By: ALEXANDER GILMAN

The relationship between the liturgical, defined by Jean-Yves Lacoste as “the logic that presides over the encounter between man and God writ large,” and the ethical is deeply ambiguous. Throughout Lacoste’s phenomenological work, Experience and the Absolute, the call of man and the world is set in contrast with the call of the Absolute. In this text Lacoste begins with the Heideggerian notion of our being as being-in-the world-toward-death and explores how a liturgical relationship with the absolute subverts, but also sublates, our being-in-the-world in favor of a being-toward-God. Without rejecting Heidegger’s fundamental ontology, Lacoste aims to show how a liturgical relationship is a free choice of any Dasein. However, this turning-toward-God from being-in-the-world is not without complications. Since our ethical obligations and relationships dwell in the world, it may also be the case that ethics is subverted in the logic of the liturgical. Lacoste discusses ethics in many parts of the text, but nonetheless a thematized understanding of the exact relationship between ethics and liturgy is still necessary. There are several possibilities for how this relationship may manifest itself. The liturgical could be irreducibly separate and contradictory to ethics; the liturgical could ground ethics by creating the possibility of ethics; the liturgical could provide specific ethical content, such as virtues, laws, and commandments. In the end, we must especially look for specific ethical principles that could guide our behavior, not just a vague ethical space. I will thus maintain a basic definition of ethics as a system of moral principles that govern a person or group’s action. We must weigh these possibilities and definitions against Lacoste’s framework for the liturgical.

To help flesh out this relationship, I will also discuss Soren Kierkegaard’s philosophy of the religious and the ethical, giving a cross-reading of Fear and Trembling and Repetition guided by Dominic Desroches’ article “The Exception as Reinforcement of the Ethical Norm: The Figures of Abraham and Job in Kierkegaard’s Ethical Thought. I believe the relationship between the liturgical and the ethical is a fundamental problem in religious thought for it must be deciding factor in the legitimacy of any religious system. The boldness and rigor of Lacoste’s project to reconcile the Heideggarian phenomenological analytic of Dasein with the Christian commitment to being-toward-God must be weighed against a consideration of the ethical else it is in danger of being irrelevant to our own lives.

The first possibility for the relationship between the liturgical and the ethical, that they are in fact irreconcilable and contradictory, seems to be the momentum of the first several chapters of Experience and the Absolute. By chapter four, Lacoste brings to the fore what it is becoming a real problem in his analytic of the liturgical: subverting our relationship with the world in order to prioritize our relationship with an unknown Absolute. Liturgy appears from most of Lacoste’s accounts to contradict the logic of the world and consequently, possibly contradict our ethical responsibilities. Lacoste writes in summary, “We have defined liturgy as the resolute deliberate gesture made by those who ordain their being-in-the-world a being-before-God, and who do violence to the former in the name of the latter.”ii Although Lacoste is careful to say that liturgy transgresses and annuls rather than eliminates or destroys our relation to place, to history, and to the world, its implications are nonetheless disturbing.

Especially since in his framework we are subverting our relation to place in exchange for a liturgical ‘nonplace,’ our time for a ‘nonevent’ and our relationship to others or world for a ‘nonexperience,’ this free choice for the liturgical appears at first glance not only to be ethically suspect but also precarious in its logic. Lacoste even uses this latter word to describe the liturgical commitment, thus he is well aware of how it looks. On this point Lacoste expands, “Liturgy actually suffers from being in the margins and at a distance in two ways. It is removed from definitive realities, which it at best represents inchoately. And it is removed from all that which, in the domain of the provisional, justifiably demands that we take care of it.”iii It is suggested by this point that liturgy serves no reasonable purpose except as a diversion and distraction from the responsibilities of the ethical. The logic of liturgy is one “foreign to the logic of action.”iv

Thus, Lacoste must ask, “Is liturgy a form of divertissment?”v Lacoste’s answer will be a clear “no” but the question demands of liturgy to defend itself against the implications of subversion. In other words, why should we risk contradicting or distracting our ethical responsibility, which is tangible and concrete, for the precariousness of the liturgical?

Lacoste further complicates the issue by resisting an ethics gained solely from the logic of our being-in-the-world. By critiquing Emmanuel Levinas’ first philosophy and siding with Heidegger, he writes, “Yet the mute call that renders me “hostage” to others places no obligation on me that would emanate solely from the a priori conditions of my presence in the world.”vi Our initial condition of being-in-the-world is in fact also a divertissement from the ethical: “the world keeps the injunctions of the good veiled over.”vii Beyond the inferior ethics of the social contract, the ethical, similarly to the liturgical, aims to subvert the solipsism and existential self-centeredness of Dasein’s being-toward-death. Thus, we cannot simply disregard liturgy as irrelevant because our being-in-the-world does not grant us an originary ethics. Lacoste’s account of liturgy problematizes the ethical for believers as well as nonbelievers. We must then ask two additional questions: can the ethical be (re)gained through the liturgical and is there an alternate source for the ethical outside the liturgical?

In order to grant liturgy a positive relationship to ethics, either through grounding its possibility or providing ethical content, it must be through a paradox. If liturgy subverts our relationship to the world and diverts from the logic of work, but also provides something positive to the consideration of ethics, then the relationship is contradictory. This does not mean, however, that it is impossible. After thematizing the problem of ethics in liturgy Lacoste makes the bold claim that “The diversion that liturgy has as its task is perhaps alone in permitting us to rigorously ground the ethical meaning of our facticity.”viii This is indeed a surprising statement. First, it is claiming that the very diversion we questioned as ethically suspicious in fact grounds ethics. Second, liturgy is the sole ground for ethics. Third, the meaning of our facticity, our being-in-the-world, is, at least partially, ethical. Against the implications of liturgical divertissement, Lacoste wants to argue a strong, positive relationship between the liturgical and the ethical. There are three possibilities in Lacoste’s work for how the liturgical may ground the ethical. We must ask whether they are satisfying answers to the problems above.

First, Lacoste argues that time spent liturgically grants us a symbolic distance from the inherence of the world, thus unveiling the ethical from the divertissement of the world. Lacoste explores the logic of the “initial” versus the “originary” to flesh out this possibility. The initial, our everyday, already always being-in-the-world, as we mentioned above, “keeps the injunctions of the good veiled over.” The night of the vigil, the liturgical time par excellence, subverts our relation to world, brings us to the margins of our being-in-the-world in order to remove the world as a hindrance between ourselves and the Absolute. This turning toward God through the liturgical night, Lacoste argues, also has a morning in which we turn back toward the world, granted a distance that allows perspective and new clarity on the problems of our being-in-the-world. He writes, “The new day that concludes the liturgical vigil must be understood as the gift of the beginning given one again: the symbolism of the origin leads to the reality of a starting point, to the reality of a space opened to a freedom capable of willing, and indeed of doing good.”ix By subverting the inherence of the world we gain purity of vision, and possibly of intentions, prior to our initial thrownness. The liturgical returns us to our “originary” nature, suggesting a pre-Lapsarian symbolism, gives us back the possibility of being ethical without the distractions of the world. This is a useful starting place for developing a relationship between liturgy and ethics.

With this conclusion, however, we have not gained a real ethic but only a possibility for ethics. There is nothing inherent in the distance gained by liturgy to return to the world with an ethical project. In another place, though, Lacoste suggests a way in which liturgy additionally alerts us to our responsibility through the liturgical unhappiness of consciousness. He writes, “The liturgical unhappiness of consciousness reveals, not only that liturgy prevents us from doing good during the time of entr’acte, but also that we have ignored the ultimate (though veiled over) stakes of our being-in-the world, and that we can no longer continue to do so.”x This unhappiness, the one that motivates this paper, stays with the person during the liturgical. He or she feels that the liturgical vigil is time taken away from the necessary exigencies of the ethical. This perceived deficiency in the liturgical combined with the distance gained throughout it perhaps gives a possible solution to how the liturgical may more rigorously ground the ethical. Lacoste continues, “liturgy enables us to dwell in the world and on the earth by superimposing on our facticity the order of an ethical vocation that alone authorizes us to let the Kingdom invest itself in world and earth in advance.”xi The liturgical, then, allows the transcendent ethical logic of the Kingdom, of the eschaton, to come to the world. We see in liturgy how far the world is from the Kingdom and thus desire to change the world.

Here, it seems, Lacoste has reconciled ethics to liturgy, but there are some problems still lurking in this answer, or at least an incompleteness. In response to the first claim that liturgy opens a space that subverts and gives distance from the world, it must be reemphasized that this gives nothing but the possibility of the ethical. Even when the liturgical unhappiness of consciousness imbues us with a sense of the irresponsibility of the liturgical, this desire to return to the world still lacks any specific ethical principles. We are called back to the world with a clearer vision but how can we go about bringing the Kingdom to the world? If our being is fundamentally duplicitous, how can our beingin- vocation during liturgy inform our being-in-fact, ethically or otherwise? At best, this grounding of ethics is the grounding of a desire for the ethical. Lacoste’s claim lacks the kind of ethical framework we have in Levinas. The liturgical need not give us dogmatic rules, but it should give a concrete foundation for how to be ethical. Since Lacoste disagrees with Levinas that the ethical relation is original to our being, it seems he shies away from providing an ethical system at all. Despite this incompleteness, a lot has been gain by grounding a desire for the ethical. It shows that the liturgical and the ethical have a positive relationship. But thus far this relationship is still unthematized. We do not, as Lacoste assumes, have any sense of the “ethical ground of our facticity” but rather simply that the ethical is possible and desirable. This desire should want something more concrete and specific.

Although Lacoste does not relate this next concept directly to ethics, I believe there is one moment in the text that may be read as a more specific way in which liturgy provides an ethical framework. The liturgical project of abnegation aims to subvert our consciousness, our subjectivity, and our will. With regard to the first, Lacoste describes liturgy as “disoriented consciousness.”xii Liturgy places us in a relation different from any other relation, to an object for example. Rather than being strictly intentional, in the Husserlian sense, in the liturgical relationship we do not gather objects around us as the subject but “make ourselves available before God.”xiii The subject is no longer the center of the experience. Lacoste continues, “The I [le moi] can content itself with being an I. Now, it is precisely liturgical (in)experience that provides the exemplary case of a decentering and marginalization of the ego.” Through this dislodging of the I we become the other par excellence of the Absolute. But since the Absolute is not an other in the same sense of an worldly object or person, the relationship is disproportionate. Our otherness subordinates our ipseity. Through liturgy we exist primarily in the mode of You. Although this is not as originary to our being-in-the-world as the mode of I, the liturgical disorientation of consciousness forces us into a relationship that can radically reorient our relationship to others.

Ironically, this kind of reorientation recalls the philosophy of Levinas that Lacoste rejects, although in a different form. By de-centering the ego through liturgy we achieve two things: first, a greater selflessness and realization of the limitation of our subjectivity, and second, a model for ethically “making ourselves available” for others. Levinas’ conception of being “hostage” to the other thus takes on a new meaning through the liturgical and can thus be a useful category without conceding to his first philosophy. The relationship we have to the Absolute, throughout the language of a relation rather than that of Kingdom versus world, gives us a framework for applying a liturgical (non)experience to a worldly, ethical experience. If this disorientation of consciousness is not just incidental but rather essential to the liturgical, we have gained a more concrete grounding for the ethical. Yet, there is still something dissatisfying in this conclusion. It lacks specific ethical principles that could help guide our being-in-the-world. It gives a model for becoming a You that can hear the call of the other, but this relationship must be fleshed out more. Moreover, Lacoste does not directly connect disorientation to ethics, so we only have implications. An ambiguity still ultimately remains.

In Fear and Trembling Soren Kierkegaard explores a similar tension between the ethical and faith through the analysis of Abraham attempting to slay Isaac on Mount Moriah. Kierkegaard develops a framework for comparing the action of Abraham as the Knight of Faith and the tragic hero, or Knight of Infinite Resignation. The drama that Kierkegaard lays out for consideration involves heroic acts that suspend ethics. In the case of the tragic hero, the ethical is suspended in order to accomplish a higher ethic, such as Agamemnon sacrificing Iphigenia in order to save the polis. He stays ultimately within the ethical even when he suspends it. Abraham, Kierkegaard concludes, does no such thing but rather entirely and radically suspends the ethical for his act of faith; “in his action he overstepped the ethical altogether, and had a higher telos outside it.”xiv For Kierkegaard, Abraham’s action, although not a part of everyone’s faith commitment, is fundamental to the religious attunement. Abraham mythically dramatizes the paradox and dangerous implications of intending something transcendent, just as Lacoste’s treatment of the liturgical necessitated such radical subversion of worldliness. Kierkegaard, however, presents the problem in even starker terms.

The example of Abraham expresses for Kierkegaard the basic religious act of faith. Kierkegaard, unlike Lacoste, gives a specific definition of the ethical that he then juxtaposes with the religious. For Kierkegaard to be ethical is to will the good for the universal: “the individual’s ethical task is always to…abrogate his particularity so as to become the universal.”xv In another way, it is to put the other, as an abstract totality, before the self. The ethical is that which applies to everyone at all times. He does not flesh it out more than this, but implicit in it is an ethical attitude more concrete than with Lacoste. The religious flows through this universal but ends above it. He writes, “Faith is just this paradox, that the single individual as the particular is higher than the universal, is justified before the latter, not as subordinate but superior…”xvi The religious person’s relationship to the Absolute supersedes his or her relationship to the universal, to the ethical. Thus not only do the faithful appear non-ethical or neutral, in that they intend outside the ethical, but they also appear unethical, in that they negate the universal.

The religious attunement’s utter contradiction with the ethical is irreducible and pronounced in Kierkegaard, and thus unlike Lacoste, there is within the religious little room for finding an ethic. At least Kierkegaard is hard-pressed to find one, as he remarks, “I can understand the tragic hero, but not Abraham, even though in a certain lunatic sense I admire him more than all others.”xvii There is not within the religious drama an obvious ethical logic, hidden away in a nice paradox. Here it is a stark betrayal of the ethical, not just as a diversion but as a positive act: “What we usually call a temptation is something that keeps a person from carrying out a duty, but here the temptation is the ethical itself which would keep [Abraham] from doing God’s will.”xviii Lacoste’s conception of the liturgical can be critiqued as a temptation in the first sense, as a hindrance to carrying out the ethical. Abraham’s act does not just subvert but negate the ethical. The knight of faith is unethical, and thus we have here an even more difficult and disconcerting problem.

Besides the subtle, and ultimately unsatisfying, suggestion that Abraham must eventually descend Mount Moriah and return to the world, there is no reconciliation of the religious and ethical in Fear and Trembling. Abraham acts on the absurd and cannot be understood in terms of the universal, of the ethical. Even if we accept Abraham’s return home as possibly ethical, since his act was a negation rather than a subversion of the ethical, it is simply not enough to solve the problem. Dominic Desroches in his essay on Kierkegaardian ethics suggests a cross-reading of Fear and Trembling and Repetition to work out this problem. In the latter text, which was actually published before Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard compares the concept of recollection to that of repetition. In recollection, one returns to a past circumstance expecting similar feelings but is naturally disappointed. Recollection ends in melancholy. Repetition, however, is a return forward, a renewed will and passion to live in old circumstances in a fresh and invigorated way. When read through the lens of Abraham and ethics, a religious repetition is willing the particular over the universal, in order to repeat the universal with new vigor. Repetition suggests that faith is necessary for the ethical, a thesis similar to that of Lacoste’s, but Kierkegaard’s idea gives a more specific ethical framework.

