Some readers may recall that a couple of years ago, I made fun of a press release issued by the publishers of a book by Edward Feser that had the title Five Proofs of the Existence of God and claimed that “the existence of God can be established with certainty by way of purely rational arguments” (my italics). The point of my brief post was that life was too short to read yet another book claiming to prove the existence of any god since there have been so many failed past attempts. I said that if someone had actually come up with an irrefutable proof, that would be be earth-shattering news and reported all over the media and so I would wait and see if that a happened before wading through yet another theological treatise.
I had not heard of Feser before that episode and it appears that he is a prolific writer on theological matters, churning out books and blog posts. I used to read a lot of theology and philosophy in the days when I was a religious believer but that was way back in the 1980s and earlier. After I stopped believing and became a materialist who required affirmative evidence to believes in the existence of anything, I felt that any attempt to prove the existence of any god by intellectual arguments alone sans evidence, which is what this type of theology tries to do, was a waste of time and so stopped reading in that field. The only current theologians I had even heard of were Alvin Platinga and Willam Lane Craig both of whom lean heavily on the so-called ontological argument for god’s existence which I do not find convincing at all. (By the way, what happened to Craig? At one time he was all over the place debating the existence of god but he seems to have disappeared.)
So my knowledge of theological writers is admittedly somewhat dated. I did read a book a few months ago that was sent to me by a friend because it had belonged to her father and she thought it might interest me. It is a slim volume titled How to Think About God: A Guide for the 20th-Century Pagan by Mortimer J. Adler. (Although I had lost interest in such topics, when friends take the trouble to give me books that they think I will like, I make an effort to read them.)
Adler starts out by showing why all the earlier proofs for god’s existence are flawed and then proposes what he thinks is a superior one that is consistent with modern science. He does not invoke the creation of the universe as an argument for a god and thus foregoes the ‘prime mover’ argument. He concedes the possibility that the universe might have always existed and need not have been brought into existence at any given instant. Instead he tries to show that it is the continued existence of the universe that requires the existence of a deity. His god is a generic one and he does not come down in favor of any particular religious tradition, nor does he seek to base his arguments on any empirical evidence other than the self-evident one that the universe exists. The book was an easy read because Alder writes well. But it was unconvincing,
A few weeks ago I received the manuscript of a book THE UNNECESSARY SCIENCE: A critical analysis of natural law theory by Gunther Laird who had seen my blog post about Feser and thought I might be interested in reviewing it. As the subtitle indicates, this book is a critique of what is known in theological circles as ‘natural law theory’. ‘Natural law’ is not about the laws of science but instead is about establishing the moral and ethical bases that should govern our lives. The basis of this was furnished by Aristotle and then formulated in the context of Catholicism by Thomas Aquinas. Laird’s book takes aim at the arguments of both those thinkers as well as the further refinements of natural law theory by Feser, one of its most ardent advocates. This book is essentially a critique of the natural law thesis as elaborated on by mostly Feser. Laird has studied the entire Feser oeuvre of books, articles, and blog posts and his book is a detailed point-by-point look at what Feser claims about natural law theory and the basis for his own specific claims.
It turns out that Feser has much more ambitious goals than Adler’s minimal one of just proving the existence of any god. Feser is not just claiming that there is irrefutable proof of his god’s existence. In his hands, ‘natural law theory’ that he claims follows in a direct line from the ideas of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas is a detailed, prescriptive theory that argues that traditional Catholic doctrines in their most rigid and doctrinaire forms, are a necessary consequence of it and Catholicism in its traditional form is unequivocally the one, true religion. This results in natural law theory’s justification of condemnations of divorce, homosexuality, abortion, religious pluralism, masturbation, and so on. Natural law theory is apparently quite influential in some circles and US Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas is supposedly a firm believer in it and uses it in his opinions, which explains a lot actually, given that Thomas is one of the most conservative justices on the court and almost always rules in favor of the worst options. This does not bode well for natural law theory being humane.
Religious apologists face the perennial problem of explaining how an omnipotent and benevolent god allows the existence of evil. Laird explains the tortured arguments that Feser, like other religious apologists, give to explain away this problem, based on the ethical arguments of Aristotle and Aquinas. But Laird goes on to show that those arguments can just as easily be used to justify the most horrendous evils. In fact, that is how much of the book is written. Laird gives the Feserian (and sometimes also Thomist/Aristotelian) argument in support for each position and then shows that those same arguments can be used in support of either its opposite or for some other awful thing.
