How do we really know that basic metaphysical principles, such as, that contradictions in being are impossible, are both certain and transcendentally true? That is, how do we have perfect certitude that they apply validly to every possible thing, including the God of classical theism?

Some have argued that the principle of non-contradiction (PNC), which states that the same thing cannot both be and not be in the same respect, applies merely to macroscopic reality – to the humans and horses and even bugs we see in the full size world of our normal experience. They claim, in the name of science, that at the submicroscopic level of subatomic entities, such as photons, the principle may be violated. For example, a photon presents experimentally both as a wave and as a particle, which seems to be contradictory.

The problem with this type of objection is that in order to make the observations that allegedly “prove” that a subatomic contradiction can be real, one must be certain that subatomic observations are what they are and are not otherwise. In other words, the observer must assume that the PNC is working at the subatomic level in order to judge, for example, that the photon is in truth behaving as a particle and not like a wave. It is bad logic to presuppose that the PNC is working at the subatomic level in order to “prove” that it does not work at the subatomic level!

What limits the extent of a principle’s application is the nature of that to which it applies. What applies to one kind of being may not apply to a different one. For example, a rule about chickens may apply to all possible chickens, but it may not apply to squid.

The PNC is a principle, not about any particular kind of being, but of being or existence itself. It does not matter what kind of being we consider, for example, whether macroscopic entities or submicroscopic ones. Once the mind understands what it means to exist, as opposed to not existing, it immediately and validly applies the PNC to anything and everything.

While it is possible for something to be a non-chicken, it is not possible for something to be a non-being. The PNC applies to both creature and God, not because they are like in nature – which they are not, but because both have being or existence. So, once we understand what it means to be, we know that the PNC applies both to creature and Creator and to every least existing aspect of every possible being. That is, it is transcendentally true.

The Problem with Some Logicians

Others object that the principle of non-contradiction is really merely a rule of logic, which says that the same predicate cannot be both affirmed and denied of the same subject. In this view, the rule may have universal conceptual validity within the mind, but what is to guarantee that it applies universally to extramental beings? How do we know that the PNC can apply validly to a transcendental entity, like the God of classical theism -- the reality of which would be utterly beyond the finite world in which we live?

The problem is that even such objectors, like the rest of us, find themselves unable to think of anything, except in terms of “being” or “non-being.” Even claiming that truth is merely a matter of probability still requires absolutely affirming the state of probability.

What makes the mind work this way? What makes skeptics keep trying to find contradictions in the God of classical theism, as if that would prove with certitude that such a being is impossible? They keep demanding that God obey the PNC in spite of being highly skeptical about its transcendental application to God.

We must recall that the concepts used in logic do not represent direct knowledge of things themselves, but merely abstract notions of things existing in the mind. What we first know, in fact, is not a concept, but real things in a real world – even if that real world is merely a really experienced bad dream. Even if someone is hallucinating pink elephants dancing on the ceiling, the hallucinations are still real as hallucinations. In knowing our own hallucinations, we, in fact, know something real in its own order.

It is objected by some that we simply do not encounter abstractions, such as “being” or “existence.” But, the concepts formed through abstraction, which are the ones logicians deal with, presuppose encounters with real things. You don’t form a concept of “animal,” unless you first have judged that you have encountered a real animal from which to abstract the universal form of animal.

The first knowledge we have of things is had in a judgment of existence, that is, that “something is real.” If I encounter a tiger, I judge that something is real and tiger-like in my experience. This judgment contains both the nature of the tiger and its reality or being, confusedly apprehended at first.

It is not the structure of my language that determines the content of my experience, but the reverse. That is, it is the content of my experience which has developed the structure of my language. First, we know things, and then we invent words to describe them. Even though my words reflect the structure of my experience, they do not determine it. Rather, as I reflect on what I perceive, I express language which I judge describes it correctly.

Unlike irrational animals, I not only have sense experience of some object, but I also am fully aware that I am judging that it actually exists before me. That is why it is correct to say that “I know something to be or exist,” not by sense knowledge alone, but by an intellectual judgment that this is true.

Rather than some presupposed theory forcing the description of experience, it is the experience itself as understood that forces the description of what is taking place. That is, first there is awareness of something there, second, self-reflective awareness of the awareness itself, and third, awareness of something (the self) having the awareness of something there.

Thus, the primary act of knowing things is a judgment of some kind of nature being real, that is, as existing. This is not to be confused with the concepts, empty of all existential content, which the logician studies in terms of their proper relationships. The logician’s concepts need not exist extramentally at all, once they are abstracted from really existing things or formed through a fictional combination of qualities taken from real things, as in the case of the unicorn.

That is, we first encounter some real being, even if it is merely a real mental experience, and only secondarily do we form the concepts of things that we use in logic.

We know full well that our judgment about whether something is really existing or not is not a mere judgment about relationships between concepts, but about real being itself.

This is why judgments about the nature of being itself do not fall under the purview of the science of logic, the practical science which determines correct relationships between concepts. The rule against contradictions in predication is simply an application to logic of the metaphysical principle of non-contradiction. Metaphysics regulates the science of logic, not vice versa.

That is why the Thomistic philosopher Jacques Maritain tells us that “…logic is the science of conceptual being and not a science of real being.”¹

The Foundation of Certitude

Nor is there any doubt about the reality of being as encountered in lived experience. I often tell people just to try sitting on a large roofing nail. One might doubt whether the experience is (1) merely one of a subjective psychosomatic symptom or (2) one caused by an objectively real extramental nail. But one cannot doubt the reality of the pain involved!

That is because doubt is the fear of error, that is, the fear that something may not be the way we think it is. But, this means that there must be a real distinction between what one thinks to be real and some distinct objective reality. For example, if I think my car to be in my garage, but it actually has been removed by a thief. But, in the direct experience of the nail-induced pain itself, although I might doubt the reality of the nail, I cannot doubt the reality of the pain, because my experience of the pain is identical with the pain’s very reality – thereby allowing no possibility of a real distinction between my experience of the pain and the pain itself.

This is why we have perfect certitude that we encounter reality or being in our first experience of anything at all. For, in experiencing something, there can be no real distinction between the act of experiencing and its own real content, regardless of whether the experience is merely of some subjective fantasy or directly of some external object. The lack of a real distinction between the act of experiencing something and the reality of the experience’s own content precludes the lack of conformity required for the possibility of error and its associated doubt – at least as far as to the fact that something, some reality, some being has been encountered.

I can doubt whether the pink elephant I hallucinate dancing on the ceiling exists extramentally, but I cannot doubt that I am experiencing seeing one. Also, in that selfsame act of experiencing anything at all, we know immediately in a general way what the nature of being is, since being’s nature is given to us with certitude as our mind conforms to the real being of its own experienced content. We do not know a mere concept of being, but being itself in this direct experience of it – in the mental act in which we judge, “Something is, something is real, something is existing.”

This immediately-given understanding of being we express in judgments, such as, the principles of identity (that being is being) and non-contradiction (that being cannot be non-being). Our mind finds itself conformed to being itself in the selfsame act by which we first encounter being and in every subsequent such act. That is also why even skeptical logicians cannot help but think of all reality in terms of being and non-being, even if they formulate denials of such knowledge in their scholarly tomes.

No Rabbits Out of Genuinely Empty Hats

Just as we are perfectly certain that being cannot be non-being, we are equally certain that non-being cannot beget being. Everyone who is intellectually honest knows and admits that you cannot get something from nothing. A few confuse the “nothing” of quantum mechanics with the “absolutely nothing at all” that the philosopher is talking about. But, when they say that you get protons popping into existence from nothing in quantum mechanics, the “nothing” they refer to is not really nothing at all: it is merely a “quantum vacuum,” which is the lowest state of energy thought to be found in physical reality. It is still something – not the “total non-being” to which the philosopher refers.

Even materialists do scientific handstands to try to avoid the suggestion that the cosmos was actually somehow generated from absolute nothingness. They do not seem to want to get caught in the position of trying to explain how a magician’s completely empty hat can generate a real rabbit.

The Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR)

The human intellect knows truth in the self-reflective act of knowing its own conformity to reality or being. That is why certitudes such as the PNC are possible. But the intellect or mind is always searching for reasons to assure itself that it is in conformity with reality or being so that it knows that perfect certitude has been achieved. The Thomistic PSR has to do with whether or not all things have reasons for being or for being true.

In seeking to understand whether all things must have reasons for why and how they exist, we must first make a distinction. Some things are directly evident to our senses and can be known to exist because of this. On the other hand, the principle of sufficient reason addresses the question as to whether all things must have reasons for their existence – reasons founded in being or reality sufficient to account fully for what exists.

Note the difference between what is known to be true from direct experience and what may still not be explained by that experience. For example, we may know that something exists by direct observation. Still, that does not mean that such a being is self-explanatory or is the reason for its own existence. For example, I know that the sun exists because I can see it. But that is not the same thing as to know why the sun exists, that is, whether there is a reason for it existing and what that reason may be.

Thus, the existence of what is directly experienced is truly affirmed in the sense that we have immediate knowledge of its presence. But that is not the same thing as its being able to explain why it is present or existent.

The plain fact is that we use our minds to reason to conclusions that we expect to be true. If we could not trust our reasoning processes to lead to true conclusions, then all human knowledge would be worthless – philosophy, theology, and all the natural sciences alike. But true conclusions demand true reasons leading to them. If a conclusion is true when it conforms to reality or being, then solid reasoning requires true premises – premises or reasons that faithfully reflect objective reality or being itself.

It makes no sense to trust the mind to lead us to know true being, and yet, not to trust the way the mind demands reasons for all things in order to reach that true being.

If (1) the mind demands reasons for things that do not fully explain themselves and if (2) we trust the mind to tell us the truth about reality when it reasons correctly, then the fact that the mind is not satisfied with things that fail to fully explain themselves proves that there must be a reason for everything.

In other words, since the mind demands reasons that conform to reality or being for any statement or thing that does not fully explain itself, it necessarily follows that a thing or statement must fully explain itself in order not to need extrinsic reasons.

I say, “thing or statement,” because, although the mind reasons in terms of judgments expressed as statements, those judgments are true solely when they conform to being. So, if a thing is explained by premises, which are expressions of judgments about being, true reasoning manifests the actuality or being on which something actually depends. Thus, I shall speak of true premises as actual extrinsic reasons for something actually having being or existence.

Just as the extrinsic reasons must conform to reality or being, a thing can fully explain itself only if that self-explanation itself conforms to reality or being. That is, it must be a real intrinsic explanation of why the thing exists as it does. To the extent a thing fails to fully explain itself, then, other reason(s) must exist to explain the thing’s being.

That being the case, it must be that all things either are fully their own reason for being, or else, to the extent that they do not have sufficient intrinsic reasons for being, there must be extrinsic reasons sufficient to complete their explanation.

This is merely a complicated way to state the principle of sufficient reason, whose metaphysical expression is this: Every being must have a sufficient reason for being or coming-to-be either within itself or from some extrinsic reason or reasons. And, since these reasons are grounded in being or reality, the PSR is itself one of the metaphysical first principles of being.

The principle that you cannot get something from nothing, or being from non-being, is simply an application of the principle of sufficient reason.

Thus, being itself must be known truly by the mind for the mind to be a valid faculty with which to know reality. That is why the mind must know true being in its true judgments and why being must have a sufficient reason for itself either in itself or from another. If a thing’s sufficient reason is “from another,” that is what we speak of as a “cause,” and hence, everything that does not fully explain itself (meaning, an effect) necessarily requires an extrinsic sufficient reason (meaning, a cause).

