On Heresy and Universalism

A couple of weeks ago, Roger Olson--a theology professor at Baylor University--took up the issue of universalism on his blog, asking, "How serious a heresy is universalism?"

Of course, this is a loaded question. It assumes that universalism is a heresy. But how do we decide that? To engage this question seriously, we'd first need to wrestle with the concept of heresy itself. Olson does offer a brief definition of heresy in a parenthetical remark, saying that heresies are "theologically incorrect beliefs," but he doesn't consider the adequacy of this definition in the face of alternatives. A "theologically incorrect belief" is presumably a belief about God that doesn't correspond with the way God really is. If this is what a heresy is, then we'd expect--as Olson immediately concedes--that all Christians are heretical about something or other, and that heresy needn't be a very serious issue. The (laudable, I think) implication of this way of conceiving the matter is that the cry of heresy loses much of its force. Being a heretic ceases to be an eggregious matter, at least as such.

But the reason why this definition of heresy (and the contrary notion of orthodoxy) has these implications is because it makes the objective nature of reality the standard by which beliefs are judged heretical (or orthodox)--and it seems inevitable that each of us will, in our beliefs about ultimate reality, get some things wrong. But I think this way of understanding heresy has deeper implications that Olson (and other evangelical Christians) would be unhappy to accept. Consider: on this definition, if atheists are right about the nature of reality then all Christians of every stripe are heretical in all their theological beliefs, since all their theological beliefs would then be wrong.

Is this a possibility we should concede? Part of the trouble here is that the way Olson is actually using the term "heresy" doesn't seem to fit with this possibility. He is asking, in effect, what is orthodox and what is heretical from within a Christian context. His starting point is that Christianity, in some broad sense, is correct about the nature of reality, such that the truth of atheism isn't really on the table. More to the point, if atheism were correct this would imply that there is no meaningful framework within which it makes sense to distinguish between orthodox and heretical Christian beliefs.

Now I don't have any trouble with adopting such a presupposition for the purposes of pursuing a more circumscribed discussion: "What should Christians believe about x or y?" seems the sort of question that ought to be askable apart from being able to definitively establish that the fundamental nature of reality is theistic. But if we are asking about what Christians should believe without committing ourselves to first resolving the deep philosophical questions about ultimate reality, then our standard of orthodoxy, if you will, has got to be something other than the fundamental nature of reality.

But perhaps Olson (or if not Olson, then some more fundamentalistic Christian) would like to argue that we can settle basic metaphysical questions, such as wehether God exists, and then use these answers (which are presumably in line with Christian teaching) as a framework for establishing what is orthodox and what is heretical. But as someone who has engaged philosophically with the atheist challenges to theistic beliefs, I am pretty confident that we are not in an epistemic situation where we can say that we know that the atheist is wrong. While I find some arguments for God's existence more convincing than atheists do, this is in large measure because I have a different intuitive response to the foundational assumptions on which these arguments build. As I've argued in Is God a Delusion?, these assumptions are ones about which apparently reasonable people can and do disagree.

Since these assumptions are, furthermore, foundational in character as opposed to being deduced from evidence or arguments whose merits are uncontested, it strikes me as ad hoc and presumptuous to simply assert that those who seem otherwise reasonable but who don't share one's immediate confidence about these assumptions are therefore unreasonable. Better to say, I think, that reasonable people can and do see the world differently at the most basic level, because when it comes to the fundamental nature of reality our epistemic situation is inescapably ambiguous.

In fact, there are reasons to think that this epistemically ambuiguous situation is precisely what should be expected on a broadly Christian theistic understanding of fundamental reality. As John Hick and Simone Weil and others have suggested in various ways, our status as individual persons who exist in some measure apart from or other than God requires that the divine in some sense "withdraw," producing a "distance" between creature and creator. And as Hick notes, if God is omnipresent this distance cannot be a spatial one. "It must be an epistemic distance," Hick observes, "a distance in the cognitive dimension." The world in which we live, he argues, must be "religiously ambiguous, capable both of being seen as a purely natural phenomenon and of being seen as God's creation and experienced as mediating God's presence."

Now to get to this conclusion, one needs a certain picture of the divine, one where God cares so much about establishing and preserving the otherness of the creation that withdrawal behind a veil of mystery is called for despite the costs. It is not my intention here to defend this picture of God, but rather to point out that, in saying that the fundamental nature of reality is in some sense unknowable, one is not ruling out a theistic understanding of reality--since such epistemic ambiguity might be the very thing we would expect under certain theistic worldviews. If one is to embrace those theistic worldviews at all, the embrace would have to be rooted in something other than knowledge of its truth. To embrace such a theistic worldview with an attitude of certitude would amount to a kind of contradiction. It would amount to saying, "I am certain that there exists a God who, if He existed, would guarantee that no one could be legitimately certain that He existed."

This is not to say that the believer in such a God couldn't acquire reasons for confidence--but the confidence would come after the embrace, not before, and the confidence would have the character of an inner experiential assurance as opposed to public evidence that could be trotted out for the sake of convincing the skeptic. If there is something that is public, it's the effects of belief on the life and character of the believer; but such effects do not count as "proof" in the sense of considerations that compel the belief of reasonable people who are confronted with them.

This may seem like a major digression from my starting point, but it bears directly on Olson's definition of heresy as "theologically incorrect belief." To define heresy in this way is to set the fundamental nature of reality as the standard for distinguishing between heresy and orthodoxy. If the fundamental nature of reality is hidden from us in a basic way--as it would be under at least some plausible understandings of the divine nature--then this standard is essentially inaccessible. And a definition of heresy that asks us to distinguish beliefs according to an inaccessible standard is basically useless. To define heresy in this way is to do more than just mute the force of cries of heresy. It is to say that there is no point in talking about what is orthodox and heretical, since we have no way of determining which is which.

