Analysis of Existing: Barry Miller's Approach to God

Elmar J. Kremer

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781623563585
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Filosofia delle religioni

Miller's metaphysics, including his approach to God, is broad, deep, and original, with the potential to make a fruitful contribution to contemporary philosophy. Yet it has not received the critical attention it deserves. Miller's work deserves critical attention because of its thorough and original defense of three highly controversial positions: that existence is a real property of concrete individuals; that it is possible to prove, without assuming any principle of sufficient reason, that there is an uncaused cause of the universe; and that the uncaused cause is the simple God of classical theism. Miller's position on existence is an important alternative in current analytical philosophy to what Miller calls the "Frege-Russell-Quine" theory, and the neo-Meinongian positions of Terence Parsons and Ed Zalta. Miller's argument for an uncaused cause of the universe has been described one of the most ambitious theistic arguments produced by a well-respected, contemporary, analytic philosopher. Analysis of Existing: Barry Miller's Approach to God is the first clear, systematic interpretation of Miller's theistic philosophy.

1

Barry Miller’s Philosophical Journey

Barry Miller’s Australian confreres in the Society of Mary were bemused by his devotion to philosophy. He entered the Society after studying Thomistic philosophy for 12 years, while working as a young engineer. Thereafter he devoted himself to metaphysics, and especially to proving the existence of a God who is transcendent, that is, utterly different from the created universe. A confrere and longtime friend of Miller told me, ‘We used to say that Barry was a brain on legs’, because Miller was so focused on his philosophical work, from his early teaching in the Marist seminary in Armidale, New England, Australia, to his international career of teaching and writing. Yet he was also devoted to his pastoral duties, and near the end of his life asked his friends and parishioners to pray that he would rest in God’s love.

I. Miller’s life¹

Barry Miller was born in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, on April 29, 1923, the second of three children. He was reared in the Catholic faith by his mother, as were his sister and younger brother, Rhonda and Alan. After completing secondary school at Waverley College, conducted by the Christian Brothers, Miller received a cadetship with the Postmaster General’s Department to study electrical engineering. He completed his engineering degree in 1943 and was employed by Telecom until his entry into the novitiate of the Society of Mary in 1953. During those years, Miller attended classes at the Aquinas Academy, an institution founded in 1945 by Austin Woodbury, S. M., for the purpose of teaching Thomistic philosophy to ordinary, educated laypeople.

Miller’s talent was recognized by his religious superiors, and immediately after his ordination to the priesthood, on June 20, 1957, he was sent to the Angelicum in Rome to study philosophy. Miller received his doctorate in June, 1959. His thesis was published by Chapman in London in 1961, under the title, The Range of Intellect.² Miller had been in Rome for no more than ten or 11 months when he wrote to his religious superiors in Australia asking permission to pursue further studies in philosophy at a secular university. He offered two reasons for his request, first, that a degree from a Catholic institution would be considered, rightly or wrongly, inferior to one from a secular university; and, second, that he wanted to study philosophies other than Thomism from professors who believed the other philosophies were true. Miller mentioned Oxford, Cambridge, Yale, and Harvard as possibilities, but ended up going to Cambridge in the fall of 1959, where he obtained a B. A. (later converted, as usual, into an M. A.). While working on his Cambridge degree, he spent two months at Oxford (October 7 to December 3, 1960), where his tutors were G. E. M. Anscombe and H. P. Grice.

From his return to Australia in 1961 until 1967, Miller taught philosophy at the Marist seminary in Toongabbie, NSW. He was, by all accounts, an extremely dedicated, hard working, and uncompromising teacher. He taught the basic principles of Thomistic philosophy as he understood them, but he also tried to integrate into his courses both the main problems and the most important participants in contemporary Anglo-American philosophy. During this period, Miller was also asked to do some teaching at the Aquinas Academy.

