From Abstracta to Atheism? | Dr. Felipe Leon

Abstract objects like numbers, propositions, and universals pose some serious challenges to God’s existence. I’m joined by Felipe Leon to discuss these challenges and more.
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Felipe’s excellent blog, “Ex-Apologist”: exapologist.blogspot.com/
Felipe’s Academia page: elcamino.academia.edu/FelipeLeon
VIDEO OUTLINE
0:00 Intro and outline
1:20 Defining terms
7:46 Why believe in abstract objects?
21:30 Problems for theism
32:27 Theistic responses
RESOURCES
Leon (2019), “A Priori (Atheism)”, available for free here: www.academia.edu/37063589/A_P...
Gould (ed.) (2014), Beyond the Control of God?: Six Views on the Problem of God and Abstract Objects, www.amazon.com/Beyond-Control...
And the usual links:
My book: www.amazon.com/Majesty-Reason...
My website: majestyofreason.wordpress.com/

[@jjnan1407]

The bigger the book shelf=bigger the brain Thanks for this Joe! Maybe you'll have Leon and Rasmussen on together one day?

[@ApologeticsSquared]

Okay... The longer I watch the more it looks like Dr. Leon is using a virtual background!

[@MajestyofReason]

Bingo!

[@ApologeticsSquared]

@@MajestyofReason And here I was thinking that the man just had the most impressive bookshelf known to man!

[@anitkythera4125]

This is a wonderful discussion! I never mustered the will to read about abstracta in any depth. This tore through so many aspects of the dialectic and makes a very compelling case. I also appreciate the voice you use to indicate you're imitating a Thomist. Very funny.

[@RanchElder]

Wonderful discussion, thanks Joe and Felipe.

[@Kanendd]

Great discussion. Always enjoy listening to Felipe. 👌

[@JohnVandivier]

~25:00 - 27 - Contra the idea that Plantiga's Modal Argument requires an ontologically higher layer from which God derives or results: Plantiga's notion of a possible world is that it exists in the mind of the thinker: As such they aren't ontologically prior in fact the other worlds don't exist at all.

[@S0l40]

From an Eastern Orthodox perspective you guys are not talking about some major theological distinctions that seem crucial to parsing these things out, and I think the essence-energy distinction solves this supposed problem. First, in Orthodox Theology, nature, person, will, and act are all really distinct, but we would reject the presupposition that many people operate on that distinction entails composition or division. Second, our view does not exclude potentia from God and thus God knowing of something that he could actualize does not mean he has to actualize it. St. Maximus explains that God in eternity knew of himself as distributive of Life, Being, and Goodness to things numerically distinct from himself. This is God's knowledge of himself as he sees himself face to face in Christ, the Logos of God. Thus in the eternal begetting of the Logos we see that all abstract and concrete obejcts that will be actualized from them are summed up in God's knowledge of himself as distributive of his own eternal divine energies or actions. It is the hypostasis or person or subject, that transcends essence, attribute, will, and act. Essences do not exists out there in the abstract, but rather persist in persons or particulars. In Orthodox theology, it is the subject of the Father who grounds and is the source of the divine essence. That said I think the response I would expect at this point is that maybe I haven't adequately dealt with this bootstrapping issue. I think that's dealt with by recognizing that some actions or energies flow out naturally from God much in the same way a heartbeat flows out naturally from a healthy human being. These are are natural energies of God has and he shares and distributes those to things numerically distinct from himself as he sees fit. I'm recovering from covid and this was from my phone, but I'd love to hear some of your thoughts.

[@ReflectiveJourney]

How are forms a-causal in Platonism?. Everything emanates from the one. They are constraint relationship in a way.

[@ApologeticsSquared]

I don't share the intuitions that the entailments from realism are so problematic. Like, if abstract objects aren't the kinds of things one can be "more ultimate" than, then His not being more ultimate than them doesn't seem to impinge on His greatness anymore than His inability to make a married bachelor.

[@MajestyofReason]

I think you’re partly right. But WLC has done a nice job explaining why the aseity-sovereignty doctrine is typically held to affirm that God is the sole ultimate reality

[@MBarberfan4life]

I think if divine conceptualism is true, then that would make God greater than God would be under Platonism. And there's nothing obviously incoherent with divine conceptualism...or Platonism. So before we evaluate whether these views are plausibly incoherent, divine conceptualism clearly has God looking better.