Yet, this conclusion seems to fundamentally contradict Fear and Trembling: how does repetition succeed in this retrieval of the ethical? In the afterward to Repetition Kierkegaard addresses the reader in terms familiar to the discussion in Fear, “The exception thinks also the universal when it thinks itself, it labors also for the universal when it elaborates itself, it explains the universal when it explains itself.”xix The exception, the willing of the particular as in Abraham, in fact strengthens the universal by underlining the meaning of the universal. In its very absurdity and insanity, the exception reinforces the logic of the universal. He continues:

“In the course of time one grows weary of the perpetual patter about the universal, always the universal, repeated to the most tedious extreme of insipidity. There are exceptions. If one cannot explain them, neither can one explain the universal. Commonly one does not notice the difficulty because one does not think even the universal with passion but with an easygoing superficiality. On the other hand, the exception thinks the universal with serious passion.”xx

Similar to Lacoste, Kierkegaard makes the argument that the religious act grants a sort of respite and distance from the ethical that actually reinvigorates the latter. Yet additionally, repetition deepens ethical knowledge. By pushing the universal to its margins, its contour is regained. The religious repetition moves forward, adding richness and understanding, just as Lacoste says, “the circle that unites liturgical reason and ethical reason is the fundamental rhythm of existence, which transgressing its native conditions, desires the accomplishment of the human beyond what can be derived from our facticity.”xxi Thus Lacoste agrees with Kierkegaard’s model but we gain something concrete through Kierkegaard that is perhaps missing in Lacoste’s analysis. Placing the relationship between the religious and the ethical in the terms of the universal and particular, a specific ethical system is suggested. Because Kierkegaardian repetition reinforces the universal, rather than just returns us to our facticity with a new clarity, it brings with it an ethical framework, an attitude that suggests, through faith, how we may act ethically. The rigorous absurdity of faith provides logic to the ethical.

That is not to say that Lacoste provides nothing in filling out this complex relationship between the ethical and the liturgical. Combining the more specific Kierkegaardian language of the universal with Lacoste’s sophisticated logic of the vigil, originary, and Kingdom, as well as the liturgical disorientation of consciousness, we have thus gained a tenable possibility for how the liturgical may be reconciled to the ethical. Nevertheless, achieving such a reconciliation necessitated a creative reading of both writers in conjunction. Also, even with his additional and useful framework, there is a lot to be desired in Kierkegaard’s ethics. We in the end still lack the more practical guidance of how the liturgical may relate to a real ethical relationship. What if there is a question about what should or should not be willed as universal, such as the famous story provided by Kant of the murderer at the door for your friend? Do you lie and betray the universal for perhaps a higher ethic such as the tragic hero? The details of such a framework are not worked out.

Thus in the end, with Lacoste and Kierkegaard, we have three specific concepts that relate the liturgical to the ethical: that the liturgical vigil opens us an pure space for the ethical, that the disoriented consciousness provides a model for the ethical relation, and that repetition reinvigorates the logic of the ethical universal. In short, we have a suggestion for the relationship between the liturgical and the ethical, but not much of an ethics. In order for this problem to be truly satisfied, more work must be done to show what kind of ethical principles can be gained from the liturgical and thus why we should think the liturgical at all with regard to ethics. Moreover, the ambiguities and implications of the liturgical, such as its successful subversion of the logic of the world, also beg the disturbing question: why think the ethical at all? Why not stay in an indefinite vigil? Why return to the anxiety-ridden logic of being-in-the-world? Ultimately, we desire not just a relationship between the liturgical and the ethical but a meaningful synthesis that can guide our entire lives from the nightly vigil to our daily interactions with people and things.

End Notes

i) From Existentialist Thinkers and Ethics, ed. Christine Daigle (London: McGill-Queen’s
University Press), 2006.
ii) Jean-Yves Lacoste, Experience and the Absolute (New York: Fordham University
Press, 2004), 39, emphasis mine.
iii) Ibid, 68.
iv) Ibid, 78.
v) Ibid, 70.
vi) Ibid, 72.
vii) Ibid, 73.
viii) Ibid, 70.
ix) Ibid, 97.
x) Ibid, 73.
xi) Ibid, 75.
xii) Ibid, 149.
xiii) Ibid, 152.
xiv) Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling (New York: Penguin Books, 2003), 88.
xv) Ibid, 83.
xvi) Ibid, 84.
xvii) Ibid, 86.
xviii) Ibid, 88.
xix) Soren Kierkegaard, Repetition (New York: Harper & Row, 1941), 133.
xx) Ibid, 134.
xxi) Lacoste, 76.

Alexander Gilman (’11) is a History Major and a Philosophy Minor from Boston College

Image taken from deviantart.com

ABSTRACT: One of the most imposing problems facing the modern theist philosopher is the ‘problem of Hell,’ or the problem of how to make the Bible’s depiction of Hell as a place of eternal punishment logically consistent with the generally held theist idea that God is perfectly loving. This issue has been dealt with by a number of philosophers; some have attempted to re-imagine Hell into something less severe than eternal punishment, and some have attempted to give justifications for the traditional version of Hell. An overview of these various views and attempts will conclude that universalism—the idea that all souls must eventually be saved—is the view most compatible with a loving God. However, this paper will go on to argue that universalism’s inconsistency with the Biblical portrayal of Hell still creates a problem for the theist philosopher; as the Bible is the primary authority for the idea of Hell, any inconsistency between the Bible and our logical conclusions must make us doubt the Bible’s authority on the matter of Hell. And, as doubting the Bible in one aspect frees us to question its veracity in others, it will be argued that the problem of Hell ultimately allows us to wholly reject the Bible’s authority.

Even for those who whole-heartedly accept the idea of a loving and perfect Christian God, the thought of that God sending sinners and unbelievers to burn forever in Hell can be highly unnerving. Many believers find that the concept of Hell puts them in a bit of a bind; on the one hand, Hell is clearly a well-established idea within Christianity, and on the other, it seems almost unthinkable that a truly loving God could ever allow his creations to suffer infinitely for sins committed in a finite life. Some philosophers, such as Lewis, have used this apparent contradiction as grounds to reject Christianity and support atheism. Theist philosophers have responded by putting forward several possible solutions to the problem. For example, some attack the idea of ‘eternal’ punishment, and argue that all souls will eventually be saved (or annihilated) so that Hell will one day stand empty. Others allow for eternal punishment, but suggest that Hell is not literally a fiery lake of torture. Still others accept the fiery lake but argue that some people freely choose Hell, or that infinite punishment is somehow justified. Out of these various solutions, the idea that all souls will eventually be saved seems to follow most logically from the concept of a perfectly loving deity. Many philosophers who agree with this position, universalism, drop the issue here. However, it is highly arbitrary to pluck the idea of Hell from the Christian Bible and then fail to accept all the characteristics that the Bible attributes to Hell; the Bible is, as it turns out, alarmingly consistent in its portrayal of Hell as a place of eternal, consciously endured pain. This being the case, I must conclude that there is a contradiction between the Biblical idea of Hell and the Christian idea that God is perfectly loving; as both cannot be true, I believe it is the Biblical idea of Hell that must be rejected, and that such a rejection strongly supports a total rejection of Biblical authority.

For the purpose of later comparison, we can begin with a brief overview of the Biblical concepts of ‘Hell’ and ‘God’, the Bible being used here exclusively because it is the source that has most informed our modern understanding of both God and Hell. The Biblical facts about Hell, as Christians themselves are often quick to point out, are that everyone “will exist eternally either in heaven or hell,” (that is, heaven and hell are the only two options), that Hell is “conscious torment,” and that Hell is “eternal and irreversible” (Litke). As Lewis reminds us, such a view of Hell is actually somewhat necessary in Christianity because the whole point is that “Jesus was born to save us from something. The condition from which we have been redeemed must be truly horrible. What can be horrible enough except for eternal punishment?” (Lewis, p. 476).

Standing in contrast to this terrible, eternal Hell is the Biblical concept of God. Christians believe in a God that is omnipresent (for example, see Psalm 139:7-12), omnipotent (Genesis 18:14), unchanging (Psalm 102:25-27), omniscient (Psalm 139:2-6), and eternal (Jeremiah 10:10). God is thus incredibly powerful, but God is also merciful (see Daniel 9:9) and perfectly just (Deuteronomy 32:4); by ‘just,’ it seems to be meant that God will neither allow righteous and/or innocent people to suffer nor evildoers to have any sort of impunity. (This does seem to leave open the possibility for mercy, for it can be assumed that someone who asks God’s forgiveness is experiencing spiritual pain which may count as sufficient punishment for sins.) Perhaps the most significant Christian concept of God, though, is the idea that God is perfectly loving because God is love itself. This is made plain in 1 John 4:8, which says that anyone “who does not love does not know God, because God is love.” With this idea of God at its core, Christianity apparently sets itself up as a love-centered religion, and most believers firmly hold that their god is a god of perfect justice and perfect love.

The philosopher’s concept of God is very similar to the believer’s (or at least to the believer’s as just given), and the theist philosopher in particular usually assumes with the believer that God is morally perfect, perfectly just, and perfectly loving. We can thus turn to the various ways in which theist philosophers have tried to reconcile this idea of a perfect God with the idea of Hell. In all of the following attempts, Hell is assumed to be a reality in at least some form or other; this is maintained partly because Hell comes up so frequently as a concept in scripture, but also because several philosophers believe that God’s ‘perfect justice’ does indeed demand some sort of painful punishment for evildoers that goes beyond making them feel sorrow for what they have done. The two ‘facts’ of a perfect God and an existent Hell being assumed, the nature of Hell is then decided in each argument by what the philosopher deems logically compatible with God’s perfection. It should be noted that some philosophers’ definitions of Hell will be seen to differ drastically from the Bible’s, but this can usually be attributed to the treatment of belief in a perfect God as more basic than the belief in a strictly doctrinal Hell; as we will find, most theist philosophers who find the idea of a perfect God and the Biblical Hell incompatible choose to alter their idea of Hell rather than give up their idea of a perfect God. Again, then, the philosopher’s goal in each case is simply to find the most reasonable resolution of the main issue: under what circumstances could God allow Hell?

Addressing first the most radical alteration of ideas about Hell, we start with the theory of universalism, supported by philosophers such as Thomas Talbott and Kerry Walters. Universalism holds that a loving God must eventually save everyone, and that while there is something we could call ‘Hell,’ it is by no means a place of eternal torment. Rather, ‘Hell’ in the universalist definition is essentially purgatory, endured only for so long as people choose to be there. In other words, people may be punished in ‘Hell,’ but it is punishment inflicted with the aim of reforming sinners, and this reformation eventually comes about for everyone. As Talbott says, anything less would imply that either the sinner somehow deserved eternal punishment (which universalists reject as even possible for humans who live finite lives), or that sinners are allowed to keep sinning and thus to keep choosing separation from God in Hell (which also strikes the universalist as rather absurd). The theories that punishment is deserved and that sin does continue in Hell will be addressed shortly, but the universalist’s main objection to a traditional Hell seems to be that it would constitute a logically impossible victory of the human sinner over almighty God; in Talbott’s words, “Why should creating beings with free will (of the standard libertarian kind) include even the possibility of God’s justice (or his love) suffering an eternal defeat?” (Talbott, “Freedom,” p. 432). Or, to put it another way, a God who creates human beings and who, being omniscient, supposedly knows each individual completely should be able to ‘outsmart’ even the most freely resistant souls and bring them into a position to be saved. God should, according to the universalist, be seen as a “grand master in chess who permits a novice to move freely…and still manages to checkmate the novice in the end” (Talbott, “Freedom,” pp. 432-33).

The primary objections to universalism are that it limits free will and/or undermines justice, but both of these objections fail to really harm the argument. As for free will, the idea is supposed to be that if we know that we will all eventually succumb to God, it is no longer really a choice—but this doesn’t make a great deal of sense. Firstly, Walters correctly points out that even though “it is logically possible for an individual to refuse grace, it is not necessary that she do so” (Walters, p. 178). True free will must therefore include the possibility that all individuals will freely choose salvation, and, to bring us to the second point, why should they not? If the choice we face has only two options, that of either God (love and salvation) or Hell (the torment of separation from that love and salvation), “it seems perfectly reasonable to suppose that it is not the external coercion of God which ultimately wears away our original (and freely chosen) attitudinal obstinancy. It is rather the pain and misery…which we’ve brought on ourselves that erodes our resistance” (Walters, p. 181). Or, in the words of Talbott, “how could anyone, rational enough to qualify as a free moral agent, choose an eternity of horror over an eternity of bliss…?” (Talbott, “Freedom,” p. 429).

The other objection to universalism—that God’s perfect justice will be unsatisfied if the ‘bad’ people are initially punished but are ultimately taken to Heaven and treated just like the ‘good’—holds no more weight than the free will argument. There is, for example, an obvious difficulty in saying that a finite human being could have done something so terrible that it justly deserves infinite punishment (again, the defense of this idea will be given further on). Another problem with this objection is that it can be reasonably met by the universalist’s contention that there will be “a proportionality between the degree of obstinate wickedness and the degree of purgative suffering necessary to enable the sinner to freely choose an attitudinal change”—that is to say, the natural rewards of evil will punish the evildoers until such time as they are persuaded to repent (Walters, p. 183). A further way to meet the objection lies in Talbot’s assertion that God’s justice is not at all opposed to His mercy, for God’s “mercy demands everything his justice demands, and his justice permits everything his mercy permits…‘mercy’ and ‘justice’ are but two different names for God’s one and only moral attribute, namely his love” (Talbott, “Punishment,” p. 153). This seems like a plausible idea, and it is made especially attractive by the unity it attributes to God’s character; rather than being driven sometimes by the need to bring souls to happiness in Heaven and sometimes by the need to punish evildoers so as to afford justice to the victims of evil, God is driven only by love for all souls. As it stands, then, it would seem that despite contradicting the Biblical version of Hell, universalism presents a reasonable picture about what could be expected of a loving God.

Other ideas about re-imagining Hell into something less dire don’t strike me as equally plausible. For instance, an alternative theory dealing with the problem of ‘eternal’ punishment is annihilationism, the view that God will simply erase intractable wrongdoers from existence. This theory looks at Hell as “a metaphorical description of non-being”; it is meant to assure us that God doesn’t punish sinners any longer than justice demands, and perhaps doesn’t punish them at all before annihilating them (Kvanvig, p. 60). However, this still seems nonsensical. In the case that sinners are punished first, we have what is arguably the moral repugnance of punishment that is non-reformative; there may be some who are in favor of this, but it seems to me utterly unnecessary, cruel, and inconsistent with God’s supposedly loving nature. (This is by no means a conclusive objection, but I cannot presently take on a fuller exploration of ideas about justice.) In the case that sinners are not punished but are simply annihilated, we are left with the question of why God would have created such people in the first place; if we answer, say, that they were instrumental in bringing others to God, this still fails to seem satisfactory. Could God’s resourcefulness not have found other ways to bring certain people to belief? Does he not care for the souls used as conversion tools? In any case, can we really just discard entirely the idea that Hell is put to use, seeing as it is such a persistently present concept in Christianity? There may be some way to smooth over all these difficulties, but I do not know it, and on the whole universalism still seems more compatible with the Christian idea of God as a being of perfect love.

The third and final alternative to universalism is the idea that Hell is painful separation from God, but is not really ‘torture’ (or is at the very least bearable), and is thus a rational choice that someone could make. As Yandell argues, it may be possible that a Hell that is “a punishment, known to be a punishment, involves no fellowship with God, is bleak on any sensible standards…might still be the longish end of a life that one could rationally prefer to not existing at all” (Yandell, p. 90). There might simply be some people who are so determined not to come to God that they prefer to spend eternity apart, not facing the horror of oblivion but neither accepting the supposed horror of subordination to a will other than their own. The immediate problem here is an issue that Talbott raised earlier; how could an agent rational enough to be called ‘free’ ever prefer their own misery to the joy of being with a perfectly loving deity? In the short term it is perhaps understandable, and even over years, but across infinity? A loving God would not keep someone in Hell if they freely turned to Him (and would not punish them unless such a turn was still possible), so any change of heart must bring them to God. Wouldn’t this change be bound to happen eventually, as in universalism?

