on panentheism

Christian metaphysics, or perhaps generally just philosophy of religion, is concerned with questions of whether god exists, of how god exists in such-and-such a way should there be a god, and about how such a god might be related to the world. Panentheism falls into this last question, as does pantheism and theism. Panentheism is a compromise between the other two. That is clear. And do any reading in contemporary theology. In Pannenberg. In Moltmann. In Polkinghorn. In Tanner. One runs into the term. It seems contemporary and trendy. But what is it?

Panentheism, a word derived from the Greek πᾶν ἐν θεῷ, begins in Ancient Neoplatonism (from Heraclitus to Plotinus) and comes up through Spinoza's Deus siva Natura to arrive in contemporary western theology in the process theologies of A. N. Whitehead Process and Reality and Charles Hartshorne The Divine Relativity. (The term was coined by Prussian philosopher Karl Christian Friedrich Krause in 1832 to distinguish between the cosmologies of Hegel, Schelling, and Spinoza.) Panentheism posits that all that exists is in God and is part of God without ontological distinction, and yet, God has a unity and identity of his own distinct from that of his finite parts. It reminds me of emergence. There is a connection, but not an identity. God lives his own life, yet he lives it in and through the cosmos. The world is God’s body, and we ourselves are parts of God. Our experiences are God’s experiences. God is, to quote Whitehead, “the great companion—the fellow-sufferer who understands.”

Panentheism retains many of the religious resources of theism even as it criticizes theism’s separation between God and the world. William Hasker says, “Panentheism acknowledges that certain aspects of God’s being are unchangeable, but it stresses God’s involvement in temporal processes in a way that is meant to correct what is felt to be classical theism’s overemphasis on the immutability of God.” Where theism stresses the self-sufficiency of God from creation and characterizes their relationship as totally one-sided, panentheism says God and the world are interdependent. The god of panentheism is deeply involved in the world.

So, why choose panentheism? I can see two reasons. First, panentheism is friendly to scientific materialism and philosophies of science. But, at the same time, it can raid the cookie jar of theism. The second reason is existential: what is good for you is good for god. You can be a panentheist and follow New Thought, management-positive-thinking-optimism books at the office. There is a deep optimism in panentheism. Panentheists aren't judging anyone. And a panentheist can affirm wildly different expressions of religions with no problem.

For the Christian theologian, though, there are problems. Consider panentheism’s identification of godself with the world. If God came to earth to save sinners, then was God’s being damned? And is God quite literally saving himself? If we "fall short of the glory of God," then hasn't God's glory fallen short of itself? Furthermore, aside from dogma, only considering scientific cosmology, this unity creats a problem. Panentheism states that God needs the cosmos in order to live his life in a manner analogous to how human beings need their bodies. But consider this against our scientific understanding of the origin of our universe. God did not begin alongside the universe. That would be absurd! Yet panentheism requires an infinitely regressing series of universes.

There are difficulties that arise from distinction as well as unity. The Judeo-Christian intellectual tradition has always understood a distinction between the world and God. In the doctrine of creation, panentheism understands a creation ex deo, out of God’s own nature for creation is a necessity for the divine existence. Theism teaches creation ex nihilo, from nothing, and it specifically characterizes this as an act of grace from God to the world. The doctrine of creation and of soteriology relate closely together; if creation isn’t an act of grace, then what happens to salvation by grace? In addition, there is the matter of God as the Absolute Good. God is, in the classical categories, the Good, the True, and the Beautiful — originally, perfectly, and normatively. God is the ultimate standard against which any other good is judged. The universe is merely good in part, true in part, and beautiful in part. Panentheism ignores this. And, in doing so, it swallows evil. For if the universe is a mixture of good and evil, then so is god. God cannot then be the Absolute God, yet panentheism has no replacement. Such a standard would be independent of God. But, of course, there can't be anything independent of God. By confusing, as some have called it, the norm and the normed, panentheism drains its universe of good and evil. Sure, God cannot judge anyone, but there is also no judgment. Any act toward judgment, no matter how wise, is an expression of power, but no one can say whether it is done well or poorly or generates good or evil ends. God may be a fellow sufferer with the suffering, but he simultaneously exults with the tyrant.

