Now that I’m through with the background reading of Feser, it’s time to move on to talking about the book that spawned all of this, Gunther Laird’s “The Unnecessary Science”. When I was reading it, I had a number of points that interested me per chapter and so took a fair bit of notes on the things in each chapter. For my commentary on the book, then, that means two things. First, I’m going to examine it chapter by chapter to raise all of those issues. Second, I’m going to in general refer to my notes on the chapters and so quote and go back and read the chapters fairly little, unless I’m not sure how the points were made originally. This will, however, introduce the possibility that my notes sum things up too simply and that I’m missing something that I would catch on a re-read. However, I do have a day job and spending my time being painstaking about each point as if I was writing an academic work is, well, not part of that. I’ll try my best and try not to be too misleading if at all, but this is just a heads up that this isn’t going to be a detailed examination where every interpretation of mine is supported by quotes, nor one where I will go quote-by-quote and examine them in detail. I’m going to try to hit highlights and present them based on a summary of those highlights.
Chapter 1 is basically Laird setting out his interpretation of what the basics of the Thomist/Scholastic view are, and while there are certain to be quibbles I think it’s close enough to get the discussion off the ground. Thus, I’m not going to talk about that chapter. Instead, I’ll leap straight into Chapter 2 which starts out with and basically is about the argument that I find is one that atheists tend to jump to first when dealing with these arguments but is one that really no atheist should actually use because of its implications. Yes, it’s the standard “Well, even if you establish a God, you haven’t established that it’s the God of your preferred religion!” argument. Laird, at least, gets it out of the way early so we can focus on more interesting things, but I still don’t see it as a particularly useful argument.
The main reason I disparage atheists who make that move is that if they accept that God as presented it refutes their own atheism. After all, if they concede that it establishes the existence of a theistic God then if they accept the argument they really shouldn’t be atheists anymore, because they should accept that a theistic God exists and at least not accepting that is pretty much the definition of “atheist”. At that point, quibbling over which specific religion — if any — best captures that theistic God is, well, diving into theology and Philosophy of Religion, starting from the established idea that there is a God. So an atheist either should spend their time showing how the argument doesn’t work, or else should be looking for which religious God is the right one instead of trying to denigrate the argument for not establishing specifically which religious God exists.
Laird, both somewhat here but more so later on, does have a way around this, by claiming that the Scholastic Pure Act better supports the idea of a deistic God than a theistic one. By this, he could maintain that he can still remain an atheist because no theistic God is proven by that argument, only a deistic one. And this could then follow on from some atheistic arguments about deistic gods, where they can argue that there is no reason for even that entity to exist, as since it doesn’t interfere in the universe anymore it is entirely possible that that entity created the universe and then went out of existence. This way, then, the atheist can insist that no God or gods exist at all, whether theistic or deistic … as long as they don’t have to accept the idea that Pure Act, at a minimum, must still exist.
Unfortunately, the very arguments that establish the existence of Pure Act also establish that Pure Act must exist and must always exist. It exists necessarily. Even if you reject that it must be the hierarchical cause for the existence and continued existence of all things — which Laird would have to here or else it would be a theistic God by definition — it still has to exist because nothing could ever possibly take it out of existence, even itself. So even if the atheist argues that it doesn’t have to be or isn’t actually doing anything in the universe anymore, it still has to exist. Thus, the atheist would have to concede that there is a higher power, and would have to concede that it is an intelligent higher power (if they accept the Thomist/Scholastic argument). All this would mean is that they’d have to believe in an eternally existing intelligent deistic God, which would also likely have to be considered supernatural. That seems to force most atheists to give up most of the things they wanted to commit to as atheists.
And it gets even worse than that, because by the nature of Pure Act we not only know that it has to exist, we also know that in existing it has to maintain its ability to impact the world. This is part of its nature and is in fact the very reason it could create the universe at all (or be its cause). So the best the atheist can do is assert that maybe this thing that created the universe, could change it, and is intelligent just happens to not impacting the world at the moment. While a case might be made for that, it’s not a very strong one, nor could it actually in and of itself be used against claims that that God either did impact the universe in the past or will in the future. Given the structure, that purportedly deistic God could at any time become theistic by doing something, anything. That’s not really much of a deistic God anymore, and so we really should just go ahead and claim that it’s a theistic God, instead of splitting hairs so that atheists can maintain the label of “atheist” for themselves. Thus, again, atheists had better either engage the argument directly and show how it doesn’t work, or else start looking really hard for which God is the right one.
