An Impermissible god

“From other passages, in which God is said to draw or bend Satan himself, and all the reprobate, to his will, a more difficult question arises. For the carnal mind can scarcely comprehend how, when acting by their means, he contracts no taint from their impurity, nay, how, in a common operation, he is exempt from all guilt, and can justly condemn his own ministers. Hence a distinction has been invented between doing and permitting because to many it seemed altogether inexplicable how Satan and all the wicked are so under the hand and authority of God, that he directs their malice to whatever end he pleases, and employs their iniquities to execute his Judgments. The modesty of those who are thus alarmed at the appearance of absurdity might perhaps be excused, did they not endeavour to vindicate the justice of God from every semblance of stigma by defending an untruth. It seems absurd that man should be blinded by the will and command of God, and yet be forthwith punished for his blindness. Hence, recourse is had to the evasion that this is done only by the permission, and not also by the will of God. He himself, however, openly declaring that he does this, repudiates the evasion. That men do nothing save at the secret instigation of God, and do not discuss and deliberate on any thing but what he has previously decreed with himself and brings to pass by his secret direction, is proved by numberless clear passages of Scripture. What we formerly quoted from the Psalms, to the effect that he does whatever pleases him, certainly extends to all the actions of men. If God is the arbiter of peace and war, as is there said, and that without any exception, who will venture to say that men are borne along at random with a blind impulse, while He is unconscious or quiescent?…And hence it appears that they are impelled by the sure appointment of God. I admit, indeed, that God often acts in the reprobate by interposing the agency of Satan; but in such a manner, that Satan himself performs his part, just as he is impelled, and succeeds only in so far as he is permitted…The sum of the whole is this,—since the will of God is said to be the cause of all things, all the counsels and actions of men must be held to be governed by his providence; so that he not only exerts his power in the elect, who are guided by the Holy Spirit, but also forces the reprobate to do him service.” John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religon 1.18. 1-2

Round and Round the Mulberry Bush

If you read enough in a given area you learn to recognize patterns, or at least you should. You begin to see the same issues come up or the same solutions more or less, but just in different dress. Once you get the pattern of problems in Origen, it is amazing how pervasive and long lasting they are. People go ground and round for centuries. This is one reason why the theology of Maximus the Confessor is so important and so liberating. Maxmus freed me from these problems. By the grace of God, he can free you too.

Here in John Piper’s remarks, you can see the implicit Origenism. In order for God to be God he must be God over something or more properly a cause of something.

It is a proper and excellent thing for infinite glory to shine forth; and for the same reason, it is proper that the shining forth of God’s glory should be complete; that is, that all parts of his glory should shine forth, that every beauty should be proportionably effulgent, that the beholder may have a proper notion of God. It is not proper that one glory should be exceedingly manifested, and another not at all.…

Thus it is necessary, that God’s awful majesty, his authority and dreadful greatness, justice, and holiness, should be manifested. But this could not be, unless sin and punishment had been decreed; so that the shining forth of God’s glory would be very imperfect, both because these parts of divine glory would not shine forth as the others do, and also the glory of his goodness, love, and holiness would be faint without them; nay, they could scarcely shine forth at all. If it were not right that God should decree and permit and punish sin, there could be no manifestation of God’s holiness in hatred of sin, or in showing any preference, in his providence, of godliness before it.

There would be no manifestation of God’s grace or true goodness, if there was no sin to be pardoned, no misery to be saved from. How much happiness soever he bestowed, his goodness would not be so much prized and admired.…

So evil is necessary, in order to the highest happiness of the creature, and the completeness of that communication of God, for which he made the world; because the creature’s happiness consists in the knowledge of God, and the sense of his love. And if the knowledge of him be imperfect, the happiness of the creature must be proportionably imperfect. (Concerning the Divine Decrees, 528, emphasis added. On page 350 of Desiring God) HT to Inhabitatio Dei

I suppose the appropriate set of questions for Piper would be the following. Is creation necessary in order for God to be Lord? Is the Son subodinate in essence in order for the Father to be Father and Lord over someone, lest God’s attribute of being Lord go unrealized? Is it any wonder that modern Arianism (Unitarianism) came out of theology like this? It doesn’t seem to dawn on Piper that he is now advocating a kind of daulism with the good dependent on the evil. What relation has God with the devil? Piper seems to think plenty.  He has fully imbibed it seems the Hellenistic view that morality is dialetically conditioned, good has an opposite. (And people charge that Orthodoxy is baptized Platonism! Where Mr. Piper is this stuff stated in Scripture? So much for Sola Scriptura! ) I suppose the devil must be eternal now in order for God to be God too?! (I must confess I’d pay real money to see an exchange between James White and Piper on White’s claim that God fulfills the conditions on libertarian free will and Piper’s claim that evil is necessary for God to be fully God-Ah, the monkey and the weasel!)

