Classical Theism

Yes, I haven't read a book on metaphysics in like a year. I actually haven't read a lot this past year save for some dark fantasy. I think the current outrage culture is geared more towards political extremists than religious fundamentalists. Early 2000s to early teens dealt with the emergence of the new atheist movement, and a mass awareness that religion is at odds with the exponentially moving progressive ethos--redefining marriage, radical feminism, etc. Social issues vs the religious conservative had a philosophical backdrop of feuding ideas. One of these feuds was metaphysical in nature, atheism vs theism. But the two bitter philosophical stags of theism and atheism have waned, and the prevailing cultural dialogue is now purely political which in itself has its own creeds, dogmatists, orthodoxy, etc.

Hello to any wayfaring veterans of this forum. I stroll through this ghost town from time to time mostly for nostalgia's sake, reminiscing about the bustle that once was Classical Theism Forum.

Happy Easter!

I am thinking mainly historically involved books, but anything would be fine.

The Resurrection of Jesus: A New Historiographical Approach
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0830827196/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_fabt1_ycWSFbRKKA8C4

Was probably the most thorough and dense read on the historicity of the Resurrection I've ever come across. NT Wright's the Resurrection of the Son of God is a good work too.

This place is an eerie ghost town now. I remember the old days in here and the old forum where threads would remain active and busy for months. This community helped me so much in forming my metaphysical beliefs.

I don't think so. I think theism as a whole would be compromised, since I agree with Samuel Clarke in thinking that if the Necessary Being is personal/intelligent, then it must be good. How could it even make any sense for a being to be intelligent but indifferent towards the good? That would constitute a limitation, a form of irrationality. If a being is intelligent, rational, then it must care about goodness and fittingness, and must in fact desire the good.

If the Necessary Being is personal, but doesn't care about or desire things to be good and fitting, then the Necessary Being is stupid, which is absurd. How and why would it be stupid or have such a limitation/lack of perfection? It would be deficient, less than purely actual, limited, etc.

And if the Necessary Being is not personal, then all perfections associated with personhood (such as intelligence, will, consciousness, etc) would have magically come into being from nothing. We don't secure the intelligibility of being after all. The source of existence must also be the source of perfections, otherwise we would have a case of a reality (such as intelligence) coming into being from nothing. Plus all the other arguments we have for attributing intelligence, will, etc. to the First Cause.

Thus the Necessary Being must be intelligent (in fact, it must be omniscient). But if it is to be omniscient, it must know moral truths, natural laws, etc; it must in fact desire the good and reject evil, and given that there is no ignorance, weakness or any other imperfection in the First Cause, it must be morally perfect.

So the problem of evil is indeed an argument against theism in general. And a powerful argument, in fact, as I think Davies's and Hart's "classical theist" response is almost entirely useless. Some theodicy must be true. Still, even without knowing any theodicy, one can (and should, I think) still find the positive case for God's existence to be more compelling than the problem of evil.

Thanks for addressing that Atno. I hadn't contemplated much on this, but considering now the adage that being is convertible with goodness or that actuality is perfection, I think you're right that the problem of evil can pose a metaphysical challenge to theism in general.

What has helped me is contemplating the classical notion of God as the metaphysical bedrock of being and how denial of this comes at the cost of purging the world of intelligibility and implicitly affirming that reality bottoms out to a big fat brute fact or 'just thereness.'

Yeah, you might be right. But I still think there's a seeming cultural dichotomy between atheism and religious theism. Academics usually take one or the other. Lay people, as you point out, may hold some quasi-spiritual sort of secularism like the prominent new age trends.

I absolutely adored the forum when I made an account years back on the original site. It helped cultivate in me a love for metaphysics and ethics that I still find myself enamored with during contemplative moments. So many questions I've had answered by this community. I truly am sad that it has fizzled out. I used to sift through the archives continuously, and would always refresh the page to see what new debates or questions are posted. Though I might not be active from time to time, I'll always stop in. I still glance over it weekly.

I'm looking for a book that looks at reductive materialism, its origins, and various possible alternatives. I've really appreciated Feser's Aristotle's Revenge and Nagel's Mind and Cosmos. Anything to add to these?