Of the ‘softer’ versions of Hell, universalism thus remains the most likely—but what of the justifications for traditional models of Hell? What of, for instance, the idea that eternal torment in Hell is justified by libertarian free will? In the words of Van Holten, “I am not sure whether God’s love entails that he may not create persons with libertarian free will, all the while knowing they will not be saved. If his infallible foreknowledge is compatible with the creature’s freely choosing damnation, then presumably, God is not to blame for it,” just as God is not to blame for any evil actions a person may have chosen to take during their lifetime (Van Holten, p. 51). As I see it, part of the problem with this criticism (aside from questions about the intelligibility of libertarian free will) is the idea that anyone forced to a decision between God and Hell could ‘freely choose damnation’; if we continue to assume that God is perfectly loving and that Hell is a place of torment, such a choice is in no way rational, and it seems highly doubtful that it could ever be made in full consciousness by a rational agent. And if it is not a rational choice, then is a person’s mere uncertainty about God during their finite lifetime really to be punished with infinite pain? Furthermore, it seems incorrect to compare evil action, allowed on Earth so as to bring about other goods, with the choice not to believe in God, which simply leads to an eternity in Hell. Perpetual, punishment, if it really does go on for infinity, can’t bring about any positive results; it’s whipping a dead horse, so to speak, to know that the person in Hell will never get better but to continue to torture them anyway. It quickly begins to seem cruel and unfair to punish the sins and bad choices of a finite life with the infinite suffering of non-reformative punishment, and again, such cruelty would seem incompatible with a loving God.

What if, though, we move to the second argument contradicting universalism, and expand the libertarian free will argument to say that the sin continues once in Hell; that is, we could say that a sinner retains their free will, continues to choose Hell over God, and thus solve the difficulty of eternal punishment for finite sins. As Seymour puts it, “Any individual human sin, it is true, is finite in seriousness; but an everlasting series of sins is infinite in seriousness and so deserves infinite punishment. By preserving freedom in the afterlife we can suppose it possible that the damned commit such a series of sins” (Seymour, p. 83). However, we again run into problems; for example, we are once more confronted with the absurdity that any could, in full freedom, choose Hell. The universalist Talbott objects that “only someone mired in illusion or deception of some kind would be free, given the standard libertarian analysis, to choose evil…the way in which clarity of vision and knowing the truth compels obedience is very different from the way in which the medieval practice of pressing might compel a plea of guilty or not guilty” (Talbott, “Freedom,” p. 428). I agree that it seems unbelievable that anyone should, for eternity, keep choosing to suffer Hell if they knew the true nature of Hell and God, and likewise incredible that a loving God would leave someone in the dark for eternity so that they could never make the rational choice of happiness with God.

Nevertheless, there persists the idea that some sinners must be in Hell for eternity, and one argument claims that this is because there simply is no possible world in which we are all saved. Craig argues that “it is possible that some persons out of self-will or perversity would freely reject God no matter what the circumstances He placed them in,” and that the complexity inherent in a world actually makes it unsurprising “that there should be no feasible worlds available to God in which all persons are freely saved (unless, perhaps, those worlds are radically deficient in other respects, say, by having only a handful of people in them)” (Craig, p. 308, p. 300). In other words, Craig argues that the world is such a complicated mechanism that the billions of little pieces (that is, souls) can never work together in complete harmony; there will always be some pieces that fall off or become damaged, and likewise there will always be some souls who face damnation. Craig further argues that since the blessed in Heaven will suffer if they know of the suffering in Hell, God will simply shield the blessed from this knowledge; the “tragic fact that every world feasible for God is one involving persons who are lost would not force Him to refrain from creation or to annul creaturely freedom lest the blessedness of the saved be undermined, for it is possible that the reality of lost persons is a fact the pain of which He alone shall endure for eternity” (Craig, p. 308).

This argument for the inevitability of Hell would be fine if we imagined God as a mere supernatural ‘organizer,’ a being who is given billions of fixed personalities and must sort them into certain circumstances so that the greatest number of souls end up in Heaven. However, I find this argument far less reasonable when God is also considered as our creator. After all, God not only makes the conditions, he makes the people, and that means heavily influencing the genetic and psychological factors that will guide each person’s choices. This being the case, I find it difficult to imagine that there is no possible world at all in which all individuals choose God. Craig argues that universalism does not prove the logical necessity of universal salvation, but it is precisely here that he seems to miss the point; after all, universalism just says that there is at least one possible world in which everyone is saved and that this is the world God would have chosen to create. It is, in fact, Craig who fails to prove logical necessity, for he gives no reason to believe that damnation is a logically necessary consequence of free will. And I have further problems with this argument; in what way, for instance, is a world with fewer people ‘deficient,’ if all of these people eventually get the ultimate joy of eternity with God? And how could God be justified in deceiving the blessed about the condition of the damned?

I am thus unimpressed by all the arguments that Hell must be (or even logically could be) a place of infinite suffering, and I maintain the position that universalism is the best available philosophical option. Universalism seems to be not only the idea of Hell most compatible with a loving God, but also seems to make the most intuitive sense. It is also worth pointing out that the vast majority of objections to universalism are grounded in the fact that it disagrees with the Bible; in other words, the objections are not philosophical or rational in nature, but are rather based on scripture. And must a philosopher really take scripture into account?
Well, yes, for in this case it would seem shortsighted to do otherwise. As demonstrated earlier, the philosophical concept of God is at the very least heavily inspired by the Bible, and ultimately rests on Biblical authority for justification. The concept of Hell likewise relies on Biblical authority, but if this is the case, then it seems completely illogical to ask what kind of Hell we could rationally expect from God without checking our conclusion against the Bible itself. And, as also demonstrated earlier, what the Bible says is clear, consistent, and decidedly opposed to the views of the anti-Hell philosopher. As Litke points out, it is flatly contradictory with scripture to accept the “second chance view” (the view that one can escape or be redeemed from Hell), “Universalism,” or “Annihilationism.” What, then, are we to do with the philosophical conclusion of universalism, the Bible’s depiction of Hell, and the idea of a loving God that is held by theist philosophers and by Christians in general?

Faced with the contradiction between the Biblical assertion of an eternal Hell and the logically superior universalist view, our options can be summarized as follows:

1. Finite sin can deserve infinite, non-corrective punishment.
2. God is not perfect, or has standards of morality that differ from ours: the Bible is wrong in saying that God is morally perfect, or we are wrong in thinking that our ideas of morality accord with God’s.
3. Hell does not exist (or is never used), and the Bible is misleading about Hell.
4. Hell does not exist (or is never used), and the Bible itself is simply wrong and unreliable.

The first option has no arguments in its favor that I find convincing, and is irreconcilable with any God deserving of worship and love. The second option simply states that God isn’t deserving of worship and love, so Hell could exist as a place of torment, but then any individual worshipper would be morally culpable in praising a God capable of such “divine evil” (Lewis, p. 480). This does not seem to solve anything, for it is completely incompatible with everything the Christian asserts about a perfect God and especially contradicts the common theist belief that God is morally perfect. The third option could be a way out for the Christian, but it also seems ridiculously arbitrary; why trust the Bible about so many aspects of faith, but not Hell? One could claim that Hell-talk is some sort of metaphor, but aside from the fact that Hell is talked about in a consistent and blisteringly straightforward manner, it is also insisted on repeatedly by Christ himself (as in Mark 9:47-48). What reason could there be, then, to reject traditional notions of Hell without also rejecting the authority of Christ? It would thus seem that we are left with nothing but the fourth option; as the existence of both a loving, perfect God and a Hell of eternal punishment are incompatible, the Bible that says that both of these things exist should be concluded to be wrong. Of course, both God and Hell being such vital components of Christianity, and the Bible being its primary voice of authority, the foundations of the religion itself become very dubious at this point.

Again, I am inclined to accept universalism as the only outcome that a perfect, just, and loving God would find acceptable. However, I also agree with Lewis when he says that universalism is essentially “a fantasy”; it is divorced from all characteristics of Hell as given in the Bible, and without taking scripture at its word, what is the basis for any talk about Hell at all (Lewis, p. 481)? And for that matter, if there is no way to logically salvage an important Christian tenet like Hell without ignoring everything that Christians appear obliged to believe about Hell, then doesn’t the depth of the contradiction make rejection of the Christian Bible seem a more rational route? What’s more, as Lewis points out, theists may even be guilty of wrongdoing if they do not make such a rejection; modern Christians often “dodge the consequence [of Hell] by keeping it all in soft focus,” but if one worships and loves a God who creates the Biblical Hell, a place with “billions of damned souls writhing in eternal agony,” what does that say about one’s morality (Lewis, p. 480)? For Christians who wish to be rational in their theism, it would thus seem that the problem of Hell calls for a hard second look at belief.

Works Cited

Craig, William. “Talbott’s Universalism.” Religious Studies 27.3 (1991): 297-308. JSTOR database. 17 Jan. 2011 .
Holy Bible: New Living Translation. Wheaton: Tyndale, 2004.
Kvanvig, Jonathan. “Review: [untitled].” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 36.1 (1994): 59-61. JSTOR database. 2 February 2011 .
Lewis, David. “Divine Evil.” Arguing About Religion. Ed. Kevin Timpe. New York: Routledge, 2009. 472-481.
Litke, Sid. “What the Bible Says About Hell.” Bible.org. 1998. 18 Jan. 2011 .
Seymour, Charles. “Hell, Justice, and Freedom.” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 43.2 (1998): 69-86. JSTOR database. 17 Jan. 2011 .
Talbott, Thomas. “Freedom, Damnation, and the Power to Sin with Impunity.” Religious Studies 37.4 (2001): 417-434. JSTOR database. 17 Jan. 2011 .
Talbott, Thomas. “Punishment, Forgiveness, and Divine Justice.” Religious Studies 29.2 (1993): 151-168. JSTOR database. 17 Jan. 2011 .
Van Holten, Wilco. “Hell and the Goodness of God.” Religious Studies 35.1 (1999): 37-55. JSTOR database. 10 Jan. 2011 .
Walters, Kerry. “Hell, This Isn’t Necessary after All.” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 29.3 (1991): 175-186. JSTOR database. 10 Jan. 2011 .
Yandell, Keith. “The Doctrine of Hell and Moral Philosophy.” Religious Studies 28.1 (1992): 75-90. JSTOR database. 10 Jan. 2011 .

Erin McDonnell (’13) is a Philosophy and Studio-Art Double-Major at Cornell University

Abstract: While there is significant variation in the theist’s description of God, there are nonetheless a set of attributes upon which there is general (but certainly not universal) agreement. God is omnipotent, omniscient, and is capable of interacting in the lives of humans. My purpose in this paper is to provide an account of God’s relation to time given an assumption of these three divine attributes. I will show that the task is unsuccessful for an eternal God (one that exists outside of time), and succeeds in a modified version of an everlasting God that exists with an open future.

—

To the believing theist, God has many attributes. Most will agree (although with considerable variation in the details) that God is omnipotent (it is in his power to do anything that can be done) and God is omniscient (he knows everything that can be known). Additionally, many believe that God is a being that acts in the lives of humans. He is not an impassive observer, but rather an active agent who listens to prayer and doles out reward and punishment. Despite God’s considerable strengths, many believe that he is nonetheless limited by human free will. God has given humans the freedom to determine their actions, and therefore for free decisions he cannot cause humans to act in one manner rather than another. These properties of God and man, although all certainly debatable, I will assume as true. This assumption is acceptable in that I believe it is a set that is held by many believers in God.

Given these assumptions, I wish to consider how to formulate a consistent theory of the relationship between God and time. Throughout the history of philosophy, various theories have developed. One school of thought, espoused by thinkers such as Boethius, Augustine and Aquinas argues that God must be eternal. A being that is eternal exists apart from or outside of time. I will begin the paper with a description of the motivation for defining God in this perhaps unnatural manner. Many contemporary philosophers have argued against an eternal God in favor of one that is everlasting – one that is within time, but without beginning or end. I will consider the implications of both conceptions, and ultimately argue for a strain of the everlasting theory as the only consistent theory of God’s relationship to time that allows for all of the divine attributes described above.

The Problem of God’s Omniscience and Human Free Will

For my entire existence, I cannot escape the effects of time. All around me I am struck by the products of temporality – what once was the future soon passes into the present and then rapidly becomes the past. While I have control over my place in space, I am helpless in my passage through time. Indeed, I struggle to imagine myself or anything else existing in a world without time. Therefore, it might seem at first natural to conclude that God too exists in a world defined by the rules of time, and is therefore everlasting.

Nelson Pike argues that if God is everlasting and he is omniscient (as was assumed for this paper), then human free will is impossible.¹ He provides the following example:

“Last Saturday afternoon, Jones mowed his lawn. Assuming that God exists and is (essentially) omniscient, it follows that (let us say) eighty years prior to last Saturday afternoon, God knew (and thus believed) that Jones would mow his lawn at that time. But from this it follows, I think, that at the time of action (last Saturday afternoon) Jones was not able – that is, it was not within Jones’s power – to refrain from mowing his lawn.”²

Before I analyze this example, first I will provide some comments on Pike’s definitions of divine omniscience and human freedom. As stated in the introduction, omniscience is the ability to know anything that can be known. For Pike, God’s knowledge includes complete true belief regarding events of the past, present, and future. He states this in two premises. First: “God existed at t₁” entails “If Jones did X at t₂, God believed at t₁ that Jones would do X at t₂.” Second: “God believes X” entails “‘X’ is true”.

Pike’s notion of human freedom is one of complete spontaneity of action. For all of my conscious actions that I take, I could choose to act differently. I always have the ability or power to do other than that which I actually do. Certainly, many of my behaviors are highly predictable, but nonetheless there is no fundamental restriction (such as God’s omniscience) that prevents me from doing otherwise. I am inclined to agree with this definition, and will argue in favor of it against an alternative later in this section.

Give these two definitions, the contradiction in Pike’s example is readily apparent. God knows eighty years ago that Jones will mow his lawn on Saturday. However, Jones has the freedom to not mow the lawn on Saturday. If he exercises this freedom then God was wrong eighty years ago. This contradicts God’s omniscience as stated above because God’s belief in Jones mowing his lawn on Saturday entails the truth of the proposition. Jones could not have chosen to do other than to mow the lawn on Saturday because God is everlasting (he existed without beginning) and so always believed that Jones would mow the lawn on Saturday. The same limitation on free will would develop if God believed eighty years ago that Jones does not mow the lawn on Saturday, in which case it would not be within Jones’ power to mow the lawn on Saturday.

It can be objected that it was not God’s knowledge that caused (and forced) Jones to mow the lawn, but rather it was Jones’ mowing of the lawn that caused God to know. In other words, God’s knowledge is contingent on Jones’ free will decision. However, this account is unacceptable given the assumption of an everlasting God. This God exists with the rest of the world in the present and progresses with it from the past to the present to the future. For this account to succeed, Jones’ actions in the present must determine beliefs in the past. Pike writes that this is an a priori impossibility – no action performed at a given time can alter the fact that a given person held a certain belief at a time prior to the time in question. Such an occurrence would be an example of retrocausation, and Alan Padgett gives a more thorough argument of why it is impossible, as it results in an arbitrariness of time and a breakdown of the definitions of the past, present and future.³

To resolve the contradiction, we might therefore reconsider the three assumed propositions: humans are free, God is omniscient, and God is everlasting. First, perhaps Pike’s definition of free will is too broad. As stated earlier, many of the decisions one makes are highly predictable. Research in psychology and neuroscience has enabled us to predict many human actions and explain many seemingly free, conscious decisions in terms of subconscious inclinations. Given the success of limited human knowledge to predict with high accuracy many free decisions, certainly God in his complete knowledge can predict with complete accuracy all free will decisions. Free will then is not the ability to act with complete indifference in a given situation, but rather the ability to act according to one’s predominant desire in a given situation.

