Dmitry Chernikov’s Blog

1. Beversluis critiques Kreeft and Tacelli’s argument in Handbook of Christian Apologetics that Christianity has attracted some of the brightest minds in history. He objects: “Christianity has attracted infinitely more average, below average, and even marginal minds. … I am sure that no Christian apologist would care to draw any resounding inference from that.” I care: that is an argument for Christianity from “the miracle of conversion of half the world.” The argument from the bright folks may be called the argument from “sages and saints.” Maybe those guys knew (and know) a few things we don’t. It is true furthermore that various small charismatic cults have existed, some of which ended up with the suicide of their members. I tackle this problem in The Argument for Christianity from “Martyrdom.”

2. Beversluis goes on: “Finally, even the most cursory reading of the synoptic Gospels reveals that Jesus’s disciples seldom have the slightest idea of what he is talking about. It is no exaggeration to say that they are among the most unpromising assortment of blunderers it was ever a sage’s misfortune to endure. They are always saying the wrong thing, doing the wrong thing, asking obtuse questions, jumping to absurd conclusions, missing the point, or otherwise putting their foot in their mouth.” Maybe so, but the one thing of which most of them are certain is that Jesus is God. They have faith. For example:

Then those who were in the boat worshiped him, saying, “Truly you are the Son of God.” (Mt 14:33)

* * *

Jesus said to the woman, “Your faith has saved you; go in peace.” (Lk 7:50)

* * *

Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will live, even though he dies; and whoever lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?”

“Yes, Lord,” she told him, “I believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, who was to come into the world.” (Jn 11:25-27)

* * *

When Jesus came to the region of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, “Who do people say the Son of Man is?”

They replied, “Some say John the Baptist; others say Elijah; and still others, Jeremiah or one of the prophets.”

“But what about you?” he asked. “Who do you say I am?”

Simon Peter answered, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.”

Jesus replied, “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah, for this was not revealed to you by man, but by my Father in heaven.” (Mt 16:13-17)

* * *

Thomas said to him, “My Lord and my God!” (Jn 20:28)

Admittedly, not all of them:

Philip said, “Lord, show us the Father and that will be enough for us.”

Jesus answered: “Don’t you know me, Philip, even after I have been among you such a long time? Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’? Don’t you believe that I am in the Father, and that the Father is in me?” (Jn 14:8-10)

* * *

Then the disciples came to Jesus in private and asked, “Why couldn’t we drive [the demon] out?”

He replied, “Because you have so little faith. I tell you the truth, if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there’ and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you.” (Mt 17:19-20)

So, there is both faith and skepticism in the disciples, as seems reasonable to me. As this “cursory reading” indicates, Jesus’s disciples were far from the fools Beversluis takes them for.

The Catholic Encyclopedia argues against the identity of grace and charity, saying that “sanctifying grace informs and transforms the substance of the soul; charity supernaturally informs and influences the will.” But what is a human being if not a union of the will, the intellect, and the (bodily) powers? It stands to reason that grace is identical to the union of the three theological virtues, uplifting them into deiformity but without changing human nature. In other words, faith, hope, and charity remain accidental qualities within the soul. The good habits that are attendant on grace and on the nature thus uplifted are the standard moral and intellectual virtues which may be inflused rather than acquired and the gifts perfecting them still further.

This account also explains how grace can be lost as a result of a mortal sin. The virtuous habits guiding a person’s actions in the state of grace disappear along with faith, hope, and charity if any of the latter is lost.

Consider also that a person’s nature is destroyed in hell; a person’s grace can be destroyed in this life throwing him back into unaided nature, both through sin; and, if you’ll let me speculate, a person’s glory can, too, be destroyed through a kind of heavenly sin which is dissatisfaction with his reward. In the latter case, I suppose, he might be reincarnated, and a life of grace for him, guaranteed.

