Category Archives: Metaphysics & Natural Philosophy

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Freedom is Extramundane

In the post Stochastic Sempiternity, commenter Bedarz Iliaci was uncomfortable with the notion that nature proceeds stochastically, as I there suggested. He insisted that the world must evolve deterministically in order to make any sense, and especially if rational agents such as we are to make sense of it, or of our acts in relation thereto; so that the irruption therein of inputs from rational free agents such as ourselves – and, ergo, the source of our freedom – must be to us ultimately mysterious, as flowing into the rational, determined world from some supra-mundane realm. I paraphrase him, hoping he will correct me if I have got him wrong in any important way.

Mr. Iliaci suggested that, in order to see better what he was talking about, I might profitably refer to some arguments of Fr. Stanley Jaki in his Miracles and Physics. This I did, and can now say that, compelling as Fr. Jaki’s arguments are, they do not seem to me to contradict my suggestion that nature proceeds stochastically.

Jaki excoriates the notion that the Uncertainty Relation of quantum mechanics can open room in the natural world for the causal effects of free rational agents. He argues that our inability to predict quantal events with perfect certainty does not at all justify an inference to the notion that such happenings are somewhat undetermined with respect to their causal antecedents, and therefore ontologically free. Furthermore, we ought to be cautious in making such an inference, for it would lead to a conception of nature as radically disordered at the most fundamental level.

I think Jaki is right. The inference to ontology from epistemology is unwarranted, even if it is in practical terms insuperable.

But I don’t think it matters.

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Stochastic Sempiternity

Bruce Charlton suggests in a recent post that the eternal pre-mortem existence of the human soul might be a way to provide room for our free agency in a system of things that seems otherwise, as wholly determinate in and by its derivation from some past, and ultimately by and from God, to provide none. If we are eternal, he argues, then obviously we are not determined by anything other than ourselves, and so are free – free, among other things, to Fall.

There are some fatal problems with this suggestion. But hidden within it is the germ of a solution to the problem Dr. Charlton has noticed. All that is needed to unpack it is to apply certain distinctions.

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Rene Girard on a Cause of Homosexuality

From Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World (1978; English translation, 1987); Book III, Chapter 3, “Mimesis and Sexuality” (Pages 337 – 338)

“If we recognize that the sexual appetite can be affected by the interplay of mimetic interferences, we have no reason to stop at ‘sadism’ and ‘masochism’ in our critique of false psychiatric labels. Let us grant that the subject can no longer obtain sexual satisfaction without involving the violence of the model or a simulation of that violence – and that the instinctual structures we have inherited from the animals, in the sexual domain, can allow themselves to be inflected by the mimetic game. We then have to ask ourselves [whether] these cases of interference are not likely to have a still more decisive effect and give rise to at least some of the forms of homosexuality.

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The God of the Infinite Gaps

Scorn is often poured upon the notion that God intervenes from time to time in a causal system that is otherwise cooking along quite nicely, and in good orderly fashion, all on its own. This is the “God of the Gaps” in our scientific understanding of that causal order. The suggestion of the critics is that it is illegitimate to invoke God to account for the holes that still remain in the scientific understanding of reality – in the first place, our understanding of those gaps is sure to be filled in sooner or later, and in the second, the causal order would not really be so orderly, after all, if there were indeed such great gaps in it, that had to be filled up by God. The gaps must not really be holes, they argue, but only lacunae. Defenders of theism respond that it is not mathematically possible to account for such things as the immense amount of information encoded in the DNA of even the humblest organism by reference only to stochastic procedures; and that, in the first place, the very existence of stochastic procedures, or of populations of entities that can execute them, cannot itself be explained by reference to stochastic procedures. The causal buck must somewhere stop; or else, there is in the final analysis no economy to the universe, no order or system, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary. I have made such arguments myself.

It’s an interesting debate, but in the end I don’t think it really matters. It is altogether trumped by another sort of consideration: reality is chock full of gaps that cannot possibly be bridged by any finite entity, nor by any number of finite entities, no matter how large. Indeed, the causal order – the connective tissue, as it were, of reality – is almost entirely constituted of such infinite gaps. Thus, it’s not just that our God is the God of this little gap or that, which we shall soon understand how finite causal factors fill up quite satisfactorily. No. The problem goes much deeper. Ontologically, causal gaps per se are infinite, which means among other things that they cannot be comprehended by finite intellects; and there is such an infinite gap between each and every link of the causal chain. God is not – or at least, is not merely – the God of this or that tidy little gap. He is the God of the infinite gaps, that everywhere pervade reality, and form its woof and warp.

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Prayer Extensions

I have been corresponding via email with one of our commenters. The correspondence began when I chided him for pushing the envelope on our comments policy. Slowly, gradually he has revealed to me that he is a young man of Hindu descent, who has been converted to Christianity, to a love of the West, and to Traditionalism. He is an earnest, ardent fellow, eager to learn. He has for the last many months been suffering terribly from leukemia, and of course from the many side effects of that disease and its treatments, and of the treatments of those side effects. He is sore beset, and so has not the physiological resources to suffer fools patiently. Thus the chiding.

Please remember him in your prayers, not just as a valued member of the Orthosphere community, but as a child who has been singled out – we can’t know why – for more than his fair share of suffering. Because he wishes to remain private, I cannot identify him, or tell you where he is. But God knows his address – indeed, in a sense God just is his address, no? – and will see that our prayers are properly routed, in just the way that he provides for the proper order of things. So your prayers will not go to waste.

