Category: Philosophy

Dogmatic Uncertainty

Sean Gabb, 2007

Not wanting this month to fade away without my having posted something, I reproduce my critique of Sean Gabb‘s epistemological musings from twenty years ago. I’m not picking on him, just rummaging through old essays to see if any are worth being worn in public again on this site. On my old one I wrote that the “firmest hand in England writing on behalf of classical liberal ideas belongs to Dr. Sean Gabb. Only when he wandered near philosophy proper did I find something to disagree with him about.” Below is my reply to his “On Being Uncertain: A Case for Scepticism,” Free Life Commentary, No. 105, 26 May 2003. He graciously published this criticism in his Free Life: A Journal of Classical Liberal and Libertarian Thought, Issue 47, 4 August 2003. (The links given on my old site are as dead as doornails.)

Dogmatic Uncertainty

“Murderous conviction” are the last words of Sean Gabb’s odd rhetorical exercise, but we must begin with them to understand what precedes them.

He argues that if no one knows anything for certain, then that’s true of agents of the State. Having no convictions at all, one can have no murderous convictions. For those who value their lives and property, utter lack of conviction is therefore a mental state it would be good for everyone to be in.

At first this reminded me of Jackie Mason’s comic observation that if there weren’t any food, there wouldn’t be any garbage. Upon reflection I noticed more serious difficulties. For one, lack of knowledge and lack of conviction do not correlate. One may be full of conviction on matters of which one has the weakest grasp, and cautious to the point of immobility where one is expert. Nescience is therefore no sure impediment to conviction, murderous or otherwise.

There are other problems with Mr. Gabb’s deduction. For one, he cannot, except arbitrarily, restrict nescience to agents of the State. If the State’s victims are equally ignorant, then they cannot ever hope to learn that the State exploits them. He may, of course, retort that while they may not know with certainty that they are victims of the State, they can come to know it, and many other things, “as surely as they need to.” The qualifier “with certainty” now becomes a false knot, and the slightest tug undoes the whole modern “problem” of knowledge and its latent skepticism. And into this crevice pours all that we normally count as knowledge, namely, fallible, probable judgment.

Mr. Gabb implicitly believes that we leap beyond the evidence when we claim to know with certainty the things he claims to doubt. The implicit norm, of course, is that one ought not leap beyond the evidence, but rather proportion one’s belief to it. That is, he values the exigent mind, but unfortunately conceives it according to the modern fixation with theoretical doubt. Of course, he never lets that doubt immobilize him, any more than Hume’s philosophy ever caused him to miss his appointment with the gaming room.

Mr. Gabb’s excruciatingly subjective, personal position, to the effect that he is cognitively holed up in his mind, intends a real world in which things are what they are, and wishing them otherwise will not make them so. This dynamic of self-transcendence is a homing device that orients us toward reality. It is as inescapably his as it is ours. It marks us as human.  But he has ideas that lead him to misinterpret that inner compass’s readings. Continue reading “Dogmatic Uncertainty”

Man’s “true self”: my reply to critics

Last December, I asked Bill Vallicella, my philosophical interlocuter of almost two decades, why in a Substack essay he referred to the soul as one’s “true self.” I noticed only recently, however, that I hadn’t commented on his reply (or the comments it received), and the window for that combox closed some time ago; thus this belated post.

Bill had written on the atheist Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011):

Those of us who champion free speech [Bill writes] miss him and what he would have had to say about the current state of the world had he taken care of himself, or rather his body, his true self being his soul.

On Bill’s blog, I asked:

Briefly, why do you refer to the soul as one’s “true self”? Genesis 2:7 reports that from the dust of the ground (ha-adamah) God created ha-adam, i.e., “the man.” The man became a living soul (le-nephesh hayyah) when God breathed the breath of life (nishmat hayyim) into him. The pre-animated ha-adamah was neither dead nor a “less-than-true” or incomplete human being; the animating nephesh is not the man’s self or ego. When God withdraws the breath of life from a soul, that soul dies. I think know your non-Genesis source, but I want to hear it from you. Your passing comment reminded me that I had written quite a bit about this earlier this year [i.e., in 2022]. 

Bill replied:

What I wrote suggests that there is a difference between body and soul in a person, and that the soul is the person’s self. But why true self? Well, if I can exist without a body, but I cannot exist without (being identical to) a soul, then “my” soul, or rather me qua soul is “my” true self.

I invite my reader to consider Bill’s 634-word post. Here I can only reply to points of contention, not work out a biblical anthropology.

Continue reading “Man’s “true self”: my reply to critics”

“Presuppositionalism”: a reply to an implicit criticism

In “Christ on the Possibility of Social Order without Christ (Matt. 12:24-6)”, an anonymous blogger led into his polemic against “political presuppositionalism” with a swipe at unnamed advocates of generic “presuppositionalism.”

