Saturday, February 28, 2026

Ontology and religion

In this blog post, I outline a continuous philosophical argument that bridges metaontology, the analytic necessity of theism, and the rational permissibility of revealed religion.

I begin with a tripartite taxonomy of metaontological approaches: keeping natural language to account for ordinary discourse, adding to it to explain cognitive limits, and subtracting from it to isolate fundamental scientific realities. Aligning specifically with a deflationary, non-subtractive stance, I argue that taking established linguistic practices and historical traditions at face value logically necessitates the analytic truth of theism; I assert that competent, historically informed definitions of God and existence make the statement “God exists” inherently true, thereby characterizing atheism as a failure of linguistic competence.

Building upon this theistic foundation, I subsequently defend my personal adherence to Roman Catholicism by strictly delineating faith—defined as trust in a living, external authority—from natural reason and empirical history. Ultimately, by framing Catholic dogmas and miracles as theological assertions about the past rather than empirically verifiable historical events subject to modern secular historiography, I construct a worldview where institutional religious truths remain logically insulated from, and thus never in direct contradiction with, the discoveries of natural science.

Illustration for this blog post, drawn by Nano Banana.

1. Review of metaontologies

This section reviews approaches to metaontology, as background and preamble for the next section, where I explain my oapproach.

Ontology is often introduced as a debate about what there is. But that framing can hide a prior question: what are we doing when we use existential language at all?

If ontology is “the inventory,” metaontology is the method (and sometimes the therapy) that tells us how to read the inventory: whether to take ordinary talk at face value, to revise it, to supplement it, or to treat it as a mere starting point for something else.

Once the metaontological question is put that way, three broad approaches stand out—approaches that differ not primarily in which entities they list, but in how they treat the authority of natural language and its role in inquiry.

1.1. Keeping natural language as it is

The first approach takes ordinary discourse as basically in good standing and aims to account for it, not to correct it. The animating picture is that the job of philosophy is not to redesign the language we already competently use, but to explain how that language works—its logic, its pragmatics, its embedding in life.

A canonical slogan for this attitude is Wittgenstein’s: “All propositions of our everyday language are in fact, just as they are, in perfect logical order.” (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 5.5563) Read metaontologically, the thought is that, even if many natural-language sentences cannot be easily regimented into a perspicuous language such as first-order logic, still, the competence underlying everyday talk is not an ontological mess in need of rescue. If we seem to speak easily and systematically about tables, numbers, properties, holes, shadows, reasons, possibly even “sakes” and “behalves” and “dints”, then a metaontological approach of this first kind tries to explain that systematic ease rather than treat it as an embarrassment.

Logical behaviorism, as I understand it, fits here because it interprets the meaning of our discourse in terms of the life-situations in which it is used: linguistic behavior is part of a broader pattern of action, expectation, and social practice. If a natural-language ontological commitment fits into sentences that are interpreted as true within a human form of life, then there is nothing more that could be wanted from an existence claim, and no metaphysician is needed to separate out the truly existent things from the merely linguistic commitments. Minds, emotions, and perceptions exist, but there is nothing more to the words than their role in the sentences in which they are used in actual practice.

Amie Thomasson’s “easy ontology” is an explicit case of the “keep-language” approach. The central idea is deflationary: if a fragment of ordinary language is consistently and intelligibly used, and its existential claims can be settled by uncontroversial conceptual or analytic standards, then we are entitled—in that deflated sense—to say that the relevant entities exist. Numbers, properties, holes, etc., count as existing because they are the values of variables in well-behaved, established linguistic practices. (In a footnote to page 265 of Ontology Made Easy, Thomasson says she isn’t sure “sakes” are used consistently enough in our language, but she admits their existence conditional on that.)

The payoff of this approach is continuity: ontology becomes, to a significant extent, an account of our conceptual scheme and its place in human life. For critics, an approach admitting everything from average persons to fictional detectives to moral properties seems somehow too permissive, as though anything goes; “keep-language” theorists reply, however, that it only seems that way if you are importing a thick metaphysical standard into a domain where the practice itself already determines the relevant standards of application.

1.2. Adding to natural language to explain cognition

A second metaontological approach begins by granting that natural language is an instrument designed primarily for communication, coordination, and action—not necessarily for revealing the full structure of thought or reality. On this picture, ordinary talk may be too thin, too contingent, or too parochial to capture what cognition can represent. The metaontological move is therefore expansionary: we add to natural language (or systematically extend it) to account not merely for what we do say, but for what we can think, conceive, or entertain as possible.

Here the treatment of universals is telling. Ordinary language contains common nouns and predicates, but it may not explicitly mark every conceivable universal. An expansionary approach takes the fact that something can be conceived of as “predicable of many” as itself a reason to treat it as a candidate universal, even if no community in fact speaks as though it exists. The goal is to go beyond existing linguistic habits toward a more powerful representational scheme.

Meinongianism exemplifies this strategy by allowing nonexistent objects to serve as the intentional correlates of thought: we can think about the golden mountain or the round square, so our cognitive architecture seems to range beyond what exists in the ordinary, extensional way. Meinongians treat ontology as including not just what we ordinarily talk about, but anything we can intend or represent.

Platonism is a more familiar, and related, expansionary program. (Ed Zalta, for instance, started out as a Meinongian and became a platonist, all the while keeping more or less the same views on abstract objects.) It suggests that mathematics, modality, or properties are not just useful linguistic posits but reflect a domain of abstracta that can be grasped by reason. Where the “keep-language” approach often treats talk of numbers or properties as a harmless, practice-governed manner of speaking, the “add-language” approach treats such talk as a clue to deeper cognitive and metaphysical structure. Ordinary language may underdescribe that structure, so we extend it with a theoretically motivated ontology.

The attraction here is explanatory ambition: cognition appears to outstrip ordinary description, so we enrich the ontological story accordingly. Expansionists believe other accounts of ontological commitment cannot account for the expressive power of human representations without smuggling the expansionary machinery back in; rival theorists, of course, see this as too permissive or extravagant.

1.3. Removing from natural language to reach what “really” exists

Instead of treating ordinary language as basically in order or as merely incomplete, this third approach treats ordinary language as ontologically indiscriminate. Everyday discourse is full of conveniences, idealizations, and surface grammar that may mislead us about what is fundamental. So we subtract from natural language: we revise, regiment, or replace ordinary existential talk in order to track a thicker, restricted sense of what exists—what is genuinely “in the world” rather than merely in discourse.

Neo-Quinean metaontology is the most popular version of this. On that view, existence questions are to be answered by looking to our best overall scientific theories: to exist is (roughly) to be a value of a bound variable in the regimentation of the theory we have most reason to accept. Ordinary language is not the tribunal; theory choice is. (Famously, for Quine, mathematical objects exist because they are indispensable to the formulation of our best physical theories.) The neo-Quinean can be relaxed about folk ontology yet strict about scientific ontology: everyday talk is a starting point, but ontological commitment is ultimately a matter of what our best theories must quantify over.

Neopositivist, empiricist approaches are subtractive in a different way; instead of caring so much about what our theories quantify over, the neopositivist leans on observation (and verification, or something like it): what exists is whatever is licensed by experience, measurement, or observational warrant. Here too, ordinary language is trimmed back. We may speak about abstract objects, possibilities, or unobservables, but the thick “exists” is reserved for what can be tied to observational justification. (My favorite revival of logical positivism is Minimal Verificationism by Gordian Haas, although it does not address ontological commitment.)

“Hard-road” nominalism, like Hartry Field’s project of rewriting science without abstract objects, is perhaps the most dramatic instance of subtraction. Field aimed to show that abstracta are dispensable, by rewriting the relevant scientific theories so that they no longer quantify over numbers or sets.

Defenders of this approach see it as treating deep questions of existence with a desired level of seriousness that the earlier approaches lack, by no longer letting them be settled by the surface grammar of ordinary language. There is a risk, however, of revisionary overreach: we may end up with an ontology so austere that it fails to respect the success of ordinary and scientific practices. The approach may seem unmotivated, since given that it is clearly not the ordinary sense of existence, it is unclear why restrictionists decide to speak about existence in this way, and what they think they gain by it.

