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One Step Toward God

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 June 2011

Brian Leftow
Brian Leftow
Affiliation:
Oriel College, Oxford
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Extract

Much of traditional natural theology offers causal explanations- e.g. for the universe's existence and ability to host our sort of life. But a less-remarked strand offers ontological explanations, claiming that theories involving God are the best answers to ontological questions. Leibniz, for instance, wrote in the Monadology that

If there is a reality in essences or possibilities, or… eternal truths, this reality must be founded on something existent… and consequently on the existence of the necessary being in whom essence involves existence… without (God) there would be nothing real in the possibilities – not only nothing existent, but also nothing possible.

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Papers
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 68: Philosophy and Religion , July 2011 , pp. 67 - 103
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 2011

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References

1 ##43–4, in Leibniz: Philosophical Writings, tr. Morris, Mary, (London: J.M. Dent and Sons., Ltd., 1938)Google Scholar, 10.

2 This is one way to give an ontological explanation. There are others- e.g. one can explain what set-talk is really about, or in what it consists for a set to exist.

3 Leibniz, G. W., ‘On Nature's Secrets’, in Gerhardt, C. I. (ed.), Die philosophischen Schriften von G. W. Leibniz (Berlin: Weidmann, 1875–90), vol. vii, 310Google Scholar.

4 Rhoda, Alan, ‘Truthmakers and God’, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 90 (2009) 41–62CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Zimmerman, Dean, ‘The A-Theory of Time, Presentism and Open Theism’, in Stewart, Melville (ed.), Science and Religion in Dialogue (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009)Google Scholar, v. 2.

5 Augustine, De Libero Arbitrio II, vi, 54–6.

6 Ibid., xii.

7 Ibid., xvi.

8 See my ‘God and the Problem of Universals’, Oxford Studies in Metaphysics 2 (2006), 325–56Google Scholar.

9 See e.g. Plato, Phaedo, Republic.

10 For discussion, see e.g. Bigger, Charles, Participation; a Platonic inquiry (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1968)Google Scholar.

11 Plutarch, , ‘On the Delay of the Divine Vengeance’, in De Lacy, Phillip and Einarson, Benedict, trs., Plutarch's Moralia VII (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959)Google Scholar, 550d, 195.

12 Alcinous, , The Handbook of Platonism, tr. Dillon, John (N.Y.: Oxford University Press, 1993)Google Scholar, ch. 9, ll. 33–5, 16.

13 Ennead V, 5.

14 Retractions, i, 3, 2; 83 Different Questions, 23, 46; De Gen. ad Litt. I, 4, #9.

15 So e.g. V 8.

16 For which see Plato, Parmenides, 132a1–b2.

17 Which is of course not to say that their best course was to retain Platonism in some form or another.

18 Obviously a regress threatens here. This does not distinguish Platonism from other forms of realism – each has to deal somehow with the relation between an abstract item and the concrete thing of which we predicate a property – or from trope theories, which face parallel questions about ‘compresence’. Nor does it distinguish Platonism from nominalism. In some forms of nominalism a relation takes the place of participation (satisfaction, resemblance) and parallel questions arise about this relation. In other forms no relation does – on a set theory of attributes, there can be no relation of membership. As we see below, this brings its own difficulties.

19 One could of course simplify to ‘is the standard meter and x is length-congruent with y’, but equally one could simplify (P) to ‘is appropriately related to y.’

20 And the appropriate relation is resemblance: this is a resemblance-nominalist component of his theory.

21 This is part of the content of Augustine's claim that God ‘is what He has’ – on which see my ‘Divine Simplicity’, Faith and Philosophy 23 (2006), 365–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

22 E.g. Summa Theologica Ia 15, 3 ad 1.

23 Thus I use ‘conservation’ in a slightly extended sense which includes creation as a special case.

24 Every theory of attributes owes an account of the referents of abstract terms apparently naming attributes, e.g. ‘wisdom’, Wisdom is what ‘makes’ the wise wise. In Plato, ‘wisdom’ named a Form, and to be wise was to participate in that Form. In Augustine it named a divine concept, and to be wise was to either be divine or satisfy that concept. On my view, it names a complex of divine mental events with the ontological role Forms and divine concepts filled, and to be wise is either to have the divine nature or for those events to cause one to be like God in a particular way.

