philosophy

‘Anselm’s four-dimensionalist approach successfully explains God’s action in time.’ Discuss. [40]

/ vardycharlotte / 1 Comment

St Anselm developed his understanding of how God relates to and acts in time on the basis of work already done by Boethius and before that by St Augustine. All these Classical Theists understood that God exists eternally, outside time and space. This means that Aristotle’s arguments for a Prime Mover, as well as Plato’s arguments for a Form of the Good, lend rational support for faith in God. Nevertheless, placing God outside time and space raises significant questions concerning if and how God can act within time, as well as what God’s knowledge of events within time is like and what God’s goodness can entail. If God is outside time and space then all of God’s actions – including every word that God says – must be concurrent within one simple, single act of creation. St Augustine, Boethius and St Anselm all attempted to resolve the particular problem of how God’s eternal foreknowledge seems to nullify human free will, and yet even St Anselm’s sophisticated understanding fails to explain for this, let alone how God could act in time, successfully.

Firstly, what Katherin A. Rogers claims to be St Anselm’s four-dimensionalism represents no real improvement over Boethius’ Universal Presentism in resolving the question of God’s relationship with time, whether regarding God’s knowledge or God’s actions. Whereas Presentism usually entails the belief that only the present moment really exists, the past and the future being illusory, in Boethius’ understanding because every moment is present to God, the future and past are as real as what we perceive to be the present. As Brian Leftow (in PRESENTISM, ATEMPORALITY, AND TIME’S WAY) explains, “Boethius is a temporal presentist… consider his classic simile: an atemporal God is as if on a mountain top, looking out on an entire future those lower down cannot see. It is part of the image that all the future is really there at once to be seen.” (p176) Yet this causes a problem for Boethius when it comes to God’s foreknowledge. If God sees the “future” in the same eternal moment as the “present”, how can any being be free? Because God knows what every being will do there are no alternate possibilities. Boethius argues that this problem results from out imperfect understanding of God’s eternal nature… “the reason of this obscurity is that the movement of human reasoning cannot cope with the simplicity of the Divine foreknowledge” Book V. Further, Boethius suggests that God’s knowledge does not make the outcomes of free actions logically necessary because God’s knowledge of them is contingent and dependent on those choices and outcomes occurring. “Boethius’s solution to the freedom-foreknowledge problem hinges on the claim that God’s knowledge is of all time at once and observational...” (Leftow, p176) Yet how can God’s knowledge of an event truly be conditional on that event taking place, such as to avoid making that event necessary, when God’s knowledge is eternal and identical with God’s power and goodness in God’s simple, single act of creation? Boethius’ analogy of the Chariot does nothing to help, because by his own admission, God’s knowledge is completely different to any knowledge we could have and because, as Boethius himself reminds us, there is no way that God could learn from us… as it seems He would have to if his knowledge of what we do depends on us. Further, St Anselm’s more developed position does little to resolve the problem. Like Boethius he contends that God’s knowledge, being of an eternal present, is not prior to events and so does not necessitate them. Whereas Boethius is what Leftow calls a “Universal Presentist”, St Anselm contends “but simply, you are, outside all time. For yesterday and to-day and to-morrow have no existence, except in time; but you, although nothing exists without you, nevertheless do not exist in space or time, but all things exist in you. For nothing contains you, but you contain all.” Proslogium XIX This suggests that every moment, whether we perceive it to be past, present or future, exist not only in God’s sight, but within God’s eternal being. Reflecting on what this might mean, St Anselm wrote in De Concordia 1.5 “although within eternity there is only a present, nonetheless it is not the temporal present, as is ours, but is an eternal present in which the whole of time is contained.” explaining that… “Eternity has its own simultaneity, in which exist all things that occur at the same time . . . and . . . at different times.” While Boethius position is so similar as to be identical in places, Katherin A. Rogers argues that this makes St Anselm the first true Four-Dimensionalist. She writes “Anselm, in a very clear and conscious way, adopts what I will call the “four-dimensionalist” theory of time, sometimes also called the “tenseless” theory. He is, to my knowledge, the first philosopher in history to do so.” She claims that St Anselm’s understanding of God’s relationship with time “does succeed in solving the dilemma of freedom and foreknowledge,” which might imply that it would also resolve the question of God’s eternal action. Nevertheless, Rogers’ detailed argument concerning the differences between St Anselm, Boethius and St Augustine does little to advance St Anselm’s position. While it is true that when it comes to St Augustine and Boethius, “neither elaborates his views clearly enough to rule out other interpretations” (than four dimensionalism) it is fair to say that both philosophers positions suggest that every moment is present to God, and that God’s knowledge of events is not prior to those events occurring so can’t be understood to cause those events. Given this specific overlap between Boethius and Anselm, the technicalities of their positions as regards God and time seem largely irrelevant. Rogers ends by simply restating Anselm’s argument, that God’s knowledge of the outcomes of “free” actions does not make them happen, because although God’s knowledge of those outcomes removes any alternate possibilities God’s knowledge of what we perceive to be future events is knowledge of eternally present events to God. Yet, in all practically, this is the point already made by Boethius, that God’s knowledge of “future” events is conditional like our knowledge of a chariot passing, so not such as would influence or determine such events. Whether made by Anselm or Boethius, this argument is unsuccessful in resolving the problem of freedom and foreknowledge because by these Classical Theists’ own arguments, God’s knowledge is not like ours, being simple and identical with God’s power and being. My knowing that a chariot passes by does not make the chariot speed up or slow down, but God’s knowing is the same as his doing and his being… and his knowing, doing and being in what seems to be this moment to us is concurrent with his total knowledge, action and being because His nature is to be eternal and so wholly simple. It is difficult to accept that actions can be anything other than determined when they are part of God’s eternal necessity in this way. This shows that St Anselm’s four dimensionalism fails to explain how God could act in time, successfully.

Secondly, St Anselm’s so-called Four Dimensionalism is just as inadequate as Boethius’ or Augustine’s Universal Presentism in accounting for God’s actions in time. For example, the Bible’s Salvation Narrative is, as Nelson Pike once observed, “unavoidably tensed”. St Anselm’s four dimensionalist account of God’s relationship with time suggests that every moment is present in God, suggesting that the creation is a simple, single act. However, if the creation happened at the same moment as the Fall, if Moses received the Law from God at the same moment as the same Law was fulfilled in Jesus, if the incarnation, the resurrection and the second coming all really happened at once, then there seems precious little point in Christianity. Human free will and moral responsibility are null and God’s justice a joke. As St Augustine recognized in Book XII of his Confessions, if God is timeless-eternal and wholly simple, as rationally it seems that He must be, “what was spoken was not spoken successively, one thing concluded that the next might be spoken, but all things together and eternally. Else have we time and change; and not a true eternity nor true immortality…” When God said “let there be light” – as if in the same breath he said “I am what I am” and “this is my Son; listen to Him”… meaning either that all apparent “revelations” of God’s words which imply time and a sequence of events are effective fakes… or that God intended to deceive us into thinking his words and actions responded to events and individuals. Either interpretation is gravely problematic for Christians. So much of the Bible depends on God’s actions and words being sequential that accepting a timeless-eternal view of God could only result in abandoning the Bible as a meaningful source of authority. Further, suggesting that God intended to deceive us when he seemed to speak with and respond to the Prophets, or when he seems to respond to our prayers, is both incompatible with St Anselm’s own account of God’s omnipotence – which expressly excludes God’s ability to act from impotence, such as by lying or deceiving people (“Therefore, O Lord, our God, the more truly are you omnipotent, since you are capable of nothing through impotence” Proslogion Book VII) – and a fundamental assault on the Christian faith. What would Christianity be if God’s personal response to prayer and events can only be understood as the equivalent of an AI chatbot response, pre-programmed to give the appearance of personal service by some cynical cost-saving consultant! Again, it seems that St Anselm’s four dimensionalism fails to explain how God could act in time, successfully.

Of course, St Anselm’s four-dimensionalism would be defended by Katherin A. Rogers, who would suggest that it is successful in explaining how God can know all events without removing the possibility of free actions or the justice of holding free agents responsible for what they choose to do. She points out how St Anselm’s four-dimensionalism is an improvement over the work of other classical theists who suggest that God’s eternal knowledge is so different and abstract that God’s omniscience might entail him not knowing what day it is! Nevertheless, in making God’s knowledge of ever present knowledge a function of God’s perfect self-knowledge, St Anselm comes very close to suggesting that all of creation exists within God. This striking view implies that God’s knowledge is contingent and depends on events, rather than causing them. While this is useful in facilitating free will, because being eternal God’s knowledge is identical with God’s action and God’s being, it also implies that God’s being contains time and space, whose nature is dynamic and the precise opposite to how God’s necessary being is usually understood. How can God be immutable if God’s knowledge depends on contingent events and God’s being contains all contingencies? St Anselm can’t pick and choose, maintaining that God’s knowledge is of contingencies but God’s being is necessary and immutable… if God is eternal, He is wholly simple and, as St Anselm himself explains in Proslogium XVIII all His attributes are really one attribute. Again, it seems that St Anselm’s four dimensionalism fails to explain how God could act in time, successfully.

Further, the alternative explanations of the relationship between God’s eternity and his action offered by Richard Swinburne is scarcely more successful than that offered by St Anselm. Swinburne suggests that an everlasting-in-time God could do anything which is compatible with His own previous actions and his attributes of omnibenevolence and omniscience. As in, God’s omnipotence consists in His being able to do anything that He wills (as St Augustine originally contended), bearing in mind that an omniscient being would not will anything contrary to what He has previously willed or which does not bring about the best possible world. This is a coherent explanation of God’s omnipotence which is better than St Anselm’s explanation in making sense of the Bible, and in making sense of God’s tendency to act in some situations and not in others. If God, from his omniscient (although temporal) perspective, could see that X action would bring about a worse outcome than doing nothing, then He would do nothing. Nevertheless, God’s omniscience could not entail His ability to know the outcomes of free actions, because He in His omnipotence made them free, so God’s assessment of the situation must needs be dynamic and ever-changing. Despite this, Swinburne’s account of God’s relationship with time is unsuccessful in explaining how God’s actions could be omnipotent in an absolute sense… God cannot break the laws of logic (as JL Mackie demanded that an omnipotent being should be able to do) because those same laws depend on God’s previous actions in creating said laws. In this regard, Anselm’s four-dimensionalism is more persuasive than Swinburne’s understanding, because being in-time Swinburne’s God is constrained in the present moment by His own past actions, which seems more of a constraint than actions which appear to be at different times to us having to be consistent with each other within God’s single, timeless creative act. Further, while Swinburne’s God can’t know the outcomes of free actions, and while this facilitates libertarian free will and genuine moral responsibility, this also radically limits God’s knowledge of the future, as human actions affect so much, given climate-change even the existence of the Earth. In supporting God’s knowledge of how events would seem to us from any given point in time as well as maintaining God’s knowledge of every moment as present, Anselm’s four-dimensionalism makes more sense of God’s knowledge than traditional Presentism, which holds that God knows every moment as present, but not which moment is present to us. It also makes more sense than Swinburne’s account of God’s knowledge, whereby God’s knowledge is radically limited by His decision to self-limit when it comes to the outcomes of free actions. Overall, while Swinburne’s account of God’s eternity is much more useful for Christianity than St Anselm’s, it offers interpretations of God’s attributes which turn out to be almost as empty as those of the Classical Theists. It seems that while St Anselm’s four-dimensionalism fails to explain how God could act in time successfully, so also other thinkers fail to resolve this problem.

