomism?”
Did you ever consider that he is a Catholic philosopher and this might be a very good reason why he buys into Thomism? He seems to be straight out of the scholastic tradition of the middle ages – still thinking that aristotelian metaphysics is au courant.
His two chief weapons are a dismissal of empiricism (too modern) and an appeal to authority (god is the ultimate authority). He actually thinks it is more reasonable to accept belief in god than to accept the evidence for evolution because he can reason to god without empirical evidence. Empirical evidence is messy and involves induction. Then there is the “I’m an expert on Aquinas and you’re not approach” which is a tactic he uses to quell dissent. He never summarizes his arguments to counteract critics, but just says go read my book. He really believes that if reject Aquinas’ argument, then you don’t understand his argument.
“There are reasonable responses to all of these claims, but I’m afraid that I haven’t seen you make them, at least yet.”
You haven’t made any either – is there a book we are supposed read?
I can’t make much sense of your objections, I’m afraid. I don’t think Eric claims Feser has made up his mind because he opens his book with his conclusion — Eric makes an entirely different argument as to why he thinks Feser has already made up his mind, and that analysis takes up much of this post.
As for why a book of logical argumentation can constitute an argument from authority rather than its opposite:
The question is WHY does Feser buy into Thomism? Is it because somebody told him to? That would be falling upon authority. However, he explicitly denies that he did this, even in the introduction to TLS. He says that it was the arguments that convinced him.
Why are the arguments convincing, though? If it’s because they’re “obvious” then it really is an appeal to authority after all, and my impression is that this is the thrust of Eric’s argument against Feser. As every five year old child knows, there’s no point at which one must stop asking “why?”
Thus it’s not enough to see that an argument is made and from that conclude that this is not an argument from authority. One must look at the premises and the justification thereof. To justify the premises by insisting that they’re “obvious” is indeed an appeal to authority, especially when they’re “obvious” by virtue of being endorsed by Aquinas.
Perhaps I will await your comments upon his actual arguments and not upon his overall abrasive style and your intense dislike of his conclusions, which I actually share to a large extent, being a liberal atheist myself. I think that in any argument, there must be some referral to basic premises that are supposed to be intuitively obvious, and I cannot find fault in him for doing what every philosopher has ever done in the past.
Note that the “dislike of his conclusions” is actually philosophically important. Eric is saying (and I hesitate to repeat because Eric said this quite clearly) if one’s “intuitively obvious” premises lead one to absurd conclusions it is a duty to revisit those premises and see whether a mistake might have been made. Rather more generally, while you’re correct that there must be some basic premises a philosophical skeptic isn’t going to let it rest there. Why must the ultimate premises on which our metaphysical system depend be “intuitively obvious” in the first place? Why shouldn’t the deepest mysteries be counterintuitive? What good is a premise that is merely “obvious” when so many thinkers have found so many contradictory premises obvious? It’s not enough to convince oneself as that is far too easy to do. Ideally, one should try to convince oneself otherwise using failure as the signpost to truth. But even that is problematic.
I think that his overall thrust is that Aristotelian-Thomism is not only well-supported by philosophical argumentation, but it also avoids many modern philosophical puzzles, such as mind-body dualism, causation, intentionality, rationality, and so on. In addition, the rejection of the A-T system was more a matter of taste than philosophical refutation, and it was rejected, because its conclusions were so distasteful to the liberal and anti-religious sentiments of prominent thinkers of the modern and contemporary age.
And this is supposed to be a virtue? Mind-body dualism (or at least the intuition thereof) and causality ARE real puzzles. Only a deficient philosophical system would avoid them. And I disagree with your notion that Thomism declined purely because of “fashion.” It declined because people like Hume and Kant made some serious arguments to the contrary and heavily influenced the practice of academic philosophy in the process.
Michael:
>> Did you ever consider that he is a Catholic philosopher and this might be a very good reason why he buys into Thomism? He seems to be straight out of the scholastic tradition of the middle ages – still thinking that aristotelian metaphysics is au courant.
If you read his Last Superstition, he is quite clear that he was initially a naturalist atheist, and that he changed his mind after a great deal of reading and reflection. You seem to think that he began as a Catholic, and that dictated his current Catholic conclusions, but he would deny that to be the case. Granted, he may be flexible with the truth of this matter, but his explicit claim is that it was the philosophical reasoning that ended him in Catholicism, and not the other way around.
>> His two chief weapons are a dismissal of empiricism (too modern) and an appeal to authority (god is the ultimate authority).