I'm pretty certain that Olson did not intend anything as radical (from an evangelical Christian perspective) as this. But I'm also pretty sure that the broad theistic perspective Olson embraces commits him (however unwittingly) to the view that our life situation is epistemically ambiguous in something like the manner Hick describes. And why do I say that? Because of Olson's reasons for rejecting universalism.

According to Olson, universalism can only be a matter of pious hope, not a matter of confident belief, because of the nature of human freedom. Here's how Olson puts it in his essay on universalism and heresy:

I would have to wonder how a God of love can enjoy love from creatures that is not given freely. Of course, someone might argue that, in the end, every creature will freely offer love to God and be saved (e.g., Moltmann). I would just call that optimism. There’s no way to believe that true other than a leap of optimistic hope.

More significant, however, are Oslon's thoughts from an earlier post on eternal damnation as something that results from how we use the gift of free will. Olson distinguishes between "true freedom"--which is possessed only by "one who is all that God intends for him or her to be"--and "free will," which is that power of choice by which we can "move toward or away from that real freedom." According to Olson, "God graciously extends to all the possibility of realizing true freedom IF we meet a certain condition–acknowledge our dependence on him and his grace and cease our own efforts to achieve it apart from God." Our capacity to meet or not meet this condition is, according to Olson, itself a gift of love. It affords us the capacity to determine our own fates without divine coercion.

On a basic level, this is very close to Hick. Hick believes that a God of love would give His creatures a measure of independence and freedom--a freedom that extends especially to the freedom "to open and close oneself to the dawning awareness of God". But Hick argues that the only way to secure such creaturely freedom is for God to create an "epistemic distance" which is the condition for the "cognitive freedom" to reject a theistic understanding of reality.

Why think that? It is clearly what Aquinas thought, and the reasoning isn't that difficult to grasp. On the broadly Christian picture of reality, God is the infinite objective good Who is the source of all finite goods. And as such, all creaturely goods flow from God. To be cut off from God is to be cut off from one's own good. To see and understand the truth about reality, given this portrait of what that reality is like, is to see and understand that nothing good can come from alienation from God. And to see and understand this is to see and understand that there is no reason--NONE--to reject God. All possible motives for such rejection are exposed as vacuous.

Furthermore, it is hard to credit the idea that creatures who are a product of this infinite and infinitely good God would be designed in such a way that they would gravitate towards this ultimate good when presented with it in an unclouded way. We are naturally ordered to union with God, Aquinas maintains, in such a way that when presented with an unclouded vision of the divine we cannot help but love and long for it. Aquinas therefore thought that no creature of God, made for union with God, could, once presented with an unambiguous vision of God, choose to reject God. The clear sight of the summum bonum would swamp all other desires and expose all false beliefs about the choice-worthiness of rejecting God.

If one rejected God under those circumstances, it would have to be because human free will is subject to some kind of bizarre randomness that could act against all a creature's converging motives, leading them to do what they neither want to do nor think there is any good reason to do. And Aquinas did not believe that free will operated in this perverse way. Indeed, if free will were nothing more than randomness at work in human choices, it would hardly be a gift of God. More like a curse. To be saved or damned by a flip of the coin is hardly better than being saved by divine "coercion."

All of this is developed at considerably greater length and depth by John and me in our forthcoming book, God's Final Victory. The upshot of it for present purposes is this: The freedom to reject God depends on God creating an epistemic distance between Himself and His creatures. If God is as Christianity describes Him, then we would need a space of inescapable uncertainty about what God is really like in order to be able to freely reject God.

In other words, if one wants to defend the doctrine of hell by appeal to creaturely freedom--as Olson does--one needs to suppose that the human condition is suited to free rejection of God. And there is strong reason to believe that our human condition is suited to such free rejection only if it is characterized by an inescapable degree of epistemic uncertainty about God. And in that case, if "heresy" and "orthodox" are defined in the manner that Olson proposes, it becomes very hard to make any meaningful pronouncements about what is heretical and orthodox.

Excerpt from That Damned Book: Efficacious Grace and Rational Freedom

Since participants on this blog seem to have an ongoing interest in issues of free will, I thought I'd share something from the chapter I'm working on right now from That Damned Book. The excerpt is from the first of two chapters in which we critically assess the argument that God will not save all because to do so would require Him to trump the freedom of the unregenerate in a morally unacceptable way. In the chapter from which this excerpt is drawn, we consider the first of two responses to this "liberal" justification for the doctrine of hell--namely, the response which invokes the concept of "efficacious grace" (roughly, a divine act which guarantees the salvation of the sinner by ensuring that the sinner responds favorably to God's offer of loving union with Him). In this excerpt, we begin to consider the case for the view that it is possible for God to bestow efficacious grace. Once we narrow in on the "Thomistic" view on this matter (meaning the view endorsed by followers of St. Thomas Aquinas), we offer an account of the Thomistic view of freedom. It is this part of the excerpt that I think may be of special interest to readers of this blog.


That God can bestow efficacious grace was assumed by most older dogmaticians, whether Protestant or Catholic, who discussed the matter. But the Catholics were divided over the nature of efficacious grace. Adherents to the older Thomist and Augustinian tradition took such grace to differ in kind from so-called “merely sufficient grace” (which gave sinners all they needed for salvation other than the appropriate subjective act of will). Followers of Molina, however, held that efficacious grace does not differ in kind from sufficient grace, but differs only in virtue of the fortuitous situation the creature is placed in when receiving sufficient grace.