1.4. Apparent exceptions and why they still fit

Two families of views can look like they do not fit this threefold taxonomy, but they can be integrated once we focus more closely on the metaontological stance rather than the ontology.

1.4.1. Neither particulars nor universals are fundamental

States-of-affairs ontologies (as in Armstrong) and trope theories (such as John Bacon’s) appear to reject the basic natural-language division between proper names (particulars) and common names (universals). They instead treat something else—states of affairs, or tropes—as metaphysically basic, and treat particulars and universals as derivative or constructed.

But this does not constitute a fourth metaontological approach; it is a choice of primitives that can be pursued in any of the three stances.

  • A stick-to-language version will say: ordinary language talks as if there are particulars and universals, and our job is to interpret that talk in terms of tropes or states of affairs without declaring ordinary discourse mistaken.
  • An add-to-language version will argue: ordinary talk is not enough to reveal what cognition or metaphysics demands; we must introduce tropes/states-of-affairs as theoretical posits that better capture what can be thought or conceived.
  • A subtract-from-language version will say: the ordinary distinction misleads; once we regiment our best theory properly, we should replace talk of particulars/universals with the more fundamental categories.

The crucial point is that trope theory and states-of-affairs theory do not by themselves answer how ordinary language relates to ontology; they propose a metaphysical base. Their metaontological orientation depends on whether they treat ordinary discourse as authoritative, incomplete, or misleading.

1.4.2. Ted Sider’s structural realism

Ted Sider’s emphasis on “joint-carving” structure and naturalness can also look like a distinct metaontological position. But I believe that it is better understood as not offering a metaontology at all, at least not in the sense of a systematic account of how existential discourse should be interpreted.

The reason is that “joint-carvingness” functions as a label for the desired outcome—carve nature at the joints—without giving a general method for reading, revising, or extending our existential language. If one says, “include all-and-only the joint-carving categories,” then the pressing question is: by what procedure do we determine which categories are joint-carving? If the answer is not given in a principled way—by appeal to linguistic practice, cognitive explanation, theory choice, or observation—then “naturalness” risks becoming an honorific attached to whichever categories one already favors.

If one were to operationalize the notion of “joint-carving”, it could in principle be implemented in any of the three ways (keep, add, subtract). But as a standalone slogan, (which is how it is presented by Ted Sider,) the notion can only function as an ad hoc filter: we decide case by case what is “natural,” and call the sum of our ad-hoc judgments the criterion. Nature may in some sense have “joints” or important fundamental structure, but without a disciplined account of how we are entitled to assert naturalness claims, structural realism is more of a posture than a method.

1.5. Recap

In metaontology, the central divide is not between realists and anti-realists, or between nominalists and Platonists, but between three stances toward natural language and its authority:

  1. Keep ordinary discourse and explain it.
  2. Add to ordinary discourse to capture cognition or metaphysical possibility.
  3. Subtract from ordinary discourse to isolate a thicker sense of what really exists.

Even if your theory’s primitives are such as tropes and states-of-affairs, which have no straightforward connection to natural language, still you must choose how much of natural language and cognition you want to account for in terms of your primitives; and positions that rely on evaluative vocabulary like “joint-carving” without supplying a principled account of how such evaluations are warranted risk failing to be metaontologies at all, functioning instead as an undeclared case-by-case selection procedure.

Fundamentally, a metaontology is an explicit strategy connecting language, thought, theory, and world. Without choosing and defending such a strategy, your ontology is little more than a list backed by taste.

2. Ontology and theism

This section explains my approach to metaontology and ontology. I believe that accepting the existence of God follows from my choice of metaontology, and hence this section is an “ontological argument” for the existence of God, though not in the usual way. I defend why choosing a metaontological approach that accepts theism as a matter of course is the most reasonable thing to do.

2.1. Non-subtractive, anti-structuralist, deflationary metaontology

I will state my metaontological beliefs and briefly explain why I hold each one; I do not address counterarguments because I do not know of any, and I believe there are none.

Metaontologically, I adopt a non-subtractive approach. This is to say that I reject the approach reviewed in §1.3. I believe that the philosopher has no authority to tell the layman that he is using language wrong. When Democritus allowed that “by convention there is color, by convention sweetness, by convention bitterness, but in reality there are atoms and space”, he distinguished ‘conventional existence’ from ‘real existence’, but he did not attempt the contemporary imposture which amounts to denying the success of ordinary linguistic practice. When your theorizing is over and you have finished writing your list of what things exist, it had better contain every noun in the dictionary, at minimum.

I also adopt an anti-structuralist approach. In the present sense of that term, this means, for one thing, that I reject Ted Sider’s emphasis on structure and naturalness, which I had already criticized in §1.4.2 as not constituting a metaontology at all. More precisely, not only do I reject Sider’s approach to naturalness as ad hoc, but I also do not believe in David Lewis’s or any other approach to naturalness, since I believe all of them are devices for adhockery in ontology. Since I do not believe in joint-carvingness or naturalness, I see no reason to privilege any particular way to use the word “exists” over any other way as long as both ways are defined explicitly and used consistently. Since the approaches reviewed in §1.1 and §1.2 are all careful about this, I am neutral between them.

Hence, I adopt a deflationary approach, which means that there is nothing more to the word “existence” than whatever meaning in which you explicitly define it and use it. Existence does not mean, for instance, anything about being an object of physical theory, or perceivable, or having causal power, or anything like that. You may grant such thick extended meanings to adjectival phrases such as “physical existence”, but not to existence simpliciter.

2.2. Theism should be easy

“God” can be defined in different ways.

Usually, atheist polemicists define it in whatever way is easiest to attack; for instance, the first chapter of Dawkins’s The God Delusion brackets out “Einsteinian religion” and clarifies that he will spend the rest of the book refuting “the interventionist, miracle-wreaking, thought-reading, sin-punishing, prayer-answering God of the Bible, of priests, mullahs and rabbis, and of ordinary language.” This is because atheist polemicists are not only dishonest, but philistines, caring nothing for the great philosophers of the Western tradition that led up to the world they live in. As Edward Feser said in The Last Superstition:

The irony is that to anyone who actually knows something about the history and theology of the Western religious tradition for which Harris, Dennett, Dawkins, and Hitchens show so much contempt, their books stand out for their manifest ignorance of that tradition and for the breathtaking shallowness of their philosophical analysis of religious matters. Indeed, as we will see, these authors do not even so much as understand what the word “faith” itself has actually meant, historically, within the mainstream of that tradition. One gets the impression that the bulk of their education in Christian theology consisted of reading Elmer Gantry while in college, supplemented with a viewing of Inherit the Wind and a Sunday morning spent channel-surfing televangelists. Nor do they evince the slightest awareness of the historical centrality of ideas deriving from classical philosophy – the tradition of thought deriving from Plato and Aristotle and whose greatest representatives within Christianity are Augustine and Thomas Aquinas – to the content and self-understanding of the mainstream Western religious tradition. This is perhaps not surprising in the case of either Dawkins – a writer of pop science books who evidently wouldn’t know metaphysics from Metamucil – or Vanity Fair boy Hitchens, who probably thinks metaphysics is the sort of thing people like Shirley MacLaine start babbling about when they’ve lost their box office cachet. But such ignorance is simply disgraceful in the case of Dennett and Harris, who are trained philosophers. One would never guess from reading any of the “New Atheists” (not to mention the works of countless other secularist intellectuals) that the vast majority of the greatest philosophers and scientists in the history of Western civilization – not only the thinkers just mentioned but also many modern thinkers outside the classical tradition, including Descartes, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, Boyle, Newton, and on and on – have firmly believed in the existence of God, and on the basis of entirely rational arguments. And, needless to say, they offer their readers no account of the grave philosophical challenges to which the naturalism they are committed to – the view that the natural, material world is all that exists and that empirical science is the only rational source of knowledge – has consistently been subjected throughout the history of philosophy, and which many influential and sophisticated contemporary philosophers continue to press upon it. Yet the fact is that, contrary to the standard caricature of philosophers as inveterate skeptics who have no truck with religion, among philosophers the view that the existence of God can be rationally demonstrated “enjoyed wide currency, if not hegemony . . . from classical antiquity until well after the dawn of modernity” (to quote the philosopher David Conway, writing in a book that had a major influence on Flew’s conversion to philosophical theism)9; and the suggestion that human reason can be accounted for in purely materialistic terms has, historically speaking, been regarded by most philosophers as a logical absurdity, a demonstrable falsehood. Within the classical Western philosophical tradition, belief in the existence of God and the falsity of materialism has generally been thought to rest firmly and squarely on reason, not “faith.”