He dismisses “empiricism” of the Humean variety, because it leads to incoherent conclusions and several skeptical paradoxes that are irresolvable. He does not dismiss the need for empirical verification in scientific questions, but does dismiss its necessary relevance in metaphysical speculation, because metaphysics is what allows us to interpret empirical phenomena to begin with, and thus is, in a sense, more basic.
>> He actually thinks it is more reasonable to accept belief in god than to accept the evidence for evolution because he can reason to god without empirical evidence. Empirical evidence is messy and involves induction.
Where does he reject evolution?
>> Then there is the “I’m an expert on Aquinas and you’re not approach” which is a tactic he uses to quell dissent. He never summarizes his arguments to counteract critics, but just says go read my book. He really believes that if reject Aquinas’ argument, then you don’t understand his argument.
Not at all. He explicitly says on a number of occasions that one can reject Aquinas’ argument. He does not say that it necessarily compels assent. He mentions several philosophers who are atheists who have rejected the argument. However, he does say that if one is to reject the argument, then one must reject it in its strongest form and within the context of its own metaphysical picture. One often rejects an argument by reading into its premises concepts that may be present within one’s own philosophical worldview, but are utterly foreign to the concepts involved in the argument in question.
>> You haven’t made any either – is there a book we are supposed read?
I’m unaware of any. One of my key objections is to the premise that any change from potentially X to actually X requires an actual Y to cause the transition. Quantum phenomena seem to occur without any separate actual entity that causes the change. There may be hidden variables at work, but the fact that it is possible that these events occur for no reason at all would falsify a key premise of the cosmological argument. Another objection that I have is to the argument that the First Cause must have an intellect, because it is based upon an argument from analogy to human beings, which is a pretty weak argument, in my opinion. Another objection is that just because the modern philosophical worldview has resulted in a number of paradoxes that are avoided in the classical synthesis does not falsify the modern worldview any more than the bizarre conclusions of quantum mechanics and relativity falsifying those theories.
Those are just some thoughts off-hand.
I read Feser very differently than you do. I see a man imbedded in medieval scholasticism and unable to interact with a modern world.
He can interact with modern and contemporary philosophers quite well. Does that count as an ability to “inteact with a modern world”? Also, he is not some recluse in the desert. He lives in California, and thus can interact with the world. Sure, he is repelled by much of what he observes around him as a deviation from his natural law standards, but do you love everything around you, or do you see much of your surroundings as imperfect and substandard?
How exactly is Aquinas supposed to solve our problems? The world was perfect in 1300? Dream on.
“I was once a naturalist atheist” seems to be an up and coming meme amongst believing philosophers/theologians nowadays. But as for the arguments leading him to where he’s ended up, this is simply not plausible, as you — dguller — have already made clear. When you say this:
you hit the nerve of what I was saying in “History is not an Argument.” And by bypassing empiricism — by calling in Humean, for Christ’s sake! — and hewing to Aquinas’ “metaphysical demonstration” (as he calls it), Feser simply bypasses the the modern age altogether, which is why he rightly belongs in the middle ages. And notice when he quotes other philosophers how very biased he is. He never presents an argument in a reasonably strong form. But, in any case, you can’t simply throw out three centuries of thought, as Feser does, without missing something, nor can you keep repeating the same mantra about Aristotle without ignoring most of what has been discovered about the world over the last three or four hundred years or so. In order to live in the world as Feser understands it we would have to undo modern science, democracy, human rights (and don’t remind me that Aquinas speaks of rights), financial institutions, and all the rest of the modern world, which includes, I’m afraid, much that will seem to many and perhaps most of us to be a cesspool of vice. That is what freedom enables. But Feser would not give the vote to just anyone with a pulse, and he would reinstate a deep respect for authority — like for the pope, for example, whose record has been a pretty sad one recently! (And that includes JP II (or, more correctly, pope Wojtyła), as well, who supported Maciel up until the day he died, and was pope during the time that Pope Ratzinger was in charge of the CDF, when all the ultraconservative appointments were made, and the secrecy over child abuse entered a new phase.)
But when you say:
you really miss the point of the argument to the “First Cause”, which is not an argument from analogy, but an argument from causality, understood in an Aristotelian/Aquinian way. Aquinian analogy of being comes in at another point in his theology. I don’t think it’s very compelling, but it is necessary if it is to be possible to speak about God at all; there must be some way of using language that evolved to speak about earthly things to speak about something which is not earthly, if we are going to speak about God at all. Actually, as I say, I don’t think this works, and God tends to disappear into a cloud of unknowing.