Some, especially scientific materialists who normally demand explanations for all observable phenomena, will claim that possibly some things, such as the very existence of the entire cosmos itself, are simply “brute facts” for which there is no explanation or reason at all. In so doing, they fail to grasp the necessary relationship between the mind’s validity as an instrument of true knowledge and the need for things to have existential reasons that correspond to the mind’s demand for reasons – as was shown above. In effect, a “brute fact” is no more possible than is the production of something from absolutely nothing, which latter truth every intellectually honest person knows is totally impossible.

Transcendental Nature of First Principles

For my own part, I have not the least doubt that these two first principles, (1) that being cannot both be and not be, and (2) that being cannot proceed from non-being, are apodictically true and apply to all possible beings. Nor do I think that, if these statements are properly understood, any intellectually honest, intelligent person can actually deny to himself either of them. Yes, the principle of sufficient reason has broader extension than the principle that you cannot get being from non-being. Yet, as shown above, even though it is not as clearly seen by all as is the principle that you cannot get being from absolute non-being, the principle that all beings must have a sufficient reason is equally valid and universal as is every other metaphysical first principle, simply because the laws of being are as universal as is being itself.

These metaphysical first principles apply to all beings, including the God of classical theism – for the simple reason that the mind clearly sees they must apply to any being simply in virtue of its existing. Some claim that being is a genus and, as such, cannot be analogically and transcendentally applied to God. This error arises from confusing logic and metaphysics.

In logic, any universal term, at best, rises to the level of a genus. But, any genus must be understood to be predicated univocally in all instances. Hence, the Thomistic claim that being must be predicated analogically and transcendentally is alleged to be invalid – which it would be, were it merely a concept of the type studied by logicians.

But, the understanding of being that the metaphysician forms is not formed through the normal mode of abstraction assumed by logicians. Rather, it is formed in a judgment of actually experienced being. From that being which is known in a judgment of real being, a mere concept of being is formed, which is then studied by the logician. As such, that logician’s concept would, indeed, be predicated merely univocally.

But, such a concept of being is merely a logical construct existing in the mind of the logician. It is an “artifact” constructed by abstraction from the real being of some existent thing or quality of a thing. What the mind initially and directly knows is not merely the concept abstracted from the thing, but the thing itself: Scio aliquid esse. “I know something to be.” Not, I know a concept of something to be.

When the mind grasps merely a concept of a thing, it abstracts some essence or essential quality from the really existent object of the judgment, and hence, leaves behind the very existence which differentiates the concept of being from the real being the mind first knows.

That is why being, considered as a mere concept, would be restricted to univocal predication, whereas the mind knows that real existence of real beings can vary analogically from being to being and that, whether finite or infinite, the laws of being apply to all real things. Logic is not metaphysics.

As Maritain puts it, “For by definition none of the real functions of being, but only its conceptual functions, are the proper and the direct object of logical study. There could be no more serious error than to suppose that the being of metaphysics is this being envisaged under the aspect of conceptual being….”²

That is why no one can resist applying such metaphysical first principles as non-contradiction and sufficient reason to all beings, including the Infinite Being. What has been called “the natural metaphysics of human intelligence” drives the mind to affirm the first principles of being as true and as applying to anything that exists in any way. But, they apply analogically, not univocally, since “being” is not a logical concept, but a metaphysical notion.

This is why even analytic thinkers have trouble resisting the temptation to look for what they think to be inherent contradictions in the God of classical theism. Yet, from their perspective, the law of non-contradiction need not apply to a transcendent being, such as God. If they really mean what they say, any alleged contradiction between an infinitely good God and the presence of evil in the world should be ignored – since, for them, contradictions in God might not be a problem! I have dealt with this false allegation against the goodness of God in another article on Strange Notions.

Without addressing the rest of the many details of the classical proofs for God’s existence, successfully defending the transcendental validity of these metaphysical first principles also defends common core premises essential to such proofs. Since many of the recent objections against the classical proofs for God rest on attacking the first principles of being, it should now be all the more clear that such proofs are effective and valid and that sound reason proves that the existence of God can be known by the light of unaided human reason.

For a more in-depth treatment of the themes discussed in this essay, see my longer article, “How Metaphysical Certitudes Anchor Proofs for God,” which appeared in the online Homiletic & Pastoral Review.

Antony Flew’s famous 1950 article “Theology and Falsification” posed what came to be known as the “falsificationist challenge” to theology. A claim is falsifiable when it is empirically testable—that is to say, when it makes predictions about what will be observed under such-and-such circumstances such that, if the predictions don’t pan out, the claim is thereby shown to be false.

The idea that a genuinely scientific claim must be falsifiable had already been given currency by Karl Popper. Flew’s aim was to apply it to a critique of such theological claims as the thesis that God loves us. No matter what sorts of evil and suffering occur in the world, the theologian does not give up the claim that God loves us. But then, what, in that case, does the claim actually amount to? And why should we accept the claim? Flew’s challenge was to get the theologian to specify exactly what would have to happen in order for the theologian to give up the claim that God loves us, or the claim that God exists.

Now, there are several problems with Flew’s challenge. Some of them have to do with specifically theological matters, such as the analogical use of the term “good” when applied to God, the role that divine permission of evil plays in the realization of a greater good, and so forth. Some of the problems have to do with the idea of falsification itself. As Popper himself emphasized, it is simply an error to suppose that all rationally justifiable claims have to be empirically falsifiable. Popper intended falsificationism merely as a theory about what makes a claim scientific, and not every rationally acceptable claim is or ought to be a scientific claim. Hence not every rationally acceptable claim is or ought to be empirically falsifiable.

For example, the thesis of falsificationism itself is, as Popper realized, not empirically falsifiable. This does not make Popper’s falsificationist theory of science self-refuting, because, again, he does not say in the first place that every claim has to be empirically falsifiable. Falsificationism is a claim about science but it is not itself a scientific claim, but rather a philosophical claim (what Popper called a claim of “meta-science”). It is subject to potential criticism—by way of philosophical analysis and argument, say—but not by way of empirical testing, specifically.

Claims of mathematics and logic are like this too. We can analyze and argue about them philosophically, but they are not plausibly subject to empirical refutation, specifically. And metaphysical claims are like that as well. With at least the most general sorts of metaphysical claims (e.g. about the nature of causality as such, or substance as such, or what have you), it is a sheer category mistake to suppose that they do, or ought to, entail specific empirical predictions. The reason is that the claims are too general for that. They are claims about (among other things) what any possible empirically observable phenomena must necessarily presuppose (and any possible non-empirical realities too, if there are any). Naturally, then, they are not going to be undermined by any specific empirical observation. By no means does that make them immune from rational evaluation. They can still be analyzed, and argued for or against, by way of philosophical analysis and argumentation. But as with claims of meta-science, or claims of mathematics and logic, so too with claims of metaphysics, it is a mistake to suppose that they stand or fall with empirical falsifiability.

Now, the fundamental claims and arguments of theology—for example, the most important arguments for the existence and attributes of God (such as Aquinas’s arguments, or Leibniz’s arguments)—are a species of metaphysical claim. Hence it is simply a category mistake to demand of them, as Flew did, that they be empirically falsifiable. To dismiss theology on falsificationist grounds, one would, to be consistent, also have to dismiss mathematics, logic, meta-science, and metaphysics in general. Which would be, not only absurd, but self-defeating, since the claim that only scientific claims are rationally justifiable is itself not a scientific claim but a metaphysical claim, and any argument for this claim would presuppose standards of logic.

There is also the problem that, as philosophers of science had already begun to see at the time Flew wrote, it turns out that even scientific claims are not as crisply falsifiable as Popper initially thought. Indeed, the problem was known even before Popper’s time, and famously raised by Pierre Duhem. A scientific theory is always tested in conjunction with various assumptions about background conditions obtaining at the time an experiment is performed, assumptions about the experimental set-up itself, and auxiliary scientific hypotheses about the phenomena being studied. If the outcome of an experiment is not as predicted, one could give up the theory being tested, but one might also consider giving up one or more of the auxiliary hypotheses instead, or check to see if the background conditions or experimental set-up were really as one had supposed. That does not mean that scientific theories are not empirically falsifiable after all, but it does mean that falsifying a theory is a much messier and more tentative affair than readers of pop science and pop philosophy books might suppose.

Then there are claims that are empirical and not metaphysical in the strictest sense, but still so extremely general that any possible natural science would have to take them for granted—in which case they are really presuppositions of natural science rather than propositions of natural science. For example, the proposition that change occurs is like this. We know from experience that change occurs, but it is not something falsifiable by experience, because any possible experience by which we might test it itself presupposes that change occurs. In particular, in order to test a proposition via observation or experiment, you need to see whether or not your current experience is followed by the predicted experience, which involves one experience succeeding another, which entails change. Natural science itself, then, which involves attempting to falsify theories (even if it involves more than this) presupposes something which cannot be falsified.

Necessary presuppositions of natural science like the one just described are the subject matter of that branch of philosophy known as the philosophy of nature (which, though more fundamental than natural science, is less fundamental than metaphysics as Thomists understand “metaphysics,” and is thus something of a middle-ground discipline between them). For example, the Aristotelian theory of actuality and potentiality (which is the core of the Aristotelian philosophy of nature) is grounded in an analysis of what change must involve, where the existence of change is presupposed by natural science. Hence the theory of actuality and potentiality is grounded in what is presupposed by natural science. That is why even natural science cannot overthrow it. But the characteristically Aristotelian argument for God’s existence—the argument from change to the existence of an unchanging changer of things (or, more precisely, of a purely actual actualizer of things)—is grounded in the theory of actuality and potentiality, and thus in what natural science itself must take for granted. And thus it too cannot be overturned even by natural science. This “empirical unfalsifiability” is no more a weakness of the Aristotelian argument for God’s existence than the “empirical unfalsifiability” of the existence of change, including the existence of experience itself, is a weakness. It makes the arguments in question (if they are otherwise unproblematic) more rationally secure than empirical science, not less.

Lazy shouts of “unfalisfiability!” against theological claims just ignore all this complexity—the distinctions that have to be drawn between empirical claims on the one hand and claims of mathematics, logic, and metaphysics on the other; between extremely general empirical claims and more specific ones; between philosophy of nature (which studies the philosophical presuppositions of natural science) and natural science itself; and between the testing of a thesis and the testing of the auxiliary assumptions we generally take for granted but conjoin with the thesis when drawing predictions from it.

So, falsificationism is a rather feeble instrument to wield against theology. And in fact, atheist philosophers have known this for decades, even if New Atheist combox commandos are still catching up.

All the same, where we are evaluating a specific empirical claim—rather than a claim of mathematics, logic, or metaphysics, or an extremely general empirical claim like “change occurs”—falsifiability is an important consideration, even if not as decisive as Popper supposed. Take an extremely specific and straightforward empirical claim, e.g. the claim that a large, yellowish triangular shape will suddenly appear in the center of my field of vision within the next few seconds. If no such shape actually appears in the next few seconds, it would be pretty hard to deny that the claim has been falsified. For example, I couldn’t say “Maybe the shape was there in the room, but I didn’t see it because it was behind a bookshelf.” I intentionally phrased the claim so that it was about what I would experience, not about what would be in the room, so appealing to the idea that some physical object stood in the way of my seeing it won’t help avoid falsification. Nor would it help to say “Maybe it will appear an hour from now, or tomorrow,” since the claim referred specifically to the next few seconds.

