Situational Epistemology and the Common Good

I have just finished reading

Stock, K. (2021). Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism. London: Fleet.

As the subtitle suggests, a significant part of the book is about feminism and, specifically, the response of feminism to gender-identity theory. I am not at all sure that I want to get into the ins and outs of the male-female, man-woman, gay, lesbian, transexual, bisexual, and everything else arguments the bedevil these conversations. Suffice it only to say that Stock shows, fairly convincingly, that there is a great deal of woolly thinking going on in some quarters, especially in the various lobbying groups, the consequences of which could be devastating for some other groups, particularly cis women.

Still, I by no means wish to get embroiled in some of the nasty invective that these conversations (in so far as they are conversations) usually include. I would like to focus on one of the assertions which is made by some of the lobby groups, that of ‘situational epistemology’.

On the face of it, situational epistemology is a fairly straightforward idea. Only a transsexual person can really know what it is like to be the said transexual person. I think that we can concede that without a problem. After all, only I know what it is like to be me. In fact, I am the world expert on being me. I can tell others, perhaps convincingly, what being me is like, but they cannot know that without actually becoming me, which is impossible.

The next step in the argument is the one which bears some examination, though. As the transexual person (or anyone else for that matter) is the only person who can speak of their experience, and as the said transexual person (but not the others) is oppressed, then only the transexual person can say anything about how transsexual people should be treated. This is where the dubious step, in my view, occurs.

We have conceded that only an individual can speak about what it is like to be an individual. However, a vociferous transexual, by the lights of situational epistemology, can surely only speak with authority about how it is to be themselves, not another transexual, or another woman or man or bisexual. The claim then that only transexuals can speak about policy towards transsexuality because they are the oppressed people, on the face of it, is a valid claim. The problem is that this is only a valid claim if all other transsexuals agree with them and by the light of situational epistemology that cannot be the case. There is no reason to believe that an articulate, educated, middle-class transsexual person can speak for someone less well educated, for example.

This sort of leads on to the next problem with situational epistemology. As John Donne put it centuries ago, when the word ‘man’ could still refer to the human race: ‘No man is an island’. Put another way, Aristotle observes that ‘man is a political animal’: a man of the polis, the city. We are humans and we live in communities. Even the least sociable among us lives in a community, and that community, in part at least, defines us.

The problem here with situational epistemology is that the claim is made that only person X can speak about being person X, and, therefore, only person X can hold valid opinions about how person X and their like (assuming some common trait among people that person X claims to represent) should be treated by everyone else. That is, put another way, person X comes to dictate to everyone else some aspects of society and its arrangements because person X is recognised as representative of people with the trait that person X has (suppose it is trait A). Person X represents all people with trait A, and then has the authority to say that people with trait A should be treated in manner M by society.

The problem here is twofold. Firstly, person X is silencing everyone else with trait A who might, or might not, wish the be treated in manner M. Secondly, in fact, person X is silencing everyone else, including people who might be harmed by society treating people with trait A in manner M, at least if the arguments deployed by person X and their supporters against any detractors are merely to abuse and accuse them of a heinous crime against people with trait A, pushing such people back into being an oppressed minority.

Thus Stock has a problem with transsexual lobbyists who argue that people who declare themselves to be female should be able to use female changing facilities, female prisons, and so on. The problem is that this implies a naive anthropology, that is that someone who declares themselves female is, and should be treated as, being female. There is no accommodation for the fact that people might be making such a declaration for their own persons, in the case of males claiming to be females, for personal sexual gratification.

Now, this is not to say that there are not in existence some people born with male bodies who genuinely are caused psychological harm by being counted by society as males for all time and everywhere. But nor should we be so naive suppose that all such claimants, especially when the claims are made by people who make no effort to in fact transform are genuinely females. Such claims have an impact on society, in this case, on the safety of females in woman-only areas of society.

The problem here is a broader one than our response to transsexuality. The problem is the relationship between the individual and society. The ethic deployed by the transsexual lobby groups is highly individualistic. It has to be right for the person declaring themselves to be something other than their biological sex. However, to ignore that accepting this on a large scale could cause significant problems to other sections of society is rather narrow-minded, to say the least.

