LD:
Not only was William of Ockham a theist, he believed that the ultimate ontological category was God and that everything else was contingent upon him. His use of parsimony was the simple idea that one's ontological categories should not become needlessly bloated. But, happily, God is but one ontological entity and the prime one. Marg, without apparently being minimally aware of what she is commenting on, doesn't seem to realize that Ockham was not only a religious person, but that much of his work is theological in nature. For a man who believed that one acts morally by conforming one's motives to those of the will of God, it seems pretty absurd to suggest he was only nominally religious or secretly not so. But why does Marg think such a thing? Because he seems logical. And, in Marg's world, seeming logical is antithetical to being a believer. So you end up with a preposterous situation where one of the most famous theological thinkers in western history is thought not be all that religious.
I’m not saying W. Ockham wasn’t a theist, or that his philosophical arguments didn’t assume a God. What I am saying is that relative to other philosophers in his day, his ideas didn’t seem as religious as others. It didn’t appear his purpose was to
promote a belief in a God, or to
support the church with philosophical arguments as Aquinas did. And given many of the ideas, from what I read, it seemed to me, they were radical and leaned more toward a non religious humanism than a strong fundamentalist religious belief. He didn’t want philosophy to be tied in with theology and it seemed his main interest was philosophy.
If one looks at notable philosophers in the last 100 years or so, the vast majority are atheists. Yet, I don’t think there were any atheist philosophers in Europe before 1600’s to when Romans left 400. One of the main reasons for this is that the Roman Catholic church with their power would never have allowed influential individuals to promote such a heretical idea as – I don't hold a God belief. So if you were an intellectual making a living from teaching as Ockham did you wouldn’t be able to get a job opening being an atheist and quite probably your life would be in danger. As it was he was closely scrutinized by the RC church, put under a 4 year loose house arrest while they investigated his work, and then he never went back to the academic life. He got into political commentating but wasn’t able to publish publicly and only did so underground. He opposed
all arguments for the existence of God and argued that belief rested on faith alone. That’s quite radical in his day and went completely against the church, which wanted to be able to argue that God's existence could be reasoned to. And he didn’t choose theology as a career, he was essentially forced into it at a young age by being sent to the Fransicans to be educated. It’s not as if he had many other options available to him, besides theology.
I think as well, it is quite likely that in the past I'm referring to before 1700’s it is quite likely intellectuals may have suppressed their true thoughts on God’s existence. Even today, I read on the Net many people who are involved within the religious culture of Mormonism, who keep silent about their true beliefs that they reject claims by the Mormon church. They keep silent for the sake of reducing conflict, knowing full well the negative ramifications if they were open about their true thoughts. So of course, people do what they have to in order to survive and coexist in the community or society they are a part of.
As far as Occam Razor, I think it is tricky to use properly. You have to have at least 2 equally competing theories. And if they are equally competing, then it is imperative if one has evidence the other must have as well (otherwise they aren’t equally competitive.). But if neither have evidence, which would be the case with God existence theories, then they can be argued only within a framework or game constructed. In otherwords, an axiom or assumption is made and from there one reasons to a theory or conclusion. So what may be true or relevant within a game wihich makes assumptions, can not be assumed true in the physical world.
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I’ll quote portions, which I think indicate that W. Ockham’s philosophies were radical, and more philosophical than theological. From the site : Internet for Philosophy W, Ockham
http://www.iep.utm.edu/o/ockham.htm
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"Historically, Ockham has been cast as the outstanding opponent of Thomas Aquinas (1224-1274): Aquinas perfected the great “medieval synthesis” of faith and reason and was canonized by the Catholic Church; Ockham destroyed the synthesis and was condemned by the Catholic Church.
Theologically, Ockham is a fideist, maintaining that belief in God is a matter of faith rather than knowledge. [b]Against the mainstream, he insists that theology is not a science and rejects all the alleged proofs of the existence of God.[/b]
a. Fideism
Despite his departures from orthodoxy and his conflict with the papacy, Ockham never renounced Catholicism. He steadfastly embraced fideism, the view that belief in God is a matter of faith alone.
Although fideism was soon to become common among Protestant thinkers, it was not so common among medieval Catholics. At the beginning of the Middle Ages, Augustine proposed a proof of the existence of God and promoted the view that reason is faith seeking understanding. While the standard approach for any medieval philosopher would be to recognize a role for both faith and reason in religion,
Ockham makes an uncompromising case for faith alone.
