Anthony G. Flood

Christianity and intelligibility

Beneath a post on his blog, Bill Vallicella commented on a matter of common interest. I stress that Bill wrote a comment, not a paper for a peer-reviewed journal, and that’s all I’m doing here. I offer the following only as a further, not a last word.

Last Sunday, in responding to one Joe Odegaard, Bill wrote:

While I agree that Christianity makes sense of the world and in particular of the scientific enterprise, and while I myself have argued against materialism/physicalism/naturalism and in favor of Divine Mind as source of the world’s intelligibility, it must be borne in mind that Xianity [Christianity] is a very specific religion with very specific tenets such as Incarnation and Trinity. Why should anyone think that such apparently unintelligible doctrines are necessary for the intelligibility of the natural world? (Emphasis added.—A. G. F.)

The short answer is that appearances can be untrustworthy. Unless it can be shown that those tenets are really, not just apparently, unintelligible, the implicit objection (in the form of a rhetorical question) has no force. I fail to see what special problem the “natural world” allegedly poses.

To know anything about something, we need not know that thing exhaustively (that is, the way God knows it). The Christian does not avail himself of his birthright (Christian theistic) worldview because it confers omniscience on him, but rather because (a) it saves intelligible predication and (b) no competing worldview does. That’s the claim Bill has to defeat.

How is the Incarnation or the Trinity unintelligible, even apparently?

The equal ultimacy of the one and the many in the Triune Godhead saves predication from the consequences of monism and pluralism.

It’s also unclear what problem someone who affirms exnihilation finds in a divine person’s taking the form of a divine-image bearer. Some atheists have claimed, without justification, that exnihilation is “unintelligible” but they do so because they’ve absolutized the created order instead of relativizing it to its creator, who alone is absolute. Bill affirms exnihilation without exhaustively grasping it conceptually. He can do likewise for the Trinity and the Incarnation.

The Christian worldview, expressed on the pages of the Bible, is a revelatory “package deal,” if you will, not a buffet of optional metaphysical theses. The organic connectedness (within the divine decree) of creation, trinity, and incarnation—even the so-called “contingencies of history,” e.g., Joshua’s impaling the King of Ai on a pole after slaughtering all of his subjects (Joshua 8)—await clarification in God’s good time, if He sees fit to provide it, but are put before us for our assent today.

Is Green the new Red? Why on Earth does Earth Day fall on Lenin’s birthday?

First Annual Earth Day, Union Square, April 22, 1970

Fifty-four years ago this afternoon, classes being over, I trekked two blocks east from Xavier High School along 16th Street to Union Square Park where I’d take the No. 6 subway to the Bronx. To my astonishment, the park was jam-packed with people. Thousands of them, in the middle of the day. It had the vibe of an anti-war demo. It was replicated elsewhere in Manhattan and in many other cities around the country, all too familiar to us today in its size and planning.

“What’s this?,” I muttered. “Earth Day? You gotta be kidding me!”

A newly minted Stalinist (and Jesuit high school student), I knew that that day marked the centennial of the birth of Vladimir Illych Ulanov, known to history as Lenin. Continue reading “Is Green the new Red? Why on Earth does Earth Day fall on Lenin’s birthday?”

Oppenheimer and Putin’s Suitcases

“You know, when the [United] States already had nuclear weapons and the Soviet Union was only building them, we got a significant amount of information through Soviet foreign intelligence channels . . . . They were carrying the information away not on microfilm but literally in suitcases. Suitcases!” Vladimir Putin, 2012[1]

I recently cited evidence that J. Robert Oppenheimer, the Father of the Atomic Bomb, was a security risk if ever there was one, yet he got what Albert Einstein could not: security clearance to work on the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos, New Mexico, which the legendary physicist (and leftwing activist and Zionist) had urged on President Roosevelt. As Oppenheimer was a pro-Soviet Communist, I thought it ironic that in 1946 Ayn Rand, who fled the Communist system that had impoverished her family, interviewed him for a stillborn movie project. Neither of them (or anyone else to my knowledge) ever noted that irony.

