Philosophy The Name of Love's Philosophy Essays

[The Name of Love]

So, I hope to post here a series of essays on Natural Theology, both to generate interest in the topic on this forum and get my own thoughts out there. Disclaimer: My own religious beliefs are Roman Catholic Christian and my philosophy tends towards Thomism as interpreted by contemporary analytic philosophers like Edward Feser, David S. Oderberg, and Brian Davies.

Too often, online debates about theism versus atheism are sidelined into debates about which side has the burden of proof and whether atheism is a “belief” or a “lack of belief,” about whether godlessness or religion are immoral, etc. These topics, I feel, are obfuscations about what I take the theism versus atheism debate to be. In truth, the question of God is a question of the nature of existence: can something exist without God’s conserving it at all times, if only in principle? Or does existence itself presuppose a divine being conserving something at all times?

Let us spell out the debate in these terms: the debate is between those who believe in the Doctrine of Divine Conservation (a group that includes those to adhere to the religions like Christianity and Islam, as well as philosophical theists in the vein of Aristotle or Plotinus) and those who believe in the Doctrine of Existential Inertia (a group that includes all atheists, “hard” or “soft”, all agnostics, and a great many deists). Let us go over each theory.

The Doctrine of Divine Conservation (DDC) holds that the world could not exist for an instant, even in principle, apart from the continuous sustaining action of some first cause, which I will henceforth refer to as “God” for convenience. St. Thomas Aquinas described this doctrine like this: “[T]he being of every creature depends on God, so that not for a moment could it subsist, but would fall into nothingness were it not kept in being by the operation of the Divine power.” This line of thought is repeated by Scriptural passages such as Wisdom 11:25 (“How could a thing remain, unless you willed it; or be preserved, had it not been called forth by you?”), Hebrews 1:3 (Christ “sustains all things by his mighty word”), and Colossians 1:17 (“in him all things hold together.”) as well as The Catechism of the Council of Trent and the First Vatican Council. Suffice to say, the DDC is essential to Christian orthodoxy. You can also find the DDC within Islam, Judaism, and certain pagan philosophies.

By contrast, skeptics of theism generally and Christian orthodoxy specifically are committed to the Doctrine of Existential Inertia (DEI). According to DEI, the world of contingent things, once it exists, will tend to continue in existence on its own at least until something positively acts to destroy it. It thus has no need to be conserved in being by God.

It is my contention that even so-called “soft” or “lack of belief” atheists and agnostics implicitly adhere to the DEI insofar as they hold that the world does not in principle need God to exist. Certainly, they (in theory) allow that God could be a cause, but they would reject the idea that created existence, in principle, requires God’s existence. There is not some in-between position here. Either you believe in the DDC or in the DEI. If you refuse to take up either position, then you are not being serious. A debate is between two sides, two rival worldviews, not between one worldview and one psychological condition like “lack of belief.”

Having framed the debate properly, I will now demonstrate the implausibility of DEI and the impossibility of natural objects possessing existential inertia.

First, there’s no reason we should assume that material objects have existential inertia. What internal mechanism could possibly cause a given material object to exist at any given moment? Some might be tempted to state that what causes this is some kind of physical law, similar to Newton’s concept of inertia in motion. Certainly, the law of conservation of mass seems to imply that matter in a closed system cannot be created or destroyed. However, the nature of laws of physics is a matter of controversy. If one holds that they are somehow something external to matter guiding the operations of matter, then we cannot really say that objects have existential inertia, but that they are kept into being by some law of physics, an external force, and not found within the matter itself. If you hold that laws of physics are merely abstractions of matter’s nature (as an Aristotelian like myself would say) or regularities in nature (like a Humean would say), then physical laws would be mere descriptions of what matter does and could not be an explanation for a thing’s existence.

Perhaps, one could say, existence is a property of things that are currently existing, and what it means to exist could be found within the essence of currently existing things, similar to how redness is found within apples or wetness is found within water. This line of reasoning is erroneous because these properties and the essences from which these properties are derived presuppose the existence of the objects in question. If an object’s properties depend on its existence, and its existence is one of its properties, we have a vicious regress that fails to explain anything. This shows that existence cannot be merely one property among others a given object possesses. Nor would it do to say that a thing could preserve its own existence at any given time once it does exist, for the same reason.

What if existence wasn’t some property that a thing had, but comprised the entirety of what it was? What if a thing’s essence was just existence itself? Such a hypothetical being would not need any outside force to keep it in existence because to be that thing would be uncaused rather than self-caused, and would thus avoid the vicious regression inherent to self-causation. But then this hypothetical, uncaused being would not just have self-sufficient existence, but an absolutely necessary existence. Such a being could never fail to exist by definition, because what it is to be that thing is just to exist. There would be nothing within it that would allow it to go out of existence. Furthermore, such a being would be incapable of existing in multiplicity. If some thing’s essence and existence are not really distinct, then they are identical. Now, say we had two such beings that have a self-sufficient existence, one labelled A and one labelled B. What would differentiate them? They couldn’t have any additional qualities, because then neither would be just existence itself, but “existence itself plus some differentiating quality.” So, supposing this uncaused being could exist, there would only be one of them. None of the natural objects we know of have these qualities, so none of them could be this uncaused being.

From this analysis, we can show that, at the very least, existential inertia could not exist within any known part of material objects. But we can go even further to show that the DDC must be true. Consider, as I’ve mentioned above, that, even though there is a real distinction between the essence of a given material object and its existence, the essence of a thing could not exist apart from the existence of that thing. A thing whose essence and existence are distinct must then have its existence imparted onto it by some external cause, since, as I explained above, a thing cannot be the cause of its own existence because self-causation requires existence to be a property of a thing, and properties always presuppose the existence of the things they are properties of. This would lead to the above vicious regress.

Now, if a given material object has a concurrent cause C, then C’s existence must also be explained. And if C is something whose existence and essence are really distinct, then its existence must be explained in some further cause B. And so on and so forth. This infinite regress demands a first cause because this is not speaking of temporal causal series, but hierarchical causal series, which must end in a first cause in order to be fully explained. The reason for this is that each part of the series presupposes some concurrent cause in its existence. An infinite regress here would be like a house without foundation, an utter affront to reason. This first cause could only be something whose essence just is existence, and this is what we would call “God.”

Now, God would have the qualities of something whose essence is just existence itself, meaning it would be absolutely necessary and utterly unique. But if God is utterly unique, that would mean that only he would be just existence itself and everything else that existed would have distinct essences distinct from their existences and would rely on God for their existence at any given moment. So, God is the unique, necessarily existing, uncaused cause of everything other than himself.

There is more to be said about this (such as talking about the different divine attributes), but suffice to say, I think I’ve sufficient established the DDC and refuted the DEI. Given this, it would seem that it is the hardline theists that have the credible, rational position, not the “lack of belief” atheists.

I cite Edward Feser's paper "Existential Inertia and the Five Ways" as well as his book Five Proofs of the Existence of God as my two main sources. His website is here. Feedback is appreciated.