You ask Michael where Feser rejects evolution. Well, he doesn’t now, does he, not quite? But he does. For evolution is simply the theory that life and sentience and mind is the effect of natural processes. Pope Wojtyła did the very same thing. He said that he accepted evolution, and then, at the crucial point, retracted it, saying that mind, intelligence, and soul, could not have come about by evolution. Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he? But by saying that he really said that he did not accept evolution, because the key thing about evolution is that life is a continuum, from the most “lowly” amoeba to the human being. Anyone who does not see this does not understand evolution. Feser doesn’t.
Yes Eric, Feser is very contemptuous of evolution because of its naturalistic implications. Its the view that god is not only the creator, but also the sustainer of the universe. Its the view that things are the way they are because god wants it to be that way. Its the view that humans are the reason for the universe. Its all so medieval in its outlook.
Eric:
>> And by bypassing empiricism — by calling in Humean, for Christ’s sake! — and hewing to Aquinas’ “metaphysical demonstration” (as he calls it), Feser simply bypasses the the modern age altogether, which is why he rightly belongs in the middle ages.
But he doesn’t bypass the modern age. He interrogates its presuppositions and assumptions, and finds that they lead to absurd conclusions that make rationality and morality, for example, impossible. One may disagree with his interpretations of modern and contemporary thinkers, but one cannot say that he “simply bypasses” them.
>> And notice when he quotes other philosophers how very biased he is. He never presents an argument in a reasonably strong form.
First, look at your own presentation of Aquinas and scholasticism in general for traces of bias.
Second, care to give any examples from his writings of how he offers up straw men arguments of modern thinkers?
>> But, in any case, you can’t simply throw out three centuries of thought, as Feser does, without missing something, nor can you keep repeating the same mantra about Aristotle without ignoring most of what has been discovered about the world over the last three or four hundred years or so.
The question is whether one can maintain Aristotle’s insights from within the context of the findings of modern science. Many thinkers, such as Hilary Putnam and Walter Freeman, think that older insights may carry solutions to modern philosophical puzzles. Neither of them are Catholic theologians, by the way. Certainly, Aristotle and Aquinas were likely wrong about a number of things, not having the benefits that we do of our current knowledge base, but that does not mean that they got everything wrong and have nothing to contribute to modern debates.
>> you really miss the point of the argument to the “First Cause”, which is not an argument from analogy, but an argument from causality, understood in an Aristotelian/Aquinian way. Aquinian analogy of being comes in at another point in his theology.
I wasn’t talking about the First Way at all. That was my mistake. I should have been clearer. I was referring to the Fifth Way. Sorry for the confusion. I was responding to Michael’s request for some reasonable critical responses to some of Feser’s arguments, and I tried to supply some off the top of my head.
>> Actually, as I say, I don’t think this works, and God tends to disappear into a cloud of unknowing.
I agree with you there. I have my own criticisms of Aquinas’ doctrine of analogy.
>> You ask Michael where Feser rejects evolution. Well, he doesn’t now, does he, not quite? But he does. For evolution is simply the theory that life and sentience and mind is the effect of natural processes.
Well, he has arguments in support of an immaterial component of the human mind, i.e. the intellect, and this specific phenomenon is likely inconsistent with Darwinian evolution. So, point taken. Perhaps a solution to this inconsistency would be to argue that the immaterial component is generated from material processes, and thus are part of the natural world as an emergent phenomenon, which would make evolutionary pressures applicable. I doubt that Feser would take this course, though, given his Thomist position that the immaterial component can operate independently of the body.
Michael:
If his system has solutions to modern philosophical puzzles, then that would be a worthwhile contribution. You never know where insights can come from. Spinoza turns out to have been right about a number of issues relating to emotions and the body, for example. You can read Antonio Damasio’s “Looking for Spinoza” for more details.
Well yes, dguller, but I do not think that Catholic answers are answers to our problems. Freedom is too valuable to give up to people with dogmas and dungeons.
Rob:
>> Feser’s arguments are a joke. If you take the time to slog through the acres of obscure verbiage to uncover what the premises are, you learn that his premises are either (1) falsified by physics or (2) naked assertions.
First, his premises have not been falsified by physics. There is one premise that might be falsified by quantum mechanics, as far as I can tell, but that is only under a particular interpretation of QM, which is only one amongst many. At the most, one can say that it is an open question, which is different from falsification.
Second, all arguments ultimately end in naked assertions, because we have to start from what is intuitively obvious, and then proceed from there. Sure, some of our conclusions may require us to revise our earlier assumptions, but there are still plenty of assertions present. If you want to only have arguments without any assumptions, then I think you’ll get into no arguments with anyone, which may actually make you the luckiest person in the world!
