A philosopher and theologian of some importance passed away on April 17. I refer to Robert M. Adams, long affiliated with the UNC Chapel Hill and with Rutgers. Adams gave the Gifford lectures at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland, in 1998-99. This alone makes him worthy of note. The Gifford lectures have become legendary as a regular contribution by one or another significant scholar, each presented originally as a lecture series over the course of an academic year though put eventually into book form. The mandate from the will of the late Lord Gifford is that the lectures should "promote the knowledge of God" in "the widest sense." This leaves a lot of room for interpretation. The philosophers and philosophy-adjacent scholars who have been honored with a Gifford invitation have included Josiah Royce, William James, Henri Bergson, Etienne Gilson, Samuel Alexander, Arthur Eddington, Alfred North Whitehead, Karl Barth, Reinhold Niebuhr, John Eccles, Simon Bla...
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AT least in an early phase of his own academic career, Allen W. Wood had a high opinion of Kant's book, RELIGION WITHIN THE LIMITS OF REASON ALONE. In contrast to much of the voluminous literature on that somewhat idiosyncratic item in the Kant canon, Wood thought the book consistent with Kant's three great Critiques as well as consistent with the historical monotheistic faiths. Wood wrote, "It would be a great mistake to see in the God of Kant's moral faith no more than an abstract, metaphysical idea. For Kant, moral faith in God ... is the moral man's trust in God." Wood, KANT'S MORAL RELIGION (1970). Wood seemed later to change his view, in two seminal articles in the early 1990s. Who is Allen Wood, you ask? A philosopher born in Seattle in 1942 who has taught at Cornell, Yale, and Stanford.
I'm thinking today, for no good reason, about the "free will solution" to the problem of evil in theology. Practitioners of theodicy who rely on the free will solution maintain that evil must be attributed to the independent actions of human beings, supposed to have been endowed by God with freedom of the will. This by itself would not solve the problem. It only works as a solution if it can be shown that God has a Good Reason to allow human beings to be independent of His will. Then one can conclude that it is for a greater good that He allows us to allow evil into the world. This point was insisted upon by J.L. Mackie in what a much debated publication on this subject, his EVIL AND OMNIPOTENCE (1955). Theists, as Mackie understands them, must treat free will as a “third order good.” I'm not going to argue the underlying issues today. I have done that here before. I will confine this post, rather, to simply outlining those three orders of good. ...
The ontological argument for the existence of God was long thought to have been discredited. Theists as well as atheists thought so in, say, 1958. But not only has the argument made a comeback, it has a new name that indicates a new focus: Perfect Being Theology. The name indicates that the ontological argument isn't 'only' used to show that God exists, but to prop up some very controversial ideas about His nature and the character of our worship of him.https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/the-greatest-possible-being/ I'm not an admirer of the ontological argument, and am pretty sure I'll always have something better to do than to set aside time for books such as the one pictured here. I'll be more explicit about my reactions to the ontological argument than I usually am, though. My take is that the word "perfect" has no fixed meaning, and that if through some pragmatic arbitration we could fix one it would not have anything akin to the content that...
I wrote the following three years ago this week, and I repost it for the same seasonal reason I posted it when I did, one that will become clear to the reader in due course. The great mid-20th century theologian Paul Tillich wrote the words italicized below. They are worth repeating because it seems, reading them, as if Tillich is responding to some of the misguided evangelicals of our own day, who want to turn Creation into 'intelligent design' and repackage it as 'science' for secondary schools. "Knowledge of revelation does not increase our knowledge about the structures of nature, history, and man. Whenever a claim to knowledge is made on this level, it must be subjected to the experimental tests through which truth is established. If such a claim is made in the name of revelation or of any other authority, it must be disregarded, and the ordinary methods of research and verification must be applied. ...Knowledge of revelation is knowledge about th...
A recent book by Emily Thomas, a historian of philosophy, looks at four different theories about the reality and significance of time advanced by philosophers in Britain in the seventeenth century. Her breakdown is this: there was a "void theory," "idealism," "absolutism," and "relationalism." The terms are pretty close to self-explanatory, but I'll spell it out anyway. The void theory: there is no time. Idealism: time is real, and consists of mind-dependent relations. The remaining two may each come under the broader folder "realism," in that they both hold that time is real and it is not mind dependent. But they are importantly different from one another. Absolutism: time is independent of the actions of material bodies -- that is, time could be passing even if every object were staying still. Relationalism: time is real, independent of mind, but dependent on the actions of material bodies. The Absolutist view...
Louis Menand summarizes the philosophy of Henry James Sr. quite well. Here's the money quote: "Henry James, Sr. was a Platonist. He believed (following Swedenborg) that there are two realms, a visible and an invisible, and that the invisible realm, which he named the realm of the Divine Love, is the real one. From this premise, the usual conclusions follow: humankind is now separated from the true and the real; its destiny is to arrive at the consummation intended for it by God; philosophers are here to help the rest of us understand what that consummation is. James' particular conception of it was derived in part from his reading of Swedenborg and in part from a writer with whom Swedenborg was often paired in the nineteenth century, the French socialist Charles Fourier...." From Fourier he took an idealization of the brotherhood of men, and the idea expressed in the title of his own final book, Society the Redeemed Form of Man.
