Monday, December 31, 2012

Trinitarian plumbing

What does it mean to profess the Nicene creed? As a logical and logistical matter, it isn’t even possible to profess the Nicene creed, for there’s no one Nicene creed to profess. Rather, you have to make an initial choice between two different versions of the Nicene creed: the Eastern and the Western.

The Western edition contains the famous or infamous (depending on your viewpoint) filioque clause, whereas the Eastern edition, which represents the “original” version, does not.

The filioque is generally dated to Toledo III in 589, although there’s a text-critical question regarding our extant MSS. Did the original canon include the Filioque?

However, the theology underwriting the filioque antedates Toledo. It has antecedents in Hilary of Poitiers (4C) and Marius Victorinus (4C). It especially reflects the Triadology of Augustine.  

The Western edition is the default edition for Protestants and Roman Catholics. I believe that’s the edition which is customarily recited in Roman Catholic and Protestant churches.

If you’re a high churchman (e.g. Roman Catholic, Anglo-Catholic, Eastern Orthodoxy), your authoritarian ecclesiology commits you to a take-it-or-leave-it attitude towards the Nicene creed. If, on the other hand, you’re a low churchman, you’re at liberty to affirm as much as you think is correct.

From what I’ve read, the Eastern orthodox object to the filioque on two basic grounds:

i) They raise an ecclesiastical objection. They don’t think the Western church had the authority to unilaterally amend the Nicene creed. The Nicene creed was promulgated by Constantinople 1, and only another ecumenical council has the authority to revise the Nicene creed.

Of course, that objection shifts the question to whose church has the authority to revise the Nicene creed. Obviously Roman Catholics do think their church has that prerogative.

ii) They also raise a theological objection. They think double procession is ditheistic, for it introduces a second originating principle into the Trinity.

Whether that’s true is a matter of interpretation. For instance, I believe that Augustine still regarded the Father as the primary and ultimate source of the Son and the Spirit alike. So it may be a difference of emphasis.

Conversely, the filioque may have been added to close the door on Arianism, by giving the Son a constitutive role in the intratrinitarian existence.

To some degree the Eastern and Western versions of the Nicene creed reflect different models of the Trinity. To somewhat oversimplify the difference, the Eastern begins with the Father as the source of the (other) persons whereas the Western begins with the divine nature as the source of the persons.

The whole debate is like Trinitarian plumbing. Is the Father the faucet that channels the Son and Spirit through two separate pipes, or does the Father channel the Son through one pipe, while the Son diverts the stream through another pipe to channel the Spirit?

In my opinion, both models of the Trinity trade on implicitly mechanical metaphors which are unsuited to a timeless, spaceless God.

In any event, we need to ground our doctrine of God in his biblical self-revelation, rightly interpreted.

Wittgenstein's Vienna

This post is actually not about Wittgenstein, but I’m using that to illustrate a point. Wittgenstein was a famous philosophy prof. at Cambridge. Years ago, commentators on Wittgenstein used to discuss him as if he was a British philosopher, like J. L. Austin. But, of course, he wasn’t. That treatment changed when this book was published:

Allan Janik & Stephen Toulmin: Wittgenstein’s Vienna

For more, see:

The point the authors were making is that you couldn’t really interpret Wittgenstein in a cultural vacuum. To understand him, you had to understand his formative influences.

The book also benefited from the fact that Toulmin was one of Wittgenstein’s star students. So he had firsthand knowledge of Wittgenstein.

If you want to understand Wittgenstein, it’s not enough to read Wittgenstein. You also need to study the life and times of Wittgenstein. It also helps to read expositions of his philosophy by distinguished students of his, who had the opportunity to question him, viz. Elizabeth Anscombe, Norman Malcolm, Stephen Toulmin.

Now, I say all that to say this. I’m struck by how often evangelical converts to Rome imagine that they can jump feet first into the church fathers without any basic background information. They imagine that if they just read the church fathers in some English translation, they understand what they are reading. Yet that’s terribly naïve.

Wittgenstein is far closer to our own time and civilization than the church fathers. Yet you can’t expect to understand his philosophy by simply reading his works.

To understand the church fathers, you have to do some serious reading in the secondary literature. You have to know things about their parents, education, social class. About the political and socioeconomic circumstances that conditioned their outlook. About their philosophical mentors and foils.

Some Clarkian Scripturalits like Drake Shelton also suffer from Catholic convert syndrome when it comes to the church fathers.