>> Of course, Feser would reply that he is arguing “metaphysics”, so physics has nothing to contribute.
I think that it is reasonable to claim that there are some matters that are true, but cannot be addressed by empirical science. That would be the purview of metaphysics. I was initially resistant to this idea, but have come to see that it must be true. Whether the past really happened cannot be addressed by physics, but only by philosophy, for example.
Eric:
>> Well yes, dguller, but I do not think that Catholic answers are answers to our problems. Freedom is too valuable to give up to people with dogmas and dungeons.
Why does every idea that Aquinas have automatically have to bring Catholicism with it? Even Feser states that he explicitly avoided Catholic apologism in his works, and stuck to the philosophical arguments that certainly fall far short of endorsing Catholicism. Does one have to buy into ALL of Descartes’ system to respect his idea of applying doubt to cherished beliefs? Does one have to buy into ALL of Kant’s system to agree with his claim that our mental categories necessarily color our understanding of reality?
I mean, I think that you are being unfair to Aquinas, and to Catholic thinkers in general, by applying a standard to them that you would never apply to modern and contemporary thinkers. You would never say that if you cannot accept the totality of someone’s system, then you cannot accept any part of it. That would be a classic example of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Michael:
Also, too, revisiting the arguments and perspectives of ancient, medieval and modern thinkers is often useful, because they bring a fresh perspective that we would not have otherwise considered. It is easy to get stuck in a rut when reflecting upon a subject, and if one simply repeats the same motions, then one will remain stuck. Considering a problem from a different perspective may give a new insight that can be used to make progress.
Just something to consider.
I think that it is reasonable to claim that there are some matters that are true, but cannot be addressed by empirical science. That would be the purview of metaphysics. I was initially resistant to this idea, but have come to see that it must be true. Whether the past really happened cannot be addressed by physics, but only by philosophy, for example.
Can you unpack this a little? What do you mean by “really happened”? I get some sense of what you mean — empirical science can provide evidence of history but can’t demonstrate conclusively that it didn’t all just poof into existence. But what sense of “the past really happened” is there besides “there is some sequence of events that led to the current state of the universe”? More importantly, how can philosophy reliably bring us to any conclusion about this question one way or the other?
More subtly, where does physics end and philosophy begin? Surely any philosophical investigation into the metaphysics of time and causality must take (for example) general relativity into account — is relativity a philosophical conclusion or a scientific one? Was Einstein really a physicist? If someone who did not understand the ontology of western academia compared Einstein’s work to that of a philosopher specializing in metaphysics how would that person be able to appreciate the difference in what these two people were doing?
Can you give even one example of reliable knowledge obtained purely through the application of logical reasoning? 2+2=4 (or any other mathematical fact) isn’t going to cut it because those are true by virtue of the axioms of your pet mathematical theory.
But does it have any solutions? Is Feser proposing anything that will solve a single problem we have today? Is there something to be gained by acquiescing to a celibate (well they’re supposed to be) patriarchal authority? Is homosexuality wrong? I don’t suggest erasing Aquinas or Aristotle from history – I am just curious what you think Feser’s approach has to offer; his views are totally imbedded in a medieval Catholic theology. I am unclear what you are arguing for.
I did say I was going to still read it, that the book at the very beginning describes any other worldview as being deeply immoral is not a very endearing quality. Unless that quote is inaccurate…
dguller:
It doesn’t, but it usually does, because he’s the official Catholic philosopher. If you show that he is right then you have defended Catholicism, because Aquinas shows (at least according to Feser and other Catholics) Catholicism follows from Aquinas. This doesn’t mean that all of Aquinas’ arguments are fallacious and that nothing that he says is true, but it is the high road into Catholicism, since he is the one who has been decreed to have proved the existence of God by rational means. So Catholics must defend his argumentation, otherwise they are in fact dissenters from their faith, and are anathematised.
That’s a good reason for taking Aquinas in small doses. Have you never read him at length? Time after time, appeals to the authority of Aristotle, the authority of the church, Augustine, the Bible, etc.: this is simply the way that Aquinian dialectic works. Once one of his authorities is raised, the question is answered. Read him through. It’s absolutely stultifying, but every word of it, from the standpoint of the Catholic Church, is an affirmation of the Church’s faith. That’s what councils do. They turn what might have been interesting sources of argument into dogma. And no matter what Feser says, everything he says, at least in The Last Superstition, which is the last book of his that I will bother to buy or read, is straight ahead Catholic apologetics of the most transparent kind — But of course its all rational argument, my dear; Catholics don’t have any other kind! — and contemptuous of all those who disagree.
