Anthony Flood

God: “behind the scenes” (or “under the floorboards”) of every argument

My lifelong interest in arguments for and against the existence of God was never the same once it dawned on me that unless the God of the Bible exists, there wouldn’t be any such thing as argumentation (and therefore no theistic argumentation).

A study of Cornelius Van Til and his interpreter Greg L. Bahnsen occasioned that dawning.

Not even “God does not exist” is intelligible unless God exists.

Rare is the philosopher who, inferring God’s existence from the existence or character of the world, asks whether inference itself would be possible in a non-theistic world. If it isn’t, then theistic inference is redundant. Our ability to investigate is itself a divine intention.

Professions of atheism are spiritually insincere because they result from the affirmers’ suppression of their basic awareness of God’s existence. (Romans 1:18-20) We all know the latter as incorrigibly as we know that the world has existed for millennia independently of any of us, a world that has included billions of human selves.

Further, one knows the existence of God, the world, and other selves “primordially,” that is, neither by deduction nor by induction, but prior to any deduction or induction one performs. (See my discussion of Augustus Hopkins Strong’s notion of “first truths” here.)

Continue reading “God: “behind the scenes” (or “under the floorboards”) of every argument”

When Acton met Whitehead?

Knowing that the paths of two intellectual heroes, Lord Acton and Alfred North Whitehead, crossed at Cambridge, I’ve sometimes imagined Whitehead, whose mathematics fellowship (1888-1910) overlapped Acton’s Regius Professorship of Modern History (1895-98), attending his lectures.

We know that while at Cambridge Whitehead showed interest in history and theology. But did they meet? The truth may be lost to history.

Lowe’s life of Whitehead documents that he admired Acton, was aware of his “troubles with Rome,” proposed a Cambridge memorial to him, and dropped “in on some of his lectures after Acton was appointed” to the Regius chair. (p. 186) “But I know of no discussions between them,” Lowe wrote. Image result for Alfred North Whitehead: The Man and his Work

Like Isaac Newton and Francis Bacon before him, Acton had rooms in Nevile’s Court. In his Lord Acton Roland Hill states that the designation of his room was “staircase 2, A1, on the first floor. (His library would later occupy the apartment next door.) When Whitehead married [in 1891], he changed the rooms given him by Trinity College, moving from a large, high-ceilinged room (C2) in Nevile’s Court to a modest one there” until 1902, the year of Acton’s death.

During the years of the lectures, therefore, Acton and Whitehead were “next-door neighbors.” Someone with access to Nevile’s Court’s floor plans could judge the proximity of their rooms to each other.

Lowe mentioned that in the mid-1890’s the philosopher J. M. E. McTaggart formed Eranos, a discussion group and that Whitehead was a member, but he did not think much of it. James C. Holland, in his introduction to Owen Chadwick’s study of Acton, noted that “it was at Cambridge that he gave it [i.e., “his commitment to moral judgment in history”] definitive and final expression, in May, 1897, in the privacy of his Trinity rooms in Nevile’s Court, where he [Acton] addressed a select society, the Eranus [sic], which never numbered more than twelve members.”

Continue reading “When Acton met Whitehead?”

Lord Acton: ambiguous democrat, libertarian modernist

Christopher Lazarski’s Power Tends to Corrupt: Lord Acton’s Study of Liberty (Northern Illinois University Press, 2012) is, or at least ought to be, a reputation-making book. Image result for Power Tends to Corrupt: Lord Acton's Study of Liberty

It is the best discussion of the ideas of John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton in sixty-five years, that is, since Lord Acton: A Study in Conscience and Politics, Gertrude Himmelfarb’s ground-breaking study.

Image result for Lord Acton: A Study in Conscience and Politics The author achieves this in about the same number of pages (at least, sans apparatus) but, more importantly, he does so with equal readability, all the more remarkable since English is not his mother tongue.

After having immersed himself in the events of early 20th-century Russia, the fruit of which being his 2008 The Lost Opportunity: Attempts at Unification of the Anti-Bolsheviks: 1917-1919, Lazarski shifted his scholarly interest to the political thought of a 19th-century European who, while not predicting the Bolshevik Revolution, identified the spiritual fault lines that help explain such an anti-libertarian rupture with the past.