As an aside, Piper’s view is also in principle reemniscient of Open Theism or Process Theism-God is incomplete without the world. Please, someone call Bruce Ware, quick! Who would have thought that Calvinism and Open Theism had so much in common?

Heaven deliver us from such madness. St. Maximus, pray for us!

You Spin Me Right Round, Baby, Like A Record

Prosblogion is a blog for the philosophy of religion, written by philosophy profs and grad students. The discussion is always sufficient to give the average person a mental nose bleed. Fairly recently, a post engaged Alvin Platninga’s curent endorsement of a Felix Culpa type theodicy/defense after a long personal history of advocating a free will defense. What was interesting about the discussion was that you had all of the basic ingredients of the Origenist dialectic-freedom, foreknowledge, universalism, supralapsarianism, impeccability, Hickian soul making, etc. This I suspect is due to a few major defects in contemporary analytic philosophy of religion.

Anglicans In Exile

I wrote this a long time ago, before this blog existed when I was writing on Kimel’s Pontificationsblog. I get requests for it and it is easier to just post it than to send out emails over and over again. Since it was originally a blog post, I have cleaned it up a bit and made it more or less a stand alone piece.

Anglicans in Exile

As a former Anglican myself I can sympathize with the troubles of my former brethren. On the one hand they do not see any good reason to abandon the tradition as it was handed on to them. Their problem is that they seem to be forced to leave the communion, but not the tradition that they are in. It is this loyalty that keeps them in place. Certainly loyalty has its limits and there is eventually a point where someone has to jump ship. I agree with many people who have already articulated the idea that going to Rome the eternal city (because after all, there’s always Rome!) because of problems in Anglicanism seems less than justified. By the same token I would agree with them that going to Constantinople for the same reason also lacks justification on that basis alone. But still, there is the pressing reality of what is going on in ECUSA and even in England. These are something like William James’ “forced decisions.” One doesn’t have eternity (let alone the brains) to study through all of the issues completely and yet one is compelled to make some decision. You have to dosomething. If Anglicanism does recover, it looks like things are going to get worse before they get better, at least in the long run. As an Anglican I never found a move to either body justified on strictly the basis of the quackadoxy of Spong or other individuals. What one needs is a positive reason that will tip the scale in favor of one body or another. And a positive reason that also cuts against Anglicanism would be even better since it would motivate one to leave Anglicanism for some other reason other than the presence of quackadoxy. Such a reason would allay the fears that one is being disloyal.

Be Thankful

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God and Death: A Non-Dialectical Relation

“Do not invite death by the error of your life, or bring on destruction by the works of your hands; because God did not make death, and he does not delight in the death of the living.  For he created all things so that they might exist; the generative forces of the world are wholesome, and there is no destructive poison in them,  and the dominion of Hades is not on earth. For righteousness is immortal. “

The Wisdom of Solomon, 1:13ff

“For what partnership have righteousness and iniquity? Or what fellowship has light with darkness? What accord has Christ with Be’lial?”

2 Cor 6:14ff

“For God did not create death, neither does He take delight in the destruction of living things. But death is the work rather of man, that is, its origin is in Adam’s transgression, in like manner as all other punishments.”

St. John of Damascus, An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, 2, 28.

Law, sin, death and free-will

“For we know that the Law is spiritual: but I am carnal, sold under sin.”
After having said that great evils had taken place, and that sin, taking occasion by the commandment, had grown stronger, and the opposite of what the Law mainly aimed at had been the result, and after having thrown the hearer into a great deal of perplexity, he goes on next to give the rationale of these events, after first clearing the Law of any ill suspicion. For lest — upon hearing that it was through the commandment that sin took that occasion, and that it was when it came that sin revived, and through it deceived and killed — any one should suppose the Law to be the source of these evils, he first sets forth its defense with considerable advantage, not clearing it from accusation only, but encircling it also with the utmost praise. And this he lays down, not as granting it for his own part, but as declaring a universal judgment. “For we know,” he says, “that the Law is spiritual.” As if he had said, This is an allowed thing, and self evident, that it “is spiritual,” so far is it from being the cause of sin, or to blame for the evils that have happened. And observe, that he not only clears it of accusation, but bestows exceeding great praise upon it. For by calling it spiritual, he shows it to be a teacher of virtue and hostile to vice; for this is what being spiritual means, leading off from sin of every kind’.

