On Being a Gadfly - Or, How a High School Project against "Privilege" Ended Up Promoting It

Socrates, the great Greek philosopher, is famous for taking on the role of the "gadfly" in ancient Athens.  The gadfly bites people and causes them irritation.  Socrates saw his social role as one who challenged deep-seated and fundamental assumptions in society.  Human individuals and societies like to be comfortable, and that "comfort zone" typically includes not being challenged in those ideas that we're used to and that we make use of to establish our identity and our place in the world.  The one who challenges those assumptions, then, becomes an irritant.  Socrates famously ended up being so irritating that the Athenians executed him.  But the role of the "social gadfly", though irritating, is necessary, for prevailing assumptions need to be challenged if there is to be growth in understanding.

I'm aware of a high school recently that put on an event in which there was a session trying to expose students to the problems of "privilege" in our society.  This is a project I highly endorse.  It is so easy for us to be blind to the things we take for granted and that other people don't have.  It is easy to overlook the concerns of those outside our own social circles.

But while I applaud the movement to expose people to these problems of privilege, I observe, ironically, how many unquestioned assumptions are assumed by those who are often in charge of promulgating this movement.  I think that just as many of us have grown comfortable with our privileges and need to be shaken into a greater awareness of the concerns of others, so it seems that many of the leaders of this awakening movement themselves need some awakening.  I'm sure these leaders see themselves as gadflies biting the complacent members of society, and in many ways they are, and their work is important, but I think the gadflies themselves need their own gadflies to bite them as well.  So I'd like to do some biting.

Ever since the beginning of the Enlightenment, but growing in rapidity as time has gone by, western civilization has been experiencing a "worldview coup".  An Agnostic worldview has been trying to supplant the previous Christian worldview of European Christendom.  Many of the culture war battles that have been fought and are being fought in modern western societies--and I'll focus especially on US culture, since I live here and am most familiar with this--are battles between these two worldviews.  I call the Agnostic battle-plan a "coup" because it has typically been waged stealthily rather than in the form of a straightforward assault.  The "Agnosticizers" of our society have typically not come in with straightforward arguments attempting to show that Agnosticism is a more reasonable worldview than Christianity, but they have attempted to worm themselves into the assumptions of people quietly, claiming merely to be patrons of objective and critical--and neutral--thinking.  They have worked to convert people subconsciously so that people don't even know they have been converted.  And they have been very successful in this campaign, so much so that people are in serious need of a major gadly infestation to call attention to what has gone on and what is going on.

What happened at that session at the high school I mentioned provides a good example of what I am talking about.  Students were asked a series of questions intended to point out how privileged some of them are, how easy their lives are compared to those of others.  One of those questions was something like, "Have you ever experienced disapproval from members of your family over the gender of your partner?"  A related question was, "Have you ever experienced disapproval from family over your sexuality?"  Questions were also asked to expose racial and other sorts of biases.  Taking into account the structure of this session itself as well as the sorts of messages one often sees promulgated in various ways in public schools these days, it was clear that the assumption behind these questions about sexuality was that everyone ought to be able to have their own kind of sexuality, whether heterosexual or homosexual, and that if they have had family members who have disapproved of this, those family members have been bigots along the same lines as people who might disapprove of someone because of their race.  The disapproved-of homosexual deserves sympathy because he has been treated badly, just as the person who is discriminated against because of race deserves sympathy because he has been treated badly.  Other questions were obviously geared towards transgenderism, such as, "Have you had trouble going certain places publicly, such as public restrooms?"  Again, the assumption is that if, say, an anatomical male identifies psychologicaly as a female, that person ought to receive sympathy if they have trouble going into the women's restroom because they have been treated badly by anti-transgender bigots.

I have some questions about this.  This was a public high school.  Why did they get to ask questions that assumed a particular view of homosexuality and transgenderism to be correct and other views to be wrong and bigoted?  Did they not know there are plenty of people in our society who do not share those views?  Do they not know that entire groups of people, such as Catholics, Evangelicals, Muslims, Orthodox Jews, and many others, even some Atheists and Agnostics, do not share those views (the Catholic view on transgenderism, I should note, has yet to be defined specifically, but the Catholic view of homosexuality has been defined very clearly)?  Surely this is knowledge that any "awakened" person in our society ought to have.  Why, then, does a public school get to impose particular views over others on their students?  Public schools claim to be worldview-neutral places, but they are obviously far from it.  There is great irony here.  What if they had asked the question, "Have you ever felt singled out in public because of your non-mainstream views on homosexuality or transgenderism?"  But they would never ask this question because it would treat equally views they hate and wish to discredit--even though there are students who hold those views.  If they asked this question, they would be accused by many of being hateful, anti-homosexual, anti-transgender, etc., because, in many people's minds, to show any respect at all towards these alternate views is the same as to be hateful and disrespectful towards homosexuals, transgenders, etc.  So in order to respect and sympathize with some people, we must condemn and reject others--not in an upfront sort of way, but stealthily, in the name of neutrality and universal compassion.  No one is going to say straight out, "You know those people, like Catholics, Evangelicals, etc., who hold View X on homosexuality?  Well, they're wrong, and their views don't deserve any respect or sympathy."  Rather, their view is condemned without mention, as if it can be simply swept under the rug.  This is, I would argue, actually more disrespectful of these alternate views than if they had been straightforwardly condemned.  It's like these other views and these other people are just written by social fiat out of existence.  "OK, so, of course, all rational and intelligent people, which you all are, agree with View Y, so we'll just assume that and attack View X as a stupid, evil view that all thinking and compassionate people would of course reject."

Sorry to be a gadfly, but someone needs to point this out, and loudly.  We don't get to just dismiss other people's views without acknowledgment and argument.  We don't get to throw out some views and insinuate our own as the only official viewpoint by stealth, in the name of universal compassion, tolerance, and neutrality.  This is, ironically, precisely the kind of biased and bigoted privileging that these people have sworn to try to destroy.  They are doing systematically precisely what they say they hate.

Some other examples of biased privileging from this same high school example:

They had a lot of questions geared towards homosexuals, transgenders, race, and wealth, but these are not the only kinds of privileging or experiences of advantage and disadvantage that people have in our society.  For example, what about the disadvantages of people who have large families?  I happen to have a large family, and I've observed many times how the culture is designed in such a way as to make it very difficult for large families to participate in all that the culture has to offer.  It may seem like not a big deal to go to the zoo, or the symphony, or a movie, or whatever, when you only have to pay for two or three tickets (at least for those with moderate wealth).  But what if you have to pay for ten?  Small families are privileged.  But do you know how many times I've heard that mentioned by the great promoters of privilege-awareness in our society?  Zero times.  (Now, I'm not saying some haven't talked about it.  Maybe they have, and I haven't heard them.  But it is clear that it is not nearly as much on the radar screen as other forms of privilege, such wealth, race, and sexuality.  But why should it be considered less important?)

And what about the privileges of certain personality types, or certain skill sets?  If you pay any attention to our culture, and you are open, critical, and honest, it will not take you long to recognize that certain personality types do better in our society than others.  And certain skills and talents are more valued than others.  I notice these things, because I just happen to have a personality-type (eccentric introvert) and skill set (philosophy and theology) that is pretty low on the scale in terms of social respect and opportunities.  We hear about some of these things, but not others.  Our compassion and sympathy are not as universal as we would like to think.  Actually, they tend to be very selective, and if you don't happen to meet the proper criteria to be in some group recognized as deserving sympathy, you can despair of ever getting most people to really take your concerns seriously.

We like to think we see all views and all concerns equally.  But we don't.  Of course we don't.  No one can.  Every society has a set of views and concerns that it considers reasonable, tolerable, worth consideration, etc., and those views it works to respect, protect, and promote, while other views and concerns it rejects as silly and not worth much respect or attention, or even worth disrespect or contempt.  For example, in our society, racism is a horrible evil.  That's how we think of it.  And we should, because it is.  But our position is not neutral.  If a racist complains that his view is disrespected, undervalued, or hated, and that he is regularly treated worse in our society because of it, our response is, "So what?  It's your fault, because you're a stupid, ignorant bigot."  That's how we now treat people who don't share mainstream views on homosexuality and transgenderism as well.  All societies have their heretics who threaten the values they want to inculcate and promote.  There is nothing wrong with that.  But even the heretics deserve a fundamental level of respect.  They deserve enough respect so as to allow their views to be seriously considered, if still rejected.  They deserve to have the society acknowledge their existence and to provide serious arguments against their positions, rather than being swept under the rug as non-existent and not worth being argued against straightforwardly.  They deserve that their views not be rejected and condemned and ignored in the name of "neutrality" and "universal respect for all views and concerns," because this is just a lie.  They deserve to be treated as human beings, albeit ones who are wrong about important things.  I think that those who wish to oppose biased privilege in our society ought to work to deal honestly with views they think we should reject.  If we argue for our views and against other views honestly and straightforwardly, instead of trying to win by stealth and question-begging, we will still get to argue against views we dislike, but we will have treated the advocates of those views with the proper respect owed to them as human beings.  The ideal of universal neutrality is a view of equality that is unrealistic, deceptive, and manipulative.  What I am advocating is a realistic, more honest view of equality.  Of course, it's also harder.  It's much easier to keep your own views on top if you use bias and privilege to keep them there instead of doing the hard work of actually arguing your views on their actual merits on an equal playing field with other views.

