Today some claim that modern physics evinces that Aristotelian-Thomist philosophy is an archaic myth that has outlived its credibility. They say things like, “If Thomist metaphysics contradicts modern physics, then Thomism is false.”

They make claims against Thomism, citing modern physical theories like quantum mechanics and relativity. We are told counterintuitive things, such as that (1) whole universes can pop into existence from nothing according to quantum mechanics, (2) effects sometimes actually exist before their causes, (3) special relativity entails that time is not sequential, but rather “B theory” says that past, present, and future are equally real and change is impossible, and (4) electrons around an atomic nucleus can be in two positions simultaneously, or “smeared over space.”

Still, on basic truths about the world, natural science and Thomism hold identical positions.

Epistemological realism: Natural scientists and Thomists share the conviction that we immediately sense the external world. Scientists are certain that they are discovering laws that apply to a vast extramental physical cosmos. Still, those who impose a materialist philosophical interpretation on sensation’s science find themselves entrapped in an epistemological nightmare whose immanent logic leads to the false conclusion that all we really know is internal neural patterns of our brains.

Thomism offers an alternate view of sense experience that supports natural science’s realist presupposition. It notes that all human beings have the same noetic starting point. There are three components to every human act of knowledge: (1) the thing known, (2) the act of knowing, and (3) reflexive awareness of the knowing self. In most relevant cases, what is known is known as external to one’s self. While an entire epistemology is not possible here, note that we cannot doubt external reality when it is directly confronted. Doubt arises only when we shift our attention to a judgment about the external object in which what we know is not the object itself. For example, if I close my eyes and wonder whether the lion confronting me is really about to attack me, I am no longer looking at the lion, but at some internal image of it. At that moment, I can doubt the real lion, but I cannot doubt its mental image. Opening my eyes provides a different certitude – as the lion takes its first bite.

Metaphysical first principles: Universal first principles apply to the minds and methods of modern physicists themselves. If there is even a single exception to such universal rules, there would be no logical reason ever to expect such a “broken rule” to apply again. Assuming, for instance, that the whole universe has no reason for existing, but that somehow the rest of cosmic phenomena still must have reasons, is special pleading in the extreme.

The principle of non-contradiction, which says that things cannot both be and not be, is universally applied by every scientist making an observation. Even the smallest phenomena must be read as what it is and not as its contradictory – otherwise, the reading would be useless. Claims of contradictory phenomena, such as wave-particle duality, rely on such observations. If a subatomic entity appears as a wave, that same exact reading cannot say it is a particle. Neither Thomist nor natural scientist could ever reject this principle, since, without it, every judgment could be contradicted.

Science simply cannot be done without the principle of sufficient reason. By “sufficient reason,” I refer, not to Leibniz’s famous definition, but simply the universal truth that all things must have reasons. Long before St. Thomas or Leibniz, Adam knew that all things have reasons. So do all scientists. Every scientist pursues explanations of natural phenomena because he knows they must have explanations. Through Hume’s influence, he may think of causes as “antecedents,” but he never stops looking for them because he believes in the principle of causality. Causes are merely reasons for things that do not explain themselves.

From the time a child begins to explore the world, his mind invariably demands to know reasons for all things. Things’ intelligibility demands that they “make sense” -- either through some external cause or their own internal coherence. “Why?” is the ever-pressing question. Science never researches to discover whether a given phenomenon has an explanation, but rather to discover what that explanation is. If sufficient reason is not universally true, scientists could never be sure that observed phenomena actually reveal the nature of what they study, since no underlying reason need exist. Science would be impossible. The mind’s reasoning process could never be trusted, since no reasons for thoughts need ever be present. Indeed, all the rational connections in the whole of reality depend upon our expectation that reasons underlie everything. And, if the way our mind works does not correspond to reality, science becomes fantasy and we are all, by definition, psychotic.

Even atheist scientists, like Stephen Hawking, questioning the existence of the cosmos, usually assert that it simply explains itself. They may claim that it is the end product of eternal cosmic “bubbles,” arising from “nothing” – which “nothing” turns out to be a “quantum vacuum” that itself turns out to be actually pre-existing active quantum fields consisting of virtual particles! Those who claim that the cosmos has no reason at all for existing are making a philosophical claim that happens to be at variance from both modern physics and Thomism. Thomist philosophy comports with and supports natural science’s universal operating conviction that things have reasons.

Potency and act, matter and form, finality, essence and existence: Most other Thomist principles are so clearly philosophical that natural science properly says little about them. The exceptions would be materialist denials that substantial forms and final causes exist in nature. Still, those are clearly philosophical, not scientific, claims.

What should be made of the types of counterintuitive scientific claims presented at the beginning of this article? To understand, we have to consider the various steps in the process of scientific enquiry. First, we have the target entity to be explained, for example, the actual movement of planets around the Sun. Since concrete solar system conditions are far too complex to “handle” in every detail, scientists create a “model” that abstracts essential elements of the target from less relevant details, such as, the actual shape of bodies, gravitational influence from other stars, and so forth. In the process, the model no longer perfectly fits the actual conditions of the target, and yet, is close enough to reality so as to illustrate an hypothesized explanation.

What happens next is where physicists can surreptitiously introduce philosophical assumptions. For now the scientist will make his own interpretation of the model – sometimes with hidden philosophical assumptions. Note that the “interpretation” is based on a “model,” which is based on the target reality. Hence, the speculative interpretation is two epistemic steps removed from the original reality. While the solar system model appears fairly straightforward, some evident instances of philosophical speculation are found in modern physics.

For example, most people would not realize that there more than a dozen different interpretations of quantum mechanics – many expressive of diverse philosophical assumptions or claims. Such interpretive pluralism alone bespeaks limited empirical evidence favoring one interpretation over another. Still, this philosophical quagmire does not prevent aggressive claims being made for various interpretations -- as if they were fully demonstrated by natural science.

Thomism or any valid philosophy must always comport with experience, for example, by acknowledging the fact of change. Conversely, natural science can never validly sustain claims that violate universal metaphysical principles.

Thomist metaphysics is often claimed to be “disproved” by conventional interpretations of quantum mechanics, also known as the “Copenhagen interpretation.” The paper, “Ontological Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics”(2011), exposes how such physicists’ claims “are not consistent or coherent in their existential treatment of fundamental particles, their wavefunctions, and physical states.” (Introduction) In its concluding paragraph, it warns, “The great danger in Copenhagen sophistry is not that it will harm physics as a discipline, but that it leads to egregious errors in other disciplines, which accept the Copenhagen interpretation with the authority of scientific truth.” (no. 15)

The number of erroneous metaphysical assertions made today by physicists operating outside their proper field of competence prevents “unraveling” them all here.

Still, drawing upon the same paper (no. 6), consider the following example I offer regarding the claim of “superposition” of electrons around an atom’s nucleus. Rejecting the “old” model in which electrons remained in a single orbit around the nucleus, some claim that quantum mechanics affirms such counterintuitive notions as that, when unobserved, electrons are simultaneously in different positions, or perhaps, even “smeared over space.” Yet, when we “collapse the field” by making an observation, an electron is always found solely in one position or another – never in the indefinite or contradictory positions that are assumed prior to taking the measurement. Since an electron is always found in a single position, the counterintuitive claims should be rejected for clearly violating the principle of non-contradiction. Rather, we must be talking merely about conflicting levels of probability as to where a particle actually is when not measured. Quantum mechanics ought not to be interpreted as violating sound metaphysics.

This same paper offers similar explanations of other quantum mechanics enigmas, including wave-particle duality (nos. 4, 14), Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle (no. 9), and the ontological status of virtual particles (no. 13). In these and other instances, it shows that sound metaphysical principles deserve rightful priority over counterintuitive interpretations of theoretical models. It counsels, “Denials of the principle of non-contradiction or of objective reality ought to concern physicists no less than philosophers, as these logical and metaphysical claims are presupposed by physics.” (no. 13).

A 2006 study appeared to support Wheeler’s delayed-choice thought experiment suggesting that an effect could actually occur temporally prior to its cause, thus wreaking havoc on the metaphysical principle of causality. Yet, a published comment corrected this, pointing out that the experimental observations can easily be explained without recourse to claims of reverse causation.

Although both Thomism and modern physics proclaim general “principles” or “laws,” they “get there” in vastly different ways leading to vastly different implications.

Scientific research relies upon an inductive method from many particular observations to universal conclusions that can never achieve logical necessity. Experimental verification of hypotheses entails the logical fallacy of affirming the consequent, remedied hopefully by a perfect “critical experiment.” Negative experimental results can falsify an hypothesis. But, no amount of positive results can ever absolutely prove one is true, since some unanticipated extraneous factor always might have produced the positive result. Competent scientists always admit that the experimental results merely tend to support their hypotheses. Both these logical weaknesses entail that the “laws of physics” possess neither absolute certitude nor guaranteed universality.

By contrast, Thomism and the natural metaphysics of human intelligence discover universal first principles based upon the intellectual apprehension of intelligible being in our very first experience of material things – forming a concept of being that inherently transcends all reality. Since these are principles of existence, not essence, they necessarily apply to all beings – whether of cosmic dimensions or infinitesimally small. Such universal principles are regulative of all physics and philosophy. Unseen philosophical assumptions that permeate the speculative interpretations of modern physics’ models remain subject to the primary universal laws of being – whether physicists know this or not.

Metaphysics achieves universal certitudes; modern physics will get man safely to Mars – maybe.

The rational approach to quantum mechanics given above applies to relativity theory as well. Much of relativity theory may be read as simply perfective of Newtonian physics. One novel feature of special relativity is its denial of temporal simultaneity. An odd philosophical “by product” of this was the “B theory” of time with its attendant hypothesis of “eternalism.”

The “B-theory” of time, proposed by McTaggart in 1908, states that, instead of the common sense progression of events from past, to present, to future, events can be ordered in a tenseless way. “B-theorists” appear to take a “God’s-eye” view of space-time, embracing all frames of reference. This leads them to say that past, present, and future are equally real and that change is an illusion. Some rely upon Parmenides’ ancient arguments against the possibility of change.

