PHILO LONG TEST 1

World Council of Churches

• There are 2 criteria for determining a Christian Denomination

  • Jesus is God, but also Man (Dual nature of Jesus)

  • The God that we believe in is a trinity

Religion has two etymological derivations:

• Latin religio, (n.) “reverence for gods”; “piety” (vertical dimension)

• Latin religare (v.) “to bind together” (horizontal dimension)

  • Individual relationship with their deity and with other believers

With defining religion comes many problems

• It was in the late 19th and 20th centuries that scholars of religion felt obliged to clarify what religion exactly meant

• There is still a growing feeling that the phenomenon of religion is so multi-faceted that there can be no adequate single definition

Spirituality vs Religion

• Some people identify themselves as spiritual, but not religious

  • There’s a need to understand both in a continuum

• Spirituality is religion personalized

• Religion is spirituality institutionalized

Problems in defining religion

• Religious definition

  • Emerges from within a particular religious tradition

  • Centers upon an awareness of and response to a reality that transcends ourselves and our world

• Naturalistic definition

  • Religion as a purely human activity

  • Tends to be reductionist which reduces religion to :

Essentialist Tendency of Religion

• Necessary inclusion of a transcendent being effectively excludes religious traditions with no intentional transcendent object

• Aristotle: when we define something, we define the general (genus) and specific

• Though there are many religions, there is only one true religion

  • To locate the essence or heart of religion within a single dimension (belief in God but what about religions that have non of this belief)

  • Or to a particular religion (Christianity in the case of St Augustine’s de vera religione)

    • Other non-Christian religions are seen as false

    • INC believe that they will be the only ones saved

• Religion becomes too broad as to include beliefs and areas of the study that are generally not considered religion (Marxism, nationalism, socialism)

Family-resemblance concept

• Ludwig Wittgenstein

• Analysis of language and meaning

• Seeks to shy away from the essentialist approach to religion

• It argues that a certain concept is actually a cluster of concepts accommodating differences but not to the extent that it is no longer identifiable

  • Here came the concept of a “game”

    • Family = game

    • A family that shares a number of traits and an outsider can easily pinpoint who is part of the family

• “Instead of a set of defining characteristics there is a network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing like the resemblances and differences in build, features, eye color, gait, temperament, and so on among the members of a natural family (John Hick).”

Philo (love, friend, lover) + Sophia (Wisdom) = Philosophy

Eros - more passionate love

Philia - friendship

Agape - self-sacrificing love

Rational investigation of the truths and principles of being, knowledge, and conduct

• Truths

  • Absolute and non-negotiable

  • Principles

    • Negotiable and are never absolute

    • To affirm that there are principles, there must be truths and will always be there

Truths and principles

1. Being - ontology/metaphysics

2. Knowledge - epistemology (philosophy of knowledge)

   1. Gnosis - special kind of knowledge and cannot be shared to all

      1. Christianity is also a gnostic religion because of its history of being a persecuted religion

      2. Ex. Ictus, Chi Rho (PX symbol), INRI

      3. Certain codes of identification and social standing

   2. Episteme - common knowledge

3. Conduct - ethics (moral philosophy)

   1. There are ethical issues in religion

   2. “Why was religion significant in contemporary times?”

   3. Christians - notion of martyrs

Understanding of Philosophy

• Way of life: a way of responding to the world

  • Grounded on morality

  • Reflective of life

  • Way of living = way of being

• Speculative discipline

  • Way of seeing things

  • Ludwig Wittgensetin: “to see reality in a different perspective”

Philosophy involves:

• Senses / sensory experiences

  • Faculty by which the body perceives external stimulus

• Reasons

  • The intellectual faculty by which we think, understand, and form judgement

• Intuition

  • Intellectual ability to understand something immediately, without the need for conscious reasoning

• Imagination

  • Faculty or action of forming new ideas, images, or concepts of external objects not present to the senses

• Principles

  • Propositions that serve as the foundation for a system of belief, or behavior, or reasoning

Philosophy and religion are distinct but closely related concepts

• Both are motivated by a sense of awe, wonder, and amazement

• Both respond to the same fundamental or ultimate questions of life

• Both deal with all aspects of human existence

  • They are both worldviews

• Directed by a sense of ultimacy

*Questions outlive their answers

Philosophy - most systematized body of knowledge

Philosophy of Religion

• The branch of philosophy that takes the claims of established religions and of religious believers and subjects them to critical scrutiny

• Recognizes the phenomena called religions that continue to exist until now

  • Has certain claims

  • Not just beliefs

• This is controversial!

