Philosophy and theology

Brian Garrett claims, in defence of Gaunilo’s Perfect Island and contra Plantinga, that ‘Properly understood, the great-making qualities of an island are maximal’. This article demonstrates that they are not, thus ‘the greatest conceivable island’ remains an incoherent concept and Gaunilo’s parody fails.

How are we to understand the doctrine of general resurrection in the 21st century? Paul proclaims the centrality of general resurrection in language which is no less logical than it is uncompromising (1 Corinthians 15:12-19). The Catholic Catechism re-iterates Paul’s affirmation declaring that ‘The Christian Creed - the profession of our faith in God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, and in God's creative, saving, and sanctifying action - culminates in the proclamation of the resurrection of the dead on the last day and in life everlasting.’  Given the centrality of the doctrine of general resurrection to the Christian faith and Aquinas’ dictum that only the false is contrary to the true, it is important to have, in every age, theologically, philosophically and scientifically coherent and informed conceptions of human personhood and mind-brain relationship that are faithful to the Christian doctrine and compatible with demonstrated findings of science, if we are to ‘be ready to make your defense to anyone who demands from you an accounting for the hope that is in you.’ (1 Peter 3:15)

The word 'transhumanism' was first used in 1957 by Julian Huxley who saw it as 'man remaining man, but transcending himself, by realising new possibilities of and for his human nature.'  Huxley was an advocate of eugenics, seeing it as means to planning and controlling human evolution.  H. G. Wells, a friend of Huxley and author of Men Like Gods  imagined 'benevolent scientist-technicians who will use science and technology to manufacture a perfect future.'  Thus the scene is set for the general approach to the Good, not in some Platonic, religious or properly humanist understanding, but as a practical extension of capabilities and without adequate consideration of the will and its purposes behind the capabilities.

Various attempts have been made to save Gaunilo's ‘ideal’ island by proposing different criteria for its maximal greatness or perfection. This paper addresses a recent proposal that ‘an ideal island is conceivable if it's defined as any island exhibiting an ideal ratio of great‐making island properties’ (Milo Crimi, ‘Ideally sized islands: Reply to Danielyan, Garrett and Plantinga’, Analysis 77 (2), 273‐278) and shows that it fails because the idea of an island – indeed, of anything that is finite, delineated and circumscribed as a necessary condition of its conception ‐ cannot accommodate maximal greatness or perfection; neither can a determined quantitative relation between finite relata constitute a criterion of maximal greatness or perfection.
Danielyan, Edgar (2018), On the Inherent Incoherence of Gaunilo's Island. The Heythrop Journal. doi:10.1111/heyj.13056

Dawkins’ position that the idea of God is only a meme that humans can and should rebel against suffers from numerous conceptual, evidential, epistemological and other difficulties as discussed above. The proposal seems to be chiefly based on an over-inflated belief in ‘Darwinism’ and is scientifically unjustified as well as unfruitful. The concept of memes is found wanting and unnecessary, and even if we accept memes as a concept he fails to advance substantiated arguments on how we can or why should we rebel against them.

Negative theology and ‘unbelief’ play a crucial role in reminding us that what we deny about God is no less important, and perhaps more appropriate, than what we affirm about God. The roots of the Judeo-Christian tradition, e.g. Exodus 3:14, 20:2-4, Deuteronomy 6:4, et al, warn against the abhorrence of idolatry, of mistaking the created things or concepts for their transcendent Cause, which cannot be contained, grasped, made subject to categories, if it is true God. However, both the affirmations and the denials fall necessarily short of ‘capturing God’, since anything ‘captured’ is guaranteed not be the God. What they can do is to create the tension, the ‘unknowing darkness’ in between, that points towards the One that cannot be circumscribed or categorised. In doing so the language is stretched to breaking point, indeed must break down, for the same linguistic and conceptual framework that allows us to think is the same framework that needs to be transcended on the way to union with its transcendent Creator: ‘it is the encounter with the failure of what we must say about God to represent God adequately.’  This goes all the way to the ‘existence’ of God, since ‘any understanding we have of the distinction between existence and non-existence fails of God’, and neither ‘being’ nor ‘non-being’ can be predicated of the One who is the Cause of being.