Every theory of attributes also owes an account of second-order predication, e.g. of what makes it true that wisdom is a virtue. The theory as so far stated concerns attributes of God and of concrete non-divine beings. Attributes are neither. Thus I am free to offer a different sort of account of second-order predication. For Plato, wisdom was a virtue because it participated in the Form of virtue. For Augustine, I presume, what made it true that wisdom is a virtue was the divine nature, which ‘contained’ wisdom and so settled its nature. There are three cases to consider: attributes only God can have, attributes only creatures can have, and attributes the two can share. On the first I say what Augustine did: the truthmaker is the divine nature. On the second I say it is the events themselves: what makes it true that doghood is an animal-kind may be that the doghood-event has the causal role of making dogs dogs and thereby making them animals, or perhaps that the doghood event necessarily recruits the animality-event when it operates to make dogs dogs. On the last, we must distinguish whether the attribute is God's essentially or accidentally. If essentially, the truthmaker is again the divine nature. One divine accidental attribute creatures can share is preferring Gandhi to Hitler. This has the attribute of being a preference. It has it essentially, by its own intrinsic content, and has it as it is in God, whether or not any creature comes to share it. It also has accidental attributes, e.g. being the preference Leftow mentioned in a long footnote. It has that due to what I did.

One can also ask what attributes are, on a given view. For me, there are no such things. On my account of what it is to have an attribute, strictly speaking there is no such thing as an attribute had, as in resemblance nominalism.

25 ‘God and the Problem of Universals’, Oxford Studies in Metaphysics 2 (2006), 325–56Google Scholar.

26 See Menzel, Christopher, ‘Theism, Platonism and the Metaphysics of Mathematics’, in Beaty, Michael (ed.), Christian Theism and the Problems of Philosophy (Notre Dame, In.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990), 208–29Google Scholar.

27 Quine, W. V., Word and Object (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1960), 209–10, 267Google Scholar; Quine, W. V., Theories and Things (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981)Google Scholar, 100, 107 (strictly speaking, Quine would say that we should replace attributes with sets, not that attributes are sets, but his point is that sets are what ought to be playing the roles we tend to give attributes); Lewis, David, On the Plurality of Worlds (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 50–69Google Scholar; Quinton, Anthony, ‘Properties and Classes’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 58 (1957–8), 33–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

28 I suppose a class nominalist might try to deny this, claiming that the set just is primitively the set of red things. (My thanks here to Gonzalo Rodriguez-Pereyra.) But if a set of a trout and a tuna is such because it contains a trout and a tuna, I can't see why things would be different with the set of all and only red things.

29 That is, if an ‘A theory’ is true, or if time is ‘dynamic’.

30 Pace Maddy, Penelope, Realism in Mathematics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990)Google Scholar.

31 Unless perhaps the reflectancy is an essential property of what has it. But redness is plausibly accidental in all cases.

32 Again, unless being red is essential to the red thing.

33 Unless it is the only red item.

34 This remains true regardless of the possible exceptions noted in the previous footnotes, for they are precisely special cases. For the content to be a reflectancy, the conditions mentioned would have to hold in all cases.

35 That is, one could start from Quine's move, eliminate non-sets, then treat non-singleton sets as Lewis does in Parts of Classes (London: Blackwell, 1991)Google Scholar.

36 So e.g. Gibbard, Allan, ‘Contingent Identity’, in Rea, Michael (ed.), Material Constitution (NY: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers Inc., 1997), 93–125Google Scholar and George Myro, ‘Identity and Time’, in Rea, op. cit., 148–72.

37 So e.g. David Lewis, ‘Counterparts or Double Lives?’, in Rea, op. cit., 126–47.

38 Rea, Michael, ‘Sameness Without Identity: An Aristotelian Solution to the Problem of Material Constitution’, Ratio 11 (1998): 316–328CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

39 Baker, Lynne Rudder, The Metaphysics of Everyday Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 161.

40 Armstrong, Universals, 56. If this broad approach is right, then strictly all it would take to make the relational proposition true is the existence of {a}, though the set's existence entails a's.

41 Jubien, Michael, ‘Straight Talk about Sets’, Philosophical Topics 17 (1989)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 93.

42 Rodriguez-Pereyra, Gonzalo, ‘How not to trivialise the identity of indiscernibles’, in Strawson, P. F. and Chakrabarti, A. (eds), Concepts, Properties and Qualities, (Ashgate, 2006), 217–8Google Scholar.

43 So Boolos, George, ‘The Iterative Conception of Set’, in Benacerraf, Paul and Putnam, Hilary (eds.), Philosophy of Mathematics, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983)Google Scholar, 493.