To conclude, though panentheism in the form of process theology seems to bring the goods, there are deep cracks in the dogmatic engine. Redefining the classical categories, removing the ontological distinction between creature and creator, and remaking grace over in a new image--all of these are serious problems. I like the way Hasker ends his discussion, “Panentheism," he says,

"seems to the theist to be nothing more than a disguised naturalism overlaid with a veneer of religious language. . . . The theist may even find naturalism preferable to panentheism. A naturalist, at least, rejects religion and religious values in a forthright and direct manner. A panentheist, in contrast, makes what seem to be substantive religious assertions, but when closely examined the substance tends to disappear, leaving behind only a vague aura of pious emotion.” (114)

Sometimes All You Need is Permission

Sometimes all you need is permission. You have done the hard work. You have asked the questions and assembled the data. But, for some reason, concluding remains elusive. Maybe what is missing is permission.

Permission came for me in the words of Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart. In the March edition of First Things, Hart wrote a column entitled "Reason's Faith" critiquing smug rationalism. And with it he helped me own the pieces of a puzzle I've been working on for ten years (a process attested in the history of this blog).

Hart's point is that the sharp divide between reason (ratio) and faith (fidei) is a modern experiment gone wrong. He calls the division a "tarnished relic of the seventeenth century." And its result remakes human reason as a faculty divorced from all assumption "dispassionate and disinterested." But this is wrong.

"All reasoning," says Hart, "begins from a venture of trust whose truthfulness can be ascertained only at the end of the sequence of postulates and predicates and judgment to which it gives rise." As I read this, I think of David Hume taking arrogant reason to task for too closely wedding cause and effect. Hart goes on to say why he can make this assertion.

Every assertion he says assumes a metaphysic in which the mind and the world connect and are true to one another. Enlightenment reason cannot boast this connection.

The materialist by force of will ignores his own assumptions, choosing to focus instead on the practical utility of every question. Who cares why it works. It works. And that it works becomes the all in all. The context from which the question arises eventually ceases to be noticed. Consider this comment from physical chemist Dr. Peter Coveney: "In modern biology and medicine today you would find most people not even trying to think in theoretical terms. . . What we call "Baconian theory' says, don't worry about a theoretical underpinning, just make observations, collect data, and interrogate the data." Hart calls this a true fideism. "The unyielding rationalist turns out to be the most irrational fideist of all: one who believes in reason even though there cannot possibly be any reason for that belief." With Bacon, Descartes project is similarly framed. The self is trusted to posit reality from its own foundations, an attempt at faith from below. It was only a short path to rational idealism, to Hegel, and the nihilism of postmodernity. "Without that original trust, that spiritual commitment, reason is not reason at all, but the purest irrationality."

The worldview that preceded the Enlightenment, the Medieval mind, was more integrated. It could wed mind and world and so posit truth because, behind mind and world it understood the unity and oneness by the one God.

Hart's critique of ascendant reason looks not only to the assumed metaphysic, but also appeals to natural selection. This is a move I've written about before, in that case employed by Alvin Plantinga. I think it is a devastating critique. It is simply this: if the human mind evolves, then how can we trust it to guarantee knowledge? Put another way: how can we trust reason if it is but another evolved faculty?

This is where I think theistic evolution is another fancy way of saying God made the world. The Medieval mind understood that God's unity was necessary to secure truth as the product of particulars embedded in a cosmos. The theist post-Darwin has to evoke God's triune plurality as well to ground mission, action, change--eschatology.

So then, I've had all of these pieces scattered around, but the confidence to finally--once and for all--to put them together was lacking. No longer. I'm willing to say that reason and faith are one because God's logos made the world in wisdom. I'm willing to suffer the charge of fideism and supernaturalism and the suspicion of anti-intellectualism or just plain naivete.

See also:

• Tweaking Methodological Naturalism
• Evolution, Providence, and the Political
• Evolution: Three Faithful Responses

Erich Przywara, Analogical Deliverer

I read with excitement First Things magazine's January 27, 2015 article about Erich Przywara's analogia entis today. The article by Stephen Webb is clearly written and includes as solid a description of Przywara's metaphysical insight as I have read. "Przywara," he says, "finds the formula for the analogical foundation of the Catholic Church in the Fourth Lateran Council's 1215 decree that, 'One cannot note any similarity between Creator and creature, however great, without being compelled to note an even greater dissimilarity between them.' . . . The 'ever greater,' for Przywara, signifies an ongoing, never complete, and always expanding process. The analogy of being is not an analogy of inequality, as if God and creation could be compared even if only for the purpose of demonstrating how dissimilar they are. Instead, [it] denotes a dynamic disproportionality, so that whatever characteristics we attribute to God must be continually dis/qualified on the basis of a difference that has no limit or end."

As I read it, what Przywara has done is to locate a basis for speaking philosophically about God outside of metaphor. Instead of metaphor, which I identify (perhaps incorrectly) here with the approach of natural theology (in that metaphor compares without discrimination), Przywara chooses analogy as his metaphysical foundation because, as a kind of argumentation (rather than a figure of speech) it is careful to discriminate.

