A question on natural reason
As part of diaconate formation, we are embarking on a close reading of the Catechism of the Catholic Church. I imagine that as we go through it, a variety of interesting questions will come up.
Here is the first: the CCC starts with a discussion of the knowledge of God. While avoiding the trap of philosophical “proofs” of the existence of God, it sketches some plausible arguments that show that by natural reason alone we can come to the knowledge of the existence of God as the “first cause and final end of all things.” (CCC 34).
However, in paragraph 35 it then goes on to assert that “Man’s faculties make him capable of coming to a knowledge of the existence of a personal God” (emphasis added). And in Paragraph 37 it quotes Pope Pius XII: “human reason is, strictly speaking, truly capable by its own natural power and light of attaining to a true and certain knowledge of the one personal God…” (Humanae Generis 561).
I do not see how to make this leap from the existence of a “Prime Mover” (a rather abstract and distant notion of God, and certainly not a God who loves us) to the knowledge of a personal God. By speaking of “capabilities” the text may seem to be hedging a bit, suggesting that we can but have not (or perhaps in our sinfulness will not). Nevertheless, there appears to be a gap in the reasoning here. If I recall correctly, C. S. Lewis makes the argument that by reason humanity might deduce the existence of God but only as a prime mover, and that it requires Revelation for God to reveal Himself to us as a person (indeed as a Trinity of Persons) who loves us.
Am I missing something, or is the Catechism glossing over a substantive limit in human reason? For my own part, I am doubtful of the ability of human reason alone to come to the knowledge of a personal God: it seems more in line with our fallen nature that we will find “gods” more in tune with our own prejudices and limitations.
Comments are closed.
Maybe it’s wishful thinking. Even the “proofs” for God’s existence presuppose debatable propositions about the nature of man and the nature of the universe, assuming these even have a “nature.” I personally find the traditional proofs too tied to questionable presuppositions to be of much use.
My perhaps creative reading of the catechism: human reason, on its own, cannot reach knowledge of a personal God (for one thing, grace is needed), but it is open to such knowledge. Reason can apprehend the proposition that God is a personal God: the idea is intelligible to it.
This isn’t what it means though. It means what Vatican I proclaimed as dogma: God’s existence can be known (not with supernatural Faith, of course, but with knowledge inasmuch as the existence of space and time can likewise be known), and the existence is necessarily of a conscious free entity (the meaning of “personal”). There is no real way to define “existence” without a person. I mean, just look at the Schroedinger’s Cat problem. The only way to determine what is “Reality” is by positing an Observer. “Reality” as a category only makes sense relative to consciousness (ie, as what can effect or be an object of consciousness). But unless WE are the “observer” (ie, total solipsism, which doesn’t work or else we’d be able to “choose” what is real and what isn’t), there must be some Supreme Observer who is defining what constitutes “reality” for all of us.
You’re assuming, of course, that reality, as relative to consciousness, is one thing.
Question: if God’s existence can be known through human reason inasmuch as the existence of space and time can be known through human reason, then why proclaim the possibility of this knowledge through reason as a dogma? Shouldn’t human reason be sufficient to show that human reason can attain knowledge of God?
if God’s existence can be known through human reason inasmuch as the existence of space and time can be known through human reason, then why proclaim the possibility of this knowledge through reason as a dogma? Shouldn’t human reason be sufficient to show that human reason can attain knowledge of God?
Because human reason is not perfect and makes an awful lot of mistakes sometimes — and many people think, based on these mistakes, that God’s existence cannot be known through human reason. So the Church does what She always has done: propose truths as an aid and guide for human reason (both for truths that are attainable by human reason and for truths that aren’t).
Because God’s knowability-by-natural-human-reason is an important feature in understanding Him. Otherwise, people might think it was doctrinally okay to be Fideists (something you apparently lean towards). The point of that dogma is, in some sense, that Faith and Reason are not separable, and that there is not the sort of free-for-all or allowance for total skepticism in the latter either (as you sometimes seem to be proposing), because the latter has a bearing on the former, obviously
@ Thales:
Okay, but why go the route of dogmatic proclamation? If people think, because of a mistake, that the existence of God cannot be reach by human reason, shouldn’t it be sufficient to draw attention to the specific mistakes and, using reason, demonstrate that they are in fact mistakes? Should it not also be preferable? It seems to me kinda counter-productive to defend the claim that we can know that human reason can attain knowledge of God by an appeal to dogmatic assertion:
“I can know through my reason that God exists.”
“How do you know this?”
“The Church says so.”
@ A Sinner,
I agree that faith and reason are not separable: they (I hope) point to the same thing. However, it seems odd to defend the proposition “I know that human reason can attain knowledge of God” by appealing to religious dogmatic proclamation given that the proposition is kinda-sorta about how human reason on its own can know stuff.
“Seems odd” perhaps; I do understand the “irony” it seems to contain. But if people were questioning that fact about God, then it needed to be defined.
However, it seems odd to defend the proposition “I know that human reason can attain knowledge of God” by appealing to religious dogmatic proclamation given that the proposition is kinda-sorta about how human reason on its own can know stuff.
Is it really that odd, though? Suppose we start from the mere question, Can reason attain to knowledge of God, and inquiring in a completely open-minded way. The only way we can know by reason alone that reason can attain knowledge of God is by actually attaining it. If, for instance, we haven’t done so, we don’t know whether it’s beyond the bounds of reason or not. In order to know whether reason can attain to any kind of knowledge that we ourselves have not attained, we can only appeal to someone’s authority.
Nice comments by Brandon and A Sinnner. Good thoughts.
Brandon’s last comment made me think some more. Consider how we come to knowledge, generally: we do it by receiving facts from authority, from history books, from more learned people, from other people telling us that Washington was President, that our cells contain DNA, that Jupiter is gaseous. Generally, each one of us doesn’t try to reason to or discover these facts on our own; we get guidance from some authority. Of course, we can always confirm the truth of these facts by our own reasoning or scientific inquiry or historical research, but it’s still good and useful to have a previous authority setting out this truth and guiding us to the truth.
Take what is perhaps the most logical of all sciences: math. To one starting out at math, isn’t it good for an authority to tell us that the Pythagorean theorem is true and can be proven by human reason? If we’re inclined to try to prove it on our own, knowing that it’s true gives us guidance in trying to prove it, and guards us against errors when it appears from our flawed reasoning that the theorem might be false. And if we’re not intelligent and not able to prove it by our own reasoning, or not interested enough in trying to prove it because we’re busy with other things, we can still be assured that it is true by the fact that others who we trust and who have looked into it tell us it’s true, and we can still benefit from knowing that the Pyth.theorem is true when building houses, etc.
Related to the comment I just wrote, Kyle asks whether the following discussion really is productive:
“I can know through my reason that God exists.”
“How do you know this?”
“The Church says so.”
But that’s not the entire discussion; the discussion doesn’t end there. The next question would be “Why does the Church say so?” and the response would “because of logical reason A and argument B, etc., which you can evaluate on your own.”
Consider Kyle’s discussion transposed into other subjects:
“I can know that my cells contain DNA.”
“How do you know this?”
“Because scientists and science books and intelligent people who have investigated the topic say so.”
Isn’t that how we know most truths? But that’s not a problem, since the discussion doesn’t end there, but continues “Why does science say so?” “Because of reason A and argument B, etc., which you can evaluate on your own.”
The appeal to authority makes sense when the knowledge in question is beyond the capacity of someone to grasp or learn. I’ve made, for example, the case for deferring to climate scientists on matters of climate change. We cannot reasonably master knowledge in all areas. Seems to me, however, that because human reason has the capacity to know God because human beings are made in the image and likeness of God, each human being can and should strive for as much knowledge of God as he or she is able to attain. Given this, an appeal to authority on the particular question of whether reason can attain to knowledge of doesn’t seem to be needed.
And here we’re talking about not merely an appeal to a fallible human authority in situations in which I can go investigate and perhaps come to a different conclusion: the appeal made is to an allegedly infallible authority who, while telling me that I can evaluate its reasons on my own, puts me in the position of risking my standing with it and apparently God by evaluating and coming to a different conclusion. Thing is, people well trained in theology and logic don’t buy the offered proofs for God existence. They’ve made the evaluations and found the reasons wanting. So what then?
I get your point with climate change, but my point is that authority is useful for many more (perhaps even all?) areas of knowledge, not just those we can’t reasonably master, and not just areas beyond the capacity of someone to grasp and learn. “Obvious” areas of knowledge–fundamental things, simple facts about history, science, math, etc. — are conveyed to children (and adults) by authority, and that is a good and useful thing. Sure, humans have the capacity to learn math and geography; but that doesn’t mean it’s not useful to get schoolchildren to memorize and recite the 12-times-table or U.S. Capitals instead of requiring them to discover all of this completely on their own. Consider that the Catholic Church is responsible for proposing the truth to all levels of intellect.
And then you say “people well trained in theology and logic don’t buy the offered proofs for God existence.” Yes, that’s correct — but that means you’re conceding that this is an area of knowledge that is difficult to master and might be beyond someone’s capacity to grasp. So then you must grant that authority might then become helpful for one who has faith in the Church and is inclined to accept the truths the Church proposes.
They’ve made the evaluations and found the reasons wanting. So what then?
This is a much larger question than the one we’ve been talking about — namely, why it’s not illogical to have a “truth-proposition” that X is attainable by human reason be promulgated by an authority. What you’re asking is much broader. Bu if you want to talk about what happens next after you find a truth proposed by the Catholic Church wanting, forget those truths that are attainable by human reason… that’s small fry, go for the big kahuna. What about those truths proposed by the Catholic Church that aren’t attainable by human reason, like the Trinity? What’s next for someone who finds the reasons for them wanting? As you can see, that’s a much broader question (with the answer depending greatly on what type of person you have in mind who found the reason wanting — whether it is, for example, a Catholic who accepts the Church’s authority and is inclined to accept the truths the Church proposes, or someone who doesn’t accept the Church’s authority).
They must conclude that either they haven’t found a good rationale, or that their attitudes or premises in evaluating the rationales (the “proofs”) offered by natural reason…are wrong.
Very often it will be the latter case: their basic premises regarding REASON are wrong, so thank God some of them at least have Faith to show them this.
I would suggest, Kyle, that based on a lot of things you’ve said…a lot of your premises about Reason (the whole skeptical epistemology thing) are incorrect, and that this dogma is there (if you truly have Faith) to correct you on this matter and point you in the right direction (indeed, not just regarding Faith, but regarding Reason too).
@A Sinner – Mine is an epistemology of suspicion, not skepticism. I hold the world to be knowable.
@Thales – Well, sure, the truths proclaimed by the church are part of a coherent whole. Deny one and the whole may begin to unravel for the denier. Or the church may rethink its teaching in light of new evidence.
Let me try to reiterate my basis points: if human reason can reach knowledge of God, then it’s more than likely that this has been accomplished, such as through proofs for God’s existence. It would seem, then, that such claimed accomplishments could be examined and shown to work or not work. A dogmatic declaration doesn’t seem to be necessary (though, admittedly, it may be helpful). The trouble I see is that the church has made the dogmatic declaration, and yet there seems to be cause for skepticism about the available “paths of reason” to God, given that people who seem to understand the arguments don’t think they work or signify what they’re said to say. Now it’s true that just because none of the historically offered “paths of reason” actually arrive at God doesn’t mean that no path of reason could do so.