Presuppositionalism, at least in some of its articulations, is the Christian epistemological and apologetical philosophy according to which knowledge is only possible on the condition of a self-conscious presupposition of the existence of God and the truth of his revealed word. One of the problems with presuppositionalism, at least insofar as it represents a distinct theory, is that it confuses the metaphysical conditions for the possibility of knowledge with the epistemological conditions for the possibility of knowledge. God’s existence and role as first cause may be metaphysically necessary for there to be knowledge, but it doesn’t follow from this that God has therefore made it the case that the presupposition of these truths is necessary to have knowledge. (The Natural Law Libertarian, June 19, 2023)

No, presupposing the worldview is necessary, not to have truth, but in order to give an account of how one has it. Accounting for knowledge is an epistemological task.

Continue reading ““Presuppositionalism”: a reply to an implicit criticism”

When Otis Q. Sellers Invoked Ayn Rand: More on Christian Individualism

I recently acquired the new edition of Otis Q. Sellers’s 1961 booklet Christian Individualism: A Way of Life for the Active Believer in Jesus Christ (CI) which, to my surprise, I did not already own. [Learning of this gap in my collection, Sam Marrone, my friend and brother in Christ, graciously sent me a copy of the 3.5″ x 5.5″ original, which arrived April 10th. Thanks, Sam!—A.G.F.] The text was reset by the folks at The Word of Truth Ministry, which makes nearly all of Sellers’s writings and recorded messages available, mostly free of charge. The publication is available for sale on Amazon.

What caught my eye was his quotation of Ayn Rand (1905-1982), playwright, novelist, and philosopher of individualism.  I doubt he would have cited her on individualism (or anything else) had he known she was an enemy of Christianity.

In 1957 Rand had published Atlas Shrugged, her magnum opus, but even in 1961 she was probably best known for The Fountainhead, a 1943 novel that was made into a movie starring Gary Cooper six years later. In the year that novel came out, Rand began working on “The Moral Basis of Individualism.” A “condensed” portion (which you can read here) appeared as “The Only Path to Tomorrow” in the January 1944 issue of Reader’s Digest.[1] When he cited it, it was already 17 years old and something that would have been collected in the war-related scrap drives. I’m inclined to think he had bought it when it came out and kept it from the paper salvagers.

Continue reading “When Otis Q. Sellers Invoked Ayn Rand: More on Christian Individualism”

“Philosophy after Christ”: James N. Anderson’s review

This morning James N. Anderson, Carl W. McMurray Professor of Theology and Philosophy at Reformed Theological Seminary in Charlotte and author of What’s Your Worldview?: An Interactive Approach to Life’s Big Questions—see a list of his other publications—alerted me to his review, published today, of my Philosophy after Christ: Thinking God’s Th0ughts after Him. It appears on his blog Analogical Thoughts (a.k.a., προγινώσκω, proginōskō, “to foreknow”; see Romans 8:29). For his praise of the book I am grateful, but for his criticisms, I am indebted to him. Please take this link.

 

What’s in store for 2023

Otis Q. Sellers, 1901-1992

While my country is being invaded (to name no other enormity about to befall us) I will, God willing, finish my manuscript on Otis Q. Sellers, about whom I’ve blogged (and drafted a lot apart from this platform) over the past few years.

One challenge I’ve faced is how to represent myself. I’m not a professor of Hebrew or Greek or of the Bible, but then I wasn’t a professor of American Communism when I compiled the chapters of Herbert Aptheker: Studies in Willful Blindness; or of political economy when I blogged Christ, Capital & Liberty: A Polemic into existence; or of philosophy (which I did study formally at the graduate level) before writing the posts that became Philosophy after Christ: Thinking God’s Thoughts after Him. Nevertheless, I’m proud of their contents and stand by them.

Reflecting on these books, I see that each expressed a polemical impulse to set a record straight, not to bolster a curriculum vitae. Were I to write my Sellers book to, say, impress a church historian or scripture scholar, I would doom it to failure. I also don’t think I could muster the interest to see it through.

If, however, I were to order my historical and biographical material to tell the story of my Christian Individualism (the new working title for Maverick Workman) as it found fulfillment in Sellers’s, I believe the book can resonate with fellow Christian truth-seekers. (If they manage to stumble upon it.)

While that’s going on in the background, I’ll be giving expression to other interests, especially Marxism, with which I had more than a nodding acquaintance a half-century ago, an ideological cancer that’s metastasizing throughout the body of Western culture (or what remains of it). It continues to scramble people’s minds, and it’s about time I say what I have to about it. Continue reading “What’s in store for 2023”

Commercial Break: the first review of “Philosophy after Christ: Thinking God’s Thoughts after Him”

Gerard Casey

Gerard Casey, MA, LLM, PhD, DLitt., Professor Emeritus, University College Dublin, Associated Scholar, The Mises Institute, Auburn, Alabama, and Fellow, Mises UK kindly gave Philosophy after Christ: Thinking God’s Thoughts after Him its first public review.