Okay. So let me try and make some sense of what I'm babbling about here. The point is pretty esoteric. It has to do with theological language and the general problem of talking about God at all. I won't elaborate on that now. Nevertheless, the question is whether metaphor is a suitable device for talking about God. Listen, we can't name God and godself directly. There is no one-to-one relationship that would make our language even closely suitable. So god talk has to be rhetorical in nature. It has to be a function of moving from the known to the unknown. And this relationship is not going to be explicit, but implicit, so simile is out and metaphor is in. Unfortunately, metaphor is still not up to the job. And this is where I need to define metaphor more clearly.

A metaphor is a figure of speech in which an implied, implicit, or even a hidden comparison is made between two different things that are poles apart from each other but nevertheless have one or more characteristics in common. In other words, a resemblance of two contradictory or different objects is made based on some common characteristics. Its comparison is implicit or hidden, not explicit as in a simile. We speak, write, and think in metaphors.

A metaphor works by taking a primary subject and applying it to a secondary subject, with the primary likened to the secondary. A metaphor suggests some point of comparison between primary and secondary subjects, so that the primary subject is seen differently in a new light (e.g. my heart is an open book). Thanks to the metaphor, our understanding of the primary subject (called the tenor) is enriched and expanded in some way by the second (the vehicle). And, again, this is accomplished by bringing to light some hidden connection between them, even a hiddenness that is superficial or vague. Yes, sometimes the connection between primary and secondary is very hard to work out. But this is done on purpose in that audiences find pleasure in the working out of the the thing.

Theologically speaking, then, the problem is the relationship between primary and secondary. Theologically, the primary is always God, because God is what theologians are about, and the secondary is always nature, whether phusis, the natural world, or anthropos, the human world. Is there a direct one-to-one here, even if hidden? Can I say something like "God's wisdom is far higher than human wisdom" and mean the same thing by wisdom? Is it the same word for the same thing, different only in degree, or the same word for different things? And if the latter, how do I talk about this?

Przywara says I can talk about this using analogy. By using analogy, we commit comparison but it is an open sin. We know that there is a gulf between the two; that wisdom is the same word for two incomparable things. Nevertheless, analogy allows us to confess the truth and boldly commit the error--a kind of rheotorical simul iustis et peccator.

Now why an analogy can do this, I am not sure. Technically, an analogy is an argument whereas simile and metaphor are rhetorical figures of speech. All three are involved in comparison, but the latter are short, equative moves, whereas the former is a longer worked-out system of connections. Because analogies are built logically and by means of argumentation, anything that is not connected is openly unconnected. Therefore, analogy always leaves open the door of dissimilarity. Metaphors are not interested in leaving that door open. Metaphors gesture at truth through some connection but do not simultaneously work to remind the reader that primary and secondary subjects are as different as they are similar.

So because analogy is more transparent in scope, it provides a clearer foundation for theological discourse. At least I think this is what is being said.

I need to do more reading of this in historical dogmatics, and particularly in Aquinas. Przywara is in dialogue with Aquinas on this, and a quick Google search suggests this thing called "Thomas Aquinas's doctrine of analogy."

the goodness of a creature is different from the goodness of God insofar as the divine goodness is universal and good in itself whereas created goodnesses are particular and good only by reference to something else (secundum aliquid). We see the divine goodness or truth in particular good or true things in the same way we see an exemplar in something derived from the exemplar. This example asserts something important of the participation of creatures in God: the form of “good,” “true,” “being,” etc. which creatures receive from God is not the same as God. For God is being, good, etc. per essentiam, whereas creatures only possess these forms per participationem by reference to God.

Let me quote at length here from the Summa Theologica q13a5:

whatever is predicated of various things under the same name but not in the same sense, is predicated equivocally. But no name belongs to God in the same sense that it belongs to creatures; for instance, wisdom in creatures is a quality, but not in God. Now a different genus changes an essence, since the genus is part of the definition; and the same applies to other things. Therefore whatever is said of God and of creatures is predicated equivocally.

Further, God is more distant from creatures than any creatures are from each other. But the distance of some creatures makes any univocal predication of them impossible, as in the case of those things which are not in the same genus. Therefore much less can anything be predicated univocally of God and creatures; and so only equivocal predication can be applied to them.