Kyle,
I’m right with you 100% until you say “The trouble I see…” and then you talk about the fact that there is cause for skepticism about reasoning to God. Yes, exactly, that’s the point…. that’s another reason for having an authoritative declaration. What’s the trouble? The truth is not an obvious one, even though it can be reached by human reason. Thus, an authoritative teaching guides someone who is trying to prove it by human reason (just like knowing the Pyth.theorem is true can better guide someone who is trying to prove the theorem); the teaching protects against people losing hope when they have difficulty thinking it through and protects against people despairing of finding a solution and coming to the conclusion that God is not knowable; it protects against falling into heresy, like A Sinner talked about with fideism.
If your hang-up is with the Church declaring as true something that has cause for skepticism, I understand that concern — but that concern is more clear with dozens of other teachings that are, on their surface, more questionable and more prone to skepticism than the fact of God’s existence, like the Immaculate Conception, the Assumption, transubstantiation, etc.
This authoritative proclamation may guide one in agreement with the church in an exercise of reason, but I imagine that to the outsider, it may appear a bit shifty. It looks as though the Church is saying “You can know God exists using human reason. What? You don’t reach knowledge of God through your reason? Oh, well then, you must be reasoning incorrectly. Trust us when we say you can reach this knowledge through reason!”
Kyle,
Yes, I can see that might be the case.
“It looks as though the Church is saying ‘You can know God exists using human reason. What? You don’t reach knowledge of God through your reason? Oh, well then, you must be reasoning incorrectly. Trust us when we say you can reach this knowledge through reason!’”
Yes, that is what they are saying, and good! As Thales points out, it’s like the Pythagorean Theorem or something. A geometry student who can’t prove a theorem in their textbook would be arrogant to the extreme to say, “Well, because I can’t prove it, it can’t be proven.” Thank God they have the authority of the teacher and textbook to say, “Yes, it can be proven, and if you can’t, you are the one who is proving it wrong.” Furthermore, if a naive person refused to accept one of the proofs that mathematicians have verified “work”…then their authority should be enough to let the person know that their notion of how mathematical proofs work, their fundamental axioms, are probably wrong to begin with.
It may well be that they can and that they should try on their own; but if you don’t start out knowing that you can attain it at all — and no one prior to knowing something starts out knowing simply by reasoning alone that they can attain it; they only know it is even attainable if someone has told them it is attainable — then deciding whether even to inquire is a matter of gambling. Without some prior knowledge of what is attainable, there are no live options for inquiry, merely arbitrary guesses out of infinite possibilities. Authority is how human beings beat those odds. We are constantly appealing to authority in order to recognize that something can be learned; and naturally so. The only two ways to know it are for us already to have learned it or for someone who would know to tell us that we can.
The infallibility issue seems to me irrelevant; it makes no sense whatsoever, if any expertise is relevant, to reject a kind of expertise simply on the basis that it is claimed to be certainly right. So the question is really just whether it makes sense to draw on expert opinion and authority. And the question can be turned around. People well trained in theology and logic do buy some of the offered proofs for God’s existence; they’ve made the evaluations and found the reasons adequate. So what then? All you’ve done is appeal to more authorities.
Even with the existence of authorities, inquiry (of whether to begin inquiry) is still a gamble.
I don’t think this is true. We don’t call every kind of action on the basis of probability a gamble, only those actions that have to be based more on practical considerations of gain and loss than on defensible reasons for accepting something as true. But authorities are at least candidates for being defensible reasons; and credible authorities are certainly defensible reasons.
But I think that even if the inquiry were always a gamble, the basic point would stand: some gambles are arbitrary and desperate, others not. Pascal makes this with regard to Wager — he points out that, even if we are not wholly convinced by the Wager, we need to keep in mind that this is a gamble at which we are allowed to ‘cheat’ — we can look for inside tips. This is true of Wager-type situations generally, I think. And authorities are examples of such hints and tips and cheat codes.
I suppose it depends on what you mean by personal; if you just mean ‘person-like in some ways’, then I think it follows pretty easily, but if by personal God we mean ‘provident and concerned with human life’ I think the answer gets a bit more interesting. Two of the major theological texts directly relevant to this — the Treatise on God in Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae, and Scotus’s De Primo Principio — seem to me to show that it is indeed possible to know that God is personal in the fuller sense, but they simultaneously show that it is quite difficult if you are going purely on philosophical considerations. Both of them would have certainly agreed with that point: both Aquinas and Scotus insist that any rigorous philosophical argumentation about God involves difficult issues — hence the need for revelation. And while Aquinas would I think deny that talking about God as prime mover is a way of talking that is ‘abstract and distant’, it’s nonetheless true that it takes a lot of hard argument to unfold it in a way that doesn’t make it seem so. (And while Scotus doesn’t like prime mover arguments in the strict sense of ‘prime mover’, the same can be said about other notions he does use.)
@ Kyle –
“Reason can apprehend the proposition that God is a personal God: the idea is intelligible to it.”
I don’t know… To me, it seems easier for reason to process the proposition that since the universe seems to “work” so well–according to rules that reason can discover, verify, and understand–there must be an intelligence implicit in this order. And having decided that to be the case, we can choose to call that implicit intelligence “God.”
It is when we start to try to talk about the nature of this intelligence we have decided to call God, that reason runs into difficulty. When the idea of a personal God was born, the earth was apparently the center of a creation that was almost proportional to the human experience in scope. Although the heavens couldn’t be directly seen, it was believed that they were very nearby. As compared to what we know about the universe today, those nearby heavens seem to be almost finite. Time seemed to have a definable beginning and a foreseeable end. Now we are dealing with the knowledge that we exist on one speck of dust among trillions of specks, and we need to believe that the creator of it all is focused on us, and only on us. And, even when we have decided not to let that worry us, we have the Problem of Evil to reconcile with our notion of a God who is omni-everything.
I really think reason handles more easily the notion that there must BE a God, than the proposition that we can rationally understand how that God can be a personal one.
Apprehension isn’t the same thing as understanding. One can apprehend the meaning of the proposition “God is a person” without also understanding how God can be a personal one.
Anyhow, in calling God a person, we are speaking by analogy. God is not a person.
God is in Three Persons.
I think you are misunderstanding apophatic theology here. The fact that we predicate of God only by analogy does not mean that we cannot call God a person or persons. Of course, the ousia in itself is not a person, but then, the ousia in itself, separate from its “existences”/hypostases…is beyond comprehension period.
“God is not a person.” Actually, to complicate matters even more, He is three of them.
Slow down, Sinner! I didn’t say you cannot call God a person or persons, but rather that in doing so, you speak by way of analogy.
No, you said “God is not a person.” This is incorrect. Just because “person” is predicated by analogy (like everything else), does not mean we can say He isn’t one (or three). Saying God is “not” personal, just because “person” is analogical language…is misunderstanding apophatic theology, and is in fact heresy.
It’s not incorrect to say “God is not a person” if one would also say that God is a person (of three), which I would, and do. God is not a person if by “person” I mean what I mean when I say that I am a person. As we both agree, “person” is predicated by analogy when applied to God.
Kyle, I’m not convinced that you and A Sinner mean the same thing by ‘analogy’.
Indeed, reading about “analogy in theodicy” here may help:
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/01449a.htm
Analogy doesn’t mean the predications aren’t real (though they are inadequate). In fact, analogy is a way to say something real in a relative manner about something that, absolutely speaking, is incomprehensible. God is thus not Unknowable as certain false attitudes would imply.
I’d say we mean something similar, especially as A Sinner has defined what he means by citing the CE. I’m not an agnostic: I believe that language can disclose the truth of God that God is knowable. I have no complaints about calling God Three Persons in One Nature, provided we understand that these words are finite human constructs use to disclose an infinite other. Perhaps where we disagree is in our emphasis: I stress the distance and the difference between God and what we say of God.
We may agree but I think you misunderstand how to apply the “idiom” (just like some people don’t understand how to apply the idiom related to Christ’s humanity and divinity, natures and person). Analogy or apophaticism does NOT mean you can say, “God is not a person.” Instead (at least according to the accepted conventions here), you’d say, “God is a person [or three], but only in an absolutely excellent or supereminent way, which is wholly incommensurable with its mode of being in creatures.”
But that perfection of personhood really is in God, it’s just that it is in Him in the same relation to His infinite essence that it is in creatures in relation to their finite nature. And since the infinite is incomprehensible…well, the perfection considered “absolutely” is too, but not considered analogically.
This is a common misconception which you will find refuted in The Discarded Image. It has been known since classical antiquity that the universe is very large compared to the earth. Ptolemy stated in the second century A.D. that the earth should be treated as a mathematical point in relation to the distance of the fixed stars. Not until modern times did anyone think this was a theological difficulty, and I don’t understand what the difficulty is supposed to be.
It seems to me the key words in CCC 35 are “capable..of attaining to” There is no claim here of certainty of attaining to such a knowledge.
David,
Admirable posting!!! it won’t surprise you that I have a few things to say, and want to brief or I imagine a giant hook will come from off stage as in a Bugs Bunny cartoon and drag me off mid- sentence! Excuse the giant generalization, but I think it is a great shame that Catholic theology did not really keep to an utterly Anselmian Ontological Argument. The greatest “that which ” can be conceived is a much more stable and reasonable thing across the every-changing landscape of human perception than the giant edifice of Thomism. And potentially much more ecumenical too. No matter how much Thomists say that they just absorbed or bettered the Anselmian insight, history confounds them.
In fact the Thomism as the genesis of “natural reason” thinking for the Church has been incredible vexed from the start. The Mendicant Controversy is all long forgotten, and all the young scholars condemned (by the Pope!) for heretical Aristotelianism swept under the carpet. That is once Aquinas found a sort of Goldilocks option for the ancient thought. Goldilocks in the sense that what he got “just right” is an impressive intellectual edifice that somehow did away with the rather individual implications of interpretation of the Ontological argument. For “that than which nothing greater can be conceived” is an ultimately personal judgment. Unlike the assertions of the Thomists which left nothing to interpretation.
I think it was a big mistake for the RC Church to mandate this thinking for all Catholics, and thus as you say put it into the Catechism itself. I imagine the Eastern Catholic churches just treats it lovingly in “crazy uncle” fashion. An eastern version of “se acata, perso no se cumple”. And the rest of the world scarcely anyone understands it well enough to get that this is the real reason that they can never get anything done with Catholics and that this ancient and noble organization get more recondite and misunderstood while frantically running television commercials to “come home.”
The fundamental problem with Anselm’s argument is that it presupposes knowledge that God is his essence. This makes it an a priori argument whose premises are disputable from the standpoint of the way we arrive at knowledge of things. The Thomist agrees that God is his essence, but differs from Anselm in saying that we come to know this truth through knowing that sensible things are not their essences, and that they therefore need as the cause of their being, a first being who is his essence. It’s a problem with respect to the order of coming to know things (via inventionis) rather than the order of being. The Thomist fully agrees that there must be some first necessary being who simply is, but our way of coming to know that is through knowing the contingency of material beings.
Charles,
“This makes it an a priori argument whose premises are disputable from the standpoint of the way we arrive at knowledge of things.”