That is what is so ironic here.  The opponents of unenlightened, assumed privilege use that very thing to maintain the dominance of their own views and agendas (not necessarily always consciously, of course).  It is a good thing to be jolted into greater awareness.  I just wish the ones doing the jolting would do a better job of turning their "jolters" on themselves sometimes.  Calling people's attention to these sorts of things is just what we gadflies are for.  And consider this:  The real gadflies in society are not the people everyone is praising and celebrating.  The real gadflies are the ones everyone is irritated with, because these are the ones pointing out the real blind spots.  The Athenians didn't celebrate Socrates; they executed him.  I am always amused to an extent when I see celebrations of "banned books."  To some degree, I am even more interested in the books that don't make the "celebrated banned books" list, the ones that everyone hates so much that it would be considered an offense to put them on the list of banned books, for these are, in the highest sense, the real "banned books" of our society.

One more note:  Don't misunderstand me.  I am not saying that we don't need to be concerned about privilege when it comes to race, wealth, or other things often focused on in today's discussions of these topics.  And I am not saying that people who are in immoral lifestyles don't deserve sympathy.  I think we could all use a good bit of sympathy in these difficult days.  And I am a strong advocate for universal compassion and respect for human beings.  I'm just advocating we open ourselves up to even more of this than I often see reflected in our cultural discussions of these topics.  We need much more waking up, not less.

Anyway, much to think about!  For more on the illusion of claims of "neutrality" in our culture, see here.

Published on the feast of St. Stanislaus

Predestination, Grace, and Free Will: a Dialogue between a Catholic, a Calvinist, and a Helpful Third Party

In my experience, Catholics and Calvinists often talk past each other in conversations about issues surrounding predestination, grace, and free will.  I thought that perhaps presenting such a conversation in a dialogue format might be helpful.  The participants in this dialogue are Cyril, a Calvinist; Roger, a Catholic; and Ethel, a third party who helps eventually to get the conversation on track.

Cyril:  Hi Roger!  How have you been?

Roger:  Oh hi, Cyril!  Good to see you!  Things have been going well.  How about you?

Cyril:  Things have been good.  This is my friend, Ethel.

Roger:  Hello, Ethel.

Ethel:  Hello, Roger.  Good to meet you.  I've heard a lot about you from Cyril.

Roger:  Good things, I hope!  You know, Cyril, I was just thinking about you this afternoon.  We've never gotten a chance to have that discussion about predestination, grace, and free will we've talked about.

Cyril:  Well, have you got some time right now?  I'm free!

Roger:  Sure, that would be great.  You're welcome to join in as well, of course, Ethel.

Ethel:  Sounds interesting!

Roger:  I've always been fascinated by your Calvinist point of view.  To be honest, it just seems so strange and hard to believe.  For example, you believe that God decides not to save some people.  He chooses them to go to hell!  How could a loving God do that?!

Cyril:  Well, God doesn't owe anyone anything.  We all deserve hell from God, because we're sinners.  So it is not unjust of God to choose not to save some people.  It wouldn't be unjust of God if he decided to save nobody!  Salvation is a gift of unmerited grace!

Roger:  Well, of course grace and salvation are undeserved.  But I don't think that's the point.  It's still unfair and unloving of God to choose to send some people to hell.  It's unfair, because he doesn't give them any chance to be saved.  He doesn't give them an opportunity!  How can he punish them when he doesn't give them a chance?  That seems clearly unjust.  And it's unloving.  The Bible says that God wants everyone to be saved.  How could a loving God willingly send people to hell?  Wouldn't a loving God do everything he reasonably could to save everyone?  That's what we Catholics believe.  God desires all people to be saved, and he calls everyone.  Christ died for everyone, and he gives everyone the grace they need to be saved.  But he can't make them be saved, because they have free will.  That's why some people are lost.  They freely reject God's grace.

Cyril:  The Calvinist view is not unfair.  Remember, no one deserves God's grace.  No one deserves a chance to be saved.  So it's not unfair if God doesn't give some people that opportunity.  And it's not unloving.  Love is not supposed to be indiscriminate.  You don't love random strangers as much as you love your wife or your children.  You don't love rocks as much as you love people.  Well, God has a kind of love for all people, but a more special love for his elect.  He loves other people insomuch as they are his creatures, but he does not love them enough to grant them salvation and keep them from their deserved fate in hell.  This eternal, saving love he reserves for his elect.  Also, I have some serious problems with your Catholic view.  You say no one deserves God's grace and mercy, but you act as if people do.  You say God is unfair if he doesn't save everyone, which implies that he owes salvation to everyone.  You say it would be unloving for God not to save everyone, as if God owes his love to everyone.  And you say that God gives everyone a chance to be saved, and he wants everyone to be saved, but his desires and the opportunities he gives are thwarted by the free will of creatures--as if mere creatures could frustrate the eternal purposes of God!  And you say that everyone is given a chance and ability to be saved, and that the only reason some aren't is because they reject salvation by their free will.  But that implies that salvation is not really by grace.  Sure, grace is necessary, but sinners have to add something to God's grace--namely, their own free will cooperation--in order for it to have the effect God desires.  So we're not saved by grace alone.  The saved can forever boast that the only thing that made them different from those in hell was the contribution of their own free will.  It wasn't grace that made the difference, since that was given to everyone.  It was their own free will that made the difference.  So all their goodness ultimately came from themselves and not from God.

Roger:  In the Catholic view, we are saved by grace.  It's true that we have to cooperate with that grace, but that doesn't mean we aren't saved by grace.  If someone gives me a gift, I have to freely receive it, but I don't for that reason earn the gift or make it any less of a gift.

Cyril:  But that analogy oversimplifies the matter.  It's not just that you are receiving the gift of salvation.  You are contributing to it, because it is the contribution of your will that makes the difference between the saved and the unsaved.  Picture the unsaved in hell, raging and gnashing their teeth in hatred of God.  Picture the saved, morally clean and perfect, loving God with their whole hearts for all eternity.  And what, in your view, really makes the difference between these?  It's not what God does, for Christ died for them all and he gave grace to them all.  Really, the difference comes from what they have contributed.  The unsaved made themselves what they are by their own free will, and the saved made themselves what they are by their own free will.  So, really, God's grace is just the facilitator, the background, that allows the saved to take themselves out of hell and place themselves in heaven.

Roger:  Just because the saved chose to cooperate with grace and the unsaved didn't, it doesn't prove that they made the difference and not God's grace.  It was God's grace that made the difference; the saved only chose to cooperate with that grace.  We have to remember that all the good that we can do is a gift of God's grace.  Even when we cooperate with grace, that too is a gift of God's grace!  So it's still all grace, even though we must cooperate.

Cyril:  But it's not, though.  Let's make this concrete:  Sarah is among the saved and Suzie is among the unsaved.  Sarah cooperated with grace and Suzie didn't.  You say that Sarah's cooperation with grace was a gift to her from God.  But don't you say that God also gave to Suzie the same ability to cooperate with grace.  Didn't he give grace to them both?

Roger:  Yes.

Cyril:  Well then, if God gave both of them grace, then it was not the grace that made Sarah cooperate.  Sarah contributed that herself, and Suzie didn't, and that's how they ended up so different from each other.

Roger:  But even though God gave them both grace, and Sarah cooperated and Suzie didn't, it was still the grace that gave Sarah the ability and the desire to cooperate, and so her cooperation was a gift of grace.  But let's not gloss over the problems with your position.  You say that the reason Sarah is saved and Suzie is not is because God gave grace to one and not to the other, right?

Cyril:  Yes.

Roger:  So how can you escape saying that God is unfair?  Could Suzie be saved without grace?

Cyril:  No.

Roger:  So then how could it be fair for God to damn Suzie, when there was nothing she could do about her situation?  You can't condemn someone for rejecting a gift they were never given!  It isn't Suzie's fault that she's unsaved; it's God's fault.  Sarah just got the luck of the draw and Suzie didn't.  But how can it be fair and loving for God to randomly pick some people to save and other people to throw into hell, when neither the saved nor the damned could do anything about it?  What's become of all the exhortations in Scripture for us to choose what is right, to love God, to turn away from sin, etc.?  Nobody can do any of this!  God gives nobody a real choice.  Suzie is not given grace, so she can't choose or do anything right.  Sarah is given grace, but that grace forces her to be saved; it doesn't give her any ability to say no.

Cyril:  God's grace doesn't force Sarah to be saved.  It simply makes her willing to be saved.

