Francis Rose asked:

I am taking an introductory metaphysics course in which our first unit is entitled “Who is God?”. One point in my textbook that stood out to me was the author’s statement that “indisputably” if God truly exists in both understanding and reality, then God “must be invisible”. Given how much is questioned in the discipline of metaphysics, why must we blindly accept God as being invisible? What formal proof or logic do we have that indicates that God cannot be a visible entity in reality? Perhaps if God exists, God is visible, and part of our struggle as humans is to be open to seeing God. As an aside, I am not religiously persuaded either for or against the existence of God. I am simply curious about how to approach this question from a philosophical standpoint.

Answer by Gideon Smith-Jones

It’s 23:30 here in the UK but I don’t want to let International Blasphemy Day pass without something being said against God.

Of course God is invisible. What you mean by ‘seeing’ God is something like religious revelation which isn’t literal seeing. Your author means literal seeing. If you could literally see God — not just see God in the sense of seeing some physical event that God has caused but see God as God then God would have to be an entity in the physical world.

If God is an entity in the physical world then a whole load of things that are believed about God can’t be true — being infinite, for example, or omniscient (a physical entity’s knowledge of other physical entities depends on cause and effect, which involves forming hypotheses that are increasingly difficult to verify with certainty).

But isn’t Christ God according to Christian doctrine? Only if you mean something weirdly peculiar by ‘is’, which no theologian to date has successfully explained. ‘I believe because I don’t understand’ (I believe because it’s nonsense) just about sums it up.

If I said I believed in invisible aliens who were with me all the time, observing me, giving an undetectable ‘push’ every now and then to help things along, I would be considered a candidate for a lunatic asylum. Yet this is exactly what millions, or billions, believe about the entity they call ‘God’. So strong is this belief that in some countries you can be put to death for expressing opposition to it.

‘Lots of things we justifiably believe in are invisible,’ a believer may say. The number five. Justice. Gravity or magnetism (you can only see their effects). Well if you’re saying that God is a concept or an abstract object then forget about any notion of God having any physical effect on the world (least of all being able to ‘create’ it). If you are saying that God is like a physical force, that would be fine if you have a testable theory to back it up — including proof of God’s alleged properties. Oh, but I forgot, bang goes infinitude, etc.

The God hypothesis is a crackpot theory which no reasonable human being ought to believe in. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what millions and billions continue to do. Unreason still rules — and will continue to rule until we blasphemers do something effective about it.

 

Tom asked:

In claiming that Socrates was not concerned with the metaphysical questions about the nature of the universe (which led to many of these types of philosophers being called heretics), mainly because he simply did not know the answers to those questions and wasn’t good at discovering them, he did not want to be confused with… what?

Answer by Gideon Smith-Jones

Well, I hate to say it, but this is another pretty dumb instructor’s essay question. You really don’t need to read my answer, just read Plato’s dialogue Phaedo. (Try hard to suppress your tears when you reach the end. Plato really knew how to lard it on.)

Socrates didn’t want to be confused with the ‘physikoi’, the thinkers such as Anaxagoras who speculated about the nature of the physical universe. These were not ‘metaphysical’ questions (where did your instructor get that idea?).

If you are looking for ‘metaphysical’ inquiry, then the Presocratic philosophers Parmenides and Heraclitus would the most relevant — but their theories were the precursors to Plato’s own theory of Forms, which he developed from Socrates’ teaching about the soul and the virtues.

Socrates’ concern is with ‘Man’. (Women, as distinct from men, weren’t really a topic.) However, his concern with human beings is not ‘humanistic’ in the modern sense. The soul of man is ‘akin to the Forms’ he says in the Phaedo, that is how philosophers are able to obtain knowledge of the Forms through the inquiry which Plato called ‘dialectic’ (again, modelled on the example of Socrates’ method of philosophical interrogation — the  ‘elenchus’).

This is metaphysics, in its most scary, full-blooded form!

In Aristophanes’ Comedy Clouds, the figure of Socrates is lampooned as a typical example of the ‘physical philosopher’, which shows how little the Athenians understood the revolution that was taking place. After the death of Socrates, Plato set out to set the record straight. He succeeded brilliantly, largely because of his immense literary gifts. (According to the British philosopher Gilbert Ryle in his book Plato’s Progress 1966, Plato’s dialogues were performed to live audiences.)

In the process, the great Greek Sophists, such as Gorgias and Protagoras — keen admirers of the physikoi — were abused and stigmatized, and forever banned from the Academy.

I’m sorry to say, the wellsprings of philosophy in the Western tradition are thoroughly fascist. (Karl Popper said it first, in The Open Society and its Enemies 1945.) Today, we have academic philosophy — fascism with a liberal face.

 

Jasbir asked:

What are the strengths and weaknesses of logical determinism?

Answer by Gideon Smith-Jones

A typical philosophy instructor’s question. You take any theory or view X, and then tack on, ‘What are the strengths and weaknesses of…’ without any thought to whether or not it makes sense to ask that question in the case of this particular X.

