Monthly Archives: January 2023

Arts, Christianity, Culture, History, Philosophy

Philosophy: Scholasticism and dogma

CHRISTIANITY AND PHILOSOPHY

Intro: Medieval European culture was dominated by the Church, and the classical philosophy of Plato and Aristotle was only gradually assimilated into Christian teaching

THE Church wielded considerable social and political power in medieval Europe, and also controlled access to learning. Education was provided by the Church and necessarily followed Christian doctrine, while institutions like libraries and universities were funded by the Church and staffed by monastic orders. Monks preserved and translated many ancient texts, mostly of Greek philosophy and latterly acquired from Islamic scholars and scribes.

Scholasticism was a method of tuition that used rigorous dialectical reasoning both to teach Christian theology and to scrutinise these texts. Clerics and academics used methods of reasoning developed by Plato and Aristotle to assess the compatibility of ideas with Christian doctrine. The theories of philosophers including Augustine and Thomas Aquinas were also carefully examined, and either adopted to defend Christian dogma or dismissed as heretical. Scholasticism played an important part in the integration of philosophical ideas into Christianity, remaining the prominent ethos for Christian education and theology until supplanted by humanist and scientific ideas during the Renaissance.

Existence of God: the ontological argument

With the rise of scholasticism and the Church’s embrace of Aristotelian logic in the 11th century came a renewed interest in reconciling matters of faith with reasoned argument. One of the founding fathers of the scholastic movement was Saint Anselm of Canterbury, best known for proposing the so-called ontological argument for the existence of God.

Anselm asks us to imagine the most perfect being possible. The logic and reasoned arguments pledged by him are difficult to interpret and understand, but it leads us to a conclusion that the most perfect being possible must exist – in Anselm’s words, “God is that, than which nothing greater can be achieved”. From that premise he methodically shows that if God exists in our imagination, then an even greater God is possible: one that exists in reality.

Yet, contemporaries of the time such as Gaunilo of Marmoutiers pointed out that the logic put forward by Anselm was flawed, because “his reasons could be used to prove the existence of anything.” Later philosophers, notably Thomas Aquinas and Immanuel Kant, showed that while the argument presented a notion of God’s essence, it was no proof of His existence.

Pascal’s wager

Today, it is generally agreed that there can be no logical proof either way for the existence of God, and that this is purely a matter of faith and belief. Philosophical speculation on the subject, however, continued well into the so-called “Age of Reason”. One novel take on the problem was raised by the distinguished mathematician Blaise Pascal in the 17th century.

“Pascal’s wager” examines whether, given that we have no proof of His existence, it is a better bet to believe in God or not. Pascal weighs up the pros and cons in terms of the consequences: if God exists and I deny his existence, I run the risk of eternal damnation; if He exists and I accept His existence, I earn eternal life in Paradise; but if He doesn’t exist, it will make no difference to me. Pascal devised a matrix in which different options are placed.

On balance, then, it is a safer bet to believe in His existence. Although Pascal’s wager is an interesting exercise in logic and rudimentary game theory, it is based on some unsound and shaky assumptions. For example, Aristotle’s idea of an “unmoved mover” or first cause is a direct challenge.

Creating Eternity

A major stumbling block for Christian philosophers trying to integrate Aristotelian ideas into Christian doctrine was Aristotle’s assertion that the universe has no end and no beginning. This contradicts the Biblical description of God’s creation of the world.

Thomas Aquinas, however, believed that since human reason and Christian doctrine are both gifts from God, they cannot be contradictory.  Using his ‘God-given’ reason, he argued that Aristotle was not mistaken in his concept of an eternal universe, but that God was indeed its creator: in the beginning, God created the universe, but could have also created a universe that is eternal.

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Arts, Books

Book Club: Damascus Station

SYNOPSIS

THIS superb debut novel by David McCloskey, a former CIA Analyst, is one of the most striking fictional thriller stories since Mick Herron’s magnificent Slow Horses in 2010.