Well, there’s the rub, isn’t it? The WAY we arrive at the knowledge of things. You announce the Aristotelian answer as if it contextually it arrived on medieval society like a bolt of lightning. And similarly I assume you believe it should do the same today. In fact the Anselmian view had this great advantage. It safely contained within itself a realm of the “disputable” but still very religious. It had in its bosom all the sic-et-non vitality one could ever wish for. Thomism shut that all down, and when it was apotheosized at Trent, it reduced religion to formulae, formualae of the moral life even. BIg mistake.
Aquinas’ 5th way, the Kalam Argument, and C.S. Lewis’ Moral argument all contribute to our rational knowledge of God as a personal Being. My version which summarizes these three I call “The Anthropological Argument”:
1. Human beings are intelligent, moral, and free.
2. Human intelligence, morality, and freedom must have a cause which is sufficient to explain their existence.
Therefore the cause of human intelligence, morality, and freedom must also be intelligent, moral, and free; and that Being we call God.
To support this argument you must first defend the individual arguments, but in any case knowledge does not have to meet the standard of being an indisputable proof to be rational knowledge. So I agree with the Catechism and Pius XII that we can have rational knowledge of God as a personal being.
BTW, those who believe in false gods typically construct those beliefs in their imagination and not through the use of reason.
Lamont,
That the Divine might have aspects which human beings could relate to in a personal way, thus be sufficient to addressing Him/Her as Person is a great mystery and seemingly quite incomprehensible. As to the indubitibilty of the Kalam argument, well, can I also interest you in time share, or several???
Peter,
I did not say that there are no objections to the Kalam argument. An argument can be logically valid and have a true conclusion even if someone disputes one or more of the premises. In my judgment the objections are weak and you may disagree, but where you are mistaken is when you dismiss the argument as though it did not have a long history to it and many capable defenders.
Lamont,
Only because you invoke the argument’s “long history” do I bring up the fact that many of those capable defenders were tied as well to the Holy Office of the Inquisition. I do so with trepidation, because I agree that this aspect of the RC Church’s history has been exaggerated. Yet, legalistic element of argumentation which entered Western culture because of the style of such arguments, is simply of a piece conceptually with the idea of enforcement of religious rigor through this mostly Dominican-staffed “Holy Office”. Thus, if one invokes “history” and not questions of rationality per se as evidence, such a telling consideration must be adduced. And , btw, there is a lot of detailed evidence of the dove-tailing of all these issues precisely in the Holy Office’s most famous locus, Spain, with the famous “School of Salamanca.”
I don’t find this argument even a tiny bit compelling. Statement 1 is selective (human beings are also oafish, selfish and addicted), and statement 2 is tautological (you posit an explanation for intelligence morality and freedom, and simply name whatever explanation might exist a “cause”).
The conclusion doesn’t even flow from the flawed statements 1 and 2. How did we leap from lowercase “cause” to uppercase “Being”?? Furthermore, why assume that intelligence, morality and freedom are substances which can only exist by virtue of transference from like substances? All three “substances” are manifestly attributes of judgement. Why should attributes behave like substances? If you argue that these are attributes of divine judgement, then you have another tautological loop to deal with: divine existence “proved” by implicitly-assumed divine judgement.
I think David’s real problem is that he’s smart enough and inquisitive enough to see through bogus arguments.
“I think David’s real problem is that he’s smart enough and inquisitive enough to see through bogus arguments.”
Well, I actually have a lot of problems, but thanks Frank!
Frank,
The argument is selective in that it focuses on those characteristics that are are essential to being a person. Any faults or weaknesses that a person may or may not have is irrelevant and has no bearing on the question of what it is to be a person. (This also answers Dan’s comment below.)
As to the second part of your comment, everything that comes to be has a cause. Human intelligence, morality, and freedom have not always existed. Therefore, they must have a cause – something capable of bringing them in to being. This applies both to substances and whatever features or operations are supported by a substance.
The conclusion that it is God who causes persons to exist follows informally. That is why it is stated the way it is.
Lamont,
With “those who believe in false gods” I assume you would include Averroes and Avicenna, whom, unluckily for your argument here about mere “imagination”, Aquinas relied on precisely because they had admirable “use of reason”.
Wouldn’t the counter-argument be:
1. Human beings are mortal, violent, and suffering
2. Human mortailty, violence, and suffering must have a cause which is sufficient to explain their existence.
Couldn’t this argument be likewise made to show that God is vicious, deadly, and detached?
While I like Lamont’s “Anthropological Argument” quite a bit because of the overall positive
view of humankind I do not understand why the itch to overplay(IMHO) ones hand and
muse about a rationale way to proof God’s existance from this rather sparsly sampled
data set.
If a sound God proof indeed existed we would not be discussing it in the first place at this point in time. Frankly clearly isuch proof does not exists -”no need for that particular hypothesis” as Laplace expressed it.
For me the strongest rationale ‘reason’ for the potential existence of a God is
in the numbers of human beings from the beginning of times that found
this question worth pondering – thus if we must, we could speculate that our Creator implanted a little seed in each and every one of us to desire religious expressions.
Proof it is not – just a nice thought.
“If a sound God proof indeed existed we would not be discussing it in the first place at this point in time.”
You seem to be implying that the very need to look for and discuss and debate “proofs” means that there is no proof.
I’d argue several things:
1) the debate and discussion throughout history is less about “whether” God exists (though, through misunderstanding or confusion, framed in that way), and more about just what “God” and “exist” mean in the first place and the relation between the two concepts.
2) Knowledge is not a matter of a proposition being self-evident or syllogistic. That sort of knowledge only exists in Mathematics, basically, but that doesn’t mean other sorts of knowledge obtained through other sorts of reasoning aren’t real or true.
The debate, in some sense, does prove that God exists…because the idea or concept of “God” clearly exists.
Now, for most everything, this alone proves nothing. The idea “unicorn” may exist, but that doesn’t prove that unicorns actually exist in the world. Because the idea of “unicorn” makes them to be a Thing, which can either have existence or not, an essence that can either actually be instantiated or not.
In the concept of “God” however, there is no such division. “God” is not an idea describing a possible type of “Thing” in the world, a (potential) object of existence. Rather, the very category is prior to that distinction, and structural to human consciousness or the notion of reality itself. Asking about God’s existence is less like asking about the existence of tea cups and unicorns, and more like discussing the existence of time, space, or the of “existence” itself.
Space exists. Because space is not a “Thing,” it is simply a structural feature of human consciousness (and, thus, of reality; anyone who thinks they can “get at” a reality “outside” the perspective of subjectivity is simply naive) and thus exists by the very fact that the concept exists.
There are thus two types of atheism. The first is the naive “popular” atheism that mistakenly conceives of “God” as a Thing and thus as deniable as unicorns (this, of course, is merely a reaction to the simplistic anthropomorphic God held by many people; though that’s not to dismiss Him either). This is easily dismissed and silly; they make a god out of God’s non-being as much as the anthropomorphitists make an idol of their Thing-god. It is not terribly dangerous.
The other type of atheism, the one that is the real “threat” or challenge to faith…understands what is really meant by God (the “God of the philosophers” and theologians), that it is really a description of a metaphysical category, not a Thing, and yet choose to reject this category or devalue it. For them, the denial that “God exists” is not so much a statement that the category isn’t intelligible or real as a category, but a choice to attempt to ground meaning in something else, to reject metaphysics, period, as a side-effect of the verbal programming of our brain (and thus irrelevant to the “external” material reality they posit), and that we need to thus transcend it. This sort of atheism is, thus, less about denying God exists, and more about Killing God, of attempting to overthrow the very framework of reality and human consciousness. This sort of atheism is very dangerous indeed.
(As an aside, all this also suggests to me that, whatever other lifeforms we may discover in the universe, none will be “intelligent” in a sense meaningful to us, because if the “programming language” of their brains evolved with a different “structure” or categories [and why shouldn't it have?]…we would not be able to recognize this as intelligent in any sense, they would simply be mutually unintelligible. If there are creatures “out there” [inasmuch as we can speak of external material reality] who, for example, organize knowledge without the categories of “space” or “time” or “being/non-being” [or of "knowledge" itself!] but according to some other framework or structure…would we, as humans, perceive this as intelligence at all? I have to doubt that. We should only assume there is a “universal” metaphysics, a universal structure to consciousness or the Ideas…if there is a universal over-consciousness. Otherwise, the mutual intelligibility of essences and categories could just be a coincidence of “programming language” between brains, referencing no external reality or forms.)
For example, is “triangle” a “real” thing. Or merely a category intelligible to how our brains process information? Might it be possible for some other type of brain-computer to not have “number” as a basic category, and thus for no coherent category of “three-sided shape” make any sense to it at all? I have to think that, without positing a Knower who makes the Forms universal…we’d have to admit that was a very real possibility. But, of course, that very idea throws the notion of “reality” into incoherence.
The Catechism is in line with the dogmatic declaration of Vatican I that God’s existence can be known by the light of human reason. That is, from God’s created effects, we can arise to knowledge of the existence of a being who is pure act, first efficient cause, necessary being, pure perfection, and first intelligence. Such a being is, because intellectual, personal (person being a substance, or subsistent beign, of an intellectual nature). This presupposes a certain notion of what “science” is (i.e., science in the medieval or aristotelian sense of certain mediate knowledge) and what we can know for certain through experience. I recommend Garrigou-Lagrange’s “God: his existence and nature” for an understanding of what the fathers of Vatican I meant by declaring as dogma that God’s existence can be known by the light of natural reason.
Does it make sense to be required, as a matter of faith, to accept that something can be proved by reason alone?
I really am quite partial to the contingency argument, but I am agreed with Brandon that the real issue is what the Catechism means by “personal.”
I do not see how to make this leap from the existence of a “Prime Mover” (a rather abstract and distant notion of God, and certainly not a God who loves us) to the knowledge of a personal God.
There is more than one “prime mover” argument, but you probably mean the ones based on Aristotle’s definition of motion. All these are based on seeing motion as an imperfect actuality, or an actuality that is essentially bound up with something non-actual (not unreal, but non-actual). The argument concludes to showing that imperfect actuality is entirely dependent on what is entirely actual purely actual, and so “prime mover” is perfectly synonymous with “pure actuality”.
But Aristotle doesn’t just coin the word that we translate as actual, he’s also clear that the fullest and most perfect sense of actuality is the immanent operation of life, and the most perfect sense of life is the activity of the highest sort of life. This is why, immediately after he argues for the existence of a prime mover in Metaphysics XII, he immediately says it must have the highest and most blessed life. Now there is dispute about the sense in which love is part of this life – certainly love so far as it implies lack of or need for some good won’t be a part of the sort of existence that lacked no actuality at all, and Aristotle may have been convinced by Plato that all love implied such a lack. But leaving this aside as a dead end, there is still a sense in which love is an immanent actuality and a perfect operation, and in this sense the “prime mover” must not love, but be subsistent and infinite love.
It’s crucial to focus on how Aristotle made key concept in “prime mover” arguments, namely the notion of actuality, for him energia or entelikia. This notion combines both existence and operation, that is, both static and dynamic perfection. For that matter, it combines the perfection we speak of in concrete and abstract terms. A being that is purely actual in Aristotle’s sense is one that at once transcends and possesses any perfection of what is only imperfectly actual. What is scattered and even contrary in things is unified and eminent in the life of what is purely actual. Aristotle did not understand all the implications of this (it was the work of a thousand years to unpack it, and there is still much to unpack) but, Aquinas saw very deeply into the implications of this notion of entelikia. In fact, when Aquinas wants to prove that God is a person, he thinks it suffices to point out that persons are the most perfect sort of actuality, and are therefore reflections of the personhood of God.