Those who follow Parmenides’ (born c. 515 BC) univocal use of “being” to argue that change is impossible imbibe genuinely archaic philosophy. Aristotle (384-322 BC) realized that “being” is an analogous term. Combined with his innovative principles of potency and act, he finally refuted Parmenides’ argument -- demonstrating how change was both possible and actual. Competent philosophers respect reason, but also immediate experience. Even if change were merely an illusion, as Parmenides claimed, it is real as an illusion and, as such, part of reality that must be explained, not denied.

All these peculiar “B theory” claims about time, together with its “eternalism,” are philosophical interpretations of special relativity, which are not empirically verifiable.

Special relativity shows that relativity of simultaneity obtains solely between “spatially-separated” events, meaning events outside each other’s light cone (no light-speed or sublight signal can connect them). Contrary to “B theory” claims, “Relativity does not abolish the objectivity of time as succession, at least not locally. For every physical event, there is an absolute past and absolute future that is the same in all reference frames.” (“Basic Issues in Natural Philosophy,” (2016) no. 14.1.3.)  Such local events are still temporally ordered in the common sense manner: past to present to future. Moreover, “This preserves the succession of causality, where a cause cannot be temporally posterior to its effect (though they might be simultaneous).” (Ibid.) Since all causal interaction is local (no action at a distance), the Thomist principle that the effect must be immediately dependent upon its cause is in no way violated.

Since it is impossible to examine every possible physical theory, it is reasonable to expect that any future claim by physicists that contradicts metaphysical first principles entails philosophical assumptions outside their field of competence.

Physicists loathe being told that they are doing metaphysics – even more so, that they are doing metaphysics badly.

Many competent physicists know the limitations of their science, and therefore, take their measurements, do their computations, and explain their findings -- without misleading the public with problematic speculations, which they falsely claim to be objective or definitive findings of natural science.

Contemporary science’s progressive achievements crown God’s gift of human intelligence. Still, the whole point of this article has been to show that, unlike the inherent logical weaknesses of the “laws of physics,” which prevent them from ever rightfully enunciating universal certitudes, Thomism’s universally-certain laws of being, not only are logically presupposed by physics, but, indeed, supersede any modern physics’ claims that actually contradict them.

No, Thomism is not an archaic philosophy in light of modern physics. To the contrary, Thomist metaphysics is regulative of modern physics’ speculative claims insofar as they contain philosophical assumptions and implications.

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.
 
 
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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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I recently wrote a piece on Bruce Jenner’s transformation into Caitlyn Jenner. I argued that the manner in which Jenner spoke of his transition reflected a Gnostic anthropology, which is repugnant to a Biblical view of the human being. I didn’t say a word about Jenner personally; I urged no violence against him/her; I didn’t question his/her motives. I simply made an observation that the moral and spiritual context for transgenderism is, from a classically Christian standpoint, problematic.

Not surprisingly, the article garnered a fair amount of attention and inspired a lot of commentary, both positive and negative. Among the negative remarks were a number that criticized me for fomenting “hatred” against Jenner and against the transgender community. Though I’ve come to expect this sort of reaction, I find it discouraging and the fruit of some pretty fundamental confusions.

My great mentor Robert Sokolowski long ago taught me—in one of those lapidary remarks that strikes you immediately as right and important—that philosophy is the art of making distinctions. He meant that what brings together Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Kant, Hegel, and Wittgenstein is a gift for clarifying how this differs from that, how one aspect of an idea profiles itself against another, how seemingly similar concepts are in fact distinct. In executing these moves, the great philosophers made muddy water clear. What strikes me so often as I listen to the public conversation regarding moral issues is the incapacity of so many to make the right distinctions.

Some of the muddiest water surrounds the concepts of love/hate and tolerance/intolerance. In the spirit of Sokolowski, I would like to make what I hope are some clarifying differentiations. For the mainstream of the Catholic intellectual tradition, love is not primarily an emotion, but an act of the will. To love, Thomas Aquinas says, is to want the good of the other. Consequently, hatred is not primarily a feeling, but desiring evil for another, positively wanting what is bad for someone else. Given this, when is hatred called for? When is hatred morally permissible? The simple answer: never. God is nothing but love, and Jesus said that we are to be perfect, as our heavenly father is perfect. This is precisely why he told us to love even our enemies, to bless even those who curse us, to pray even for those who maltreat us. Does this mean that our forebears were obliged to love Hitler and that we are obliged to love ISIS murderers? Yes. Period. Does it mean that we are to will the good of those who, we are convinced, are walking a dangerous moral path? Yes. Period. Should everyone love Bruce/Caitlyn Jenner? Absolutely, completely, unconditionally.

But here is where a crucial distinction has to be made: to criticize someone for engaging in immoral activity is not to “hate” that person. In point of fact, it is an act of love, for it is tantamount to willing good for him or her. Once the sense that there is objective good and evil has been attenuated, as it largely has been in our society, the only categories we have left are psychological ones. And this is why, in the minds of many, to question the moral legitimacy of transgenderism is, perforce, to “attack” or “hate” transgendered people. A very real danger that flows from the failure to make the right distinction in this regard is that moral argument evanesces. If someone who disagrees with you on an ethical matter is simply a “hater,” then you don’t have to listen to his argument or engage it critically. You are permitted, in fact, to censor him, to shut him down. Sadly, this is what obtains in much of the public arena today: the impugning of motives, the questioning of character, and the imposition of censorship. Just a few weeks ago, two Princeton faculty members, Cornel West and Robert George, had a public debate regarding same-sex marriage, West arguing for and George against. What was so refreshing was that both men, who are good friends, actually argued, that is to say, marshalled evidence, drew reasoned conclusions from premises, answered objections, etc., and neither one accused the other of “hating” advocates of the rival position. May their tribe increase.

Distinctions are called for, furthermore, regarding the word “tolerance,” which is bandied about constantly today. Typically, it has come to mean acceptance and even celebration. Thus, if one is anything shy of ecstatic about gay marriage or transgenderism, one is insufficiently “tolerant.” In point of fact, the term implies the willingness to countenance a view or activity that one does not agree with. Hence, in the context of our wise political system, each citizen is required to tolerate a range of opinions that he finds puzzling, erroneous, repugnant or even bizarre. There are lots of good reasons for this toleration, the most important of which are respect for the integrity of the individual and the avoidance of unnecessary civil strife, but it by no means implies that one is obliged to accept or celebrate those perspectives. Thus, one should certainly tolerate the right of a person to become transgendered without feeling, at the same time, obliged to exult in that person’s choice.

The ethical conversation has become, in the last fifty years, extraordinarily roiled. It would serve all of us to adopt an intellectual instinct of Thomas Aquinas. When he was confronted with a thorny question, he would typically begin his response with the comment “distinguo”(I distinguish).

NOTE: This is the second of a two-part series. Read part 1 here.

With the accidentality and priority of being for sensible things now in place, there is only one preliminary metaphysical principle that we need to establish before we can defend Premise 1 (from the first part in this series) and that is the fact that every particular thing—whether sensible or non-sensible (immaterial)—whose being is accidental and prior to its nature must receive being from an agent outside itself, i.e., an efficient cause.

First, whatever is accidental does not exist in its own right but is dependent upon a substance. (Remember the redness of the triangle mentioned earlier.)

Second, since being is an accident in the “wide sense” of the term for such things under consideration, it must be dependent upon a substance.

Third, it can’t be dependent upon the substance (think “house”) that it actuates due to its priority. If being was dependent upon the substance that it actuates, then the substance would be prior to its act of being. But if the substance (“house”) was prior to its act of being then it would be nothing since it would not have its act of being. In other words, the house would not exist. But the house does exist. Therefore, the act of being of something for which being is accidental cannot depend on the substance its actualizing.

Therefore, the act of being for a thing whose being is accidental and prior to its nature must be dependent upon some substance other than the substance that it makes actual—i.e., the thing cannot give itself being but must receive being from something else.

Now, to give being to something is to cause it through efficient causality. Therefore, anything whose being is other than its nature must receive its being by an efficient cause other than itself.

Can All of Reality Consists Only of those Things Whose Being is Accidental and Prior to its Nature?

With all our preliminary metaphysical principles established, we can now move to defending Premise 1. The basic question is, “Can all of reality consist only of things whose being is accidental and prior to its nature—things that can only receive being from an efficient cause outside themselves?”

To begin answering this question, consider the hypothetical scenario if all of reality consisted only of things whose being was accidental and prior to its nature—things whose act of existence did not belong to their nature.

If this was the case, then every particular thing that makes up “reality” would be a nature that was existentially neutral—a thing that is merely open to receiving being. In this scenario reality would consist only of natures—whether a finite or infinite amount (the quantity does not matter)—that contained no being.

This would be analogous to a series of interlinked train cars that has no engine car. No matter how many cars one posits in the series, no train car would ever have motion.

Similarly, if every particular thing within “reality” was something whose being was accidental and prior to its nature—something whose act of being did not belong to its nature—then reality would only consist of what philosophers call “existential zeroes”—natures with no being. But if reality only consisted of natures that contain no being, then no particular thing would exist; and if no particular thing would exist in all of reality, then nothing would exist; hence Premise 1. In other words, in this hypothetical scenario being would never get into the system of reality.

The Rest of the Story

But the fact that I’m writing and you are reading this article indicates that being (existence) has entered the system.

Therefore, all of reality cannot consist only of those things whose being is accidental and prior to its nature; hence the conclusion.

Another way to state the conclusion is that there must be some entity whose being is not accidental and prior to its nature but coincident with and essential to it. In other words, for such an entity its being would be its nature—it would not possess being but would be being itself—its nature would be “to be.”   This reality is what Scholastic philosophers call “subsistent being,” which simply denotes that the substance (a word that is closely related etymologically with “subsistent”) one arrives at through philosophical reasoning is being itself.