Roger:  It makes her willing?  Don't you hear the absurdity in that language?  How can someone be made to be willing?  To have a truly free choice means that we are not made to choose one way or another.  We have to be able to choose either way.  As soon as we are made to choose a certain way and our option to choose otherwise is taken away from us, then our choice is no longer truly free.  You can chafe at the word force if you want to, but that's really what it comes down to.  If my mind is taken over by aliens and they control my thoughts and actions, I might look willing enough, but it's an illusion.  I was never given a real choice.

Cyril:  We can be willing without having the ability to choose otherwise.  We can never choose against our strongest motive.

Roger:  Sure we can!  We do it all the time.  It's called "resisting temptation".

Cyril:  But if you wanted to sin more than you wanted to do the right thing, you'd do it.  If you chose to do what is right, it must be because you wanted to do that more than you wanted to sin.

Roger:  Really?  That's not my experience!  My experience is that I often have to choose to do what is right even though I really want more to do what is wrong.  That's why resisting temptation is so praiseworthy.  If the righteous were only righteous because they just happened to feel like doing the right thing, that wouldn't be any more praiseworthy than just, say, making a sandwich because you feel hungry.  There's no virtue in just doing whatever you want.  The virtue lies especially in doing what is right in spite of not wanting to, in the face of wanting to do what is wrong.

Cyril:  Well, perhaps that's part of where we differ.  I don't think the good works of the saved are meritorious.  They are gifts of grace from God.  But I have another question:  How are you going to deal with the problem of God's sovereignty?  You say that God is not in charge of what people choose.  Free will is a rogue factor, independent of God, and it can even thwart his will!  He wants everyone to be saved, but his desires are thwarted by free will.  He wants everyone to do right, but he can't make it so because of free will.  Instead of looking at history as the plan of God being carried out, you look at it as a giant chaotic jumble, where God simply has to take what he can get much of the time.  And there's no use saying that God will make it all work out in the end, because he can't even do that.  People can go to hell, and there is nothing God can do about it (without taking away their free will, which would be, in your view, to take away their very humanity)!  God is like a Dr. Frankenstein, who has the best of intentions, but simply cannot control his creation.  It has a mind of its own, and he's just got to run with it.

Roger:  No, no, it's not like that at all.  True, God respects the free will of his creatures, but he is all-knowing and all-powerful.  He can fulfill his purposes even while respecting human (and angelic) freedom.

Cyril:  But, don't you see, he doesn't fulfill all his purposes.  God wants everyone to be saved, right?  But everyone won't be saved, right?  And even if God was lucky enough to have it be that everyone would end up choosing to be saved, it would still be just that: luck.  God is at the mercy of uncontrolled chaos.  It's not his plan that runs the show or that ultimately prevails; it's chance.  Sure, he's got a lot of input, but, like the rest of us, he's got to deal with a universe that, in many ways, is beyond his control, and he just can't get everything he wants.  You might say that he could have chosen not to give free will to his creatures, but then he wanted them to have free will, didn't he?  To not give them free will would be to fail to get the creation he wanted.  But if he does give them free will, he can't make them do what he wants, and so he still can't get everything he wants.  He can win some things, but, in no scenario, can he win everything he wants.  Chance ultimately determines how much he wins and how much he loses.

Roger:  Whew!  This is getting to be a tiring conversation.  I don't feel like we are really getting anywhere.  I just don't get your view, Cyril, and I don't see how you could see my view the way you do.

Cyril:  Well, that's exactly how I feel.  Your views just don't make any sense to me.  It's like we're coming from different planets.

Roger:  Ethel, you've been silent over there.  Do you have anything to add to the conversation?

Ethel:  Well, as a matter of fact, I have been developing some thoughts as I've listened to you both talking.  I happen to know something about both Catholic and Calvinist theology, and it seems to me like you two are mostly talking past each other.  I think that is the cause of much of your confusion.

Roger:  What do you mean?

Ethel:  Well, it seems to me like you two don't really disagree as much as you think you do.

Cyril:  Really?!  It seems to me we disagree over just about everything!  Our views are like polar opposites!

Ethel:  Yes, on the surface it does seem that way.  But I think that beneath the surface there is more agreement than there may seem to be.  Perhaps, as a third party, I can help bring that out.  Let's start with the sovereignty of God.  Roger, Cyril has asked you an important question.  You talk about God wanting Suzie to be saved, and yet she isn't.  How can you square that with God being sovereign over the whole creation?  Can you elaborate on that?  Because it seems to me that Cyril has a concern worth addressing further.

Roger:  Yes, of course.  Well, God wants everyone to be saved, but he does allow people to make their own choices.  He wants a world in which free will exists and is respected.  This is part of the larger question of why evil exists in the world.  We can't think of evil as a defeat of God, because he is indeed sovereign, being the Creator of all things.  God willingly chooses to allow evil things to happen in the world, because he intends to use them to produce a greater good.  He allows some evil into the creation because he knows that he can produce a better result making use of the evil than he could if he kept all evil out altogether.  So, while God wants all people to be saved, he would rather have it that people make their own choices, so, all things considered, he chooses to allow Sarah to choose what is right and Suzie to choose what is wrong.

Ethel:  So if Suzie chooses wrongly and goes to hell, this is not a defeat of God's purposes?

Roger:  No, because God willingly allowed it to happen, in pursuit of a greater good.  God is sovereign.  He does get the world he wants.  He weaves even the evil into the ultimate pattern, like a composer might weave discordant notes into a symphony, or a novelist might weave evil characters and events into a good story.

Cyril:  In some respects, that's really not all that different from what I would say.  God chooses not to save Suzie.  That is, he chooses to allow her to choose evil and end up in hell.  He doesn't force her to choose evil, but he allows her to do so.  And he doesn't do this because of any lack of love for Suzie as his creature, but in order to promote a greater good, where even evil is woven into a tapestry that is overall perfect, where God's perfections shine out in their full glory to the happiness of all beings who do not shut themselves off from the source of all happiness.  However, one thing still bothers me about your view in this area.  You say that God allows Sarah to choose right and Suzie to choose wrong.  But are you saying that God doesn't himself decide who chooses what?  Is it just a matter of chance, and he simply has to watch to see what is going to happen?  I have a problem with that, because it suggests that God is not the source of all reality, that some things happen by chance, and God has to find out about them by observing history, that not all things are a part of his eternal plan.  This seems contrary to God's absolute sovereignty over the universe.

Roger:  God is still sovereign, but he allows for free will.  So he doesn't micromanage everything.

Cyril:  I still have a problem with that.  It makes sense to say that some human CEO might choose not to micromanage employees in his company.  But with God, you've got a Being who is the source of all reality.  It seems to me that you have to say either that every detail of history that happens is planned by him, or some things happen ultimately by chance.  I mean, sure, Sarah chooses the right and Suzie chooses the wrong.  But why?  What caused Sarah to choose the right?  What caused Suzie to choose the wrong?  Did these events simply come about by chance, or, like all things, are there causes involved that explain why two different choices occurred?

Roger:  But free will, by definition, can't be controlled!  So no, God doesn't micromanage everything.  But that doesn't mean things are left to chance.

Cyril:  Well, I don't see how that can be.

Ethel:  Let me see if I can help here by putting this a different way.  Roger, why does Sarah choose what is right?  What are all the factors that go into explaining why she decided to make that choice?

Roger:  Well, as with all choices, there are lots of factors.  With Sarah's choice to go right, certainly the prime factor was the grace of God, which persuaded her to make that choice.  God didn't make her make that choice, but his grace did effectively persuade her to it.

Ethel:  What do you mean by "effective persuasion"?

Roger:  Well, God knows everything about Sarah.  He knows what will persuade her to choose what is right.  So, from all eternity, he planned to give her his grace in such a way that it would have the effect of leading her to choose what is right.  That is why her good will is a gift of God's grace.  Without that grace, she would never have chosen right.  But with that grace, she will certainly choose what is right.  In Catholic theology, such a gift of grace is called efficacious grace, because it is effective at leading a person to go right.

Cyril:  But that's exactly what we Calvinists mean by irresistible grace!

Roger:  No, efficacious grace is not the same as irresistible grace.  Irresistible grace can't be rejected or refused, and so it removes free choice.  efficacious grace can be refused.

Cyril:  But you just said that efficacious grace is always effective.

Roger:  It is.  It always persuades a person to do what is right.  But it doesn't make them do what is right.  They could reject it, but they never do, because God knows how to apply his grace in such a way as to effectively change people's minds, hearts, and wills to lead them to do what is right.  His grace has a supernatural power to penetrate into the fallen hearts of human beings and to lead them to see and love the truth.  And he knows how to apply his grace to each individual in the way best suited to each of them.

Ethel:  Cyril, you say that grace is irresistible.  Do you mean that Sarah is literally unable to reject God, that she has that option taken away from her?