  • The reason for this is historical. The relation between ‘philosophy’ and ‘ religion’ manifests itself in a wide variety of intellectual inquiries, some of which fall in other disciplines

  • Philosophy among Greeks

    • Ancient - very subject of Philosophy

    • Medieval - Theology

      • 2 books theory - you get to know everything (Bible and nature) - Supernatural basis is faith

      • DEVOTED TO QUESTIONING MATTERS ABOUT GOD AND RELIGION

    • Modern - Natural theology; the basis is reason

• It is difficult to sustain the idea that the philosophy of religion has always been a recognizable discipline with an unvarying subject-matter spanning the whole course of western philosophical thought

First Instance of Philosophy of Religion

• 1678

  • Ralph Cudworth’s True Intellectual System of the Universe (1678) - First

• End of 18th century

  • It replaced the earlier phrase ‘natural theology’. By this time, it refers to a set of rationally discoverable to philosophical inquiry

• 19th Century

  • Friedrich Schleiermacher: argues that philosophy of religion refers to a heavily moralized body of teaching about the nature of the universe

  • GWF Hegel: it is the study of the manner and ways in which God is represented in religious consciousness

Main Areas of Inquiry

• Philosophy of religion is the critical analysis of certain concepts and issues that are central to the study of world religions

• These typically fall under five main areas of inquiry

  • Theodicy: philosophical or speculative proofs for the existence of God (dike - justice)

    • Faith seeking understanding

    • Fides quarens intellectum

  • Philosophical Theology: the study of the coherence in the description of God’s nature

    • Metaphysical Evil

  • Religious Epistemology: inquires into the rational justification of religious beliefs and the strength of evidence that warrant such beliefs

  • Religious Language: analysis of the logical character of theological terms

    • Sin, grace, redemption

  • Religious Experience: philosophical study of how ordinary experience becomes revelatory of the transcendent dimensions of reality

Shifting Weltanschauung

• God (theos)

  • Concept of transcendence

• World (cosmos)

  • cosmos/world/nature

• Humanity (anthropos)

Pre-Socratic Philosophers addressed religion in 3 distinct ways:

• Some criticizes what they see as implausible or contradictory features of conventional religion

• Other pre-Socratic philosophers provided mechanistic explanation of the causes of events that were opposed to ideas of divine intention or arguments from design

• Many pre-Socratic understood the concept of divinity in terms that were opposed to ordinary experience

Eastern and Western Religion

• Eastern Religions

  • Product of man and woman

  • Insights that transcended history

  • Myths are not historical truths, but they are moral/religious truths

    • Ex of myths: creation story, adam and eve, cain and abel, tower of babel, noah’s arc

  • History was understood differently by people in ancient times

• Monotheistic Religions

  • Jewish, Christianity, Islam

  • We humans have to make sense of what is revealed

Xenophanes of Colophon

• Attacked both the immorality and anthropomorphism of poets’ depiction of the gods

• The Gods are just images of the perfect man and perfect woman

Democritus

• Atomism provided a mechanistic explanation of the universe

• All things that happen in the natural world are explainable because of the interactions of atoms

• Even our own emotions are mechanistically explained by the interactions of atoms within ourselves and other people

Divinities

• Thinking religion in the Ancient World must grapple with indeterminateness, especially with any speech about the divine. In both Plato and Aristotle, the term “divine” is applied to realities as diverse as intellect, heavenly spheres, the Olympian gods, the separate Forms (Plato), and the First Mover of the universe (Aristotle). (Cf. Cosmology of Ptolemy)

• Intellect = divine/gods (nous)

• Reason = humans

• Sensation = animals

Plato

• The word theology first appeared (logos about God)

• Divinities → anything beyond human experience

• Religious in nature (philosophy)

• Divine representation: form of the good

• Metaphysical Dualism

  • World of Forms

    • Eidos - idea

    • But for Plato, the eidos is in an entirely different world and not in one’s mind