Is “Subsistent Being” God?

With the existence of “subsistent being” established, the next question is, “What can we know about such a being? Is such a being worthy of the term God?”

First of all, we can say that “subsistent being” would have to be the efficient cause responsible for being entering into the system of reality to begin with. Recall that in the scenario without subsistent being, being could not enter into the system. But being did enter into the system.

So, either being came from sheer nothingness or from subsistent being itself. If being came from sheer nothingness then there would be no reason why there is being rather than non-being. But to say that there is no reason for being rather than non-being is the same as saying there is nothing to distinguish being from non-being, in which case being and non-being would be one and the same which is absurd. Therefore, being cannot come from sheer nothingness. Therefore, the fact that there is something rather than nothing must be due to subsistent being itself—it’s the efficient cause of being.

Now, subsistent being is not merely the efficient cause of being entering into the system at some point in the past, but it must be the continuous cause of being for things here and now. Consider the fact that natures (essences) are conjoined to the act of being (existence) right here and right now. This is either due to themselves, some other nature for which being is accidental and prior, or subsistent being. Obviously we can’t appeal to a thing’s own nature to explain its continued existence when we can’t even appeal to it to explain it coming into existence in the first place (see the third preliminary metaphysical principle above). Furthermore, we definitely can’t appeal to some other nature of the same type less we end up with the same problem. Therefore, the continued existence of any particular thing whose being is accidental and prior to its nature must be due to subsistent being; thus subsistent being is the continuous source of being for all else that is besides itself.

Moreover, because subsistent being has existence coincident with its nature and does not have it accidentally but essentially (by nature) it does not depend on any efficient cause outside itself; hence it is an uncaused cause.

From this it follows that subsistent being is first in the order of efficient causality—“first” in the sense of ontological priority (“most fundamental”) and not necessarily temporal priority. As the first efficient cause of being, it is totally outside the series of causality among things for which being is accidental and prior to their nature.

Now, if subsistent being cannot be caused, then it must be pure actuality—void of all potentiality—since all things that are caused involves the actualization of some potency. This further means that subsistent being cannot receive any further perfection to its being otherwise it would be in potency to that perfection; thus it must be perfection in the highest degree.

Again, if subsistent being is pure act void of any potency, then it necessarily follows that subsistent being is incorporeal (immaterial) since everything of a corporeal nature (matter) contains potentiality—subject to taking on different forms.

Subsistent being, or pure act void of potency, is also entirely immutable (changeless) since mutability entails the movement from potency to act.

Eternality follows directly from immutability since all temporal beings are subject to change.

The pure actuality of the subsistent being further leads one to reason that subsistent being is completely unlimited, i.e., infinite—it can’t be restricted to existing in this way instead of that way for if it was it would be in potency to the other modes of being, which is absurd.

It must also be absolutely simple—void of any composition (e.g., form-matter and/or essence-existence) since the unity of nature and being is the very understanding of “subsistent being.” One can also reason that composite parts are in potency with respect to the whole, which of course cannot be so with the pure actuality of subsistent being.

Finally, the question becomes, “Can there be more than one of these things?” This brings us to the final attribute for this article, namely unicity. If there were a multiplicity of subsistent beings (pure acts of existence), then there necessarily would have to be a differentiating factor in at least one of them. But if one of them had a factor that differentiates its act of existence from the other act of existence, then that factor would be distinct from its act of existence, in which case it would not be absolutely simple, which is incoherent for subsistent being.

Conclusion

So, in conclusion, while I have a tremendous respect for the great theistic apologist of modernity and the arguments they employ, I must say that I find myself enamored by the breadth and depth of the Thomistic framework for natural theology. Where the rope ends for many popular theistic arguments in modern thought, such as a Creator that is very powerful but not pure power itself, beyond our time but not atemporal, one being among many but not pure being itself, it continues for the subsistent being arrived at in the Thomistic framework of thought.

So, unbelievers need not wander in the darkness of unbelief any longer. The light of the Angelic Doctor that shines in this proof and others like it has the power, I believe, to illumine the path to the God whom Thomistic philosophers know as ipsum esse subsistens and whom theologians know as “I Am Who Am.”

NOTE: This is the first of a two-part series. The second part will be shared on Wednesday.

Does God exist? Readers here at Strange Notions are well aware that throughout the centuries there have been no few attempts in constructing arguments to support an affirmative answer to this question. This is no less true today (I previously took a shot at making my humble contribution to the discussion here at Strange Notions, which you can read in six parts). Christian philosophers have put forth a considerable amount of effort in constructing supporting arguments for God’s existence. As good as some of these arguments are, however, in my opinion they often fall short in accomplishing what arguments in the Thomistic tradition accomplish.

For example, the transcendent creator that one arrives at in the modern presentations of the Kalam cosmological argument does not escape the question “What created the creator?” Such a creator, at least without employing Thomistic metaphysical principles, can only be seen as very powerful but not pure power or act itself—the purely actual being. The Kalam creator is merely a being among other beings and not the ipsum esse subsistens (“subsistent being itself”) of the Thomistic tradition that makes the question “What created the creator?” as incoherent as the question “Who is the bachelor’s wife?” Furthermore, the transcendent creator of the Kalam argument, as presented in modern formulations, only escapes the boundaries of physical time but does not escape what the medieval philosophers called aeviternity (outside of temporal, material existence but still not the absolute eternity of God – i.e., the mode of being of the angels). The Kalam creator of modern arguments is still subject to movement from potency to act; thus subject to change; thus subject to being caused; hence once again the question “What created the creator?”

The purpose of this two-part series is to offer a metaphysical approach to God’s existence that follows closely the Thomistic tradition (a bit different than my previous set of articles on God’s existence posted here at Strange Notions) and is not subject to the weaknesses mentioned above. The methodology employed for the present approach is partially inspired by Fr. Joseph Owens’ method found in his book entitled An Elementary Christian Metaphysics, which in turn draws from St. Thomas Aquinas’ “existential proof” as found in his work entitled De Ente Et Essentia (On Being and Essence). The argument presented in this article takes the modus tollens form of a conditional syllogism:

Premise 1: If all of reality consisted only of those things whose being is accidental and prior to its nature—i.e., a thing that does not have being by nature—then nothing would exist.
 
Premise 2: But things do exist.
 
Conclusion: Therefore, all of reality cannot consist of only things whose being is accidental and prior to its nature. There must exist within all of reality at least one thing that has being essentially and whose act of being is coincident with its nature—i.e., its nature and being are one and the same.

For the present article I will assume that the reader affirms Premise 2—namely that he or she and the world around us exists. Consequently, Premise 1 will be the sole focus for arriving at the conclusion but only after three preliminary metaphysical principles are established, which are drawn from Fr. Owens book mentioned above: 1) the accidentality of being to nature in sensible things, 2) the priority of being to nature in sensible things, and 3) every entity whose being is accidental and prior to its nature—whether sensible or non-sensible (immaterial)—it must receive being by some agent outside itself.

After we arrive at the type of being stated in the conclusion, we will then proceed to deduce the various attributes that make such a being worthy of the traditional term God.

The Accidentality of Being for Sensible Things

Concerning sensible things, metaphysicians often speak of at least a conceptual distinction between what a thing is and that it is—the distinction between the nature (essence) of a thing and its being (existence). But is there any justification for such an idea? Fr. Joseph Owens offers two lines of reason by which one can arrive at this conclusion.¹

The first line of reason considers the two ways in which a sensible thing can have being. First, a thing can have being in the world that exists outside thought or imagination. For example, a house may have being today in the world outside the minds of the neighborhood residents though not tomorrow if the city is going to demolish it to make room for downtown parking. This way of existence is called real being.

The other way that something may exist or have being is in the mind or imagination—what metaphysicians call cognitional being. For example, the aforementioned house would have existed in the mind of the architect (cognitional being) before it existed in the outside world (real being). Or the house could exist in the mind of the residents (cognitional being) while the house is standing and even after it is destroyed.

So, with the distinction between real being and cognitional being in place, the question arises, “How does this distinction indicate that a thing’s nature and its being are not entirely the same?” To use the aforementioned example of the house and apply it to the above reasoning, one may say that the house has real being today, will lose that way of being tomorrow when it’s demolished, but still retain cognitional being in the minds of the neighborhood residents. If the nature (essence) of the house remains the same as it loses one way of being and acquires another, then apparently the nature of the house is at least conceptually different than its being.²

The second line of reason for demonstrating the distinction between the nature of sensible things and their being follows the abstraction of forms in human intellection. Consider the example of man’s knowledge of a tree. When one observes an oak tree, he or she abstracts the nature (form) of treeness and then is able to apply that idea to any other mode of existence that the nature of a tree may have—such as a pine tree.

Now, the nature (essence) of a tree, in and of itself, cannot include any particular existence it may have. For example, if treeness was determined to exist only in the pine tree way, then no oak trees would exist. Similarly, if treeness was determined to exist only in the oak tree way, then no pine trees would exist. But pine and oak trees do exist. Therefore, treeness itself does not include the oak tree mode of being or the pine tree mode of being. The same would apply for any mode of being for a tree. Consequently, being does not belong to the nature of a tree.

So, in light of the two lines of thought above, one can conclude that the nature of a sensible thing must be distinct from its being. In other words, being lies outside the nature of sensible things.

Now, as metaphysicians point out, if being does not belong to the nature of sensible things, then being must be an accident (i.e., non-essential) for sensible things. This is based on the metaphysical principle that whatever is in a thing that does not belong to it by nature belongs to it accidentally—e.g., the red triangle does not have redness by nature but only accidentally. “But,” one may ask, “How can being be an accident when it transcends (hence the term transcendental) the nine Aristotelian accidental categories of being?” As Fr. Joseph Owens answers in his book, although it cannot be an accident in the “predicamental sense,” or what metaphysicians call a “narrow sense,” it still can be considered an accident in a “wide sense” simply because it is not part of a sensible thing’s nature.³

The Priority of Being to Nature in Sensible Things

The second preliminary metaphysical principle is the priority of being to nature or essence in sensible things.