 

[The Name of Love]

The following contains an excerpt from Edward Feser’s blog and makes references to his book Five Proofs of God’s Existence. Again, the link to his website is here. I also reference various articles from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

So, in my last thread, I went over an argument for God’s existence that depended on the real distinction between essence and existence. This argument originated in the Catholic philosopher Thomas Aquinas’s book On Being and Essence, and, to summarize, argues that everything that has a real distinction between its existence (that it is) and its essence (what it is) must have its existence ultimately derived from some first cause whose essence just is existence itself. Since all known objects of our experience have such a real distinction, they all have their existence caused by a first cause. And since nothing whose essence is identical with its existence can have multiplicity or contingency, this first cause is an absolutely necessary uncaused cause of everything else. This argument was framed as a refutation of the Doctrine of Existential Inertia (which holds that objects, once they start existing, remain in existence until they are positively destroyed) and a proof for the Doctrine of Divine Conservation (which holds that any created object depends on God’s will in order to exist at any point in time and would be destroyed if God ceased to will it into existence).

In this essay, we will attempt to build on the previous argument, refute both pantheism (the belief that God is the universe) and panentheism (the belief that God is both immanent to the universe and beyond the universe simultaneously), and defend classical theism.

First, there is a need for definitions. Pantheism is the belief that God is identical to the world in an ontological sense (that is, in being). To them, God is the universe, full stop. Pantheism is associated with Advaita Vedanta school of Hinduism, some varieties of Kabbalistic Judaism, Celtic spirituality, Sufi mysticism, Spinozan philosophy, and transcendentalism. The Stanford Encyclopedia also notes that modern popular film, such as Star Wars, Avatar, and The Lion King all include pantheistic themes. Similarly, panentheism is the belief that God is both immanent to the universe and beyond the universe simultaneously. Unlike pantheism, God is not identical with the world, but is still present in the world in such a way that he is changed by it. Panentheism is associated with the religious beliefs of Neoplatonism and their Cambridge Platonist successors, the Eastern Orthodox Christian Church, and universalism. It should be noted that there is significant overlap between pantheists and panentheists, such that Baruch Spinoza and the Advaita Vedanta school of Hinduism could be argued as being either pantheistic or panentheistic.

Classical theism is the tradition of natural theology most common to Western philosophical theism and has prevailed in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam historically. It is rooted in the classical realist philosophy (that is, in the Aristotelian and Neoplatonic traditions). Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas, Maimonides, and Avicenna were all classical theists. Classical theism holds that, whatever else we say about God, he must be the metaphysically ultimate first cause of creation. Classical theism has traditionally stressed God’s transcendence and distinctness from his creation.

Building on what we know from last time, we know that God is absolutely necessary for the existence of everything else and utterly unique in his existence (that is to say, there could not be more than one God). But it follows then that if God is utterly unique from anything, including things in the realm of experience, how can we learn about him?

Following the Christian philosopher Pseudo-Dionysus the Aeropagite, we know of three ways that we can determine God’s attributes: via negativa, via causalitatis, and via eminentia. Via negativa or by way of negation is where we deny of God any characteristic that is incompatible with his being the first cause or is incompatible with his other attributes. Via causalitatis or by way of causality is where we move from knowledge of the world to knowledge of God as the cause of the world. And finally, via eminentia or by way of eminence is whereby we conclude, by way of the principle of proportionate causality (according to which every cause contains the effect in some way), that God can be said to possess in an eminent way certain features we attribute to things in the world.

First, God must have aseity. Divine aseity refers to God’s independence in his existence, decrees, will, and actions. If God were not self-sufficient in a radical way, then he would depend on something else for his existence or actions. Thus, he would not be a first cause in any real sense. Contrary to atheist fiction, which depicts God as being somehow dependent on his worshippers, God does not need us in any way. All he needs is himself.

Another important attribute God has is simplicity. God must be non-composite or without parts (material or metaphysical). God is an undivided whole that cannot be separated in reality. For if God did have parts, then each of those parts would be ontologically prior to it, so there would need to be some cause even more basic to explain why God’s parts were combined the way they were and that thing would be the first cause. Divine simplicity has many radical implications, one of which being that God is each of his own attributes; he does not have existence, he is existence. God’s simplicity makes him so utterly unlike anything else that it is hotly contested by modern theologians like Alvin Plantinga and William Lane Craig, who argue that the concept is incoherent. But to deny it is to deny that God is the first cause, which is anathema to any self-respecting monotheist.

These concepts fit in nicely with our previous essay. God’s utter transcendence (or aseity) fits with the previous description of him being the absolutely necessary uncaused first cause. God doesn’t need something outside of himself in order to exist. As an Aristotelian would put it, he has no potential in need of actualization, because he is purely actual. And God’s absolutely simple nature fits very nicely with his essence and existence having no distinction. Created beings, insofar as they have a real distinction between their essence and existence, have parts.

This is where the pantheist and panentheist positions break down. Contra the pantheist, God could not be the universe because the universe is made up of parts, and God is simple. The universe and its constituent parts are metaphysical composites of essence and existence, and the material universe in particular is made up of physical parts that are conjoined. God, being metaphysically simple by necessity, could not be the universe for this very reason.

And contra the panentheist, God cannot be immanent to the universe in a way that would allow him to be affected by the universe, else that would violate his aseity. Some panentheists try to get around this by claiming God has necessary and contingent aspects. But this again would violate divine simplicity, as God could not have any real contingent properties in the Scholastic sense. Note that this does not lead to us believing that God’s every action is part of his necessary essence and is therefore necessary in itself. God’s status as creator of the world is not a real property but what Scholastics call a relation. To demonstrate what I mean by this, imagine that Socrates and Plato were the same height, but then Plato grew a few inches. According to modern philosophy, Socrates would have gained the “property” of “being smaller than Plato,” but this does not entail any real change in Socrates. Similarly, the creation of the world and its changing relationship with God entail no real change in God.

In conclusion, the correct conception of God is classical theism: a radically transcendent being that has no need to interact with us, but deigns to do so anyways.

As a side note for any of my, this conception of God ties into why God is male. For this topic, I’ll quote Edward Feser’s blog here. He starts by refuting the idea that God is an impersonal “it” by pointing to how God has something analogical to an intellect and free will, and since these are definitive of persons, it follows that God cannot be referred to as an “it.”

I will go over a defense of God’s intellect in a later post.

But why “He” rather than “She”? Well, consider further that from the point of view of classical natural law theory, the fundamental natural social institution – the family – has the father as its head… Suffice it to say that the claim is not that men are morally superior to women, or that they have dictatorial rights over their wives and children, or that all men are born leaders and all women born followers. The claim is rather that in any orderly social arrangement there must be some ultimate authority, and that nature has ordained that at least in the normal case it is in the father in whom this authority resides. For when human beings are living in accordance with what the natural law requires of them in the area of sexual morality, families will tend to be large. Obviously this would put a very great burden on mothers if there were no one to protect and provide for them and their children, but protecting and providing for them is precisely what a father is supposed to do. And that, from the point of view of natural law theory, is why men tend to be more assertive and oriented to the public rather than the domestic realm, and thus more oriented toward leadership.

…[F]rom the perspective of the moral theory associated with A-T, paternal and thus masculine imagery is naturally going to be regarded as the appropriate sort to use when characterizing God’s relationship to His creatures. For they are dependent on Him in a way comparable to a family’s dependence on a father; and He has authority over them comparable to the authority a father has over his family.

So, one reason for God’s being a “he” rather than a “she” is that he relates to the universe similar to how a man relates to his family: as its head.