The argument from reason

A friend asked me what I thought of Victor Reppert’s argument from reason. Here’s my response:


I just finished reading his version of the argument in the Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology. Here are my off-the-cuff impressions:

i) I think it’s a good argument. I think it can be popularized.

ii) In popularizing theistic proofs, I think we need to clarify the value and limitations of popularized theistic proofs. I think we should classify popularized theistic proofs under defensive apologetics rather than offensive apologetics. I think they can be useful in giving Christians supporting arguments for their faith. They can give Christians some intellectual confidence or assurance.

However, I think it would often be a mistake for a Christian to imagine that this equips him to go on the offensive and pick fights or do battle with unbelievers.

In debate, a specialist usually has an advantage over a nonspecialist. He can argue circles around the nonspecialist. Even though the specialist may be dead wrong, he can do a snow job on the nonspecialist.

An atheist who’s a clever young philosophy major has a lot of strategies at his disposal to deflect a popularized version of the AFR. If Joe Six-pack Christian gets into an argument with an unbeliever like that, he may well lose the argument, not because he’s wrong, but because he lacks the sophistication to field the counterarguments.

And that experience could disillusion him. That might shake his faith. Leave him worse off than before. So we need to make sure the nonspecialist has reasonable expectations about what a popularized theistic proof can accomplish.

iii) There’s also the question of how to interpret the AFR.

a) Is it one argument, or a bundle of distinct arguments?

Reppert divides the argument into six subarguments, but are these six distinct arguments from reason, or are these six supporting arguments for the same basic argument?

b) For instance, is dualism essential to the AFR? Take an idealistic version of atheism like McTaggart’s idealism. Everything would be mental.

Yet that would still be vulnerable to the AFR. Mentality is not interchangeable with rationality. Take the clinically insane.

c) Likewise, some people I’ve read think this is about the determinism/indeterminism debate. That if our beliefs are determined, then our beliefs are arbitrary. But I think that objection misses the point of argument.

Seems to me the AFR isn’t targeting the general principle of determinate beliefs, but beliefs determined by a mindless process.

By the same token, the AFT would also target accidental beliefs. Beliefs which result from a stochastic process.

iv) In popularizing a theistic proof, the key is to find and exploit good illustrations. For instance, Reppert uses the hypothetical example of someone who throws dice to decide what to believe. You could expand on that example.

a) We’d say that’s an irrational way to choose beliefs, because there’s no essential correlation between the selection process and the truth of the corresponding belief. And that’s because it’s just a matter of chance what combination the dice will yield on any particular throw.

Mind you, there’s a sense in which the randomness is determined by physical conditions and mathematical constraints, which is why we can calculate the odds. Only so many combinations are mathematically possible.

But there’s no internal relation between the dice and the beliefs. The same throw could select a different belief, or a different throw could select the same belief. It all depends on how the dice are positioned in the fist, the angle of the throw, the amount of force behind the throw, &c.

b) One might compare this to loaded dice. The dice are loaded with the intention of yielding a particular result, for a purpose. To win by cheating.

v) Scrabble would be another example.

a) In one respect, that’s a physical state which can represent something else. The arrangement of letters can refer.

But lettered sequences aren’t inherently meaningful. Rather, that’s based on language, alphabets, and spelling systems. That’s a code which we use to assign meaning to inanimate objects. An arbitrary convention. The significance is contingent on an agreed-upon set of rules. Mutual understanding.

b) Likewise, we distinguish between words which are fortuitously formed by shaking the box, then emptying the contents onto the table, and words which are intentionally formed by a player selecting Scrabble pieces from a pile and arranging or rearranging them to spell a word or sentence.

If a girlfriend and boyfriend were playing Scrabble, and she saw her boyfriend shake the box, resulting in the pieces randomly spelling “Will you marry me?”, she wouldn’t treat that as a marriage proposal (unless she was deluded). But if she saw him take pieces on the table and arrange them to spell “Will you marry me?”, she’d rightly interpreted that as a marriage proposal.

These are ways of illustrating the difference between beliefs produced by a reliable process and beliefs produced by an unreliable process.

vi) Finally, one stock objection to the AFR is that the evolution of reason is trustworthy, for if it wasn’t trustworthy, we wouldn’t still be around.

I haven’t kept up with all the current literature on that debate, but I think that appeal is flawed on multiple grounds:

a) It’s an a posteriori counterargument to an a priori argument. The AFT is an argument in principle. An empirical argument really can’t disprove an argument in principle. It isn’t that kind of argument.

b) Reasoning back from the outcome doesn’t yield that premise. Even if we grant macroevolution, even if we grant that our survival retroactively validates the fact that evolution selects for reliable beliefs, that’s not an argument for naturalistic evolution. At best, that would be an argument for theistic evolution. For guided evolution.