“No,” if we are talking about actual grace or God’s transient help to act, because God’s actions always attain their end. There is a caveat, however. God can assist a person successfully by touching at least one of the will, the intellect, or the bodily powers of action. Thus,

if God has not influenced the will, then even after the grace is bestowed, one may change his mind and fail to choose the end;

if God has not influenced the intellect, then one may fail to know how to attain the end;

if God has not influenced the powers, then one may fail in his efforts to attain the end.

But actual grace can move a person to action infallibly, if God so wishes.

“Yes,” if the grace is habitual or sanctifying (the permanent state of grace), because that grace is (1) an upgraded nature (the “light of grace”) coming complete with (2) the habits to guide the workings of that new nature, that is, infused virtues and gifts. Grace is necessary, because one has the powers and the disposition to act to merit salvation which he would not have without grace; it can be sufficient, because normally no actual grace is required to move one to do supernaturally meritorious works; yet be inefficacious in that one can at any time go against the disposition and sin and even lose the divine habit altogether. Having grace does not guarantee, though it predisposes one to, supernaturally meritorious acts, just as having any good habit is not always guaranteed to elicit a virtuous act.

Reposting this with an update… I think I should have used standard permalinks to make reposting easier.

The source for the reason why God is masculine is Peter Kreeft’s speech “Women and the Priesthood.” He says that God is masculine, because He “impregnates” the soul from the outside with grace. I add that there are reasons why each person of the Trinity could be called masculine.

The first person, because (1f) He as Creator and in His capacity as a perfect agent or pure act created matter and imbued it with form, and that which acts is masculine, while that which is acted upon is feminine; and (2f) as Father He rewards and punishes those He loves, an activity which properly belongs to the father not the mother (or at least, to the masculine part of every human being).

The second person, because (1s) as Redeemer it belongs to the man to sacrifice himself for his bride rather than to the woman for her bridegroom; and (2s) Jesus was male (of course, this only shows the sex of His human nature not His divine nature, but it would be odd indeed if the divine Daughter was incarnated as a male).

The third person, because (1h) as Sanctifier, as Kreeft states, He gives grace which bears fruit, etc.

Update. I just realized that I already spoke on this question in my Questions About God… And Answers which seems to have aged well. I also found another reason about which I completely forgot:

Look at Gen 3:16: “To the woman he said, ‘… Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you.’” That, of course, is how it works in families, normally. But God is ruled by no one but rules everything. Hence it would not be consistent with human experience to imagine God to be feminine.

Finally, Just as God is the creator of both form and matter, act and potency, so He did not need a Mother which stands for “matter” to beget a Child. His goodness and power were sufficient. But the Child is a perfect image of the Father and is therefore a “boy,” the Son.

It is written:

When he arrived at the other side in the region of the Gadarenes, two demon-possessed men coming from the tombs met him. They were so violent that no one could pass that way. “What do you want with us, Son of God?” they shouted. “Have you come here to torture us before the appointed time?”

Some distance from them a large herd of pigs was feeding. The demons begged Jesus, “If you drive us out, send us into the herd of pigs.”

He said to them, “Go!” So they came out and went into the pigs, and the whole herd rushed down the steep bank into the lake and died in the water. (Mt 8:28-32)

Was Jesus at fault for violating the property rights of the pigs’ owner? It seems that it was the demons who violated the owner’s rights not Jesus. Jesus merely allowed them to enter the pigs. But why would He listen to the demons’ request? Are they not morally pure evil? Well yes, but before “the appointed time” demons are part of nature, and they have a purpose, namely to torment, tempt, etc. humans, and therefore have certain “rights.” Being useful (to God and even to men) is a kind of good. Insofar as the demons were good, they deserved consideration.

Beversluis seeks to diffuse the C.S. Lewis’s “Liar, Lunatic, Lord” trilemma.