Logical determinism is not a thesis, theory or claim — true or false — although it appears to be one. Today, as I write this answer, it is Thursday. Let’s say that tomorrow, Friday, either Britain will declare war on Germany or it is not the case that Britain will declare war on Germany. It is not important how probable or improbable the two alternatives are. We can state, as a matter of logical necessity, that there is no other possibility. One of these two alternatives must be the case.

‘So what?’ you may very well ask. Have I given you any important information? No. One cannot deny the law of excluded middle ‘P or not-P’ without self-contradiction. It is irrelevant what proposition one substitutes for ‘P’ — whether, for example it is a past or future tense statement — the result is the same. If you exhaust all the possibilities then you exhaust all the possibilities. Nothing else is possible.

The reason for taking an interest in logical determinism is the false belief that it entails fatalism. If it is true that tomorrow Britain will declare war on Germany, then even if Germany agrees to all Britain’s demands and pays an extra 100 billion Euros to sweeten the deal, Britain will declare war on Germany. If it is true that tomorrow Britain will declare war on Germany, then even if a giant meteorite destroys the Earth before midnight, Britain will declare war on Germany.

Obviously, this is just silly.

Somehow, implicitly — and illicitly — a further move has been made that makes the claim ‘P or not-P’ seem to say more than it actually does say. The thought goes something like this. When I consider the statement, ‘Britain will declare war on Germany’ I am picturing a possible fact, that either exists or it doesn’t exist. The fact is ‘out there’, in the future, waiting to happen, one way or the other, like a statue waiting for the unveiling ceremony. It is as if the future history of the universe is written indelibly in marble or granite, just waiting to be revealed.

That is just a picture in the fatalist’s head. It has no meaning beyond that.

Let’s say that a row over the EU is boiling over, to the point where it is looking increasingly likely that Britain will declare war on Germany. War seems inevitable. Yet there is still the possibility that it can be averted. Britain’s declaration of war won’t be a fact until it happens. If you say, ‘Either war will be declared or not,’ you are not saying anything. If you say, ‘The decision is a fact now, which nothing can alter or prevent,’ then you are making a false metaphysical statement.

 

Aslam asked:

Existence of God in Islam.

Answer by Gideon Smith-Jones

Ignoring the fact that this isn’t a question, or a statement, I shall treat this as an invitation to consider, from a philosophical standpoint, what it means to assert the existence of God within the monotheistic tradition of Islam, comparing this with Christian and Judaic teaching.

You can’t talk about the existence of God without making some claim about God’s nature. ‘God’ is just a word, until you give some account of why this word is so important to you.

An observing Jew will never write the word I have just put down as it breaks the 4th Commandment. ‘Adonai’ is not the name of God but a marker indicating something that one is forbidden to name.

I have personally seen Protestant demonstrators at the revered Catholic shrine to Our Lady of Walsingham, waving placards saying ‘Idolators!’ and accusations of a similar nature.

However, the 3rd Commandment, ‘Thou shalt not make any graven images’ is taken most seriously and literally in Islam. The prohibition extends to the Prophet, and has incited murder in the streets of Paris.

What to make of this? Evidently, the entity in question is something tremendous, so awe-inspiring that it is at least questionable whether one is permitted even to name it or represent it in any form whatsoever.

Writing 500 years before the Common Era, the Greek Presocratic philosopher Xenophanes — possibly influenced by the filtering through of the Hebrew tradition as a result of the vast increase in trade in that region — was the first philosopher in the Western tradition to put forward an a priori argument for a singular deity.

The Greek ‘gods’ were too much like human beings in their quarrels and arrogance to be worthy of worship, remarked Xenophanes. To allow even two ‘gods’ would be to limit the power of each because they would first have to agree a course of action before doing anything. According to Xenophanes, the one deity does not require physical force to act, as earth-bound beings or even the gods on Olympus do. ‘He shakes all things by the thought of his mind.’

Abraham, working in his father’s idol business, came to a similar conclusion. Although perhaps in his case it was not philosophical argument but just disgust at the absurdity of bowing down before a piece of granite.

Then again, it all depends on what role this object is playing in your belief system, what exactly it is that you think you are doing, or whom you are addressing. Why do you look to the sky when you address the Lord, or Allah, or Adonai? Isn’t God everywhere?

It’s pretty clear that whatever human beings do, however they express their religious beliefs, what they are looking for is something sufficiently elevated to be worthy of worship. The best argument I have seen for belief in God is that if you don’t worship God, then you will make a ‘god’ out of something else, something more mundane, something absurd, an idol.

As an atheist, the argument leaves me unmoved, but I grasp its sense. All the evidence seems to show that the human race is still in its infancy. We cannot get by without ‘worshipping’ something. If not God, then iPhones or Orwell’s ‘Big Brother’. Why? Why the need to bow down? I don’t have an answer to that question.