JRR Tolkien used the term "sub-creation" in reference to man's use of imagination to create new worlds, stories, people, etc. He saw fantasy literature as the purest form of this. Sub-creation for Tolkien was a way of worshipping God, it was an emulation of the divine act of creation. I find it quasi-platonic, this idea that man has a natural inclination to imitate the divine through his artistic capacity, never actually achieving divine creation but merely approximating it.

More info here:
http://www.cslewisinstitute.org/node/1207

I'll try to answer this like a good Thomist:

Well, a monotheistic understanding of the First Cause seems to follow from its metaphysical simplicity. Pure actuality excludes potentiality. Potency is a sort of limitation of positive being, of actuality. A cat on a table is limited by its potency to be actually elsewhere in the kitchen or, broadly speaking, anywhere in the cosmos. His multitude of potentialities to be in location x,y,z, etc. narrows his actuality. He stands in potency to all these locations insofar as he is actually in one location. Potentiality, in a sense, carves up actuality, producing specificity. Now pure actuality is unlimited, it has no metaphysical limitations--it's the reason why the Scholastics refer to God as infinite. He is not bound by any metaphysical composition which would limit his being. Is it possible to have two purely actual first causes? In what sense do we differentiate them? Is one in location x rather than y? Is one in state x rather than y? All possible instances of differentiation require a narrowing of actuality and the introduction of a potency to be otherwise, therefore spoiling the First Cause, making it another secondary causal member in a chain of metaphysically-composite beings. 

Here's a whack at the second one. Unintelligent material things possess one substantial form at a time. A tree possesses the form of a tree. It doesn't simultaneously possess the form of dead wood, charcoal, ash--those forms stand in potency. An intelligent being can possess more than one form without undergoing radical material transformation. Therefore, you can come to understand the form of the tree via the immaterial operation of your intellect. Your intellect isn't materially subdued into actually becoming a tree, rather, it grasps the nature of a tree apart from its particular material instantiation. Now when it comes to the First Cause, it must by consequence of metaphysical simplicity, be immaterial. By virtue of being immaterial it can be the metaphysical bedrock for not just one but the vast multitude of forms. God is not simultaneously a tree, a horsefly, a human, a pig, etc. There is no form informing some material substratum of the First Cause. Rather, by virtue of immateriality, the First Cause grounds all forms in a way analogous to the human intellect.

A match may catch on fire and generate its effect of flame, consequently burning itself to ash. But it can only be one substantial form. The match isn't simultaneously ash and match. Now perhaps the First Cause has all of these forms, including rational animality, in some virtual way. Similar to how sticks aren't formally flame but do have the virtual power via friction to produce flame. In no sense is the flame metaphysically a part of the sticks beyond being the effect of a virtual power. Now this sort of unthinking virtual causation makes sense with the example of a material thing tending towards certain effects. Those effects are attributed to the powers of its material composition, like in the case of the sticks. And this is done blindly, unintelligent, with no immediate recourse to some intellect. But what about something immaterial virtually producing forms. With regards to our own intellects, we frequently produce accidental forms and, in a looser sense, substantial forms. We are imbued with intentionality, aboutness, immaterial apprehension. E.g. a painter painting a painting he sees in his mind's eye, a CEO assembling an advisory board he's dreamed of, you planning to write your questions out, an outdoors-man turning trees into a bonfire he's been planning to make. There is an immaterial grasp of a form that prefigures any virtual causation. Now, say, we have merely a material thing producing something like a bonfire. An unconscious assortment of circuitry and sensors that make up a robot that is programmed to locate trees, cut them, and light a fire from their logs. By virtue of being merely the aggregate assortment of unintelligent material parts, the robot doesn't really grasp what it means to chop down a tree, to assemble a bonfire. He doesn't really grasp what fire is, what ash is, etc. Why? Because he's a material thing. Now contrast that with the designers of the robot who had to grasp all of those immaterial concepts of chopping, logs, fire, etc. By virtue of their immateriality, they had in them the prior forms necessary to design the robot and virtually create something qualitatively other than themselves, that is, a robot and a fire.

