On Joe Schmid’s “simple, confessional argument against Classical Theism”: A short Thomistic Response

Joe Schmid and his beautiful laser eyes 

Agnostic philosopher Joe Schmid, who owns a blog and a YouTube channel called Majesty of Reason, presents what he calls a “simple, confessional argument against Classical Theism” in one of his recent blog posts. The argument is as follows:

1.     If classical theism (CT) is true, then for any x, if x is not God, is created by God.

2.     If CT is true, then God is free to create or not create.

3.     If (i) God is free to create or not create, and (ii) for any x, if x is not God, is created by God, then for any x, if x is not God, x is contingent (i.e. can be absent from reality).

4.     So, if CT, is true then for any x, if x is not God, x is contingent. [1-3]

5.     There is some x such that x is not God and x is not contingent.

6.     So, CT is false [4-5]

 

Schmid is correct in pointing out that the issue in here is whether or not premise 5 is correct. To speak more precisely, if there is an x such that x is not absolutely necessary, then we can infer from that that CT is false. In order, then, to properly make his case, Schmid has to clarify what he means by “contingent” and “not contingent/necessary”.

Before Anything Else

But before we get to my response, I just would like to reiterate what the title of this blog is saying: this response is, specifically, a Thomistic response. In other words, I won’t be speaking for all forms of CT in this blog post. Probably, Schmid’s argument is effective against non-Thomist forms of CT. But let’s put those other forms aside for now. Again, I will only be arguing from the Thomistic perspective. (Some forms of CT, however, might also have an identical model of God that Thomists believe in. If that’s the case, then I have no problem responding to Schmid’s argument on their behalf)

It is also great to note the fact that Schmid, as he puts it in his blog post, wants to emphasize the “confessional nature” of the argument he’s presenting. He writes:

Arguments are avenues for thinkers simply to confess to their dialectical partners what strikes them as convincing, true, or clear. They aren’t attacks, weapons, or anything of that sort. They’re simply confessions ― revelations of personal sight. “I simply confess to you that these premises seem true to me” is a motto I (and, I think others) should get accustomed to using.

Indeed, the very purpose of argumentation (and philosophy in general) is for people to journey together into the truth. This means respectful dialogue or sharing of ideas is a must. We philosophize and argue not to stump the person defending the contrary idea we are against, but to be able to assess the ideas of the other side with clarity and charity, so that in the end, we may be able to connect to each other as persons.

In the spirit of the confessional nature of arguments, Schmid confesses that the argument above “strikes (him) as deeply plausible… (and) clearly sound”. Alright, fair enough. But after reading the blog post as a whole, I felt the need to respond and make a confession of my own. I confess that: brother Joe, I think you got a couple of definitions of some terms, and hence some premises, wrong. The way you try to defend the fifth premise is also, it seems to me, erroneous. In the spirit of Christian charity, allow me to correct some of them.

What is “Contingent”?

In the third premise, Schmid gives us a definition of what a contingent thing is: x is a contingent thing such that x “can be absent from reality”. I will also be assuming that for Schmid, if x can be absent from reality/contingent, then x depends on something else besides itself as a reason/cause for x’s being real (this follows from Schmid’s premise 3: If x is contingent, then x’s being real is ultimately due to God’s causal, creative action; also, for the sake of this discussion, this “something else” need not be a sustaining reason/cause for x’s being real, so this definition of contingency need not be connected to what Schmid calls the Existential Expiration Thesis (EET) which says that “Necessarily, temporal objects will cease to exist (by means of instantaneous annihilation) in the absence of causally sustaining factors” (Schmid (2020)). The EET, though an important aspect of CT, is a different topic from what I want to address in this blog post.).

But this, I would argue, is an erroneous definition of “contingency”. To be dependent on something else besides itself as a reason/cause for its being real doesn’t imply that it is contingent. A necessary being can still be dependent on something else for its reality. Furthermore, I would say that x, if x is not God, is still dependent on God even if x cannot be absent from reality/necessary. In other words, there can be created necessities, and hence an object’s contingency/ability to be absent from reality doesn’t follow from (ii) of premise 3.