Cyril:  No, certainly not.  Sarah could reject grace if she wanted to, but she will never want to, because irresistible grace causes her to not want to.  It's not that the option to refuse is removed; it's that God opens people's hearts to see the truth and to desire to follow it, shedding his supernatural light and love into their hearts.

Roger:  But that's the same as my view!

Cyril:  So it would seem.

Ethel:  But what about Suzie, Roger?  What is it that leads her to reject the right?

Roger:  Well, it isn't God!  God never tempts anyone to evil or makes them do evil.

Ethel:  But God was able to bring Sarah to accept his grace.  Couldn't he do the same for Suzie?

Roger:  He could, theoretically, but he chooses not to.  Again, it's the whole problem of evil.  God often allows evil things to happen because he is seeking a greater good.  From all eternity, God determined the path of history.  He decided what he would do, what he would prevent, what he would allow, etc.  He knew what would happen in all possible scenarios.  And he decided to actualize the world that accomplished his purposes.  In that world, some evil is prevented, but some is allowed.  With regard to Suzie, God saw that it was best, all things considered, not to put Suzie into a position in which she would be persuaded efficaciously by his grace.  This is a great mystery, and we have to be careful here!  God doesn't force Suzie to do anything.  He gives her every chance to choose to go right.  He wants her to go right.  But he does decide, in his eternal plan, to allow her to go wrong.  With Sarah, he decides to efficaciously lead her by his grace to choose right, while he allows Suzie to go wrong.  But this is totally unlike Cyril's view, where God actively chooses to damn Suzie because he wants her to be damned, and he gives her no choice.

Ethel:  Cyril, could Suzie choose to be saved if she wanted to?

Cyril:  Yes.  She has that option.  If she ends up damned, it is her own fault for refusing God and his grace of her own free will.

Ethel:  So God gives her everything she needs to choose and do what is right, if she will simply choose to avail herself of her opportunity?

Cyril:  Yes.  God does not force her to reject him or remove the freedom of her choice.  He simply refrains from efficaciously moving her will to accept him.  She has everything she needs to be saved if she would choose that.

Roger:  That's what we Catholics call sufficient grace--that God gives all of us everything we need to be saved if we would choose to accept it.  I thought you Calvinists denied that and say instead that only the elect have grace!

Cyril:  We say that God only effectively converts by his grace the elect and brings them to eternal salvation.  But he does give even the non-elect the objective opportunity to be saved if they would want to be--which they won't, unless God efficaciously leads them to that.

Ethel:  So would you say, Cyril, that God, in his grace, efficaciously leads Sarah to choose right, while he allows, in his eternal plan, for Suzie to choose to go wrong?

Cyril:  Yes, basically.  Since the Fall, we all choose to go wrong, but God leads his elect back to himself by his grace, while allowing the reprobate--the non-elect--to continue to go wrong.

Ethel:  Does he allow the repbrobate to go wrong because he hates them, because he likes to see them damned, because he has no love for them?

Cyril:  No, not at all!  God loves all his creatures, although he puts his special eternal love on those he's chosen to bring to eternal salvation.  He doesn't like anyone to be damned.  In itself, that is hateful to him.  But he does allow some to choose freely to turn away from him and end up damned in order to pursue the greater good.

Roger:  So would you say that God desires all men to be saved?

Cyril:  Well, it depends on what you mean.  God desires all men to be saved, in the sense that, in itself considered, he is pleased with the salvation of people and hates the damnation of people.  He never desires or loves the suffering of any being for its own sake, although he ordains suffering in his plan, not for its own sake, but for the greater good.  So, all things being equal, God desires both Sarah and Suzie to be saved.  But, all things considered, as they are in his eternal plan, he chooses to bring Sarah to salvation and not to bring Suzie to salvation, not out of any malice towards Suzie or any love of her suffering per se, but because he sees that it is for the greater good.

Roger:  Yes, I would say basically the same thing.  In Catholic theology, we talk about God's antecedent will and his consequent will.  The former is what God wills in itself considered, all things being equal, while the latter is what he wills all things considered.  So God antecedently wills all to be saved, but he does not consequently will all to be saved, inasmuch as he has chosen to allow some to be lost in his eternal plan.

Cyril:  Very interesting!  But, Roger, I have one further question on this point.  You talk about God's allowing people to make evil choices.  Is it possible for God to simply allow things to happen?  Doesn't he, being God, have to positively ordain all things, cause them to happen, good and bad?

Roger:  No, certainly not!  God is not the author of evil!  He allows it to happen, but he never causes it!

Cyril:  Well then, what causes it?

Roger:  Evil people making evil choices.

Cyril:  But isn't God behind those evil choices?

Roger:  No!

Ethel:  Roger, would you say that evil happens contrary to God's plan, that it thwarts his purposes in history?

Roger:  No, of course not.  Evil can only occur to the extent that God willingly, in his sovereign plan, allows it to happen.  Nothing happens outside of God's plan, not even the smallest things.  You see, goodness is a positive thing, while evil is a negative thing.  It's like light and darkness.  God creates light and goodness, but he only allows darkness and evil, because the latter are not positive beings or entities, but are simply absences of being.  Darkness is the absence of light, not a positive entity in itself.  And evil is simply the lack of goodness.  It is a weakness, a failure.  So God can't be the cause or source of evil, for that would imply that evil is a positive thing that has its roots in some evil in God himself.

Ethel:  Cyril, do you think evil is a positive entity that has its roots in God himself?

Cyril:  Certainly not!  God is not the author of evil.  God causes evil to happen, but he does this in a way different from his causation of good.  The same goes for light and darkness.  Light is a positive being created by God.  But darkness is caused by God only by his not creating or putting light in certain places.  Similarly, good is a positive thing that comes from God and that he gives as a gift.  But evil, or sin, is not a positive thing that comes from God.  It comes about simply from God refraining from causing good to exist in some place.  So, with Sarah and Suzie for example, God positively acts to infuse Sarah's heart with goodness, but he does not infuse Suzie's heart with evil.  He simply refrains from giving her the effectual grace that would infuse her heart with goodness, and so he allows her to continue in her sinful condition.

Roger:  Do you notice, Cyril, that you are using the word "allow" just about as much as I am?

Cyril:  Now that you mention it, I suppose I am.  I guess there's nothing objectionable about the word.  It just concerned me when I heard it coming from you, because I thought that lurking behind it might be some denial of God's sovereignty.  But I guess that's not the case.

Ethel:  OK, so if I'm understanding you both correctly so far, it seems that you both agree that God is sovereign over the whole universe, that he loves good and hates evil, but that he has allowed evil things to happen in the world in order to achieve the greatest good.  You both agree that good is a positive thing that comes from God, while evil is a negative thing that God allows by refraining from producing good in some ways, while both what God causes and what he allows are under the sovereign plan of God which accounts for all the details of history.  You agree that God gives people real free will--meaning the ability to make real choices--and that he respects that freedom, but that human freedom is also under the sovereignty of God and is never exercised apart from or in a way that thwarts God's eternal plan for history.  You agree that people, since the Fall, have turned away from God, and that no one can or will turn savingly to God without grace.  You agree that God has planned all of history from all eternity, and that in that plan, God has chosen some out of the mass of fallen humanity to bring to salvation by giving them grace in such a way as to efficaciously lead their minds, hearts, and wills to freely choose him, while he has chosen to refrain from efficaciously converting others, allowing them to freely reject him and end up damned.  He has not allowed some to be damned because he lacks love or because he enjoys seeing people damned or wants to see them damned, but because he is pursuing a greater good in which his glorious perfections will be fully displayed and the greatest happiness will be attained for all those beings who choose not to reject it.  You both agree that everyone has a chance to be saved.  Everyone has sufficient grace to be saved, meaning that they are given everything they need to have the objective possibility to be saved if they would choose to do so, that all obstacles are removed but their own free refusal to be saved, so that there is no one who might choose to be saved but be prevented from attaining salvation.  You both agree that if people are damned, it is their own fault, and that if people are saved, it is a gift from God.  The saved choose to cooperate with grace, but that cooperation is in itself a gift of grace, so that while the will is important in salvation, all saving good in its entirety is ultimately a gift of grace.  Am I right so far?

Roger and Cyril:  Yes, surprisingly, it would seem so!

Ethel:  Is there anything else we need to address?

Roger:  I'd like to ask about the Calvinist idea of Limited Atonement.  Don't you Calvinists say that Christ died only for the elect and not for everyone?

Cyril:  Yes.

Roger:  Well, doesn't that contradict everything we've agreed upon?  If Christ died only for the elect, then only the elect can be saved!  Everyone else is left out, with no possibility of being saved.  So their damnation is not their own fault!

Cyril:  But if Christ died for everyone, then why isn't everyone saved?  Is Christ's death a failure in some cases?  Is he not powerful enough to save?  If Christ died for everyone, then his death doesn't actually bring about anyone's salvation.  It simply makes everyone's salvation possible, without making anyone's salvation actual.

