Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) famously posed the ultimate question: “Why is there something rather than nothing?” To this, theoretical physicist Sean Carroll replies: “The universe can simply exist, end of story.”

Still, as I have shown elsewhere, everything must have a reason for its being or coming-to-be, including the cosmos. This metaphysical first principle is ably defended by others as well.¹ One distinction must be added: either a thing is its own reason or not. To the extent it fails to fully explain itself, something else must be posited as an extrinsic sufficient reason: a cause. So, does the cosmos “simply exist” – or does it need a cause?

The leading philosophers of ancient Greece showed no inkling of the concept of creation ex nihilo in time. For Leucippus (c. 490-430 B.C.) and Democritus (c. 460-360 B.C.), indivisible atoms were eternal in the void and creation of the world simply entailed them becoming packed or scattered, thus producing the world of things about us. For Plato (c. 428-348 B.C.), the creation myth of the Timaeus entailed the demiurge looking up to the eternal forms and patterning the pre-existing unordered material chaos according to them to produce the orderly cosmos. Even Aristotle (384-322 B.C.) appears to argue in his Physics, book one, that matter must have always existed as the substratum for the endless change of forms.

Unique to Western thought was the Jewish and Christian belief in a free creation of the world by God in time – ex nihilo et utens nihilo: out of nothing and presupposing no pre-existent material. Neo-Platonists, beginning with Plotinus (c. 204-270), did have a notion of creation ex nihilo, but solely as a necessary emanation from God, not the free creation of Christian thought.

Flash forward to the seventeenth century and we see a resurgence of philosophical atomism by theists Descartes, Gassendi, Boyle, and others. This later begot scientific atomism in nineteenth century chemistry and physics, which then invited the atheistic interpretations of scientific materialism and naturalism. For centuries, atheistic materialists had assumed the eternity of the material world, a view seemingly harmonious with the “new atomism.” All of this also fit well with twentieth century astronomy’s standard “steady state” theory.

The advent of the “Big Bang” theory of cosmic origins by Belgian priest and astronomer Georges Lemaitre (1894-1966) thus met opposition for proposing a scientific hypothesis that the cosmos actually had a temporal beginning. Among the first to complain was Albert Einstein himself. Science had seemed squarely in the atheist’s corner, until this upstart theory was proposed – a theory that sounded too much like what atheists viewed as the “Christian mythology” of creation in time. As astronomer Robert Jastrow observed, this led to a peculiar reaction by scientists in which they opposed a promising new theory – possibly on grounds more philosophical than scientific. It wasn’t until the 1964 cosmic microwave background radiation discovery by Penzias and Wilson that the Big Bang theory became generally accepted as correct.

In the final two sentences of his 1978 book, God and the Astronomers, Dr. Jastrow writes: “For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance, he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.”

Battle Over the “Big Bang’s” Significance

Atheistic scientists, like physicist Stephen Hawking, seek to avoid any possible theological implications of the Big Bang by redefining the meaning of this absolute beginning in time in terms that would avoid any need for God. He posits an imaginary time in which there would be no boundaries to space-time just as there are no boundaries to earth’s surface, concluding: “Thus, the universe would be a completely self-contained system. It would not be determined by anything outside the physical universe that we observe.”

Today we see atheists doing all they can to eliminate a cosmos instantly created by an all-powerful God, either by (1) alleging that something can, indeed, be made out of nothing, in light of quantum mechanics, or (2) by claiming, like Dr. Hawking, that the beginning somehow does not really need a metaphysical explanation.

Still, it turns out that the “nothing” that atheists claim can be used to make an entire cosmos from is not really “nothing” at all, but simply the actual something of a quantum vacuum, which entails a lot of matter-antimatter potential that “crackles with energy.” Empty space is not nothing, but something very physically real.

Everyone truthfully knows that you simply cannot get something from absolutely nothing. Even Dr. Hawking tries to evade an absolute beginning in time for the cosmos by his “no boundary” explanation offered above. This also why materialists who would evade a Creator feel forced to affirm the endless past existence of something -- be it physical matter as such, or some kind of minimal energy field from which the Big Bang exploded, or at least, certain laws of physics. Indeed, one method used to defeat the Kalam cosmological argument for God is to claim that the premise that the universe must have had a beginning in time is false.

The fact that such mental gymnastics are engaged in so as to evade precisely an absolute cosmic beginning bespeaks the massive problems it would present to atheistic materialism.

What is there about the very thought of the cosmos suddenly popping into existence out of absolutely nothing that so instantly moves the mind of most sane men to say, “Then, God must exist!’? What is there about such instantaneous creation ex nihilo that bespeaks so unequivocally to the human mind the exclusive mark of true divinity?

Why Infinite Power is Required

Both atheist and theist alike see in the “out-of-nothing” explosive instant appearance of a Big Bang the manifestation of unlimited raw power, infinite power. Just as clear is the fact that infinite power could reside solely in an infinite being that fulfills the classical definition of God. This is precisely why atheists go to great lengths to deny that any such “creation event” could have ever occurred at the beginning of time.

Still, is such instinctive inference rationally justified? What first stands out is the fact that absolutely no one claims that the cosmos actually appeared out of nowhere and from absolutely nothing. Atheists either claim it always existed in some physical form or other, or else, attempt the bait and switch of claiming it came from nothing – but the “nothing” turns out to be the actual something of the quantum vacuum as explained above. In proclaiming the Christian doctrine of true creation in time, theists do not hold that the cosmos arose from absolutely nothing either. Rather, they say the world was made by the power of the eternal God.

Thus, all explicitly or implicitly concur (1) that something has always existed and (2) that you do not get something from absolutely nothing.

But then, why does it take infinite power to create ex nihilo et utens nihilo? After all, the cosmos which is created, though immense, is still existentially limited. So, why would unlimited power be required to create what is itself limited in being?

Well, as St. Thomas Aquinas points out², “… the power of the maker is measured not only by substance of the thing made but also from the manner of its making ….” To build the Empire State Building in one year is impressive. But to build it in a single day would defy belief. To make a chicken from another chicken by cloning is impressive. To evolve a chicken from random subatomic particles is nearly unimaginable – since the distance between what there is to work with and the produced chicken is even greater than in the cloning example. But to produce a chicken from no preexisting matter requires immeasurable power, since there is no proportion at all between nothing and something. Since immeasurable power is the same as unlimited or infinite power, it would take infinite power for God to create the cosmos ex nihilo.

The Real Meaning of “Being Created”

Thus, on the hypothesis that the cosmos did begin in time, it would depend on the infinite power of God to have created it. Now what depends on another to bring it into existence clearly does not account for its own existence, but rather depends on another for the existence it has received. The creature that “pops into existence” is an effect, that is, a being that does not adequately explain its own existence. As such, it depends on an extrinsic cause for its existence.

So, if God exercises his infinite power to bring the cosmos into being, what happens the next moment after he has created it? Can God cease his causal activity in relation to the world, and yet, the world still exists? As St. Thomas observes³, “When the cause ceases causing, the effect ceases.” Were God to withdraw his creative causality from the cosmos, the cosmos would cease to exist. God must continue to create the universe in order for the universe to continue to exist. This creatio continua or “conservation” must continue for as long as the world continues to exist. Thus, God is said, not only to create the world, but also to conserve it in existence.

Moreover, for St. Thomas, there is a real distinction between the world having a beginning in time and its being created ex nihilo. This is clear from the fact that, while St. Thomas maintains that the belief that the world was created with a temporal beginning is a doctrine of Catholic Faith, he does not maintain that this is possible to prove from natural reason. Indeed, in his short work On the Eternity of the World, St. Thomas explicitly argues for the philosophical possibility of the world’s eternity. After all, God could have been creating (conserving) the world from all eternity: it would have no beginning in time, yet still be created.

This means that the concept of the world beginning in time is distinct from the concept of its being created by the power of God. Even if God did not create the world with a beginning in time, the world would still be the object of his creative act in order to sustain it in being throughout eternity.

For the same reason that it would take infinite power to create the world at the beginning of time, it takes infinite power to keep it in existence even if it existed from all eternity. This is because the real meaning of “being created” is not tied to having a temporal beginning, but rather to the fact that anything exists as opposed to non-existence. It takes infinite power to explain why anything simply exists – even the least subatomic particle “popping into existence” for a nanosecond in a quantum vacuum.

In other words, the creative act is not measured by the fact that something goes from non-being to being at the beginning of its existence, but simply by the fact that it manifests the act of existing as opposed to non-being during its existence. Both acts require exactly the same power to explain fully: infinite power.

The key insight here is that existence itself is an act – the most basic of all acts: that by which a thing is constituted as real as opposed to being nothing at all. This act “does something.” It keeps every creature in being. And the power needed to do this is measured by the same criteria we discussed earlier. Since there is no proportion at all between non-being and being, there is no way to measure the power required to posit this act by which a finite being is being continually created, that is, “standing outside of nothingness,” even if it had no beginning in time.

Infinite power is required to explain the existence of every finite being and of that whole collectivity of finite bodies known as the cosmos. It takes infinite power to explain the existence of the cosmos. But infinite power cannot reside in a finite being or even in a collectivity of finite beings.

Therefore there must exist an Infinite Being, God, who alone can possess and manifest the infinite power required to create and conserve in existence the finite cosmos.

“Why is there something rather than nothing?” The answer to this ultimate question is simply “because God exists and creates it.” God’s infinite power is the reason for his own existence. My argument here is a redacted version of a formal paper that I have published elsewhere.