Oppie’s Red politics was not a youthful, romantic fling from which he was detached only by the imperative of stopping Hitler. Two days ago Diana West, having read my post, wrote to suggest that while Harvey Klehr and John Earl Haynes, the scholarly witnesses that informed my post, established the color of Oppie’s politics, there is evidence that he crossed the line demarcating political activity from disloyalty. I am grateful to her for pointing me toward that evidence, part of which I now pass along to you. Continue reading “Oppenheimer and Putin’s Suitcases”

“At the end of the day”: Trump’s compromise

Donald Trump on abortion: 'It should be the law of the state' “The states will determine by vote, or legislation, or perhaps both, and whatever they decide must be the law of the land—in this case [abortion], the law of the state. Many states will be different. Many states will have a different number of weeks … at the end of the day it is all about the will of the people.” Donald Trump, Truth Social, today. (Emphasis added.)

“At the end of the day”? Say, when the sun goes down (as I once heard Bill O’Reilly quip)?

Trump’s context is, of course, the U.S. politics and Constitution, not eschatology. The end of the day (ἡμέρας) of man (ἀνθρωπίνης) (1 Corinthians 4:3), every detail of which having been ordained to come to pass (Ephesians 1:11), will inaugurate the day (ἡμέρας) of Christ (Χριστοῦ) (Philippians 1:6; not the Day of the Lord).

In that day, co-extensive with the manifest Kingdom of God, there will be The mercy of God and the unborn child - St George Orthodox Ministry no exceptions for any species of homicide. The penalty will be death (Acts 5:1-11; the Acts period being a foretaste of the Kingdom[1]). God’s will, not “the people’s,” will be done, on earth, as it is in heaven (Matthew 6:10).

Note

[1] See my “Sellers’s Eschatology: Some Distinctives,” June 7, 2020.

When Rand Met Oppenheimer: A Neglected Irony

Sometimes a fact can be so plain that it’s overlooked, so obvious as to be devious. Herbert Aptheker’s conspicuous silence about C. L. R. James, for example, took me 40 years to notice. (To my knowledge, no one else had noticed it before or since). The absence of any mention by the passionately anti-communist Ayn Rand about the cerebral Communist “Father of the Atomic Bomb” J. Robert Oppenheimer is a silence that neither she nor any Objectivist writer felt comfortable addressing afterward.

From reading Jennifer Burns’s 2009 The Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right, I’ve learned that in 1946, basking in the success of her novel The Fountainhead, Oscar-winning film producer Hal Wallis (Casablanca, The Maltese Falcon) tasked her to write screenplays, one of them titled Top Secret:

Rand began a careful investigation of the Los Alamos [New Mexico atomic bomb] project, even securing an extensive audience with the atomic scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer, head of the Manhattan Project. The film was never produced, but Rand’s encounter with Oppenheimer provided fuel for a character in her developing novel, the scientist Robert Stadler.[1]

Burns didn’t source this assertion. (I wish I had picked up Burns’s book when it came out.) I was therefore pleased to find a 2023 essay by Ayn Rand Institute archivist, Brandon Lisi: Continue reading “When Rand Met Oppenheimer: A Neglected Irony”

Otis Q. Sellers, the Scottboro Boys, and me

undefined — The “Boys” with their attorney, Samuel Liebowitz, and Alabama State Militia Guard, 1932.

Ninety-three years ago today, nine Black teenagers, “hoboing” on a freight train between Chattanooga and Memphis, Tennessee, were attacked by a mob of white youths who strongly disapproved of their presence on “a white man’s train.” Thrown off it by their intended victims, the hooligans falsely reported to police in Paint Rock, Alabama, that the teenagers has attacked them. After a search of the train, the police rounded up not only the Black youths but also two white women who then falsely accused them of rape. The prosecution of “The Scottsboro Boys,” the first international cause célèbre of the American Civil Rights Movement, afforded an opportunity for the Communist Party to leave its mark, the first of many, on that movement. This complex historical episode eventually became the subject of academic study, and one of the first scholars to study it was my friend and fellow Aptheker research assistant, Hugh Murray. [1]

Jane, Otis, and Mildred Sellers, probably late 1930s

On that very day, March 25, 1931, Otis Q. Sellers turned 30. He was not yet the grey eminence I knew in the 197os, but the young man finally out of his twenties and on his way to becoming the Bible teacher from whom I learned much. About his life and thought I’ve been blogging into existence, for the past six years, a 96,000-word manuscript. (I’m raising funds to publish it as a book, I hope this year.) Two years into the Great Depression, Sellers was in the middle of his stint (1928-1932) as pastor of Fifth Avenue Baptist Church in Newport, Kentucky, which he left (to shorten a long story brutally) “to do my own studies.” On his milestone birthday, what was transpiring 400 miles south of him was on the mind of few Americans, and his wasn’t one of them. That would soon change.

