Descartes’ cosmological argument seems to rest on two things he takes as incorrigible: he has an idea of God, and he can’t account for it given his epistemic status, i.e., he is sure he couldn’t be the originator of the idea. The rough-and-tumble version of the argument is that given all the idea entails, omniscience, omni-benevolence, and so on, he concludes that the only cause of the idea must be the very being who actually has the predicates, which is, of course, God himself.

The payoff, Descartes thinks, is twofold: the first payoff is that because only God could hold such ideas at all he is the only explanans for the explanandum of the existence of the idea itself, and because Descartes knows he isn’t God (otherwise, it would be manifest to him that the idea of God were the sort of thing he could comfortably think up), he knows that there must necessarily be something outside of his thinking mind. The second payoff is that God’s goodness, one of the attributes Descartes has in the idea of God, Descartes can rest assured that God is no deceiver, thereby rendering any concerns for the evil genius impotent. Further, because of God’s non-deceptive nature, Descartes believes he has more tools in place to answer his doubt.

Finally, I thought I’d briefly comment on Descartes’ influences. Though you rightly point out that he was Catholic, the Church’s influence upon him doesn’t seem to have been too great, though the Church’s schooling at the time, particularly the education being offered by the then nascent Jesuit order, the order under whose provenance Descartes’ education was given, had a lasting impact on his thought, not only in facilitating his mind generally, but also by serving as a springboard from which to being his own thought. A wonderful (and cheap!) book that covers some of the influence the Jesuits had on Descartes’ thought is “Descartes on Causation” by Tad Schmaltz. The first chapter is devoted to early modern Jesuit philosophy, particularly, of course, Suarez. Another good book would be “Descartes: A Biography” by Desmond Clarke. That could help tie some of the influence loose ends together.

Great podcasts, guys. I know this is an old one, so perhaps I’ve wasted my time in writing this, but I thought it’d be worth a try.

Cheers,

Stephen

[…]René Descartes – ReformedForum.org[…]…

Hi Natie,

I think we’re in agreement in our descriptions of the scientific community, at least up to the last sentence of your first paragraph. Although I begin to part ways with Kuhn when it comes to incommensurability, I agree that there are many constraints on hypothesis formation, many of which arise from theoretical presuppositions. I think that’s what I described in my description of the history of physics; perhaps I wasn’t clear.

With regard to those occasions “when atheist scientists say a priori that intelligent design is not science,” I suppose you may be right, although few scientists are in the business of making strictly a priori claims. In my experience, many atheistic *and* theistic scientists say that intelligent design is not a science, and they do so a posteriori. Given that intelligent design-ists have had decades to come up with any hypotheses stronger than “you can’t explain this yet” and have failed to do so, I think it’s safe to say that intelligent design-ism is not a science. Yet. Anyway, that’s another conversation.

I’ve been reading about the “perspicuity of Scripture”, and it seems like there are several different conceptions of it… one common one is the position that any person can – with the guidance of the Holy Spirit – obtain a sufficiently correct understanding of what is needful for salvation. That seems to be something different from the position you are taking; you seem to be saying that not only is the Scripture sufficient unto salvation, but also that it is – in itself – sufficient unto the creation of accurate propositional statements about the nature of God, the nature of man, etc. The first claim is, of course, totally unverifiable (no one can know whether another’s faith or understanding or whatever was satisfactory to God, right?), but the second claim – your claim – is pretty dubious, for the same reasons I adumbrated in my previous post. Let me ramble…

Theologies and systems of belief derived from the Scriptures by intelligent people acting in good faith will be chronically underdetermined by the available evidence. Each person who begins to develop a theological system will begin with the texts which seem most “clear” to them. As the theology expands, the theologian will take into consideration what seem to him to be the “difficult” texts that appear to conflict with their embryonic theology, and will exegete a construct that explains the inconsistency in terms of that theology. By the time the theological system has matured, it will be an internally consistent model, founded on the “clear” texts, accounting for the “difficult” texts, and wholly justifiable in terms of scripture alone.

A competing theological system which has been built from a foundation of texts which its creators thought were “clear” will have its own exegesis for its own “difficult” texts, which may, in fact, be the “clear” texts of the rival system. Nevertheless, the second system can also be internally consistent and wholly justifiable in terms of scripture alone.

Now, how can you decide which system is correct? If you are determined to restrict your judgment to Scripture, you cannot decide. You can believe that one set of “clear” texts is “clearer” than another, but you cannot base that belief on Scripture, because your assessment of “clarity” is a presupposition that determines how you actually make judgments about Scripture. Your exegesis may be another man’s eisegesis, even if both of you are acting in good faith.