We are not isolated, autonomous, atomised individuals, no matter how much postmodernism might claim that we are. We still have to live in a society, and that society has to provide safety and security for all, not just for one group which declares itself to be oppressed and to be able to speak for all such oppressed people.

The Frontiers of Knowledge

As I have mentioned, I have been, fairly slowly, reading

Grayling, A. C. (2021). The Frontiers of Knowledge: What We Now Know About Science, History and the Mind. London: Penguin.

It is a good book, nicely written, although of course, it cannot deliver on the sub-title. We know a lot more about science than high-energy particle physics and cosmology, for example. Fortunately, Grayling is well aware of the limits of the book.

I have mentioned already the irritations of the section on physics, and I will not rehearse them again. I am not a historian, but I do think that the middle section on history attempts to do too much. It covers both the evolution of the human from the various fossil traces, and a bit about pre-history and early history which can be gleaned from archaeology. There is a good bit about various sorts of historical denial – starting with Holocaust deniers but moving beyond that to the various issues arising from colonialism and its usually violent interactions with those already settled in the ‘empty’ lands of North America and Australia.

The third section, on psychology and the philosophy of mind I cannot really comment on. The achievements in experimental psychology are great, its implications are uncertain and concerning on ethical grounds. We already know that Internet giants and some governments collect a great deal of data on people’s online habits, and use that to either try to sell us stuff or monitor our activities for possible subversive activity. As with, for example, nuclear weapons, the advances of a young science, in this case, neuroscience, outstrip our moral and cultural resources to decide what we want to do with it. As it is almost impossible in these circumstances, to stop the science being done (perhaps scientists are a bit naive, thinking that no one would use their discoveries for bad purposes) we are left with the uneasy feeling that the advances will not end well for humanity.

Still, Grayling is an atheist, and so you know what you are going to get when you read the book. Actually, he manages to keep his own views on religion fairly well at bay. There are a few ‘god-of-the-gaps’ snipes early on, and an extended part on the iniquities of the Templeton Foundation funding archaeological work on ancient sites looking for evidence of religion. It is a fair point that religion in, say, 10000 BC may not look anything like religion in the 2000s AD. It could, in fact, be noted that religion in, say, Japan in 2020 probably does not look much like (at least so far as material remains may go) religion in England in 2020. The problem is not, perhaps, one of looking for evidence of something, but that archaeology gives a snapshot of material remains, not meanings. We cannot, in fact, reconstruct the meanings that our ancestors placed on certain material items. Speculation is all that remains.

Still, at the end, Grayling launches the long-expected (by me, at least) attack on religion, declaring it irrational (as opposed to rational beliefs). An irrational belief is taken as false when premising them or acting on them leads to a high incidence of poor outcomes (p. 338). Irrational beliefs are also inconsistent with each other or with rational beliefs. Grayling, of course, singles out the problem of evil – the existence of an omnipotent and wholly good deity is inconsistent with natural evils. The god is either not omnipotent or not good.

Grayling claims the theological response to the problem of evil is that suffering serves some greater long term good which we, as mere humans, cannot discern. ‘The carpet of divine inscrutability is always a good place to sweep difficulties under, and the kind of manoeuvre in which it consists is a mark of irrational belief in its own right.’ (p. 339). Perhaps, but for all his acquired erudition in physics, history and neuroscience, Grayling’s theology is a bit suspect. I doubt that divine inscrutability would last long as a theodicy in any undergraduate essay on the problem of evil. To suppose that theologians are not aware of the problems and have, on the whole, moved beyond that solution to the problem of evil is actually to insult theology as an academic discipline, theologians as rational humans, and to presume that theology does not develop as a discipline.

There are many responses, theologically, to the problem of evil that do not sweep it under the carpet of divine inscrutability. Natural evils, after all, often arise from our own errors and sinfulness in using and abusing the world and its resources. The death toll in the 2004 tsunami was a lot higher than it could have been if humans had not cleared the mango swamps to make beaches for tourists. It is quite possible that the Covid-19 pandemic could have been avoided if habitat destruction had not forced wild animals into closer proximity with humans, with consequences for inter-species transmission of a virus. Childhood cancer, or some of them, could well be linked to pollution or environmental chemicals. And so on.