If, for instance, we keep rolling sixes, we don’t conclude that we’re lucky. For there quickly comes a point where that’s too lucky to be sheer luck. Rather, we conclude that the dice are loaded.

c) If brainpower confers a survival advantage, how did our less cerebrally endowed precursors survive to evolve bigger brains?

d) Insects survive and thrive without brainpower or true beliefs. So where’s the connection?

e) According to evolutionary history, the vast percentage of biological organisms became extinct.

f) The appeal is circular. You can only cite the success of evolution in producing advantageous beliefs on the prior assumption that your brain can be trusted to evaluate the evidence. But that’s the very issue in dispute.

Crime stats

One issue which crops up in the gun control debate is the oft-cited claim that according to FBI crime stats, rates of homicide have been steadily declining for the past 40 years. And this, in turn, is attributed to tighter gun control laws.

However, I’ve read various sources which indicate the reported decline in murder rates is due to better trauma care, which enables more gunshot victims to survive.  By definition, the victim has to die for that to be classified and counted as a homicide. So what percentages have changed–gunshot victims or gunshot fatalities?

George Will, Philosopher/Journalist, on the American Political Philosophy

What do Dwight Eisenhower, Woodrow Wilson, Andrew Fleming West, James Madison, Oxford University, Princeton University, William F. Buckley, Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, John Locke, William Jennings Bryan, William Howard Taft, Niccolò Machiavelli, Immanual Kant, Martin Luther, and Rene Descartes all have in common?

Answer: They all appear (with correct citations) in the following George Will speech, December 4, at Washington University in St. Louis:

I'd encourage you to watch the whole speech. It runs about an hour and a half [There is a Q/A session afterward]. Here is a .pdf text of the speech.

If you don't have time, here's a selection:

‘What is the church?’ Ask first ‘What does God intend for man?’

What is God’s intention with respect to man? That’s a key component in answering the question “what is the church?”

While keeping the Reformed confessions in mind, G.K. Beale, in his A New Testament Biblical Theology: The Unfolding of the Old Testament in the New, (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic ©2011) says this:

My thesis is that the major theological ideas of the [New Testament] flow out of the following New Testament storyline, of which the new-creational kingdom and its expansion are the central element leading to God’s glory: Jesus’s life, trials, death for sinners, and especially resurrection by the Spirit have launched the fulfillment of the eschatological already-not yet new-creational reign, bestowed by grace through faith and resulting in worldwide commission to the faithful to advance this new-creational reign and resulting in judgment for the unbelieving, unto the triune God’s glory [emphasis is Beale’s, pg 23].

Beale swoops out and takes a look at the grand sweep of Scripture. He stresses that “the resurrected Christ is ‘the foundation-stone of the New Creation [that] has come into position.” But elsewhere, he notes that the resurrected Christ has a “back story” that extends back through the Old Testament to Adam. He stresses that Paul’s contention in Romans 5, for example, is not a brand new thought of Paul’s, but rather, it is the result of a lifetime of the Apostle’s reflection on the Old Testament message:

Sunday, December 30, 2012

Stockholm syndrome

As most of you know, Stockholm syndrome is a psychological condition in which captives or abductees come to form emotional bonds with their captors. I believe it’s more common among women. Atheism is the theological version of Stockholm syndrome.

In the gulag of our fallen world, you have two types of prisoners. On the one hand, you have the assimilators and collaborators who’ve made peace with life in the death camp. They are content to stay in the death camp. To sicken, starve, age, and die in the death camp.

Having resigned themselves to their lot, they make a virtue of their self-imposed necessity. They come to love the death camp. Embrace the death camp. They come to love the commandant. They come to love the prison guards.

They festoon the razor wire with wildflowers. They take pride in painting their rat-infested barracks. They take pride in scrubbing the floors. They take joy in farming the sweltering malarial swamps. They compose patriotic work songs in honor of the commandant. As one of them put it:

We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous gulag, fragrant with open sewers, bountiful with snakes, scorpions, and mosquitoes. Within decades we must close our eyes again. Isn’t it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun, to work at understanding the gulag and how we have come to wake up in it? This is how I answer when I am asked–as I am surprisingly often–why I bother to get up in the mornings. To put it the other way round, isn’t it sad to go to your grave without ever wondering why you were born? Who, with such a thought, would not spring from bed, eager to resume discovering the death camp and rejoicing to be a part of it?