At first glance it seems pretty obvious that being is prior to nature since if being was not ontologically presupposed, then there would be no nature. “But,” one may object, “Does not being itself arise from composition within the thing, and consists in that composition? For example, being is not found in the mere matter of sensible things nor is it found in the mere form of sensible things but only in the composition of the matter and form. Therefore, it seems that the component parts, namely form and matter in this case, are prior to being.” How does one respond?

As Fr. Joseph Owens explains, the answer lies in the fact that principles of nature that constitute the being of a sensible thing, namely form and matter, are secondary and concomitant aspects under which being is conceptualized and do not express the deepest character of being—namely act or perfection.⁴ Being is the actuality or perfection of whatever is actual or perfect in a thing—it is actuality unqualified.

For example, being is the actuality of the act of being a man or the actuality of the act of being a horse. There can be neither an act of being a man (form and matter) nor an act of being a horse (form and matter) without actuality or being. So, as Fr. Owens concludes in his book, “As an existential composing it [being] is absolutely prior in actuality to the nature it makes be.”⁵ The bottom line is that without being the composite nature of a sensible thing would not exist. Being, therefore, is ontologically prior to nature for sensible things.
 
Stay tuned for Part 2 of this post on Wednesday!
 
 
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Gary Gutting is a Notre Dame philosophy professor who thinks that what counts about arguments is whether they “work.” And so his complaint against natural-law arguments for Catholic teachings about sex is that they “no longer work (if they ever did)”. His New York Times “Opinionator” post of March 12th (“Unraveling the Church Ban on Gay Sex”) names us as two people who are “still” exponents of such arguments. For us what counts about an argument is whether it is sound, i.e., whether its premises are true and its logic valid. If a line of thought about the morality of sex is reasonable today, it was reasonable in the time of Jesus or Plato or Abraham or as far back as we find men and women and their children. Whether arguments “work” persuasively in one era but not another is philosophically irrelevant, as any philosopher should take for granted.

Gutting seems to think none of the positions of Judeo-Christian civilization on sex ethics are true, though he mentions only a few acts or practices that his own principles would leave immune from moral objection, carefully stopping short of calling attention to others such as polygamy, polyamory, prostitution, adultery, promiscuity, incest, bestiality and the man-boy sex that Plato’s friends and associates admired (but Plato himself condemned, like his teacher Socrates as Plato depicts him). This is not surprising, since his whole article never mentions, even by implication, the idea that grounds and unifies the whole set of sex-morality teachings, not only for Catholicism but also for Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and other great thinkers.

The idea is not “heterosexual union,” nor “shared acts directed towards reproduction,” nor any of the other concepts Gutting refers to and associates with “nature.” Instead, it’s the idea—the intrinsic human value—of marriage.

Even apart from any question of its legal status, marriage is a natural form of human association, with its own basic structure and value. It is the sort of loving union inherently oriented to family life; it is the sort of living bond that by its nature would be fulfilled—extended and enriched—by the bearing and rearing of children. Children by their nature need such familial, parental nurture, support, and guidance; by their coming to be, they make possible the continuance and flourishing of the wider society whose aid and social capital made feasible the wellbeing of their parents and other forebears.

Of course, people sometimes band together in other arrangements with a view to child-rearing, and other forms of association can realize other types of (non-erotic) love. But only a man and woman together can commit to a loving union of the kind inherently oriented to family life and appropriate to being the mother and the father of their children. What this procreative-parental commitment and union require is an especially deep and far-reaching bond: the man and woman’s making the most extensive and permanent of human mutual commitments to sharing of life and earthly destiny, centered upon a permanently exclusive sexual relationship. The shaping end of procreation-and-nurturing thus unifies and explains all the features of marriage as “traditionally” understood: permanent exclusivity, sexual consummation, family life, and a radical union of the persons (in body as well as mind, in the wide-range pursuits of domestic life) that is uniquely extensive across time (“until death us do part”) and at each time (exclusive).

Because marriage is in these ways (i) an especially complete loving union (ii) of the sort oriented to procreation, it is uniquely embodied in sex acts with the same dual nature: acts that are (i) chosen as a seal of their complete (permanently exclusive) marital love-and-commitment (ii) and of the sort apt to make them (where circumstance allows) parents, the mother and father of their children. Only coital acts—chosen with a will to permanently exclusive marital love—can actualize, express, and allow the husband and wife to more fully experience their marriage—the multi-level (physical, emotional, rational-dispositional) sharing of life whose foundation and matrix is the biological unity made uniquely possible by sexual-reproductive complementarity. That explains why historically in our law (and in philosophical accounts of the intelligibility of the pertinent legal norms) only acts of spouses that fulfill the behavioral conditions of procreation have validly consummated marriage—and they do that whether or not the non-behavioral conditions of procreation happen to obtain. In short, only such sex acts are marital.

Moral reasoning is “of a natural law kind,” whether in St. Paul or St. Thomas Aquinas—or in Plato, Aristotle, Musonius Rufus, and others untouched by Jewish or Christian thought—not because it tries to read premises or conclusions off biological or sociological facts. It doesn’t. Instead, it considers what are the basic forms of human flourishing: conditions or activities that are good for us in themselves: friendship, knowledge, life and health, and the like. The identification of these of course takes into account biological and other cause-and-effect facts. But it is focused not on those but on the intrinsic goodness of the various elements of human fulfillment. We can then reason to the moral goodness and badness of types of choice and act by considering which choices are consistent with love and respect for ourselves and all others in regard to each of these basic dimensions of fulfillment. A choice consistent with love and respect for all the goods in all persons is morally upright; one that isn’t, is immoral.

That determination of consistency must take into account the fundamental circumstances of all our choices and acts. The basic goods for which we can act are many and various, so we cannot realize them all at once. But they all remain always goods, and each in its own irreplaceable way. So in pursuing some, we ought not to choose to denigrate or damage any of the others. And as they are goods for all people, we ought not to let our choosing be deflected by prejudice, wayward passion, and the like.

Now one of the basic human goods, as each of the thinkers mentioned above—and not just the Catholics or other Christians—understood, is marriage. So sex ethics unfolds by considering the conditions under which choices to engage in sex acts are consistent with the good of marriage. A few sentences in a short essay such as this one are not enough to show the good sense of this unfolding by defending and deploying its premises in ordered sequence to their conclusions. But one key to understanding it all is to grasp that—aside from obvious forms of injustice and harm-doing involving sex, especially the various forms of rape and some aspects of incest—every conclusion about wrong kinds of sex act is of the form: this kind of choice is wrong because it is unreasonable because it is against the good of marriage that is intrinsic to human fulfillment (of mother, father, their children, and their society). All forms of morally bad sex are against human nature because they are contrary to integral human fulfillment and therefore against reason.

The fact that from a limited perspective they may, as Gutting writes, be experienced or conceptualized as contributing to “meaning, growth and fulfillment” does not show that they truly are—that is, that they can be integrated with human fulfillment considered in a more rationally adequate way. Plato himself exposed the fallacy of thinking otherwise, at the very founding of Professor Gutting’s academic discipline. What satisfies desire or induces pleasure, however good or bad it is in its full reality, will likely be experienced, at least initially, as promising meaning, fulfillment, and even personal growth—the elements of Gutting’s truncated and superficial replacement of natural law theory.

The point of philosophical reflection is to evaluate prospective choices from a critical-rational standpoint in order to assess their compatibility with human fulfilment traced to its ultimate principles in the basic human goods, and considered holistically or integrally. Indeed, the contrary thought, applied to sex—as in Gutting’s post—would make it impossible to justify general moral exclusions of promiscuity, or anonymous sex, each of which can satisfy desire, and in each of which some people report finding meaning or personal satisfaction. (Thus, John Updike extensively expounded in novels and life the “sacrament of [serial] adultery,” and Andrew Sullivan the “spiritual value” of anonymous sex—i.e. intimate relations among strangers who do not even share their names with each other. Can Gutting find grounds consistent with his rejection of our views for denying what Updike, Sullivan, and many others claim? We don’t think so, though he is, of course, welcome to try.)

So Gutting’s arguments to show that homosexual sex acts can be morally right are all beside the point. He has invented a weird straw-man “natural-law” “selfish pleasure” argument against same-sex sex acts, and knocked it down. But it is not an argument either of us has ever endorsed. The natural-law argument against such acts is essentially the same as against any other kind of non-marital sex—from masturbation to fornication to adultery to bestiality. (The last is more degrading than the others, of course, in expressing an equality between persons and beasts; these kinds of act aren’t alike in every morally significant respect and degree—the point is just that there is one morally disqualifying feature they all share.) If popular speech singles out some of these acts—masturbation, same-sex sex acts, or indeed acts with beasts—as “unnatural,” it is because they are especially visibly not of the marital kind, involving behavior visibly not of the procreative sort. But the truly morally significant thing about all non-marital sex acts is that, in diverse forms, they involve disrespect for the basic good of marriage.

There are several ways to see this disrespect. Here, in these next four paragraphs, is one. Adequately respecting any basic good requires, among other things, not setting one’s will directly against any conditions essential and internal to that good. Now if a husband and wife do not reserve sex to their marriage, then even their sex acts with each other can’t really actualize and embody their marital bond: for these acts can’t express a truly exclusive commitment, which marriage inherently is. The husband and wife’s firm will to reserve sex for each other is, then, an essential condition of any sex they have with each other being marital sex. Even just a husband’s conditional willingness to engage in sex with someone else—e.g., “if the circumstances ever ensured that my wife wouldn’t find out…”—disables the marital quality of his sex acts with his wife, whether or not he ever actually cheats; and likewise for a wife.