Miller’s teaching, however, was not uniformly appreciated by his confreres. His first run-in was with Austin Woodbury, who terminated Miller’s work at the Academy after learning that Miller disagreed with him about Aquinas’s views on the impressed and expressed species in human knowledge.³ Miller’s teaching was also controversial among the students and teachers at the seminary, and in the spring of 1967, Wilfrid Radford, S. M., the Superior of the Seminary, asked the Marist Provincial Council to help him persuade Miller to change his approach. In a ‘Submission to the Provincial Council re Teaching of Philosophy at Toongabbie’, Radford listed three objections to Miller’s teaching: First, Miller exhibited a ‘studied neutrality’ when expounding different philosophical positions. Radford opined that such an approach did not sufficiently ‘throw the teaching of St. Thomas into relief’, and was not suitable for forming the students into disciples of Aquinas. Radford conceded that ‘the conclusions of St. Thomas’ were to be found in Miller’s courses, and that those courses ‘would be [excellent] for bringing home the truth of the Thomistic doctrine to a philosopher already sophisticated and of another school’. But for beginners they were more likely to produce the impression that ‘no philosophical system can be presumed to have priority over another, and that the Church should not impose one system as the rational basis of faith and of theology’.

Radford’s second objection was that Miller’s ‘complex and eclectic approach’ could make it ‘wellnigh impossible for the beginner to come to see Thomism as a coherent system based on a set of metaphysically necessary principles’. Radford cites a passage in Miller’s article on teaching philosophy in the seminary, in which Miller indicates that such philosophers as Ryle, Wittgenstein, and John Wisdom would have something to contribute to the understanding of philosophical psychology; that the controversy about the analytic/synthetic distinction was relevant to metaphysics; and that R. W. Hepburn, the contributors to New Essays in Philosophical Theology, and John Mackie merited consideration when discussing the existence of God, together with such Thomists as Klubertanz, McInerny, and Fabro.⁴ This approach, Radford says, had produced some students ‘who were unaware of Thomism as a system, except as a name to be suspicious of, an authoritarian bogey’.

Radford’s third objection was that Miller’s courses were ‘far too advanced and difficult for the beginner—even the gifted beginner’. In conclusion, Radford emphasizes that Miller ‘is truly a gifted and devoted scholar and teacher, and has the power of communicating his enthusiasm to others’. ‘I have always seen him’, Radford adds, ‘as a man who would be at his best in a great University, where he would provide an almost unique link between Scholasticism and contemporary philosophical thought—in both of which fields he is highly versed’.

Miller prefaced his defense by identifying two main points of disagreement between Radford and himself, namely, how to teach Thomism in the twentieth century and how to interpret what the Second Vatican Council said about teaching philosophy in the seminary. Miller says he does not think either his position or Radford’s can be ‘proved apodictically to be correct’, but that both views are reasonable. His own views, he says, ‘being reasonable, that is, being tenable without any special pleading or straining of facts . . . are consequently legitimate and admissible’. ‘Although I regard Fr. Radford’s views as wrong’, Miller adds, ‘I do not think them unreasonable’. For that reason, ‘if our situations were reversed, I should feel under no obligation to suppress their implementation’.

Regarding the teaching of Thomism in the twentieth century, Miller says that a philosopher ought to deal with contemporary philosophical problems and to welcome philosophical insights wherever they are found, including the insights of those with whom he or she disagrees. ‘“In this way’, Miller said, ‘philosophy becomes what it should be—an active search for truth (irrespective of where it may be found), and not a museum of truths’.⁵ Furthermore, that is precisely the way St Thomas acted: ‘St. Thomas’ method in the 13th century was to consider the problems under discussion at that time, to consider them as they were framed by his contemporaries, and to work to a solution which would answer all the objections and synthesise [Sic] the valid insights of others’. Miller then goes on to argue that his own view of the Second Vatican Council is ‘perfectly faithful to what the Council actually says (as distinct from Fr. Radford’s interpretation), and hence is quite legitimate to hold’.

Turning to Radford’s detailed objections, Miller brushed off the complaint about his ‘studied neutrality’ in presenting philosophical problems, pointing out that in the absence of such neutrality, ‘students might well gain the impression that philosophy is studied for some reason other than that of a love for seeking, honoring, and defending the truth, as the [Second Vatican] Council requires’. Once again, ‘no one was more studied in this regard [i.e. in presenting opposing views in a neutral way] than St. Thomas’. In reply to Radford’s remark that Miller’s ‘neutrality’ would suggest ‘that the Church should not impose one system [Thomism] as the rational basis of faith and of theology’, Miller uses a nice analogy: ‘This is something like claiming that a music teacher’s insistence on students seeing the beauty of what they study will detract from the right of the Church to impose the use of a particular form of music, e.g., Gregorian chant’.

