Dmitry Chernikov’s Blog

No, habits do not nullify your free will. (Neither do impulsivity and fast reflexes.)

Responding to a claim that equality does not matter as long as in the absolute terms people are well-off, “Angry Bear” writes:

Maybe in Cowen’s world people don’t care if they work just as hard but get less money than others but in the real world it makes people distrustful of the system and causes them to lose faith in the fairness of society.

I can’t resist quoting Mises here:

The socialists and interventionists call entrepreneurial profit, interest on capital, and rent of land “unearned” because they consider that only the toil and trouble of the worker is real and worthy of being rewarded. However, reality does not reward toil and trouble. If toil and trouble is expended according to well-conceived plans, its outcome increases the means available for want-satisfaction. (Human Action, 396)

In other words, maybe the reason why the some of the alleged “hard workers” receive lower compensation than others is that they don’t work “smartly.” Or maybe they are just losers who choose to blame “the system” for their own shortcomings.

Indeed, capitalism is a “system” in which no one is forced into a role assigned to him even before birth by caste or class. “Equality under the law gives you the power to challenge every millionaire. It is — in a market not sabotaged by government-imposed restrictions — exclusively your fault if you do not outstrip the chocolate king, the movie star and the boxing champion.” And:

The poor man need not be inferior to the prosperous businessman in other regards; he may sometimes be outstanding in scientific, literary, and artistic achievements or in civic leadership. But in the social system of production he is inferior. The creative genius may be right in his disdain for commercial success; it may be true that he would have been prosperous in business if he had not preferred other things. But the clerks and workers who boast of their moral superiority deceive themselves and find consolation in this self-deception. They do not admit that they have been tried and found wanting by their fellow citizens, the consumers. (314)

Our author believes that not only is poverty somehow due to a lack of education but that lack of education is due to poverty. What do you know, government schools don’t, in fact, make education equally miserable for all people! Some, perhaps the wealthier folks, escape and actually learn something. Well, we can’t have that, can we? “The deck is stacked against poor people in terms of educational opportunity,” the Bear continues. Doesn’t this prove too much? Isn’t the “deck stacked against poor people” in their capacity as consumers in everything? Should we therefore immediately communize the USA? Of course, any such action will make poor people even poorer, but “Angry Bear,” I suppose, is too angry at the alleged “injustices” of the world to care. Mises, comparing the market process to political voting, writes:

It is true, in the market the various consumers have not the same voting right. The rich cast more votes than the poorer citizens. But this inequality is itself the outcome of a previous voting process. To be rich, in a pure market economy, is the outcome of success in filling best the demands of the consumers. A wealthy man can preserve his wealth only by continuing to serve the consumers in the most efficient way. (271)

In fact, for any fellow with enough brains, no matter how little money he has initially, there are no obstacles to a good life in the United States other than those coming from within himself. And one can succeed even without brains. What’s even more important is that under no economic system are people immune from failure, since everyone has to deal with uncertain future. Capitalism cannot be impugned, because in it people are responsible for their own economic destiny and thus for their own financial self-destruction, should they choose it.

Can God know that He is omniscient? That is, can He be justified in holding the true belief that He is all-knowing? God, being supremely actual, knows Himself by vision; He “sees” Himself. But how does He know that His vision is completely reliable? After all, God cannot examine Himself to find out. For if His vision is imperfect, then He may either err or fail to find the answer altogether.

In other words, God must be justified in (correctly) believing that

1. He knows everything about Himself;
2. He knows everything about the created world;
3. there is nothing else to be known.

These three points can be condensed into two:

1. There is nothing in Himself that God does not see (= God has all the truths);
2. There is nothing that God sees that is not in or from Himself (= God believes in no falsehoods).

There is a different way for God to arrive at the knowledge of this matter than “introspection.” This is to invoke the doctrine of divine simplicity. God is His own knowledge and His own understanding. God’s act of understanding is God; therefore, there is no aspect of Him (or an aspect of the world, for that matter, because God’s effects pre-exist in Him as in the first cause), of the existence and properties of which God is not aware. In other words, the act of God’s intellect is His substance; it subsists in itself; God is a “thought thinking itself.” Hence God’s evidence for the true belief that He knows everything about Himself is His knowledge that He is simple and that His understanding is His own essence. In God there is no distinction between the subject knowing, the object known, and the intelligible species representing, and God is aware of that. It may, of course, be asked again, how God is justified in knowing these things. The answer is that if you think that you are composite, then you are composite. This is because, if God believes Himself to be composite, then there is in His mind at least two parts of which He is made up (e.g., substance and accident, or essence and existence). But God’s knowledge is His substance. Whatever He knows, He is. Hence God is composite, contrary to what is true. In other words, God has no choice but to think of Himself (truly) as simple, and His inability to think otherwise is His evidence for His simplicity.

To reiterate, God’s simplicity entails His full knowledge of Himself and the created world.

But how can God be sure of His unity — that there is nothing else besides Him and His creation? He can be sure, because God is being itself subsisting and the source of all being. His knowledge, when united with an act of will and an exercise of power, is the cause of all that exists; therefore He knows all that exists (through Himself). God cannot “miss” anything, because if something is out there, He had to have brought it into being by giving it a gift of His own essence/existence. Again it may be asked how God knows that He is the sole creator of all things. Here I’ll point to ST, I, 11, 3 as proof. God can reason likewise.

Spider Webs. Our author showcases a computer program that can automatically, via simulated natural selection, adjust the parameters of a web through generations of spiders in order to improve its efficiency. The variables include the number of randomly shot flies caught and the cost of silk, both possibly subject to the law of diminishing marginal utility (or its spider equivalent). The web changes in shape and size. (Climbing Mount Improbable, “Silken Fetters”)

In so doing Dawkins demonstrates that it is not impossible that the quality of spider webs can improve with time. But this is precisely what William Dembski has identified as a “routine” problem in TRIZ which can be solved by trial and error. The question is, can evolution solve what is quite possibly an “inventive” problem of making web-producing insects in the first place? Once a decent web is there, I have no problem admitting that it can evolve in the fashion that Dawkins suggests, in the process becoming more and more efficient. But how to get from no-spinneret to a fully-functioning one?

