Philosophy is Just Puzzle-Piecing… Kind Of

One might think of worldviews—philosophical Big Pictures—as puzzles. The process of constructing (or perhaps discovering) a worldview often involves assembling various commitments—moral, metaphysical, epistemological, mereological, anthropological, scientific, and so on—and attempting to piece them together into a coherent whole, much like assembling a massive jigsaw.

And when it comes to this project, I suggest the best-case scenario is where one has commitments that are all rationally well-motivated and has figured out how to fit them all together—no pieces are left out, and no parts of the puzzle remain unconnected. The picture is perfect (and probably only God has it).

Whereas the worst-case scenario is when someone holds commitments that are not well-motivated—irrational to whatever extent—and clearly do not fit together into a coherent whole. One has silly pieces that don’t connect. Think of someone who is at once a nihilist-moralist or a physicalist-theist or whatever. Whether such a person actually exists (they do) doesn’t matter.¹ The point is simply this: minimally, what you don’t want is a situation where you have different pieces and see that they don’t fit together. That’s a contradiction, the worst sort of tension a worldview can have. This means—unless one just wants to persist in irrationality—that one must either abandon or modify a commitment to make it fit with their other commitments.

For most people—everyday people, that is—their worldview contains some commitments that are well-motivated, others not so much. Usually, they just have lots of commitments that were handed on and accepted rather uncritically. On top of that, their puzzle remains pretty incomplete—some sections might be fitted together, but plenty of other pieces are just sitting in a heap. They haven’t even tried to fit them together, let alone checked whether they actually do.

The philosopher, on the other hand, is someone who takes a step back, critically reflects on their worldview, and actively works to sort and connect the pieces. If certain pieces don’t fit, they discard them and seek new ones, refining their commitments until a coherent picture begins to emerge.

But of course, not all philosophers have a perfectly completed worldview puzzle either. Most of the time, their puzzle remains seriously incomplete, and even if they’ve made a real effort to sort through and understand plenty—though not all—of the pieces that are supposed to go into it, they still have pieces, maybe lots of them, where they just don’t see how they fit together. This doesn’t mean they’ve discovered that these pieces don’t fit (not seeing is not the same as seeing not); it just means that tensions come in degrees.

Let me break that down. Sometimes, you have pieces or commitments that clearly don’t fit—that’s a contradiction, a deathblow. Other times, it seems like they probably don’t fit, or it’s really hard to see how they could—call that a paradox, if you like. You don’t definitely see that they don’t fit, but you can tell it’s going to be tricky to make them work together. And then there are cases where you just don’t see how they fit, but you also have no reason to think they won’t or that they’re unlikely to—call that a puzzle.

Other things being equal, a worldview with fewer tensions—fewer areas where it’s unclear whether things fit together or where it seems unlikely that they do—is preferable. But let’s be realistic: all of us have tensions in our worldview. If you think you don’t, you probably haven’t thought very long or hard about yours. The deeper you think about anything, the more questions arise, and the way you answer one question won’t always immediately line up with how you answer another.

To illustrate, let me give a few examples of tensions—or initial tensions, anyway—between commitments I hold. One commitment I hold in metaphysics is to divine universal causality—namely, that God is the cause of any positive being apart from Himself; nothing has any actuality or causal efficacy apart from God’s bringing it about. Another commitment I hold in philosophical anthropology is to libertarian human freedom—that we are not determined, meaning no factor is both prior to and logically sufficient for our actions (the conditions for being determined). Rather than history simply passing through us and determining us, we can affect history as substantial rational agents.

Both of these commitments, I think, are well motivated. Traditional considerations of metaphysical grounding and ontological ultimacy lead me to firmly embrace classical theism and the recognition of God as the ultimate source of everything apart from Himself. As for my commitment to freedom, this just strikes me as a basic Moorean fact—one evident through everyday experience and introspection.

Obviously, on the surface, these commitments don’t just seem in tension; they seem nearly contradictory. The initial reaction isn’t merely uncertainty about how they fit together but the impression that they probably don’t. On the one hand, I’m saying God causes everything. On the other hand, I’m saying we are capable of rational willing—of top-down, reasons-based action—where we really could have chosen otherwise than we did, at least in some cases.

How, exactly, are these supposed to go together?

Well, fortunately, I believe there is a very good answer—one I can only gesture at here—found in the work of W. Matthews Grant (his book here; an interview here). This answer ultimately arises from another of my commitments: divine simplicity and the extrinsic model of divine agency that follows from it, along with the traditional distinction between primary and secondary causality. (The short version is that this model of divine agency entails an ontology in which our actions are both 100% up to God and 100% up to us—what Grant calls the "dual sources" account. Again, you’ll have to read his book for more; it’s one of my favorites.)

At the end of the day, I believe these commitments are not only compatible but that my commitment to libertarian freedom may, in fact, only be compatible with my commitment to divine simplicity. (Honestly, I haven’t seen any other model that as well avoids the threat of determinism.) Either way, this is a case where two things that initially seem incompatible actually turn out to be substantially compatible—a cool result and one that has certainly increased my overall confidence in classical theism.

Another obvious tension in my worldview is the most common one for theism: the problem of evil. As a classical theist, one of my core commitments is to the traditional notion of God as perfectly good—the climax (and convergence) of axiology and ontology. Another of my commitments—which should be a commitment of everyone, given that it is an obvious fact of the world—is that horrific instances of suffering and evil exist.

Are these commitments strictly incompatible—meaning, can one draw out a contradiction from them? In a forthcoming paper, I argue that no, this can never actually be achieved. But just because one cannot generate a contradiction doesn’t mean one can’t insist they are nevertheless paradoxical or problematic. Yet I don’t think even this is true. Here again, we have a case where two things that initially seem at odds turn out, upon deeper inspection, to be quite compatible. (Of course, this is mere assertion here, I realize, but it’s a point I do my best to substantiate in my book and elsewhere.)

But even if that weren’t the case, would it be the end of the world? Hardly. After all, a worldview doesn’t need to have every piece perfectly in place—or even every paradox resolved—to be rationally defensible. If it did, then nobody would be entitled to hold any worldview rationally, because nobody, as I’ve mentioned, has all the pieces neatly fitted together—at least not if they’re seriously trying to account for everything that needs to be accounted for. That task is far beyond what any human could reasonably achieve in a lifetime.

So, we do the best we can, often building on the work of those who—more often than not—have done far better and more impressive work than we have. After all, most of us don’t, nor should we, begin our worldview puzzles from scratch. Instead, we are usually handed something already partially completed and asked to inspect the work done so far, seeing if we can move it along, even if only in some small measure. And even if we find reason to abandon the worldview we were initially given, what we typically adopt in its place is, once again, something that has already been shaped and refined over many centuries by others before us.

1. And they usually have some clever way of making their position seem less obviously absurd than it is—but I won’t get into that here.