I will also quote Feser’s footnote 9, which clarifies the quotation he used:

Conway, The Rediscovery of Wisdom, p. 79. The rational demonstrability of theism is in Conway’s view the core of what he calls the “classical conception” of philosophy, a conception he attributes to Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, Plotinus and the other Neo-Platonists, Augustine, Boethius, Maimonides, Aquinas, Renaissance thinkers like Marsilio Ficino and Erasmus, and even (despite their rejection of certain key ancient and medieval philosophical ideas) modern thinkers like Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Benjamin Whichcote and other Cambridge Platonists, Newton, Shaftesbury, and Hutcheson. To this list of philosophical theists could be added, of course, Anselm, Duns Scotus, and many other medieval Scholastic writers; Islamic philosophers like Avicenna, al-Ghazali, and Averroes; modern philosophers like Locke, Berkeley, Samuel Clarke, and William Paley; Suarez and other Late Scholastic philosophers; Garrigou-Lagrange, Maritain, Gilson, and other Neo-Scholastics and Neo-Thomists of the 19th and 20th centuries; A.E. Taylor, F.R. Tennant, and other 20th-century Anglican philosophers; and, among contemporary analytic philosophers, David Braine, William Lane Craig, Brian Davies, John Haldane, Robert Koons, Barry Miller, David Oderberg, Alvin Plantinga, Alexander Pruss, James Ross, Richard Swinburne, Charles Taliaferro, and William Vallicella – to name just a few.

Look at all those names. Those were smart people. They are better than you and me. Indeed, if a reader is about to comment on this post, I am absolutely certain with no doubt in my mind that I consider that reader, holistically considered as a human being, a worse person than each and every one of these philosophers, taken individually; they were simply better at thinking, which is the central component of the value of a person. (And hence it does not matter if they supported slavery, or whatever.) We must consider, as Felipe Miguel’s thesis warned, “The Epistemic Significance of Agreement with Exceptional Theistic Philosophers”.

I claim that, in order to honor the great thinkers of the Western philosophical tradition, we should define “God” and “exists” in whatever sense makes it plausible to say that it is true that “God exists”. It is insensitive, and culture-hating, to define it any other way, in light of the above. There are many such plausible senses available, such as the property of “Platonic Being” of Ed Zalta’s Abstract Objects, p. 43; I am not particular about it. Due to my anti-structuralism on metaontology, I believe many different definitions of “God” and “exists” can be acceptable; and due to my deflationist, anti-subtractive view on metaontology, I believe most of the acceptable definitions will turn out to make the sentence “God exists” come out true.

To be clear: I am saying that you have to contort the definitions until you’re willing to say the words “God exists”, no matter what you mean by them, and if you’re unwilling to do so then you’re insensitive and you hate culture. Some readers may be concerned whether a plausible definition may not turn out to be deistic rather than theistic. Such readers are trying to draw a sharp line between deism and theism, which cannot be done historically; see Atheism and Deism Revalued on the issue. From a historically informed perspective, the definition of “deism” is as indeterminate as the definition of “God”.

2.3. Analyticity of theism

If the components of the proposition “God exists” are defined in some way that makes the proposition true, then it is an analytically true proposition. This seems to have two consequences:

  1. It seems to put me on one historical camp, which favored a priori or ontological proofs-of-God, against a different historical camp, which favored a posteriori or empirical proofs-of-God.
  2. It seems to commit me to the claim that atheists are not competent language users, since they use the word “God” without attributing existence to him.

Regarding the first, I will clarify that actually, both camps gave a priori arguments; regarding the second, I will accept the consequence and explain how it might be true.

2.3.1. Historical arguments were not truly a posteriori

There are two senses in which an argument can be a posteriori, or empirical:

  • An argument is a posteriori in a thorough sense when it is possible for a competent language user to deny the putatively observational premise, if he lacks some relevant nonlinguistic knowledge.
  • An argument is a posteriori in a limited sense when it is conceivable for a human being to deny the putatively observational premise, although such a human being would not be a competent language user.

While many historical arguments for the existence of God have been described as “a posteriori”, I claim that they were only a posteriori in a limited sense, but not in a thorough sense. In the modern, broad sense of analyticity, it is analytic, hence a priori, to say “some things move” (argument from motion) or “some things have the appearance of design” (argument from design), in the relevant technical senses of “motion” and “appearance of design”; if someone denied that any things move, he would not be a competent language user regarding the verb “to move” and the noun “motion”. Due to the difficulty in giving up competent language use regarding these words, even atheists do not generally respond to these arguments by denying their putatively observational premise, and instead they respond by denying the consequence.

2.3.2. Atheists are not competent language users

If the components of the proposition “God exists” are defined in some way that makes the proposition true, then it is an analytically true proposition, which means atheists are not competent language users with respect to these words. I claim that this is the case; for instance, atheism often falls out of a restrictive metaontology which, as noted before, leads systematically to incompetent language use.

Since we can find studies saying autistic people are more likely to be atheists, and also have difficulties with figurative language, I have been tempted to speculate that atheism is connected to difficulties with polysemous language, finding it hard to say something “exists” if it’s not connected to sense-perception (as most things that exist are). However, a study comparing religion and verbal ability does not support this view.

Aside from ordinary confusion owing to poor education, we cannot rule out dishonesty; after all, one purpose of identification as an atheist is to signal your membership in atheist culture, and hence the fact that you consider the bulk of humanity to be your outgroup, i.e., that you hate most humans. This motivation is clearly not tied to truth-value. Such, then, are the mechanisms for incompetent language use by atheists.

3. Religion

“Natural religion” is when you try to honor God based on what you know about him from nature, without claiming that any particular event constitutes a divine revelation. If you somehow felt inspired by the divine being whose existence was proved above, you could attempt to honor him based only on your natural knowledge; I do not care much about attempts to do this, although it is theologically important that this is possible.

“Revealed religion” is when you accept some particular event as a divine revelation, such as the miracle at Mount Sinai, or the miracle of Jesus’s resurrection, or some other miracle. This also often involves a holy book, and so on.

Either one may be simply called “religion”, depending on context.

I am a Roman Catholic. This section of this blog post will clarify my views on revealed religion, but only in order to avoid confusion with my belief in theism, which was explained above.

3.1. Motivation of revealed religion, generally: matters of faith

My approach to revealed religion is defined by the following conceptions.

  1. If something can be found outside revealed religion, then it is not a correct motivation for revealed religion. Hence, the following are not correct motivations for revealed religion: aesthetic appeal, a sense of belonging to a community, moral values. (Although impious philosophers such as Spinoza and Kant have believed that revealed religion is for the sake of moral values, I side with Christian philosophers such as Augustine and Thomas Aquinas in believing that revealed religion has nothing to do with moral values, since moral values can be demonstrated with absolute clarity beyond a shadow of a doubt by the unaided power of human natural reason, and hence do not require revealed religion.)
  2. Revealed religion is believed on faith, and it is characteristic of faith that one cannot be irrational for failing to have it. Hence, I reject views where religious belief is to be supported by reason, such as evidentialist approaches where the resurrection of Jesus is argued to have happened historically; and I reject views where reason is to be supported by religious belief, such as in presuppositionalist apologetics.
  3. Faith is trust in an external authority. Hence, religious belief is not properly basic as Alvin Plantinga says, nor does it require any special faculty besides our senses, our will, and our reason; in particular, it does not require a faculty of intellectual intuition, or “sensus divinitatis”, or any belief-producing “inner witness of the Holy Ghost” except insofar as it may be said that the Holy Ghost works on humans by means of their ordinary faculties.

