Dmitry Chernikov’s Blog

Eller admits that relativism, understood as the claim that “all judgments and values come from some particular point of view,” is a “danger,” because “this awareness is inimical to believing in your own man-made environment: if we know that we just made it up ourselves, it has no special or exclusive claim to our credulity or affection. ‘Why this and not that?’ is the perpetual response of relativism to any specific nonrational appeal to our attention and commitment.” (Natural Atheism, 328) How much like Robert Nozick’s ruminations on the meaning of life this is! (I comment on him here and here.) This is exactly what happens when the divine “I am,” whose Being and Light are everywhere and which calls for our “attention and commitment” from no matter which perspective we find ourselves in, is done away with (or replaced, at best, with “I think, therefore I am.”). I don’t envy Eller. But I let him be as he prefers matters.

Our author’s main point is that immersion into the study of anthropology leads one to accept cultural relativism, and that, in turn, makes one into a freethinker. In what follows I will try to discern the connections, if any, between these three things.

Cultural relativism, in Eller’s understanding, “does not maintain that ‘anything goes’ but merely reports that this goes here and that goes there.” If that were all, then cultural relativism would be a science describing different individuals and cultures. Relativism would be anthropology. But that is a strange definition of relativism. And, of course, Eller thinks nothing of contradicting himself in the next paragraph: “we must abandon the notion of absolute morality” (Natural Atheism, 109), getting closer to the dictionary definition of this term: “the view that ethical and moral standards are relative to what a particular society or culture believes to be good/bad, right/wrong.” In his example of the debate within the Catholic church on the status of Indians soon after the discovery of America, Eller writes that neither those who considered them subhuman nor those who considered them fully human but cared only about converting them to Christianity “considered the relativistic option — to learn from and about them, to tolerate their difference, and to leave them alone.” (116) Our author does not take his own doctrine seriously. It was part of the Western culture at that time to be imperialistic. Who is he to judge that culture? If a culture is intent upon razing and pillaging, that is just its peculiar feature and our response should be “to learn from and about them.” (Learn what? How better to raze and pillage?)

And what does it mean, “to leave them alone”? Is our author against miscegenation, whether of blood or ideas? Must no culture influence another? Must there be no intercourse, whether of commerce, travel, science, etc., between cultures? But if this idea is absurd, then why is it wrong for a person to become a missionary and work within foreign cultures to convert folks there to Christianity? It seems like an eminently peaceful occupation. Eller objects: “Few if any American missionaries ever arranged debates with Indian tribal leaders; instead they threatened them with hell, rewarded or punished them with material goods, and coerced them with military power.” (126) Has it occurred to our author that Indian tribes were unprepared for formal disputations? How many professors even today in the academia are so prepared? And anyway, this is an objection to the means by which conversion was effected, not to the end of conversion itself.

Eller finally cannot completely divorce himself from the natural law. Traditional cultures range “from the happy to the miserable, from the peaceful to the warlike.” (118) Could it be that those cultures are happy because they are in some sense better than those cultures that are miserable? Mises clearly has done his homework on this issue:

The Asiatics and the Africans no less than the peoples of European descent have been eager to struggle successfully for survival and to use reason as the foremost weapon in these endeavors. They have sought to get rid of the beasts of prey and of disease, to prevent famines and to raise the productivity of labor. There can be no doubt that in the pursuit of these aims they have been less successful than the whites. The proof is that they are eager to profit from all achievements of the West. Those ethnologists would be right, if Mongols or Africans, tormented by a painful disease, were to renounce the aid of a European doctor because their mentality or their world view led them to believe that it is better to suffer than to be relieved of pain. Mahatma Gandhi disavowed his whole philosophy when he entered a modern hospital to be treated for appendicitis.

The North American Indians lacked the ingenuity to invent the wheel. The inhabitants of the Alps were not keen enough to construct skis which would have rendered their hard life much more agreeable. Such shortcomings were not due to a mentality different from those of the races which had long since used wheels and skis; they were failures, even when judged from the point of view of the Indians and the Alpine mountaineers. (Human Action, 84ff)

There have been spiritual failures, as well, to come up with a half-decent religion. Even if we assume for the sake of argument that relativism is true, religion is far more than morality. It is a set of articles of faith; it is theocentric work; it is many other things. It can co-exist with a variety of moral theories, intuitions, and rules. Eller reports that he spent two years among Australian aboriginals, “trying to speak their language, eat their food, practice their culture, and enter their universe of meaning and action.” What he failed to grasp, unfortunately, was that his own ideals of unbiased scholarly work were part of his own Western culture and were not shared by his subjects. Even if he was genuinely attempting to try their “cultural glasses” on and “’see’ or think or understand as those others do,” (111) it was he who was studying them; they did not study him, a fact which demonstrates his own superiority as clearly as day.