His name first came to my attention when, perusing online a Google Books snippet of a multi-volume biography of Friedrich Hayek, I caught a citation of Casey’s Murray Rothbard. In the reference notes, I found mention of two short essays of mine on Rothbard, residue of my ill-fated attempt (despite Joann Rothbard and Lew Rockwell’s blessings) to research Murray’s life and thought for publication.[1] 

With that as my entrée, I reached out to Casey on the 24th anniversary of Murray’s passing in 2019. After a few months’ correspondence, I asked if he would read the manuscript of, and perhaps write a foreword for, Christ, Capital & Liberty: A Polemic. He graciously agreed, and the book appeared that July with his generous commendation.

Here’s the aforementioned review, which appeared on Amazon’s UK site on August 3rd.

I certainly couldn’t hoped for a better review!

Please consider writing one or alerting your philosopher friends to Philosophy after Christ: Thinking God’s Thoughts after Him.

Thank you for considering doing either of those things.

And thank you, Professor Casey!

 

Note

[1] Hayek: A Collaborative Biography: Part IV, England, the Ordinal Revolution and the Road to Serfdom, 1931-50, edited by Robert Leeson, Palgrave Macmillan 2015, 48, 60; Gerard Casey, Murray Rothbard, Continuum International Publishing, 2010, 153. The citations are of Murray Newton Rothbard: Notes toward a Biography and Murray Newton Rothbard: An Introduction to His Thought. Links will take you to their text on my old site.

Philosophy after Christ: Thinking God’s Thoughts after Him

Philosophy after Christ: Thinking God’s Thoughts after Him, foreword  by David Gordon, Ph.D., went live on Amazon today in hard cover, paperback, and Kindle editions. It will be a day or so before the editions interlink on their respective product pages and the “Look inside!” feature is available on all three. Here’s what you’ll find on them:

“Two things especially struck me . . . . One is the sincerity and passion of [Flood’s] efforts over fifty years to explore various ways of understanding Christian faith. He has at various times looked to Bernard Lonergan and Gordon Clark for guidance, but he has now found a resting place in the presuppositionalism of Cornelius Van Til and Greg Bahnsen. . . . The other . . . is the exceptional learning displayed in it. Tony knows the Bible very well, and he discourses learnedly on the meaning of various Hebrew and Greek words in it. He brings to bear in his discussion a great many of the major Western philosophers, showing a detailed knowledge of their thought. If I am not convinced by Tony’s main thesis . . . I nevertheless commend this acute and erudite book highly.” From the Foreword by David Gordon, PhD, Senior Fellow, Ludwig von Mises Institute

When Christ said we’re to live, not by bread alone, by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God (Matthew 4:4), He didn’t make an exception for philosophers. In Scripture, the philosopher has a cornucopia of divine words to feast upon as eagerly as one who hungers physically devours bread.

To pursue philosophy after Christ the way an artist seeks to emulate the style of a master is to reflect that dependence. The price of denying it is to fall prey to one or another species of foolishness.

In Philosophy after Christ: Thinking God’s Thoughts after Him, Anthony Flood (Christ, Capital & Liberty: A Polemic) explores how “vain deceit after the tradition of men” (Colossians 2:8) has taken captive many philosophers, Christian as well as non-Christian.

To philosophize after Christ is to pursue Christ as the Wisdom of God. This requires learning what He has revealed about Himself, the cosmos, and mankind in Holy Scripture and then regimenting one’s thinking and living accordingly.

It also means internalizing the Bible’s Weltanschauung, our “birthright worldview” as created image-bearers, as the presupposition of intelligible predication, that is, of making sense of things, even our sense-making.

The effort to conform one’s mind to Christ’s can generate a “philosophy of philosophy,” or metaphilosophy, indispensable to the “metapologetics” that undergirds sound Christian apologetics.

In Part 1, Basics, Flood describes philosophizing as the unfolding of implications of the worldview which, with our linguistic capability, we inherit at birth.

Part 2, Dialectics, he explores the oppositions that worldviews generate and shows how non-Christian worldviews can infiltrate even the thinking of Christians, including the Catholic Bernard Lonergan and the Calvinist Gordon Clark.

Part 3, Polemics, discusses several expressions of dialectics:

    • John Frame’s Square of Religious Opposition, on which Flood then locates
    • David Ramsay Steele’s atheism;
    • Flood’s defense of the transcendental argument for God’s existence;
    • William Vallicella’s critique of Flood’s metaphilosophy; and
    • Two books, one by Evangelicals that’s silent about the worldview approach to defending the Christian faith, the other by Roman Catholics who embrace that approach, but fail to identify its non-Catholic origins.