I answer that, univocal predication is impossible between God and creatures. The reason of this is that every effect which is not an adequate result of the power of the efficient cause, receives the similitude of the agent not in its full degree, but in a measure that falls short, so that what is divided and multiplied in the effects resides in the agent simply, and in the same manner; as for example the sun by exercise of its one power produces manifold and various forms in all inferior things. In the same way, as said in the preceding article, all perfections existing in creatures divided and multiplied, pre-exist in God unitedly. Thus when any term expressing perfection is applied to a creature, it signifies that perfection distinct in idea from other perfections; as, for instance, by the term "wise" applied to man, we signify some perfection distinct from a man's essence, and distinct from his power and existence, and from all similar things; whereas when we apply to it God, we do not mean to signify anything distinct from His essence, or power, or existence. Thus also this term "wise" applied to man in some degree circumscribes and comprehends the thing signified; whereas this is not the case when it is applied to God; but it leaves the thing signified as incomprehended, and as exceeding the signification of the name. Hence it is evident that this term "wise" is not applied in the same way to God and to man. The same rule applies to other terms. Hence no name is predicated univocally of God and of creatures.

The Three Options

Bluntly stated, there seems to be three options available to the publicly thinking Christian today. And by publicly thinking I mean the Christian who is interested in thinking outside of the ecclesiastical circle, the Christian interested in speaking in the public square.

The public square is always tended by a gatekeeper, and as I've said before, the gatekeeper in our day is Enlightenment secularism manifested culturally in the materialism of the hard sciences. This is to say that the public square and all conversation allowed in the public square is implicitly in dialogue or in open agreement with the philosophical assumptions of science.

So, then, the public Christian has three ways of speaking. First, he may fully adopt materialist presuppositions and compartmentalize his mind, so that he is a Christian in some spheres and a secularist in the other. A subset of this is that he may refuse to compartmentalize the two and live buffeted by the tension. Second, he may retreat from the the metaphysics of modernity into a neoclassical metaphysics. My hypothesis is that the Intelligent Design community is pursuing this option, and that this option fuels the success of that effort to revive the argument from design. Third and finally, he may adopt the extremely new metaphysics of process or emergence.

I believe that an orthodox confession can be made within any of these three strategies--and, for me, this is a very new idea! Using the metaphor of a car, where orthodox confession is the body, the underlying metaphysic is its engine. One can swap out an engine and retain the integrity of the body (to lesser and greater degrees.) And, stepping further out, my guess is that the publicly thinking Christian cannot remain neutral forever but will, by steps known or unknown, inevitably choose one of the above three options.

Final caveat: in the course of time more options may develop. These are the ones I'm aware of presently. The Radical Orthodoxy movement of ten years ago (to the present?) was, to my mind, a variant of option two. And it is demonstrable that process or emergence has yet to produce what could be called thick orthodoxy, or something that the Nicene Fathers might recognize and agree with. This, however, does not mean it cannot, but only that it has not at this point in its development.

G. W. Leibniz. Discourse on Metaphysics

G W. Leibniz's Discourse on Metaphysics is the olive branch of a mind at once seizing and being seized by the churning intellectualism of the seventeenth century. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1717), forty at the time he penned his first mature outline of a universal metaphysic, was a man standing in between the ideological armies of Cartesian modernism and Aristotelian conservatism. His Discourse sounds above the crush of these two ideologies. It paves another way. And, in doing so, it has long outgrown its place as a piece of private correspondence to inform thinkers across the disciplines of the present day.

The roots of Leibniz’s intellectual modernism are traced to his youth. G. W. Leibniz was born July 1 at Leipzig, the son of a professor of moral philosophy. His mother also had university ties; her father was a Professor of Law. Culturally, the violence of the Thirty-Years war would subside in another two years time. Yet, Leibniz’s own intellectual violence grew with age. Upon his father’s death, the six-year old was allowed access to an expansive library. He taught himself enough Greek and Latin to, “immerse myself in the historians and poets.” He absorbed the ideas of Plato, Herodotus, Aristotle, Cicero, Augustine, Aquinas, and many others, all without intellectual prejudice. Leibniz’s gift to all was the unity of a curious mind. Authors were valued each for their own contribution. It was a habit of synthesis he would carry with him throughout life.

As a young man, Leibniz’s democratic intelligence had great affect upon his career. He studied law and philosophy at the universities of Leibzig and Altdorf, yet declined a university post in lieu of the broader opportunities of public service. (No doubt, the cultural stagnations attending a protracted war made a professorship repellent to the autodidact.) His employer was the Elector of Mainz. Leibniz’s flair for law, mining diplomatically from both scholastic canon and scientific analysis, brought him success and opportunities for travel. One diplomatic mission took him to Paris in the spring of 1672.