Of course, that’s not a very interesting empirical claim. Most interesting empirical claims are far less specific than that, even though they are nowhere near as general as the claim that change occurs. There is, needless to say, a large range of cases, some of which are more toward the general end of things, some of them more toward the specific, and the latter are easier to falsify than the former. But even if the more general ones aren’t as crisply falsifiable as a more simplistic application of the Popperian model would imply, they are still far from unfalsifiable.

For example, take the claim that heavy smoking over a long period of time has a strong tendency to cause cancer. Obviously this is not falsified by the fact that some heavy smokers never develop cancer, because the claim has been phrased in a way that takes account of that. It speaks only of a strong tendency, and even a strong tendency needn’t always be realized. But neither is the claim made vacuous by that qualification. If it turned out that only five percent of people who smoke heavily over the course of many years ended up getting cancer, we could reasonably say that the claim had been falsified. Whereas if it turned out that sixty percent of those who smoke heavily over the course of many years end up getting cancer, we would say that the claim had survived falsification, even though sixty percent is well short of one hundred percent. Indeed, even if the percentage were much lower than that—suppose it were forty percent, for example—it would not necessarily follow that the claim had been falsified.

Nor need there be anything like even that strong a link between two phenomena for us reasonably to posit a causal correlation. Take an example often discussed in philosophy of science, viz. the relationship between syphilis and paresis. If syphilis is untreated, it can lead to paresis, though this is rare. But it would be absurd, not to mention medically irresponsible, to conclude that the claim of a causal correlation between syphilis and paresis is falsified by the fact that actually developing paresis is rare. All the same, if there were on record only one or two cases, out of millions, of paresis following upon syphilis, it would—especially if no mechanism by which the one might lead to the other were proposed—be hard in that case to resist the conclusion that the claim of a causal correlation had been falsified.

So, an empirical claim concerning a causal link between two phenomena can be substantive rather than vacuous, and also empirically very well-supported, even if there are many cases in which the one phenomenon is not in fact followed by the other. Considerations about falsifiability, properly understood, do not undermine the point. Indeed, someone who resists such a claim might himself be subject to criticism on the grounds that he has made his position unfalsifiable.

For example, suppose a heavy smoker said, in reply to those who implored him to cut back: “Oh come on, lots of people smoke heavily and don’t get cancer! So how can you maintain your claim that there is a causal link, in the face of all that evidence? Don’t you know that a serious scientific claim should be falsifiable?” In fact, of course, it is the heavy smoker in question who is more plausibly accused of being insufficiently respectful of falsifiability. For there is a very strong link between heavy smoking and cancer, even if the former doesn’t always lead to the latter. And the empirical evidence for that link is so strong that it is those who deny it who are refusing to let their position be falsified by the evidence.

More could be said, but in fact these reflections on falsification are intended merely as a preamble to an application of the idea to a domain very different from the examples considered so far—namely, an example concerning politics and current events. I’ll get to that in another post.
 
 
NOTE: Dr. Feser's contributions at Strange Notions were originally posted on his blog, including this article, and therefore lose some of their context when reprinted here. Dr. Feser explains why that matters.
 
 
(Image credit: Efengshui)

Should I believe in miracles? This question doesn’t pertain to whether I should believe in this miracle or that miracle. It has to do with whether I’m rationally justified in believing in miracles as such.

David Hume's Wisdom for the Wise

The eightenth-century Scottish skeptic philosopher David Hume argued the wise man should not believe in miracles. The basis for his assertion was what might be called the “repeatability principle”—evidence for what occurs over and over (the regular) always outweighs evidence for that which does not (the rare). Since miracles are rare and contradict our uniform experience, Hume argues the wise man ought never to believe in miracles.

While it’s true that a wise man should base his belief on the weight of evidence, it’s not true that evidence for uniform experience always outweighs evidence for what is singular and rare.

We know this for several reasons, but I’ll give you four.

Why Uniform Experience Doesn't Make Belief in Miracles Irrational

First, if Hume’s principle concerning uniform experience were correct, then we would have to deny many things we hold as true. For example, the Big Bang was a singular event that is unrepeatable. Have you experienced any Big Bangs lately? I would also venture to say you haven’t experienced anybody landing on the moon in recent times.

Now, if we hold to Hume’s principle, it would be irrational to believe the scientific account of the Big Bang and the historical fact that Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, since these occurrences contradict our uniform experience. But this is absurd. The Big Bang is one of the most rigorously established theories in all of science, and all who are not obsessed with conspiracy theories hold Neil Armstrong’s walk on the moon is a historical fact.

Moreover, Hume’s principle nullifies science itself. As an inductive discipline, science necessarily presupposes the possibility of discovering new things that may contradict uniform experience. Scientific laws are revised all the time based on new contrary evidence. But if Hume’s principle were correct, scientists would never have reasonable grounds to revise laws, and thus replacing the Newtonian view of the universe with Einstein’s view would have been irrational. No skeptic can hold this and still be seen as intellectually credible.

A third reason why Hume’s argument from uniform experience fails is that it sets the standard for authenticating a miracle too high. It views rarity as that which disqualifies rational belief, yet rarity is of the essence of a miracle. A miracle, by definition, is an unusual event, something contrary to the ordinary course of things. So, according to Hume’s view, every miracle is disqualified from the start, because every miracle is a rare event.

This is analogous to making a fifty-foot bar the qualifying height for a good high jumper, when no jumpers can even clear an eight-foot bar. It is simply unreasonable to set a standard so high that no one can ever reach it. If skeptics desire Christian beliefs to be subject to falsification, then they ought not set standards where Christian beliefs cannot be proven true.

A fourth critique of Hume’s argument is it commits the fallacy of special pleading, a fallacy in which one deliberately ignores aspects unfavorable to his point of view. Hume is basing his argument on his experience, or perhaps the experiences of those he knows. Perhaps there were people in Hume’s time, or even people of the past, whose common experience involved miracles. This is precisely the claim of the early Christians. While Hume is within his rights to speak authoritatively about his own experience, he cannot do so with regard to others. His own uniform experience cannot be used to exclude the testimony of another person’s experience.

The Improbable is Too High a Hurdle to Jump

A skeptic may not articulate his or her skepticism about miracles as does Hume but simply might express the inability to overcome the hurdle of accepting something so improbable. A skeptic might say, “The miracles in the Bible are just too far-fetched for me to believe—a man rising from the dead? Blind people seeing? You expect me to believe that?”

While I can sympathize with someone who has a healthy skepticism when it comes to improbable events, we can’t reject something outright simply because it’s improbable.

First, an event might be improbable when considered relative to our general background knowledge, but, relative to other specific knowledge or evidence, improbability can decrease.

For example, it’s highly improbable that the winning number for the California Lottery would be 6345789. If the newspaper, however, says this is the winning number, then the probability changes, making the odds for it being the winning number higher. Furthermore, if the news anchor broadcasts it as the winning number on the nightly news, then the odds for it being the winning number become even higher.

Similarly, miracles, like Jesus rising from the dead, are improbable relative to our background knowledge—men don’t usually rise from the dead. But the improbability decreases when it’s considered relative to specific evidence, namely, eyewitness testimonies. If the testimonies are sound, then belief is rational despite the event’s improbability.

A second response to help a skeptic overcome the high hurdle of a miracle’s improbability is Hume’s principle:

"[N]o testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the miracle be of such a kind, that its falsehood be more miraculous, than the fact, which it endeavors to establish." (David Hume, Of Miracles).

Many skeptics consider only how improbable a miracle is but hardly ever consider the improbability of a miracle not occurring despite the testimony.

Take for example the Resurrection of Jesus, to which the early Christians testified. Skeptics rightfully consider this event as improbable and are rational when they exercise caution concerning the testimonies of it. But very seldom do skeptics consider how improbable the alternative explanations are.

For example, it’s much more improbable that the early Christians stole the body and lied about the Resurrection only to gain death. People don’t die for what they know to be a lie. Furthermore, it’s highly unlikely the apostles would give simple, nondramatic accounts—not to mention giving women the role as first witnesses—if they were lying about the Resurrection.

Another improbable alternative to the literal Resurrection of Jesus is that the Christians hallucinated. It’s improbable because St. Paul records Jesus appearing to many different people on several different occasions as well as appearing to more than 500 disciples at the same time (see 1 Cor. 15:6)—occurrences not typical of hallucinations.

So, when facing the obstacle of improbability, the question should not be “Should I believe in miracles as such?” but “Is there sufficient evidence to believe this or that miracle?” If the evidence for a particular miracle is trustworthy—say, the resurrection of Jesus—then belief in that miracle would be reasonable, even though it’s an improbable event.

The wise man surely needs to exercise caution when confronted with accounts of the miraculous. But the wise man should also be open to following the evidence where it leads, no matter how extraordinary and improbable it is.

Some years ago while I was delivering a lecture on faith and reason at a secular university, I informed my audience that I had taught the Apostles’ Creed to my daughter, who was four or five at the time. I then noted that as a family we recited the creed every day during our family devotions.

As I expected, the audience appeared to be disturbed by my revelation. One of the students spoke for many when she insisted that children should be raised without “religious dogma”. Instead, they should be free to “make up their own minds” about what to believe. Parents could certainly inform them of the various options, but they should not be partisans for a particular view. Instead, she opined, the conscientious parent should sit back and let their children make their own decisions unencumbered by undue parental influence.

One commonly encounters this ideal of the dispassionate, objective parent in the free thought movement. Consider, for example, this passage from Catie Wilkins’s essay “110 Love Street”:

“My dad, a supremely rational man, even when addressing four-year-olds, answered my question, ‘what happens when you die?’ logically and truthfully. He replied, ‘No one really knows, but we have lots of theories. Some people believe in heaven and hell, some people believe in reincarnation, and some people believe that nothing happens.’ The other four-year-olds were not privy to the open, balanced information that I had, leaving me the only four-year-old to suggest that heaven might not exist.” (“110 Love Street,” in ed. Ariane Sherine, There’s Probably No God: The Atheist’s Guide to Christmas (London: Friday, 2009), 21-22)

Wilkins believed her father’s pedagogical advice provided an empowering and non-dogmatic way to instruct a small child by dispassionately and objectively providing the range of views on a given issue and allowing the child to make her own decision. In short, Wilkins’s father provided a precise contrast with my dogmatizing bequeathal of the Apostles’ Creed to my unwitting progeny.

If Wilkins’s anecdote exemplifies the ideal of the free thought parent, it also exemplifies the inherent tensions , and even contradictions, with this ideal. We can begin to illumine those problems by changing up the scenario. Imagine that instead of posing a question about life after death, the child posed a question about the nature of the good and the right. After overhearing a disturbing murder story on the evening news, the child turns to her father and poses the question: “Daddy, is it always wrong to kill somebody just because you want their money?”

Questions about the good and the right, like questions about the afterlife, are beset with controversy. And so freethought dad gives his non-dogmatic and dispassionate reply in which he offers a survey of opinions so that the child may draw her own conclusions:

“No one really knows, but we have lots of theories. Some people believe it is absolutely wrong because it violates moral virtue or a moral law. But other people believe it could be right if doing so increased the overall happiness in society. Still others believe that each individual must decide what is right for them, and if money makes them happy then they can rightly kill for it.”

