A reprint is not a reply

Some of my readers seem to think that Jay Richards’ recent series of posts over at Evolution News and Views (here and here) constitute a reply to my recent post about Richards.  But in fact Richards has merely been reprinting, in several installments, the very essay of his that I was criticizing in my post!  He is, quite literally, just repeating himself without actually responding to my objections.  Moreover, Richards himself says in the first of his posts that that is all he is doing.  The brief introductory material he adds there mainly just summarizes some of the claims he makes in his essay – claims I already answered in my original post – without adding anything new. 

(Actually, there is one new tidbit there: Richards informs us that he “agree[s] with Duns Scotus' critique of what he took to be Thomas' view of [analogical predication].”  Readers of my original post on Richards will note the irony.) 

So, in answer to any readers who might be wondering whether I’m going to reply to Richards’ “latest”: I already did reply! You should be asking him when he’s going to reply to me.  (When he does, I guess I can just reprint my original post about him and people will think it’s a reply…)

A further thought on the “one god further” objection

We’ve been beating up on the “one god further” objection to theism.  Here’s another way to look at the problem with it.  The objection, you’ll recall, goes like this:

When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.

Suppose I go along with the gag.  Why do I dismiss all other gods?
 

Well, in part because there is ample reason to think they do not exist.  But also – and far more importantly – because even if they did exist, they would all in various respects be less than ultimate and thus would not be truly divine and worthy of worship.  So, for example, if the gods of Olympus existed, we would expect to find them living atop Mount Olympus, and they don’t.  But even if they did exist – suppose they return to Olympus when no one is looking, or reside in some other dimension as in the Marvel Comics version of the Olympian gods – they would all in various respects manifest limitations and defects that show them to be mere creatures like us, even if more grand creatures than we are.  Hence, as we know from mythology, they are all supposed to suffer myriad limitations on their power, and to be motivated by various petty concerns.  They come into existence, just as we do.  They can be startled when the face of the guy they’re about to kiss comes peeling off to reveal a leering skull.  (Just check out Aphrodite – also known as Venus – on that comic book cover up above!  You’d think the skeleton hands would have been a clue that something was up with this dude…)

In short, the gods of Olympus, or of any of the other pantheons for that matter, are all essentially finite, contingent beings like us, about as impressive as extraterrestrials – which might be very impressive indeed, of course, but still within the order of creation.  In particular (and to be more philosophically precise) they would all be mixtures of actuality and potentiality and compounds of essence and existence, would all be governed by principles outside themselves, and would all be less than absolutely necessary in their existence and imperfect in their natures.  And that means that, no less than we do, they would depend for their being on that which is Pure Actuality, that which is Being Itself (i.e. in which essence and existence are identical), that which exists in an absolutely necessary and independent way and in which all the diverse, derivative, and finite perfections manifest in the world of our experience exist in a united, underived, and infinite way.  That is to say, they, no less than we, would depend for their being on the God of classical theism.

Of course, you might reject classical theism on other grounds, but to pretend that it is subject to the same sorts of objections that might be presented against the gods of Olympus is simply to miss the central point of 2500 years of philosophical reflection on the question of God’s existence and nature.  For from at least Xenophanes onward, it has been understood by Western philosophers that the only divinity worthy of the name is that which is not “a being” among other beings or in any way less than metaphysically ultimate.  Thus, the main problem with all so-called “gods” other than the God of classical theism is not that they don’t exist.  It is rather that even if they did exist, they would not be the ultimate source of reality and thus would not be truly divine or worthy of worship.  Worshipping Zeus or Thor, for example, would still be idolatrous and irrational even if they existed and the God of classical theism did not.  The rational response called for in such a circumstance would not be “Well, it turns out that the one thing worthy of worship doesn’t exist, so let’s instead worship one of these half-assed pseudo-deities.  Thor’s got a new movie coming out, so I’ll go with him…”  Rather, it would be “The one thing worthy of worship doesn’t exist, so, naturally, there’s nothing worth worshipping.”  But then, a world without the God of classical theism would as a matter of metaphysical necessity be utterly unintelligible anyway, so there wouldn’t be any point in doing much of anything, much less worshipping false gods. 

Good thing, then, that a world without the God of classical theism is (since the world is intelligible) metaphysically impossible.  Indeed, the same writers who developed the classical theistic understanding of the nature of God also put forward cogent arguments for His existence, and the two issues are deeply interrelated.  For the arguments that are, historically, the central arguments for theism – those developed within the Neo-Platonic, Aristotelian, and Thomistic and other Scholastic traditions – are precisely arguments for a cause of the world which could not even in principle be less than ultimate or absolutely unique.  To see why there must be a God is precisely to see why He cannot intelligibly be compared to other so-called “gods.”  (See chapter 3 of Aquinas for my fullest defense of the main arguments.)  But even someone who rejected those arguments as proofs of God’s existence must, if he understood them, at least agree that such a comparison would be ludicrous.

In response to the “one god further” objection, then, nothing further need be said but this: 

When you understand why I dismiss all other gods, you’ll understand why I dismiss your “one god further” objection as puerile.