Paris in the seventeenth century was the intellectual center of the world. Aristotelian scholasticism, traditionally dominant in the schools, was failing in influence before the demonstrable results of the modern philosophers: Galileo, Torricelli, Cavaliere, Descartes, Pascal, and Hobbes. The substantial forms of the schoolmen were being poured into new wineskins of geometry, mechanics, and motion. New solutions reopened new problems to scrutiny: In a world of atomic flux, how can there be any continuity of matter? What is the relationship between contingency and necessity? Can we obtain a clear and distinct idea of things as they are en res by observing things as they appear to be?

In order to participate in the Parisian milieu, Leibniz needed to learn many new ideas. His education was Aristotelian. He was a humanist in the renaissance tradition. Therefore, the modernism of Paris was entirely new. He worked hard to understand and embrace the truths of its observational methodology. He negotiated meetings with the philosophers Antoine Arnauld and Nicolas Malebranche (he would also visit Baruch Spinoza in Holland). He read unpublished manuscripts by Pascal and Descartes. Yet, it was the teaching of Christiaan Huygens that equipped him to practice modern philosophy.

Huygens’s mathematical instruction found fertile soil; Leibniz’s progress was quick. He was elected to the Royal Society of London in 1673. His famous calculating machine was built that same year. He suggested ideas for improvements in barometry, time keeping and the calculation of distance, as well as for mechanical devices such as pumps, carriages, gears, and lenses. By the time Leibniz returned to Hanover in 1676, his mastery of mathematics was so thorough that, in 1675, at twenty-eight years of age, he had discovered the infinitesimal, or differential, calculus. Its dynamism formed the basis of all of Leibniz’s subsequent philosophical reasoning to his death on November 14, 1716.

Until 1675, a type of curve existed, called a mechanical or transcendent curve, which defied geometrical analysis. The mechanical curve resembles the shape made by a sail in the wind. Cartesians judged the curve to be forever inexplicable to mathematics because its explanation would require the knowledge of all possible numbers, a knowledge in extenso. Leibniz disagreed. The entire shape of the curve does not need to be explained, he reasoned, but only its geometrical movement. If the difference between each of its infinitesimally small points could be expressed geometrically, then all that would be needed to complete the analysis would be the movement of the equation. Expressing the generation of the curve geometrically–its “construction principle”–is tantamount to expressing the curve itself, and without the requirement of in extenso understanding. All that is needed to plot an infinitely complex shape is a foundational measurement and dynamic principle of continuity based on that measurement.

Leibniz’s mathematical insight was, in reality, an application of his rationalist understanding of knowledge. Throughout his educational life, he envisioned a universal characteristic language, an algebraic mathematics of logic (ars characteristica) by which all knowledge could not only be explained and compared, but ultimately constructed. Descartes had considered such a thing, but dismissed it since such a language would depend upon a true and absolute, if not omniscient, understanding. Leibniz, again, disagreed. Mathematics, he said, works by the dynamic manipulation of a handful of algebraic symbols. The sum of all equations is not needed to make mathematical advances. It was the same solution he proposed for the problem of the transcendental curve.

Yet, this application of thought traced far larger horizons. This was a worldview, a cosmology. The universal characteristic was a logos, a ratio of the universe. It was a logic so large that it could only be called a metaphysic. Leibniz’s universal characteristic required a metaphysical basis which would explain not only the change and extension of substances (if not a re-definition of substance itself), but also the contingency and necessity of God and of humanity. It would be a unique synthesis of truths from both Aristotelian scholasticism and Cartesian modernism. He appended descriptive abstracts of his metaphysic in his correspondence with Arnauld in 1686 (these are today incorporated as sectional summaries.) The whole was also prepared for publication, though its was not printed in his lifetime. It is known today as the Discourse on Metaphysics.

There are three principle aspects to the Discourse, all of which serve to make it a metaphysic in the style of his universal characteristic: first, there is existence; then, substance; and, lastly, there is proportion, or how these substances work together.

“God is an absolutely perfect being,” he writes, “whence it follows that God . . . acts in the most perfect manner.” Leibniz was not known for his religiosity, but was following his age by grounding his universal metaphysic in the nature of God. Descartes had done the same in the Meditations on First Philosophy (1641), as had the medieval scholastics. Substances must have reason for existing in the infinite variety he conceived. Therefore, God must exist and have a reason for making the world as it is. Leibniz found the answer in the perfection of God, which results in a world made as perfectly as possible. He expressed perfection through a variety/simplicity criterion in which the best solution finds geometric expression in the balance between the complexity of a figure and the simplicity of its informing equation: “God . . . has chosen the most perfect [method of creation], that is to say the one which is at the same time the simplest in hypothesis and the richest in phenomena.” Voltaire later ridiculed Leibniz through the character of Dr. Pangloss in Candide (1759) for his belief that this was the best of all possible worlds, yet Leibniz’s variety/simplicity criterion is understandable given the cosmological philosophy of the time.

