Deep Thoughts II

Impossible things don't happen.

(Oddly enough, on Platonist views of modality on which necessity is an abstract property of abstract propositions, it is far from obvious why this is so. So much the worse for Platonist theories of modality.)

Can an atheist love God?

One standard answer is this: An atheist can love God under a a description different from standard theistic ones (cf. this article). For instance, God is the truth, and an atheist might love the truth.

But there is a second story that could perhaps be told. St. Augustine said that to love someone, one must know the beloved to exist. This is at least a little too strong, I think. One might believe but not know that the beloved exists. But even that might be too strong. Suppose that George believes there is no life after death and knows his wife, Patricia, has died. Could we not say that, nonetheless, his love for his wife could survive her death? Love is a matter of will, not intellect. Certainly, as long as George thinks Patricia is alive he can love her. But a mere change of belief is not a change of will. It seems, thus, that unless there is a shift in his will, he can continue to love Patricia even after she is dead and even though he does not believe she is alive. Moreover, it does not seem right to say that George is just loving the past Patricia in some eternalist (or growing block) sense. Besides, one could tell a story where George comes to believe that Patricia never existed--maybe he comes to believe that he had always hallucinated her. But if love is a matter of will, not intellect, then he can continue to love Patricia even after he acquires this belief.

If so, then an atheist could love God. But, likely, not every atheist does. (Just as, likely, not every theist does.) Some atheists would be relieved to learn God exists (J.J.C. Smart sounds that way in his volume with John Haldane), but some atheists might be rather dismayed.

Even if it is possible to love someone whom one believes not to exist, it is not clear that one can love someone who doesn't exist. Love is of a particular individual, and there is typically[note 1] no way to individuate totally non-existent beings.

Deep Thoughts I

You have never been older than today.

(The posts in this occasional series are inspired by Richard Gale's account of how when asked by his family members what he worked on, he responded in profound-sounding tautologies. Some of the examples I will give may be Richard's, but my memories of his examples are hazy, so I won't be able to credit them. The ones involving time are more likely his than the others.)

Errors and love

Suppose John loves Mary "for being a baroness" (and for what follows from being a baroness), but does not love him for any other reason. But in fact, unbeknownst to both of them (errors in the geneology, say)[note 1] On the other hand, if Mary is a commoner, then in typical cases, we would say that John, who loves her for being a baroness, doesn't actually love her. Instead, he loves a Baroness Mary who does not exist.

But, pace Kierkegaard, it seems that sometimes loving y for P does entail loving y. This will be true at least in the case where y has P and P is a lovable quality of y. Granted, such a love is presumably a conditional one, and hence inferior to the love that Kierkegaard rightly values, but it is still a love. Moreover, the example of Duchess Mary thought to be a baroness shows that sometimes x loves y for P and y lacks P, but nonetheless x has a love for y there. This will be so for instance when y lacks P, but has a property that, in x's structure of beliefs, is more more lovable.

It could be said that if this is how things are, I've misdescribed John's love. He doesn't love Mary for being a baroness, but for being at least a baroness. Maybe--but the way I put it seems more natural. What makes her be at least a baroness is her being a baron, and it is for this that Mary loves him.

Hence, from "x loves y for having property P" it does not follow that x loves y. This gives a precise meaning to Kierkegaard's statement that to add reasons to love is to subtract from the love. In fact, it might be the case that that x loves y entails that x loves y for various properties, but that x loves y for some property only entails that x loves y in some cases, such as cases of y's essential properties like being a creature of God.

A different example of Kierkegaard's statement might be cases where x loves y for having P, and y has P, but we would hesitate to say that x loves y. This will be cases where the property P is not one that makes for the interpersonal love that is typically meant when we say x loves y. For instance, this will be true when the cannibal loves y for y's taste, and y in fact is tasty to the cannibal. Sure, we could say that the cannibal loves y, but she is loving y not in the way one loves a person, but in the way one loves a cake. But maybe these kinds of cases are just like the cases of a mistake about properties. For maybe the cannibal loves y not just for y's taste, but for y's being tasty and y's being food. But y, in fact, is not food (at least not in the normative sense).

Why do I care? For several reasons. First, I am interested in the phenomena of distorted love. Second, I am interested theologically in the ways one might misconceive of God and Christ and still count as believing.