Similarly, if people are willing to perform a sex act that fails to embody permanent commitment, or a bond that is procreative in type (whether or not it is, or can in the circumstances be, procreative in effect), they disable themselves from willing in such a way that their sexual congress can actualize and express the good of marriage, which is inherently permanent and procreative in type. Even mere approval of anyone’s non-marital sexual conduct implies a conditional willingness to engage in such acts oneself—namely, if one were in relevantly similar circumstances. That is, such approval implies willingness to choose sex under a description (e.g., “simply pleasing to all three of us,” or “simply expressive of affection,” or “simply conducive to my psycho-somatic health”) other than: marital.

Any such willingness vitiates an essential condition internal to any realization of the good of marriage and damages that aspect of ourselves—our human nature—that makes us, to quote Aristotle, conjugal beings. (Aristotle is famous for teaching that the human being is by nature a political animal; what is less often recalled is his teaching that human beings are even more fundamentally conjugal than political.) So it involves a failure to respect that basic human good; so it involves immorality, whether or not one is married or plans to be.

And because this particular basic good is so central to the common good, failures to respect it—forms of willing or willingness at odds with it—are also failures of due respect for the good of one’s whole society. This is not a merely abstract or “merely moral” matter: Such contra-marital attitudes easily spread and cause tremendous and quite visible social harm, as the carnage of the Sexual Revolution makes clear—harm measured in broken hearts and homes, fatherless children, and broader related injustices.

Plato, Aristotle, Paul, and everyone in the tradition understood that everyone unwillingly experiences some disordered tendencies towards some non-marital acts, and that some experience disordered tendencies exclusively to non-marital acts. They also understood that many who choose to engage in same-sex sexual relations do not have such an exclusive tendency. Their moral arguments are valid for both and all kinds of persons, though harder for some to live up to than for others.

Catholic sexual ethics is “still” as fully reasonable today as it was when St Paul expounded it—and identified prostitution and same-sex sex acts as obviously or visibly far out of line with it—as the sort of thing that people would lose their sound judgment about if and only if they or their society were blind to or careless about the omnipresent, invisible reality of divine causation ex nihilo, divine providence, and the possibility of a divinely willed human destiny beyond death. The natural law understanding of human fulfillment is inherently intelligible without adverting to that “theistic” framework. But when reason closes itself off against the real framework as a true whole—in thought decapitating it—other distortions of understanding and judgment will ensue, especially in reason’s practical domain, where desire and satisfaction provide every incentive to rationalization of misjudgment.

The Archbishop of San Francisco wasn’t depending on natural law philosophizing when he said (what Gutting takes his cue from) that homosexual acts are against nature. He was just repeating Paul’s letter to the Romans, where the connections between reason, conscience, natural law, divine existence, and the divine revealed will and promise for human wellbeing are laid out as building blocks of the Catholic faith. But the concordance of this revealed faith with the best philosophy untouched by Hebrew sources, as a higher synthesis of the insights of Plato and Aristotle and many others, is just a sign of its perennial validity. Another equally telling sign is its good fruit—the good fruit of its exclusions and its condemnations of certain kinds of choice. These include the protection of children's rights to have a father and a mother exclusively and devotedly theirs, in fruitful families within a civil society that can fulfill the elementary conditions of sustainability: large numbers of marriages generously welcoming children who are nurtured in dignity and supported in respect for (and willingness to adopt in their turn) this fulfilling, generous, but demanding form of life.
 
 
This article was co-written by Robert P. George and John Finnis. Robert P. George is the McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence, and Director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions, at Princeton University. John Finnis is Professor of Law and Legal Philosophy Emeritus in the University of Oxford and the Biolchini Family Professor of Law at the University of Notre Dame. The article was originally posted at Public Discourse and reprinted here with permission.
 
 
(Image credit: Jordan Kranda)

Last December, an article by Daniel Linford entitled "Do Atheists Reject the Wrong Kind of God? Not Likely" appeared at Scientia Salon. Certain recent "popular books,” according to Linford, have advanced a "mystical" notion of God, arguing that contemporary atheists have directed their disbelief only toward "smaller" conceptions of the divine. Three contemporaries are singled out: Karen Armstrong, John Haught, and David Bentley Hart.

On what Linford denominates the "mystical" view, God is radically transcendent, not a being within the cosmic order, and cannot be circumscribed by human language. Many of the atheist assaults are directed against a God who is, more or less, a being among beings, and a person much like us. Linford believes that sophisticated thinkers have sought to outflank such arguments by moving to higher ground, positing a God who escapes our language and ways of thought.

But the higher ground strategy fails, according to Linford, for three reasons. In the first place, it is unclear (to Linford) why God must transcend our language and our concepts, rather than having some other sort of transcendence. Instead of expanding on this objection, Linford merely directs the reader to arguments made elsewhere by Alvin Plantinga.

The second reason the retreat to mysticism fails, according to Linford, is that God’s revelations to us cannot be trusted if we cannot really know God’s character for truthfulness. After all, if we must deny that God is good or true in any sense that we can recognize, we can't very well claim that our defective notion of God's goodness or truthfulness precludes divine trickery (for leading one to err is precisely what a defective understanding of something does).

As a third ground for rejecting the notion of a radically transcendent God, Linford claims that God's absolute unknowability deprives us of any criteria with which to determine what phenomena would count as evidence for God. In the case of a more anthromorphic God—a God who is good like us, compassionate like us, thinks like us, and so on—we could know what would count as evidence for his activity. If we know what God is like, we can know what God is likely to do. But if we cannot know God's nature, then we cannot know what God would do. We could not determine in advance what effects such a God would render in the world, and therefore, could not know what to look for.

I suspect some readers will find these arguments puzzling on their face. I do. Who, for instance, thinks that assertions of God's transcendence of space and time, the web of language, or finite minds is limited to mystical theology? In fact, the vast majority of the great theistic traditions—Christianity, Islam, Judaism, many forms of Hinduism, certain forms of Buddhism, the classical philosophical tradition, and so on—regard God as transcendent in precisely such a sense. The misapprehension that belief in God's transcendence is a recent concoction from university educated theologians who have modified theology to their more sophisticated tastes—or to escape atheistic criticism—is almost as widespread among popular atheistic tracts as the notion divine transcendence is in the theology, spirituality, scriptures, etc. of the great theistic traditions. Aside from the Mormons who doggedly visit my home with some regularity, I know of no religious believers who believe God to be a finite spirit within the imminent order—with the probable exception of the aberrant (historically speaking) tradition of theistic personalism.

But these are mere quibbles compared to the real difficulty with Linford's case. Linford confuses the claim that what God is, God's essence, cannot be captured in language with the claim that we can have no knowledge of God whatsoever. Put in a more technical vocabulary, Linford confuses the claim that earthly minds cannot have quidditive knowledge of God’s essence with the claim that we cannot have any knowledge of God.

Over and over again, one finds Linford supposing that God is powerful or loving "in no way that we can understand ...," or that God's goodness "cannot be understood by finite humans," or that if "the mystical theologians wish to say that God is truthful and trustworthy ... this would involve knowing things about God's goodness which the mystical theologian maintains we cannot know."

But do mystical theologians claim we know nothing about God? Let's consider the example of St. Thomas Aquinas, apparently regarded by Linford to be a mystic. Linford claims that Aquinas believes that "we do not even know what it means to say that God exists," and he cites the Summa Theologica Ia, Q. 3, prologue as proof. Such a claim seems, to anyone who has read Aquinas, misleading at best. The prologue Linford cites runs as follows:

"Once we have ascertained that a given thing exists, we then have to inquire into its mode of being in order to come to know its real definition (quid est). However, in the case of God we cannot know His real definition, but can know only what He is not; and so we are unable to examine God’s mode of being, but instead can examine only what His mode of being is not….
 
By excluding from God certain things that do not befit Him, e.g., composition, change, and other things of this sort, it is possible to show what His mode of being is not. So, first of all, we will inquire into His simplicity, by which composition is excluded from Him (question 3). And because among corporeal things the simple ones are imperfect and mere parts, we will inquire, second, into His perfection (questions 4-6); third, into His infinity (questions 7-8); fourth, into His immutability (questions 9-10); and fifth, into His oneness (question 11)." - ST Ia, Q. 3, Prologue (Freddoso Trans.)

The very text that Linford cites as evidence that "we do now even know what it means to say that God exists" says that we can know that God exists, is metaphysically simple, that he is perfect, infinite, and one. Linford's unwary readers might, I think, feel misled. If we know nothing of God, how can we know God is simple or infinite? The answer is that Aquinas hardly believes we don’t know what it means to say that God exists, but rather that we don’t comprehend God’s essence. This sort of misleading conflation is foundational for Linford's whole argument.

Such logic fails even for our finite, worldly knowledge. No one would say, for instance, that the pre-moderns knew nothing of water, even though they did understand its essence (H₂0). Nor did the ancients grasp the essence of the stars, but they could nevertheless predict celestial movements. One can lack knowledge of the essence of a thing while still observing many of its properties, characteristics, effects on other things, and so on. One can know quite a bit about something without grasping the thing’s essence.

Linford's mistake seems to come from a misunderstanding of how negation works in theology (mystical or otherwise). He recognizes the alternation between apophatic and cataphatic movements briefly, but misses what is going in the dialectic. One can affirm, for example, that God is like the sun (in that he brings life) but then deny that God does so as a physical entity without going back to square one. The original affirmation is preserved; its limitations denied. Or again, to affirm that God is good, but not good as we are (as relatively fragile beings that must achieve perfection or beatitude from a certain poverty in our being) does not simply negate the whole of the original sense of God's goodness. It only negates the limitations in the original sense, while preserving the affirmation.

Perhaps this sounds more of the soft strains of poetry than the more substantial power of reason. Linford's primary target is Karen Armstrong—though he cites others, such as David Hart and Denys Turner—and Armstrong does sometimes overemphasize the apophatic way beyond what is metaphysically reasonable. However, the central insight that God is radically transcendent, not an entity in the cosmic order, etc. is not only the cornerstone of mainstream theism, it is eminently susceptible rigorous metaphysical accounts. By way of illustration, let us reconsider Linford's three objections.