Currently Associate Dean in Warsaw’s School of International Relations at Lazarski University (founded by a distant relative), our author draws upon Roland Hill’s magisterial life of Acton for frame and meat, but does not minutely track that monumental biography. Image result for roland hill acton

What he does track are the contours of Acton’s prodigious learning. He divides his terrain into four parts, three devoted to Acton’s areas of interest—the ancient world (Jerusalem and Athens), the modern alternative (especially the Anglo-American tradition), and the revolutionary crisis to which that alternative succumbed (the French Revolution). A fourth part expounds and interprets Acton’s view of “the best regime,” a question rarely absent from Lazarski’s neat encapsulations of the master’s texts.

Continue reading “Lord Acton: ambiguous democrat, libertarian modernist”

I believe that I may avoid absurdity and foolishness

The “motto” that summarizes my understanding of the relationship between faith and reason is not Tertullian’s Credo quia absurdum est (“I believe because it is absurd”).

It is, rather, a corollary of Anselm’s subjunctive Credo ut intelligam (“I believe that I may understand”) or Augustine’s imperative Crede, ut intelligas (“Believe that you may understand”).

It is: Credo ut evitam absurditatem somniumque. I believe that I may avoid absurdity and foolishness.

Absurdity and foolishness are the fruit of “philosoph[izing] after the elements of this world” (Colossians 2:8). In those elements is rooted the opposite of wisdom, “every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God” (2 Corinthians 10:5 ESV). The term “misosophy” marks off that discourse from philosophizing “after Christ.”

“We will hear again of this matter” (Acts 17:32) was the lame response of the Areopagite misosopher to the preaching of the Apostle Paul.

“He who is not with Me is against Me” (Luke 11:23). Non-Christians are not disinterested observers. What God says about them is what matters, and He denies the possibility of their neutrality.

The non-Christian who claims to be neutral about Christ may think he makes good on his claim if he only refrains from ridiculing Christians. They, however, may not (at least not integrally) take the non-Christian’s self-representation at face value.

In Proverbs 8 Wisdom is a person who was with God at Creation. John 1 elaborates upon and complements that picture: the Wisdom of God is the Word of God.

There is a dual promise: “For whoever finds me finds life and obtains favor from the Lord, but he who fails to find me injures himself; all who hate me love death.” (Proverbs 8:35-36; ESV).

It’s safe to assume that he who loves death does not love wisdom. To remove all doubt, God says that such a man hates Wisdom. He is, therefore, a misosopher.

Bernard Lonergan had it backwards; August Hopkins Strong, about right.

This post develops the point of an earlier post on the Roman Catholic theologian Bernard J. F. Lonergan (1904-1984). Image result for bernard lonergan

“If the real is completely intelligible,” Lonergan argued, “God exists. But the real is completely intelligible. Therefore, God exists.” Insight: A Study of Human Understanding, New York: Philosophical Library, 1957, 672; Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, Book 3, U Toronto Press, 5th ed, 1992.

Lonergan seems to have derived the minor premise (“But the real is completely intelligible”) from the alleged fact that the human desire to know, which (allegedly) by nature seeks complete intelligibility, therefore affirms (at least implicitly) the existence of a completely intelligent object (which satisfies that desire).

This affirmation in turn entails the existence of a completely intelligent “unrestricted act of understanding” that understands everything about everything and bears all the attributes of the God of Christian theism to boot.

Epistemologically self-conscious Christians know that Christ is the light of every human knower. (John 1:9; “In thy light shall we see light.” Psalm 36:9b) They not only know God exists, but know that they know God exists. (Romans 1:18-20)

And so they do not feel a need to prove God’s existence from things allegedly known better, any more than they feel the need to prove the existence of a world existing independently of their experience of it or the existence of persons like themselves. They reject any presumption of atheism.

Continue reading “Bernard Lonergan had it backwards; August Hopkins Strong, about right.”

Antony Sutton’s Inconvenient Research

I’m not an expert on the works of Antony C. Sutton (1925-2002), but I hope to be one day, and this post will explain why.

Deep within the second volume of his magnum opus, Sutton posed the following alternative:

To subsidize and support a system that is the object of massive military expenditures is both illogical and irrational. . . . it calls into question not only the ability and the wisdom but indeed the basic common sense of the policymakers. The choice is therefore clear: either the West should abandon massive armaments expenditures because the Soviet Union is not an enemy of the West, or it should abandon the technical transfers that make it possible for the Soviet Union to pose the threat to the Free World which is the raison d’être for such a large share of Western expenditures. Western Technology and Soviet Economic Development, 1945-1965, Stanford, Hoover Institution, 1968, p. 400.