The “one god further” objection

A reader calls attention to Bill Vallicella’s reply to what might be called the “one god further” objection to theism.  Bill sums up the objection as follows:

The idea, I take it, is that all gods are on a par, and so, given that everyone is an atheist with respect to some gods, one may as well make a clean sweep and be an atheist with respect to all gods. You don't believe in Zeus or in a celestial teapot. Then why do you believe in the God of Isaac, Abraham, and Jacob?

Or as the Common Sense Atheism blog used to proclaim proudly on its masthead:

When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.

I see that that blog has now removed this one-liner, which is perhaps a sign that intellectual progress is possible even among New Atheist types.  Because while your average “Internet Infidel” seems to regard the “one god further” objection as devastatingly clever, it is in fact embarrassingly inept, a sign of the extreme decadence into which secularist “thought” has fallen in the Age of Dawkins. 

Suppose someone skeptical about Euclidean geometry said:

When you understand why you regard all the particular triangles you’ve observed as having sides that are less than perfectly straight, you will understand why I regard Euclidean plane triangles as such to have sides that are less than perfectly straight.

Or suppose a critic of Platonism said:

When you understand why you regard the things of ordinary experience as in various ways imperfect or less than fully good instances of their kinds, you will understand why I regard Plato’s Form of the Good as being less than fully good.

Would these count as devastating objections to Euclidean geometry and Platonism?  Would they serve as fitting mottos for blogs devoted to “Common Sense Anti-Euclideanism” or “Common Sense Anti-Platonism”?  Obviously not.  They would demonstrate only that the speaker didn’t have the slightest clue what the hell he was talking about.

The “one god further” objection is no better than these stupid “objections” would be.  The “Common Sense Anti-Euclidean” objection supposes that the concept of a triangle as defined in textbooks of Euclidean geometry is merely one triangle alongside all the others that one comes across in traffic signs, dinner bells, and the like, only invisible and better drawn.  But of course, that is not what it is at all.  What the textbooks describe is not a triangle, not even an especially well-drawn one, but rather (Euclidean) triangularity itself, and the triangles one comes across in everyday experience are defective precisely because they fail to conform to the standard it represents.  The “Common Sense Anti-Platonism” objection supposes that the Form of the Good is merely one more or less perfect or imperfect instance of some class or category alongside the other instances, albeit an especially impressive one.  But of course, that is not what it is at all.  The Form of the Good doesn’t have goodness in some more or less incomplete way; rather, it just is goodness, participation in which determines the degree of goodness had by things which do have goodness only in some more or less incomplete way.  Similarly, the “Common Sense Atheist” or “one god further” objection supposes that the God of classical theism is merely one further superhuman being alongside others who have found worshippers – Thor, Zeus, Quetzalcoatl, and so forth – only a superhuman being of even greater power, knowledge, and goodness than these other deities have.  But of course, that is not what God is at all.  He is not “a being” alongside other beings, not even an especially impressive one, but rather Being Itself or Pure Actuality, that from which all mere “beings” (including Thor, Zeus, and Quetzalcoatl, if they existed) derive the limited actuality or existence they possess.  Neither does He “have” power, knowledge, goodness, and the like; rather, He is power, knowledge, and goodness (where the “participation” relation in Plato’s theory of Forms is transformed by the classical theist into a relation between created things and their uncaused cause, in light of the doctrine of divine simplicity – and also thereby transformed, by Thomists anyway, into a kind of efficient-causal relation). 

Note that the “Common Sense Anti-Platonist” objection is a silly objection whether or not one accepts Platonism, and that the “Common Sense Anti-Euclidean” objection would be a silly objection whether or not one accepted Euclidean geometry.  In the same way, the “Common Sense Atheist” or “one god further” objection would be a silly objection even if one had other grounds for rejecting classical theism.  In all three cases, the objections represent a failure to understand even the fundamentals of the position one is attacking.

It is no good replying that lots of ordinary religious people conceive of God in all sorts of crude ways at odds with the sophisticated philosophical theology developed by classical theists – ways that make of God something like a glorified Thor or Zeus.  The “man on the street” also believes all sorts of silly things about science – that Darwinism claims that monkeys gave birth to human beings, say, or that molecules are made up of little balls and sticks.  But it would be preposterous for someone to pretend he had landed a blow against Darwinism or modern chemistry by attacking these silly straw men.  Similarly, what matters in evaluating classical theism is not what your Grandpa or your Pastor Bob have to say about it, but rather what serious thinkers like Aristotle, Plotinus, Athanasius, Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas, Avicenna, Averroes, Maimonides, and countless others have to say. 

Nor would it be any good to insist that the “one god further” objection is significant at least as a reply to the more anthropomorphic “theistic personalist” conception of God that has replaced the classical theist conception in the thinking of many modern theologians and philosophers of religion.  For one thing, most theistic personalists, though they depart in significant (and in my view disastrous) ways from classical theism, are still committed to a far more sophisticated conception of God than purveyors of the “one god further” objection take as their preferred target.  (Comparing God to the Flying Spaghetti Monster is not a serious reply to a theistic personalist like Plantinga or Swinburne.)  More importantly, purveyors of this objection take themselves to be presenting a serious criticism of Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and philosophical theism as such – not merely of this or that modern representative of these views – and the historically mainstream tradition in these religions and in philosophical theology is classical theist, not theistic personalist.  Hence to fail to address the classical theist conception of God is ipso facto to fail seriously to address the claims of these traditions.  In particular, unless one has made a serious study of philosophical theology as it has been developed within the Neo-Platonic, Aristotelian, Thomistic and other Scholastic traditions, one’s understanding of traditional Christian, Jewish, and Islamic theology, not to mention philosophical theism, is simply infantile.