Regarding the objection that his approach was ‘eclectic’, Miller says that Radford was using a ‘loaded’ expression, and that his attack was doubly unfair because the passage he quoted about Ryle, Wittgenstein, etc. was from an article in which Miller had been asked specifically by the editor of the Marist journal ‘to comment on ways in which contemporary philosophy could contribute to our philosophy course’. In any event, Miller continues, the passage does not even begin to prove Radford’s point: ‘There is all the difference in the world between eclecticism and synthesis. If Fr. Radford thinks they are the same, he must condemn St. Thomas as one of the most eclectic philosophers who ever lived’.

Miller admits that ‘there is some truth’ in Radford’s third objection. In particular, parts of one of the five courses for which Miller was responsible (the course on philosophical psychology) ‘are too advanced’, and he says he intends to simplify the course in the following year. Clearly, Miller’s standards of teaching philosophy were different from those of at least some of his confreres, and Radford was not wrong when he said that Miller would have been better employed in a great university. Intense and uncompromising in his pursuit of philosophy, Miller was demanding as a teacher outside as well as inside the classroom. The anthropologist Gerald A. Arbuckle, S. M., a fellow student with Miller at the Angelicum, recounts a conversation he had with Miller while they walked back and forth on the rooftop of the Marist center in Rome. Miller was trying to explain the distinction between essence and existence, and Arbuckle said he was more confused after the explanation than at the beginning. ‘Crumbs’, said Miller, using his favorite explicative, ‘Why can’t you understand that?’ Although Arbuckle remained a close friend of Miller until Miller’s death, he never managed to understand his friend’s philosophy.

Miller’s superiors were spared the need to adjudicate the disagreement between Radford and Miller by a request from Notre Dame Seminary, a Marist institution in New Orleans, Louisiana, for someone to replace a philosophy professor on leave for a year. Miller accepted the appointment.⁶ He took advantage of the year in North America to travel widely and give lectures at a number of universities. He also attended a six-week session on metaphysics at South Hampton, New York, from June 23 to August 8, 1968, sponsored by the Council for Philosophical Studies, where the lecturers included Peter Geach, as well as W. V. Quine, Wilfrid Sellars, Roderick Chisholm, Alvin Plantinga, and Bernard Williams. On one trip through the mid-west of the United States, he made his first visit to the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana, a visit that led to his appointment there as a Visiting Lecturer in Philosophy from September 16, 1968 to January 31, 1969. He was to return to Notre Dame to work in the Center for Philosophy of Religion for two months in 1985, and again as a Distinguished Visiting Fellow in 1992–3.

Upon his return to Australia in 1968, with the support of his religious community, Miller sought a position in a secular university and joined the philosophy department of the University of New England in the fall of 1969. He remained there until 1987, when he took retirement one year early in order to accept an appointment as Visiting Professor at the University of Münster, West Germany, for 1987–8. He then returned to Australia, and, with the exception of 1992–3, spent at Notre Dame, he lived at Hunter’s Hill, a harborside suburb about 8 kilometers to the west of Sydney, where the Marist seminary had been relocated. There he completed his trilogy in philosophical theology: From Existence to God (1992), A Most Unlikely God (1996), and The Fullness of Being (2002). He also continued his pastoral work, serving at the parish of St Peter Chanel, Woolwich, until October, 2004, when he suffered a serious brain injury as the result of an accidental fall down a flight of stone steps. He died on August 16, 2006.

II. Miller’s philosophical theology

Miller’s ‘Philosophy in the S...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Introduction
• 1 Barry Millers Philosophical Journey
• 2 Beginning with Existence
• 3 From Existence to God
• 4 Divine Simplicity
• 5 Simplicity, Creation, and Human Freedom
• 6 Objections and Replies
• Bibliography
• Index