Jason Grey wrote:

I'm on my way offline, but the short answer to your second question is that I don't think it does. I deny the first conditional of the dilemma for the reasons I stated. This should also, I hope, go some way to showing why I reject the notion that God's omnipotence does in fact lead to radical skepticism. The purpose of my dilemma was to show that if God is deceitful (ie. such that He just banged around transubstantiating everything), then we don't need anything nearly as spectacular as transubstantiation for the kind of skepticism Mark mentioned in the line I later quoted.

It would be interesting to discuss the points you list (I consider at least a few untroubling; ie. at least one is I think, at bottom, tied up with a Humean analysis of the laws of nature I reject) in a separate thread. Didn't Daniel ask questions about some epistemological claims you made anyway?

I was not meaning to say that I endorsed every one of those points.  Only that each provides a strong prima facie reason for thinking that absolute Cartesian certainty is impossible in empirical matters.  I think, in fact, this Cartesian shift from truth to certainty is one of the great things that has gone wrong with modern thought.  

I think the demand for Cartesian certainty in all cases, that is, to make this kind of certainty a necessary condition of knowledge ends up rendering almost all knowledge impossible, and therefore entails skepticism.  

It does seem to be true that if God just "banged around transubstantiating everything" (nice turn of phrase), then that would present a serious skeptical problem.  I think the way to answer it is to argue for an intellectualist conception of God rather than a voluntarist one (an inscrutably "banging around" God).  I think Muslims have this problem, and that it did and does significantly hinder philosophy and science in the greater Islamic world.  I think Christianity contracted this voluntarist conception in

Let me take a go at the question of transubstantiation.   

The bread and wine used in the sacrament of the Eucharist are said to BE the body and blood of Christ.  Now, they show no outward sign of change -- that is, they seem outwardly to the senses to still BE bread and wine.  If one were to hide a consecrated loaf amidst loaves of unconsecrated bread or set a chalice of consecrated wine amidst several other chalices of unconsecrated wine, the ones that are consecrated, and therefore ARE the body and blood of Christ, would seemingly be undetectable as such.

This leads to the fairly reasonable question:  if we know what a thing IS only by its manifest powers and properties, and the consecrated bread and wine still retain their powers and poperties as bread and wine, how can they BE the body and blood of Christ also?

The typical Protestant answer is: "They can't be two things at once and aren't.  They are not really the body and blood of Christ, but only symbols of Christ's body and blood." 

The typical Orthodox answer is: "They are the body and blood of Christ, and we don't know how this is possible.  It is a mystery.  Or better, a Mystery (the Greek for "sacrament" is [color=#252525]μυστήριον)."

The typical Catholic answer is that some light can be shed on the sarcament by the docrine of transubstantiation, namely, that the bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ in their substance (being, ousia), while remaining unchanged in their accidents or properties.  

In Aristotelian metaphysics, substance/ousia has two chief meanings: the primary meaning is an individuated relatively independent existing being (to on) and the secondary meaning is form or essence or nature (to ti ēn einai).  So, for example, a cat is a substance.  It is a discrete, definable being that we can point to as a distinct act of existence conjoined with a nature or form or whatness (in this case the form "cat") which

DanielCC wrote:

Jason Grey wrote:

For example, my copy of the Summa Theologiae has written on it in big fat black Sharpie letters:  STRAW  
I think that's worth remembering every time one reads Thomas. 
 

On a tangent but an anti-philosophical friend once tried that bit on me. I responded by pointing out that my favourite proof in fact came about as a result of a mystical experience – he was not too happy about this. 

I am definitely not anti-philosophical.  But like many here I suspect, I think that human reason (like all that is best in us)  aims upwards to God, who can of course meet us more than halfway, through revelation and grace.  

Why would it surprise us in the least that a God whom we believe is Himself both the eternal Logos and Truth itself would guide a trust-seeking philosopher to an argument?  Haven't almost all the great Christian philosophers and thinkers prayed for assistance, support, and guidance in their thinking?  I'm not sure one can even distinguish praying and philosophizing in, say, The Confessions.  God may even have a sense of humor about this:  Anselm famously prayed a very long time for THE argument to answer the atheist -- and he got the Ontological Argument.  Question: is that in any way related to God's answers, much more directly, to questions by Moses and Job?

"Here we see as through a glass, darkly."  The human intellect is like a darkened mirror.  It is neither useless nor is it functioning optimally.  In addition to some darkness being INSIDE the faculty that is meant to reflect light, the mirror of the intellect must be aimed in the right direction.  A metanoia is required, a "complete turning of the mind around towards the light" so beautifilly described in Plato's Cave Image.  Plato says that intellect, the eye of the soul, can no more be turned around towards the light without the whole soul being turn towards virtue and the good, than the eye can look throu

Hello everyone.

I am a professional philosopher and an Orthodox Christian.  My journey to classic liturgical theism is in many ways parallel to Professer Feser's -- I passed from Nietzsche's utter destruction of my very faint early (nearly contentless) Prostentism to Heidegger and thence to Plato and finally forward to Christianity, as the genuine culmination of Greek philosophy.  My path led me through Plato to Byzantium rather than through Aristotle to Rome, but I would never diminish Aristotle (whom I consider to be a modified Platonist in all essential respects).  Paradoxically, Catholicism is a like a sweet lure to a philospher like me, but this makes me distrust it.  I tend to regard Latin Christianity as over-emphasizing the power of discursive rationality (logos in the lesser sense, or better, dianoia) and under-emphasizing mystical noētic experience, which in my view sets the stage for the denial of noēsis -- which I take to be equivalent to nominalism, or the denial of real natures or essences, and thus to entail William of Ockham's assertion of the primacy of will and freedom in God over intellect and reason, which was in turn to become (I believe) THE chief mark of modernity: the (step by step) subordination of everything, including the beautiful, the good, and the true (in that order) to the total autonomy of will, first the divine will in theology, and then the human will in philosophical anthropology.  To my mind, the core belief or inner spirit of modernity is this faith in the total autonomy of the will and the perception of anything that hinders or restricts this spontaneous movement of the will as bad, and something to be liberated from.  To thus be absolute sponaneity, this will must itself be contentless except as its own pure movement, a kind of nothingness, or nothing in itself: Nietzsche and Sartre are right to say that modernity is essentially nihilism, a faith not in nothing but in the [i]