All mimsy were the borogoves

This post is inspired by this discussion.

Is the following sentence true?
(1) If the borogoves were mimsy, then the borogoves were mimsy or green.
The following is, after all, true:
(2) If the kings of Antarctica were spherical, then the kings of Antarctica were spherical or green.
It seems like (1) unproblematically expresses an analytic truth. But of course it's not so simple. In order for (1) to express an analytic truth in the obvious way that it seems to, both occurrences of "borogoves", as well as of "mimsy", must have the same meaning. But "borogoves" and "mimsy" have no meaning, and hence in particular the multiple tokenings do not have the same meaning, and so (1) is not guaranteed. Unlike (2), which is unproblematically true, whether we read it as material or subjunctive.

So what?

Well, here is a puzzle. Take a bunch of ontological terms of art: "substance", "trope", "accident", "mode", "property", "universal", "relation", "essence", "form", "participation" and "bundle". These terms figure in different theories, some ancient and some modern. It is plausible that if one of these theories is false, then it is not only contingently false, but necessarily so. Moreover, it seems likely that if one of these theories is false, then the terms of art from it not only lack reference, but are actually nonsense. But if this is right, then how can we argue against one of these theories?

The typical way is by reductio: we assume the theory and derive a contradiction. Yes, but derive how? Obviously: logically. Yes, but how can we apply logic to nonsense? We get exactly the problem we saw in (1). It seems, thus, that if our argument against the theory succeeds, it cuts off the branch it was sitting on. And why should our opponent listen to an argument that, according to its own conclusion, makes no logical sense?

Maybe we can reason conditionally. If the words "borogoves" and "mimsy" had meaning, and if they were used univocally, then sentence (1) would be true. If so, then when we engage in a reductio of a theory that we think will ultimately be non-sense, we are really making a semantic statement. If theory T is true, then terms A, B and C have meaning. But if they have meaning, then theory T entails a contradiction. Hence, theory T is not true.

But getting the logic of this reductio right is a difficult affair, I think. Consider the first part, viz., the claim that if the theory were true, then certain words would have meaning. Where do we get that claim? From the theory itself? Typically not. Consider Platonism and its technical terms, "Form" and "participation". Platonism is a set of statements about Forms and participation. It is not a set of statements about the words "Form" and "participation". It is false to say that Platonism says that the words "Form" and "participation" (in the technical sense) make sense. Perhaps the most obvious way to see that it is false is to note that in Plato's time, the words "Form" and "participation" didn't make sense because there was no English language back then. Could we say that Platonism says that "eidos" (in the technical sense) makes sense? No, for Platonism would not have been a different theory had it been developed by people who spoke Hittite instead of Greek, but "eidos" (in the technical sense) would not have made sense.

A more complicated way of looking at this is that in the reductio, we look not at a theory considered as a set of propositions, but at a set of texts, or maybe of mental acts, and we are constructing an argument that if these texts follow the standard grammar of our language, then they contradict themselves and hence are false. But, the argument continues, these texts cannot merely be false--they can only be true or nonsense; so they must be nonsense. I think this kind of works if one is careful.

Our old friend the reductio is a complex beast.

Same-sex relations: The argument from the Old Testament

Occasionally, the Old Testament (OT) prohibitions on same-sex sexual activity are used as part of a Christian theological case for the impermissibility of same-sex sexual activity. There is one weakness in this argument that I want to address (I do not want to deny that there are other issues), and this is that some OT rules--most evidently dietary ones--have been sublated in New Testament times and are binding on the Christian in a non-literal form (e.g., the prohibitions on some foods that come into a person's mouth might be transformed into a prohibition on the speech that comes out of a person's mouth). The traditional answer is to distinguish between "ceremonial" and "moral" precepts, and to claim that the ceremonial ones no longer literally bind those who have died in Christ (though they may exist in a sublated form), but the moral ones are eternal. The opponent of the argument against same-sex sexual relations may well claim that the prohibition in question falls in the ceremonial category.

But I think there is a different way of fixing up the OT-based argument for impermissibility. I shall claim that it would be inappropriate for the God of love to prohibit same-sex sexual relations unless these relations are wrong. Here is the argument.