It is true that every person is born into some family, community, and state. These affect his development from child to adult. But they do not determine his development. Eller writes of religious experiences: “even for the subject, the experience is mere raw data; if I hear a voice, how do I know that it is the voice of God? It could be the voice of Allah, Vishnu, Buddha, Satan, or my cat; each is equally (un)likely.” (43) Cultural influences are, too, mere raw data. Everyone, according to the principle of methodological individualism, once he attains the age of reason, decides for himself which culture he wants to belong to. Logically then, we must speak of individual relativism; indeed, culture always changes in response to new ideas and actions of individual human beings. Culture is not an independent unit of analysis; the individual is. Finally, if individual relativism is taken to mean that happiness is subjective, then no doubt, it’s true. If it’s taken to mean that there is no such thing as objective glory or shame, then it is false.

Eller knows that, of course. When he writes that he wishes religion would go away, is he thinking of eliminating it from his own culture or from every culture? Being a skilled anthropologist, he may not have his own culture at all. He may instead think of himself not only as an anthropological scholar but also as a doctor, a healer of cultures in the manner, perhaps, of Richard Weaver. Religion is a mass delusion, his diagnosis must run, and so every culture will benefit from its destruction. But if that’s not (individual) imperialism, I don’t know what is. Whatever happened to choosing “the relativistic option”? Again, his idea is that meeting the Other, “those who differ yet still deserve their humanity,” (128) will lead you to a more objective view of various cultures. That’s all to the good. But I fail to see why encountering other religions must convince you of the falsity of your own, and if it does so convince you, why it is contrary to reason to choose for yourself the best religion from among those you have studied rather than atheism. Just as Eller is unmoved in his beliefs by the existence of theistic cultures, neither need a Christian or a believer of any other faith be moved by the existence of Eller’s own atheistic culture.

In other words, Eller gives no evidence for his corollary claim that all religions are created equal. The idea that religions and, in particular, Christianity have no methodology to adjudicate their claims is equally unfounded. The methodologies are as diverse as God’s influence in the world: in nature — metaphysics, ethics, psychology, praxeology, cosmology; in grace — biology, religious experience, history, archeology, Biblical interpretation; in glory — the testimonies of saints and Jesus Himself. And I’ve omitted a whole lot of other disciplines studying which can lead one to God. In principle, there are as many paths to God as there are human beings, though paths obviously intersect.

Let me further quote from an old article of mine: “I want to mention the common atheistic idea that the Christian God is equivalent to pagan gods. There is a likeness, according to Barnett, between ‘Ganesh, Jah, Yahweh, Allah, Zeus or any of the thousands of others.’ Nothing could be further from the truth. Pagan gods were within nature; they were a part of the world; the Christian God transcends the created universe. Pagan gods were subject to the same passions that humans were; the Christian God has no passions at all. Pagan gods did wicked things; the Christian God is supremely good. Pagan gods had bodies; the Christian God is a spirit. Pagan gods were not simple nor One nor perfect not timeless nor immutable nor infinite nor loving nor just nor merciful nor omniscient nor omnipotent. The Christian God is all these and more. Pagan gods were not their own existence; the Christian God is His existence. In short, there is no comparison between Yahweh and, say, Zeus. And the evidence of science and philosophy points to the Christian God and not to the gods of the Greek mythology.” Thus, at least these “gods” can be eliminated from consideration from the start, leaving monotheism as the only contender.

Thus, on the contrary, exposure to different cultures will likely result in objective improvements of one’s own. Even hardcore anthropologists need not abandon their own culture. But they may suggest and implement solutions of which other societies were a source. As both a cause and effect of that (i.e., of doing good to one’s own kin, clan, country), one’s attachment to his own culture may increase.

Conclusion. Close familiarity with other cultures and individuals need not make one into a cultural relativist, nor cause one to abandon one’s own religion or religion in general. It is certainly helpful in “freeing one’s mind” and should be required therapy for American self-absorption which has led to so many wars, but one ought not to forget what is true and false and what works and what doesn’t.