 

Carla asked:

Is there any normative ethical claim that says that one should reduce suffering of others? Is there a strong claim, that suffering and pain can be considered bad and must therefore be avoided?

Answer by Gideon Smith-Jones

If someone is suffering, and I have the power to reduce that suffering, and no worse consequences would follow if I reduced that person’s suffering, and the person in question doesn’t deserve to suffer as punishment for some heinous crime — ought I to attempt to reduce the suffering? Is that a moral law or axiom?

Intuition suggests that it might be. It is hard to justify allowing avoidable undeserved suffering. On the other hand, doesn’t that assume that ‘suffering’ is always bad? That’s the assumption I would question. Let’s say you are studying hard for the exam, and the effort is really killing you. For your own good, I want you to suffer. You have been far too easy on yourself in the past, and this is your big test, your opportunity to step up to the mark. I wouldn’t want to take that away from you!

The example I have given against the normative view that one ought always to strive to reduce the suffering of others is consistent with saying that, other things being equal, suffering and pain are intrinsically undesirable things that we have a possibly defeasible reason to avoid. But is even that true?

It seems obvious. But like good philosophical questions, the more you think about it the more you wonder. Why are suffering and pain intrinsically bad? What is ‘painful’ about pain? Couldn’t you learn to enjoy pain, love it? Would it still be pain, or would it become a pleasurable sensation?

It’s a fallacy to argue that if you enjoy pain, then the ‘pain’, for you, becomes pleasurable. Not at all. If you’re a masochist, then you want the pain to be painful (for whatever psychological reasons, say, your needing to ‘act out’ some punishment that you imagine you deserve).

Similarly with other forms of suffering. Maybe the only time you really feel alive — really connected to the world around you — is when you are suffering. The more you suffer, the truer your vision of reality becomes. That’s why fakirs and mystics proverbially go out into the desert to starve and dehydrate themselves to the point of death.

 

Jurgis asked:

What do you think of Merab Mamardashvili’s motto, ‘The Devil is playing with us, when we are not thinking precisely’?

Answer by Gideon Smith-Jones

Talk about ‘precision’ is like waving a red flag to a bull when you’re in conversation with an analytic philosopher. The English language is no longer enough — algebraic symbolism is now the norm in articles published in the major journals. The idea goes back to the 18th century philosopher Leibniz and his ‘characteristica universalis’:

“All our reasoning is nothing but the joining and substituting of characters, whether these characters be words or symbols or pictures… if we could find characters or signs appropriate for expressing all our thoughts as definitely and as exactly as arithmetic expresses numbers or geometric analysis expresses lines, we could in all subjects insofar as they are amenable to reasoning, accomplish what is done in Arithmetic and Geometry.”

(For a longer quote, see http://follydiddledah.com/image_and_quote_7.html.)

The ‘scab of symboles’ as Hobbes called it affects some areas of philosophy more than others. Some parts are still relatively free of it. Yet even then one finds points explained with irritating overkill, as if clarity can be achieved only by the philosophic equivalent of legalese, allowing no possible room for misinterpretation.

This kind of stuff bores me senseless — I’m not ashamed to admit, I won’t even make the attempt to read it even there are reasons to think there is something good buried down there. I don’t care. Let it stay buried. Academic philosophers should talk like normal human beings or shut up — because no-one outside their tiny circle is listening.

My view of precision is much more practical. It’s about having your mind on the job, something Robert Pirsig talks about in his Zen and the Art. It’s not a new idea: Aristotle was there first. You have to have the eye, or the ear, or the feel for what you are doing — whether it is making a brush mark on a canvas, tightening a nut on a motorcycle engine, selecting the right word, or choosing one of innumerable ways of casting an argument.

Mamardashvili was a Georgian philosopher, working under the Soviet regime. (See his profile in the ISFP Gallery of Russian Thinkers http://isfp.co.uk/russian_thinkers/merab_mamardashvili.html.) In his book Philosophizer, Geoffrey Klempner states:

“I have a theory that Russian intellectual life is afflicted by chronic bad conscience, which will take many generations to overcome. Under the Communists, ‘intellectuals’ and ‘philosophers’ (so-called) debated apparently weighty problems, all the time aware of the vast weight of censorship bearing down, silencing any genuinely significant idea. They pretended concern for the pursuit of truth while all the time hopelessly mired in lies. Those who refused to bend ended up in the Gulags. A lucky few escaped to the West.” (Chapter 9, ‘A touch of poshlust’)

This is somewhat unkind. Despite the restrictions on freedom of thought, Russian thinkers succeeded in producing a welter of original ideas, that have no counterpart either in the analytic or continental traditions. Yet there is a point to be made here. When a thinker protests, ‘At all costs, I am trying to think precisely,’ there is always a suspicion that the motivation for philosophy — the pursuit of truth at all costs, regardless of the outcome — has taken second place. This applies as much to analytic philosophy as it does to those Russian thinkers (I suspect Mamardashvili was not one of them)  who allowed themselves to be cowed by the the fascist bullies of the Soviet regime.