Needless to say, your typical “Internet Infidel” or “New Atheist” is entirely innocent of knowledge of these traditions.  Nor is he much interested in finding out what they really have to say – he prefers to spend his time coming up with ever more elaborate rationalizations for refusing to find out.  But like the Myers Shuffle (the secularist rationalization du jour), the “one god further” objection has this much going for it: It is an infallible indicator that one is not dealing with a serious or well-informed skeptic.

[For readers who are interested in learning about classical theism, I have defended it at length in my books The Last Superstition and Aquinas.  I have also had reason to discuss it in several earlier posts, which deal with such issues as divine simplicity, the relationship between classical theism and theistic personalism, and the relevance of the classical theistic understanding of God to issues concerning morality and the problem of evil.  See, for example:

“William Lane Craig on divine simplicity”

“Davies on divine simplicity and freedom”

“Classical theism”

“God, man, and classical theism”

“Law’s ‘evil-god challenge’”

“God, obligation, and the Euthyphro dilemma”

Please read at least the posts linked to before commenting critically on what I’ve written in this one, since I would rather not have to repeat things I’ve said elsewhere.]

Descartes’ “trademark” argument

Descartes presents three arguments for God’s existence in the Meditations: a version of the ontological argument; the “preservation” argument, which is an eccentric variation on the idea of God as First Cause; and the “trademark” argument.  Each of these is problematic, though each is also more interesting and defensible than it is usually given credit for.  I have said something about ontological arguments in a couple of recent posts (here and here), and I might have something to say about the “preservation” argument in a future post.  For now let’s consider the “trademark” argument – probably the most maligned of the three.

The basic thrust of the trademark argument is that the idea of God could not possibly have gotten into the mind unless God Himself put it there.  Its presence in the mind thus constitutes a kind of divine signature or trademark, and therefore shows that God exists.  Like Descartes’ other arguments for God’s existence, the trademark argument starts from premises that can be known by someone in the epistemic situation Descartes finds himself in by the Second Meditation:  He knows that he exists as a thinking thing, but so far that’s all he knows.  Hence he has to work from knowledge of himself and of his ideas alone if he is to come to know anything else.

Descartes is of course well aware that people first come to learn about God from other people, such as parents.  What is at issue is whether this teaching is a matter of introducing into the mind something that wasn’t there before at all, or rather of drawing out of it something that was there already but only unconsciously (like the geometrical knowledge Plato famously has Socrates draw out of the slave in the Meno).  Descartes takes it to be the latter.  But even if it weren’t, we would still need to ask where our parents got the idea of God, where the people they got it from got it, and so on, and Descartes’ argument is intended to show that one way or another, directly or indirectly, the idea of God could only have originated with God Himself.

How is the argument supposed to work?  To understand it requires a prior understanding of several background assumptions that Descartes either borrows from Scholasticism (altering them somewhat in the process) or develops on the basis of Scholastic concepts.  The first is his distinction between the formal reality and the objective reality of an idea.  A thing’s formal reality might be thought of as analogous to its “form” as that would be understood in Scholastic thought – though only analogous, since Descartes rejects the Scholastic doctrine of formal causes.  It is in any event that which a thing has simply by virtue of being the kind of thing it is.  Hence all ideas have the same formal reality since, qua ideas, they are all just modes of a thinking substance.  Ideas differ in their objective reality, however, insofar as they represent different things – as a contemporary philosopher might say, they differ in their “intentional objects” (and thus are in that sense “objectively” different).

Despite the awkwardness of the terminology, the basic idea is simple enough, and can be understood by comparison with other kinds of representations, such as words or pictures.  “Dog” and “cat” are the same kind of thing – they are both words – and thus have the same formal reality.  But they differ in what they refer to – the first refers to dogs, the second to cats – and thus differ in objective reality.  A blueprint of a house and a blueprint of a computer are the same kind of thing – they are both blueprints – and thus have the same formal reality.  But they differ in what they represent – the first represents a house, the second a computer – and thus they differ in objective reality.  Similarly, the idea of a stone and the idea of God are the same kind of thing – they are both ideas – and thus have the same formal reality.  But they differ in what they represent – the first represents stones, the second represents God – and thus they differ in objective reality.  (This marks another respect in which Descartes differs from the Scholastics, who did not regard thought as involving inner “representations.”) 