The first argument our author makes is that the Bible and Gospels in particular are unreliable. Well, blow me down. If the New Testament narratives “incorporate later recollections, interpolations, embellishments, fictionalizations, and ascriptions of deity,” then the implications of this go far beyond the obscure fact of the failure of C.S. Lewis’s argument. Are we even sure that Jesus existed? Is Christianity “based on a myth, mass hallucination, and even outright lies”? Forget C.S. Lewis; given Beversluis’s argument we probably have an intellectual imperative to abandon the Christian faith altogether! In other words, that the Bible is not to be trusted is an immensely strong claim which lays waste to the religion of billions. To call it controversial is hardly to do justice to it. So, it is entirely reasonable to dismiss this argument as proving too much. We must evaluate C.S. Lewis’s trilemma on the condition that the Gospels are accurate. I mean, who can doubt that Lewis himself would agree that if the Gospels recount events that never took place, then he has no case?

Lewis claims to be an expert in literary criticism and asserts that the Gospels don’t feel to him like a myth. Beversluis dismisses Lewis’s statement by saying that his expertise is irrelevant: Lewis is deluded into falsely assuming that “wide reading in a particular genre necessarily makes one’s judgment more reliable than narrow intensive reading in the same genre.” Yet earlier he thinks nothing of referring to “the opinion of mainstream New Testament scholarship generally” and to psychiatric experts. Does our author remember what he says from one moment to the next? Is being an expert valuable or not?

Beversluis goes on to claim that Jesus may in fact have been insane, since he allegedly had moral failings. Jesus curses the fig, he orders the demons to enter and drown the pigs, he takes a colt without permission, he condemns the Pharisees, he claims that wanting to commit adultery is a sin (isn’t it?), etc. Now I think that there is a reasonable explanation of these behaviors, and it is certainly not madness. But I just don’t see how anyone who falsely claims to be the omnipotent immortal God, “the way and the truth and the life,” who created the universe could be any kind of teacher, let alone a great moral one.

In order to forgive sins, Beversluis argues, Jesus need not have been God; he only needed to have been something like a Catholic priest who had the authority to forgive sins. Now if Jesus had this authority, he must have received it directly from God, for no one else could ordain him — he was the first priest. But (1) the Bible does not relate to us any story of such ordination; on the contrary, Christ says he builds his Church, that is, the Church in which he, Jesus Christ is to be worshipped; and (2) God would not favor and empower a lunatic or a fiend to be the founder of what would later become a worldwide religion. There is a much more serious problem with this, however. The Incarnation has altered the relationship between men and God. It effected a genuine change in the cosmic order of things. It is only after Jesus’s mission was completed that forgiveness of sins became possible. The Law condemned the world of sin; nobody had the right to forgive except the Father, but He was not willing, and the Son had not yet taken ownership of the world from his Father. If Jesus was not God, then he could not have been a sin-forgiving priest either.

But Beversluis makes two good points. Jesus’s moral teachings are good regardless of who he is; they stand or fall on their own. Consider, however, that Jesus taught a lot of things that dealt with heavenly affairs and divine truths. If he was merely “a man who believed that he was God (or the Son of God), but was not,” then the articles of faith revealed by Jesus have no authority, because there was no way Jesus could know them — unless God revealed them to him, which He wouldn’t, because, again, He would not have chosen a crazy man or a fiend to deliver the revelations. Second, the key to Christianity is not moral teachings; moral teachers are a dime a dozen. Once again, it is the change in the relationship between mankind and God.

His second point is that numerous controversies on the nature of Jesus animated the Church Fathers. It was not immediately clear that Jesus had two natures, fully human and fully divine, in one person, etc. Many hypotheses were entertained, and these had to be settled by extensive discussion. It follows that concluding that Jesus was God was not so trivial a matter as C.S. Lewis would have us believe; otherwise why had so many people been confused before the official doctrine was finally promulgated? Ah, but you see, we don’t know the process of reasoning by which the early Church came to what are now orthodox doctrines. Perhaps it took them so long to arrive at the truth precisely because they did not have access to the C.S. Lewis’s argument. In other words, if C.S. Lewis had lived in those days, Adoptionism and Arianism and so forth might never have arisen, so cogent his argument would have seemed to the Church councils.