Ethel:  There is a saying in Christian theology: "Christ's death is sufficient for all men, but efficient only for the elect."  What do you two think about that?  Could you get behind that?

Cyril:  Yes, Calvinists usually accept this saying.  Christ's death is sufficient for all men in a few ways.  For one, it is of infinite value and power, so that it could actually save all men.  Also, it is freely offered to all men.  If any person, elect or not, should choose to receive that offer, Christ's death would save them.  There is no such thing as a person who would choose to receive Christ's death but would have it refused them.  It is available to all if they will choose it.  But Christ's death is efficient only for the elect, in that, in his eternal plan, God chose to effectively and actually bring about the eternal salvation of only the elect, and, in fact, he only actually brings about their eternal salvation.

Roger:  I would say basically the same thing.  Christ's death is infinite in value and power and so is sufficient to save all people.  It is truly offered and available to all.  It gives to everyone the possibility of being saved if they should choose to accept it.  But it doesn't actually bring about the eternal salvation of anyone but those who choose freely to receive it.  People can reject it.  As we've discussed, from all eternity, God chose to give grace in an efficacious way to some--the elect--and so bring them to accept his grace.  He did not intend to bring the non-elect efficaciously to the choice of eternal salvation.  So we can say that, in God's eternal plan, and in actuality, Christ's death does not actually bring about the eternal salvation of anyone but the elect (though, again, it is sufficient for all and is offered and available to all).

Ethel:  So, if I'm understanding correctly, it sounds like you two are in basic agreement about the various ways in which Christ's death and the application of that death are limited and unlimited.

Roger and Cyril:  Yes, I suppose we are!

Ethel:  Well, I've got to be going now.  But thanks for letting me be a part of such an interesting conversation!

Roger and Cyril:  You're welcome.  And thank you for helping to make that conversation much more enjoyable and productive!  We've covered a lot of ground, and I think we've both realized that we have much more in common in these areas than either of us previously thought.  Not that there isn't more we could talk about.  But we'll save that for another time.

For more, see here and here.

Reality is a Concept - Or, What's Wrong with Immanuel Kant

Kant's Theory

Immanuel Kant is one of the most important of the modern philosophers.  In my opinion, his importance lies more than anything else in his epistemology, whereby he attempted to take empiricism to its logical conclusions.  (For those who don't do a lot of philosophy, epistemology simply means "our ideas about how we can know things."  Empiricism is the epistemological view that says that all knowledge comes through the senses in some way or another.)  His formulation of how we know, what we can know, and what we can't know, has fundamentally shaped modern thought on these subjects ever since.  He provided a strong philosophical foundation for the empiricist Agnosticism that much of our culture tends to take for granted today.

Kant's basic theory goes like this:  Information about objective reality only comes through the senses.  But sense data is a big, unorganized mess.  Our minds give order to that data and so create the appearance of the ordered cosmos that we see.  Our minds impose categories--like space, time, number/quantity, and other logical categories--on the chaos of sense data, and the world we know is created out of that.  Sense data is like someone throwing at us a bunch of wires, bits of metal, glass, and other things, all piled in a heap.  But then someone comes along and puts the whole thing together and builds a car--that is like our mind, with its categories, organizing sense data into the world we know.  The end result of this is that we really know nothing at all about the objective world outside of our minds.  All the characteristics we can gather from what we experience (quantity, color, taste, sound, shape, spatial extension, temporal extension, etc.) have been imposed on that experience by our minds.  So what we are really experiencing is the creation of our own minds, not the true, objective world.  The latter we can never know, for we cannot get beyond or outside of our own mental categories.

Kant was very interested to distance his view from a view called idealism.  He was thinking of the theory of idealism put forward by another Enlightenment philosopher, George Berkeley.  Berkeley had proposed that, actually, everything that exists is either mind or the perceptions of mind.  In his view, there is no such thing as "external matter" conceived of as some reality that exists outside of the experience of minds.  He based this conclusion on many of the same arguments Kant would later use.  He pointed out that all our concepts--color, texture, sound, taste, smell, shape, distance, extension, and therefore space and time--only make sense when understood as perceptions of minds.  The color red, for example, is meaningless apart from the idea of someone seeing red.  Taste is meaningless without the idea of someone tasting something.  Even something like shape, which seems objective, implies a perceiving mind, for shape depends on extension (this part of object A is at some distance from that part of object A), which implies a perceiver in relation to whose viewpoint things can be in different places.  Without some viewpoint connected to someone viewing, there would be no meaning in talking about point A being in a different place from point B, for the viewpoint of the viewer provides the grid on which different places can exist.  There is no characteristic of matter whatsoever that is intelligible without, for its context, the idea of a perceiver perceiving it.

Berkeley concluded from all of this that the idea of "matter" as some entity existing apart from the experience of minds is meaningless gibberish, and so is non-existent.  Berkeley's critics accused him of denying the existence of the external world.  Berkeley replied that he was not denying the existence of the external world, but merely describing more accurately what the external world is--not an entity existing apart from the experience of perceivers, but an entity existing by means of such perception.  "To be is to be perceived."  But Kant was not convinced.  He didn't like the idea that there is no world external to the experience of minds.  He wanted to maintain the idea of such a world.  But he also agreed with Berkeley that all our perceptions and experiences are of things created by our own minds.  Therefore, he concluded, a mentally external world exists, but we can know nothing at all about it.  Here is Kant describing all of this in his own words, from his classic work, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics (First Part, Section 13, Remark 2, from the public domain translation by Paul Carus, provided by Wikisource under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, found here):

Whatever is given us as object, must be given us in intuition. All our intuition however takes place by means of the senses only; the understanding intuits nothing, but only reflects. And as we have just shown that the senses never and in no manner enable us to know things in themselves, but only their appearances, which are mere representations of the sensibility, we conclude that "all bodies, together with the space in which they are, must be considered nothing but mere representations in us, and exist nowhere but in our thoughts." Now, is not this manifest idealism? 

Idealism consists in the assertion, that there are none but thinking beings, all other things, which we think are perceived in intuition, being nothing but representations in the thinking beings, to which no object external to them corresponds in fact. Whereas I say, that things as objects of our senses existing outside us are given, but we know nothing of what they may be in themselves, knowing only their appearances, i. e., the representations which they cause in us by affecting our senses. Consequently I grant by all means that there are bodies without us, that is, things which, though quite unknown to us as to what they are in themselves, we yet know by the representations which their influence on our sensibility procures us, and which we call bodies, a term signifying merely the appearance of the thing which is unknown to us, but not therefore less actual. Can this be termed idealism? It is the very contrary. 

Long before Locke's time, but assuredly since him, it has been generally assumed and granted without detriment to the actual existence of external things, that many of their predicates may be said to belong not to the things in themselves, but to their appearances, and to have no proper existence outside our representation. Heat, color, and taste, for instance, are of this kind. Now, if I go farther, and for weighty reasons rank as mere appearances the remaining qualities of bodies also, which are called primary, such as extension, place, and in general space, with all that which belongs to it (impenetrability or materiality, space, etc.)---no one in the least can adduce the reason of its being inadmissible. As little as the man who admits colors not to be properties of the object in itself, but only as modifications of the sense of sight, should on that account be called an idealist, so little can my system be named idealistic, merely because I find that more, nay, all the properties which constitute the intuition of a body belong merely to its appearance. The existence of the thing that appears is thereby not destroyed, as in genuine idealism, but it is only shown, that we cannot possibly know it by the senses as it is in itself. 

I should be glad to know what my assertions must be in order to avoid all idealism. Undoubtedly, I should say, that the representation of space is not only perfectly conformable to the relation which our sensibility has to objects---that I have said--- but that it is quite similar to the object,---an assertion in which I can find as little meaning as if I said that the sensation of red has a similarity to the property of vermilion, which excites this sensation in me.

So here is where Kant has become very influential.  Most people today, at least those immersed in Western culture and Western thought, take it for granted that all our knowledge comes through the senses.  They would claim that we cannot know anything in any other way.  But what about logic?  Can we gain knowledge through an application of logic to our concepts?  For example, consider the idea that the past is infinite--that is, that there was no beginning to the universe, but that it has always been going on, that no matter how far back you went in a time machine, you would never run into a beginning of time because there is no such beginning.  I submit that the concept of an "infinite past" is logically absurd.  It is absurd because it contains a contradiction--the concept of "infinite" contradicts the concept of "past".  The "past" is that part of the timeline that we have already got through.  But an "infinite", in terms of number or quantity, is by definition something that can never be got through.  If you try to count to infinity, for example, you will never arrive.  So an infinite past would be a length of time that could never be gotten through, it could never be completed, and yet the "past", by definition, is a length of time that has already been gotten through, it is already completed.  Yes, we are adding to the past as we move into the future, but that part of time which is already the "past" is already through.  So an "infinite past" would be a length of time that both cannot be gotten through and also has already been gotten through--a manifest contradiction.  But contradictions cannot exist, for, by definition, being excludes non-being, and all beings exclude their opposites.  Whatever is, by definition it is what it is and isn't what it isn't.  So the conclusion of logic is that an infinite past cannot exist, and therefore the past must be finite--that is, it must be limited.

