We continued in this session with the three philosophers known as the continental rationalists: Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz. They all lived on the continent of Europe, so we're distinguishing them from the next three that we're going to look at, all of whom lived in Britain, and they are called the British empiricists. The difference between the two has to do with their view of the rational order that exists in the world, which is known by the human mind and used by humans to reason, make theories, and draw conclusions.

The rationalists don’t simply believe that there are laws of logic and mathematics; they believe that those are the very fabric of the universe. Descartes even speaks of them as secondary substance. I explained that term in a previous lecture: "substance" means what has independent existence. So, you would think that any Christian philosophizing would say only God has independent existence. God is the reality that stands under ("sub" means "under" and "stance" refers to standing) and supports, giving existence to everything else. And that’s what Descartes did say. He wasn’t as extreme a rationalist as the two fellows who followed him, Spinoza and Leibniz.

However, there’s more at stake. What has independent existence? That includes logic and math, which they tend to see as pretty much the same thing. I think in our own time, we distinguish them because they’ve been elaborated—especially logic has been developed so much in the 20th century that it’s certainly not identical with math, though there is a point at which they converge. But it includes logic and math, and there’s a slogan that very nicely sums up their attitude about the rest of it: "The real is rational, and the rational is real."

Think about that for a minute. See what they’re trying to get away with here. Because the rules we use to prove things—the laws of logic and mathematics—are regarded as having independent existence. They’re part of substance, secondary substance. Remember, that’s what Descartes called it. God is the primary substance, but we've got this other mediating substance. And for these philosophers, for Spinoza, for example, the mediating substances are mind and body. Mind is the reality that operates according to logical and mathematical laws—well, let’s say minds are supposed to do that. I mean, I’ve had a few students who struggled with that one. But they think that’s what mind is: a rational, thinking thing.

They regard this slogan as the key to reality in this strong sense: whatever is not self-contradictory is real.Whoa,

they really mean that? They sure did, and you can see it most clearly in Spinoza's proofs of God's existence. Spinoza gave a number of proofs, and we'll look at them just now. But think about this: if the definition of a thing is not self-contradictory, then it's real. And then they proceed to show that the definition of God, as the being with all and only perfections, is not self-contradictory. Therefore, God exists. But I don’t see any reason I can’t say the same thing about a flying carpet. There’s nothing in the concept of a flying carpet that’s self-contradictory, but that doesn’t make it real. Not being self-contradictory makes something possible, not actual. It’s possible—and I think there are other reasons why flying carpets aren’t possible; I don’t think they pass that criterion. But there are all sorts of things, the definition of which doesn’t contradict itself, that are not real or are never going to be. Think of a talking tree—runs a close second to a flying carpet. There are all sorts of fantasy things that we can think of that don’t contradict themselves, so they’re not logically impossible, but they’re physically impossible, or biologically impossible, or impossible in some other sense.

But Spinoza and the others aren’t having it. They insist: "The real is the rational, and the rational is the real."

Einstein made an interesting comment about that. His point was that not everything that can be mathematized is real, and he gave this clever quip: "Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts."

Clever move.

Sure, not everything that can be expressed in math is real, and not everything that’s real can be reduced to a mathematical formula. So, he rejects both sides of that rationalistic extreme, but our buddy Spinoza affirms it. Let’s have a look at a couple of the proofs that Spinoza offers. One of them goes like this:

  1. God alone is substance.
  2. God has all and only perfections.

Perfection, of course, is any property that makes something better to have than to lack and is possessed in the maximal degree or the highest possible instance of it. So, this is the view that God has the highest possible justice, love, mercy, knowledge, power, wisdom, grace, and so on—whatever the perfections are, however many there are. There may be a million that we don’t know about, but God is the being that has all perfections and only perfections.

  1. God is, by definition, uncaused and unpreventable. Therefore, God must exist.

And the “must” there is a logical “must.” It means that to deny that God exists, you have to contradict yourself—so that can’t be right. In this way, this argument by Spinoza reflects one given earlier by Saint Anselm around 1100. Anselm came up with the same sort of thing: God is the being with all and only perfections, therefore God has perfect existence. What’s perfect existence as opposed to imperfect? Well, perfect existence means you are completely self-existent; you are unconditionally non-dependent, and only God has that. You and I have existence, but it’s not perfect existence. We didn’t always exist, and we will cease to—at least in this life. So, we are not uncaused or unpreventable, but God is. That’s what we mean by God. Therefore, Anselm’s going to say, it follows that God has to exist.

And Spinoza repeats that in another proof. He does this one:

  1. Assume God doesn’t exist.
  2. But God is defined as the being that cannot fail to exist. If God has all perfections, He has perfect existence, so that requires that He cannot fail.
  3. So, what happens then in step three of the argument? These two premises contradict each other. God can’t be uncaused and unpreventable and not exist.

Therefore, God exists—and necessarily.

Where “necessarily” means you have to contradict yourself to deny it. Both Anselm’s argument and Spinoza’s assume that since you have to contradict yourself to deny that God exists, God must exist.

And, of course, there’s a famous criticism of this: it treats existence as though it’s one more property of things—think of ordinary things that we experience every day.

This pen has properties. It has the property of being white, the property of being solid, the property of being light enough to be lifted with one hand, and the property of making marks on my electronic blackboard here. Is existence one more characteristic of it? The objection says no. Existence is just whether there is such a thing as the pen. It’s not one more property of the pen. There can’t be a pen from which you can subtract existence. You can subtract all the other properties. It doesn’t have to be white, it doesn’t have to be solid, and it doesn’t have to be light enough to lift. We can make it so it’s none of those things. We can subtract any of those properties and substitute others. It can be a different color, a different size, a different shape, and if we make it out of the proper material, it could be attracted to the table like a magnet, so that you’d have to exert 1,000 pounds of force to lift it. But if you take away existence, you take away the whole thing and its properties. Existence isn’t just another property of a thing, and treating it as such is mistaken. I think the objection is exactly right.

