Since reason is incapable of fathoming this God and good works incapable of appeasing Him, faith alone could be Luther’s refuge. In Luther’s case, the prospect of judgment by the terrifying God of nominalism and voluntarism – an omnipotent and capricious will, ungoverned by any rational principle – was cause for despair. With the humanists this was manifested in their emphasis on man as an individual, willing being rather than as a rational animal. As Michael Allen Gillespie argues in his recent book The Theological Origins of Modernity, the Renaissance humanists’ revolution in culture, Luther’s revolution in theology, Descartes’ revolution in philosophy, and Hobbes’s revolution in politics also have their roots in Ockhamism. Once again, only faith can in Ockham’s view do the job Aquinas thought reason capable of.Īnd that is only the beginning. Given Ockham’s voluntarism, morality can only rest on arbitrary divine commands rather than human nature, and these commands can in turn be known only via divine revelation. If traditional natural theology goes by the board in Ockham’s philosophy, so too does natural law. Nor, in his view, can we prove the immateriality and immortality of the human soul – unsurprisingly, given that the traditional Platonic and Thomistic arguments for the soul’s immateriality and immortality depend crucially on realism about universals, which Ockham rejects. For those conclusions we need to rely on faith. To be sure, Ockham himself didn’t go so far as to deny that one could argue for some sort of first cause, but he didn’t think we could get, through philosophical arguments alone, to the conclusion that there is only one such cause, or that it is free, infinite, or even the cause of all things. Naturally, all of this tends to undermine causal arguments for the existence of God. (See William Thorburn’s article “The Myth of Ockham’s Razor”) And while the old Razor Boy did cut away the foundations of medieval thought, it was not (contrary to what Christopher Hitchens thinks) on the basis of some kind of proto-scientific rationalism, but rather in the name of an anti-rationalist authoritarian theology. On the other hand, the specific formulation usually associated with Ockham – “Entities should not be multiplied without necessity” – first appears centuries after Ockham’s time, and the label “Ockham’s Razor” appears only in the nineteenth century. On the one hand, the basic idea is as old as Aristotle and can be found in various medieval authors. But there was nothing distinctively Ockhamite about that, and nothing terribly revolutionary in it either. Superficial histories of thought would attribute this meta-paternity to the so-called “Ockham’s razor” principle. If Descartes was the father of modern philosophy, the medieval philosopher William of Ockham was the great grandfather.
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