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Book Review: The Recalcitrant Imago Dei by J.P. Moreland

This is the first of what will probably be many book reviews. Yes, it is indeed just another way to put easy content up on my site. Since school started I have less time for this, but I’m still reading as much as I can. Any feedback would be wonderful. I’ll post the review criteria at the bottom of this review, and probably make an individual post about it so the criteria can be easily accessed. Also, any suggestions for other categories to review would be appreciated (or suggestions to remove categories).

J.P. Moreland’s The Recalcitrant Imago Dei is a work that outlines a case against naturalism based on what a Christian would define as the “image of God.” These recalcitrant (as far as naturalism is concerned) facts include consciousness, free will, rationality, a substantial soul, objective morality, and intrinsic value.

J.P. Moreland has, I believe, outlined a rather magnficent critique of naturalism in this work. Chapter by chapter, he lays out philosophical defeaters for naturalism that are based on some of the most basic facts of human life. Each chapter contains clear, though often intellectually challenging, arguments against naturalism based on such things as consciousness or free will.

The chapter on Consciousness was, I believe, great, but I’ve read almost all the material in other works (specifically, J.P. Moreland’s Consciousness and the Existence of God and William Lane Craig/Moreland’s Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology). I believe that current apologists are certainly on to something when they consider the argument from consciousness, which I would consider a rather impressive defeater of naturalism. Moreland’s version of the argument is actually an argument for theism, and as far as I’m concerned, that makes it even better.

The next chapter considers the case of the freedom of the will. I believe that Moreland is correct in suggesting that naturalism generally, and physicalism specifically are almost certainly defeaters of the freedom of the will. Morelands argument in this chapter is again similar to some of his other works (here it would be Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview), but there is some material here that is both not recycled and very useful. I believe that this is a chapter I will continue to open to in my debates with physicalists.

One argument that continues to pique my interest is the argument from rationality. In this chapter, Moreland doesn’t so much employ an argument from reason for the existence of God as he uses the existence of reason as a defeater for naturalism. I believe many of the aspects of the argument from reason tend to mirror some of the teleological argument’s claims, and because of this I generally am biased against it, but I find Moreland’s methodology of using it against naturalism rather than as a proof for God quite interesting and will probably use it in application.

The chapter on the substantial soul is, I believe, less useful as an argument against naturalism (I think naturalists who argue that the soul is a physical object are, well, generally ignored nowadays), but the chapter contains several pages of highly useful definitions. It’s another chapter I will almost certainly continue to open to in order to clearly outline my responses.

Objective morality is a continual problem that I don’t see naturalism having any way around. I’m a huge advocate of the moral argument, and while Moreland doesn’t advance any specific moral argument in this chapter, he uses the idea of objective morality as a defeater for naturalism (and vice versa). Further, he argues that naturalism has no way to give humans intrinsic value, due to the idea that, according to naturalism, humans are merely animals and have no significant differences between them and, say, a dog as far as the physical world is concerned. His discussion in this chapter and the previous chapter on the errors of various philosophers using species relations when they should be discussing genus relations is highly interesting, though I’m unsure of the applicability.

The appendix has a few useful things, but it is mostly just Moreland observing various philosophical trends. He does offer an argument against naturalistic dismissivism that I will probably make use of in the future.

Overall, The Recalcitrant Imago Dei is a fantastic work. Although some portions of it are clearly recycled, including almost an entire chapter, it is a work that I will almost certainly use again and again. Moreland’s style of writing is almost always clear, but he sometimes suffers from an overuse of philosophical terms that are usually obvious in meaning, but could probably have been better said in a simpler fashion (like qualia, desiderata, etc.). I got this book hoping it would have some good arguments in it to help formulate a general critique of naturalism and I was not disappointed. I recommend this book highly, but be aware of the fact that it is certainly not easy reading.

Contents:

Naturalism, Theism and Human Persons: Identifying the Central Crisis of Our Age —1

Naturalism, Consciousness and Human Persons —16

Naturalism, Free Will and Human Persons —41

Naturalism, Rationality and Human Persons —67

Naturalism, a Substantial Soul and Human Persons —104

Naturalism, Objective Morality, Intrinsic Value and Human Persons —143

Appendix: Dismissive Naturalism: Responding to Nagel’s Last Stand —165

Scores:

Quality of Arguments (if it applies): 8

Overall Content: 9

Difficulty: 7

Clarity: 9

Theology/Doctrine: N/A- other than fairly fundamental Christian belief, this doesn’t really have enough to judge the work based on Doctrinal or Theological stances

Value (price): 8- Amazon has it for around 30-40$ The book’s actual material (before the notes/index start) comprise 180 pages. Normally I think this is a little low for a 40$ book, but there is no wasted space here.