Spinoza has other proofs, but they all come down to the same stuff, and they all assume that

the real is rational. That means whatever is real is capable of having a rational explanation or definition. It’s open to human knowledge, open to being conceived logically, and whatever works out logically is rational. Whatever can be defined rationally, whatever is subject to proof—and we can construct the proof in front of you—then, if it’s rational, it is real. And, of course, that’s the part they’re trying to apply to God. They’re saying it’s rational. We can give a rational definition: God is the being with all and only perfections.

Now, in other courses, I’ve criticized that argument, the idea of God being defined as the sum of perfections, and I don’t want to repeat all of that here, but I’ll give an abbreviated account of it, starting with this: Scripture doesn’t mention anything about perfections. It attributes different characteristics to God, and I think it does so because God really has those characteristics. Scripture says that God knows us, that He created and sustains the whole of creation, including us, that it grieves God that we are sinful creatures who do not live in accordance with His law, and that God has created the plan of salvation and, in fact, entered His own world as a human to rescue us from the consequences of our sin. All those things are in Scripture, and that gives us God’s plan of salvation. It does not, however, say God is all and only perfections. It doesn’t mention perfections at all. In fact, the only time I know of that the word perfection occurs in the New Testament is when Jesus says to His disciples,

"Be perfect, as your Father in heaven is perfect."

Now, according to the view that God is the being with all and only perfections, this statement would be telling His disciples something absolutely crazy. Jesus would be telling them to be God—"You be perfect as your Father is perfect"—and that’s not at all what it means. It has nothing to do with Plato’s idea that there are perfections in another realm. When Saint Augustine read that, he said, “Ah, Plato discovered God. There’s the highest perfection of all, and Plato even calls it the Father of all things." Augustine thought this was the way to understand our God as revealed in Scripture.

My reaction to that is utter horror. No, it’s not. You don’t take a pagan theory, try to impose it on Scripture, and read Scripture through the lenses of that pagan theory. Augustine thought Plato was wrong only because Plato believed in a myriad of perfections and didn’t understand that they’re all combined in one being. In other words, for Augustine, God doesn’t have the perfections; He is them.

But then, if Jesus says to His disciples, "You be perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect," He’s telling them to be divine beings. He’s telling them to be self-existent creators of the universe, which is nuts. So, what does it mean? The Greek meaning of “perfect” is the highest possible degree of something—the maximal instance of goodness, justice, knowledge, or power. Those are all perfections, yes, but Jews didn’t use the term that way. To them, perfect meant complete.

What Jesus is talking about here is the covenant between God and human beings. He’s saying to His disciples, "You be completely faithful to your end of the covenant as God in heaven is to His end of the covenant." It’s got nothing to do with God being comprised of perfections.

So, I find that Plato's theory is not only unsupported philosophically—you can say, "Here’s a theory," but you can’t give convincing reasons to show it’s right—but it’s also incompatible with what Scripture says about God and the attributes He has. One entire chapter of Scripture is devoted to the fact that God's wisdom is something He created. In Proverbs 8, wisdom says of herself, "I was the first of God's creatures. He brought me forth before the heavens and earth." So, prior to creating the rest of the universe, God brought about wisdom, and He possesses it. This doesn’t mean there was ever a time God didn’t have it, because God exists outside of time. He created time as a feature of His created cosmos. But it does mean that wisdom itself depends on Him to exist. The fact that there is such a quality and that anything can have it—including God—is something God has brought about. That chapter ends with wisdom saying of herself, "And after He used me as a guide in all creation, then I was with the children of men." So, God sees to it that human beings are created so they, too, can participate in wisdom—they don’t have to be fools all the time.

I find that what Scripture does say about God and the way He possesses His properties is utterly at odds with this theory of perfections. So, I wouldn’t define God that way to begin with. God is not the being who has or is all and only perfections. God is the being who has created everything other than Himself, and since the New Testament says that means everything, visible and invisible, it covers everything. That’s why Saint Basil, the fourth-century theologian, put it this way:

"If there are perfections, God created them."

He’s not sure there are. He’s not totally convinced Plato was right, as Augustine became some years after Saint Basil. But Basil knows enough to say whatever is real is created. Everything that’s real other than God is created by God, and Colossians 1 says that means everything, visible or invisible—that covers the lot.

So, I have serious disagreements with the work Spinoza is doing here. I don’t think the real is totally rational, and I certainly don’t think that whatever turns out not to be self-contradictory has to be real. That, to me, seems beyond the pale—silly, even—and I don’t know why a really intelligent person would say a thing like that. Just because the definition of something doesn’t contradict itself doesn’t mean, poof, it exists. No. And I’ve given you some examples already. Well, I won’t belabor this point. Spinoza gave other proofs, but they’re all basically alike: God is defined as the being with all perfections, perfect existence means He cannot come into being or pass away, and therefore God is the being that cannot come into being and can’t pass away. Therefore, God exists. And you go, "Whoa, something went wrong there." And the problem is, he’s assuming that if it doesn’t contradict itself, it’s real. Certainly, there are a myriad of things we can define so that the definition doesn’t contradict itself, but they’re not real and never have been, and never will be.

Well, I think that’s going to do it for our recap of Mr. Spinoza. The next person we covered briefly, and need to recap also, is Leibniz.