In my opinion, revealed religion is when you trust an external authority about “matters of faith” related to honoring God, such as what names he should be called, what rituals may be rightly performed in his honor, afterlife-related beliefs, etc. In my opinion, these are questions on which nature does not determine an answer, and hence unaided human natural reason will not arrive at an answer. But you may still want an answer, since it is common to want to have rituals performed surrounding your birth, death, marriage, etc. But then again, you are not rationally required to want these answers, and you may be perfectly rational if you decide to have no answers to these questions which are matters of faith.

3.2. Motivation for Catholicism: one, holy, catholic, apostolic

The Catholic Church has traditionally claimed that its “motives of credibility” are its unity, holiness, catholicity, and apostolicity. There are many documents in which it claims this, and the most prominent one nowadays is the Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraphs 811–870. The catechism also cites other sources in its footnotes for your perusal.

Notice how this works perfectly with my conception of faith: you certainly are not irrational if you fail to believe in Catholicism due to these motivations, hence faith is kept distinct and separate from reason, such that they cannot be confused. However, these are pretty appealing motivations anyway, and not in a merely aesthetic sense:

  • Unity is pretty cool if you care about saying “I believe in this religion” in a way that has any truth-conditions at all. I have shown that it is impossible for Protestantism to have any fixed meaning, and similarly with Judaism and other religions, because there is no central living authority. Catholicism, on the other hand, is whatever the Pope says it is, hence it means something.
  • Holiness can refer to whatever senses of holiness you may think of. Certainly the doctrines of Catholicism contain no error, as will be explained in the next section.
  • Catholicity, or worldwideness, is nice if you care about being part of something which is spread across the whole world, and hence serves as a symbol of cosmopolitan aspirations.
  • Apostolicity might not seem obviously cool by itself – after all, if you already love the apostles, you’re already interested in Christianity. But actually, it has a similar relationship to time as catholicity has to space. Christianity claims continuity with ancient Judaism, which is one of the world’s oldest religions, all the way in the bronze age. And in particular, Catholicism claims a continuity of institutional hierarchy: the first Pope picked up where the last Jewish High Priest had left off. Even if Hinduism is older than ancient Judaism by some measures, certainly it cannot claim this kind of institutional continuity. Given the previous remarks on unity, this means Hinduism cannot claim to really be the same religion that it was in antiquity, unlike Catholicism.

3.3. Faith vs. reason

The burden of this section is to show that Catholicism does not contradict reason, which is easy to do.

3.3.1. History vs the past

I believe various claims about the past made by Catholicism, such as that Jesus rose from the dead, performed miracles, etc etc. I do so without any irrationality, for you may notice that I did not call these historical claims.

Although many official Church documents may call these historical claims, they are not historical claims in the sense I mean it: in this sense, something is part of history if-and-only-if we can determine that it is part of the past from current evidence, by current methods. Since current university-accepted historiographical methods do not permit accepting that miracles happened, no miracles are part of history in this sense.

The Catholic Church does not claim that miracles are part of history in this sense, either: the Church instead asserts that these events happened in the past, and does not furthermore make the claim that there is evidence, acceptable by current methods, to show that they happened. Hence, in the sense at hand, the Catholic Church makes claims about the past, not about history.

The Church’s claims about the past are to be accepted on faith, entirely unrelated to any claims about history. The historian is free to determine the content of history without any worries that he may be debunking some claim made by the Catholic Church.

3.3.2. Other propositions

Maybe you think the Catholic Church makes some claim which is not about the past, but which is nevertheless erroneous. You shouldn’t think so, since the following is a dogma proclaimed by the First Vatican Council:

  1. Even though faith is above reason, there can never be any real disagreement between faith and reason, since it is the same God who reveals the mysteries and infuses faith, and who has endowed the human mind with the light of reason.

  2. God cannot deny himself, nor can truth ever be in opposition to truth. The appearance of this kind of specious contradiction is chiefly due to the fact that either the dogmas of faith are not understood and explained in accordance with the mind of the Church, or unsound views are mistaken for the conclusions of reason.

  3. Therefore we define that every assertion contrary to the truth of enlightened faith is totally false.

  4. Furthermore the Church which, together with its apostolic office of teaching, has received the charge of preserving the deposit of faith, has by divine appointment the right and duty of condemning what wrongly passes for knowledge, lest anyone be led astray by philosophy and empty deceit.

  5. Hence all faithful Christians are forbidden to defend as the legitimate conclusions of science those opinions which are known to be contrary to the doctrine of faith, particularly if they have been condemned by the Church; and furthermore they are absolutely bound to hold them to be errors which wear the deceptive appearance of truth.

This dogma is very important, since you may use it to assure yourself that any supposed falsehood proclaimed by the Catholic Church is only your misunderstanding. After all, suppose you know by your own reason that some proposition P is true. Then if the Catholic Church seems to proclaim that not-P is true, there is a contradiction between faith and reason, which contradicts the Vatican I dogma. Hence, charitably interpreted, the Catholic Church does not proclaim that not-P is true, no matter how it may appear to the contrary.

This may seem weird if you’ve never thought about it. But Catholicism is not like Protestantism, where it is your job to figure out how to interpret the revealed words defensibly. This is very much not your job. If the proposition P seems to you, by the power of your natural human reason, to be a legitimate conclusion of science, then all you have to do is to simply teach it as such, as you normally would; and if the Catholic Church disagrees, then you will be notified of your excommunication by your bishop, or by the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, or by the Pope himself, as the case may be. This actual enforcement by a living authority is what determines that, after all, you had in that case turned out to really have been “forbidden to defend as the legitimate conclusions of science” the proposition P. Of course, if it really is proven that the proposition P is true without doubt, such that it is irrational to deny it, then in such a circumstance Catholicism would have falsified itself. This hasn’t happened, and by God’s protection, it won’t.

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Tuesday, February 17, 2026

Logic of Law

I am not sure whether Frank van Dun’s stated justifications for developing his formal theory of law hold much water. He says he is using formal logic to avoid the ambiguities in natural language, but the only semantics provided for his logic is to give a natural-language interpretation of each predicate. And obviously, the central words in the theory, namely the relation of “belonging”, are certainly understood differently by different cultures. If van Dun wanted to avoid such issues, it may have been desirable to give a semantics that translates these relations into less loaded terms, which may be cashed out into positivistic “observation-sentences” or something of the sort.

Nevertheless, van Dun’s theory is very interesting in its own right. I feel an aesthetic attraction to it. Hence, this blog post redevelops the formal elements of The Logic of Law, by Frank van Dun, in a new notation, and with proofs given (van Dun gave no proofs, only theorem statements). I have replaced van Dun’s idiosyncratic quantifiers with standard ones, and in every instance where variable names were used to implicitly distinguish domains (such as the variable name $p$ used to imply that it is restricted to persons), I have replaced that with restricted quantification over explicitly-defined sets. I have also replaced many of van Dun’s predicates and relations with infix-notated symbols, because I thought that looked nicer. Although I added proofs of each of the propositions, at least one of them was not provable as stated, as you will see.

The same labels are used for propositions as far as possible, so you can easily compare this blog post to van Dun’s paper; but van Dun wrote many propositions without labels, so it might not be very easy to compare, anyway, especially since I preferred to add a new natural-language paraphrase of each of the formal statements instead of reusing his paraphrase.

Illustration of van Dun’s legal system as notated by this blog post, made with Nano Banana.
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Sunday, February 15, 2026

Reductive analyses of desert

This blog post explores the possibility of giving a reductive analysis of the concept of desert, as in, “getting what you deserve”. I briefly talk about the current state of research on desert, which seems to fail to give any reductive analysis; then I give my preferred reductive analysis, as well as some utilitarian reductive analyses which I developed for my friend Tetraspace, so that she would not need to use a trivialized view.