While clearly secular in his sympathies, Laird is by no means a knee-jerk antagonist to the religious views of Feser. He says that Feser writes very clearly and that his explanations of what natural law theory entails are easy to follow. As far as I can tell (note that theology is not my field) he tries to give Feser’s arguments as sympathetic a hearing as he can and does not try to take his words out of context. Laird lays out the essence of Feser’s case.
Feser, as he so often does, explains precisely what the “natural law” tradition is in language you don’t have to be a Supreme Court justice to understand. From about the fourth century B.C, in ancient Greece, philosophers such as Plato and his student Aristotle started pondering questions like “what is change?” and “when we say two things share a certain property, what do we mean?” Eventually, the answers they arrived at led them (or at least some of their followers) to conclude that a single, eternal, omnibenevolent, omnipotent, and omniscient God existed, and that this allowed human beings to objectively discern what behaviors were immoral or moral. Centuries later, during the fall of the Roman Empire and the subsequent Middle Ages, Catholics such as St. Augustine and St. Aquinas took another look at the writings of pagan thinkers like Aristotle and Plato and married them to the Catholic religion, concluding that the answers to philosophical questions these Greeks had found also pointed towards the truth of Christianity (and very specifically Catholicism), as well as the truth of orthodox Catholic moral teaching. That meant no divorce, no gay marriage, and no abortion, among other things, along with state sponsorship of the Catholic church and official discouragement (to put it mildly) of atheism. This is the philosophical tradition to which Clarence Thomas belongs, and according to which Roe vs. Wade or gay marriage or public denial of a supernatural God overseeing human affairs are all offenses against the moral order and cannot be tolerated by any state, secular or otherwise. Regardless of whether or not the Founding Fathers subscribed to that tradition, its adherents claim it is objectively true and must be upheld even today, centuries after their deaths. As Feser tells us in The Last Superstition, “the classical theism and traditional morality of Western civilization…ought to be restored to their rightful place as the guiding principles of Western thought, society, and politics, and that, accordingly, secularism ought to be driven back into the intellectual and political margins whence it came.”
Laird’s goal is the opposite of Feser’s. The very fact that Laird spends about 360 pages closely critiquing Feser’s arguments and quotes him copiously suggests that this is no drive-by sniping. Feser should feel complimented that someone has gone to such a great extent to read all his writings and take the trouble to write an entire book containing an extremely detailed analysis of his views, even if his conclusions are not favorable. It appears that Feser has not as yet responded to this book.
Given that this is entirely a discussion of philosophy-based theology, you have to brace yourself for the writing style in that field which tends to be heavy on formal definitions and esoteric arguments. Laird has a breezy writing style with lots of down-to-Earth examples taken from everyday life and popular culture that makes the going easier than it otherwise might have been, but he cannot completely eliminate all the theological esotericism if he wants to give justice to the subject. So there is a lot of discussion of forms, actuality, potentiality, essences, and the like.
Laird’s book is an invaluable resource for anyone who seeks to really get to grips with natural law theory in general and Feser’s use of it to provide support for rigid Catholic orthodox doctrine on issues of doctrine, morality, and ethics, views that are shared by many conservative Catholics and evangelical Christians. You can get Laird’s book here and here and it will also be available on Kindle.
It turned out that Feser was really ticked off by my earlier post about his press release and had written a strong rebuttal. As a result, I had a whole host of Feser acolytes coming here and taking issue with me, leading to that post having nearly 300 comments! It reminded me of the ferocious response one gets from their acolytes when one writes anything critical of Sam Harris or Jordan Peterson. Most of the comments by Feser’s fans were harshly critical of me, saying in effect that I was not worthy to lick the boots of such a deep thinker as Feser and for saying anything at all about the book without having read it, ignoring the reasons I gave for not doing so. Fun times! Maybe they will return as a result of this post and if they do I just want to say “Hi, folks! Welcome back!”
Since a bona fide god is likely to be nasty, I think we should be looking for specific evidence pointing to the existence of Nyarlahotep, the insane, malicious god in the writings of H P Lovecraft.
Charles Stross has even published a popular series of fictional accounts of how the Lovecraftian entities interact with the modern world, but I doubt evangelical Christians would like them.