Continue reading “Otis Q. Sellers, the Scottboro Boys, and me”

Besides race, what did Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Paul Robeson, Lorraine Hansberry, Bayard Rustin, W. E. B. Du Bois, Rosa Parks, and Martin Luther King have in common? Hugh Murray on the relationship between civil rights activists and Communists.

New Orleans Woolworth’s sit-in, September 9, 1960: Jerome Smith, Ruth Despenza, Joyce Taylor, Hugh Murray, Archie Allen, William Harrell

My friend Hugh Murray (b. 1938), a native New Orleanian, is a veteran of the African American civil rights movement (CRM), a critic of its betrayal by “affirmative action” (its latest incarnation being “diversity, equity, and inclusion”), and scholar of the 1931 trial of the Scottsboro Boys, the first international American civil rights cause célèbre. Our paths first crossed over a half-century ago in the reading room of the American Institute for Marxist Studies (AIMS) on East 30^th Street in Manhattan. Its director, Herbert Aptheker (1915-2003), hired us (and others) as research assistants for the massive project of preparing for publication the correspondence, bibliography, and published writings of William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (1868-1963). For the past few years, Hugh and I have been preparing an anthology of Hugh’s writings for publication later this year, Deo volente.

On his blog, Murray recently explored the tension between the noble, justice-seeking motives of the CRM and the ignoble motives of the Communist movement to which some CRM activists were attracted to one degree or another. (For the CRM one could substitute the labor movement.) It’s a tension I’d rather ignore. It’s easier to concentrate on the horrors of Communism uncomplicated by the fact that many Communists were drawn to it to fight the horrors of lynching and other violence. It was easy for me to call them dupes (among whom I was once numbered) and leave it at that.

Continue reading “Besides race, what did Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Paul Robeson, Lorraine Hansberry, Bayard Rustin, W. E. B. Du Bois, Rosa Parks, and Martin Luther King have in common? Hugh Murray on the relationship between civil rights activists and Communists.”

Do atheists have an excuse?

An edited version of this post, first published here five years ago today, forms the first half of Chapter 5 of Philosophy after Christ: Thinking God’s Thoughts after Him. The post linked in the first paragraph appeared on Bill Vallicella’s blog in 2018 (therefore, more than “a few months ago”).—A.G.F.

In a short post few months ago, Bill Vallicella argued that “If God exists, and one is an atheist, then one is ignorant of God, but it does not follow that one is culpably ignorant.” (Italics added.)

Bill takes his definition of “culpable ignorance” from a Catholic dictionary: ignorance is blameworthy if the ignorant one could have “cleared up” his ignorance, but chose not to. “One is said to be simply (but culpably) ignorant,” the dictionary says, “if one fails to make enough effort to learn what should be known.”

Bill applies this to the atheist this way:

I hold that there is vincible ignorance on various matters. But I deny that atheists are vincibly ignorant. Some might be, but not qua atheists. Whether or not God exists, one is not morally culpable for denying the existence of God. Nor do I think one is morally culpable if one doubts the existence of God.

Bill acknowledges that his exculpation of the professing atheist “puts me at odds with St. Paul, at least on one interpretation of what he is saying at Romans 1: 18-20.”

I’ll say! As Bill wrote in the post he linked to: “There are sincere and decent atheists, and they have plenty of excuse for their unbelief. The best of them, if wrong in the end, are excusably wrong.”

That position reveals a great deal about Bill’s idea of God. It’s not the idea one gets from the Bible, arguably the source of what Bill calls “the Judeo-Christian tradition.” I bring this up because Bill stipulates (in the post under discussion) that for “present purposes, it suffices to say that ‘God’ refers to the supreme being of the Judeo-Christian tradition.”