However, this is not at all in line with the intuitive feel of free will. It is true that human behavior is highly predictable, but this is because of expected goals for human actions, such as survival or positive social interaction. If I choose not to adhere to these goals and take up others, my choice of actions may change entirely. It is entirely within my ability to alter these goals, and furthermore entirely within my ability to alter my actions. Pike’s description of free will survives the objection.

Let us consider his definition of omniscience. This too seems to hold because God ought to have full knowledge of all events. This knowledge would be infringed if it is possible for God to hold false beliefs (false beliefs are by definition not knowledge). The main difficulty arises regarding God’s knowledge of the human future. Later in the paper I will revisit this point, and argue that it is a premise that the future is unknowable that ultimately resolves the contradiction. More must be developed before that conclusion can be reached.

Finally, could it be that God is not temporal in nature? If God is not within time, then perhaps we can escape the difficulty of an action in the present determining a belief in the past by removing the belief from the past entirely. This is the direction taken by many classical philosophers, and will be further considered in the next section.

Boethius, Augustine and an Eternal God

Boethius argues that God must be eternal, where eternality is “the complete possession of an endless life enjoyed as one simultaneous whole.”⁴ God is removed from the passage of time, and therefore observes all events occurring in an “eternal Now”. In this sense, God lives all moments simultaneously, and thereby transcends the temporal life, which is nothing more than a fleeting, transitory moment: “whatever is living in time proceeds in the present from times past to times future; and nothing existing in time is so constituted as to embrace the whole span of its life at once, but it has not yet grasped tomorrow, while it has already lost yesterday.”

Augustine similarly argues that God must be eternal, that a God that is everlasting is limited in his divine fullness. He writes of God:

“Thy years neither go nor come; but ours both go and come in order that all separate moments may come to pass. All thy years stand together as one, since they are abiding. Nor do thy years past exclude the years to come because thy years do not pass away. All these years of ours shall be with thee, when all of them shall have ceased to be. Thy years are but a day, and thy day is not recurrent, but always today. Thy “today” yields not to tomorrow and does not follow yesterday. Thy “today” is eternity.”⁵

An eternal God solves Pike’s problem of omniscience and free will. No longer does God know in the past what I will choose to do in the future. Rather, God knows both simultaneously and so there is no case of backwards causation. This simultaneity renders it impossible for me to ‘change my mind’ after God has formed a belief on my action, because the belief and action occur as one from the perspective of God. Boethius writes, “God is the ever prescient spectator of all things, and the eternity of His vision, which is ever present, runs in unison with the future nature of our acts, dispensing rewards to the good, punishments to the evil.”⁶

While the Boethian eternal God solves one problem, it creates another. How exactly does an eternal God view the events that occur in my temporal life and the temporal life of the universe? For Boethius, the answer is that all parts of the life of the universe are grasped simultaneously. This, I believe, is problematic. An essential part of knowledge of the universe is the ability to grasp the order in which events occur. To understand an object is to know what caused it – to understand what came before the object that led to its existence. A viewpoint of the world that presents cause and effect simultaneously eliminates this important element of knowledge, and this would be an odd limitation on God’s omniscience. If an eternal God is to be viable, the description must be changed, or at least refined. To do this, I will use J. Ellis McTaggart’s two conceptions of time.

McTaggart and the B-Series Conception of Divine Eternality

McTaggart writes that there are two ways in which we distinguish between positions in time.⁷ The first class describes events as past, present or future (where events are equivalent to positions in time). This class is called the A-series and describes time as “the series of positions running from the far past through the near past to the present, and then from the present to the near future and the far future”. The B-series, on the other hand, is the description of events as occurring earlier than, simultaneous with, or later than other events. Distinctions in the B-series are permanent because an event that is earlier than another event will always be earlier, and an event that is later than another event will always be later. Distinctions in the A-series are never permanent because all events are at one time the past, at another time the present, and at another time the future.

McTaggart argues that real time requires an A-series ordering.⁸ Real time requires change, and even when things do not change they are only perceived in relation to other things that are changing. Because the B-series of events is permanent and thus unchanging it is insufficient to explain time, and so time as change necessitates an A-series. That which is temporal has an A-series ordering of time. An eternal God, however, is atemporal and thus could not be part of an A-series conception of time. This agrees with the Boethian view that God does not perceive events occurring in the past, present and future. The B-series, because it does not involve change, is insufficient for an account of time, and can therefore be attributed to an eternal God.⁹ In doing so, the objection to Boethius presented above can be resolved.

An eternal God who perceives a B-series but not an A-series does not experience events occurring as tensed events in the past, present and future. Rather, events are perceived in a static ordering, observed all at once. While the A-series elevates the present because it is the only point of direct experience (while the past and future are perceived only through memory and prediction, respectively), the B-series views all events equally without a temporal reference point. Events in a B-series nonetheless have a definite order and so, as McTaggart observes, if events are in the order M, N, O, P then they are not in the order M, O, N, P or O, N, M, P or any other possible order.

Given that God observes events in a B-series, it must be refined what is meant when it is said that he observes all events simultaneously. In one sense, it is simultaneous because God can see all of the events at once, just as I see at once all the books lined up on a bookshelf. However, and more importantly, the events are not simultaneous (stretching somewhat the definition of simultaneity) because the events have a defined order. There is a definite order to the books lined up on a shelf. This account allows an eternal God to view the causal chain between events because he views them in their temporal order, but not occurring in their temporal order. In doing so, God’s omniscience is not limited as it was in the Boethian theory. Furthermore, human freedom is still maintained because God views the entire bookshelf of events at once, and included on this shelf are books of choices on human freedom. Omniscience, free will and eternality are reconciled.

The Problem of God’s Eternality and Divine Action

I stated at the outset of this paper that my goal was to provide a consistent account of human free will with divine omniscience and divine action. To this point I have done this with the first two, but can divine action be included in this account of an eternal God? By divine action, I mean a God who serves as an agent of change in the lives of humans. This conception of God explains the primary function of prayer. One prays to God because he believes that God is capable of hearing his prayer and, based on the act of prayer, God will take action. There is not a guarantee of divine action based on prayer, but there is certainly a belief that prayer encourages divine action.

I will consider two examples of divine action. These events need not have actually occurred, only that they might possibly have occurred. First, Moses prays to God as he is leading the Israelites out of Egypt. God hears Moses’ prayer and acts in the form of parting the Red Sea and the Israelites cross to safety. Second, a boy afflicted with cancer prays a month ago to be cured. God hears the boy’s prayer, acts to ensure a successful chemotherapy treatment, and a week later it is found that the cancer is in remission.

Let us assume that for both examples God’s action was what I will call a true divine action, which has two characteristics. First, in a true divine action God does not act unless he receives the proper prayer. If Moses had not prayed to God, then God would not have parted the Red Sea. Second, a true divine action is one in which the actual outcome would not have occurred if God had not acted. If God had not intervened in the chemotherapy treatment, then the boy would not have been cured.

From a human perspective, there is a definite temporal ordering of the two events. Moses’ prayer occurred thousands of years before the boy’s prayer. God’s action in response to Moses’ prayer likewise occurred thousands of years before God’s action in response to the boy’s prayer. Does this require God’s action, from the divine perspective, to be temporal as well?

The working description of God is a being that is eternal but views the events of the world in a B-series ordering as though looking at the books arranged on a bookshelf. One such book is Moses praying to God, followed by a book on God parting the Red Sea. Another book further along the shelf is a book on the boy praying to be cured, followed by a book on the successful chemotherapy treatment. However, the acts of prayer were free will decisions by Moses and the boy. Certainly, it was in their interest to pray given the dire circumstances they faced, but it was entirely within their power to opt not to pray if they so chose. To deny this is to deny their meaningful freedom as defined earlier. Additionally, because God’s actions in the two examples were true divine actions, God acted only because the two people prayed.

Because the actions of Moses and the boy were free will actions, God could not have acted until they prayed. His action was contingent on the act of prayer. In other words, God had to wait until Moses prayed before he chose to part the Red Sea. God’s decision could not have been predetermined because he would not have chosen to part the sea if Moses had not chosen freely to pray. But the act of waiting requires temporality because one action cannot occur until a time following another action. Therefore, God’s action in answering prayer is necessarily temporal.

Nicholas Wolterstorff argues this same point in a slightly different fashion.¹⁰ In order to act in the temporal world, God must have a certain kind of knowledge that goes beyond that which would be afforded from a B-series ordering of time. God must be able to know of some temporal events that they are occurring (that they are present), of other temporal events that they were occurring (that they are past), and of still other temporal events that they will be occurring (that they are future). The B-series ordering gives God knowledge only of the order in which events occur, but no knowledge of tenses – those events that have occurred, are occurring, or will occur. A God that acts according to free will decisions learns what happens when they happen, and thus must act according to knowledge of the time in which events occur. In order to allow for divine action, God must exist in an A-series ordering (one that includes tenses of past, present and future) in addition to a B-series ordering. As a result, God cannot be eternal.

God Acting According to Divine Action Conditionals

It can be objected that it is not the case that God waits for humans to make free decisions, and only then does he determine the proper divine action. God, given his omniscience, can surely grasp the full range of all possible free will decisions in all possible situations. Therefore, perhaps God has established a set of conditionals defining his actions given all free decisions. For example, when the wheels of the universe and time were put in motion, God established the conditional “If Moses prays to me while fleeing from the Egyptians, then I will part the Red Sea”. Additionally, he established the conditional “If Moses does not pray to me while fleeing from the Egyptians, then I will not part the Red Sea”.

Given these conditionals, God no longer needs to locate the moment in time when Moses chooses freely to pray for the Red Sea to be parted. He does not wait for prayer and then chooses to act, but rather there is a rule that is automatically applied if a sufficient condition is met. God can remain outside of time as he inspects the many books of time (which now includes some of his actions), but he is still capable of answering prayers in the sense that prayers bring about divine response, while the absence of prayer brings about an absence of response.

I believe that this conception would limit God in a critical way, and for this reason is not acceptable. Throughout this paper, I have assumed that humans posses free will. When presented with a conscious decision, it is within human power to choose the response. The decision is not predetermined and there is never a necessary result given a set of conditions. If humans possess this amount of freedom, surely God should possess it as well. But if he acts according to conditionals, then his actions are predetermined – it is not within his power to act other than how a conditional dictates. It is true that God himself determined the conditionals, and is free in the sense that he determined the rules of his actions. However, I find the existence of rules at all to be fundamentally limiting, and therefore result in a type of freedom less than that of human freedom. Accordingly, the objection fails and we are left with the problem that a God that exhibits divine action cannot be eternal and must be temporal.

Open Theism and a Revised Conception of an Everlasting God

I wrote earlier in the paper that I would consider a possible revision on God’s omniscience to reconcile divine omniscience and free will. Given that the attempt to revise God’s relationship to time (by making him eternal) was unsuccessful, I will now consider this alternate option. In doing so I will preserve the definition of omniscience as knowing everything that can be known, but with a significant limitation on what can be known.

An open theist holds that because the future has not yet occurred, it is entirely open and therefore completely unknowable. In fact, this move is entirely rational. The present as we experience it, and only the present, is completely real, and therefore we can have knowledge of it. The past, because it was once the present, is also real and so we can have knowledge of it as well. The future, however, cannot make this claim to reality. An open future is a future in which no one, including God, can have any knowledge of because there is nothing to be known of that which is not real. Knowledge of the future is akin to knowledge of square circles; both are logical impossibilities that cannot be known. Therefore, a claim that God does not know the future is completely consistent with his omniscience – he knows only that which can be known. Additionally, an open future requires that God be temporal because the future fundamentally differs from the past and present in that the latter two are known completely by God, while God cannot know the former. God can readily distinguish between the past, present and future and so exists in an A-series order of time.

God’s relationship to time for an open theist is better understood by way of analogy, as described by J.R. Lucas¹¹: “Instead of thinking of God’s providence as a sort of blue-print, we should liken it to the Persian rug-maker, who lets his children work at one end while he does the other.” Rather than being predetermined as a blueprint and unknown only to the extent that it cannot be properly read, the future ought to be conceived as an unwoven rug. As the rug is woven the future becomes known as the present and past, in a limited capacity to humans and in its completeness to an everlasting and omniscient God.

An open future also allows for full human free will. Choices are made in the present and determine the future. God does not know what choice I will make until I make it because there is no knowledge of my future. Upon my making a free choice, God, as a temporal being, acts according to what he deems to be proper reward or punishment. Open theism allows for the desired reconciliation of omniscience, free will and divine action.

It might be objected that open theism poses too severe a limitation on God’s omniscience and therefore departs too radically from the general theist’s understanding of omniscience. However, on closer inspection the limitation is not nearly as significant as might first be thought. While God cannot know the future, there are many elements of it that he can be very well justified in believing. For example, given humanity’s finite but extensive scientific knowledge of the past, we have been able to make fantastically accurate predictions about future events. God, as possessor of complete knowledge of the past, will be remarkably better at predicting the future than any human theory. To the extent that physical laws of the past hold in the future, God’s ability to predict the future is limited only by free will decisions, and so his ability to predict the future is quite extensive and successful. A God who possesses complete knowledge of the past is still one that ought to be revered because this knowledge is readily extended into a future that has yet to be realized.

In sum, it should be noted that while I believe I have shown that a temporal description of God under open theism reconciles several commonly held divine attributes, I do not claim that it reconciles all of the commonly held divine attributes. For example, many believe that God is a necessary being. If time is contingent and God is a part of time, then it would seem that God too is contingent. This question will require considerably more exploration, with one possible route being Garrett DeWeese’s argument for God existing necessarily in metaphysical time rather than contingently in physical time.¹² Nonetheless, the task accomplished in this paper is considerable and demonstrates how, in addition to considering the challenges of describing any single divine attribute, it is equally if not more challenging to describe how many attributes can coexist in a single being.

Endnotes

By Asam Ahmad

ABSTRACT: In April of 2008, Yale University’s Aliza Shvarts was accused of a sort of ‘insanity’ that made her unable to make sound judgements and jeopardize her own body for the sake of her art. This paper aims to explore the nature of Shvarts’ artistic project and understand the hyper-reactionary interventions that followed its appearance. I will argue that what caused this hyper intervention and the disciplinary actions that followed was more than just the project itself – it was the very ambiguity of the Event the project was presenting us with, its very refusal to ‘name’ the meaning of that event, and its threatening status in the (patriarchal) public discourse as a result of this ambivalence. In attempting to explicate the threatening (but emancipatory) potential of Shvarts’ insistence on ambivalence, I hope to demonstrate that the punitive measures incurred by Shvarts for refusing to name that ambivalence ["name that ambivalence" not idiomatic. could replace with "disambiguate" or "explain her performance" MH] and thus contain its disruptive potential reveals the ways in which the dominant patriarchal and heteronormative discourses circumscribe the female body and thus deny the autonomy of the female subject.