After all, there are persons whose sexual attraction is exclusively towards members of their own sex. Some highly motivated such individuals do apparently succeed in changing their attractions to opposite-sex ones, but it does not seem that the majority succeed (I've heard from a colleague that the best data indicates that about 30% of highly motivated same-sex attracted individuals can change to have an attraction for the opposite-sex). It is also plausible that same-sex attracted individuals unable to change to being opposite-sex attracted existed in not insignificant numbers in ancient Israel. The defender of same-sex sexual relations is unlikely to deny this.

Now, flourishing in a morally upright romantic relationship is one of the central parts of human flourishing (that does not deny that some might appropriately sacrifice this form of flourishing for the supernatural goals of celibacy), and it is particularly a flourishing in respect of our capacity to love. If same-sex sexual relations are morally permissible (apart from divine prohibitions), then same-sex romantic relationships will, surely, be a central part of the potential human flourishing of same-sex attracted individuals. Furthermore, sexual relations within marital commitment are the consummation of a romantic relationship. If same-sex sexual relations are morally permissible, then to prohibit same-sex sexual relations to an individual incapable of opposite-sex sexual relations is to prohibit the individual from exercising a central part of human flourishing. And this seems an inappropriate thing for the God who is Love to do, and whose purpose for us is to fulfill our love. (In fact, I think a number of the statements in this paragraph are standard parts of the case for the permissibility of same-sex sexual relations.)

In summary, if same-sex sexual relations are morally permissible (apart from divine prohibitions), they enter into the consummation of morally upright romantic relationships for people incapable of flourishing within opposite-sex romantic relationships. But if so, then it was inappropriate for our God to have forbidden them in OT times. But God did forbid them in OT times, and God does not do what is inappropriate. Hence, it was appropriate for our God to forbid these relations, and hence the relations were not morally permissible. But morality itself does not change (though ceremonies do), and hence even now they are not morally permissible.

Observe that a similar argument cannot be made in the case of clearly ceremonial precepts. E.g., ham is yummy, but eating ham is not central to the fulfillment of human individuals. Even if one were biologically constituted so that ham is the food that would taste best to one, it would be false that there is a central part of human flourishing to which the eating of ham would be essential. So even though eating ham is not morally wrong (in itself), it would not be inappropriate for our God to prohibit it to a segment of the human population.

Objection 1: Perhaps God had made a special blanket call for a segment of the Israelite population (namely, the same-sex attracted population, or at least the portion of it unable to change the attraction) to engage in the supernatural self-sacrifice of chaste celibacy.

Responses: This seems implausible. First, widespread celibacy for a supernatural reason seems to be a new thing in Christian times. Second, there is no indication of a special supernatural goal being given to this segment of the population, though it is possible that one was given, but no data survives about this.

Objection 2: God has absolute authority over us. He would be fully within his rights to prohibit blue-eyed people from engaging in sexual relations with anybody. We have no right to our human flourishing--it is all a gift of God.

Response: I think there is much to this objection. Indeed, I think it is the most powerful objection to my argument. However, even though such a prohibition would probably be permissible to God in the abstract, it does not seem to fit with God's plans for the human race as shown in Scripture. God gives us life, life to the full.

Objection 3: The objection proves too much, because it also shows that God is not within his rights to allow impotence to happen (since impotence makes the marital consummation of romantic relationships impossible). But impotence happens, and God is omnipotent, so God must be allowing it to happen.

Response: There is a difference between permitting and doing. God permits evils to happen to us, in order that a greater good might be instantiated, but that is not the same as positively doing evil. However, if God actually prohibited same-sex sexual relations, and these relations were a crucial part of the human flourishing of some individuals, then this would be a much more direction relation between God and the evil--it would be like God forbade us from breathing. A prohibition is an action.

Objection 4: The commands in the OT are not the word of God but the word of humans.

Response: I said I would be responding to a specific objection to the OT-based argument against same-sex sexual relations, not against every objection. Objection 4 applies to just about every Scriptural argument. Those like me who accept the divine inspiration of Scripture (without denying that the human authors were authors, along with God) will not find Objection 4 particularly compelling.

Individual duties in unjust wars

Apparently, a predominant view is that the ordinary soldier who follows decent military orders (ones that do not transgress jus in bello) in an unjust war does not do wrong.