Postscript

Given the difficulty that some viewers of Strange Notions have had in grasping the insight that physical laws like inertia fail to fully explain the continued motion of heavenly bodies, I suspect that they may find the argument presented herein demanding full explanation of cosmic existence to be even less compelling. Still, it is curious that these same minds that are so skeptical of any rational explanation of our incredible universe should so easily be intellectually satisfied with the “just so” explanation of a cosmos that has always “just happened to exist” without any real explanation either in itself or from an extrinsic cause.

“Motion is the act of a being in potency insofar as it is in potency.” - Aristotle, Physics Book III, 201a10-11

In his famous First Way of proving God’s existence, St. Thomas Aquinas says, “It is certain, and evident to our senses, that in the world some things are in motion.”¹ But, are things really in motion? Most people would think that motion in the world is too obvious to doubt. Yet, some, based on theories of modern physics, claim that physical change in the universe is actually impossible. Change or motion—meaning that “this” becomes “that” with some persisting reality exhibiting those before and after qualities—simply does not exist. Like Parmenides, those denying motion claim that our dynamically changing, evolving world is merely one grand illusion.

Despite such claims that change is unreal, philosopher of physics Tim Maudlin, well known for studying entangled quantum particles, insists, “Physics has discovered some really strange things about the world, but it has not discovered that change is an illusion.”

In his book, The Trouble with Physics (reprint edition, 2007), theoretical physicist Lee Smolin puts his finger on why physics is prone to make the mistake of saying motion and time are unreal: “…Descartes and Galileo both made a most wonderful discovery: You could draw a graph, with one axis being space and the other being time. A motion through space then becomes a curve on the graph. In this way, time is represented as if it were another dimension of space. Motion is frozen, and a whole history of constant motion and change is presented to us as something static and unchanging.”² In other words, the static mathematical abstractions of modern physics automatically tend to omit the very starting point they presume, namely, the reality of objective motion or change.

In a new book, Neo-Aristotelian Perspectives on Contemporary Science (2017), philosopher Edward Feser points to the incoherence of physicists denying the reality of motion when their scientific method presupposes it. For example, even the simplest experiment requires watching for movement of a needle on a dial:

“When the needle moves from its rest position it loses one attribute and gains another (namely a particular spatial location), and it is one and the same needle that loses and gains these attributes and one and the same dial of which the needle is a component. If there were no gain or loss of attributes, or if the needle or dial were not the same, the observation would be completely useless.”³

Similarly, physicists presume real physical causation takes place through time with ontologically-continuous physical agents causing the continuous coming-to-be of ontologically-continuous effects. For example, the same rocket engine causes the progressive ascent of the same spacecraft into orbit. This is simply how natural science has always understood the nature of physical causation operating in the real world. That a physical theory should be interpreted as contradicting this universal scientific presupposition defies understanding.

Even if change or motion were simply a subjective illusion or a memory function product, it is still immediately recognized and judged by the intellect for precisely what it is, that is, a change. The intellect knows the nature of being and forms a concept of being that begets the universal certitude of the principle of non-contradiction – a truth about reality that scientists absolutely accept, but have no scientific way of explaining. In like fashion, the intellect judges the nature of change or motion as real when immediately experienced – no matter its size or type. Whether it is extramental or intramental change makes no difference. Static experiences alone would never beget the concept of motion, since non-motion contradicts motion.

One of the greatest philosophers of science of the 20^th century, Karl Popper, says of the experience of change within consciousness, “It could not be explained away by a theory of the successive rising into our consciousness of time slices which in some sense coexist; for this kind of ‘rising into consciousness’ would have precisely the same character as that succession of changes which the theory tries to explain away.” Worse yet for materialists who deny change, if all that exists is material, then change’s reality within consciousness means that change is real in the physical universe.

We have a concept of change solely because we have encountered a reality – subjective or not – that actually contained motion. That alone explains how we even have such a concept. Yes, we form concepts of imaginary things. But, they are always composed of elements taken from real objects, as a unicorn is composed of concepts taken from real horses and real horns. Since the concept of change itself is primary, it must be based on an actually existing nature.

Nor could motion or change be experienced as such unless both the “before” and “after” of the change is present to the same knower. This fulfills change’s meaning, since “this” becomes “that” with something (the knower) persisting to both the before and after.

Therefore, change or motion is objectively real.

If some physicists cannot reconcile the immediately given reality of motion or change, as defined here, with their speculative inferences drawn from the special theory of relativity, their speculations must be wrong on that point.

Einstein’s special relativity thought experiment assumes a train moving past a standing observer. Observer, of what? Observer that the train is in motion! The observer knows it is motion because the train he observes is in diverse positions relative to his own position. So, for him there is a before and after with himself, the observer, being present to both – which fulfills the Aristotelian meaning of motion. Clearly, no speculative interpretation of special relativity can contradict the reality of the very motion Einstein’s thought experiment presupposes in its proof.

Either Einstein made a mistake in one of his assumptions, or else, one of several philosophical interpretations of special relativity compatible with motion must be correct.⁴ In any case, the immediately given reality of motion or change trumps any subsequently developed theory that denies its objective reality.

“Quidquid movetur ab alio movetur.” Whatever is moved is moved by another. What this famous principle really means is this: Whatever is in motion is being moved here and now by another. While motion is mostly thought of in terms of local motion – motion from place to place, any type of change can be called motion.

As seen above, motion does not mean simply one thing replacing another, like frames in a motion picture film. Rather, it means one thing becoming somehow different with some persisting reality connecting the before and after. For example, consider the same knower experiencing successive images, or, the same body moving from one position to a different position relative to some point of reference.

Aristotle defines motion as the act of a being in potency insofar as it is in potency. Easier to grasp is this description: the progressive actualization of a potency. For purposes of describing motion, potency is what is able to be, but is not; act is that which is fully real or completed. Strictly speaking, motion means local motion, a change of place. More broadly, it can mean any kind of change, any passage of something from potency to act—sometimes even instantaneously.

For a non-technical macroscopic example, consider water being heated from room temperature to boiling. Motion is not maintaining the water at 72 degrees, but progressively adding heat so as to constantly raise the temperature until 212 degrees is reached. If the “raising” stops at, say, 200 degrees, the motion stops, even though the heat must be maintained to stay at that point. Thus, the motion is not the act already achieved, namely, the 200 degrees, but the act that is achieving the potency yet to be fulfilled, that is, 212 degrees.

The reason everything in motion needs a mover is simple. A thing cannot reduce itself from potency to act and that is exactly what is happening to the thing in motion: it is being reduced from potency to act. Yet, “reduction” here does not mean less being, but more being!

A thing in motion is gaining new perfections of existence every moment it continues to move or change. Since a being cannot give to itself that which it lacks, something else must be giving to it that which it lacks, but is gaining incrementally.

Yet, how do we know this reasoning is correct? While it is easy to defend the principle in terms of the standard Thomistic analysis of potency and act, many today do not fully appreciate the full force of such reasoning.

Here is a different way to see the objective certitude of the principle that whatever is in motion must be being moved by another, one simply based on “the natural metaphysics of human intelligence.”

Everyone knows and uses the metaphysical principle of non-contradiction, that is, that nothing can both be and not be at the same time and in the same way. Even though materialist scientists cannot prove this principle or show how its certitude arises, they have no honest doubts about its universal truth and application. This is because the human intellect, once it forms the concept of being, sees clearly the necessary truth of its application to all possible things.

So too, the fact that you cannot get something from absolutely nothing is universally accepted—after you eliminate claims of getting particles from quantum vacuums that turn out to be something after all. Once it is understood that the philosopher means really nothing, every honest mind assents to the truth that from nothing, nothing comes to be.

What has this to do with things in motion? Simply this: a thing in motion is gaining new properties of being it did not previously possess. As such, with respect to those properties it did not have, it is non-being; nothing at all. Since nothing cannot beget something without extrinsic causal assistance, a being in motion must be getting this new being from something other than itself, that is, from a mover.

For a thing to reduce itself from potency to act would be for it to be giving itself the very perfections of existence that it lacks. This is equivalent to having something that is non-being in a certain respect accounting for the coming-to-be of the selfsame being that it does not have. Being coming from non-being is impossible and absurd.

The full force of this principle is not understood until it is realized that it applies even to bodies already in a “state” of motion—a motion “explained” by most moderns simply by appeal to Newton’s principle of inertia. Even those who defend the principle that motion requires a mover sometimes retreat to applying it solely to cases in which a change in inertial motion occurs. Thus, to accelerate or decelerate an object in motion is seen to require a mover, but that the object merely stays in its present “state” of motion is considered fully explained by inertia.

Part of the problem is that it may not be clear as to exactly which body is in motion, since all motion appears relative—so that if A moves relative to B, we cannot tell which body is actually undergoing the motion. In fact, it could be both. But it really does not matter at all, since all we need to know is that a change of distance or relative position between two or more bodies occurs.

Just as I have shown in a prior Strange Notions article how many confuse physical antecedents with real causes of present effects, so too, acceptance of Newton’s first law of motion as full explanation for the phenomenon of inertial motion causes many to fail to see the further need of metaphysical explanation. Modern science correctly describes the phenomenon under consideration: a body in motion tends to remain in motion. But mere description is not identical to giving an adequate explanation as to why this phenomenon occurs at all.

Calling motion a “state” does not render it static. All motion still requires the continuous reduction of potency to act. And since nothing can give to itself the new perfections or qualities of existence that it lacks, some extrinsic reason or cause must account for the coming-to-be of those changes.