In conclusion, St Anselm’s four-dimensionalism fails to explain how God could act in time successfully. Yet, this problem remains without a resolution. Classical theism renders God’s attributes empty words and faith in His existence pointless and yet Theistic Personalism, such as presented by Richard Swinburne, renders God’s attributes almost equally empty and surrenders the classical arguments as direct support for their God’s existence along the way. Much as Theistic Personalists like to co-opt the classical arguments for God’s existence to serve in cumulative arguments for God’s existence, or to defend the “reasonableness” of faith… they ignore or evade the fact that these same arguments support a God who is timeless-eternal and not a God who is everlasting-in-time. In the end, they like St Anselm must make a choice… either accept all of the implications of a rationally defensible faith-position and abandon Christianity, or stop appealing to reason at all and accept that faith in an everlasting God with meaningful attributes can only be based on experience.

Critically evaluate Kant’s criticisms of the Ontological Argument. [40] 

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The ontological argument is the name that Kant himself assigned to arguments which attempt to demonstrate God’s existence from reason alone.  Starting with an a priori definition of God, such as that God is “that than which nothing greater can be conceived of” (St Anselm, Proslogion II) or that God is “supremely perfect” (Descartes, Meditation V), ontological arguments show that existence – or necessary existence – is part of that definition and thus that God’s existence is de dicto necessary, as the fact that a man is unmarried is de dicto necessary if he is a bachelor.  Having coined the term “ontological argument”, Kant went on to criticise these arguments in the opening to his Critique of Pure Reason (1781), arguing that the arguments fail because 1) all existential statements must be synthetic, 2) existence is not a perfection and 3) existence is not a predicate.  He concludes that the ontological argument is “so much labour and effort lost” because it cannot do what it sets out to do and prove God’s existence from reason alone.  Nevertheless, despite being enormously influential, Kant’s criticisms fail to establish the impossibility of an ontological argument for God’s existence because they depend on Kant’s worldview which he asserts dogmatically and fails to argue for. 

Kant’s claim that the ontological argument fails because all existential statements must be synthetic is nothing more than an assertion of his own critical worldview, developed in the years after Hume “awoke me from my dogmatic slumbers and gave a completely different direction to my enquiries…” in 1770.  Kant claims that “If, then, I try to conceive a being, as the highest reality (without any defect), the question still remains, whether it exists or not. For though in my concept there may be wanting nothing of the possible real content of a thing in general, something is wanting in its relation to my whole state of thinking, namely, that the knowledge of that object should be possible a posteriori also…” He points out that there is nothing self-contradictory about saying “God does not exist”, because existence cannot be part of the concept of God, but must always be established empirically, synthetically, so that existence is always contingent and includes the possibility of non-existence. Yet, what privileges a posteriori knowledge over a priori knowledge, beyond Kant’s assertion?  As GW Hegel noticed straightaway and as WV Quine late pointed out in his “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” (1951) Kant simply asserts that meaningful claims must be either synthetic or analytic and that all existential claims must be synthetic.  Who says that the empirical senses are the arbiters of existence or that nothing can be said to exist that is incapable of being experienced through the senses?  How could it be reasonable to suggest that the senses of a hairless ape inhabiting temperate regions of an insignificant planet orbiting a small star on an outer spiral of the milky way provide the only window on reality?  As Plato and Descartes would have agreed, the “reality” we experience through our senses is ever-changing, imperfect and seen through the filter of senses and concepts in the mind.  Concepts and ideas are permanent and our window on them through reason less misty, so it is more reasonable to see these as ultimate reality.  Further, for followers of Wittgenstein, even if Kant’s worldview is accepted, as Norman Malcolm pointed out, Kant’s worldview and thus “language game” is just one out of many.  To those who hold a different worldview – such as a Platonic worldview in which ultimate reality is metaphysical and the means of accessing it reason – the claim that all existential statements must be synthetic is untrue and unconvincing.  It follows that Kant’s criticism fails to destroy the possibility of an ontological proof for God’s existence.  

Kant’s claim that the ontological argument also fails because existence is not a perfection fails because, as Charles Hartshorne pointed out, while ordinary contingent existence is not a perfection, necessary existence might well be.  Kant’s example of 100 thalers being the same in concept whether it exists or not, and not 101 thalers or 150 by existing, seems to make his point convincingly… and yet neither Anselm nor Descartes conceives of God’s existence being like the existence of other, contingent things.  A chocolate cake, a unicorn, a man or an island might be said to exist or not to exist, but only God can necessarily exist, so while existence might not alter the concept of cake, unicorn, man or island, necessary existence is of the essence of God as the supremely perfect being.  Charles Hartshorne suggested that Anselm’s ontological argument in Prosologion 3 might well evade Kant’s criticism that existence is not a perfection for this reason, nevertheless, Kant would reject this criticism of his point, rejecting the whole concept of necessary existence.  As he had already said, all existential statements must be synthetic, so necessary existence is, in Kant’s worldview, impossible.  JN Findlay noted this, suggesting that “it was indeed an ill day for Anselm when he hit upon his famous proof. For on that day he not only laid bare something that is of the essence of an adequate religious object, but also something that entails its necessary non-existence.” (Findlay, 1948) And that Anselm’s ontological argument in Proslogion III, by demonstrating how God’s contingent existence is impossible, shows that God’s existence is impossible because nothing can necessarily exist.  Yet, as I have already argued, Findlay and Kant are doing nothing more than asserting their own worldview, which excludes necessary existence not because it is inconceivable but because it is not compatible with their stated position which privileges things which can be experienced through the empirical senses. Further, as Hartshorne also pointed out, if it makes sense to talk about God’s necessary non-existence then it makes just as much sense to talk about God’s necessary existence. And, as Norman Malcolm pointed out, what is possible and impossible depends more on our language game than on what it might or might not refer to objectively.  It seems that in arguing that existence is not a perfection Kant got no further than Gaunilo had in refuting the ontological argument; again he just asserted that it was incompatible with his own limited worldview.  

Finally, Kant wrongly argued that existence is not a predicate.  By this Kant meant that existence cannot be accidentally predicated of God, because – as Anselm had pointed out – God’s existence is not something that might or might not be true of God.  Also, existence is wrongly used as an accidental predicate in relation to other things, because it adds nothing to the concept of the object (is not a perfection).  Rather, existence is the basis on which anything else can meaningfully be predicated.  As Russell pointed out, if I say “the present King of France is bald” I imply that there is a present King of France, which makes my predication of baldness meaningful.  If there is no present King of France, predicating anything of him is meaningless.  Similarly, if I say that God exists, I imply that there is a God who exists, smuggling my conclusion into my premises and in this way begging the question.  It follows that existence is not an accidental predicate and could not be used as one of God even if it were.  Further, existence cannot be essentially predicated of anything because… all existential statements must be synthetic. Here again, Kant reverts to asserting his worldview.  While He is right to point out that existence is not an accidental predicate because it is not a perfection, this is beside the point when it comes to the Ontological Argument, as Anselm pointed out in his Responsio to Gaunilo.  In this context, the question concerns whether existence is of the essence and nature of God, whether God necessarily exists.  As Hartshorne reasoned, necessary existence might well be predicated essentially of God, even if contingent existence cannot be used as an accidental predicate of anything.  For Hartshorne there are three alternatives for us to consider: 

i.God is impossible 

ii.God is possible, but may or may not exist 

iii.God exists necessarily. 

because God cannot be just a possibility, since he is by definition preeminent, so God’s existence is necessary.  Hartshorne’s modal ontological argument has been refined in different ways, including by Plantinga and Craig, but in essence – for those who share his worldview at least – it proves God’s necessary existence.  It seems that Kant’s criticism that existence is not a predicate fails to undermine the ontological argument either, at least beyond those who share his worldview.   

In conclusion, Kant’s criticisms of the Ontological Argument are persuasive if and only if you share his limited and dogmatic worldview.  Of course, many Philosophers did and do share this worldview – including Lotze, Schopenhauer, Russell and Findlay – and they will not accept the existence of other worldviews because it is part of their worldview to see their own perspective as the only truthful perspective on reality.  Nevertheless, for anybody who holds a different worldview – such as for St Anselm, Descartes, Hartshorne or Malcolm – Kant’s criticisms are ineffective and there is still the possibility of proving God’s existence a priori, from reason alone.  If ultimate reality is metaphysical and accessed through reason not empirical experience, and if existence is not defined in terms of being contingent existence, then the concept of God can de dicto necessarily contain His necessary existence despite His being incapable of empirical observation.  

Is there really a moral difference between killing somebody and letting somebody die? [40]

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The answer to this question seems obvious. Legally, there is a significant difference between killing someone and letting them die. Killing somebody by active means, depending on the circumstances, might be treated as murder, manslaughter or causing death by dangerous driving for example, all of which are subject to serious punishments. On the other hand, letting somebody die might attract no penalty at all, because this is what we all have to do at some point when medical options are unavailable or not in a person’s best interests. In the case of Airedale NHS Trust v. Bland, the House of Lords judgement “thou shall not kill, but thou needst not strive officiously to keep alive.” When it is in a patient’s best interests it can be the right thing to do to do nothing and let them die. Even where a doctor is negligent and allows somebody to die who might have been saved the penalty is much, much less than if they actively killed somebody – and usually covered by insurance. Nevertheless, despite the obvious answer, the question concerns the moral and not the legal difference between killing and letting die. The answer to this is more contentious. On the one hand traditional Christian Ethics and Kantian Ethics would agree with the law, that there is the world of difference between killing and letting die, but on the other hand, Utilitarianism and Situation Ethics as consequentialist approaches to decision-making would reject that distinction, arguing that the effects of both are the same so as actions they are morally equivalent. Nevertheless, the claim that killing and letting die are morally equivalent is not persuasive. Consider other examples whereby the same effects are achieved by different means. Is there a moral difference between actively lying to a friend or not telling them something that you might have? Is there a moral difference between making somebody homeless and failing to help a homeless person by housing them? Most people would see acts of omission (failing to do good) as less morally serious than acts of commission (i.e. actively doing wrong), so there is a moral difference between killing and letting die.