To claim that theology has no rational response to the problem of evil is, it seems to me, to perpetrate a sweeping under the carpet of religious irrationality of the responses which rational theologians have made. This is unfortunate. If Grayling is going to comment on something he could, at least, be fair enough to find more recent responses to evil in the theological literature than his (unreferenced) sweeping statements. After all, he has clearly followed some of the literature in the other fields he focuses on.

The point of the book is to demonstrate that while we are probing the frontiers of knowledge, in all directions, we are simply adding to the stack of things that we do not know, but are becoming aware of being ignorant of. It is a bit of a shame that Grayling perpetrates such ignorance with respect to theology right at the end.

The Physics Phenomenon

There is a curious effect when people, usually non-physicists, write about physics. They tend to land up talking about particle physics and cosmology as if they were more or less the same thing and also the only really interesting bits of physics (or worse, science in general) that there is. Now undoubtedly cosmology and particle physics are interesting. They are the realms where the very big and the very small meet. Often, the interest is in the ‘fundamental structure of the universe’ (whatever that means), and, somehow, that links to our interest in who we are and what we mean by it.

I have just read the physics section of A. C. Grayling’s The Frontiers of Knowledge. Leaving aside his occasional swipes at theism (I suspect it gets worse in the sections on history and psychology) he does focus on exactly these two areas of physics, even though he is to well informed to think that these are the only areas of science worth thinking about.

Nevertheless, most popular physics does the same thing. Quantum mechanics and the theories of relativity are weird, counter-intuitive. Trying to explain them and then discuss the implications without a single equation is difficult, to say the least. Grayling does a good job, on the whole, with only a few slips (the photoelectric effect does not depend on the intensity of the light shone upon it, but the frequency – I am sure that is a slip, and there seems to be some confusion about Planck’s constant).

The interesting thing about the section is not the summary of modern physics (in the sense of cosmology and particle physics) but the various understandings of what it might mean for us. Grayling describes several problems, which might best be described as philosophical. For example, the pinhole effect means that, as humans, we look at the universe through cognitive equipment designed for our scale – somewhere between the very big and the very small. That means that the very big and the very small do not behave in ways that are intuitive to us. Perhaps the surprise is really that we can, with the aid of mathematics, describe these realms at all.

But mathematics is another rub, perhaps. Why is mathematics so successful in describing the universe and its phenomena? Physics is a mathematical science, after all, although physics is not mathematics. Much of physics consists of describing a phenomenon through an equation, solving the equation, albeit approximately, and then seeing if your result bears any resemblance to the real world.

And here is the next rub, I think, and one which perhaps is not pondered enough by more popular physics writers. Much, if not most, physics is the art of approximating. Cosmology and quantum physics have a tendency to look at ‘pure’ systems. Thus we can quest for a ‘theory of everything’, where all forces are contained in one neat, clear, and concise formula. The idea is that the mathematics gives us something that is, in terms of mathematical aesthetics, beautiful. It would be, of course, highly abstract and, probably, only a few highly trained mathematical physicists would understand it. But some would claim that we had solved the universe.

The problem here is that once we are even slightly away from highly abstract theories of everything, physics rapidly gets messy. Approximation aboud, and there is not alternative but to make them and then refer back to the real world, though experimentation, to verify the results we obtain by calculation. This is true as well of cosmology and particle physics, but the theories tend to race off towards the unverifiable horizon quite quickly, and some of them never seem to return.

That does not mean to say that theories of everything will remain unverifiable, but it does say that they might not be terribly useful in more everyday physics. It is entirely unnecessary to consider the composition of protons while understanding the structure of the hydrogen atom. Quarks and gluons have no impact on solid-state physics at all. Yet these subjects are important parts of physics, and, probably, more physicists work on them than work on the fundamental structure of reality and the universe in general.

This might, of course, be part of the general oddness of the human race, or at least those parts of it which consider such things. Many a late-night undergraduate session was (and probably still is) fuelled by a few beers and a discussion of the true meaning of quantum mechanics. Richard Feynman dismissed such issues, arguing that we should just shut up and calculate. The theories work and produce verifiable numbers; why worry about what the theories mean?