Three assertions reveal Ockham to be a fideist.
i. Theology is Not a Science
As a staunch empiricist, Ockham is committed to the thesis that
all knowledge comes from experience. Yet we have no experience of God. It follows inescapably that we have no knowledge of God, as Ockham affirms in the following passage:
“In order to demonstrate the statement of faith that we formulate about God, what we would need for the central concept is a simple cognition of the divine nature in itself—what someone who sees God has. Nevertheless, we cannot have this kind of cognition in our present state.” [Quodlibetal Questions, pp. 103-4]
ii. The Trinity is a Logical Contradiction
For Ockham, however, this syllogism establishes that theology is not logical and must never be mixed with philosophy.
iii. There Is No Evidence of Purpose in the Natural World
Though Ockham was reluctant to disagree with Aristotle, he was so determined to keep theology separate from science and philosophy, that he felt compelled to criticize the fourth (which he calls “final”) cause. Ockham writes,
"If I accepted no authority, I would claim that it cannot be proved either from statements known in themselves or from experience that every effect has a final cause.... Someone who is just following natural reason would claim that the question “why?” is inappropriate in the case of natural actions. For he would maintain that it is no real question to ask something like, “For what reason is fire generated?” [Quodlibetal Questions, pp. 246-9]
No doubt Ockham put his criticism in hypothetical, third-person terms because he knew that openly asserting that the universe itself may be entirely purposeless would never pass muster with the powers that be.
b. Against the Proofs of God’s Existence
Needless to say,
Ockham rejects all of the alleged proofs of the existence of God. Two of the most important proofs then, as now, were Anselm’s ontological proof and Thomas Aquinas’s cosmological proof.
The Ontological Proof
Ockham’s curt response to the ontological argument is that it does not prove that there is just one greatest entity. Bearing the Great Chain of Being in mind, it is evident what he means to say. If God and the angels do not exist, then human beings are the greatest entities, and there is no single best among us. Notice that, even if there were a single best among humans, he or she would be a “god” in a very different sense than is required by Catholic orthodoxy.
ii. The Cosmological Proof
Ockham explicitly affirms that it is possible that the world had no beginning, as Aristotle maintained.
Ockham readily grants that if the world has to be “held up” by conserving causes, then there must be a first among them because otherwise the set of conserving causes would constitute an uncountable quantity of actually existing things. It is in fact a tenet of belief that God is both an efficient and conserving cause of the cosmos, and Ockham accepts this tenet on faith. He handily points out, however, that, just as the cosmos need not have a beginning; it need not be “held up” in this way at all. Each existing thing may be its own conserving cause. Hence the cosmological argument is entirely inconclusive.
Ockham’s fideism amounts to a refusal to rely on the God hypothesis for theory building. It is worth bearing in mind that there were no philosophy departments or philosophy degrees in the Middle Ages. A student’s only choices for graduate school were law, medicine, or theology. Wanting to be a philosopher, Ockham studied theology and ran through his theological exercises, all the while trying to carve out a separate space for philosophy. The one area where the two worlds collide inextricably for him is in ethics.
8. Political Theory
Although Ockham was summoned to the papal court in Avignon to defend a number of “suspect theses” extracted from his work, largely concerning the sacrament of the altar, he was never found guilty of heresy, and his conflict with the papacy ultimately had nothing to do with the sacrament of the altar. While staying in Avignon, Ockham met Michael Cesena (1270-1342), the Minister General of the Franciscan Order, who was there in protest of the Pope’s recent pronouncements about the Franciscan vow of poverty. Michael asked Ockham to study these pronouncements, whereupon Ockham joined the protest and soon became irretrievably entangled in a political imbroglio. Leaving academia behind for good, he nevertheless marshaled his central philosophical insights into the debate.
While Ockham was not allowed to publish his political treatises, they circulated widely underground, indirectly influencing major developments in political thought.
b. Separation of Church and State
Ockham extends his commitment to poverty beyond just the Franciscan order, convinced that wealth is an inappropriate source of power for the Catholic Church as a whole. In his view, the Catholic Church has a spiritual power which sets it apart from the secular world. This conviction leads Ockham to propose the doctrine that was to become the foundation of the United States Constitution: separation of church and state.
Ockham boldly proposes a third alternative: the pope and the emperor should be separate but equal, each supreme in his own domain. This was an outrageous suggestion, unwelcome on both sides. Ockham’s argument for it stems from reflections that foreshadow the “state of nature” thought experiments of premier modern political theorists Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), John Locke (1632-1704) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778).
Ockham writes,
For this reason, the head of Christians does not, as a rule, have power to punish secular wrongs with a capital penalty and other bodily penalties and it is for thus punishing such wrongs that temporal power and riches are chiefly necessary; such punishment is granted chiefly to the secular power. The pope therefore, can, as a rule, correct wrongdoers only with a spiritual penalty. It is not, therefore, necessary that he should excel in temporal power or abound in temporal riches, but it is enough that Christians should willingly obey him. [A Letter to the Friars Minor and other Writings, p. 204]
For Ockham, the separation of church and state is a separation of the ideal and the real.
c. Freedom of Speech
Even more interesting, however, is Ockham’s view of non-theological speech. He writes that
...purely philosophical assertions which do not pertain to theology should not be solemnly condemned or forbidden by anyone, because in connection with such assertions anyone at all ought to be free to say freely what pleases him, [Dialogus, I.2.22]
This statement long predates the Areopagitica of John Milton (1608-1674), which is typically heralded as the earliest defense of free speech in Western history.
Ockham’s contributions in political thought are less known and appreciated than they may have been if he had been able to publish them. Likewise, there is no telling what he might have accomplished in philosophy if he had been allowed to carry on with his academic career. Ockham was ahead of his time. His role in history was to make way for new ideas, boldly planting seeds that grew and flourished after his death.