A Good Question

According to Jonathan Prejean, I asked good questions. Part of good philosophy is framing questions clearly to help get to the heart of the matter. You don’t have all the time in the world, so asking good questions is a way of scraping away unnecessary steps.  My question was part of a discussion at Triumphications concerning the nature of grace (and the grace of nature) and the Theotokos. I want to know, qua explanation, if the Catholic model can explain why God has Mary immaculately conceived and free from inherited albeit analogical guilt, why not just skip all of the evil in the world and do this for everyone? Or perhaps more strongly, why not create everyone in a state of confirmed grace? This kind of question is significant for lots of reasons. Currently in the literature on the problem of evil, this essential question has been a major objection to Plantinga type free will defenses. I have seen it proposed in one form or another by everyone from typical atheologians as well as process and open theists. But on to Jonathan’s reply.

Jonathan replied: “I could have prevented the possibility of either of my children committing actual sin by slaughtering them after they were baptized. Why didn’t I do that? This I think shows the inadequacy of your underlying worry about the problem of evil. There is a purpose in people being allowed to be subject to evil, even if that purpose is necessarily inscrutable to reason. I will let my children possibly be damned to Hell, not because I hate them, but because I love them. I suspect it is the same with God.”

I responded with the following: “I don’t think you have given the proper analogy. God could have prevented lots of moral evil, not by doing some evil to human agents but by doing some great good to them. If you could have given your child a proverbial pill to prevent them from not only sinning but ever dying or any serious suffering, wouldn’t you do so? Now, you may object that your ways aren’t the ways of God. Fair enough, but given the imago dei, it is also true that we have via reason, barring Calvinism and Jansenism, a genuine notion of goodness. I can’t see why it wouldn’t be good to give them the pill. Do you?”  

The problem with theodicy

Atwood stated on Pontificators blog:
Daniel, I think it is true that there IS a difference between Lutheran and Catholic views of theodicy/freedom of the will. (If there isn’t a difference how can we be heretics?)

I will say yes, while I agree that there are some differences and some are better than others, I think both of them get swallowed up in the end in determinism–which is why it is absolutely impossible for Roman Catholic theology to be semi-Pelagian. What I see as the differences between them is analogous to the differences between Augustine and Origen. While the former is content in having a certain amount of tension involved in his doctrine at the price of remaining orthodox, the latter carries his implications out to their end (at least as a speculative possibility). Likewise, Rome embraces a form of synergism in respect to the acquisition of justice and to a certain degree, remaining just. But it is still underpinned by monergism for those elect persons to be not only infallibly but to INEVITABLY be elected to glory. In other words, it doesn’t really matter much how they got there whether it be formal, final, or efficient differences if man’s acts end up being inevitable. Determinism is determinism is determinism.

This can demonstrated whether we’re talking about Augustinianism, Molinism, Scotism, Thomism, Lutheranism, or Calvinism. All of them, in the end, have to deny man libertarian freedom to keep man stable–even if the former 4 are more ammenable.

This cashing out of salvation is a symptom of the idea of thinking of a person as a relation, and yes this goes back to the Trinity. If a person is just an internal relation of an essence and subsequently reducible to that essence, determinism is going to crop up some where down the line whether it be in one’s Triadology, Christology, Soteriology, or Eschatology no matter how much nuance one does in one of these theological categories. Origen has his determinism from the top, which is why movement of ‘the One’ involves kinesis resulting in genesis of preexistent souls into bodies, their kinesis and ‘travel’ back to ‘the One’ resulting in stasis, and then they self-diffuse again (sin in the eschaton), and the cycle repeats itself. Origen has the strongest view of predestination and of the apokatastasis one could have and he is consistent with the doctrine of God being absolutely simple in my opinion. This is why if you solve the problem at its root, you don’t have to mitigate it elsewhere and have the problem creep up again. This is also why sola fide was not only absent in Athanasius, the Cappadocians, Cyril, Maximus, et al, it’s not even logically possible. It all goes right back to Triadological and Christological problems.