Wings. Here is how insects developed wings: First, the tiny wings functioned as “solar panels.” At some point “further improvement in solar-panel performance tails off.” But, according to the research Dawkins cites, the wings would still not be large enough to be useful for flight. What to do? Wait a minute! “[S]ome insects evolved larger body size for a quite different reason” which would have caused the wing stubs to grow “automatically.” That’s about all Dawkins gives us. (114)

First of all, isn’t it obvious that if the wings grew proportionately to the rest of the body, they would still be mere “stubs,” only bigger in size? They would also have to carry greater weight, and as Dawkins himself points out, weight goes up as the cube of the linear dimension, while surface area goes up only as the square. And who is to say whether the most optimal wings’ shape for catching sunlight is the same as an appropriate shape for flying? Perhaps it was, in fact, impossible to go from solar panels as they efficiently developed to flight implements by a steadily rising path round the Mount Improbable. How does Dawkins know?

Second, the flying system in insects is more than just wings. It also involves, at the very least, the exoskeleton, muscles, and the nervous system, including the brain. Further, the entire insect has to be engineered with precision and optimized so that it can function. There would very likely have to be multiple genes controlling the subsystems jointly responsible for flight. A thorough genetic analysis would have to be done in order to find out whether the structure permitting an insect to fly is or is not irreducibly complex, and if so, then to what extent.

And the same goes for all winged animals. Dawkins recognizes the problem and writes that in one scenario “the same nervous circuits as were used to control the centre of gravity in the jumping ancestor would, rather effortlessly, have lent themselves to controlling the flight surfaces later in the evolutionary story.” This is the only place where he notices this problem, and the notice is not too helpful. For precisely how effortlessly? And where did the original circuits come from? With respect to God Dawkins is sensitive to the alleged problem of infinite regress: “Who created God?,” he asks. He does not seem to notice the problem of regressing from one complex system to another in his own writings.

Finally, it must be shown that genetic variation in the wingless ancestors of modern winged creatures included mutations that produced wings. This must, of course, be demonstrated independently of the fact that creatures with wings exist right now; we cannot reason from the existence of wings to their having evolved from no-wings. I have no idea how Dawkins would go about solving this problem.

Shells. By manipulating three parameters of shell construction our author creates a variety of mollusc shells on his computer screen which substantially resemble the real shells. (Ibid., “The Museum of All Shells”)

Very nice, but, in the first place, this is merely a simulation. No mollusc calculates flare, verm, and spire in making the shell. Yet they make them anyway. Secondly, once again we see how one species of mollusc can evolve into another (that is, into one with a shell that looks different), more suitable for its environment. But we get no clue as to how shells arose in the first place.

A paper I am reviewing defines regret as follows:

A painful negative feeling experienced by an agent as a result of feeling responsible for some unpleasant, unfavorable, or unacceptable outcome of a situation that presented some alternative choice the agent could have selected in the past and in fact, wishes that she had selected.

This is a great definition. (Incidentally, what’s with the “she”? Is this a fad or fashion or some obsequious gesture designed to placate the feminists (is feminism still going on or did it die in the 90s?) or some guilt trip over the thousands of years of male oppression or what have you or an acknowledgement that well, as we have recently discovered, women are people, too, and deserve to be recognized in this way? What’s going on here? If the goal is to avoid sexism, isn’t “she” sexist, either? Or is the idea that men have lorded it over with the masculine pronouns since forever, and payback’s, pun intended, a bitch? Perhaps the point is to be entirely random, throwing a “she” here and a “he” there. This way no one will be able to complain.)

Now since regret entails that the poorly chosen action cannot be undone, the only purpose of this emotion is self-punishment with pain of loss, with the standard four theories of punishment applying (e.g., to deter future errors). It serves no other purpose.

I’ll begin with Aquinas:

[I]t is evident that the upbringing of a human child requires not only the mother’s care for his nourishment, but much more the care of his father as guide and guardian, and under whom he progresses in goods both internal and external. Hence human nature rebels against an indeterminate union of the sexes and demands that a man should be united to a determinate woman and should abide with her a long time or even for a whole lifetime. Hence it is that in the human race the male has a natural solicitude for the certainty of offspring, because on him devolves the upbringing of the child: and this certainly would cease if the union of sexes were indeterminate. (ST, II II, 154, 2)

For example, against Plato’s idea of the community of women and children, Aristotle argues that in such a scheme

1. Children will be neglected. (That is, instead of parents’ equally loving all children, they will most likely be equally indifferent to all children.)
2. The best means to teaching virtue, including love, is by parental instruction, not by the state.
3. Love and friendship between men and women as it exists in the state of matrimony and between parents and children will be absent, which will greatly impoverish human existence.
4. Offences against parents by children which are contrary to “natural piety” will no longer be visible and therefore correctable.
5. Intercourse between close relatives may occur.

To these it may be added that

6. Marriage is a vocation in which both the man and the woman help each other to attain virtue and happiness. Outlawing it would be bad for both.
7. Offspring will be produced indiscriminately which will lead the “city” to poverty, high child mortality, and even infanticide.
8. In practice, the rulers will arrogate to themselves the right to have as much sex as they prefer, while controlling the procreation and sexual activity of their subjects, which is a form of slavery.
9. If the desirability of the community of property is not assumed, then if the parents do not know their children, then the latter cannot inherit their parents’ property.
10. “Woman is taken into partnership with man for the need of childbearing: therefore when the fertility and beauty of woman ceases, there is a bar against her being taken up by another man. If then a man, taking a woman to wife in the time of her youth, when beauty and fertility wait upon her, could send her away when she was advanced in years, he would do the woman harm, contrary to natural equity.” (Aquinas, SCG, 3, 123)
11. The incentives for the wife to take care of her husband and for the husband of his wife will disappear, and so will the domestic division of labor, which will harm production.