Firstly, the fact that there is a difference between killing and letting die is supported by the Bible, which distinguishes between things we do intentionally and accidentally and things done actively and passively. In the Old Testament the penalty for murder (intentional, active killing of a person) was death [Genesis 9:6], but nobody suggested that fellow citizens should be executed for failing to feed famine victims. The moral instruction to leave crops for the poor to glean existed of course [Leviticus 23:22], but there was no specific and individual penalty for ignoring it. While Prophets warned that the people would be punished collectively for ignoring the rights of the poor and vulnerable [e.g. Amos 2], suggesting that ignoring these rights is immoral and against the will of God, there can be no doubt that there is a moral difference between active, intentional killing (murder) and letting die, whether intentionally or otherwise. On the other hand, in the New Testament Jesus equated the intention with the action in his moral teaching. In Matthew 5 He taught that anger was morally equivalent to murder, a lustful look morally equivalent with adultery. By this logic, allowing somebody to die with malign intent would be the equivalent of murder, and yet this principle has rarely, if ever, been adopted by Christian ethics. Perhaps the key to this issue is what the word “morally” means. Because it is often impossible to know what motivated an action it is not possible to put a lot of weight on intentions in law or in formal Christian ethics. A person might even be unsure about their own motivations, so it is extremely difficult to assess these objectively. Nevertheless, Christians believe that God knows the inmost secrets of our hearts, being aware of motivations that we might not even be aware of ourselves [Psalm 139]. In this case, intentions might make all the difference to the moral status of an action in God’s eyes, while in the eyes of formal Christian ethics they cannot. Having said that, a Roman Catholic might argue that the Church has been given the authority to “bind and loose” Matthew 18:18, and this would suggest that the moral judgement of the Church – which cannot give much weight to intentions – still applies in heaven. This suggests that there is a moral difference between killing and letting die, whatever the situation or motivations, although that does not mean that letting die is always morally permissable.

Secondly, most versions of Natural Law (used alongside the Bible and Church teaching as the basis for Roman Catholic Ethics) teach that actions are more significant than intentions, which suggests that there is a moral difference between killing and letting die. For example, because of Natural Law Catholic ethics would see it as far worse to use artificial contraception or abortion than to remain celibate and so childless. Contraception and abortion actively prohibit a basic human good – life – while celibacy might be necessary in order to achieve another human good, as in the case of Priests. Morally, there is a real difference between doing something – often for an evil intention – and committing not to do it for a good intention. In Summa 2i, 20, 1 Aquinas explains that an action may be good when carried out with a good intention, but morally evil when carried out with an evil intention. He uses the example of giving alms – good when done out of agape-love and evil when done for vainglory. This implies that saving a life might be good when in the best interests of a patient, but morally evil when done for other reasons, in which case allowing to die might be morally preferable. The same reasoning might suggest that killing would be morally wrong when done with a malign intention and potentially right when done with a loving intention, yet Aquinas stops short of this conclusion. He reasons that while it is a duty to follow synderesis, even if it leads us to make such a faulty decision, this does not excuse us if we carry out actions which contradict conscientia, as killing a person always would because it actively prohibits the basic human good of life. It follows that the wrongness of killing is not dependent on motivations, and yet the situation does make some difference. Aquinas acknowledged the difference between not acting in cases where you can and should act and not acting when you can’t do anything or shouldn’t because of an order etc. He wrote “the cause of what follows from want of action is not always the agent as not acting; but only then when the agent can and ought to act.” [Summa 2i, 6, 3] This suggests that letting a relative die when you can’t help or have been ordered, such as by a court, not to would be morally very different from letting a patient die as a doctor when you could and are allowed to help. Further, in Summa 2i, 76, 3 Aquinas notes that ignorance might reduce the sinfulness of an action, because it makes some actions involuntary, when “voluntariness is essential to sin.” In this way, there would be a moral difference between a person whose synderesis led them to kill an elderly relative out of compassion and a person who intentionally killed an elderly relative in order to benefit from a will. Nevertheless, this interpretation would be strongly rejected by the Roman Catholic Church today, which teaches that any active euthanasia is the moral equivalent of murder, evil. In 2020 the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith has reaffirmed Roman Catholic teaching that euthanasia is an “intrinsically evil act”. The letter Samaritanus Bonus: On the care of persons in the critical and terminal phases of life described assisted dying and euthanasia as “homicide”, and said that the sacraments must be withheld from those who are planning to end their lives. This underlines the moral difference that the Church perceives between killing somebody – regardless of motivations – and letting die.

Thirdly, Kantian Ethics agrees that there is a moral difference between killing and letting die. For Kant, the maxim behind our actions is the action considered independently of any context and, if it cannot be universalised, it is absolutely and always wrong. In this way killing a hated enemy, killing an elderly relative to benefit from their will, killing a relative who is begging for an easeful death and suicide are all morally equivalent. Because the maxim cannot be universalised, killing is absolutely wrong. Despite this, Kant also taught that intentions are even more significant in determining the moral status of an action than the action in itself. Famously, he began the “Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals” (1785) by stating that “Nothing in the world—or out of it!—can possibly be conceived that could be called ‘good’ without qualification except a GOOD WILL.” If an action is undertaken out of fear or habit or for any other reason than freely, for duty’s sake, then this renders the action morally wrong, which pollutes the will and prevents it being worthy of the eternal reward which we must postulate as existing for good wills, so that they can do as they feel that they should and so that the universe is fair. Further, Kant taught that a negative duty i.e. not to kill, lie or steal always trumps a positive duty e.g. to feed the hungry. This suggests that there is a moral difference between killing and letting die; while in some circumstances both are immoral, killing (achieving the end by active means) is always worse. Nevertheless, Peter Singer would reject this conclusion, arguing that there is little moral difference between killing and letting die. In “Practical Ethics” he argued that there is no moral difference between aborting a near-term foetus because it has a disability and killing a newborn infant. In fact, he argued that it is morally preferable, even a moral duty, to kill a newborn who is suffering and who has no hope of a quality life so that money spent on neonatal care could be spent more productively elsewhere. In “Unsanctifying Human Life” Singer and Kuhse argue the same with regard to Euthanasia, suggesting that it is morally preferable to kill an elderly relative with dementia than to allow them to die – slowly and expensively – while others suffer for lack of healthcare resources. Further, in “The Life you can Save” Singer argued that neglecting an opportunity to help somebody and killing them are morally equivalent. He used the example of a child drowning in a pond, pointing out that we would feel a moral imperative to ruin expensive shoes in order to save them… and that we should equally feel a moral imperative to save a child on the other side of the world by sending the £200 our shoes cost to a charity. Through all these cases, Singer makes a fair point in pointing out that we are wrong to place so much weight on the moral difference between killing and letting die. It is helpful to consider that letting die might well cause more suffering and that killing should not be the taboo that it is to most people, when in practical terms it may be preferable. Singer is also right to point out how most people wrongly prefer people who are close to us and choose to ignore those who are further from us, whether in space or time, meaning that we tend to be thoughtless and ignore the moral imperative to use our money wisely and avoid decisions which – however unintentionally – harm others now or in the future. Nevertheless, however right Singer is to make a theoretical point as regards the equivalence of killing and letting die, in practice it is not reasonable to treat the two as moral equivalents, because the law deals in rules and generalities, not intentions and specific situations. Further, as Onora O’Neill has argued, we can’t agree that failing to help somebody in need – such as by giving money for famine relief – is morally the same as killing them. While both are morally bad, killing is worse because it is active and intentionally evil.

Despite this, most consequentialists will agree with Singer, arguing that there is no moral difference between killing and letting die, because the consequences, which justify an action or condemn it, could be the same either way. Take for example a case of assisted dying; the patient is dying, so the only factor that decides the morality of killing them or letting them die is the amount of pleasure or pain that results from the action, so far as the patient and other interested parties are concerned. As Bentham pointed out “all other things being equal, poetry is as good as pushpin” or, in other words, what you do to produce the results is immaterial; all that matters, morally, is the results. This means that there is no essential moral difference between killing and letting die such as would make one better than the other in all situations. It may be that letting someone die produces more suffering than killing them would, as in a case of a patient dying of motor-neurone disease who has asked to “die with dignity” and whose relatives and friends are all supportive. In other cases however, killing would undoubtedly cause more suffering than allowing to die, such as when the law allows passive euthanasia but not active. In such a case, killing might get a doctor struck off and even imprisoned, even when their intentions were altruistic and good. The case of Dr Cox and Lilian Boyes shows how this could be the case. While the situation makes all the difference in terms of the moral status of the action, Utilitarians such as Jeremy Bentham would reject the idea that intentions make any moral difference; as he argues “nature has placed mankind under two sovereign masters; the pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of pain” so we should “always act so as to produce the greatest happiness for the greatest number…” what we intend is not at issue, only what we achieve in respect of pleasure and pain in society. This highlights one of the problems with consequentialism – what Peter Singer has identified as the biggest problem that Utilitarianism faces – the Problem of Prediction. That is, consequentialism depends on our ability to calculate the pleasure and/or pain resulting from possible actions so that we can choose the one which is morally preferable in maximising pleasure and minimising pain, in advance of doing anything. In practice, our calculations are often flawed meaning that while we intend to minimise suffering, in the end we fail to do this. Because intentions don’t count and the only thing that justifies an action, morally, is the consequences the agent takes a risk every time they act, trusting that what they intend will happen and so ensure that they have done what is right. In a case of euthanasia, for example, the situation is further complicated by the difficulty of assessing someone else’s pain, whether in the person dying or in their relatives and friends. How can we measure grief or accurately determine whether it is outweighed by the suffering a person dying, say of cancer, experiences in their final hours? Bentham’s felicific calculus, while well meant, is of little practical use when it comes to making such assessments and only serves to highlight another significant criticism of consequentialist ethics, that they are subjective. Of course, rule utilitarianism, such as that proposed by Peter Singer in recent years, gets round both the problem of prediction and the subjectivity problem by developing rules on the basis of the utilitarian maxim, which are then applied in most or all cases regardless of the details. Yet, as RM Hare pointed out, rule utilitarianism means that there is little difference between a Utilitarian and say a Kantian approach. Also, in answer to this question, it would probably mean that there is a moral difference between killing and letting die because rules tend to be framed around actions, not omissions and because it is hard to imagine a rule prohibiting letting people die being practical in many cases!

In conclusion, there is a moral difference between killing and letting die because this is the case in law, in the Bible, in Natural Law and Kantian Ethics. As has been discussed, it is also true in Rule Utilitarianism, which is really the only practical version of Utilitarianism.

There is no such thing as a soul. Discuss [40]

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Materialists would agree that there is no such thing as a soul, arguing that we are our bodies, and the sensation of consciousness can be explained solely by the operation of our physical brains.  Dualists would disagree, arguing that “I” am separate from my body and exist primarily as a soul or mind, which might even be separable from my body, surviving death.  Overall, given developments within neuroscience, materialism is the more persuasive position, so it is fair to say that there is no such thing as a soul.

Firstly, Aristotle argued that the soul is the formal cause of the body.  It makes us human and gives us our individual personality, but it can’t be separated from the body.  He used the example of a wax-seal to make his point.  Just as the shape of the seal can’t exist without the wax, so the soul cannot exist separately from the body.  Nevertheless, Aristotle did believe that the soul is a separate substance, sufficiently as to have three parts.  He even speculated that part of the rational soul, the intellect, might survive death.  In this way, Aristotle was not a straightforward materialist.  Yet Aristotle worked millennia before science gave us an understanding of the brain.  By the 1940s Gilbert Ryle was able to refine Aristotle’s model of the soul, suggesting that the “official doctrine” of dualism was based on a category mistake and that there is no separate “soul” substance.  For Ryle, just as the foreigner watching cricket makes a mistake to ask to see the “team spirit” as if it was another player or piece of equipment, so the philosopher who identifies the soul as something with separate, let alone separable, existence is making an error rooted in our misuse of language.  Today, Susan Blackmore would agree.  While she still sees the hard problem of consciousness as unsolved, she rejects dualism as unscientific.  Daniel Dennett agrees, saying that dualism is “giving up” on the future ability of neuroscience to explain why we feel conscious and separate from our bodies but are in fact only our bodies.  In these ways, it is fair to say that there is no such thing as a soul. 