This applies just as much to bodies in a “state” of inertial motion as it does to objects that are accelerating or decelerating. Nor does it matter which object is considered to be in motion, since any change in spatial relation or any other kind of relation between things entails a real change in something—and that requires some extrinsic agent or mover to complete the explanation of what is going on—to account for the “new being” that is manifested, even if that new being is merely a change of relative position. Some outside agent must exist to account for the coming-to-be of the new existential qualities manifested by these new spatial relationships.

Newton’s first law of motion is not an exception to the principle that whatever is in motion requires a mover here and now continuously providing the new modes of existence manifested by continuing change or motion.

Of course, local motion is only one type of motion, but it is one of central occupation to physical science. The principle in question applies to every conceivable type of change, not only of local motion, but also to changes of quality, relation, size, disposition, time, and so forth. It can even be applied to spiritual changes that entail no gradual change. That is, even an instantaneous change by which a potency is actualized requires an extrinsic agent to effect the change, as when a fresh insight suddenly “pops” into one’s mind.

Much more can be said, but this should be enough to demonstrate that the philosophical principle that whatever is in motion is moved by another is absolutely certain and universally true.

This principle is not merely a principle of natural philosophy, but of metaphysics as well—since motion, which is the progressive actualization of a potency, entails that something is gaining new qualities of being. A being in motion must be getting this new being from something other than itself.

All of this shows that this principle is a principle of being, just like the principle of non-contradiction. As such, just like the concept of being and the principle of non-contradiction, it applies to all beings and can be used in an analogical manner, even possibly to reason from finite being to infinite being in a transcendent fashion. This, of course, foreshadows a role for this principle well beyond the topic at hand.

At the heart of the philosophy of Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas is the idea that we come into contact with reality through the senses. But what if our senses are not a reliable source? Perhaps our senses are deceiving us, and everything we perceive isn’t real but is merely an illusion like in the movie The Matrix.

Descartes

This skepticism of sense knowledge was part of René Descartes’s methodic doubt, which many radical skeptics have adopted. Descartes argued:

Whatever I have up till now accepted as most true I have acquired either from the senses or through the senses. But from time to time I have found that the senses deceive me, and it is prudent never to trust completely those who have deceived us even once (Meditations, I, pp. 12f.).

Descartes’ point is, if our senses have deceived us before, how do we know our senses aren’t deceiving us now? One example Descartes gives as evidence our senses deceive us is the fact that objects at a distance look smaller than what they actually are.

But this is not deception. The sense of sight is reporting accurately what it perceives, namely the person appears small at a distance and then appears big when close up. As D.Q. McInerny says, “This is the sense of sight functioning just as it should, in order to give me a proper knowledge of distance” (Epistemology, 192). Error would come in only if one made the judgment, “That man is small and then becomes big.” Truth and falsity do not reside in sensory perception but in the act of judging that perception.

St. Thomas Aquinas makes the point this way:

Truth and falsity exist principally in the soul’s judgment. . . . Hence, a thing is not said to be false because it always of itself causes a false apprehension, but rather because its natural appearance is likely to cause a false apprehension (Questiones Disputatae de Veritate 1:10; emphasis added).

Another problem with Descartes’s reason for doubting sensory perception is that he relies on only one sensory power. It’s often the case that in order to test whether one sense is deceiving us, we must use another sense.

To use an example that many radical skeptics do to justify their doubt of sense knowledge, I may perceive the stick partially immersed in water as crooked. How do I determine if what I perceive is actually the case? I pick up the stick. When I do so I judge the stick is not actually crooked. But notice that in order to make a correct judgment about the stick, I employ another sensory power—namely, touch—that I must trust in order to make the proper the judgment.

With regard to Descartes’s example, in order to make a proper judgment about the size of the man walking up the street, Descartes would have to make contact with him through the sense of touch and measure him in order to determine that he is not small, which requires trust in sense knowledge.

Furthermore, Descartes’s recognition of the man’s small stature as unusual presupposes his trust in his previous sensory experience of the man’s tall stature. As Ralph McInerny notes, “[Descartes] must trust his senses in order to doubt them” (A First Glance at St. Thomas Aquinas, 37).

So, if it’s reasonable to trust sense knowledge, and the senses put us into contact with the world outside the mind, then we can have certitude that what we perceive is objectively real.

Dreams

The appeal to dreams is another way radical skeptics attempt to undermine trust in the senses. Taking their cue from Descartes again, they argue, “How do I know I’m not dreaming right now?” We can respond in two ways.

First, we experience ourselves being awake. As such, the skeptic must shoulder the burden of proof and not merely make an assertion (as Descartes did) but give reason to believe we’re not awake.

Second, in order to determine if our experience is a dream state, one must be able to identify a dream state. But as the philosopher Kenneth Gallagher explains, one can identify a dream state only by comparison with our waking consciousness:

It would be literally nonsensical to ask: how do I know that waking is not what I ordinarily mean by dreaming, because if it were, I wouldn't know what I ordinarily mean by dreaming (The Philosophy of Knowledge, 41].

Conjecture about whether waking is dreaming is literally of no practical use. If our waking is dreaming, then there is no point in talking of dreaming.

Malignant power

Some skeptics may argue that our defense of sense knowledge assumes our sensory and cognitive faculties are real. Following in the steps again of Descartes, they argue, “What if our perception is merely the product of a malignant being manipulating our sensory and cognitive powers, thus making our experiences and knowledge mere illusions?”

Look, just because it is logically possible that we are being deceived by a malignant power does not mean it is plausible. Logical possibility means only that there is no logical contradiction. Plausibility is present whenever there are good reasons for thinking something to be the case. Are there any good reasons to think we are being deceived by a malignant power? The obvious answer is no.

Second, the only possible way to settle the question is to use the very faculties that are being called into question. It is impossible to reflect upon our sensory and cognitive faculties apart from their activities. As the late philosopher Peter Coffey writes:

[C]ognitive faculties cannot be tested or examined in themselves and abstracting from their activities: whatever we know or can know about the nature of the mind and its faculties we can know only through their activities: there is no other channel of information open to us (Epistemology vol. I., 93).

If doubting our cognitive faculties presupposes their use, then there is no way to question their validity.

Finally, the objection is subversive of the argument itself. If the skeptic is correct, then it’s possible the soundness of the skeptic’s argument is yet another illusion generated by the malignant power.

Conclusion

The attempt by radical skeptics to undermine the perennial philosophy of knowledge as found in Aristotle and Aquinas can be a major stumbling block for the pursuit of truth. But showing how one cannot doubt the senses without trusting them, and eliminating the possibility of our waking state being a dream state along with the possibility of manipulation by a malignant power, can remove the stumbling block and open the path to knowledge of the real.
 
 
(Image credit: The Creators Project)

Antony Flew’s famous 1950 article “Theology and Falsification” posed what came to be known as the “falsificationist challenge” to theology. A claim is falsifiable when it is empirically testable—that is to say, when it makes predictions about what will be observed under such-and-such circumstances such that, if the predictions don’t pan out, the claim is thereby shown to be false.

The idea that a genuinely scientific claim must be falsifiable had already been given currency by Karl Popper. Flew’s aim was to apply it to a critique of such theological claims as the thesis that God loves us. No matter what sorts of evil and suffering occur in the world, the theologian does not give up the claim that God loves us. But then, what, in that case, does the claim actually amount to? And why should we accept the claim? Flew’s challenge was to get the theologian to specify exactly what would have to happen in order for the theologian to give up the claim that God loves us, or the claim that God exists.

Now, there are several problems with Flew’s challenge. Some of them have to do with specifically theological matters, such as the analogical use of the term “good” when applied to God, the role that divine permission of evil plays in the realization of a greater good, and so forth. Some of the problems have to do with the idea of falsification itself. As Popper himself emphasized, it is simply an error to suppose that all rationally justifiable claims have to be empirically falsifiable. Popper intended falsificationism merely as a theory about what makes a claim scientific, and not every rationally acceptable claim is or ought to be a scientific claim. Hence not every rationally acceptable claim is or ought to be empirically falsifiable.

For example, the thesis of falsificationism itself is, as Popper realized, not empirically falsifiable. This does not make Popper’s falsificationist theory of science self-refuting, because, again, he does not say in the first place that every claim has to be empirically falsifiable. Falsificationism is a claim about science but it is not itself a scientific claim, but rather a philosophical claim (what Popper called a claim of “meta-science”). It is subject to potential criticism—by way of philosophical analysis and argument, say—but not by way of empirical testing, specifically.

Claims of mathematics and logic are like this too. We can analyze and argue about them philosophically, but they are not plausibly subject to empirical refutation, specifically. And metaphysical claims are like that as well. With at least the most general sorts of metaphysical claims (e.g. about the nature of causality as such, or substance as such, or what have you), it is a sheer category mistake to suppose that they do, or ought to, entail specific empirical predictions. The reason is that the claims are too general for that. They are claims about (among other things) what any possible empirically observable phenomena must necessarily presuppose (and any possible non-empirical realities too, if there are any). Naturally, then, they are not going to be undermined by any specific empirical observation. By no means does that make them immune from rational evaluation. They can still be analyzed, and argued for or against, by way of philosophical analysis and argumentation. But as with claims of meta-science, or claims of mathematics and logic, so too with claims of metaphysics, it is a mistake to suppose that they stand or fall with empirical falsifiability.