Relevance: 9

Review Criteria:

The Quality of arguments is just what it says. Obviously this is subjective. Do I think the arguments presented in the book (if there are any) are valid and/or useful?

Overall Content is a general judge of how good I felt the book is.

Difficulty is the amount of work it takes to get through the work. Higher values don’t necessarily mean the book is better, just more difficult to read.

Clarity simply outlines how clear I believe the author was.

Theology/Doctrine is my judgment, clearly based on my presuppositions, of how good I felt the author’s theological or doctrinal content was (if there is any).

Value is a determination of whether I believe the book is worth the asking price.

Relevance outlines whether I think the book has real-life applications. A low score in this doesn’t necessarily mean the book is bad, just that I believe there may not be much to use. In other words, a book could score low on this criterium, but I might still find it quite good.

Cleaning the Altar

This past Saturday (the 19th), I went with my girlfriend to clean up after a church had been vandalized.

When we got to the church, most of the damage had already been undone. There were several crosses that had been smashed amongst the pews. There was a safe in the basement that had a hole punched through it. The vandal(s) had dumped powdered bleach all over the items in the basement, including chairs and tables.

The church is having an event this weekend, so cleaning up was a top priority, not just cleaning the damage, but doing as much as we could to get the church in general in top shape.

Part of my job was to clean the altar. It was wonderful. I was polishing/washing and my girlfriend was drying. As I was wiping down the altar, I was singing softly “Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy, Lord have mercy… on me.” It was a wonderful connection. God’s presence is real in the world and such events do nothing but confirm God’s hand in all things as far as I am concerned. It was a truly spiritual experience and one that I’ll never forget.

The Suffering God: Christianity, Evil, and God

Christianity is confronted with many questions in this era.

What is it that makes Christianity different?

Aren’t all religions the same?

Are not all the gods people worship really just the same god?

I (and many before me) suggest, however, that there is an answer to all of these questions. One of my professors, the Reverend Dr. Richard J. Shuta, told a story in our class. He was on the way back home, waiting for a cab. A man was waiting with him. Rev. Dr. Shuta is a theologian, and the man, who would be travelling in the cab with him, was a professor of philosophy. The man cut to the chaise and said, “I have just one question. If I stand on a street corner and I see a church, a mosque, a hindu temple, a buddhist temple, etc… why should I enter the church instead of any other?”

Dr. Shuta’s answer was simple, but profound. “Suffering.”

It is remarkable, in my opinion, that suffering, which is often used as a weapon against theism (see my post on this topic), can be such a remarkable explanatory tool for Christianity. For it is suffering itself which sets Christianity apart.

If a list of all the things that united all humanity were compiled, I am sure that suffering would be near the top of the list. Suffering is something each and every individual experiences on some level. It is how we make sense of this suffering that is different.

The God of Christianity understands this universal concept. The God Christianity worships is symbolized by a Cross, the image of suffering. Other religions demand that humanity approaches god. They demand that humanity make oneself better, purify oneself, become nothing, etc. Christianity has God do it for us. God came to us, God suffered, God took the burden on Himself so we may live in eternity.

The Suffering God is the God of Christianity. The Loving God is the God of Christianity. What is it that makes Christianity different? The God of Christianity knows pain, and understands it, and experienced it.

Again, it is the Cross that defines Christianity. What do Christians believe? Christ crucified for all.

Ravi Zacharias states, in Can Man Live Without God? “It is the cross that invites us to die to self that the life of Christ may live in us fully. Without the cross there is no glory in man. The difference between man-made utopias and a God-made heaven is the cross (178).” [Emphasis his]. It is the cross. It is this symbol of suffering Christ. The symbol of our Suffering God. Suffering unites humanity, and God knows this suffering intimately.

Modern theism, according to N.T. Wright, seems to tend towards Enlightenment Deism. I’d tend to agree. Even Christians tend to think of God as some far away being that “loves us” but doesn’t really interact with us. It’s a concept that must be abolished from Christianity, for our God is the God who is Here. Our God is Immanuel, literally “God with us.” This God of Christianity is the one which we have too often abandoned and modified with our philosophical meanderings, allowing worldly concepts to permeate a personal, truly loving God.