The second reason has to do with the doctrine of ex nihilo and its implications.

From a classical theistic perspective, God creates the world ex nihilo rather that out of His own substance. Creation is thus in no way comparable to gestation and birth, imagery which, when applied to theology, suggests either pantheism or a pagan cosmogony. The divine creative act is more like the relatively “distant” role played by the father in procreation. Accordingly, paternal and thus masculine imagery better conveys God’s transcendence.

Again, Feser defends referring to God as “he” by invoking the concept of imagery. Certainly, those who claim God is male are not claiming him to be male in the sense humans are (since he doesn’t have physical parts). Rather, he is male in a way analogous to us, in the sense to how he relates to creation.

Feser then goes on to note the specifically Scriptural reasons why God would be considered male by a Christian, but I will not go into them into detail here.

If I were to summarize, I would say that a classical theist conception of God would portray God as masculine because of his authority and transcendence. In contrast, a feminine portrayal of God invokes images of submission and physical gestation (and therefore dependence on creation). Describing God as female invokes imagery that makes him more creaturely and less divine, so it is more fitting given God’s nature for him to be male.

 

[The Name of Love]

In my previous essays, I’ve gone over one of the major proofs of God’s existence and shed some light on God’s nature. Now we get to the big three attributes: omnipotence, omniscience, and omnibenevolence. Most laymen define God by these three attributes, and though it is not how I would define God, it is important nonetheless to demonstrate that these traits must be attributed to him. For each of these three attributes, I will explain their definition, why God (who, as you recall, is subsistent existence itself) must be these things, and briefly address some critiques of the attributes in question.

A disclaimer is in order, however: when I say God has some attribute, I am not saying he has them in the same sense that we have them. God does not univocally have power, knowledge, and goodness as we do. Rather, power, knowledge, and goodness in God is like power, knowledge, and goodness in us humans, but it’s clear from things like the doctrine of divine simplicity that God is not like us.

Power is the capacity for action. Because God is the source of existence for all of created reality, we know that he does have power. But God doesn’t have just some power, he has omnipotence. “Omni-” means “all” and “-potence” is related to the concept of having some capacity (with words like potent, potency, potential, etc.). Taken together, they mean “all-powerful,” as in God possess all existing powers. In layman terms, God can cause to exist or occur anything that could in principle exist or occur. The question of “can God create a stone too heavy for him to lift?” and related problems are easily solved by pointing out self-contradictory nature of a stone too heavy for God to lift. It cannot in principle exist anymore than a married bachelor or a square circle.

So how can we know God is omnipotent? Well, recall how everything other than God depends on God for its existence at any given moment. Now, we recognize that the characteristic properties of an object flow from its nature or essence. If nothing could exist without God’s constantly willing it to exist, then nothing could act without God’s will because acting is presupposed by existing. Taking all this into account, we come to the conclusion that nothing could have the power to do anything apart from God. If all power that has existed, does exist, and might exist belongs to God, then God has all powers and is therefore omnipotent.

Now, omniscience has as its root “science” which is related to the concept of knowledge. So “omniscience” means “all-knowing.” But what does omniscience entail, exactly? Well, being all-knowing means having knowledge of everything that exists. But for there to be knowledge, some mind must think some proposition p is true, p really is true, and one thinks p is true as a result of some reliable process of thought formation. So, for every p that truly exists, God must think p is true as a result of some reliable thought process, and he must have no false propositions within his mind.

In order to prove that God can think “p is true,” he must first be able to think, so we must prove that God has something like an intellect. We know God causes the existence of the essences of all other things. This means that he caused all the different forms and patterns that exist within particular things as well. Now, in order to be the cause of something, something of the effect must inhere within you; you cannot give what you do not have. This is called the principle of proportionate causality. Now, the effect could exist in the cause formally (e.g. a fiery match causing a forest fire because it is also on fire), virtually (e.g. my causing you to have a $20 bill because I gave you a check for $20), or eminently (e.g. a squirrel causing a nut to be buried underground because it has the power to bury things). Now, since God caused all other essences, with their various forms and patterns, to exist, those essences must exist in him in some way. They cannot exist formally in him because that would entail pantheism, but they could exist within him in the same way those essences exist within us – that is to say, in our minds as abstract ideas. So, God must have something like an intellect within him to hold these forms within him.

But it is not just concepts that exist in God’s intellect. Consider a cat sitting on a mat. That the cat and the mat exist at all at any instant in which they do exist is due to God’s causal activity. It follows then that the state of affairs of the cat being on the mat is also caused by God. So, just as the cat’s catness and the mat’s matness both exist inside God’s mind as abstract objects, the state of affairs whereby the cat is on the mat must exist in God’s mind in the form of the proposition the cat is on the mat. The ramifications of this means that God must hold all true propositions within his intellect. Catholic philosopher Edward Feser likens this to an author with perfect memory coming up with a story in a single, instantaneous flash of insight. This author must be correct about what is in his writing because he’s the one who wrote the story to begin with. Similarly, God must know his creation because he’s the one who continuously creates everything.

The most notable objection to divine omniscience is its supposed incompatibility with free will. If God knows I will go to the grocery store tomorrow, then I cannot fail to go to the grocery store tomorrow. But then, how can I freely choose to go to the grocery store when it’s impossible for me to choose otherwise? This objection can be easily answered with the author-book analogy. Suppose an author wrote a crime novel in which one of the characters plots the murder of another and carries out the deed successfully. Would it make sense to go “he didn’t commit the murder of his own free will, he only did it because the author wrote the story that way”? No. The author’s writing the story the way he did is not inconsistent with the character’s having freely committed murder. Just as it is perfectly coherent to claim an author created a story in which a character freely chose to commit a murder, it is perfectly coherent to claim God causes a world to exist in which you freely chose to go to the grocery store tomorrow. God’s action only is inconsistent with free will when we anthropomorphize him by claiming his sort of causation is the same as ours. So, this line of reasoning fails.

Another, more sophisticated critique of divine omniscience goes like this: the definition of omniscience laid out presupposes that there is a set of all true propositions. But there cannot be a set of all true propositions, so omniscience in this sense is impossible. According to Cantor’s theorem in set theory, any given power set of S – that is, any given set consisting of all subsets of S – must contain more members than the set itself. But if S consists of all true propositions, then there cannot be a power set of S, so there is not a set of all truths.

The problem with the above argument is threefold. First, if the above argument is correct, then we also cannot say there is a set of all propositions, so we wouldn’t be able to say anything coherent about those propositions. But we can clearly make coherent claims about all propositions – such as that they must be either true or false, so why can’t we also say that an omniscient being would know all true propositions? Second, there is no reason to think of this knowledge in terms of sets of truths; even if God knows no set of all true propositions, it does not follow that there is some particular true proposition God doesn’t know. Third, this assumes that God’s knowledge consists of discrete ideas in the divine intellect. Given divine simplicity, this is clearly false. Rather, God’s knowledge is analogous to human knowledge, but God’s knowledge is undivided. God’s knowledge is like a beam of white light; various beams of colored light can be derived by passing it through a prism, and though the colors are not separated out until the beam reaches the prism, they are still in the white light in a unified way. In a similar way, the varied forms, patterns, and propositions in the world are all finite ways of expressing the infinite ideal that is God.