So, it seems that C.S. Lewis’s trilemma is alive and well.

See also: Liar, Lunatic, or Lord; The Argument for Christianity from “Martyrdom”.

“… people who heed the Biblical behest to turn the other cheek can actually harm decent people by letting predation be seen to pay off. Righteous indignation, conversely, can serve a social purpose.” (Ethics as Social Science, 66)

I once read someone’s opinion that Jesus’s counsels, such as to turn the other cheek and “if someone wants to sue you and take your tunic, [to] let him have your cloak as well,” (Mt 5:39-40) were suitable in a society where the legal system was primitive and obtaining enforcement of laws and judicial verdicts was difficult. (Also, e.g., “Then Peter came to Jesus and asked, ‘Lord, how many times shall I forgive my brother when he sins against me? Up to seven times?’ Jesus answered, ‘I tell you, not seven times, but seventy-seven times.’” (Mt 18:21-22)) Today, the author argued, he’d simply call the cops.

Fundamentally, on His 3rd level, God is goodness. God is a gift that keeps on giving. Now in order to give, one must first have, and so God by necessity must have a 2nd-level essence — which turns out to be personhood — and, if essence, then power. At logical moment 1 God wonders, “What am I going to do with all that power?” and, because God is good, He is driven to communicate His being to another. God therefore begets a Son to Whom He gives of Himself His divine nature, everything He has. This entails that God’s goodness is perfect, as He communicates to someone all of His own actuality, withholding nothing. Now just as goodness on the 3rd level is nothing more than communication of itself and of being, so the 2nd-level being communicated is, too, good. The metaphysical / moral / physical good distinction belongs to this 2nd level. Hence in willing to the Son the Father’s nature or the Father’s good, the Father loves the Son from which act the Holy Ghost spirates. God also comes to know Himself in the Son or the eternal Word. Level 2 is thereby fulfilled, in that we have God as the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Who, through knowing and loving Himself, is now perfectly happy. Thus we justify the paradoxical conclusion that happiness can only be attained in self-giving. Of course, God’s goodness did not exhaust itself in the begetting of the Son but bears further fruit in the form of creation.

The 2nd level is the realm of possible worlds. The best possible world is simply God Himself. He represents the best way to be. (Note carefully that the created universe is the best ideal world chosen by God from all the ideal worlds He could actualize; but it should not be referred to as the best possible world.) Just as negative theology belongs to level 1, positive or “perfect being” theology is used to work with level 2. Let’s go back to God’s 2nd-level personality, the spirit. Since it’s perfect, God is omnipotent. At logical moment 2 God “scans” Himself, wondering whether there is anything He cannot overcome, whether there are powers greater than His. And God realizes that in order to have absolute power, He must be both simple and unable to enter into composition with other things. For if God had parts or could form a compound, then the interaction of these parts would be governed by some natural laws which would be prior to God and would therefore condition and limit Him. God’s essence and power would be circumscribed by these necessities. As God is, however, the first being and pure act, He must be subject to no demands of how to behave.

From power, then, flow simplicity and perfect freedom. Now I have mentioned before that these are distinct notions. Speaking as a political philosopher, “One can have the right to do something but not the ability, or the ability but not the right. A person who is free from interference by other human beings may be severely limited as to what he can do. Conversely, a slave ever at his master’s beck and call can have considerable power and discretion to act as, for example, the overseer of other slaves.” Similar considerations apply in theology. Level 1 is thus fulfilled in the fact that God is free to do anything He can do. God is even free to make Himself composite or to permanently divest Himself of freedom; it’s just not in His power to do so. (And similarly, God has the power to do evil, but it’s not “in His goodness” to do so.)

Holy Cyclops compares God to an imperceptible leprechaun: “It’s conceivable. I cannot prove otherwise. … [But c]onceivability is not good reason for belief.” Well, of course not. Conceivability does not entail possibility, and possibility does not entail actuality. But conceivability at least admits that some concept of God appears to be without contradictions. And that’s a big concession on the part of the atheist. Every article in The Impossibility of God, which I have reviewed on this blog, alleges that the classical concept of God is in some way or another incoherent or self-contradictory. Disagreeing with every single argument in this book is for Cyclops a step towards belief.

