Category Archives: philosophy

07 Mar

Not Architect but Maker

Nihil ex nihilo fit – nothing comes out of nothing. This is the starting point for the “debate” or slanging-match between the creationists and the new atheists. It is a very old argument and it is not very enlightening, despite its venerable credentials. It is in essence the same argument as that between the 18th century deists such as William Paley and their positivistic opponents such as David Hume. It goes even further back, to Aquinas and the scholastics and eventually to Aristotle. David Bentley Hart comments acerbically that the two sides in this dispute are so fatuous that they deserve each other.

For God is not the Great Architect, as the freemasons vainly believe. God is not the supreme technologist and fabricator, the one who made all the bits: he is the Creator. God was regarded by Augustine and Aquinas as the First Cause, but they didn’t mean that God set some mechanical sequence in motion and then, as it were, retired. By “First Cause” they were not talking about some aspect of thermodynamics: they meant that God is the One who gives reality to what otherwise would remain forever only potential.

This is what the Creed means when, quoting the first chapter of St John’s Gospel, it says by whom all things were made.

God does not therefore fabricate the world: rather he bestows upon the natural order its being. Something of this can be seen in the very first verses of Genesis where in the beginning there was not nothingness, but the earth was without form and void. It is God who gives form – being – to the formless void.

Those, like Richard Dawkins and indeed all materialists, who argue that the material order requires no Creator and that it is self-generating and self-sufficient – that there is nothing but the material order – fail to understand that, if that were the case, there is no way we could ever know that it is the case. Because knowledge implies thoughts, and thoughts are not material.

Perhaps there is an analogy between God’s creativity and ours – which we should in any case expect since we are made in God’s image. So the novelist when he creates his novel does not make the pen and paper with which he writes it though, of course, without the pen and paper, the novelist would not be able to present to us the characters he invents for us. These characters are not the ink marks on the page: they are the production of the mind of the novelist.

Similarly, we are creatures created by the mind of God. Specifically, as Augustine says, by the love of God. And God’s act of creation is not like the big bang. It is continuous and everlasting. Augustine says that if God were to stop loving us even for a moment, we should immediately cease to exist. Fortunately for us, God cannot do this. For God is love and he is bound to act in accordance with his nature. Augustine goes further and says, God is love and nothing else. Thus if God were to cease loving, he would cease to be God. (To express this anthropomorphically, God would cease to exist)  

Incidentally, that old chestnut objection to the existence of God expressed by the question, Who made God? can be applied more pertinently to the big bang: if the big bang were really the first cause, what caused the big bang? In other words, how could a purely natural order naturally generate itself?

Dante underscores this truth at the end of The Divine Comedy when he speaks of the love that moves the sun and the other stars

Thus our existence is not our material features, but it is our being, our reality, bestowed upon us by the gift of God.

Once we understand this, the familiar difficulties with the idea of life after death entirely disappear.

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27 Feb

Letters of mass deception

The sending of letters guaranteeing immunity against prosecution to more than 180 known IRA terrorists was not, as David Cameron claimed, “a blunder of monumental proportions.” It was deliberate government policy. It was begun under Blair and it has continued under Brown and Cameron, and it was no less than a deal done with the IRA, an act of appeasement. “Sell-out” and “betrayal” are some of the shameful phrases which come to mind.

Radio Four’s PM Programme interviewed Peter Hain – of all people – on the subject. Among his other accomplishments, Hain is a type of utilitarian philosopher: that is one who does not believe in the difference between good and bad or indeed that there are moral absolutes of any sort. Though, sickeningly, he began by expressing his sympathy to the victims of IRA terrorism, he went on to say that the letters guaranteeing immunity – and now we hear even of official pardons – were justified in order to to enact the Northern Ireland Agreement, to set up the “peace process” and to provide for the cessation of terrorism and the creation of power sharing, He said more than once that the letters caused him to feel uncomfortable and he reiterated his sympathy for those who had suffered and are still suffering from the results of terrorism. But he said the policy was justified by its results.

This is the standard utilitarian approach: the ends always justify the means. Nothing is ever done because it is right in itself, but always so that a greater good might be produced. The problem with this sort of moral philosophy is precisely in its claim to aim for this greater good while refusing to give the word good any rational content. Thus utilitarianism is contradictory and incoherent. Specifically in this case it involves the assumption that peace – a questionable peace anyhow – is preferable to war. Peace at any price. But in genuine ethical reasoning there must always first be some definition of a specific and absolute good. Morality in the utilitarian philosophy becomes a mere plaything, infinitely malleable, in which human beings (and all that happens to them as a result of utilitarian policies) are regarded as means to an end – and that end never being properly identified. True ethics – deontological ethics, Kantian ethics – teaches the truth that human beings – people – must never be treated as means to any end but as ends in themselves. Moreover, that we should never do evil in the hope that good will come of it.

Utilitarianism pretends to be the embodiment of rationality and kindness, moral virtue itself. But in reality it is frightening. I have sat through the debates in moral philosophy and heard the champions of John Stuart Mill’s book Utilitarianism. And scarily, I have heard the teachings of Mill’s admirers and intellectual descendants such as A.J. Ayer and C.L. Stevenson. Ayer declared plainly in chapter six of his book Language,, Truth and Logic (1936) that all ethical terms are in every case “meaningless.” Stevenson in The Emotive meaning of Ethical Terms (1937) agreed with Ayer and then went further saying that, insofar as ethical terms have any use at all, it is only to persuade. Pressed by theists, Christians, Jews and various other deontologists, Stevenson conceded that – since ethical terms have no linguistic or syntactic meaning – they achieve their ends in much the same way as a club or any other weapon achieves its ends.