This view seems quite clearly mistaken, though. First of all, it is always wrong to formally cooperate with an evildoer, where to "formally cooperate" is to share an intention in virtue of which the evildoer counts as an evildoer. But in an unjust war, the leaders of one's country are evildoers (perhaps non-culpable ones, but that doesn't matter), and they are evildoers in part because they intend the deaths of enemy soldiers. Thus the ordinary soldier in intentionally killing enemy soldiers is formally cooperating with evil. Moreover, even if the cooperation were not formal but material (i.e., the cooperator did not share any of the evil intentions of the evildoers, but nonetheless materially contributed to the evil), given the fact that few evils on the face of the earth are as bad as an unjust war, the presumption against such cooperation would still be almost indefeasibly strong.

Second, the state lacks the authority to permit one to intentionally kill those who are doing nothing wrong. That is simply an invalid exercise of the state's authority. This is particularly clear when the unjust military action takes place on the territory of the victim state, since except in cases like lawful self-defense or of embassies, one is bound by the laws of the state that one is in the territory of, but it is also true when the action takes place within the territory of the unjustly warring state. To kill those who are doing nothing wrong is, simply, wrong. So it is wrong to kill in an unjust war when the other side is acting justly (there are wars that are bilaterally unjust--this argument does not apply to those), since then one is killing soldiers who are acting in a morally permissible manner, viz., by engaging in a just war.

But suppose that it is objected that while the state waging the unjust war acts impermissibly in authorizing the killing of the enemy, the authorization nonetheless "succeeds", i.e., the individual soldiers on the unjust side do become authorized. This seems mistaken, but suppose it. Then we get a third argument. If it were not wrong to engage in combat on the unjust side, there would be no such thing as a just war. For in a just war, the state permissibly authorizes the killing of enemy soldiers. But it is wrong for the state to authorize the killing of people who are doing nothing wrong. Hence if the soldiers on the unjust side are doing nothing wrong, it is wrong for a state with justice on its side to authorize killing them. And that is absurd.

Objection: One can defend oneself lethally against someone who is doing nothing wrong. Response: That seems mistaken. If I have broken legs and can't move, and a toddler with a deadly communicable disease is running towards me, I do not have the right to shoot the toddler before he gets to me.

Note that it seems that what I said is compatible with the claim that the soldiers on the unjust side are, frequently, not culpable for their wrongful actions. It seems to me--and I could very well be wrong--that lethal state-authorized self-defense is concerned with stopping evildoers, rather than with stopping culpable evildoers. Culpability requires an individual judgment that is not practicable. Alternately, one might here make the move that Cardinal Ratzinger does in an essay on conscience, which is that even those who are ignorant of the moral law are guilty of having blinded themselves to the moral law. However, in some cases, the enemy soldiers are not ignorant of the moral law, but of the relevant facts of the situation (e.g., some German soldiers may have falsely believed that Poland invaded Germany).

Perverse rewards

Dear Public Diary,
Can anything be done about the perverse rewards of academic life in philosophy, where a new way of being wrong is rewarded and an old way of being right typically gets no reward (unless it has been forgotten and is being rediscovered by one), and the more subtle an error in the argument for the false conclusion--and hence, the more harmful the argument--the greater the reward?

Perhaps prayer and fasting is the only solution. It should be particularly effective, at least in one's own case. Mea culpa.

p.s. Of course God brings good out of evil. An original error can move the field forward, even towards truth. But that God brings good from evil is no excuse for doing evil.

Music and the problem of evil

Suppose I have superhuman hearing. While you are listening to Beethoven's Ninth, I hear, with great precision, every single sound wave impacting each of my eardrums. But I do not actually assemble them into a coherent piece of music.[note 1] As far as aesthetic appreciation goes, I might as well be looking at a CD under a scanning electron microscope.

It is quite easy to see all the physical details of a work of art without seeing the work as a whole, which work gives meaning to the parts. The details may look nothing like the whole. And suppose now that we did not even see all the details, first, because our perceptual processes already processed the data in some lossy way, perhaps a way irrelevant to the aesthetic qualities (think of someone who, whenever a piece of music came into his ears, received instead a visual representation of a Fourier transform of a distorted version of the sound), and, second, because we did not perceive the whole. Then our judgment as to the aesthetic qualities of the whole, as to the fittingness of parts, would be of very dubious value.