Now, the fundamental claims and arguments of theology—for example, the most important arguments for the existence and attributes of God (such as Aquinas’s arguments, or Leibniz’s arguments)—are a species of metaphysical claim. Hence it is simply a category mistake to demand of them, as Flew did, that they be empirically falsifiable. To dismiss theology on falsificationist grounds, one would, to be consistent, also have to dismiss mathematics, logic, meta-science, and metaphysics in general. Which would be, not only absurd, but self-defeating, since the claim that only scientific claims are rationally justifiable is itself not a scientific claim but a metaphysical claim, and any argument for this claim would presuppose standards of logic.

There is also the problem that, as philosophers of science had already begun to see at the time Flew wrote, it turns out that even scientific claims are not as crisply falsifiable as Popper initially thought. Indeed, the problem was known even before Popper’s time, and famously raised by Pierre Duhem. A scientific theory is always tested in conjunction with various assumptions about background conditions obtaining at the time an experiment is performed, assumptions about the experimental set-up itself, and auxiliary scientific hypotheses about the phenomena being studied. If the outcome of an experiment is not as predicted, one could give up the theory being tested, but one might also consider giving up one or more of the auxiliary hypotheses instead, or check to see if the background conditions or experimental set-up were really as one had supposed. That does not mean that scientific theories are not empirically falsifiable after all, but it does mean that falsifying a theory is a much messier and more tentative affair than readers of pop science and pop philosophy books might suppose.

Then there are claims that are empirical and not metaphysical in the strictest sense, but still so extremely general that any possible natural science would have to take them for granted—in which case they are really presuppositions of natural science rather than propositions of natural science. For example, the proposition that change occurs is like this. We know from experience that change occurs, but it is not something falsifiable by experience, because any possible experience by which we might test it itself presupposes that change occurs. In particular, in order to test a proposition via observation or experiment, you need to see whether or not your current experience is followed by the predicted experience, which involves one experience succeeding another, which entails change. Natural science itself, then, which involves attempting to falsify theories (even if it involves more than this) presupposes something which cannot be falsified.

Necessary presuppositions of natural science like the one just described are the subject matter of that branch of philosophy known as the philosophy of nature (which, though more fundamental than natural science, is less fundamental than metaphysics as Thomists understand “metaphysics,” and is thus something of a middle-ground discipline between them). For example, the Aristotelian theory of actuality and potentiality (which is the core of the Aristotelian philosophy of nature) is grounded in an analysis of what change must involve, where the existence of change is presupposed by natural science. Hence the theory of actuality and potentiality is grounded in what is presupposed by natural science. That is why even natural science cannot overthrow it. But the characteristically Aristotelian argument for God’s existence—the argument from change to the existence of an unchanging changer of things (or, more precisely, of a purely actual actualizer of things)—is grounded in the theory of actuality and potentiality, and thus in what natural science itself must take for granted. And thus it too cannot be overturned even by natural science. This “empirical unfalsifiability” is no more a weakness of the Aristotelian argument for God’s existence than the “empirical unfalsifiability” of the existence of change, including the existence of experience itself, is a weakness. It makes the arguments in question (if they are otherwise unproblematic) more rationally secure than empirical science, not less.

Lazy shouts of “unfalisfiability!” against theological claims just ignore all this complexity—the distinctions that have to be drawn between empirical claims on the one hand and claims of mathematics, logic, and metaphysics on the other; between extremely general empirical claims and more specific ones; between philosophy of nature (which studies the philosophical presuppositions of natural science) and natural science itself; and between the testing of a thesis and the testing of the auxiliary assumptions we generally take for granted but conjoin with the thesis when drawing predictions from it.

So, falsificationism is a rather feeble instrument to wield against theology. And in fact, atheist philosophers have known this for decades, even if New Atheist combox commandos are still catching up.

All the same, where we are evaluating a specific empirical claim—rather than a claim of mathematics, logic, or metaphysics, or an extremely general empirical claim like “change occurs”—falsifiability is an important consideration, even if not as decisive as Popper supposed. Take an extremely specific and straightforward empirical claim, e.g. the claim that a large, yellowish triangular shape will suddenly appear in the center of my field of vision within the next few seconds. If no such shape actually appears in the next few seconds, it would be pretty hard to deny that the claim has been falsified. For example, I couldn’t say “Maybe the shape was there in the room, but I didn’t see it because it was behind a bookshelf.” I intentionally phrased the claim so that it was about what I would experience, not about what would be in the room, so appealing to the idea that some physical object stood in the way of my seeing it won’t help avoid falsification. Nor would it help to say “Maybe it will appear an hour from now, or tomorrow,” since the claim referred specifically to the next few seconds.

Of course, that’s not a very interesting empirical claim. Most interesting empirical claims are far less specific than that, even though they are nowhere near as general as the claim that change occurs. There is, needless to say, a large range of cases, some of which are more toward the general end of things, some of them more toward the specific, and the latter are easier to falsify than the former. But even if the more general ones aren’t as crisply falsifiable as a more simplistic application of the Popperian model would imply, they are still far from unfalsifiable.

For example, take the claim that heavy smoking over a long period of time has a strong tendency to cause cancer. Obviously this is not falsified by the fact that some heavy smokers never develop cancer, because the claim has been phrased in a way that takes account of that. It speaks only of a strong tendency, and even a strong tendency needn’t always be realized. But neither is the claim made vacuous by that qualification. If it turned out that only five percent of people who smoke heavily over the course of many years ended up getting cancer, we could reasonably say that the claim had been falsified. Whereas if it turned out that sixty percent of those who smoke heavily over the course of many years end up getting cancer, we would say that the claim had survived falsification, even though sixty percent is well short of one hundred percent. Indeed, even if the percentage were much lower than that—suppose it were forty percent, for example—it would not necessarily follow that the claim had been falsified.

Nor need there be anything like even that strong a link between two phenomena for us reasonably to posit a causal correlation. Take an example often discussed in philosophy of science, viz. the relationship between syphilis and paresis. If syphilis is untreated, it can lead to paresis, though this is rare. But it would be absurd, not to mention medically irresponsible, to conclude that the claim of a causal correlation between syphilis and paresis is falsified by the fact that actually developing paresis is rare. All the same, if there were on record only one or two cases, out of millions, of paresis following upon syphilis, it would—especially if no mechanism by which the one might lead to the other were proposed—be hard in that case to resist the conclusion that the claim of a causal correlation had been falsified.

So, an empirical claim concerning a causal link between two phenomena can be substantive rather than vacuous, and also empirically very well-supported, even if there are many cases in which the one phenomenon is not in fact followed by the other. Considerations about falsifiability, properly understood, do not undermine the point. Indeed, someone who resists such a claim might himself be subject to criticism on the grounds that he has made his position unfalsifiable.

For example, suppose a heavy smoker said, in reply to those who implored him to cut back: “Oh come on, lots of people smoke heavily and don’t get cancer! So how can you maintain your claim that there is a causal link, in the face of all that evidence? Don’t you know that a serious scientific claim should be falsifiable?” In fact, of course, it is the heavy smoker in question who is more plausibly accused of being insufficiently respectful of falsifiability. For there is a very strong link between heavy smoking and cancer, even if the former doesn’t always lead to the latter. And the empirical evidence for that link is so strong that it is those who deny it who are refusing to let their position be falsified by the evidence.

More could be said, but in fact these reflections on falsification are intended merely as a preamble to an application of the idea to a domain very different from the examples considered so far—namely, an example concerning politics and current events. I’ll get to that in another post.
 
 
NOTE: Dr. Feser's contributions at Strange Notions were originally posted on his blog, including this article, and therefore lose some of their context when reprinted here. Dr. Feser explains why that matters.
 
 
(Image credit: Efengshui)

Last week, I wrote about the longstanding Catholic drive to reinterpret the philosophy of Plato as realist. In actuality, Aristotle’s philosophy perfected Plato’s by connecting the material to the formal world—two separated domains which, in Plato, remain wholly alien to one another. Accordingly, it is quite a “stretcher,” I suggested, when Catholics talk about Plato as a realist. Any philosophy which divorces the material and the formal qualifies as anti-realism, because matter’s interaction with form is the very thing that constitutes intelligibility. (More on that below…)

As predicted, the article’s “combox” bore out my very thesis: Catholics and other Westerners (including some atheists) remain so strongly accustomed to just such an unduly charitable characterization of Plato that they startle to hear otherwise.

But here’s the real rub: such a distinction between the two ancient philosophers matters only because we live in a more violently anti-realist Modern era, which put to death (in popular thought) the Natural Law of Aristotle and of the Church’s Scholastic philosophy. Plato’s errors would not matter nearly so much if we were pre-Moderns.

As mentioned in last week’s article, living in the “Modern era” means inhabiting the centuries after the Sixteenth. Two moments of that most unfortunate century are directly insinuated here: the Protestant Reformation and the secularist Enlightenment. They are equal but opposite rejections of the Natural Law.

Today, in English-speaking countries, the faithful grandchildren of the Reformation are usually thought of as “the religious right,” while the intellectual progeny of the Enlightenment comprise “the secular left.” It so happens, as one of history’s bitterest ironies, that in countries like America and England, a giant, sustained food fight erupted between the two sets of grandchildren...who were once fellow travelers! We are all familiar with these skirmishes, of course, comprising the so-called “culture war” between two shouting, red-faced fundamentalisms: Protestant Biblicism versus Enlightenment Scientism in all its many vestiges.

The narrative not falsely goes that these two camps despise one another.

They do…today. But as aforementioned, it was not always so. One is surprised to find that together, each half of Prot-Enlight originally teamed up with the other against the Natural Law of Aristotle and of the Catholic Church. Together, each camp strove cooperatively to make the sixteenth century Catholic view of nature, the Natural Law, seem outdated. Together, both parties asserted an aggressive new anti-realist dichotomy for the supposedly new times: form versus matter, faith versus science, even faith versus reason.