That is not where most people who think about it are at. Grayling describes a number of the issues which do come about. Perhaps mathematics and human cognition are so closely linked that we can only see patterns in nature that are mathematically describable. Perhaps Kant was right when he argued that we see nothing as it is in itself, but only can describe the phenomena, that everything is only describable, ultimately, in relation to the human and to human cognitive structures.

Perhaps, but physics does allow us to describe, albeit only partially, things in relation to each other – the interaction of billiard balls, perhaps. In principle, there is no human required to be present. A ball enters, hits another one, imparts a certain quantity of energy and momentum, and the balls go their separate ways. Except for the measurement of the initial and final states, there seems to be little role for the human here. The universe is clockwork.

And so, roughly speaking, we are back to Berkeley’s challenge. Is the world a product of the human mind or not? If not, is the world a product of the mind of God, and, again, if not, how does it manage to be? If the universe is only material how come it is so complex? And, perhaps, how come it has developed intelligent life (well, fairly intelligent life) to observe its complexities, albeit only partially?

Berkeley

 George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne, sometime Dean of Derry, fellow of Trinity College, Dublin and probably the best known Irish philosopher is one of those people in the history of philosophy who just will not go away. He is usually grouped with the ‘British Empiricists’, along with Locke and Hume, who bracket him. Indeed, he does draw a lot of his thinking from Locke, whom he criticises. Hume famously regarded Berkeley as a sceptic, something which, I imagine, Berkeley would have strenuously denied.

I have just finished reading

Flage, D. (2014). Berkeley. Cambridge: Polity.

This is in the ‘classic thinkers; series, and presumably the implication is that Berkeley is a classic thinker, whatever one of those might be. But in my reading and research Berkeley is one of those people whose ideas just will not go away. Perhaps it is because Ian Ramsey started off as a Berkeleian idealist. Perhaps, also, because Lonergan regarded Berkeley as a ‘naive idealist’, or perhaps because Harriet Baber (in her book on The Trinity) described Berkeley as a brilliant, mad Irishman who contrived wonderful arguments in support of crazy conclusions.

I am not particularly going to engage with Berkeley’s thought, at least directly. For one thing, I have not read enough of it, and for another, it is a bit confusing, at least insofar as its conclusions are, on the face of it, crazy. After all, he does come to the conclusion that the material world does not exist, and that everything is in the mind, or at least someone’s mind. The be perceived is to be is his watchword. If something is not observed by someone, then it does not exist.

The argument develops from that step, which is perhaps a bit unusual and counter-intuitive, to arguing that as, for example, the table downstairs will still be there even though I am not in the room, cannot see it, and nor can anyone else, that some mind must be able to see the object and, therefore, that mind must be that of God. Berkeley’s argument, therefore, is an argument for the existence of God.

Theism is a bit of a drug on the philosophical market at present, of course. Many philosophers are not theists, and some are outright atheists. There still seems to be some thought around that humanity has somehow outgrown God, or, as Laplace put it, there is no need of that hypothesis. Indeed, I’m currently reading A. C. Grayling’s new book on the ‘Frontiers of Knowledge’. While it is, of course, dangerous to discuss a book before you have finished it, Grayling is a well known atheist philosopher, and seem to regard modern theism as a ‘God of the gaps’, that is a God whose activity as understood by humans retreats as more is discovered, and also historical theism as a sort of proto-technology, that is trying to control the environment without really knowing what was going on. Presumably science, in spite of the huge (and, as Grayling acknowledges, growing) gulfs of ignorance we have, will still blow all theism away.

I am not pretending that Berkeley has any answers to these problems. He was, after all, doing his philosophy in the early Eighteenth Century when the scientific revolution (or one of them) was only just getting going. Indeed, part of his work was an objection to some aspects of Newton’s theories, that is the inventions of imaginary (or ‘occult’) forces to account for movements, such as centrifugal and centripetal force.