Next we have the distinction Descartes draws between degrees of formal reality, of which there are three: Modes have the lowest degree of formal reality; finite substances have a higher degree; and an infinite substance would have the highest degree of reality.  A “mode” would be something like the shape, size, or motion of a stone, which exists only insofar as it inheres in the stone, in contrast to the stone itself which, as a substance, does not inhere in anything.  That’s why it makes sense to say “All I’ve got in my pocket is a stone,” but not “All I’ve got in my pocket is the shape of a stone” – there’s no such thing as the shape of a stone apart from a stone which has it.  The stone thus has an independent existence in a way its shape, size, motion, and other modes do not, and in that sense has a higher degree of reality than they do.  As a finite substance, though, the stone comes into existence and passes out of existence, depends on other things for its existence, and is limited in various other respects as well.  In this way it has a lower degree of reality than an infinite substance – namely God, if God exists (which at this point Descartes does not yet claim to have shown, lest he argue in a circle) – which neither comes into being nor passes away, existing necessarily rather than contingently, and without limitations.  An idea has a particularly low degree of reality since it is not only a kind of mode, but, qua mode of a thinking substance, something with no mind-independent reality at all (which even the modes of the stone have).

The final background assumption we need to understand is something commentators on Descartes often refer to as the Causal Adequacy Principle, according to which a total efficient cause must have, either formally or eminently, at least as much reality as its effect.  This is a variation on the Scholastic Principle of Proportionate Causality (which I discuss and defend in Aquinas).  What it means can be illustrated by a simple example.  Suppose you come across a puddle of thick, red liquid on the ground near an outdoor water faucet.  You know that a leak in the water line could not have caused it all by itself, because a leak might generate a puddle, but not a thick, red puddle, specifically.  There had to be an additional factor as well, such as someone’s spilling cherry soda, or perhaps dropping a “fizzy” tablet into the water.  For whatever is in the effect must in some way or other be in the cause as well, otherwise it couldn’t have gotten into the effect.  Now, it might be in the cause “formally” – that is to say, in the same manner in which it is in the effect – as it is when the cause is red soda and the effect is a red puddle.  Or it might be in the cause “eminently,” as it is when the fizzy tablet is not red but has the causal power, by virtue of its chemical structure, to generate redness in a puddle when it hits the water.  Moreover, the “reality” of the effect might all be present (either formally or eminently) in a single cause – as when the effect is a puddle of red soda and the cause is a can of red soda – or it might instead be in several causal factors acting together as a total cause – as when the effect is the red puddle and the cause is water from the line together with the fizzy tablet.

When we combine the distinction between degrees of formal reality with the Causal Adequacy Principle, we get the result that any cause can, by itself, produce an effect only of the same or a lower degree of reality.  An infinite substance, if there is one, can cause either a finite substance or a mode to exist.  A finite substance can cause either another finite substance or a mode to exist, but cannot cause an infinite substance.  A mode can cause another mode to exist, but cannot cause a substance, whether finite or infinite.  An idea can, all things being equal, cause another idea, but it cannot cause a mind-independent mode to exist.  For a cause cannot give what it doesn’t have to give.  An idea doesn’t have mind-independence, so it can’t impart mind-independence to anything; mind-independent modes don’t have the stronger kind of independent existence substances have, so they can’t impart such independent existence to a substance; and finite substances don’t have the kind of unlimited, necessary existence an infinite substance has, so they can’t impart this sort of existence to an infinite substance.

When in turn we combine these themes with the distinction between the formal and objective reality of ideas, we get the result that the cause of an idea must have within it as much formal reality as the idea has objective reality.  Once again, though the terminology is forbidding if one isn’t familiar with it, the basic idea is fairly simple.  Consider again a blueprint for a computer: If you find such a blueprint lying on the kitchen table one morning, you know it wasn’t the dog or your five-year-old son who drew it.  The reason is that there is nothing in the “formal reality” of the dog or the five-year-old – in particular, nothing in the mind or the drawing capacities of either – that corresponds to the “objective reality” of the blueprint – that is, the design plan for the computer that is represented by the blueprint.  You know that only someone with the requisite knowledge of electrical engineering could have been its ultimate source, that even if someone who had no such knowledge had drawn it, that is only because he had (say) copied it from a blueprint made by someone who did have such knowledge. 

Of course, you could also suppose instead that it was drawn from scratch by someone who knew nothing about electrical engineering but just by accident had come up with a diagram that looked like the blueprint for a computer.  But in that case you can, for that very reason, no longer regard it as truly a blueprint at all, but instead only as something that looked as if it were a blueprint.  If it really is a blueprint, though, really, literally represents a computer, then only someone with the relevant knowledge could have been the ultimate source of the diagram.  That is to say, only someone with sufficiently sophisticated concepts could have the “formal reality” to produce a blueprint with the “objective reality” in question.

[I put aside for the moment the question of whether something non-human – another computer, say – could have produced the blueprint, or whether natural selection could produce something of comparable sophistication, in the form of the “program” encoded in DNA.  Suffice it for present purposes to note that if either a computer or natural selection could do such things, that could only be because the information that ends up in their products already pre-existed in some form or other in the total cause (i.e. all the relevant causal factors taken together, which might be the computer or natural selection together with other factors).  Misguided ID theorists should take note, however, that the issue has nothing whatsoever to do with “probabilities” or with “complexity” per se.  It is not “highly improbable” but rather metaphysically impossible for even the slightest bit of information to arise out of a total cause that did not already have it in some fashion, whether “formally,” “eminently,” or “virtually” (as the Scholastics would put it – again, see the discussion of the Principle of Proportionate Causality in Aquinas).  I have discussed these issues in earlier posts, here and here.]