Now the Kantian empiricist responds in this way:  "OK, I'll grant that the concept of an 'infinite past' is contradictory and therefore illogical.  But that doesn't tell us at all about the real world.  It only tells us about our concepts.  We're just playing around with ideas inside our own heads.  Such logical games can tell us nothing about objective reality, which exists outside our heads and our concepts.  So such logical analyses provide us with no knowledge.  Knowledge can only come through the senses, not through logic."

My First Objection to Kant

Now here's where I want to provide a fundamental critique of the Kantian view.  I want to make two objections, the second more important than the first.

My first objection is that, if the Kantian is right, then he is indeed right that our logical analyses provide no actual knowledge of the objective world.  But it also follows that our senses provide no knowledge of the objective world.  Kant himself admitted as much, and my experience suggests that the more perceptive among the modern empiricist Agnostics will also admit as much when pressed.  But I think they often fail to live up to the full implications of this admission.  So I think this conclusion needs to be pressed.  If this Kantian empiricist view is right, then nothing at all, neither logic nor our senses nor anything else, gives us any knowledge of reality.  Logic gives us no knowledge of reality because it only provides an analysis of the concepts in our heads and doesn't touch the real, external world.  And our senses provide us with no knowledge of reality because they never actually give us any access to the external world.  Kant appears to say at first that they do grant such access, but then he takes it all back by affirming that it is the categories of our minds ordering the sense data that really is the source of everything we actually know and experience.  Space, time, extension, quantity, shape, taste, color--in short, everything at all in our experience and knowledge--is a creation of our minds.  It is not what the external world is really like.  We know nothing at all about the external world.  You can be sure that Kant did not reach this conclusion because he wanted to.  He would have liked to have shown us how we can have actual knowledge of reality.  But he rightly recognized that his way of thinking about how we gain knowledge made that impossible.  Empirical sense data, without adding anything else, even logic, to it, can tell us absolutely nothing about reality.  I look across the room and see an apple on the table.  How do I know that there really is an apple on the table?  Perhaps it is an illusion.  How do I know that if there is an apple on the table, it isn't also true at the same time that there is NOT an apple on the table?  Only logic could make that inference.  But if I cannot even deduce that from my experience, if I cannot even, by my experience, exclude the opposite, then my experience tells me nothing, for there is nothing there that can be translated into any concept that could possibly have any meaning to me.  If all I've got, literally, is empirical sense data to go on ultimately, then all I can know, literally, is nothing at all.  And if all the characteristics that make up our idea of what a physical object is--color, shape, size, etc.--only exist as experiences of our minds, as Kant says, and cannot be attributed to objects in the external world, then we can really have no idea at all of what a "physical object" is or is like.  The very phrase, "physical object", becomes simply a meaningless collection of sounds.

I think it is worth bringing this out because I think it is missed by a lot of people who like to think like empiricist Agnostics and deny that logic can tell us about reality.  Even those more acute thinkers who will grant this in principle seem to forget it in the practice of their lives.  They keep going on as if they know something about the world, while denying in theory that they do.  They seek to gratify their curiosity, they argue with people, they hold opinions, they act on their opinions and seem to feel they are doing something meaningful in some way, they do science--all of which must be ultimately meaningless if their epistemology is correct.

My Second Objection to Kant

But this is not, I think, the most important objection to the Kantian theory.  The most important objection is that it is plainly wrong.  Its error consists in a simple forgetfulness with regard to the definition of words.  The Kantians--and George Berkeley before them--are quite right in pointing out that all our concepts--color, shape, texture, distance, extension, divisibility, quantity, etc.--are, well, concepts.  That is, they are ideas that exist in the minds of thinking and perceiving beings.  But then the Kantians make their fallacious move--they draw a distinction between our concepts about reality and reality itself, asserting that since all we know is the former, we can never know the latter.  Do you see the fallacy in drawing this distinction?  Think about it for a moment before reading on, and see if you can figure it out before I tell you what it is.

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OK, did you figure it out?  The fallacy, of course, is that reality itself is also a concept, just like all the other concepts.  It is just as much an idea in our minds as any other concept.  So the distinction between our concepts and reality itself is a false distinction.  There is no reality outside our concepts, by definition, since reality is itself one of those concepts.  The whole Kantian skeptical conclusion rests on the assumption that because we can never get beyond our concepts, we can never get to that which is outside those concepts, namely reality itself.  So our concepts block us off from reality, leading to the conclusion that we can know nothing at all.  But if reality itself is a concept, then just the opposite is true.  Experience of (and analysis of) our concepts does give us true knowledge of reality, because these concepts are nothing else than reality itself.  It turns out that George Berkeley had already given us the answer to Kant's skepticism decades before Kant ever wrote, when he pointed out that it is a fallacy to worry about idealism leaving out the external world.  Idealism is only leaving out the external world if we assume an idea about what the "external world" is contrary to what the idealist view thinks it is--that is, if we assume that the "external world" is something that exists outside of our concepts, outside of the experiences of minds.  But since reality itself is a concept, it is contradictory gibberish to talk about a reality that exists outside of our concepts.  So even though we can know nothing beyond our concepts, we have lost nothing of reality, for concepts are reality.  They are simply one and the same thing.  The "reality" that Kant thought lies forever beyond our knowledge turns out to be itself unreal, nothing but a phantom born of confusion in how we are using our words.

It is easy to be confused by such phantoms of language, because language can be used in ways that create illusions or impressions that don't correspond to reality.  I think of comic literature like Alice in Wonderland, where much of the humor is carried on by playing around with the illusions of language.  Or we can think of the example with the cats that is often used in philosophy classes:  "I can prove to you that a cat has nine tails.  No cat has eight tails.  One cat has one more tail than no cat.  Therefore, since 8+1=9, one cat has nine tails."  Of course, the problem here is a trick in the use of language.  Some classic arguments against the existence of God are based in such fallacious use of language.  For example, some Atheists argue that there cannot be an all-powerful being, because such a being could not make a rock so big that he couldn't lift it.  "If he can lift the rock, then it's not a rock so big that he can't lift it, so he can't create such a rock.  But if he can't lift it, then he can't lift it, so there is something he can't do.  Either way, there has to be something he can't do, so he cannot be all-powerful."  The problem with this argument is simply that the arguer is assuming that the word can't always implies a lack of power.  But this is not the case.  Sometimes something is impossible to someone because of a lack of power, but other times the impossibility lies not in a lack of power but in the absurdity of the concept.  The reason why God can't make a rock so big he can't lift it is not because he lacks power, but, on the contrary, it is because he has all power.  Being all-powerful, he can't make a rock more powerful than himself, which would be a contradiction.  Similarly, God cannot make a square circle, not because he lacks power, but because the concept of a square circle is meaningless gibberish.  But because the word "can't" often implies a lack of power, we neglect to consider whether the present argument is such a case, we just assume it is, and so we fall into the fallacy.

It seems like we must be out of touch with external reality if all we can know are our own concepts.  But this seeming is just an illusion.  It comes from having a false impression of what a concept is and what the external world is.  We vaguely imagine someone's head, and concepts floating around in that head, and then we imagine a world outside of that head.  But the idealists don't deny the existence of objects outside of people's heads; they deny the existence of objects outside of people's perceptions and concepts.  The very concept of outside is itself a concept.  So, by definition, there is nothing outside concepts.  Therefore, a logical analysis of concepts can give us true knowledge of actual reality.  We are not limited to the empiricist way of knowing things.  If logic excludes an "infinite past" because the concept involves a contradiction, then we know that an "infinite past" does not and cannot exist.  We know something true (and very important) about the real world.

So recognizing Kant's fallacy here can help us get beyond the false empiricist epistemology that has cut off from modern culture and much of modern philosophy a very important source of knowledge about the real world.  By adopting this false epistemology, we have blinded ourselves and doomed ourselves to an unresolvable skepticism.  But it is all unnecessary, for our epistemology is based in nothing other than a simple fallacy.  Once we realize this, we can get back to exploring the real world using all of the resources at our disposal.

For more, see here, here, and here.  It is evident that recognizing the inextricability of reality from the concepts and experiences of minds points to a view of reality in which mind is fundamental, as opposed to a view where mind is somehow an eventual by-product produced by non-mind.  To see how all of this relates to arguments for the existence of God, see chapter three of my book, Why Christianity is True, including the section on "Deeper Philosophical Issues".

