The subtitle is Philosophers Explain Their Turn to Catholicism. I was hoping for a lot more philosophy. It was mostly a collection of conversion stories of people who happen to work in philosophy. If you’re looking for a philosophical treatment of faith and reason, this is not it.
Edward Feser and Brian Cutter dive into some philosophy, but not in the depth I was hoping for.
For example, Feser says, “arguments developed by John Searle and other philosophers of mind convinced me that none of the existing attempts to explain the human mind in materialist terms could work.” Okay, but can you summarize those arguments for us?
Feser also said this, which everyone should memorize:
You cannot be confident that you have given an idea a fair hearing until you make a serious effort to understand how a rational person could find it plausible.
Following up on that concept, he mentions how the pedestrian replies to Aquinas (e.g., “Aquinas: everything has a cause, therefore there must be a first cause, who is God; Critic: then God has to have a cause, ha ha ha you dummy”) completely misunderstand what Aquinas is saying. Also, any response to Aquinas that implies he is stupid shows conclusively that the critic has not understood Aquinas. When you think an argument worthy of your average 8-year old overturns somebody’s position, it’s almost a dead certainty you haven’t understood that position.
I learned this lesson myself when, after telling a ditsy Catholic that Jesus said “call no man Father,” she said, “Really? I’ll have to tell my priest that.” As if the priest had never read that passage, and didn’t have an answer to it. I realized in a moment that until I knew how an educated priest understood that passage, my argument was garbage.
Anyway, Feser’s essay is worth reading, but isn’t nearly long enough.
Cutter is also worth reading.
He introduces a label I hadn’t heard before (although I was familiar with the concept). He says a “Moorean truth is ‘one of those things that we know better than we know the premises of any philosophical argument to the contrary.'”
For example, there are some things I know that I could never doubt: I exist, I have first-person experience, I make choices. There is no argument that could possibly dissuade me from those beliefs, because the premises of those arguments could never be as certain as I am of those fundamental facts.
Like Feser, Cutter touches on the things I want to hear more about, but doesn’t satisfy.
I was struck with a strong and sudden conviction that consciousness obviously isn’t reducible to physical processes, that subjective experience is clearly something quite different in kind from the movements of matter, and that by officially committing to reductive physicalism about consciousness … I was just lying to myself.
And ….? Please go on.
In general, I am often surprised at the stupid arguments otherwise intelligent people believe. All the writers in this collection of essays are smart people, but all of them also said things that caused my pencil to scribble “silly” or “oh, come on” in the margin. Which brings me to an argument for Catholicism that occurred to me as I was reading this book.
Your average Protestant pastor — i.e., one from an intellectually rigorous tradition — not the “just believe it, man” type — often feels the need to have answers to objections. But this is, quite frankly, madness. If you spend a few weeks studying the question “what is an ecumenical council?,” you will realize that you could spend half your life trying to answer that question. And there are 10,000 questions like that. The idea that Rev. Smartypants can give an adequate answer to all objections is a delusion.
If he has any sense, he realizes he has to fall back on something. And what is that “something”? It’s the judgment of a community.
You know, I can’t answer that question, but here are some other people you might consult.
A Protestant can do the same, to some extent, but note the important difference. A Protestant has to decide — in his own judgement — whether he should stay in communion with Denomination 107.214. It’s hard to come up with an over-riding principle that says “I can trust the community of 107.214ers.”
The Catholic priest can point to other sources which might not even be correct (how would he know?), but which are still in his communion. He doesn’t have to wonder, “Oh, crap! Is this one of those questions I can’t answer for myself that might ultimately undo my decision to hitch my wagon to 107.214?”
This illustrates what people don’t understand about Martin Luther’s position on James. Luther knew that the Gospel preceded the Scriptures, and that the Scriptures had to be judged based on the Gospel, and not the other way around. He believed justification by faith was that Gospel, and used it as the rule to judge what should or should not be in Scripture. James didn’t teach justification by faith (so he thought), therefore it didn’t belong in Scripture.
So there you have it, right? Here’s a rule of unity. Everyone who believes in “justification by faith” has the Gospel and is part of the church.
Is that really the way it works?
Anyway, most Crowhill readers shouldn’t bother with this book. Although I would recommend looking up Feser’s treatment of Aquinas’ five ways. That’s my next study.
Merely personal testimonies do very little for me, but some people really get off on them. I heard someone expound on C. S. Lewis’ conversion, which was allegedly “rational.” But it seemed to me to involve the very dubious presupposition that the stuff we need (or long for) must really be there. I haven’t read that account firsthand though, so maybe it is stronger than the exposition that I heard.
What often perturbs me about defenses of theism is that they usually involve yet another dubious presupposition, namely that if you reject theism you must embrace materialism. I myself rejected materialism by the time I was 20 years old. I told my favorite philosophy professor that I was a materialist because I was an empiricist. In response he went into an elaborate argument that empiricism actually entails the very opposite view, namely idealism: that everything is really mental. Of course he drew heavily on Berkeley and Hume. So basically the argument was that since I only experience mental occurrences (impressions and ideas in Humean terminology) I cannot really know firsthand that there are material things outside of my mind. And since an empiricist thinks that all of her concepts are derived from experience she will have to concede that she doesn’t even have a concept of the material or physical. That argument made a big impression on my back then, but of course I have “evolved” since then.
Since someone told me that Feser recommends one of my articles, I was naturally curious about him. I saw him discuss the five ways in a discussion with Ben Shapiro (who was refreshingly well behaved, in contrast with his usual complacent manner). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pnn1iiVegYY There are all kinds of problems with the line of argumentation that Feser takes, which is very much in line with Thomism. Where I found him particularly weak was in explaining how you get from a first mover (or unmoved mover) to God. I would especially press the question: How do we know that that such a being is conscious (thinking, cognizant, mental, etc.)? Aristotle thinks that it thinks because thinking is pure actuality. You really have to buy into a hefty Aristotelian narrative to buy that. It is indeed a tall order. But of course Feser only had about an hour to explain a whole lot of stuff.
Feser also lamented about how Thomism is caricatured, and rightly so. But I have seen a lot of caricaturing on the part of theists or full-blown “Christians” directed at not only materialism, but also at Cartesianism. For some reason a lot of those people want to make Descartes a punching bag. (Actually materialists also usually find him reprehensible.) I don’t find him all that bad, though I am by no means a Cartesian. I do, however, tend to start take a first-person point of view (“phenomenology”) in metaphysical matters.
That’ll be enough for the time being, as I have much work to do.
Thanks for the interesting reply.
In your comment about Lewis, you contrast “rational” with “involving dubious presuppositions.” My attitude is that we all have dubious presuppositions. I’ve never met anyone — no matter how smart or educated — who doesn’t have some blind spots.
For example, I’ve heard genius physicists speaking of how the world could have come “from nothing.” They say something along the lines of “‘nothing’ is not stable, so energy and then matter coming into being is a more stable situation ….” Somehow they miss that they didn’t start with nothing, and I completely don’t get that.
Anyway, it seems to me that “rationality” is what we do with our premises.
I agree with you that materialism and theism are not the only options, although I would add that “theism” is a very broad category. Would you call someone a theist if they believed “evolution is the universe coming to understand itself”? (The Dilbert dude wrote a weird book along those lines.)
I would not judge Feser by an interview. I’ve read The Last Superstition, which is pretty good, and I’m interested in finding some more of his work on the Five Ways.