Why do I say that these theories are “chronically underdetermined”? Because there is no new evidence to be had! If you are bound to Scripture, you have already made all your “observations”, and you are stuck – you cannot perform any new experiments to distinguish between the theories. If you want a way to distinguish between the theories, you must go outside of Scripture. The only option you have is to make louder and more emphatic assertions – which is, I think, a good summary of the history of protestant theology.

So how do you (or other philosophers of theology) resolve this problem? Has anyone made an effort, or is all this writing only going to get me another instance of, “We can just know we’re right, because we’re the ones that God has granted rightness to,” or something similar?

We’re straying far from the topic of Descartes here… perhaps this discussion would be a good topic for a podcast? If you wanted to focus it on something specific, you could consider the following pair of positions, which I would argue are underdetermined by Scripture:

1) Every human soul will be redeemed by Christ and will spend eternity with God. In the last day, all the sins and good deeds of each person will be revealed to each other person (some people may be more unhappy than others at that point) but all will accept the mercy of God when it is offered through Christ, and their tears of shame will be wiped away.
2) Most human souls will not be redeemed by Christ and will spend eternity in some kind of unpleasant situation. A few souls, who God chose before the world was created, will return to him and spend eternity in some kind of very pleasant situation. Christ has something to do with all this choosing, but really, God always knew who would end up where.

Just a thought,
Steve

Hi Stevie,

sorry for the delay. There’s a lot of great interest in what you said, but I’d like to make just one point. You honed in on the remark I made about misreading the Bible, and you followed that thought to a comparison between the intellectual worlds of theology and of science. In response to the comparison, I’d like to say first that science is not as uniform and impersonal as is often claimed. I think this is an important point emphasized in 20th century philosophy of science, most notably in Kuhn’s SSR. Seems like the idea is not that science is sort of purely and impersonally inductive, but that hypotheses are drawn from a robust theoretical framework which is – and must be – presupposed. So when a scientific question is asked, the emphasis in 20th century thought has brought out all the full conceptual framework within which any particular question is asked. Broadly viewed, science is in constant revolution, each paradigm representing whatever constitutes, at whatever time, the boundaries of the professional discipline. I think some of this comes out clearly when atheist scientists say a priori that intelligent design is not science.

but the other side, about theological method and the variety and polarity of theological schools and churches – indeed bro, this situation is lamentable. The Bible itself teaches that unity is a Christian value, and the church ought to work for it.

What I can say about the way “we” Reformed folk do theology is this: we believe in the sufficiency (everything necessary for salvation is contained there, and nothing can be added), necessity (can’t know God truly without it), authority (you get that one), and perspicuity of Scripture. The last one is important: it means that the less explicit or more “difficult” parts of Scripture ought to be understood in light of the clearer passages. So this sets the groundwork for an interpretive methodology which renders the human reader clearly subordinate to the text itself. If there is disagreement between persons, “what does the Scripture say?” If there are conflicting interpretation of a particular passage, or confusion on a passage, “what does the whole or greater part of the Bible say which helps with the interpretation of this text?” So the idea is that the human interpreter, as I said, is subjected to the text. We are “stewards” of the mysteries of God, we’re just house keepers, so we determine, methodologically, not to invent anything or add anything to the Scripture.

So, I suppose, the Reformed theological tradition shares your concern and frustration with the unhappy diversity and confusion within the Christian church, which provokes, so often, il-feelings among Christians. Our answer is that the whole church should be under the authority of the text of Scripture, and its not just a bumper sticker – we take that very seriously.

Thanks again!

Don’t mind at all! Thanks very much Steve for this very thoughtful response. I think you make interesting and insightful comments here. Please give me some time to formulate a response.

Thanks

I can totally understand what you’re claiming when you say that the Bible is true – that it is the word of God and is never in error or contradiction. It’s the same sort of thing I’m claiming when I say that reality is really real – that there are no glitches in reality, and that it doesn’t try to trick me. It’s a fundamental claim, for which it seems to the person making it that no evidence is needed (or even possible), but which must be made if you want to get somewhere. So I see where you’re coming from (even if I don’t agree).