Finally, there are the following theological counter-arguments:

12. The divine commandment “Honor thy father and thy mother” cannot be fulfilled.
13. In Christian theology marriage is a reflection of the union of Christ and His Church; thus a maintaining a community of women would transgress the divine law.

But what if through birth control no child will be conceived? And is intercourse outside marriage between two persons at least one whom is infertile therefore OK?

Aquinas continues:

[W]herever there occurs a special kind of deformity whereby the venereal act is rendered unbecoming, there is a determinate species of lust. This may occur in two ways: First, through being contrary to right reason, and this is common to all lustful vices; secondly, because, in addition, it is contrary to the natural order of the venereal act as becoming to the human race: and this is called “the unnatural vice.” This may happen in several ways. First, by procuring pollution, without any copulation, for the sake of venereal pleasure: this pertains to the sin of “uncleanness” which some call “effeminacy.” (ST, II II, 154, 11)

So, masturbation is “unnatural” and, as he states later of all incontinence, disgraceful and childish, but if it is sinful, then it must, like also fornication, harm the soul. How?

To understand that, a psychological analysis can be profitably added to the foregoing. In both cases the soul goes out to love someone yet finds no one. This is most obvious with respect to masturbation, but even in simple fornication, since the woman is not your spouse, you cannot posses her completely nor allow your generative power to bear fruit in her in the form of a child, and the soul cannot fully fall in love with her either. This “pulling back” away from a full communion with your partner damages the soul and corrupts nature, especially if done on a regular basis.

Is intercourse between a permanently infertile couple within marriage allowed? This is a difficult question: my answer is, a definite “maybe.”

I was asked: “Won’t people be unhappy that they could have been even happier in heaven had they lived a better life?”

The technical term for this is “pain of loss,” as contrasted with “pain of sense.” The question is, will there be pain of loss in heaven? Intuitively, it seems that there shouldn’t be any. The blessed may have regrets initially upon being judged (e.g., upon seeing their “life review,” as they call it in near-death experiences). But once they have entered heaven, they should feel no sadness for missed opportunities. Why not? First, it is worth pointing out that the blessed feel neither envy for those greater than they in glory nor contempt for those less than they (for those who are in heaven). They are content with their reward as just and reflecting their merit. But what would stop them from regretting their mistakes, even though they have been forgiven?

One possibility is this. You will not regret your choices, because you will understand the whole economy of salvation, including perhaps, God’s utilitarian trading off one person’s happiness for another’s (it might not feel so bad if it was your happiness that was traded off, since in the communion of saints individuals are members of one another, united by sublime charity, such that another’s happiness is your own, though perhaps still not as strongly as your own). You will understand how even your mistakes were somehow necessary or unavoidable. If you are saved, then good must come out of evil. That does not mean that you should start doing evil so that good will result (for one good that can come out of evil and add to God’s glory is the punishment of sinners, in which God’s justice is manifested), but that no evil will in the end be revealed as gratuitous or without a good purpose.

Now when I say that “even your mistakes were somehow necessary or unavoidable,” I mean that these mistakes could have been avoided perhaps only due to divine intervention. But God cannot dispense with our own strivings, because it is exerting our own powers that makes us who we are. Even mistakes cause us to learn, perhaps the hard way. Human beings are self-correcting and must, as a matter of fact, self-correct.

If that explanation is unsatisfying, here is another one. It is written: “To him who overcomes, I will give some of the hidden manna. I will also give him a white stone with a new name written on it, known only to him who receives it.” (Rev 2:17) The stone signifies identity. In heaven you will be what you will be, no longer mutable, especially toward evil. And you will be so consumed with God and, perhaps, with the fellow saints around you, that you will simply not think about your previous life. For, indeed, “the old order of things has passed away.” (Rev 21:4) Once you are finished, whatever you will be, the rigors of being made (”Like clay in the hand of the potter, so are you in my hand, O house of Israel.” (Jer 18:6)) will no longer occupy you at all.

Aquinas writes that “whatever perfection exists in any creature, wholly pre-exists and is contained in God in an excelling manner.” (I, 14, 6) But, deliberatiely to be somewhat naive about it, if all things are more perfect in God than they are in themselves, does God really know them? And, as a related question, does God know evil, and if so, how?

I write below that “the perfection of God’s knowledge consists not insignificantly in knowing how His own perfections can be imitated by or participated in by or communicated to creatures.” But God knows not only the perfect ways of being but also the imperfect ones, for otherwise His knowledge would be deficient. Further, evil is the privation of good, as darkness is the privation of light. If one “knows” light, one also “knows” the different intensities of light, from very bright to almost complete darkness. In the same way, God knows the different degrees of perfection, some of which may be goodness corrupted to some extent by evil.

So, a saint possesses greater perfection than a sinful man, yet even the latter possesses some perfection, and God knows the degrees of the perfections of both. That human perfections are “contained in God in an excelling manner” only means that God knows how we can be at our best; it does not mean that God does not know how we are really. For, again, God’s perfections can be imitated by creatures better or worse, and God knows all the degrees to which things can imitate Him and therefore, by vision, the degrees to which things do imitate Him.

It follows that God also knows by how much things fall short of their ultimate actuality or perfection, and this difference is the “evil” in things. An interesting question is, does God know all the differences in the perfections of things? Would he always know that one thing is better than another by “this much” or “that much”? In economics we learn than utility comparisons are ordinal not cardinal, constituting a scale of values. Utilities cannot be added or subtracted; hence one cannot say that he prefers A to B by n “utils,” or even that one prefers A to B by a greater amount of satisfaction than by how much he prefers B to C. Can God? Does God know how much one thing is better than another in terms of its essence, accidents, or happiness? My hunch is that He actually does have an objective scale somewhere in His closet.

Here is exactly how it happened:

Elephant trunks contain no bones and do not fossilize, but we don’t need fossils to realize that the elephant trunk started out as just a nose. (Climbing Mount Improbable, 92)

There you have it, folks. Surely, this account is both obvious and complete and plausible. It is obvious, because what else could possibly serve as a precursor to the trunk? It couldn’t have been a tongue or an eye or anything crazy like that! Besides, it’s attached to the face right in the place where the nose would ordinarily be. Just put, say, a human nose on an elephant in your imagination – will not the resulting animal look reasonable and not at all absurd? No, it clearly had to be the nose.