David, perhaps your curiostiy can be satisfied in the Companion to the CCC, or maybe someone has proposed an argument to get from the Prime Mover to the Personal God argument elsewhere? Maybe you could use your own reasoning, logic, and intuition and make a post to prove it.
(can you delete the previous comment and post this one?)
I do not see how to make this leap from the existence of a “Prime Mover” (a rather abstract and distant notion of God, and certainly not a God who loves us) to the knowledge of a personal God.
There is more than one “prime mover” argument, but you probably mean the ones based on Aristotle’s definition of motion. All these are based on seeing motion as an imperfect actuality, or an actuality that is essentially bound up with something non-actual (not unreal, but non-actual). The argument concludes to showing that imperfect actuality is entirely dependent on what is entirely actual or purely actual, and so “prime mover” is synonymous with “pure actuality”.
Note that Aristotle made the word that we translate as “actual” and he’s also clear that the fullest sense of actuality is life, and the fullest life is the life of the highest soul. This is why, after he argues for the existence of a prime mover in Metaphysics XII, he immediately says it must have the highest and most blessed life. Now there is dispute about the sense in which love is part of this life – certainly love so far as it implies lack of or need for some good won’t characterize a life of pure actuality, and Aristotle may have been convinced by Plato that all love implied such a lack. But leaving this aside, there is still a sense in which love is an immanent actuality and a perfect operation, and in this sense the “prime mover” must not only love, but be subsistent and infinite love.
It’s crucial to focus on the concept Aristotle made that does the work in his “prime mover” arguments, namely the notion of actuality – for him energia or entelikia and for St. Thomas actus. This notion combines both existence and operation, that is, both static and dynamic perfection. For that matter, it combines the perfection we speak of in concrete and abstract terms. A being that is purely actual in Aristotle’s sense is one that at once transcends and possesses any perfection of what is only imperfectly actual. What is scattered and even contrary in things is unified and eminent in the life of what is purely actual. Aristotle did not understand all the implications of this (it was the work of a thousand years to unpack it, and there is still much to unpack) but Aquinas saw very deeply into the implications of this notion of entelikia. In fact, when Aquinas wants to prove that God is a person, he thinks it suffices to point out that persons are the most actual being in nature, and are therefore reflections of the personhood of God.
I find the following part somewhat refutes many of the hypotheses in here which claim that we can only obtain a reflective or tertiary knowledge of God’s personhood:
“human reason is, strictly speaking, truly capable by its own natural power and light of attaining to a true and certain knowledge of the one personal God…”
Personally, I find that a rather grand claim, but I also defer to the knowledge, expertise, and spiritual maturity of the one who wrote that, indicating not that it is wrong, but somewhere my knowledge must be incomplete.
For what it’s worth, I do believe that we can achieve some degree of knowledge of God’s personhood, both inductively and deductively, but primarily inductively. It is a knowledge, but less a rational knowledge – much in the same way you know you love someone, but cannot prove it.
Incidentally, for those looking for a good logical argument – I find the same argument that proves God’s existence particuarly useful in proving his personhood as an implicit corollary.
The essence of it is the answer to the question:
Tomorrow I will choose not to obey the laws of gravity. Can’t do it? Why not?
If you work through it, you’ll see why God must exist, and why God must be a person.
OK, that took me a minute, but it is an interesting angle.
The nice thing is, that particular argument doesn’t rely on any presupposed philosophical framework. Some of the new atheists have proposed alternatives to the contingency argument, but this one is pretty hard to argue against.
Could one of the two of you give a few hints? I don’t see the point.
May I second David on this one? This sounds intriguing, but I think I am too dense to work my way through it and would greatly benefit from having it spelled out some. Thank you!
Here’s an analogy – You spend your whole life driving down a highway where all cars are going 60mph. Your car goes this fast, everyone else’s car goes this fast – as a matter of fact everyone who has ever lived has never gone beyond this speed. Scientists soon begin realizing this is an observable, repeatable principle – a “law of the highway” as you will. They begin researching the law and even find a sign posted that says “Speed Limit: 60mph”. QED. Philosophers begin to wonder where this sign came from, and postulate a God that put the sign there. They even create a contingency argument claiming that God must exist since the speed depends on the sign, which then must depend on some “lawmaker” who caused the sign to appear. Scientists don’t buy it, claiming that there is no reason to believe the sign ever had a beginning – it always existed.
But here’s the tricky part – once a conscious being realizes that it’s just a sign, and that there are no police or cameras that can recognize a breach of the speed limit and write a ticket, that conscious being can simply choose to disobey it without consequence. What’s there to stop them?
Doesn’t something have to be in place to both (a) recognize when a law is about to be broken, and (b) prevent it from being broken?
If you can’t simply choose to disobey the law of gravity, there is an order being enforced (either intrinsically or extrinsically – doesn’t matter) by not just someTHING – but someONE. This act of recognition requires the capacity for intellgience and activity – i.e. God therefore must not only exist, but he must be a person capable of recognizing violations in the order and enforcing the order.
There must be a road.
NOTE: Please delete that “There must be a road.” from the last line of the above comment. It was pasted in accidentally.
@Dan
You’re thought exercise does indeed rely on a ‘presupposed philosophical framework’. Specifically, it treats natural laws as thought they work like manmade laws — as though they are extrinsic to the things to which they apply and must be dictated/enforced by some external agent. In other words, it presupposes the thing it is meant to demonstrate (the existence of that external agent).
In general parlance, and in the natural sciences, ‘natural law’ is meant more as a metaphor.
1. Don’t get caught up in the language of the example. The actual argument occurs at a higher level of generalization than natural law. The real argument is that we observe an order which cannot be subjugated by the will of a conscious entity. What’s stopping us? It’s either something, or it’s nothing. If it’s nothing, then nothing can stop us. Therefore, it must be something.
After that, it becomes a game of definitions to label this “something”. But this “something” is unequivocally present – whether intrinsic or extrinsic or whatever-trinsic is irrelevant. It’s there, and it’s actively limiting us. This means it is also active.
2. Unlike other arguments for the existence of God, this one presupposes no framework whatsoever. It is the only argument that is actively verifiable. Don’t like my answer? Then prove me wrong. The only way to do so is to violate gravity. Go ahead – try as many times as you like.
Thank you for your explanation. I think I see your point now.
My main concern with this argument, as I understand it, is that it posits an interpretation of laws of nature which is very different from what physicists usually mean when they use the word “law”. Your argument understands the meaning of “law” to be necessarily PRESCRIPTIVE, whereas most physicists would describe laws of nature as being DESCRIPTIVE. That is, the only real assumption is that the universe follows some sort of order, and the laws of nature simply attempt to describe, to some level of accuracy, the particular form that that order takes.
With the understanding of “laws of nature” that most physicists have, the question of why we can’t “disobey” gravity doesn’t lead so naturally to an understanding of God. This understanding would suggest merely that there is a consistent tendency for matter to aggregate together, that this tendency occurs spontaneously and without any recognition or consciousness, and that we can give this tendency a name like “the Law of Gravity” for notational simplicity. We can’t choose to disobey the law of gravity because the molecules in our bodies follow this aforementioned tendency independently of our or anyone else’s consciousness. You might say that this tendency is “enforced” by Someone, or you might say that it just happens. It doesn’t seem to me that one would be led more likely to one conclusion or the other without an a priori understanding of God.
What are your thoughts about this? As both a Catholic and a physicist, I am very interested in these kinds of questions, which represent to me the intersection of these two disciplines. So I am not so interested in refuting you as exploring the topic.
Apologies. I meant to say “PROSCRIPTIVE” where I wrote “PRESCRIPTIVE”.
I think I will make it a point to make all my diction errors in all caps so they are all the more apparent after the comment posts. :)
I didn’t see your latest comment until I had already posted my previous two. So apologies if it seems like I am talking past you.
To respond to your 12:08 pm comment, my difficulty is that I don’t think it is impossible to imagine that the “something” that stops us from disobeying gravity is PASSIVELY limiting us; that is, it operates independently of our or anyone else’s consciousness, and therefore our consciousness is simply irrelevant and has no bearing on its operation whatsoever.
Not sure if we cross-posted, but I think my post immediately above yours addresses this concern. Whether it’s prescriptive or descriptive isn’t relevant – it’s that an observable order exists that we can’t violate through an act of the will. Let me clarify:
This understanding would suggest merely that there is a consistent tendency for matter to aggregate together, that this tendency occurs spontaneously and without any recognition or consciousness, and that we can give this tendency a name like “the Law of Gravity” for notational simplicity. We can’t choose to disobey the law of gravity because the molecules in our bodies follow this aforementioned tendency independently of our or anyone else’s consciousness. You might say that this tendency is “enforced” by Someone, or you might say that it just happens
The argument is a little more subtle than that. Don’t get caught up in the language of the example. Let me use your language to capture the same point: A tendency exists that occurs spontaneously and without any consciousness – the origin or cause is unknown and frankly irrelevant – it just is. Now, this tendency is consistent and observable. As a conscious entity, I can recognize this tendency. Once I recognize it, I can now conceive of an alternative to said tendency (e.g. if I observe that a force acts upon me which binds me to the earth, I will conceive of myself floating freely). As an active entity, I can choose to float by an act of the will, and must – if there is nothing preventing me from doing so.
Now, the scientist says “that’s ridiculous – you can’t just choose to float”. But the philosopher asks “What’s stopping me?”. No answer the scientist can provide can adequately answer that question – the scientist’s only cry is a non-answer of circular logic: You can’t affect the tendency of an object because it is a tendency of that object to behave that way!
Where this argument becomes even more meaningful is that it is actively testable, repeatable, and verifiable. We cannot float. Some order is imposed upon us against our will. And that order must be active, because my act of the will is active.
@Andrew – We seem to be cross-posting a lot here. :)
To respond to your 12:08 pm comment, my difficulty is that I don’t think it is impossible to imagine that the “something” that stops us from disobeying gravity is PASSIVELY limiting us; that is, it operates independently of our or anyone else’s consciousness, and therefore our consciousness is simply irrelevant and has no bearing on its operation whatsoever.
What’s the difference between an active limitation and a passive one? The question remains the same: “If I choose to do X, but cannot, what is stopping me?” There are only two answers: “Nothing” and “Something”. If it were “nothing”, then nothing is stopping us and we can do it. We therefore all agree the answer is “something”. You’re claming this “something” need not be God. But all we’re really doing at this point is a definition game. You already acknowledge the something, you’re just choosing not to label it as God. And that would be correct from the perspective of Science – as it is beyond the scope of Science to defined what this “something” is. But it is well within the realm of of philosophy and metaphysics to label it; hence why I label it “God”.
OK. No arguments with the immediately previous post — not even when I wear my “physicist” hat. (I wonder what such a hat would look like.)
However, I had thought that the original argument was that this was a proof that God exists AND He is a person. The immediate argument seems to be saying that a “something” is stopping us from floating away, and that you choose to call that “something” God. This idea is perfectly fine to me when I wear my “Catholic” hat, but it doesn’t seem to have been established yet that the “something” is any more than a mindless mechanism (which I think is what I really was getting at with my possibly questionable choice of the word “passive”). Where do we get to the idea that the mindless mechanism is really a person? What logical step am I missing?