Ironically, the two sides cooperated steadily against the Church during the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries in order to create these false dichotomies, only to spend the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries arguing ceaselessly about them!

Whether or not the reader accepts Plato’s role in this Modernist overturn of the Natural Law, it is far more important—and leagues more undeniable—to a clear conception of our world that we come to terms with the primary role played by Prot-Enlight. Plato’s role was mere prefigurement to that of the Prot-Enlight philosophies. The Prot-Enlight philosophies set the goal as the complete eradication of the Natural Law.

Prot-Enlight and the Three Prongs of the Natural Law

The two halves of Prot-Enlight Modernism altered the prevailing Western notion not so much of God, counterintuitively, as of nature. That is, any pop-theological changes wrought by the Reformation or the Enlightenment were actually secondary, in pervasiveness, to the harmful amendments Prot-Enlight made to the popular Western view of the world, or reality, itself.

I wrote in last week’s article: “In the main, Aristotelianism stands for reality’s incipient freedom and morality, its intelligibility, and its teleology.” Whether we’re talking about the authors of the Enlightenment like Francis Bacon and David Hume or the authors of the Reformation like Martin Luther and John Calvin, Prot-Enlight sought to “take down” the “big game” of the Catholic Natural Law, of which these three prongs were (and are) constitutive.

Natural Law Prong #1: Firstly, Catholic Aristotelianism (i.e. Thomism) puts forward physical nature as the forum of man’s freedom and morality. In other words, humanity’s freedom and morality are altogether natural. Catholicism does not naively suppose that either human or physical nature guarantee man’s automatic morality through any and all uses of his freedom; rather, physical nature is the forum where the proper use of human intellect and will may through deliberate action dispose each of the natural appetites, through habit, toward morality. And nature is the locus in quo where this happens. The secular and the Protestant worlds together decry this Catholic position: morality, for each worldview, counteracts nature. Again, for Catholicism, morality is perfectly natural, which is why Thomas Aquinas asserted that all of the appetites are natural…if implemented with the proper disposition, of course.

Protestantism, as mentioned above, rejects the possibility of freedom and morality altogether. Man is enslaved to sin. Whether we talk of Luther’s assertion that human will is “in bondage,” or Calvin’s infamous doctrine of predestination, Protestantism writ large rejects the first prong of the Natural Law hailed by the Catholic Church. The Protestant view of sin, mankind’s “total depravity,” swallows up any possible proper usage of intellect or will.

The Enlightenment, on the other hand, posited naturalism—the perfect opposite of the Natural Law’s first prong. Naturalism describes a deterministic nature which we find “red in tooth and claw.” The animals are no more than complex mechanisms, meat machines, which operate as the vector sum of their competing appetites. Moreover, naturalism places man squarely in the middle of, not above, nature. He too is bestial. He too is determined by his appetites alone. He too is just a meat machine. As such, human free will is rejected and determinism (equal but opposite to Protestant pre-determinism) prevails, although Enlightenment thinkers certainly wouldn’t designate this “sin,” as the Protestants do.

Natural Law Prong #2: Secondly, Catholic Aristotelianism puts forward nature as intelligible. “Being is intelligible,” Aristotle famously explained. As articulated in last week’s article, Aristotle described that form was in matter, as it were, rather than above matter, as Plato had taught. Because matter is in-formed, then, nature is intelligible. If form were instead compartmentalized somewhere above matter, as in Plato’s “noetic heaven,” then the material objects would be neither knowable nor differentiable. But the opposite is true. On this Aristotelian basis, the Thomism of the Catholic Church affirms that faith and reason work together, rather than against one another. Faith is strengthened, not weakened, by the two ways of knowing about human reality: the a priori way, philosophy, and the a posteriori way, science. Both philosophy and science affirm theology because, as Thomas Aquinas famously held, “truth cannot contradict truth.”

Protestantism, beginning with Luther, repudiated the scientific worldview—and not only the false scientific worldview of Scientism, but even science properly done. Protestantism also rejected the philosophical approach to the world: Luther held that “the whole of Aristotle is to theology as shadow is to light.” The rallying cry of Luther’s Reformation was sola scriptura, meaning that the Bible alone—not science or philosophy or anything less than supernatural revelation—is intelligible to the mind of man.

The teachings of the Enlightenment, in a coordinate if opposite manner, reject the intelligibility of the universe. And this is strange because Enlightenment secularists have always claimed to be “for science,” a claim which requires the principle of intelligibility. It’s quite simple: the new Scientism posits materialism. For the materialist, nothing but matters exists. Even though this precludes both ratio and intellectus, materialists never seem to understand how their point of view vitiates science’s ability to be done at all (cogitation requires ratio and intellectus: one recalls John Lennox’s debate with Richard Dawkins, where clearly Dawkins failed to understand Lennox that “the principle of consciousness, intelligibility itself, proved [his] point”).

Natural Law Prong #3: Thirdly, the Aristotelian view of nature poses nature’s goal-orientedness (i.e. teleology). Nature discloses its own purpose. Just as in prong #2, wherein the Catholic worldview affirms via the principle of intelligibility the formal cause of nature, this third prong of the Natural Law affirms nature's final cause as Jesus Christ. Nature's purposive, christological aspect is the culmination of Natural Law prongs one and two: because nature has a goal, its morality and intelligibility are thereby validly connected to the supernatural. If, in fact, nature were devoid of a supernatural telos, as the Prot-Enlights believe, then its ostensible morality and intelligibility would be rendered arbitrary and even conceptually null.

So, with regard to the convoluted Protestant stance on prong #3, the Reformation rejection was not of Christ, but of his sustained connection to the physical world. Reformation theology rejects the idea that nature's purpose is knowable through human examinations of the world. In short, Protestants express ambivalence insofar as they think the natural world does not really have a knowable supernatural end, even though of course they affirm Christ as the Logos (and in that sense, the goal). As Louis Bouyer said, “in Protestantism, everything goes on, or seems to go on, as if the Incarnation had ended with the Ascension of the Savior.” As if Jesus' connection to the world lasted only thirty-three years!

Clearly, through the Enlightenment’s rejections of God, of formal causation, and even of consciousness itself, the secularists removed any conception of a purpose in the universe. Such a crystal clear issue need not be belabored here. The secularists tell us every day, after all, that everything is pointless.

Conclusion

From here, the story only gets stranger and stranger. After all, the Modern English-speaking republics—Canada, New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, among ours and the motherland—all claim to be founded upon the Natural Law, even as their professed basis lies in the twin sixteenth century movements (their opposite motives notwithstanding) whose raison d’etre was the elimination thereof!

So where does that leave us?

It leaves us confused, schizophrenic. Think of American history: who was it but men steeped in the Reformation and the Enlightenment—the “Prots” and the “Enlights”—who drafted the several state constitutions, the Virginia Declaration of Rights, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights? And what are these papers but documented ways of life, memorialized articles of culture, predicated squarely upon the Natural Law. As such, we Moderns are confounded citizens of the most schizophrenic republics of all-time. America, crown gem of all the paradoxical republics, was even founded as against Rome, by folks who thought Canterbury had grown to be too close a likeness.

Americans in 2016 have the temerity to be surprised when recounting our cultural failures in Natural Law living. Many Americans even have the gall to wonder why our republic is failing. In short, when Modernism is based upon dual rivaling rejections of the Natural Law, untangling the web equates to no trifling academic affair: it becomes an existential exercise required for our very survival. Until the republics founded in the Modern era return to the Natural Law, we will continue to be unable to justify such republican desiderata and sine qua nons as: natural rights, subsidiarity, popular morality, anthropology, a liberty-based political economy, and a humane employment of science and technology (materialist science yields materialistic technology, as we recognize). We shall no longer receive these benefits without shouldering the burdens, or at the very least without acknowledging the mutual exclusivity of the Natural Law and Prot-Enlight Modernism.

Until we return to Aristotle, to Thomas, and to the Natural Law, we should expect to find our Modern world more than just cold and hostile to us—we should expect to find it unfree, unintelligible, and pointless.

NOTE: Today we kick off an occasional series of exchanges between Catholic theologian Dr. Michael Augros, author of Who Designed the Designer?: A Rediscovered Path to God's Existence (Ignatius Press, 2015), and various email interlocutors. We'll start with the first email question today and Friday we'll share Dr. Augros' response. Enjoy!
 

 
Hello Dr. Augros,

I am a devout Catholic who recently purchased your book, Who Designed the Designer? I just finished the first chapter but hesitate to read further without first obtaining clarification regarding the first step in your proof. Granted, I am no philosopher, but I perceive potential issues already in the first chapter that I was hoping you would be able to clear up to allow me to read further.

I see problems with your first premise as it applies to infinite regression of causes. Your first proof states:

"If there were caused causes, with no first cause, they would constitute a middle with nothing before it.
 
But it is impossible for there to be a middle with nothing before it.
Therefore, there cannot be caused causes with no first cause."

It seems to me you could just take that proof and substitute the words "cause before each cause" for the words "first cause" and still have a valid proof for an infinite regression of causes without the need for an absolute first cause.

It would thus read as follows:

"If there were caused causes, with no cause before each cause, they would constitute a middle with nothing before it.
 
But it is impossible to have a middle with nothing before it. Therefore, there cannot be caused causes with no cause before each cause."

I am really hoping I am missing something here.