Absolute and Conditional/Suppositional Necessity

In his response to the third objection raised in the eighth article of the nineteenth question of the first part of the Summa Theologiae, St. Thomas Aquinas writes that “things effected by the divine will have that kind of necessity that God wills them to have, either absolute or conditional. Not all things, therefore, are absolute necessities.” Earlier in the Summa, Aquinas also writes in his explication of the Third Way that “every necessary thing either has its necessity caused by another, or not” (ST I, q. 2, a. 3). So, for Aquinas, not all forms of necessities are the same. A necessary thing can be “caused by another (a necessary thing’s necessity is conditional/suppositional) or not (a necessary thing’s necessity is absolute). To better understand the distinction, consider an object O. If O cannot be absent from reality in and of itself, then O is absolutely necessary. But if O cannot be absent from reality due to some prior condition, then O is conditionally necessary. Thomists would cite angels and souls as objects which are conditionally necessary. To understand better the concept of conditional necessity, let’s use a well-known analogy about the sun’s being eternal and the sunlight that flows from the eternal sun. The sunlight cannot fail to be, given that it necessarily flows from the sun, which also cannot fail to be, given that it is eternal. But even if the sunlight cannot fail to be, it’s being always real/always being present in reality is still dependent on some prior condition. Another possible example would be water’s necessarily being a composite of hydrogen and oxygen. Let’s say that composites of hydrogen and oxygen are already present from eternity and that these composites can never fail to be. Considering the fact that being water necessarily follows from its being a composite of hydrogen and oxygen, things that are water cannot be absent from reality, despite the fact that its inability to be absent from reality is dependent upon a prior condition, namely, being a composite of hydrogen and oxygen. In other words, its being dependent upon a prior position doesn’t mean it’s contingent. (Note: If you don’t like my examples, that’s okay. Look for other ones that you think is better. The metaphysical principle that was explained does not depend on the examples anyway.)

That being said, a thing, then, can be necessary and still be created/dependent upon other conditions (supposing that being created is a form of dependence). Thus, Schmid’s claim, for instance that “[t]he number 2, if it exists, wouldn’t simply exist on Mondays (say) but not on Tuesdays; it wouldn’t just happen to exist. It would necessarily exist”, doesn’t necessarily prove his point. He still has to argue for the idea that number 2 (and others that are similar to it) have to exist, and hence necessary, without any dependence upon other condition(s). In other words, Schmid has to give reasons to believe why number 2’s necessity is an absolute necessity. Schmid’s (ii) of his premise 3 is therefore false (or, at least, possibly false/not metaphysically necessarily true). He ought to give reasons to believe why x, if x is created/dependent upon other conditions, is automatically contingent in order to prove that his third premise cannot be false.

On Schmid’s Assumed form of Realism

In support of his premise 5, Schmid appeals to realism about “numbers, mathematical objects, propositions, relations, universals, etc.”. He writes that if these things exist, then they exist necessarily.

The realism he seems to assume in the argument seems to be a kind of realism that says numbers and the like can be properly called objects that absolutely necessarily exist. It seems to me that it’s a kind of realism that is similar with, if not entirely identical to, Platonic realism. With this in mind, the argument then says that since numbers and the like are objects distinct from God that are absolutely necessary, these objects, which are obviously distinct from God, exist apart from God’s causing it to be/God’s freedom to either create or not create them. But CT says that everything distinct from God is subject to God’s causing them to be/God’s freedom to either create or not create them. It follows that CT is false.

