Unicorns and Great Pumpkins

 

                Protestants and atheists (with a smattering of Thomists) do this thing called analytic philosophy of religion in which I have very little interest. It is rigorously discursive, highly formalized and, as far as I can tell, utterly a-historical. As a historicist, then, it does not get to first base philosophically, at least where I am concerned. There are those with a taste for such things but I, alas, am not one of them. Nor will I EVER be one of them. That said, I do recall one bit of discussion generated by Plantinga et.al. and that concerned the Great Pumpkin from the Peanuts cartoon strip. Plantinga held that certain beliefs could be ‘properly basic’. A properly basic belief might be a belief in something like the principle of induction: i.e. that we can generalize from experience. Notoriously, post-Hume, there is no agreed on ‘proof’ of the principle of induction which does not presuppose the principle of induction. Induction cannot be induced from experience because that presupposes the validity of the very principle being induced. Of course, this doesn’t matter. We all ACT as if induction were valid and are probably reasonable to do so. Indeed, it is quite reasonable to believe in induction in spite of the fact that it is not an object of proof and cannot be mediated evidentially. Belief in induction might then be said to be properly basic: a bedrock idea that needs no basis itself because it is the basis of all others. Plantinga held that, in the same terms, a belief in God might be properly basic: a belief we have of which we can give no account and need give no account for it is foundational for all our other beliefs. One objection made to Plantinga was that ANY bit of adventitious content can occupy the same position in the web of our beliefs. The Great Pumpkin from Peanuts could be such a content and this, surely, was reductio ad absurdum of Plantinga’s argument.

                I have no existential interest in this question beyond the fact there is one thing of which I AM utterly certain. Whatever may be the case with God the Great Pumpkin cannot be the object of a properly basic belief. This helps me with a question I mooted earlier about unicorns. A student I knew, Mandy, was a believer in unicorns. (https://willsbernard435.blogspot.com/2021/05/save-me-from-horn-of-unicorn.html) I concluded at the time that if her belief in unicorns was sufficiently foundational there might be no grounds on which I could argue her out of it. The Great Pumpkin debate, though, now gives me some confidence that I have at least an indirect route to dislodging her belief. The answer, I am pleased to say, is history. The Great Pumpkin has none and the unicorn the wrong sort.  They are purely contingent, arbitrary bits of content with no explanatory or other organizing power. Neither one says anything about anything else. Neither unifies a manifold or marshals a field or anchors a life. As such neither has any function and is simply inert as a core belief and an inert core belief is surely a non-functioning core belief irrelevant to the person who holds it. Neither idea can be USED.[1] ‘God’ is not such a concept and this is because it is a historical concept. This means that it has gained gravity and heft over time by being fleshed out and applied and explained. It has made people’s lives different (for better or worse) and taken on a contour that make it a possible object of core belief or final concern. God, unlike the Great Pumpkin, has a track record.

Of course, this means that the idea of God cannot, in nominalist fashion, simply be posited as an empty, arbitrary bit of content. Great pumpkin theorists create the odd impression that concepts are atomic like facts are assumed to be. God, Santa Claus and the Great Pumpkin are simple units of content each one of which can be swapped out for the other. I can believe in God exactly as you can believe in Atlantis. Each functions the same way and in the exact same sense in any existential proposition. This is to my mind radically a-historical and radically wrong.The idea of God must take the form of an absolute or first principle to have any pragmatic ‘heft’. It must, in fact, be an all-encompassing speculative concept to be the apex point of knowing and striving. It must manifest this absoluteness in the process of its development as a principle as it progressively overcomes external, sensuous determinations and takes on the form of pure idea. Such a principle might well be ‘properly basic’ in Plantinga’s sense though surely the matter could not just end there. The pure idea of the absolute must also be fruitful. In a sense, we must develop the world out of it which, for one thing, means that the absolute cannot be the blank, monistic identity of 18th Century Deism but self-revealing personhood. The structure of self-revealing person-hood is triadic (revealer, revealed and revealing) so that the concept of the absolute develops over time as the historic doctrine of the Trinity. This is more than anyone could accomplish with the Great Pumpkin, Unicorns or any other arbitrary posit and if I could ever find Mandy again I would ask her to consider whether this is a damn sight more than unicorns could EVER do.         


[1] Of course one can think of uses for the idea of unicorns but these would be as adventitious as the content itself. Unicorns cannot be an object of core or foundational belief because the concept simply cannot function that way. Unicorns would then be an ordinary idea like water, or bears or protons to be evaluated as all other such ideas. One then, indeed, could ask of Mandy what evidence she can produce for mono-corn horses.

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