If one loves the wisdom of God (the only wisdom worth seeking), then Jesus’ words must constitute one’s philosophical “global positioning system.” Philosophy after Christ shows you what that involves.

* * *

Your reaction to this book, critical as well as appreciative, will be welcome.

There is no right to “opportunity,” equal or otherwise: my objection to Simon Clarke’s defense

Simon Clarke, American University of Armenia

Although the meaning of “opportunity” has evolved over the last hundred years to refer narrowly to the chances of being economically employed, it has never lost its tie to the broader idea of “circumstance” or “set of circumstances.” Losing that connection has entailed adverse social consequences. Politics, the sphere of demands for non-market, state-enforced outcomes for some at the expense of others, has driven that constriction.

In a 2005 essay for The Philosophers’ Magazine, Dr. Simon Clarke (then lecturer in philosophy, University of Canterbury, New Zealand; currently Associate Professor and Chair, Political Science and International Affairs, American University in Armenia) offered a case for what has euphemistically been dubbed “affirmative action,” governmental and corporate policies that favor hiring members of certain groups.

Clarke presupposed, but did not argue for, the alleged moral obligation on which his argument is grounded, namely, the one to improve the self-esteem of certain group members by increasing their visibility in employment.

In my 2006 rebuttal to his article (reproduced below), I made many points, to which I’d like to give a wider audience. Unfortunately I did not, however, hammer this deficiency as hard as I should have. I’ll try in this preface.

Continue reading “There is no right to “opportunity,” equal or otherwise: my objection to Simon Clarke’s defense”

Explanation Unexplained

Does David Ramsay Steele’s Atheism Explained: From Folly to Philosophy confirm aspects of the Square of Religious Opposition discussed in a previous post? [1] In this one I’ll defend an affirmative answer.

This square is an aid to thinking about worldviews according to the epistemic authority they presuppose (if not acknowledge) and what it governs, that is, their principles of transcendence and imminence, unity and diversity.

The Square of Religious Opposition

Christian

Non-Christian

Transcendence:

1.   Absoluteness

2.   Control

3.   Universals

4.   Unity

5.   Law

Quadrant II:

God’s Has Revealed Himself Concretely in His Word and Works

(Christian “rationalism”)

 

Quadrant I:

The Human Mind Can Know Everything—Reality Is Exhaustively Cognizable

(Antitheistic rationalism)

 
Immanence:

1.   Relativity

2.   Freedom

3.   Particulars

4.   Diversity

5.   Randomness

Quadrant III:

God Is the Sovereign Creator

(Christian “irrationalism” — which makes human reasoning possible)

Quadrant IV:

The Human Mind Is Limited—Nobody Can Know for Sure

(Antitheistic irrationalism)

Each of Steele’s many arguments calls for an apologetic response from a specialist.[2] The table of contents lists many topics and rhetorical tacks.[3] None of them holds up, however, if nothing is holding Steele up. And nothing does.

To show this, I’ve chosen one section of Steele’s book, “God Must Be Subject to Natural Law.” In those few lines he gives the game away, the game being the sport he believes he’s making of Christian theism. But first a few matters by way of background.

According to Steele, either one believes in the God of the Bible (hereafter “God”) or one doesn’t. He happens not to, and so he declares himself an atheist. Thinking no reason for believing is sound, he ends his book by speculating about sociological and psychological causes for the persistence of the allegedly groundless belief. Thus, “atheism explained.” I will not survey his survey.

It is, in any case, incomplete. Steele claims to have started his explanatory enterprise by eliminating “extreme positions”[4] before considering less radical ones. He never, however, deals with arguably the most extreme of them all, namely, that human knowledge of God is innate and requires no justification. The very condition of justification is in need of none. If there is a debate, it is over identifying that condition.

Human beings can unethically suppress that innate knowledge, however, and profess atheism, which is what Steele does. The biblical worldview holds that every human being capable of forming beliefs (a) knows that God exists and (b) is responsible for that knowledge (John 1:19, Romans 1:18). [5]  His or her profession of atheism is irrelevant to this issue as is the profession of theism.

Steele writes from within an undeclared worldview, one that rules out the Bible’s in advance. That’s unfortunate, for it’s the only one that makes possible the critique and theoretical justification he’s engaged in. It’s the only one revealed by perfect intelligence (Psalm 147:5, אֵ֣ין  מִסְפָּֽר׃, ayin mispar). In the same world cognitive norms comport with absolute moral values, numbers, logical laws, natural regularity, and interpersonal communication and many other otherwise incommensurable realities. They cohere in the Biblical worldview at the center of which is a sovereign creator-God. I can show that they cannot cohere in Steele’s. Continue reading “Explanation Unexplained”