I’d like to suggest that free-will libertarianism considers the agent, the self making the choices to be an irreducible ultimate given. On the other hand, it seems compatible with libertarianism to hold that the choice is still determined in the sense that if agent P were put in circumstances C, where C is a set of fully specified circumstances including the whole history of the world up until the time of P’s free action, again and again, he would choose the same thing. As I write, “if I were put into the same situation with the same ‘me’ as I was at the moment of the choice a million times, then every time I would, assuming that there is no random element influencing our choices, reliably pick” the same course of action. In real life we can’t reproduce this experiment, because neither the circumstances now nor the person as he is now nor the random events (if any) that are now taking place will ever be repeated. We would need a set of a million possible worlds to play with, surely God’s own personal prerogative. So, can we say that libertarians are, too, determinists who, however, do not deconstruct the individual agent into, say, “nature and nurture” but consider him to be an elementary simple “particle” or cause?

I want to throw it out as a possibility that in heaven the blessed do not make choices, because there is only one good, namely, God Himself, and He perfectly satisfies every desire. The saints are not capable of not choosing God, because they are “closed up”; they are confirmed in goodness. We might also speculate that God so reveals Himself to the blessed in their contemplation of Him as “time” goes on as to maximize their happiness. So, no choosing goes on in heaven; there is no necessity to sacrifice a lesser good in order to obtain a greater one; no need to be content with the lesser of some two evils.

Now I don’t know if the picture so far painted is true; I haven’t been to heaven, but it is certainly what Aquinas suggests in ST, II-I, 1-5. This could serve as a reply to someone who objects that if there is free will in heaven, then God could have made rational creatures who would always choose good. Therefore, evil is unexplained, etc.

On the other hand, free will here is necessary for soul-making; while in heaven this process ceases and there is no more becoming but only completed being, knowledge, and enjoyment of oneself, God, and perhaps other blessed in the communion of saints.

Walk with me through this article on free will in The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

[I]f Allison is coerced into doing a morally bad act, such as stealing a car, we shouldn’t hold her morally responsible for this action since it is not an action that she did of her own free will.

Reply: Suppose that Allison is coerced under threat of death. In that case she prefers living and stealing the car to dying and not stealing the car, a perfect example of free will, i.e., the process of ranking goals which results in a value scale in Allison’s mind and heart, in uninhibited operation. She is not morally responsible not because her will was unfree but because she made a good choice by foregoing the greater crime of what would have essentially been committing suicide by refusing to obey her captors in favor of a lesser crime of stealing the car.

If Allison is brainwashed during her nap to want to walk her dog, then even if no external impediment prevents her from carrying through with this decision, we would say that her taking the dog for a walk is not a free action. … If Allison has been brainwashed to walk the dog at a certain time, then even if she were to turn on the news and sees that it is snowing, she would attempt to walk the dog despite having good reasons not to. Thus, manipulated agents are not reasons-responsive, and in virtue of this lack free will.

Reply: Suppose that Allison is somehow convinced that the news is not trustworthy and that she should believe the exact opposite of what is being reported. (Kind of like me.) She holds a false belief, but presumably, she thinks she has good grounds for it. She’s mistaken, but how does that undermine the essence of the process of choice? Choosing on the basis of bad or invalid data is still choosing. She fails to attain the ends she seeks; she fails to increase her happiness; she may even become less happy if she tries to execute an action based of false information, but she chooses quite normally.

Coercion and manipulation undermine free will, on this view, in virtue of making agents not reasons-responsive.

Reply: Coercion and manipulation do not undermine free will, as free will is part of the essence of human beings. Coercion makes you less free only in the political sense, because other human beings unjustly limit your freedom of action beyond the limit that praxeological law and the demands of social cooperation (such as other people’s private property rights) already impose on it. Manipulation and deception, as shown above, diminish your happiness not your free will.

Allison is contemplating whether to walk her dog or not. Unbeknown to Allison, her father, Lloyd, wants to insure that she does decide to walk the dog. He has therefore implanted a computer chip in her head such that if she is about to decide not to walk the dog, the chip will activate and coerce her into deciding to take the dog for a walk. Given the presence of the chip, Allison is unable not to decide to walk her dog, and she lacks the ability to do otherwise. However, Allison does decide to walk the dog on her own. …

Frankfurt concludes that Allison is morally responsible despite lacking the ability to do otherwise.