On that point, the biggest argument Laird makes against Feser in that chapter, as far as I can see, is an argument that says that for Feser’s claim that the God that maps to Pure Act is the Catholic God, Feser needs to make a deductive argument from the metaphysics that establishes Pure Act itself, but Feser doesn’t have such an argument and can’t make one, so he can’t get even reasonably from Pure Act to the Catholic God. What’s most puzzling about this argument is that Laird himself notes that Feser does not actually hold that stance himself, and yet Laird, to my knowledge, never really makes a good argument for why it would have to be a deductive argument. The best I can recall is that the argument for the metaphysics is and must be deductive according to Feser, and so Laird might be arguing that establishing which God is the right one must be deductive as well. But this would seem to make the same problematic move that Descartes made in his epistemology, by assuming that unless our knowledge was certain we couldn’t have it at all. Laird clearly doesn’t think that all knowledge must be so justified, but it also doesn’t make sense to say that if we know something deductively and a priori that all of the implications and details of that proposition must also be only knowable deductively and a priori, so I don’t really see why I should accept Laird’s argument here and not Feser’s that explicitly separates the question of the right metaphysics from the right religion and argues that we should pick the best religion based on which one aligns best with the metaphysics.
Laird actually does recognize this view of Feser’s and addresses it both a bit here and later (arguing later that other religions seem to fit better). However, Feser’s argument that the Resurrection fits the sort of miracle that only a Pure Act could accomplish while the miracles of other religions are much less in line with that is not a bad argument, and I felt that argument wasn’t refuted very well, at least in that chapter. Additionally, there are good reasons to think that Catholicism is the best bet for someone convinced by Scholastic and Thomist reasoning because it is the religion that most directly incorporates that philosophy into its theology. If we are merely looking for the best bet — and are willing to admit that we might be wrong — then it looks like Catholicism fits the bill better than the alternatives. So it’s only if Laird insists that we have to be certain and have to find the precise right one deductively that we could doubt that Catholicism is a reasonable and likely the most reasonable candidate for the religion that aligns with God as Pure Act.
While he doesn’t seem to develop it, the most Laird can do here is argue that Feser’s historical evidence is too weak to support his contention, and the evidence is too weak to support that contention for any other religion as well, and so what we ought to do is accept that there is a God but not accept that any religion actually reflects that God. In short, that we can believe in that God without having to adopt any religion since we can’t know which religion is the right one. That’s not an unreasonable stance and I think a lot of former atheists could be comforted by the fact that they don’t necessarily have to run out and join a religion if they can’t disprove the metaphysical argument, but unfortunately it actually doesn’t do anything to Catholics who decide that the Catholic religion really is the right one to follow. While we may not (or may, depending on one’s epistemology) have sufficient evidence to know that the Catholic God is the right one, there would certainly be sufficient evidence to believe that it is. So we’d move the epistemological issue out one step, moving from not having enough evidence for knowledge but perhaps having enough to believe that a God exists to knowing that a God exists but possibly only having enough evidence to believe that that God is the Catholic God. This would still be overall a win for theists in general and Catholics in particular.
So it doesn’t look like this argument is all that productive. Laird really needs to either go after the argument itself, or else change to a strategy of figuring out which religion is the one that reflects the God the argument proves exists.
The next chapter focuses on the ethical implications, including the sexual ones, and so is the first chapter that addresses something that I focused on in detail when reading Feser. This should be interesting.
Tags: The Unnecessary Science
The Verbose Stoic 
January 13, 2021 at 1:58 am |
Hi Verbose Stoic,
Thanks for the time and consideration you’ve given to *The Unnecessary Science* thus far. Allow me a couple of responses.
First, you’re right in saying I don’t really refute Catholicism or decisively prove it wrong, but doing so wasn’t really my intent. I might have mentioned this a couple of times on a Tippling Philosopher, but I’m not a diehard anti-theist–I’m more of an agnostic than anything else. You mention “it’s only if Laird insists that we have to be certain and have to find the precise right one deductively that we could doubt that Catholicism is a reasonable and likely the most reasonable candidate for the religion that aligns with God as Pure Act”, but that actually isn’t something I went out of my way to deny. As I state on page 106, “nothing in this chapter entails that Catholicism *must* be false, only that it might *possibly* be.”
My main intent in this chapter wasn’t to score a deathblow against Catholicism but to refute Feser’s critique of Locke’s arguments for religious tolerance. If Catholicism in particular could be proven to be correct with metaphysical certainty (in the sense Feser uses that term), then Locke might be wrong and the state might be justified in advocating for Catholicism and barring other religions. However, as far as I can tell you’re not arguing for Catholicism being irrefutably and necessarily true, you’re positing that the evidence it has makes it more reasonable, perhaps even the “most” reasonable of all religions. But being the “most reasonable” out of all alternatives isn’t the same as being absolutely and necessarily true, and implies that the other alternatives ought to be at least tolerated.