Likewise, when you discuss Aristotle's view that even an infinity of causes requires a first cause, it seems to me that it all comes down to how you word the proof and how you define the terms, otherwise we run into the same problem Zeno ran into. You say that even an infinite set is definite and must therefore include a maximum "effect maker" and that maximum producer of effects cannot, by necessity, be preceded by a greater effect producer. The problem I see is there will never be a maximum effect maker with an infinite series of causes, insofar as the cause immediately preceding any other cause will necessarily include all the other cause's effects plus at least one, namely the other cause. If we consider that this "definite set" is open-ended with an infinite chain of causes, I don't think you can really define "maximum" in the way you do, since by necessity, the maximum will never end in a "definite set" which is open-ended, which is part of the definition of infinity. Please clarify this issue for me.

I am also having problems understanding how the first cause necessarily needs to still exist with us today. To tweak your train analogy, if the engine, which you designate the first cause, spontaneously exploded and the explosion pushed all the connected boxcars on a frictionless railroad track indefinitely, we would still have the same chain of causes and effects but with an initial mover that no longer exists. I don't really follow your logic that the first cause must, by necessity, still be with us today.

I understand you must be busy and I am not even a student of yours, but any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!

Sincerely,
Mark D.

The Catholic Church asserts the truth that mankind has suffered a privation of grace as a consequence of disobedience. By the sin of our first parents we are saddled until the end of time with the defect of Original Sin. Man is fallen. To be born into this world is to be burdened with a life of toil, trial and torment. Adam and Eve were in a state of grace in the Garden of Eden before succumbing to temptation. The doctrine of the fall is a most obvious proposition expounded upon by nearly every religious and philosophical tradition in history. To deny man’s fallen nature is an unprecedented narrowness based on implausible pathology grounded in the denial of the most vital attributes that make us fully human.

Man is more than just material, he has an interior and transcendent nature recognizable by his intellect and will. When Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden for disobedience, God described the consequences of their rebellion in Genesis 23:17-19 when He said “cursed is the ground because of you; in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it shall bring forth to you; and you shall eat the plants of the field. In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread.” This is an obvious statement about the physical difficulties all men have faced throughout the millennia of human existence. What may not be so obvious is that this is analogous to the two other realms of human existence as well, those two dimensions of interiority we know as intellect and will. It is as difficult to cultivate the right use of reason and our moral sensibilities as it is to till hard earth. Agriculture on material soil is like education and spiritual formation on the inner soil.

It is real labor to cultivate the inner landscape. Just as there was no need for agriculture in the Garden of Eden, there was no need for education before the Fall. Education is after all intended to be the cultivation of habits of being most fully expressed by the acquisition of virtue and the deracination of vice. Adam and Eve had preternatural gifts of perception, clear intellectual sight, an acuity of judgment, a precision of the senses, and astounding memory retention. They were also gifted the infused knowledge of things as they pertained to their station in the divine economy. There was no need for virtue because the appetites were properly subordinated to the right use of reason.

The sin of our first parents resulted in the loss of sanctifying and sanitizing grace. We even find ourselves bereft of the original preternatural gifts. Our natures have been corrupted by the original sin and we are left with three wounds of the fall, a darkened intellect, a weakened will, and an inclination towards evil. Our lot in life became dreary, toil against the soil for man and painful childbirth for the woman. Strife, hatred, and enmity now characterize this vale of tears as we struggle to rediscover our purpose when dark shade prevents us from seeing clearly. Although the fall of man is expressed most comprehensively by the Catholic Church, the truth of the doctrine of the fall is by no means exclusive to Christianity.

Many traditions hold myths depicting the fallen nature of man. In Gnosticism, there is gratitude for the snake revealing hidden knowledge to Adam and Eve which liberates them from the “demiurge’s” constricting control. In Islam, Adam and Eve are deceived by Shaitaan who promised them immortality and other delights, but even after having been warned, they gave into Shaitaan’s temptations. In Zoroastrianism and Persian Myths, humankind is created to resist and endure through degradation and decay by cultivating good habits of charitable deeds, the correct use of speech and by the right use of the intellect.

The Hindu tradition has prayers to Varuna, Indra, and Agni which allude to a corrupt human nature by constantly asking forgiveness of their sins and for their offenses against the gods and their neighbors. In Buddhism the predominate theme is suffering and falleness, in the words of the Buddha in the Dhammapada, 147-8 “Behold this painted body, a body full of wounds, put together, diseased, and full of many thoughts in which there is neither permanence nor stability. This body is worn out, a nest of diseases and very frail. This heap of corruption breaks in pieces, life indeed ends in death.” Even Confucius in his Analects stressed the importance and difficulty of cultivating the virtues to live the moral life. He called for men to constantly remind themselves of the inverse golden rule. This is similar to the Ancient Greeks who clearly understood the need to cultivate virtue to combat man’s natural inclination towards evil.

Perhaps the most notable non-Christian tradition to elucidate man’s fallen nature is found in the myth of Pandora. The Titan Prometheus was charged with making man out of dust. Man was a feeble creature with a poor lot in life. Prometheus had pity on man and asked Zeus if he could give them fire. Zeus refused but Prometheus stole fire from Zeus anyway and got caught. Zeus had Prometheus chained to the side of a mountain while he planned revenge on Prometheus’ family.

In the meantime, the gods made beautiful Pandora out of clay. Pandora means “all gifts” and she is named so because Zeus had all the gods and goddesses each give her a gift as he made her a live person. Hera gave Pandora an insatiable curiosity. Zeus offered Pandora as a wife to Prometheus’ dimwitted brother Epimetheus and gave them a box for a wedding present with the instruction that she was never to open it. Of course Zeus knew she wouldn’t be able to resist and when she opened the box and let loose its contents, Zeus’ punishment was complete, for in the box were all the evils, sicknesses, and sins that ushered death irrevocably into the world. Of course, man has lived in this fallen state ever since. There is further corroboration in philosophy.

In book two of The Republic, Plato alludes to man’s fallen nature by having Glaucon assert that it is good to perpetrate injustice for gain but bad to suffer it. Glaucon further proclaims a fallen notion of justice by a compromise between the distorted notion that doing injustice without punishment is a benefit and suffering an injustice without the ability to retaliate is a great evil. Glaucon suggests that conventional laws are asserted to protect victims, “not as a good, but as the lesser evil, and honored by reason of the inability of men to do injustice” without interference. Plato has Glaucon further assert that concerning the conventional law, “no man who is worthy to be called a man would ever submit to such an agreement if he were able to resist; he would be mad if he did.” To illustrate his point, Glaucon tells the myth of Gyges ring to demonstrate that the just and unjust man alike will find themselves on the same road if only given the right circumstances.

Plato later demonstrates that because of our fallen nature we are called to cultivate virtue and commit to moral formation for excellence if we are going to do the right thing for the right reasons. There is no doubt that most men in Gyges position would take advantage of invisibility for personal gain, even though it is immoral. This is an illustration of man’s fallen nature because our uncultivated inclinations do not square with natural law of goodness and truth.

All the major philosophical and religious traditions in the history of the world acknowledge the fallen nature of man. The obvious incongruity between the natural good and man’s inclination to do evil is a most evident thing. The history books are a record of the strife, sin and death that have plagued all peoples in all lands and at all times. We are in a unique time when a growing number “educated” souls operate in fields that systematically deny the fallen nature of man. Professions such as education, psychology, the social sciences and several more operate as if all of humankind’s strife has its root causes in genetic accidents and material inequalities.

Why such a radical break from the preponderance of history and evidence?

Aristotle said “the least initial deviation from the truth is multiplied later a thousand fold.” The problems we face today began in the Garden with one bite of the fruit of the forbidden tree. That first deviation is the source of incalculable error multiplying a thousand fold in every subsequent generation. In the modern era, the movement to deny the fallen nature of man is the artifact of another original error. At the end of the period known as the scholastic philosophical tradition, William of Occam (1287-1347) asserted an initial deviation known as nominalism. He used his razor to begin to cut real things off from their real explanations. Universal realities had been severed from their images or signs.

By identifying the contrivance that universal truths revealed by God are mere names, we can observe one initial deviation that serves as the root for countless philosophical errors today. Specifically, the denial of universal truths is the first step to cut the image off from the reality. Since the advent of Occam’s nominalism in the 13^th century, the ground was laid for the enlightenment which embodies the thousand fold errors instituted by Occam. In excising reality from images and images from shadows, the Enlightenment ushered in the philosophical age of inversion. Sir Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum inverted Aristotle’s deductive method based on first principles to the inductive method of scientific inquiry grounded in the idea that “man is the measure of all things.” The misapplication of the scientific method to philosophical, moral and educational concerns has made a wasteland of modern notions of interiority.

St. Pope John Paul II said in May of 2003 that the “drama of contemporary culture is the lack of interiority, the absence of contemplation. Without interiority culture has no content; it is like a body that has not yet found its soul. What can humanity do without interiority? Unfortunately, we know the answer very well. When the contemplative spirit is missing, life is not protected and all that is human is denigrated. Without interiority, modern man puts his own integrity at risk.” We risk exponentially expediting societal decay by the denial of man’s fallen nature, but we also risk incalculably more: eternity.