The Cross is suffering. The symbol with which we refer to Christ is a symbol of suffering. It is this idea that is vastly important when thinking of Christianity. Christianity acknowledges suffering. Its symbol is one of suffering. Christianity explains suffering in human terms, rather than reducing it to naturalistic accounts, trying to explain it away, and the like. Christianity realizes there is real suffering in the world, and worships the God who suffered Himself that we be reconciled to Him.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, that great German pastor, martyred for his faith by Hitler, wrote in Ethics, “It is with the Christ who is persecuted and who suffers in His Church that justice, truth, humanity, and freedom now seek refuge; it is with the Christ who found no shelter in the world, the Christ who was cast out from the world, the Christ of the crib and of the cross, under whose protection they now seek sanctuary… (61).”

Christ’s suffering is our shelter.

I’d like to conclude that there is therefore a kind of argument because of evil, not a problem or argument of evil that can be presented in defense for Christianity, rather than as an offense against it. I haven’t fully developed this argument, so I don’t have a formal layout yet. Instead, I’ll present it in informal fashion:

There is a universal suffering which leads to a universal need for comfort. This universal need seems to imply that there is comfort to be had. There is, in fact, some comfort to be had. If there is comfort to be had, it further seems that this comfort must be, possibly, universal. Comfort can only be transferred on a personal, rather than an impersonal level. Thus, the universal comfort must interact on a personal level. A universal comforter that is personal tends to point towards theism rather than any other worldview.

This is only the bare-bones of an argument I’ve only recently started to develop, and I’d be happy to receive feedback, positive or negative.

Immaterialism and Idealism within Theism

Immaterialism/Idealism (essentially the same thing) is a philosophy that I believe can prove fertile for theism. I will start with an exploration of the Immaterialist views of Berkeley, an outline of his arguments, a brief critique, and how I believe Immaterialism can be used within theism.

Bishop George Berkeley was one of the pioneers of what he called Immaterialism, a philosophy that can generally be referred to as Idealism.

Immaterialism is the rejection of matter. It is the claim that “two kinds of things exist in reality: (1) minds (or spirits), and (2) the ideas they perceive (Lawhead, 321).”

Berkeley writes, “Some truths there are so near and obvious to the mind, that a man need only open his eyes to see them… all [the objects in the universe] have not any subsistence without a mind, tha t their being (esse) is to be perceived or known; that consequently so long as they are not actually perceived by me, or do not exist in my mind or that of any other created spirit, they must either have no existence at all, or else subsist in the mind of some eternal spirit… To be convinced of which, the reader need only reflect and try to separate in his own thoughts the being of a sensible thing from its being perceived (Berkeley, 89).”

Outside of being perceived, objects do not exist. There is no such thing as matter. Berkeley’s philosophy is probably that which lead to the question: if a tree falls in a forest, and no one hears it, does it make a sound? Berkeley would respond by saying that just the fact that we conceive of such a question means that yes, because by our act of even imaging such a thing, it brings it into our mind and therefore into perception.

It follows from this that we can’t simply bring things into perspective on our own. There must be a cause for these perceptions. Our minds have images of a “w0rld” in them, but it doesn’t follow that these are created by oneself. Berkeley claimed that our perception is directly projected into our minds by God.

Berkeley brought up a few arguments for his Immaterialism, believing that it was wholly rational to hold such a view. He is famously known for saying “Esse est percipi” or “To be is to be perceived.” The first is a set of arguments:

“1. Primary (solidity, motion, rest, quantity, etc.) and secondary qualities (color, taste, etc.) cannot be separated in the mind, because they always appear together and are perceived in the same way

2. Thus, if one quality is mind dependent, the other will be also

3. …Secondary qualities are mind dependent

4. Therefore, primary qualities are mind dependent (Lawhead, 325)”

and

“1. All properties which are relative are subjective

2. Primary properties are relative properties

3. Therefore, primary properties are subjective (Geisler, 145)”

This argument leads to the entire world, including such objects as dirt, flowers, birds, and the like, to be equivalent to imagined things such as a flying pig. All of these things are subjective and have qualities that are mind-dependent.

Another argument was his argument from the mental dependency of ideas:

“1. Sensible objects are things present to us in sense experience

2. What is presented to us in sense experience consists solely of our ideas

3. Ideas exist solely in our minds

4. Therefore, sensible objects exist solely in our minds (Lawhead, 323)”

Again the argument seems sound.

It is telling that Berkeley’s arguments are still debated in philosophy. Generally speaking, the only way any one has ever gotten around them was by arguing either Occam’s Razor (which I don’t think applies, as it’s not really multiplying entites, rather, Immaterialism would vastly reduce the entities involved) or by rejecting them based on common sense (i.e. we can see that there is a material world, so there is one–an argument that seems circular at best). Hume said of Berkeley’s views that ‘Their only effect is to cause… momentary amazement and irresolution and confusion.” I would tend to agree, in light of the following two problems.

