I promised at the beginning of this paper [“Objectivism and Theism”] that, after presenting the positive case for theism on Objectivist grounds, I would examine Dr. [Nathaniel] Branden’s arguments and state where, in my judgement, he goes astray. To this task I now turn.

Contradiction and Miracles; the Fatalist Fallacy; Natural Law

Objection:
  If you have abandoned belief in a God who can perform contradictions, well and good. What you have apparently not noticed is that you cannot stop there. You want to draw a line between the making of round squares, which you concede to be impossible, and the turning of water into wine, and women into salt, and other such nonsense, which you still claim that God can do. This looks suspiciously like the Analytic-Synthetic Dichotomy, which no rational person can accept who has ref Professor Peikoff’s brilliant dissection of that fallacy.

Reply:
  There is nothing in Professor Peikoff’s article which presents the slightest difficulty for the believer in miracles. He divides facts straightforwardly into “man-made” facts and “metaphysical” facts. The first could have been otherwise and the second could not. For example, it is a man-made fact that Paris is the capital of France, and this can be altered any time that the French government, with the backing of the French people, chooses to do so. It is now too late to change the fact that Paris was the capital of France in 1950, but this is nevertheless a man-made fact, in that the French people, who have free will, could have chosen otherwise in 1949. On the other hand, given the fact (for suitable N) that the human race is less than N years old, this is certainly not a man-made fact. (Non-existent men could not have chosen to exist!) Likewise, it is not a man-made fact that light travels at 186,000 miles per second, or that gravity is an inverse-square force, or that space has three dimensions. There is not a thing we can do about any of these facts. Of them, therefore, Professor Peikoff would say: “They are metaphysical. They could not have been otherwise. They follow from the nature of the entities involved.”

Now, even on Professor Peikoff’s own terms, we can make mistakes in deciding whether a given fact is man-made or metaphysical. In 1825, most chemists would have thought it a metaphysical fact that organic compounds cannot be synthesized outside a living organism, and that chemical elements cannot be changed into other chemical elements. On the other hand, they would not have thought, as do most physicists today, that there are absolute limits to the speed with which a material object, or even a message, can travel, or to the accuracy with which the position and velocity of a particle can be measured. Thus our classification of facts into metaphysical and man-made (and of imagined alternatives into possible and impossible) must be contextual, subject to revision in the light of further discovery.

All this when we consider only two categories: man-made facts (plus facts made by other free creatures, if any) and metaphysical facts. But there is no reason why Professor Peikoff’s analysis, just as it stands, should not accommodate God-made facts as well. We say: “It is a man-fact that there are fifty states in the United States. Men have so chosen, but they could have chosen otherwise, and they are still free to change the number.” Just so, we may say: “It is a God-made fact that there are nine planets in the solar system. God has so chosen, but he could have chosen otherwise, and he is still free to change the number.” [Reminder: James is writing more than 25 years before Pluto was reclassified as a dwarf planet.]

Let us examine the contention that the miraculous is the contradictory, so that a God who cannot perform contradictions cannot perform miracles either. Let us consider a favorite miracle of atheists, that of turning a woman into a pillar of salt. (Please note that to assert God’s omnipotence is to assert only that he could do this if he chose. Whether he has ever so chosen is another question altogether and will not be considered here.)

The critic says that if God were to turn a woman into a pillar of salt, that would be a contradiction. I do not see why. A contradiction involves the same proposition’s being true and false at the same time in the same sense. A and not-A. Where is the contradiction here? Is it that God is saying both, “This is a woman” and “This is a pillar of salt (and therefore not a woman)”? But it is not a woman and a pillar of salt at the same time, and there is no contradiction in saying that something is one thing at one time, and another thing later. To call that a contradiction would be to commit the error of Parmenides, who concluded on this ground that all motion and change are impossible. Miss Rand is not a disciple of Parmenides.

I suppose that the contradiction complained of is rather between “No woman ever becomes a pillar of salt,” and “This woman has become a pillar of salt.” Admittedly, the two assertions contradict each other. But that does not prove that the second assertion cannot be true; it proves only that the two assertions cannot both be true simultaneously.

We have here an example of what is sometimes called the Fatalist Fallacy — that which is, must be. People say that if a man is sitting he cannot be standing and if he is standing he cannot be sitting, and either way his posture is a matter of logical necessity and not of choice. But the “cannot” here does not express an impossibility of sitting, but rather an impossibility of sitting-when-he-is-standing, which is not the same thing at all, and leaves him perfectly free to sit or stand as he pleases. When someone says, “If it is true that Jones is sitting, then Jones must be sitting,” he is offering a special case of the statement, “If p is true, then p must be true.“ But this must be read as “p necessarily-implies p,” and not as “p implies necessarily-p.” And thus, read, it has no overtones of non-freedom. In the sentence, “If x is greater than three, then x must be great than two,“ the mathematical necessity expressed by “must” attaches not to the consequent (x is greater than two) but to the consequence — to the “if ... then,” the conditional relation between the two clauses. [01] It is not that the second clause necessarily holds, but that the second clause necessarily follows.