Here is a natural and appealing idea: it is a good thing when people get what they deserve. If I am distributing raises, and only Jones deserves a raise, then it would be better for me to give the raise to Jones than to anyone else. —Feldman and Skow, SEP entry on “Desert”

SEP on desert

Recently, as an outgrowth of a curiosity about contemporary value theory, I was reading the SEP article on the concept of desert. The following infographic depicts the state of philosophical research on the topic, as portrayed by the SEP article.

Infographic of SEP on desert, drawn by Nano Banana. Please click for full image.

What struck me about the SEP article was that all the given theories took the concept of desert as a primitive concept. This concept can be analysed in terms of its relata: all desert claims involve someone who deserves it (the deserver), something deserved (the desert), and something about the deserver in virtue of which the desert is deserved (the desert base), and optionally a fourth element, which is someone from whom the deserver deserves the desert (the distributor). It can also be distinguished from entitlement: desert holds in virtue of intrinsic features of the deserver, while entitlement holds in virtue of social institutions. But none of the theorists cited in the article seemed to be offering a reductive analysis of desert in terms of other concepts.

Deontological reduction of desert

Personally, I really don’t want to take desert as a primitive concept. I already have a moral theory, so everything looks like a nail. Using my moral theory to define desert, I think my own view of desert is this:

x deserves y (from p) ≝ x has a moral right to receive y (from p), in at least the broad sense of morality. If x has this moral right in the narrow sense of morality, we might say x strongly deserves y (from p).

My moral theory is such that this analysis works perfectly, as far as I can tell. 

Utilitarian reductions of desert

My friend Tetraspace is some sort of utilitarian, I think. When I was reading the SEP article, I was reminded of her views on desert.

Trivialized desert

For we each of us deserve everything, every luxury that was ever piled in the tombs of the dead kings, and we each of us deserve nothing, not a mouthful of bread in hunger. —Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed (quote)

In some old posts to X (formerly Twitter), now deleted, Tetraspace made comments to the effect of espousing a trivialized view of desert: every sentient being, regardless of personal traits, deserves whatever they would get in an ideal world, which includes all of their wildest dreams and infinite eternal happiness, since that’s what everyone receives in the ideal world. I call this view trivialized because everyone deserves the same thing, regardless of who or what they are. (Or rather, maybe different people deserve different things to the extent that they enjoy different things, but still, the linguistic difference is very small.)

She appealed to her consequentialist sympathies to support this view, since she was unable to think of how to arrive at a nontrivial view of desert within her consequentialist framework. Given the state of research in the SEP article (where desert was always taken as a primitive), I really can’t blame her, but I still thought she could do better, even if we insist on a reductive analysis of desert within utilitarianism.

Desert as time-bound desert-from a possibly elided distributor

In a reply to Tetraspace on X (formerly Twitter), in May 2025, I had once offhandedly suggested that she should use this analysis:

x deserves y ≝ ∃ p ∈ person, ∃ t ∈ time, EV(⌜p doesn’t give y to x within t⌝) < 0.

Of course, we can get the version with a distributor by simply freeing the variable:

x deserves y from p ≝ ∃ t ∈ time, EV(⌜p doesn’t give y to x within t⌝) < 0.

Come to think of it now, while this analysis can recover many of the commonsense linguistic phenomena, it has some grave flaws. Namely, it implies that a terrorist kidnapper deserves to receive a ransom, as long as his threat that he will kill his hostages is credible. So much, then, for the time-bound desert-from view.

Note (2026-02-16): I had been silently using the little ⌜corners⌝ for quasiquotation, and this apparently confused Tetraspace at first, so I am noting here that this is what they are.

Desert as improvement in felicific power

After thinking about it now, my best attempt for Tetraspace is that Tetraspace should have a concept of someone’s “power to make things better”, and then she should use this analysis:

x deserves y (from p) ≝ at least one of these holds:

  1. y is not rivalrous, and receiving y (from p) will increase x’s power to make things better
  2. y is rivalrous, and receiving y (from p) will increase x’s power to make things better more than if y is given (by p) to anyone else

I think this analysis produces most of the commonsense theorems:

  • random abuse is undeserved, because random suffering usually makes you worse at making things better,
  • random gifts are usually undeserved but sometimes deserved,
  • rewards for good actions are deserved, because of the incentive that they provide, and
  • punishment is deserved if, and only if, (and precisely to the extent that,) it’s rehabilitative.

I have no idea whether Tetraspace would take exception to a powers ontology. I think, to account for science, she needs the concept of powers anyway, regardless whether it is primitive; so she might as well use it for the desert theory. Under this analysis, desert is reduced to a metaphysical component (the concept of power) and an evaluative component (an order of world-states from better to worse), where the latter component can be taken wholly from her own value theory. My own moral theory proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that her value theory is wrong, but there is no reason why it should lead her to say weird-sounding things about what people deserve.

FDT-style desert

Upon reading the above, Tetraspace herself suggested adding a counterfactual conditional to the naïve time-bound reduction, which would allow avoiding the result where terrorists deserve ransom. An FDT-style approach that I believe is likely to capture her preferred reasoning is given below.

x deserves y (from p) ≝ The expected utility of the world where the decision algorithm A (which p runs) is logically fixed to output “give y to x” is higher than the world where A is fixed to output “don’t give y.” That is,

Desert(x, y) ≝ EV(⌜A □→ Give⌝) > EV(⌜A □→ ¬Give⌝)

Where the evaluation includes all subjunctive dependencies (past, present, and future) linked to algorithm A.

The box-arrow notation is, of course, David Lewis’s box-arrow for counterfactuals.

This formulation is somewhat opaque to me, but it seems to give the following commonsense results:

  • People deserve to be compensated for completed work or good deeds, because the optimal decision algorithm must reliably reward past cooperation to ensure future cooperation.
  • Bad actors do not deserve to have their demands met (e.g., ransoms), because an algorithm that rewards threats logically guarantees that more threats will be made.
  • Criminals deserve punishment even if it will not rehabilitate them, because fulfilling the algorithm's prior commitment to punish is necessary to deter others from committing the same crime.
  • Offenders deserve penalties that fit the crime, because an optimal incentive structure balances the necessary deterrent effect against the societal friction and cost of extreme, draconian penalties.
  • Victims do not deserve random bad luck, natural disasters, or random abuse, because unpredictable suffering serves no logical or functional role in shaping positive behavior.

It also seems to yield the result that you deserve your lottery win because you intentionally acquired a ticket, but not a different kind of windfall that really had nothing to do with your decision policy.

I am glad that Tetraspace was able to use her own resources to get closer to commonsense views on desert; the possibility of getting threatened by terrorists is obviously a common decision theory example, but for whatever reason I did not think of this, despite having looked into similar stuff before. I suppose I have to hand this one to the folks at LessWrong. Counterfactuals are still somewhat unclear and metaphysical nowadays, but there is more research going into clarifying them than into powers ontology (or at least I think so), so this seems like an improvement upon the previous proposals.

Funny “loading screen” art made with Nano Banana, also posted here.
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Thursday, February 12, 2026

Chesterton’s fence is easy to get over

Many people who I’ve talked to seem to think that Chesterton’s fence consists in a very strong presumption against changing institutions. Some praise it as the very symbol of their own strong attitude against changing institutions, and refer to any change in institutions as “tearing down Chesterton’s fences”; others condemn Chesterton’s fence as being an excessively strong constraint, arguing we should be readier to change institutions, and hence should abandon Chesterton’s fence.

Enough is enough. This blog post argues that Chesterton’s fence is actually a very weak constraint. I argue that this is how it was meant by Chesterton, and that it is not useful to interpret it in any other sense. This is partly a point in favor of the fence: if a reformer can’t even meet Chesterton’s very weak constraint, which is very easy to meet, then he’s a very poor reformer who hasn’t even done his very easy homework, and certainly shouldn’t be admitted to the rule of our society. But it also means that getting over Chesterton’s fence is not the be-all-end-all of whether you’ll allow someone to change your institutions; you need more defenses than Chesterton’s waist-high garden fence.

G.K. Chesterton’s original text

Chesterton’s fence is a parable that was given entirely in two paragraphs in his book “The Thing: Why I Am A Catholic”, in the chapter “The Drift from Domesticity”. In full, they run as follows:

In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.”