One of St. Thomas’ proofs of the infinity of God is this: “Again, an effect cannot transcend its cause. But our intellect can only be from God, Who is the first cause of all things. Our intellect cannot think of anything greater than God. If, then, it can think of something greater than every finite being, it remains that God is not finite.” (SCG, I, 43, [11]) The sense of infinitude he is promoting here is “spiritual greatness,” meaning either completeness of nature or extent of power, that is, omnipotence. This is very similar to Descartes’ arguments in Meditations on First Philosophy, e.g., “It is true that I have the idea of substance in me in virtue of the fact that I am a substance; but this would not account for my having the idea of an infinite substance, when I am finite, unless this idea proceeded from some substance which really was infinite.” It might seem that the difference is that Descartes wants to prove God’s existence (the idea of God is “the mark of the craftsman stamped on his work”), while Aquinas is only concerned with His infinity. But since proving God’s existence is identical to demonstrating which attributes are co-instantiated in the same being, both philosophers are doing essentially the same thing.

This argument for the existence of God tries to deduce from the meaning of the term “God” the fact that this term also has a referent. Normally, semiotics teaches that the signified is a different beast than the referent. But is that true for the signifier “God”? It seems that when God signifies “a being than which no greater can be thought,” this conception includes within itself the fact of God’s existence in reality. So, what we do when trying to think of the greatest possible being is we start enumerating its attributes: the being than which no greater can be thought must be omnipotent, omniscient, 3, 4, 5, actually existing, 7, 8… Now here I argue that its existence remains a conception, such that “from the idea of a perfect being only an idea of its actual existence follows, not its actual existence.” Am I right?

Consider a second version of the ontological argument. Let X be a being that is pure actuality. Let also it be possible for X to exist (lest it can be argued that in not existing X has no potency to come to exist, because its existence is impossible). Then if X did not exist or existed but could corrupt and perish, then existence would stand to X’s essence as act to potency, and X would no longer be pure act, contrary to the definition. In other words, the meaning of the term “pure actuality” entails existence of pure actuality. There are two interpretations of this argument. (1) If the concept of pure actuality is not incoherent, which it’s not, then X exists. (2) If anything is pure actuality, then it has existence by its very nature, i.e., X is imperishable.

Now I’d like to suggest that there are two distinct criteria for something’s existing at work here:

(a) (∃X)(X is pure actuality) (normal existential statement); and
(b) (∀X)(X is pure actuality → X exists) (from definition of pure actuality).

Suppose that (a) is false. Then “X is pure actuality” is false for all X, and the truth value of “X exists” is undefined. And that’s exactly, as far as I see it, what Aquinas says in (ST, I, 2, 1, ad 2): “Nor can it be argued that it actually exists, unless it be admitted that there actually exists something than which nothing greater can be thought; and this precisely is not admitted by those who hold that God does not exist.” We can’t argue for the consequent of (b) unless we admit (a), and (a) is not self-evident. ◊(∃X)(X is pure actuality) is true, but we don’t know at this stage of our proof whether X exists in the actual world.

Update. (a) and (b) may be clarified as follows:

(a’) (∃X)(X’s essence is described by the phrase “pure actuality”);
(b’) (∀X)(X’s essence is described by the phrase “pure actuality” → X exists).