Reply: You can be morally responsible because you willed the action or rejoiced in something even if you did not bring it about. Suppose you have envied someone’s success and wished for that person’s destruction. You are guilty of the sin of envy, and this sin has all the attributes necessary to make it a sin: it’s against the natural and divine laws; it corrupts nature; it effects a debt of punishment, etc. “Anyone who hates his brother is a murderer.” (1 Jn 3:15) So, the inference that Allison is morally culpable is hardly surprising. This is because if the chip had forced her to walk the dog, she would not have wanted to do so, in which case it would have been an involuntary action, and she would not have acquired any merit or demerit for performing it.

The Origination Argument: If determinism were true, it might be true that Allison chooses to walk her dog because of her beliefs and desires, but those beliefs and desires would themselves be the inevitable products of causal chains that began millions of years ago. Thus, a determined agent is at most a source, but not the ultimate source, of her volitions. According to proponents of this sort of argument for incompatibilism, the truth of determinism would mean that agents don’t cause their actions in the kind of way needed for free will and, ultimately, moral responsibility.

Reply: It is possible that God implants a soul into every gestating fetus, e.g., one chakra after another. Thus, God creates a substance which becomes the originator of effects, the source of volitions. God remains the first cause, but the new substance retains its capacity to cause volitions and thoughts through its own power. The chain of events need not therefore go back millions of years but only to conception and birth.

The Consequence Argument: The asymmetry between past and future is illustrated by the fact that we don’t deliberate about the past in the same way that we deliberate about the future. While Allison might deliberate about whether a past action was really the best action that she could have done, she deliberates about the future in a different way. Allison can question whether her past actions were in fact the best, but she can both question what future acts would be best as well as which future acts she should perform. Thus, it looks like the future is open to Allison, or up to her, in a way that the past is not. In other words, when an agent like Allison is using her free will, what she is doing is selecting from a range of different options for the future, each of which is possible given the past and the laws of nature.

Reply: Deliberation is how plans to affect the future are formed. But it could also be that the results of any deliberation are in principle predictable (even if there is a random process acting on the atoms of the brain or something of that nature, God could still predict your decisions), given exhaustive knowledge of the person and situation.

The first locus is whether, given your value scale or your ranking of your desires, your knowledge of the means to those desires, that is, of how to satisfy them, and your power to actualize your plan of action, it is possible to predict exactly what will transpire. I think the answer to that question is “yes,” and it’s obvious and non-negotiable. Given these three things, there is no point of failure, which means that the action will be attempted, and the top ranking desire, satisfied.

The second locus is whether it is possible to predict which desire or thought will occur in you next. I write that “The soul is fitted the object, and if the object fits, the soul desires it or rejoices in it. This act of fitting is not at all random; it depends fully upon the configuration of the soul and the object whose goodness is being analyzed. In other words, I think that an omniscient God could predict our desires.” Does it indeed depend fully? The question is then, given your “nature,” by which here I mean personality, bodily make-up, etc., and your “nurture,” that is, the inputs to you sensed or reflected on, can one determine without fail what you will want or think of or do next?

In a brief conversation Victor has asked me whether the fact that Mother Theresa was virtuous and a serial killer, whose name I failed to catch, vicious was a matter of luck. Our nun had the lucky causal antecedents all the way to the Big Bang, while the killer did not.

First of all, there is such a thing as the law of human nature. You just don’t achieve happiness by (unlawfully) killing people. So, humans are self-correcting. But perhaps the killer’s self-correcting mechanism was damaged or corrupted somehow. Was that due to luck, too?

Imagine a possible world in which the serial killer reads my blog and reconsiders his choice of avocation. Surely, that’s a great thing for him and for his victims. But alas, in the real world that does not happen. Who is responsible for this outrageous waste of goodness? Seems like nobody is. How come there was no good soul who would force our potential killer to read my blog? Why else but bad luck? Finally, why didn’t God interfere? Perhaps for utilitarian reasons. I agree with Two-Face: “One man is born a hero, his brother a coward. Babies starve, politicians grow fat. Holy men are martyred, and junkies grow legion. Why? Why, why, why, why, why? Luck! Blind, stupid, simple, doo-dah, clueless luck!”