I suspect most people will find the father’s response in the second scenario to be problematic (to say the least). But what, exactly, is wrong with it? Let’s consider two problems.

To begin with, the father’s answer is wholly inappropriate for the cognitive level of a four year old. Granted, ethicists disagree over questions like whether it is always wrong to kill somebody for money, but it doesn’t follow that a four year old needs to hear about that entire controversy. At this age they need a simple answer. Complexity and nuance can (and should) be acquired over time, but you need a place to begin.

And what kind of simple answer should one give? Presumably, the answer that best approximates what the parent believes to be true adjusted for the cognitive capacity of the child. For example, if the father believes it is wrong to kill people just because you want their money, then that’s the answer: “Yes, it’s wrong to kill people just because you want their money.” (And if he doesn’t believe this, one hopes his daughter’s question might provide an occasion to reconsider his own view.)

The second problem with the response is that it is not nearly as free and uncommitted as one might think. Despite his alleged neutrality as regards the ethical question, the father is surprisingly committed and dogmatic when he prefaces his comment with the proviso, “No one really knows…” This is most certainly not a neutral statement. Instead, it is a robust epistemological claim. In short, while the father may not espouse any particular ethical view, he does commend to his child a strong agnosticism as regards all ethical views on the topic, and as I said that is not neutral.

So why does this freethought dad believe nobody knows the nature of right and wrong? One suspects that his strong agnosticism is based on an assumption like this: if experts disagree on a particular topic, then one cannot know what the right answer is on that topic. Thus, for example, if ethicists disagree about the wrongness of an action like killing for money, then we cannot know if that action is indeed wrong.

Alas, this assumption is self-defeating. While freethought dad’s belief that unanimity is required for belief is an epistemological claim, epistemologists do not all agree with it. Thus, if we accept that assumption then we ought to reject it.

In other words, unanimity among experts is not required before one can hold a reasonable belief, or make a knowledge claim, on a particular topic. And so the father is free to tell his daughter that it is always wrong to kill other people for money, even if he is aware of ethicists who disagree with him.

The same points that apply to ethics apply as well to the afterlife. If the father is a strong agnostic, that is, if he is persuaded that nobody really knows what happens after death, then he is free to tell his child that nobody really knows. But he should not delude himself into thinking that this perspective is somehow neutral, for it surely isn’t. He is commending a strong agnosticism to his child and if he is successful, she will grow up to hold the same view, just like Catie Wilkins did.

And what of the father whose beliefs about the afterlife are not agnostic but rather Christian, and thus which include convictions about the general resurrection, heaven, and hell? If the strong agnostic is permitted to raise up his child in the belief that nobody knows what happens when you die, then why isn’t the Christian parent permitted to raise up his child in the belief that Christians do know?

The fact is that there is no neutral way for a parent to raise a child … or field their questions.  Every answer is sourced in particular beliefs, value judgments, and a broader view of the world. As a result, it is best that we all recognize that parenting involves, among other things, the desire to inculcate in one’s children that set of beliefs and values that one holds to be true.

To be sure, those of us who value fairness and objectivity and a healthy recognition of one’s own cognitive biases will hope that all parents will include those same values in their education. But we hope for that not because that hope is neutral or value free. Rather, we hope for it because it is in this bequeathal of self-awareness of one’s own limitations and generosity toward others that true free-thought is found. It is most certainly not found in the delusion that a dogmatic agnosticism or skepticism toward a particular subject matter is somehow neutral or objective or value free.
 
 
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Gorgias the Nihilist, an ancient Greek philosopher, was said to have argued the following four points:

1. Nothing exists;
2. Even if something exists, nothing can be known about it; and
3. Even if something can be known about it, knowledge about it can’t be communicated to others.
4. Even if it can be communicated, it cannot be understood.

Of course, if you can understand his argument, he’s wrong. So too, many modern thinkers hold to positions that, fall apart into self-refutation when critically examined.

Today, I want to look at three such popular claims. In showing their inherent contradictions, I hope to show why we can (and must) affirm that knowable, non-empirically testable, absolute truths exist.

Step 1: Answering Relativism

The claim: “Absolute truth does not exist.”

Why it’s self-refuting: The claim “absolute truth does not exist” is either absolutely true or it’s not. But, of course, it can’t be absolutely true, since that would create a contradiction: we would have proven the existence of an absolute truth, the claim itself. Since it cannot be absolutely true, we must concede that there are some cases in which the proposition “absolute truth does not exist” must be false… in which case, we’re back to affirming the existence of absolute truth.

What we can know: Absolute truth exists. Put another way, the claim “absolute truth exists” is absolutely true.

Step 2: Answering Skepticism

The claim: “We can’t know anything for certain.” Or “I don’t know if we can know anything for certain.”

Why it’s self-refuting: This one is a subtler self-refutation then the first, because it looks humble. After all, if I can say, “I don’t know the number of stars in the universe,” why can’t I take it a few steps further, and say, “I can’t know anything for certain”?

Simple. Because in saying that, you’re claiming to know something about your own knowledge. When we say, “I don’t know x,” we’re saying, “I know that my knowledge on x is inconclusive.”

Take the most mild-seeming statement: “I don’t know if we can know anything for certain.” What you’re really saying is that, “I know that my knowledge on whether anything can be known for certain is inconclusive.” So you’re still affirming something: that you know your knowledge to be inconclusive.

There are two ways of showing this. First, because it could be a lie. The claim “I don’t know who took the last cookie,” could very well be proven false, if we later found the cookie in your purse. So these “I don’t know” claims are still affirming something, even if they’re just affirming ignorance.

Second, apply the “I don’t know” to another person. If I said, “You don’t know anything about cars,” I’m making a definitive statement about what you do and don’t know. To be able to make that statement, I have to have some knowledge about you and about cars. So if I was to say, “you don’t know if we can know anything for certain,” I’d be claiming to know that you were a skeptic – a fact that I can’t know, since I’m not sure who’s reading this right now.

So when you say “I don’t know if we can know anything for certain,” you’re saying that you know for certain that you’re ignorant on the matter. But that establishes that things necessarily can be known for certain.

This is unavoidable: to make a claim, you’re claiming to know something. So any positive formulation of skepticism (“no one can know anything for certain,” “I can’t know anything for certain,” “I don’t know anything for certain,” etc.) ends up being self-refuting. For this reason, the cleverest skeptics often word their skepticism as rhetorical questions (e.g., de Montaigne’s “What do I know?”). If they were to say what they’re hinting at, it would be self-refuting. They avoid it by merely suggesting the self-refuting proposition.

Finally, remember that in Step 1 we determined that the claim “absolute truth exists” is absolutely true. We’ve established this by showing the logical contradiction of holding the contrary position. In other words, we’ve already identified a truth that we can know for certain: “absolute truth exists.”

What we can know: Absolute truth exists, and is knowable.

Step 3: Answering Scientific Materialism

The claim: “All truth is empirically or scientifically testable.”

Why it’s self-refuting: The claim that “All truth is empirically or scientifically testable” is not empirically or scientifically testable. It’s not even conceivable to scientifically test a hypothesis about the truths of non-scientifically testable hypotheses. In fact, “all truth is empirically or scientifically testable” is a broad (self-refuting) metaphysical and epistemological claim.

What about the seemingly moderate claim, “We cannot know if anything is true outside of the natural sciences”? Remember, from Step 2, that “I don’t know x,” means the same as saying, “I know that my knowledge on x is inconclusive.” Here, it means, “I know that my knowledge on the truth of things outside of the natural sciences is inconclusive.” But the natural sciences can never establish your ignorance of truths outside the natural sciences. So to make this claim, you need to affirm as certain a truth that you could not have derived from the natural sciences. So even this more moderate-seeming claim is self-refuting.

Furthermore, all scientific knowledge is built upon a bed of metaphysical propositions (for example, the principle of noncontradiction) that cannot be established scientifically. Get rid of these, and you get rid of the basis for every natural science. There’s no way of rejecting these premises while still affirming the conclusions that the natural sciences produce.

Finally, remember that in Step 2, we established the truth of the claim “absolute truth exists, and is knowable.” This is a truth we know with certainty, but it’s not an empirical or scientific question. It can be established simply by seeing that its negation is a contradiction. So that’s a concrete example of an absolute truth known apart from the empirical and scientific testing of the natural sciences.

Conclusion: There exists absolute and knowable truth, outside of the realm of the natural sciences, and not subject to empirical and scientific testing.

Editor's Note: This is a follow-up piece to Dr. Peter Kreeft's article from earlier in the week titled "Why Reality Includes More (Not Less) Than You Probably Think". Be sure to read that one first.

Merely refuting reductionism does not yet give us any positive evidence for transcendentalism, however, just as merely refuting atheism does not give you positive evidence for theism.  We might well be stuck in agnosticism, unable to prove either of the two contradictory propositions, that there is or that there is not a God, or a Santa Claus, or any S that is more than P. So today I a proof for transcendentalism, in one area of human experience: thinking, which corresponds to the ideal we all want: truth.

The Demonstration of Metaphysical Transcendence

The commonest form of metaphysical reductionism, and the most philosophically interesting and controversial one, is materialism, which is the claim that everything that is real is material; that there is not a second dimension or kind of reality that is immaterial, or spiritual, or mental, but that what we call mind and mental phenomena can be reduced to and explained as merely material phenomena.  According to materialism, all that happens when we calculate that 21+31=52, or when we judge that murder is evil, or when we believe that God exists, or that we perceive the sky as blue, or when we predict that we will die, is that certain bundles of physical energy are doing certain physical things, like moving across synapses or producing chemical reactions, in our brains.  The claim is that there are no immaterial phenomena that cannot be explained as material phenomena.

Now there is one very easy refutation of this argument for materialism.  It is simply that the premise does not entail the conclusion.  For even if we grant the premise that we find no immaterial phenomena that cannot be fully explained as material phenomena, this does not logically entail the conclusion that there are no immaterial phenomena, any more than the fact that we find no convex curve in the Canadian border of America that cannot be explained as a concave curve in the American border of Canada entails the fact that there is no Canada but only America.

In fact, the very same argument that the materialist uses to justify materialism can be used, with equal force, by an immaterialist, that is, by someone who believes that matter does not exist and all is mind.  For we can find no material phenomena that cannot be explained as immaterial phenomena, as projections of consciousness or forms of consciousness.  For as soon as you think about a thing, even if that thing is a supposedly material thing like a rock, that thing has become an ingredient in your consciousness.  It is in principle impossible to think of a rock that cannot be explained as the thought of a rock.

(And if the thought is true, by the most common definition of truth, there is nothing different in the thought than in the thing, that is, nothing different in the “rock” in quotation marks and the rock without quotation marks, except the quotation marks; and the quotation marks are not part of the material inside the quotation marks.  Insofar as there is any difference between the thought in the quotation marks and the thing outside the quotation marks, the thought designated by the quotation marks is not true, because it is not the same as the thing.)

You can explain all supposedly material phenomena as immaterial just as you can explain all supposedly immaterial phenomena as material.  Imagine the two sets of phenomena listed in two parallel columns.  There is no phenomenon in either of the two columns that does not have an identical twin in the other column.  The two columns match perfectly, so that monistic materialism, common sense dualism, and monistic spiritualism all explain the data.  (So does William James’ “neutral monism,” although that one neutral stuff that is neither matter nor spirit cannot be defined or conceived except negatively.)