It is complete, because the trunk’s evolution must have been exceedingly simple. The nose of some primordial mammal got longer and longer, becoming more and more useful in the process (perhaps, as Dawkins allows, for different purposes), until it ended up as a trunk. Yes, but what of the fact that it is “[e]quipped with fifty thousand muscles and controlled by a brain to match such complexity” (Ibid.)? Ah, who cares, evolution is so darn clever, it brings tears to my eyes as I marvel at its powers.

It’s plausible, because, surely, only religious fanatics believe that it is necessary to determine the specified complexity of biological systems and organs in order to infer whether they have most probably come about by chance and necessity or by design. Dawkins sees no need to back up his claims. He is committed to evolution, set in his ways, and no stinkin’ irreducible complexity, tight integration of parts, minimal function, and other like engineering concepts are going to shake his contentment as an “intellectually fulfilled atheist.”

Here are a few additional problems dealing with the (possible) evolution of the trunk.

1. Why have only elephants evolved the trunk, given its obvious usefulness? Dawkins would probably say that it was the most efficient tool given all the other physical properties of the elephant (such as its size). Further, the trunk would be inefficient for any other animal. But verifying whether these statements are true requires some real in-depth investigation which will use the principles of biology, anatomy, physics, and engineering. Questions such as “In what ways would a Malayan tapir have to change overall if it were to develop a trunk, and would such a creature be competitive in its present (or any) environment?” would need to be answered. If such work has not been done, then it is possible for a theist to say that the reason why no other animal has a trunk is not that it would be evolutionary suicide but that such animals have simply not been created.

   Alternatively, Dawkins could say that elephants filled an ecological niche. But surely, other niches have always been available for animals with trunks. If not, let Dawkins demonstrate it. (Yes, the burden of proof is on him; I’m not the one writing books promoting my pet theory.)

2. Darwinists always tell us that how the first lifeforms came into being is irrelevant to the problems of evolution. Why, then, could God (let’s say) not have made elephants first and then left them to evolve into proboscis monkeys and elephant seals, in part by having their trunks shrink until they turned into noses? Further, suppose that God did not create elephants but rather started out with single-celled organisms. Then it may be argued that a thing has to be short before it gets long, not vice versa. But one can easily imagine a snake (or something like that) somehow slowly developing an elephant body and turning into a trunk. How is that less plausible than Dawkins’s scenario?
3. According to Dawkins, “there must have been a smooth, gradual succession of steadily longer noses, a sliding gradient of thickening muscles and more intricately dissected nerves.” (Ibid.) First, this begs the question of whether “a smooth, gradual succession” could, indeed, occur. For goodness’ sake, if you want to neutralize ID theorists, just show that the trunk has low specified complexity, and the doubters will be convinced. Second, the trunk is different from any nose not by degree by in kind. It
   

   can wrench and push with tonnes of force. Yet, at the same time it is capable of performing the most delicate operations such as plucking a small seed-pop to pop in the mouth. This versatile organ is a siphon capable of holding four litres of water to be drunk or sprayed over the body, as an extended finger and as a trumpet or loud speaker. The trunk has social functions, too… (Ibid.)

   Of course, Dawkins can argue that changes in kind can occur as a result of numerous small changes in degree. But that means that the trunk’s intermediate stages in the course of its evolution had to be useful, too. Dawkins falls back onto the idea that “[e]arly elongation could have provided an advantage that had nothing to do with picking up objects.” Like what? I think that our author should be required to do better than simply tell an extremely incomplete just-so story.

The moral seems to be that Dawkins’s ruminations are quite useless for understanding how the trunk actually came about.

Here is Plantinga’s review. And here is Littlejohn’s commentary.

First, I don’t find Plantinga’s style to be grating; quite the contrary, I think it’s delightful. I’ve addressed the compatibility of simplicity and intelligence in the previous post. So that should alleviate some of Littlejohn’s distress.

I’ve also enjoyed Plantinga’s precious refutation of God’s complexity according to Dawkins’s own definition:

According to his definition (set out in The Blind Watchmaker), something is complex if it has parts that are “arranged in a way that is unlikely to have arisen by chance alone.” But of course God isn’t a material object at all and hence has no parts. God is a spirit, an immaterial spiritual being, and therefore has no parts at all. A fortiori (as philosophers like to say) God doesn’t have parts arranged in ways unlikely to have arisen by chance. Therefore, given the definition of complexity Dawkins himself proposes, God is not complex.

Unfortunately, I have to end this post by being somewhat critical of Plantinga: I’m not sure that “According to classical theism, God is a necessary being; it is not so much as possible that there should be no such person as God; he exists in all possible worlds.” I think that that is actually a fairly modern refinement, reminiscent of the modal ontological argument. When Aquinas, for example, says that God is (absolutely) necessary, he means that God is imperishable – that He does not go out of existence. He does not go so far as to say that God exists in all possible worlds. But He may, for no matter the world we can imagine, it cannot but be incomplete and therefore stand in need of God.

I am also uncertain of Plantinga’s counter-argument about fine-tuning. The in itself improbable fine-tuning of our universe, which he labels alpha, is explained by it being one of countless others; the existence of humans in alpha is explained by its being fine-tuned, not, as Plantinga seems to think, the other way around. But maybe I don’t quite grasp his reasoning.