I think the Thomist would argue that by virtue of being immaterial, the First Cause necessarily possesses all forms in an intellectual fashion. The resultant forms of the First Cause's creative act aren't analogous to the blind and unthinking examples of material virtual causation, precisely because the First Cause is immaterial. If anything the creative act would be more analogous to our own intellectual capacity as intentional beings.

Quote from: Dominik on November 03, 2019, 07:09:23 pm

The way I read Brian, the Stoics don´t have the resource on their own to forbid abortion based on their philosophy, since based on solely that reasonably the question could be asked if an abortion due to disease or genetic disorders wouldn´t be the more mercyful action. I´m not open to that discussion, period.

Historically, that is correct.  Seneca openly celebrates the father who leaves the disabled newborn to die, and he does so, at least seemingly, based on the Stoic conception of natural law.  I'm not well-versed enough in natural law to say anything about how Stoic natural law differs from something like Thomist/Catholic natural law, although it would be interesting to flesh out the differences.  I would think it comes down to what the natural activity and telos of the human being is conceived to be.  For the Stoic it is merely reason (which includes all of the virtues as species of reason), while I think the Catholic would ascribe broader essential activity to the human being.  For example, love would seem to be something a human being naturally and essentially does, that is not merely a species of reason/reasoning.

The Stoics have two types of natural law.

Stoicism has a sort of pantheistic understanding of the natural order. God isn't utterly transcendent but intimately a part of the cosmos.

"The universe itself is God and the universal outpouring of its soul; it is this same world's guiding principle, operating in mind and reason."
--Chrysippus, De Natura Deorum

God is an active intelligence, a directing flow. The movement of the cosmos is churned by Fate, a guiding divine intelligence. Seneca equates God with the providential nature of divine reason. So, in part, the Stoic natural law includes a conforming of our internal state to the divine intelligence, that is, an acceptance of Fate, its array of externals, and the subsequent balancing of one's internal mental state with the ebb and flow of the cosmos. This is roughly similar to the Thomistic metaphysical understanding of God as the the divine intelligence that directs all things towards their ends. Final causality is ultimately rooted in the divine and, without this intelligence, there would be no motion. Of course the striking difference is that Thomism views God as radically transcendent vis-a-vis Him being pure actuality.

The Stoics also overlap with Thomism with regards to the idea that each thing has an ordained nature. Thus a 'good' tree lives in accord with its nature, absorbing water, growing branches, taking in sunlight, producing buds, etc. However, it seems that the Stoics put more emphasis on the former understanding of nature as divine fate, hence the Stoic emphasis of coming to accept externals as the means to peace or apatheia. Whereas the Thomist would put more emphasis on the latter understanding of nature as an obligation to our ordained quiddity.

Thomistic natural law involves the agent coming to a greater understanding of his nature and then directing his will towards the proper ends of that nature. Stoic natural law, from what I understand, involves the agent coming to a greater understanding of the external affairs or Fate of the entire cosmic scheme and his place in it and then conforming his will to be in accord with it.

I can see why the Stoics would be proponents of euthanasia, seeing it as boldly accepting nature as divine Fate. And obviously the Thomist would be against this, seeing any deliberate frustration of a natural end as wrong (of course excessively cleaning one's ears, picking one's nose, could be classified as frustrating the end of those organs, however, the severity of frustrating those ends doesn't involve a rapid corruption of what it means to be a rational animal--morally wrong, probably not, but slightly imprudent, perhaps?).  Now something like substance abuse to deliberately frustrate one's rational thinking and overly heighten emotional gratification would be an egregious frustration of rational animality.

I think currently the typical lay person has an interesting blend of both of these classical natural law interpretations. We tend to classify what's bad or wrong for a natural substance by judging it against its universalized nature. We call someone handicapped or mentally ill insofar as they don't instantiate what is thought of as a healthy human being. But we also emphasize dealing with one's lot in life, coming to realistically understand one's limits, one's talents, etc. And no doubt there are many Christian circles that view God as a giant Fate modulator, seeing tsunamis, fires, terrorist attacks as divine providence, and that we ought to come to peace and security in God's will for the cosmos.