All of the following is his email reply:

“My only comment on your new work is the same as my fundamental comment on all of your work: it is completely prejudicial in favor of the religion that you have decided in advance to defend. As a crucial example, your definition of religion, explicitly and intentionally, privileges your religion over other religions. But as an intelligent scholar, you know that that is unfair and invalid. While, to be sure, definitions are not objective things but man-made tools, some are better than others in being (1) inclusive and (2) productive. Your definition is higly exclusionary and totally unproductive. Here, and in all your other assertions, you are deeply immersed in the ‘language game’ of christianity. I am sure you are familiar with Wittgenstein and the concept of language game. The grammar of christianity allows and compels certain utterances, about ‘faith’ and ‘grace’ etc. It also forces Xians to say slanted things about concepts like relativism and agnosticism. However, outside that linguistic universe (which Xians usually think of as the ‘community of belief’) those terms, concepts, and utterances are not so much false as completley meaningless and inappropriate. Not all religions (your dismissive definition notwithstanding) have a concept of faith or grace or for that matter god or sin or prayer. But you must be able to see that you are trapped within your discursive world, not referring to or making any insights into the wider world outside your language game. And obviously, not only all other religions vary in their discursive realities, but all non-religions do too. For me, as a completely unreligious person, the Xian language game is as meaningless as the Hindu or Buddhist one. Your problem is that you–and your Xian interlocutors — are deep inside a box, and you do not even realize that you are in a box… or that a box exists.

“I say this to you as a concerned fellow scholar. One simply cannot make biased assertions in support of one’s own religion or language and expect those to stand as proof or argument for anything. Muslims advance their own ‘arguments,’ Hindus theirs, ad infinitum. They, and you, are stuck within a Kuhnian paradigm, and until they, and you, realize that they are purveyors and practitioners of paradigm and find a way to transcend their, and your, paradigm, then members of various religions cannot even talk to each other… and none of them can talk to me.

“I would like to ask you one question: can you name for me ONE element of the ‘method’ of metaphysics, and ONE discovery or fact that this ‘method’ has ever produced? Understand that the analysis of a concept like ’substance’ is not a discovery or fact; it is merely an elaboration on one lexical item in the language game of a particular discursive practice.”

1. Kenosis allows God to voluntarily lose some of His attributes, such as omniscience. But when that happens God no longer knows Himself! What He does not know He cannot love, so the Holy Spirit is hampered, too. In particular, kenosis may require that God does not realize that He is omnipotent. Far from being Godlike, He is then a fool, lacking the most basic knowledge of His own nature. That God could become such a fool seems like a major modal defect in Him, yet the Christian concept of God requires Him to be perfect in every way. Nor is God any longer pure act, because there is in Him a potentiality to forget.

2. If Jesus could not restore His omniscience at will, then this was a limitation on His power and therefore a grave imperfection. If He did, then the claim of limited knowledge is vapid: anything He needed to find out He could find out by allowing Himself to “remember” what He allegedly lost in the process of Incarnation and kenotic “emptying.”

3. How could God restore His essence once Jesus’s job was done? Lack of omniscience regarding God’s essence means that God’s generative or begetting power was after all defective, if there was a possibility for the Father’s image of Himself — the Son — to worsen in completeness of nature.

4. Kenosis tries to diminish God’s attributes. But Jesus had “low” attributes already from His human nature! Why alter the divine nature, as well? It is precisely the union of the metaphysically perfect and the metaphysically imperfect that must be explained. One can’t explain it by saying that the divine nature was after all just like human nature or that there was no assumption of the human nature at all: the divine nature somehow became the human nature. “It is not by virtue of what he gave up, but in virtue of what he took on, that he humbled himself,” writes Morris (The Logic of God Incarnate, 104). Exactly.

So of what use is the doctrine of kenosis?

Thomas Morris says He did. His main shtick consists in distinguishing between being fully X and being merely X; for example:

Consider a diamond. It has all the properties essential to being a physical object (mass, spatiotemporal location, etc.). So it is fully physical. Consider now an alligator. It has all the properties essential to being a physical object. It is fully physical. But, there is a sense in which we can say that it is not merely physical. It has properties of animation as well. It is an organic being. In contrast, the gem is merely physical as well as being fully physical. (The Logic of God Incarnate, 66)

You see the pattern; man is fully alive, like our alligator, but not merely alive; he is higher on the metaphysical hierarchy due to being rational, etc. “And… [Aristotle] compares the various souls to the species of figures, one of which contains another; as a pentagon contains and exceeds a tetragon. Thus the intellectual soul contains virtually whatever belongs to the sensitive soul of brute animals, and to the nutritive souls of plants.” (ST, I, 76, 3) Similarly, Jesus is fully human but, unlike you and me, not merely human; he is also divine — both fully and merely, of course, because there is nothing higher than God.