While volumes of scholastic theology have been written on this dispute, for our purposes a brief overview is sufficient. According to the Thomists and their Protestant followers, when God grants efficacious grace, what He does is guarantee conversion and regeneration by putting creatures in a state that influences their motives such that they have every reason to respond favorably to the offer of salvation and no reason not to. But if this is what efficacious grace involves, it raises important questions about the nature of creaturely freedom. Most significantly, one may wonder if efficacious grace is consistent with libertarian freedom—by which we mean, roughly, the power to act or not act on motives that incline but do not determine the will. Freedom in this libertarian sense exists only if, when one makes a choice, one could have chosen otherwise—that is, there is some possible world in which one chooses otherwise.

In affirming that God can grant efficacious grace, the Thomists did not mean thereby entirely to deny creatures freedom in something like this sense. Rather, they meant simply to limit its scope. Specifically, the Thomistic view is that what we call libertarian freedom is a coherent understanding of freedom only when the creature confronts conflicting motives for action. It does not extend to circumstances in which the creature has every reason to pursue a given course of action and no reason not to. Under such circumstances the Thomistic view is that the will of the creature is not merely inclined towards the given action but determined to do it. The action remains wholly voluntary, but there is no possible world in which an agent who has every motive to do A and no motive not to nevertheless refrains from doing A—and so, it seems, the action is determined even though voluntary, and so conforms to what is usually labeled “compatibilist freedom” by contemporary philosophers.

But it strikes us that this contemporary language implies something Thomists did not mean to imply—namely that there are two kinds of freedom, compatibilist and libertarian. We find it more in tune with Thomistic ideas to say that freedom simply operates differently under conditions of uniformity of motives than it does under conditions in which motives conflict. In the latter case, free choice looks like what we think of when we speak of libertarian freedom, whereas in the former case it looks like what we think of when we speak of compatibilist freedom.

If this is right, God could guarantee that the unregenerate freely-but-inevitably make the subjective choices necessary for salvation. For Thomists, this is the essence of how efficacious grace works: it brings all the creature’s motives into conformity with the choice of pursuing loving union with God above all things.

The Molinists, however, objected to the Thomistic view of efficacious grace because they took it that freedom has a libertarian character even under conditions of uniform motives. Granted this strong notion of libertarian freedom, it would initially seem impossible for God to give efficacious grace without first extinguishing the creature’s freedom. But the Molinists argued, on the contrary, that (i) God has middle knowledge, and (ii) for every rational creature there is a possible world in which she would freely (in the strong libertarian sense) respond favorably to God’s offer of salvation. That God has middle knowledge means He knows, for any creature X He might create, what X would freely do in any circumstance God might put X in. Thus God can give efficacious grace to X by creating that world in which He knows, by middle knowledge, that X would favorably respond to grace.

For a number of reasons we are unconvinced by this Molinist doctrine. First, we are not convinced that divine omniscience entails middle knowledge. It is not clear to us that, in the absence of an actual (libertarian) free choice made under an actual set of circumstances, there is any truth of the matter with respect to what the agent would freely choose in the libertarian sense. Furthermore, as William Lane Craig has shown, supposing that God does have middle knowledge does not, by itself, demonstrate that He can give efficacious grace. Hence, we will not argue here that efficacious grace is possible on the Molinist view of freedom. Given the strong libertarian perspective of the Molinists, we think a different argument for universalism (which we discuss in the next chapter), is more compelling than the argument from efficacious grace developed here.

In this chapter, then, we will argue that God has available to Him a morally permissible means of bringing it about that all a creature’s motives uniformly favor conversion. If so, then on a Thomistic view of freedom there is a morally permissible means for God to guarantee that all freely make the choices necessary for salvation.

So, is there a means whereby God could, without moral fault, bring about in a creature uniformity of salvation-inducing motives? To answer this, we think it may be helpful to develop a fuller picture of the Thomistic view of freedom by way of a contemporary philosopher—Thomas Talbott—whose thinking is very close on this matter to that of the Thomists.

Like the Thomists, Talbott insists that one cannot imagine anyone freely choosing what they have no motive to choose and every motive not to choose. Such a choice, for Talbott, is incoherent. If one is in a condition such that all of one’s motives converge on a single choice, then Talbott thinks this choice becomes inevitable.

On Talbott’s view such a choice may nevertheless be truly free—but only if certain conditions are met. Talbott argues that if ignorance or deception entails that one chooses based on misrepresentations of the alternatives (such that what one thinks one is choosing is different from what one is actually doing), then one’s freedom is impeded. And if controlling affective states entail that an agent is determined to choose one option even if informed deliberation would come down in favor of another, then the agent is “in bondage to desire” and, again, not truly free. But if someone is “freed from all ignorance, deception, and bondage to desire,” the agent’s choice is free even if all motives converge on a single option, thereby making the choice of that option inevitable.

But if all of this is right, then there will be different ways to produce conformity of motives, not all of which should be assessed in the same way. Consider the following case. Suppose Jenny grows up in a dystopian future where all children are fed a highly addictive drug from infancy. They are taught (falsely) that the drug is a medicine they need to stay healthy—while in fact it is used by a tyrannical regime to control the people. Given her addiction and beliefs, Jenny’s motives all converge on the choice to continue taking the drug. But insofar as this choice is governed by deception and addiction, it is not free in Talbott’s sense.

But suppose a resistance group reveals to Jenny the truth, so that she now knows the drug is harmful but remains addicted. She now has reason-based motives to stop taking the drug, but they are impotent because she is in bondage to her addiction. Perhaps the resistance gives her a counter-drug that weakens the strength of her addiction but does not shut down the cravings. Now, whenever she is in the vicinity of the drug, she faces an inner struggle. Sometimes, with the right help and support (and a bit of luck) she can resist her craving; but usually she falls prey to it, weeping in horror at her own weakness. At this point we might say she has some measure of freedom—but it remains constrained by the hold the drug continues to exert.