    • The eidos is a separate domain

  • World of Senses

• Plato’s philosophy is the solution to two dominant philosophies

  • Parmenides

    • Reason to inquire about reality

    • Reality is permanent and is one

  • Heraclitus

    • Senses to inquire about reality

      • Reality is always changing

    • “Nobody steps on the same river twice”

    • Multiple realities

    • Representation of reality is fire because it is constantly moving and anything that touches fire will change

Greek Thinker’s Basic Premise

• Nihil Ex Nihilo: Nothing comes from nothing, hence, the eternity of the world

  • This was challenged by christifanity: creatio ex nihilo

Antioch: where the followers of Jesus were called Christians

Apatia: one of the only women philosopher

Philo the Jew: used knowledge of greek theology to understand first books of the Hebrew bible (Torah)

Clement of Alexandria

• Most famous philsopher: Origen (used greek concepts to interpret the bible)

• Another famous philosopher: Justin Martyr (used philosophy to explain true presence of christ in the consecrated bread and wine)

The whole medieval world (from 5th to 15th century) was largely devoted to considering questions about God and matters of religion

• St. Augustine: Credo ut intelligam (I believe that I may understand). St. Anselm: Fides quaerens intellectum (Faith seeking understanding)

  • Conversion of philosophy to faith

• For some medieval thinkers (Augustine and Bonaventure) the central theme is the conversion or ascent of philosophy to faith

• For others, philosophy is the intellectual foundation to faith, grasped and expressed as theology

  • Philosophy was important to understand what we believe in

Augustine of Hippo

• City of God: denied the activity of pagan gods

  • They are merely creatures like ourselves

• Differences of the biblical God with the pagan gods:

  • Augustine’s biblical God is intimately involved with the world, especially with the importance of the mystery of the Incarnation

  • The biblical God is entirely independent of the world. Even if the world had not been created, God would still be capable of existing, which is not the case with the pagan mind. In ancient thought, the divine cannot be conceived as being without the world

The most enduring model for philosophical speculation on divine matters was by Anselm of Canterbury (1033 - 1109) in his Proslogion (Prayer book, ontological argument for God’s existence)

• The expression fides quaerens intellectum doesn’t mean that the medievals already know what they believe. Hence, they always post the question ‘But what do I believe in?’ For example in Augustine: What do I believe in God?

• The point is: what do theological formulas mean? Hence, seeking of understanding.

• This strategy is seen in Anselm’s ontological argument

  • It is better understood not as a demonstration of God’s existence but a systematic investigation into God’s mode of existence

  • Anselm was seeking to understand God’s existence

• Proving God’s existence: I will not believe God exists until I know God exists

  • Medieval times: I believe in God because God revealed himself to me

Other medievals argue that it is exigent to study philosophy first before theology

• E.g. in Moises Maimonides’ (1135 - 1204) rebuke to a student who wishes to skip philosophy in order to reach theology

• Another is Roger Bacon (1220 - 92): nothing can be known about God without prior study of languages, mathematics, optics, experiential science, and moral philosophy

The highpoint of the scholastic speculation on God (end of 13th and early 14th century):

• Thomas Aquinas (1225 - 74): theology employs, improves and perfects the best of ancient philosophy. Great deference to ancient philosophers and thinkers. Gives to Aristotle the honorific title “the philosopher” (philosophus). Nonetheless, in his discussion of Aristotle, he transforms Aristotelian doctrines, sometimes quite opposed to Aristotle’s intentions (cf. concept of substance in eucharistic transubstantiation)

  • We come into existence when we come into conception

• John Duns Scotus (c. 1266 - 1308): refuses to accommodate Aristotle. His Augustianism is a melange of Augustine, neo-Platonism, reaction to his contemporaries like Henry of Ghent, and an Aristotelianism filtered by Latin Averroism

• Something is still something even with accidental change

Fides quaerens intellectum - faith seeking understanding

Complications

1. Christian reform movements of the Reformation were often sharply critical of the use of philosophy in discussions of God and creation