For Bill’s argument to work, that interpretation of Romans 1:18-20—God infallibly communicates His existence, power, and divinity to all people and they are all responsible for having received that communication—would have to fall outside that “tradition.”

God’s Word is the light that enlightens everyone who comes into the world (John 1:9). There are no exceptions for professing atheists.

Continue reading “Do atheists have an excuse?”

Michael Volpe’s thoughts occasioned by “Philosophy after Christ”

Michael Volpe had intended to append the following as a comment to the last post, but it merits standing alone as a post. I appreciate the effort he put into it; in due time, I’ll address his criticisms in a comment of my own.—A.G.F.

In his book Philosophy after Christ: Thinking God’s Thoughts after Him, Anthony Flood opts for a transcendental argument for the existence of God. It can be summarized as the impossibility of the contrary because Christianity as a worldview alone gives the conditions that makes predication possible. Since Anthony clearly states his indebtedness to Cornelius Van Til, one must ask what difference, if any, there is between their understanding of the same argument.

The Calvinistic Van Til built his form of the transcendental argument to justify the contradiction that God desires the salvation of those whom He does not choose. And though He elects, this free offer of Christ for all supposedly relieves God of the charge of being evil for not choosing everyone when He could have done so. Especially since it is man and not God who is the ultimate cause of sin deserving of hell. Thus, Van Til needs to combat not only the belief in free will and free thought, but rationalism. The former two lead to chance as being ultimate and the latter requires omniscience. Either way, if any of these are true, they would destroy the belief that his hyper-infralapsarian Calvinism (grounds the free offer in Christ’s limited atonement) is the transcendental truth or worldview alone which establishes predication but without its constituent truths logically entailing each other for a sound and consistent deductive system. Continue reading “Michael Volpe’s thoughts occasioned by “Philosophy after Christ””

Philosophy before Christ: the case of an Athenian fence-sitter

In Colossians 2:8, Paul warns Christians not to be seduced by philosophy after (κατὰ, kata) “the elementary principles of the cosmos” (τὰ στοιχεῖα τοῦ κόσμου, ta stoicheia tou kosmou, i.e., demonic spirit-beings[1]) and not after Christ. This suggests the possibility of “philosophy after Christ,” a suggestion I pursued in a book with that title.[2]

“After” here doesn’t mean chronologically subsequent, but rather “in the manner or style of,” as one might paint after Rembrandt or after Picasso. When we philosophize, that is, pursue wisdom to help us lead rightly ordered lives, we ought to do so as Christ the Wisdom of God (σοφίᾳ τοῦ Θεοῦ, sophia tou Theou; 1 Corinthians 1:21) counsels. All philosophy that’s not “after Christ” (not only, say, Hermeticism) assumes a “neutral” posture toward God’s self-revelation in Scripture.[3]

Interestingly, twenty verses earlier, Paul taught not only that all things (τὰ πάντα, ta panta) cohere (συνίστημι, sunistēmi) in Christ, but also that He is “before all things (πρὸ τὰ πάντων, pro ta pantōn)” (Colossians 1:17). That is, He ranks above them because He created them: “. . . without Him nothing was made that was made” (John 1:3b). He decrees what is true about anything other than Himself: “All (כֹּ֤ל, kol) whatever (אֲשֶׁר, asher) pleases (חָפֵ֥ץ, hapes) the Lord (יְהוָ֗ה, Yahweh) does (עָ֫שָׂ֥ה asah)” (Psalm 135:6a). That includes the states of affairs we call “facts.”

Christ is not only “temporally” antecedent to (from “eternity past”[4]) His creation, but also pre-eminent over it. The set of “all things” includes His image-bearers: nothing has priority over Him—not even a philosopher’s mind. The thinker who gives epistemic authority to every Word that proceeds from the mouth of God (by which we are to live: Matthew 4:4) is different from the one who awards that status to something else. By “philosophy after Christ” I mean the pursuit of wisdom by practicing what Jesus preached, that is, answering Satan’s lies with Scripture; that is, putting Christ before that pursuit, not the other way around. Continue reading “Philosophy before Christ: the case of an Athenian fence-sitter”