I had my epiphany when you wrote, “… I can expect to encounter biblical teachings which frustrate or confuse my mind; I can even say that I understand some Bible teachings now which I did not understand in years past for the simple reason that in my (sinful, proud) heart I did not want to hear them.” THAT is the sort of thing that I have been trying to point out the possibility of! I didn’t want to try to argue you guys out of your conviction that the Bible is the word of God (you’ll have to realize that on your own :-P) but I did want to bring to light the fact that you can draw incorrect conclusions from true facts.

Your relationship to the Bible it’s precisely analogical to my relationship to reality. I think it’s real, true, and consistent – but I also think that I make mistakes about what is the case. I’ve made plenty of mistakes, in observation, in deduction, in reaction — I’ve probably made mistakes in most ways that can be made, all based on what I perceived to be true about reality. But that doesn’t mean reality wasn’t true – it just means the model of reality I had in my head did not match the actual reality out there in the world. Likewise, it’s quite possible for those who believe the Bible is true to make mistakes about what the truth of it is. In fact, it’s quite obviously the case that they do make such mistakes, quite often.

Here is where I hope I can make my point clear: there is something deeply flawed in the way religious believers have tried to develop the best possible human understanding of the truths contained in the Bible (or other holy texts). Compare the development of the study of physics to the development of theology: the modern incarnations of each were born at (very roughly) the same time, with Descartes and Luther, and began to mature with Newton and Calvin. Very intelligent and educated people have been working on both areas of study for about the same amount of time. And yet in the modern world almost everyone with a reasonable education in physics will identify the same laws, principles, theories, and facts (except at the cutting edge of new research), while almost everyone with a reasonable education in theology will identify a different set of laws, principles, theories, and facts. (And if you look beyond protestant theology the differences are not minor, they are fundamental – the equivalent of quantum physics vs. the four elements.)

What’s going on? What makes people – including you – think that their methods of extracting truth from their texts are working correctly, while everyone else’s methods are flawed? Why don’t you draw the (to me) more obvious conclusion – that there is something wrong with everyone’s methods – and scrap the whole thing, then start over with new methods? That is the sort of thing that happens all the time in physics: whenever people start spinning ad hoc theories in all directions, you can be pretty sure we’re about to have a major re-write of a bunch of theories. But even when this happens, very few people claim that the nature/truth of reality itself has changed – most people realize that what needed to change was our understanding of it. In the same way, I would think that you would be able to ditch all your creeds and confessions and start over from your ground of truth – in hopeful cooperation with everyone else who shares that ground – and make an effort to figure out something that is a little more correct than before.

I would think that you Reformed folk would be especially good at doing things like that. I mean, you don’t think that holding to the wrong creed is going to lead to your condemnation by God; you believe that no action on your part can interfere with God’s plan for your salvation. So why do you cling so desperately to the claims about God which have been handed down to you? Why not try something new?

Now I’ve rambled, and perhaps even grown a bit polemical. I hope you don’t mind… I really need to get my own blog.

Steve

Hi Steve,

Thanks very much for listening so intently to our discussions. Your responses are also most welcome. You are right to point out the similarity between Calvin’s and Descartes’ practice of accepting so much before or without presenting an argument for it. They assume in fact even more than just ‘that God exists’ but very much about him, what he is like, and so on. An important difference however is that Descartes happily takes revealed truth on the authority of the Roman Catholic Church (a human institution) while Calvin takes revealed truth on the authority of the Scriptures, which he believes to be produced by human authors but ultimately by the singular and infallible divine author. The RC church is much more comfortable mixing revealed and naturally discoverable truths than the Reformed/Calvinist church; for this reason you find Descartes making these arguments for the existence of God on the one hand, while he is a happy Catholic on the other, with or without those arguments. So those arguments – Rome is clear on this – have limited use. They are meant to add rational support to truths held on ecclesiastical authority, or to encourage Christians in times of doubt, or to break down the arguments of skeptics. Of course Descartes’ arguments turned out to be pretty weak, but generally speaking, this is the RC idea of doing theology in this way. Interestingly, they believe that the Bible itself teaches that the church’s authority is divinely ordained, and even that the Bible itself allows for, or even sets the precedent for, this kind of mixed revealed/natural theological methodology.

You won’t find many Reformed people bothering too terribly much with such arguments, first, because we don’t consider them at all successful; you can’t really get much more than a sort of divine abstracted something or other, or somethings, by arguing in this way. Most importantly, we believe the scriptural teaching to be that Scripture alone bears special authority as the word of God, in the fullest sense, (not the church), that the Old and New Testaments together are the full and sufficient given word of God (that nothing can/should be added), that the special revelation contained in the Bible is unconditionally necessary for salvation and for knowledge of the truth (truth cannot be known on other grounds), and that Scripture is ultimately its own interpreter – that is, that it should be understood in light of itself, since it bears its own authority. This last thing is a very particular hermeneutic/interpretive principle which means, among other things, that any human understanding of what the Bible teaches is always subject to correction by the Bible itself. The reader is a subject of the text, a steward of the Word, its servant, basically.