Indeed, they cannot.

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Aquinas vs. Ovid: body, soul, and person

As she splashed his hair with revengeful drops,
she spoke the spine-chilling words which warned of impending disaster:
‘Now you may tell the story of seeing Diana naked–
if story-telling is in your power!’ No more was needed.
The head she had sprinkled sprouted the horns of a lusty stag;
the neck expanded, the ears were narrowed to pointed tips;
she changed his hands into hooves and his arms into long and slender
forelegs; she covered his frame in a pelt of dappled buckskin;
last, she injected panic. The son of Autonoe bolted…

What does it mean to say that Diana turned Actaeon into a stag?  I mean, I get it that she’s a goddess and can cause a deer to appear where a man once was, but what does it mean to say that the deer is still Actaeon?  According to the Philosopher, the unity of a thing (and hence our ability to identify it as the same thing in different states) comes from its substantial form, but Actaeon has just changed species.  While there may be some continuity of vital and sensitive processes, the essential nature of these has been altered.  It would seem that this is no different from saying that Actaeon was killed and his matter reconstituted as a deer, but this is not how we understand the story.  (Otherwise, the deer being killed by Actaeon’s dogs would be no new misfortune for the poor hunter.)  An Aristotelian might say that the poet cheats by having the deer experience human-like emotions and thoughts.  Still, we have all experienced moments of terror when reason abandoned us.  Couldn’t we imagine Actaeon’s last moments being like this, and it being consistent with the restrictions of deer-nature?  We can imagine this, and we know what we are imagining that makes seeing Diana and getting attacked by dogs be events that happen to the same being.  It is a single subjectivity, a single stream of consciousness, a single “I” that can attach itself to both experiences, even though the two experiences belonged to different natures.

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What natural theology does for personal piety

Our friend Bruce Charlton has recently devoted several posts (they are all worth reading, but see especially here) to arguing that the tenets of classical theism can be bad for the faith of ordinary Christians.  He claims (and who could really deny it?) that discussions of the divine attributes are opaque and abstract, while the Christian faith should be accessible to simple folk and children.  He also claims that philosophical theists have insuperable problems squaring an omnipotent being’s benevolence with the world as we see it.  In contrast, Bruce proposes a limited God, neither omnipotent nor omniscient, part of the world rather than above it, who is too weak to remove evil from the world and is thus not responsible for it.

It is no unhealthy thing for natural theology to be called upon from time to time to justify itself to those who recognize that communion with God is the only ultimate good.  This is a good thing for traditionalists “in good standing” to be discussing.  Nevertheless, I think Bruce has misjudged the classical doctrine of God, whose purpose is not to confound the faith of simple folk but to justify it.

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Order, Randomness & Evolution

Fellow orthospherean blogger Chester Poe (of Occidental Traditionalist) commented:

… something I have long wondered. What are the opinions of Kristor, bonald, and Mr. Roebuck, on the issue of Evolution v. Creationism? What about the age of the earth?

I responded briefly (for me). But then I had some further thoughts, which I here set forth.

Evolution, properly speaking, is just a term to indicate the literal “out-rolling” of time. Despite my focus on eternity of late, I do indeed believe that temporal events really happen, and are causally related to each other in orderly fashion, which is all that belief in “evolution” properly connotes.

The vernacular idiom of these latter days, however, takes “evolution” to connote the concurrent operation of two quite different procedures: random mutation and natural selection. “Evolution” in the modern sense therefore urges two different metaphysical propositions: that what happens in the world is the outcome of a process of selection, which determines what characteristics of organisms are lethal by killing them off sooner or more often; and that novelty of form in nature is the result of random errors of replication, to which the practical circumstances of the entity in which such novelties are first manifest (whether molecule, organism, or species) are completely irrelevant.

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The Argument from Truth

Omniscience could not fail to comprehend all truths, and anything less than omniscience would fail as an understanding of the whole truth. Further, only omniscience could fully understand the whole meaning of even a single proposition, so as adequately to evaluate its truth value; for the infinite extent of the realm of the possible entails that the potential consequences in experience of the truth of any proposition are necessarily infinite in number, and until one knows all the consequences of a concept, one cannot fully comprehend its meaning. So only an omniscient being can know the whole truth, or the whole meaning of any one truth. If therefore a proposition is true, it must necessarily be found among that set of propositions entertained by God as the whole truth. So only the propositions entertained as true by God can in fact be true. Other beings may understand their truth, to be sure; but if any truth is to be at all apprehensible by any creature, it must first have been entertained as such by the Divine Mind – for had it not been thus Divinely understood as true, it could not be true at all, to anyone. I.e., it would be false.

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Christ is How You are Doing This

When Christ says in John 14:6 that he is the Way, the Truth, and the Light, he does not only mean that he is the Way to the Father. He means also that he – and the Father, and the Holy Spirit – are the way we are each doing whatever it is we are doing at any given moment. This is also, likewise, an aspect of what Paul means in Acts 17:28, when he says that in God we live, move and have our being. The being and power I am and have right this moment came just now from God, not per accidens, but per se (this origination per se being the forecondition for any causal origination per accidens). I certainly didn’t arrange for the existence and potentiality of this moment of my life to happen. I just find myself right here, right now. Which, when you think about it, is totally inexplicable, on creaturely terms. Thus all the power I exert right now, all the ways that I can act, are provided to me by God.

Everything that I am and have is derived from God’s creative act.

What will I do with this little bit of his being and power that, in making it out of nothing, Christ has given to me?

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