But this leaves us undecided among the three (or four) alternative metaphysics.  It does not refute any one of them, all of which explain the data.  It only refutes the materialist’s claimed refutation of spirit and the immaterialist’s claimed refutation of matter.  I want to go farther: I want to refute materialism, as my primary example of metaphysical reductionism.

The Refutation of Materialism

The refutation depends on one simple and obvious premise: that the knowledge of a thing is not one of the parts of that thing.  I shall first prove this premise (that will take some time), and then I will use it to prove my conclusion that knowledge transcends matter (that will not take much time at all).

Let’s say you want to know x.  Let’s say x is Beatrice and you are Dante.  Now all knowing, insofar as it is knowing, is true, is accurate.  And this means, according to common sense, that it is all that the thing known is.  Aristotle’s “identity theory” of truth is simply what common sense means by truth.  A true thought matches the real thing so that there is nothing added or subtracted.  If there is a lack of identity between the objective thing and the subjective thought of it, there is a fault in the thought, a lack of knowledge.  There is no such thing as false knowledge.

Of course none of us can have complete knowledge of anything or anybody, not even a flea, much less Beatrice.  Only God is omniscient and infallible, by definition; that is, only God, the creator and designer of Beatrice, if He exists, could know everything there is to know about her. And we are not God.  (I apologize if this news upsets any of you.)  Yet not only do “all men by nature desire to know,” as Aristotle famously said, but we want to know everything there is to know about everything there is to know, in Bernard Lonergan’s formula.  That is what curiosity means.

Now let’s suppose you are Dante, and you know something new about Beatrice: that she ate a plum this morning.  Then that knowledge is a new fact about you, a new piece of knowing for you; but your knowing this new fact about Beatrice does not add anything new to Beatrice, as the plum did.  If it did, then that would falsify the Beatrice you want to know, which is Beatrice-as-she-is-in-herself, not merely Beatrice-as-known-by-you.  There is no problem at all in knowing Beatrice-as-known-by-you; that happens automatically, by definition.  You want to know more than that; you want to know Beatrice-as-she-really-is-in-herself; and because you usually do not succeed at this task, it is a struggle and not an automatic success.

If Beatrice sees you looking at her, this changes her; this is a new fact about her.  But if she does not see you looking at her, your looking does not change her, only you.  New facts about you do not of themselves constitute new facts about her.

(If you are thinking about Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle here, and wondering whether the observation of B by A might not change B as well as A, I am here assuming that Einstein was right and Heisenberg wrong about the Uncertainty Principle; that the act of knowing a thing, mentally, does not change the thing, unless it also changes it physically, by interfering with light waves, for instance.  If the mental act of knowing B changed A (whether B is Beatrice or a subatomic particle), then knowledge of B would be impossible, because things would change and jump outside our knowledge as soon as we knew them, as if the target would jump away from the arrow just as the arrow was about to enter it, so that no arrow would ever hit its target; no knowledge would ever know its intended object—even the mental object labeled ‘Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle.’  Thus the Uncertainty Principle, interpreted ontologically, seems self-contradictory, like all forms of universal skepticism.)

(I am also implicitly assuming an epistemological realism in assuming that we are like archers, and acts of knowing are like arrows, and bows are like minds, and targets are like the things we want to know.  I am assuming that ideas are not targets but arrows; that ideas are means-of-knowing or acts-of-knowing, not objects-of-knowing; that real things are our targets, or objects-of-knowing.  I am assuming that Aquinas is right in ST I, 85, 2 when he defines ideas as means of knowing and real things as objects of knowing, and that Locke is wrong in the very first sentence of his Essay, when he defines an idea as the object of knowing.  For if that were true, then we could never know whether or not any of our ideas corresponded to or were identical with the real world, and we would have to draw Hume’s skeptical conclusion.  We would be like prisoners in a jail cell who saw only pictures of the outside world on a TV screen; without a direct knowing of the outside world, we could never know which of the pictures were true and which were not.)

So Beatrice’s plum is a new part of Beatrice, not of me (Dante), and my knowing this is a new part of me, not of her.  That this must be so can be shown by a merely logical analysis.  Let us suppose that 9,000 facts about Beatrice constitute the whole Beatrice.  If my knowing these 9,000 facts constituted fact #9,001 about her, then I could not know her, because the Beatrice I knew would be “Beatrice minus fact #9,001,” and that is not the true Beatrice, any more than Beatrice-without-a-plum is not the true Beatrice this morning.

Knowledge cannot commit suicide in the very act of coming to life; and that is what it would do if each act of knowledge changed the old object to a new one in the very act of trying to know the old one.

From this crucial premise, that I have taken such a long time to expound, I quickly deduce the falsity of materialism.  I do this by adding just one more premise, namely that modern science is possible.  Modern science claims to know some principles that are true for the whole universe, principles like F=MA or E=MC squared.  Now since the universe is the sum total of all material things (matter, time, and space being correlative), it follows that modern science knows some truths about all of matter.

Now take this second premise—that by science we can know the universe, and combine it with our first premise, that the knowledge of any thing is not one of the parts of that thing, and you get the conclusion that our knowledge of the universe is not part of the universe, but an addition to it, transcending it.

The conclusion is shocking to the reductionist.  As C.S. Lewis puts it in Miracles, it gives us a metaphysic that is like the moon: a material body pockmarked with craters caused by things that came from outside, like meteors, fingerprints of transcendence.  Each of these meteors symbolizes an act of knowing.

• Reductionism gives us a picture of reality that is like the moon with craters caused from within by its own volcanoes (which many astronomers believed to be the true source of lunar craters until the middle of the 20th century).
• Transcendentalism gives us a picture of the universe that is like the moon with craters caused by meteors that come from beyond the moon.  Intelligent extraterrestrials looking at the farms and cities of our globe from their space ship would not explain these things in the same way as they would explain earth’s geological formations, for they are effects not just of material forces but of acts of knowing material forces and knowing how to change them.

The simple “bottom line” is that since any act of knowing transcends its object, the act of knowing the universe transcends the universe.
 
 
Originally published at PeterKreeft.com. Used with permission.
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The most usual position among philosophers in the Western world today, in fact the most usual position among academics generally, is some kind of reductionism.  By “reductionism” I mean simply the belief that the world-view, or implicit metaphysics, of most people, or ordinary people, especially people of previous eras and cultures, errs by believing too much; that Hamlet’s Shakespeare was exactly wrong when he said to Horatio that “there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in your philosophy.”  The prevailing view among modern Western intellectuals is that there are in fact fewer things, or fewer kinds of things, or fewer dimensions of things, in heaven and earth, that is, in objective reality, than in most people’s philosophies or beliefs.  Thus most modern philosophers see the role of philosophical education primarily as a disillusioning, a debunking of myth, superstition, and naiveté.

This contrasts sharply with the way Plato and most classical philosophers saw the role of philosophy and the purpose of philosophical education.  They saw it as a “leading-out” (that is the literal meaning of our word “education”: from the Latin e-ducare), leading the student out of a smaller, narrower belief-system that was like a little underground cave into a radically larger world.  For Plato, this meant a world with more than the two metaphysical dimensions that most people believe exists: objective matter and subjective spirit or mind.  It meant a third dimension, the dimension of objective Platonic Forms, objectively real Ideas that were not dependent on subjective minds.

Plato’s “cave,” the most famous image in the history of philosophy, and Plato’s “theory of Forms” or “theory of Ideas,” the most famous theory in the history of philosophy, exemplify the claim that Shakespeare was right.  For they claim that there is not just another world, but another whole kind of world, another whole dimension of reality, which is neither subjective consciousness nor objective matter, but objective Form, essence, Idea, meaning, or “whatness.”

When Shakespeare had Hamlet utter his famous statement comparing the number of things in heaven and earth, that is, in objective reality, with the number of things in your philosophy, that is, in subjective consciousness, he probably did not have Plato’s theory of Forms in mind explicitly.  Hamlet was simply telling Horatio that ghosts are real even though Horatio did not believe they were; that heaven and earth were more commodious than Horatio’s thoughts because they contained real ghosts.  But what is common to both Plato and Shakespeare is the view that ordinary thinking errs not by believing too much to be real, but too little.

Certainly, most traditional philosophers, that is, most pre-modern philosophers, held this view.  This is certainly true of Eastern philosophy, of Hindu, Buddhist, and Taoist philosophy.  (We can call these religions “philosophies” insofar as they are examples of the human “love of wisdom,” though not primarily through the instrument of reason).  It is true also of most pre-modern Jewish, Christian, and Muslim philosophers.  But the modern tendency in the West is the opposite.  It could be called “reductionism.”  It seeks to reduce rather than to expand the student’s objects of belief.  This tendency is already clearly present in Bacon, Machiavelli, Descartes, and Hobbes.  In fact, it began with William of Ockham’s Nominalism, the denial of objectively real universals, which even in the 14th century was called the “via moderna,” the modern way.

I will label these two directions in philosophy “reductionism” and “transcendentalism,” just to have two handy, one-word terms.  I mean by “transcendentalism” not the particular philosophy of Emerson and Thoreau but simply Shakespeare’s view that there is more, not less, in objective reality than we usually think.

It is usually thought today, by both reductionists and transcendentalists alike, that reason (in the modern sense of severely logical reasoning rather than in the older sense of the word “reason” that included intuitive or contemplative wisdom) leads to reductionism, and that the only way to justify transcendentalism is to reduce reason to a secondary or instrumental status and to exalt something else over it—for instance, intuition, desire, imagination or religious faith.  The purpose of this article is to refute that idea by demonstrating, by strictly logical reasoning, (1) that reductionism is self-contradictory, and (2) that transcendentalism is self-evident once we admit data from our three most valued and distinctively human powers, namely our power to think anything true, to choose anything good, and to appreciate anything beautiful.

Today we'll focus on (1) and in the next article, later this week, we'll focus on (2).

Narrowing the Definition

We must first define transcendentalism more carefully.  For in one sense, transcendentalism is obviously and non-controversially true: there are a larger number of entities in the world than we know about, more than any one individual human being and even all human beings, are aware of: more galaxies, more bacteria, more craters on the moon, more species of insects, etc.  But that is merely quantitative.  What is controversial is qualitative transcendentalism, which claims not merely that there are more things but more kinds of things than we think, more dimensions; that there are, in addition to rocks and dogs and stars, also things like gods or God, ghosts or angels, Platonic Ideas or Hegelian dialectical triads, attributes of Brahman or of Allah, and after-death experiences of reincarnations on earth or levels of Heaven and Hell.  I do not claim to demonstrate the truth of any one of these particular versions of transcendentalism, but simply to demonstrate transcendentalism in principle.

Other meanings of “transcendence” are either too broad or too narrow for our purposes here.  The term is too broad if it means simply any kind of moreness, for no one denies the purely quantitative moreness I mentioned above.  Also no one denies the literal, physical transcendence of a flying airplane over the ground, or of a tall person over a short one, or the quantitative transcendence of the number 4 over the number 3, or of the amount of territory in the United States in the 21st century over the amount of territory in the United States in the 18th century, or the psychological transcendence of an act of disobedience to a law over the intention of the lawmaker to limit such acts.   I want to use the term more narrowly and controversially than that.