(OT : Stross is a darn good author, way better than that Dan Brown feller)
I found that long long thread tiring, but strangely rewarding. It convinced me that the argument being presented (prime mover?) was simply based on an ancient/medieval view of the world. If you push an object on even the smoothest surface, it eventually comes to a stop. If it somehow just kept moving (no friction, etc) something must be maintaining the motion. Ergo, hitting a baseball in outer space is a finite cause, but its subsequent motion must be an infinite effect. Of course, it’s clothed in the fine silk of metaphysical verbiage, but that’s all it really is; a rather sad attachment to a pre-Newtonian worldview.
you write:”Thomas is one of the most conservative justices on the court and almost always rules in favor of the worst options.”
.
Question: in what way are his options the worst? What are the other options? How the options were measured against one another? You are vague on this point.
Poor Aristotle! He would have been appalled to find his work used to prop up what he would undoubtedly have regarded as a bizarre and highly distasteful barbarian superstition.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Any god would of necessity be absolutely corrupt (IE completely devoted to unenlightened self-interest).
“I felt that any attempt to prove the existence of any god by intellectual arguments alone sans evidence, which is what this type of theology tries to do”
As you noticed in that older blogpost from 2017 about Feser his type of apologetics actually doesn’t. The simples example are the Cosmological Arguments (Feser promotes one version), which starts with an observation that there is something rather than nothing. That’s evidence by definition.
The essential and crucial problem with all god-arguments that start with such a piece of evidence was already formulated at the end of the 19th Century by the Dutch ex-theologian and anarcho-socialist Ferdinand Domela Nieuwenhuis:
“To derive a supernatural world from our natural one requires a salto mortale.”
This problem is emphasized in ao Herman Philipse’s God in the Age of Science.
As few apologists have read that book and no one who has has succeeded in even addressing, let alone tackling this problem there is no reason at all to read anything anymore written by apologists.
Remains “purely rational” arguments like the Ontological Argument. That one is incoherent, because it assumes one god and concludes (when properly formulated) two (namely a perfectly good one and a perfectly evil one).
No, your knowledge of apologetics is not outdated. The field hasn’t made any progress last several years. Example:
“Instead he tries to show that it is the continued existence of the universe that requires the existence of a deity.”
Already brought forward by Richard Swinburne. Addressed in Herman Philipse’s book.
So is anything argued by Feser. If his fanboys and -girls show up again my answer will be: read and understand Philipse’s book first.
OK, I’m tempted by @2 RobG (no, I’m not contradicting to him).
How is it possible that First Supernatural Cause (Prime Mover, whatever) causes a First Natural Cause? How does that work?
Specific: how did a FSC like the christian god create a FNC like quantum fields? What means did he use? What procedures did he follow? How is it even possible that a supernatural entitiy creates something natural like quantum fields? How does that even make sense? And -- reminding Ockham -- what does this add to our knowledge and understanding?
That’s the salto mortale Domela Nieuwenhuis talked about.
mnbo: The bigger question is “:Why” creation? Because the FSC was lonely? Bored? How can an omni-being existing outside of time in the eternal now be lonely or bored? Because He wanted “worship”? Why? Why does an omni-being NEED anything? He is complete in Himself. There are so many questions, and so few answers. (i.e. none)
This sounds very much like Ed Feser’s Existential Inertia and the Five Ways. I wonder if Adler argues something similar? Ah, I see, looking through Feser’s paper again, that Feser repeatedly cites Adler, but disagrees with some aspect of Adler’s argument while still concluding that God is “necessary” to make the universe exist.
Abstract of Feser’s paper:
This is the same paper that contains, at the end, the admission that I posted in this comment: That if you reject the concepts of “final causes” and “substantial forms” and so on, and instead accept a mechanistic view of reality, all of Aristotelian-Thomistic reasoning is useless.
You could write a post stating that explicitly: “According to Edward Feser, I don’t need to read his Five Proofs of the Existence of God“. Heh.
@bmiller:
There have been a number of science fiction/fantasy stories that deliberately played to the ‘why’. (Heck, the Tenchi Muyo anime has a similar question as part of its backstory, in one version at least, with three goddesses trying to see if the natural world could create something that none of them could directly.)