Our author writes:

Any Designer capable of construcing the dazzling array of living things would have to be intelligent ad complicated beyond all imagining. And complicated is just another word for improbable – and therefore demanding of explanation. A theologian who repostes that his god is sublimely simple has (not very) neatly evaded the issue, for a sufficiently simple god, whatever other virtues he might have, would be too simple to be capable of designing a universe (to say nothing of forgiving sins, answering prayers, blessing unions, transubstantiating wine, and many other achievements variously expected of him.) You cannot have it both ways. Either your god is capable of designing worlds and doing all the other godlike things, in which case he needs an explanation in his own right. Or he is not, in which case he cannot provide an explanation. (Climbing Mount Improbable, 77)

I am going to be charitable and not presume that Dawkins’s error is simple, no pun intended, equivocation. “Simple” can mean, among other things, either “not composite” or “mentally retarded.” God is, indeed, simple in the first sense as Dawkins allows, but He is not thereby made stupid. Furthermore, infinity and omniscience are not only compatible with absolute simplicity; they follow from it. How?

Aquinas writes, summarizing ST, I, 3, 1-6: “For there is neither composition of quantitative parts in God, since He is not a body; nor composition of matter and form; nor does His nature differ from His ’suppositum’; nor His essence from His existence; neither is there in Him composition of genus and difference, nor of subject and accident.” (I, 3, 7) Let’s go through these one by one.

1. That God is not a body means that he is not constrained by any physical shape. He is not confined to a particular spatial location or to any particular point in time. Nor is He bound by any laws of nature of the physical universe.
2. That He is pure form means that this form, God, is not contracted into any parcel of matter; nor is matter, which is potential to many forms bound to a particular form.
3. That the individual God is His own nature, that is, that God is divinity, means that God is not defined, and therefore limited, by any nature separate from Him, as humans, for example, are defined by their nature, humanity. The concrete in God is the same as the abstract; the particular, the same as the universal.
4. That God’s essence is His existence means that God’s being does not subsist in a given nature, again, being thereby limited by it. On the contrary, God is being itself subsisting in itself, and bounded by nothing.
5. That in God there is no composition of genus and difference means that God, being the principle of all being, is also the principle of all genera and is not reducible to (or contained in) any particular one.

These seem to cover all the ways in which God can be limited. And if God is not limited, then He is unlimited and infinite.

From God’s infinity we can infer the fact that God possesses great, perhaps perfect, knowledge. Aquinas does it by pointing out that “intelligent beings are distinguished from non-intelligent beings in that the latter possess only their own form; whereas the intelligent being is naturally adapted to have also the form of some other thing; for the idea of the thing known is in the knower. Hence it is manifest that the nature of a non-intelligent being is more contracted and limited; whereas the nature of intelligent beings has a greater amplitude and extension… But sense is cognitive because it can receive images free from matter, and the intellect is still further cognitive, because it is more separated from matter and unmixed… Since therefore God is in the highest degree of immateriality…, it follows that He occupies the highest place in knowledge.” (I, 14, 1) So, the logic is as follows:

1. God is immaterial (from I, 3, 1-2).
2. God is simple, infinite, and self-existing (from I, 3; I, 7, 1; I, 3, 4).
3. God is intelligent (because since human souls are intelligent, a fortiori, so is God’s infinite spirit).
4. God is supremely immaterial (the human intellect abstracts the immaterial “cupness” from this cup and that cup; the knowledge in the divine intellect, which is God’s essence itself, is not abstracted in this manner but is rather the cause of both cupness and this cup. It would seem that a thing is either material or not, but we can meaningfully say that God’s intellect’s immateriality is higher than human intellect’s, because God’s intellect and what it sees in itself are one and the same thing, and they do not depend on the existence of material things at all, being immaterial wholly of themselves.).
5. God is supremely intelligent (from (b) and (d)).

So, Dawkins is wrong to associate simplicity with primitiveness. He may be mistaken, because he confuses the simplicity of God with the simplicity of chemical elements, elementary particles, and, ultimately, “prime matter.” I will give a programming analogy: Two classes in OOP differ by their properties, methods, and so forth, but each property is simple and does not differ from other properties yet is nevertheless distinct from them. So two properties in an exemplar form are distinct because they occupy different “memory locations” in God’s celestial computer and mean different things. Of course, God and prime matter cannot be distinct in this manner; rather they are distinct as a (spiritually simple) programmer is distinct from a (materially simple) main memory location of a turned off computer. Prime matter objects, perhaps the physisist’s “strings,” are simple as the most primitive building blocks of all matter; God’s simplicity is the perfect unification of all great-making properties into an unlimited “One.”

But does not the fact that God knows many things mean that He cannot be simple? No more than Dawkins’s extensive knowledge of biology means that his mind is somehow composed of that knowledge. (Of course, God’s self-knowledge is His substance, but all truths are in God in a “natural unity.”) Dawkins’s own intellect is a unified single entity, Hume’s idea that “our attributions of identity result only from the easy transition of the mind from one perception to another” (Stroud, Hume, 122) notwithstanding, and the knowledge it possesses does not obviate its identity or relative simplicity.

More to the point, the perfecton of God’s knowledge consists not insignificantly in knowing how His own perfections can be imitated by or participated in by or communicated to creatures. In effect, God conceives of His essence getting “morphed” and lowered into the finitude of created things (as well as merely possible things) in every imaginable way. God knows “things other than Himself by His essence, as being the likeness of things, or as their active principle.” (I, 14, 11) Therefore it is no offense to God’s simplicity that He should know many things and have many ideas (exemplar forms) of created things through Himself.

In short, then, God’s simplicity is part of His perfection. Dawkins’s concerns are thereby addressed.

Oh come now, dude.

1. These do not have high specified complexity, nor are they irreducibly complex.
2. They are not molecular machines, biochemical robots, or complex systems, like the flagellum or the blood clotting cascade; they have no moving parts; nor do they perform any function whatsoever.
3. No matter how much they “evolve,” they still remain trees; they do not turn into, say, cyclic graphs.
4. The original tree, which, again, is of no greater sophistication than any evolved structure, is given as initial data. But where is it supposed to come from?
5. The “large” changes we see in the pictures are indeed cumulatively many small changes; this does not prove that all biological systems can be made in this fashion, or even that any can. How does Dawkins know that his computer simulation is in any way at all analogous to the real thing?
6. Dawkins writes: “The [evolved] biomorphs… seem to me to resemble wasps, butterflies, spiders, scorpions, flatworms, lice, and other ‘creatures’ that look vaguely biological…” (Climbing Mount Improbable, 32). Is he serious? These are pictures of tree-like structures bent an folded in various shapes. The leg of a wasp is not a segment of ink on paper. Nor is a wasp internally structured like a tree. The “resemblance” has, of course, no significance.

