An
accusation sometimes
leveled by theistic personalists against the classical theism of thinkers
like Augustine, Anselm, and Aquinas is that their position makes God out to be “unemotional”
or “unfeeling” and thus less than personal.
Is the charge just? It is not, as
I’ve argued
many times. So, does God have
emotions? It depends on what you
mean. On the one hand, as Aquinas argues
in Summa Contra Gentiles I.89, it is not
correct to attribute to God what he calls “the passions of the appetites.” For passions involve changeability, and since
God is purely actual and without passive potentiality, he cannot change. Hence it makes no sense to think of God
becoming agitated or calming down, feeling a sudden pang of sadness or a surge
of excitement, or undergoing any of the other shifts in affect that we often
have in mind when we talk of the emotions.
On the other hand, no sooner does Aquinas say this than he immediately
goes on in SCG I.90-91 to argue
that there is in God delight, joy,
and love. And of course, delight, joy,
and love are also among the things we have in mind when we talk of the
emotions.
Sunday, April 15, 2018
Friday, April 13, 2018
Upcoming speaking engagements
Just back
from a very enjoyable speaking engagement at Baylor
University. Here are the next few
scheduled talks:
Thursday, April 5, 2018
Chalk on Five Proofs, etc.
At The American Conservative, Casey Chalk recounts
some of the public controversies I’ve been party to over the last few
years, and judges them a model of how academic debate ought to proceed. (David Bentley Hart drops by to comment in
the TAC combox.) Meanwhile, at The University Bookman, Chalk kindly
reviews Five
Proofs of the Existence of God. From
the review:
Wednesday, April 4, 2018
Five Books on Arguments for God’s Existence (Updated)
Five Books is a website devoted to in-depth
interviews with leaders in a wide variety of fields – philosophy, politics, science,
literature, and so forth – about five books in their fields that they would
recommend. Recently I
was interviewed for the site on the subject of five books on arguments for
the existence of God. It’s a pretty long
interview (and conversational in style insofar as it was conducted by
telephone).
Friday, March 30, 2018
Holy Triduum
I wish all
my readers a holy Good Friday and Easter Sunday. Some Triduum-related posts from past years:
No hell, no heaven
As Aquinas teaches, Christ did not die to save the fallen
angels, because they cannot be saved.
They cannot be saved because their wills are locked on to evil. It is impossible for them to repent. It is impossible for them to repent because
they are incorporeal, and thus lack the bodily preconditions for the changeability
of the will’s basic orientation toward either good or evil. An angel makes this basic choice once and for
all upon its creation. It is because we
are corporeal that Christ can save us.
But he can do so only while we are still in the flesh. Upon death, the soul is divorced from the
body and thus, like an angel, becomes locked on to a basic orientation toward
either good or evil. If it is not saved
before death, it cannot be saved. It’s game over. I explained the reasons for all this in a post
on the metaphysics of damnation.
Friday, March 23, 2018
Bellarmine on capital punishment
In a recent Catholic World Report article supplementing the argument of By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed, I called attention to the consistent support for capital
punishment to be found in the Doctors of the Church. (See the article for an explanation of the
doctrinal significance of this consensus.)
As I there noted, St. Robert Bellarmine is an especially important witness
on this topic. For one thing, among all
the Doctors, Bellarmine wrote the most systematically and at greatest length
about how Christian principles apply within a modern political order, specifically. For another, he addressed the subject of capital
punishment at some length, in chapters 13 and 21 of De Laicis, or the
Treatise on Civil Government. What
Bellarmine has to say strongly reinforces the judgment that the Church cannot
reverse her traditional teaching that capital punishment is legitimate in
principle (a judgment for which there is already conclusive independent
evidence, as the writings referred to above show).
Tuesday, March 13, 2018
Divine causality and human freedom
Is the
conception of divine causality defended by classical theists like Aquinas (and
which I defend in Five Proofs of the Existence of God) compatible with our having free will? The reason they might seem not to be compatible is that for Aquinas
and those of like mind, nothing exists or operates even for an instant without
God sustaining it in being and cooperating with its activity. The flame of a stove burner heats the water
above it only insofar as God sustains the flame in being and imparts causal
efficacy to it. And you scroll down to
read the rest of this article only insofar as God sustains you in being and
imparts causal efficacy to your will.
But doesn’t this mean that you are not free to do otherwise? For isn’t it really God who is doing
everything and you are doing nothing?
Friday, March 9, 2018
The missing links
Feedspot has
released its list of the Top 15 Christian Philosophy Blogs and
Websites. This blog is ranked at #1. Thank you, Feedspot!
At Public Discourse, Fr. Nicanor Austriaco responds to Fr. Michael Chaberek’s book on Thomism and evolution.
At First Things, Matthew Rose on Christianity
and the alt-right.
Philosophers
Jonathan Ellis and Eric Schwitzgebel argue
that philosophers are as prone to post-hoc rationalization as anyone else.