I think the step you are missing is exploring, philosophically, how a “mindless mechanism” could bind conscious subjects, and more specifically, how it could bind multiple conscious subjects (assuming you believe more than one human subject) to the same “reality.” In what sense is THIS universe the “real” one except that it is the one in which our consciousness is?
Because a passive object by definition subjugates itself to an active one. My consciousness is active. e.g. I conceive of breaking the law of gravity, and I choose to do so. My choice is an act of the will, and therefore if the law of gravity were passive, my active choice would supersede it. This is intrinsic to the definition of passive and active. You would have to ascribe active properties to the passive entity in order to be consistent, but that, by definition, turns it into an activity. Therefore, only activity of some sort can counteract the activity of my will.
not even when I wear my “physicist” hat. (I wonder what such a hat would look like.)
I’m guessing it would exist in ten or twenty six dimensions, depending on the brand of the hat. :)
If I understand correctly, it seems like the concept being proposed – and the one I am having difficulty with – is this “primacy of consciousness” or “primacy of will” idea. It seems to be an idea that the conscious will is of such power that it cannot be opposed by something “lesser” than it, or alternately that consciousness is the only thing that can determine reality in the first place, a lot like the Participatory Anthropic Principle. My difficulty is that I see this idea as an unprovable (although plausible) assumption about reality, and could even imagine cynically suspecting that it is a result of an unwarranted bias towards consciousness (i.e., we are conscious beings, so we naturally give prime status to consciousness).
It seems to me that the people least convinced by this would be strong materialists, who would posit almost the opposite: that there is a real, external, and objective universe of real things which exist whether anyone is conscious of them or not, and the thing that we call “consciousness” is just one of those real things in the universe and consists of nothing more than a series of electrical and chemical processes – anything more than that is just illusory. (I grant you that it doesn’t SEEM like this is the case, but what seems to be the case doesn’t constitute a proof.) Schrodinger’s cat would be definitely alive or definitely dead and NOT in a superposition of states. By this thinking, there is nothing about an act of will (which is just an electrical function of the brain) which would inherently be any more or less potent than any other process going on in the universe. I don’t subscribe to this view myself, but I don’t see any observation about the universe that would convincingly refute it, either.
To me, the materialist view is also an assumption and biased, but it is no more or less unprovable than the “consciousness is primary” assumption. I can’t seem to get past the idea that the primacy of consciousness is something that one would come to AFTER believing in God, not before.
As a postscript, I have to say I would definitely shell out the extra bucks for the twenty-six dimensional hat. :)
Except that I’m sure it would be a real b*tch to clean. :)
This again isn’t a question of primacy or hierarchy. It’s not that the will has some sort of magical powers – the point is that said order must be actively enforced from moment to moment.
OK, Dan. let’s say I grant you the idea of active enforcement for the sake of argument. (I don’t have to, after all — I could take an instrumentalist position, popularly known as “shut up and calculate”, where I take the position that the mechanism behind the laws of nature is untestable, unknowable, and therefore not worth considering. I actually have an agnostic co-worker with whom I have theological discussions with and who frequently takes that position. I won’t do it because it would end the discussion completely, and that is no fun. :) )
I’m still stuck on why a mindless but active mechanism (e.g. the “something” which is hte essence of gravity) couldn’t be responsible for limiting my active, mindful will. I had brought up the “primacy of will” concept because I thought that was the way to deny the aforementioned possibility, but if you tell me that is not the case then I am stuck again.
“that consciousness is the only thing that can determine reality in the first place, a lot like the Participatory Anthropic Principle. My difficulty is that I see this idea as an unprovable (although plausible) assumption about reality, and could even imagine cynically suspecting that it is a result of an unwarranted bias towards consciousness (i.e., we are conscious beings, so we naturally give prime status to consciousness).”
It’s even more fundamental than that: we are conscious beings, we are consciousnesses, our knowledge IS conscious-knowledge…so there is simply NO WAY to step “outside” ourselves and start anywhere other than subjectivity itself. The strict materialist is extremely naive, as he starts with the a priori assumption that the universe is not just his own dream (ie, solipsism). But where is he getting this assumption from? Truly, we can’t speak of conciousness “biasing” us against other forms of reality, as we ARE consciousnesses and our only knowledge is conscious. We can only possibly look at the world from “inside” subjectivity. It is simply impossible to step outside it and look at it “objectively.”
@Andrew – because passive subjugates itself to active. Since I am capable of acting, that which is passive is subjugated to my action. That is intrinsic to the definition of passive and active.
That only leaves one other option – that the enforcement principle is an active one. If I understand you correctly, even if you were to concede that it were active, you don’t see why said prinicple needs to be intelligent (i.e. it doesn’t follow that God need be a person). Is that correct?
Assuming I’ve got your question right, the answer is that said activity exists in response to the freedom of us as conscious subjects to perform an action at any moment in time. As a physical process, you can calculate the probability I will do X (e.g. my atoms quantum tunneling their way to a beach in hawaii). However, when consciousness is in play, there does not exist a probability that I will choose X, as I have the freedom to choose it, or to not choose it, at every moment in time. Something other than a physical process involving probability must be in effect “monitoring” my consciousness for these choices, and effecting a physical response (or non-response). This requires intelligence.
@ A Sinner: I don’t know if I find this argument as self-evident as you do. It appears to me that the argument takes an epistemological statement (reality can only be perceived through consciousness) and raises it to the level of an ontological statement (reality can only exist through consciousness). The epistemological statement is what you are asserting; the ontological statement seems to be what you need to decide that a mutually shared reality requires a higher consciousness, i.e. God. I think you are saying that the equivalence is valid because there is no way for us to talk about reality outside of the perception of it within our consciousness, but I am not so sure of that. To me, this equating of the epistemological and the ontological is a logical step that flies in the face of the commonsense notion (i.e. the notion that most people probably have who don’t study philosophy and don’t think much about these things) that there is an assumed objective external reality, which is perhaps not ontologically definable, but whose existence is verified by the fact that it is mutually shared. That just seems to be a simpler, less abstract, and more commonsense approach if you don’t already come into the argument believing in God.
@ Dan: I think I am too dense to get what you are saying here. Your last comment seems to be asserting that free will is different from mindless physical processes because it is inherently non-predictable. I’m still not following why this means our will cannot be restrained by said mindless process. It seems to me that a perfectly reasonable alternate interprestation is that our conscious will has some small interaction with the physical world, i.e. it is connected by nerve pathways to our bodies and limbs, which are physical and can have some effects in the real world, but these connections are constrained by the same mindless processes that affect everything else in reality. Thus, I may will that I raise my hand over my head, and that will itself is unconstrained, but the translation of that will into action in the physical world is constrained by the physical limits of my physiology to perform that translation. I could, for example, have a motor neuron problem (i.e. paralysis) which prevents my hand from moving even though nothing stops me from willing it to be so. I may will myself to overcome gravity, and that will is unconstrained, but there is nothing in the set of available mindless physical mechanisms which allow my physical body to translate that will into an accomodating action. But I suspect I am not getting your point.
I think this discussion is still interesting, although I don’t know if anyone else is paying attention anymore; however, we may have to decide at some point whether we are getting anywhere with this or just going in circles. It is beginning to be reminiscent of the beginning of Godel, Esher, Bach where the tortoise and Achilles are having an argument and Achilles is frustrated because the tortoise won’t accept the even most basic logical propositions that Achilles finds to be self evident. If you are finding that I am being too tortoise for you, please let me know.
Though I have not posted I have been following this discussion with great interest. Let me say that Andrew has done an excellent job of presenting the objections I have intuited but have not been able to articulate.
“To me, this equating of the epistemological and the ontological is a logical step that flies in the face of the commonsense notion (i.e. the notion that most people probably have who don’t study philosophy and don’t think much about these things) that there is an assumed objective external reality, which is perhaps not ontologically definable, but whose existence is verified by the fact that it is mutually shared. That just seems to be a simpler, less abstract, and more commonsense approach if you don’t already come into the argument believing in God.”
People dream don’t they? That alone should be enough to raise the spectre of Solipsism. Philosophy doesn’t ultimately arise from elitist abstractions, it arises from common questions that occur to many people at some point in their lives, such as: How do I know I’m not dreaming right now? How do I know other people are really conscious and not just figments of my own “dream”? How do I know I’m not a “brain in a vat” or in The Matrix?
You say “verified by the fact that it is mutually shared” and that is EXACTLY my point. Shared by whom?? By other consciousnesses, presumably! The “objective external reality” is constructed, by the very nature of our idea of it, as something verified by being “coordinated” across or between different consciousnesses. The thing that makes us assume it is not just our own solipsistic dream is that we believe we are not alone, we believe that other people are conscious and share this same waking reality.
Yet, other people could all just be characters in a “dream.” Furthermore, there are some parts of reality that are not being perceived by anyone at a given time, there is no one there to “verify” this reality by sharing it unless we posit the Idea of an Over-consciousness.
In other words, the “common sense” escape from solipsism does not deny what I’m saying, but further demonstrates it.
When we speak of an independent external objective reality, we mean something along the lines of this: yes, when I leave the room it’s still there, because even though I’m not currently perceiving it, someone else still is or could be, a [hypothetical] someone else who, presumably, could also at some point perceive the same thing as me. The room may not be “real to me” in an immediate way when I’m not in it, but it [potentially] is to other people, and since they and I may “cross paths” someday and become objects of each others consciousness and share the SAME reality, my own notion of reality expands beyond my own immediate perception, because other people form a “link” between what I can immediately perceive, and what they have perceived outside of me.
However, we know there are places (and times!) where there were no human observers. How can these be brought into the conceptual construct of “reality” without positing at least the hypothetical of someone observing them?
The minute we imagine something as “real” outside our immediate experience…we are by nature imagining OURSELVES being conscious of it!!! We may not be there in actuality, but the very conceiving of it as real takes the form of conceiving of it as observed by us in some manner.
“Reality” may not immediately intuitively imply that something is, in fact, observed. But the very nature of the concept implies that the “real” thing is observABLE, that a “real” thing is that which COULD be consciously experienced (at least in its effects) IF someone WERE there to experience it. To imagine something is “real” is to imagine experiencing it or its effects.
Yet, when imagining, say, the Triassic Period as being observable (even if not actually observed by us or anyone human being), this in itself contains the “idea of” an observer. The “idea of,” at least. Saying something is “observable” contains the notion of it being observed, even if only “the notion of” as opposed to asserting actual observation.
However, God IS the Idea of God, God IS the Notion of God. To me, saying “the concept of God exists” and “God exists” are, I think, equivalent.
Here’s why: if “the notion of” an observer of reality is real, and is in fact implicit to the structure of consciousness itself (and it is; reality is conceived of as the observable, which contains the notion of an observer)…this would, in itself, not necessarily imply there actually is an observer (ie, it could be the hypothetical alone which is structural to the definition; the “observable” implies potential observation, not necessarily actual observation).