So I think in response to your last comment, yes (!), I, Nate Shannon, willfully subject myself to the Bible and accept its claims, AND, since I believe that whatever the Bible teaches is true/truth, then if you ask me what I believe (is true), I will say (literally, perhaps) ‘whatever the Bible teaches’. But this is very different from making those claims on my own authority. The idea that I subject myself in heart, mind and body, to the Bible is inextricable from my obeisance to God in heart, mind and body. So when I am convinced that the Bible teaches something, I am convinced that God teaches it. Weirdly, because of my relationship to the author of the Bible, as humble finite sinful creature to eternal perfect holy creator, the Bible is a source of truth which is deeper than I can really expect to penetrate, and I can expect to encounter biblical teachings which frustrate or confuse my mind; I can even say that I understand some Bible teachings now which I did not understand in years past for the simple reason that in my (sinful, proud) heart I did not want to hear them. Thus we say ‘I believe, help my unbelief’.

I’m starting to ramble… one of the dangers of online dialogue – one of many – is solipsism. I’m so engrossed in what I’m writing that I’ve forgotten that its most likely boring or incoherent – or both – for other people. I hope maybe I’ve broken some ground in clarifying the Reformed idea of taking truth on authority. Is there circularity in it? Well, I suppose. But ONLY if you ASSUME that God in fact is NOT the author of Scripture; then yes, our position is helplessly, incoherently circular. If the Triune God, F, S, and HS is the author of the Bible – just imagine for a moment that He is – then logical circles are no longer really an issue; He has spoken. So we’re not really making arguments for God; we confess with Scripture that God is who he says he is. We are not the authors or inventors but the stewards of the truth of the Bible. I am blessed and honored and filled with peace and joy, quite frankly, to be a servant of the truth of God in Christ Jesus.

Thanks Steve – the day you quit listening will be a sad day indeed.

Here’s a page with a bunch of the sounds.

Thanks Patrick. James Dolezal and I discuss Helm’s new book and spend a few minutes on Descartes in the forthcoming Reformed Media Review ep. 31. It will be out next week.

Jonathan, you wrote, “The difference is a circle that begins and ends with Man as the arbiter of truth, or a circle that begins and ends with the Triune God of Scripture.”

I read that as, “The difference is a circle that begins and ends with Man as the arbiter of truth, or a circle that begins and ends with Jonathan and his friends.”

The reason that I read it like that is that I’m having an argument with you. I am not having an argument with “the Triune God of Scripture” because I don’t think that entity posts under the name Jonathan, nor does it appear on Refomed Forum podcasts. So when a claim is put forward in this argument that claim is presented by a human, evaluated by a human, and the decision about whether or not to accept it is made by a human. I know I am not God, and I’m pretty sure you are not God, so would you please stop speaking as if you are able to make pronouncements on behalf of God? You are not able.

So, now that we’ve got that straightened out… I have the same foundation you have: I have a brain, some experiences, and some common sense. I have some understanding of logic and numbers. I have no magic powers, epistemic or otherwise. I’m just a person. So are you. We are both trying to make sense of the world. We differ only in that you think you can be right by saying you are right, and I don’t think that works.

Oh, and before we get off track, it’s YOUR idea that you have a handle on a “truth GIVEN from special revelation”, and it’s YOUR idea that you’re assuming as a premise to your argument. You can’t dodge the fact that it’s YOUR assumption through some epistemic slight of hand which passes YOUR favorite document off as a direct line to God – it’s still YOUR assumption, whatever it is that YOU are assuming. Ergo, the idea of God which you extract from your special revelation is YOUR idea of God by virtue of the fact that YOU chose which scripture to extract it from and the method of extraction.

Jonathan, it is you who are saying that Descartes would be making a mistake if he were to start out assuming what he intends to prove, and it is also you who are claiming that it not a mistake for you to make the same move. Perhaps you’re comfortable with that inconsistency, but if so, would you be honest enough to just come out and say that you don’t care whether your arguments are consistent with themselves?