Many properties “may be essential to being merely human, but they can be held, in all epistemic and metaphysical propriety, not to be essential to being fully human, to exemplifying the kind-essence of humanity.” (67) One such property may be “being a child of human parents.” What Jesus assumed then is our humanity, namely, body and soul, the kind-essence, rational animality. The latter included the will and the intellect. But what He most certainly did not assume is human personality, that is, a spirit, the individual-essence. A related distinction Morris draws is between common or even universal properties of human beings and their essential properties. The difference is between ∀(x)(Fx), ∀(x which have ever existed and will ever exist)(Fx), and N(Fx). Just because a property is actually, in this world, common to all (mere) men does not make it necessary.

Now (1) if the human will and intellect did not result in a personality which in Jesus was the personality of God the Son, then what purpose did they serve? Jesus had “[c]ommand and sympathy, power and charm, authority and affection, cheerfulness and gravity”; unparalleled “strength, poise, and grace.” Were these from His divine nature or from His human nature? I think these traits were shared between Christ’s natures, but they originated in His divinity. (2) Who controlled the body of Jesus, the divine person or the human soul? The human soul acted but through the medium of and in obedience to the divine and godlike virtues which themselves were adornments of his divine personality and constituted his individual essence. Jesus’s powers of acting came from His human soul, but His habits were divine. Christ had the virtues “most perfectly beyond the common mode. In this sense Plotinus gave to a certain sublime degree of virtue the name of ‘virtue of the purified soul’.” (ST, III, 7, 2, ad 2) And (3) what was the relationship between the divine nature/person and the human mind in Jesus? The person of God the Son comprehended God, while His human intellect enjoyed the beatific vision but without comprehending God. I think that any question Jesus’s human mind wanted to ask of the inner life of God it could ask and receive an answer from His divine mind. On the other hand, Jesus’s divine mind was enriched by the “free” knowledge of the actual world Jesus was obtaining during His life with us.

Here is my understanding of it:

On a separate page.

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.

For the intellect it offers unmitigated and infinite perfection, never to be actually comprehended, providing untold riches for the eternal life. Atheism, as best, considers man to be the measure of all things, and what a poor measure it is! Atheism forces one to cling to the temporal and transient which never seem adequate. “Don’t look up,” atheism says.

For action and striving it offers optimism, a lively hope that good will triumph. For, as I have suggested, either good or evil wins in the end. Christianity says good is the victor. Atheism must honestly recognize that it is a defeatist doctrine. It entails the destruction of life’s work and body and soul and human race and life. And if it is human nature to side with the winner, then atheism inclines one towards evil, such as deception and violence, in hopes that it will help one to stay alive.

For the will it offers joy and rest from the exhaustion of the worldly struggles.

Why wouldn’t you choose it?

Eller’s analysis of agnosticism claims that it denies that one can have any knowledge of God. But in that case one is automatically and essentially an atheist. For why bother considering the existence of that which is totally unknown or unknowable? What are we showing the existence of? “If you said that you have no idea what a zorg is or what it does or wants but that you believe that there is such a thing as zorg — and even worse, that you center your life around the existence and wishes of a zorg — I would think you were either pulling my leg or talking crazy.” (Natural Atheism, 170) But of course agnosticism is nothing of the sort. An agnostic says: “I accept your concept of God in all its richness as coherent; it is possible that this God exists; moreover, the probability that God exists is high enough to make me uncomfortable with atheism, which is why I am not an atheist; however, I still have doubts that this idea of God is instantiated.” An agnostic then knows what God is; he just does not know that He is.

