Just Thomism

Lead us not into temptation,

but deliver us from evil.

While granting at the outset the impossibility of God proposing evil as a good (which is what James 1:13 speaks of in forbidding us to see temptation as from God), nevertheless God has a right to test anything he pleases or even place it in a circumstance where sin is likely or foreseeable, even to a finite intelligence looking at the situation. so what if he chooses to place it in such a circumstance? Either the creature finds the power to resist or not; and if not, he either keeps asking or not. Again, if he asks he either receives or not; and if he doesn’t receive he either keeps asking or not. This story ends either with receiving the grace to resist or with ceasing to ask; if the first then he is delivered from evil, if not then the divine wrath delivers him over to what is shameful (Rom 1:26.)

Free choice has a role to play in all this, but no created mover is a first mover. As our whole substance is from another, a fortiori our accidental power to act is from another. This is what James explains later in chapter 1: Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, nor shadow of changing. The variation and changeability of our action – even or especially our free choices, and above all the best choices to ask for divine help to grow in virtues – trace back to the immobility of pure actuality. 

A dollar is 0.93 Euros (just checked.)

The sentence is a correct use of “is” and is even true conversely, but it is very different from the use of “is” that predicates the definition of a dollar, which is another predicate conversely true. Even among definitions, one would divide the nominal definition, which would be a relatively straightforward account of how to correctly use the word (of the sort one would find in a dictionary) and the real definition, which articulates the essential principles of being a dollar, derived from a fundamental theory of currency.

One underappreciated problem in the philosophy of science,* or in attempts to ontologize scientific findings, is overlooking the distinction between “is” of factual equivalence with the “is” of definition. One relatively small but familiar subset of this problem is the correlation/causation conflation, where causation is clearly seeks an essential principle belonging to a real definition while correlation expresses a mere factual equivalence. But the problem is a good deal larger than this, since even the binding of two variables by a “scientific law” does not state the essential principles of something. Hume was clear on this (his “necessary connection” is the articulation of a per se or essential principle) and the popular view of Hume is that he took it as evidence that we have to settle for laws as mere correlations of facts as opposed to discovering essential principles of nature.

If we take the pop-Hume route, we have to drop any ontologizing from science, even to the point of denying any ontological value to claims like “I am made of atoms” or “a force is moving the car” or “an artificial intelligence is possible.” I haven’t made up my mind about whether I want to go this far, but I’m far enough down the road of believing this to wonder whether scientific unifications (and therefore reductions) express any bona fide homogeneity in nature.

*Bearing in mind that philosophy of science is a huge field and the problem I’m noticing might be considered in some part of field I’m not reading.

The locus classicus for the opposition of spirit and flesh is Mt. 26: 41, where Christ describes his disciples’ temptation to sleep when they were told to watch by saying the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak. In interpreting this, the temptation is to divide the person into two parts – reason and the passions, the will and the emotions, etc – and to identify one with spirit and the other with flesh. But this seems inconsistent with what Christ is saying. Why talk about the weakness of passion immediately before the disciples are to be overcome by it? Perhaps we could save this account of flesh as passions by saying the passions are the weak link, but this also seems to miss what Christ is speaking about. If the disciples had reasoned to themselves about why they should take a quick nap, this reasoning would be precisely what Christ called the flesh, and if they had kept themselves kept awake with intense emotions, all those emotions would be a perfect example of what Christ called the spirit.

While spirit and flesh don’t divide as different powers, they divide very well by different objects. Flesh is anything turned away from Christ; spirit is anything oriented toward him. If passions or reason or the will or a teaching or a practice is turned toward Christ it is spirit, if not, flesh.*  Mt. 26:41 is testifying about the tension of the divided heart lacking the simplicity of devotion, but this division runs though the whole of the person and cannot be localized in any power.

*This especially helps to explain Christ’s bread of life discourse in John 6, which concludes by saying the flesh availeth nothing, these words I speak to you are spirit and life. The words of John 6 are supereminently ordered to Christ, as being the authoritative basis for the truth of his sacramental presence in the world.