The atheist problem of denying man’s fallen nature is one of denying a proper understanding of the interiority of man. To believe that man is not fallen is also to deny the nature and existence of virtue and vice, which is a denial of the objective standard of truth goodness and beauty. To deny the Fall is also to deny the reality of nearly all of human history as well as to collected wisdom of nearly every philosophical and religious tradition. To deny the fallen nature of man is to arrogate to oneself the possibility of constructing a heaven on earth. The efforts have been made on a massive scale and they have produced catastrophic results sure to proliferate as the foolish rush towards an impossible utopia based on the false assumption of man’s natural goodness. These reductive utopian schemes are picking up even more momentum in this ever darkening age. The only possibility of surviving the denial of man’s fallen nature is for souls to hope to transcend humanity itself, and by the single trick of applied technology, this is a most impossible endeavor.

Some atheists will object to arguments for God by observing, "If a particular proof for God is so strong, why doesn't it convince everyone?"

This objection is perhaps the most prevalent, and the cheapest one to make, yet a complete answer to it involves several components and is also interesting in its own right.

This objector presents the theist with a dilemma: either I must pretend to be a supergenius like none the world has ever seen, presenting new and amazing arguments for God’s existence that will, for the first time ever, convince everyone and bring hordes of atheists to their knees, or, less flatteringly, I must countenance the possibility that I am a hack with prodigious ignorance of the failures of past thinkers and arguments concerning this matter.

Well, I freely confess I am no supergenius. The arguments in my recent book, Who Designed the Designer?: A Rediscovered Path to God's Existence (Ignatius Press, 2015), convincing as I take them to be, are not my own inventions. Practically all of them come from a great tradition of thinkers that began with the pre-Socratic philosophers and acquired fresh vigor with Socrates and Plato and Aristotle, then continued through Boethius, the great Arab Aristotelians, and Aquinas, and lives on today in various universities around the world.

But if any of these arguments is truly a proof, then why has none been universally accepted? Why do so many smart people continue to reject them all?

Before I answer that question, it is only fair to note that since the time of Aquinas, if not since the time of Aristotle, there has always been a significant number of philosophers in the world who have accepted arguments like those in my book as successful proofs. That is roughly twenty-three centuries of measurable success. Somehow such reasonings persist down through the ages, convincing thousands of great minds in every generation along the way, some of whom were originally atheists. It is simply a matter of fact, in other words, that the arguments do convince many smart people and have done so since they first saw the light of day. That still leaves us with the unconvinced philosophers to account for, of course.

Some who go by the name philosophers are quacks, and we need not concern ourselves with what they think. Many others struggle with a willful attachment to atheism. Unlike any mathematical truth, the truth about God’s existence or nonexistence is profoundly relevant to everyone’s conception of goodness and happiness and purpose. Not only God but many other things considered by philosophers and not mathematicians possess this potentially life-altering character—a fact perceived most keenly by the philosophers themselves. Hence, there is a possibility of desire influencing thought in philosophical questions where there is no correspondingly strong element of desire in mathematical investigations. We should not expect, in other words, that even the most solid and genuine proofs of philosophy will enjoy the same universal convincing power as those in mathematics. In philosophical matters, even genuine proofs can be surrounded by obstacles nowhere to be found in the world of mathematics.

But if we continue scanning the people who have been called philosophers, after leaving aside quacks and those whose thinking is unduly shaped or inhibited by desire or prejudice one way or the other, we will still find a number of them left to be explained. There are many philosophers in the world who do not go about promoting arguments like those in my book and are nevertheless neither quacks nor particularly attached to atheism. What can be said about those?

It seems to me that most of them simply have never heard the arguments. This might at first sound incredible. Practically everyone who can read has heard of Aristotle, and most people have heard of Aquinas. Then how can there be nonquack philosophers who have not studied Aristotle’s or Aquinas’ arguments for God’s existence? The answer is not far to seek. We must remember that philosophy is an enormous enterprise with a history spanning well over two thousand years and that modern education encourages specialization. That is a recipe guaranteeing significant lacunae in every philosopher’s intellectual formation. I believe it was Konrad Lorenz who said, “Every man gets a narrower and narrower field of knowledge in which he must be an expert in order to compete with other people. The specialist knows more and more about less and less and finally knows everything about nothing.” Not every philosopher winds up as bad as all that, but some degree of specialization is necessary, and consequently a generous dose of ignorance of one’s own general field is inevitable. Much the same is true in science. A particle physicist might be as ignorant as I am about the Krebs cycle of respiration or of the chemical formula for caffeine. A Kant expert might hardly have read two words of Aristotle. Even an expert in Aristotle’s logical works might know next to nothing about his ethical and political writings.

There are also powerful academic disincentives for anyone who might be tempted to study Aristotle or Aquinas at all with a view to finding out the truth. One of these is that Aristotle and Aquinas are both thinkers from the distant past. That is sufficient evidence for most people, even most of those who go into philosophy these days, that their thinking is in all ways outmoded. It doesn’t help matters that they were geocentrists. The result is that the study of them is widely regarded as an exercise in the history of thought, not so much a properly philosophical enterprise. But if we do bother to read them, we find in their writings more than geocentrism and similarly outdated ideas (which, by the way, they themselves regarded as hypotheses and distinguished sharply from philosophical truths that they considered absolutely certain and timeless). In Aquinas we find that the statements emphasized and insisted upon are not those like “Earth is at the center of the universe” but those of another type. I mean self-evident statements, such as “Nothing gives what it does not have” and “Among things actually existing but unequal, one must be the maximum” and also the necessary consequences of these. Such statements remain as true as ever. They are not time sensitive. And they have nothing to do with geocentrism.

Nonetheless, a thoughtlessly inherited prejudice against reading “ancient” and “medieval” thinkers for genuine insights into reality persists in modern universities, as it has now for at least a century or two. And so indeed the God-philosophy of Aristotle and Aquinas is read by a bare minimum of today’s philosophers and read with any degree of care and open-mindedness by far fewer still. That is why Christopher Hitchens (who was not a philosopher) could mention the word geocentrist and consider Aristotle and Aquinas quite dispatched by it. It is also why Richard Dawkins (also not a philosopher) can grossly misrepresent Aquinas’ five ways while provoking hardly a squawk from any but a handful of philosophers. And it is also why Bertrand Russell (who was a philosopher) could set up a mere straw man and call it the “argument of the First Cause”.

Now let’s sum that all up. Unlike most mathematical questions, the God question is among those that affect human desires, and so it inevitably becomes the object of prejudices, intellectual fashions, educational policies, social trends, laws, obnoxious religiosity, and other cultural phenomena that can skew our thinking about it in either direction, for or against God. That philosophers do not all agree about it is therefore no proof that it lies beyond the sphere of inherently decidable (and decided) questions. The disagreement is instead largely due to other causes, such as those I have been describing. To suppose that the failure of an argument for God to convince some thinkers is necessarily the fault of the argument, before even identifying such a fault, is therefore a lazy assumption valued only by those who would avoid having to understand the argument itself.
 
 
Adapted from Who Designed the Designer?: A Rediscovered Path to God's Existence (Ignatius Press, 2015) by Dr. Michael Augros. Copyright 2014, Ignatius Press. Reprinted with permission.
 
 
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St. Thomas Aquinas, citing Aristotle, once wrote: “a small error at the outset can lead to great errors in the final conclusions.” What he means is that given the nature of reason, if any one of your premises is mistaken, no matter how trivial it may seem to your overall project, your conclusions may turn out to be wrong, very wrong.

A great example of what St. Thomas means can be found in a TED talk by Professor Yuval Noah Harari. In “What Explains the Rise of Humans?”, Harari argues that the homo sapiens' dominance of the earth is best explained by the human imagination’s ability to construct certain “stories” about “fictional entities” that provide the means by which we can, in large numbers, cooperate with one another. Among these fictional entities are God, human rights, and the value of paper money.

Watch the short 17-minute talk below:

Although Professor Harari is an engaging speaker and his talk rhetorically attractive, the philosophical credentials of his theory left me with more questions than the theory has the resources to answer.

Let’s begin by asking this question: How does Professor Harari know that these “stories” about the divine, natural rights, and a nation’s currency are “fictions”? He does not say. All he does is assume that the correct account of reality is materialism, the belief that the only things that are “real” are those physical things that are subject to quantifiable measure.

As he says about the nature of human rights:

Human rights, just like God and heaven, are just a story that we’ve invented. They are not an objective reality; they are not some biological effect about Homo sapiens. Take a human being, cut him open, look inside, you will find the heart, the kidneys, neurons, hormones, DNA, but you won’t find any rights. The only place you find rights are in the stories that we have invented and spread around over the last few centuries. They may be very positive stories, very good stories, but they’re still just fictional stories that we’ve invented.

So it turns out that because human rights (not to mention, God) cannot be detected by the instruments and methods of the natural sciences, they are not part of “objective reality.” But like the country singer Johnny Lee, who once sang of his vain search for love in “single bars” and with “good time lovers,” Professor Harari is looking for rights in all the wrong places. He is, as the philosopher Edward Feser puts it, like “the drunk who insists on looking for his lost car keys under the lamp post, on the grounds that that is the only place where there is enough light by which to see them.”

Where then should we “look” for rights? We need not go further than Professor Harari’s own lecture. By offering an account of the rise of humans that he believes is correct, he is implying that those who disagree with this account are mistaken. Assuming that the purpose of argument, as well as the use of evidence in support of an explanation, is to arrive at the truth or something approximating the truth, it follows that the mistaken person has no right to claim that he is correct.

It also follows from this that a person who ignores evidence, good reasoning, and thoughtful reflection, while embracing wishful thinking, fallacious reasoning, and thoughtless meandering, is wronging himself. Yet to make such a judgment one must know the ends to which the human person is ordered.