There have been at least a couple of stories where the answer wasn’t just ‘because the FSC was bored/lonely’, but actually ‘because the FSC was suicidal and was trying to create something capable of taking it out’. Another posited that our universe was actually like a pearl… an irritant that had layers of reality placed over it and that the actual FSC was trying to get rid of because, well, it was an irritant.
At least in science fiction, the writers are admitting up front that this is just a cool idea and doesn’t necessarily have anyhing to do with the reality that most people live in.
Owlmirror@9,
Thanks for that reference. I might actually read a 25-page paper (I’ve downloaded it, at any rate) -- I’m not likely to read Feser’s whole book, life is too short. I see that at the end, after your quote, Feser argues that the Humean account of causation as nothing more than constant conjunction is an inadequate foundation for science. There I’d agree with him, but a return to Aristotelian categories is not the answer; I advocate a critical realist approach, which agrees that things have potentials which may or may not be actualized, but explains potentialities, and causality, in terms of generative mechanisms rather than formal and final causes. IOW, it remains within the materialist/naturalist metaphysics Feser rejects.
Sorry -- I failed to close either the link or the italicisation @11.
[I did those for you-Mano]
jenorafeuer@10,
Yes, maybe the FSC will at some point notice (or maybe, has already noticed) that one of it’s nice planets has gone mouldy, and will wipe the mould off -- or even get it to wipe itself off!
… what happened to Craig?
Several of the Patheos Non-Believer bloggers continue to engage with him, or at least his writings and podcasts. Recently, one replied (via a non-Patheos blog) to Craig’s rationalization (this summer) of fundiegelicals supporting Trump™.
The “Secular Outpost” blog even took a long look at Feser’s arguments.
@Fried Fish:
First, that’s not one point, that’s three.
Second, Mano wasn’t vague on those 3 points, he did not address them at all.
Third, Mano is neither a constitutional scholar nor a court-watcher, and one would have to be both of those things to answer your questions.
Which brings up, fourth, the obvious conclusions that you aren’t interested in actually discussing these things. If you did, you’d be hanging out in one of the many student lounges & other gathering spaces at your local law school and chatting people up about where you can find a comprehensive analysis of Clarence Thomas’ jurisprudential theories and significant decisions, concurrences & dissents. Instead you’re quizzing a retired physics professor.
Fifth, the conclusions in my fourth response strongly support the idea that you must, then, be a troll.
Hi, everyone! I’m Gunther Laird, the author of The Unnecessary Science, the book Dr. Singham’s reviewing here. First, I’d just like to thank Mano again for his generosity in giving my work a look. This is my first book on the subject, and I cannot express enough how appreciative I am that a scholar like our host was willing to spend his own time and effort in giving a relative newcomer to the field such as myself a fair hearing. I’m glad Mano liked it, and I hope some of you will as well--according to my publisher, we should hopefully get a ebook version of the text out in October at the earliest, if that would be a more convenient purchasing option for anyone. On that note, if anyone here has any questions about the book, please feel free to ask away, I enjoy taking queries about my work. I think birgerjohansson might like the later chaoters in particular, given their reference to Nyarlathotep--I explicitly describe how a “Lovecraftian” sort of God can also solve the philosophical problems Feser brings up over the course of his books 🙂
Incidentally, I just wandered back over to the American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly site, and noticed that the current issue has a section devoted to Feser -- a précis of his new book, Aristotle’s Revenge: The Metaphysical Foundations of Physical and Biological Science, two responses to that, and Feser’s response to those responses. The first page of each article can be viewed.
First paragraph of Feser’s précis:
Seriously?
I see that one of the responses is by a Robert C. Koons, and a quick search finds a person of that name who is a professor of philosophy at U of Texas at Austin. “Analytic Thomist”, says his web page.
And the other response is by a Stephen M. Barr, and a quick search finds a person of that name who is a physicist at U of Delaware, and also a Catholic who argues for the compatibility of science and religion.
Feser’s response to those responses is particularly notable in that he actually cites National Lampoon’s Animal House.
It would be a cheap shot to throw Feser’s words back at him, but Feser is hardly above the taking of cheap shots.
Hi Owlmirror,
As an aside, it is interesting to note that Stephen Barr the physicist is apparently the brother of Bill Barr the AG, as it happens:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Barr
Stephen Barr is listed as his brother.