44 Leftow ‘God and the Problem of Universals’

45 See e.g. Armstrong, D.M., Universals (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1989), 33–6Google Scholar.

46 Yablo, Stephen, ‘Intrinsicness’, Philosophical Topics 26 (1999), 479–505CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

47 As in Rodriguez-Pereyra's, Gonzalo version (Resemblance Nominalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

48 This sort of comparative argument raises a question: even if I could show that the theist theory is more reasonably believed than any other, it might not follow that it is more reasonable to believe it than to withhold judgment on the whole matter, perhaps with the sense that if that's the best answer, there must be something wrong with the question. In reply: withholding judgment would be reasonable if there were no positive arguments for the victorious view (i.e. if the case for it were purely comparative), if it seemed likely that there were further theories to be had, if there were independent reason to consider the question flawed and if the question were minor, tangential and (so to speak) optional rather than required. None of these conditions is met here. Predication is fundamental to our conceptual apparatus, and attributes are fundamental to any ontology. So if the ontology of these things is a legitimate question at all, it cannot be a minor or tangential one to any metaphysician. Whether some ontological questions are substantive, non-verbal and answerable is becoming an issue after a long abeyance (see e.g. Chalmers, David, Manley, David and Wasserman, Ryan (eds.), Metametaphysics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009Google Scholar)). But the debate does not focus on the problem of attributes in particular, and those who argue that not all ontological questions are equal in these respects do not seem to see the question of attributes as one of the ‘bad’ ones. Only one fundamentally new theory has emerged since the Middle Ages, and it (mereological nominalism) has not actually been held, but merely mentioned as an option: so the likelihood of something both fundamentally new and very attractive seems small. Finally, there are positive arguments for the theist view: that it does the work we want of such a theory, that it is parsimonious, and that it permits a good epistemology of predication. To say just a bit about the last: one can ask about what justifies common-attribute claims, and about whether the scheme of common attributes we ascribe to things really ‘cuts nature at the joints’. We call many things dogs, but do they really have a kind in common? At one level, all attribute-theories are on a par: we ascribe common kinds due to likenesses we notice, no matter what the truth about attributes is. On another, they are not. On concept-nominalism, kinds just are concepts we predicate. On Van Inwagen's theory of properties something relevantly similar is true (see van Inwagen, Peter, ‘A Theory of Properties’, Oxford Studies in Metaphysics 1 (2005)), 107–39Google Scholar. On either, if a kind-concept applies in common, that is all there is to it: ipso facto the things to which it applies share a kind. These theories bring a strong epistemic guarantee for our kind-scheme with them. However, a guarantee that strong is implausible: surely we are able to get kinds wrong. I hope to show elsewhere that concept nominalism is simply untenable and that van Inwagen's view does so much less needed ontological work than my own that whatever epistemic differences there are between the two are not sufficient to tip the scales van Inwagen's way. My own view can appeal to the goodness of God as reason to believe that we are so made as to attain some truth about kinds over time. This is (I think) the strongest sort of epistemic guarantee that stands a chance of being correct. More needs to be said, of course, but I suggest that in light of these things, withholding judgment may not be the most reasonable move.

49 If the first event was a fluctuation in ‘quantum vacuum’ by which an initial zone of expanding space and matter appeared, then the universe did not in the text's sense begin to exist unless the vacuum itself appeared, for the vacuum is a natural item able to be a cause.

50 Ultimately, laws about the nature of God – as (I'd argue) other natural laws are ultimately about the natures of other sorts of being.

51 ‘Swinburne on Divine Necessity’, Religious Studies 46 (2010), 141–6CrossRefGoogle Scholar and ‘Divine Necessity’, in Charles Taliaferro and Chad Meister (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Christian Philosophical Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 15–30.

52 Jurgen De Wispelaere pushed this point with me in another context.

53 Thus Descartes, in holding that the principal and essential attribute of a soul is to be thinking, and so too Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles I, 44.

54 For some important expressions and criticisms of the view, see Block, Ned (ed.), Readings in the Philosophy of Psychology (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980)Google Scholar.

55 So e.g. Braddon-Mitchell, David and Jackson, Frank, Philosophy of Mind and Cognition (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1996)Google Scholar, 52.

56 As in Ned Block's ‘Blockhead’ example (Block, Ned, ‘Psychologism and Behaviorism’, Philosophical Review 90 (1981), 5–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar).

57 Putnam, Hilary, ‘The Nature of Mental events’, reprinted in Hilary Putnam, Mind, Language, and Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 429–440CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

58 To have something that looks very like God, we would have to add that it is morally perfect. If we enrich Con's concept with moral perfection, we gain an additional, epistemically-based argument for the truth of my view – but I can't develop this here.