We can see this reasoning in a variety of other contexts, such as history or anthropology or sociology. For instance, the most reasonable explanation for the extinction of the dinosaurs is a meteoroid impact; IIRC this is what most scientists and archaelogists today accept. But there are a handful of other explanations I’ve heard about, like volcanoes in the Indian subcontinent blowing up or problems with sea levels (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cretaceous%E2%80%93Paleogene_extinction_event#Alternative_hypotheses). Or take the Vietnam War–the consensus among historians is that there’s no way America could have won in the long run, but some, like Mark Moyar, have argued South Vietnam could have persevered if the U.S hadn’t assassinated Diem. I don’t mean to argue for any of these positions here, but my point is that even though the majority of scientists or historians have settled on one explanation or interpretation as “most reasonable,” based on historical evidence, they haven’t called for scientists who take the Deccan Traps hypothesis or Mark Moyar to be censured or placed under house arrest. Thus, my argument in chapter 2 was that even if Catholicism seems to be reasonable, or even most reasonable, Feser hasn’t proven it with the deductive certainty he needs to refute Locke’s arguments for toleration, as we tolerate alternative views in the sciences and humanities for reasons not entirely dissimilar to those Locke gave.
That said, I do mention in a couple of places that Feser’s arguments could also imply that other religions, not Catholicism, are more “reasonable.” Around page 101 I spend a bit of time on Mormonism, and on page 96 I note how Jewish and Muslim metaphysicians could use the same sort of argument David Oderberg does to flatly deny the possibility of the Resurrection, no matter how strong the historical evidence for it may be.
Aside from that, looking over your posts about sexual morality, it seems we’ve actually come to many of the same conclusions–I think you’ll very much like chapter 3, perhaps great minds do think alike 😉 I also explore some problems with arguments for “pure act” itself in much greater detail near the end of the book; I concentrate on the problems with Aristotle’s “actuality/potentiality” distinction and I argue for a Deistic god based on some problems I highlight with Feser’s “novelist” attempt to reconcile free will with classical theism.
Thanks again for your time!
January 13, 2021 at 12:09 pm |
I don’t mean to argue for any of these positions here, but my point is that even though the majority of scientists or historians have settled on one explanation or interpretation as “most reasonable,” based on historical evidence, they haven’t called for scientists who take the Deccan Traps hypothesis or Mark Moyar to be censured or placed under house arrest.
That’s because nobody expects major negative consequences if society converges around the wrong explanations for these events. In cases where people do expect major negative consequences — Holocaust denialism, for example, or scientific racism — proponents absolutely do face professional ruin, and (depending on the jurisdiction they’re in) sometimes legal punishment, as well.
January 13, 2021 at 6:24 pm
Hi theoriginalmrx,
Good points about Holocaust denialism and scientific racism–and for what it’s worth, I agree that Holocaust denialism should be criminalized. However, as you note, the rationale for doing so seems to be utilitarian; holocaust denialists and scientific racists increase the odds of having to deal with synagogue shootings and cross burnings and other forms of violence. But if we take that rationale to religion, we have an argument against tolerating “false religions” if they lead to violence, but not “false religions” that are otherwise harmless. I make precisely this point in the book itself, in fact, albeit in a slightly humorous way 🙂 From page 106:
“Since philosophical argument alone can’t tell us much about the truth of any given religion, it would probably be best to tolerate all of them, at least as long as they don’t mandate flying planes into buildings or human sacrifice or whatnot.”
January 14, 2021 at 10:13 am
Good points about Holocaust denialism and scientific racism–and for what it’s worth, I agree that Holocaust denialism should be criminalized. However, as you note, the rationale for doing so seems to be utilitarian; holocaust denialists and scientific racists increase the odds of having to deal with synagogue shootings and cross burnings and other forms of violence. But if we take that rationale to religion, we have an argument against tolerating “false religions” if they lead to violence, but not “false religions” that are otherwise harmless
It’s not just the risk of violence — people about scientific racism leading to, e.g., employment discrimination, because employers might refuse to employ people of “inferior” races.
Regarding harmlessness, going to hell is much more harmful than being unemployed, having a cross burnt in your front garden, or even being shot. So if we’re justified in banning beliefs we “believe” but don’t “know” are false if we think they’ll increase the odds of people being unemployed, harassed, or shot, then a fortiori we’re also justified in banning beliefs we “believe” but don’t “know” are false if we think they’ll increase the odds of people going to hell.
January 13, 2021 at 5:10 pm |
Feel free to respond as often and as much as you want.
As a note, I have read the entire book, and have taken notes — sometimes lengthy — on each individual chapter. Because of time constraints, I’m not going back to re-read each chapter (I finished the book maybe a month ago?) before posting on it, except maybe to look specific things up that my notes are not clear on. That’s why I referenced Deism specifically here and noted that you did try to argue for a Deistic Pure Act later, and so may or may not pick that up when I look at that chapter.
I hope doing it this way doesn’t result in my misrepresenting your views too much. I apologize in advance if I do.