Finally, omnibenevolence or “all-goodness” is where God has all goodness. But what exactly is goodness? Well, consider a Euclidean triangle, which has the nature of being a closed plane figure with three straight sides. Now consider that particular triangles we find in the material world do not always live up to the standard of the perfect, Euclidean triangle. A triangle drawn hastily on the cracked plastic seat of a moving bus will probably fail to be completely closed or have perfectly straight lines, and even a carefully drawn triangle on paper with a pen and a ruler will contain subtle flaws. Still, the latter triangle will be considered a better triangle than the former because the latter better embodies what it is to be a triangle. We can say then the former is a “bad” triangle and the latter is a “good” triangle. This idea of goodness and badness is the sense of “good” and “bad” we speak of when we talking about good or bad specimen, good or bad instances of a thing. This sense of goodness and badness is objective because it is based in the facts of what a thing is, its essence.

Now, goodness requires being actual in a certain way – that is, in a way that involves realizing the nature of the thing something is. A triangle is good to the extent its sides are actually straight, a tree is good to the extent that it actually carries out photosynthesis, etc. Badness, meanwhile, involves a failure to be actual in some way. It is a privation, an absence of something that a fully actualized specimen of a kind of thing would possess given its nature. Goodness and badness, then, aren’t on metaphysical par, for to be good is a kind of actuality while badness is a kind of unrealized potentiality.

Actuality and potentiality are Aristotelian terms that describe differing modes of being: actual being and potential being specifically. An actuality is what actually exists while potential being is what could exist. For example, leaves on a tree are actually green now, but they have the potential to turn yellow under certain conditions. That potential to be yellow is a part of the essence of the green leaf. Now, existence corresponds to actuality because to exist is to be actual, and essence corresponds to potentiality in that the capacities of a thing’s essence are potentials to be something else. But God is just subsistent existence, which means he is purely actual and lacks all potentials. Therefore, he would lack any privations, any badness and just be goodness itself. As a matter of fact, the Scholastics believed that goodness and being were convertible for this very reason. Insofar as God is the source of all being, he is the source of all goodness too, and is omnibenevolent.

As you can see, the assertion of God’s omnibenevolence depends on God’s status as subsistent existence itself as well as the privation account of badness. Contemporary philosophers tend to reject this account, but not for good reasons. Some claim the privation account denies the reality of evil, but this is incorrect. To point out that blindness is the absence of sight, the failure of the eyes or optic nerves to function correctly, is not the same thing as denying that blindness does not exist. Rather, privation is an explanation of what blindness (and indeed, badness) is.

Others claim that pain is a type of badness is not the absence of something. However, pain is not without qualification bad, for pain serves the functions of indicating to an organism that something is wrong. For instance, the pain felt by a person that touches a burning stove is a good thing, and if they were lack that pain, then the absence of pain would be a bad thing. There are also cases where pain is experienced as a good thing, such as the satisfying pain one feels after a good workout. Pain in itself is not bad, only some things associated with pain (bodily dysfunction or damage) or things that are consequences of pain (such as loss of tranquility of mind).

Still others claim that there are certain kinds of moral evil that cannot be analyzed in terms of privation. For example, the privation account holds that murder involves the failure to respect the duty not to kill an innocent person. But murderers must have some intention or desire to murder, and these are positive aspects. So, can we really say that murder is a privation? But this misses the point of privation ethics, which states that only the badness of things are privations. A murderer may have certain beliefs and desires, but beliefs and desires are not per se evil. A murderer might be motivated by the desire to acquire money or gain pleasure. The desires for those things (money and pleasure) are good; it is the failure to subordinate those lesser goods to the greater goods of respecting the life of another person that makes the act evil and therefore a privation.

So, all of the objections to the privation account of evil fail. But this is not the primary critique of God’s goodness; that honor belongs to the infamous problem of evil. I will come out and say this: most theists believe the problem of evil is the most difficult problem facing theism. The dilemma presented is stated like this: if God exists, why wouldn’t he destroy all evil? Either he’s not all-good or he’s not all-powerful. Either way, he’s not worthy of worship.

But I find the problem easy to refute given how we know God is both good and the world’s creator through independent arguments. Holding those ideas together is not illogical because God is not morally obligated to do anything. To use the author analogy from before: if the world is like a story, God is not a character in the story alongside the other characters, but the author of the story. It makes no sense to think of an author as being unjust to his characters.

So then, why does God allow bad things to occur? How can he be perfect when he creates imperfect things? To answer these questions, let us suppose I was in the middle of drawing a triangle, but I stopped before I completed the drawing. Does this entail some kind of imperfection within me? No, because I could have a good reason for not finishing the triangle. Similarly, we cannot know the good that God will draw out of the sufferings of this life. We are like characters in a novel, unable to know in chapter three what the author has written in chapter nine.

This concludes my series of essays on natural theology. In the next few series of essays, I will be laying out some explanations and defenses of the essentialist-cum-teleological view of nature and the immortality of the human soul.

 

[The Name of Love]

Modern philosophy considered broadly distinguishes itself from the earlier Aristotelian and Neo-Platonist philosophies by its rejection of inherent natures imbued with a divinely-given purpose. This teleological-cum-essentialist (or teleo-essentialist) view of reality informed much of early empirical science as it emerged in Medieval Europe, but listening to modern science popularizers like Richard Dawkins or Steven Pinker, you’d be forgiven for thinking the opposite.

Certainly, the founders of modern science such as Galileo Galilee, Isaac Newton, Francis Bacon, and Rene Descartes all rejected the earlier teleo-essentialist view in favor of one that eschewed inherent natures with purposes. According to their new worldview, objects did not have inherent natures or purposes. Instead, each object was a particular individual with nothing in common with any other individual. Those trees outside your window? They aren’t really trees. Each one is an individual thing, and the “treeness” that is supposedly shared between them is just inside your head. The opium that seems have the power to make people fall asleep? There’s nothing inherent to the properties of opium to cause people to do that, and in fact it could cause you to turn into a frog instead. The heart pumping your blood right now? There’s no reason why it does that; it just does.

This worldview seems to contradict common sense. After all, if trees don’t actually have treeness in common, how can we pick out the difference between a tree and a non-tree? If opium doesn’t have the power to make people fall asleep, then why does ingesting opium so often end in the person falling asleep? And if the heart’s purpose isn’t actually to pump blood, why is it so often the case that it does just that?

The moderns do have an answer to this sort of objection. Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume famously held that the mind may perceive event A followed by event B, leading to the formation of an expectation that B will always follow A. But to project this expectation onto the world, he would claim, is not rational. There’s no reason why reality should fit one’s expectations, after all. You may expect opium will make people who take it sleepy, but maybe it will turn someone into a frog instead. John Locke, another Enlightenment thinker, also held that the creation of species of things like “treeness” was similarly the result of projecting our expectations onto reality. There’s no reason for one tree to be like another tree. In other words, it’s all in your head.

This seems like a rather silly idea, but it’s one that’s very popular amongst scientists due to the prominence of Darwinism. Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution gave scientific credibility to the modern philosophy in two ways. First, in proving macro-evolution, he was able to make the case that species are fluid rather than fixed, and this undermined the teleo-essentialist worldview that supposedly relied on the existence of fixed species. Second, he was able to describe apparent goal-directedness in nature in way that seemed to eliminate teleological language. So rather than hearts having the purpose of pumping blood, creatures without hearts, and thus without circulating blood, died out and creatures with hearts survived. And so on for all apparently goal-directed biological functions.