But then imagine the resistance group finds a way to break her addiction. Now she neither craves the drug nor thinks taking it is a good idea. Let’s suppose, further, that she has no other motive to continue taking it but many reasons not to: concern for her health and continued freedom from addiction, gratitude to her liberators, a desire to oppose the unjust regime, etc. Suppose, in other words, that once she is finally freed of her addiction all her motives converge on a single choice: not to take the drug. Even if this means (as Talbott and the Thomists believe) that her rejecting the drug is inevitable, we wouldn’t want to say her choice isn’t free. Rather, we’d say that, with respect to this issue, she is truly free for the first time.

This example shows, we think, that the “libertarian” and “compatibilist” labels are both inadequate for the sense of freedom that Talbott champions. Prior to help from the resistance, Jenny’s choice to take the drug would be free in the compatibilist sense—but not free in Talbott’s sense. After her final liberation, her choice to refuse the drug is free in Talbott’s sense—but not in the libertarian sense (which assumes the possibility of having chosen otherwise). What makes the choice free in the one case but not in the other is that reason is no longer impeded from playing the role it ought to play in decision-making. Hence, we think the best label for this conception of freedom is “rational freedom.” And given Aquinas’s emphasis on the natural ordering of the will to follow reason, we think such “rational freedom”—which treats only some cases of uniform motives determining one’s choices as free—best captures the Thomistic view.

Underlying this view of freedom are several presuppositions, which can be summarized as follows: (i) Values are objective, such that there are objectively good or best choices and objectively bad ones; (ii) the rational faculty makes judgments in accord with its finite grasp of this objective order of values; (iii) the will can be controlled by non-rational forces (such as addictions, childhood coping mechanisms, entrenched habits); (iv) the will is naturally ordered to choose in accord with rational judgments, such that in the absence of non-rational controlling factors the will always chooses in accord with reason.

These presuppositions imply, in brief, that the will is naturally ordered to follow reason (its “default setting,” if you will, even if the will can be reprogrammed), and that reason in turn is naturally ordered to discern the objective good. On this view, choices are free to the extent that both will and reason can operate in accord with their nature—that is, there is nothing (such as “ignorance, deception, or bondage to desire”) that impedes them from acting on their natural teleology. This, we think, captures the essence of freedom as it is understood both by the Thomists and, more recently, by Talbott.

In any event, what all of this shows is that one can bring about uniformity of motives both in ways that impede “rational” freedom and in ways that do not. As such, if efficacious grace is a divine act of producing uniformity of salvation-favoring motives in the unregenerate, this divine act may or may not impede freedom in the Thomistic sense—depending on whether this uniformity is produced by inducing false beliefs and/or affective states at odds with reason, or whether it is produced by revealing truth and removing affective barriers to acting on what reason discerns.

Given this perspective, the question is not only whether God can bring about uniformity of salvation-favoring motives in the unregenerate, but whether He can do so in a way that promotes rather than impedes rational freedom. In fact, we think it falls within the power of an omnipotent being to do both. Hence, not only do we think it is within God’s power to bestow efficacious grace. We think it is within God’s power to do so in a way that does not violate the freedom of the unregenerate—at least if “freedom” is understood in this Thomistic sense.

Richard Dawkins, the Neo-Thomist

Of course, the title of this post is kind of a joke. A Thomist is a follower of St. Thomas Aquinas, whose arguments for God Dawkins dismisses as “vacuous” in a couple of pages in The God Delusion (pp. 77-79). This dismissal is—as I’ve pointed out in Is God a Delusion? (pp. 101-105) and elsewhere—based on a mischaracterization of the arguments. He basically attacks straw men. This is not to say that Aquinas’s actual arguments succeed in their aims, but it does say something about the care (or lack thereof) which Dawkins brings to bear on the philosophical arguments for God’s existence.


But in addition to pointing out Dawkins’ exegetical shortcomings with respect to Aquinas in Is God a Delusion?, I also note something else in passing. Speficially, I point out that Dawkins’ mischaracterization of the logical structure of the first two of Aquinas’s Five Ways is particularly egregious because his own argument against theism has the very same logical structure. Here’s how I put it there:

Just as Aquinas did, Dawkins notes that a certain kind of explanation leads to an infinite regress. He insists that an infinite regress explains nothing. And so he concludes that there needs to exist a regress-ending explanation of a different kind (p. 116).

It occurs to me that it might be useful—both for general readers of this blog and for students in my class who are examining Dawkins’ atheological argument—to lay out the parallel between Dawkins’ and Aquinas’s arguments more explicitly. Let’s begin with Dawkins’ argument against the idea that the universe is ultimately explained by an intelligent designer. Here is at least one way to formalize it:

D1. There are instances of “organized complexity” (Dawkins’ term for a complex teleological system, that is, a system comprised of parts whose parts work together to achieve a common end or to make possible a certain kind of coherent activity)

D2. Every instance of organized complexity must be explained either by (a) an intelligent designer or (b) a "self-bootstrapping crane," that is, an uncomplicated mechanism such as Darwiniain natural selection that builds organized complexity gradually. (Dawkins endorses this because he thinks organized complexity is far too improbable to be explained by chance).

D3. Any intelligence capable of designing a given instance of organized complexity must exhibit at least as much organized complexity as what it designs.

D4. Hence, nothing in category (a) can terminate a regress of explanations—and hence be the ULTIMATE explanation—for organized complexity.

D5. An infinite regress of explanations, without an ultimate explanation, explains nothing.

D6. Hence, to explain organized complexity, we must posit something in category (b) to serve as the ultimate explanation.

