Based Academia, Part 3: Christian Analytic Philosophy
The path Christian analytic philosophers have taken has been warped by the institutional pressures of the discipline.
The most interesting test case of the assumptions of analytic philosophy are the Christian analytic philosophers. Clearly, orthodox Christianity falls outside the Overton window of secular, materialistic analytic philosophy. And today’s Christian analytic philosophers certainly transgress some of the pieties of analytic philosophy, say, on the existence of God.
But in spite of departing from secular analytic orthodoxy on a couple of obvious points, they abide by the strictures of analytic thought on a great many others. Particularly, the more subtle doctrines and prejudices of analytic philosophers on the nature of logic and language retain a hold on their minds. In abiding by these, Christian analytic philosophers receive some of the intellectual respectability that a secular analytic philosopher possesses and find for themselves a place within the guild, if a rather cramped corner.
In short, the problem is that Christian analytic philosophers reject some of the prejudices and assumptions of mainstream analytic philosophy, but not enough of them, and not always the right ones. Many simply assume the controversial analytic assumptions with regard to logic and the philosophy of language; and those who do examine those assumptions tend to perpetuate and worsen them.
Believing in What Doesn’t Exist
I said in my previous post that the game of analytic philosophy is materialism, rigged by the materialists against themselves. The secular analytic philosopher’s goal is to be “ontologically committed” to the fewest kinds of entities by the purification of his own vocabulary of as many nouns as possible. But secular analytic philosophers almost universally believe that mathematics and physics require them to be committed to non-material entities, such as numbers, classes, sets, facts, propositions, states of affairs, and - God save us - possible worlds. (Some try to reduce these to material entities, though with varying levels of success.)
Here, Christian analytic philosophers see an opening.1 If some non-material entities are permitted, then why not others? And the converse, if one, as a Christian, has already embraced one important immaterial entity, there is no reason not to be open to as many non-material entities as one’s secular colleagues are willing to respect.
Most of these philosophically respectable non-material entities are classified as abstract objects. That is, these objects don’t exist in the same way as material entities, certainly, nor even as concrete realities, like God and angels are supposed by believers to be. Abstract objects are a staple of contemporary analytic metaphysics and so raise no eyebrows.
Many of these arise from a couple of revolutions in analytic philosophy that coincided with the rise in the profession of Christian philosophers: The modal logic revolution and the analytic metaphysics revolution. There was a time in analytic philosophy in which things were more tied down to and based in science. While logical positivism, the second generation of analytic philosophy, had its shortcomings, it forbade metaphysics - including naturalistic, scientistic metaphysics - in favor of scientific discourse. It favored scientific propositions over even discourse about the possible, the necessary, the natures or essences of things.
if one, as a Christian, has already embraced one important immaterial entity, there is no reason not to be open to as many non-material entities as one’s secular colleagues are willing to respect.
This changed over the following generation or two. Modal logicians found ways to express symbolically “modal truths,” those about what is possible and necessary (and many other postulated modalities). Many of these featured “possible worlds” as an essential feature. And positivism was abandoned in favor of naturalistic metaphysics, following which, since metaphysics was now fair game, alternative non-naturalistic metaphysics.
Both of these changes were seen as amenable to a rising generation of Christian philosophers, like Alvin Plantinga, Nicholas Wolterstorff, and Peter Van Inwagen. (Not to mention that Saul Kripke, one of the other founders of modal logic, is a believing Jew, who has never accepted the secular pieties of analytic philosophy.) The idea of possible worlds had significant theological resonance, and a historical pedigree in the writings of another Christian philosopher, Leibniz (not to mention its science-fiction resonance). An openness to metaphysics allowed for non-naturalistic metaphysics to be proposed and for religious metaphysicians to argue that God played an important metaphysical role. (Often a linguistic role, like truth-maker of propositions, chooser between possible worlds, etc.)
The rise of Christian analytic philosophy was an important development, allowing for the widening of discourse in academic philosophy.2 However, the particular path Christian analytic philosophers have taken has been warped by the institutional pressures of the discipline. In particular, a belief in abstract entities has been adopted as being amenable to Christian faith. But there is a difference between accepting a concrete, immaterial entity, God, and proliferating entities that are immaterial on account of their lacking concrete existence. (N.B., it’s pretty easy to be immaterial if you don’t concretely exist!) God, angels, heaven, hell - none of these are proposed by Christian orthodoxy as existing in the abstract. There is in fact little affinity between believing in concrete, immaterial entities and believing in abstract entities.
What, after all, is it to exist abstractly? Here, analytic metaphysical thought encounters a difficulty. Their postulated abstract entities arise from the philosophical method discussed in part 2, of ontological commitment. All those entities to which our nouns commit us, but that are not conceivably material or concrete but immaterial are considered as existing but as “abstract.” Yet the etymology of “abstract” and the philosophical basis is Aristotelian. The abstract is what the mind, within itself, separates conceptually in spite of it only ever being found united in a substance. A form, for example, on the Aristotelian view, does not exist as a substance; a substance is a unity of formed matter. The form exists as an intellectual abstraction, that is a mental product of mental activity. Only the substance has existence per se. The abstraction is a step away from existence into the intellectual realm.