A libertarian will not be swayed. After all, we all feel free. Any defense of determinism, no matter how unimpeachable, must be wrong. For example, he will say, it is true that the circumstances we find ourselves in and our natural endowments are often a matter of luck. But our responses to those are due to choice. I couldn’t agree more:

[F]ree will is contrasted with the will as that which chooses is contrasted with that which loves, desire, and enjoys. Thus, free-will adds something to will, namely the fact that not all desires can be satisfied and therefore desires have to and can be ranked according to urgency or subjective importance.

I regard the will as an intellectual appetite which either desires something as examined by the power of judgment or enjoys something already obtained. Free-will, in contrast with the will, is the power of choice. If I desire x, that which desires is the will; but that which chooses (the pursuit of) x while setting aside y and z is the free will. But both will and free will are the same power. Now what causes a man to will something? Who knows? And who cares? We all desire different things somehow and for some reason.

Suppose that I ponder choosing between x, y, z, and w, and pick x. This process of contemplating alternatives and introspecting the utility of each alternative is the process of choice, during which freedom of the will is made manifest. But given my value scale, as well as my beliefs and powers, I would choose the same every time. In other words, if I were put into the same situation with the same “me” as I was at the moment of the choice a million times, then every time I would, assuming that there is no random element influencing our choices, reliably pick x.

If I’m wrong, I sure don’t understand why.

He is not a political libertarian which I am, but he is a free-will libertarian which I am not. I’ve posted on the latter subject before:

• What Is Free Will?
• Hartshorne, Chance, and Freedom
• “Could Have Done Otherwise”?

But how can we reconcile compatibilism with moral responsibility? Now responsibility is a Guardian notion, such that wrongful actions involve “a rebellion against or flouting the correct values or, put simply, the good. Punishment puts the offender in his place and reestablishes the proper hierarchy or order of the universe with the good triumphant and evil thwarted and despised.” A guilty person has illicitly appropriated to himself some goods or happiness. Right demands that this happiness be taken away from him and then some. No one is to be allowed to defy the law and get away with some (alleged) benefit. That’s in the case of punishment. There is also the reward for respecting the good, and that is glory, whether human or divine. (So, Jesus, for example, warns us about seeking glory with men: “they have received their reward in full. But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving may be in secret. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.” (Mt 6:2-4) Morality works with both human and the divine laws.) In between there is innocence which gets you nothing.

As I pointed out before, Guardian morality is social in nature. Therefore, punishment or reward for breaking or obeying the law respectively can be given regardless of whether one’s choices are determined or not. The proper hierarchy of morally righteous individuals can be maintained and is maintained by Guardian gatekeepers, even if one’s place in the scheme of things is determined by one’s nature, personality, and external stimuli. The same reasoning is used in the Rational morality, also social: whether or not our choices are determined, people respond to incentives — they are “rational” (to use that word in its ugly neoclassical economic sense) — and so deterring or encouraging behavior will “work,” i.e., affect behavior in some desired way, even if that behavior has a sufficient cause. (In other words, incentives are part of the sufficient cause.)

Even considering an individualist morality, such as that of Idealists, we see that even if one is not technically responsible for his character, good men can be recognized, and evil men forgotten.

The appeal of free-will libertarianism as far as moral responsibility is concerned lies in the apparent legitimacy of exclamations such as: “You bastard! How could you do that?!” and a subsequent response “I’m sorry! I was stupid/weak/malicious!” If moral responsibility is to be interpreted along the lines given here, why is the guy sorry? After all, he did what he did, and he could do nothing else. But why not consider “You bastard!” to be a judgment of the lawfulness of the person’s past actions (by a Guardian) or of his character flaws and a recognition that it is possible for him to get better (by an Idealist)? There is something a person ought to do or be yet falls short of it. What is condemned are the actions and the gap, not the person. We all know about hating the sin yet loving the sinner. “You bastard!” therefore does not mean “I hate you!,” though we may properly show contempt to an evil person. It means, in the case of Guardians, “You have misappropriated happiness and are therefore being thrust low in the moral hierarchy.” Or, in the case of Idealists, “Your have corrupted your habits still further.”

Now Aquinas considers ignorance to be at the same time (1) a cause of sin, (2) a vice, and (3) an excuse for sinning (if not negligent). (ST, II-I, 76) But if ignorance, then why not also weakness and malice? It is arbitrary to exclude them from the list of causes/vices/excuses. How to remove this tension? Simply by accepting determinism and saying that (a) you couldn’t do otherwise (and are therefore excused), and yet (b) you are still, for example, an evil and worthless son of a bitch (and are therefore condemned). You can judge the goodness (or lack thereof) of a thing, an action, etc. regardless of how that goodness came about. What a thing is and how it was generated are two entirely different questions which must not be confused with one another.