This paradox rests on the most elementary common sense. The gate or fence did not grow there. It was not set up by somnambulists who built it in their sleep. It is highly improbable that it was put there by escaped lunatics who were for some reason loose in the street. Some person had some reason for thinking it would be a good thing for somebody. And until we know what the reason was, we really cannot judge whether the reason was reasonable. It is extremely probable that we have overlooked some whole aspect of the question, if something set up by human beings like ourselves seems to be entirely meaningless and mysterious. There are reformers who get over this difficulty by assuming that all their fathers were fools; but if that be so, we can only say that folly appears to be a hereditary disease. But the truth is that nobody has any business to destroy a social institution until he has really seen it as an historical institution. If he knows how it arose, and what purposes it was supposed to serve, he may really be able to say that they were bad purposes, or that they have since become bad purposes, or that they are purposes which are no longer served. But if he simply stares at the thing as a senseless monstrosity that has somehow sprung up in his path, it is he and not the traditionalist who is suffering from an illusion. We might even say that he is seeing things in a nightmare. This principle applies to a thousand things, to trifles as well as true institutions, to convention as well as to conviction. It was exactly the sort of person, like Joan of Arc, who did know why women wore skirts, who was most justified in not wearing one; it was exactly the sort of person, like St. Francis, who did sympathise with the feast and the fireside, who was most entitled to become a beggar on the open road. And when, in the general emancipation of modern society, the Duchess says she does not see why she shouldn’t play leapfrog, or the Dean declares that he sees no valid canonical reason why he should not stand on his head, we may say to these persons with patient benevolence: “Defer, therefore, the operation you contemplate until you have realised by ripe reflection what principle or prejudice you are violating. Then play leapfrog and stand on your head and the Lord be with you.”

Chesterton moves on from this to say that “among the traditions that are being thus attacked, not intelligently but most unintelligently, is the fundamental human creation called the Household or the Home”. Chesterton was a social conservative, and the fence was only introduced as a device to defend the family against leftist critiques. He had no broader, general theory of the fence beyond these two paragraphs, and he did not come back to it.

Chesterton’s fence, when stated as a “principle”, is sometimes summarized as, “Do not remove a fence until you know why it was put up in the first place.” As you can see from the full text above, this does capture Chesterton’s advice. What I intend to emphasize in this blog post is that it fully captures all of his advice.

Chesterton only required a debunking origin story, and this is very easy to provide

Chesterton’s fence, when stated like this, is a really easy constraint to get over. To get over Chesterton’s fence, the reformer who would like to abolish an institution F need only provide, and support, two claims:

  1. The institution F was originally instituted with the intention of fulfilling the purpose P.
  2. The purpose P is not a purpose that we currently need, or want, or should want, to fulfill anymore. (Or alternatively, P is already equally well or better fulfiflled by a different institution G, which has made F redundant; or, F does not fulfill P anymore.)

That’s it. I call those two claims together a “debunking origin story”: the claim 1 gives an origin story for the institution F, and the claim 2 uses that origin story to debunk F with respect to our current society.

Quick thinkers will already notice that it’s still possible that the institution F is a good institution even though it is possible for a critic of F to get over Chesterton’s fence when criticizing it, and that is my point: Chesterton’s fence is only a weak constraint. For slower thinkers, however, I will give a list of debunking origin stories for some presently-standing institutions, which will emphasize my point.

Examples of debunking origin stories

Here are 20 examples of still-existing institutions/policies that people sometimes condemn by pointing to “bad origins” (racism, eugenics, colonial violence, etc.). Although I did not put any care into collecting the list (and hence the examples ended up somewhat U.S.-centric), I personally endorse all of these arguments:

  1. Minimum-wage laws — Critics point out that some Progressive Era advocates explicitly used eugenics / “unfit worker” arguments in support of wage floors.
  2. Planned Parenthood / the early U.S. birth-control movement — Often condemned because Margaret Sanger embraced eugenics rhetoric (which Planned Parenthood itself acknowledges, while arguing the history is complicated).
  3. Modern American policing — Frequently criticized as having roots in slave patrols and racialized social control (with some historians/commentators disputing how direct that lineage is).
  4. The prison system + prison labor — Condemned because the 13th Amendment’s “punishment” exception and post–Civil War practices like convict leasing are seen as reconstituting coerced labor.
  5. The U.S. Electoral College — Criticized as a constitutional compromise entangled with slavery-era power and representation (including incentives tied to enslaved populations).
  6. The U.S. Senate filibuster — Often condemned for its long association with blocking civil-rights legislation (even when writers disagree about whether it originated that way).
  7. Single-family zoning — Condemned for exclusionary roots tied to racial segregation and keeping certain groups out of neighborhoods.
  8. Homeowners associations (HOAs) / deed restrictions (historical) — Criticized because many neighborhood governance structures grew alongside racially restrictive covenants and enforced segregation norms (even though those covenants are now unenforceable).
  9. U.S. housing finance & underwriting institutions — Condemned due to the legacy of redlining and government-backed mortgage systems that excluded Black neighborhoods (even though explicit redlining was later outlawed).
  10. Standardized testing (IQ tests, SAT/aptitude testing) — Criticized for eugenicist intellectual roots and early claims about racial hierarchy used to justify exclusion.
  11. The “War on Drugs” policy apparatus — Condemned as structurally racialized, with critics citing both historical intent claims and racially disparate impacts in enforcement.
  12. The U.S. Border Patrol / border enforcement institutions — Criticized as emerging from restrictionist eras and racialized immigration politics; critics describe “racist origins” in early 20th-century enforcement formation.
  13. The modern U.S. visa/quota border-control framework (legacy of 1924) — Condemned because the Immigration Act of 1924 was strongly shaped by racial hierarchy and eugenics-influenced restrictionism, and it helped institutionalize modern border controls.
  14. Vagrancy / loitering policing and related ordinances — Criticized as inheriting logic from Black Codes that criminalized idleness and constrained freedom after emancipation.
  15. Major museums with colonial-era collections — Condemned because many collections were built through colonial conquest/looting, prompting restitution and repatriation disputes.
  16. Elite universities with slavery ties — Condemned because many prominent schools benefited from enslavement, slave-trade wealth, or related institutions, and some now publish formal reports acknowledging it.
  17. Land-grant universities (Morrill Act system) — Criticized as having been financed through expropriated Indigenous land, with ongoing debates about restitution and revenue.
  18. Child welfare systems in Indigenous contexts — Condemned due to the legacy of state-sponsored family separation (e.g., federal Indian boarding schools) and continuing debates about removals and sovereignty.
  19. Psychiatry’s diagnostic institutions (e.g., DSM tradition) — Criticized because the field historically pathologized homosexuality and used institutional power in ways now seen as abusive; advocates cite this to challenge current authority.
  20. Columbus Day (and similar “heritage” civic holidays) — Condemned for celebrating a figure linked to colonization and Indigenous dispossession, which is why many jurisdictions have shifted to Indigenous Peoples’ Day while the federal observance still exists.

Notice that all of these criticisms, if true, successfully get over Chesterton’s fence: they claim that the institution F arose to fulfill a purpose P, and that the purpose P is not a purpose that we currently need, or want, or should want, to fulfill anymore. (Of course, they do need to be true, which is debatable, but this is beyond the scope of this blog post.)

I hope using a slew of claims that are very controversial in current politics helped you notice how weak of a constraint Chesterton’s fence is.

Isn’t that the genetic fallacy?

The genetic fallacy is when you criticize an argument because of the motivations of the person who argued it. So the criticisms above technically don’t commit the genetic fallacy in the usual sense. However, in the broader sense where having bad origins doesn’t mean something is itself bad, the criticisms in the list do commit the genetic fallacy if used by themselves, as the first and only criticism of the institutions.

But if a defender of each of these institutions had decided to appeal to Chesterton’s fence as a defense of the institutions, then the debunking origin story provided by the criticisms fully fulfills everything Chesterton asked for. Nothing more is needed to get past Chesterton’s challenge. Chesterton’s fence has been successfully gotten over by these critics, because they provided a debunking origin story, and Chesterton’s fence, as such, does not ask for anything more, or anything else.