Not only does it ooze authenticity, with some rather exacting details of what it takes to recruit someone to spy against their country (a charge of Treason), it also includes a love story to pierce the heart.

This is not the dark, anguished world of Greene or Le Carré, this is a brilliant evocation of the perils and dangers espionage poses to a young man who is not afraid to show emotion. It is set against the civil war in Syria.

CIA officer Sam Joseph is sent to Paris in the hope of recruiting Mariam Haddad, an official in the Palace of President Assad, with access to many systems and secrets. When the two meet, they fall in love, which brings the treacherous world of espionage into sharp focus. Who is to be trusted and by whom?

Painstakingly detailed and narrated, yet told with exceptional literary flair, it identifies McCloskey as an exciting new voice in espionage. Readers of Damascus Station should relish every page, the story demands it.

– Damascus Station by David McCloskey is published by Swift, 432pp

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Arts, Philosophy, Psychology, Science

Philosophy: David Hume

EMPIRICIST & ESSENTIAL THINKER (1711–1776)

– A narrative and critique on the philosophy of David Hume

David Hume is the philosophical hero of modern day sceptics and empiricists, renouncing all knowledge except that which can be gained from the senses. Alas, as Quine would later famously say, echoing Hume, what can be garnered from the senses is, after all, not much.

From Locke, Hume had drawn the conclusion that all human knowledge is based on relations amongst ideas, or “sense impressions”. Anything not given in experience is mere invention and must be ruthlessly discarded. As a result he denies the existence of God, the self, the objective existence of logical necessity, causation, and even the validity of inductive knowledge itself. His aim is twofold: at once demolitionary – to rid science of all falsehoods based on “invention rather than experience” – and constructive, to found a science of human nature. Much impressed with how Isaac Newton had described the physical world according to simple mechanical laws, Hume had a mind to do something similar for the nature of human understanding. His Treatise on Human Nature is a painstaking study in experimental psychology in search of general principles. In this, however, Hume can be seen as being spectacularly unsuccessful, primarily because his whole taxonomy of “impressions” and “ideas” is derived from the much discredited Cartesian model. Nevertheless, Hume’s negative program is a devastating example of the power of logical critique. His sceptical results, especially regarding induction, remain problematic for modern philosophers.

Hume observes that we never experience our own self, only the continuous chain of experiences themselves. This psychological fact leads Hume to the dubious metaphysical conclusion that the self is an illusion, and in fact personal identity is nothing but the continuous succession of perceptual experience. “I am,” Hume famously says, “nothing but a bundle of perceptions”. Following a similar line of thought, Hume notices that the force that compels one event to follow another, causation, is also never experienced in sense impressions. All that is given in experience is the regular succession of one kind of event being followed by another. But the supposition that the earlier event, the so-called “cause”, must be followed by the succeeding event, the “effect”, is merely human expectation projected onto reality. There is no justification for believing that there is any casual necessity in the ordering of events.

Hume’s scepticism does not stop there, and the belief in causation is just a special case of a more general psychological trait: inductive reasoning. Inductive reasoning is the process that leads us to make generalisations from observing a number of similar cases. For example, having observed many white swans but no black swans, one might seemingly be justifiably led to the conclusion that “All swans are white”. Equally, being aware that men often die, we conclude “All men are mortal”. But such generalisations go beyond what is given in experience and are not logically justified. After all, black swans were found in Australia, and there is always the logical possibility of coming across an immortal man. Hume claimed that inductive reasoning could not be relied upon to lead us to the truth, for observing a regularity does not rule out the possibility that next time something different will occur. Since all scientific laws are merely generalisations from inductive reasoning, this so-called “problem of induction” has been pressing for philosophers of science. Trying to show how induction is justified has taxed them throughout the 20th and 21st Centuries. Karl Popper is notable for offering the most promising solution to Humean scepticism. Popper’s brand of scientific method, ‘falsificationism’ gave rise to a whole new area of debate in the philosophy of science. According to Popper, the mark of a scientific theory is whether it makes predictions which could in principle serve to falsify it.

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