Secondly, classic arguments for dualism are flawed, so that there is no evidence for a soul beyond that most people feel they have one and, as Brian Davies pointed out, “just because I feel sober doesn’t mean that I am!” 

  • Plato’s arguments for substance dualism are archaic and unconvincing.  In the Phaedo Socrates appeals to the prevalence of opposites or dualisms in nature, to our affinity with the world of forms, to recollection and to the simplicity of the soul to support Plato’s claim that we are primarily an immortal soul.  Yet what modern Philosopher will be convinced to believe that something exists because lots of things seem to have a pair… light has darkness, day has night… so of course the body must have a soul.  What modern Philosopher would accept that our soul must be indestructible because it is simple and simple because it seems not to change as our body changes.  Not very persuasive!  Also, what modern Philosopher would accept that we must be primarily an immaterial soul because we have an intuitive grasp of mathematics or logic or an “affinity” with immaterial ideas in a speculative “world of forms”?  There is no evidence for past lives, no evidence for a world of forms and no evidence for an immaterial soul.  Plato’s argument is nothing more than assertion… I think therefore “I” must be made of thought. 
  • The same goes for Descartes, the other leading substance dualist.  His argument for the soul begins with his “foundational belief” that “I think therefore I am” from which he extrapolates that “I” am primarily what thinks… being a mind and not a brain.  Norman Malcolm identified the weakness of Descartes position when he wrote “If it were valid to argue ‘I can doubt that my body exists but not that I exist, ergo I am not my body’, it would be equally valid to argue ‘I can doubt that there exists a being whose essential nature is to think, but I cannot doubt that I exist, ergo I am not a being whose essential nature is to think’. Descartes is hoist with his own petard.” Further, even Descartes suggested that the brain must contain a seat of the soul, where the mind joins the body.  His suggestion that this was the Pineal Gland, just because it is shaped like a third inner eye, betrays the unscientific nature of his argument.  Although Popper and Eccles presented a modern version of Descartes substance dualism in Critical Dualism, suggesting that the seat of the soul is in the frontal lobes of the brain and not the pineal gland, their position still fails to attract scientific support.  As Dennett said, dualism smacks of mysticism and magic and amounts to “giving up” on science. 

In these ways also, it is fair to say that there is no such thing as a soul. 

On the other hand, Popper also suggested that World Three amounts to empirical evidence for the existence of World Two – the human mind.  The fact that great works of art, literature, architecture exist is material proof of the existence of the minds that gave them shape.  It may be that the mind is not separate or separable from the brain or body, but that does not mean that it does not exist when its products are evident all around us, including on this page.  Further, HH Price and Peter Vardy argue that the existence of the soul could make sense of the full human experience, which includes dreams and paranormal experiences.  Surely it is unscientific to dismiss all those aspects of the human experience which can’t be adequately explained without a separate soul, just because they point to the existence of a soul which can’t otherwise be evidenced?  Nevertheless, neither of these arguments for a soul are credible.  Popper’s World Three could just as well serve as evidence that human brains have amazing computational power.  When a computer generates complex, unique products like Bitcoins, nobody speculates that the products are evidence that there is something in the computer that might survive if it was unplugged and disassembled!  As Ryle would have said, this is like the myth of the “ghost in the machine” – better evidence for lazy thinking and superstition than it is for the soul.  Further, dreams and paranormal experiences have been investigated by Blackmore and can be explained in terms of (ab)normal brain activity, mistakenly interpreted, or as fakes.  The fact that even when there are credible scientific explanations of such phenomena people still want to believe in the existence of a soul, and that belief in a soul remains so “sticky”, supports Dawkins suggestion that it is a meme or virus of the mind.  We find it easier to believe in a soul than to accept that we are “blind robot vehicles for those selfish molecules known as genes.”  Yet wishful thinking is no basis to believe that something exists, so there is no such thing as the soul. 

In conclusion, there is no such thing as a soul.  Ryle, Blackmore and Dawkins were correct when they identified the origins of belief in the soul as a “category mistake”, a metaphor and a meme.  What we feel when we think, the sense that “I” am not my body and the “me” that seems to stay the same as I age… these sensations are the products of the material operations of the brain, just as works of art and architecture are.

[40 minutes, A Level notes]

Assess the view that the Ontological Argument depends on logical fallacies that cannot be overcome.

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The Ontological Argument was first proposed by St Anselm in 1078. In the Proslogion he tried to demonstrate the existence of God from reason alone, first by defining God as “that than which nothing greater can be conceived of”… as existence “in re” rather than only “in intellectu” makes something greater, God must therefore exist, and then by claiming that necessary existence is greater than contingent existence and so must be a property of God. The Ontological Argument soon attracted criticism, first from Gaunilo of Marmoutiers whose “on behalf of the fool” suggested that it seems like a joke to suggest that something must exist just because it is perfect, and then from Aquinas, who pointed out that “because we do not know the nature of God, His existence is not self-evident to us.” Nevertheless, while most people are sceptical of Anselm’s argument, as Bertrand Russell pointed out “it is easier to feel convinced that it must be fallacious than it is to find out precisely where the fallacy lies.” As it happens, the argument – while containing some logical fallacies – does not depend on these so that they cannot be overcome. It is a valid argument… the question of its soundness depends on one’s worldview.

Firstly, it could be said that both versions of Anselm’s argument depend upon the logical fallacy of bare assertion, as in they assert that “God is that than which nothing greater can be conceived of” without proper argument. Nevertheless, all a priori arguments start with a priori premises, definitions which depend on a priori knowledge (reason alone) and often cannot be argued for using evidence. For example, if I argued that as bachelors are unmarried men and Simon is unmarried, that Simon must be a bachelor, it is not reasonable for you to demand that I demonstrate that bachelors are unmarried men from observations before proceeding. Similarly, if I argued that 2+2 = 4, I must begin with a priori knowledge of the numbers 2 and 4 and the concept of addition. It is not reasonable to ask for an argument that 2=2 and 4=4 before accepting that 2+2 = 4… because any sane person knows what 2 and 4 refer to and what the concept of addition entails. Anselm pointed out that anyone who claims that God is not “that than which nothing greater can be conceived” must be a fool. How can anyone think that there could be something greater than God… if they do, then they have fundamentally misunderstood the concept of God. In this way, while Anselm does assert his premises, he is justified in doing so and this “logical fallacy” is not a serious criticism of the ontological argument. Similarly, Anselm’s argument could be accused of begging the question, meaning that his conclusion of God’s necessary existence is contained within the premises. Yet surely this is the whole point of a deductive argument! Nobody criticises the argument 2+2 = 4 because the concept of 4 contains the concept of 2 twice. What Anselm is trying to do is to clarify that our concept of God includes His necessary existence, so it is unreasonable to expect Anselm’s conclusion not to contain his premises. In both these ways, Anselm’s Ontological Argument does not depend on any logical fallacies that cannot be overcome.

Secondly, it could be said that Anselm’s argument is guilty of being ad hominem and of appealing to authority. Anselm certainly attacks atheists as fools and quotes from Psalm 14:1 as part of his argument. Nevertheless, neither Anselm’s colourful language nor his Biblical allusion are part of his reasoning, so his argument could be stated without either quite easily. More seriously, addition, Anselm could be accused of asking a loaded question of atheists. Is God “that than which nothing greater can be conceived of”? The atheist is railroaded into answering yes, in which case they have already admitted the conclusion, or no, in which case they are a fool… Yet as Bertrand Russell pointed out, asking a question about the properties of a non-existent object is meaningless. If I asked you “is the present King of France bald?” I feel bound to give a yes or no answer, when in fact I can’t give either because there is no present King of France. Similarly, in asking atheists to answer the question “is God that than which nothing greater can be conceived of”, Anselm could be bamboozling the atheist into answering yes or no, when either option would mean that they cede their point. This seems a lot like the either-or fallacy as well, with Anselm excluding options other than yes or no. However, it is clear that everybody, atheists included, have a concept of God as “that than which nothing greater can be conceived of” in their minds, meaning that He undoubtedly exists “in intellectu” in a way that the present King of France, perfect islands etc. do not. As Anselm pointed out in his “Responsio” to Gaunilo, there is a difference between islands and God, in that islands can only exist contingently whereas God exists, if he exists at all, necessarily. This means that Russell’s point about the present King of France is not relevant to the Ontological Argument, as when Anselm asks “is God greater than that which can be conceived of”, he is justified in assuming that the knowledge of God exists a priori in intellectu, when the knowledge of contingent things – whether Kings or Islands – can only be a posteriori and synthetic. Kant is right to say “Whatever, therefore, our concept of an object may contain, we must always step outside it, in order to attribute to it existence…” when it comes to any and all contingently existing things, but as Anselm pointed out, God is not like other things, so the ontological argument could only ever apply to God. It seems that Anselm’s argument survives the accusation of depending on these logical fallacies as well.

On the other hand, Kant argued that Anselm creates the whole category of “necessary existence” to get around Gaunilo’s obvious criticism that what applies to perfect Gods should apply equally to perfect islands, unicorns and such. In this way, Anselm’s argument would depend on special pleading. Kant argued that existence involves having the potential to be and not be, so necessary existence is a contradictory concept like a square circle and so impossible. He reasoned that because existence must include having the potential to be and not be, existence cannot be used as an essential predicate of anything. Later in 1948 JN Findlay went further, claiming that “it was indeed an ill day for Anselm when he hit upon his famous proof. For on that day he not only laid bare something that is of the essence of an adequate religious object, but also something that entails its necessary non-existence.” For Findlay, if there are three options – God is impossible, God may or may not exist or God necessarily exists, then the Ontological Argument serves to show that God must be impossible and necessarily not exist, because if God may or may not exist He wouldn’t be God and necessary existence is impossible. Nevertheless, Hartshorne rejected this, arguing that if Findlay says that necessary existence is impossible, so must be necessary non-existence. Further, Kant’s definition of existence applies to contingent existence only, as does his claim that existence cannot be an essential predicate, necessary existence does not include the potential to exist and not exist by definition and so it could be an essential predicate of God. For Hartshorne, there is nothing impossible about necessary existence. We can conceive of God necessarily existing in much the same way as we can conceive of a three-sided triangle, when we cannot conceive of a square circle. As Alvin Plantinga and William Lane Craig have pointed out, if God’s necessary existence is even possible – in the way that a unicorn or a Gruffalo is possible but a five-sided triangle is not – then God exists necessarily in every possible world. Of course, Kant would reject this, pointing out that we have no experience of “necessary existence”, making it a “cupola of judgement”, being outside our possible existence and entirely speculative. Nevertheless, although Kant’s criticisms are coherent with and conclusively destroy the Ontological Argument within his worldview, Kant’s worldview has been criticised by Quine for depending on dogmas and is not shared by everybody. As Norman Malcolm pointed out, it is clear that “necessary existence” is possible and not contradictory within some “forms of life” and their language games. This suggests that at least within these forms of life, necessary existence is not an impossible or invented category of existence, so Anselm’s argument does not depend on special pleading.