Now compare this argument with Aquinas’s “First Way”—the way from motion. Keep in mind that for Aquinas, “motion” is a technical term that means roughly the same as what we mean by “change”—except that the focus seems to be on what might be called “positive changes,” that is, changes in which something comes to acquire a property it had previously lacked, as opposed to losing a property it had previously possessed. While the meaningfulness of this distinction can be challenged under some assumptions about the nature of properties, it at least has some intuitive plausibility (changing from being a non-conscious thing to a conscious one seems to involve coming to possess something, whereas changing from being conscious to non-conscious seems to involve losing something). In any event, with this understanding of “motion” in mind, we can formalize Aquinas’s First Way as follows:

A1. There are things that move from being potentially something (say S) to being actually S (from “potency” to “act” with respect to S).

A2. Everything that moves from potency to act with respect to S must have its movement explained either by (a) something else that is itself moved from potency to act with respect to S or (b) something that always actually possessed S (an eternal S-possessor).

A3. Nothing in category (a) can terminate a regress of explanations—and hence be the ULTIMATE explanation—of movement from potency to act.

A4. An infinite regress of explanations, without an ultimate explanation, explains nothing

A5. Hence, to explain motion, we must posit something in category (b) to serve as the ultimate explanation.

Of course, the two arguments are quite different in terms of the substantive premises they adopt. And Dawkins’ argument requires an additional premise (D3) that, structurally, isn’t required for Aquinas’s argument. But other than the need to insert this additional premise D3 (which, by the way, is probably the primary target of critical responses to Dawkins’ argument), the two arguments share the same logical structure.

And this makes it all the more perplexing that Dawkins would fail to accurately represent Aquinas’s arguments. Because at least when he sets himself to the task of constructing his own positive argument for his own conclusion (as opposed to attacking the arguments of others), Dawkins thinks, more than a little bit, like Aquinas.

And that, by the way, is a compliment. (For other, lengthier compliments of Dawkins, see my 2009 post, "The Misguided Desire to Stifle Dawkins," which I wrote when members of the Oklahoma Legislature made a stink about the University of Oklahoma's decision to invite Dawkins to speak on campus as part of its celebration of the 150th anniversary of the publication of The Origin of Species).

Aquinas's "Third Way": One Interpolation

Traditional theists believe, among other things, that there exists a “necessary being”—a being that could not have failed to exist—and that this necessary being is the fundamental or ultimate reality which explains the existence of all other things. But in the world of ordinary experience, the world we encounter through our senses, we only encounter beings which appear to be contingent—that is, beings which could have failed to exist. While there are necessary truths about the world we encounter (for example, that given an initial state of affairs and certain causal laws, a subsequent state of affairs must embody certain features), these truths are consistent with nothing actually existing, and so do not imply a necessary being.


Nothing in our ordinary experience fits with such a “necessary” thing. As Hume famously noted, everything that I can imagine existing is something I can imagine not existing. And for Hume, “imagination” is a technical term that refers to our capacity to reorganize the ideas derived from empirical experience in endless ways. As such, imagination refers to a possible way that the building-blocks of empirical experience might be arranged. Hume’s point, then, is that there is nothing in empirical experience from which we can derive the idea of necessary existence.

As such, to believe in a necessary being is to believe in the existence of something that falls entirely outside the world of ordinary experience—and furthermore, to hold that this “transcendent” reality is more fundamental and, in a sense, of greater ultimate significance than the world we encounter through our senses. This transcendent, necessary reality is the source or “creator” of the world we know. In short, to believe in a necessary being is to adopt a kind of religious stance towards the world (at least in one sense of the term "religious").

But can anything justify such a stance, or is it pure fabrication (as some critics of religion are prone to assert with great confidence)? Historically, a number of philosophers have offered arguments in favor of the existence of a transcendent reality characterized by necessary existence. Probably the most famous is St. Thomas Aquinas, the philosopher and theologian whose body of work is typically regarded as the towering intellectual achievement of the Middle Ages.

Aquinas explicitly argues for the existence of a necessary being in the third of his “Five Way” for proving the existence of God. Let me say that, although Aquinas introduces these five arguments as ways that God’s existence “can be proved,” it is pretty clear that the phrase here is intended in a very loose sense. What we get are five arguments, each for a different conclusion. The first concludes that there must exist an unmoved mover, the second an uncaused cause, the third a necessary being, the fourth something that embodies all the “perfections” that other things only approximate, the fifth an intelligence that guides the unintelligent things that exhibit goal-directed behavior. He then tacks on to the end of each argument a phrase such as “and this we name God” or “everyone understands this to be God.”

So, Aquinas is clearly speaking here to an audience of believers who have a robust idea of God—one for which all of these appellations (unmoved mover, uncaused cause, necessary being, etc.) fit admirably. Aquinas is here showing that there are several arguments which support the existence of something which has one or another of the distinctive properties typically attributed to God. But it needs to be remembered that these “Five Ways” are Aquinas’s starting point in a much more expansive case for the existence of the Christian God in which Aquinas believes.

So, what about the “Third Way”? For me, this is the most interesting of Aquinas’ arguments, but it is also the most perplexing. In fact, on an initial reading it seems as if Aquinas is guilty of a logical error. Specifically, it seems as if he moves, without justification, from asserting one proposition (which I will call PN, for “possible nothingness”) to assuming a related one (which I will call AN, for “actual nothingness”). Here are the propositions in question:

PN: “If all existing things are contingent, then it is possible that at some time nothing existed.”

AN: “If all existing things are contingent, then at some time nothing existed.”

While PN seems to be a justified assertion—and while it is the assertion that Aquinas explicitly makes—his argument’s validity depends on asserting AN. Did Aquinas inadvertently slip from one to the other without noticing? Or did Aquinas see (and assume that we would see) that PN, perhaps in conjunction with certain unstated but self-evident premises, implied AN?