Note that it isn’t just that a dog or a five-year-old couldn’t build an actual computer; again, they couldn’t come up with even the blueprint for a computer, since the information content contained in the blueprint is the same as that contained in the computer itself, and that is what the dog and the five-year-old don’t have.  And for the same reason, neither could come up with even the idea of a computer merely from the resources they’ve got qua dog or five-year-old.  A dog couldn’t come up with the idea no matter how much time you gave it, and a five-year-old couldn’t come up with it unless he first learns a lot more than the typical five-year-old does or is capable of learning.

Now, what about the idea of God?  It couldn’t come from some entirely unthinking mode or substance, precisely because they are devoid of any ideas whatsoever and thus can’t impart ideas.  So it must come from something that already has within it, in some way or other (whether formally or eminently), ideas or the capacity to generate them.  Nor could the idea of God come merely from other ideas all by themselves, apart from a thinking substance which has the ideas.  For even the ideas of (say) pure actuality, omnipotence, omniscience, and the like, considered individually, would need to be combined by some mind in order for them together to form the idea of God.  That leaves only a finite thinking substance or an infinite thinking substance – that is, God Himself – remaining as the possible ultimate sources of the idea of God.  And whatever its ultimate source is must have as much formal reality as the idea of God has objective reality, just as the source of the blueprint for a computer has to have at least the sophistication that the computer itself has (as the mind of an electrical engineer does). 

But in Descartes’ view, no finite substance, thinking or otherwise, can possibly have the requisite formal reality.  For the idea of God is the idea of something infinite, and finite substances, precisely because they are finite, do not have of themselves the formal reality to generate even the idea of infinity, any more than a dog or a five-year-old could generate all by themselves even the idea of a computer.   And this essentially gives us the “trademark” argument, which we can now summarize as follows:

1. I find within myself the idea of God: a supremely perfect [i.e. purely actual] being, infinite, independent, supremely intelligent, supremely powerful, and creator of everything other than Himself.

2. Whatever caused this idea must have at least as much formal reality as the idea has objective reality.

3. But anything other than God has less formal reality than the idea of God has objective reality.

4. So only God Himself could be the ultimate cause of my idea of God.

5. So God exists.

What should we think of this argument?  As I have said, it is almost universally rejected, and with scorn.  (Though for an interesting recent defense, see Steven Duncan’s The Proof of the External World: Cartesian Theism and the Possibility of Knowledge.)  But I think that the scorn, at least, is misplaced.  Certainly the background principles are, in my view anyway, correct (or at least their more consistently Scholastic analogues are correct).  Those who reject the Causal Adequacy Principle, for example, tend either not to understand it, or are overly impressed with what are in fact easily-answered objections, or perhaps dismiss it merely because it smacks of medieval ideas of the sort that aren’t fashionable in contemporary philosophy. 

But there are, nevertheless, some serious objections that can be raised against the trademark argument.  An objection that Descartes himself considers is that he could have arrived at the idea of God all by himself merely by negating the idea of what is finite.  For example, he could start with the idea of knowledge, which he has to a limited degree, and negate those limits so as to arrive at the idea of omniscience.  But Descartes responds that this has things backwards: In his view, the idea of what is finite itself presupposes the idea of what is infinite, just as a boundary presupposes a larger expanse outside the boundary.  (Compare: The notion of an imperfect circle presupposes the idea of a circle, which just is the idea of a perfect circle.)

A more serious difficulty, though, is one that John Cottingham raises in his book Descartes.  We can grant that a sophisticated blueprint of a computer is beyond the capacity of the average five-year-old to produce.  But suppose instead that we came across a drawing of a box-like object with the words “supremely complicated computer” written on it.  Here, of course, we might well suppose that the five-year-old could have drawn it.  Now, is our idea of God as a supremely perfect being more like the blueprint for a computer, or more like the box-like object with the words in question written on it?  If it is more like the former, then Descartes may have a case for saying that it could not have originated with us.  But if it is more like the latter, then it seems he does not.

This is an objection a Thomist is bound to take seriously, for from a Thomistic point of view we cannot in the strict sense grasp God’s essence, and thus cannot form an idea of God that captures anything close to what God is like in Himself.  This, you will recall, is the reason Aquinas rejects Anselm’s ontological argument, and it would seem to entail a rejection of the “trademark” argument as well.  If we fully grasped the divine essence, then we would see from that essence alone that God cannot fail to exist, just as Anselm says; but in fact we do not fully grasp it.  Similarly, if we fully grasped the divine essence, we would have an idea of God of which only God Himself could have been the source, just as Descartes says; but, again, in fact we don’t fully grasp it. 

Of course, that does not by any means entail that we cannot know that God exists, or that we can know nothing about His nature.  We can know that God exists, but (contrary to what Descartes supposes) only a posteriori, through arguments like the Five Ways (when properly understood in terms of the Aristotelian-Thomistic metaphysics underlying them – once again, see Aquinas).  And we can know a great deal about the divine attributes, but relatively speaking our knowledge of the divine nature is bound to be more like the five-year-old child’s knowledge of the computer than the electrical engineer’s knowledge of it.

So, Descartes’ “trademark” argument, while of greater interest than it is often given credit for having, ultimately fails.  Like Descartes’ “clear and distinct perception” argument for dualism, what’s true in it isn’t new, and what’s new in it isn’t true.