   1. West: Catholicism (Latin)

   2. East: Orthodox (Greek) - Byzantine, Islamic, Istanbul

      1. Was conquered by Islam and moved to Russia

2. Fierce disputes over the conclusion of the nova scientia or new science

   1. Science - systematized body of knowledge

   2. “Old science” of Aristotle = deductive

      1. From general principles - practical beliefs

   3. “New science” = induction

      1. How to expand the systematized body of knowledge

      2. Creating and adding more knowledge

      3. Problem - new science used the experimental method in order to increase knowledge

         1. While religion relied on divine revelation

3. General impoverishment of tradtitional philosophical speculation on divine matters

   1. Marked tendency to legislate upon innumerable points of doctrine

   2. Reduction of theology to canon law

   3. The majority of early modern thinkers affirmed the existence and activity of God

Martin Luther

• Critical of the Church

• Issue: indulgences - still apparent today - remission of temporal punishment due to sin

  • Partial: doesn’t remove the complete temporal punishment

  • Plenary: all TP will be cleaned; you will go to heaven

    • Jubilee - passing through the porta santa

    • Conditions: confession, communion, intentions of the pope

Intellectus quaerens fiden - intellectual seeking something to believe in

• Philosophers are seeking proofs for God’s existence so that they may believe in God (NOW)

• Theodicy

3 Solas by Protestant Reformers

1. Sola Fide - faith alone

2. Sola scriptura - scripture alone

3. Sola gratia - grace alone

*Position of the church: faith and reason, scripture and tradition, grace and action

Two Fathers of Modernity

1. Francis Bacon

   1. Wrote the book Novum Organon

2. Rene Descartes

   1. Meditations on First Philosophy

   2. Methodic Doubt

      1. Knowledge has to be Clear and distinct (you cannot doubt it or you will fall into a contradiction)

      2. Cogito ergo sum (I think therefore I exist)

      3. Skepticism - Denies out the human ability to know truth with certainty

Res infinita

• God; you can doubt his existence

• Only God can exist depedently from something else

God reveals

• Sacred Scriptures

• Sacred Tradition

Modernity is anthropocentric - dependent on the man that thinks about him

Substance - that which exists independently of anything else

Relation - ultimate physical category; meaning of truth is relative

Reason - Medival (based on religious belief); Modern age (reason brings progress, but there were world wars)

• Modern philosophers - truth of sciences are found in beliefs

Thomas Kuhn

• Structures of Scientific Revolution

• What is proved true in science will be disproved in the future

Theory of Everything

• There can only be one theory explaining everything

• Macro level - theory of relativity

• Micro - quantum mechanics

Theory of Relativity

• Attempts to explain the whole universe

• Cannot eplxain sub-atomic levels

Contemporary Philosophy

• More critical, analyzes the attitude of the mind

Auguste Comte - formulated 3 stages in the development of civilization

• Religious/Primitive

  • Religious explanation of the universe

  • Philosophical hypothesis

    • Mythos became logos

    • Doesnt presuppose existence of divinities

  • Scientific Knowledge

    • Goes beyond religion

Paul Ricoeur

• French Philosopher advanced in Hermeneutics

  • Art and skill of interpretation

  • To think of religion is to interpret certain mindsets regarding religion

• Two modes of interpretation at work in hermeneutics

  • As restoration or recollection of meaning

  • As an exercise of suspicion: one doubts whether there really is an object presupposed in the earlier mode

    • Ex. language is a lived reality and is always evolving

    • Sometimes you realize that there is no meaning to be retrieving in the first place

• 3 masters of suspicion: Marx, Freud and Nietzsche

• Their goal: flattening of the vertical horizon of religion

  • There is no God

  • If God is reaffirmed then that has to be reinterpreted

  • The God of religion is not a being who exists out there but is a reflection of who we are

  • Anthr

• Argues that the purported transcendent object of religion is all-too-human

• Marx

  • Religion is the opiate of the oppressed class

• Nietzsche

  • Religion is the manifestation of ressentiment in a slave ethic

• Freud

  • Religion is an illusory attempt at wishful thinking

Luc Ferry

• Contemporary philosopher - Book: The Man-God

• “The God-Man” - translated in english

  • We say the God-Man because it refers to Jesus Christ who is God, Eternal, begotten-of-all ages who decides to enter our universe and become man

  • But Ferry wrote the title as this because he says that Jesus Christ is a man who became God and became divinized in human imagination. Man becoming divinized/God

• In order to appreciate nature in contemporary times, people must believe in the Man-God (Jesus Christ)

• Horizontal transcendence

  • Religion must be spread horizontally: see God by serving other people and changing society