Now it is plausible that a universe created by God is very much like a work of art. A work of art we see only a portion of and in a way that involves perceptual pre-processing of a sort that may lose many significant aspects of the axiological properties of the work.

If that is how we saw things, then we would find a portion of the "sceptical theism" position quite plausible: we would find it quite plausible that various local evils we see fit into global patterns that give them a very different significance from what we thought. I am not saying the local evils disappear, that they are not evil. But the meaning is very different. We see this in music, in literature, in painting.

[A]ll people are under control in their own spheres; but to everyone it seems as if there is no control over them. As for you, you only have to bother about what you want to be, because whatever and however you want to be, the craftsman knows where to put you. Consider a painter. Various colors are set before him, and he knows where to put each color. The sinner, of course, wanted to be the color black; does that mean the craftsman is not in control, and doesn't know where to put him? How many things he can do, in full control, with the color black! How many detailed embellishments the painter can make! He paints the hair with it, paints the eyebrows. To paint the forehead he only uses white. - St. Augustine, Sermon 125

And just as there may be aesthetic values we are unaware of, there may be moral values we are unaware of.

All this points towards a version of sceptical theism. But I think we should not go too far in that direction. For unlike a piece of music, the work of art that the universe is is executed not out of soundwaves that have little individual worth, the universe is a work that incorporates persons--beings in the image and likeness of God. This makes the divine work much more gloriously impressive especially if God doesn't determine our free actions, but it also means that there is real, intrinsic meaning in the local situations we find, in the pains, joys, sufferings and ecstasies of life. While the meaning of these can be transformed, evils will still be evils. The problem of evil is not solved in this way, but it is, I think, mitigated significantly.

Moreover, thinking in this way solves a problem that plagues standard sceptical theist solutions, namely that they undercut design arguments for the existence of God. For although we might be unable to perceive the significance of the whole, we might perceive significance in the part, and the beauty of a figure in a painting, a chapter in a novel or musical movement can be sufficient to establish something about the talent of the artist.

I explore some of these themes in this piece I once presented at a conference, but the online version is sadly bereft of its illustrations in part for copyright reasons.

One thing I have learned from Hume

I have learned at least one very valuable thing from Hume: there is no real metaphysical problem in dualist mind-body causation or in temporally backwards causation.

This is a surprising thing to take from Hume, given that Hume does find dualist mind-body causation troublesome and his account of causation makes temporally backwards causation incoherent. But here is my line of reasoning.

We learn from the Inquiry that what intuitively seem the least problematic cases of causation, namely kinematic interaction between solid objects in contact with each other, are as mysterious as cases of causation that we might intuitively find more surprising, like action at a distance. Leibniz thought there was something deeply odd about gravitational action at a distance--it was as if there was a "mutual love, as if matter had senses"[note 1]. But on Hume's analysis, the puzzlement by someone like Leibniz about action at a distance and the lack of puzzlement about mechanistic interaction is simply due to our being overly familiar with mechanistic interaction. However, if we engage in some mental estrangement from the mechanistic interaction, we realize it is just as mysterious as action at a distance.

Likewise, I think mind-body causation and backwards causation are strange, but they are no more mysterious than mechanistic interaction. Since we should not reject mechanistic interaction (unlike Hume, I am willing to take it at face value), neither should we reject the possibilities of the former.

Granted, puzzlement at mind-body causation or backwards causation is not the only argument against these. But it is psychologically the most powerful. The only other form of argument against these is something like this: "On account A of causation, mind-body causation or backwards causation is impossible. Account A is true. Hence, mind-body causation or backwards causation is impossible." But we learn from Hume's valiant failed attempt at a regularity account of causation just how hard it is to come up with an account of causation. In fact, I think all accounts of causation that do not simply take causation to be primitive fail. And accounts of causation that do take causation to be primitive have no special difficulty about mind-body causation or backwards causation.

McTaggart on time

McTaggart is famous for his argument that there is no such thing as time as it is commonly conceived--there is only a sequence with a betweenness relation but no ordering.