So, we see how such a view would come to dominate modern academia. As we speak, philosophers are working out the logical conclusion of the modern view: that everything is the result of blind laws of nature governing the behavior of inherently meaningless and purposeless physical particles.

For the present purposes, I wish to provide reasons for why I reject this modern rejection of the teleo-essentialist worldview. In short, I believe modern philosophy is a form of universal acid that dissolves everything, leaving one unable to form rational, coherent thoughts about anything. This is because much of how we understand the world and ourselves presupposes the concept of inherent natures pointed towards something else. Everything from philosophy of mind to science to ethics is dissolved by the modern rejection of teleo-essentialism, as demonstrated below.

Philosophy of Mind

One of the main projects of modern naturalist and materialist philosophers is the “mind-body problem.” Though seemingly all of reality can be explained in “scientific” (read: modern philosophical) terms, the mind seems resistant to this. Some of the brightest minds of the twentieth century have tried and failed to explain the mind this way. Though Internet Atheists are so certain they can explain everything in terms of physical science, that the god of the gaps is being filled by modern science, if they are knowledgeable and honest on this issue, they will, if pressed, say “well, we haven’t explained how the mind works just yet. But we will eventually!”

But there is a good reason why the mind cannot be explained “scientifically,” and this reason lies precisely in the method by which the modern philosophy explained all other instances of apparent teleo-essentialism in nature. Though you could dismiss treeness, the power of opium to cause sleep, or the purpose of hearts as mental projections, how could you explain mental projections in this way? If the physical world is really devoid of such things, and all apparent instances of those things existing in the physical world actually exist in your mind, it then follows that the mind is not physical. Cartesian Dualists accepted this as a given, but modern naturalists are forever plagued by this “mind-body problem.”

Thus, a “materialistic explanation of the mind” is like an “atheistic explanation of God” – it’s not an explanation so much as a denial of its very existence. Eliminative materialists like Daniel Dennet, Paul and Patricia Churchland, and Alex Rosenburg all accept this as the natural conclusion of “science.” But their view is incoherent. Take Dennet, who explains consciousness as “an illusion,” disregarding that illusions only exist within the very consciousness Dennet denies even exists. The Churchlands and Rosenburg are similarly incoherent when they attempt to describe their worldview, yet this is the logical end result if one embraces the modern philosophy and is a materialist.

Epistemology

According to Descartes, the purpose of modern science is to describe physical reality. However, science as an activity takes place only within the minds of the scientists themselves. But how can we know that the mental representations of reality within our heads (and by extension, the heads of the scientists) have any kind of relationship the reality itself? To establish that they do, we need to prove that the mental representations have in fact been caused by the things they purportedly represent.

But how can we say this cause-and-effect relationship exists given modern philosophy? According to David Hume, causes and effects are “loose and separate”; that is to say, anything is capable of causing anything in principle because there are no inherent natures or purposes to anything. If this view of reality is correct, there is no guarantee that your particular mental representation of the computer screen you experience as you read this is being caused by an actual computer screen. You could be in the Matrix for all you know.

Of course, this sort of radical skepticism is rarely taken to its logical conclusion by the average person simply because it’s impossible to live as though it were true. However, people who are influenced by this philosophy are inclined to take seriously the relativist view that all belief systems are “socially constructed,” that the representations of reality from one person are particular to that person, and no particular representation represents reality more accurately than any other. This would lead to truth relativism, casting serious doubt on all of our knowledge, scientific or otherwise.

Suppose you were able to escape this problem of skepticism somehow, as Descartes was able to through his ontological argument for God’s existence. Scientific knowledge would still be undermined by the inability to trust inductive knowledge. After all, if modern philosophy is correct, any cause could produce any range of effects. There is nothing inherent about a pencil that says it cannot become an elephant tomorrow, after all. And if you can say that, we cannot say that science is really about anything other than what has happened in the past. Science collapses into history.

Finally, science is undermined by the inability to group things together coherently. If my classification of particular animals as members of the same species or my classification of particular substances as being made of the same molecules is merely a mental projection with no basis in reality, then we cannot know those things at all. All classifications become mental projections. Because we as humans understand things by placing them into categories, modern philosophy makes knowledge of the extramental world impossible in every instance.

Personal Identity

If there is no guarantee that anything will be the same tomorrow as it is today, then there is no guarantee that any given person will be the same person tomorrow as they are today. Without some essential human nature to provide a principle of unity, all that is left are the individual parts that we are constituted of. Indeed, the views of the various modern philosophers seem to confirm this, with each one choosing one part of us and claiming it is what makes us human. Descartes identified the self with the res cogitans or mental substance, an immaterial spirit only contingently related to the body. Locke identified the self with a “stream of consciousness” that he too dissociated from the body of the person. Modern materialists identify the self either with the body (or at least some crucial part of it, like the brain), with some psychological element (memories, personality traits, etc.), or some combination of the two.

These views inevitably lead to numerous paradoxes and absurdities. For instance, Descartes’ view means that we aren’t actually our bodies, so whenever our body does something, it is not something “we” do. We are like ghosts in a machine. Locke’s view, if it were true, would mean that, if a computer with my consciousness downloaded onto it were to create two clones with that consciousness after I died, then both those clones would be me at the same time. Thus, if one of the clones died, we would have to say that I am alive and dead simultaneously. These problems and more lead to some modern philosophers claiming that there is no such thing as a “self.”

But the resulting absurdities not only those of the logical kind but of the moral kind as well. Suppose one believed that thought or awareness was what constituted a person. Given modern philosophy, there does not exist any kind of capacity of thought or awareness that persists even when a certain person has no way of exercising that capacity, so only actual episodes of thought or consciousness matter in determining when a person can be said to exist. Given this, nothing that does not in fact demonstrate any episodes of thought or consciousness – such as fetuses or people in “persistent vegetative states” – can plausibly count as a person. On the other hand, since certain non-human animals have episodes of thought or consciousness, then we ought to afford some of them the same personhood as fully formed human beings. Thus, we have arrived at the moral view that claims carnivorism is immoral, but abortion and euthanasia are a-okay.

Human Action

Human action is rendered nonsensical under the modern philosophical view. If one were to take Descartes’ view of the human soul, then it becomes unclear how the mind could cause the body to do anything. How could the ghost inside the machine cause the machine to move, given that the machine is not part of the ghost? The question plagues modern day Cartesian dualists.

Taking the materialist route, meanwhile, means more or less denying humans even have free will. After all, if everything in the material realm is caused by meaningless, purposeless chains of efficient causation between physical particles, then human action is merely the results of physical particles pushed and pulled by blind laws of nature. Human action, under this view, is ultimately no from the behavior of billiard balls on a pool table. This deterministic worldview undermines morality, which presupposes that human can make moral choices.

Human Rights and Ethics

How can we have human rights given the modern philosophy? Thomas Hobbes is most explicit on this – according to him, everyone in the “state of nature” has the “right” to do whatever he wants; that is to say, no one has any rights at all in the moral sense of the term. Moral law does not exist until it is invented by us to stave off the chaotic nightmare that is the “state of nature,” and human rights are merely a matter of social convention.