Except. On further consideration, we realize that in this case we cannot treat of “reality” itself as if it is just another “thing” IN reality, and thus neither the “hypothetical” observer. As the “notion of” the observer comes PRIOR to the “is” in question, because the “is” is being defined with reference to the hypothetical observer in the first place! So it doesn’t even make sense to speak of the hypothetical observer as part of the being/non-being duality, because this observer is being posited as logically PRIOR to reality itself, reality’s definition is dependent on this “hypothetical” observer, who is thus PRIOR to “reality.” And so this hypothetical observer IS necessarily conceived of (when the implications of consciousness itself are “dissected” in this manner) the same thing as “the concept OF the hypothetical observer” (in other words, its essence is its existence),
@Andrew – There are two conversation threads going on right now – A Sinner’s metaphyiscal one and mine. To help streamline the discussion, I’ll start a new section at the bottom in response to you.
@ A Sinner: I’m still under the impression that your ontological definition of reality is something that I only accept as a operational feature.
Here’s how I see the argument shaping up so far: You are asserting that reality can only be apprehended by our consciousness, and that the reason we know it is reality is that it is mutually shared amongst multiple consciousnesses. (The notion that this mutual sharing is actually an illusion — the solipsism argument — is something that neither of us is arguing, so we don’t pursue that avenue at all.)
Where it seems that we differ is that you now take the idea “what multiple consciousnesses mutually perceive” and make that the actual definition of reality, whereas I am only accepting that idea as an operational definition, or feature, or reality.
Here is an analogy which I hope illustrates the distinction I am trying to make. In most treatments of statistical mechanics, temperature is given a specific and precise definition (it is defined as the derivative of energy with respect to the number of quantum states, but fortunately for our purposes, the details of the definition are not important, just the fact that there is one). This is what I am calling the “actual” definition of temperature — the way we choose to define it within our logical system of propositions. However, we don’t perceive temperature in a way that is directly anything like the actual definition. Our perception of temperature is based on other statements that you can make about temperature, for example “temperature is the property of a system that determines how heat will transfer between it and other systems.” One could take this latter statement to be an “operational” definition of temperature, i.e. it is the only way that we can perceive and measure temperature for any day-to-day purpose, even though it is not the “actual” one.
I could take the operational definition and declare it to be the actual one instead, and this will serve me for most purposes. However, I will be led into some strange conclusions if I insist on doing that. For example, if I used the above operational definition of temperature as my actual one, I would be forced to conclude that the universe as a whole could not have a temperature, since temperature only has meaning with reference to heat transfer to another system. Since there is nothing outside the universe to transfer heat to, I would have to come to the conclusion that temperature has no meaning for the universe as a whole. However, we know that, according to the actual definition, temperature is really based on energy and quantum states, both of which the universe presumably has, and so by this definition the universe does have a temperature (even though we can’t measure it). So our choice of which to make the actual definition itself leads us to differing conclusions.
So, likewise in our case, I agree with you that consciousness is the only way to perceive and understand reality, and that even the concepts of perception and understanding can only come about with respect to consciousness. However, I choose not to accept that statement as an actual definition of reality. I declare it to be an operational definition instead: a true statement about the nature of reality and consciousness to be sure, but more like a side feature of reality and not an integral part of its actual definition.
Since I am declaring “reality is perceived only through consciousness” to be the way reality is FOR PRACTICAL PURPOSES, not the way it MUST BE, I am not led to the same logical conclusion that you are about the necessity of God’s existence. I don’t need to posit a universal Observer because I am not insisting that reality must be observed in all cases by definition, merely that reality IS observed in all cases that we can conceive of.
So the next sensible question is, what is the actual definition of reality?
I would declare that within the logical system I have put forward, that it doesn’t have one! Every logical system has entities in it which are assumed and not defined. After all, you need something within the system from which to define other things. My high school geometry textbook (if I may be permitted to remember anything that far back!) declares the existence of points to be assumed and not defined. In real analysis, we assume the existence of integers and define real numbers from them. In number theory, we don’t even assume integers, but derive them from sets, which are assumed. So I can validly declare reality to be one of the things I am assuming which is not defined. Granted, my motivation for thinking this assumption might be valid is the fact that reality is mutually shared amongst consciousnesses, but that is not the same as requiring that observation about consciousness to be part of the definition. To return to my number theory analogy above, I may be motivated to assume the existence of sets because I want to be able to generate integers from them, but that doesn’t mean that I now require sets to be defined with respect to integers. So I am happy to declare reality to exist axiomatically without definition.
I suspect that you will find this treatment of reality unsatisfying. After all, I am rejecting what seems to be a perfectly good definition of reality, calling it an operational feature, and replacing it with nothing at all! I have included the analogies of thermodynamics and number theory to suggest that methodologically what I am doing is not that different from established logical systems. I accept that my argument might be aesthetically displeasing, but I hope that it is methodologically valid.
I have made this logical choice because I think it follows more closely what I would call a commonsense notion of reality. When a four-year old leaves a crayon on the table and finds it later, she thinks, “The crayon was here all this time,” not “Someone else must have thought about the crayon being here during the time that I forgot about it.” (I know that’s an oversimplification, but I can’t even begin to formulate your idea properly in four-year old speak.) So I build my logical system to jive with this commonsense notion. Of course, what I call “commonsense” is just my personal bias, but it is not inherently more or less valid than anyone else’s bias. Within my biased system, the notion that reality was thought into existence is a corollary of God’s existence, not the other way around.
At the risk of sounding like a Greek chorus, I find Andrew’s explanations very reasonable and consonant with my own thinking. Just because I am aware of reality by conscious observation does not logically mandate that I postulate a universal observer for it to exist.
“I’m still under the impression that your ontological definition of reality is something that I only accept as a operational feature.”
Then you misunderstand my argument. It’s not an ontological one, it’s an epistemological one.
“You are asserting that reality can only be apprehended by our consciousness, and that the reason we know it is reality is that it is mutually shared amongst multiple consciousnesses.”
No. There is reality that is only shared by ours. Our own dreams are real (AS dreams) for example. What do we mean when we say “real”? We mean a (potential) object of consciousness. This is our primitive notion of the real; to deny our own existence is simply unintelligible, because we have to exist to deny our existence. We can imagine a person who does not actually exist denying his existence, but in order to do so we must imagine him existing!
“make that the actual definition of reality, whereas I am only accepting that idea as an operational definition, or feature, or reality.”
I don’t even know how to speak of “the actual definition of reality” outside our subjectivity. “Definition” is a function of a subject, a person. “Reality” is a construct, or at least it is a construct-to-us. In the order of our knowledge, something has to “exist-to-us” before we can abstract to the idea of it existing outside of us.
“So, likewise in our case, I agree with you that consciousness is the only way to perceive and understand reality, and that even the concepts of perception and understanding can only come about with respect to consciousness. However, I choose not to accept that statement as an actual definition of reality. I declare it to be an operational definition instead: a true statement about the nature of reality and consciousness to be sure, but more like a side feature of reality and not an integral part of its actual definition.”
But this is assuming “reality” has an “actual definition” outside consciousness. But I think that’s absurd. “Definition” is a function of subjects. “Reality” is not like “temperature” because temperature is a phenomenon IN reality. Your analogy doesn’t work because you’re analogizing reality-itself to real-things. But that is manifestly a category error. Reality isn’t a “real thing” anymore than blue is a blue thing.
“I don’t need to posit a universal Observer because I am not insisting that reality must be observed in all cases by definition, merely that reality IS observed in all cases that we can conceive of.”
But in what sense is something “real” outside the idea of it being observed? When we say something is “real” we are necessarily conceiving of it! I can’t imagine something “being” without imagining that something! Speaking of things “outside” or “beyond” that doesn’t even seem cognitively meaningful to me. If things are utterly beyond the realm of knowledge…they aren’t “things.”
“So I can validly declare reality to be one of the things I am assuming which is not defined.”
I don’t know what you mean by “validly.” To me, we already have a “axiom” we can start from which is self-evident: namely, our own consciousness. Starting from anything other than this doesn’t seem to satisfy Occam’s Razor. The axiom we should start from is our own consciousness, because our own consciousness is self-evident, by definition. We cannot intelligibly deny our own subjective experience, so our subjective experience must be the “starting place” from which we abstract the notion of Existence in general. To start by positing a concept separate from that seems to me just epistemologically incoherent.
“When a four-year old leaves a crayon on the table and finds it later, she thinks, ‘The crayon was here all this time,’ not ‘Someone else must have thought about the crayon being here during the time that I forgot about it.’”
Ah, but this isn’t quite true. A “four year old” may think this way, but a four month old does not. Object Permanence is a truth abstracted by the brain only through a long developmental process of experimentation. Infants, as far as we can tell, basically are solipsistic, and constructing a non-solipsistic syntax for the world is an arduous developmental process. They don’t do it through philosophizing (which is, in some sense, ‘working backwards’), but nevertheless.
“it is not inherently more or less valid than anyone else’s bias.”
I think it is less valid than a system built on the self-evidence of our own existence. You are assuming “common sense” in a way that is not self-evident. Whereas “I think therefore I am” is self-evident.
What I mean by “validly” is merely that it is internally consistent and conforms to our observational expectations. In this case, I am asserting an independent external objective reality, i.e. there is a universe of real things which really exist even if no one is thinking about them. This universe exhibits all the phenomenon that we expect to see: it is consistent, there is object permanence, etc. just like your universe with an ultimate Observer. There is no observation in the physical universe that you can make that would distingish my universe from your universe. That is all I mean by “valid”.
I agree I have posited additional assumptions for my system — they were actually necessary to arrive at a non-”God mandated” universe — but deciding whether that is or is not a good thing to do is really an aesthetic consideration (and I consider Occam’s Razor to be an appeal to an aesthetic consideration). I don’t blame you at all for finding the argument unsatisfying, but if an argument is “valid” in the sense in the previous paragraph, anything else said about it is largely a matter of opinion about what constitutes good methodology, and a matter of bias as to what end conclusion one is inclined to go to.
Mind you, I actually think the argument you have presented is a very good one, and thought-provoking. As a Catholic, I would have to say that the conclusion you come to (i.e. God exists and He is a person) is indeed the correct one. The original question proposed by David (if I can remember that far back!) was to what extent this conclusion could be arrived at by reason alone. You would strongly answer that question in the affirmative, but there are people like me and David who are considerably less sure about that than you are. I think the discussion we have had leads me to the thought that strong arguments to motivate God’s existence can be made, but that none of them are completely unassailable (which stands to reason, because I think no argument is truly unassailable to a sufficiently imaginative assailant. The tortoise in Godel Escher Bach once more comes to mind).
I personally have my own arguments for believing in God’s existence, but none of them are based on epistemology or the nature of reality, just because I personally find that a very spiritually dry area to go searching for God. My own arguments are likewise assailable, and alternate theories could be constructed, etc. but in the end none of that matters, because they make enough sense to me to lead me to God. It appears that your arguments work for you, and I have no desire or interest in trying to diminish that.
“I am asserting an independent external objective reality, i.e. there is a universe of real things which really exist even if no one is thinking about them.”
This, however, is not self-evident in the manner “I think therefore I am” is.
“This universe exhibits all the phenomenon that we expect to see: it is consistent, there is object permanence, etc.”
Ah, but there’s your problem: for this universe to exhibit all the phenomenon we expect to see…we have to see it!
Who knows if it’s meeting our expectations when we don’t see it. Maybe “behind our backs” the universe dissolves into funky colors only to jump back into place as soon as we look. There’s no way to know.
We CAN’T think about “something no one is thinking about” because to do so…we have to think about it!! By definition.
“There is no observation in the physical universe that you can make that would distingish my universe from your universe.”