On the other hand, “transcendence” is often used in a specifically theistic sense, as asserting a transcendent Creator-God.  This is only one case in point of what I mean by “transcendence,” though probably the most important one.  But I want to include also things like Plato’s “Ideas,” Plotinus’s “One beyond being,”  Buddha’s “Nirvana,” Spinoza’s “natura naturans,” and even Shankara’s nondualistic notion of Brahman, which is monistic or pantheistic or pan-entheistic and thus not transcendent in the theistic sense.  What all of these have in common is the claim that there are more kinds of things in reality than we ordinarily believe.

The Refutation of Reductionism in General

I will first refute reductionism in general, then three of the most important forms of reductionism in particular, namely the reduction of thought to something material, of moral choice to something relative, and of aesthetic experience to something subjective.  Metaphysical materialism, moral relativism, and aesthetic subjectivism are three of the most popular forms of relativism, among ordinary people as well as philosophers.  And they are all logically refutable.

Here is my logical refutation of reductionism.

The formula for reductionism is that “S is nothing more than P”, or “S is only P,” or “there is no more in S than P.”  For instance, we may say “He’s nothing but a fake,” denying that he is authentic, or trustable, or truth-telling.  Or we may say “that monster was nothing but a dream,” denying that it exists outside the dream.  Or we may say that “love is nothing but lust” or “thinking is nothing but cerebral biochemistry,” or “evolution is nothing but the survival of the fittest” or “religion is nothing but superstition.”  My argument here is not with the content but with the logical form of these assertions, so my point applies to all assertions that have this logical form, no matter what their content.

“S is nothing but P” means “there is nothing more in S than there is in P.”  This, in turn, means that “there is no more-than-P S,” or “there is no trans-P S,” or “S does not transcend P.”  For instance, “love is nothing but lust” means “there is no more-than-lust love,” or “there is no love that transcends lust.”  Thus the formula for reductionism can always be expressed as an E proposition, a universal negative.

But there is a well-known difficulty in justifying universal negative propositions.  To say that “there is no S that transcends P” means that “there is in all reality no S that transcends P.”  For instance, to say that there is no real Santa Claus is to say that there is no real Santa Claus anywhere in the world, either at the North Pole or at the equator or in your closet.

Let us define Santa literally, as the entity in the popular story, the fat man in the red flannel suit who lives near the North Pole, employs elves to make toys, and flies magical reindeer through the skies to deliver presents to children around the world every Christmas.  Even asserting skepticism about the existence of this literal Santa Claus has a logical difficulty.  It is this: to claim that there is no Santa Claus is to claim that you know that there is no Santa Claus; and that is to claim that you know this universal negative, that you know that there is no Santa Claus anywhere in objective reality, as distinct from subjective reality, or consciousness, or imagination, or belief.

The difficulty is that in order to know that a proposition of this kind is true, we would have to know all of objective reality.  For if we do not, then we cannot be sure that the thing we have denied existence to might not exist in some corner, or dimension, or  part, or area, of objective reality that we did not know about.

The difficulty can be overcome, however, and the assertion that there is no Santa can be reasonably verified.  For it does not require a universal knowledge of every particular, only of some empirical facts.  For instance, we do not need to search every closet to be sure there is no Santa.  For Santa, as defined, lives and works at the North Pole, and we have mapped all the regions around the North Pole and are quite sure that there are no factories there capable of producing enough toys for all the world’s children.  Also, the laws of physics prevent anyone, even if he had magic flying reindeer, from flying to every child’s house in the world and depositing Christmas presents in one night.

(By the way, I do not think that magic flying reindeer are refuted in the same way by the laws of empirical physics, any more than any other kind of magic is.  It is not logically impossible that some entities perform acts which defy physical laws, if those entities are not merely physical entities.  We ourselves defy gravity whenever we decide to jump, because while we live we are not merely physical entities, but have souls or minds or wills, which interfere with matter, as a hand interferes with a sword’s tendency to fall whenever that hand swings the sword.  But when we die, we (or what is left of us in this world) become merely physical entities.  That is what we bury in cemeteries.  And what we bury in cemeteries never jumps around and defies physical laws, just as a sword always drops to the ground and stays there when no longer wielded by a hand.)

Now let us substitute God for Santa Claus.  (According to atheism, that is exactly what we do when we grow up.)  God is not the only example of transcendence, but He is clearly the one most important, most interesting, and most argued about.  So let us analyze what we are saying when we say “there is no God.”

Let us define or describe God as most people do, as “the being that created the universe.”  Thus God by definition transcends the universe.  So when we say that there is no God we are saying that there is in all reality no being that transcends the universe, that there is nothing more in reality than there is in the universe.

Now in order for us to know that there is nothing more in all reality than there is in the universe, we have to know something about all reality—in fact, we have to know enough about it to be sure that it excludes God. And if the idea of God is neither logically self-contradictory nor refuted by any empirical fact, then in order to justify the assertion that there is no God, we must know that there is no corner of reality, no kind of reality, and no dimension of reality, in which God can possibly exist.  And that means that we have to know every corner, every kind, and every dimension of reality.

The word for that kind of knowledge is “omniscience.”  It is an attribute of God.  If there is an omniscient being, that being is God.  So the claim that we can know that there is no God logically implies that the person who makes that claim has omniscience, that is, is God.  So to claim to know that there is no God is to imply that there is a God, and that he is now speaking.

But just because reductionism is logically problematic, that doesn't mean transcendentalism is true. So on Friday I will offer a proof for transcendentalism. Stay tuned!
 
 
Originally published at PeterKreeft.com. Used with permission.
(Image credit: Associated Press)

According to many today, the advance of the natural physical sciences continues to shrink the “space” for God. The “gaps” where someone can place God are decreasing, and therefore the “God hypothesis” will one day be swallowed whole by the progress of the scientific endeavor. Even more, the “space” where one could posit the human person as something more than just a complex, organized collection of matter and energy is said to have disappeared.

While I find a materialist metaphysics very hard to coherently defend, I do find it interesting that an increasing amount of “secular” philosophers, who have no particular sympathy towards deism or theism, are beginning to question the assumption that materialism is true.¹ It seems the rise of the physical sciences has led to matter and energy being proclaimed as the one true “god.”

As we read a few months back on Strange Notions, in Pat Shultz’s article on the personal pronoun “I” and inner subjectivity, atheism and materialism seem to be connected in an intimate manner. But if we can show that materialism is false, beyond a reasonable doubt, we can begin to proclaim with Dr. Edward Feser that materialism is in fact one of the last superstitions and one of the final myths that we have created.² We then can begin to recognize that there exists more to reality than simply matter and energy. Our heart and mind can then be opened to a deeper and more nuanced understanding of the human person and ultimately to the possibility of the Divine.

While I will not propose arguments for either this more complete account of the human person or a specifically theistic worldview in this essay, I do wish to address the coherency of actually holding that materialism is true. Materialism is the metaphysical proposal that all that exists is material in its nature. This means that no immaterial, spiritual entities exist in all reality. While there are many issues that arise which challenge the coherency of the materialist hypothesis, one of the most basic is the existence of truth. The reason is that truth, and our beliefs in general, necessarily seep into every facet of our human condition. Every coherent thought we have and word we proclaim is some sort of belief statement about the true nature of reality. Even when we aim to purposely deceive, we are working off of the assumption that there is a truth about reality that we are trying to keep hidden. We cannot say that truth does not exist without at the same time contradicting ourself.

But there is a key distinction that makes the human person so unique. It is not simply the case that it is possible that some of the beliefs we hold are actually true. Rather, the human person is capable of using reason to hold that certain beliefs are more rational to hold as actually true over alternative beliefs. In other words, it is possible for the human person to distinguish between beliefs that merely appear true and beliefs that are actually true. This is done through the proper use of reason and the intellect. The alternative to this position is complete skepticism, where a person holds that one cannot tell the difference between a belief that is actually true and one that only appears to be true.

We can already begin to see that the position of complete skepticism is incoherent and must be rejected. The statement, “I hold that it is actually true that a person cannot tell the difference between a belief that is actually true and one that only appears to be true” is clearly an incoherent proposition. In a more succinct manner, what we are saying is that, “I hold that complete skepticism is actually true.” This is a self-contradiction and what is called a “proof by contradiction”. Therefore, we reject complete skepticism (this will be an important part of the actual arguments below) and move on to the main attraction.

We will be using the form of a basic logical philosophical proof. If you read the series at Strange Notions about the existence of an unconditioned reality, this should look very familiar. This type of argument can be very strong, because if the logical form is valid and the premises are true, then the conclusion is necessarily true (from the metaphysical—the ontological—point of view). From an epistemological point of view, if the premises can be shown to be true, beyond a reasonable doubt, then the conclusion that follows is also to be held as true beyond a reasonable doubt.

We will be proposing all the ways in which truth could arise within the human person, while at the same time assuming that the human person is a purely material being. If all these options must ultimately be reduced to absurdity, using valid logical form and true premises, then we will also reduce the assumption of materialism to absurdity. This will be done by taking each of the options one at a time, assuming it is true, and then working to show that the position is actually internally incoherent. And if the position can be shown to be internally incoherent, then means we must reject that original assumption.

The Argument

I. Either all of reality is material in nature (i.e., materialism is true) or all of reality is not material in nature (i.e., materialism is not true).

We start by breaking our options for reality into two absolute groups. There are no other options available. Either all of reality is material in nature (i.e., materialism is true) or all of reality is not material in nature (i.e., materialism is not true). We do this so that if the assumption that materialism is true leads to a logical contradiction, then we must conclude that materialism is not true.

We will start by assuming that materialism is true. This means that the belief-making mechanisms of the human person are ultimately reducible to the overall physical state of the human person. Many would point towards the chemical processes in the brain and the overall state of the nervous system, but of course there may be more “materiality” to the human person that we have yet to discover and study. This is the reason we use the general statement of “the overall physical state of the human person”—whatever that physical state may end up being. And the reason this is true is because nothing but matter and energy exists, so all our beliefs ultimately arise from the complex interaction of matter and energy.

II. If materialism is true, we have three alternative possibilities:

(A) The human person’s belief-making mechanisms do not follow any sort of consistent natural physical laws.

(B) The human person’s belief-making mechanisms do follow complex natural physical laws and always lead to true beliefs.

(C) The human person’s belief-making mechanisms do follow complex natural physical laws and do not always lead to true beliefs.

What we have done here is lay out all possible options in all reality. (I did not include the option of natural laws always leading to false beliefs, since that option can be easily seen to be incoherent.) We will take each option in turn to see whether it can account for holding beliefs that we have reason to believe are more rational to hold as actually true than alternative beliefs; that is, we will see if any of these options can account for the fact that the human person is capable of distinguishing between beliefs that are actually true and beliefs that only appear to be true.

III. The Materialist Options evaluated

Materialist Option (A)

1. We assume that Materialist Option (A) is true. (The human person’s belief-making mechanisms do not follow any sort of consistent natural physical laws)
2. Complete skepticism is false.
3. If the human person’s belief-making mechanisms do not follow any consistent natural physical laws, then all the matter/energy that makes up the human person’s belief-making mechanisms behave in random ways.
4. If the belief-making mechanisms behave in random ways, then the beliefs that come from this belief-making mechanism will also be random.
5. If the beliefs are random, then the human person cannot rationally hold that any belief is actually true, rather than only appearing to be true.
6. If the human person cannot rationally hold that any belief is actually true, rather than only appearing to be true, then complete skepticism is true.
7. Contradiction between premise (2) and premise (6).
8. Therefore, we reject the original assumption of Materialist Option (A).