Against interpreting Chesterton’s fence in a stronger sense

If someone says Chesterton did not mean what I said he meant, then such a person is certainly wrong and irrational, and not worth listening to, and should certainly be excluded from society; I will not say they should be killed, but certainly no one would miss them. But let us suppose a more reasonable opponent of my blog post. Such a reasonable opponent says:

Sure, I concede Chesterton meant what you said he meant, since I am reasonable, unlike an irrational and unlovable person who does not concede this. But I think you are making Chesterton’s fence into something useless and irrelevant, and hence I think we should use the name “Chesterton’s fence” to refer to the stronger principle that, if we wish to tear down an institution, we should find out what purpose it currently serves. After all, Chesterton’s fence is only relevant to the extent that the original purpose of an institution sheds some light on its current purpose, and that’s obviously what we should care about, so it is not even worth having a name for the other thing.

It is the nature of a reasonable opponent that, although he is reasonable, I oppose him. My reason is as follows: defenders of an institution can always make up an infinity of purposes that they think (or claim to think) the institution currently serves for them. It is not clear which of these deserve a hearing. Maybe you should just do your best to answer the best arguments against your view that you can think of, but then Chesterton’s fence is not distinct from the “principle of charity”, or “steel manning”; it is certainly not worth having a third name for an idea that already has two.

More to the point, Chesterton’s fence has Chesterton’s name on it, and Chesterton is a famous traditionalist conservative. It makes sense that Chesterton’s fence should refer to something that talks about deferring to tradition, and our forefathers, etc. Chesterton’s fence clearly ties into Burkean conservative defenses of tradition, such as the view of tradition that Ed Feser attributes to F.A. Hayek. An interpretation of Chesterton’s fence should honor its conservative and traditionalist roots.

Chesterton’s idea, as I reconstruct it, has to do with an intuition that when we actively or passively support the continued existence of an institution, we don’t only (or even necessarily) do so because we have our own reasoning to think it’s a good idea, but also (or sometimes even exclusively) because we trust the tradition of our society that has been maintaining the institution up to now. Our trust in our ancestors, in turn, is only as good as their trust in their ancestors, and so on, and the line of people trusting each other has to end at the people who first instituted the institution. Chesterton is saying that, even before you get to the merits of the discussion of an institution, you should be able to at least overcome our commonsense trust in our ancestors. And I add: if you can’t even do that, how good of a reformer can you be, exactly?

Conclusion

In summary, to recapitulate:

  1. Chesterton’s fence only requires that you provide a debunking origin story of an institution that you seek to abolish: describe the original purpose of the institution, and show that that purpose is no longer a good reason for the institution.
  2. This is what Chesterton meant by it.
  3. This is what is interesting to mean by it, because (1) interpreting it as being about purposes currently served by an institution makes it too similar to charitableness/steelmanning, and (2) the debunking-origin-story interpretation also best captures Chesterton’s conservative and traditionalist worldview, and (3) a weak constraint is more interesting as a challenge to a reformer, because if a reformer can’t even meet a weak constraint, then he is certainly a bad reformer.
Illustration for this blog post, drawn by Nano Banana.
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Monday, February 2, 2026

Simplified modal ontological argument

This blog post defends S5 modal logic by arguing that atheists should not reject its axioms merely to avoid the theistic conclusion of Plantinga-style modal ontological arguments. It does so by emphasizing that a modal ontological argument is, after all, an ontological argument: it moves from a certain substantive definitional claim about God to an affirmative existential claim about God. The real work in the argument is done by the substantive definitional claim, and the logic, regardless how strong of a modal logic it is, is just scaffolding. Or so I claim, and I defend this by recasting the modal ontological argument in a weaker modal logic with stronger premises, showing that the argument is still valid and can still be equally well motivated by informal conceptions of theism in this way, and then only afterwards comparing the argument with something that you’d need S5 to show. S5 is then seen to be a perfectly innocent, and delightfully accurate, model of how alethic modalities work in natural language, so that non-theists who would like to reject modal ontological arguments would be best served by either sticking to an agnostic or sceptical claim about theism or by adopting some theory that denies the very possibility of the truth of theism, rather than trying to make such strange, hard to interpret claims as that “God’s existence is contingent since it isn’t actual, but it could have been actual, in which case it would be necessary”.

I first came up with the central argument of this blog post on 2025-08-03, but the blog post came largely from a discussion on 2026-02-02 in which I used the argument to defend S5, much the same as in this blog post (in fact, a few words in this blog post were reused from the discussion).

1. Introduction

Alvin Plantinga famously considered his own modal ontological argument unconvincing. Maybe his pessimism about natural theology was warranted in some way, but it wasn’t helped by his needlessly overcomplicated presentation of the argument.

Plantinga’s argument, like all ontological arguments, moves from a substantive, definitional claim about God to an affirmative existential claim. But Plantinga took it for granted that he would be able to use the strongest modal logic, S5, and hence, like a logician seeking to use only the minimal necessary axioms, pared down his substantive understanding of God to a minimal claim that allowed S5 to do as much of the work of the proof as possible. This is perfectly fine if the argument is to remain academic, but naturally, since it is a proof-of-God, it made its way to apologists, who merely repeated Plantinga’s argument without deeper reflection on what was being said in it. This was the first time many atheists heard of modal logic, and many of them reflexively denied the S5 axioms instead of the premises, which is what the argument’s phrasing was meant to pressure them to do. But while modal logicians can laugh at atheists being made to look foolish by restricting themselves to a uselessly weak version of alethic modal logic, laypersons don’t really see what’s so funny about this. And I think it’s a dismal state of affairs, because I don’t want to be unable to use the nice, perfect, beautiful, S5 modal logic when modelling alethic modalities in my conversations with atheists, just because they’re afraid of Plantinga. Enough is enough.

In this blog post, I restate the modal ontological argument by using a weaker modal logic combined with a stronger substantive definitional claim about God, so as to make the background understanding of God explicit, and show that nothing is unusual about it. With this, I aim to show that the substantive definitional claim about God is the real core of the ontological argument, not anything about S5. I review the options for non-theists very thoroughly so as to make it clear that they really don’t need to deny S5, and there’s really no reason to do so. The main goal of this blog post, in summary, is to emphasize the advantages and innocence of S5, so as to show that S5, by itself, says nothing more than natural language intuitively says about alethic modalities, so that the core of any modal ontological argument is something else.

2. The argument restated

The argument uses classical propositional modal logic with axiom T, and uses g as a constant that means “God exists”. (Axiom T is the same as what is called Axiom M by the SEP, which seems to be an outlier on this.) The exposition uses the definition ◇p ≝ ¬□¬p freely, and also freely speaks of “theists” as believers in g and “atheists” as believers in ¬g, with “agnostics” being those who suspend judgment, and “sceptics” being those who deny that it is possible to know whether g is the case (more on this in section 3); “non-theists” are whichever persons aren’t theists, of course.

The argument is stated as follows:

  1. □g ∨ □¬g (premise)
  2. ¬(□¬g) (premise)
  3. □g (1,2 DS)
  4. g (3 via axiom T)

This all went by very fast, so I am going to explain it line-by-line.

2.1. Premise 1: God’s existence is not contingent

Premise 1 states that God’s existence is either necessary or impossible. This is to deny that God is a contingent being, in the sense that God might either have been or not have been. The negation of Premise 1 is ◇g ∧ ◇¬g, i.e., possibly God exists AND possibly God doesn’t exist. Theists who accept Premise 1 deny that it’s possible that God doesn’t exist, and atheists who accept Premise 1 deny that it’s possible that God exists. Hence, neither theism nor atheism are forced by Premise 1 by itself.

The motivation of Premise 1 for theists is that they accept one of the disjuncts. The motivation of Premise 1 for atheists is that, if they affirm ◇g ∧ ◇¬g, then it’s unclear that their statement ¬g is really denying the same thing that theists affirm. After all, theists conceive of God as a necessary being, not as a contingent being. If the atheist denies Premise 1, the theist is free to say that the atheist hasn’t really denied what he affirms.