Soul or life explains a body’s self-motion. The first, and in some sense the only thing it needs to do, is explain how a self is a principle of its own motion, in opposition to inanimate beings, where there is no need to posit a self to explain motion.

Self motion occurs when the mover and moved are one substance. By contrast, while a bicycle and rider are mover and moved, they aren’t one substance; a robot and its engineer are moved and mover, but are also not one substance; but the substance that grows legs is the same substance that has the legs (or later uses them.) A self-mover is thus a sort of engineer (and user) that is one substance with the machine.

Let’s just say it: the metaphor of a homunculus works up to a point. The soul is (a) a being in the substantial order that (b) is the agent cause of the motion of body and (c) is that for whose sake the body exists. Imagining the soul can’t survive death is usually just the mistake of conflating a substantial form with an accidental one. Nevertheless, there is an obvious fail point for the homunculus metaphor, namely that the union of mover and moved is precisely what constitutes the self mover’s substance. Even under the hypothesis that the human soul survives separation, its separation is still a substantial change and death of the person. Death is not the sailor getting off the ship or the prisoner leaving the cell, but the destruction of the hypostasis of the species.

The question of scriptural inerrancy needs to be detangled from the question of historicity. Inerrancy is a conclusion starting from an authority declaring that scripture faithfully relates all those things and only those things that God wanted expressed, together with the axiom that lies or mistakes cannot express omniscience. Taking the text as inerrant thus rests essentially (even if not entirely) in authority as opposed to axiom, intuitive appeal, or argumentation. While historicity has more than one sense, my chief objection to it arises when it takes itself as a discourse that rules out anyone engaged in faith seeking understanding.

The historical is a consensus view among those accepted as rational, which in practice means the consensus among university professors and the journals they publish in. At the present time, rational or historical thus means the consensus view among agnostic, Jewish, liberal Christian, and conservative Christian biblical scholars, along with the various ways one might push or massage the consensus in certain directions. One can understand this as open to faith seeking understanding (simply allow those with faith to be part of forming the consensus) but one can also understand it as ruling out faith as bias. The cry of “bias” will probably dissolve upon analysis: a bias can’t be taken generally as ruling out any prior belief, so it can only be taken narrowly as ruling out false or misleading beliefs, and it is simply question-begging to define faith as biased in the narrow sense. In fact, if bias means false the term itself becomes superfluous: as if anyone needed to be told that a rational discourse couldn’t appeal to something false! The same sort of analysis would arise if we tried to define a bias as pre-judging of an affair “without evidence.” All this means is that faith judgments are rash or ill-formed, and again, the term becomes superfluous.

It is, however, obvious that the consensus doesn’t include inerrancy, and it is silly to expect it to. Inerrancy does not mean that one without faith would be compelled by the text itself to conclude it was inerrant, the way one could be compelled after thoroughly proofreading the back of an Algebra textbook to say it contained no errors in the answers it gave to a problem set. Inerrancy is an article of faith and so depends on an appeal to an authority. One need not even say that inerrancy demands one is rationally compelled to conclude that scripture is historically reliable. Inerrancy makes no predictions about the modern day consensus of various Christians and non-Christians. How could it?

1.) On the one hand, God’s creation of the universe is necessarily and act of wisdom, for to order something to its highest principle is an act of wisdom, and simply by creating God orders something distinct from himself to its highest principle, namely God. So far as wisdom is the height and perfection of rationality, in this sense the universe is supremely rational.

2.) On the other hand, if we consider the possibilities creating and not creating, God stands to both as equally compatible with what he has to do, so he stands to both like a bricklayer stands to any two bricks in a pile. So far as rationality consists in having a reason for incompossible options, creation (and for similar reasons, redemption) is not rational but an act of sheer will. As Thomas puts it (and the bricklayer example is his) creation rests on an act God performs sola voluntate. 