As I believe we have pointed out in the past… The goal is not to just point out circularity, but autonomy. If you can provide one statement or predicate at all that is not circular in the end… we would love to see it. In fact the method of “Pointing out circularity at foundational level axioms” is itself circular. The difference is a circle that begins and ends with Man as the arbiter of truth, or a circle that begins and ends with the Triune God of Scripture. Because of this, what we would want to ask YOU Steve is where does YOUR foundation begin? With yourself? With your brain? With causality? Numbers? Experience? Common Sense? In other words, we critique others based on our foundation. If you do not have an epistemic foundation that gives interpretation to all experiences, then on what basis are you criticizing any view whatsoever? To put it simply, what/who do you hang your hat on? Kant? Darwin? Derrida? Hitchens (please don’t say Hitchens, he is a horrible philosopher)? Not to be condescending, but to call foul on any statement requires a rule book. We have shown you without any shame our rule book, what is yours?

I’ve listened to this episode 3 times now, trying to figure out the best way to approach your hermetically sealed worldview, and I think I may have identified something that perhaps get you to think about how tangled your arguments need to be in order to stay inside the perimeter you’ve laid out for yourselves.

At 18:26 you say, “If [Descartes] is trying to do the Anselmian method by saying you have to have the predicate of perfect existence because otherwise something would be greater, then you can say, ‘Well, you’re trying to prove an idea which you already have.’ See, Descartes says, ‘OK, What’s my idea of God. Now how do I prove that,’ which is obviously just assuming what you want to prove.” So you obviously understand what a circular argument is, and that it’s illegitimate to take your ending point as your starting point.

But then at 31:16 you say, “For Calvin, which is the tradition that we follow, knowledge of God and knowledge of self are always coincident; you can never have any time in which you have knowledge of yourself prior to knowledge of God, because you being a creature being made in God’s image and being dependent on God for your very epistemology, to say anything else would be an epistemic failure.” That claim is, if anything, _more_ circular than the claim which you pointed out Descartes could be seen as making. So why are you able to detect circularity in Descartes, but not in yourselves?

Steve

Reformed Forum crew and its Van Tillian listens might be interested to know that some recent work on Descartes’s argues that he uses a form of transcendental argument in the Meditations. I think Janet Broughton’s work Descartes’s Method of Doubt http://www.worldcat.org/title/descartess-method-of-doubt/oclc/46937490&referer=brief_results is the first serious discussion of this. For some shameless self-promotion, I have a (rough) draft arguing that Descartes uses a strong transcendental argument, following the same presuppositional logic as Van Til’s: http://sites.google.com/site/paphilosophy/home/papers/Descartes%27sTranscendentalProject%28Winter2010%29.pdf?attredirects=0&d=1

Also, if anyone’s interested, here is a fairly comprehensive bibliography on Descartes: http://sites.google.com/site/paphilosophy/home/papers/DescartesBibliography.pdf?attredirects=0&d=1

We left off some important points regarding Descartes’ proofs of God. We discussed Descartes’ argument that the concept of God includes perfect existence and that (I’m summarizing here of course) God cannot really be conceived without this perfect existence. I think we can trace this to his thoughts on simple substances – he says that we shouldn’t invest too much in talk about the attributes/accidents of some object because we never experience those things separately. So talking about God as lacking perfect existence is like talking about any other object which lacks some integral part of its essence, like an apple which lacks roundness or something, a rock which lacks hardness. I think the easy response is that this doesn’t mean at all that you haven’t invented the concept and accomplishes really very little as far as real existence; Descartes is in effect saying that “if God exists then he necessarily has existence”. And Kant’s point that existence is not a predicate does, as J.Brack wanted to say, I think stands: you can’t just say God is a thing which includes attributes X1-Xn, among which is existence. On the other hand – as we discussed, say Descartes see this not as an ungrounded proof, but as a “way” which depends and presumes upon the authoritative teaching of the church. In this case his natural theology follows revealed theology in a sense much more amenable to the Reformed perspective, and this argument begins to look a little presuppositional, doesn’t it? God either is the full a se God, or he just isn’t.

But another argument which Descartes offers is very scholastic in flavor, in both its axiomatic strategy and because its a posteriori. Rene argues that there must be at least as much being in the cause as there is in the effect. So its cosmological but not teleological. He also argues from an Augustinian ‘until my heart rests in thee,’ a sort of teleological orientation of the human person typically emphasized in R.C. theology, saying that all of the perfections that lie in our minds and hearts, and by which we find ourselves lacking in so many respects, toward which we naturally strive, are the natural overflow of a heart which innately knows God.

Just wanted to add that since we didn’t get around to it. See you soon my dears