The very use of “contingent” as standard modal terminology hints at this way of conceiving of necessary truths, since it comes from Leibnizian metaphysics. In the Leibnizian metaphysics, whenever you said something was “contingent”, you also said it was “contingent on” something else: the “things that might have been and might not have been” were coextensive with the “things that depend on something else for their existence”. Leibniz took this simply as a linguistic datum, and it went unquestioned for a long time (I’m still not sure who exactly questions it), because it just works with natural language so perfectly.

But affirming Premise 1 does not require a commitment to this thesis of Leibnizian metaphysics. Using “fundamental being” for beings that aren’t ontologically dependent, then we might say that, regardless whether Leibniz is right in saying that all-and-only fundamental beings are necessary beings, it remains that theists conceive of God as a necessary being, quite apart from whether theists conceive of God as a fundamental being (which I think they also do, but which the argument does not claim). If the atheist conceives of God as a contingent being, which might either be or not be, then the atheist is not meaning the same thing by “God” that the theist means by it.

I say that the theist conceives of God as a necessary being. There is, of course, no universal agreement among theists about anything, so which theist do I mean? Well, Alvin Plantinga, for one, certainly conceives of God as a necessary being, and hence accepts Premise 1. Leibniz, of course, also does. More generally, I can’t think of any theist in the history of philosophy or of religion who ever explicitly denied Premise 1, at least about the greatest god, although not all of them always explicitly affirmed it. The atheist who denies Premise 1 is being very weird, historically, and hence I think I am saying something very plausible in saying that he is not denying something that any theists affirm. So if the atheist wants to deny what theists affirm, he must accept Premise 1, and hence (if he wants to remain an atheist in the present sense, rather than an agnostic or sceptic) claim that God’s existence is impossible, not just “possible but not actual”. More on options for atheists in section 3.

2.2. Premise 2 (God’s existence is possible) and the derivation

Premise 2 states that God’s existence is not impossible. Together with Premise 1, this easily implies theism, of course. Plantinga also uses Premise 2, so this argument isn’t an improvement on Plantinga in this respect. The atheist is free to deny Premise 2 if he wants; this is discussed in section 3.

To be fully explicit in case someone can’t read the notation: Since Premise 1 said God’s existence is either necessary or impossible, and Premise 2 denied that it’s impossible, then by Disjunctive Syllogism you get that God’s existence is necessary, which is the proposition 3. Axiom T says that necessary propositions are actually true, hence from proposition 3, via axiom T, you get proposition 4. I don’t expect any of this derivation to be controversial, it’s the premises that are controversial.

3. Options for non-theists, and why rejecting S5 isn’t one

The argument did not use the full strength of the modal logic system S5; it relied more or less entirely on the fact that Premise 1 is required to capture the theist’s informal understanding of God.

Granted, it also used Axiom T. But Axiom T, unlike the more bespoke S5 axioms that involve iterated modalities, is certainly obviously true in natural language. When would you ever say that something is “necessarily true but not actually true”? This seems simply ungrammatical. Hence, Axiom T is an analytic truth.

3.1. How S5 enters into the argument, and why rejecting it is a bad idea

How does S5 even come into it, then? The answer may be surprising: S5 only comes into it if the atheist wants to accept Premise 2 (i.e., deny that God’s existence is impossible; together with atheism and Axiom T, this already implies the negation of Premise 1, but nevermind this for now) and furthermore affirm that, “if God had existed, then God would exist necessarily”, in the subjunctive mood, interpreted under a standard modal reading of subjunctives. S5 is then required to show that such an atheist is inconsistent, such that the subjunctive statement combined with Premise 2 would force theism. I will explain.

If the atheist merely wants to say, in the indicative mood, that “if God exists, then God exists necessarily”, then this can be interpreted as a mere material conditional, g → □g. Even for the atheist, this can coexist in a classical S5 model with ◇g (God’s existence is not impossible), because, since the atheist accepts ¬g, then accepting g would lead to inconsistency. In classical logic, “from a contradiction, anything follows”, and in particular, you have g → □g.

But if the atheist wants to say, in the subjunctive mood, “if God had existed, then God would exist necessarily”, then under a standard modal reading of subjunctive conditionals, S5 can show that this atheist cannot, as an atheist, grant that it is possible that God exists. This standard interpretation, seen for instance here and here, interprets a subjunctive statement “if A had been the case, then B would have been the case” as materially implying, at least, that ◇A → ◇B. So for the atheist who says, “if God had existed, then God would exist necessarily”, this amounts to ◇g → ◇□g. Combined with his commitment to ◇g from his acceptance of Premise 2, the atheist becomes committed to ◇□g. This is where the characteristic axiom of S5, which is called either Axiom 5 or Axiom E depending on the source, comes into play, which says that ◇□p → □p. Instantiating the scheme with g, you have ◇□g → □g. By modus ponens, you have □g, and then Axiom T yields the theistic conclusion, as before. So such an atheist would be inconsistent, committed to theism and atheism, under S5.

However, such an atheist is certainly inconsistent in a more ordinary way, not just given S5. If he claims that God’s existence is possible (given his acceptance of Premise 2) but not actual (given his acceptance of atheism), then he claims that God’s existence is contingent. (That is, atheism and Premise 2, together with Axiom T, commit him to the negation of Premise 1.) So it is simply very strange, in natural language, that he claims, about God’s existence, that “if this proposition were to be true, it would be a necessary truth”. If you were to ever say the just-quoted sentence about any other proposition in your life, certainly you would be saying it about something which is either a tautology or a contradiction, such as a mathematical conjecture, not about something contingent. It is very weird, in natural language, to say that a contingent proposition would be necessary if it were true. The modal translation, and the S5 axiom, are only capturing this reality about how language is used, not introducing anything out of the ordinary. The dispute is about the premises, not about S5.

S5 is the best formal model of natural alethic modal language. It corresponds to frames where the accessibility relation is reflexive, symmetric, and transitive, or equivalently, reflexive and Euclidean. This is simply how natural-language alethic modalities work, and there is really nothing else to use, if you want a model of alethic modalities in formal logic. There is no reason to weaken it. I encourage you to look further into modal logic with an open mind, without thinking so much about theistic arguments, so that you will see what I am talking about. (Do not confuse alethic modalities with other modalities, of course, such as epistemic, deontic, or temporal modalities, which I do not address here.)

3.2. The real live options for non-theists

If you don’t want to accept theism, your options are the following:

3.2.1. Agnosticism or scepticism

This is to suspend judgment on whether God exists (agnosticism), or alternatively, to claim that is impossible to know whether God exists (scepticism about theism). These can be challenged, but I don’t care to do so here.

3.2.2. Believe that God’s existence is impossible, and hence reject Premise 2

Since the ontological argument merely proves that there is a necessary being, the most direct way to do this is to deny that there are any necessary beings at all, which is certainly something some people have believed, such as David Hume; if there are no necessary beings, then any purported necessary being is impossible.

If the atheist wants to make a more modest claim, he can use the typical arguments that some particular version of God’s purported attributes leads to inconsistency, such as arguments from evil, or from the omnipotence paradox. Those arguments are, of course, tied to a specific notion of what God’s attributes are, which may be disputed by the theist. Alternatively, the atheist can restrict necessary beings in a more local way, such as by claiming that the only necessary beings are (for instance) mathematical objects, and God isn’t (for instance) a mathematical object. You need to motivate the restriction on necessary beings somehow, and the more kinds of necessary beings you allow, of course, the more room there is for theists to argue that God fits into one of your allowed kinds.

3.2.3. Dispute the theist’s definition

I am including this option for logical completeness: technically, you may reject Premise 1 and try, somehow, to answer the theist’s challenge that this does not capture his conception of God. You may claim that the theist does not really believe that it is impossible for God to fail to exist, despite his protestations to the contrary; you may try to interpret the religious and theological tradition as somehow best explained by a contingent view of God. I do not think this makes any sense, but I can’t let my blog post be anything but exhaustive.

Illustration for this blog post, drawn by Nano Banana.
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