A final objection. Isn’t self-making undermined given the theory propounded here? I think God’s project is to produce individuals who reflect His nature in numerous kinds of ways. A common humanity, a beginning of personality and inborn traits (such as, indeed, temperament), and external and internal stimuli, keys the soul’s lock, responses to which are continuously tested as to how well they promote the agent’s happiness, are what make us what we are. And to these must be added God’s direct intelligent design of the soul in the form of grace. And these produce the requisite variety of human beings. “Moral responsibility” is simply not in the picture.

I have indicated what I mean by transcendentals here. However, I failed to realize at that time that the 4 transcendentals, though they indeed correspond to the 4 temperaments, do not nevertheless take their character from the 4 moral virtues. Instead, they are aspects of wisdom. In fact, all three of the intellectual virtues — wisdom, as well as knowledge and understanding — are quadriform. This insight solves the problem of how the same virtues can be had by persons of every temperament. It is not just the NT Rationals who get to be scientists but Guardians, Artisans, and Idealists, as well — in their own way.

Knowledge is divided as follows:

Understanding — and here we get to the unexplored 2/3 of epistemology; so we are in uncharted waters — can be divided in this manner:

Of the Artisan understanding Mises has written: “The understanding establishes the fact that an individual or a group of individuals have engaged in a definite action emanating from definite value judgments and choices and aiming at definite ends, and that they have applied for the attainment of these ends definite means suggested by definite technological, therapeutical, and praxeological doctrines. It furthermore tries to appreciate the effects and the intensity of the effects brought about by an action; it tries to assign to every action its relevance, i.e., its bearing upon the course of events.” (Human Action, 50) Artisan understanding is a “sense” of what is or was going on.

The Guardian understanding is a vision of what ought to be going on.

For Rationals the big picture is important only to the extent that it is “filled in.” For Idealists the particular details are important only to the extent that they lead to overall understanding.

Thus, understanding is a kind of seeing. It’s the mind’s eye that sees.

And, for completeness’ sake, wisdom:

We can distinguish four kinds of moral perfection:

1. of obedience: legal, perfect obedience to (a) God’s will or (b) the law, either natural or divine;
2. of being: virtuous character, sharp identity, nothing about oneself which one hates or is ashamed of;
3. of deeds: works of mercy, successful entrepreneurship;
4. of becoming: having no obstacles to one’s creative advance, perfect foresight of the consequences of one’s (a) actions, (b) rules governing action.

Considering (1), it is surely possible to live an entire life without breaking any human law. Similarly, it should be possible to obey the natural law perfectly (of course, not necessarily immediately in life), if its content is known, and the consequences for breaking it are fully felt. And with the help of grace one should eventually be able to adhere even to the divine law or to God’s will, as far as one can recognize it.

We can reason in a similar manner about the next three kinds of perfection.

In other words, it is possible to live without sin, though we must make a distinction between mortal sin which is avoidable and venial sin which is much harder never to fall into. (NB: Hodge does not recognize this division of sin, saying that all sins are mortal. (Outlines of Theology, 536))

If charity is gone, then faith ceases to be practical, that is, supplying the means to the end of reaching salvation and God and becomes a purely speculative and scientific object of knowledge: if I loved God or if I wanted to be saved, then that’s what I would have to do, according to the articles of faith. But I don’t, in fact, love God, etc. So, in practice I am under no obligation to act out my knowledge. Hence the faith is dead: it is causally inefficatious. Moreover, one no longer hopes, because acting to attain salvation is absurd, if one does not want to be saved, and even if he knows how he can be saved.

I am redating and updating this post.

Here is part I. Suppose that a person reads the Gospel and comes to believe what it says. Can he do so of his own natural power? The answer is yes, but this belief will be a mere opinion. Grace is still needed to turn that opinion into faith which admits no doubt. Thus, faith is an undoubted belief in supernaturally revealed things. Now faith, Hodge says, includes knowledge. (Outlines of Theology, 467) This crude statement can be interpreted as follows: a person may be well-justified in believing something that happens to be true, such as that God is a Trinity, but fail to believe it, again, because of doubts. Faith, on the contrary, includes assent and is a justified true belief, which is, of course, the fallibilist definition of knowledge. It may be objected that if a person is doubting, then he is not, in fact, well-justified in his belief. The reply is that doubt may be due to sin or blindness which the Holy Spirit, in infusing faith, eliminates, rather than to any epistemic trouble.