…

In April of 2008, Yale University’s Aliza Shvarts was accused of a sort of ‘insanity’ that made her unable to make sound judgements and jeopardize her own body for the sake of her art. As her senior art project, approved and guided by two senior faculty members, was about to be shown at Green Hall (part of the Yale campus), US media felt obliged to intervene, telling us what the project was really about, why and how it was so unbelievably shocking, and making sure to question the ‘mental health’ of the student who was presenting it along the way. What caused this hyper intervention and the disciplinary actions that followed was more than just the project itself – it was the very ambiguity of the Event the project was presenting us with, its very refusal to ‘name’ the meaning of that event, and its threatening status in the (patriarchal) public discourse as a result of this ambivalence. This paper aims to explicate the threatening (but emancipatory) potential of Shvarts’ insistence on ambivalence, and in so doing, to demonstrate that the punitive measures incurred by Shvarts for refusing to name that ambivalence and thus contain its disruptive potential reveals the ways in which the dominant patriarchal and heteronormative discourses circumscribe the female body and thus deny the autonomy of the female subject.

I.                   Discerning the Potential

Shvarts’ (forced) explanation of her project insists on ambivalence as a fundamental component of her artistic project. Here is the first paragraph of her statement:

For the past year, I performed repeated self-induced miscarriages. I created a group of fabricators from volunteers who submitted to periodic STD screenings and agreed to their complete and permanent anonymity. From the 9th to the 15th day of my menstrual cycle, the fabricators would provide me with sperm samples, which I used to privately self-inseminate. Using a needleless syringe, I would inject the sperm near my cervix within 30 minutes of its collection, so as to insure the possibility of fertilization. On the 28th day of my cycle, I would ingest an abortifacient, after which I would experience cramps and heavy bleeding.

These self-induced miscarriages gain their ambiguous and ambivalent status by Shvarts’ ingestion of the abortifacient near ‘the expected date of [her] menstruation’ cycle. The artistic piece itself consists of a giant cube covered with plastic sheeting onto which Shvart’s blood is plastered with Vaseline so as to stop it from coagulating. Onto this cube are projected images of Shvarts in her bathtub, collecting the blood as it is discharged from her body. As Shvarts herself notes, the ‘performance exists only as I chose to represent it’ – a statement which, unfortunately, will be flatly contradicted by the institutional intervention carried out by Yale’s administrative staff. What is important for now, is the very ambiguity that Shvarts insists upon and its isolation of ‘the locus of ontology to an act of readership.’ The artistic representation forces the reader to name the blood on display – and in so doing, to participate in the normative injunction to ‘literally construct bodies’ through the linguistically and politically ideological and authorial act of naming the blood (as either menstrual discharge or as the result of miscarriage).

Louis Althusser is helpful here in explicating the ways in which the body does not just come into being physically but is already ideologically and linguistically ‘pre-appointed.’ Noting the ‘ideological ritual that surrounds the expectation of a ‘birth,’ Althusser writes: ‘[everyone] knows how much and in what way an unborn child is expected: [...] it is certain in advance that it will bear its Father’s Name, and will therefore have an identity and be irreplaceable.’ Even before its birth, ‘the child is always-already a subject (boy or girl).’ These ideological rituals ‘literally construct bodies’ – which is obviously not the same as saying that the body exists only as an ideological or linguistic construct. Instead, it points towards the ways in which no ‘subject’ is or can be formed outside of the patriarchal and (hetero)normative discourse which demarcates the space the subject will occupy, and that even before it is born, there are ideological, linguistic and even political demands that it must fulfill simply in order to be constituted as a subject. Shvarts’ refusal to name that blood then – as either menstrual or a result of miscarriage – deprives the ‘reader’ of the ideological need to partake in these expectant rituals, and requires the reader to locate the ontology of the act and the blood him/herself – to name it – and thus determine its coordinates within the normative discourse as either ‘just menstrual blood’ or the blood of the pre-appointed, ‘irreplaceable’ subject in Shvart’s womb. [I wonder whether this is a genuine or a false dilemma. It would seem possible to "name" the blood in several ways that the author fails to mention - why must the blood of an abortion be the blood of an 'irreplaceable' subject? Why should we even think that a fetus is a subject / person? MH]

Shvarts’ refusal to name that blood, her refusal to allow us to easily digest the piece by self-ascribing a ‘word to something physical,’ is what gets her into ‘trouble.’ The confinement of the ‘something physical’ outside of the linguistic order (and thus inside Lacan’s Real), gives us an idea of the troubling nature of ambivalence – particularly in relation to the female body – and the dominant discourse’s need to remove that ambivalence in order to stabilize and contain its disruptive elements.

II.                The Insistence on Ambivalence

Coincidentally, Shvarts’ own explanation of her project relies most heavily on Judith Butler’s text entitled ‘Gender Trouble.’ Shvarts’ refusal to assign a word to the blood means that the performance (and the act itself) exists only as ‘copies of copies of which there is no original.’ Besides the obvious invocation of Derrida here, one should also note the analogy with Butler’s argument that gender is performative rather than expressive, that it is learnt (imitated, copied) rather than expressing ‘an internal core or substance.’ When Shvarts’ notes that ‘it is a myth that women are “meant” to be feminine and men masculine, that penises and vaginas are “meant” for penetrative heterosexual sex,’ she is implicitly trying to destabilize the (hetero)normative categorizations of gender and (especially) sex as ontological givens, as somehow tied together by some transcendental moment prior to the ‘sexed’ body. She is, in her own words, asking us to see that ‘normative understandings of biological function are a mythology imposed on form’ – a mythology that enables the ‘sexist, racist, ableist, nationalist and homophobic perspective[s].’

Butler’s reading of Julia Kristeva’s Abjection can help us make sense of this seemingly hyperbolic claim. For Butler, the body is not written upon as a ‘pre-discursive entity’ because the body itself does not exist prior ‘to its cultural inscription.’ Butler argues that we must reconsider the body’s status as a ‘blank page,’ as a ‘void,’ and as ‘the inscribed surface of events’ if we are to ‘truly’ emancipate ourselves from the heteronormative construction of a stable male/female gender binary and ‘the implicit hierarchy’ it maintains. In elucidating her argument, Butler notes that to maintain such discursive and ontological stability, the body as a ‘discrete’ entity must first be stabilized – and it is this very stability which Kristeva’s notion of the abject calls into question. Butler writes: ‘[what] constitutes the limit of the body is never merely material, but [rather] the surface, the skin [of the body] is systemically signified by taboos and anticipated transgressions; indeed, the boundaries of the body become [...] the limits of the social per se.’ In Kristeva’s account, these boundaries through which the discrete body and the discrete subject are constituted require the ‘abjection’ of that ‘which has been expelled from the body, discharged as excrement,’ and for these abjections to be ‘literally rendered “Other”‘ in order for the body to maintain its status as a discretely demarcated entity and a discretely defined ‘self.’

Shvarts’ blood then, as it exists in the artistic installation, is so ‘threatening’ precisely because it threatens to disrupt the stability of these discretely demarcated entities; precisely because it refuses to abject or to name that which must be abjected for the normatively defined and normatively constructed foundation of the body as a discretely demarcated entity to be maintained. We can begin to see now why Shvarts’ makes the claim that these mythologies (of function) enable the ‘sexist, racist, ableist, nationalist and homophobic perspective[s].’ If the abject is that which ‘confounds [the "inner" and "outer" worlds of the subject] by those excremental passages in which the inner effectively becomes [the] outer,’ it follows that the repulsion, the disgust one feels in the presence of the abject is more than just a biological impulse or an ‘evolutionary’ function – it effectively locates the ‘mode by which Others become shit’ and ‘I’ retain my purity. Read in this way, Shvarts’ blood in the piece, its ambivalent, unnamed presence and its refusal to become abjected as simply a ‘natural’ biological expulsion, threatens more than just the public discourse and the political and normative conventions that accompany it: it effectively threatens us – threatens our constitution of ourselves as subjects and as discrete selves. It refuses to admit to our authorial intervention by its insistence on its ambiguous and ambivalent status, a status that is unable to be contained by the discursive fields which wish it to be absolved, disappeared, and denied.

III.             Containing the Ambivalence

Thus far, I have tried to limit the discussion of this Event in the public sphere in order to explicate what Shvarts’ was trying to do and why it was so threatening to the public discourse surrounding it. It will be instructive now to bring into focus that (hyper) public reaction and the institutional interventions that ensued. Noting this reaction is instructive in different but interrelated ways: it can help us explicate what it reveals about the status of a woman’s body in our culture today, what the normative injunctions are doing here, and how the disciplinary, punitive measures surrounding the woman’s body function, holding it in place, and making sure it does not cause trouble.

Even a cursory glance at the media’s urgent need to name what Shvarts is doing makes apparent that, where Shvarts insists on ambivalence, the characterizations rush to get rid of it, to name her project as either ‘Abortion Art,’ a ‘Hoax,’ or a ‘Rant against the “Patriarchal Heteronormative.”‘ As I have been arguing all along, this immediately demonstrates that the act of naming is an ideological and political act: by containing the disruptive ambivalence of Shvarts’ project, the incitement to name illustrates the destabilizing potential of Shvarts’ disruption of the “Patriarchal Heteronormative.”

The installation was first brought to the public’s attention by the The Drudge Report website. From there it was picked up by various news outlets and discussed excessively in the blogosphere. This discussion was, alas, quick to follow in the ‘shocked-but-not-awed’ mould of the national US media. One website asked readers the question ‘How messed up is Aliza Shvarts?’ – with the only choices being: a) Very messed up, but about what I’d expect from an artist, b) Very very messed up, or c) Put-her-in-jail-messed-up. Conservative news outlets in particular were quick to emphasize the ‘shock’ of a woman performing ‘repeated self-induced’ miscarriages for the purposes of artistic commentary – but they were quick to transmute ‘miscarriages’ into abortions, the a-word having a particularly insidious tinge in American cultural discourse. Even The New York Times, which claims for itself the status of the ‘paper of record,’ sided with the Yale administrators in a lengthy article explaining how, ‘while freedom of expression is important in the academic world, so is providing guidance and setting limits.’ Mario Lavandeira, the owner of Perez Hilton, the popular gossip website, wrote a lengthy diatribe against the sanity of Miss Shvarts, replete with several adolescent ‘Ew[s]!’ and the mandated ‘humanistic’ interventions to ‘save her from herself!’

With this onslaught of superficial, hyper-reactionary characterizations of Shvarts’ project (and disturbingly, of Shvarts herself), the administrative staff at Yale University decided that ‘something had to give.’ That something, of course, was the questioning of Aliza Shvarts, which concluded with the demand that the project and its attendant concealment of what actually transpired had to be publicly divulged. It was thus revealed that Shvarts’ entire project was a ‘creative fiction,’ the redundant adjective inevitably required to quell even the most patriarchal of institutions. This intervention and the following statement released by the Yale administrators reassured all concerned individuals that they need not worry themselves as the sanctity of the patriarchal discourse had not ‘really’ been violated.

While this revelation is extremely unfortunate, as it takes away the initial force of Shvarts’ project, the hyper reactionary characterizations by the media and the institutional interventions by the Yale administrators unmasks an even more disturbing reality. By reacting so forcefully, by denying Shvarts’ right to her own privacy and her rights as an artist, the consequences which resulted from this public revelation reveal even more clearly the controls which the dominant discourse maintains on the female body and the female subject.

Even apart from the fact that only women can give birth to children, I suspect that, all other things being the same, this piece would not have roused nearly the level of frenzy it did or the incitement to disciplinary action it required had the piece been performed by a man. While we can recognize the real ethical concerns outlined by some in the media, it is important to note that what is at stake is Yale’s public disclosure of what actually transpired in the period leading up to Shvart’s public installation. Yale could have easily verified whether the project crossed any ethical boundaries, but instead they chose to publicly disclose the nature of the entire project. This explicitly tells us that the rights of the dominant culture to not be disturbed are more important than the female subject’s attempt to artistically explore why those disturbances are there as disturbances, and how and why they function in the way that they do.

Further, the normative and institutional interventions answer the question of the female subject’s bodily sovereignty explicitly in the negative: not only is the female subject not an equal subject – the female subject does not even have the right to her own body. As one feminist blogger sarcastically notes,

Ours is a quaint, superstitious culture with strict rules about where and when and why and how male and female reproductive materials may touch. There are different consequences depending on the sex of the parties involved. For example, there are no consequences at all for men (unless they are homos). But women sure have a lot of explaining to do if their genetic material touches someone else’s before they have secured the permission of a bunch of authority figures, such as the ghost of a dead Nazarene on a stick, their dad, their boyfriend, or the U.S. Government.

While we can have a laugh at ‘the ghost of [the] dead Nazarene on a stick’ or the characterization of our culture as ‘quaint’ and ‘superstitious,’ we cannot afford to forget that these differential measures and consequences, apart from being soundly unfair, are extremely destructive not only to the female subject but to our claims for being a ‘just’ and ‘fair’ society. Moreover, they reveal the ways in which our culture maintains its patriarchal and heteronormative stability by restricting different punitive measures for different subjects, and by implicitly demanding adherence to its prescribed ontological categories of being by reserving for itself the right to regularly ‘punish those who fail to do their gender right.’

IV.             Conclusion

Through an explication of both Aliza Shvart’s artistic goals and the punitive measures she incurred by refusing to ‘do her gender right,’ I have tried to show how the dominant patriarchal and heteronormative discourse maintain their stability and their inevitably sutured coherence. This dominant discourse maintains for itself the institutional, social, and even linguistic apparatuses which make sure that the female subject does not exercise her full autonomy as an ‘ego-driven’ consciousness or fulfill her rights as an individual subject. Certainly, I have not exhausted all of the ways in which and through which the female subject is interpellated, the ways in which even the right to her own body and its processes are denied, and the multiple ways in which this circumscribed space is continually being reinscribed for her. But I have also tried to show that, even as the dominant discourse shores up its discursive unity, structural cracks and possible openings for future interventions appear. Aliza Shvarts’ project may not be shown at the Green Hall because of her refusal to be denied her autonomy as a female subject and as an artist, but the consequences she has incurred and the singularly unfair judgements that have been passed upon her – by the public, by the media, by the institutions of which she is a part, and, of course, by the dominant patriarchal discourse – show us more clearly than perhaps ever before that the emancipation of the female subject remains an ongoing project, and that it is ‘the prerogative of every individual to acknowledge and explore’ not only the emancipatory potential this project contains for all human beings, but also to explore the ways in which we can, and indeed must, help bring it to fruition.

Footnotes

Edidin, Peter. Controversy Over Abortion Art. The New York Times. April 19, 2008. Accessed April 25, 2008. < http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/19/arts/design/19arts-CONTROVERSYO_BRF.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=Shvarts%2C+Aliza&st=nyt&oref=slogin>.

Nizaa, Mike. Sticking to the Bit? Yale’s Abortion Artist. The New York Times. April 18, 2008. Accessed April 18, 2008. < http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/04/18/sticking-to-the-bit-yales-abortion-artist/index.html?hp>

Shvarts, Aliza. Shvarts Explains her ‘Repeated Self-Induced Miscarriages.’ Yale Daily News. April 18, 2008. Accessed April 18, 2008. <http://www.yaledailynews.com/articles/view/24559>. Unless other indicated, all quotes are from Shvarts’ statement.

Daum, Meghan. It’s Period Art. Los Angeles Times. April 26, 2008. Accessed April 27, 2008. <http://www.latimes.com/news/columnists/la-oe-daum26apr26,1,2249073.column>.

Althusser, Louis. Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. New York: Norton, 2001. 1505.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Shvarts notes that her project is meant to be an ‘intervention into our normative understanding of “the Real” and its accompanying politics of convention.’ She is, of course, invoking Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic model here, and it is important to note the importance of ambivalence as a disrupting intervention into the seemingly smooth functioning of the Symbolic and Imaginary Orders. See, for instance, Leitch, Vincent. Jacques Lacan. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. New York: Norton, 2001. 1278-1284.

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed. Leitch, Vincent. New York: Norton, 2001. 2497.

Ibid, 2492-2497.