So what was Berkeley up to? Why did a highly intelligent man spend his time promulgating such theories which were, on the face of it, bizarre? Various people have come up with various reasons, of course. A lot is to do with the historical context Berkeley lived in, and a bit to do with his Christian faith. I cannot help but think there is a little more to it than that. To some extent, I suspect, Berkeley was making fun of some thinkers of his time.

The title page of two of Berkeley’s significant works include subtitles. The Principles of Human Knowledge has: ‘wherein the chief causes of error and difficulty in the sciences, with the grounds of scepticism, atheism, and irreligion, are inquired into.’ The Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous has the subtitle: ‘The design of which is plainly to demonstrate the reality and perfection of human knowledge, the incorporeal nature of the soul and the immediate providence of a deity in opposition to sceptics and atheists. Also to open a method for rendering the sciences more easy, useful, and compendious.’

Berkeley’s targets are clear: sceptics, atheists and, in the Alciphron dialogues, ‘freethinkers’. It seems to me that the implication of these works is the irrationality of the sceptical atheistic viewpoint. Berkeley seems to be arguing that the sceptics and atheists might be arguing that theism, or specifically Christianity is irrational, but their own grounds for understanding the world, that is, materialism, are at least as irrational as any other. Berkeley can come up with a totally crazy system that is entirely consistent within itself – immaterial idealism – and, from that, out-argue the materialist sceptics, represented by, for example, Hylas. If that is the case then all the rational, material systems the atheists, sceptics or freethinkers might come up with are no more valid than Berkeley’s own mad system. The mere coherence of a system of philosophy does not point towards its overall correctness, after all. At some point, the system has to touch the real world somewhere. Berkeley argues that it does, and that point is in our minds. Most philosophers would probably argue that the point is in the material world, but just because that is reasonable and coherent does not make it any more correct than Berkeley’s system.

Berkeley’s system is, then, just different. In the terms of his times he could argue with, and possibly win against, his imagined opponents, the sceptics and atheists of his day. Recall, after all, that Deism was regarded as a threat to orthodox Christian faith at the time. Berkeley would probably argue that Occam’s razor applies to world philosophies of this sort and that his views yield fewer objects than the other, and therefore is to be favoured for its relative simplicity.

Perhaps, therefore, we should not just dismiss Berkeley as being a naive idealist or immaterialist. Perhaps he was just suggesting that we have to make a choice in our philosophical system, and that naive idealism is not as bad as naive materialism. Perhaps, in the face of modern science, he has a point.

Anglo-Saxon Theology

A long time ago I undertook an Open University course in history (which I failed, by the way), but one of the points that the course made was that in order to really understand history (say, the history of ‘Britain’) it was necessary to understand something about the religion of the people involved. History is much more than events, the narratives of lives, politics, wars, and so on. History is about people and how they behave, and their behaviour is mediated by what they know and what they believe.

A problem with some history is that historians have a tendency to ignore people’s religious faith. This is probably a sign of the times. Faith has increasingly become marginalised in the public sphere and privatised. ‘If it works for you…’ is the mantra of the age, rather than questions along the lines of ‘Is it true?’

This can have some rather odd effects. For example, (and I am not just trying to get at one author)

Pickles, T. (2018). Kingship, Society, and the Church in Anglo-Saxon Yorkshire. Oxford: OUP.

This is an excellent and interesting work on Yorkshire during the Anglo-Saxon period. However, its argument is that the elite moved into the church for economic and social reasons, becoming an ‘ecclesiastical aristocracy’ and preserving their political power. Maybe. But he does not, so far as I recall, suggest that some of the people who became Christians might have believed in the Christian faith and that might have affected how they behaved.

For example, Hild was great-niece of Edwin of the Derians and abbess of Hartlepool, and then Whitby. Hild initially set out to join her sister in the religious life. Pickles (p 61-2) suggests that many of the ‘personalities' of the early Anglo-Saxon Christian age did similar sorts of things. The kin group was clearly important, although Pickles does not that ‘spiritual’ kinship was also a factor, through god-parenthood. Further, the abbeys presided over by Hild did promote cults of the royal lines. But there must be a bit more to it than that.