Response to Linford's First Objection

Linford's first objection to the transcendence of God is that it is unclear why "God has this sort of transcendence—the sort where we do not possess words adequate to describe God—and not some other." Yet, it is immediately and abundantly clear why God—at least the God of classical theism—transcends the sense of ordinary words. Our language is adapted for finite entities and their relations. When we say X is Y, for example, we generally mean that some determinate thing, a this or that, has some relatively determinate property. Gold is yellow, rather than some other color, for example. Ordinary language relies on the finite determinations of finite things.

We use language, then, in light of the finite mode of things, their properties, and their relations. But God—what the great theistic traditions mean by God—is not finite. God is qualitatively infinite, meaning that his nature is not limited or qualified in any way. If there is a God, then, it is perfectly clear why he would transcend our ordinary linguistic habits. The inadequacy of language to express God’s nature follows straightforwardly from the ontological difference between finite and infinite being.

Response to Linford's Second Objection

Linford's second objection is that the restrictions of our knowledge of God on which the "mystical" theologians insist render any revelation unreliable. If we cannot understand the truth or goodness of God, how can we appeal to God's goodness or truthfulness to secure the authority of revelation?

It will be immediately evident to the reader that this again trades on the conflation of essential knowledge, or perhaps perfect knowledge, and non-essential, or perhaps imperfect knowledge. I know hardly anything about tapirs, and certainly don't grasp precisely what it is that makes tapirs tapirs, but I know they do not read Shakespeare. Or, to use a previous example, though premoderns did not understand water in its essence, they knew that it existed and what it could be expected to do. Similarly, we may not fully grasp God's goodness, but this hardly means we have no idea of God's goodness or what it means for us. Our notion of God’s nature can be inadequate as essential knowledge, but nevertheless more than enough to ensure the trustworthiness of revelation.

Response to Linford's Third Objection

Linford's third objection is only slightly more substantial than the first two. Since we do not know what God is in himself, then—so Linford argues—we cannot know what would count as evidence for God. Were "made by God" coded into the genetic code of living beings, we could not use this as evidence of God's existence unless we know that God is the type of deity who would do such a thing. This objection, like the second, conflates essential knowledge with accidental knowledge, and fails for the same reason.

This objection is interesting, though, because it provides an opportunity to illustrate how we can reach negative knowledge of God. Consider the following argument from contingency by way of illustration. Note that by “contingent being,” I mean any being whose essence does not explain its existence.

Premise 1: only contingent beings have a restricted mode of being (i.e., have a determinate, finite, way of existing, e.g., existing this way rather than that).

Premise 2: the existence of a contingent reality caused by a set (whether finite or infinite) of solely contingent realities is inexplicable.

Premise 3: nothing exists inexplicably.

Premise 4: a non-contingent cause must be posited to explain the existence of a given contingent thing (from premises 2 and 3).

Premise 5: there can be no more than one being with an unrestricted mode of being.

Conclusion: there exists one infinite (i.e., unrestricted) being who causes contingent things to be (from 1 and 4).¹

I hasten to add that this argument won't be compelling without auxiliary arguments to establish the premises. The point is to see how an argument for God can move from the existence of contingent beings to the existence of a qualitatively infinite, absolute being (or beings) negatively. If the premises are defensible, one can infer the existence of an infinite being without ever needing to conceive of the essence of that infinite being, simply from the inadequacy of finite being's ability to account for itself. If it is evident from a consideration of the finitude of contingent beings that contingent beings cannot account for their existence, then we can infer (by negation) the need for non-finite, non-contingent being.

On such an account, it would be clear what would count as evidence (indeed, conclusive evidence) for God’s existence: the existence of any contingent, finite thing. And this without the need to grasp God's essence, except apophatically—understanding God as neither finite nor contingent. And, indeed, this "negative way" is often how God's simplicity, infinity, perfection, and absoluteness are traditionally established.

Conclusion

Well, I have complained that Linford has made elementary mistakes about divine transcendence. What constructive suggestions have to offer? How might the interested reader get a foothold in the notion of divine transcendence?

Gregory of Nyssa's Life of Moses is a wonderful account of the ascent to God by apophatic spiritual practices, using the story of Moses as a metaphor. Readers interested in learning about the more Eastern, mystical notion of God would do well to start there. For those seeking a more philosophical account, Pseudo-Dionysius' Divine Names and Mystical Theology are a wonderful statement of the metaphysics of the East.

Those who prefer a more familiar philosophical style could consult W. Norris Clarke's The One and the Many for a lucid argument for the existence of God using the Thomist categories of essence and existence. Clarke both argues for the existence of God and offers a clear account of the relation of the finite to the infinite. For the more advanced reader, Erich Przywara's recently translated Analogia Entis is perhaps the best statement of God's transcendence. Przywara employs Thomist categories but engages with philosophers such as Husserl and Heidegger, who still loom large on the philosophical scene.
 
 
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NOTE: Today we finish our two part series by Dr. Edward Feser exploring questions about science, philosophy, causality, and radioactive decay. You can read the first part here.
 

 
 
Now, if there must be causality at the macro level (at the very least in the case of the causal relations between the external world and our perceptual experiences of it), and this causality is not captured in the description of the world that physics itself gives us, then it follows that there is more to causality than physics can tell us. And even if you dispute the views of Russell, Putnam, Merricks, et al., physics itself is not going to settle the matter. For it is not an empirical matter, but a philosophical dispute about how to interpret the empirical evidence.

(Nor will it do to dismiss such disputes on the grounds that the competing views about them are “unfalsifiable.” This is known as falsificationism, a thesis put forward by a philosopher, Karl Popper. As Popper himself realized, falsificationism is not itself a scientific thesis but a meta-level claim about science.)

If physics in general raises philosophical questions it cannot answer, the same is even more clearly true of quantum mechanics in particular. Feynman’s famous remark that nobody understands quantum mechanics is an overstatement, but it is certainly by no means obvious how to interpret some of the theory’s stranger aspects. Quantum mechanics has been claimed to “show” all sorts of things—that the law of excluded middle is false, that scientific realism is false, that idealism is true, etc. By itself it shows none of these things. In each case, certain philosophical assumptions are first read into quantum mechanics and then read out again. But the same thing is true of claims to the effect that quantum mechanics undermines causality. By itself it does not, and could not, show such a thing either. Here as in the other cases, it is the metaphysical background assumptions we bring to bear on quantum mechanics that determine how we interpret it. This is as true of philosophical naturalists, atheists, et al. as it is of Scholastics.

Now, the Scholastic metaphysician argues, on grounds entirely independent of questions about how to interpret quantum mechanics, that there are a number of metaphysical theses that any possible empirical science is going to have to presuppose. Most fundamentally, there is the Aristotelian theory of act and potency, according to which we cannot make sense of change as a real feature of the world unless we recognize that there is, in addition to what is actual on the one hand, and sheer nothingness on the other, a middle ground of potentiality. Change is the actualization of a potentiality, and unless we affirm this we will be stuck with a static Parmenidean conception of the world. And that is not an option, because the existence of change cannot coherently be denied. Even to work through the steps of an argument for the non-existence of change is itself an instance of change. Sensory experience—and thus the observation and experiment on which empirical science rests—presupposes real change. (Hence it is incoherent to suggest, as is sometimes done, that relativity shows that change is illusory, since the evidence for relativity presupposes sensory experience and thus change.)

Now, the main concepts of the Aristotelian-Scholastic metaphysical apparatus—substantial form and prime matter, final causality and efficient causality, and so forth—are essentially an outworking of the theory of act and potency. You can argue about whether this or that object truly has a substantial form or is merely an aggregate, about whether we have correctly identified and characterized the teleological features of such-and-such a natural process, and so on. What cannot be denied is that substantial form, teleology, etc. are bedrock features of the natural order and will inevitably feature in a complete picture of the physical world at some level of analysis. All of that follows from a consistent application of the theory of act and potency. It also cannot be denied that any potential that is actualized is actualized by something already actual. That is the core of the “principle of causality,” and it follows from the principle of sufficient reason—a principle which, rightly understood, also cannot coherently be denied.

I spell out the reasons for all of this in detail, and also discuss the inherent limitations of empirical science, in Scholastic Metaphysics. The point to emphasize for present purposes is that the Scholastic holds that there a number of general metaphysical truths which we can know completely independently of particular disputes within physics or any other empirical science, precisely because they rest on what any possible empirical science must itself presuppose. (One of Cruz-Uribe’s readers insinuates that in resting its key theses on something other than empirical science, Scholastic metaphysics undermines the possibility of any common ground with its critics. But this is precisely the reverse of the truth and once again completely misses the point. Since Scholastic metaphysical arguments begin with what empirical science presupposes—for example, the possibility of sensory experience, and the possibility of at least partial explanations—they thereby begin precisely with what the critics already accept, not with what they reject.)

Radioactive Decay

So, here is where we are before we even get to the issue of radioactive decay: Purportedly physics-based objections to Scholastic metaphysics—including objections to Scholastic claims about causality—are, as a matter of course, poorly thought out. They commonly blur the distinction between empirical and philosophical claims, confuse what is really only one notion of causality with causality as such, and confuse mere illustrations or applications of general metaphysical principles with the principles themselves. Meanwhile, we know on independent grounds that physics, of its very nature, cannot in principle tell us everything there is to know about physical reality, including especially the causal features of physical reality. Its exclusively mathematical conceptual apparatus necessarily leaves out whatever cannot be captured in quantitative terms. Physics also implies that there must be something more to physical reality than what it captures, since mathematical structure is of itself a mere abstraction and there must be some concrete reality which has the structure.