John Locke attempted to stave off this amoral stance by reference to God’s ownership of us. Since God created us, so the argument goes, we are his property, so anyone who harms another human being in his life, liberty, or property effectively violates God’s rights. Our rights are not inherent to us then, but rather derivative of God’s rights as our owner. But how do we know whether we are violating God’s property rights or not? Outside of a direct appeal to divine revelation, there really is no answer.

Another problem that crops up with regards to “human rights” is that, under the modern philosophy, there is no such thing as human nature. We are all individuals, and our apparent humanity that we supposedly have in common is simply a mental projection onto reality. In other words, what is or isn’t a human being is ultimately a subjective matter, which defeats the entire purpose of human rights in the first place! Those who are committed to both the existence of both human rights and modern philosophy are forced to say “human beings have rights we must respect! Also, we can decide who is or isn’t a human being and can change that on a whim.”

But the problem runs much, much deeper than this. The modern philosophy ultimately makes it impossible to judge any given individual thing to be a better or worse specimen of its type because there are no “types” in extramental reality. But this would mean there are no such thing as better or worse human beings. To say that there is something objectively “good” or “bad” in any sense (including the moral sense) is nonsensical. From this, we get the modernist principle that reason is the “slave of the passions” (in the words of David Hume). Under this view, reason can tell us what we must do to further the realization of whatever it is we value, and it can tell us whether the pursuit of some values would be consistent with the realization of others, but it cannot tell us what ultimate values we ought to have. All moral evaluations are ultimately subjective.

To be charitable, David Hume (and those following after him) need not believe our moral attitudes are as arbitrary as our choice in clothing. They might argue that some moral attitudes are “natural” to us in the sense that they are statistically common in our given area or conducive to our survival. But these judgments lack any normative force. For this reason, the Humean has nothing to say to the sociopath who happens not to share these attitudes. Nor does he have anything to say to ideological groups like Nazis, communists, jihadists, feminists, and the like that wish to remake society in their image via social or genetic engineering. All the Humean can do is shrug and say “well, I hope they don’t succeed.”

Now a Hobbesian might believe that morality is created from the social contract between rationally self-interested individuals. Under this view, what we call morality is nothing more than a mutual non-aggression pact between self-interested individuals driven by passion. To the Hobbesian, only what could be agreed upon by all rationally self-interested persons to be conducive to their mutual advantage is what is “moral.” But this form of morality isn’t moral in any real sense. Under this idea, there’s nothing in principle wrong with kidnapping a child so you could rape and kill them if that’s how you get your kicks. Morality in this view is but an illusion.

Other modern ethical theories similarly flounder. Utilitarianism is all about maximizing “the greatest happiness for the greatest number,” but it inevitably defines “happiness” in subjectivist terms a la Hume while providing no explanation as to why anyone should care about the happiness of the “greatest number” as opposed to his own happiness or the happiness of some favored group. Kantian morality claims something about reason itself demands that we follow his famous Categorical Imperative, according to which you should only follow a principle if you could will it to become a universal law binding on all rational beings. But the Categorical Imperative is a useless test for proving what is or isn’t moral (“tell a lie when it would lead to an overall good result” would pass while “give all you have to the poor and live out your life as a celibate monk” would fail), and we have no way of knowing whether the Categorical Imperative is really true to the nature of human reason given how the modern philosophy Kant presupposes rejects that anything has a nature to begin with. Modern liberal ethicists like John Rawls appeal to the “intuitions” shared by all decent people, but their position basically amounts to Hume’s subjectivism expressed using pseudo-Kantian jargon.

Conclusion

In short, the modern philosophy characterized by the rejection teleo-essentialism is false. It defies common sense on its face, creates numerous philosophical problems when examined, and leads to all kinds of absurdities if followed to its logical conclusion. Sadly, these premises are taken for granted by so many people in the modern day. You cannot use the reductio ad absurdum argument against the bongo; no matter how absurd the conclusions of his premises are, he will embrace them whole-heartedly, descending into irrationalism if he must.

 

[The Name of Love]

So last time, we talked about teleo-essentialism, contrasting it with the modern philosophy. While the teleo-essentialist believes things have knowable essences with purposes, the bongo (the advocate of modernist philosophy) believes there exists no essences or purposes. The modernist view is obviously false for the previously given reasons, but is the alternative equally flawed? In this essay, I hope to defend the teleo-essentialist worldview.

Ur-Platonism Against the Modern World

I recently had the pleasure of listening to an excellent talk by Father James Brent at the Thomistic Institute’s Student Leadership Conference called “Responding to Contemporary Atheism.” Truly, it could have easily been titled “Responding to the Modern Philosophy.” Father Brent argues that we ought to adopt the framework of philosophy professor Lloyd P. Gerson as a way of understanding modern secularism and the conflict between secularism and traditional religion. Of course, the question of whether God exists is an important one, but it’s not the only difference between religious traditionalists and modern secularists. The typical Dawkinite “lack of belief” atheist assumes a specific metaphysical worldview as much as their Bible-thumping fundamentalist counterpart.

The broad tent of worldviews of religious traditionalists is what Gerson calls “Ur-Platonism” or “big tent” Platonism. The Ur-Platonist worldview is defined by five things it rejects and seven key themes that are reinforced by the worldview.

The five things Ur-Platonism rejects are:

• Materialism: the belief that all things that exist are bodies and their properties.
• Mechanism: the belief that the explanations available to a materialist are adequate to explain reality.
• Nominalism: the belief that all that exists are individuals each individually situated in space and time.
• Relativism: the belief that the true is what is appears to me or my group or what is good is what is good for me or my group.
• Skepticism: the belief that necessary and universal knowledge is impossible.

The seven key themes of Ur-Platonism are:

• The universe has systematic unity.
• This unity reflects an explanatory hierarchy and in particular a “top-down” approach to explanation (as opposed to the “bottom-up” approach of naturalism), in which the simple is prior to the complex and the intelligible is prior to the sensible.
• The divine constitutes an irreducible explanatory category and is to be conceived of in personal terms.
• The psychological also constitutes an irreducible explanatory category.
• Persons are part of the hierarchy and their happiness consists in recovering a lost position within it, in a way that can be described as “becoming like God.”
• Moral and aesthetic value is to be analyzed by reference to this metaphysical hierarchy.
• The epistemological order is contained with this metaphysical order.

Now, I will not be defending all of these ideas in this essay. However, I do want to shed a light on how vastly different my worldview is from the modern one. The modern philosophy is characterized by its embrace of most (if not all) of the five things Ur-Platonism rejects, most prominently mechanism and nominalism. In fact, I argue that mechanism and nominalism represent the root of the philosophical problem of modernity, and it is the teleo-essentialist worldview I will define and defend in this essay.

Teleo-Essentialism Defined

First, what is teleo-essentialism? Simply put, teleo-essentialism is the combination of essentialism and intrinsic teleological realism. For the definition of these things, I will refer to David S. Oderberg’s Real Essentialism and Edward Feser’s “Teleology: A Shopper’s Guide.”