[@bds8715]

I hope to have a library like that one day 😍

[@exapologist]

Me too! Sadly, it's just a Zoom background.

[@johnrobin3316]

Hi there, I saw your comment on Capturing Christianity. It seemed like you dislike secularism and trans people transitioning. I wanted to ask, is transphobia a packaged deal with traditional Christianity?

[@bds8715]

@@johnrobin3316 because this comment is passive aggressive and insulting, I think there is a very small chance for there to be productive dialogue here. But I'm an optimist so... I see three possible definitions of transphobia: emotional, legal, and invalidating (let me know if there could be more). Emotional is basic disgust or hatred. A perfect example of this kind of bigotry is shown in the movie Green Book where Viggo Mortensen's character throws away two glasses because they were used by black people. Such a transphobe would not want to be friends with a trans person or make eye contact with them or be around them, etc. I introspect and just see that I'm not like that so I'm certain I'm not transphobic on this basis. Legal: advocating for policies or performing some kind of political action that disadvantages trans people (perhaps directly OR indirectly). I perform no such legal or political actions nor do I have beliefs such as "It should be illegal to transition." So I'm certain I'm not transphobic on that angle either. Invalidating: If a Christian has a core identity (I am a Child of God), then that identity can be threatened by arguments against the existence of God or the truth of Christianity. I don't see why this couldn't be applied in the same way to all other identities. Arguments against Islam invalidate the Muslim identity, etc. So arguments against certain models of gender can invalidate the trans identity. Because this definition of transphobia is a bad definition (it leads to Christophobia when none is there) it ought to be rejected in favor of one or both of the above definitions. Truthseeking always involves invalidating someone's identity. That's the tension. That's why being passive aggressive and insulting is certainly always wrong: it doesn't help that tension but makes it worse.

[@TheProdigalMeowMeowMeowReturns]

BDS, excellent reply to the passive aggressive comment!

[@richardgamrat1944]

Just finished watching Leone on Digital Gnosis channel!

[@DigitalGnosis]

I usurped Joe by interviewing Felipe the day before!

[@nathanroush8918]

In regards to your comments on divine simplicity at the end: If no abstracta is necessary prior to God, then is there not a difference between God creating something necessary in reality as opposed to it being necessary already prior to or simultaneous to God? In other words something may appear necessary from our perspective because we live in this reality, but if there is no logical necessity for abstracta to exist prior to God on the view of divine simplicity how can we really say it is more or less probable that any abstracta would be necessary in the same way God is given our vantage point? It seems like we are bound by our vantage point to have no ability to discern whether it is more or less probable they exist necessarily apart from God, or that there necessity is attributable to God. Curious for your thoughts

[@qqqmyes4509]

Confess your unbridled love for Dr. Leon

[@logicalliberty132]

EPIC!!!

[@rishabwarrier2769]

Another video! Another video I don't know enough to understand 😞. Also Joe are you going to get a discord account/server?

[@MajestyofReason]

My patrons and I have a discord channel! I myself am not active on discord, mainly because I find that social media consumes a lot of my time -- time that I should be spending on my research. So I've tried to limit my social media use to, basically, KZbin and FB occasionally :) I think you'll be able to understand the video! We tried explaining things super clearly :) If you have any questions about the vid, feel free to message me on FB messenger!

[@jordancox8802]

Really enjoyed this. Joe, what in your view, is the most promising theistic response on offer? Has Rasmussen addressed this?

[@MajestyofReason]

Thanks! Josh talks about it a bit in his dialogue book with Felipe, but those in our Purdue phil religion gang reading group (including myself) found his view really unclear. He says the abstract landscape is 'contained in' God, without spelling this 'containment' out. [Josh was in our reading group but only attended the final meeting. We brought this up to him, and he said this portion of the book is one that is on the edge of his thinking and one, at the time, he didn't have a satisfactory account of [i.e. an account of what this containment amounts to].] As for the most promising theistic response, that's a good question. It might be interesting for a theist to go an Aristotelian realist route. They would take the cost of denying the necessity of abstracta, but they would have many of the benefits of realism [except the necessity]. James Franklin's recent Palgrave book comes to mind as a contemporary defense of Aristotelian realism :)

[@deathnote4171]

@@MajestyofReasonHi Can you kindly Do a conversation with Exurb1a and this KZbin channel kzbin.info

[@crabking6884]

On Alex Malpass' objection to divine conceptualism, could a divine conseptualist get around it by saying "A proposition isn't equivalent with god's thought itself, rather it is equivalent to the contents of that particular thought"? I read Alex's paper a few months ago so I don't quite remember all the relavant details. Other than that, this was a fun topic.