  • Through this, humanity becomes God

  • The essence of the teaching of Jesus Christ is actually transformative actions but sometimes causes our lives

  • St. Maximilian Kolbe

    • Conventual Fransiscan

    • Polish priest

    • Wrote things that were anti-Nazi and ended up in the concentration camps of Hitler

    • Volunteered to sacrifice himself in the place of someone who was caught escaping

    • Religion and morality is NOT the same thing

  • Giann Benetta Molla

    • Sacrificed herself for the life of her about-to-be-born child

  • Religion will tell you to be heroic and morality will not

  • Les Miserables: “To love the other person is to see the face of God”

    • Love the miserable

• Greatest manifestation of vertical transcendence is through horizontal transcendence

  • Luc Ferry: sometimes we need to revisit the way we think of religion

    • We need to reinterpret religion in current times

Ludwig Feuerbach

• German theologan and philosopher of religion and is very devout but has a different understanding of religion

• Religion as self-objectification

• Concept of religion: in line with the projection theory of Xenophanes and Freud

• Religion - self-objectification of humanity’s ultimate hope and destiny

  • We entertain religion and the concepts that we have of religion is our ultimate hope and destiny

  • Ex. peace, love, understanding, care

    • Values that we could not find here therefore we project it into a future time, hence this is a feature of religion.

• A “devout atheist”

  • A god that we do believe in, is our projection

  • There is no god

• The Essence of Christianity

  • Consciousness of God is self-consciousness, knowledge of God is self-knowledge…. Religion is the solemn unveiling of a man’s hidden treasurees, the revelation of his intimate thoughts, the open confession of his love-secrets.”

Karl Marx

• Religion as Ideology

• Emphasized the anthropocentricism of religion

• Religion persists as long as humanity is alienated from itself

• Religion is ideological; it is the opium of the people

  • double-edged sword because people NEED religion because of the trauma, sufferings, and alienation that they experience

  • When faced with something terrifying, we cling onto something

• Religion has an ideological, double-character:

  • Religion as a need by the oppressed people

  • Religion as an illusory satisfaction

• Religion misconstrued the world

  • The solution that religion offers, does not coincide with the reality we face

  • Religion provides an escape

  • Problem = the world

  • escape = heaven

• No place for religion in an emancipated social order

  • In a world of communism, there is no place for religion

  • Early christians exercise communism

  • Religion taught the early christians to let go of everything they had and give it to the poor

  • Everything is already provided and you don’t have to appeal to any transcendent deity

Friedrich Nietzsche

• Religion as a resssentiment

• A cultural critique

• Religion- reversal of the master-slave logic

  • There will be no master without any slaves

  • People who experience slavery in their life, rationalize their situation

    • Ex. i am the victim, i am the oppressed, i am morally superior to the masters in my life

    • Religion will say that it is ok

• Not founded on Reason, but rather on the Will to Power

  • Slaves are deprived of their power, these people cling to religion in order to hold on to the will to power even though they are slaves

• “God is dead”

  • Zarathustra

    • “We have killed God”

    • Killed God like how we kill a lighted lamp in broad daylight

  • We have already created culture where we are all in broad daylight, hence no need to carry a lamp or we don’t need to believe in God

    • Modern society has made God not necessary

• Master-slave structure

• Christianity stems from a slave ethic of ressentiment

• The genuine human ideal is the Ubermensch (Overman)

  • The way to escape is this

  • “Superman” (not the superhero)

  • Our morality should be beyond the good and evil religion has taught us

  • Transvaluation of values

    • Beyond good vs evil

      • For some people to be good, there must be someone who is evil

Sigmund Freud - Religion as an Illusion

• Religion - fundamentally “wish-fulfillment”

• Religion is the projection of neurotic needs that stream from the human unconscious

• Religion is like a dream, a wish fulfillment

  • Offers a bulwark of security

  • Religion is an illusion, but not a delusion

• Characteristics of religion as an illusion

  • Motivation underlying religious belief had for its basis a wish-fulfillment

  • Because of the strength of this wish, a genuine relation with reality is factored out

    • Our needs color our sense of reality

  • The belief does not warrant verification

    • Because the belief is rooted in wish-fulfillment meaning it is not there

Natural Theology

• Belief in God or gods is central in most religions of the world

  • Is it reasonable to believe in God

  • What kind of God should be believed in

• Attempt to know what can be known about God independently of any special religious authority