You’ll find that sometimes his name is spelled with a "tz" and sometimes just with a "z." The proper way, written in German, is just with the "z." Leibniz also thinks the real is rational, and the rational is real. I mentioned to you what a towering genius this fellow was, but he still buys into the rationalistic assumption: the rational is real, and the real is rational. Now, these two fellows are confronted with Descartes’ part—they read Descartes and want to affirm the dualism Descartes held. There are minds and bodies in humans, and they are not the same thing—they’re completely distinct. By definition, Spinoza gets over the interaction problem by being a pantheist: Well, at root, they’re both the same, made of the being of God. The interaction takes place in the being of God, so we can’t explore it further. But then, as things manifest themselves to our experience, they come across as mind or body—that’s our experience. But behind the scenes, it’s all part and parcel of God, of the being of God.

Leibniz can’t go that route. Leibniz is not a pantheist—he doesn’t want to be one, anyway. He wants to affirm God as He is taught in the Christian religion. Leibniz was a Christian, but he needs to overcome the interaction problem. How’s he going to do that? Well, in his ontology, he proposes that all things consist of what he calls monads.

What the heck is a monad? It’s just a way of saying a unit. There are basic units of reality. And what are these basic units? They are centers of force—physical force—and consciousness.

And all creatures are comprised of monads. Now you understand what he’s telling you—the tiniest particles of matter aren’t just force, But they're also conscious. Everything has some mind in it because all monads do. When you put something together that's made of many of these tiny units, and you get a bigger thing, you get more mind, so you get more consciousness. So, there never is a reality that's solely physical, where the biological emerges, and from the biological emerges consciousness—perception, for example—and then from that emerges rationality. No, no. For Leibniz, it's all there in the beginning. It all starts with units that are units of force—that's their material side, their physical side—and units of consciousness combined. And you get varying degrees of matter. You get more intense matter, more solid stuff. The higher up the scale you go in the level of creatures that exist, the higher up you go means the more units that are put together, the more monads it takes to constitute this. So, presumably, it takes more to constitute a dog than it does to constitute a daisy. Daisies are conscious. They have consciousness, but it doesn't rise to the point of being able to perceive other things or have perceptions or concepts.

I don't know whether Leibniz thought animals had concepts. We now know that higher animals do—dolphins, for example, chimpanzees, gorillas—they’ve been taught sign language, and they communicate with their trainers, stuff like that. So, this consciousness might emerge gradually. I think both Spinoza and Leibniz would applaud Darwin’s theory that consciousness developed gradually because they would just say that shows God planted the seeds of this development right in the original stuff He called into being and made creation, and then it worked its way up. They would have no problem with that at all. But the monads? That’s just weird, right? The dust at your feet is conscious—only very dimly conscious—but I wonder if it knows it's being stepped on. Maybe not. That's too high a concept. But then, by the time you get to a human being, you

The human is both physical and mental, right? That means consciousness. But for humans, mental means not only consciousness but rationality. Humans know the laws of logic and especially mathematics, and are able to understand the creation around them and other humans because of the ability to form logical concepts, do mathematical proofs, and so on. These are Leibnizian terms:

Substance.

It’s not that minds are substance, but the laws of consciousness and rationality are. Minds are the powers of the human self, able to grasp them, reason according to them, and use them to calculate and understand the world around them. That and force. So, whereas Descartes defined the material side as occupying space, that was supposed to be the main characteristic of physics. Leibniz says no, it’s to be a point of force, and that’s much closer to what Newton is going to do. So, we have a very different sort of theory.

Well, how does this explain interaction? When you think about what Spinoza said, he actually denies interaction. Descartes says there’s real interaction between mind and body, but I don’t know how it works—it’s a miracle caused by God. I can’t see any way to explain it.

Spinoza says there really is no interaction between mind and body. The interaction takes place where mind and body converge in the being of God. So, they’re just the same thing in God—they’re not different. One can do something and produce effects in another because they’re all made out of the being of God. That’s what transmits this. So, they’re not really two utterly different things affecting one another, producing effects in the other—that’s just what we experience from our point of view. We don’t see the divine being; we see minds and bodies. But since it’s all made of the divine being—that’s pantheism, it’s all made of the divine being—what would be interaction, one affecting the other, takes place in the being of God behind the scenes.

When we come to Leibniz, Leibniz doesn’t want to be a pantheist. Let’s say God created these monads, the units of force and consciousness, and the consciousness does not produce effects in the force, and the force does not produce effects in the consciousness. He’s got a dualism in which mind and body interaction looks impossible to explain again. But instead of just saying there is no interaction, he tells you why we experience things as though there is. And his theory goes like this: in each monad, and we’re talking about a human monad, okay, there’s a mental side and there’s a body. There are minds and bodies, alright? There are all these points of force and matter. Up here in the mental side, we have perceptions, percepts, and concepts, and the body never produces an effect in the mind, nor the mind in the body, but it doesn’t need to because we experience the world the way we do even if they didn’t produce effects in each other, provided that God pre-programmed each to reflect the other.

So, his theory is that God pre-programmed the mind so that every time, let’s say, the body stubs its toe, pain occurs in the mind. And it’s pain in that toe that was stubbed. And every time the mind decides—let’s say I decide to move my foot—the body, that is, the foot, responds. The body moves the way I want it to move.

And God has pre-programmed each of these, each human monad, so that in its entire life, it is never in contact with any other monads, never in contact with anything outside itself. The expression used is that, according to his theory, monads are windowless. They have no windows. Nobody peeks out and sees what's going on in the world. Why? Well, because it’s like having a TV camera. You've been pre-programmed here. Here is all that’s going on in the world, running off inside your mind, as though it’s percepts of what’s outside, but it’s been pre-programmed. Because God’s pre-programmed the whole thing—all that’s ever going to happen physically, all that’s ever going to happen mentally—all of everybody has willed to move their body in a certain way. He's pre-programmed the body to move that way at that time. It’s

a little far-fetched, and it has a big drawback. If God has pre-programmed what takes place in our minds and affects our bodies, and what takes place in our bodies and affects our minds, what happens

to our freedom? Why isn’t it the case, then, that we have no free will?