Deadly unserious

Catholic bishops are obliged to convey the authentic teaching of the Church on matters of faith and morals.  The modern, secular, liberal world utterly despises that teaching, and its hostility has only increased in the decades since the Fathers of Vatican II hoped that some common ground might be found on the basis of which the Church and the world could cooperate.  A bishop can deal with this situation in one of two ways.  He can damn the torpedoes and press on at full speed, Athanasius contra mundum.   Or he can temporize.  We have seen how the temporizing strategy played out during last year’s debate over health care.  It is manifest in many other areas too, such as the debate over capital punishment, as current events in Illinois and Arizona illustrate.

Here’s how the temporizing approach works.  Where the liberal or secularist finds Catholic teaching hopelessly “reactionary,” the temporizing churchman will either keep silent about it or qualify it to the point of blunting or even neutralizing its force.  Hence he will, for example, say nothing at all about contraception.  Homosexuality and abortion he cannot keep silent about, because they are matters of current political controversy.  Regarding homosexuality, then, he will issue a vague statement to the effect that the Church believes that we are all called to honor the Creator’s plan for sex and marriage.  If he can’t avoid doing so, he will acknowledge that this entails that homosexual activity is immoral; but he will also, and almost before he has finished uttering it, proceed to bury this acknowledgment under a mountain of verbiage about the respect, sensitivity, compassion, and understanding owed homosexual persons, about the evils of discrimination, etc.  Regarding abortion, the temporizing bishop will speak vaguely of “promoting a culture of life” and emphasize the compassion owed women who find themselves “in difficult circumstances” – rather than, say, calling attention to the unique depravity of willfully murdering your own flesh and blood for the sake of a hassle-free orgasm.  No matter how wicked the practice or policy and no matter how shrill and dishonest the propaganda of its defenders, the temporizing bishop will respond in the mildest fashion and will attribute only the best motives to the other side.  As George Carlin might have put it, whereas the great churchmen of the past were football players, the modern, temporizing bishop prefers baseball.  Or to switch metaphors, he brings a bean bag to a gunfight. 

Or at least he does so where, again, the Church’s teaching seems “reactionary.”  Where it seems (or can be made to seem) “progressive,” the temporizing churchman suddenly turns into Knute Rockne, or Gary Cooper in High Noon.   He will issue bold statements on immigration, health care, or capital punishment, and will emphasize these purportedly “liberal friendly” issues to the point of exaggerating their significance relative to the Church’s more “reactionary” teachings.  And he will see common ground between Catholicism and liberalism where in fact there is no common ground – sometimes in a manner that seriously distorts what the Church actually teaches.  Again, last year’s health care debate provides an illustration: The statements made at the time by the USCCB gave the false impression that, apart from federal funding of abortion, Catholic teaching would favor the passage of President’s health care bill, or something like it.  But as I noted at the time, the fact is that while Catholic social teaching unambiguously rejects the dogmatic laissez-faire position of extreme libertarianism, it is at the level of general principle nevertheless much closer to the “conservative” end of the political spectrum than to the “liberal” end – insisting, on grounds of justice, on decentralized and private solutions wherever possible, and leaving matters of concrete policy for competent laymen to decide rather than imposing any particular program.

Something similar can be said of Catholic teaching about capital punishment, though you would never guess it from the statements made by some churchmen.  To be sure, the Church firmly rejects the bloodthirsty “hang ‘em high” attitude one finds among some right-wingers.  But she has also firmly and consistently rejected the claim that the death penalty is inherently unjust.  As we saw in a previous post, the legitimacy in principle of capital punishment is grounded in natural law and in the infallible moral teaching of scripture, and is the consistent teaching of the Catholic Church from her foundation down to the present day.  It was reaffirmed even by Pope John Paul II, who was probably the most prominent churchmen ever to oppose the death penalty.  Indeed, the late Pope even stopped short of claiming that capital punishment was never justifiable in practice, holding only that cases where it might be called for are “very rare, if not practically non-existent.”

The significance of this refusal of the Church to embrace doctrinaire abolitionism cannot be overstated, for it puts the Church fundamentally at odds with liberalism at the level of principle, whatever commonalities there might be between some bishops and some liberal politicians at the level of policy.  And it shows how poorly thought-out and misleading are the statements sometimes made on this subject by Catholic bishops, including the recent statements cited above.  The Arizona bishops assert that capital punishment is “state-sanctioned vengeance that is not in keeping with the Gospel of Jesus Christ,” that “when other means are available to keep society safe from dangerous criminals [capital punishment] denies the intrinsic dignity and sanctity of human life,” and that it “is actually a contribution to a culture of death.”  But these statements are, from the point of view of the actual teaching of the Church, either false or in need of serious qualification.  As with the bishops’ statements on health care, crucial but ambiguous terms are left undefined, nuances in Catholic teaching are ignored, and apparent inconsistencies are unresolved. 