Ibid, 2492. This has sometimes been read as if Butler is proposing that there simply is no body. Of course Butler knows that there is – but her account of the dangers of maintaining the body as somehow untouched by the discursive fields through which we access it underlines the problems of denying a ‘precategorical soure of disruption’ in our understanding of the body. Another way of saying this is that we must acknowledge and deal with the fact that we have no access to the body outside of the discursive fields of ‘intelligibility’ and knowledge which structure our thought and form the basis of all our emancipatory ideals (2490-92).

Ibid, 2490-2501.

Ibid, 2493.

Ibid, 2494. See also Kristeva, Julia. Approaching Abjection. The Powers of Horror. New York: Columbia P, 1982. 1-31.

Ibid, 2495.

NA. Aliza Shvarts: Abortion Goo Girl Rants Against the “Patriarchal Heteronormative.” American Digest: Dispatches From the New America. April 17, 2008. Accessed April 25, 2008. <http://americandigest.org/mt-archives/bad_americans/abortion_goo_gi.php>.

Nizaa, Mike. Sticking to the Bit? Yale’s Abortion Artist. The New York Times. April 18, 2008. In the interests of space, I will cite the rest of the news sources in the Works cited page, unless two different articles are from the same source.

NA. How Messed Up is Aliza Shvarts?. Zimbio. April 17, 2008. Accessed April 26, 2008. <http://www.zimbio.com/Aliza+Shvarts/polls/3/How+messed+up+is+Aliza+Shvarts>.

Ibid.

Drucilla Cornell’s reinterpreation of Derrida’s Law for a feminist jurisprudence is extremely instructive here. If the Law does not, and even cannot, ‘see’ the literal and symbolic violence it incurs on the female subject – indeed, if it cannot even recognize her as an equal subject under the law, what obligation does a woman have to follow that civic law when it denies or conflicts with her very subjectivity under the Law and as a human being? See, Cornell, Drucilla. Civil Disobedience and Deconstruction. Feminist Interpretations of Derrida. Ed., Holland, Nancy J. NA.

As the owner of the blog I Blame the Patriarchy writes: ‘Because Art is godly and dudely and should always be literally, unambiguously true, and literally, unambiguously devoid of the artist’s ladyparts (which two conditions are really one and the same); anything less shows a shocking disregard for human life, heterosexuality, the rules, the Lord, the exacting standards of misogyny uniformly and eternally endorsed by our august culture of domination, and those baronial Yale benefactors who happen to be anti-choice’. NA. She Couldn’t Just Sign It “R. Mutt” and Call It a Day? I Blame The Patriarchy. April 22, 2008. Accessed April 24, 2008. <http://blog.iblamethepatriarchy.com/2008/04/22/yale-art-hoax/>.

NA. Miscarriage Art Cube Provokes “Outcry.” I Blame The Patriarchy. April 18, 2008. <http://blog.iblamethepatriarchy.com/2008/04/18/miscarriage-art-cube-provokes-outcry/>.

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed. Leitch, Vincent. New York: Norton, 2001. 2500.

Cornell, Drucilla. Civil Disobedience and Deconstruction. Feminist Interpretations of Derrida. Ed., Holland, Nancy J. NA.

Yale administrators demanded that, unless she sign a statement that her ‘performance [...] was a fiction that she had concocted,’ her project would not be shown. Shvarts refused. Kennedy, Randy. Yale Demands End to Student’s Performance. The New York Times. April 22, 2008. Accessed April 25, 2008. <http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/22/arts/22arts-YALEDEMANDSE_BRF.html?scp=3&sq=Shvarts%2C+Aliza&st=nyt>.

Asam Ahmad (’10) is a Philosophy and Literature specialist at University of Toronto.

ABSTRACT

The following is a brief introduction to the origins and logical flaws within St. Anselm’s famous Ontological Argument for the existence of G-d. Throughout the time since Anselm first formulated his argument, logicians and philosopher, including Kant, Gödel, and Aquinas, have struggled to reveal its apparent flaws. Through the study of this complex argument in the philosophy of religion, several advances in modern logic have emerged, including an understanding of the sensitive treatment of how to classify existence, whether it is a property of an object, or a quantifier within a logical system.

Throughout the years since St. Anselm of Canterbury first published the original version of his ontological argument for G-d’s existence in the Proslogium, many have come to criticize and analyze the logic behind his famous argument. What separates this argument from others in providing a formal proof for G-d’s existence, was that it had used entirely a metaphysical, a priori method of establishing the existence of G-d, rather than an empirical method as was used by the cosmological argument. St. Anselm was the medieval Archbishop of Canterbury, who lived roughly during the 11^th century C.E. (A.D.) Anselm began his argument, claiming that there were two types of existent beings within this world, those who were necessary, that is beings who were needed to exist and contingent beings who existed, but whose existence was not entirely necessary. (3) He then continued to define G-d as “something that than which nothing greater can be conceived.” (1) Anselm then referred to Psalm xiv. 1 stating, “Or is there no such nature, since the fool has said in his heart, there is no God?” (1) He wished to eliminate the fool’s atheistic doubts, which were represented within the psalm, by proving that G-d existed, at least within the fool’s understanding. If he could establish this assumption, then he could lay out the rest of his argument. According to Anselm, even the fool could wholeheartedly admit that he has the ability to imagine “something that than which nothing greater can be conceived,” and that the fool could admit to having this notion within his understanding, even if he fails to see that G-d exists within reality. (1) He continues to claim that if something exists both in reality and within the imagination, then such an existence is greater than something, which exists solely within one’s mind. (1) By accepting this proposition, a reductio argument (a contradiction) can then be formulated, because by the combination of Anselm’s definition of G-d (that which none greater can be conceived), and the fact that the existence of something within the mind and external to the mind is greater than something merely within our minds, it must be by the definition of G-d, that it be existent outside our minds as well. Thus by the reductio argument, G-d must exist externally according to Anselm. Anselm states, “… assuredly that, than which nothing greater can be conceived, cannot exist in the understanding alone. For, suppose it exists in the understanding alone: then it can be conceived to exist in reality; which is greater…Therefore if that than which a greater cannot be imagined is in the understanding alone, that very thing than which a greater cannot be imagined is something than which a greater can be imagined. But certainly this cannot be.” (1) He draws a contradiction from this statement and thus by reductio ad absurdum, he concludes that there must be “something than which a greater cannot be imagined, both in the understanding and in reality,” which is G-d. (1)

Several criticisms of the argument had followed after Anselm first formulated it. The first such criticism was by a contemporary of Anselm, Gaunilo of Marmoutier, a Catholic Monk who rejected Anselm’s rationalization, attacking the reasoning behind the argument, using his perfect island example. His explanation of the problem with the ontological argument went as follows: all have the ability to distinctly conceive of a greatest, largest, most perfect island, but that such a concept within one’s understanding does not entail that such an island exists within reality. Gaunilo didn’t attack any of the premises of Anselm’s argument, but rather followed the argument’s logical steps to come up with a rather insane conclusion, thus weakening Anselm’s reasoning. If the argument had indeed been taken seriously, one could conceive of a perfect island, even a perfect dog, fish, or turtle, or anything for that matter, that must be true to exist within our mind’s understanding and thus exist in reality, by the very definition of “that which none greater can be conceived.” It appeared that Anselm’s argument had suggested that through the definition of something, one could define anything into existence. (2) There are however some notable problems with Gaunilo’s objection, because it used an example of an island, the sort of object, whose properties and qualities of perfection fail to have intrinsic maximum limits of degree, (ex: length, amount of trees, etc. fail to have an ultimate maximum conceivable degree of perfection), unlike Anselm’s argument which is a proof for the existence of G-d, whose properties are intrinsic maximums (maximum good, maximum truth, etc.). Thus according to philosopher C.D. Broad, Gaunilo’s objection cannot be fully applied to Anselm’s situation. (2)

St. Thomas Aquinas, an Italian, Catholic theologian and philosopher also criticized the ontological argument, claiming that the argument only had the ability to work for those who accepted the proposed definition of G-d given by Anselm, whereby many people felt that the definition of G-d might not necessarily be “that which none greater can be conceived,” but rather many believed G-d to be in the form of a body like the resurrected body of Jesus. (2) He continued to explain that G-d was an infinite being, and that finite beings such as ourselves might never come to fully comprehend such a greater being. Even if we take Anselm’s definition of G-d to be “that which none greater can be conceived,” literally, we as finite beings, could only turn to finite examples to be able to comprehend the definition of G-d, and might not fully be able to understand G-d through comparisons within our finite world and understanding of things. (2)

Immanuel Kant, the famous Prussian philosopher, had several objections to the ontological argument, found within the Critique on Pure Reason. Kant argued against Anselm’s premise that things which exist both in reality and in the mind, are greater than those things which solely exist within the mind. He proposed that adding such a premise to the ontological argument, forces existence to be viewed as a property of a concept, and that existence cannot be thought of as a property (later on it would come to be defined as a type of logical quantifier). (2) Because modern logic hadn’t been available to Kant during the late 18^th century, he had creatively used the relationships between subject and predicates of sentences to indicate why existence should not be categorized as a property, where a predicate represents the properties of the subject of the sentence or concept. Philosopher Alvin Plantinga had simplified Kant’s ambiguous argument, which used a confusing subject predicate relationship, into a more modern perspective using logic. Plantinga explained that one should consider the example, that of the concept of a bachelor, which is defined as an unmarried man. By the definition of a bachelor, B the bachelor had certain properties (P1, P2, P3,…, Pn). (5) Using Anselm’s logic, a bachelor would be a contingent concept, “that is to say, it is not necessarily true that there are things to which this concept applies…the proposition there are bachelors, while true, is obviously not necessarily true.” (5) One could then claim that there had indeed been a super bachelor SB, with the property of existence E so that SB has all of the properties of being a bachelor and the new property of existence, SB(P1, P2, …., Pn, E). (5) It would appear that we had just defined a SB into existence by the new property E we assigned to it. Even after we have defined the concept of a SB with the property E, this does not entail that there are in actuality any SB, “all that follows is that…All the superbachelors there are exist.” (5) It also follows that because SB holds all of the properties that a B holds, every SB is a B. If a SB exists, then a B must also exist, but remember a B is contingent and so SB must also be contingent and so, it then becomes apparent that every B must also be a SB. It appears, as mentioned previously, that using such logic, one could define any concept they wished into existence, providing existence or being was used as a property in the sense Anselm had used in his argument. (5)

The most fascinating aspect of Anselm’s argument had not been the proof itself, but rather the criticisms, which arose by philosophers across the centuries, as a response to the logical formulation of the proof. The argument had sparked an increased curiosity into the study of the metaphysics of existence through the search for the inherent flaws within the constructs of Anselm’s argument. It is interesting to note, that even within the root of the word ontological, there lies the root, ont which is Greek for being and existence. Once more, for almost one thousand years, the argument seemed not only to inspire others, including Descartes, Leibniz, Goedel, and Plantinga, to improve upon Anselm’s proof and create their own formulations of ontological arguments, but also to analyze the argument and gain insight into the nature of logic through the study of metaphysics. Such inspiration ultimately led to several major advancements in our understanding of logic and the nature of existence and how it is to be handled in logical systems. The ontological argument sparked much debate, and as Bertrand Russell proposed, it is much harder to put one’s finger on exactly why the argument was flawed, rather than to be able to say that it was indeed flawed. (4)

Works Cited

1. “Anselm (1033-1109): Proslogium.” Medieval Sourcebook. 1998. Fordham University. <http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/basis/anselm-proslogium.html>.

2. Himma, Kenneth E. “The Ontological Argument.” The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2006. Seattle Pacific University. <http://www.iep.utm.edu/o/ont-arg.htm>.

3. “Ontological Argument.” Wikipedia. 13 Mar. 2008. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontological_argument#Anselm.27s_argument>.

4. Oppy, Graham. “Ontological Arguments.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2007. Metaphysics Research Lab, CSLI, Stanford University. <http://www.science.uva.nl/~seop/entries/ontological-arguments/#GodOntArg>.

5. Plantinga, Alvin. “A Modal Version of the Ontological Argument, From God, Freedom and Evil.” Philosophy of Religion. Comp. William L. Rowe and William J. Wainwright. Ed. Robert Ferm. New York: Oxford UP, 1998. 109-125.

Matthew Rowe (’10) is a Philospohy and Physics double major at Carnegie Mellon University

In Religion Within the Limits of Pure Reason Alone, Immanuel Kant considers the claim that God “arises out of mortality” without being the basis for moral obligation. “Morality thus leads ineluctably to religion, through which extends itself to the idea of a powerful moral Lawgiver, outside of mankind, for Whose will that is the final end (of creation) which at the same time can and ought to be man’s final end.” Kant develops what he calls the “pure religion of reason” and explains this true moral religion in relation to other established, historical religions. He was particularly interested in the question of how the moral recovery of individuals, and all of mankind, is possible. For Kant, religion as we know it is a synthesis of theological ideas and morality. There is really but one moral “religion”, divided into various ecclesiastical faiths that are influenced by their historical periods. Essentially, the creation of these faiths clarified his belief that “moral perfection” in individuals could only be brought about by the recovery of mankind as a whole; these faiths were created as an expression of this capacity to attempt to live a better moral life. Each faith is a historical religion, based upon a certain set of statutes that dictate to its followers what to do/not to do, while a true rational religion is based on morality. How do we know we are moral agents? What are the conditions of this “true religion” Kant speaks of and how do some faiths, most especially Judaism and Christianity, adhere or not adhere to these conditions? Overall, the biggest indicator of morality in Kant’s moral religion is our intentions to become better people and live better lives; whether we create faiths to structure these desires is irrelevant. Evidently, where these ecclesiastical faiths fail, is by providing limitations on our good deeds, rather than true exits. The only true answer we have to discovering our morality is by listening to or hearts and desiring to become good, in itself, while at the same time, realizing where we lack the knowledge to overcome evil and getting help.

Religion, as defined by Kant, is the recognition of a moral disposition (and the moral duties that this distinction encompasses) as divine commands (142). Man, as a rational being, is free and capable of changing and overcoming his propensity to evil (24). This ideal of moral recovery correlates to the ideal “of a humanity pleasing to God” in that a radical change in a mode of evil thought could imply man’s justification as a moral agent before God (21). However, this justification is dependent on man deemed free from evil, a claim that is uncertain in itself. As a natural propensity, evil can’t be overcome by a specific set of morally good actions. If that were the case, there would be a Guidebook to the Afterlife sold in stores everywhere. Rather, man on his own is unable to succeed and find moral security in his sensual world, so we must look to another power that we create and acknowledge as morally superior and omnipotent, in this case God.

The more crucial question here seems to be, if we are free and our own moral agents, how can God appear to be our moral legislators? In Book III of the Religion, Kant argues that the rule of the “moral principle will only be possible in an ethical state, i.e. kingdom of virtue.” This ethical state can’t be determined by man in a political sense, though human laws dictate certain kinds of behavior as any state normally would. Since an ethical state is formed free from forceful influence on ethical behavior, it can’t be governed solely by human laws. This must mean there must be something else-non human- governing, a divine figure (91). Moral legislation concerns the inner hearts and dispositions of human beings, which are not subject to external laws. God alone is able to recognize the good and see through our hearts and motives to know our moral beliefs (95).

However, though God is an important idea in morality, He is not so valuable as to merit direct obedience of His laws, per say. For Kant, God is an allegorical reference to our own morality that does not imply the stories and characteristics that biblical construction in Scripture acribes to Him. He is an abstract concept of reason; we create the philosophical notion of a God as an expression of our morality and rationality. This is the basis that Kant uses to strike a balance between God’s moral rule over us and our own human freedom. God is a supreme ruler who is not coercive; He would never force us to follow his laws and moral laws do not originate in him, though he is thought of as the “highest lawgiver in an ethical commonwealth” (90). In essence, God’s rule does not interfere with human autonomy, i.e. human legislation and He could not conceivably enact laws that are unknown to us but, He is not independent from moral law as it is designed by our human reason. Therefore, God only figures in our sensuality as a result of our human freedom and free will.