Daniel Jones

Simplicity, Virtue and the Problem of Evil, Pt 2.

If it is possible to have libertarian freedom and never sin, then there are logically possible circumstances or “worlds” where people have libertarian freedom and yet never sin. More strongly, it is logically impossible for agents in some world to sin who also have libertarian freedom. Because this is so, appeals to libertarian freedom are not going to be enough to exculpate God from guilt with respect to actual evils or even the possibility of evil. Those logically possible worlds in which it is impossible for libertarianly free agents ever to sin seem accessible to God. By accessible I mean that God could have brought those circumstances about or created them. On the whole, those worlds where agents with libertarian freedom are impeccable seem morally superior to worlds in which agents have libertarian freedom but lack impeccability.

There is a separate question as to whether God always creates the best or if there is a best possible world or even if there are better possible worlds. I do not wish to tangle with that mess at the moment. But there seems to be something right about Aquinas’ insistence for example that some worlds will contain more evil than others but on the whole will be better than those worlds with less evil because the former will be better ordered. Even granting that though it seems to me that you can get as much of “better ordering” as you like with a combination of libertarian freedom with moral impeccability. That is, given worlds where both are equally ordered well but one has evil and free will, while the other has free will but impeccable agents, it seems obvious to me that the latter is on the whole the better world.

So adding free will to the mix doesn’t explain the possibility of evil since you can have free will and impeccable agents. Also, free will doesn’t explain why God creates this world where we have freedom and the possibility of evil as opposed to some other world because it seems as if you can have equally well ordered worlds with or without evil. In this way the possibility of evil is severed from free will and creation in general. The reason why evil is possible in God’s creation is not that creation is composite and therefore capable of dissolution. If that were true the only way to eliminate the possibility of evil would be to mitigate or eliminate creation’s creatureliness in some way, specifically their free will. Nor is the reason why evil is possible in creation because there are agents with free will. Why then does God create this world which has the possibility of evil and has free will since there seem to be other possible worlds that are much much better to select from?

The answer I think lies in the notion of virtue. Here I am following roughly Plato and Aristotle’s notion of a virtue as an excellence or arête of a thing. The excellence of a knife is its sharpness. The excellence of a human being is justice. Following Aristotle a virtue is a natural capacity which is guided by reason as a mean between two extremes attained by habit. The reason why one wants to be virtuous as opposed to akratic or weak willed is so that one doesn’t have to deliberate about what the good act is to perform on a specific occasion. A virtuous person just does out of habit the good act. Mother Theresa didn’t have to reflect about helping poor or sick people on her doorstep-she just did it. The goal of habituation is to become so fixed in virtue, in the Good as to just naturally do the good act. But more precisely to be fixed in virtue doesn’t imply that deliberation per se is the problem. The reason why deliberation is problematic is because we deliberate between real and apparent goods. We suffer from a kind of ignorance about the Good. If an agent were to only deliberate between real goods and not apparent goods deliberation per se would be harmless.

As something of a tangent it is important to notice that deliberation seems to imply alternative possibilities and to see this imagine the following “Frankfurt” like case. Imagine unbeknownst to me some malign agent seeks to control my actions by means of some scientific widget or some supernatural power. This widget or power permits the covert agent to monitor my mental states and acts and to manipulate them by means of manipulating my brain states. If the malign agent sees that I am going to choose X, he does nothing since that is the choice he wants me to make. If he sees that I am going to do Y then he intervenes in some way to neutralize that neurological state in my brain. And he sees this by virtue of viewing the decisions I have made. Prior to making a decision though all he sees is my deliberating between two options.

But notice that when I am deliberating I am deciding between two options, specifically to continue to deliberate or to make a decision. My power to deliberate between options is itself an instance of having alternative possibilities. It does not matter if my decision, should I decide on Y is nullified by this malign agent. By deliberating I am choosing between alternative possibilities. And these alternative possibilities will be as robust as anyone would like for ascriptions of moral responsibility. The only way to eliminate these alternative possibilities is for this malign agent to take away my power of deliberation. But given that deliberation seems plausibly necessarily tied to being free taking away my power to deliberate is just to take away my freedom. Deliberation then is a necessary condition for libertarian free will.