Some students of Objectivism have ignored this distinction, and have supposed themselves to be following Professor Peikoff in so doing. Let us consider what he has to say on the subject.

Truth is the identification of a fact of reality. Whether the fact in question is metaphysical or man-made, the fact determines the truth: if the fact exists, there is no alternative in regard to what is true. For instance, the fact that the U.S. has 50 states was not metaphysically necessary — but as long as this is men’s choice, the proposition that “The U.S. has 50 states” is necessarily true. A true proposition must describe the facts as they are. In this sense, a “necessary truth” is a redundancy, and a “contingent truth” a self-contradiction. [02]

If one wishes to use the term “tautology” in this context, then all truths are “tautological.” (And by the same reasoning, all falsehoods are self-contradictory.) [03]

In Professor Peikoff’s terminology, given the fact that there are fifty states, the statement that there are fifty-one is a contradiction, in that it contradicts existing reality. In this sense, it looks as if we ought to say not only that God is capable of bringing about contradictions, but that so is man, or indeed any agent of change. Of course, Professor Peikoff is not so naive. He would reply that the statement that there are fifty-one states is false (and so a contradiction — i.e., contrary to reality) only as long as men choose that there shall be fewer than fifty-one states. If they choose to make the number of states fifty-one, they simultaneously make the statement in question true, and alter reality so that the statement no longer contradiction reality.

A source of much confusion about miracles is the practice of saying that a miracle is an event that violates the laws of nature, or that for God to perform a miracle is for him to suspend the laws of nature. It would be better to say that for God to perform a miracle is for him to act directly upon a natural object. For example, suppose that on a particular occasion, God causes water to flow uphill. Someone says: “God has suspended the law of nature that water always flows downhill,” or “God has altered the nature of water.” But in fact it is not the nature of water always to flow downhill. Ask anyone who has ever designed, or used, a pump! Rather, it is the nature of water to move (to accelerate) in the direction of the sum of the forces acting on it, and it is the nature of the Earth to exert a force downhill. Thus, water will flow downhill, unless prevented by an equal or greater force, such as the resistant pressure of a barrier, or the force exerted by a pump, or the direct action of God. It is idle to complain that the physical interaction between God and the physical world cannot be analyzed entirely in terms of the laws of the physical world. Interaction between two systems can never be analyzed totally in terms internal to one of the systems.

Once again, I point out that the omnipotence of God means only that he can perform miracles if he chooses, not that he has done so. All theists, as far as I know, reject most alleged miracles. Some theists reject all of them.

Since this is not an essay on miracles, I say no more of them, but refer the interested reader to the books Miracles, by C.S. Lewis, and The Mind of the Maker, by Dorothy L. Sayers. For another point of view, there are Chance and Providence and Physicist and Christian, by William G. Pollard. [04] 

References
[Editor’s notes are in blue.]

* The title refers to Nathaniel Branden’s lecture “The Concept of God,” from his lecture series “The Basic Principles of Objectivism.” That lecture is fully transcribed in his book The Vision of Ayn Rand, chapter 4. Partial and perhaps complete audios seem to be available throughout the Internet. See also R.A. Childs, “The Epistemological Basis of Anarchism,” Note 19.

[01] J. Hospers, Introduction to Philosophical Analysis, (Elwood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1967; 2nd ed.); page 281.

  Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Paul Edward (Macmillan, 1967).

[02] L. Peikoff, “The Analytic-Syn. Dichotomy,” 6/8/10g [[References of this form refer to The Objectivist Newsletter, so that volume 6, number 8 would be August 1967. After volume 4, the name of the publication was The Objectivist. The page numbers for the latter are those of the original format, not those in the bound volume] & IOE 150-51 [Ayn Rand, Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, Harry Binswanger and Leonard Peikoff eds. (New York: New American Library, 1990; 2nd expanded edition), page 111].

[03] L. Peikoff, “The Analytic-Syn. Dichotomy,” 6/6/9a-d [June 1967] & IOE 135-36 [Correct page: 100].

[04] C.S. Lewis, Miracles. Several editions: Macmillan 1947 (pb); 2nd ed. Fontana, Glasgow, 1960 (pb); London: Geoffrey Bles/The Centenary Press, 1947 (hb).

  D.L. Sayers, The Mind of the Maker. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1941; Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1970 (hb); New York: Meridian Books, 1956 (pb).

  W.G. Pollard, Chance and Providence. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1958.

  W.G. Polalrd, Physicist and Christian. Greenwich, Conn.: The Seabury Press, Inc., 1961.