It looks as though there isn’t any way to squeeze the freedom in. Leibniz wanted it; he wanted to affirm free will, but the system doesn’t seem to allow it. And I remind you again about this debate between determinism and freedom. Determinism is the view that all of our actions, thoughts, beliefs, attitudes, and feelings are determined—that is, absolutely caused—by physical forces that existed before we existed and which impact us, so that we are not actually free. We think we are, but all that we like, dislike, believe, not believe, all that we perceive, is produced in us, and it does not need the cooperation of our will to do it. So, when we talk about human freedom, it narrows the issue too strictly to just talk about freedom of the will—that only talks about choices that we make—and it’s important for ethics and the law, for example, to say that somebody did an action of his own free will, therefore he's responsible for it. The determinist wants to say all of our actions, and that means all humans’ actions, are determined by forces that existed before we were ever born, and those forces impact us, so that it makes us think what we think, believe what we believe, dislike what we dislike, and so on.

But talking about it as free will seems to narrow it just to the choices that we make. We need freedom not only of the will but freedom to think rationally, to weigh evidence, to draw conclusions. A lot of determinists concede that there’s no free will, and they say, therefore, our justice system should be different. I mentioned this last lecture. They say that if someone killed somebody else, murdered someone, they should be segregated from the rest of society. They should be locked up if they did it, so that they won’t kill anymore. Of course, you might think no murder was ever committed in prison, but they should not be blamed. We can’t say, "This is an awful person just because they like to kill people and eat their victims," or something like Jeffrey Dahmer. It’s not evil; it’s just that he didn’t come out well, given the forces that went into forming our galaxy and our planet, and finally, his body, and so on. He couldn’t help being that way.

But I’m saying it’s not just freedom of the will, but freedom of reason. If you’ve kissed off freedom, you also can’t reason freely, and that means that all our trouble of investigating something, say scientifically, to find out what constitutes it and how it works, all of our effort—our evidence-gathering, evidence-weighing, deciding between competing theories, and coming to a reasonable conclusion—that’s all an illusion too. We’re forced to every one of the conclusions we accept all along the way. That’s what determinism entails—not just no freedom of choice for ethics and the law, but no freedom of reasoning over the entire spectrum of human experience. And having taken that away, the theory also then defeats itself. If we have no freedom to reason and come to a reasonably drawn conclusion and believe it for the reasons, then we have no reason to think that determinism is exempt from that. It too is forced on the people that believe it, and it’s not the result of a rational argument or evidence.

So determinism is self-defeating, and I think that’s the main reason. That, and the fact that we have the experience of choosing freely and of rational deliberation—that agonizing process of coming to the right conclusion, finally deciding—maybe a member of a jury or something. Here's all the evidence for and against the guilt of this person, weighs it, summarizes the arguments, goes through them, finds flaws, finds points that the two attorneys didn’t make, thinks the whole thing through, and comes to the conclusion, "I’m voting for the guilt or innocence of the poor sap on trial."

So don’t be too quick to be impressed by the determinist arguments because, if he’s right, he doesn’t believe it for those arguments. He believes it was the way the Big Bang took place 13 billion years ago. That’s his own theory. I think Leibniz has a serious problem trying to keep freedom if whatever occurs on this side produces effects here only because God pre-programmed this to respond that way. And whatever occurs here is perceived and weighed and judged here because God pre-programmed this to take place at just this time, and there’s no real interaction at all.

So that’s how the problem of interaction was confronted in Descartes’ own century, in the 17th century. We have three positions: real interaction, but I know not how—that’s Descartes; the illusion of interaction, interaction not needed because mind and body, at bottom, are one—that’s Spinoza; and Leibniz’s, where there’s no real interaction, but there’s a pre-established harmony between mind and body because God’s pre-programmed both to reflect what’s going on in the other.

Wild stuff, huh? Yeah. I see we’ve run out of time. I think this little review will be helpful though, especially if you’re reading Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz. I hope you’re keeping up with that reading. Next time, we will proceed to go further in this century, and we’ll look at what takes place now in Britain with the philosophers who are called British empiricists. Let’s get that word clear right from the beginning here. 

We continued in this session with the three philosophers known as the continental rationalists: Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz. They all lived on the continent of Europe, so we're distinguishing them from the next three that we're going to look at, all of whom lived in Britain, and they are called the British empiricists. The difference between the two has to do with their view of the rational order that exists in the world, which is known by the human mind and used by humans to reason, make theories, and draw conclusions.

The rationalists don’t simply believe that there are laws of logic and mathematics; they believe that those are the very fabric of the universe. Descartes even speaks of them as secondary substance. I explained that term in a previous lecture: "substance" means what has independent existence. So, you would think that any Christian philosophizing would say only God has independent existence. God is the reality that stands under ("sub" means "under" and "stance" refers to standing) and supports, giving existence to everything else. And that’s what Descartes did say. He wasn’t as extreme a rationalist as the two fellows who followed him, Spinoza and Leibniz.

However, there’s more at stake. What has independent existence? That includes logic and math, which they tend to see as pretty much the same thing. I think in our own time, we distinguish them because they’ve been elaborated—especially logic has been developed so much in the 20th century that it’s certainly not identical with math, though there is a point at which they converge. But it includes logic and math, and there’s a slogan that very nicely sums up their attitude about the rest of it: "The real is rational, and the rational is real."