So, just as you can smoothly morph a torus into a teacup, you can morph one tree into another which will look rather unlike it. I don’t see, however, what that is supposed to demonstrate.

I am reading Dawkins’s Climbing Mount Improbable, and on p. 6 he says, commenting on the merely apparent design of some natural rock formation, that “the human brain seems actively eager to see faces: it seeks them out.” I’ve suddenly come to appreciate Victor Reppert’s quip: “Sometimes when people talk about what the brain does I want to say ‘Interesting fellow, Mr. Brain. Remarkable what he can do.’”

Bayes’s Theorem tells us how to revise our beliefs in light of new evidence. It looks as follows:

           P(B|A) x P(C|A.B)
P(B|A.C) = -----------------
                P(C|A)

This theorem can be used to test the probability of a hypothesis given some evidence for it. In this case we reformulate it in this way (K which stands for “background knowledge” is omitted for the sake of simplicity):

         P(H) x P(E|H)
P(H|E) = -------------
             P(E)

P(H) is called prior probability or probability without taking E into account; P(E|H) is called likelihood or the probability that E would obtain given H; P(E) is called expectedness; and P(H|E) is called posterior probability or the probability after the evidence has come in. The higher P(H) is, the more likely the H|E is; similarly, the less we expect E or, put differently, the more we are surprised by E, the greater the chance that H|E will hold. Since we tailor the hypothesis to fit the evidence, P(E|H) is often 1 or close to 1.

Victor Reppert has written a considerable amount on the argument from desire, and the idea is that P(desire for God | theism) is fairly high, because it is not unreasonable to expect that we would long for heaven if the Christian God exists. At the same time P(desire) is low, because God and heaven are certainly hidden from view, so much so that not everyone is convinced of their very existence. It is quite surprising that we long to transcend this world and ourselves. Surely, no other animal does so. Why on earth would we discover such a phenomenon within ourselves? One could try to develop some kind of an evolutionary story of how a desire for God has arisen in us, but any such attempt would be forced, in my view. Hence P(T|D) > P(T), and thus D (desire) provides evidence for theism.

I have expressed an opinion that God is not limited by logic, because His knowledge is intutive and perfect and therefore God stands in no need of performing logical inferences. Thus, we from A → B, A deduce B, but God knows all three of A → B, A, and B and does not have to engage in such deductive reasoning. On the other hand, God knows the proposition “B follows from from A → B, A deductively.” So, God knows logic, and His knowledge is rational, such that He is aware of all logical, causal, mathematical, synthetic a priori and other relations between entities. He knows it but does not use it.

Moreover, logical truths are necessary and apply to all the possible worlds which God knows through Himself; hence God must necessarily know logic (of course, it would be enough if logic governed even a single possible world). But that does not negate what seems to me the fact of God’s essence itself being beyond logic. In defense of this thesis, I might as well do something normally abhorrent to me and wax mystical:

[The Cause of all] is not soul or mind, nor does it possess imagination, conviction, speech, or understanding. Nor is it speech per se, understanding per se. It cannot be spoken of and it cannot be grasped by understanding. It is not number or order, greatness or smallness, equality or inequality, similarity or dissimilarity. It is not immovable, moving or at rest. It has no power, it is not power, nor is it light. It does not live nor is it life. It is not a substance, nor is it eternity or time. It cannot be grasped by the understanding since it is neither one nor oneness, divinity nor goodness. Nor is it a spirit, in the sense in which we understand that term. It is not sonship or fatherhood and it is nothing known to us or to any other being. It falls neither within the predicate of nonbeing nor of being. Existing beings do not know it as it actually is and it does not know them as they are. There is no speaking of it, nor name nor knowledge of it. Darkness and light, error and truth – it is none of these. It is beyond assertion and denial. We make assertions and denials of what is next to it, but never of it, for it is both beyond every assertion, being the perfect and unique cause of all things, and, by virtue its preeminently simple and absolute nature, free of every limitation, beyond every limitation; it is also beyond every denial. (Pseudo-Dionysius, The Mystical Theology)

C.S. Lewis writes:

Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for these desires exists. A baby feels hunger; well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim; well, there is such a thing as water. Men feel sexual desire; well, there is such a thing as sex. If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. (Mere Christianity, Bk. III, Chap. 10, “Hope”)

I will marshal three objections to this argument and suggest possible replies for the first two. The first objection simply notices that I may feel thirst, as natural a desire as any, yet be in the middle of the desert dying precisely of thirst. So, water may be unavailable to me even though I may desire it. Moreover, suppose a baby is born in the desert and is left to die there. It will never in its life taste water at all. Now it will be objected, of course, that water must still exist somewhere and in relative abundance; otherwise there would be no living creatures at all. But in that case, God, too, may exist somewhere, but be inaccessible to us in certain situations for one reason or another. Some people may reach Him quickly, others after a long period of struggle; still others not at all. Perhaps only an elect group of supermen can reach Him, who knows? Worse, He might have completely abandoned us to our own devices. Before this argument can work, theories of grace, election, predestination, and the like need to be worked out. It would appear that Lewis simply wants to prove too much.

