My dear friend Bruce Charlton – an Orthospherean from before our first days and indeed the moderator at his own site of the discussion in which we decided to call this blog “the Orthosphere,” a pen friend of mine for years beforehand, and an honored contributor here still (so far as WordPress is concerned, he can post here anything he likes) – has it seems taken my recent post on the difficulties that bedevil radical ontological pluralism as a philosophical challenge. It was not intended as such, but so be it. It would be cheap of me to ignore his response, so, here goes: a fisking, alas.
Theology
The Efficacious Christian Faith of Children
Some in our ambit have worried that a faith that can be comprehended only by way of years of study on abstruse theological and metaphysical topics cannot eo ipso be efficacious for ordinary people who have no time or inclination for such things; have suggested that, surely, God would have opened the portal of salvation even to those ready only for spiritual milk (I Corinthians 3:2), or even only for pap. They have on these grounds criticized classical Christian theology of God (as eternal, omniscient, and so forth), arguing that such notions as omnipotence are beyond the ken of most believers.
As indeed they seem to be. Does that matter to Christian theology? What is far more, does it matter to Christian life? I.e., is Christian theology beside the point, or worse, ruining the project of salvation in Christ?
Christ the King of All the Heavens has Defeated His Rebellious Satrap Azazel
Having conquered Death, Jesus has conquered our entire system of things, of which Satan is yet still Lord – for a time. The Logos, who is the King of kings and Lord of lords, the God of gods and Light of light, gave dominion of our cosmos at her beginning as a fief to his satrap, the seraph Satan. Satan then, with some number of his vassals, rebelled against his Lord and King, and so Fell from grace, and from his throne in the Court of Heaven. With him and his angels the whole realm of which they were minsters Fell in train, defected by their defection. So death – entropy, noise, error, sin, thus the gradual decrease of her power and being, her beauty, activity, life – began to eat her.
How Good Friday Works Good for Us
The human Body of God died on Good Friday. All baptized Christians are members of that Body – of that society of living organisms which together participate a living organism – more or less. All of them that remain in it on through to their own deaths shall die as integral thereto, and so be raised with the Body of Jesus to everlasting bliss.
It’s really that simple. To understand how Jesus rescues us, we need not spell out how he knits up and repairs the devastation of the Fall – our own, and that of the whole cosmos – so that we can (our cosmos in train) follow him through the strait and narrow portal that leads to life. We don’t need to understand how the Atonement works. All we need do is remember always that as members of his Body, we are at one with him.
Thus his agony is ours … and ours is his.
The Appeal of Parsimony
I doubt that anyone has not first and intuitively, viscerally responded at his first encounter with Ockham’s Razor but with a flash of recognition and agreement.
Why? Why is parsimony alluring? Why does it feel to us a reliable guide to reliable understanding?
It’s not just that explanations employing fewer entities are easier to handle. It’s not just a matter of economy of cerebral operations. There is that, to be sure, but there is more to it than that. For, there could not be any true increase in economy of cerebral operations unless there was really a prior economy of ontology, to which the cerebral operations corresponded. An increase of economy of cerebral operations that had no bearing on the real operanda denoted by the operans thereof could not be nice, could not feel good; for, it could offer no hedonic payoff that was veridical. All its hedonic payoffs would be noise, and useless, and so would have been culled by natural selection, or good common sense, or the urge to increase efficiency of cerebral operations – to think better and more logically, more consistently (these are all different ways of indicating the same thing).
Our preference for economy in explanation is a correlate of the Hamiltonian Least Path that nature ever takes (mutatis mutandis). It tracks reality.
OK, so; on Ockham’s Razor, to what explanation do all others reduce, and tend? The one with the fewest entities, no?
OK, which explanation has the fewest entities?
Theism.
The most parsimonious explanation of all things, to which all partial explanations reduce and tend, is the One.
+++++
The atheist could respond by saying that his explanation has zero explanatory entities, and so is more parsimonious than theism. But the zero of explanatory entities is the zero of explanation; so that, in so saying, the atheist has agreed that reality is radically unintelligible, and that he himself is therefore an ignoramus.