But this precisely what the Classical Theist would deny, or at least what the Aristotelian-Thomist would deny. For Aristotelians/Thomists, numbers, mathematical objects, and the like are mere abstractions from concrete objects, not objects as such. As David Oderberg writes in his book, Real Essentialism, regarding numbers, “the existence of numbers depends on the existence of things that are not numbers… Without things that are not numbers there would be no numbers, since numbers are abstractions from the existence of things” (page 9). The same thing can be said with propositions, universals, and the like. These things, then, cannot be properly called objects that can independently exist apart from other objects. When we say that there are 52 cards in the deck and that we are shuffling the said deck, for example, we are not saying that we are shuffling the number 52. What we’re saying is that, given the cards in the deck, we can abstract from it the number 52. As Gaven Kerr has said (in one of our conversations), abstract objects are actually not objects, but rather are “intelligible features of substances” which are entertained via abstraction. In other words, abstract objects are actually only those which are parasitic upon concrete objects/substances, but are not really objects themselves, in a similar way that substances can be called “objects”.

An objection may be raised here. Someone might say that we don’t know how many concrete objects are there in the whole universe. What we do know, however, is that numbers are infinite. But how can we know that numbers are infinite if the quantity of the things from where we abstract them can possibly be merely finite?

But nobody here is asserting that in order to abstract all of the numbers (or any abstract things, for that matter) from concrete reality, we ought to have the same quantity of concrete objects to abstract from with the quantity of the numbers (or any abstract things) themselves. Even if O is the only thing in the whole universe, O is enough to be a source of abstraction, regardless of the quantity/size of the abstract object (or a set(s) thereof) that we are trying to abstract from O.

Anyhow, the point is that, even if Schmid is right (and I think he is) in assuming realism about numbers and other abstract stuffs, his assumption about what exactly are these stuffs is wrong. All kinds of abstracta, even the necessary ones, is parasitic upon (at least one) concrete object(s). The Classical Theist can then argue from this that the one concrete being that all abstracta is ultimately derived from/parasitic to is God.

With all of this in mind, we can also say that since abstract stuffs aren’t really “stuffs” in the strict sense, like concrete objects, then God’s relationship to them isn’t really causal, since abstract objects, by nature, aren’t causal objects (because, again, they aren’t really “objects”). All we need to say is that God has a causal relationship with the concrete objects from which we derive the abstracta(s) from. After all, given that an abstracta isn’t really an object, then God doesn’t impart esse to it, but only to those which we abstract it from, namely, concrete objects.

So, in some sense, therefore, I guess we can also say that, since abstract objects, necessary or not, are dependent upon concrete objects, and that these concrete objects (the Classical Theist will argue), whether necessary or not as well, ultimately depend on God for their esse, then we can derive from this the conclusion that abstract objects, necessary or not, ultimately depend on God.

If Schmid says that necessary abstract objects cannot be dependent on God given their necessity, then we come back to the issue of the distinction between absolute and conditional necessity. The claim that necessary objects cannot be dependent on God (or some prior condition for that matter) given their necessity can only be true if their necessity is an absolute one.

Conclusion

To summarize: from the perspective of the Classical Theist (or, at least, specifically the Thomist), then, premises 3 and 4 are false, since (ii) of the third premise has an erroneous definition of “contingency”, which means that not all created things are contingent. Another error is Schmid’s assumption about the nature of abstracta. We cannot talk about abstracta in exactly the same way we talk about the objects around us, which is exactly what he does in premise 5. Strictly speaking, there is no x such that x refers to necessary abstracta apart from God, as Schmid seems to be saying, because an abstracta isn’t a substance at all, but only a mere feature of a substance(s). There’s no issue, then, in saying that God doesn’t cause necessary abstracta, at least roughly speaking, because abstracta isn’t a thing that God imparts esse upon. God only imparts esse to the things we abstract from.

So, there you go. I hope I wrote this blog post with enough charity to merit a good response from you, Joe. I also want to say that your work – both in your blog and YouTube videos – have been extremely helpful to my own journey and growth as a student of philosophy, and I thank you so much for that. I hope we meet in the future so that I can give you a fist bump 😊. God bless you, Joe.

Reference:

Schmid, J.C. Existential inertia and the Aristotelian proof. Int J Philos Relig (2020).