In any case, while I did touch on Aristotle’s Revenge at some points in The Unnecessary Science, and (despite it not being marketed to laymen) found it relatively comprehensible, I think Feser’s own quote there, as you highlight, illustrates the problems with Feser’s approach. I pull my punches somewhat throughout my own text and don’t make the point explicitly, but while you *can* (if you share Feser’s intellectual bent) reconcile Aristotle and modern science if you work really, really hard, you don’t really have to. I spend some time in chapters 6 and 7 exploring how the old-school atomism of one of Aristotle’s rivals can deflect the charges Feser (and assumedly Aristotle himself) threw at it.
I find the fact that someone is offering “five proofs of the existence of God” suspicious in and of itself.
If even one of them were convincing, what would be the point of the other four?
Gunther Laird @ # 16 -- I gather that both Catholics© and the Transcendental Meditation™ organization have a spiel about Natural Law. Do they perceive/worship the same NL(s)?
Hi Pierce,
I’m not exactly sure what you mean by the “Transcendental Meditation” folks--my first thought are the kind of tiedye hippies who are into astrology and such. In that case, there’s not much daylight between the groups; the hippies tend to be less authoritarian than people like Feser say “natural law” demands. However, if you meant something different I’m not sure that would apply, haha.
I think arguing about the existence of deities just plays into the hands of those who promote those fictions. It always feels like this is just one big centuries long distraction from the vile things religion promotes and does.
The core problem with religions isn’t that they promote belief in something that isn’t there. It’s that they use fictions and lies to promote dangerous nonsense, tribalism, and other evils. Even most believers don’t tend to think there’s any way they’ll round a corner and bump into a deity so it feels a lot more useful to argue about why the bad viewpoints pushed by religions are bad.
I realize this is a distraction from the topic but I feel like the topic itself is a distraction from the real issues.
Hi Lanir,
That’s a legitimate point, but for that reason I think you’d especially like *The Unnecessary Science.* It deals with ethics too, not just the existence of God. Chapter 5 in particular discusses how many of the “natural law” arguments can justify very nasty stuff.
@8 Bmiller: “The bigger question is “:Why” creation?”
“Why” presupposes that there is a supernatural mind capable of having reasons, intentions, motivation etc. I reject that presupposition. So no, it’s not the bigger question.
The questions I asked aim to conclude that supernatural entities (including the christian god) are a meaningless concept, exactly because they can’t be answered.
Gunther Laird @ # 21 -- by “the ‘Transcendental Meditation’ folks” I mean specifically Maharishi University in Fairfield, Iowa, and its worldwide affiliates, which straddle the line between cult and religion.
They posit a new-agey sort of “Natural Law”, which I would have expected you to run across eventually just by doing online searches for that term:
@Pierce R. Butler, Gunther Laird:
There was actually a ‘Natural Law Party’ in Canadian politics for a while. These are people who believe that if they station enough yogic flyers around the Parliament buildings they can achieve mystical harmony and transcendence for the whole country, and then spread it out world-wide.
My take is that both they and the Catholics share a concept of ‘Natural Law’ as being ‘stuff that we consider so obvious that we don’t see why we should need to justify it’, but that they differ on significant points on what the natural laws actually are. In both cases it’s basically a retreat to ‘this is so much a part of our worldview that we get really defensive if it’s questioned’ kind of thinking.
jenorafeuer @ # 26: … people who believe that if they station enough yogic flyers around the Parliament buildings they can achieve mystical harmony and transcendence for the whole country…
That sounds very Trans-Med-ish. Back in the 20th C, the TM posse claimed they could teach people to levitate, and produced great hilarity with demonstrations of groups of believers -- purportedly in the early training phase of mind-powered flight -- sitting crosslegged but “hopping” by twitching their thigh and buttocks muscles. They also claimed that the sheer presence of large groups of T-Meditators in a city could/did bring down crime rates.
It’s all Quantum, y’know!
The A Tippling Philosopher blog over at Patheos has acknowledged (and quoted virtually all of) our esteemed host’s post here.
@Pierce R. Butler and jenorafeuer,
Learn something new every day, I can honestly say I’ve never come across those curious organizations, even through all the research I’ve done on natural law. Yes, it is a good deal different than the sort of natural law Feser and co. believe in--at least as Feser might want to have it. He’d say his version of natural law is based on rigrous metaphysical (logical) demonstration, whereas ‘transcendental consciousness’ is just woo. Though as I hope to have demonstrated, Feser’s own arguments, again, are hardly as airtight as he would like.