Think about that for a minute. See what they’re trying to get away with here. Because the rules we use to prove things—the laws of logic and mathematics—are regarded as having independent existence. They’re part of substance, secondary substance. Remember, that’s what Descartes called it. God is the primary substance, but we've got this other mediating substance. And for these philosophers, for Spinoza, for example, the mediating substances are mind and body. Mind is the reality that operates according to logical and mathematical laws—well, let’s say minds are supposed to do that. I mean, I’ve had a few students who struggled with that one. But they think that’s what mind is: a rational, thinking thing.

They regard this slogan as the key to reality in this strong sense: whatever is not self-contradictory is real.Whoa,

they really mean that? They sure did, and you can see it most clearly in Spinoza's proofs of God's existence. Spinoza gave a number of proofs, and we'll look at them just now. But think about this: if the definition of a thing is not self-contradictory, then it's real. And then they proceed to show that the definition of God, as the being with all and only perfections, is not self-contradictory. Therefore, God exists. But I don’t see any reason I can’t say the same thing about a flying carpet. There’s nothing in the concept of a flying carpet that’s self-contradictory, but that doesn’t make it real. Not being self-contradictory makes something possible, not actual. It’s possible—and I think there are other reasons why flying carpets aren’t possible; I don’t think they pass that criterion. But there are all sorts of things, the definition of which doesn’t contradict itself, that are not real or are never going to be. Think of a talking tree—runs a close second to a flying carpet. There are all sorts of fantasy things that we can think of that don’t contradict themselves, so they’re not logically impossible, but they’re physically impossible, or biologically impossible, or impossible in some other sense.

But Spinoza and the others aren’t having it. They insist: "The real is the rational, and the rational is the real."

Einstein made an interesting comment about that. His point was that not everything that can be mathematized is real, and he gave this clever quip: "Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts."

Clever move.

Sure, not everything that can be expressed in math is real, and not everything that’s real can be reduced to a mathematical formula. So, he rejects both sides of that rationalistic extreme, but our buddy Spinoza affirms it. Let’s have a look at a couple of the proofs that Spinoza offers. One of them goes like this:

  1. God alone is substance.
  2. God has all and only perfections.

Perfection, of course, is any property that makes something better to have than to lack and is possessed in the maximal degree or the highest possible instance of it. So, this is the view that God has the highest possible justice, love, mercy, knowledge, power, wisdom, grace, and so on—whatever the perfections are, however many there are. There may be a million that we don’t know about, but God is the being that has all perfections and only perfections.

  1. God is, by definition, uncaused and unpreventable. Therefore, God must exist.

And the “must” there is a logical “must.” It means that to deny that God exists, you have to contradict yourself—so that can’t be right. In this way, this argument by Spinoza reflects one given earlier by Saint Anselm around 1100. Anselm came up with the same sort of thing: God is the being with all and only perfections, therefore God has perfect existence. What’s perfect existence as opposed to imperfect? Well, perfect existence means you are completely self-existent; you are unconditionally non-dependent, and only God has that. You and I have existence, but it’s not perfect existence. We didn’t always exist, and we will cease to—at least in this life. So, we are not uncaused or unpreventable, but God is. That’s what we mean by God. Therefore, Anselm’s going to say, it follows that God has to exist.

And Spinoza repeats that in another proof. He does this one:

  1. Assume God doesn’t exist.
  2. But God is defined as the being that cannot fail to exist. If God has all perfections, He has perfect existence, so that requires that He cannot fail.
  3. So, what happens then in step three of the argument? These two premises contradict each other. God can’t be uncaused and unpreventable and not exist.

Therefore, God exists—and necessarily.

Where “necessarily” means you have to contradict yourself to deny it. Both Anselm’s argument and Spinoza’s assume that since you have to contradict yourself to deny that God exists, God must exist.

And, of course, there’s a famous criticism of this: it treats existence as though it’s one more property of things—think of ordinary things that we experience every day.

This pen has properties. It has the property of being white, the property of being solid, the property of being light enough to be lifted with one hand, and the property of making marks on my electronic blackboard here. Is existence one more characteristic of it? The objection says no. Existence is just whether there is such a thing as the pen. It’s not one more property of the pen. There can’t be a pen from which you can subtract existence. You can subtract all the other properties. It doesn’t have to be white, it doesn’t have to be solid, and it doesn’t have to be light enough to lift. We can make it so it’s none of those things. We can subtract any of those properties and substitute others. It can be a different color, a different size, a different shape, and if we make it out of the proper material, it could be attracted to the table like a magnet, so that you’d have to exert 1,000 pounds of force to lift it. But if you take away existence, you take away the whole thing and its properties. Existence isn’t just another property of a thing, and treating it as such is mistaken. I think the objection is exactly right.

Spinoza has other proofs, but they all come down to the same stuff, and they all assume that

the real is rational. That means whatever is real is capable of having a rational explanation or definition. It’s open to human knowledge, open to being conceived logically, and whatever works out logically is rational. Whatever can be defined rationally, whatever is subject to proof—and we can construct the proof in front of you—then, if it’s rational, it is real. And, of course, that’s the part they’re trying to apply to God. They’re saying it’s rational. We can give a rational definition: God is the being with all and only perfections.

Now, in other courses, I’ve criticized that argument, the idea of God being defined as the sum of perfections, and I don’t want to repeat all of that here, but I’ll give an abbreviated account of it, starting with this: Scripture doesn’t mention anything about perfections. It attributes different characteristics to God, and I think it does so because God really has those characteristics. Scripture says that God knows us, that He created and sustains the whole of creation, including us, that it grieves God that we are sinful creatures who do not live in accordance with His law, and that God has created the plan of salvation and, in fact, entered His own world as a human to rescue us from the consequences of our sin. All those things are in Scripture, and that gives us God’s plan of salvation. It does not, however, say God is all and only perfections. It doesn’t mention perfections at all. In fact, the only time I know of that the word perfection occurs in the New Testament is when Jesus says to His disciples,

"Be perfect, as your Father in heaven is perfect."