The job at hand now is to show that each of these premises is true beyond a reasonable doubt. Premise (2)—that complete skepticism is false—was demonstrated above.

Premises (3) and (4) are evident from the fact that if even a single part of the matter/energy that forms the human person’s belief-making mechanisms does not follow any consistent physical laws, then the beliefs that come from them will be random. To be random means that our belief-making mechanisms are not directed towards coming to true beliefs—in fact these mechanisms aren’t directed towards anything!

Premise (5) and (6) simply shows that if our beliefs are completely random then we have no way to rationally hold that any of our beliefs are actually true, rather than simply appearing to be true. Furthermore, our belief in the fact that our beliefs are random would itself a random. This leads to complete skepticism, which creates an internal contradiction in this hypothesis. Therefore, we reject Materialist Option (A). The belief that the human person’s belief-making mechanisms do not follow any sort of consistent natural physical laws is false.

Materialist Option (B)

1. We assume that Materialist Option (B) is true. (The human person’s belief-making mechanisms do follow complex natural physical laws and always lead to true beliefs)
2. If the human person’s belief-making mechanisms always leads to true beliefs, then every belief the human person holds is true.
3. The human person does not always hold true beliefs.
4. Contradiction between premises (2) and (3).
5. Therefore, we reject the original assumption of Materialist Option (B).

This option is the one that is most easily seen to be false. The proposal that we always come to true beliefs is false by the fact that two people can, and many times do, hold contradictory beliefs to be true. It is also shown forth by the fact that we assume that science has shown that people have come to false beliefs about reality in the past. Those entering into discussion on a site like Strange Notions are actually working from the assumption that they are coming together to discuss what the actual truth of reality is, which assumes that false beliefs about reality are possible. With that said, we can reject Materialist Option (B). The belief that the human person’s belief-making mechanisms do follow complex natural physical laws and always lead to true beliefs is false.

Materialist Option (C)

1. We assume that Materialist Option (C) is true. (The human person’s belief-making mechanisms do follow complex natural physical laws and do not always lead to true beliefs.)
2. Complete skepticism is false.
3. If the human person’s belief-making mechanisms follow natural physical laws, which do not always lead to true beliefs, then some beliefs a person holds are true and some they hold are false.
4. If the exact same natural physical laws that govern the human person’s belief-making mechanisms do lead to both true and false beliefs, then the human person cannot rationally hold that any particular belief is actually true, rather than only appearing to be true.
5. If the human person cannot rationally hold that any particular belief is actually true, rather than only appearing to be true, then complete skepticism is true.
6. Contradiction between premises (2) and (5).
7. Therefore, we reject the original assumption of Materialist Option (C).

Materialist Option (C) is probably the hypothesis that needs the most attention. This is because it seems to have the most promise of being able to describe reality as it actually is. Common human experience tells us that the human person can come to both true and false beliefs. And when we assume materialism, the belief-making mechanisms would seem to need to follow some sort of very complex natural physical laws. Obviously, if they didn’t always follow some sort of natural physical laws, then the coherency of our physical sciences is undermined, and we would be back to Materialist Option (A), which we addressed above. This is because the sciences rely upon the assumption that matter and energy actually do follow complex natural “physical laws” (even laws stating probabilities, such as those in versions of quantum mechanics, are natural physical laws nonetheless.)

So we again begin by acknowledging that complete skepticism is false. In premise (3), we simply point out that if the belief-making mechanisms of the human person do not always lead to true beliefs, then some of the beliefs that the person holds will be true and some of them will be false.

Premise (4) is the key premise in this argument. It points out that these consistent complex natural laws lead the human person’s belief-making mechanisms to sometimes hold true beliefs and at other times to hold false beliefs. In other words, the same law in the same exact situation can lead to either a true or false belief. If that is the case, then there is no way to tell whether a belief we hold is actually true, or whether it merely appears true. (The only way to avoid this conclusion is to hold a deterministic account of beliefs, where every belief we hold is true. This is Materialist Option (B), which we discussed above and found to be false.)

As has been the problem with all three of these proposals, there is no way to step back and use reason to say that this belief is actually true, rather than the belief only appearing to be true. In other words, complete skepticism is again true. Materialist Position (C) contains an internal contradiction. We can then reject Materialist Option (C). The belief that the human person’s belief-making mechanisms do follow complex natural physical laws and do not always lead to true beliefs is false.

IV. The Grand Conclusion

What we have done is evaluate all three options that would attempt to explain, at a metaphysical level, how the human person would come to beliefs on a materialistic view of reality. What we have found is that all three of these positions are internally incoherent. Because of this we can reject the original assumption that all of reality is material in nature and conclude that there exists in all of reality more than just matter and energy—materialism is false. But even more specifically, because we are dealing with the belief-making mechanisms of the human person, we can conclude that the human person itself is not merely a material being.

The fact that this is a philosophical proof means that no finding in science could in principle undermine the conclusion. The only way to disprove this conclusion would be to use philosophical argument. Because of this fact, “promissory materialism”, the belief that one day the sciences will be able to explain all of reality in terms of matter and energy, is of no use. It does not matter what science discovers about the physical “laws” of the universe. It does not matter what other discoveries science makes in regards to quantum physics, string theory, multi-verses, or any other surprises this beautiful and vast cosmos has in store for us. This is, in part, what makes good philosophical arguments so strong.

The Evolution Objection

When I have had discussions with others about the topic of materialism and truth, evolution naturally comes up. Many times evolution appears to be the savior of this whole materialist enterprise—if a materialist has tried to replace God with matter and energy, then Jesus is replaced by the theory of evolution.

The central point of the evolution objection is that evolution is a sort of “optimizer”. Evolution has no ultimate purpose, goal, or “end”, but the more beings who survive to reproduce with a certain trait means that there will be a higher probability of having that trait passed down to future generations. So it could be proposed that in the roughly four billion years since it is believed life first appeared on earth, the belief-making mechanisms have been optimized so that, at this point in history, we have very good reason to believe that the majority of our beliefs are actually true. This plays off of the fact that it is reasonable to believe that a biological being who holds more true beliefs would seem to have a higher probability of surviving.

The fact of the matter is this could all be true, but it would still not change the fact that materialism is an incoherent belief.

The reason for this is we are not debating whether the human person could actually hold some true beliefs. The above discussion hinges upon the question of whether it is possible to show that any specific belief we hold is actually true, rather than simply appearing to be true to us. If we can’t show this, then the human person is left in a state of complete skepticism, even in regards to the belief that “materialism is true”.

For example, “materialism is true” is a belief that the materialist needs to show is actually true, and doesn’t simply appear true to them. But the materialist necessarily saws off the branch that they are sitting on when they claim that materialism is true. This branch is itself the only thing that gives them the ability to hold that anything they hold is actually true. They are making the claim that materialism is true, but they cannot tell you if it is actually true, or if it only appears true. They destroy truth itself, which destroys their ability to hold any of their beliefs as being actually true statements. In fact, any thought a materialist has, or any statement that a materialist speaks, ends up being proof that materialism is false.

Truth is one of the key ways in which the transcendent nature of the human person makes its presence felt. This is why, over 2,000 years ago, Aristotle called the human person the “rational animal”. A rational intellect, a self-conscious nature, and a free will are all inextricably tied together. To be able to say that we have reason to believe that something is actually true, and doesn’t just appear to be true, is to “take a step back” from our belief. Picture it like placing the belief in front of you, and then objectively studying whether it is true or not. This is the reason why the human person can hold that it is rational to believe that some beliefs are actually, objectively true. And as we investigated at the beginning of this essay, the alternative, complete skepticism—that the human person cannot tell whether a belief is actually true or only appears true—is false.

So in the end, materialism and truth do have irreconcilable differences and must go their separate ways—to divorce and never become united, although it is, in fact, a union that never could have taken place.

It may be possible to boil down this entire essay to one statement: if complete skepticism is false, then materialism is also false.

But what then in regards to the proper conception of the human person itself? We have rejected materialism and we must also reject a dualist account, most prominently because of the mysterious and almost magical notion of how these two substances of an immaterial mind and material body would come together to interact. Our gaze must then fall to a type of hylomorphic account; an account that recognizes a distinction between the material and immateriality of the human person, but insists that the person is a single unified substance. This type of account must hold that the spiritual aspects of the human person do not reside in the living body, but rather must be identified with the entirety of the single unified living body—a living body that is a unity of both immateriality and materiality.

The next task is to defend and nuance this hylomorphic conception of the human person. I leave this task to the better equipped Mr. Patrick Schultz, who I just so happen to know has produced two fantastic essays on this exact topic (coming this Wednesday and Friday at Strange Notions.)

So we shall wait, not in the darkness of uncertainty, but in the light, knowing that philosophy can shed light on the issue of the true nature of the human person!

Two fantastic articles at Strange Notions in recent weeks have turned from the question of God to the question of the human self. In “Atheism and the Personal Pronoun,” Patrick Schultz explores what he calls a “doorstop” argument for the soul: under materialist atheism, we are mindless machines, but given that every one of us is inescapably a subjective “I,” materialist atheism looks false. In “Exorcizing the Ghost from the Machine,” Matthew Newland counters this argument by looking at brain-mind causality, naturalistic “emergence,” and split-brain research, concluding that the conscious mind may very well be a kind of “city” of proto-minds operating in unison. I find points of agreement in both pieces, but would like to reframe the question from a third perspective. (If nothing else, I hope this whole discussion is a reminder that there is room in the Catholic Church for vastly different conclusions on some very fundamental questions.)

There’s an old Irish joke that Richard Dawkins recounts as well as anyone in The God Delusion:

“A journalist, researching for an article on the complex political situation in Northern Ireland, was in a pub in a war-torn area of Belfast. One of his potential informants leaned over his pint of Guinness and suspiciously cross-examined the journalist: “Are you a Catholic or a Protestant?” the Irishman asked. "Neither," replied the journalist; “I'm an atheist.” The Irishman, not content with this answer, put a further question: “Ah, but are you a Catholic atheist or a Protestant atheist?”

The absurdity of the joke is that the Irishman is so entrenched in the local standoff that he can’t help but see a hapless outsider as belonging to one side or the other. As far as he’s concerned, there is no third option.

This is a perfect analogy for what has happened with modern philosophy of mind. Instead of Catholics and Protestants, we have rationalists and empiricists; instead of Jesus, our common reference point is Descartes. And instead of unbelievers, we have those who doubt the wisdom of the epistemological turn inaugurated with Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am.”

That turn, like it or not, wields enormous influence on all of Western thought and culture, especially modern philosophy. On the continent, Descartes’ fellow rationalists were all hugely influenced by his epistemology, and though they came to different conclusions, all continued the angelic quest for the foundations of reason. Across the English Channel, the empiricists also put on the mantle of epistemology, but were skeptical about “innate ideas”, seeing in man only a bundle of sense perceptions. Kant, awoken from his “dogmatic slumber” by Hume’s skepticism, attempted to rectify these two traditions with his Critique of Pure Reason, catapulting us further into rarefied spiritual air with the German and British idealists – which, in turn, capitulated us into the logical positivism that has dominated the Anglo-American universities until just recently. Even today, most maneuvers and counter-maneuvers, from Chalmers’ p-zombies to Dennett’s Cartesian theater, are situated in the same contextual snare. Like quicksand, the more we wrestle with Cartesian notions of the self, the deeper he sinks us into the epistemological tradition—and round and round we go.