On the other hand, you have the malcontents and irreconcilables. They never feel at home in the death camp. They are constantly plotting how to escape. They are always on the lookout for chinks in the security system. They nurse the unquenchable hope for something greater beyond the barbed wire. As one of them put it:


They don’t simply want it for themselves. They try to befriend prison guards, so that some of the guards can also make a better life for themselves. Find happiness outside the death camp.

The captives who love the death camp don’t simply disagree with the captives who hate the death camp. They resent them. They can’t stand the fact that some prisoners don’t share their wistful view of the death camp. They try to shame them into loving the death camp.

When they discover an underground tunnel, they sabotage it. When they find a hole in the fence, they repair it. When they find out a prison guard is collaborating with the escapees, they rat him out to the commandant.

A Noteworthy but Flawed Systematic Theology

Humanism and human worth

According to naturalistic evolution, this is all humans amount to:


Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (Oxford University Press, USA; 30th Anniversary edition, 2006), 35.

Ask yourself if that's adequate go ground human hope, human worth, human rights.

The Devil's Chaplain

At the John Radcliffe Hospital, a physician tells Richard Dawkins that his son was stillborn. A hospital chaplain talks Richard into secretly adopting an orphaned newborn whose mother died in childbirth. Out of concern for his wife’s mental health, Richard agrees. He and his wife Marian name the child Damien.

Shortly thereafter, Richard’s mentor, Nikolaas Tinbergen, is killed in a freak accident when a gas main explodes under his car. As a result, Richard is appointed to replace Tinbergen as the Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science

Five years later, Damien’s original nanny is bitten to death by a black mamba. This is puzzling because there are no black mambas in Oxfordshire. Richard assumes the snake must have escaped from a private collector. 

A few days later, a new nanny, Mrs. Baylock, arrives out of nowhere to replace her–claiming the agency sent her after reading the obituary. Richard hires her on condition that she never read fairy tales to Damien: “I have sometimes worried about the educational effects of fairy tales. Could they be pernicious, leading children down pathways of gullibility towards anti-scientific superstition and religion? I think looking back to my own childhood, the fact that so many of the stories I read allowed the possibility of frogs turning into princes, whether that has a sort of insidious affect on rationality. Faith can be very very dangerous, and deliberately to implant it into the vulnerable mind of an innocent child is a grievous wrong. I’ve always been scrupulously careful to avoid the smallest suggestion of infant indoctrination, which I think is ultimately responsible for much of the evil in the world. I want Damien to make up his own mind freely when he becomes old enough to do so. I would encourage him to think for himself–as long as he thinks like me.”

One night, when Marian goes into Damien’s bedroom, she’s confronted by a menacing Rottweiler with glowing red eyes. She runs from the room and tells Richard. “It’s like some hellbound with eyes that glow in the dark!”

Richard assures her that the dog’s eyeshine is simply the natural effect of tapetum lucidum reflecting the nightlight in Damien’s bedroom. The next day, Richard asks the nanny about the strange dog. Mrs. Baylock tells him it’s a guard dog that the agency sent to protect the boy. Damien has become very attached to the new dog.

One day, when Damien is playing with another boy, his playmate accidentally breaks Damien’s toy train. Damien glares at the boy, mutters a Sumerian curse, and the boy bursts into flames. The burning boy runs screaming from the room, and dies moments later.

The police are mystified, but Richard assures them that there must be a perfectly natural explanation for what happened. “Just because science so far has failed to explain something, such as spontaneous combustion, to say it follows that the facile, pathetic explanations which religion has produced somehow by default must win the argument is really quite ridiculous.”

Another time, Marian walks into Damien’s bedroom when Damien playing with toy soldiers. The toy soldiers are floating in midair.

Marian tells Richard. “It’s as if he was moving them with his mind.”

He assures her that there must be a scientific explanation for levitation–if that’s what it was. Probably an optical illusion, or anomalous atmospheric conditions. Must have something to do with electromagnetic fields. “If ever there was a slamming of the door in the face of constructive investigation, it is the word miracle. To a medieval peasant, a radio would have seemed like a miracle. Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence.”

On Damien’s sixth birthday party, Marian hires a magician to perform tricks for the children who came to celebrate Damien’s birthday. The magician pulls a rabbit out of the hat. Marian sees Damien touch the rabbit. It turns into a cobra. The magician is horrified. The children scream and run away. All except for Damien.