Now, according to the view that God is the being with all and only perfections, this statement would be telling His disciples something absolutely crazy. Jesus would be telling them to be God—"You be perfect as your Father is perfect"—and that’s not at all what it means. It has nothing to do with Plato’s idea that there are perfections in another realm. When Saint Augustine read that, he said, “Ah, Plato discovered God. There’s the highest perfection of all, and Plato even calls it the Father of all things." Augustine thought this was the way to understand our God as revealed in Scripture.

My reaction to that is utter horror. No, it’s not. You don’t take a pagan theory, try to impose it on Scripture, and read Scripture through the lenses of that pagan theory. Augustine thought Plato was wrong only because Plato believed in a myriad of perfections and didn’t understand that they’re all combined in one being. In other words, for Augustine, God doesn’t have the perfections; He is them.

But then, if Jesus says to His disciples, "You be perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect," He’s telling them to be divine beings. He’s telling them to be self-existent creators of the universe, which is nuts. So, what does it mean? The Greek meaning of “perfect” is the highest possible degree of something—the maximal instance of goodness, justice, knowledge, or power. Those are all perfections, yes, but Jews didn’t use the term that way. To them, perfect meant complete.

What Jesus is talking about here is the covenant between God and human beings. He’s saying to His disciples, "You be completely faithful to your end of the covenant as God in heaven is to His end of the covenant." It’s got nothing to do with God being comprised of perfections.

So, I find that Plato's theory is not only unsupported philosophically—you can say, "Here’s a theory," but you can’t give convincing reasons to show it’s right—but it’s also incompatible with what Scripture says about God and the attributes He has. One entire chapter of Scripture is devoted to the fact that God's wisdom is something He created. In Proverbs 8, wisdom says of herself, "I was the first of God's creatures. He brought me forth before the heavens and earth." So, prior to creating the rest of the universe, God brought about wisdom, and He possesses it. This doesn’t mean there was ever a time God didn’t have it, because God exists outside of time. He created time as a feature of His created cosmos. But it does mean that wisdom itself depends on Him to exist. The fact that there is such a quality and that anything can have it—including God—is something God has brought about. That chapter ends with wisdom saying of herself, "And after He used me as a guide in all creation, then I was with the children of men." So, God sees to it that human beings are created so they, too, can participate in wisdom—they don’t have to be fools all the time.

I find that what Scripture does say about God and the way He possesses His properties is utterly at odds with this theory of perfections. So, I wouldn’t define God that way to begin with. God is not the being who has or is all and only perfections. God is the being who has created everything other than Himself, and since the New Testament says that means everything, visible and invisible, it covers everything. That’s why Saint Basil, the fourth-century theologian, put it this way:

"If there are perfections, God created them."

He’s not sure there are. He’s not totally convinced Plato was right, as Augustine became some years after Saint Basil. But Basil knows enough to say whatever is real is created. Everything that’s real other than God is created by God, and Colossians 1 says that means everything, visible or invisible—that covers the lot.

So, I have serious disagreements with the work Spinoza is doing here. I don’t think the real is totally rational, and I certainly don’t think that whatever turns out not to be self-contradictory has to be real. That, to me, seems beyond the pale—silly, even—and I don’t know why a really intelligent person would say a thing like that. Just because the definition of something doesn’t contradict itself doesn’t mean, poof, it exists. No. And I’ve given you some examples already. Well, I won’t belabor this point. Spinoza gave other proofs, but they’re all basically alike: God is defined as the being with all perfections, perfect existence means He cannot come into being or pass away, and therefore God is the being that cannot come into being and can’t pass away. Therefore, God exists. And you go, "Whoa, something went wrong there." And the problem is, he’s assuming that if it doesn’t contradict itself, it’s real. Certainly, there are a myriad of things we can define so that the definition doesn’t contradict itself, but they’re not real and never have been, and never will be.

Well, I think that’s going to do it for our recap of Mr. Spinoza. The next person we covered briefly, and need to recap also, is Leibniz.

You’ll find that sometimes his name is spelled with a "tz" and sometimes just with a "z." The proper way, written in German, is just with the "z." Leibniz also thinks the real is rational, and the rational is real. I mentioned to you what a towering genius this fellow was, but he still buys into the rationalistic assumption: the rational is real, and the real is rational. Now, these two fellows are confronted with Descartes’ part—they read Descartes and want to affirm the dualism Descartes held. There are minds and bodies in humans, and they are not the same thing—they’re completely distinct. By definition, Spinoza gets over the interaction problem by being a pantheist: Well, at root, they’re both the same, made of the being of God. The interaction takes place in the being of God, so we can’t explore it further. But then, as things manifest themselves to our experience, they come across as mind or body—that’s our experience. But behind the scenes, it’s all part and parcel of God, of the being of God.

Leibniz can’t go that route. Leibniz is not a pantheist—he doesn’t want to be one, anyway. He wants to affirm God as He is taught in the Christian religion. Leibniz was a Christian, but he needs to overcome the interaction problem. How’s he going to do that? Well, in his ontology, he proposes that all things consist of what he calls monads.

What the heck is a monad? It’s just a way of saying a unit. There are basic units of reality. And what are these basic units? They are centers of force—physical force—and consciousness.