I'm not sure whether the theological/Christological views of John D. Caputo count as fideism in the sense in which that term attaches to, say, Tertullian, Pascal, Kierkegaard, or Karl Barth. Whether he joins that august company or not, as the significance of his works comes to be sorted by time, I'm glad he recently came within my ken. Caputo's works include: AGAINST ETHICS (1993) THE WEAKNESS OF GOD (2003) And at essay length, "Temporal Transcendence," in TRANSCENDENCE AND BEYOND (2007). The title of the anthology to which I've just referred reminds me a bit of Buzz Lightyear's expression, "To Infinity and Beyond." But that is probably unfair to them both. One quote. Caputo is often quoted saying this, though I don't know the sourcing specifics for it. "I am seeking to know what religion would look like, what form it would take, if it were wrested free from people who consider themselves authorities in matters in whic...
My recent reading includes a biography of one of my favorite novelists, John Updike, written by Adam Begley, former books editor for The New York Observer. Quite incidentally, I see that one of the blurbs on the dust jacket comes from Janet Malcolm, another author I'm sure I've mentioned in this blog or its precursor. Malcolm is known for In the Freud Archives and for her take on the Jeffrey MacDonald case. This is what she has to say about Begley's book, "He has rendered a portrait of the writer that shimmers with truth. This is literary biography at its highest level of excellence." I wondered when I first picked the book up how long it would take Begley to mention the theologian Karl Barth, who haunts so many of Updike's works. The index indicates Barth is mentioned just five times, a modest number IMHO. The first time at p. 223, and it is in the form of a direct quote from his subject. In order to give himself relief from an "oppressive blanke...
If a believer in God is going to have a theodicy, that is, a measured effort to “justify the ways of God to man,” he is going to have to go in one of three directions. There are only three. The problem is this. If God is all-powerful, then He can bring an end to evil. If God is ideally benevolent, then He wants to bring an end to evil. So: why is there evil? Three answers: you can choose to remain silent and regard the question as an unanswerable mystery (which Job learns to do at the end of the OT book bearing his name). Or you can define “all-powerful” in a way that solves the problem. Or you can define “benevolent” in a way that solves the problem. The problem is created by two constraints: that of power and that of goodness. Although no theodical authors would put it this way, some of them define “power” down and others define “goodness” down, loosening the one constraint or the other. In the late 17th century, Leibniz famously defined "power" down. ...
I never post on Tuesday. This week, though, I think I'll make an exception. As was widely expected, Governor Martin O'Malley has come in third in a three-candidate field in the Iowa caucus, part of the Democratic Party's primary campaign for its Presidential nomination. Worse, he received in essence no support and suspended his campaign before the votes had been counted. I spare O'Malley a moment of thought today because of a brief remark he made during the "town hall" meeting that the three candidates for that nomination held, in as non-debate-like a format as could be arranged, one week before the caucus. If I heard him right, O'Malley said that the difficulties faced by a progressive political agenda in the United States today are "the hidden God's way of letting us know the job is important." I hope I heard that correctly because it is a fascinating expression. One doesn't hear a politician use the phrase "the hidden God...
The great mid-20th-century theologian Paul Tillich wrote the words italicized below. They are worth repeating because it seems, reading them, as if Tillich is responding to some of the misguided evangelicals of our day, who want to turn Creation into "intelligent design" and repackage it as "science" for secondary schools. "Knowledge of revelation does not increase our knowledge about the structures of nature, history, and man. Whenever a claim to knowledge is made on this level, it must be subjected to the experimental tests through which truth is established. If such a claim is made in the name of revelation or of any other authority, it must be disregarded, and the ordinary methods of research and verification must be applied. ...Knowledge of revelation is knowledge about the revelation of the mystery of being to us, not information about the nature of beings and their relation to one another." SYSTEMATIC THEOLOGY, Vol. 1 Since Martin Luther ...
Following up on yesterday's observation. The original Hebrew word for Satan is a noun meaning obstruction or opposition. Likewise, the Greek "diabolos" means "slanderer." These are hardly terms one employs for a faithful employee. So the etymology would seem to pose a problem for the warden/functionary view I mentioned yesterday. But well after the origin of such terms, and well before Dante's time, Satan had taken on some of the contours of a functionary. The concept of a Great Chain of Being suggests, after all, a harmonious universe where everything has its place, presided over by God, so that the very concept of an active adversary of God on the cosmic level comes to seem absurd, and there is little left but room for a warden who is sometimes also a trickster. The Nicolas Cage movie DRIVE ANGRY comes to mind in this connection.
I was binge-watching THE WIRE recently, but the theme song "Way Down in the Hole," kept causing my mind to wander to theological questions. The lyrics end as follows, "Don't pay heed to temptation, for his hands are so cold, "You gotta help me keep the devil, Way down in the hole." Within post-biblical Christian theology, the role of the devil in cosmology is very ambiguous. Is he a servant of God, or is he an adversary? Is he sort of a frenemy? If, with Dante, you see Satan chiefly as a prison warden of hell, then Satan would seem to be a servant of God. He rules over a "kingdom" only in the sense that a warden does. He superintends the punishment that the higher authority has decided should be meted out. God is the Governor and the legislature, the judges and juries, all in one Being. Satan is the humble obedient prison warden. Yet Satan's presence there too is a punishment. The "warden" analogy falters here. You can ...