The perfection of God makes simple substances a metaphysical, and not just philosophical, assertion. God, from an innumerable number of possible worlds, actualizes the substances that together express the most perfect world. There are no atoms, no vacuum, only an infinity of simple substances. Substances, also called “ideas” and “souls”, had not yet achieved the true idealism that would characterize their expression in Leibniz’s more mature Monadology (1714). Yet, the conceptual foundation was already there in the concept of expression and the identity of indiscernables.

To define these terms, it is helpful to reconsider the mechanical curve which Leibniz explained using the differential calculus. Each of the curve’s infinite number of points contains virtually the entire curve, though the curve itself stretches infinitely into space. This point-by-point containment corresponds to the concept of expression. Each substance in Leibniz’s metaphysic is entirely complete in itself. It contains in itself all that defines it, both past, present and future. Its relationships to other substances are also contained in its concept. Every substance uniquely reflects the universe from its own position in relation to the whole as a windowless world unto itself.

Such uniqueness is what is meant by the identity of indiscernibles. Leibniz’s epistemology defined a true expression as that which contains in its subject all which may be predicated of it. Therefore, a subject is absolutely complete in itself; it contains all of its possible predications. This means that no two substances are completely identical. The identity of indiscernibles was informed both by the pre-formationist biology of the day and the recent discovery of the microscope.

Having laid the foundation of his metaphysics, Leibniz now had only to put the machine in motion, a process he understood as a function of God’s harmonious interaction with the universe. Leibniz called the interaction of substances a pre-established harmony. The system that results is, as he had hoped, one of immense difference and organic dependency.

That is not to say there are no internal problems created by the system. His effort to defend his metaphysic against Arnauld’s charge of determinism attests to that. Indeed, Leibniz’s effort to make peace between necessity and contingency within the same metaphysic makes the Discourse a classic text on the subject. Scholars still debate whether freedom is possible in his system, constrained as it is by the completeness and resulting necessity of each substance.

On the other hand, scholars are finding much that is to be learned from Leibniz’s philosophy. Many of his ideas, never properly assembled and scattered through thousands of pages of correspondence (luckily, Leibniz, who served as chief librarian in the court of Hanover and who was offered a position at the Vatican, collected his correspondence), are today being published for the first time. Three volumes of the Prussian Academy’s forty-volume critical edition are available. Thus, Leibniz’s contribution to the history of ideas is being reassessed. The organic and dynamic relationship he saw in all things influences many disciplines, including modern metaphysics of modality, phenomenology, symbolic logic, the desire of physics for its own universal characteristic and even Chinese Studies (Leibniz made careful analysis of the I Ching and of Chinese political science). He has also been called the father of supercomputers, relay switches, and virtual reality. It is no wonder that Alfred North Whitehead included Leibniz in his century of ideas.

So then, G. W. Leibniz’s Discourse on Metaphysics is an olive branch arguing for the related dependency of all ideas upon each other, regardless of their source. To dismiss him as a system is to dismiss the consistency of the human mind and the possibility of intellectual progress. Therefore, reading the Discourse is both a tour and a possibility. It is a tour because the Discourse introduces its reader to the basic problems and ideas that informed the early Enlightenment. It is a possibility because those same ideas ultimately create and critique the philosophical story of today.

Bibliography

Writings

Leibniz, G. W. Samtliche Schriften und Briefe, ed. German Academy of Sciences. 40 vols. Darmstadt and Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1923- .
---. Die Philosophischen Schriften von G. W. Leibniz. 7 vols. Ed. C. I. Gerhardt. Berlin: Weidmann, 1875-90.
---. Philosophical Papers and Letters, 2nd ed. Ed. and trans. L. E. Loemker. Dordrecht: Reidel, 1969.
---. Leibniz: Philosophical Writings. Ed. and trans. G. H. R. Parkinson. London: Dent, 1973.
---. New Essays on Human Understanding. Ed. and trans. P. Remnant and J. Bennett. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981.
---. Theodicy, trans. E. M. Huggard (LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 1985).
---. G. W. Leibniz: Philosophical Essays, ed. and trans. R. Ariew and D. Garber (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1989).
---. Leibniz: Monadology and other Philosophical Essays. Trans. Paul Schrecker and Anne Martin Schrecker. Bobbs-Merrill. Library of Liberal Arts. Indianapolis, 1965.
---. Leibniz: Selections. Ed. Philip P. Wiener. New York: Charles Scribners Sons, 1951.