But such ends, or final causes, cannot be detected by the instruments and methods of the natural sciences. If you cut open a human being, as Professor Harari would put it, you cannot see the goods to which the person is ordered. If that is what makes such goods not part of “objective reality,” however, then the practitioners of the scientific enterprise itself are bereft of any grounds by which to condemn ignorance and extol wisdom, two judgments whose veracity depends on the “fictional story” of an immaterial reality, a human being’s form. After all, you cannot know that a being comes up short in the use of any of its natural powers unless you first know the sort of thing that it is. Thus, we say a blind person lacks sight while a sightless stone lacks nothing.

The laws of logic are also central to the scientific enterprise. That is, in order to engage in a scientific inquiry one should reason well, which means that one should not violate the laws of logic. But the laws of logic are not material entities that one can find by cutting anything open, let alone a human being. In fact, the relationships between an argument’s premises and terms are logical, not spatial, which means that they are not physical objects. Consider a valid argument form, modus ponens:

If P, then Q
P
Therefore Q

This is a valid form, not because the two premises somehow together physically cause the conclusion, as a cue ball moves the 8-ball when they touch. Rather, as a matter of logical necessity, the conclusion is entailed by the premises.

That relationship is not physical, though it seems just as real and part of “objective reality” as the relationship between the two billiard balls or what one sees when one cuts open a human being. So, we have yet another reason to reject Professor Harari’s materialism.

Here’s the point: if someone offers a theory of reality that excludes what seems to be obviously true, it’s probably a good idea to be skeptical of the theory rather than to doubt common sense. For it is, ironically, our common sense—what we pre-reflectively believe about the good, the true, and the beautiful—that makes theory-making, even bad theory-making, possible.
 
 
Thus column first appeared on the website The Catholic Thing (www.thecatholicthing.org). Copyright 2015. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.
 
 
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In a recent post here, I asked, “Do You Need God to Know That Abortion is Wrong?” I was prompted by two things: on the one hand, a series of articles defending the idea that we can be moral without God; and on the other, articles like this one, suggesting that opposition to abortion can only be “because God.” Those two positions don't work together. As I explained in the post,

The pro-life argument is simple: (1) human beings are alive from the moment of fertilization, and (2) it is morally wrong (and ought to be illegal) to intentionally kill innocent human beings. The first point is a scientific one. The second is a moral and legal one, one that science can’t answer. You don’t find human rights under a microscope, and there’s no experiment capable of proving that murder is wrong.

Since the scientific point is clear-cut and settled (it's inescapable that unique human beings are created at the moment of fertilization), everything turns on point (2). But the intentional killing of innocent human beings is what the philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe calls the “hard core” of the definition of murder. So to frame the question slightly differently, to say that abortion is okay, you have to say that (a) murder is at least sometimes okay, and that (b) abortion falls within this class of exceptions.

This has sparked a lively debate, as well as a rebuttal from Steven Dillon. I want to address the kind of arguments being raised generally first, and then look at what makes Steven's position frightening.

I. Do we need to believe in God to know that all murder is wrong?

Broadly speaking, there are four major types of responses to this question:

1. Only Theists Can be Anti-Murder: If you argue that abortion is wrong because unborn children have souls, or if you argue that abortion is okay (at least up to a certain point) because they don't, you're making arguments that are inaccessible to atheists. In either case, you're acting as if opposition to murder can only be predicated on the presence of the human soul. If killing someone is only wrong if we're sure they have a soul, why aren't atheists pro-murder?
2. Murder isn't Always Wrong: If you argue that abortion is okay because killing one life can sometimes save two, or because our being pro-abortion is necessary for us to justify euthanasia and organ harvesting, then we've got a slightly different issue. In these case, you don't believe that murder is always wrong. You might have personally-convincing reasons for your views, like utilitarianism or a rejection of impaired human life, but at least own your own convictions. If you don't – if you insist on paying lip service to being uniformly opposed to murder, while holding to these positions – your advocacy will necessarily be incoherent, because you're arguing for two irreconcilable positions.
3. It's Okay to Kill Fetuses: If you argue that abortion is okay because unborn children don't meet the requirements to be protected human life, you're not showing that unborn children aren't scientifically and materially human beings. Instead, you're either saying that they're not really humans, for some immaterial and non-scientific reason (like the first group), or that they are a group of humans that it's okay to intentionally kill (like the second). Here, the clearest way forward would be for you to spell out your presumptions and beliefs: e.g., “I think that murder is only wrong when your victim can feel pain at the time of death.”
4. Abortion is Always Wrong: this fourth group includes those, including both religious pro-lifers and nonreligious pro-lifers like Secular Alliance for Life, who treat the prohibition against murder as absolute. This opposition (most clearly in the case of secular pro-lifers) is not based upon their recognition of a human soul. If you reject the existence of the soul and reject all forms of murder, this is the only camp to which you can rationally adhere.

All of Steven's arguments seem to fall within the first category. He doesn't dispute the biological evidence. Instead, he assumes (but stops short of acknowledging) that abortion is wrong only if the fetus has a human soul. If he's right, and you don't believe that anyone has a human soul, then you've got a problem rationally holding to the prohibition against murder.

II. Do We Need Metaphysics to Settle the Abortion Debate?

In his response, Steven takes issue with my twofold formulation. Specifically, he accuses me of conflating terms, between biological humans in (1) and metaphysical humans in (2). I'm actually doing no such thing: I mean human in the same sense in both (1) and (2), and reject the whole idea of humans who are biological-but-not-metaphysical (or vice versa). It's immoral, and ought to be illegal, to murder those that we recognize, scientifically, as human beings. Furthermore, any sort of metaphysical definition of “human” that fails to capture the entire set of all humans is a bad definition.

If Steven wants to hold that you need metaphysics to know that killing innocent human beings is wrong, or if he wants to carve out an exception to the prohibition against murder for those that (according to a metaphysics of his own making) he considers biologically-but-not-metaphysically human, he's free to make those arguments. But recognize that in each of these cases, he's the one shifting the conversation into metaphysics, and the one creating two classes of human beings.

I mention all of this for a simple reason. The rest of this article will be getting into specific metaphysical questions involving the soul. It would be easy, especially for an atheist or someone who thinks that only the natural sciences produce factual knowledge, to write off this whole inquiry as bunk. I certainly understand. But if you're going to do that, recognize that what you're rejecting is not my original argument, but Steven's attempt to carve out a metaphysical exception to the prohibition against murder.

With that in mind, let's dive into the metaphysics directly.

III. Is the Fetus Metaphysically Human?

This is the meat of Steven's argument. He asks, but doesn't answer, an important question: “What gets aborted?” To the extent that he gives any sort of answer, it's by negation. He denies that the fetus is human or even an animal. Based on his trifold distinction, the answer to his questions seems to be that fetuses are now a type of plant, but (likely, for obvious reasons) he doesn't spell out this conclusion.

He is led to this conclusion by two arguments, one good and one bad. The good argument is that there is a threefold distinction between plants (which have metabolism), animals (which can sense), and humans (who can reason). The bad argument is in how he understands this distinction. When Aristotle first proposed this distinction (In Book II, Chapter III of De Anima), he was looking at types of things. That is, a plant is the type of creature that can metabolize, an animal is the type of creature that can move and sense, and humans are the type of creature that can reason. In each case, the higher creatures also have the powers of the lower ones. By this standard, you're a human even when you're not reasoning, even when you're incapable of reasoning, as long as you're the type of creature that's capable of reasoning (which, of course, you are).

When Steven applies this distinction, in contrast, he's looking at whether you can currently employ these powers. That is, an animal is only an animal if it can sense right now. By this definition, you can't let sleeping dogs lie. Having fallen asleep (temporarily losing control over their powers of sensation), they cease to be animals, and thus cease to be dogs. You, too, lose your humanity every night when you fall asleep, by this analysis. You also cease to be a human if you fall into a coma (either permanently or temporarily), enter a sensory deprivation chamber, or get so drunk that your reason is completely impaired. If you go blind or become infertile, you similarly become less human, because you're less capable of employing your sensory or reproductive powers.

It takes very little to see the problems with such a position. After all, if someone slips Rohypnol into your drink and you pass out, are you still a human being with rights that should be protected? If Steven is right that human rights turn on whether you can currently reason or sense, the answer would seem to be no.

IV. What Is the Soul?

This, I think, suffices to answer his arguments, but there's an additional point worth clearing up. We often think of the soul as a sort of “ghost in the machine,” but that's not a good understanding of the soul. The Latin term for soul is “anima,” because it's the immaterial animating principle of the body. This can be shown easily enough, quite apart from Scripture or even philosophy. Simply envision two identical twins, one of whom suddenly dies. On the level of the matter, they are still identical. The same particles are swirling around, as before, and the dead twin has the same body that existed while he was alive, moments ago.

So whatever distinguishes them, whatever separates living things from dead ones, can't be a material difference... even though we can observe its effects on a material level. This principle of animation, separating the living from the dead, is what we call the anima or the soul. It's the organizational principle of the body, the body's “form.” And this is true whether we're talking about humans, or (to use Kreeft's example) cows, or ferns.

In contrast, Steven's inquiry imagines that you can have an animated human being, growing and developing in the womb of her mother, and that at some point, a soul suddenly enters her body. Not so. If you've got a living human, you've got an ensouled human. So the whole thrust of Steven's investigation is founded upon misunderstanding the soul.

So if the question of abortion boils down to a philosophical inquiry into whether or not the fetus has a human soul, very well: he does. But this still leaves me with my original question: does the question of abortion, or murder more broadly, boil down to whether or not the victim is ensouled? If so, where does that leave atheists?
 
 
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