In this paper I propose that atheists are not rationally required to revise their convictions just because there are reasonable theists. However, they should be theoretically open to such revision particularly because ‘we all live out our lives in states of epistemic imperfection’, as many rational agents would agree.  I offer philosophical arguments for this position and also propose theological reasons for it, taking the reference to ‘reasonable theists’ to suggest a case of putative epistemic peer disagreement problem.

Philosophical consideration of divine power in monotheistic context has traditionally focused on the coherence or otherwise of the concept of omnipotence and increasingly elaborate attempts to define and delineate what God can and cannot do. In this paper I consider whether understanding of God's omnipotence as 'God can do everything' is an accurate and helpful way to understand the concept of divine power as attested in the Christian tradition. I aim to demonstrate that the Judeo-Christian belief in God as the Supreme Power can be held without succumbing to 'death by thousand qualifications' associated with the treatment of omnipotence as 'God can do everything'. I will not be considering the related questions of creation, miracles, problem of evil, etc. due to space constraints even though systematic treatment of divine power would require their consideration alongside discussion of divine power.

Christian discipleship is centred on the inner personal transformation to which the disciples of the incarnate Lord are called and virtue ethics with its primary focus on the persons rather than rules or consequences is a fitting ethical framework for its articulation. This personal transformation is understood to be the work of the divine grace as well as the person concerned, collectively in the ekklesia which is the body of Christ and individually in conforming to the imago Dei in Jesus Christ.  This transformation, initiated and sustained by the Spirit, involves re-orientation away from ‘the world’ and towards the mind of Christ - ‘imitatio Christi’ - which can be traced back to the beginning of the Judeo-Christian tradition: ‘Speak to all the congregation of the people of Israel and say to them: You shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy.’  Christian discipleship is primarily about inner conversion, change and transformation in response to divine revelation and initiative, in a ‘Gift-Call-Response dynamic of the moral life’.  Christian virtue ethics tradition, with its focus on the character and inner dispositions of moral agents, is well suited to help us understand what Christian discipleship involves, unlike utilitarian or deontological approaches with their focus on rules or consequences instead of persons that do not give us such understanding.

Judgment of conscience, at least formed and informed conscience, is compelling inter alia precisely because it is perceived by the subject as binding search for objective truth. It is not a capricious fancy, with no basis in anything whatsoever outside the perceived autonomy of the individual, that can be easily and painlessly dispensed with at a whim. Unfortunately, the grotesque exaggeration of individual autonomy in the contemporary Western societies, ignoring the facts of our intellectual, spiritual and material dependence on others, feeds the misguided narrative that everyone is sovereign on their island, contra Donne. Such attitude repudiates our duties and obligations towards each other, undermines our shared humanity, and is simply not in accord with the facts.

Despite the good intentions, the need to reduce inhumanity of humans to each other, and overall improvement, at least in some parts of the world, in respect for human life and dignity, the human rights discourse suffers from serious conceptual weaknesses, lip service and outright rejection in parts of the world. The practical decision to anchor the human rights discourse in the oblique concept of inherent human dignity does not seem to give it sufficient ontological justification.

I propose some principles for a Christian ethical and political engagement in contemporary Western societies guided by Luke 9:25, while appreciating the difficulties facing such engagement. These difficulties should be taken seriously by the church, but should not seem insurmountable since ‘the virtue of hope is between the vices of despair and presumption’.  Considering the internal difficulties and self-undermining features of some of the challenges discussed above we may yet discover that terrifying statues have feet of clay. Christians therefore are to live without making an idol of pluralism, remembering the first and the greatest commandment. I therefore propose faithfulness as a key to Christian engagement in a pluralist culture, and attempt to articulate what that could mean below. By keeping our gaze firmly on the cross and by being nourished by the rich tradition of spiritual and intellectual life of the church we can and should engage, however arduous it may seem, in societies that still live in the shadow of the faith but have lost its light, as Chesterton has observed in The Everlasting Man.

In Euthyphro Socrates succeeds in demonstrating Euthyphro’s lack of knowledge and understanding of the central to the dialogue concept of piety (εὐσέβεια) by showing his inability to satisfactorily define what is piety, but whether he succeeds in affirming or denying possibility of objective knowledge of God per se and in principle is a different question, a question which requires careful attention to the risk of anachronistic reading of the dialogue as well as caution regarding the claim that only definitions can serve as explanations.