Schultz and Newland, too, both reference Descartes in their articles. Schultz, echoing Aquinas, notes that the soul is “an animating principle” of the body, but the analogy of emptied suits and the language of a brain “belonging” to a soul both conjure, however slightly, the shadow of Cartesian rationalism.

In reaction to this, Newland proposes to “exorcise” the “ghost from the machine” by exploring Whitehead’s empiricism, positing a bundle of “little minds” that emerges from its “environment, structure, and chemical reactions.” Newland mirrors the arc of empiricism in one other crucial way: the invocation of an Aristotelian “soul” feels redundant. What is this “soul” if not an unnecessary metaphysical tier tacked on to what’s already been broken down and explained? This seems to be the arc of naturalism from Locke to Dennett where our spiritual side is concerned: the effervescent “soul” becomes as wispy and feckless an appendage as a phantom limb. It seems cleaner and more efficient to just cut it off and move on.

These two systems, often in very subtle ways, tend to push us to one side or the other whenever we approach the self, dragging us into an endless tug-of-war over one and the same epistemological rope. Henri Bergson, in his Introduction to Metaphysics, sought a way out through the concept of intuition, arguing that the two traditions were “dupes of the same illusion,” both “equally powerless to reach the inner self.” Jacques Maritain, a young student at the Sorbonne, had been in suicidal despair over the positivist view of life until he sat in on Bergson’s lectures. Eventually, he and Étienne Gilson, another student of Bergson’s, initiated a twentieth century revival in Scholastic metaphysics, abandoning their master’s philosophy but continuing his attack on the Cartesian-Kantian bloodline.

This revolt was not some isolated French fashion. As Charles Taylor shows in his essay "Overcoming Epistemology", recent philosophy has seen a succession of attempts from both analytic and continental thinkers to get out from under the crushing weight of the epistemological tradition. There is the phenomenology of Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty (carried forward today by Jean-Luc Marion) and the existentialism which sprouted from it; there is the late turn in Wittgenstein’s thought away from logical analysis toward ordinary language; there is neopragmatist Richard Rorty’s hugely influential Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature published in 1979; and there is Taylor’s own book, Sources of the Self, which looks to the “moral sources”—cultural, historical, and religious as well as philosophical—that inform our modern notions of the self.

What that self finally is for each of these thinkers obviously varies greatly. But Taylor argues that what’s more important is what they have in common:

"We argue the inadequacy of the epistemological construal, and the necessity of a new conception, from what we show to be the indispensable conditions of there being anything like experience or awareness of the world in the first place. Just how to characterize this reality, whose conditions we are defining, can itself be a problem, of course…For all this extremely important shift in the center of gravity of what we take as the starting point, there is a continuity between Kant and Heidegger, Wittgenstein, or Merleau-Ponty. They all start from the intuition that this central phenomenon of experience, or the clearing, is not made intelligible on the epistemological construal, in either its empiricist or rationalist variants."

In other words, we need to step out of the stream of consciousness and out into the broader valley surrounding it. We need to, like the atheist in the Irish joke, proclaim our freedom from the provincial dilemma which creeps up in increasingly subtle ways. It’s not the Cartesian ghost we need to exorcise, but the epistemological séance that conjured it in the first place.

That reorientation of man back toward our being-in-the-world—one that simultaneously resists the perennial impulse toward reductionism—is well underway. We see, to use Bergson’s phrasing, an empiricism “worthy of the name” on the horizon, one which is “obliged to make an absolutely new effort for each object it studies.” Gilson’s formulation—with its eye squarely on the wisdom of classical philosophy—rings true for all of us, and is as good a place as any to start:

“Man is not a mind that thinks, but a being who knows other beings as true, who loves them as good, and who enjoys them as beautiful.”

 
 
(Image credit: Culture CPG)

NOTE: On Monday we featured a guest post by one of our non-Catholic contributors, Steven Dillon, titled "Do Catholics Know Their Theology is Correct?". Today Catholic writer Brandon Vogt responds.

 
Before beginning my response to Steven Dillon's thoughtful article at Strange Notions, "Do Catholics Know That Their Theology is Correct?", I want to first thank him for contributing. I've long admired Steven's clarity, good-will, and irenic approach. It's always a delight to interact with him.

Now before getting to the meat of his argument, I wanted to defuse a couple misunderstandings at the beginning. In his second paragraph, Steven writes "an atheist can discern the Catholic Church’s claim to having not contradicted itself in any of its official teachings." Indeed, an atheist can and should examine such a claim. And Steven provides two examples where he thinks the Catholic Church has offered contradictory teachings. The first concerns original sin and salvation:

"The extraordinary magisterium decreed – through the 15th century Council of Florence – that whoever dies in the state of original sin alone goes to hell. But, no one can die in the state of original sin alone if, as the universal and ordinary magisterium currently teaches, God gives everyone the grace necessary to be saved; for the acceptance of this grace removes original sin and its rejection adds mortal or venial sin. Which infallible magisterium is right?"

On my reading, I simply don't see a contradiction between those two statements. I suppose Steven is wondering how someone can die "in original sin alone", and that's perhaps where he sees a contradiction. One example would be a child born into original sin, but who dies before receiving the Sacrament of Baptism but also before committing any mortal sins. It is at least possible that such children are not saved. (Although many Catholics, including myself, believe that such children are saved through a sort of baptism by blood—a technical idea too complex to go into here.) But the point is there is no logical contradiction between the two statements that Steven offered.

Steven's second proposed contradiction concerns the Church's claim of papal primacy. If that teaching was true, and stemmed from Christ and the apostles, Steven wonders, why was it not more widely attested in the early centuries or in St. Luke's Gospel? Without answering that question directly (that's for another article), all we should note is that, again, this entails no logical contradiction here. Even if we grant Steven's supposition that the doctrine wasn't widely professed, that would not contradict its authenticity. Things can be true without being widely known or attested (although I think papal primacy was both.)

With those two points out of the way, let's move on to Steven's key contentions in his article. Steven is primarily interested with the question, "Do Catholics know their theology is correct?" Right off the bat, we run into an obstacle since Steven doesn't define how he's using the word "know." In the field of religious epistemology, there are several types of knowledge and therefore to understand Steven's ensuing points, we have to understand how he's using that term here. (Perhaps in the comment box below Steven can define how he's using it.)

In reading the rest of the article, it seems clear to me that Steven has adopted the central error of Skepticism: equating "knowledge" with "certainty." Although this conflation is common today it is rife with problems. For instance, under such a definition, we couldn't really know anything, even things we're fairly confident about. If you were asked, "Do you know you're typing on a computer?" then under this definition, my answer would have to be:

"Well, I think I am, but perhaps I'm actually a brain in a vat and a mad scientist is manipulating chemicals to make me believe I'm typing on a computer. Since that's at least possible, I can't be certain that I'm really typing on a computer. I guess I don't know whether I'm typing on a computer. So no, I don't know."

Most people would consider this response absurd, even though it flows logically from Steven's equating of "knowledge" with "certainty." But if the response is absurd and untenable, then so is the original conflation.

Let me pose the problem another way. When you assume that knowledge entails certainty, you suppose that in order to know X, you must know with certainty that you know X, which requires you must know with certainty that you know with certainty that you know X, etc. etc. etc. The claim "knowledge entails certainty" is, therefore, ultimately self-defeating because you can never attain certain knowledge of your knowledge.

If Steven's question (do Catholics know their theology is correct?) refers to epistemic certainty, then we Catholics would happily answer "No", just as the computer typist in our example would have to. However, if Steven were using "know" in the most common sense, meaning to "be reasonably aware of through observation, inquiry, or information", then we would give a more affirmative reply. Catholics know their theology is correct in ways similar to knowing our history or physics is correct, although in the case of theology, Catholics also have recourse to a divinely-guided magisterium who distinguishes truth from falsity (on some issues.)

In addition to defining "know", it's also important we understand what Steven means by "their [i.e., Catholic's] theology." Perhaps by "their theology" Steven is referring only to the Catholic Church's magisterial teachings, as delivered through Scripture, Tradition, Church councils, popes, etc. But perhaps he's also including the theology professed by individual Catholics (i.e., "my personal theology", or what I believe about God), which is often diverse and contradictory, and certainly in addition to the Church's magisterial teachings. This is an important distinction because, for example, I may "know" theological truths expressed infallibly by the Church's magisterium but be hesitant about saying I "know" theological truths that I hold personally, but which haven't been formally adjudicated. To be more concrete, I know that Mary was born without original sin primarily because the Church's divine teaching authority has infallibly confirmed this, providing strong warrant. But I don't know whether God has incarnated himself on other planets to other species, although I do have an informed theological opinion about it. It's not clear which, or both, of those scenarios would pertain to Steven's question, "do Catholics know their theology is correct?" since both scenarios concern theological concepts. A Catholic's answer to his question would vary based on which set of claims Steven is referring to.

One more point of confusion. To me at least, it's not clear whether Steven is using "theology" the way Catholics would either. He defines theology as "the theorizing about a piece of divine revelation." But divine revelation only comprises part of theology. For example, one of the largest and oldest sub-disciplines of theology is Natural Theology, which concerns what we can know about God without the aid of divine revelation, simply through nature and reasoned reflection. Thus we can arrive at knowledge of God's existence by reasoning from the contingent world around us (natural theology), or we can arrive at knowledge of God's existence through the divine authority of Christ's Church, which has taught this point infallibly (revealed theology). The same conclusion can be arrived at through two paths, and thus entail different levels of knowledge or certainty.

Those are all necessary distinctions we must settle before we can answer Steven's core question. But instead of just stopping there to wait for these clarifications, I would like to engage one of Steven's major claims. He writes:

"Expert theologians'…reasons for holding this-or-that theological belief have not been good enough to persuade any significant portions of their peers even after centuries and centuries of scholarship…If experts do not have good enough reasons to settle a dispute, then the dispute is not settled. The fact of the matter is not yet known."

The problem I see with this suggestion is that just because a claim lacks complete consensus doesn't mean we lack knowledge about that claim. To see plenty of counter-examples, simply turn to the natural sciences. Many people disagree about evolution, but that doesn't mean we lack knowledge about evolution. It's therefore false to assume that disunity about a particular belief means that nobody has knowledge concerning that belief, or that such knowledge is impossible or difficult to attain.

In the quoted paragraph, I'm also not sure what Steven is referring to when he says "this-or-that theological belief." For many theological beliefs have been widely persuasive. Among expert theologians, there is almost unanimous agreement that Jesus claimed to be God, that he was crucified, and that he rose from the dead. The core tenants of the Nicene Creed are held with equal assent (as Steven later admits). Thus by Steven's own evaluation, in which majority assent is a key feature of true knowledge, theologians can say they "know" the tenants of Jesus' resurrection and the entirety of the Nicene Creed.

So in summary, to answer Steven's original question (do Catholics know their theology is correct?) we must understand what he means by "know" and "theology". It would also help if, instead of considering theology in general, we narrowed it down to a particular theological belief: do Catholics know their theology about [X] is correct?

But if I had to answer in the most general way, "Yes, Catholics have strong warrant to believe their theological beliefs are true."

Again, I appreciate Steven's thoughtful article and I look forward to his responses in the comment boxes.

(For those interested in a Catholic approach to epistemology written by one of the Church's greatest intellects, I recommend Blessed John Henry Newman's classic, Grammar of Assent. You can read it free online or sample his ideas in this article.)