Philosophically speaking, the more interesting question is not whether Aquinas in fact saw a sound inference from PN to AN, but whether there actually is such an inference. Is there? If there is, then the discipline of philosophy requires that we interpret Aquinas’ argument accordingly. That is, philosophy calls us to pursue what is called The Principle of Charity—that is, the principle of formulation the arguments of others in their strongest possible form.

Along with many other philosophers interested in Aquinas, I have reflected on alternative ways of justifying the inference from PN to AN in Aquinas’s Third Way. The formulation of the argument that I presented to my philosophy of religion class on Wednesday was the outcome of such reflection combined with an invocation of the Principle of Charity. What follows is a slight modification (for the sake of greater clarity) of what I presented to my class. I have also identified what is a core premise and what is an inference from prior premises.

1. There exist contingent things (core premise)

2. For each contingent thing, it is possible that it not have existed and, hence, that it not have existed at a given time T (core premise)

3. If, for each contingent thing, it is possible that it not exist at a given time T, then it is possible that no contingent things exist at time T (core premise)

4. Therefore, it is possible that at one time no contingent things existed (from 2 & 3)

5. Given infinite time, every possibility occurs (that is, as the timeline moves towards infinity, the probability that some event with a real possibility of occurring does occur at least once along that timeline approaches 1) (core premise)

6. Either the succession of contingent states extends infinitely into the past, or it has a starting point. (core premise)

7. If the succession of contingent states has a starting point, then at one time no contingent things existed. (core premise)

8. If the succession into the past is infinite, then at one time no contingent things existed (from 4 & 5)

9. Therefore, at one time no contingent things existed (from 6-8)

10. Therefore, if all existing things are contingent, then at one time nothing existed (from 9)

11. If at one time nothing existed, then nothing could ever have come into existence and nothing would exist now (core premise)

12. Therefore, it is not the case that at one time nothing existed (from 1 & 11)

13. Therefore, it is not the case that all existing things are contingent (from 9 & 12)

14. Everything that exists is either contingent or necessary (core premise)

15. Therefore, there exists something necessary (from 13 & 14)

The argument as Aquinas presents it actually goes on to distinguish between two ways in which something could be said to exist necessarily (what might be called dependent vs. independent necessity), and then argue for the existence of something with independent necessity. But the part of the argument presented here is enough to digest and reflect on by itself.

Is this the argument that Aquinas intended, or is it merely one charitable interpolation of his words? I can’t say for sure. But either way, it’s an interesting argument for the existence of a necessary being—and it’s hardly silly. Since the argument is formally valid, anyone who wants to deny the conclusion needs to deny one of the core premises (by which I mean premises that are not conclusions derived from subarguments within the broader argument).

So, for those who want to deny the conclusion, which premise are you going to challenge, and on what basis?

Considering the Place of Intuitions in Philosophical Reasoning

A key issue that comes up repeatedly on this blog also strikes me as crucial for understanding the philosophical method—and so seems a fitting topic both for students of mine who are about to dig into my philosophy of religion course and for regular readers of this blog. The issue is this: When it is reasonable to trust our intuitions? Put another way, when is it appropriate to make use of an intuitive judgment as a premise in an argument, thereby treating it as a reason to believe a conclusion?


Of course, all of us agree that our intuitions can be mistaken. But does it follow that we are never warranted in making use of them? Is it even possible to refuse to make use of our intuitions—or is it, rather, the case that all of us inevitably appeal to intuitive judgments (but, perhaps, are mostly unaware that we are doing so, because the judgments seem so obvious to us that we don’t even notice we’re assuming them?)

I suspect the latter is true, especially when we are wrestling with philosophical questions—questions which, typically, cannot be answered based on sensory observation alone. In my own experience, everyone who engages in philosophical discussions and debates has intuitions that they are making use of—but not everyone recognizes their own intuitive presuppositions. In a sense, our intuitive starting points operate as the lenses through which we look at our world. Since we’re looking through them, they often become invisible to us. Part of what philosophers strive to do (with greater or lesser degrees of success) is to explicate what these starting points are. And in many cases the most valuable outcome of philosophical debate is that participants come away from them more fully aware of their own intuitive starting points than they were before—as well as more aware of how looking through those “lenses” colors their experience.

Of course, many of the premises that philosophers make use of in their arguments are drawn from observation. Sometimes they are observations of the most general kind (for example, the first of Aquinas’ “Five Ways”—his initial arguments for the existence of something with God-like properties—begins with the premise that there are things that undergo change). And philosophers will also make use of principles that are matters of logic (for example, the principle that something cannot be both the case and not the case at the same time in the same way, or the principle that if A and B are the identical thing, then everything that is true of A is also true of B).

But often enough, a premise in a philosophical argument will be neither of these things. Instead, it will be something that, while neither a matter of logic nor based on observation, just seems right (at least to the philosopher advancing the argument). In some cases the premise is thought to be self-evident. For example, Leibniz appeals at several points in his philosophical arguments to what he calls “The Principle of Sufficient Reason”—roughly, the principle that for everything that is the case, there is a reason why it, rather than something else, is the case. He treats this as a “first principle”—a self-evident starting point for reasoning about things.

And Leibniz isn’t alone. Richard Dawkins, in The God Delusion, offers an argument against the existence of God that depends on a principle Dawkins is only partly explicit about. The principle runs roughly as follows: “In order for an instance of organized complexity to be adequately explained by an intelligent designer, the intelligent designer—whether material or immaterial—must be at least as complex as that which is being explained.”

This principle isn’t a matter of logical necessity, and it certainly isn’t a matter of empirical observation (how many immaterial intelligent designers have we observed so as to ascertain that they consistently display the property of being at least as complex as what they have designed?). So why does Dawkins accept this principle? Because it just seems right to him. In other words, he has a strong intuition that it is true.