It is precisely the need to have this balance in our lives, and our desires to become morally better as we forever strive towards the God ideal, that mankind has created faiths and churches to bind us together in that struggle. Whether these connections of cooperation to be better people are completely pure is another story. As for his discussion of the faiths, Kant poses several limits on certain types, most especially Judaism. However, he does not criticize all aspects of organized religion; he only finds that there is a natural tension between moral principles and religious traditions. As was stated previously, there are many “religions”, all influenced by the time periods in which they were created, but there is only one universal moral law. Humans determine this moral law by relying on their own instincts and intentions as to whether they overcame the natural propensity to evil. We don’t need organized religion to explain our moral capacity; we already know it. Moreover, religious practices can undermine moral principles. A community life, even one in the form of a religious commonwealth, can foster impulses towards revenge and competition. Man’s propensity to evil can influence other men in society. Religious institutions often identify religious experience with the performance of certain rituals or the acceptance of certain beliefs. This is in itself dangerous because individuals can simultaneously adhere to strict requirements of a particular faith’s church and harbor hatred, jealousy or immoral desires. Secondly, some religious traditions promote the idea that incantations or professions of faith endear people to God (an example of this kind would be Calvinism). The danger here is that people would behave morally not because it’s the right (and thus rational) thing to do, but because it’s a daily chore designed to appease God’s wishes. This is of course, in itself, not moral because to behave morally is to do good deeds with good intentions, and not to be forcefully told to do anything we wouldn’t want to. Finally, and related to the previous comment, Kant objects to those religious traditions that say God’s grace will save you, regardless of your own behavior. Our actions have true moral worth only if we performed them independently, without God’s assistance.

In its original form, he argues, Judaism is not a religion at all, but merely a political entity masked in the form of an institutionalized religion. Firstly, Judaism is not essentially religious because its commands relate to external acts and lay no requirements “upon a moral disposition” (116). These commands are only to be observed in an outward fashion, not necessarily inward. However, Kant makes a point to say that the “Ten Commandments, are, to the eye of reason, as valid as ethical commands even had they not been given publicly” (116). Secondly, Judaism limits reward and punishment to this world, with no recognition of the possibility that these incentives/non-incentives affect the morality of the human soul as such. Thirdly, Judaism is adamant of the Jews as a conception of chosen persons (117). This shows enmity towards all other people, and therefore, evokes the enmity of all. Lastly, in several places in this book, Kant criticizes Abraham’s decision to slaughter his son at the command of God as immoral. These criticisms deserve to be discussed further.

Is Judaism really essentially political, rather than religious? Kant does not doubt that Jews, “each for himself, have framed some sort of religious faith which was mingled with the articles of their statutory belief.” This kind of religious faith he takes to be outside the “legislation of Judaism.” At this point, we can wonder what his relationship is to Judaism and what he considers to be its pro points. Presumably, he takes the Old Testament to be the defining text for Judaism and it can be said that, even with this historical scripture, Kant was right to a certain degree about the political tenets of this faith. Moses performed a political act when he freed slaves from bondage of an Egyptian pharaoh and the Israelites had political problems, among others. Kant’s position with respect to this faith (and subsequent faiths he discusses) calls into question the nature of heaven that we as moral agents hope for, not the nature of God by whose grace we gain passage to that kingdom. When he comes to question what is heaven, Kant gives us a kingdom of ends called an ethical commonwealth. It is here where we can find, for Kant’s criticism of Jews as chosen people, he seems at ease with the notion that a commonwealth of sorts made up of morally upright people (who can be called chosen) at its center is ok (90). From Kant’s perspective, Judaism seems to be centered around God, while his own position is centered around the prospects of a good life in heaven. However, he is completely opposed to the idea that one can have true knowledge of any world outside the empirical, sensual world he lives in. There is the possibility of knowing something, but this “knowledge” of other worlds is not certain or actual.

Kant is very critical of other religions that claim the ability to guarantee a follower’s acceptance into heaven. There is no guarantee, ever, that the morally good acts we do in this lifetime will translate to a place in the kingdom of heaven. The only activity that can be called pleasing to God is activity that is, in itself, morally good and useful in this world. While he argues that only through intentions can one be called moral or not, he also contends that none of us can look into the hearts (disposition) of another person. Thus, any legislation created on in this world can only be directed at allowing (or restricting) behavior, not intentions of individuals. Kant understands this better than most; his criticism of the Ten Commandments is that they lay no requirements on having a good moral disposition, simply that these laws be followed. To have the status of ethical commands, as he states earlier, they must be directed towards the moral disposition; in essence, we must do away with the conception of Ten Commandments as divine law and allow these “recommendations” to pervade our moral consciousness.

Kant’s claim that proper moral commands must “lay requirements upon the moral disposition” seems somewhat at odds in respect to his analysis of the nature and status of ethical principles. Kant points out that no command from outside an individual can stand strictly as an ethical command, unless it is simultaneously self imposed. We can’t be commanded to freely do the right thing, therefore, no purely external commands can be directed towards our inner disposition and be ethical. Either the command is directed at the behavior alone (which means its outside of ethical implications) or the command is one that an individual should later take on as self imposed.

Self imposition of these moral maxims is what defines who is morally good or evil; the notion of a chosen people that are graced by God as worthy of entering the gates of Heaven is both wrong and useless to Kant. Whereas Judaism has an idea of a chosen people, Christianity has a chosen individual, namely Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is an example of what makes Christianity the closest of the faiths to a moral religion. Kant may say we should not think of this faith as so high to merit its establishment as superior because “we find that the religious doctrines of most other people peoples tended in the same direction,” but, he also offers no other examples than Christianity. For Kant, Christianity is the closest to coming towards a moral religion because it teaches us to want to be good. Judaism doesn’t go to this extent, and it is in this case that it lacks what Christianity has, however flawed it is.

Turning to Kant’s charge that Abraham’s decision to sacrifice Isaac was immoral. Looked at in the literal sense, it was immoral because the decision to take a life is in itself an evil action, with evil intentions. Kant himself presents a view (one that religious people in today’s age can be familiar with) that the Bible has to be interpreted by people of scholarship before it can be understood. It would have to be interpreted by standards of morality, naturally, because these faiths are created by church men with some set of laws that serve the divine. However, where these faiths go wrong is requiring that these laws need to be obeyed absolutely in order to serve and worship. For Kant, the only way to serve God and thus be religious is to serve man. One would try to speak hypothetically of this event as one that happened prior to the enactment of Ten Commandments and at a time where no moral laws were available to follow. Kant would immediately mark this defense as weak because for rational beings there is always a moral law that governs us, the categorical imperative. It exists in all humans, like Abraham. This is an example of how Scripture can make allegorical references -that for Kant is essential to understanding in our sensual world of any concept of the divine- in such a way that they can make claims that ordinarily would not match with a true moral religion.

However, Kant’s specific criticisms of Judaism seem thin in comparison to his laudation of Christianity as closer to his true moral religion. In one example: “Christianity possesses the great advantage over Judaism of being represented as coming from the mouth of the first teacher not as a statutory but as a moral religion, and thus entering into the closest relation with reason so that, through reason, it was able of itself, without historical learning, to be spread at all times and among all peoples with the greatest trustworthiness.” This seems to be at odds, somewhat, with his remark that the Ten Commandments, which are in of themselves statutory laws made by God, are valid as ethical commands in the view of reason. Apparently, there are exceptions in terms of statutory commands that can be a part of a moral religion.

In addition, in the Religion, we see Kant combine a compliment of a particular faith with a criticism. It is as if he merits their creation, but simultaneously denounces their ability to be the profound and primary religion for all people. For example, a fragment in Part II where he credits Jewish “theocracy” with establishing a form of government “instituted solely for the public and exclusive veneration of a principle of morality.” It seems that he’s impressed, except of course he immediately follows it with a lengthy criticism on their lack of attaining “spiritual natures” with respect to the overall moral good and not material goods of this world. “A people which has a written religion (sacred books) never fuses together in one faith with a people… possessing no such books but only rites…” The long history of Jews was “worthy of notice” but not proof of a divine special purpose; their long-lasting existence attributed to a written language of religion.

Even then, with a written religion, Kant wonders if Jews (and to this extent, Christians and Muslims whose religions were based off Judaism) had help in preserving these sacred tests because they were helped by the other ecclesiastical faiths. “For Jews could ever and again seek out their old documents among the Christians…whenever in their wandering their skill in reading these books and so the desire to posses them was lost…” Plainly, Kant sees the preservation of the Jewish people either “the proof of a special beneficent providence saving this people,” or “an example of punitive justice visited upon because it stiff-neckedly sought to create a political and not moral concept of the Messiah.”

It is precisely because of this skepticism with any institutional church calling itself a religion that we see Kant ascribe the merits of their teachings as explained through revelation and mystery. Kant takes mystery to be something that we know of, but can’t know in certainty enough to communicate it correctly and publicly. Mystery is distinguished from the inscrutable in that the inscrutable is defined as something we can communicate but can’t understand how it was created and for what cause. A man’s duty can’t be a mystery to him, however “inscrutable” it is, because it was essentially born out of his freedom and will. Kant then contrasts this idea of what we can do for our morality compared to what God alone can do. It is a genuine mystery of religion when we know why something occurs but not what it is that happens. An example of this is how we know God can help us to become moral, we don’t know how He does it but it is done somehow. In other words, we can answer the “why” question (because we want to be more moral individuals) but we need assistance and guidance to answer the “what” (what does God do to assist us? Revelation remains a mystery of comprehension to us but the basis for which to communicate our morality must, and will always, remain purely rational.

Revelation is in the group of concepts that Kant describes as unnecessary, but possible in relation to the expectations we have to try and live our lives morally. Also, in this group is religious enthusiasm. The simple religious observation of “God’s laws” ensures holy success for some in ecclesiastical faiths (including Judaism and Christianity). However, Kant rejects this idea of religious enthusiasm because it implies that a simple profession of faith (or sorrow for one’s previous sins) will please God, and that an absolute devotion to moral conduct isn’t required. Essentially, Kant sees religious enthusiasm as something that would help us avoid our moral responsibilities. As was discussed before, there is a lack of evidence suggesting our efforts will cause God to forgive our sins. Because we have no evidence we shouldn’t assume that public religious rituals have any affect on our moral standing in God’s eyes.

Kant’s true moral religion does not rely on institutionalized faiths and historical religious traditions to strive for a truer and more complete morality. Any rational person can adopt a pure moral faith if they intend to become better. Under moral faith, which can be said is part of the foundation of Kant’s religion, good moral conduct is far more important than ritual and/or public professions of faith. Good moral conduct is the standard by which we can postulate how we are as free beings and whether our ends and means are good in of themselves. Pure moral faith is demanding for its practitioners, not only because it is based upon a hypothetical and individualistic notion of “how far along are we on our journey to Good” but, because it requires these people to constantly evaluate their actions and make sure the duty motivates them.

Despite these apparent differences between Kant’s religion and Christianity (or Judaism), it is clear that they contain similarities. Both emphasize a fundamental change of heart, beyond a mere change of actions. As in Christianity, Kant believes the most important thing is the individual person and that human duties should be treated as divine commands. It is here, explicitly, that he shows his deep respect for Christian tenets in relation to his own moral religion. In Christianity, moral conduct is not a result of accident; it is a result of acting on our morally sound principles and by distinguishing between our desires and our duty to choose which desires to act on. These aspects of Christianity, and of any other similar religion, gel well with Kant’s beliefs in the importance of maxims. We must live in accordance to these moral rules to, in fact, be defined as moral. People who have chosen a set of maxims are morally free and thus, true agents of their morality. Faiths only provide hope, hope that we can eventually be completely moral in the eyes of the Supreme Lawgiver and thus, be good beings. It is plain to see how Immanuel Kant was influenced by organized religions. However, he sought to create a moral religion more in tune with our sensibilities as human beings living in society and interacting with one another.

Works Cited

Kant, Immanuel. Religion Within the Limits of Pure Reason Alone, edited by Theodore M. Greene.

(New York: Open Court Publishing Company, 1960)

.

Daniel Arango (’09) is a Political Science and Philosophy double major at Boston University.

Upon purchasing a tin of tobacco from the market, Bertrand Russell began his routine trek back to the campus of Cambridge University. Suddenly, as if struck by Zeus’ bolt, he threw his hands into the air and exclaimed, “Great Scott, the ontological argument is sound!” (Pojman 2). This epiphany-like experience has not been uncommon among philosophers of both the classical and modern eras. Beginning with its original formulation by St. Anselm, the ontological argument for the existence of God has confounded philosophers for over nine centuries, and it continues to be a subject of profound debate.

The following are several integral reasons for its sustained salience in the field of philosophy. First, it is an analytic argument justified strictly by reason, rather than experience (a priori), making the preponderance of “arm-chair” philosophers content. Secondly, it is a deductive argument, meaning that if the truths of the premises are confirmed, the truth of the conclusion follows necessarily, making its potential power staggering. Thirdly, even if one is steadfast in one’s particular theistic disposition, the argument maintains its significance, in that it presents interesting philosophical questions unrelated to belief in God.

For these reasons, and undoubtedly many more, the ontological argument for the existence of God clearly warrants the ensuing analysis, a minute branch in the apparently timeless dialogue. In particular, the following few pages will endeavor to explain in detail the ontological argument’s two premises and resulting conclusion, while the latter few pages will scrutinize the first noteworthy challenge to the argument; Gaunilo’s “Perfect Island” essay.

The initial construction of the ontological argument is put forth in St. Anselm’s Proslogion, its foundation established here:

So even the fool must admit that something that which nothing greater can be thought exists at least in his understanding… And surely that than which a greater cannot be thought cannot exist only in the understanding. For if it exists only in the understanding it can be thought to exist in reality as well, which is greater… Therefore, there is no doubt that something than which a greater cannot be thought of exists both in the understanding and in reality (Pojman 4).

St. Anselm goes on to produce a Reductio ad absurdum version, but the former will be advantageous in its simplicity. The following is a conventional argument structure deduced from the simplistic version:

1. Something than which nothing greater can be thought exists at least in the understanding.
2. It is greater to exist in reality than to solely exist in the understanding.
3. Thus, something which a greater cannot be thought of exists both in the understanding and reality.

Upon viewing this argument for the first time, one might believe premise (1) to be ambiguous and the meaning somewhat opaque. In order to clarify, it is generally accepted that the “Something than which nothing greater can be thought” is a definitional equivalent to God. This assumes that God has all maximally and objectively great properties such as omnipotence, omniscience, omnibenevolence, and omnipresence. These specific “omni” properties will be examined in detail subsequent to the further presentation and explanation of the argument.

A newcomer to the ontological argument also may initially be suspicious of premise (2). In order to elucidate the tyro, one may think of a situation in which there is a choice between two nearly identical diamonds. Diamond A has the following properties: flawlessness, iridescence, incalculable monetary worth, and existence in reality (entails existence in the understanding), while Diamond B has these properties: flawlessness, iridescence, incalculable monetary worth, and existence in the understanding. Thus, the sole distinction between these two diamonds is that Diamond A exists both in reality and in the understanding, while Diamond B exists only in the understanding. What follows is unquestionably the selection of Diamond A. However, the newcomer may not be satisfied with this example, for one wonders if the former result applies to a situation in which the choice is between two parking tickets. Ticket A has the following properties: given for unjust reasons, requires sixty dollar payment, and exists in reality, while Ticket B has these properties: given for unjust reasons, requires sixty dollar payment, and exists in the understanding. What follows, though, is unquestionably the choice of Ticket B, which might indicate that existence in reality is actually not greater than existence in the understanding. It seems, though, that this predicament can be remedied by just slightly altering premise (2)

2. It is greater to exist in reality than to solely exist in the understanding for objectively good things.

Now Ticket B can safely be chosen by the tyro without fear of undermining the argument.