And all creatures are comprised of monads. Now you understand what he’s telling you—the tiniest particles of matter aren’t just force, But they're also conscious. Everything has some mind in it because all monads do. When you put something together that's made of many of these tiny units, and you get a bigger thing, you get more mind, so you get more consciousness. So, there never is a reality that's solely physical, where the biological emerges, and from the biological emerges consciousness—perception, for example—and then from that emerges rationality. No, no. For Leibniz, it's all there in the beginning. It all starts with units that are units of force—that's their material side, their physical side—and units of consciousness combined. And you get varying degrees of matter. You get more intense matter, more solid stuff. The higher up the scale you go in the level of creatures that exist, the higher up you go means the more units that are put together, the more monads it takes to constitute this. So, presumably, it takes more to constitute a dog than it does to constitute a daisy. Daisies are conscious. They have consciousness, but it doesn't rise to the point of being able to perceive other things or have perceptions or concepts.

I don't know whether Leibniz thought animals had concepts. We now know that higher animals do—dolphins, for example, chimpanzees, gorillas—they’ve been taught sign language, and they communicate with their trainers, stuff like that. So, this consciousness might emerge gradually. I think both Spinoza and Leibniz would applaud Darwin’s theory that consciousness developed gradually because they would just say that shows God planted the seeds of this development right in the original stuff He called into being and made creation, and then it worked its way up. They would have no problem with that at all. But the monads? That’s just weird, right? The dust at your feet is conscious—only very dimly conscious—but I wonder if it knows it's being stepped on. Maybe not. That's too high a concept. But then, by the time you get to a human being, you

The human is both physical and mental, right? That means consciousness. But for humans, mental means not only consciousness but rationality. Humans know the laws of logic and especially mathematics, and are able to understand the creation around them and other humans because of the ability to form logical concepts, do mathematical proofs, and so on. These are Leibnizian terms:

Substance.

It’s not that minds are substance, but the laws of consciousness and rationality are. Minds are the powers of the human self, able to grasp them, reason according to them, and use them to calculate and understand the world around them. That and force. So, whereas Descartes defined the material side as occupying space, that was supposed to be the main characteristic of physics. Leibniz says no, it’s to be a point of force, and that’s much closer to what Newton is going to do. So, we have a very different sort of theory.

Well, how does this explain interaction? When you think about what Spinoza said, he actually denies interaction. Descartes says there’s real interaction between mind and body, but I don’t know how it works—it’s a miracle caused by God. I can’t see any way to explain it.

Spinoza says there really is no interaction between mind and body. The interaction takes place where mind and body converge in the being of God. So, they’re just the same thing in God—they’re not different. One can do something and produce effects in another because they’re all made out of the being of God. That’s what transmits this. So, they’re not really two utterly different things affecting one another, producing effects in the other—that’s just what we experience from our point of view. We don’t see the divine being; we see minds and bodies. But since it’s all made of the divine being—that’s pantheism, it’s all made of the divine being—what would be interaction, one affecting the other, takes place in the being of God behind the scenes.

When we come to Leibniz, Leibniz doesn’t want to be a pantheist. Let’s say God created these monads, the units of force and consciousness, and the consciousness does not produce effects in the force, and the force does not produce effects in the consciousness. He’s got a dualism in which mind and body interaction looks impossible to explain again. But instead of just saying there is no interaction, he tells you why we experience things as though there is. And his theory goes like this: in each monad, and we’re talking about a human monad, okay, there’s a mental side and there’s a body. There are minds and bodies, alright? There are all these points of force and matter. Up here in the mental side, we have perceptions, percepts, and concepts, and the body never produces an effect in the mind, nor the mind in the body, but it doesn’t need to because we experience the world the way we do even if they didn’t produce effects in each other, provided that God pre-programmed each to reflect the other.

So, his theory is that God pre-programmed the mind so that every time, let’s say, the body stubs its toe, pain occurs in the mind. And it’s pain in that toe that was stubbed. And every time the mind decides—let’s say I decide to move my foot—the body, that is, the foot, responds. The body moves the way I want it to move.

And God has pre-programmed each of these, each human monad, so that in its entire life, it is never in contact with any other monads, never in contact with anything outside itself. The expression used is that, according to his theory, monads are windowless. They have no windows. Nobody peeks out and sees what's going on in the world. Why? Well, because it’s like having a TV camera. You've been pre-programmed here. Here is all that’s going on in the world, running off inside your mind, as though it’s percepts of what’s outside, but it’s been pre-programmed. Because God’s pre-programmed the whole thing—all that’s ever going to happen physically, all that’s ever going to happen mentally—all of everybody has willed to move their body in a certain way. He's pre-programmed the body to move that way at that time. It’s

a little far-fetched, and it has a big drawback. If God has pre-programmed what takes place in our minds and affects our bodies, and what takes place in our bodies and affects our minds, what happens

to our freedom? Why isn’t it the case, then, that we have no free will?

It looks as though there isn’t any way to squeeze the freedom in. Leibniz wanted it; he wanted to affirm free will, but the system doesn’t seem to allow it. And I remind you again about this debate between determinism and freedom. Determinism is the view that all of our actions, thoughts, beliefs, attitudes, and feelings are determined—that is, absolutely caused—by physical forces that existed before we existed and which impact us, so that we are not actually free. We think we are, but all that we like, dislike, believe, not believe, all that we perceive, is produced in us, and it does not need the cooperation of our will to do it. So, when we talk about human freedom, it narrows the issue too strictly to just talk about freedom of the will—that only talks about choices that we make—and it’s important for ethics and the law, for example, to say that somebody did an action of his own free will, therefore he's responsible for it. The determinist wants to say all of our actions, and that means all humans’ actions, are determined by forces that existed before we were ever born, and those forces impact us, so that it makes us think what we think, believe what we believe, dislike what we dislike, and so on.