Essentialism is, in the words of philosopher David S. Oderberg, the proposition that there are real, knowable essences. Essentialism is meant to explain how unity could exist in a world of multiple things. Now there are two levels to this unity. On the one hand, multiple individuals can fall under the same kind of thing; Fido and Rover possess a unity of a different sort to the unity possessed by Fred and Wilma and vice versa because the former pair are dogs and the latter pair are humans. On the other, there is unity in within a concrete entity; there exists objects that display a unified, characteristic repertoire of behavior, operations, and functions indicative of a single, integral entity that persists through change. For instance, you may have the thoughts you have now, and they may be your thoughts, but you could have easily had different thoughts. This would have been a change, but you still remained yourself.

Essentialism neatly explains this unity-in-multiplicity by pointing to essences. But essentialism not a mere philosophical posit; the existence of essences is as certain as existence itself. Because for everything that exists, it must be possible to say what it is, what it could not be, and why it is as it is. Essences themselves are not mere bundles of essential features. My sense of humor is an essential property of myself, but it is not a part of my essence; rather, my essence is what’s necessary to explain why I have a sense of humor in the first place. For example, my having a sense of humor flows from my essence of rational animality.

We learn of the essences of things a posteriori supplemented where necessary by a priori metaphysical reflection concerning such things as classification, structure, explanation, causation, unity, specificity and generality, and so on. But to say the essences of material objects are knowable through everyday and scientific observation isn’t the same as saying there should be an empirical test for essence. There is no magic test, no piece of metaphysical litmus paper, that we can apply so as to know in all common cases – let alone uncommon ones – what the essence of something is. Nevertheless, we do know of essences by general observation and reasoning. We ask questions like “if I took away this or that quality of the thing in question, would its nature remain the same? Would it continue to display the same characteristic properties, functions, operations, and behavior that it does when it possesses the quality that I remove in thought?” It is through this method that we come to understand whether a quality is either an essential quality or an accidental one.

Essentialism stands in stark contrast to nominalism, which necessarily holds that this unity-in-multiplicity is a mere illusion. Nominalism taken to its logical conclusion can be found in the works of post-modernists like Jacques Derrida. If you want an excellent but simple explanation of this, I would check out this video by Cuck Philosophy.

Postmodernism is, in many ways, the fulfillment of nominalism – positing that these eternal categories of male/female, life/death, civilization/nature, etc. are, in fact, illusory. They are merely “social constructs,” products of our social and historical context that can be done away with at a whim, not real things. Essentialism stands in contrast to this worldview.

Another concept rejected by modern philosophers is the idea of telos. The telos of a thing or process is the end or goal which it points.

Edward Feser divides teleology into five different levels.

• Basic causal regularities: If cause A regularly generate some effect or range of effects B rather than C, D, or no effects at all, then we can say that the telos of A is the generation of B. So, if opioids regularly cause people to go to sleep, we can say that the telos of opioids is to induce sleep.
• Complex inorganic processes: Certain causal chains happen regularly enough to be referred to as “cycles,” (i.e. the rock cycle and the water cycle). The telos of each stage in the cycle is the next stage in the cycle (for example, the telos of condensation is bringing about precipitation).
• Basic biological phenomena: Within living things, there is a kind of immanent causation, a form of causation in which a part acts for the good of the whole it is a part of. These parts each have their own ends which are for the good of the organism. For example, the telos of the heart is to pump blood throughout the creature.
• Distinctly animal life: Unlike other types of organisms, animals are capable of sensation, appetite, and locomotion. These activities entail a kind of conscious goal-seeking different in kind than the basic biological phenomena.
• Human thought and action: Human thought has a conceptual structure foreign to other animals; rational thought has intentionality and purpose in the fullest sense.

Now, in modern discourse, the debate about teleology resides primarily at the third level (biological phenomena) and is fought between evolutionists and defenders of Intelligent Design (ID). The evolutionists believe that teleological descriptions of biological phenomena are either false or, if true, reducible to descriptions cast in nonteleological terms. The ID theorists, by contrast, hold the teleological descriptions to be true in an unqualified way. Furthermore, they would argue that the existence of this teleology in nature is evidence of God. In other words, teleology is the result of an intelligent creator imposing his will extrinsically on material substances that would otherwise not have a telos. Plato held a similar view of teleology, but believed it to be the work of the demiurge, not God.

The Aristotelians and the Scholastics, by contrast, held an intrinsic realist view of teleology, rejecting both of these options, and it is this view that I hold to be true. Intrinsic Teleological Realism (as Edward Feser calls is) holds that things in nature have a telos or purpose that the objects point to, and that that telos is inherent to the nature of that substance. This is not to say that this teleology does not have its origins in God’s mind, or that there is no such thing as extrinsic teleology. Rather, this position holds that the telos present in natural things is largely intrinsic to the nature of those things.

To see the contrast in the three views of teleology, let us take the example of an acorn. The telos or goal of an acorn is to become a tree. The evolutionist might say that the acorn’s goal can be reduced to a description of how the organism evolved or is otherwise illusory. The ID theorist might say that the acorn’s goal is irreducibly real but exists intrinsic to the acorn itself. The intrinsic teleological realist would hold that the acorn’s goal is intrinsic to the acorn itself.

Essentialism and Intrinsic Teleological Realism, taken together, holds that, in nature, there are real, knowable essences that have an end or telos inherent to them. Such is the defining feature of the teleo-essentialist worldview.

Teleo-Essentialism Defended

Teleo-essentialism, on its face, seems to be undeniable. Can we not say what a thing is and what properties it constitutes? However, postmodernists and other followers of the modern philosophy rightfully point out that classifications are much harder than one would expect. Take the difficulty of classifying soup. There are many things that are called “soup,” and it appears they have little in common except that they are a type of food that we call “soup.” Sure, we could define soup as a “hot, liquid food prepared from meat, fish, or vegetable stock combined with various other ingredients and often containing solid pieces,” but there are always exceptions. If soup is hot, then are cold soups not soup? If soup is supposed to be liquid, then are solid soups not soups? If soup is supposed to be made of vegetables and meat, then are dessert soups that are primarily made up of fruit no soups? And so on.

In fact, you could do this for any category. If the man/woman dichotomy is determined by chromosomes, what about those with XXY chromosomes? If it’s determined by behavior, then where do tomboys or effeminate men fit in? If it’s determined by reproductive function, then what about sterile people? And if something as basic as biological sex could be reduced this way, then why not everything else?

This line of thinking was largely influenced by the Darwinian theory of evolution. Darwinism posited that, through macro-evolution, amoeba-like creature could eventually become men if given billions of years to evolve. If this was plausible, then how could we say that each kind was of creature had its own essence? Darwinism seemed to blur one kind of creature into another. Things that were once thought of as strict dichotomies are blurred, and all that is left are individuals that belong to no group.

But as Oderberg writes:

One does not need to be a professional zoologist to note essential differences between elephants and tigers, birds and fish, bacteria and archaea, toads and bacteria, zebras and monkeys, Bonobos and orangutans, horses and panthers, palm trees and tomato plants, spiders and worms, funnel web spiders and redback spiders, hyenas and gazelles, earthworms and pigs, porcupines and platypuses, and so on ad nauseam, to be convinced that there are, of course, essential differences between species. And by ‘species’ we include not just the infima species, which is what systematists usually mean by species, but all of the species/genera that metaphysics and systematics recognize in the tree of life, however that tree be constructed, e.g. whether as a metaphysical Porphyrian Tree, a Linnaean hierarchy, or a phylogenetic genealogy.