Now back to virtue. How is virtue going to help us explain why God created this world with freedom and evil as opposed to some other world with freedom and the impossibility of evil? One of the funny things about virtue is that it cannot be had by thinking about it. Being moral isn’t a matter of propositional knowledge alone.
Virtue requires praxis or action. Virtue is an attained state and so one cannot be created virtuous. One can be created good and innocent but not virtuous since virtue requires action. To become morally impeccable is to become immune to vice or sin. Moral impeccability then seems to be a kind of state in which an agent is so virtuous as to be immune from evil. To be virtuous in this way would to be like God because God is unmoved or affected by evil. It is not possible for God to do evil because just is the Good.

With a rough notion of virtue in hand we can connect it to the insights concerning free will set out earlier. Free will doesn’t require alternative possibilities of differing moral value just a plurality of options. But virtue does require the possibility of failure and here is why. Because virtue is a mean or proportion between two extremes and is attained by habit it takes practice to become virtuous. One has to have the “knack” for doing the good act in the appropriate way for the appropriate reasons and on the appropriate occasion. It is possible for some agent starting out on the trek of virtue to become so without failure but failure is still a possibility nonetheless because the acquisition of virtue takes practice. Moreover agents starting out on the road to virtue are ignorant concerning real and apparent goods which is why they have to deliberate between them.

Because virtue is attained by habit or action there is a kind of division in an agent who begins their trek on the road to virtue. Because they lack the requisite experience their employment of their faculties, their will specifically isn’t yet fixed in the Good. So suppose that God creates out first parents innocent and without blame. It will still be the case that they do not have any practice at being virtuous. It will also be the case that for them they are ignorant concerning real and apparent goods. God creates their faculties good in and of themselves. As faculties they are naturally directed towards that which is presented to them or taken to be good. But the person’s employment or use of these faculties is not yet fixed in the good.

So the nature is fixed in the Good so that human nature qua human nature is still good, even after the Fall. This is why evil is a possibility because on the road to the acquisition of virtue vice is a possibility. Vice or sin is not therefore tied to the composition of creation but to the distance between the natural faculties and the personal employment of them. Once this gulf is bridged through virtue then the possibility of evil is eliminated. When the real good that our faculty of will is naturally directed towards is “fused” with our personal employment of our will our willing or volitions are fixed in the Good. Our first parents then are given a very simply command to obey as they begin their journey to becoming virtuous. Through continued obedience they would have reached a state of moral impeccability and hence been “as gods.”

So it is virtue and free will together that explain why God selects this world to create as opposed to some other. Morally impeccable agents only come about through the acquisition of virtue and the acquisition of virtue requires the possibility of failure. Compared to other worlds where there is no virtue, a world with freedom and the possibility of virtue seems the better choice by far. This is why this world is the best way to the best possible world.

But what has all of this to do with divine simplicity? Well putting it all together we can revisit Origen and Augustine. Origen wished to preserve the doctrine of the Imagio Dei where humans have libertarian freedom. As a consequence it was impossible for Origen to conceive of humans (or angels for that matter) as completely fixed in the Good or morally impeccable. Augustine wished to preserve moral impeccability and the way to do that he thought was to eliminate libertarian freedom. Absolute simplicity motivated Augustine’s elimination of libertarian freedom in the eschaton because there was only one good option to select, namely God. Absolute simplicity motivated Origen’s view since for him being fixed in the Good would imply a annihilation of something essential to us as rational agents, specifically libertarian free will. Since God was absolute simple for Origen free will was essentially characterized as selecting between good and evil options, instead of good options. The only way to stave off the annihilation of human personhood was to have a series of falls and redemptions because sin is a clear individuating principle between good and evil.

But if we reject absolute simplicity then there is no motivation to eliminate libertarian freedom in the eschaton. If God is metaphysically “complex” so that there are infinite number of Goods in the Good that is God then there can be libertarian freedom in the eschaton without the possibility of evil. We can bring together Augustine’s wish to preserve the moral impeccability of the redeemed while also preserving Origen’s desire to preserve the libertarian freedom that goes along with the Imagio Dei. The possibility of sin isn’t tied to plurality but to the possibility of virtue. Once virtue is attained for an agent the possibility of evil is removed. This means that for the morally impeccable agents in heaven there are an infinite number of goods to choose from so that they are always active in the eschaton in their enjoyment of God.

Perry Robinson