Second, Lewis’ premises imply a distinction between “natural” and “artificial” desires. This distinction is illusory. It is just as “natural” to walk from point A to point B as it is to desire to get to your destination much quicker, which means desiring to travel by car or airplane. It is just as natural to want sex as it is to wear beautiful clothing to look sexy. Or to desire the knowledge of the terrain in which you find yourself as the knowledge of computer programming. As Mises writes:

Choosing determines all human decisions. In making his choice man chooses not only between various material things and services. All human values are offered for option. All ends and all means, both material and ideal issues, the sublime and the base, the noble and the ignoble, are ranged in a single row and subjected to a decision which picks out one thing and sets aside another. Nothing that men aim at or want to avoid remains outside of this arrangement into a unique scale of gradation and preference. (Human Action, 3)

Yet neither cars nor clothing nor computers are naturally available. Again it may be objected that they are possible at least in principle. But what about a trip to the Andromeda galaxy? Or what of living for 900 years? I may want these, but it is not unreasonable to argue that such goods will be forever out of reach for humanity. It also follows oddly that God might be available only to people living in an advanced civilization; people in more primitive societies may well search for God in vain. Lewis may counter that for these desires for travel, beauty, knowledge, etc. there exist some objects which satisfy them, no matter the level of economic or technological development. He could say that God, too, is available to all people on some level, regardless of their theological sophistication, spiritual acuity, or virtue. This line of argument seems to salvage his reasoning, so far.

The final, and, I think, fatal objection is that the desire for God is not natural at all but supernatural. Yes, one can prove that God exists and learn of His attributes by reason alone. But you cannot know that God has adopted you as His child and created heaven, a place of ineffable bliss, for you as your inheritance. Only faith, hope, and charity, which are gifts from God, let you understand that. If Lewis finds in himself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, then he must have received grace which is freely given and certainly not a natural human want. It follows that one cannot reason from the existence of food for the satisfaction of natural hunger to the existence of God for the satisfaction of natural spiritual hunger. The latter in some non-religious may perhaps be satisfied by music, science, art, and who knows what else. And even if one asks, “Is that all there is?” one cannot imagine heaven without the assistance of grace.

It is true, of course, that a Christian God may certainly be inferred from a religious experience, but such an experience would not be a natural one.

Is Lewis’ argument thereby proven faulty?

Actual things – by vision, that is, intelligence united with an act of will that the thing exist. Possible things (and possible worlds) – by simple intelligence or intelligence without such willing.

Hence the difference between the actual world and the infinity of possible worlds that could have been but were not created is only that God willed the actual world in existence. It follows that God does not know more “after” creation than “before” creation, and it is in “His own essence in which all images of things are comprehended.” All this is “natural” knowledge, and it is essential to God. Moreover, there is no difference between the manner in which God knows the actual world and the manner in which He knows any possible world; God knows the actual world simply as one of the possible ones. But wait: does not He know which world is actual? Yes, but this knowledge is from eternity. The decision to create is an eternal one, and so, therefore, is the knowledge of which world to actualize. This knowledge depends on God’s will and is therefore of a contingent event, as in this event could have been otherwise than it was. (God’s knowledge of all of His causal actions vis-à-vis the actual world is also of contingent events.)

Parenthetically, it is possible that the actual world could not have been different. For God is perfectly wise and always chooses the best means to the realization of His ends. If this world is the best possible world relative to God’s ends, and if God’s ends in creating this world (e.g., total happiness, God’s own glory, and the like) could not be other than what they were, then this world was the uniquely correct one to actualize. But, on the other hand, heaven is better than earth in terms of an environment conducive to human happiness; hence God could have made (and did make) a better world. Further, He could make each creature better with respect to its accidents, such as IQ, bodily strength, wisdom, etc. I am not sure whether He could make creatures essentially superior to men and angels, but my guess is that He could not, for we are made in God’s own image and likeness.

First, it will be useful to establish that God’s knowledge is intuitive not discursive. “Intuitive” means “all at the same ‘time’.” God does not reason from A to B to C, either logically or causally; He knows A, B, and C, and the relations between them all at once. “God sees all things in one (thing), which is Himself. Therefore God sees all things together, and not successively. … Now the term discursive reasoning is attained when the second is seen in the first, by resolving the effects into their causes; and then the discursion ceases. Hence as God sees His effects in Himself as their cause, His knowledge is not discursive.” (ST, I, 14, 7)

That is why God does not need logic. Logic is a means for deriving conclusions from premises, salve veritate. God does not need to do that in Himself, because He is a simple unity, and He sees Himself with perfect clarity; God does not need to do that in relation to the world, because He already knows all the premises and conclusions and how they are related, including logically related, with each other by seeing them in Himself. In the latter case God knows logic, but only in order to deal with His creation. Logic depends on the logical structure of the human mind. God does not need logic in order to be Himself.

In other words, God does not need logic in His own inner life. If God had never created, but remained alone as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, then He would not need logic in order to be God. Logic was created along with the world which is diverse not simple and has multiplicity of things rather than being a perfect unity, and along with human beings. (A similar problem is this: since God is one, and the Trinity is three, does it mean that mathematics and numbers are prior to God and in a way define Him? No, because the “one” that we are talking about, at least, is convertible with “being,” and yet for our comprehension we have to ascribe a sort of privation to God by saying that He is a unity.)

Again, logic is a means for discursive reasoning. It’s a procedure for discovery of truths. It gets us validly from one true proposition to another. God does not need to engage in such reasoning, proceeding logically from the known to the unknown, because His knowledge is intuitive, “discerning all things directly in its own light” (Hodge, Outlines of Theology, 144). It is independent, such that it is the cause of things, unlike us for whom things are the cause of our knowledge of them. God’s knowledge is “total and simultaneous, not successive. It is one single, indivisible act of intuition, beholding all things in themselves, their relations and successions, as ever present.” (Ibid., 145) God is not bound by human logic, because He does not require it.

On the other hand, in reasoning about God, logic is indispensable. We cannot say that God is eternal and at the same time not eternal.

I should probably mention the obvious fact that intuitive knowledge is superior to discursive knowledge.

There is the idea that as human power over nature grows, our need for God will be progressively lessened. Richard Feynman put it this way:

God was invented to explain mystery. God is always invented to explain those things that you do not understand. Now, when you finally discover how something works, you get some laws which you’re taking away from God; you don’t need him anymore. But you need him for the other mysteries. So therefore you leave him to create the universe because we haven’t figured that out yet; you need him for understanding those things which you don’t believe the laws will explain, such as consciousness, or why you only live to a certain length of time – life and death – stuff like that. God is always associated with those things that you do not understand. (quoted in Superstrings: A Theory of Everything, Paul C. W. Davies and Julian R. Brown eds.)