Further Reading

Bobro, Marc and Kenneth Clatterbaugh “Unpacking the Monad: Leibniz’s Theory of Causality” Monist 7.3 (1996): 408.
Broad, C. D. Leibniz: an Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975.
Brown, Stuart. “Leibniz and the Classical Tradition” International Journal of the Classical Tradition 2.1 (1995): 68.
Hooker, M., ed. Leibniz: Critical and Interpretive Essays. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982.
Jolley, Nicholas, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Leibniz. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
Jolley, Nicholas. “Leibniz.” A Companion to the Philosophers. Ed. Robert L. Arrington. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1999. 360-366.
Mates, B. The Philosophy of Leibniz: Metaphysics and Language. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.
Riley, Patrick. Leibniz’ Universal Jurisprudence: Justice as the Charity of the Wise. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996.
Sesonske, Alexander. “Pre-Established Harmony and Other Comic Strategies” Journal of Aesthetics & Art Criticism 55.3 (1997): 253.
Steinhart, Eric. “Leibniz’s Palace of the Fates: A Seventeenth-Century Virtual Reality System” Presence: Teleoperators & Virtual Environments 6.1 (1997): 133.
The Monist 81.4 (1998) is entirely devoted to various aspects of Leibniz’s metaphysics.

Web Sites

http://www.uh.edu/~gbrown/start.html Gregory Brown’s Leibniz homepage. Brown’s website is an expansive portal to all things Leibniz. It includes links to the Leibniz Listserv, various societies and journals as well as information in the form of journal and encyclopedia articles.

http://www.maths.tcd.ie/pub/HistMath/People/Leibniz/RouseBall/RB_Leibnitz.html An article on Leibniz mathematical ideas which forms part of a collection of mathematical biographies made available online.

http://mally.stanford.edu/leibniz.html This Stanford University website is Leibniz-at-a-glance, including dates of authorship for his principles works, events in his life, and a short bibliography for further reading which focuses specifically on his conceptual philosophy.

http://www.peirce.org/writings/p119.html An online publication of the article, “How to Make Our Ideas Clear” by Charles S. Pierce reprinted from Popular Science Monthly 12. Jan. 1878, 286-302. The article is concerned with logic in general and the contributions made by Descartes and Leibniz in particular.

http://etext.leeds.ac.uk/leibniz/leibniz.htm An online publication of George MacDonald Ross’s book, Leibniz (Oxford University Press (Past Masters) 1984) made available through the University of Leeds Electronic Text Centre. A comprehensive and understandable study of Leibniz’s thought, with special attention given to the mathematical basis of his insights in philosophy and logic.

http://www.tulane.edu/~plodge/lzlinks/ Leibniz Links: A selection of web pages devoted to the philosophy of G. W. Leibniz compiled by Paul Lodge.

http://www.philosopher.org.uk/ Philosophy Since the Enlightenment by Roger Jones. This website is very helpful for seeing Leibniz’s philosophy against the philosophical spectrum of present and past.
(c) 2002 Thom Chittom
Printed by permission, Barnes & Noble World Digital Library

Plantinga pulls a Samson

Alvin Plantinga throws out a nearly adorable argument against naturalism, or reductionism, in the July/August 2008 issue of Books & Culture. It is quite a straightforward move, almost syllogistic, and it goes like this: "Naturalists say that science proves their position, and in particular evolution. Plantinga disagrees. “Evolution and naturalism are not merely uneasy bedfellows,” he writes. “One can’t rationally be an evolutionary naturalist.” Now why does he say this?

Here’s the critique: if the mind has arrived by means of evolutionary processes, forces conditioned by history and the larger cosmological context, then how do we know that what it thinks is true is true? Plantinga quotes Darwin:

With me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of a man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would anyone trust in the convictions of a monkey’s mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?[1]

He goes on to say that for the naturalist, beliefs, along with other mental states, are caused by neurophysiology. And evolution says that this equipment has been adapted, and is still adaptive for the purpose of genetic reproduction. I like his quote from Francis Crick, “Our highly developed brains . . . were not evolved under the pressure of discovering scientific truth, but only to enable us to be clever enough to survive and leave descendents” (from The Astonishing Hypothesis). Natural selection doesn’t care about truth, it cares about sex, and if false beliefs mean more sex, then that is fine.