Image result for western technology and soviet economic development When I chanced upon Sutton’s trilogy at a public library in the early ’70s, I was still viewing the world through Herbert Aptheker’s red-tinted spectacles. The massive amount of evidence of technology transfer that Sutton had discovered, organized, and published—under the imprint of Stanford University’s Hoover Institution—cohered with neither the Communist worldview I then held nor my anti-Communist one a few years later.

For Sutton proved that for at least fifty years capitalists had sold their supposed mortal enemies helming the Soviet Union much more than the proverbial rope with which to hang them (thereby fulfilling a prediction apocryphally attributed to Lenin).

Continue reading “Antony Sutton’s Inconvenient Research”

Lew Rockwell and the Story of the Ludwig von Mises Institute

Soon my autobiographical vignette of Murray Rothbard will join those of Herbert Aptheker, Sidney Hook, Bernard Lonergan, and Eric Voegelin. In preparation for that post I’m sharing, with the author’s permission, a recent letter from Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. the Founder and Chairman of the Mises Institute. It’s a fundraising letter, one to which I hope you’ll respond. But it’s more than that: it’s his personal story of Mises, Murray, and the Institute, one he must have told a thousand times, but never more vividly and concisely. Let’s listen to Lew. — AGF

November 13, 2018

Dear Friend,

When I met Ludwig von Mises, he was exactly as I had imagined him: kind, brilliant, dignified, beautifully mannered and dressed, a gentleman from what Murray Rothbard called “an older and better world.” Image result for the ludwig von mises institute His wife, Margit, had been an actress, and she had great beauty, intelligence, and presence as well.

Image result for margrit von mises

A genius, Mises was the greatest economist of the 20th century, and a hero in his courageous battles with Marxists, National Socialists, and Keynesians. Never did he put his own career ahead of teaching the truth, which he did in brilliant book after brilliant book. As a result, he never had the professorships and honors that were his due. Forced to flee the Nazi occupiers, he found American Keynesians a hostile bunch as well. So his career was stunted, but not his spirit, and not the legacy and example he left to all who cherish freedom. Image result for last knight of liberalism

Murray Rothbard I had the privilege of knowing well. He was funny, charming, and a genius, too. Like his mentor Mises, Murray suffered in his career for his integrity and truth-telling, which he also displayed in brilliant book after brilliant book. Even billionaire oligarchs couldn’t stop him. A model scholar, teacher, and polymath, he seemed, like Mises, to know everything.

Murray once told me he never heard Mises express any self-pity for his treatment, but only good will and determination. I never heard Murray express such feelings either. He was the happy warrior of Austrian economics and liberty. Continue reading “Lew Rockwell and the Story of the Ludwig von Mises Institute”

The Problem OF Philosophy

Aristotle’s School

There are problems of philosophy, which philosophers have perennially asked and attempted to answer. What really exists? What can (and do) I know? What is the nature of the good, the true, and the beautiful?

But there’s also the problem of philosophy, one that philosophy raises implicitly but cannot answer directly. That’s the problem of worldview. Do my answers to those philosophical questions comport or clash with one another? How much about the world must I “take for granted” when I ask my first question? Can I query those takings?

When one is adverting to the problem of “background” worldview one is not trying to solve problems that arise on its terms. And one’s worldview must be able to acknowledge worldview-diversity. But where is one standing when one entertains that problem?

As my interest in the worldview problem has increased, that in philosophical problems has decreased. That’s because philosophical problems now seem to me a function of one’s basic, non-negotiable stance toward the world. When philosophers pay attention to it, they’re not “doing” philosophy. When they don’t, their philosophical work is exposed to worldview-level criticism.

It’s not that philosophical questions are unimportant. The almost fifty years I spent studying them were not wasted time. Philosophical questions are endlessly interesting culturally and historically. But worldview questions have supplanted philosophical ones in my mind, perhaps because my worldview is of paramount importance to me and, going forward, I wish to advert to it explicitly. Worldviews assign various values to cultural and historical importance and hence to philosophy.

Philosophers who profess the same worldview can agree or disagree fruitfully about, for example, the veridicality of sense perception. Those who do not profess the same worldview, but are not conscious of that disparity, may misunderstand both their agreements and disagreements, even if when they use the same natural language correctly. If they are conscious of that disparity, then it is not clear what their apparent agreements or disagreements could mean. “God exists,” affirms the Christian, who thinks the idea of God important. “Yes, God exists!,” answers the Buddhist, who deems it a distraction from the main issue of living. Continue reading “The Problem OF Philosophy”

Return to Philosophy and The Recovery of Belief

The titles of two books by British philosopher C. E. M. Joad (1891-1953) comprise the title of this post. They resonate with me in ways I will try to describe.