The first is that if our thoughts and the things we conceive are projected into our minds by God as defined by Christianity, then why do we have in our thoughts evil things? The problem of evil is particularly strong against Berkeley’s view that all of our thoughts are projected into our minds by God–or at least sustained by Him. Why would God project evil, or why would He sustain evil thoughts so that we could conceive of or perceive them?

The second problem is that of Christianity itself. It seems that, if we are just minds and there is no actual matter or a “world,” there should be no need for Jesus as a physical “New Adam” and savior. Why would God work within the seemingly obvious universe in a historical fashion (i.e. being historically tied into Jesus), if history is so tied into matter and the physical world, which does not exist? It seems backward.

A third problem that I don’t think is valid is the argument that what we see is obvious–there is a physical world. Logically, this argument doesn’t seem to have a foot to stand on, especially given that Berkeley’s arguments specifically break down such an argument. Generally, this third problem is the reason Immaterialism is rejected: we just can’t make any sense of it.

I do believe that Immaterialism could prove a fertile ground for the Christian. The first point I’d make is that the arguments for it seem fairly conclusive. I’ve read some arguments that supposedly refute Immaterialism, but they all generally amount to my third objection. Just because we innately view the world as physical does not mean it is. The second point is that if Immaterialism, especially that of Berkeleyan influence, were true, then theism is unavoidable. These two points seem to make Immaterialism more appealing to theists.

I suggest two ways to approach Immaterialism in a theistic way. These two ways are wholly different.

1. The first way would be to argue that Immaterialism is indeed unavoidable. But rather than embracing the idea that perceived objects are projected into our minds by God, one could rather argue that perceived objects do in fact exist as sustained immaterial (here using “immaterial” only to mean not-made-of-matter) objects.

In other words, Berkeley’s premise that things that are not perceived do not exist is true, but we can focus on the point he follows that with: that all things subsist in the mind of some immaterial spirit (in other words, all “things,” “objects,” etc. exist in terms of being perceived by some being). Further, rather than saying that this spirit then projects these objects and thoughts into our minds, one could embrace the idea that such things are rather projected into a universe–one that is not matter per se but some kind of non-matter substance. Perhaps some kind of idea-substance.

Everything in the universe would therefore be ideas, but individual created minds (i.e. ours) could have some control over how these things interact. Evil is in the universe because God created us and granted us some influence over this universe. Our ideas corrupted it on the fall into sin. While this view seems at first glance rather nonsensical, I believe that it gains footing with Berkeley’s arguments for Immaterialism, as well as the idea that “matter” is itself just super-condensed energy. Ideas, thoughts, and the like, could be energy, but not some kind of undefined substance known as “matter.”

Thus there is a real world and it is the one we experience, but our understanding of it is completely wrong. Rather than some physical, material world, the world is wholly sustained and upheld by the Creator. Matter as we know it is undefined and is, in actuality, incarnations of ideas into the universe. Incarnation here being defined as a “manifestation of a non-material thing (i.e. an idea) into something that can be defined as, for lack of a better term, ‘physical.'” I would call this view Incarnationalist Immaterialism (a term I coin here). It’s not one I’ve read anywhere, but one I’ve developed myself (though I don’t necessarily believe it–see below).

-I tend to think of this first view as a sort of compromise between what I tend to think of as a very solid case for Immaterialism and the “common sense argument” for an actual world.

2. Rather than embrace Immaterialism in any form, a theist could point to such arguments as evidence for God. If we cannot prove that there is even a physical realm, what grounds do we have for assuming such things as naturalism, phsyicalism, and the like. Note that with this view, the theist does not even need to agree with any for mof Idealism/Immaterialism, he or she can simply incorporate it into a general pattern of argumentation, using arguments for Immaterialism to show that the way we perceive the universe, including such basic things as matter, is questionable. Theism points to something unquestionable and objective: God.

-These views are wholly different, and I’m not sure which I myself would conform to, if either. What I do believe, however, is that Berkeley’s argumentation for Immaterialism is nearly flawless. It is when he attempts to incorporate God as the all-perceiver that his argument suffers the problem of evil. Nevertheless, Immaterialism is a compelling view that, while it may not have much sway in the so-called real world, philosophically speaking is of great interest.

Sources (not any particular format):

Berkeley, George. Edited by G.N. Wright. The Works of George Berkeley, Volume I. Bibliobazaar.

Geisler, Norman and Paul Feinberg. Introduction to Philosophy. Baker Academic.

Lawhead, William. The Voyage of Discovery. Thomson Advantage Books.

The preceding post is the property of J.W. Wartick and should not be reproduced in part or in whole without the expressed consent of the author.