Often, philosophers rely on thought experiments whose most important function is to serve as “intuition pumps”—that is, their purpose is to help us get clear on what our intuitions are. In other words, the purpose of these thought experiments is to help us pinpoint what “just seems right” to us, to make these assumptions explicit--in part so that we can make deliberate use of them in our subsequent reasoning as opposed to relying on them implicitly without noticing that that’s what we’re doing; in part because only once we are conscious of our intuitive starting-points will we make them available for critical scrutiny.

And this leads to my next point. If reliance on intuitions is inevitable—but iour ntuitions are fallible—we are faced with an important question: When should we trust our intuitions and make use of them, and when shouldn’t we? Put another way, when is an intuition a good reason for me to believe something, and when isn’t it?

At this point I think it’s important to distinguish between two kinds of intuitions. First, your mind may leap ahead of your plodding intellect to a conclusion that, in a sense, you believe “intuitively.” But in such cases, the intuition presents itself as a kind of research project: You have a sense (an “intuition”) that the body of evidence (or the rules of logic, or the basic doctrines of a belief system) supports this conclusion—but you still need to do the work of showing that it does. And once you take the time and effort to pursue that work, your intuition might be vindicated or undermined. In either case, you no longer believe it intuitively.

That’s not the kind of intuition I want to focus on here. Rather, I want to focus on the kind of intuition that serves as a foundation for thinking and critical reflection. I have in mind beliefs that just seem right to us in themselves, that we have a strong confidence in, but which we don’t believe on the basis of other things. The point is that we all have such intuitive starting points. But having them is no guarantee of their truth…and yet it would be impossible, I contend, to operate in the world without trusting these intuitions at least some of the time. So when do we, and when don’t we, trust them?

Now I don’t think I can, in a blog post, provide a fully satisfying answer to this question and then show that it’s the right one. But I do want to sketch out an answer that I find compelling (based on my intuitions?)—in part so that others can better understand my perspective, and in part to stimulate discussion.

So, when is an intuition of mine a “good reason”—that is, when is it appropriate for me to make use of that intuition in my reasoning, reaching conclusions based on it, making decisions in the light of those conclusions, etc.?

Let me begin the sketch of my answer by making two suggestions. First, I want to suggest that the worth of a reason can be specific to a particular reasoner in a particular context such that what is a good reason for me to reach a certain conclusion, given my circumstances, may not be a good reason for you in your circumstances. This I think is going to be a characteristic feature of intuitions: That an intuition of mine is a good reason for me here and now does not imply that it must be a good reason for you—and so, if you don’t share this intuition, I am not warranted in regarding you as unreasonable.

In this respect, rock-bottom intuitions are different from, say, logical principles. If you deny the principle of noncontradiction, it may be entirely appropriate to call you irrational. If you consistently refuse to accept the clear implications of the most meticulous empirical observations consistently corroborated by the most highly trained researchers, I might be justified in calling you irrational. But if you don’t accept Dawkins’ intuitive principle about complexity or Leibniz’s Principle of Sufficient Reason, I’m not convinced that a judgment of irrationality is going to be appropriate. Put another way, there are some things about which reasonable people can disagree—and intuitions are among them.

My second suggestion is this: While an  intuition can be a good reason for me even if it is something I could be wrong about, it needn't be. The fallibility of my basic intuitions imposes important constraints on when I can legitimately make use of them in my reasoning and when I cannot.

Because intuitions are fallible, I don’t think one should hold to them fanatically. One should, in other words, be open to evidence and arguments that might refute them (or that might shake your intuitive judgment enough that they no longer seem so intuitively right to you). But in the absence of such evidence or arguments, if I have a strong intuition that something is the case, then I may treat it as a premise in my thinking when the implications of doing so should my intuition prove mistaken are benign (or are no more pernicious than the implications of setting the intuition aside). However, when the implications of trusting my intuition are not benign (or are less benign than the implications of setting the intuition aside), I am not warranted in making use of the intuition as if it were a reliable premise.

To put this more succinctly, intuitions can face evidential “defeaters” (evidence that counts against the truth of the intuition) and pragmatic ones (practical circumstances which make it too risky to trust the intuition).

Let me focus a bit more on the latter. Whether acting on a mistaken intuition has benign or malignant implications may vary according to context—in one situation it may be entirely harmless to trust an intuition even should it prove to be wrong, while in another context the costs of trusting the very same intuition (should the intuition prove mistaken) are grave. But we also need to consider opportunity costs: what benefits are lost if one refrains from trusting an intuition and the intuition proves to be sound? In some cases, there are costs or benefits that emerge regardless of the intuition’s truth—that is, there may be benefits to trusting the intuition even if the intuition proves false (or costs to trusting it even if it should happen to be true).

But hovering over all such pragmatic assessment of intuitions is the difficult fact that it relies on an evaluative framework of some kind. When you say that the costs of trusting an intuition should it prove to be mistaken are high, you are making a value judgment about the consequences of believing an intuition in error. How do we determine what is the right evaluative framework to use? Moral intuitions? You see the problem, I hope.

But instead of pursuing this problem here, let me explore more deeply how pragmatic assessment of intuitions might work by considering an example—a case in which mistakenly trusting one’s intuitions is (at least within my evaluative framework) not benign. Having recently finished reading Bernard Beckett’s short novel, Genesis, a particular scenario from that book comes immediately to mind—and it seems a particularly fitting one because it potentially poses pragmatic challenges to some of my own intuitions, ones that we’ve been talking about in connection with my recent series of posts on materialist conceptions of mind.

(It’s also fitting because it might serve as free advertising for Bernard’s novel, which in addition to being thought-provoking on a philosophical level also earns the high praise of having kept me up significantly past my bedtime).