Further, other critics suggest that Anselm’s argument takes advantage of the useful ambiguity in the word “necessary”, thus depending on the fallacy of equivocation. The word necessary can mean de re necessary, in the sense it is used in Aquinas’ third way, meaning that God is self-explaining, doesn’t depend on anything, fully actual. The word necessary can also mean de dicto necessary, in the sense that it means that God’s existence is part of the concept of God so God’s non-existence cannot be asserted without contradiction. For example, saying “this triangle has five angles” would be to assert a contradiction, because the word tri-angle necessarily and by definition entails having only three angles. Could it be that the word “necessary” means two different things and that Anselm shifts from one meaning to the other to bamboozle us with a what Schopenhauer called a “sleight of hand trick?” While the concept of necessary existence is confusing and while the word “necessary” is used in both senses in the argument, the argument does not depend on ambiguity or equivocation because there is what Hegel called a “unity of thought and of existence in the infinite.” While there are two meanings to the word “necessary” these are related in that de dicto necessity refers to concepts and the rules of logic that originate in and depend on God’s de re necessity. Of course, Aquinas’ criticism of the attempt to demonstrate God’s existence from reason alone is apt here. Given that most – if not all – people struggle to “conceive of” God’s nature, how can we analyse that nature to find necessary existence – another almost inconceivable idea – within it? Aquinas as right that while God’s existence may be self-evident, it is not self-evident to us, and therefore that it is better to demonstrate His existence from what is known, observations. Nevertheless, the question asks whether the Ontological Argument depends on logical fallacies that cannot be overcome and the answer to that must be that it does not. There is no equivocation or fundamental ambiguity on which the argument depends.

In conclusion, Russell was right to say that “it is easier to feel convinced that it must be fallacious than it is to find out precisely where the fallacy lies.” The Ontological Argument does not depend on logical fallacies that cannot be overcome. It is a valid argument, but depends for its soundness on the particular worldview or form of life within which it is advanced.

“Gaunilo shows that atheists are not fools!” Discuss

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In his Proslogium Chapter II St Anselm quoted Psalm 14:1 “the fool says in his heart there is no God” and then attempted to demonstrate that atheists are indeed fools in asserting a straight contradiction – that God (who necessarily exists by definition) does not exist.  Gaunilo responded in his wittily titled “On behalf of the Fool”, using his famous “perfect island” analogy to reduce St Anselm’s argument to absurdity as part of a more sophisticated multi-pronged attack.  Despite the fact that St Anselm attempted to refute Gaunilo’s points in his Responsio, Gaunilo succeeded in showing that Atheists are not in fact fools. 

Firstly, Gaunilo reduced Anselm’s argument in Proslogium II to absurdity, pointing out that “if a man should try to prove to me by such reasoning that this island truly exists… either I should believe that he was jesting, or I know not which I ought to regard as the greater fool: myself supposing I should allow him this proof or him, if he should suppose that he had established with any certainly the existence of this island…”  Anselm was right to object, noting how God is not like an island or any other thing in time and space, so that while God is capable of necessarily existing, the island is not.  “I promise confidently that if any man shall devise anything existing either in reality of in concept alone (except that than which nothing greater can be conceived) to which he can adapt the sequence of my reasoning, I will discover that thing, and will give him his island, not to be lost again…” However, in practice Gaunilo’s point still stands because asserting God’s necessary existence cannot take us beyond the world of words and ideas. As Kant (in his Critique of Pure Reason 1787) and later Russell pointed out, existence is not a predicate and adds nothing to the concept of an object to make it more perfect and therefore a necessary property of God as “that than which nothing greater can be conceived of”.  Kant wrote “Being is evidently not a real predicate, or a concept of something that can be added to the concept of a thing. It is merely the admission of a thing, and of certain determinations in it. Logically, it is merely the copula of a judgment.” Further, to exist means to exist within – or at least to have an effect within – time and space.  As Kant later pointed out, contingency is of the essence of existence – having the capability to exist or not exist, to exist here and not there or now and not then.  To use Kant’s words, all existential claims must be synthetic; he wrote “If, then, I try to conceive a being, as the highest reality (without any defect), the question still remains, whether it exists or not. For though in my concept there may be wanting nothing of the possible real content of a thing in general, something is wanting in its relation to my whole state of thinking, namely, that the knowledge of that object should be possible a posteriori also…”  While Kant’s criticism has been rejected by both Hegel and Quine for being “dogmatic” and based on assertion rather than proper argument, and while Norman Malcolm also rejected Kant’s claim writing  “In those complex systems of thought, those “language games”, God has the status of a necessary being.  Who can doubt that?  I believe that we can rightly take the existence of those religious systems of thought in which God features as a necessary being as disproof of the dogma affirmed by Hume (and Kant of course) that no existential proposition may be necessary…”, in practice Kant’s criticism appeals to common sense, as Gaunilo’s did.  It is unreasonable to claim that something exists when there is no way to see hear, touch, smell or taste it and when its effects are not observable on things that we can hear, touch, see, smell or taste either.  It may be true that the meaning of words depends on how they are used rather than on what they refer to in some cases, but not when it comes to existence!  Whatever people understand by the word gravity within a form of life will not change the fact that if you jump off a cliff you will fall to your death.  Similarly, you can’t define something into existence; as Gaunilo rightly pointed out, to suggest otherwise can only be construed as “a charming joke” (Schopenhauer dismissed the Ontological argument for being such) or plain foolish.  In this way, Gaunilo succeeded in showing that atheists are not in fact fools, but that advocates of the Ontological Argument might well be.  

Secondly, Gaunilo is right to point out that Anselm’s claim that Atheists are fools because they hold a contradictory idea in their minds is mistaken.  While Anselm suggests that the atheist conceives of God – who necessarily exists – not existing in much the same way as a fool might conceive of a five-sided triangle, through simply not understanding anything, Gaunilo points out that people can conceive of lots of non-existing things without being in the slightest foolish.  Take the Gruffalo for one example… many people have an idea of this frightening creature in their mind, while also knowing that there is no such creature outside the pages of a storybook.  He wrote “in my understanding, as I still think, could be all sorts of things whose existence is uncertain, or which do not exist at all…”  Aquinas agreed with Gaunilo, writing “the opposite of the proposition “God exists” can be mentally admitted.” Summa Theologica 1:2:1 and much later, Kant also agreed that it is perfectly possible to conceive of God while rejecting any claim that God exists, writing “If then, I try to conceive a being, as the highest reality (without any defect), the question still remains, whether it exists or not. For though in my concept there may be wanting nothing of the possible real content of a thing in general, something is wanting in its relation to my whole state of thinking, namely, that the knowledge of that object should be possible a posteriori also…” Anselm tries in this as well to distinguish between God and other things, writing “if that thing can be conceived at all, it must exist” because God alone, as that than which nothing greater can be conceived of, must necessarily exist.  Later, Charles Hartshorne agreed with Anselm, pointing out that either God is impossible, or that he exists contingently or that he exists necessarily.  The Ontological Argument shows that God cannot exist contingently – or He would not be worthy of worship or “that than which nothing greater can be conceived of” and Hartshorne argues that God’s existence is not impossible, leaving only the possibility that God exists necessarily.  Nevertheless, Gaunilo points out that Anselm is mistaken in claiming that because we can only conceive of God necessarily existing, he necessarily exists.  This is not how we conceive of things; the artist conceives of an object before they put brush to canvas, so the idea exists “in intellectu” before and prior it it being “in re” – the idea of an object and the object are two separate and separable things in all cases, including God.  I could conceive of God as a necessarily existing being, but my conception of him would be something separate from his actual existence as what I have conceived of, leaving open the possibility that He could be only an idea in the mind, however apparently contradictory that might be. Again, as Kant wrote, “Whatever, therefore, our concept of an object may contain, we must always step outside it, in order to attribute to it existence..” In this way as well, therefore, Gaunilo shows that atheists are not fools.  

Thirdly, Gaunilo argues that some atheists could recognise the word “God” without having an idea of what God is sufficiently for it to contain a contradiction, which is convincing.  I might recognize the word “squircle” – and even begin to appreciate what concept it might refer to – while still unable to conceive of a square-circle properly.  The squircle is therefore not “in intellectu”, let alone “in re” despite my accepting the definition of a squircle as a square circle.  As Russell later pointed out, if I say “the present King of France is bald” it seems like I am making a sensible proposition that is capable of being true or false, but actually because there is no present King of France, the proposition is not capable of being either true or false and is therefore meaningless.  Is it not possible that when the Atheist accepts that “God is that than which nothing greater can be conceived of” they do no more than you might in momentarily wondering if the present King of France is bald? On reflection they then conclude that there is no present King of France, so the question is meaningless.  In relation to Anselm’s argument, the Atheist then reflects on the concept of necessary existence and concludes that it is impossible, so the concept of God is impossible and the Ontological argument meaningless.  Here as well, Gaunilo showed that the Atheist is not a fool, but rather a person too sophisticated to be taken in by what Schopenhauer called Anselm’s “sleight of hand trick“.  

Finally, Gaunilo points out that nobody can have a complete conception of the nature of God, because God’s nature is to be mysterious, unlike any other thing and greater than that which can be conceived of. It follows that – Atheist or not – without a clear idea of God it is impossible to analyse that idea and find existence or necessary existence within it.  He explained “I do not know that reality itself which God is, nor can I form a conjecture of that reality from some other like reality.  For you yourself assert that reality is such that there can be nothing else like it…” Later, Aquinas agreed, writing “because we do not know the nature of God, the existence of God is not self-evident” Summa 1.2.1 Although Anselm defends against this criticism vigorously, writing “It is evident to any rational mind, that by ascending from the lesser good to the greater, we can form a considerable notion of a being than which a greater is inconceivable” and “If he denies that a notion may be formed from other objects of a being than which a greater is inconceivable… let him remember that the invisible things of God, from the creation of the world are clearly seen…” Gaunilo’s point stands because Anselm’s reasoning reduces God to being the greatest of things, rather than that than which nothing greater can be conceived of.  By Anselm’s own reasoning in Proslogion III God’s nature is not like the nature of other things and God’s greatness is not like the greatness of other things.  While other things exist contingently, God exists necessarily, so it is not possible to “ascend from the lesser good to the greater” or to build an understanding of God’s nature from an understanding of created things.  Further, in 1948 JN Findlay argued that “it was indeed an ill day for Anselm when he hit upon his famous proof.  For on that day, he not only laid bare something that is of the essence of an adequate religious object, but also something that entails its necessary non-existence.”  If Anselm is serious in Proslogion III that necessary existence is a necessary property of God as “that than which nothing greater can be conceived of” then in addition to making it impossible for anybody to have sufficient grasp of the concept of God to analyse it and find existence within it, it also makes God’s existence impossible.  As Findlay reasoned, a contingent being would not deserve worship & wouldn’t really be God, but a necessary being is a logical absurdity, meaning that Anselm’s argument proves that God’s existence is impossible.  In this way as well, therefore, Gaunilo shows that atheists are not fools… but JN Findlay showed that Anselm was! 

