A UK magazine called Standpoint reviews two religious books that adopt naturalism as a means of defending -- rather than attacking -- religious faith. The reviewer is not impressed.
This theistic framework is not the only possible framework for spirituality: both the writers under discussion flirt intermittently with the Buddhist notion of anatta — the idea that the self is an illusion and that there is nothing beyond a constant flow of impermanent conditions that arise and pass away. But it is no easy task to graft such ideas on to the ethical rootstock of Western spirituality. For one thing, it is far from clear how a worldview based on detachment and oceanic merging into the impersonal void could support anything like a morality of unconditional requirements that calls us to orient our lives towards the Good.I'm not sure that I accept the reviewer's premise that naturally-oriented arguments are non-theistic. I've been reading Avicenna, as you know. A Muslim, and Persian, Avicenna is one of the most impressive thinkers I've ever encountered: his reputation is, if anything, understated. I had gotten the impression from books that mentioned him that he was mostly important to philosophy (as opposed to medicine) for having transmitted Aristotle, and some works of Plato, to the West. In fact, his philosophy synthesizes both Aristotle and Plato, and then adds unique elements that are originally present in neither -- but which are demanding and deeply considered. It's not for no reason that he was widely read by Medieval thinkers, or that much of his thought was incorporated by philosophers like St. Thomas Aquinas.
We need, as Comte-Sponville rightly concedes, fidelity to the tradition that shaped us. But part of that tradition condemns intellectual pride and calls us to humility. A little humility may be enough to allow us to make the short step from fidelity to faith. We need the humility to accept that we cannot create our own values, or pick and choose the rootstock from which our fragile moral sensibilities have sprung.
Consider his proof for the existence of God. You can read the original in his Metaphysics, but it's pretty dense stuff: the commentary I've linked to may be easier if you aren't philosophers yourselves. I'll further gloss the commentary below.
Avicenna leaves the conceptual realm for a single empirical datum: "There is no doubt that something exists."
This is the same thing that St. Augustine and, later, Descartes came away with as an undoubtable truth. Descartes' formula is the most famous today, but he was the last of the three.
Avicenna proceeds: "Everything that exists is either necessary [by reason of itself] or possible [by reason of itself and necessary by reason of another]."
If something exists, that is, it must at least be possible for it to exist. If it weren't possible, it couldn't exist! That much is easy to understand.
Why "necessary," though? The argument hinges on the idea of where one 'gets' existence. Whether we're talking about a natural thing or an artifact of human creation, how can something come to exist? A horse can be bred by two other horses; a house can be built by a man. Gases in space can collect together and form a planet. But in all cases, the new thing that comes to exist is obtaining existence from something that already exists.
Therefore, if any single thing exists, it is necessary that something else existed to give it existence (if that first thing doesn't, itself, exist by necessity). Nothing can give existence if it does not exist itself. The parent horses had to exist if there is a foal; the men had to exist if there is a house; the gases in space had to exist if there is a planet. Those things, since they exist, had to have something that existed prior to them... etc.
Avicenna notes that you could go back through an infinite regress if you don't anchor this somewhere (this problem was first recognized by Agrippa the Skeptic). Avicenna doesn't rely on that argument, though: he points out that it's enough to recognize the necessity in the first step. If we know that something exists, we already can make a necessary claim: either (a) it was necessary in itself, or (b) it is necessary that something else made it exist.
If we rely on the infinite regress, we could potentially stop here: if something exists, then either it is necessary in itself, or it necessarily has a prior existent. At least one thing, then, necessarily has to exist in order for anything to exist: we just have to find out which one is 'necessary in itself' and we can stop.
That isn't Avicenna's method, though. The next part of his proof hinges on the question of what holds things in existence, which he believes helps us establish the nature of what kind of thing could be 'necessary in itself.' We can go through that if you're interested. It's an interesting use of neoplatonic emanation to insist on the unity and one-ness of the necessary existent (which St. Thomas Aquinas has to answer, since he wants to hold that the 'necessary existent' is not one thing, but three-in-one).
For now, though, I'd just like to note that there remain arguments for God that arise from naturalism, and which aren't adequately demonstrated false by either logic or science. They are very difficult and dense arguments, which are much harder to grapple with than most modern readers have patience for doing. As a result, they tend to be airily dismissed by moderns who haven't taken the trouble to fully understand the argument in the first place. That's a choice, but not a necessity.
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