In dismissing the argument for the existence of God from “personal experience” Eller relies on two tricks. First, he argues, “If I hear a voice in my head or have a mystical feeling or see a beautiful sunset and call that a religious experience, I have imposed a meaning on it and prejudiced the evaluation of it as an experience.” It is harder to misconstrue the argument more crassly. Every experience is interpreted, that is, “imposed a meaning” on. When our author sees the sunset, etc., he, too, interprets this experience, though as non-religious. Does he thereby “prejudice the evaluation of it as an experience,” too? Not necessarily. A new experience tries to fit into the picture of the world that we already have. Sometime the fit is perfect; other times the experience is to a greater or lesser extent discounted, because it does not cohere with what we already think we know; still other times, we adjust even our fundamental and most cherished beliefs in order to accommodate the experience. This procedure is followed whether one is a religious man or not. Now what is the right way of interpreting any experience that provokes an inkling, whether weak or strong, to consider it “religious”? Our first point is that genuine religious experiences are self-authenticating — if you hear God’s voice, you simply know with absolute certainty that it is God speaking to you. You feel no doubt: God’s grace comes with a guarantee that it is from God. Second, Peter Kreeft proposes three criteria for evaluating the truth of claims of communion with God: “(1) the consistency of these claims (are they self-consistent as well as consistent with what we know otherwise to be true?); (2) the character of those who make these claims (do these persons seem honest, decent, trustworthy?); and (3) the effects these experiences have had in their own lives and the lives of others (have these persons become more loving as a result of what they experienced? More genuinely edifying? Or, alternatively, have they become vain and self-absorbed?).” (Handbook of Christian Apologetics, 82) So, we have to do the hard work of verifying each religious experience on its own merits, which means that the easy and brisk dismissal of them just won’t do.

Let’s consider the second argument Eller employs, namely that the experiences of various religions contradict each other: “Third, religious experiences are so different for different people that it serves as a red flag for us; the occurrence and interpretation of such experiences seems closely related to personality and culture, so much so that we can explain and dismiss them as culture-bound. In other words, if Christians have personal experiences of God, Jesus, and Mary, and Muslims have personal experiences of Allah, and Hindus have personal experiences of Brahma or Shiva or Vishnu, then either an awful lot of gods exist (to take the experiences seriously) or people just experience what they want or expect to.” (Natural Atheism, 43ff)

Now the varieties of religious experiences would seem to validate the admittedly very general notion that there is “something beyond,” rather than falsify it. The question then is, what is beyond? There is no universal agreement. But which reasonably sophisticated branch of human knowledge enjoys universal agreement? That economists disagree with each other does not mean there is no truth of the matter, nor that there is not a basic core doctrine that enjoys the support of all economists. Same with religions: all true religious experiences awaken us to a higher humanity and even deiformity. In Kreeft’s words, “many people understand their experience this way: they are ‘united with’ or ‘taken up into’ a boundless and overwhelming Knowledge and Love, a Love that fills them with itself but infinitely exceeds their capacity to receive.” (82) And Love by any other name… And, as can be proved independently, Christian religious experiences have more truth to them than experiences of the adherent of any other religion, because the Christian concept of ultimate reality is superior to any other. Further, that religious experiences are “culture-bound” is a pseudo-explanation: what is culture but mutual influence of individuals on each other? Perhaps the culture in which religious experiences are given respectful consideration has been formed by numerous people’s having genuine religious experiences in the past and describing what they had gone through to the public. The variety in experiences is due not only to different personalities of the folks but also to the fact that God is infinite, and religious experiences may perceive different aspects of Him. Instead of throwing our hands in air, helpless against this diversity, we should put all the experiences together, study them as any other phenomenon, and see what they tell us about God, life, the universe, and everything.

Finally, Eller owes us an account of what experience would convince him that God exists. Victor Reppert relates that atheist philosopher Keith Parsons told him that if the stars in the Virgo cluster were to spell out the words “Turn Or Burn This Means You Parsons,” then he would turn. Eller needs something analogous, lest his atheism be unfalsifiable.