We also know that quantum mechanics in particular raises all sorts of puzzling metaphysical questions (not merely about causality) that it cannot answer. And, the Scholastic argues, we know on independent grounds—grounds that any possible empirical science must presuppose—that there are a number of metaphysical truths that we must bring to bear on our understanding of the world whatever the specific empirical facts turn out to be, including the truth that causality must be a real feature of the world.

So, when critics glibly allege that radioactive decay or other quantum phenomena undermine causality, the trouble is that they are making a charge which requires defense. It is preposterous to pretend that the burden of proof is on the Scholastic to show that quantum mechanics is compatible with Scholastic claims about causality. The burden of proof is rather on the critic to show that there really is any incompatibility. (Few people would claim that the burden of proof is on anyone to prove that quantum mechanics doesn’t establish idealism, or doesn’t undermine the law of excluded middle, or doesn’t refute scientific realism. It is generally realized that the claims in question here are very large ones that go well beyond anything quantum mechanics itself can be said to establish, so that the burden of proof is on anyone who wants to claim quantum mechanics has such sweeping implications. So why is the burden of proof on the Scholastic to show that quantum mechanics doesn’t undermine causality?)

In particular, the critic owes us an account of why, since physics cannot in principle capture all there is to physical reality in the first place—and in particular arguably fails entirely (as Russell held) to capture causality in general—we should regard it as especially noteworthy if it fails to capture causality in one particular case. If the critic, like the early Russell, denies that there is any causality at all, he owes us an account of how he can coherently take such a position, and in particular how he can account for our knowledge of the world physics tells us about if we have no causal contact with it. If the critic says instead that genuine causality does exist in some parts of nature but not in the particular cases he thinks quantum mechanics casts doubt on, he owes us an account of why we should draw the line where he says we should, and how there could be such a line. (As I noted recently with respect to the Principle of Sufficient Reason, it is difficult to see how it could be coherent to think that things are in principle explicable in some cases while denying that they are in general explicable in principle. Yet to affirm the principle of causality in some cases and deny it in others seems similarly incoherent.)

In short, anyone who claims that quantum mechanics undermines Scholastic metaphysical claims about causality owes us an alternative worked-out metaphysical picture before we should take him seriously (just as anyone who would claim that quantum mechanics undermines the law of excluded middle owes us an alternative system of logic if we are to take him seriously). And if he gives us one, it would really be that metaphysical system itself, rather than quantum mechanics per se, that is doing the heavy lifting.

Now, no one expects a logician to launch into a mini treatise on quantum mechanics before setting forth a textbook exposition of classical logic, law of excluded middle and all. The reason is that it is widely understood that it is just false to say flatly that “Quantum mechanics has undermined classical logic.” Quantum mechanics has done no such thing. Rather, some people have been led by their metaphysical speculations about quantum mechanics to wonder whether logic might be rewritten without the law of excluded middle. Logicians who have independent grounds to think that the law of excluded middle cannot be false have no reason to take these speculations very seriously or respond in detail to them when going about their ordinary work.

Similarly, there is no reason why a Scholastic metaphysician should be expected to launch into a detailed discussion of quantum mechanics before deploying the principle of causality in a general metaphysical context, or when giving an argument for the existence of God. For it is also simply false to say that “Quantum mechanics has undermined the principle of causality.” It has done no such thing. The most that one can say is that some people have been led by their metaphysical speculations about quantum mechanics to wonder whether metaphysics might be rewritten in a way that does without the principle of causality. But metaphysicians who have independent grounds to think that the principle of causality cannot be false have no reason to take these speculations very seriously or to respond in detail to them when going about their ordinary work.

Of course, logicians have examined proposed non-classical systems of logic, and classical logicians have put forward criticisms of these alternative systems. The point is that their doing so is not a prerequisite of their being rationally justified in using classical logic. Similarly, a Scholastic metaphysician, especially if he is interested in questions about philosophy of nature and philosophy of physics, can and should address questions about how to interpret various puzzling aspects of quantum mechanics. But the point is that doing so is not a prerequisite to his being rationally justified in appealing to the principle of causality in general metaphysics or in presenting a First Cause argument for the existence of God.

But how might a Scholastic interpret phenomena like radioactive decay? I hinted at one possible approach in the post on Oerter linked to above, an approach which is suggested by the way some Scholastic philosophers have thought about local motion. Some of these thinkers, and Aquinas in particular, take the view that a substance can manifest certain dispositions in a “spontaneous” way in the sense that these manifestations simply follow from its nature or substantial form. A thing’s natural tendencies vis-à-vis local motion would be an example. These motions simply follow from the thing’s substantial form and do not require a continuously conjoined external mover. Now, that is not to say that the motion in question does not have an efficient cause. But the efficient cause is just whatever generated the substance and thus gave it the substantial form that accounts (qua formal cause) for its natural local motion. (It is commonly but erroneously thought that medieval Aristotelians in general thought that all local motion as such required a continuously conjoined cause. In fact that was true only of some of these thinkers, not all of them. For detailed discussion of this issue, see James Weisheipl’s book Nature and Motion in the Middle Ages, from which I borrow the language of “spontaneity.”  I also discuss these issues in more detail here.)

Now, Aquinas himself elaborated on this idea in conjunction with the thesis that the “natural place” toward which heavy objects are inclined to move is the center of the earth, and he supposed also that projectile motions required a conjoined mover insofar as he regarded them as “violent” rather than natural. Both of these suppositions are outmoded, but the more general thesis summarized in the preceding paragraph is logically independent of them and can easily be disentangled from them. One can consistently affirm (a) that a substance will tend toward a certain kind of local motion simply because of its substantial form, while rejecting the claim that (b) this local motion involves movement toward a certain specific place, such as the center of the earth.

Indeed, some contemporary Aristotelians have proposed that affirming (a) while rejecting (b) is the right way to think about inertial motion: Newton’s principle of inertia, on this view, is a description of the way a physical object will tend to behave vis-à-vis local motion given its nature or substantial form. (Again, see this article for discussion of the relevant literature.) The point for present purposes, though, is that the idea just described also provides a model—I don’t say it is the only model, just a model—for understanding what is going on metaphysically with phenomena like radioactive decay.

The idea would be this. Let’s borrow an example from philosopher of science Phil Dowe’s book, Physical Causation, since I’ll have reason to return to the use he makes of it in a moment. Dowe writes:

"Suppose that we have an unstable lead atom, say Pb²¹⁰. Such an atom may decay, without outside interference, by α-decay into the mercury atom Hg²⁰⁶. Suppose the probability that the atom will decay in the next minute is x. Then
 
P(E|C) = x
 
where C is the existence of the lead atom at a certain time t₁, and E is the production of the mercury atom within the minute immediately following t₁." (pp. 22-23)

Now, applying the conceptual apparatus borrowed from Aquinas (which, I should add, Dowe himself does not do), we can say that the decay in question is “spontaneous” in something like the way Aquinas thought the natural local motion of a physical substance is “spontaneous.” In particular, given the nature or substantial form of Pb²¹⁰, there is a probability of x that it will decay in the next minute. The probability is not unintelligible, but grounded in what it is to be Pb²¹⁰ . The decay thus has a cause in the sense that (i) it has a formal cause in the nature or substantial form of the particular Pb²¹⁰ atom, and (ii) it has an efficient cause in whatever it was that originally generated that Pb²¹⁰ atom (whenever that was).

It is worth noting that you don’t need to be a Scholastic to think that there really is causation in cases like this, which brings me to Dowe’s own use of this example. As Dowe notes, even if it is claimed that decay phenomena are incompatible with deterministic causality, it doesn’t follow that there is no causality at all in such cases. All that would follow is that the causality is not deterministic. In defense of the claim that there is causality of at least an indeterministic sort in cases like the one he cites, he writes:

"If I bring a bucket of Pb²¹⁰ into the room, and you get radiation sickness, then doubtless I am responsible for your ailment. But in this type of case, I cannot be morally responsible for an action for which I am not causally responsible. Now the causal chain linking my action and your sickness involves a connection constituted by numerous connections like the one just described. Thus the insistence that C does not cause E on the grounds that there’s no deterministic link entails that I am not morally responsible for your sickness. Which is sick." (p. 23)

Dowe also points out that “scientists describe such cases of decay as instances of production of Hg²⁰⁶… [and] ‘production’ is a near-synonym for ‘causation’” (p. 23). This sounds paradoxical only if we fallaciously conflate deterministic causality and causality as such.

Interestingly, elsewhere in his book, Dowe argues that Newton’s first law should be interpreted as entailing, not that a body’s uniform motion has no cause, but rather that its inertia, conceived of as a property of a body, is its cause (pp. 53-54).  This dovetails with the analysis of inertial motion given by some contemporary Aristotelians, to which I alluded above. John Losee, in his book Theories of Causality, discusses Dowe’s views and notes the parallel between what Dowe says about radioactive decay and what he says about inertia (p. 126). The parallel, I would say (using notions neither Dowe nor Losee appeal to), is this: In both cases, Dowe is describing the way a thing will “spontaneously” tend to behave given its nature or substantial form (albeit the manifestation of the tendency is probabilistic in the case of Pb²¹⁰ but not in the case of inertial motion).

So, Dowe’s views seem to some extent to recapitulate the elements of the Aquinas-inspired account of radioactive decay sketched above, which I earlier put forward in the post replying to Oerter. It is worth emphasizing that neither Dowe nor Losee has any Scholastic ax to grind, and that I came across their work long after writing that post—so as to forestall any objection to the effect that the proposed account is somehow a merely ad hoc way to try to get round the objection from radioactive decay (an objection that would be absurd in any case given that the basic concepts made use of in the proposed account are centuries old). On the contrary, it is an account that someone could accept whatever his views about Scholastic metaphysics in general, or about the application of the principle of causality to arguments for God’s existence.