[@MajestyofReason]

Good question! The reason divine conceptualists want to avoid that is because it undermines the very appeal of divine conceptualism in the first place. In particular, divine conceptualists posit propositions in order to account for how numerically distinct thoughts can have numerically one-and-the-same content. The content, then, is the proposition. But if God's thought isn't the proposition, then we're left without an account of the ontology of the content of God's thought. The divine conceptualist typically argues that common content presupposes one proposition. But if the proposition is likewise the content of God's thought, then the divine conceptualist has simply *avoided* answering the question of the ontological status of this content [i.e. proposition]. And yet they were supposed to be answering this question.

[@TheAnalyticChristian]

Excellent video! I really enjoyed it. Maybe I’m a crappy theist but I don’t really feel the force of the argument because Im not attached to divine aseity. What am I failing to see? Help me Joe!

[@MajestyofReason]

I think that may be quite a reasonable way out of the difficulties! Here are potentially two problems: First, many in the perfect being theism crowd will demur. They will argue that a God that exists a se is better, more perfect, more supreme than one that doesn't. This does seem reasonably intuitive: if x depends on something numerically distinct from x, but y is independent, y seems better at least in this regard. [Then again, impossibilities cannot be perfections, and if it's impossible to exist a se, then this argument might not work. But it might work: one could simply conclude that perfection requires aseity, and precisely because aseity is impossible, perfection itself is impossible. But someone antecendently inclined to theism might infer from this that aseity simply isn't a perfection to begin with. So, it might depend on how one comes to the dialectic to begin with.] Second, denying aseity strong contravenes philosophical, Abrahamic, and Christian traditions; and surely this should have at least some weight in one's theorizing about God. :)

[@TheAnalyticChristian]

@@MajestyofReason thank you. I thought of those two considerations as well. I guess I’m willing to let go of both aseity and tradition if there is good reason to. I’ll probably do an interview on this topic now with Dr. Kenneth Boyce. He did his dissertation defending fictionalist nominalism. He watched the video and read Leon’s paper.

[@TheAnalyticChristian]

@@MajestyofReason btw, thank you so much for elevating the discussions between theists and non-theists! It makes me better and I feel like we are on the same team exploring reality together!

[@MajestyofReason]

@@TheAnalyticChristian that sounds AMAZING!!!

[@MajestyofReason]

@@TheAnalyticChristian I met Kenny at a SCP meeting in 2019. You’re gonna have to tell him I said hi!!

[@AdherentApologetics]

You realize Arsenal didn't make the top 7 right :)

[@MajestyofReason]

Shhhhh. Tottenham was lucky to beat Leicester...

[@ivansavkovic7820]

Can someone explain to me. How is that Gods omniscient is an abstract object, i cant understand that part?

[@leovere]

Hey do you know what happened to elephant philosopy?

[@MajestyofReason]

He emailed me the other day; from what I can gather, he needs a break from the chaos of social media etc. He hasn’t updated me (yet) about the status of his channel going forward, though. It could potentially be a temporary deactivation; but we shall see as time progresses! I believe he probably over-worked himself making three videos a week and wants to take his hiatus/break seriously 🙂

[@worlddj1364]

When Muslims translated the Platonic heritage, they tackled this problem, would you consider inviting anyone who has a good Islamic background to elaborate further how Islamic philosophy dealt with this?

[@mannytps9986]

This is an unrelated question but do you support Arsenal?

[@hhstark8663]

Why can you not both be an atheist philosopher and a confessional Christian that goes to church and pray (like Eric Blair alias George Orwell)? I think that atheist philosophy does not disprove god per say, it just says god is not a necessary being in philosophy (god-agnostic panteism?). Then I think atheist philosophy would leave room for god theologically. - Or am I missing something?

[@SamGarcia]

Biblically, abstracta is just a subset of the spirit world. That's what abstractions are, spirits. This is derived from Genesis 1, Jesus is the image of God, but the Spirit is the likeness of God. All spirits are likenesses, which abstractions are.

[@tylerjourneaux4352]

That library tho.