In conclusion, Gaunilo shows that atheists are not fools.  While Anselm easily heads off his “perfect island” criticism by pointing towards the more developed version of the argument he already presented in Proslogium III in his Responsio, Gaunilo’s full critique demonstrates that Anselm’s reasoning is unsound.  While Anselm’s a priori definition of God as “that than which nothing greater can be conceived” is reasonable, Gaunilo showed that he is wrong to assume that accepting this definition entails having a clear enough idea of God to analyse and find necessary existence within.  Gaunilo also showed that Anselm was wrong to ignore the existence of two separate stages in conceiving of any object, that of having an idea “in intellectu” and that of appreciating that the idea exists “in re.”  As Kant later agreed, it is perfectly possible to have an idea of a necessarily-existing being (God) while appreciating that there is no instance of such a being, however contradictory that might seem, because the world of ideas and the world of existence are separate and separable and it is not possible to define something into existence or prove God’s necessary existence from reason alone.   

To what extent does Aquinas’ Cosmological Argument successfully reach the conclusion that there is a transcendent creator? [40]

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Aquinas’ Cosmological Argument fails to demonstrate the existence of the Christian God.  While the first, second and third ways offer some support to the belief that there must be a Prime Mover, Uncaused Cause and Necessary Being, In the Summa Theologica 1,2,3 Aquinas only asserts that “this is what all men speak of as God.”  Indeed, taking the Prime Mover as an example, it could share only some of the characteristics of God as He is normally understood.  While the Prime Mover is certainly transcendent and immutable, the extent to which it could be omnipotent or omniscient, let alone omnibenevolent or immanent, is slight and unconvincing.  Nevertheless, putting this criticism aside, Aquinas’ Cosmological Argument successfully demonstrates the existence of a transcendent explanation for the Kosmos.

Firstly, in Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion Hume’s character Philo criticised the Cosmological Argument, asking how anybody can be certain that everything has a cause. While it is true that the observed laws of nature which form the premises of Aquinas’ argument depend on observations which are necessarily limited within time and space, questioning whether such observations can be taken to be fair and representative attacks the Cosmological Principle on which all science depends.  Newton was the first to express the Cosmological Principle, the assumption that “viewed on a sufficiently large scale, the properties of the universe are the same for all observers” or in other words that the universe is homogenous and isotropic and more fundamentally, that the way we observe the universe is the way it really is and that this is a fair and representative sample of the whole. In asking whether there might not be uncaused things in the universe despite the fact that these have never been observed, Hume’s criticism of the Cosmological Argument constitutes a sceptical attack on the human ability to use observations as a basis for understanding the Natural Laws which govern the universe, so by accepting this criticism we lose far more than one approach to demonstrating the existence of God.  It follows that Aquinas’ argument survives Hume’s first criticism and demonstrates the existence of a transcendent “creator”. 

Secondly, Hume’s character Philo goes on to ask why the cause of the universe, if such there is, would have to be intelligible.  This criticism is no more effective than the first.  The whole point of Aquinas argument is to show that whatever caused the universe must be transcendent and beyond human understanding, impervious to the laws of motion, causation and contingency that govern everything else.  For Aquinas, the cause of the universe is “neither something nor nothing,” a necessary being that does not exist as things exist, contingently, but rather eternally and immutably outside the framework of spatio-temporal reality.  While Kant argued that necessary existence is so far beyond our experience to be beyond possible knowledge, Aquinas does not claim to be able to know or understand God, only to deduce that He exists, albeit mysteriously.  It follows that Aquinas’ Cosmological Argument survives Hume’s second criticism and Kant’s criticism as well, demonstrating the existence of a transcendent “creator”. 

Thirdly, Hume’s character Philo argues that Aquinas’ argument relies on the Fallacy of Composition, and indeed Aquinas does move from observations of movement, causation and contingency in the universe to claiming that the universe as a whole must be moved, caused and have something to depend on.  Russell used the powerful example of all men having mothers but the human race not having a mother to explain Hume’s point.  However, while it is fallacious to assume that characteristics of the part MUST be true of the whole, it is not impossible that they are true of the whole.  Aquinas (and more recently Craig) appeal to common sense as well as fallacious reasoning when they argue that given that everything in the universe is caused, the universe must also have a cause.  The alternative, that the universe is uncaused or, as Russell put it, a “brute fact” seems unacceptable to most people today, not least because the Aristotelian infinite-universe paradigm has been replaced by Big Bang Theory which shows that the universe had an absolute beginning.  Masses of Scientific evidence now supports the claim that the universe had a cause, even if that cause outside of the normal laws of nature and so transcendent, even if this was not a “creator” as this would normally be understood.  It follows that Aquinas’ Cosmological Argument survives Hume’s third criticism and Russell’s criticisms as well, demonstrating that the universe has a transcendent cause, if not a “creator” precisely. 

On the other hand, Aquinas’ Cosmological Argument falls short of providing rational support for faith in the transcendent creator-God of Christianity.  As Hume rightly pointed out, there is no way to show that there could not be multiple uncaused causes of the universe, let alone that the cause would be omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent or in any sense personal or capable of becoming incarnate in Jesus Christ.  Nevertheless, the question did not ask whether Aquinas’ argument successfully reached the conclusion that God exists, but rather asked whether the argument successfully reached the conclusion that there is a transcendent creator.  A transcendent creator may, but also may not be, the same as the God of Christianity.  In this case, Aquinas’ argument demonstrates the existence of a transcendent entity that is responsible for initiating and sustaining the universe but no more. 

In conclusion, Aquinas’ Cosmological Argument successfully reaches the conclusion that there is a transcendent “creator” but does not demonstrate the existence of God. As William Lane Craig has argued, it is for theologians to determine whether the attributes of the transcendent cause of the universe can be reconciled with those of the object of religious faith.  This is why his Kalam argument stops with the conclusion “the universe must have a cause” rather than making the leap to saying “and this is what all men speak of as God” as Aquinas boldly does. 

Assess Aristotle’s four causes.  [40] 

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Aristotle saw philosophy as “a science which investigates being as being” (Metaphysics Book IV, Part I), meaning that it is concerned with understanding what it means for things to exist rather than how particular things exist, which is the role of the “special sciences”.  So, if philosophical “knowledge is the object of our inquiry” (Physics Book II, Part III) then we “must proceed to consider causes, their character and number.” Aristotle set out four types of causes which all things have, namely material causes “that out of which a thing comes to be and persists… e.g. the bronze of a statue”, the formal cause “the form or the archetype, the statement of the essence”, the efficient causes or “the primary source of the change or of coming to rest” and the final cause, “that for the sake of which a thing is done”, sometimes called the telos of the thing.  Aristotle’s theory of causation has been enormously influential, giving rise to natural law and virtue ethics on one hand and to the cosmological and teleological arguments for God’s existence and the Catholic concept of God on the other. Nevertheless, and despite this, Aristotle’s four causes fail to explain “being as being”.   

Firstly, Aristotle’s focus on material and efficient causation as important aspects of what makes something what it is has led to a naïve scientific materialism becoming the dominant world-view today.  Although the material causes of an object are often incidental and secondary, meaning that an object can be made out of many different materials while still being that object, Aristotle’s focus on the senses as the primary source of knowledge led those influenced by Aristotle to focus on sense-experience and downplay the role that reason has in processing it.  Although Aristotle himself acknowledged the important role that reason plays in enabling us to access knowledge and even warned that “if only the sensible exists there would be nothing if animate things were not, for there would be no faculty of sense…” (Metaphysics, Book V, Part V) this did little to stop the slide towards materialism and beyond into reductionism, the scientific tendency to reduce complex things and explain them only in terms of their physical parts.  In this way, logical positivists Moritz Schlick and AJ Ayer argued that the only possible knowledge is based on sense-data and that any claim that is unverifiable (or not a tautology and logically necessary) is “meaningless” – claiming that claims about beauty, morality and religion are just expressions of personal feeling and emotion and without content beyond that.  Further, Richard Dawkins in “The Selfish Gene” described human beings as “survival machines – robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes.” This sort of naïve materialism and reductionism, myopically focused on the five empirical senses, has been criticised by Thomas Nagel and John Polkinghorne for being an artificially narrow view of human experience and leading scientists to ignore other possible sources of knowledge and understanding about our universe.  In this way, Aristotle’s four causes and particularly his focus on material and efficient causation, fails to explain “being as being”.   

Secondly, like Plato Aristotle argued that things exist by participating in a formal cause – although unlike Plato, Aristotle did not see the formal cause as “real” or having any independent existence.  The idea that there is a formal cause or archetype for everything, including for human beings, has had an overwhelmingly negative effect on women.  In his “Generation of Animals” Book IV, Aristotle argued that the formal cause of the human being is male, reasoning that females are defective males.  Despite the fact that science has since shown Aristotle’s observations to be mistaken and his reasoning faulty, it went on to influence scientists and wider society to the present day.  In 2020 the feminist writer Caroline Criado Perez published “Invisible women: exposing data bias in a world designed for men”, providing hundreds of horrifying ways in which women are still disadvantaged by Aristotle’s assumption that there is a single “formal cause” or archetype for humanity, which is male.  The fact that Aristotle relied on limited observations and went on to misinterpret his observations in line with the dominant misogynistic prejudices of his day points to two other weaknesses in Aristotle’s approach.  Firstly, seeking knowledge through sense-experience means that knowledge is based on necessarily limited and ever-changing data.  Secondly, that sense-experience is subjective and subject to confirmation-bias and to being interpreted within a paradigm.  By contrast, Plato’s focus on rational reflection as the primary source of knowledge means that the limitations of our senses and the tiny slice through time and space that is available for them to experience don’t matter.  Also, Plato’s focus on reason means that there is more incentive to examine our prejudices and paradigm than there is when we are using reason only to interpret observations.  In this way as well, Aristotle’s four causes and particularly his understanding of the formal cause fails to explain “being as being”.   

Thirdly, Aristotle argued that all things have a “final cause” or telos, which they tend to fulfil, flourishing.  This includes human beings and indeed the universe as a whole.  Aristotle’s teleological world-view and his concept of the final cause is flawed because it is a product of how we as human beings tend and want to see things, rather than how they really are.  The existentialist Philosopher Jean Paul Sartre argued that the whole idea that the universe is efficient and tends towards flourishing is wrong. In his novel “Nausea” he reflected on a chestnut tree root, writing “absurd, irreducible, nothing – not even a profound and secret delirium of nature – could explain it…” Reality is, for Sartre, fundamentally chaotic.  We gloss over reality with a fairy-story of order, purpose, efficiency and flourishing, in order to cope with the aimless, random and meaningless chaos of existence.  Sartre rejected Aristotelian ethics, arguing that “all human activities are equivalent and all are on principle doomed to failure.”  While we may not agree with Sartre’s bleak vision of human existence, his argument shows that Aristotle’s teleological world-view is not entirely consistent with human experience and particularly with the prevalence of suffering in the natural world.  Further, Sartre raises a legitimate question over whether the final cause might not be a human projection rather than a property of existence.  If the final cause of a chair is to be sat on, it is fair to say that the designer of the chair – a human mind – allocates the final cause.  Why could not the same be true of the final cause of an animal, or of human beings?  If this is indeed the case, there is little basis for Aristotelian Ethics (Natural Law and Virtue Ethics) or for Aristotelian arguments for God’s existence, such as the cosmological and teleological arguments.  In this way also, Aristotle’s four causes and particularly his understanding of the final cause fails to explain “being as being”.   