Contrary to the claims of modern evolutionists, Darwinism does not entail the kind of infinite variation required for a biological anti-essentialism. Darwinism does not postulate variation in mammalian species with respect to being warm-blooded and breathing air with lungs or with tigers with respect to being land-dwelling or in black rats with respect to not navigating by echolocation. The mistake, Oderberg claims, lies in thinking essences are nothing more than property clusters. Properties are indicators of essence, but even the simplest creature will have an incredibly long list of necessary characteristics, some of which may be unlistable in principle. But an essentialist does not have to list all of the (what may be) infinite characteristics of a creature to be able to enable at least a provisional judgment as to the substantial form of an organism.

Furthermore, the essence is the entire point of specific classification in the first place. Organisms exhibit stability, the capacity to develop and maintain a well-functioning individual that is typical of its kind. This stability is achieved through the very plasticity Darwinian anti-essentialists point to in their arguments. How can one understand the stability or plasticity of a species if one cannot understand their nature?

Another argument against essentialism is the argument of the “universal accidental.” We have no way of distinguishing between essential and non-essential properties that are universally possessed by the members of some kind K for which the question of its essential properties arises, whereby “universally” means “for all times and all places.” What could possibly distinguish an essential property and an accidental property that just so happened to exist in all times and places?

One mistake this argument makes is confusing essences and essential properties. The essence of a thing explains why a thing has its essential properties. My capacity for humor is an essential property I possess which flows from my essence. But my essence, that of a rational animal, is not an essential property; it explains why I have such essential properties. In this case, rationality implies a capacity for abstract thinking, with which I could form a combination of concepts in my head that that shows the various kinds of dissonance with everyday life. And animality implies a capacity for passion, for finding things surprising. Taken together, these capacities allow me to judge various things or possible things as “humorous.” The capacity for humor is therefore an essential property because it flows from what it means to be a human, and no human could fail to have such a characteristic.

Additionally, while an essentialist can acknowledge the existence of some universal accidental property, it must be admitted that such a thing is an exception, not the rule. In nearly every case, universal characteristics – those found in kinds of a thing everywhere and all times – are nearly always essential. Methodologically speaking, there’s nothing wrong with assuming a universal characteristic is also an essential one.

Finally, as mentioned above, when it comes to the true essence of a thing, not just its essential properties, the essentialist is able to make the leap from universality to essentialness without holding either there must be some empirical test for essence or holding all essentialist judgments to be certain on all occasions. Consider the following example:

Suppose I am walking through a field and come across a creature that has a vaguely human shape, is supported by two planks of wood, and has a torso consisting of a sack stuffed with straw, from which protrude two more bits of wood. On top is something that looks a little like a human face, only it too is wood, with pebbles for eyes, a twig for a nose, and two more twigs protruding from either side. Is it a human being? Of course not, I realize – it’s a scarecrow. How do I know? Well, because human beings are essentially animals and this thing is not even alive. But how do I know humans are essentially animals?

For the real essentialist, there is nothing intrinsically impossible about the sort of reasoning that goes into establishing such a proposition, whatever the epistemological difficulties when it comes to particular kinds of thing. We all know what counts as a paradigmatic human being, or a stereotypical human, to use Putnam’s terminology. Human beings have natures, as I have already argued in respect of things in general. When a thing displays a range of characteristic operations and behaviour, a characteristic set of functions, and we are able to observe a range of similarities and differences between it and other things, and thereby to classify it, no matter how approximately, within a taxonomic scheme that ascends in increasing generality and descends in increasing specificity – then we are justified in ascribing to it an essence or nature, even if we don’t know what that essence or nature is; or, though we do know part of the essence, yet we do not know the complete essence.

Though the essence of a thing can only be known through observation, there needn’t be some sort of repeatable empirical test for essence, just as there needn’t be a single, codified empirical test for the real essence of a thing. So, essentialism is definitely true.

But is there such a thing as teleology? Are things in nature “directed” towards some other thing? Many of the moderns disagree, but their disagreement often comes from their misunderstanding of what teleology is. To them, teleology always involves either a process with stages (as in the development of an acorn into an oak tree) or a part working for the good of a whole (as with a human heart). But as we discussed before, the only thing essential to teleology is an inclination towards an end, such as the tendency of an ice cube to cause its surroundings to grow colder. The ice cube has this tendency as opposed to a tendency to warm its surroundings or cause them to become toxic or not affect anything at all.

Thus, the moderns’ attempt to explain away all instances of teleology in nature by way of Darwinian evolution because evolution itself causes certain outcomes rather than others, and, therefore, is pointed towards some end. Even if we were to say that hearts pump blood only because creatures without hearts did not survive the evolutionary process, evolution itself is a process pointed towards certain outcomes rather than others and is itself an instance of teleology.

Besides this, the reality of teleology is rationally inescapable. Suppose we were to say that there are no purposes, functions or goal-directed forces of any kind. If that were the case, then our intellect isn't purposed toward the attainment of truth because it couldn't be purposed towards anything at all. But if this were the case, then all rationality and rational discourse would be impossible. For rational thought depends on inherently goal-oriented inferences aimed at producing true conclusions, and a person can only be rational if they follow teleological norms such as "we ought to believe what is true and reject what is false." Teleological realism must be true in order for arguments to be made at all!

Conclusion

The teleo-essentialist worldview, far from being “debunked” by modern science, is actually vindicated by human reason and every day experience, as this essay and the previous one have demonstrated. Someone who wishes to defend the modern worldview has to overcome the obstacles I’ve laid out.

But why is this view so maligned by modern philosophy? Part of this is simple ignorance. Many people, including philosophers who should know better, create elaborate and ridiculous strawmen to obfuscate what teleo-essentialists actually believe. They would claim that essentialism amounts in believing that some sort of “spirit” inhabits every object to make them what they are. Or they would make teleology out to be saying that God has imbued rocks with some grand purpose in the same way the human heart’s purpose is to pump blood.

Often, many of these people use non-sequiturs to defend their positions. For instance, they would associate teleo-essentialism with medieval superstition and the modern philosophy with modern science and technology, and then say “if you reject modern philosophy, you must reject its fruits!” But as I pointed out in my previous essay, the modern sciences are, in fact, undermined by the modern philosophy in several key ways. Besides that, this is a blatant non-sequitur; even if modern philosophy were necessary for our technological and scientific advancements, it would not prove it to be true.

Another non-sequitur used is how the modern philosophy underpins the findings of modernity. They would claim “if the modern philosophy fails, then our justifications for liberalism, for secularism, for naturalism, for [insert whatever faddish political project the speak likes] will be for naught, and we’ll regress to the dark ages!” But this, too, is a non-sequitur; even if teleo-essentialist thinking would cause us to “regress to the dark ages,” it would not prove it false.

And if the truth holds within it a reactionary imperative that threatens the modern project? Then so much the worse for that project.

 

[The Name of Love]

I wrote an essay on Cancel Culture here. Give it a good look-over!

 

[The Name of Love]

I wrote a new essay on Individualism.

 

[The Name of Love]

Please improve your reading comprehension.

Please improve your character. Maybe reading this response I made will help.

 

[The Name of Love]

Come and see it here.