There are many problems with this view. First, as social cooperation advances to include into the division of labor the entire world, the contribution to general welfare of each individual becomes less and less significant. Each person becomes ever more specialized. (By this I do not, of course, mean that, for example, an individual entrepreneur or a scientific genius is replaceable. Remove the top 1% of human achievers and we will promptly slide back into Stone Age.) Hence, even if collectively human power over nature increases, the corresponding power of each individual diminishes. It is true that each individual benefits from social cooperation, because by supplying something valuable to other agents on the market he can in turn demand a variety of good and services, thereby causing others to work for him. And this is a kind of power. But one’s intrinsic mastery over the world nonetheless decreases with progress. Therefore, the point stands: renaissance men are a thing of the past. It follows that each individual today is uniquely helpless without his fellow men and may therefore “need” and depend on God (as a guardian not only of souls but of civilizations) more than he might have in times long gone.

The same argument applies to scientists who must nowadays heavily specialize, as well. Yet in God there is all truth.

Second, with the intensification of social cooperation it becomes ever more important for men to adjust their conduct to the requirements of morality, lest society be destroyed. Wars, civil wars, violent revolutions are incompatible with capitalism and its corollary, the ever improving standard of living. Ever deadlier weapons require correspondingly ever greater self-restraint. New technologies create new temptations, resulting in new snares laid out for men, such as might be, e.g., an addiction to video games or human procreation techniques that cannot be used morally. At the same time, many old snares do not disappear, as human nature and its virtues and vices remain forever the same. Hence, to the extent that belief in God promotes ethical behavior, God will again be “needed” more than ever before.

It might be objected here that with proper incentives, given a libertarian society, self-interested actions resulting in social benefits will to an extent supplant what was previously the domain of charity. E.g., Mises writes: “The liberal is convinced that victorious war is an evil even for the victor, that peace is always better than war. He demands no sacrifice from the stronger, but only that he should come to realize where his true interests lie and should learn to understand that peace is for him, the stronger, just as advantageous as it is for the weaker.” (Liberalism, 24) I’ll make two remarks here. First, in the short-run theft may be preferable to some to honest toil. Second, the establishment and preservation of a free society on which civilization depends is itself a work of mercy. Life, liberty, and property do not defend themselves.

Third, as Mises writes, human action “can never bring full satisfaction; it merely gives for an evanescent instant a partial removal of uneasiness. As soon as one want is satisfied, new wants spring up and ask for satisfaction. Civilization, it is said, makes people poorer, because it multiplies their wishes and does not soothe, but kindles, desires.” (Human Action, 881) So, increased power over the world will not make human beings more content with what they have. Therefore, the need for God need not diminish. (I realize, of course, that the desire for God is different in kind from the desire for a toaster. It is still true, however, that human wants are unlimited, and indifference to God will not come from having all of one’s “selfish” ends met.)

Fourth, as Philip Wicksteed writes, “a man can be neither a saint, nor a lover, nor a poet, unless he has comparatively recently had something to eat.” Or, as Mises points out correctly, “Wisdom and science and the arts thrive better in a world of affluence than among needy peoples.” (Human Action, 155) Capitalism, by freeing people from the necessity to engage in backbreaking labor during most of their waking hours, has given many people the time and leisure necessary to study such arcane disciplines as philosophy and theology, thereby making the knowledge of God available to the common man. Consequently, we should expect greater interest in God in a prosperous and technologically advanced society than in a poor one.

Fifth, life in an advanced society is only slightly less precarious than it is in a primitive one. It is true that social cooperation is now much more resilient to local disasters, but individuals are not. The dangers are different, but they are still present, and death claims victory against everyone anyway. “Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature,” Pascal writes in Pensées, and man remains this way despite all attempts to use his “thinking” power to make his life less sorrowful.

Sixth, although we pray “Thy will be done, On earth as it is in heaven,” and science and technology are means to the realization of this prayer, earth will never be like heaven, where “He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.” (Rev 21:4) Clearly, heavenly bliss far exceeds earthly pleasures, no matter how successfully nature is subdued and is made to serve man.

Furthermore, the limitations of this world are not, as Feynman’s optimistic outlook would have it, naturally transcendable; metaphysical evil is real. Scarcity of resources, of time, limits to technology and human cognitive capacity can never go away. Omnipotence is denied to men by their nature and the nature of the world. This does not, of course, tell us whether an omnipotent God exists to “compensate” for the human weakness. But it does provide a cogent reality check as to how much we can “take away” from God.

With respect now to speculative knowledge, natural laws are fine and good, but everywhere we encounter ultimate givens, things which we are unable to subject to further analysis. Likewise, it is vain to contemplate, as Feynman is forced to, the coming into being of the universe uncaused, from “nothing,” the state of no-space, no-time, no-physical laws, no-initial conditions, and even no-basis for randomness. At these and other like points science stops and metaphysics begins.

Seventh, advances in science (such as the Big Bang cosmology or the intelligent design theories) and philosophy may bring to light new evidence for the existence of God, as well as result in better understanding of God’s attributes and of His works.

Finally, contra Feynman, God is not an ad hoc gap-plugger in our theories. His existence can be deduced from His effects, by observing the world and ourselves. Regardless of the state of our scientific knowledge, the universe will remain fundamentally incomplete and require a transcendent God in order to satisfy our wonder. Nor is God a substitute for knowledge, keeping men content with their ignorance of natural causes. On the contrary, “for perfect happiness the intellect needs to reach the very Essence of the First Cause” (ST, II-I, 3, 8) which is God. If it is argued that we might shamelessly seek to explain things we do not understand by saying that “God did it,” then the answer is that we need to decide whether or not God, in fact, “did it” on a case-by-case basis. Some (a lot of) things are due to nature, others to chance, and still others to intelligent action. And in the latter case the intelligence in question may well be God’s.

Conclusion. Neither economic nor technological nor scientific progress is to blame for a falling attendance rate at your local church.