Pope Francis, Scandalon

Jesus saith unto them, Did ye never read in the scriptures, The stone which the builders rejected, the same is become the head of the corner: this is the Lord's doing, and it is marvellous in our eyes? . . . And whosoever shall fall on this stone shall be broken: but on whomsoever it shall fall, it will grind him to powder.  (Matthew 21:42, 44)

Wherefore also it is contained in the scripture, Behold, I lay in Sion a chief corner stone, elect, precious: and he that believeth on him shall not be confounded. Unto you therefore which believe he is precious: but unto them which be disobedient, the stone which the builders disallowed, the same is made the head of the corner, and a stone of stumbling, and a rock of offence, even to them which stumble at the word, being disobedient: whereunto also they were appointed. (1 Peter 2:6-8)

Jesus often warned people that his person and his message could be a scandalon--a "rock of offense"--to many.  We humans are not as wise as we like to think.  We're often on the wrong track, and when God comes to tell us that, his message is not always welcome (to put it mildly).  Think of the prophets and how they were received.  Think of the apostles.  And Jesus himself, the Truth Incarnate, was hung on a cross to die for confronting people with God's truth.

Jesus appointed the apostles to succeed him as the leaders of his Church.  The apostles, in turn, appointed bishops to continue the succession of leaders to the end of time.  St. Peter, the chief of the apostles, died in Rome and left his apostolic authority to the bishops of Rome.  Since that time, as Catholics know, the Bishop of Rome has had a special role in leading the people of God.  The First Vatican Council articulates this thoroughly:

And since by the divine right of Apostolic primacy, the Roman Pontiff is placed over the Universal Church, we further teach and declare that he is the supreme judge of the faithful, and that in all causes, the decision of which belongs to the Church, recourse may be had to his tribunal, and that none may re-open the judgment of the Apostolic See, than whose authority there is no greater, nor can any lawfully review its judgment.  Wherefore they err from the right course who assert that it is lawful to appeal from the judgments of the Roman Pontiffs to an Ecumenical Council, as to an authority higher than that of the Roman Pontiff.  (Vatican I, Session 4, Chapter 3, as found in The Vatican Council and Its Definitions: A Pastoral Letter to the Clergy, Second Edition, by Cardinal Henry Edward Manning, Archbishop of Westminster [New York: D & J Sadlier, 1871], 234-240, edited and footnotes removed by Mark Hausam, found here) 

. . . [T]he Holy Roman Church enjoys supreme and full Primacy and preeminence over the whole Catholic Church, which it truly and humbly acknowledges that it has received with the plenitude of power from our Lord Himself in the person of blessed Peter, Prince or Head of the Apostles, whose successor the Roman Pontiff is; and as the Apostolic See is bound before all others to defend the truth of faith, so also if any questions regarding faith shall arise, they must be defined by its judgment. . . .  

Therefore the Bishops of the whole world, now singly, now assembled in synod, following the long-established custom of Churches, and the form of the ancient rule, sent word to this Apostolic See of those dangers especially which sprang up in matters of faith, that there the losses of faith might be most effectually repaired where the faith cannot fail. . . .

And indeed all the venerable Fathers have embraced and the holy orthodox Doctors have venerated and followed their Apostolic doctrine; knowing most fully that this See of holy Peter remains ever free from all blemish of error according to the divine promise of the Lord our Saviour made to the Prince of His disciples: I have prayed for thee that thy faith fail not, and, when thou art converted, confirm thy brethren.

This gift, then, of truth and never-failing faith was conferred by heaven upon Peter and his successors in this Chair, that they might perform their high office for the salvation of all; that the whole flock of Christ kept away by them from the poisonous food of error, might be nourished with the pasture of heavenly doctrine; that the occasion of schism being removed the whole Church might be kept one, and, resting on its foundation, might stand firm against the gates of hell. (Chapter 4)

So we see that the Apostolic See of Rome, in the person of the Roman bishop--the Pope--has always had the unique task of keeping the people of God on the right track.  It has been St. Peter's task to strengthen his brethren (Luke 22:32).  God preserves the Apostolic See from error, so that it will always lead the people of God aright.  It is a sure beacon of truth in a world of confusion, lit by the light of the Holy Spirit.  In light of what we know about how God's messengers are typically received, then, we might expect that what the Popes of Rome have to say to us will not always be something everyone wants to hear.

Our current Pope, Pope Francis, presents a very interesting, and even ironic, example of this.  He has said many things in his six years as pope that have scandalized many.  But some conservative-leaning Catholics have been concerned that Pope Francis has, to some degree, betrayed his calling and has set aside his duty to speak the truth even when it is unpopular.  They feel that this is the time for the Pope to be confronting the liberal point of view that has been seeking to dominate our culture--to stand up against contraception, abortion, same-sex marriage, and all those other things in which modern culture contradicts Catholic teaching.  To be sure, the Pope has spoken against these things, but some conservatives feel he has not done enough.  Instead of making these sorts of things the central focus of his message to the culture, he has instead spent most of his time harping on liberal themes like climate change and protecting the environment, the plight of migrants, the injustice of the death penalty, concern for the poor, atheists going to heaven, etc.  He has muddied Catholic teaching regarding marriage by compromising with the culture, allowing "nuances" in pastoral discipline regarding people in "irregular unions"--that is, objectively adulterous relationships.  He's muddied Catholic teaching on the death penalty by worrying about things like the "dignity of criminals."  He doesn't speak out enough against homosexuality, instead confusing people by saying things like, "Who am I to judge?"  The Pope is supposed to be a scandalon--a rock of offense, aggressively speaking truth against the evils of our day--but Pope Francis has put that aside, instead seeking to "build bridges," "engage in dialogue," "seek common ground," "emphasize mercy," etc.  Far from combatting liberalism, his theology seems rather to be a constant stream of liberal themes and concerns.  Where's the scandalon?  Instead of being a rock of offense, Pope Francis seems to have capitulated to modern culture, sucking up to the liberals and therefore receiving their respect and praise.  Or so these conservative Catholics tell us.

Sometimes it is hard for us to see something because we are looking in the wrong direction.  Pope Francis appears to have abandoned his duty to be the scandalon.  But has he?  Has he put aside and neglected the truths that we need to hear today, the truths that cause those on the wrong path to stumble?  In fact, his teaching has been very controversial, and it has caused a lot of stumbling.  But it's not been primarily the liberals who have done the stumbling.  It's been the conservatives.  For years, some conservatives in the Church have built up an idea in their minds of what Catholic teaching is all about.  They have watched American and western culture move further and further away from orthodox Christianity.  They've watched the rise of the sexual revolution, with all the immorality, corruption, and heartbreak it has brought.  They've watched acts of homosexual sexual relations go from being shunned to being celebrated and paraded.  They've watched our society embrace the "culture of death" in so many ways--with euthanasia, contraception, abortion, etc.  And they've watched the Church take a bold stand against all of these things.  In many of these areas, they've seen the Church take up a common cause with political conservativism, with the enemies being the liberals.  In watching all of this, some of them have fallen into the difficult-to-detect, subtle shift from recognizing that Catholic teaching has common cause in some areas with political conservativism to nearly identifying Catholic teaching with political conservativism.  They have learned to think of the conservatives as the "good guys" and the liberals as the "bad guys".  They've promoted the Republican Party and despised the Democratic Party.

But Catholic teaching transcends the political divides of our culture.  It may sometimes agree with the conservatives, but it is not conservativism..  It may sometimes oppose the liberals, but it is not anti-liberalism.  This subtle near-identification of Catholic teaching with conservativism has led to a blind spot in the vision of some conservative Catholics.  They've praised the Apostolic See when it has stood up against the errors of the liberals.  They've attacked liberal Catholics who have refused to accept Church teaching about things like contraception, women priests, and homosexuality as "cafeteria Catholics"--that is, as Catholics who only follow the Church when the Church happens to agree with what they already think, but who are ready, when conflict arises between Church teaching and their own ideals and values, to rebel against the Church in order to cling to their own ideologies.  And they have been right to point out the inconsistencies of these liberal Catholics.  But--and here is the irony--at the same time they've been attacking the liberals, they've fallen into the very same trap themselves.  Pope Francis has provided the scandalon that has brought their own "cafeteria Catholicism" to light.  When liberals attacked Pope St. Paul VI's great encyclical Humanae Vitae, with its stand against modern liberal errors in the areas of family and sexual ethics, they criticized them and accused them of refusing to trust God's leading of his Church and the Pope to shine the light of truth into the world.  But Pope Francis's main focus has been not on the errors of the liberals--though he has attacked these quite clearly and not infrequently--but on errors more often committed by modern political conservatives.  According to him, the liberals have in fact been right about some things.  They've been right to emphasize injustices against the poor, migrants, and other oppressed classes.  They've been right about the need to focus attention on protecting the earth and its environment.  They've been right in emphasizing the virtues of compassion and mercy.  Pope Francis believes that what our culture especially needs more of is mercy and compassion.  He also believes that this is something the Church badly needs.