Of course, Aristotle’s four causes remain influential and reflecting on them remains an important part of investigating “being as being”.  Certainly, Aristotle’s widening of philosophy to investigate the material and efficient causes of things as well as their formal cause, had positive effects on philosophy as well as negative effects.  His focus on observations inspired generations of scientists to document the natural world and to investigate the laws by which it operates.  Of course, Aristotle never intended his work to inspire the descent into naïve scientific materialism and reductionism and didn’t appreciate the unfounded and potentially damaging nature of his work in his “Generation of Animals”.  Nevertheless, this question doesn’t ask for an assessment of Aristotle’s contribution to Philosophy as a whole, but only for an assessment of his four causes and, as this essay has shown, a focus on the four causes that Aristotle identified, as he understood them, has led to an artificially narrow, misogynistic and unrealistically optimistic world-view, while also leaving unanswered questions.  How can material causes contribute to being while being interchangeable?  How can everything have efficient causes while the universe does not – either because it is infinite or because there is no time and space or possible causation before it?  Might not the formal and final causes be a product of how we see things rather than how they really are?   In this way as well, Aristotle’s four causes fail to explain being as being”.

In conclusion, Aristotle’s four causes fail to explain “being as being”.  This is because they are not fully supported by experience and/or might more be a function of how we understand being than a function of being itself.  In consequence, philosophers must continue to “investigate being as being” by examining the causes of things anew rather than relying on Aristotle’s 2500 year old categorization of causes.   

Human freedom is not compatible with divine omniscience. Discuss [40]

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The tension between divine omniscience and free-will matters because without free-will God becomes responsible for the consequences of human actions and cannot justly use evil and suffering to punish “sinful” choices, to deter people from sinning or to teach them to make better choices in future, falsifying the both the theodicies of St Irenaeus and St Augustine and making the logical problem of evil seemingly insurmountable.  Both Boethius and St Anselm acknowledged the apparent contradiction between believing that God has omniscience and that humans have free will, at least sufficient to make them morally responsible for the consequences of their actions.  In Book V Part III of The Consolations of Philosophy, Boethius wrote “if from eternity He foreknows not only what men will do, but also their designs and purposes, there can be no freedom of the will”.  In De Concordia 1.1 St. Anselm wrote “for it is necessary that the things foreknown by God be going to occur, whereas the things done by free choice occur without any necessity.”  Nevertheless, both Boethius and St. Anselm believed that they had succeeded in reconciling divine omniscience and human free will and in showing that there is no contradiction between them.  As St. Anselm wrote “the foreknowledge from which necessity follows and the freedom of choice from which necessity is absent are here seen (for one who rightly understands it) to be not at all incompatible.” Nevertheless, while Boethius and Anselm succeed in showing that there is no necessary contradiction between God’s omniscience and human freedom, they do so only by highlighting the limited meaning that words like omniscience have when applied to God to such an extent that by attempting to solve one challenge to religious belief, they open up another. 

Boethius approached the task of reconciling divine omniscience and human freedom by arguing that God’s knowledge is timeless and therefore while God knows what free beings do, this in no way causes their actions because there is no sense of temporal progression or causation within in God’s knowledge.  Boethius wrote “[God’s] eternity is the possession of endless life whole and perfect at a single moment… since God abides for ever in an eternal present, His knowledge, also transcending all movement of time, dwells in the simplicity of its own changeless present, and, embracing the whole infinite sweep of the past and of the future, contemplates all that falls within its simple cognition as if it were now taking place.“ (Book 5, Part VI) For God therefore, knowledge of what (for us in time) precedes a free choice, of the choice itself and of its consequences are all concurrent and there is no sense of process, of one thing leading to or causing another.  Further, God’s knowledge does not in itself precede what God knows, since God exists timelessly and the whole creation exists in the simple, changeless present to God.  Because God’s knowledge doesn’t in fact exist before what happens, God’s knowledge can’t be said to make what happens logically necessary.  As Boethius explains, God’s knowledge of what happens is not simply necessary, but rather conditionally necessary.  Just as my sight of the bus arriving at its stop at 3.14pm does not make the bus arrive at that time, so God’s sight of what happens in His eternal present depends on what happens and does not necessitate what happens or take away from the freedom of those people who make it happen.  Boethius’ attempt to reconcile human freedom with divine omniscience casts some doubt on the assumption that God’s knowledge of what, to us, is in the future causes what happens and so dilutes human freedom.  Nevertheless, in practice the difference between it being logically necessary that something will happen and being only contingently necessary that something will happen is more of a technical and less of a pastorally satisfying argument.  Christians believe that God is omnipotent as well as omniscient, so the fact that God knows that suffering happens and does nothing to stop it is the heart of the matter.  For the free-will defense to work as a defense of God’s goodness and justice in allowing suffering, God’s creation of free-beings must be justified by this being part of the best possible world and yet Boethius’ argument only serves to make this more difficult to believe.  If God created the world containing free-beings simultaneously with knowing all the suffering this action would cause, there is no way that human freedom can justify God in creating at all.  There was never a possibility that human freedom could exist without the holocaust or the sorts of gratuitous innocent child or animal suffering outlined in papers by William Rowe and Gregory S. Paul, so the idea that God is justly punishing human beings for misusing free-will seems void and the Christian salvation narrative falls flat.  While Schleiermacher, drawing on St. Paul’s argument in Romans 5, argued that God would be justified in causing us to fall into sin, evil and suffering because this facilitates and enlarges God’s gift of grace in saving us, as John Hick pointed out in Evil and the God of Love (1966), a doctor would not be so justified by causing injuries to patients because this facilitates and enlarges their actions in healing these same injuries.  In this way it seems that Boethius’ attempt to reconcile human freedom with divine omniscience, while interesting on a technical level, only serves to open Christian belief to further challenges. 

Secondly, as William Lane Craig explains in his article “St. Anselm on Divine Foreknowledge and Future Contingency” (1986) St Anselm began by agreeing with Boethius, arguing that the proposition “If God foreknows something, necessarily this thing will occur” is logically equivalent to the proposition “If this thing will occur, necessarily it will occur.” Because the proposition contains an “if” the event is conditionally, not simply, necessary.  However, in his “De Concordia” St. Anselm went beyond Boethius with the result that he argued that God foreknowing that something will happen contingently (i.e. as a result of a free choice) actually ensures that human beings have a free choice rather than taking human freedom away.  As St Anselm wrote “Now, on the assumption that some action is going to occur without necessity, God foreknows this, since He foreknows all future events. And that which is foreknown by God is, necessarily, going to occur, as is foreknown. Therefore, it is necessary that something is going to occur without necessity. Hence, the foreknowledge from which necessity follows and the freedom of choice from which necessity is absent are here seen (for one who rightly understands it) to be not at all incompatible.”  Nevertheless, this argument is unconvincing because God’s timeless knowledge must be both of the fact that something happens contingently and of what actually happens.  To be meaningful, most people would demand that human freedom consists of being able to effect different outcomes – known as the Principle of Alternate Possibilities – but if God knows the outcome of a choice (whether or not that he also knows that that outcome is only contingently necessary) there is no alternate possibility, no freedom and no moral responsibility for that outcome.  Because God knows the outcome, that outcome will happen, whether or not it results from a choice that felt free.  Take an example; a person is offered a range of identical boxes and they are told that each contains something different.  They “freely” choose one box… but it then turns out that all the boxes contained the same thing, so the outcome of their action was in fact pre-determined.  Was the choice really a free choice?  Compatibilists like Harry Frankfurt try to argue that human freedom and moral responsibility do not in fact depend on the ability to effect different outcomes (the Principle of Alternate Possibilities).  Frankfurt uses the example of Jones, Smith and Black to show that Jones could still be free and morally responsible for shooting Smith even if Black had decided to make sure Smith died if Jones chickens out.  Nevertheless, there is a crucial difference between Frankfurt’s example and the case of human freedom and moral responsibility in relation to an omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent God; Black is not omnipotent, omniscient or omnibenevolent!  Black does not know what Jones will do or whether he will have to step in and shoot Smith… or even whether he will miss.  God, on the other hand, knows what Jones will do and what He will do and what will happen simultaneously as part of his timelessly simple knowledge of creation.  God is omnipotent and omniscient and needs to be omnibenevolent as well if freedom is going to work as a theodicy but because God, unlike Black, knows what Jones will “freely” choose, that Smith will die and what He will or won’t have to do to square those facts. Because there really are no alternate possibilities in God’s case (where there still are some in the case of Jones, Smith and Black) Human beings cannot be said to be morally responsible for what they do, leaving God’s goodness compromised.  It follows then that St. Anselm’s attempt to reconcile human freedom with divine omniscience, however sophisticated it is, gets us no closer to a resolution to this problem than did Boethius’. 

Nevertheless, using God’s eternity to reconcile omniscience and human freedom demands that God’s eternity is understood in the sense of God existing wholly simply, outside time, rather than eternally and aware of the passage of time as Theistic Personalists like Richard Swinburne would prefer.  As both Swinburne and Wolterstorff have argued, this model of God’s eternity is problematic because it renders God’s knowledge so different from human knowledge that it ceases to be recognizable as knowledge at all.  As Anthony Kenny observed, for a timeless eternal God, “my typing of this paper is simultaneous with the whole of eternity. Again, on this view, the great fire of Rome is simultaneous with the whole of eternity. Therefore, while I type these very words, Nero fiddles heartlessly on.” (Kenny, The God of the Philosophers (Oxford, Clarendon Press) 1979, 38–9) If God really has no sense of progression or causation, then in what sense does he really know or better understand anything at all?  Swinburne points out that God can still have omniscience provided his knowledge extends to his knowing everything that it is logically possible that God can know.  If God exists timelessly-eternally, then what is logically possible for God to know is extremely limited, given that all sense of time as well as space must be removed.  Perhaps the best way to imagine it is that God’s knowledge of the universe can only extend to being aware of the singularity that gave rise to the Big Bang – within this infinitely small, infinitely dense particle the whole universe, all time and all space, all matter and all energy was contained, but in itself it would be far, far removed from the universe as it has ever existed since the beginning of time.  To use another analogy; a person’s genome is contained within the nucleus of a single cell, but knowing the genome is far removed from knowing the person (or people) the genetic instructions could give rise to.   If God’s attributes are so limited by his timeless-eternal nature, then the meaningfulness of religious language and of any religious claim about God is called into question.  Consequently, while Boethius and Anselm succeed in showing that there is no necessary contradiction between God’s omniscience and human freedom, they do so only by highlighting the limited meaning that words like omniscience have when applied to God to such an extent that by attempting to solve one challenge to religious belief, they open up another. 