Monday, March 5, 2018
Carrier carries on
Richard
Carrier has replied to my recent response to his critique of Five Proofs of the Existence of God, both in the comments section of his original post and in a new post. “Feser can’t read,”
Carrier complains. Why? Because – get this – I actually took the
first six paragraphs of the section he titled “Argument One: The Aristotelian
Proof” to be part of his response to the Aristotelian proof. What was
I thinking?
Sunday, March 4, 2018
It’s the latest open thread
It’s your
opportunity once again to converse about anything that strikes your fancy. From film noir to The Cars, Freud to cigars, set
theory to dive bars. As always, keep it
civil, keep it classy, no trolling or troll-feeding.
Previous open threads linked to here, if memory lane is your thing.
Thursday, March 1, 2018
Hart on Five Proofs
At
Church Life Journal, David
Bentley Hart kindly reviews Five
Proofs of the Existence of God.
From the review:
Edward Feser has a definite gift for making fairly abstruse philosophical material accessible to readers from outside the academic world, without compromising the rigor of the arguments or omitting challenging details… Perhaps the best example of this gift in action hitherto was his 2006 volume Philosophy of Mind: A Beginner’s Guide (at least, speaking for myself, I have both recommended it to general readers and used it with undergraduates, in either case with very happy results). But this present volume is no less substantial an achievement…
Wednesday, February 28, 2018
The Oxford Handbook of Freedom
My essay “Freedom
in the Scholastic Tradition” appears in The
Oxford Handbook of Freedom, edited by David Schmidtz and Carmen Pavel
and just out from Oxford University Press.
The other contributors to the volume are Elizabeth Anderson, Richard
Arneson, Ralf M. Bader, David Boonin, Jason Brennan, Allen Buchanan, Mark
Bryant Budolfson, Piper L. Bringhurst, Kyla Ebels-Duggan, Gerald Gaus, Ryan
Patrick Hanley, Michael Huemer, David Keyt, Frank Lovett, Fred D. Miller Jr.,
Elijah Millgram, Eddy Nahmias, Serena Olsaretti, James R. Otteson, Orlando
Patterson, Carmen E. Pavel, Mark Pennington, Daniel C. Russell, David Sobel,
Hillel Steiner, Virgil Henry Storr, Steven Wall, and Matt Zwolinski.
Saturday, February 24, 2018
Carrier on Five Proofs
In an article at his blog, pop atheist writer Richard Carrier grandly
claims to have “debunked!” (exclamation point in the original) Five Proofs of the Existence of God. It’s a
bizarrely incompetent performance. To
say that Carrier attacks straw men would be an insult to straw men, which
usually bear at least a crude resemblance to the argument under consideration. They are also usually at least
intelligible. By contrast, consider this
paragraph from the beginning of Carrier’s discussion of the Aristotelian proof:
Monday, February 19, 2018
Drunk stoned perverted dead
The
immorality of perverting a faculty is far from the whole of natural law moral
reasoning, but it is an important and neglected part of it. The best known application of the idea is
within the context of sexual morality, and it is also famously applied in
the analysis of the morality of lying.
Another important and perhaps less well known application is in the
analysis of the morality of using alcohol and drugs. The topic is especially timely considering
the current trend in the U.S. toward the legalization of marijuana.
Tuesday, February 13, 2018
Time, space, and God
Samuel
Clarke’s A Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God is one of the great works of natural
theology. But Clarke’s position is
nevertheless in several respects problematic from a Thomistic point of
view. For example, Clarke, like his
buddy Newton, takes an absolutist view of time and space. Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophy of nature
does not take an absolutist position (though it does not exactly take a
relationalist position either). There
are independent metaphysical reasons for this, but for the moment I want to focus
on a theological problem.
Sunday, February 11, 2018
NOR on By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed
In the
latest issue of New Oxford Review,
F. Douglas Kneibert kindly reviews By
Man Shall His Blood Be Shed: A Catholic Defense of Capital Punishment. From the review:
Catholics
are so accustomed to hearing that opposition to capital punishment is pro-life
that few may realize there are good reasons to support it. Those reasons are set forth in a systematic
and convincing manner in By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed. Edward Feser and Joseph M. Bessette find the
pendulum has swung too far in one direction in the capital-punishment debate
(to the extent there is one today), and Catholics are confused when told that
something their Church upholds, and has always upheld, is now considered
immoral…
Thursday, February 8, 2018
The latest on Five Proofs
Check out a
short interview I did for EWTN’s Bookmark
Brief, hosted by Doug Keck, on the subject of Five
Proofs of the Existence of God.
The much longer interview I did for Bookmark
will appear before long.
At First Things, Dan
Hitchens reflects on how the arguments of Five Proofs might be received in an age of short attention spans.
Jeff Mirus
at Catholic Culture recommends
Five Proofs.
At Catholic World Report, Christopher
Morrissey kindly reviews Five Proofs. From the review:
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