There are plenty of Catholics who have wound up, for all sorts of reasons, in objectively disordered family and sexual relationships.  The conservative critics say that what is most needed is firm and swift punishment.  "Tell them to stop sinning, and if they don't, throw them out!  Who cares what they've gone through, how they've got into this mess, what their motivations have been, and why they are still stuck!  Enforce the discipline.  That's all that matters."  When Pope Francis, in Amoris Laetitia, asserted that what is especially needed in many of these cases is a kind of nuanced pastoral care that pays attention to all of the complexities of these people's situations and tries to find ways to help them grow in their relationship with God as they struggle forward with getting their lives straightened out, the conservative critics accused him of compromising with evil, abandoning traditional Catholic morality, etc.  "What relationship with God?" they've said.  "These people can't have any real relationship with God!  They're refusing to follow the Church's moral teaching!  They need to do the right thing immediately and fully or we should write them off as nothing but sinful rebels and tell them to come back when they are willing to repent!"

When Pope Francis put out his 2015 encyclical, Laudato Si, as soon as the conservative critics saw that it dealt with subjects like "climate change," they immediately decided the whole thing was pretty much just a liberal manifesto, and they reacted accordingly, trying to justify why they could write off what the Pope was saying as worthless rubbish they could safely ignore and reject.

When Pope Francis, last summer, stated that the Church has been following a path of doctrinal development that has led to the conclusion that, in the current day, the death penalty is to be regarded as inadmissible because its attitude and practice is inconsistent with the human dignity of criminals, the conservative critics immediately rejected this as a betrayal of Catholic tradition.  They asserted that they would continue to teach the admissibility of the death penalty as the real Catholic teaching, whatever the Pope and the revised Catechism of the Catholic Church said.  I mean, who does the Pope think he is anyway, to tell Catholics what to believe?!  Some of the critics have even published articles and books defending the admissibility of the death penalty as the true Catholic position.

As we mentioned earlier, when God speaks truth into the world, it often produces a negative reaction, for we all like to think we know better.  And that negative reaction has not always come from the obvious and notorious "sinners."  It has not infrequently come from the ones who have considered themselves the guardians of the pure tradition.  The most obvious example of this is the reaction of the Pharisees and the Sadducees to Jesus's teaching.  Instead of allowing themselves to be enlightened by what Jesus was saying and doing in light of the promises of the prophets, they opposed and rejected him because he did not fit into the schemes they had adopted as to how things should be.  Instead of changing their schemes to accommodate God, they rejected God to preserve their schemes.  And they accused Jesus of being the one to abandon the tradition of God.  They accused him of being too merciful to the sinners, who, in their view, needed not mercy so much as a good dose of cold, hard moral discipline.

In fact, interestingly, some of the most famous rejections of papal teaching throughout Church history have come from people who have believed that the Pope was being too merciful and not hard enough on sinners.  In the middle of the second century, St. Cyprian, bishop of Carthage, and Firmilian, bishop of Caesaria, led a movement of opposition to Pope St. Stephen because he decreed that all the churches should accept baptism even when it was administered by the hands of heretics so long as the baptism was performed validly.  Cyprian and Firmilian accused Pope Stephen of compromising the truth and being lax on heretics.  Instead of insisting on the black-and-white truth, they said, Pope Stephen was muddying the waters by bringing confusing nuances into the practice of the Church.  Here's a sample of what Firmilian said in his own words, from a letter he wrote to Cyprian:

17. And in this respect I am justly indignant at this so open and manifest folly of Stephen, that he who so boasts of the place of his episcopate, and contends that he holds the succession from Peter, [2946] on whom the foundations of the Church were laid, should introduce many other rocks and establish new buildings of many churches; maintaining that there is baptism in them by his authority. For they who are baptized, doubtless, fill up the number of the Church. But he who approves their baptism maintains, of those baptized, that the Church is also with them. Nor does he understand that the truth of the Christian Rock is overshadowed, and in some measure abolished, by him when he thus betrays and deserts unity. [2947] The apostle acknowledges that the Jews, although blinded by ignorance, and bound by the grossest wickedness, have yet a zeal for God. Stephen, who announces that he holds by succession the throne of Peter, is stirred with no zeal against heretics, when he concedes to them, not a moderate, but the very greatest power of grace: so far as to say and assert that, by the sacrament of baptism, the filth of the old man is washed away by them, that they pardon the former mortal sins, that they make sons of God by heavenly regeneration, and renew to eternal life by the sanctification of the divine laver. He who concedes and gives up to heretics in this way the great and heavenly gifts of the Church, what else does he do but communicate with them for whom he maintains and claims so much grace? And now he hesitates in vain to consent to them, and to be a partaker with them in other matters also, to meet together with them, and equally with them to mingle their prayers, and appoint a common altar and sacrifice. . . . 

23. What, then, is to be made of what is written, "Abstain from strange water, and drink not from a strange fountain," [2955] if, leaving the sealed fountain of the Church, you take up strange water for your own, and pollute the Church with unhallowed fountains? For when you communicate with the baptism of heretics, what else do you do than drink from their slough and mud; and while you yourself are purged with the Church's sanctification, you become befouled with the contact of the filth of others? And do you not fear the judgment of God when you are giving testimony to heretics in opposition to the Church, although it is written, "A false witness shall not be unpunished?" [2956] But indeed you are worse than all heretics. For when many, as soon as their error is known, come over to you from them that they may receive the true light of the Church, you assist the errors of those who come, and, obscuring the light of ecclesiastical truth, you heap up the darkness of the heretical night; and although they confess that they are in sins, and have no grace, and therefore come to the Church, you take away from them remission of sins, which is given in baptism, by saying that they are already baptized and have obtained the grace of the Church outside the Church, and you do not perceive that their souls will be required at your hands when the day of judgment shall come, for having denied to the thirsting the drink of the Church, and having been the occasion of death to those that were desirious of living. And, after all this, you are indignant! 

24. Consider with what want of judgment you dare to blame those who strive for the truth against falsehood.  For who ought more justly to be indignant against the other?--whether he who supports God's enemies, or he who, in opposition to him who supports God's enemies, unites with us on behalf of the truth of the Church?  (Firmilian, Bishop of Cæsarea in Cappadocia, to Cyprian, Against the Letter of Stephen, AD 256, text taken from the plain text version found here at the Christian Classics Ethereal Library.  Also found, more accessibly, here.)

Eventually Pope Stephen's position won out universally, and all Catholics accepted his practice as the correct one.  (When you go against the teaching of the Pope, you're always, by definition, ultimately on the wrong side of history.)  Read some of the conservative critics of Pope Francis today, and you will be reminded of the truth of the saying, "There is nothing new under the sun."

The conservative critics of Pope Francis have accused him of abandoning his duty to be the scandalon in the midst of an evil world.  But these are Catholics, and so they should remember that Christ appointed St. Peter and his successors to be a beacon of light to lead the Church through the mazes of confusion we encounter in this fallen world.  If the Apostolic See speaks out and warns us of errors, should not our first response be to look inside ourselves, to examine our own ideas, to see if we've perhaps become too one-sided, to see if even in our zeal to get things right, we might have missed something?  Maybe our construction of what "Catholic teaching" is needs to be adjusted.  Would it be so surprising if we all need adjustment now and then by the very power appointed by Christ for his Church to help us make such adjustments?

Therefore the Bishops of the whole world, now singly, now assembled in synod, following the long-established custom of Churches, and the form of the ancient rule, sent word to this Apostolic See of those dangers especially which sprang up in matters of faith, that there the losses of faith might be most effectually repaired where the faith cannot fail. 

It would be nice if error always came up on just one side at a time, if we could neatly package it according to just one specific ideology so that we could always fight on just one front.  But, unfortunately, things are seldom so simple.  When we're fighting against one error or evil, another error or evil comes up to bite us from another direction.  We have to be vigilant to watch in all directions so that we don't become like pendulums, always swinging to one extreme or another, and never able to achieve balance.  We need justice, but we also need mercy.  Those who have gone astray need moral discipline, but they also need compassion and understanding.  Our world is full of so much confusion and heartache today.  We are so lost, perhaps more than at any other time in human history.  At least the pagan pre-Christian culture was, in a sense, young, ready to be confronted with the fresh new gospel.  But, in a sense, we are old.  Our culture has arisen out of the wreck of a corrupted and abandoned Christendom.  We've come to the end of our rope in many ways.  We need to be confronted with the clear light of truth, including, and especially, in areas where we don't want to hear it.  But we also need that message to be given to us with the compassion of a parent seeking a wayward child, who understands and empathizes with where we have been and the confusion and pain we have fallen into, and who is able to comfort us and be with us as we try, slowly but surely, to make progress little by little in our moral lives.  In our age perhaps more than in any other, we need to hear the "truth spoken in love."  Perhaps one of the main tasks of the Apostolic See in the present time is to remind us of this, to keep us from trying to choose truth over love or vice versa.  Will we listen to what God is saying through his chosen vessel?  "Search me, O God, and know my heart: try me, and know my thoughts: And see if there be any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting" (Psalm 139:23-24).