Yes there is, and that is that I am coming from the perspective (which is self-evidently real) of my own consciousness. I’m not starting from a universe. I’m starting from the “architecture” of my own consciousness. And it’s quite clear that in the architecture of human consciousness, reality and knowledge are conceptually “bootstrapped.” My universe is distinguished from “Yours” because I’m in mine!
“‘I am asserting an independent external objective reality, i.e. there is a universe of real things which really exist even if no one is thinking about them.’
This, however, is not self-evident in the manner ‘I think therefore I am’ is.”
“Self-evident” is a matter of opinion. I think I would agree with you that consciousness is even more self-evident than external reality. But I don’t insist that something be at the very highest level of self-evidence before I am allowed to postulate it. In mathematics, we postulate points, which have all kinds of unusual properties (e.g. zero size) and are hardly self-evident, but they are necessary to build any kind of logical system in geometry.
I could postulate all kinds of ridiculous things like pink unicorns and Flying Spaghetti Monsters, although I would say that it is in bad form to postulate something that one doesn’t personally think is reasonably plausible. I happen to think — based on the experience of mutually shared reality across multiple consciousnesses — that objective external reality is plausible enough to be worth postulating. You may disagree, of course, but then the debate devolves into what we each personally think is worthy to be included in an argument.
“Who knows if it’s meeting our expectations when we don’t see it. Maybe ‘behind our backs’ the universe dissolves into funky colors only to jump back into place as soon as we look. There’s no way to know.”
Well, of course there’s no way to know. That’s why I have to postulate it in the first place. I happen to prefer my postulate of objective reality over the postulate that the universe dissolves when no one is looking, because it is simpler, but that is just a matter of opinion. By the definition of “valid” that I gave in my previous comment, the dissolving universe postulate is valid too, and therefore I accept it as a possibility also. I just don’t think so because it doesn’t seem plausible enough to me.
“We CAN’T think about ‘something no one is thinking about’ because to do so…we have to think about it!! By definition.”
True, but a corollary of my external reality postulate is that things do actually exist when no one is thinking about them. Nobody was thinking about the dwarf planet Sedna on November 13, 2003, the day before it was discovered. But according to the universe I postulated, Sedna still actually existed that day on its own.
“‘There is no observation in the physical universe that you can make that would distingish my universe from your universe.’
Yes there is, and that is that I am coming from the perspective (which is self-evidently real) of my own consciousness. I’m not starting from a universe. I’m starting from the ‘architecture’ of my own consciousness. And it’s quite clear that in the architecture of human consciousness, reality and knowledge are conceptually “bootstrapped.” My universe is distinguished from ‘Yours’ because I’m in mine!”
I’m in mine, too. According to my postulate, there is an objective external reality within which my consciousness participates. What I mean by my statement above is, I don’t think there is any physical scientific experiment you can perform that will prove that there is no objective external reality. That is the only standard of “validity” that I am using to judge a theory, and anything else is a matter of aesthetics. The universe I describe fits all the phenomenon, as it were, just like yours does.
If I understand what you’re talking about (and I’m not sure I do), this seems to be what I meant when I said the only other way to define Reality coherently is pure solipsism, but that solipsism doesn’t seem to “work” because our consciousness seems to receive reality rather than make reality, we can’t make something not exist just by choosing to deny it or ignore it (though, in that sense, it might not exist “for us.”) But for a coherent notion of reality, there must be some Observer who defines reality “objectively” for “everyone else” too.
Very close. See my analogy above. I don’t think it necessarily has to be “for everyone else too” for the proposition to be true. Even if it was just for the observer, the established boundaries of consciousness prove the existence of an extrinsic Observer with the authority to bind your consciousness to a particular order. Otherwise, you could just choose something else and there would be nothing to stop you.
Even if we subscribe to the idea that there must be a fixed, objective reality that encloses (or forecloses) are existence, what about this argument goes to show that this reality must take the form of an Observer?
Because, hazemyth, I no of no other way to define “reality” or “existence” or “being” without reference to consciousness.
Mathematically, for example, quantum physics knows that there are many possibilities. And yet, the wave function always collapses (in a non-deterministic manner) on ONE reality. There are two “solutions” to this among physicists, but they are philosophical and not natural science, really.
The first is the Copenhagen interpretation which basically says “consciousness causes collapse.” The alternative that “collapses” into reality (among several alternatives) can only be defined as that which, post facto, is available to our consciousness.
The “many worlds” interpretation posits that they are all “equally” “real” and that every time the cosmos reaches such a “choice” the universe branches into more and more parallel universes. The problem with this interpretation is that it doesn’t explain, at all, why our consciousness is in THIS “reality” and not any of the “parallel” realities which affect us only as mathematical abstractions. Most people would say that “parallel” universes like this are not meaningfully “real” in the same sense as the universe that our consciousness is actually IN.
Of course, you could say, “there may be consciousnesses in that reality too.” Okay, but relative to what can they be said to “exist”?? What is the “standard” for “existence” or “being” here? For that category to be meaningfully applied to both, the category would have to exist somehow “across universes.” But that implies that there is, in fact, an basic Idea in any reality that can be called “real.” And just like what is “real for us” can only possibly be determined what a potential object of our consciousness, what is real, period, must be defined relative to some ultimate Observer, outside of whose knowing and loving the concept of “being” is meaningless.
I’m not clear that quantum mechanics leads to the necessity of consciousness that you suggest.
I would say that “consciousness causes collapse” is a very significant extension of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. That is the version of the interpretation put forward by John von Neumann and Eugene Wigner, but it is hardly the only way to see it. My understanding of the Copenhagen interpretation is that MEASUREMENT causes collapse, not consciousness. It is perfectly consistent with the Copenhagen interpretation, for example, to say that some machine, a simple laboratory detector for example, might measure some property of a particle and collapse its waveform, even though the computer connected to the detector has no consciousness to speak of. This is what is referred to as an “objective collapse theory.”
I would say that the “ultimate Observer” interpretation would be the natural one for someone who already believed in God – as a Catholic, it is certainly my interpretation. However, I don’t see that it follows as a necessary logical conclusion from quantum mechanics.
But Andrew, some observer needs to READ the measuring instrument or computer, or else it too is inside a “black box” (like the cat) of possibly being “either way.” This principle can be applied to infinite regress. It’s only when it terminates in [our] consciousness that we can say that one option is surely “real” instead of merely “possible” among all the alternatives. There is no other way to define “real” otherwise. The only way to say which of the alternate histories is “real”…is by saying the real one is the one our consciousness exists in. That is the only coherent definition of “real” that distinguishes it from the merely “possible.”
Really, it’s the old question, “If a tree falls in the woods, and no one is around, does it make a sound?” This is, basically, the fundamental “thought experiment” when it comes to defining reality and existence (and seeing how God is structural to them).
There are only two possible answers to this question that actually involve coherent definitions of the real:
1) “No” (and, more specifically, “No, and in fact it makes no sound if I MYSELF don’t hear it.”)
or
2) “Yes, because God ‘hears’ it.”
It’s the same basic question as whether the world still exists when I go to sleep (or before I was born, or after I die), and whether the room still exists when we all leave and close the door.
And the answer is either solipsism, or there is some Over-Observer whose consciousness defines reality for everyone.
Solipsism does not seem to “work” because, besides being very lonely (it would mean all other people we like to think of as conscious like ourselves, are really just figments in our “dream”) it also doesn’t explain why THIS reality.
Which is to say, positing OUR consciousness as the Subject with reference to which “reality” (compared to all the “parallel alternatives” of possibility) is defined…works in terms of the “what” of reality, but it doesn’t tell us WHY; I can intelligibly define the Real as that which occurs to my consciousness, but since I don’t actively choose the “content”…it still seems to beg for some outside explanation or force to determine the why.
God, on the other hand, as both the supreme Knower and Chooser (knowledge and freedom being “two sides of the same coin” of consciousness/personhood/subjectivity) explains both what “reality” is in an intelligible manner with reference to His Knowledge, and also explains why with reference to His choosing.
I understand and agree with the idea of God thinking everything into being. My dispute is whether this is a necessary conclusion of quantum mechanics particularly.
Quantum mechanics does state that a wavefunction will collapse as a result of a measurement, but is mum as to what constitutes a measurement. The idea that consciousness be the only thing that measures is the von Neumann interpretation, which is only one of a multitude of interpretations of quantum mechanics:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpretations_of_quantum_mechanics
Objective collapse theory, for example, would state definitively that the wavefunction collapses the moment it is read by my aforementioned mindless measuring device, and that it is collapsed long before any conscious mind gets to it. By this thinking, quantum mechanics poses no threat to the idea of an objective external reality independent of consciousness, and so the tree in the forest can easily make a sound that no one hears.
It is possible to construct all kinds of weird thought experiment paradoxes that occur when you hold too strongly to the von Neumann interpretation (or any other interpretation of quantum mechanics, for that matter). My own personal feeling is that quantum mechanics is too ambiguous to use as a foundation for any firm ontological theory, but that is just my own opinion.
I’m not using quantum mechanics as the BASIS, it’s just one interesting demonstrative example of the principle that “reality” can only be defined relative to consciousness.
Physicists have gone beyond the realm of science when it comes to these different “interpretations” of quantum mechanics. Because the Schroedinger’s Cat question basically boils down to “How is ‘reality’ distinct from ‘possibility’ ?” this is metaphysical/philosophical territory they have strayed into.
An interpretation that says “any measurement” (but not necessarily conscious) defines the “reality” of which alternative the wave function collapses in…is equivalent to saying “What happens is what happens.” Because any “measurement” could be anything. Heck, the very fact of the cat dying could be taken as a “measurement” of the particle having decayed.
However, defining which alternative is “real” as opposed to “possible” as simply “whichever actually happens”…is unintelligible. The only philosophically coherent way to define which universe/history is the “real” one is to say it is the one our consciousness exists in. It is only with reference to consciousness that we can define the real vs. the merely possible (and certainly vs. the totally inconceivable).
Also, the ontological looks too much like a category mistake to be a good proof for God’s existence (at least to me, though people much smarter than I can’t seem to make up their mind as to whether it actually is a category mistake), but, as an articulation of what God must be and what God’s relationship with creation must entail, it is unsurpassed.
Interesting discussion. I find myself agreeing with those who say that while natural reason may be enough to arrive at a concept of God as “prime mover”, it takes a movement from God, i.e. revelation, to get to a concept of God as being personally interested in us.
It seems to me that the first really personal relationship with God discussed in the Old Testament was the story of Abraham. It is a mysterious account, we aren’t told if God spoke to him in dreams, or exactly how Abraham “heard” God.
As people have said, that’s not what “personal” means in this context. A “person” is simply a conscious/free (two sides of the same coin ultimately) subject.
There is another distinctly different argument for the existence of God found in the first part of the second part questions 1-5 of the Summa Theologica. It can be summarized as follows:
1. Human beings seek lasting happiness and complete fulfillment that cannot be attained through any finite or created thing.
2. Only something boundless, eternal, and uncreated could satisfy the deepest longings of the human soul.
3. God is by definition the uncreated good and the only Being capable of being man’s ultimate end.
4. A creature would not exist with a potency that can only be fulfilled by God if God did not exist.
5. Therefore, God exists.
The proof of this argument is that anyone who finds God on a personal level finds that which fulfills in a way that no finite created thing can. Only then is the heart at rest as St. Augustine most famously said.