While this elucidation might have aided the newcomer’s comprehension of premise (2), it has also brought forth from the shadows the complex problem (originally raised by Immanuel Kant) of whether existence of any sort can correctly be called a property. For instance, the meaningfulness of a sentence such as, “God is existent.”, is very questionable, in that the existence of God must be presupposed for the sentence to be coherent. One cannot declare that the sentence is either true or false; it is an empty predicate which does not have meaning. Perhaps then, existence cannot actually be used in the way Anselm uses it in the ontological argument. But, being such an immense difficulty and one which requires a thorough examination, this question cannot properly be analyzed in an essay of this length. Thus, existence as both a property and a predicate will be assumed through the duration of the essay.

Now that the newcomer has become fairly erudite concerning the ontological argument, the earliest major refutation of it must be examined. Immediately after the publishing of St. Anselm’s Proslogion, a monk named Gaunilo set forth what has been known as the “Perfect Island” essay (although it is not clear that he ever uses the word “perfect”). In this essay, Gaunilo attempts to show the absurdity of the ontological argument by overloading its possible conclusions. He asserts that one could “prove” the existence of any object “more excellent” than all other objects of its type, through this argument. This would overload and trivialize the argument by demonstrating that various absurd conclusions could be deduced soundly from it. Speaking sardonically of St. Anselm, Gaunilo states (subsequent to a description of a most excellent island):

But if this person went on to draw a conclusion, and say, “You cannot any longer doubt that this island, more excellent than all others on earth, truly exists in reality. For you do not doubt that this island exists in your understanding, and since it is more excellent to exist not merely in the understanding but also in reality this island must also exist in reality” (Pojman 5).

The following is a more conventional structure, mirroring the ontological argument’s construction, taken from the above passage:

1. An island more excellent than any other islands exists at least in the understanding.
2. It is more excellent (greater) to exist in reality than to solely exist in the understanding.
3. The island more excellent than any other islands exists both in the understanding and reality.

It seems as if the newcomer’s questioning of the ambiguity of premise (1) in the ontological argument, applies equally to premise (1) of Gaunilo’s “Most Excellent Island” (MEI) argument. Thus, a discussion of what grouping of properties might constitute a MEI is now needed.

One inherent problem is that most, if not all, of the properties of a MEI are merely subjective. For instance, one person’s conception of a MEI might contain many coconut trees (because he likes the taste of coconut), while another’s conception might contain many banana trees and no coconut trees (because he likes the taste of bananas and is allergic to coconut). Again, a Nubian’s conception of a MEI might have a temperature property of 92 degrees Fahrenheit while an Inuit’s conception of a MEI might have a temperature property of 42 degrees Fahrenheit. Therefore, it seems impossible to conceive of an objective or universally accepted notion of a MEI.

The case is different, however, in regards to St. Anselm’s “greatest possible being”, which can be defined as a being that possesses all objectively good properties to their maximal extent. One clear example of this is knowledge (a type of objective good) which is obtained by God to its maximal extent through the property of Omniscience (will later be defined in detail). Other objective goods, though, are not so visibly expressed by the “omni” properties. But once probed deeply enough, the “omni” properties are actually found to covertly contain these goods. For instance, an objective good such as justness is obtained by God through the property of omnibenevolence, which presupposes justness to its maximal extent. Therefore, while Gaunilo’s MEI is subject to people’s relative notions of goodness, St. Anselm’s “greatest possible being” can be conceived objectively and through some degree of universal consent.

Laying aside this aforementioned impediment to Gaunilo’s conclusion in order to form yet another more concrete impediment, one may assume that there are, in fact, certain objective properties of a MEI. Maximal amounts of landmass, of foliage, and of sand may be considered objectively excellent properties of an island. However, Alvin Plantinga contends that “maximal” (greatest possible) properties do not make coherent sense in this circumstance. “The qualities that make for greatness in islands – number of palm trees, amount and quality of coconuts, for example – most of these qualities have no intrinsic maximums. So the idea of a greatest possible island is an inconsistent or incoherent idea” (Plantinga 91). He compares these properties to “a natural number than which it’s not possible that there be greater”, which he declares is an unmistakably incoherent concept. Thus, Plantinga concludes that even a conception of a MEI is not possible, which in turn mortally wounds Gaunilo’s attempted refutation of the ontological argument.

“But the wound has been inflicted on more than one victim”, the now astute student of the ontological argument contends, “St. Anselm’s argument undoubtedly has the same demise in regards to properties without intrinsic maximums”. To analyze this claim further, a list of God’s (greatest possible being’s) theoretical properties is necessary.

The four foundational properties that are generally agreed to by philosophers and theologians alike are the following: omnipotence, omniscience, omnibenvolence, and omnipresence. In defining omnipotence; the ability (or power) to either perform or not perform any possible action. In defining omniscience; having the knowledge of whether any possible proposition is either true or false. In defining omnibenevolence; for every action that is performed, it is performed through a purely good will. In defining omnipresence; being in every possible spatial relation to every actual object.

In order to demonstrate that these “omni” properties do have intrinsic maximums, one must imagine a possible world in which there are only a few possible actions. If a being inside this possible world has the ability to either perform or not perform any of the given actions, he would be omnipotent in relation to that world. Now in transferring this case to the much larger-scale actual world; for all the given possible actions, it is coherent to conceive of a being which could perform or not perform any of those actions. This being would be omnipotent.

As for omniscience, Plantinga asserts “And certainly knowledge, for example, does have an intrinsic maximum: If for every proposition p, a being B knows whether or not p is true, then B has a degree of knowledge that is utterly unsurpassable”(Plantinga 91). It is possible, therefore, that in the actual world there are (n) number of (p) propositions, and for every (p) a being knows whether (p) is either true false. This being would be omniscient.

In the case of omnibenvolence, one could surely conceive of a being which, for every action that is performed by the being (surely a finite number), that action is performed out of a wholly good will. Lastly, in regards to omnipresence, it is admitted that this property does not have as clear of an intrinsic maximum as do the other “omni” properties; however, it may be coherent to think of a being which is present at every relation in space (possibly a finite number) to every actual object. All of this is merely intended to show the weakness in premise (1) of Gaunilo’s argument while maintaining the viability of premise (1) in St. Anselm’s argument.

Hopefully, the student of the ontological argument will now have serious qualms as to the force of Gaunilo’s essay. Specifically, in that the properties which are obtained by a MEI are both subjective and lacking in intrinsic maximums (rendering the mere conception of a MEI impossible), as opposed to the properties obtained by Anselm’s “greatest possible being” which are both objective and intrinsically maximal (allowing for the conception of it to be both possible and coherent). But one final objection to Gaunilo’s argument seems valuable for putting at ease the student who may still sense the strength of the MEI.

As to their nature, there is a great divide between the concept of “greatest possible being” and the concept of a MEI. This is because the MEI is by definition a type of an island, which is an object inherently lacking in certain great-making properties. This creates a problem for Gaunilo’s argument while lending credence to Anselm’s argument because of the aforementioned addition to premise (2) of Anselm’s original argument, which states that, “It is greater to exist in reality than to solely exist in the understanding for objectively good things”. For it is more likely that an object with no lack of great-making qualities (God) is objectively good than it is for an object with inherent deficiencies to be objectively good. And an island, by its very nature, does not have: consciousness, a will, an ability to perform actions etc.

“But” interrupts the student, “perhaps the objective MEI does have the properties of consciousness, a will, an ability to perform actions etc.”. Very well, but as soon as a MEI is given consciousness, a will, ability to perform actions etc. it begins to look very similar to our conception of God. And at this point Gaunilo’s argument becomes mute, and the ontological argument returns unscathed by the MEI, meanwhile recommencing its effort in attempting to prove God’s existence.

The broad aim of this essay has been to examine the ontological argument’s intricacies and thereby strengthen its appearance, which may have seemed feeble at the outset. In refuting Gaunilo’s argument, various apparent deficiencies were found evident in the ontological argument, but through examination they were revealed to be mostly unsubstantiated. While this is true, there are still numerous other objections to St. Anselm’s ontological argument, and accordingly its dissection will in all probability continue for yet another nine centuries.

Works Cited

Alston, William P. “The Ontological Argument Revisited”. The Philosophical Review, Vol. 69, No. 4. (Oct., 1960), pp. 452-474

Oppy, Graham. “Ontological Arguments.” Philosophical Database. 8 Feb. 1996. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 22 Feb. 2008 <http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ontological-arguments/#TaxOntArg>.

Plantinga, Alvin. God, Freedom, and Evil. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1974.

Pojman, Louis P., and Michael Rea. Philosophy and Religion. Ed. Worth Hawes. 5th ed. Belmont, CA: Thomson Wadsworth, 2003.

Alex Hathaway (’10) is a Philosophy major at University of Colorado.

Homepage art courtesy of beremski.

When evaluating the soundness of a philosophical argument, one must test the argument against the most extreme cases to find a possible counterexample. An evaluation of Divine Command Theory (DCT) is no exception to this critical process. One extreme case is where in DCT, under certain circumstances, could it be morally permissible, indeed, even morally required, to torture an innocent three year old via DCT. After a brief exegesis of DCT, the paper will develop a response to this objection that defends the DCT argument. Ultimately, however, after putting forth the response to this counterexample, it will be necessary to show that the defense of DCT is unsound in response to the counterargument.

The argument for DCT centers around the notion that actions receive their moral status because God commands it to be so. Therefore, DCT argues that the moral classification of actions lies outside the realm of human interpretation or opinion. The first premise of DCT assigns moral status to all actions; an action is either morally wrong, morally required, or morally permitted. It is important to note that while it may be possible to suggest hard cases (actions that are hard to distinguish exactly which category it belongs), one has to acknowledge that all actions fit somewhere on this spectrum. For example, if one were to deny that morality does not exist and does not fit into this spectrum (moral skepticism) then one would be acknowledging that removing a burning iron (that is easily movable and will not inflict any possible harm on the individual moving it) that has fallen onto his mother‘s face is not a morally required action; the difficulty of defending this position therefore becomes self-evident. The first premise serves as nothing more than a declaration of the moral framework in which all human actions are conducted.

The second premise of DCT argues that the moral status of all human actions come from God. It is important to note that DCT is not merely a correlation of moral decisions between God and people; rather, actions have their moral status because God commands it to be so. To avoid ambiguity, an action is morally wrong because God commands for it not to be done while an action is morally required because God commands it to be done. One possible objection to the second premise is that it is not an explanation of why actions have their moral status because the reason for why God chose the moral status of actions remains unknown. Essentially, one is claiming the need for sufficient reason as to why God made it so. However, the reply to this objection is that God’s choice is the ultimate reason; there exists no necessary justification beyond that decision. The final premise states that given the first two premises, God exists. Because actions do have moral status, and the only explanation for why these actions have this moral status is because God commanded it to be so, it becomes necessary for God to exist.

Given the premises put forth in DCT, one can now analyze the moral status of torturing an innocent three year old. However, putting the DCT aside for a moment, one has to acknowledge that the torturing of a three year old is held to be universally wrong, especially when one eliminates any extraneous details and assumes other things equal. For example, this is not a case where the torturing of a three year old will satisfy a lunatic’s demands and stop him from pressing a button that will blow up the earth (although even that example is potentially debatable). Also, given that there are examples in history where innocent three year olds have been tortured, one has to assume that even the torturers recognized that their actions were morally wrong and only did it out of some rage or insanity, not because they actually believed it to be morally permissible. According to DCT, the torturing of an innocent three year old is morally wrong because it is inconsistent with God’s commands; in other words, God commands for people not to torture three year olds. Therefore, while torturing an innocent three year old may intuitively feel morally wrong, the actual reason for why we do not torture innocent three year olds, according to DCT, is because God commands humans not to torture innocent three year olds.

Now, ignoring the current status of moral actions, what if the torturing of innocent three year olds was not just morally permitted, but morally required. To make God’s command more specific, if one sees a three-year-old child (no younger, no older) then one is morally required to torture it. And, furthermore, the necessary requirement for torture means causing intense suffering in the child for at least 10 minutes. Despite one’s intuition that this disproves divine command theory, one has to consider the context with which our intuition exists. As it stands now, the torturing of innocent three year olds is morally wrong, and, as a result of this, it becomes impossible to imagine it being the case where this is morally required. The source of morality, that being God’s command, is outside the scope of human comprehension; thus, the actual switching of God’s command is also outside the scope of human comprehension. If person X were to say that torturing an innocent three year old was morally required, in addition to trying to prevent person X from being around a three year old, one would still hold this action to be morally wrong because God commanded it so. This comparison (some person claiming torturing an innocent three year old to be morally permissible) serves to demonstrate how one feels in trying to convince themselves of this moral status; human beings cannot convince themselves of new moral status for a specific action just as they cannot trust a stranger claiming to command it to be so.

Although one feels that the torturing of an innocent three year old is morally wrong, one has to recall that God’s command for moral status presupposes any human intuition or feeling about moral status. Would it not be more reasonable to argue that God’s determination of moral status could be the determinant for why certain actions feel morally wrong? It is unreasonable to suppose that there were humans in a world without any moral status commanded to actions (especially considering one accepts the first premise where actions do have moral status) and then God took a collective poll of human’s feelings towards certain actions and then, after taking into account how humans felt about actions, commanded moral status to actions. It is far more reasonable that humans, having at least a partial understanding of God’s decisions on the moral status of actions, have developed feelings of right and wrong in an attempt to live by the commands of God. Therefore, when humans coin God as “perfectly benevolent” they are merely asserting the good feeling associated with a partial understanding of what God commanded to be morally appropriate; god is above benevolent in that what he decided just is without any necessary consultation of other beings or entities. The entire concept of perfect benevolence, therefore, is merely an extrapolation of partial benevolence (experienced in humans) onto God.

One possible analogy (which fails to be as perfect an example as the objection itself) that demonstrates how DCT can reconcile with the torturing of a three year old can be seen in the rules of basketball. If one takes too many steps without dribbling (traveling) they break a rule and suffer the consequence. To imagine, given the current rules of basketball, people being required to take as many steps as possible without dribbling just feels wrong. However, if the goal of basketball, decided when the original rules of basketball were established, were to take as many steps before dribbling the ball, one would feel required to take as many steps as possible. Not only would this person feel required to do this, but they would also to some extent feel good about doing it. Likewise, if God were to change the moral status of torturing an innocent three year old from morally wrong to morally required (which is itself an absurd hypothetical assertion considering that God would never need to), humans would actually feel good about torturing a three year old.

While the argument for possibly justifying the torturing a three year old via DCT is compelling and creative, it is also deductively invalid, only partly resulting from the fact that DCT itself is deductively invalid. There are a few possible objections with this counter-reply, but one that is most glaring is trying to understand how God’s commands regarding the moral status of actions are revealed to humans. In the original objection one asserted an example that was most universally believed to be morally wrong. Now, why is the moral status of actions so much more obvious and widely held to humans than other actions? If God were to command a different moral status for the torturing of innocent three year olds, how would human beings come to know it is now morally required? Nonetheless, the immediate rejection of the torturing of three-year -olds in regard to DCT simply because one feels it wrong is not a sufficient reply; the exploration into how this can be justified requires some creativity but also facilities a greater understanding of DCT itself.

Garrett Lasnier (’12) is a Philosophy major at Johns Hopkins University.

.

Note: Homepage thumbnail taken from AnnaKirsten’s deviantART.