And, by the way, just so that you know I noticed: Feser does bypass modernity. He addresses it only to dismiss it in favour of his narrow Catholicism. But of course he bypasses it. What do you think all that cesspool of vice, give anyone with a pulse the vote, is about?
Just a note dguller. The fifth way is basically the argument from design. As Aquinas says:
Must have been one of the others. (Sorry if this gets out of order. It’s not quite clear what reply button to hit.)
I’m sorry. In what way has Feser avoid apologetics in The Last Superstition? It’s pretty straightforward Catholic apologetics from beginning to end. And, show me one good new argument in the book, and perhaps I’ll change my mind. I didn’t, quite honestly, see one. But he is a particularly unpleasant writer to read. I won’t read more of him, that I can assure you.
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You are wrong about why Feser’s point reminded me of Himmler. Certainly ends and means come into it. But what reminded me of Himmler was the idea, not only that ends justify means, but the idea that the good to come justifies inhumanity now (“difficult moral obligations”). This is not just the end of an action, but a comprehensive ideal towards which all our actions should be directed, so that we do not overvalue this life, here, now. So we can and must hold to our values, which are not aimed at an earthly kingdom, no matter how cruel it may seem, no matter how much it may seem to subvert the rights of individuals.
Himmler wasn’t justifying an act by the end that would be achieved, but a monstrous crime against humanity in order to achieve the comprehensive goal of a National Socialist ideal, just as Feser thinks it is appropriate to subvert human rights for the sake of another world. In the light of this, he suggests, “difficult moral obligations, which seem bearable in the light of the prospect of an eternal reward, come to seem impossible to live up to when our horizons are this-worldly.” So the Bishop of Phoenix can steel himself to excommunicate a nun because she approved saving the life of a woman by abortion because of an overvaluation placed on this life, because her horizons were this-worldly. Himmler said the same. “I know its tough work, but it has to be done. Our horizons must be broader than this.” There’s the resemblance.
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Dan:
Like I said, read the book. It is full of arguments. He introduces premises, deduces conclusions. Trust me, he does. He does not just cite thinkers’ opinions, and leave it at that.
If you are going to allow premises to be counterintuitive, then you have lost any grounds for complaining when conclusions are counterintuitive, as well. You cannot have it both ways, I’m afraid. You cannot say that Feser’s arguments must be wrong, because the conclusions are ridiculous! Oh, but it is perfectly okay to have ridiculous and counterintuitive premises in an argument. No problem there. Either absurdity is a strike against an argument, or it is not. And absurdity is a complex phenomenon anyway, especially since a number of truths have turned out to be true even though they were initially considered to be absurd and counterintuitive.
They are only real puzzles under a certain set of assumptions. For example, causality is only problematic if you buy into Hume’s idea that sense impressions are the root to determining truth in the world, and that if one lacks sense impressions about X, then X cannot exist. His argument boils down to the fact that because all we experience is one event following another, and never the necessary connection between them, then there is no such necessary connection between a cause and its effect. If you reject his initial premise, then you no longer have this conclusion. In other words, if you accept that there are true phenomena that are not directly perceived by the senses, then there is no problem with causality per se being one of them.
Read the history. There were no arguments against Aristotle. There was an impression that his system was stultifying and an obstacle, and so it was ridiculed into irrelevance, especially his use of formal and final causes. I would love to know what Hume and Kant said that refuted Aristotle. Sure, he was wrong about a number of scientific theories, but so what? So was Descartes, and yet no-one would say that his ideas were refuted, because some scientific predictions were falsified.
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I have left a short note over on your blog. I think what you say in your observations is not altogether correct, and you should read much more closely what is really being said. That being said, I do acknowledge that I have let some personal animosity enter into my assessment of Feser’s work, and for that reason have decided not to comment for the time being on it. However, that does not mean that I think his arguments are in any way convincing. Indeed, the last chapter of the book, although I have not been able to discover exactly what his arguments really are, is surely just an attempt to make a case for Intellgent Design, for if, in fact, natural teleology points beyond itself to God, then the explanation of the natural world is reduced, not to materialism, but to theology. I scarcely think anyone will consider this a viable research strategy. Feser thinks that there is something wrong with the biologists use of teleological terms, but, in fact, biological systems are just natural teleological systems, though the functional language can be replaced by the language of variation and environmental filtration.
PS. Are you sure you meant ‘apposite’