One problem might be that by concentrating on the stories of these individuals, and stripping them of their moral-didactic content, the faith and belief world that the people moved in also disappears. Conversion and Christian institutions might have offered new possibilities to negotiate social and psychological crises, but they also offered surely a new way of life, a new set of beliefs. Conversion, surely, was not just about social, economic, and political opportunities.

The issue is addressed more fully in another tome:

H. Foxall Forbes. (2013). Heaven and Earth in Anglo-Saxon England: Theology and Society in an Age of Faith. Farnham: Ashgate.

Foxall Forbes has qualifications in both history and theology, and hence a deeper understanding of how the Christian faith might actually have actuated and motivated the people of Anglo-Saxon England. That said, of course, there are still problems: the evidence which we have is, more or less, from the elites. The texts are, by definition, that of the literate classes. Archaeology, where it exists, only gives snapshots of activities, not reasons, motivations of belief worlds.

Nevertheless, Foxall Forbes does argue that Christian theology and the religious beliefs and behaviour that it entailed were important in Anglo-Saxon society. For example, bishops, as royal advisors, intellectuals, and Christians, did influence both the drawing up of laws (and, indeed, drew some of them up) and how they were executed. In particular, Foxall Forbes tackles the vexed question of ordeals as evidence and suggests, quite strongly, that while bishops did not ban the use of ordeals, they did question the value of them in confirming guilt or innocence. They were, in this view, a process of last resort, perhaps, indeed, used as a ritual to give the accused every chance to confess and, perhaps, repent. Repentant sinners were not, in the view of the bishops, to be put to death.

The traffic between theology and society was two-way, of course. It never has not been. Lonergan remarks that theology mediates between the tenets of the Christian faith and the cultural matrix in which that faith is lived out. Thus beliefs of the people, such as purgatory, might not have been part of the core theology of the Christian church of the time, but because people believed in it, and took action to ensure the brevity of their, or their loved ones’s, souls sojourn in the place it became part of the practices of the church, even if the theoretical underpinnings remain obscure. Perhaps, as Foxall Forbes notes, it was just such a prevalent belief that it was more or less unquestioned.

We live in a very different age. Theology and the church have had to reconcile themselves with being marginalised in public life. Bishops no longer draw up law codes for monarchs to issue. If bishops comment on laws they are often told to keep out of politics. If they do not, of course, then they are accused of not taking a lead on moral issues. Neither of these options were really the lot of Anglo-Saxon bishops. The bishops who were involved in law-making seem to have tried, according to their lights and the possibilities of the times, to have ameliorated some of the harsher punishments which the times might have inflicted on criminals.

Theology in Anglo-Saxon England was not the plaything of the elite. Certainly, of course, the elite – bishops and abbots, for example – were the ones educated in theology. But Christian belief permeated society and had an impact at every level, so far as we can tell. Theology was bound up with local elites, national power, and kings, but also with the belief of the wider population and the culture of the times.

For example, a problem in the late eleventh century with a tree overshadowing a church was probably not to do with paganism, but with the priest sitting under it while gambling and drinking. In the overwhelmingly Christian context of of the time, it is, as Foxall Forbes notes, unlikely that St Wulfstan of Worcester would have recognised a genuine pagan if he had fallen out of the tree itself (p. 58).

Riding the Tiger

You might wonder what all that messing about with tigers, definitions thereof, and considerations of the greatest, or most tigerish tiger, was all about. A fair question. The answer is that, at least in my mind, it was all to do with the ontological argument for the existence of God. This might tell you more about my mind and its organisation than you really wanted to know.

The point here is that the greatest, most tiger-like tiger possible is analogous to God, at least insofar as anything is. To be the greatest tiger, or the most tiger-like tiger, the tiger in question has to exist. The greatest tiger cannot be the greatest tiger if the tiger does not exist – existing is part of what we mean by being the greatest, after all. Mohammed Ali could not have claimed to be the greatest boxer if he had not existed. Similarly, we cannot claim that a given tiger is the greatest if that tiger does not (or has not) exist.