Now faith corresponds to knowledge of the means, to intellect, and to the Son; charity corresponds to the love of the end, to the will, and to the Holy Spirit; and hope corresponds to the power to attain the end sought, to essence, and to the Father. And just as beliefs spring from the intellect, and desires, from the will, so (external) actions or (internal) “activities” connecting the two in reality arise out of power. The will commands, the intellect finds the way to get there, and the powers of a person execute the order given. This means that hope is not defined, as we may be tempted to do, as, for example, “a belief in the sufficiency of someone’s power,” for one may hope with little confidence; nor as “an ardent wish that something occur,” which pertains to the will, but rather as “taking steps to execute a plan to accomplish a goal.” Hope, in other words, is demonstrated in action.

Trust is a belief that the person or procedure you trust will not disappoint. Trust is attendant upon faith only if it is an article of faith that someone is to be trusted (e.g., God and His promises). Hope follows upon faith only if it is an article of faith that he who believes will attain some end, e.g., salvation. But that is precisely what the articles of faith do not assert (because salvation is attained through a combination of faith, hope, and charity)! Hence, we can continue to maintain, as per part I, that charity is necessary though not sufficient for faith, and faith, necessary though not sufficient for hope.

We may define confidence as rationally grounded hope. Aquinas, however, assigns confidence to the genus fortitude. (ST, II-II, 128, 1) To the obvious objection that confidence is similar to hope and apparently strengthens hope, our author replies that “by confidence which here is accounted a part of fortitude, man hopes in himself, yet under God withal.” (ad 2) I think the idea that hoping in oneself or having confidence in oneself causes you to act with courage, and at the same time lack of self-confidence makes you a coward. Thus, the connection between power/hope, a theological virtue, and fortitude, a moral virtue, is that as you proceed to follow your plan, you may encounter great dangers. And in order to emerge victorious, you must not only possess the requisite power to triumph but also courage to subdue your fears. It may be objected that if you have the power, you have no reason to be afraid. But in the case of uncertain future and unknown perils, courage and tactical cleverness allow your power to be exercised. They are psychological means to success, through which power is channeled in a particular case which calls for fortutude.

It follows that power can require any other virtue, as well, for its uninhibited operation.

(What is “hoping against hope”? It is continuing to work under the belief that the probability of success is very low or, in other words, “hop[ing] without any basis for expecting fulfillment.” (m-w.com) This happens when the importance of the project being pursued is so great that one cannot abandon it even if it seems that further effort will likely be wasted. In such a case the benefits of going on still outweigh the costs.)

In this way the moral virtues are applied to theological virtues to “activate” them. If charity is the form of all virtues, as Aquinas believes, then all virtues are matter of charity. They are what charity is made of; the particular forms that charity takes. They make charity “work.”

His view is that had Adam persevered in righteousness and remained obedient to God (in every way, including not eating of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil), then he and Eve and, presumably, their descendants would have earned instant glory, which amounts to “infallible, moral excellence, and inalienable blessedness,” after the “probationary period” in the Garden. (Outlines of Theology, 311) I wonder, is this the opinion of the Catholic Church, as well?

To quote again from the NDE described in my The Body and Theodicy,

Death, in this world, was a time when the individual had experienced everything that he or she needed to experience. To die meant to lie down and let go; then the spirit would rise up, and the community would gather around. There would be a great rejoicing, because they all had insight into the heavenly realm, and the spirit would join with the angels that came down to meet it. They could see the spirit leave and knew that it was time for the spirit to move on; it had outgrown the need for growth in this world. Individuals who died had achieved all they were capable of in this world in terms of love, appreciation, understanding, and working in harmony with others.

Is this the world we could’ve had, or is the whole thing a preposterous fantasy?

The absurdity of this question should be immediately perceived after reading this post, where the relevant argument is that “our nature is created for the sake of our virtues (a truth manifested in the move from the beginning to the proficient state), and our virtues are attained for the sake of happiness (the move from the proficient to the perfect state).” Hence also, by the way, the Thomistic designation of habits (in particular, virtues and vices) as standing midway between powers and acts.