Clearly, Classical Theists from Boethius through Anselm to Aquinas and later Thomists would disagree, arguing that seeing God’s eternity in terms of His existing timelessly and wholly simply is the only possible model of God.  A God who exists eternally in the sense of being everlasting and aware of the passage of the present moment cannot be said to be immutable, because even if God knows past present and future, if God’s knowledge is changed from being knowledge of the future into being knowledge of the present and then into being knowledge of the past by the passage of the present moment, then God’s knowledge is changed by and must depend on time to some extent.  While Classical Theists would accept that the content of religious claims such as “God is omniscient” is limited and certainly that the word knowledge cannot be used univocally, they deny that there is no content such claims.  St Thomas Aquinas’ doctrine of analogy attempted to demonstrate how claims about God contain meaning because concepts take their primary meaning in the being of God and only their secondary, analogical meaning from things in the world. For Classical Theists like Boethius and St Anselm then, using God’s timeless-eternity to reconcile divine omniscience and human freedom is rational and presents no insurmountable problems to religious believers.  Nevertheless, God’s immutability is hardly the most important attribute of God for Christians.  Immutability is in itself difficult to reconcile with Christian beliefs about the Fall, the Incarnation, the action of the Holy Spirit in the world and life after death.  As Nelson Pike pointed out, the scriptures are “unavoidably tensed” and so it is difficult to conceive of how they could retain the meaning and authority that Christian doctrines imbue them with while making so many claims about God that cannot be true if God is timelessly-eternal.  As Oscar Cullman observed in 1950 “in the biblical picture, God’s eternity is not qualitatively different from our temporality.” For Theistic Personalists like Richard Swinburne and Nicholas Wolterstorff, Scripture and the Good News that it contains must be the starting point for and not a potential embarrassment to Christian faith in an eternal, omniscient God.  It follows then that the attempt to use God’s eternity to reconcile God’s omniscience with human freedom comes at too high a price… and yet there is no other satisfactory way to reconcile God’s omniscience with human freedom.  Putting God as everlasting-in-time preserves God’s goodness – as well as essential Christian doctrines – but doing this in effect limits what God knows, compromising His omniscience and through that His omnipotence as well.  The passage of the present moment would at the very least change what God knows from future to present and present to past, making God’s knowledge depend on time, changable and not immutable or perfect. Arguing that God’s knowledge in time is further limited by logic, so that God can’t know the future insofar it is effected by free-choices compromises God’s knowledge even further. Realistically, what could God know about the future if all the ways in which free choices might effect that future are removed? In the nuclear age, God’s knowledge of the future couldn’t extend to knowing the world will exist tomorrow, and a God who doesn’t know whether tomorrow come is hardly more omniscient than I am! In the end it comes down to a choice – preserve God’s omniscience (and omnipotence) at the expense of human freedom, God’s goodness and essential Christian doctrines or preserve God’s goodness and essential Christian doctrines at the expense of his omniscience (and omnipotence).  There is no way to make logical sense of the “inconsistent triad” of Christian beliefs about God or to make human freedom compatible with God’s omniscience.

In conclusion, human freedom is not compatible with divine omniscience… unless freedom isn’t really freedom or omniscience isn’t really omniscience.  Indeed, there is no way to reconcile real freedom to effect alternate possibilities with timeless-eternal-omniscience, while everlasting-in-time omniscience is not really omniscience, because time at the very least changes what is known.  The implications of this are significant and show that there is no way to really resolve the logical problem of evil and that classical theodicies yield nothing.  Christians are left with an inconsistent set of beliefs about God, which they may well be willing to live with on an individual level… but which inconsistency can only cast doubt on the role of reason and philosophy in faith. 

Critically evaluate St Augustine’s attempt to resolve the logical problem of evil. (40)

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The logical problem of evil was most famously expressed by David Hume when he wrote “Is [God] willing to prevent evil, but not able? then is he impotent. Is he able, but not willing? then is he malevolent…”  The existence of evil seems to demonstrate that Christian faith rests on what Hume called “an inconsistent triad” of beliefs, namely that God exists and is omnipotent, God exists and is omnibenevolent and that Evil exists.  While writing many centuries before Hume, St Augustine repeatedly responded to this same problem and developed a complex, multi-layered theodicy.  While St. Augustine is best remembered for his free will defence, he also proposed that evil is a lack of good (privatio boni) and so not a positive part of God’s creation and reasoned that God allowing there to be privations of good is justified with reference to the principle of plenitude, in that they facilitate diversity in nature which is awe-inspiring and beautiful, pointing to the glory of God and the need to worship Him. Nevertheless, and despite the sophistication and importance of St. Augustine’s attempt to resolve the logical problem of evil, his attempt was not successful.

Focussing first on the free-will defence argument, St Augustine argued that evil results from the human misuse of free-will and is therefore our fault, not God’s.  God, being omnibenevolent, is beholden to create the best possible world and this, St Augustine reasons, contains free beings who can choose the good, rather than achieving it by design.  However, the freedom to choose the good necessarily entails the freedom to choose to sin, causing suffering to ourselves, other people and indeed the whole of creation as God, again being omnibenevolent and so just, is beholden to ensure that evil actions have evil results in order to deter people from choosing them again.  When human beings chose to sin, first corporately at the Fall in Genesis 3 in which all humanity was “seminally present” in Adam, and then as individuals, evil and suffering entered the world not by God’s design, but as a logically necessary consequence of God creating the best possible world. This argument is fraught with difficulties however.  Firstly, as JL Mackie asked in his famous essay “Evil and Omnipotence”, why could not an omnipotent God create a world containing free beings who always chose to do what is right?  Omnipotence suggests that ability to do anything, even (as Descartes reasoned) what seems logically impossible to us, such as making 2+2=5.  Secondly, even if (as St Thomas Aquinas argued) God’s creative action is timelessly simple and cannot, therefore, contain logical contradictions, why shouldn’t an omnipotent God create free beings whose poor choices have less severe consequences than they do in our world.  Is the holocaust a logically necessary consequence of God’s creation of the best possible world?  If it is, the meaning of omnipotence – and of best in the context of possible worlds – seems to be very far indeed from any meaning we can understand. Thirdly, such omnipotence and such a “best” possible world seems incompatible with God’s omnibenevolence; wouldn’t a good God have been better not to create at all than to have created a world in which the holocaust (and perhaps even worse examples of human depravity yet to come) was a logically necessary feature. Fourthly and finally, the whole idea of human beings having free will is inconsistent with the notion of divine omnipotence.  Ass Boethius acknowledged in the Consolations of Philosophy Book V, Omnipotence is usually understood to entail omniscience and, if God knows what we will choose before we choose it, our freedom is not meaningful.  Given that God has both the power to step in to prevent the consequences of our poor choices and the goodness that demands that he should, divine omniscience negates the free-will defence and means that this aspect of St. Augustine’s attempt to resolve the logical problem of evil is unsuccessful.

Moving on to consider St. Augustine’s suggestion that evil is “privatio boni” and therefore not a part of God’s creation for Him to be responsible for.  While defining evil as a privation has been popular through the history of the Church with Philosophers – St Thomas Aquinas also defined evil in this way – as John Hick pointed out, it is deeply unconvincing in a pastoral context.  To those afflicted by suffering saying that child cancer is not a positive part of God’s creation but only results from a justified instance of a lack of good things seems deeply inappropriate as well as being unconvincing.  Medicine has moved on since the 5th Century and we now know that much sickness is not caused by a lack of health but by pathogens which have a very real existence.  Why did an all-powerful, all-good God create coronaviruses, whose only purpose seems to be to infect beings in order to multiply themselves, whatever suffering that causes?  The standard response to this, pointing out that we are criticising God’s creation on the basis of our own perspective, not God’s, falls foul of the central Christian belief that God created the natural world for human beings.  If aspects of creation make it impossible for human beings to do as God commanded, “be fruitful and increase in number, fill the earth and subdue it…” (Genesis 1:28) then this demands an explanation.  If God, being omnipotent and willing human beings to be good, created a world in which the conflicting purposes of organisms naturally and inevitably results in suffering then there is indeed a logical problem.  It is simply not possible to deny the existence of evil or reduce it to a lack of good when “nature is red in tooth and claw”.  In this respect as well, therefore, St. Augustine’s attempt to resolve the logical problem of evil is unsuccessful.

Moving on to St. Augustine’s claim that God allowing evil and the suffering it causes is justified with reference to the Principle of Plenitude, this aspect of his Theodicy is also unsuccessful.  St. Augustine claimed that God is justified in creating, even when creation necessarily involved privations (evil), each of which would cause intense suffering, because of the beauty of creation, which would point towards and express God’s own glory.  For St. Augustine, part of God’s goodness is the need to express his nature creatively, yet this implies a limitation on God.  If God is omnipotent, then why should God have the need to express his nature creatively… and even more so if that creative self-expression would inevitably lead to privations on the scale of the holocaust.  St Augustine also reasons that God’s creative self-expression, including its necessary privations, is justified because it points the human mind to the existence and glory of God.  Yet again, this implies that God has a need to be known, acknowledged, worshipped and glorified in a way that seems to undermine His omnipotence.  If God is omnipotent He must also be omniscient which, as St. Thomas Aquinas argues in Summa Theologica 1,14,2, includes having perfect self-knowledge such as that “God understands Himself through Himself”. If God knows himself perfectly, then why would he have any need to be known, acknowledged, worshipped and glorified by any created being?  In this respect as well, therefore, St. Augustine’s attempt to resolve the logical problem of evil is unsuccessful.

Of course, St Augustine’s theodicy has been enormously influential.  Today Alvin Plantinga’s “God, Freedom and Evil” draws heavily on all aspects of the Augustinian tradition to provide a way for believers to defend themselves against the “defeaters” levelled at faith by atheists.  Plantinga has adapted Augustine’s arguments to address common criticisms, such as by developing his argument for transworld depravity to show that suffering will result from God’s creation of free beings in any possible world without ever having to be part of God’s intention for any world. Nevertheless, despite the continued popularity of the Augustinian-type theodicy, it remains deeply problematic.  Plantinga’s argument still depends on God being both omnipotent and having to create free beings the consequences of whose actions cannot be limited.  He still reasons that God can be both omnipotent and omniscient and not be responsible for the consequences of human choices. He does not so much defeat Mackie’s criticisms of the Augustinian theodicy as deny them. 

In conclusion, St Augustine’s attempt to resolve the logical problem of evil is unsuccessful at every level.  His free will defence fails to reconcile God’s omnipotence with His omnibenevolence, his re-definition of evil as privatio boni fails to do justice to the real experience of evil and its effects in the world and his Principle of Plenitude implies that God, being omnipotent, is still limited.  Despite the fact that St. Augustine’s theodicy continues to inspire writers like Alvin Plantinga, philosophers of religion should look elsewhere if they want to make progress towards a resolution of the logical problem of evil.