When Marian tells Richard what she saw, he brushes off the incident as slight-of-hand. “It really comes down to parsimony, economy of explanation,” He says. “It is possible that your car engine is driven by psychokinetic energy, but if it looks like a petrol engine, smells like a petrol engine and performs exactly as well as a petrol engine, the sensible working hypothesis is that it is a petrol engine. Telepathy and possession by the spirits of the dead are not ruled out as a matter of principle. There is certainly nothing impossible about abduction by aliens in UFOs. One day it may be happen. But on grounds of probability it should be kept as an explanation of last resort. It is unparsimonious, demanding more than routinely weak evidence before we should believe it. If you hear hooves clip-clopping down a London street, it could be a zebra or even a unicorn, but, before we assume that it’s anything other than a horse, we should demand a certain minimal standard of evidence.”

One day Marian takes Damien to the zoo. When they go to the herpetarium, all the snakes press themselves against the glass, as if they were doing obeisance to Damien.

Fr. Brennan, an Anglican priest, visits Richard’s office at Oxford to warn him that his adopted son is possessed. Damien is the long-predicted Antichrist, he says.  He urges Richard to have Damien baptized and exorcised. Read him the Bible every day.

Richard is scornful: “Don’t ever be lazy enough, defeatist enough, cowardly enough to say ‘I don’t understand it so it must be a miracle–it must be supernatural–it must be the occult–God did it–the Devil did it.’ Say instead, that it’s a puzzle, it’s strange, it’s a challenge that we should rise to. Whether we rise to the challenge by questioning the truth of the observation, or by expanding our science in new and exciting directions–the proper and brave response to any such challenge is to tackle it head-on. And until we’ve found a proper answer to the mystery, it’s perfectly ok simply to say ‘this is something we don’t yet understand–but we’re working on it’. It’s the only honest thing to do. Miracles, magic and myths, they can be fun. Everybody likes a good story. Myths are fun, as long as you don’t confuse them with the truth.”

“But that’s precisely why the dark side entrusted the child to your care,” Fr. Brennan interjects. “They knew you’d provide the perfect cover. The Devil’s dupe. You’d be the very last person to suspect Damien’s true identity–until it’s too late!”

Richard orders the priest to leave. After he goes outside, Fr. Brennan is struck dead by a lightning bolt, even though there’s not a cloud in the sky.

Marian starts having nightmares about Damien. She begins to question whether Damien could really be her own child. As she’s driving to his office to share her concerns, she’s swallowed alive by a sinkhole, which suddenly appears right under her car. 

Was reading Hans Küng a preventative, innoculating RC Seminarians from becoming sexual predators?

I know, correlation doesn’t mean causation. But I was surprised to find that explanation among these comments, ostensibly from priests, or at least, former Roman Catholic seminarians, in response to this recent article about Hans Küng:

Vincent of Valley Forge • 3 days ago
Hans Kung and certain other loyal critics of the modern papacy were on our favorite, unauthorized reading list "a few years back" at St Charles Seminary here in the Philadelphia area. Funny thing: none of us who secretly met and read Kung in St Charles were among those others who later became predators of children. [emphasis added] Yes, a few of us left the seminary or later, left the priesthood. But those of us who left became professionals, in one field or another, and some are still Catholic. Those of us who have stayed and been ordained (some of us go back decades to remember our secret reading of Kung at St Charles) try to be good pastors and give the sermons our people need. And we keep our heads down. We love being priests. We pray for the conversion of the Vatican [emphasis added].

Now with Archbishop Chaput we have more reason than ever to keep our heads down. He probably thinks we are being reverend. But the right word is cautious.

And this:

Friday, December 28, 2012

The Vatican on gun control

That was then:

This is now:

An ant's view of intelligent design theory


Drone1: Who do you think designed this bicycle?

Drone2: No one!

Drone1: No one?


Drone1: I find that hard to believe.





Drone1: What’s your alternative?




Creeping unitarianism

On the one hand:


On the other hand:





"The greatest"
















Jesus may have in mind something like this:




iv) It’s also striking that Jesus says:





v) Likewise, in 16:7, Jesus says:
















History and chronology

Thursday, December 27, 2012

The earth shall not be moved




Jesus walked on H2O

Drake is having conniption fits:




















Loftus’ faulty argument for atheism gets an F double minus

The beginning of the end

Creative measures in crime-fighting

God as author analogy








IF God foreordained and rendered certain a particular event…










rogereolson says:
June 28, 2012 at 1:14 pm


rogereolson says:
June 30, 2012 at 1:00 pm







rogereolson says:
December 27, 2012 at 12:59 pm







Faith in science







Wednesday, December 26, 2012

Help a child

Outside the camp



It’s a sequel to this post:

    Your brother in Christ,









That’s the kind of friend Spencer has been to me.


























Your position is an instance of Ockhamism, in my estimation.



Sorry to be a pest, but isn’t that ambiguous?