Joad’s life and writings are a recent discovery of mine, too recent for me to have dedicated a portal to his essays on my dormant philosophy site as I had done for many other thinkers. I can’t now recall what occasioned Joad’s coming to my attention. Perhaps he wandered onto the stage of his times about which I’ve been reading lately.

It was his prose style, however, that caught and held my attention, which was then drawn to his biography. I get almost as much pleasure from reading Joad as I do Brand Blanshard, Joad’s contemporary, which is to say, a great deal.

The way Joad wrote has reawakened within me the kind of feelings that led me to philosophy almost fifty years ago. A few years ago I found myself unable to write about it anymore after having proposed a metaphilosophy that drew the criticism of William F. Vallicella, a philosopher I respect. I wrote many pages of notes toward a reply, but found myself unable to articulate to my satisfaction my critique of philosophy’s presuppositions, which critique also serves as an apologetic for orthodox Christian theism.

Perhaps I’ve retreated into metaphilosophy because I despair of reaching philosophical conclusions. Really, what end has my site served other than that of displaying my philosophical interests at the expense of committing to definite answers to philosophical questions?

The charge of conflating defense and critique might occur even to sympathetic readers. Such a charge, however, overlooks a key thesis of the critique, namely, that dependence on God, whether acknowledged, unacknowledged, or even denied, underpins every theoretical enterprise. (Even the enterprise of demonstrating the dependence of all theorizing on God.) An implication of the critique is that denial of such dependence is self-stultifying. Even the failure to acknowledge it is an unstable intellectual position.

As it happened, a little book entitled Return to Philosophy (1935) came into my life, and reading it has encouraged me to give the whole thing another try. Maybe. I’m keenly aware that I had begun to pursue worldview-apologetics and metaphilosophy at the expense of actual philosophizing. Whether I have it in me to philosophize any more is an open question.

For most of his life Joad was not only a socialist, but also a professed atheist who became dissatisfied with the worldview that underpinned that profession. He returned to the Church of England of his youth a few years before his death. (He never repented of his socialism, although he increasingly acknowledged, and feared, that the means to that end was a bloated and rights-violating state.) In The Recovery of Belief (1953) the many arguments he had relied on in support of his atheism pass in review. Some of them are arguments that have occurred to me, as have Joad’s criticisms thereof.

An ex-Communist myself, I experienced my own recovery of belief about forty years ago. The work of relating my return to my recovery, however, is a work in progress. This blog may provide a platform for it.

Will Durant: Fending off “the Reaper” for almost a century

A hundred pages into William Manchester‘s, A World Lit Only by Fire: The Medieval Mind and the Renaissance Portrait of an Age, I peeked two hundred pages further at his “acknowledgements and sources.” There to my delight (and surprise) I read:

Let me set down those works which have been the underpinning of this volume. First—for their scope and rich detail—three volumes from Will Durant’s eleven-volume Story of Civilization: volume 4, The Age of Faith; volume 5, The Renaissance; and volume 6, The Reformation. The events of those twelve centuries, from the sack of Rome in A.D. 410 to the beheading of Anne Boleyn in 1536, emerge from Durant’s pages in splendid array. Image result for will durant ariel durant story of civilization

Here was a popular professor of history and author (The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill; The Death of a President: November 20–November 25, 1963; American Caesar: Douglas MacArthur 1880–1964) honoring the work of a popular amateur. Manchester also acknowledged his use of “[a]nother towering monument of historicism,” namely The New Cambridge Medieval History and its Modern sequel, and several other series, but he regarded Durant’s epic narrative as on par with them, even giving it pride of place. I wasn’t expecting such confirmation of my taste, but welcomed it. Image result for will durant

One serendipity led to another. Browsing my copies of the three volumes Manchester cited, I found myself enjoying the diverse ways Will Durant (1885-1981) expressed not only awareness of the things upon which the successful completion of his project depended, but also what psychologists call “mortality salience.”

I then took down from the shelf Our Oriental Heritage, the series’Durant’s inaugural tome. Image result for will durant ariel durant our oriental heritage As its preface drew to a close, I noticed that the author’s eloquent affirmation of purpose, excitement and hope betrayed hardly any awareness of limitations. Here are the words of a man undertaking a massive project in his fiftieth year, in the aftermath of Wall Street’s collapse, the memories of the Great War still fresh in his readers’ minds as the winds of its successor begin to blow in Europe. Where the latter will soon take Western Civilization, of course, he does not predict: Continue reading “Will Durant: Fending off “the Reaper” for almost a century”