I want to thank everyone for the many contributions to this thread. The argument expanded to include a discussion of proofs of whether God exists, which also included a discussion of whether these proofs yield a “personal” God. (And I am grateful for the careful distinctions made about the word personal.)
To summarize my final thoughts: I find the classical arguments about the existence of God interesting, but not logically compelling. God exists, but my knowing this is not a consequence of these arguments; rather, they illuminate this knowledge without providing a clear road for someone without this knowledge to follow. At there best, I find them to be good evidence that belief in God is not irrational but fully consistent with human reason.
I am not convinced in any way by the arguments sketched here (whether from quantum physics or various metaphysical arguments about reality) that lead from the existence of God as a “prime mover” (using this term loosely) to God as a personal God. I am not saying this is impossible, but the arguments don’t follow.
I think Kyle raises an interesting question about defining dogmatically what natural reason can accomplish; in reading these passages I am going to focus on the capability. In rereading the quote from Pius XII it really only asserts that we can come to “true and certain knowledge” of the personal God. It does not say that this knowledge is complete or even that this knowledge shows us that God is a person. (I will concede it is harder to force this reading onto CCC paragraph 35. I need to ponder this some more.)
Finally, this discussion convinces me that the authors of the Catechism (perhaps unintentionally) left a large logical lacuna in their argument, and that paragraph 35 should have been preceded by some discussion about the God being a person.
“I am not convinced in any way by the arguments sketched here (whether from quantum physics or various metaphysical arguments about reality) that lead from the existence of God as a ‘prime mover’ (using this term loosely) to God as a personal God. I am not saying this is impossible, but the arguments don’t follow.”
Define reality or existence for me (as opposed to mere possibility or conceivability) in a non-tautological manner WITHOUT reference to consciousness, then.
How about the argument that one cannot give what one does not have? Since we are created as persons, God must have personhood to give to us.
Before I would give any credence to this argument, I would want to see the meaning of “give” and “have” spelled out more carefully. The rhino virus has “given” me a cold today, but it does not make sense to say that it itself “has” a cold.
It seems your example supports the point. What you call “a cold” is, of course, the virus. The rhino virus gave what it had – itself.
As Robin Williams said in one of his classic early routines: “Reality: what a concept!”
Reality simply is, and I am not sure how to go about defining it. But my inability to do so does not preclude me from stating my opinion that your arguments do not convince me. A posteriori, I believe that God does indeed observe all things, but I am not convinced that this follows by logical necessity from the existence of reality.
It’s not a hard question or a trick question, David. It’s a simple question.
Given that we can imagine alternate histories, alternate possibilities, alternate “realities”…how do you know that THIS one is the “real” one? (In fact, what I’m asking is what even allows us to refer to this one as “this” one?) By what standard do you distinguish the real from the possible? The answer is not hard at all.
I, at least, know that “this” reality is “the real” reality…because I’m in it!
If you disagree with this idea, I’d like to know how. To me it is not merely convincing, it is self-evident.
I’ll take a stab at this. How do I know that the reality I experience is the “real” reality? I don’t. I assume it is because it is the only reality I experience and of which I am conscious. Both my experience and my consciousness are rather limited and scope and extension, though, so while I think it’s safe to assume that they disclose a reality, it does not thereby follow from this disclosure that this reality in which I find myself is the reality or the only reality.
I also take the view that what I call reality is in a way a product of consciousness and signification, which, if correct, means that my reality is not entirely the same as the reality, if there is such a thing as the reality.
“How do I know that the reality I experience is the ‘real’ reality? I don’t. I assume it is because it is the only reality I experience and of which I am conscious.”
I never meant to say anything about “the” real reality, I just asked what lets you say that the reality you experience is “real” (even if only AS a subjective experience)…and the answer is that this is simply axiomatic, “I think therefore I am” or something like that. There is no more “complex” definition than, “My experiences, by the very fact of being subjective experiences, are by definition ‘real’ because that’s how real is defined.”
Your own subjectivity, and the way “being” works as a “structural” feature of that consciousness, makes it so that saying your own consciousness does not exist…is simply unintelligible nonsense; you’d have to exist to deny your own existence.
This, however, establishes from the very start that Being and consciousness are intrinsically linked in the very “syntax” of human consciousness and subjectivity. I’m no Cartesian, but his fundamental axiom does capture nicely the fact that “thinking” (ie, conciousness) and existence are bootstrapped conceptually in human experience, that an “I” (of some sort) and “Am” cannot be separated, they are two sides of the same coin.
Some might say, “Oh, sure, but this isn’t an objective reality, it’s just a necessity of how the ‘programming language’ of our brains work,” in other words, that it’s just a verbal game.
What this fails to see, though, is that we can ONLY start from “within” the perspective of our own subjectivity. Acting as if we can meta-critique the very syntax and internal logic of conscious experience itself, as if we can stand “outside” it in order to do so…is naive to the max, as we will, obviously, still be “within” it at that point.
“Both my experience and my consciousness are rather limited and scope and extension, though, so while I think it’s safe to assume that they disclose a reality, it does not thereby follow from this disclosure that this reality in which I find myself is the reality or the only reality.”
No, of course not. But it does mean, by definition, that your experiences are “real” at least AS experiences. However, what this notion does is make reality and subjectivity two sides of the same coin in human consciousness; our Idea of “reality” starts with the self-evidence of existence due to conscious experience. Applying the term “reality” to other things thus must have some connection to this definition somehow, by some analogy, in order to be meaningfully the same concept.
“I also take the view that what I call reality is in a way a product of consciousness and signification, which, if correct, means that my reality is not entirely the same as the reality, if there is such a thing as the reality.”
Well, I’d say it means that IF there is reality beyond what you are immediately conscious of (the denial of which is Solipsism; which I consider the other major “plausible” alternative to Theism)…then your reality, your conscious experiences, must be PART of it, a SUBSET of it. They are not “different” from it, because the very notion of reality as “that which exists” would INCLUDE your conscious experiences (and anything else which might also be said to exist outside them).
A Sinner:
I just accept as axiomatic that the reality I perceive is. But what is your point in asking this question?
Well, I don’t think it’s as simple as that. The reality you perceive is “real” but it could be real like a dream (ie, it does not necessarily imply any “external” world). However, while that which forms the object of your consciousness, the content of your conciousness, can be called real “by definition” or simply axiomatically like this, it gets a lot trickier when we do speak of the “external” realities which we assume exist even when they are not currently the object of our consciousness. And yet, what is the connection between the “by definition” reality of the immediate object of our consciousness and the reality of these things? The two definitions cannot be entirely disconnected if both things are conceived of as meaningfully “real.”
@Andrew – Here’s the response to your questions above. I think you nailed the core of the issue:
but these connections are constrained by the same mindless processes that affect everything else in reality.
This is the essence of it. Any physical process can be modelled mathematically, and therefore is subject to mathematical processes. The probability that I will do X as a phyiscal quantity can always be calculated. Free will and consciousness, on the other hand, cannot be modelled mathematically. As as sentient being, the probability that I will do X is undefined. It involves an autonomous choice of a sentient mind and cannot be described mathematically.
I’ll spare the proof at this point but the essence of it is that no equation exists that can model a process where one term is mathematically undefined. Because consciousness intrinsically introduces a mathematically undefined term, you cannot create an equation to model a physical process that originates from a choice. You can, however, model the physical processes that occur as a result of that choice, which is where your argument starts. And again, that would be correct from the physicist’s standpoint – the physicist isn’t concerned with the origin of the laws of physics, nor of the origin of a physical process – they’re just interested in modelling the process itself.
But this precise moment – the moment where a sentient choice becomes manifest in a physical process – requires that the limiting principle which we discussed above must be intelligent; there is something which must translate the potency of my consciousness into the activity of a physically manifest process. This cannot be a purely natural process as it has no probability function. A separate animating principle must therefore exist.
Now, because this animating principle has no probability function and is not mathematically describable, this animating principle must have an intrinsic mechanism to “decide” whether the potency of my consciousness is capable of being actualized or not. This requires intelligence.
(If you want to see a more proof, I can produce it, but it’s pretty dense).
@ Dan — I’m still not sure about this. I’m not sure that the limitations in the interaction between sentient will and the physical world require an intelligence to perform the limiting.
The model I have in my mind is something like this. Say I’m trying to translate a Vox Nova combox comment into Nebbinese. (That’s the name of a fictional language invented by my daughter and her BFF.) Unfortunately, the only words in Nebbinese are BEGIN, END, and STOP. (At least I cant make a syntax error!) The number of possible ideas I can communicate in a combox is potentially unlimited, and depends only on my will, but I am unable to communicate most of them in Nebbinese because the language is so limited. I don’t think that most people would say that there’s an intelligence limiting my will to express myself in Nebbinese — it’s just a structural feature of the language. The only “mechanism” stopping me from carrying out my will to translate the combox is the paucity of words available.
Similarly, I see that the physical world offers only a limited set of “controls” through which my unlimited will can express actions in that world. There is no intelligence actively hindering me. It’s just that the controls aren’t there. You can ask the question, “Well, who put the controls there?” but that seems to me to be getting back to the argument from contingency.
Does the proof you mention deal with this?
Yes, I will post it later this evening. It’s more formal, but addresses that concern.
I think we’re talking about apples and oranges. I recognize your point, but it doesn’t address my argument. My argument is that intelligence is required to manfiest something which has no possible mathematical description into a framework that can be expressed mathematically. Here’s the difference:
Your example can be expressed mathematically. e.g. you can create a mapping between the English lexicon and Nebbinese and define it as a function. Of course, there will be major gaps in the items that don’t map, but nevertheless you can create a complete description of both lexicons and map them. You can even take it a step further and replace the english language with all possible current and future lexicons. Even in that environment, you still have a mathematically describable system.
Where my argument diverges is that one of the sets (consciousness) cannot be expressed mathematically – not even by infinity – so not projection exists from one set to the other. Some non-physical process must be responsible for said translation, and as a consequence it must be intelligent.
Also, let’s remember how Plato defines “knowledge,” as a justified true belief (some might add the additional caveat that it must be a truly-justified true belief, due to the “coin-in-pocket problem” where it can be questioned whether someone has “knowledge” if they believe something coincidentally true for an utterly wrong or unrelated reason.)
In that sense, I think saying we can have “knowledge” of a personal God is different from saying we can have “proof” from Natural Reason.
The universe is sort of like, say, some markings on a sheet of paper that SEEM to contain a message, a Meaning. Now, of course, it is possible that the markings on the paper (especially if they are somewhat ambiguous) were just coincidental splashes of mud that just happen to look sorta like they spell something. Likewise, I suppose, with the universe as a whole and Meaning as a whole.
But, if we believe that a “writer” exists based on the message we read in the markings, and if that writer does in fact exist, if the message was in fact intentional and not just mud-splashes, then our belief was by definition “knowledge,” as it was a true belief based on a true “justification,” the markings being the true evidence of a writer (since it was, in fact, an effect of the posited cause). They aren’t “proof” necessarily (since coincidence was a possible interpretation). But they are a justification for the belief, at least, and if that belief was in fact true, and was causally related to the evidence we cited for it, then that is “knowledge” from Natural Reason.
Interesting: I really like this “weaker” (broader?) definition of knowledge. Reading further in the Catechism, there are hints that this is what they meant earlier, but it is not well developed.