If parsimony were our only index of explanatory excellence, the atheist would have a point. But he doesn’t, because it isn’t. Beauty, power, elegance, scope, and generalizability are other criteria of excellent theories. There are many others.
The Argument from the Autophagy of the Problem of Evil
When you’ve been blogging for more than a decade, it gets hard to remember what you’ve already said that was worth further consideration. I just stumbled upon one such locution, in a comment from 2017:
If there is no God, then there is no such thing really as troubles. All troubles then are private illusions. So if the atheists are correct in their argument that the evils of creation rule out God, then the evils of creation disappear – they are not in fact evils, but rather just stuff happening for no reason, that has therefore no true moral or aesthetic character. The objectionable evils of creation are not therefore truly objectionable, but are rather only speciously objectionable; and so therefore they cannot tell against God. As autophagous, the Problem of Evil then corrects itself.
The basic idea is that in the absence of Good – of Good per se, and absolutely – there can’t be such a thing as a lesser good. If there is no Good – i.e., no category of the good – then can there be no such thing as a good. All there can be, rather, is one or another sort of evil.
But then, in the utter and categoreal absence of good, there can be no possible defects of goodness; no possible evils. In which case, there can be no Problem of Evil (problems are a sort of evil).
The Basic Error of Modernity versus the Basic Truth of Tradition
I’ve just finished one of the 20 or 30 best books I’ve ever read. Theophany: The NeoPlatonic Philosophy of Dionysius the Areopagite, by Eric Perl, is only 138 pages long (counting end notes, but not index or bibliography), but it took me months to read, because it is so packed with insight. I could read only a page or so in a given session, before I had to set the book aside to process what I had learned. Perl opens Neo-Platonism and sets it forth plainly and coherently. Before I read it, Neo-Platonism seemed to me a foggy confusing mess. Having read it, I feel that I understand Neo-Platonism as it were from the inside; so much so that I am able to see that it has informed my own thought from the beginning. Indeed, I daresay I may just have discovered that I have been a Neo-Platonist all along!
Highly recommended, for those who are interested in metaphysics generally, or in ancient Greek philosophy. Or, for that matter, in thinking clearly.
I write about the book now because in his conclusion, Perl nails the divergence – or as I would characterize it, the divagation – in intellectual history that gave rise to the whole of modernism: to liberalism, nominalism, Kantianism, the Nietzschean transvaluation of values, to relativism, and so forth; in the limit, to nihilism, to nonsense, to insanity, and so to cultural deliquescence. Beginning on page 111, he writes:
Philosophical Skeleton Keys: the Anselmian Definition in Operation
Anselm defines God as that than which no greater can be conceived. His Definition entails that God is that than which no greater can be conceived by any mind whatever, including the omniscient mind of God. In a previous post, I suggested that the Definition is a Philosophical Skeleton Key because it resolves so many philosophical, theological, and doctrinal perplexities – and so, settles at least many of the religious disagreements, heresies, and schisms – and wars – that such perplexities have so often engendered.
Let’s look at a few examples of how the Definition does this.
Philosophical Skeleton Keys: the Anselmian Definition
In the greatest, most far reaching, most consequential, and therefore most important insight of human thought so far, Saint Anselm of Canterbury defined “God” so that we might settle completely, and profoundly, all worries we could ever have – about God, and so about any other and thus lesser thing that we might suffer. He defined “God” so that we could stop worrying altogether, and so be happy; be, i.e., good, as properly oriented to reality, and so therefore happy.
I’ve elaborated the Anselmian Definition a bit for the sake of this discussion:
God is that than which no greater can be conceived along any dimension of greatness by any mind whatever.
The Argument from the Problem of Evil
If there were no God, there could be no Problem of Evil, for in that case there could be no such thing – no such thing really – as evil.
There is a Problem of Evil.
QED.
The Orthosphere 