With respect to God, of course, we have a slight problem. By many definitions of God God is the greatest. Anselm’s argument, now named the ontological argument, is roughly speaking that given ‘the Fool has said in his heart, there is no God’ (Ps 4:1), the said Fool will know what the word God means. If I say ‘God exists’ then, by the normal rules of language, you will know at least roughly what I mean.

Anselm argues that the Fool knows what the Psalmist is talking about: ‘something-than-which-nothing-greater-can-be-thought’. God, here, is simply the greatest thing (in a very loose use of the word ‘thing’) that we can think of, and then some. In fact, the then some is that this great being has to exist, otherwise it would be missing a bit of being the greatest being. Part of the meaning of the word God is that it refers to the supreme being, after all. I suspect that most western people, at least, would agree to that, whether they are atheists of theist or somewhere in between.

Here we have a few links to the greatest tiger post. Firstly, there is the problem of existence. Does the greatest tiger exist? If the greatest tiger does not exist, then it is not the greatest tiger. The question is more pointed with respect to God, of course. If we can imagine the supreme being, something-than-which-nothing-greater-can-be-thought, then by the same token as the tiger, He must exist, otherwise something is missing from the greatness.

We also have a definition problem: God is defined as the supreme being and part of that definition is surely ‘something-than-which-nothing-greater-can-be-thought’. In which case the ontological argument proves nothing; it is simply a convoluted but circular argument revolving around the definition of God. We cannot define the greatest tiger and thereby make that tiger exist. Can we, therefore, define God and thereby make Him exist?

Of course, we cannot. If God could be caused to exist by human word definition, we would automatically rule that being out as a candidate for God. The question seems to turn upon our definition and use of words, however. We use the word God in a certain way, and in public discourse we agree on what the word means. Most words we use describe things in the world, whether those are objects, actions, activities or emotions. They may be more or less abstract, granted, we may understand the meaning of words to a greater or lesser extent, but nevertheless, ultimately they are pinned to things in the world.

It is not quite the same with God, of course. Here the analogy with tigers fails. Tigers, whatever they are, are creatures in the world. If I wanted to I could go and observe a tiger, and abstract from that tiger the features of the species. I could then journey on and view a variety of tigers and take their common features. That would be my ‘type’ of a tiger, against which other creatures are judged. A few would match, and I would call them tigers, perhaps of different colours. Many would not and I would have to call them ‘not-a-tiger’ or invent a different type for them.

I cannot do a similar exercise with God, however. The definition of God, after all, is that He is unique and invisible – a spiritual being not a material being. Therefore I cannot go and observe a number of God and abstract the common factors to form an ideal God. The definition of God simply does not work like that.

That does not seem to mean that the definition is unique, however. For example, I can go to a country and say ‘show me the economy’. The locals would probably look at me as if I were mad. The economy is a thing that we cannot actually see. It is something we can see the effects of, and describe in metaphor and analogy: economies slow down, or overheat, or whatever. But the economy as such is not something I can examine. I might see the effects of an economic slow-down, but not see the slowing itself.

Perhaps this is a better analogy than the tiger for God. I can see tigers, I cannot see God, but nor can I see the economy. I can see the effects of the economy, and of course, people differ about whether those effects are good or bad for people. Similarly, I can see the effects of God, at least from certain perspectives. I can believe that the trees I see in the garden, or the tigers in the world, were created by God – not necessarily directly, of course, but by setting initial conditions and processes. I can also not believe that and be an atheist. Both sides can produce evidence for their point of view, as Marxist and capitalist economists can disagree over that their data means for an economy.

But that seems to make the existence of God a personal choice, which, probably, neither theists or atheists would be particularly happy with. Analogies, by definition, fail eventually, and we have found the limits of tiger and economic analogies for God.

The Greatest Tiger

Let us suppose that tigers exist. That is, of course, a fairly unprovable assertion, at least without running the risk of getting mauled, but let us grant that tigers are tigers. Thus there must be something with defines the state of being a tiger: teeth, claws, carnivorous appetites, stipes, a cat-like appearance and so on.

Now, let us suppose that there are two types of tiger, characterized by orange and black stripes (the ‘orange tiger’) and by black and white stripes (the ‘white tiger’). We are now left with the question as to which type (species) of tiger is most ‘tigerish’, that is, most like the ideal type of tiger that we have in our minds.