[@TheBrunarr]

The first time I've heard Craig referred to as a classical theist lol

[@TheBookgeek7]

Not exactly true for me! A Thomist friend of mine said he basically agrees with everything Craig says... And yeah, It's very plausible that Craig is just a confused Classical Theist!

[@danzo1711]

@@TheBookgeek7 Then you don't understand classical theism. Classical theism maintains divine simplicity, divine immutability, divine timelessness, divine impassibility, and negative theology. Craig rejects all of these principles.

[@TheBookgeek7]

@@danzo1711 If you mean William Lane Craig... Um... yeah: As for Divine Simplicity: Since he holds that God has some sort of "Logical Necessity"- either what he means is that something ELSE, logically grounds God's existence in which case... it might ground several parts of God each separately- which is logically fine, but not very orthodox (and he always tries to be orthodox!); or else he means that there is something (more or less unknown) about the laws of logic THEMSELVES which implies that God exists. If the later, than I would ask him how he would distinguish between one part of God & another, since it would seem that all of God's attributes must (Logically) imply one another without appeal to anything else- since there is only one... thing, which we could call the laws of logic. Craig seems merely confused at this point. I've never heard Craig disagree with Divine Immutability, or impassibility, simply as such. In his book on Divine Timelessness, he thoroughly affirms that God's character is (& concedes that His Essence might be) utterly changeless, since that's simple Biblical data! As for opposing Timelessness... his argument seems to be: "I believe in the A Theory of time; God knows everything, and therefore God must know what the present moment is." But, he would grant that God knows everything about every moment of time, & plenty of Classical Theists (like Edward Feser) would grant the A-Theory of time, it's not clear what Craig adds to this- apart from giving God a sort of wristwatch for His arm! This, again, seems like a mere confusion! Lastly Negative theology: Classical Theists seem to be kind of mixed about this one. I think there's a lot of things they'd maintain we can know about God- if only by analogy- maybe even more than that! (See Bishop Robert Barron in his debate w/ Craig on the subject). Either way, though, I find Craig kind of irritating. He tends to avoid really deep questions of Metaphysics- & why else be a philosopher of anything, if you're not going to ask deep questions!

[@TheBrunarr]

@@TheBookgeek7 Craig explicity rejects timelessness, immutability, and impassibility, and thomistic simplicity. He thinks God changes, He thinks God is a temporal being post creation, etc

[@TheProdigalMeowMeowMeowReturns]

Craig has called himself a classical theist, but he’s using that term differently from how basically all other “classical theists” use the description. Craig is *not* a classical theist, but obviously there’s a ton of overlap between classical and neoclassical theism.

[@georgiejacob]

Life is different once you realize the library in the background has been green-screened. What a scandal! Sorry everyone; couldn't help.

[@kleenex3000]

I deem the assertion "exists necessarily" to be categorically wrong. Whether you like or not, the imaginary (PSYCHE) does NOT exist, is rather made up from/about the existing. Assertions (LOGOI) such as the written aequation "1=1" they DO exist. Sure is, NOBODY can prove that the assertion "1=1" !!!IS!!! true. The assertion is merely DEEMED TO BE true by many! Bcz the assertion is deemed to be useful, necessary, it is called "necessarily true" - that's all.

[@TheBrunarr]

I deem you're wrong

[@amuail]

First!!! Felipe is BASED!

[@theonetruetim]

This is one of your best joints, right here. & 1:03:04 For the record; Dogs do exist & cats entail modality. They scoff at necessity. For the record... (Been tearin thru yr content. Have many thoughts, as a result... Thank u. Keep on keepin' on, brother! I'll keep assimilatin')

[@MajestyofReason]

🙂♥

[@OriginalWinProductions]

A Biblical complication which worsens the objection from naughty thoughts, Jesus himself said Matthew 5:28; "I say unto you, That whosoever looketh. on a woman to lust after her hath committed. adultery with her already in his heart". It would be odd for God to command people not to think lustful thoughts when God does just that. Jesus doesn't offer the qualifier "it's okay to think these thoughts, just don't indulge".

[@SantiagoAaronGarcia]

Bad=privation of good(non being) God/pure act=omnibenevolent being(does not lack any good) God can actualize things, but only for them to be. Evil would be a non-being, and he can't actualize non-being. Btw, that was not funny

[@alexmarkadonis7179]

Get over it. Not everyone accepts evil's realizer as a privation. Reality can be offensive. Tough shit.