While (1) and (2) are compatible, even for us, (2) is compatible with two very distinct views of God. On the one hand, the divine indifference to creation can be viewed as a grand cosmic shrug or Lucretian swerve in excelsis. The bricklayer example tends in this direction, and there is perhaps some value to the metaphor as allowing for the creature to see its nothingness in the face of divinity, i.e. its literal equivalence to nothingness relative to what God needs to do. Whatever God wants to do, he could accomplish just as well without me, or even without creating at all.

But one can account for the divine indifference just as well through supererogation, namely through an act of mercy. The supererogatory and duty-bound action are also formally incompossible, but whereas the latter action has a reason for it, the former does not., and so can explain the sort of non-rationality of (2.) But this is clearly what in fact does happen, since creation is supremely and paradigmatically supererogatory.

1.) Look! Some sensible thing, an X

2.) An X has a cause Y

3.) There is therefore a first Y that is not an X in any way, and therefore deserves to be called God.

X= thing in motion/potency, agent cause with an agent cause, contingent thing, more and less perfect being/ mid-grade being, thing acting for goals without intelligence.

Christian devotion is toward the God who liberates from evil. Though God stood before being and non being and would have been equally perfect whichever he chose, he chose to to create, not out of a cosmic shrug or disinterested indifference, but from a fullness of mercy. In the face of moral evil he would have been just as glorified by the condemnation of all in justice as by salvation, but he chose salvation, not on a whim, but because mercy is more fundamental to him than justice. Even where mercy is compatible with condemnation in justice, it is still more radical than it, and stands to it as though a primary to a secondary cause.

The effort of Christian devotion is coming to trust divine mercy as the fundamental divine attribute with respect to creatures. We bring the sin and nothingness, he brings salvation and existence. This has always demanded a great deal of trust arising from a strange source that overcomes a congenital desire to do otherwise. The people in Capernaum had to trust themselves to one who, to all appearances, looked just like a man and not a God; we have to trust ourselves to what, to all appearances, looks like the silence of the world and the ritual of sacraments. I’d hear someone out who said that the Capernians had it easier, but this only goes so far: it would have been easy enough for them to avoid approaching Christ out of embarrassment or dislike for crowds, or to be put off when they saw he was “just a man” (cf. Naaman), or to avoid him because they felt foolish to ask someone with no medical degree to heal skin lesions or paralysis. We all know such things aren’t cured by touching them! Christ was right that their faith healed them. Absent faith, they would have found one excuse or another just to stay sick. We find reasons not to trust too. We all know it doesn’t work.

Leaving aside how reasonable it is to do so, faith grows into hope that God will deliver us from evil, no matter what we take as evidence to the contrary. Devotion to Christ is trusting in a healing mercy, which not only gives rise to a joy in the face of divine goodness, but even in the awareness of our own defects, which are exactly what the mercy of the triune God seeks out most to heal.

Standpoint theory can start with the empirical observation that those who are excluded by some structure are more likely to notice that it excludes. The able-bodied, for example, just walk up the staircase while the disabled recognize it as an impassable barrier. The obviousness of the disabled person’s epistemic advantage justifies some deliberate attempt to take into account the viewpoints of the marginalized (“diversity”.) To leave it as this, however, isn’t enough to justify a typical standpoint theory: one has to go further and insist that the one who notices the exclusion has to organize politically or socially against it. If, after all, the person simply accepts his exclusion as the way things are or even comes to see it as justified, they are just as bad as those who don’t recognize it at all.

So standpoint theory is at its strongest when justifying the standpoint materially. To formally justify it one needs a further premise that the exclusion one notices is unjust. Questions of exclusion are however questions of distributive justice, and it is at this point that things get much murkier than they are generally allowed to be recognized. In the Ancien Régime, this question was perhaps much easier, since distributive justice followed some more or less naturally occuring class structure. But with the liberal revolution all this was thrown into question. Human equality seems to require that everyone had a right to anything, so any absence of some good thing was a violation of right. If I’m not king, my throne is usurped! There is therefore a tendency to see any exclusion as a violation of justice, and so standpoint theory becomes justified formally.