Plantinga, with the help of a math buddy, asks, then, what is the chance that any one proposition is true? Out of one hundred beliefs, how many will be false and how many will be true. Answer: not even a handful, and there’s no way to tell one way or the other.

Evolutionary naturalism, then, is self-refuting. Or, as he says, “One who accepts evolutionary naturalism has a defeater for the belief that her cognitive faculties are reliable: a reason for giving up that belief, for rejecting it, for no longer holding it.” What this means is that evolution spoils naturalism of its epistemological power. The reductionist is the one in danger of falling into an unholy skepticism (although Plantinga points out that Aristotle, the Stoics, and Hegel managed to be atheists without simultaneously embracing naturalism.) And what about the Christian? Well, is there any need to explain it? Get thee, saint, to Augustine and read his de Magistro, and get thee to the imago Dei, the doctrine of the logos, of creation, and of general revelation.

POSTSCRIPT: August 2019

Discussing the hypothesis of emergence, author Russell Howell writes, "This approach has been debated extensively. For example, Alvin Plantinga's celebrated essay, "An Evolutionary Argument against Naturalism"[2] claims that rationality is very unlikely a quality produced by survivability. Plantinga's approach, as he acknowledges, is similar to that found in C. S. Lewis's Miracles. (Lewis's argument, incidentally, was recently enhanced by Victor Reppert in his book C. S. Lewis's Dangerous Idea.) The thrust of their thinking here is that you cannot get (or are very unlikely to get) rationality out of a causally closed system that works solely on the basis of blind chance physical interactions operating in accordance with a "survival of the fittest" paradigm.[3] (cf Pattern 83: Opening a Closed Circle.)

[1] Letter to William Graham (Down, July 3, 1881, in The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, ed. Francis Darwin (London: John Murray, 1887), Volume 1, pp. 315-16. "The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility." ~ Albert Einstein

[2] This essay has appeared in various forms. See, for example, Alvin Plantinga, Warrant and Proper Function, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), Chapter 12. Fruitful research can be made in to the Naturalism debate between C. S. Lewis and G. E. M. Anscombe. Considered along a timeline, Plantinga's argument is either a repetition of or a development of the Argument from Reason. See Lewis's Miracles at http://stefangillies.wordpress.com/c-s-lewis-2/

[3] Russell W. Howell "Does Mathematical Beauty Pose problems for Naturalism?" Christian Scholar's Review 35:4 (Summer 2006): 498-499. Also Pascal Boyer, Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought (New York, NY: Basic Books, 2001). Howell: "Any theory that would combine evolutionary explanations for rationality with naturalism "would still run up against the arguments of Mark Steiner . . . Strictly speaking, Steiner's argument attempts to refute "non-anthropocentrism" rather than naturalism. But if Steiner is correct, the naturalist should not take comfort. For any form of naturalism, Steiner muses, is ipso facto non-anthropocentric, n that it would disallow a privileged status for humans in the scope of the universe. If, as Steiner argues, the success of mathematics can be shown to put humans in some sort of privileged position, then naturalism has some problems to sort out. . . . mathematicians and scientist . . . rely on human notions of beauty and symmetry in the development of their theories. In fact, such activity has been a longstanding and consistent strategy" (500).

Jonathan Edwards may be on to something

To be frank, I have never been attracted to the theology of American Puritan theologian Jonathan Edwards. Perhaps because of his historical and geographic situation, he always seems to exist in an eddy of history, a backwater, protected and immune from the force of the enrushing early Enlightenment and its theological questions and challenges. Plus, in matters spiritual or otherwise, the guy was a hard ass. There, I said it.

Nevertheless, this quotation from Sam Storms, the author of Signs of the Spirit: An Interpretation of Jonathan Edwards' Religious Affections says I'm no doubt badly mistaken. In an interview printed in Crossway's publicity publication, The Book Report, Storms says:

[Edwards] saw everything in the light of the glory and power and majesty of God, from the smallest of spiders to the most expansive of galaxies. Everything exists by virtue of God's incessant infusion of life and energy. Everything exists to reflect the glory and splendor of its Creator. Everything exists to draw us to God so that we might glorify him by finding satisfaction in all that he is for us in Jesus.

Let's face it. In the wake of a personal openness to science, I'm hunting around to see what models theology can provide. And though I am not at all interested in adopting process theology, a direction which, in my opinion, gives the store away in exchange for contemporary ideological legitimacy, Edwards "incessant infusion" hints at possibility.

Jonathan Edwards; Sam Storms; process theology; science and religion; theology; metaphysics