Take the assertion that capital punishment amounts to “state-sanctioned vengeance that is not in keeping with the Gospel of Jesus Christ.”  Is St. Paul speaking at odds with the Gospel when under divine inspiration he tells us in the epistle to the Romans that the state “bears not the sword in vain” and acts as a “minister of God, a revenger to execute wrath on him that does evil”?  The answer, of course, is No, and the reason is clear from the Church’s traditional teaching.  As Cardinal Roberti’s Dictionary of Moral Theology tells us, the term “vengeance” has both a broad and a narrow sense.  In the broad sense of the term, vengeance is “the infliction of physical punishment upon someone as retribution for injury caused to another.”  And in this sense, vengeance “if done for good and just motives, e.g., love of justice, or preservation of the juridico-social order, or the correction of an evildoer, by a competent authority, according to laws … of itself, is a good act.”  This is the sort of “revenge” or “vengeance” that St. Paul is endorsing in Romans and that the Church herself has always endorsed precisely because it is necessary to maintain a just social order.  For it is this sort of “vengeance” that the state is engaged in not only when executing criminals, but in inflicting any other punishment – in incarcerating evildoers, levying fines, and so forth. 

Of course, there is also a narrower and objectionable sense of “vengeance.”  In this sense, Roberti’s Dictionary tells us, vengeance is punishment that is “inflicted out of an ill-feeling toward one who has offended, ill-treated or caused suffering to another, or simply to satisfy one’s ill feeling toward his enemy, or for the pleasure of payment in kind.”  It is this sort of vengeance that is contrary to Christian charity, “an evil act” and “a sin.”  But there is no more reason to think that capital punishment is especially linked to “vengeance” in this objectionable sense than there is to think that incarceration or the levying of fines is linked to it.

The Arizona bishops’ statement rests, then, on a fallacy of equivocation.  Capital punishment is indeed “state-sanctioned vengeance” in the first sense of “vengeance,” but in that sense it is not contrary to “the Gospel of Jesus Christ.”  “Vengeance” in the second sense is contrary to the Gospel, but capital punishment is not, or need not be, “vengeance” in that sense.

But isn’t “vengeance” even in the first sense ruled out by John Paul’s II teaching – cited by the Arizona bishops – to the effect that “capital punishment should be limited only to extremely rare situations where it is necessary to defend society”?  For doesn’t that teaching entail that the Church’s “current” position is that only “defense” – rather than punishment or retributive justice – can legitimately motivate a resort to capital punishment?

The answer is that John Paul II’s teaching does not entail that at all; in fact it entails just the opposite.  For neither the late Pope nor any other orthodox Catholic moralist would ever advocate executing an innocent person, or someone guilty of only a relatively minor offense, in the name of “defending society.”  They would never say, for example, that teenagers guilty of minor acts of vandalism should be summarily shot in circumstances where there are no prisons to hold them.  The reason is obvious: Teenage vandals have done nothing to deserve the death penalty, whereas murderers have.  That is why the latter might at least in principle be executed in the interests of “defending society,” while the former may not be.  Far from pointing away from the Church’s traditional teaching that capital punishment can be merited on grounds of retributive justice, then, the late Pope’s position implicitly reinforces that traditional teaching.

One must also be careful in interpreting the claim that “defense” alone can justify capital punishment.  Both in this context and when discussing just war theory, those inclined toward a more “liberal” position typically presuppose an arbitrarily narrow construal of what counts as a “defensive” action.  In particular, they appear to assume that lethal force can only ever be deployed in direct response to some immediate attack – when an enemy army is actually pouring over the border, say, or when a captured murderer could at any moment break his guard’s neck and escape.  But moral theologians have traditionally used “defense” to cover a much wider range of actions.  For instance, older manuals of ethics and moral theology (such as Fagothey’s Right and Reason) allow that a “punitive war” carried out against a “gangster nation” can in principle count as “defensive,” especially insofar as this would help to preserve “right order and the future peace of the world.”  (I have discussed this issue at length in a series of posts on just war – here, here, and here – at the old Right Reason blog.) 

By the same token, capital punishment would surely be justifiable in principle as a way of “defending society” if it has significant deterrence value.  Of course, whether it really does have such value is a matter of controversy.  But it is also an empirical matter concerning which bishops have no special competence, and about which Catholics might reasonably disagree.  (This is no doubt why then-Cardinal Ratzinger affirmed in 2004 that faithful Catholics could in principle “be at odds with the Holy Father on the application of capital punishment” and that “there may be a legitimate diversity of opinion even among Catholics about… applying the death penalty.”)

For these reasons, it simply will not do glibly to assert that capital punishment under modern conditions “denies the intrinsic dignity and sanctity of human life” and “promotes a culture of death.”  Does putting criminals in prison “deny the dignity of human free will” or “promote a culture of slavery”?  Does levying fines on them violate the right to private property or “promote a culture of theft”?  Obviously not, and the reason is that a criminal can, by virtue of his actions, forfeit his right to liberty and to his property.  But in the same way, he can “deprive himself of his own right to life” (as Pope Pius XII put it).  That does not mean that the state should always exercise its right to take his life.  But it does entail that capital punishment cannot possibly be intrinsically contrary to “the sanctity of human life” or conducive to a “culture of death.”  If it were, then the Church would not and could not teach that capital punishment can at least in principle be legitimate.