There is in fact little affinity between believing in concrete, immaterial entities and believing in abstract entities.
But, some analytics will object: We are not Aristotelians, but Platonists. And Plato certainly countenanced abstract objects! To which I say, did he? In fact, Plato’s forms were thought to be more real, more concrete than what is material. They were thought to be causally efficacious, such that later Christian Platonists identified the forms with the divine nature. The analytic view is, then, a halfway-house between Aristotelianism and Platonism, and on an ancient view, a simply contradictory one, desiring the explanatory power of Platonism and the “ontological parsimony” of Aristotelianism at the same time.
To summarize the problem for Christian analytic philosophers, there is nothing based about believing in things that not only don’t exist, but that don’t exist by stipulated definition. What is abstract is what does not exist in its own right but is only separable intellectually. Existence is concrete; there is no such thing as abstract existence.
To put it another way, Christian analytic philosophers have asked the atheists which immaterial entities to believe in and have believed in them.
Like the Christian analytic philosophers, I think that atheistic, or at least non-Christian thinkers have a lot to offer intellectually. To disagree with their atheism is not to discount the merits of careful philosophical and scientific thought, including even the linguistic method of analytic philosophy. But even as someone who believes in the supernatural, I would have thought that if your wanted to learn something from naturalistic atheists, it would be their grounding in the empirical world, not their accidental belief in abstract entities on the basis of mathematical, logical, and linguistic confusions. Follow atheists where they are based, not where they fail to be.
Incomprehension of Classical Christian Thought
Christian analytic philosophy shows its slavery to contemporary assumptions most plainly when it tries to read the classical Christian tradition. The classical Christian tradition of thought follows the metaphysical path of Plato and Aristotle. By their separation from this tradition and slavery to their own tradition, Christian analytic philosophers not only dispute the claims of classical Christian theology and philosophy; they fail to understand them.
Nicholas Wolterstorff reflects on this in a notable article.3 Following on his, Alvin Plantinga’s, and his other colleagues rejection of classical Christian thought, he notices that the problem is deeper than disagreement. He ends up articulating rather well the difference between a basically linguistic metaphysics and a “constituent” one. This doesn’t move him to sympathy with the tradition though. The best that can be said is that at least Wolterstorff is self-aware.
Alvin Plantinga, on the other hand, though the more prominent name, is much more cavalier in his dismissal of the classical tradition. In his Does God Have a Nature? he takes one of the primary claims of classical Christian theology, divine simplicity, and says that either means one ridiculous thing or another, those being the only two options allowed by his background assumptions. And he’s correct, if you assume an unargued Fregean metaphysics.
As I worked my way toward my dissertation topic, I followed the trail of the aspects of analytic philosophy that seemed to me false but operated as assumptions. Eventually, my professor (himself an agnostic) detected what I was railing against: “Plantingianism,” he called it. If Fregeanism is a main dogma of analytic philosophy against which I will direct my dissertation, then Plantingianism is an even more concentrated dose of the same.
Plantinga’s assumptions are not even completely unargued. On the contrary, his The Nature of Necessity is an examination of exactly the questions in the philosophy of language and logic on which there are analytic dogmas. However, recoiling from one error, W.V.O. Quine’s nominalism, he articulates one of the most advanced form of Fregeanism imaginable, of course, masquerading as realism and Platonism. And along the way, he does his work with the tone of a rather clever man carelessly chuckling at questions of the utmost seriousness (the same tone that dominated his dismissal of divine simplicity and the classical Chrsitian tradition in Does God Have a Nature?).
To actually have a worthy debate between the classical Christian tradition and contemporary analytic philosophy, it would be necessary, first, to have an advocate and defender of the classical tradition. Plantinga does not interact with any. To adjudicate the dispute would take someone who stood, to some extent, above or within both traditions, contemporary metaphysics and ancient-medieval thought. Unfortunately, most people, even who call themselves philosophers, only understand one tradition or the other.
This begs the question, how can someone claim to be a philosophy who only understands one recent and narrow tradition of thought?
Analytic philosophy often operates under the illusion that it advances like science, and only the last 10-20 years of journal articles are relevant. One would have thought that Christianity would free philosophers of such “chronological snobbery.” Unfortunately, even C. S. Lewis, who coined the phrase, is too ancient a thinker for today’s Christian analytics to have read him.
Given the depth of these criticisms, I won’t even begin to discuss the compromises to Christian doctrine and moral teaching that the Christian analytic philosophers have made over the course of their careers. Christian analytic philosophy has been shaped too much by its academic surroundings and bid for respectability, not enough by its own theological and moral foundation.4 Those looking for a based philosophy must look elsewhere.
Plantinga is explicit about it, describing his realization that early analytic philosophers, like Bertrand Russell, were not strict materialists.
See the parallel theological turn in continental philosophy.
Wolterstorff, “Divine Simplicity,” https://www.jstor.org/stable/2214108.
See the apt criticism by D.Z. Phillips, “Advice to Philosophers who are Christians,” https://www.jstor.org/stable/43248281.