This then is the emotive meaning of ethical terms. It is the secular gospel of utilitarianism, the blunt instrument of the bully and the demagogue. It is no coincidence that Ayer and Stevenson – the 20th century’s most notable utilitarian philosophers – produced their work at the same time as Hitler and Stalin were living out the profound similarities between persuasion and the club.

The horror of it is that these things are not just academic but the very substance and ground of our political life and public policy. Specifically the utilitarian philosopher and his political disciples say: The word “good” is meaningless; moreover what I am doing I am doing for a greater good

It was Milton who described hell as “confusion worse confounded.”

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18 Feb

First catch your murderer…then let him go

When capital punishment was abolished in Britain in 1965, to the public’s great displeasure, we were assured that convicted murderers would be given life sentences and that “life would mean life.” But last year the European Court of Human Rights ruled that life sentences must provide for appeal and review and now our own Court of Appeal is about to pronounce on whether this shall be so or not. The ECHR is of the opinion that whole life sentences without the possibility of review or appeal are inhumane and infringe the murderers’ human rights.

This is a subversive opinion announced by a Court notorious for its subversion of the moral order, and therefore of abrogating the very principle of justice it was created to uphold. There are no rights in wrongs. One who commits murder thereby places himself outside the usual social framework of rights. He is correctly described as an outlaw. Moreover, it is not society which makes him into an outlaw, but entirely his own doing by means of his crime. A convicted murderer must, If there is no death penalty, expect to have his freedom removed for the remainder of his days. This is just, and we know directly and intuitively that it is just. Try considering the alternative expressed as a simple proposition: “Killers should go free.” It is patently absurd. In effect it involves declaring that the murderer should not be punished but rewarded for his crime by being granted his freedom.

None of this is merely hypothetical. Between 2000 and 2010, thirty convicted murderers were freed and killed again. There have been a further five such atrocities in the last four years alone.

And it is not the murderer alone who bears responsibility for these deaths: the authorities who grant him his release are responsible too. The problem is that here we have a perverted notion of what responsibility means, as the Court which would free a murderer does so out of a perceived responsibility concerning the murderer’s rights: but this involves having no responsibility concerning the lives of those he is freed to kill.

Thus the social morality of the ECHR is a precise inversion of rational ethics and it amounts to the satanic principle: “Evil, be thou my good.” 

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24 Jan

On not being afraid

What is a person? More generally, what is it to be?

The materialist would tell you that to be is to be a body and that mind or mental functions are mere epiphenomena – side-effects, as it were, of processes which are wholly physical. According to the materialist hypothesis, there is nothing except what is physical. You are your body and you begin when your body begins and you end when your body dies.

There is another view which we can call dualism and this is frequently – erroneously – equated with Christian doctrine: that we are souls and bodies. So, according to dualism, there are in effect two substances: a physical substance and a spiritual substance. Sometimes the soul is regarded as the same thing as the mind. We are asked to believe that the soul or mind (the spiritual thing) is inside the body. But this cannot be, because the only thing which can be inside a physical thing is another physical thing.

Rather we should perhaps regard mind and body as two aspects of the same thing seen from different perspectives. St Paul seems to have believed something like this to be the case as he refers to a spiritual body – in the Greek a soma-pneumatikon.

From the usual perspective of individual consciousness, we tend to think that this individual consciousness – the mind in action, as it were – is the central agent controlling whatever the individual does.

But there is another, more helpful, view which is to be found in Christian mysticism, Sufism, Jewish spirituality, in the Upanishads and in Artur Schopenhauer’s Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung. (The World as Will and Representation) According to this, the person or being uses his mind in much the same way as he uses his body and is thus not to identified with either his mind or his body. This individual being may be termed the person’s soul. Except it is not individual and distinct from other manifestations of being.

All being is one, eternal and indestructible

Moreover, these various mysticisms can be experienced practically, through prayer and meditation. When, for example, I meditate by observing my breathing and discarding all other thoughts as these arise, it is not my mind which is performing this meditation but my being – or soul, if you like. And this being is not distinct from being in general. It is nevertheless what I truly am. Thus whatever happens to my body and my mind – including death – cannot alter the fact that I am part of that universal being which is eternal and indestructible.

This ancient and (to me) very reassuring view can be investigated further by studying the mystical writings of most of the world’s great religions, in the book by Schopenhauer mentioned above and in a clear and most approachable style in Bryan Magee’s Confessions of a Philosopher

Furthermore, from the Christian perspective the origin of all being is the being of God the Holy Trinity. To understand the Holy Trinity we do not, as St Augustine said, need to go outside ourselves. For we are made in the image of the being of God. That is, we may regard the mind as an image of the Father, the Body as an image of the Incarnate Son and the indestructible soul as an image of the Holy Ghost, the means of the Divine Unity: as the Nicene Creed says, the Holy Ghost proceeding from the Father and the Son

These things are true and you can trust them.

Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost: as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be; world without end. Amen

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