• Hostility stems from a kind of fideism

Types of beliefs in God

1. Polytheism - beliefs that there exists a plurality of personal gods

2. Henotheism - recognizes a plurality of gods, but restricts allegiance to one

3. Monotheism - belief that only one personal god exists

4. Pantheism - god is identical with nature or with the universe (impersonal)

5. Panentheism - god is not identical with the universe but must be seen as including the universe

Types of beliefs in God based on philosophical systems and positions

• Dualism: plurality of two gods opposed to each other (usually good and evil); variation of polytheism

  • Ex. Manicheanism

    • St. Augustine breifly subscribed to this

      • God Good

      • God Evil

    • Exists because of the problem of evil

      • Where did evil come from? Because evil could not come from God

      • Evil is the absence of good

        • Not a reality

      • Darkness “exists” because there is no light

    • St. Augustine - there is evil because there is an absence of good. The nearer you are to God, there is good but the farther you are from God, there is evil

  • Dominated medieval period

    • Later debunked by modern philosophers like Immanuel Kant and his notion of radical evil

• Deism: belief in one God, but does not involve himself in his creation; variation of monotheism or theism

  • From latin word Deus = God

  • The problem of Natural Evil

    • Ex. tsunami, earthquakes

  • Solution = creation is like a mechanical watch

    • Complicated with many parts and will function perfectly at the beginning, but will eventually stop through wear and tear

      • Will only become fixed when a watch maker fixes it

    • God left the world, hence evil started to emerge

      • The world is very old already which is why it is “malfunctioning”

• Absolute monism: God is an absolute unity manifested in a less fully real world; variation of pantheism and panentheism

  • G.W.H Hegel

    • There is only 1 absolute full real reality = Geist (German word for “Spirit)

      • Everything that happens in history is just the Geist coming into self-consciousness

• Agnosticism: truth of God’s existence cannot be known and hence one suspends judgment on this question

  • Agnosis (Greek word) - negation of special knowledge whether god exists or not"

• Atheism: actual denial of God’s existence

  • Clear judgement that there is no god

• Naturalism: atheism positively expressed; The natural order of things exists “on its own”

“Four Horsemen of New Atheism”

• Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion, 2006)

  • We have everything we need in nature

• Christopher Hitchens (God is Not Great, 2007)

• Sam Harris (The End of Faith, 2004)

• Daniel Dennett (Breaking the Spell, 2007)

Theistic concept of God

• “God dies the death of a thousand qualifications” - Anthony Flew, Theology and Falsification, 1950

  • Any statement is worth consideration only if it is falsifiable

  • We need to have empirical evidence that God exists

  • Anthony Flew is a very famous atheist

  • “My discovery of the Divine has been a pilgraimage of reason, and not of faith.”

• Monotheism holds a special place in philosophy of religion because it is professed by the major world religion, namely, Judaism, Christianity and Islam

• Among theistic religions, there seems to be common agreement as to God’s nature: God is supposed to be worthy of worship, the supreme object of religious devotion

Likewise, God is considered to be:

• A. omnipotent

• B. omniscient

• C. morally perfect or all good

• Likewise, God is said to be infinite. Not in the sense though that he can do anything. The infinity of his power is within the confines of the non-contradictory. He cannot create a square circle

  • God cannot be self-contradictory

  • If you introduce change in God, then he will be subject to time

God is a necessary being

• God does not just happen to exist. Since nothing can threaten his existence, his nonexistence is not really possible. One may understand this necessity in two ways

  • God’s existence is logically necessary. The statement “God does not exist” is contradictory then

  • God’s necessity is grounded in his power and independence. That is, God is self-existent; his existence depends on nothing else outside of himself. In medieval parlance, this themed God’s aseity

God is a personal being

• His being is not just “another being” His being personal follows from his attribute as all-knowing, perfect and good

  • As personal, God acts, namely, God is a creator god

  • As creator, God is continuously active in his creation (contra deism)

  • Being continuously active in creation, God is also said to be omnipresent, God has no body. God is pure spirit

God is eternal

• If God is present in all places, likewise god is present in all times

• God is immutable

• Following God’s eternality, God is absolutely unchangeable

Theism

• Logically coherent

• Burden of proof rests on anyone who argues that it is self contradictory