At the heart of the story is the relationship between two characters—one human, one android. The human, Adam Forde, has violated the laws of the Republic in which he lives in a way that makes him a focal figure in the Republic’s internal turmoil. Neither executing him nor letting him go are safe options from the standpoint of the authorities, and so they pursue a compromise: he is locked away with an experimental android prototype, Art, for the purposes of exposing it to stimulation that will facilitate its cognitive development.

Let’s suppose Adam knows a fair bit about Art’s internal circuitry (I don’t think this is true of Adam in the novel, but let’s assume it). Suppose, furthermore, that based on this knowledge he has a strong intuitive sense that nothing in that circuitry could account for the presence of consciousness.

He might, of course, have the same intuition about the human brain: nothing about the physical system of the brain can, by itself, account for the existence of this thing called consciousness. But, like me, he'd also know that he is conscious, and that his conscious states are demonstrably correlated with brain states. Perhaps he reconciles these facts with his intuition about the inability of a physical system alone to explain consciousness by positing that there is something about the brain which attunes it to some non-physical reality. Although he has no idea what this non-physical reality is like, his strong intuitive sense that a physical system alone cannot account for the consciousness he's so intimately acquainted with leads him to believe there must be some mysterious additional component at work—but that there's also something about the brain’s unique properties that makes the connection with this non-material element possible. (We would have to suppose, furthermore, that he lacks a different intuition that some people do seem to have—namely, that if there is some essentially “spiritual” or non-physical reality, it couldn’t interact with a physical one, at least not in the way necessary to generate consciousness as we know it).

Of course, if all of this is true of Adam, then he might also think the same things about Art’s circuitry—that is, he might believe that any appropriately structured physical system could do the same work that the brain does, such that there is no reason in principle why an artificial intelligence could not be created. But let’s suppose he knows a fair bit about Art’s circuitry—and not only is it unlike the biological circuitry of the brain, but its design is of a sort that (perhaps based on a thought experiment similar, perhaps, to Searle’s “Chinese Room”) Adam has a strong intuitive sense cannot do the sort of consciousness-generating work a brain can do. And so, Adam's intuitions lead to the conclusion that, at best, all that Art's circuitry can do is mimic the behavior of a conscious being.

Now it may be that after prolonged interaction with Art, Adam accumulates a body of data that really challenges these underlying intuitions. Perhaps his interaction with Art has a flow to it that just doesn’t fit with the hypothesis that Art is merely mimicking consciousness. The nuances of their exchanges just seem too hard to “fake.” And so, eventually, he reaches a point at which his intuitions have been defeated by a body of experiential evidence. If so, it would no longer be reasonable for him to invoke his original intuitions as premises—he'll be forced to conclude that one of another of them must be set aside, since taken together they imply a conclusion that he has strong evidential grounds for disbelieving. His intuitions have suffered evidential defeat.

(This, by the way, seems to be what actually happens to Adam in the story.)

But in the first days of his imprisonment with Art, his intuitions will not yet have been defeated in this way. At that point, it may be reasonable for him to trust them—but that depends on the pragmatic assessment of the associated costs. And those costs are a matter of context. My circumstances are quite unlike those that Adam faces. Among other things, I'm not sharing living quarters with an artificial intellegence that behaves as if it is conscious. And that difference might matter a great deal for whether Adam is warranted in trusting his intutions.

In fact, in this case I think it would be unreasonable for him to accept his intuitions, even though they haven’t been evidentially defeated—because operating as if they are true (and hence as if Art is not a conscious being) is more costly, should the intuitions prove mistaken, than operating as if they are false.

Here’s my thinking. If Adam operates as if Art is not conscious and he's mistaken, there is a real cost of considerable moral significance—as I understand it, the cost would be a failure to treat a conscious being with the dignity that such a being deserves. To treat a conscious being as if it were an unconscious one is to objectify it. In a sense, this is what distressed me about Adam’s early treatment of Art in the novel: in their first days together, Adam is happy to act on the assumption that Art is no more conscious than a toaster (although there is some evidence that, even at this early stage, Adam isn’t entirely confident in this assumption--he's drawn into conversation with the android, but almost as if to repudiate himself for acting as if this were a conscious being he strikes out against it in an act of physical violence).

One wonders whether this early treatment by Adam may have played an important role in Art’s subsequent development—if you’re conscious, the experience of being objectified, treated like a thing, creates both wounds and needs that can have long-term negative repercussions, ones that often propagate outwards onto others. (If you want to know more about Art’s development, read the book.)

On the other hand, were Adam to operate as if Art is a conscious being and is mistaken, the costs don’t seem to be comparable. And so, in this case, there is a pragmatic reason for Adam to set aside his intuitions, even if they have not been evidentially defeated--because they have been pragmatically defeated instead.

It is, by the way, this sort of thinking that I believe underlies a comment that philosopher Peter Singer once made to me. (Peter Singer is a renowned moral philosopher who is most famous for having written Animal Liberation, a book that helped to launch the animal rights movement). Back in the '90’s Singer visited the university where I was teaching, and the philosophy department had a dinner for him at the home of one of our department members—a vegetarian dinner, of course. During the meal I asked him what he thought about eating snails.

Now, Singer’s argument for vegetarianism hinges on his case for saying that if a non-human animal has interests, its interests should weigh as heavily in our moral deliberations as the comparable interests of a human. Since pigs and cows and chickens all have interests—as evinced by their capacity to suffer—their interests need to be given the same moral weight as ours. My question to Singer was therefore really a question about whether he thought snails (and other animals with neurological systems far simpler than those of pigs and chickens, etc.) met this criterion of being interest-bearers, a condition that Singer (unlike certain environmental philosophers) doesn’t think can be met in the absence of consciousness--leading him to conclude that plants do not have interests.

Singer’s answer? “I don’t know if snails have interests, but I give them the benefit of the doubt.”