I propose that reading 2 and 3 Proslogion as advancing exclusively philosophical arguments and virtually ignoring the context of both the book and its author is untenable. I agree with Smart who identifies a radical misunderstanding of the Sitz im Leben of Proslogion in exclusively philosophical readings of Anselm: 'Anselm's attitude is radically misunderstood if it is thought of as being purely philosophical and theoretical. His real aim is practical, polemical, apologetic. He is engaged in combatting scepticism - the scepticism of the fool who says in his heart, "There is no God”. Against this position Saint Anselm advances the view that not only does God exist, He exists with an absolute necessity which excludes the possibility of His being even conceived correctly as possibly not existing. In pursuit of such a purpose Anselm might legitimately use any order of cognition he thought sound and he might therefore be expected to depend on faith at least in part; only had his end been pure philosophic speculation would such an appeal to the supra-rational have been out of court.'  Smart’s view is supported in particular by Anselm’s reply to Gaunilo, where he writes ‘Now my strongest argument that this is false is to appeal to your faith and to your conscience’ - such an appeal being reasonable only if the arguments advanced are not exclusively philosophical.

In other words, is there only one universally or widely accepted philosophical concept of consciousness? Is ‘univocal concept of consciousness’ a coherent concept itself and if so what hinges on its formulation? If we fail to arrive at such a univocal concept what are the consequences for the philosophy of mind? I consider some of the recent work on the subject and discuss certain assumptions and their problematics to approach the questions above. I conclude that there is not a univocal concept of consciousness and it is an open question whether it can be defined. The nature of consciousness and perhaps some other questions may be beyond our ken as quantum mechanics is beyond the grasp of garden snails.

The type identity theory ('IT') is the proposition that mental states are brain states, the claim primarily attributed to Smart, Feigl and Place, which was further advanced in particular by Armstrong who proposed that all mental states are brain states. It is usually proposed by those who have a strong prior commitment to reductive physicalism. The IT may seem plausible given strong prior commitment to physicalism; even then it has to deal with the multiple realisation and phenomenal consciousness objections among others. Its proponents have not offered responses to either of these objections that are convincing to those without prior commitment to reductive physicalism. As someone who is not so committed I conclude that the type identity theory is implausible and can be rationally rejected.

The public discourse on this subject is polarised into the so-called 'pro-life' and 'pro-choice'  camps, particularly in the West. Morality or otherwise of abortion is a challenging question that is often a victim of ignorance, hidden agendas, fundamentally different worldviews and a host of social issues. Continuing development of science and medicine also has its profound impact on this question, not to mention the shifts in social contexts, especially in the West. The debate is often predicated on the concept of personhood, which is one of the most difficult questions in philosophy,  and whether an embryo is a 'person with potential' or a 'potential person'. The real or apparent dichotomy of quality vs. sanctity of life also bears upon the debate, related to other debates within the larger theistic-atheistic debates such as euthanasia and so-called 'right to die': 'Today, then, the medical tradition emphasizing the principle of sanctity of human life is competing with another school of thought according to which some lives are not worth living, because they are perceived to be of too poor a quality.'  This essay tries to provide some historical background, briefly outline the arguments on behalf of both sides, subject them to critique, and finally offer a tentative and hesitant conclusion. As Thomas Nagel has suggested 'There is no view from nowhere' and therefore anyone, on either side of the argument, comes with the inevitable baggage of beliefs, experiences and commitments that influence to a larger or lesser degree one's answer to this challenging question.

In Contra Gentes Athanasius dealt with heathen idolatry and philosophical pantheism before postulating creation as revelation of the one true God through the Word, and concluded by anticipating the treatment of the Incarnation in De Incarnatione, the second part of his treatise, which is the subject of this brief study.

From the very beginning of the church her administration was based on the pre-existing administrative divisions, first of the Roman empire, and later of the other states where the Gospel was preached. In this short paper I argue that despite this historical fact, territory and territorial administration are peripheral and secondary to the identity and character of the church.

Should the Roman Catholic Church abolish the compulsory requirement of clerical celibacy or maintain that discipline as it has done for many centuries? I attempt to answer this difficult question by discussing some of the arguments for and against abolition of compulsory clerical celibacy with reference to Catholic practice, theology and the mission of the Church in the modern world.