The part of the argument that has received most attention is the clever argument that an A-series--the series of times ordered as past, present and future--is incoherent. This argument is that (a) the Battle of Waterloo was exactly the same when it was in the future, then when it was in the present and then when it was in the past, but (b) it was not exactly the same because it changed from being future, to being present to being past. Since (a) and (b) conflict, the notions of pastness, presentness and futurity are incoherent.

What I want to say something about, however, is the second part of McTaggart's argument. The second part of the argument is that a B-series--the series of points in time ordered by an earlier-than relation--cannot do justice to what we mean by "time" because the earlier-than ordering from depends on the A-series. The third part was to note that our perception of time is innately contradictory because of flexibility in the length of the "now".

Crucial to the second part of McTaggart's argument is the idea that the A-series is needed to give a direction to the set of times. Given the set of all times and a betweenness relation on them (time t₁ is between times t₀ and t₂, say), we can get two different orderings compatible with the betweenness relation (e.g., we can take t₀ to be earlier than t₁ and t₁ to be earlier than t₂, or we can take t₂ to be earlier than t₁ and t₁ to be earlier than t₀), and unless we use the A-series to specify that the right ordering is the one that takes the past to be earlier than the future, we have no way of choosing between these two.

But here McTaggart is mistaken in two ways. First, he has given us no reason to think that the earlier-than ordering is supposed to be defined in terms of the A-series concepts of past, present and future, rather than the other way around. For he gives us no reason to suppose that the A-series has any special resources to distinguish between past and future. Granted, we might posit that the distinction is primitive, but we if we do that, we can just as well posit that the choice between one of the two candidates for the earlier-than relation is to be settled by saying that one of them is primitively the right relation for the job. (The growing block theorist does have an answer, but McTaggart's argument against the A-series supposes an eternalist A-series.)

Second, there certainly is candidates for the job of distinguishing the relation. We might, very simply, take a variant of Kant's solution. The earlier-than relation is the one that points in the direction of predominant causation--typically, when A causes B and A and B are non-simultaneous, then A is prior to B. If there are any exceptions to this (cases of prophecy might be such), they seem to be rare. This account has the theoretical advantage that it leaves one less thing to explain--why the earlier-than relation happens to be the direction of predominant causation. Granted, one might explain that through a reductive account of causation where the direction of time is part of the reductive base (e.g., Hume's account), but I don't think any such account is plausible.

An argument against hedonism

Hedonism is the claim that how well off one is is a function of pleasure. Suppose you experienced the greatest pleasure of your life between times t₀ and t₁. For the ensuing, I will assume that the mental supervenes locally on the physical, but even if that is not true (and I doubt it is true), we can modify the description.
If hedonism is true, then the following life is better than yours. Fred begins his existence a day before a time t₀*, in the neural state you were in a day before t₀. During this day he has the same experiences as you had over the day before t₀. He then undergoes the pleasurable experience you had between t₀ and t₁. As soon as that is over, his neural state is reset to the state it had at t₀*. Then he re-experiences the pleasure you had between t₀ and t₁. Then his memory is reset again. Then he re-experiences that pleasure. And so on, for two hundred years.
Let's say the most pleasant experience of your life was the first time you managed to ride a bicycle without training wheels. Then Fred has that experience, over and over, each time feeling and thinking it's the first time.
Unless the experience you had between t₀ and t₁ was some kind of supernatural experience like that of union with God, and it is not that kind of pleasure that typical hedonists are talking about, I think Fred's life is horrible. It is a nightmare, but Fred of course thinks it is just great.
But hedonism claims Fred is better off than you are, which is absurd.
Note: One might have personal identity worries about Fred's persistence. However, a bout of amnesia during which one loses memory of a period of time does not destroy personal identity, as long as there are earlier memories. That was why I posited that Fred spends a day sharing the experiences you had for the day before t₀, so that the memory of these experiences will anchor his identity through the two hundred years of recurrence.

Essences can be contingent

Merry Christmas everyone!

I have nothing profound to say for Christmas, so here is a bit of philosophy. The Logos became a human being. He existed eternally, but only from around 4 BC was he a human being. Here is an interesting philosophical conclusion one can draw from this: Being human is not always a modally essential property of a human being, where a modal essential property of x is one that x cannot lack. For the Logos has the property of being human, but it was possible for him not to have this property.