Both species of tiger show, of course, most of the characteristics of ‘being a tiger’ – the teeth, claws, appetite, and stripes. So only the colour of the tiger is at issue. Is orange or white more distinctive of a tiger?

Most people would probably opt for an orange tiger as being the typical sort of tiger, the sort that most humans when thinking of the word tiger would conjure up. Thus, we can say that the orange tiger is the most tigerish or tigers, while the white is not quite as tigerish, due to its colour.

Suppose there was a supporter of the primacy of the white tiger, or even a white tiger of philosophical bent. They could argue that, in fact, as white contains all other colours, the tigerishness of the white tiger includes the tigerishness of all other tigers, including orange tigers and every other hue of potential tiger – red, green and blue and all points in between. We can, for the moment at least, discard the possibility of ultra-violet and infra-red tigers.

We have now generalized one of our assumptions, that there are only two sorts of tiger. The white tiger, it is now claimed, displays the tigerishness of all possible tigers, as the white tiger contains all possible colours of tiger, as well as the other characteristics of the animal.

The orange tiger can reply to this arguing that the white tiger is a white tiger, and not all tiger colours. White is a distinctive colour, a pigmentation, not a conglomeration of all possible colours. That might work with white light, the argument could go, but does not work with fur. White light when beamed through a prism may refract into all the possible colours, but white tigers do not.

A response to this might be that while white tigers do not, admittedly, refract, observing a white tiger through an orange filter would make the white tiger’s fur orange, while observing an orange tiger through a white filer would leave the perception of the orange tiger as being orange. Thus, in some sense, the perception at least of a white tiger contains all possible tigers.

The argument might develop along a number of lines at this point. For example, the orange tiger could suggest that the perception of a tiger and its reality are not the same thing. While someone could perceive a white tiger as being orange, and hence deduce that they were perceiving an orange tiger, this does not mean that the tiger is orange. In fact, the perceiver could well identify the white tiger seen through and orange filter as a tiger because they then perceive the tiger as being of a normal colour (orange) for a tiger. This, therefore, is further evidence for orange tigers being the most tiger-like tigers, not the contrary.

Another development could be along idealist lines. We believe that there is a form of tiger, call it Tiger, in some higher dimension. All tigers participate in this form, through some unknown mechanism. The Tiger gives tigers of all hues their tigerishness. This works (except for the mystical ‘participation’ bit) but does not solve our problem. Is the Tiger orange or white? We have only moved the problem into a higher dimension, not solved it.

We can argue, perhaps, that the problem here is one of definition. Are we defining ‘tiger’ as being white or orange? If we decide to call one a ‘tiger’ and the other a ‘snow tiger’ then we can resolve the problem. Tigers are tigers and snow tigers are snow tigers. That partially defines away our dilemma, but only partially. A snow tiger is still a recognizable tiger; we have just defined away its potential equivalence to an orange tiger. We could equally define a white tiger as a tiger and an orange tiger as an orange tiger, and we would still have to same problem.

The question then arises as to whether we can think of a ‘tiger more tigerish than can be thought’, the ultimate tiger, or, perhaps, the Tiger of the ideal form. Perhaps we can, although we still run into the problem of the colour of the specific tigers in front of us. We could have the form of a white tiger, and the form of an orange tiger, but that, again, merely seems to move the problem to a different dimension, that of the relationship between the forms of the tigers – are they both derived from a higher form of ‘tiger’, or are they independent?

I am really not sure there is an answer to this problem, and many people would probably argue that it is a pseudo-problem anyway. Tigers come in both white and orange forms. One is not more of a tiger than another, they are both tigers, just different tigers. Do we really need to relate one tiger to another and find out which epitomizes the tiger? After all, if we meet a tiger in the jungle, we are unlikely to question whether it is a proper tiger or not – running away or climbing a tree would seem to be a sensible option rather than quizzing it as to its tigerishness.

And yet it does not seem that the problem is quite so simple to dismiss. There are tigers both orange and white. But how do we know they are both tigers without having some higher conceptual Tiger’ to compare them with?