Why, then, does the Church “currently” take a more negative view of capital punishment than she has in the past?  The answer is that she does not do so, at least not at the level of principle.  And even at the practical level, the novelty of John Paul II’s teaching has been exaggerated both by his critics and by some of his admirers.  For one can find similar views expressed earlier in the Catholic theological tradition, including in the supposedly more “reactionary” moralists of the Neo-Scholastic pre-Vatican II period.  Consider Volume 1 of the 1925 edition of Fr. Thomas Slater’s A Manual of Moral Theology, which tells us, on the one hand, that:

The right of the State to punish criminals with the infliction of death is either expressly conceded or clearly supposed in Holy Scripture.  It is sufficiently evident, too, from natural reason…

while nevertheless affirming, on the other hand, that:

If the time should ever come when the infliction of less severe penalties will suffice to punish crime and safeguard life and property, then capital punishment should be abolished, but that time does not seem to be at hand yet. (p. 196)

Or consider the 1921 edition of Spirago and Clarke’s The Catechism Explained, which, after affirming that “the officers of justice are warranted in punishing evil-doers with death,” emphasizes that this punishment should be inflicted “only… when the welfare of society demands it” (p. 388) and insists that:

It is an error to suppose that the Church advocates capital punishment on the principle of retaliation; an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth… The Church does not like to see blood shed, she desires that every sinner should have time to amend.  She permits, but does not approve capital punishment. (p. 389)

This particular passage indicates that the reason for a more lenient treatment of those guilty of the most serious crimes has to do not with justice, but with mercy – with giving “every sinner… time to amend.”  As the 2005 Compendium of the Catechism of the Catholic Church states, the Church prefers when possible that punishment “do[es] not remove definitively from the guilty party the possibility of reforming himself.”

This is the deep reason why the Church’s position can never be assimilated to that of the liberal secularist opponent of capital punishment.  In fact the two positions are diametrically opposed.  The Church insists that it is in principle just to execute a murderer, because such a person has forfeited his right to life and done something worthy of death.  The Church’s appeal is rather to mercy, for the murderer has also merited a punishment far worse than death – eternal damnation – and the Church hopes that the murderer might still avoid this punishment if given time to repent.  The liberal secularist, by contrast, insists that capital punishment is unjust, on the grounds that no one ever forfeits his right to life and that no one is deserving of execution.  The liberal does not fundamentally appeal to mercy, then, because in the legal context, one typically shows mercy precisely by refraining from inflicting a punishment that is deserved.  The liberal secularist also denies that there is any afterlife in which we are to be punished or rewarded, and objects to capital punishment in part precisely for this reason.  In short, the Church’s recommendation against capital punishment is not absolute, and presupposes that we have a supernatural end; the liberal secularist’s abolitionism is absolute, and presupposes that we do not have a supernatural end.  The liberal secularist cares only about this life.  The Church cares primarily about the next life.  (On this point, see this 2007 Anthony McCarthy piece from Touchstone.)

Any statement of Catholic teaching that does not make these differences crystal clear is simply not theologically serious.  For the inescapable fact is that the contemporary Magisterium of the Church, two millennia of tradition, and the infallible moral teaching of scripture all affirm the legitimacy in principle of the death penalty. It would be foolish and intellectually dishonest to pretend that this is a minor point, which can safely be ignored for practical purposes.  The affirmation exists for a reason, and commands our attention.  It teaches us something important about the nature of justice, about the gravity of certain crimes, and about the relative insignificance of this life compared to the next.  To cite only those scriptural passages or ecclesiastical documents which emphasize mercy while minimizing or ignoring those which emphasize the legitimacy of the death penalty is to distort the significance of the former.

My own view is that when every aspect of Catholic teaching is carefully considered, it should lead even those Catholics who are skeptical about capital punishment to oppose a thoroughgoing abolitionist position.  For to take the death penalty off the books entirely would “send the message” that the liberal secularist approach to the issue is correct, and as we have seen, no Catholic can possibly endorse that approach.  Better to maintain capital punishment as an option in principle, then, even if its actual application is “very rare, if not nonexistent.”  And if it does indeed have significant deterrent value – a position that a Catholic has a right to hold if he believes the evidence supports it – then its application arguably should not be rare.

In any event, it seems to me that a summary of the Church’s teaching that takes every aspect of it into account might look something like this:

The Catholic Church teaches that those guilty of the most serious crimes, such as murder, have forfeited their right to life and thus merit the penalty of death.  For this reason, lawful authorities can in principle justly inflict this penalty on such criminals in circumstances where following such a policy is the best way of protecting society against them.  However, the Church also fervently desires that every sinner have an opportunity to repent and thereby to avoid eternal damnation while he still has a chance to do so.  She also teaches forgiveness and mercy, and insists that no punishment ever be inflicted in a spirit of vengeance.  Accordingly, the Church maintains that it is more in harmony with the special dignity entailed by the supernatural end to which we have been called that justice be tempered with mercy, and that the death penalty not be inflicted when non-lethal means are sufficient to protect society.  Exactly when such means are in fact sufficient is a prudential matter for competent lawful authorities to determine, and about which Catholics can legitimately disagree.  They must be careful to keep all aspects of the Church’s teaching in mind as they form their thinking on this subject.

But I do not expect to hear such a statement any time soon.  Athanasius has, alas, been dead for some time.