This raises an interesting question. Is humanity a modally essential property of us? If yes, then the same property can be modally essential in one being but not in another. This isn't very surprising. (If we allow disjunctive properties, it's easy to come up with such properties. Thus, an electron modally essentially has the property of being a non-elephant or weighing 7000 pounds. It is possible for an elephant to have this disjunctive property, but it will not have it essentially--if it gains or loses weight, it'll lose the property.)

Suppose not. That would have the following interesting consequence: We could hold on to Aquinas' idea that when the body is dead and only the soul is alive after death and before the resurrection, the human being does not exist, while at the same time accepting that we will exist at that time, reduced to a soul.

But I suspect that we are modally essentially human, unlike the Logos. So I have to give a different story about the resurrection. I actually think it's possible to be a human being without a body, though this is a severely defective state.

Church Fathers and Summa Theologica eBooks

Not long ago, I prepared for myself a Plucker eBook of the Church Fathers, based on the great collection at New Advent. With permission of Kevin Knight who runs New Admin (thank you!), I have now posted the ebook here. It's 32mb.

I also posted a Plucker eBook of St Thomas's Summa Theologica at the same location.

The Plucker format can be read on most modern PDAs (PalmOS, PPC or Linux), computers (Windows XP, Mac OS X or Linux) and the IRex iLiad, and the ebook download page includes information on how to get reading software for your device.

I like the idea of having the Church Fathers with me always on my Palm TX. Right now I'm reading St. Irenaeus. [edited]

Commonality of nature and the Incarnation

St. Athanasius insists that it was crucial for Christ's redemption of us that Christ both share in the divine nature and in the human nature: in the divine nature to unite us with God, and in the human nature in order to unite us with God. The bond of a common nature with us made his redemptive work applicable to us.

The idea that the common human nature is a genuine bond is a fruitful one. (A lot of science-fiction from the middle of the last century takes this bond to be important. Yes, the aliens of the stories are persons, but there is a special bond that human persons share. However, a number of science-fiction writers confused this special bond with some kind of human superiority to the aliens they populated their stories with. But that is mistaken, a mistake which we will avoid if we remember C. S. Lewis's discussion of two kinds of patriotism--the bad kind where one likes one's country because one thinks one's country is better and the good kind where one simply has affection for one's country and its institutions and culture.)

It is, however, tempting after Kant to see what is significant about us as not our humanity which integrally includes both the personal and the animal aspects of our existence, but just the personal aspects. If we see what is significant about us as just personhood, then Athanasius' account of why the Incarnation was needed loses some of its force. For if what is significant about us is personhood, then the second person of the Trinity already had personhood prior to the Incarnation. Admittedly that personhood was not precisely like ours--if St. Thomas is right, we can term the Logos and ourselves "persons" only by analogy. But nonetheless there is an analogy there, and the fleshly nature of the Incarnation becomes less clearly needed.

It is theologically important to hold on to the idea that we are not just persons. We are also animals. We are human beings with all that this entails. That is one reason why accounts that attempt to reconcile evolution with the divine plan by insisting that God only cared about producing persons, and left it to a chance he did not control whether these persons should be mammals or reptiles, biped or quadrapeds, and so on, are theologically mistaken. A part of the significance of the Incarnation is that our concrete enfleshment matters. The kind of persons we are is defined in large part by our flesh, and the kind of flesh we have is defined in large part by its aptness towards personal activity. Ignoring the concrete enfleshment is apt to lead us to philosophical error, such as the error of those who think that there are two co-located beings in front of this computer, one a person and the other an animal, an error that leads to moral mistakes on issues like abortion and euthanasia.

What is this commonality of nature that all of humans have and which St. Athanasius thought so important? Platonists will say it is our common participation in a single thing, the Form of Humanity. Aristotelians will say that it is our possession of numerically distinct essences, which are, nonetheless, qualitatively the same. The Platonic story fits somewhat better with St. Athanasius' account, but both accounts provide an ontological basis for the commonality of nature.

Christ, having reconciled us human beings with God will also re-integrate our nature, bringing the animal and the personal together, when he transforms us in the resurrection, completing his new creation in us. Blessed be his name!

The Word became flesh. Let us bend the knees of our body and of our soul before him as we celebrate with joy this jarring truth.