But talking about it as free will seems to narrow it just to the choices that we make. We need freedom not only of the will but freedom to think rationally, to weigh evidence, to draw conclusions. A lot of determinists concede that there’s no free will, and they say, therefore, our justice system should be different. I mentioned this last lecture. They say that if someone killed somebody else, murdered someone, they should be segregated from the rest of society. They should be locked up if they did it, so that they won’t kill anymore. Of course, you might think no murder was ever committed in prison, but they should not be blamed. We can’t say, "This is an awful person just because they like to kill people and eat their victims," or something like Jeffrey Dahmer. It’s not evil; it’s just that he didn’t come out well, given the forces that went into forming our galaxy and our planet, and finally, his body, and so on. He couldn’t help being that way.

But I’m saying it’s not just freedom of the will, but freedom of reason. If you’ve kissed off freedom, you also can’t reason freely, and that means that all our trouble of investigating something, say scientifically, to find out what constitutes it and how it works, all of our effort—our evidence-gathering, evidence-weighing, deciding between competing theories, and coming to a reasonable conclusion—that’s all an illusion too. We’re forced to every one of the conclusions we accept all along the way. That’s what determinism entails—not just no freedom of choice for ethics and the law, but no freedom of reasoning over the entire spectrum of human experience. And having taken that away, the theory also then defeats itself. If we have no freedom to reason and come to a reasonably drawn conclusion and believe it for the reasons, then we have no reason to think that determinism is exempt from that. It too is forced on the people that believe it, and it’s not the result of a rational argument or evidence.

So determinism is self-defeating, and I think that’s the main reason. That, and the fact that we have the experience of choosing freely and of rational deliberation—that agonizing process of coming to the right conclusion, finally deciding—maybe a member of a jury or something. Here's all the evidence for and against the guilt of this person, weighs it, summarizes the arguments, goes through them, finds flaws, finds points that the two attorneys didn’t make, thinks the whole thing through, and comes to the conclusion, "I’m voting for the guilt or innocence of the poor sap on trial."

So don’t be too quick to be impressed by the determinist arguments because, if he’s right, he doesn’t believe it for those arguments. He believes it was the way the Big Bang took place 13 billion years ago. That’s his own theory. I think Leibniz has a serious problem trying to keep freedom if whatever occurs on this side produces effects here only because God pre-programmed this to respond that way. And whatever occurs here is perceived and weighed and judged here because God pre-programmed this to take place at just this time, and there’s no real interaction at all.

So that’s how the problem of interaction was confronted in Descartes’ own century, in the 17th century. We have three positions: real interaction, but I know not how—that’s Descartes; the illusion of interaction, interaction not needed because mind and body, at bottom, are one—that’s Spinoza; and Leibniz’s, where there’s no real interaction, but there’s a pre-established harmony between mind and body because God’s pre-programmed both to reflect what’s going on in the other.

Wild stuff, huh? Yeah. I see we’ve run out of time. I think this little review will be helpful though, especially if you’re reading Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz. I hope you’re keeping up with that reading. Next time, we will proceed to go further in this century, and we’ll look at what takes place now in Britain with the philosophers who are called British empiricists. Let’s get that word clear right from the beginning here.

An empiricist is someone who believes that experience is how we come to know the world around us and ourselves, and the primary example of that is sense perception. In fact, this group of philosophers, who emphasize getting information from experience, specifically sense perception, often take this concept to an extreme. Let me rephrase that. They push this idea so far that they don’t really begin with our experience in its full richness. I agree with empiricism if it means that experience is the source of our knowledge of ourselves, others, and the world around us. But the question is: what is it that we actually experience?

Empiricists claim that the first thing we experience are perceptions, which they believe exist as separate entities inside our minds, and these perceptions possess only sensory properties. According to them, the primary elements of experience are sensory data or sense perceptions—sights, tastes, touches, sounds, and smells that register in our minds. They argue that these perceptions are what is given to us in experience. However, this view oversimplifies what we truly find in our experience.

The primary thing we experience is the world itself: things, events, states of affairs, relationships, and persons. They claim to start with experience, but in reality, they limit it to sensory perceptions that are supposed to be copies of the things causing them. But that’s not what is truly given in our experience. We don’t experience isolated sense data; instead, we experience a world filled with objects, events, and relationships, each possessing a variety of properties.

For instance, when you look around your living room, you don’t just experience colors, sounds, tastes, and smells. You experience objects—tables, chairs, sofas, paintings, windows. These objects have a multiplicity of properties, including sensory properties (like color and texture), but they also have physical, mathematical, and even logical properties. You can measure a table, gauge its size and shape, and observe its weight and mass. These objects also have logical properties, such as being distinguishable from one another, and linguistic properties, such as being nameable and describable in language.

Empiricists, by focusing only on sensory data, miss the full complexity of what we actually experience. They reduce everything to perceptions that have only sensory properties, and this creates a problem when they try to account for the rest of experience. As a result, they end up concluding that all we know exists inside our minds as sense perceptions, and we cannot know for certain whether these perceptions correspond to a real external world or if such a world even exists.

This brings us to the sad legacy of Enlightenment empiricism. While the Enlightenment is often praised for freeing reason from superstition and expanding human understanding, it left us with a troubling skepticism about the reality of the world around us. According to this legacy, we are locked inside our own minds, unable to know for sure whether there is a world beyond our perceptions, or what that world is like. This is a rather grim conclusion: we might be the only things that exist, trapped in a mental "virtual reality" of our own making, unsure of anything beyond ourselves. That's a pretty bleak outcome for a philosophy that claims to be based on human experience.


آخر تعديل: الثلاثاء، 29 أكتوبر 2024، 5:42 م