Anyway, onto this chapter:
I came across Feser’s argument against Locke either in your chapter or in his works (or maybe both), but it wasn’t an argument that really interested me, which why I didn’t address it. My main thrust was to start from the common argument made by atheists that there is some meaning to noting that you can’t get to a specific religion from Pure Act, and my response to that is, well, what I said: it doesn’t really work for atheists except in a tangential way. Specifically for Feser, it seemed to me that you were arguing that unless he could show it deductively then he couldn’t claim to know or even reasonably believe that Pure Act is reflected by the Catholic religion, which is directly in contrast to what he actually argues as well as general epistemology. Tying it back to Locke’s argument, all Feser would need to argue, I think, is that if we could know that Catholicism was the correct religion then the state would not have to tolerate other by definition false religions, and we could indeed come to know that Catholicism is correct with a historical argument based on a foundation of Pure Act. So it wouldn’t matter if we could possibly be wrong about Catholicism being the right religion, as long as we could support it sufficiently.
Which leads to my ultimate comments on why Catholicism is as good as any other religions in relating to Pure Act, if not better. Thus, someone who accepted Pure Act could quite reasonably choose Catholicism as the religion that best comports with Pure Act, and so believe it to be true and not be irrational, nor overstepping their epistemic grounds.
Anyway, thanks for responding and I hope you check back for the other chapters, since I don’t think I’ll be responding to a comment of yours every week, just to avoid flooding Jonathan’s site.
January 13, 2021 at 6:20 pm
Tying it back to Locke’s argument, all Feser would need to argue, I think, is that if we could know that Catholicism was the correct religion then the state would not have to tolerate other by definition false religions, and we could indeed come to know that Catholicism is correct with a historical argument based on a foundation of Pure Act.
Well, like I said above, my position is that the argument against toleration is much weaker if we’re going by inductive historical argument, which is much less certain than deductive logical argumentation. We might “believe” Catholicism is correct simply because it seems to have the weight of historical evidence on its side (though that’s very shaky, as I’ll reiterate later on), but we can’t “know” it’s correct in the sense of absolute certainty because historical induction doesn’t permit that sort of certainty. And I use those words as I got the sense of them from this statement of yours, “While we may not (or may, depending on one’s epistemology) have sufficient evidence to *know* that the Catholic God is the right one, there would certainly be sufficient evidence to *believe* that it is.” Now, my epistemology doesn’t accept that there’s sufficient evidence for us to “know” Catholicism is true, and the point I was making is that, curiously, Feser’s epistemology, so far as I can tell, actually doesn’t either, at least when you examine it closely. He repeatedly makes the epistemological distinction in *The Last Superstition* and other books between the deductive certainty of metaphysical argumentation and the less reliable inductive methods of science (and, though he doesn’t use that example, history). But in that case, he would have to admit that the evidence for Catholicism in particular isn’t as “ironclad” as the evidence for a generic God–even if only in the thin sense of, “there’s no way I could possibly be wrong about God existing, but I might be wrong about that God being Catholic, even if there’s only a small chance.”
In any case, though, for the reasons I described in my previous comment, I would agree with this: Thus, someone who accepted Pure Act could quite reasonably choose Catholicism as the religion that best comports with Pure Act, and so believe it to be true and not be irrational, nor overstepping their epistemic grounds. My point was simply that someone who accepted Pure Act could also quite reasonably choose Judaism, Islam, or Mormonism and not be irrational or overstepping their epistemic grounds (refer back to the page numbers I mentioned above). Thus, another reason I think Feser’s argument against Locke fails.
January 14, 2021 at 6:10 pm |
Well, two things.
First, the negative effects of holocaust denialism/scientific racism are considerably more “believable” than the negative effects of having the wrong religion, even if we assume we can “know” what the right one is. Aside from Jesus, and maybe those kids who claim to have seen Heaven, no-one’s provided indisputable proof of the afterlife. On the other hand, watching someone get their head blown off or even, less spectacularly, having an employer kick you out for being a (insert racial epithet of your choice here) are events much harder to claim don’t actually exist.
But fine, aside from that, as I mention in my other comments to my host, it’s actually not at all obvious that Catholicism has the strongest historical (or metaphysical) backing. Jews and Muslims could argue that the metaphysics of divine simplicity rule out Christianity to start with, and Mormons could argue they have even more historical evidence for their beliefs than Catholics do. And if those Muslims or Mormons would claim that Catholics are going to hell, well, you’ve got an argument for ISIS or the Deseret Nation 😛
January 15, 2021 at 5:23 am
Those arguments both boil down to “But Catholicism is wrong anyway,” in which case I don’t see why you don’t just make that argument in the first place, given that, if true, it would render otiose any Lockean claims about why Catholics ought to tolerate other religions.
January 18, 2021 at 4:12 am |
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