In any event, as I have said, the burden of proof is not on the Scholastic metaphysician to provide an account of how radioactive decay can be reconciled with the principle of causality, because claims to the effect that there is an incompatibility are not even well-motivated in the first place. The burden of proof is rather on the critic of Scholastic metaphysics to develop an alternative metaphysical framework on which the rejection of the principle of causality is defensible, and within which the critic might embed his favored interpretation of quantum mechanics. But that is not very likely. For the Scholastic has grounds entirely independent of issues about quantum mechanics or radioactive decay to conclude that no such alternative metaphysics is forthcoming.
 
 
NOTE: Dr. Feser's contributions at Strange Notions were originally posted on his blog, and therefore lose some of their context when reprinted here. Dr. Feser explains why that matters.
(Image credit: Nuclear Power Yes Please)

NOTE: Today we begin a two part series by Dr. Edward Feser exploring questions about science, philosophy, causality, and radioactive decay. We'll share the second part on Wednesday.
 

 
 
At the Catholic blog Vox Nova, mathematics professor David Cruz-Uribe writes:

"I… am currently working through the metaphysics of St. Thomas Aquinas as part of his proofs of the existence of God… [S]ome possibly naive counter-examples from quantum mechanics come to mind. For instance, discussing the principle that nothing can change without being affected externally, I immediately thought of the spontaneous decay of atoms and even of particles (e.g., so-called proton decay).
 
This might be a very naive question: my knowledge of quantum mechanics is rusty and probably out of date, and I know much, much less about scholastic metaphysics. So can any of our readers point me to some useful references on this specific topic?"

I’ve discussed this issue before, and one of Cruz-Uribe’s readers directs him to a blog post of mine in which I responded to a version of this sort of objection raised by physicist Robert Oerter. Unfortunately, the combox discussion that ensues largely consists of a couple of Cruz-Uribe’s readers competing with each other to see who can emit the most squid ink (though Brandon Watson manfully tries to shine some light into the darkness). One reader starts things out by writing:

"Feser’s… argument seems to boil down to saying, 'Just because we can’t find a cause for quantum phenomena doesn’t mean there isn’t one.' … Thing is, Bell has shown that you can’t have local unknown variables in quantum events. Bohm’s interpretation would give you the possibility of unknown variables (thus taking out the random, seemingly acausal, aspect), but at the price of locality (in short, such variables would be global, and not tied to a specific location; so you lose any predictability, anyway)."

As readers of the post on Oerter know, this essentially just repeats the completely point-missing objection from Oerter that was the subject of the post, while ignoring what I said in the post in reply to the objection! The combox discussion goes downhill from there, with so many points missed, questions begged, and crucial distinctions blurred.

Cruz-Uribe’s reader accuses me of having a “weak” understanding of the relevant physics, which is why he launches into the mini lesson on Bell and Bohm. But it’s his reading skills that are weak, since I made it clear in the post that I wasn’t in the first place making any claim about the physics of systems of the sort in question, and thus wasn’t saying anything that could be incompatible with what we know from physics. In particular, I wasn’t advocating a “hidden variable theory” or the like, but rather making a purely philosophical point about causality that is entirely independent of such theories.

This is one of many factors that hinder fruitful discussion of these topics even with well-meaning people (like Cruz-Uribe) who know some science but know little philosophy. They constantly translate philosophical claims into the physics terms that they feel more comfortable and familiar with, and proceed to run off at high speed in the wrong direction.

This is why you really can’t address specific issues like radioactive decay without first doing some general philosophical stage-setting. For it’s never really the empirical or scientific details that are doing the work in objections to Scholastic metaphysics like the one at issue. What’s really doing the work is the ton of philosophical baggage that the critics unreflectively bring to bear on the subject—the assumptions they read into the physics and then read back out again, thinking they’ve raised a “scientific” objection when what they’ve really done is raised a question-begging philosophical objection disguised as a scientific objection.

(I imagine that educated religious people like Cruz-Uribe and his readers aren’t fooled by this kind of sleight of hand in other scientific contexts. For instance, I’d wager that they would be unimpressed by arguments to the effect that neuroscience has shown that free will is an illusion. As I have argued here and here, neuroscience has shown no such thing, and such claims invariably rest not on science but on tendentious philosophical assumptions that have been read into the scientific findings. But exactly the same thing is true of claims to the effect that quantum mechanics has falsified the principle of causality, or that Newton or Einstein refuted the Aristotelian analysis of change.)

In what follows, then, I will first prepare the ground by calling attention to some common fallacies committed by critics of Scholastic metaphysics who appeal to modern physics—fallacies some of which are committed by Cruz-Uribe’s readers in the course of their combox discussion. Anyone wanting to comment intelligently on the subject at hand has to take care to avoid these fallacies. Second, I will make some general remarks about what a philosophical approach to the subject at hand involves, as opposed to the approach taken by physics. (I’ve discussed this issue many times before, and indeed did so in a couple of posts—here and here—that followed up the post on Oerter that Cruz-Uribe and his readers were discussing.) Finally, in light of this background I’ll address the specific issue of radioactive decay and causality.

Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science

So, let’s consider some of the confusions that are rife in discussions of the relationship between physics on the one hand and philosophy (and in particular Scholastic philosophy) on the other:

A. Conflating empirical and metaphysical issues: Those who know some science but not a lot of philosophy very often assume that when a Scholastic philosopher says something about the nature of causality, or substance, or matter, or the like, then he is making a claim that stands or falls with what physics tells us, or at any rate should stand or fall with what physics tells us. But this is a category mistake. Scholastic metaphysics is not in competition with physics, but approaches the phenomena at a different (and indeed deeper) level of analysis. Its claims do not stand or fall with the findings of physics, any more than the claims of arithmetic stand or fall with the findings of physics. Indeed, like arithmetic, the basic theses of Scholastic metaphysics are (so the Scholastic argues) something any possible physics must presuppose.

Sometimes the critics assume that Scholastic metaphysics is in competition with physics because they are themselves making question-begging metaphysical assumptions. For instance, they might assume that any rationally justifiable claim about the nature of matter simply must be susceptible of formulation in the mathematical language of physics, or must be susceptible of empirical falsification. They are essentially making a metaphysics out of physics. Only physics can tell us anything about the nature of physical reality (so the critic supposes), so any claim about the nature of physical reality is implicitly, even if not explicitly, a claim of physics. As we will see below, this cannot possibly be right. Physics cannot even in principle tell us everything there is to know about physical reality (let alone reality more generally). But even if the assumption in question could be right, it simply begs the question against the Scholastic merely to assert it, since the Scholastic rejects this assumption, and on the basis of arguments that need to be answered rather than ignored (arguments I’ll discuss below).

Sometimes the conflation of empirical and metaphysical issues is due less to such large-scale philosophical assumptions than to a simple fallacy of equivocation. Both physicists and Scholastic metaphysicians use terms like “cause,” “matter,” and the like.  A superficial reading therefore often leads critics to assume that they are addressing the same issues, when in fact they are very often not using the key terms in the same sense.

Sometimes the conflation is due to sheer intellectual sloppiness. Critics will formulate the issues in ridiculously sweeping terms, making peremptory claims to the effect that “Aristotelianism was refuted by modern science,” for example. In fact, of course, the labels “Aristotelianism” and “modern science” each cover a large number of distinct and logically independent ideas and arguments, and these need carefully to be disentangled before the question of the relationship between Scholastic metaphysics and modern physics can fruitfully be addressed. It is no good to say (for example) that since Aristotle’s geocentrism and theory of natural place have been falsified, “therefore” we should not take seriously his theory of act and potency or the account of causality that rests on it. This is simply a non sequitur. Such issues are completely independent of one another, logically speaking (regardless of the contingent historical association between them).

B. Conflating genus and species: Even when physicists and Scholastic metaphysicians are using terms in the same sense, critics often confuse what is really only a specific instance of the general class named by a term with the general class itself. For example, where the notion of “cause” is concerned, Scholastic metaphysicians distinguish between formal, material, efficient, and final causes. Where efficient causes are concerned, they distinguish between principal and instrumental causes, between series of causes which are essentially ordered and those which are accidentally ordered, and between those which operate simultaneously versus those which are ordered in time. They distinguish between total causes and partial causes, and between proximate and remote causes. They regard causality as primarily a feature of substances and only secondarily as a relation between events. They distinguish between causal powers and the operation of those powers, between active causal power and passive potencies. And so forth. All of these distinctions are backed by arguments, and the Scholastic maintains that they are all necessary in order to capture the complexity of causal relations as they exist in the actual world.

Now, those who criticize Scholastic metaphysics on scientific grounds typically operate with a very narrow understanding of causality. In particular, they often conceive of it as a deterministic relation holding between temporally separated events. They will then argue (for example) that quantum mechanics has undermined causality thus understood, and conclude that it has therefore undermined causality full stop. One problem with this, of course, is that whether quantum mechanics really is incompatible with determinism is a matter of controversy, though as I have said, nothing in the Scholastic position stands or falls with the defensibility of Bohmian hidden variable theories. The deeper point is that it is simply fallacious to suppose that to undermine one kind of causality (and in one kind of context) is to undermine causality as such. Certainly it begs the question against the Scholastic, who denies that all causality reduces to deterministic relations holding between temporally separated events.

The conflation of a general class with a specific kind within the general class is evident too in discussions of motion. Scholastics and other Aristotelians think of motion in general as change, and change as the actualization of potency. Local motion or change with respect to place or location is just one kind of actualization of a potency, and is metaphysically less fundamental than other kinds. When motion is discussed in modern physics, however, it is of course local motion that is exclusively in view.

There is nothing necessarily wrong with this focus, but it would be fallacious to draw, from what modern physics says about “motion” (in the sense of local motion), sweeping conclusions about what Aristotelians say about “motion” (in the sense of the actualization of potency). This would be to confuse what is true of one kind of change for what is true of change as such. Yet this kind of fallacious conflation is very common. Of course, a critic of Scholastic metaphysics might claim that local motion is the only kind of change there really is, but merely to assert this is simply to beg the question against the Scholastic, who has arguments for the claim that local motion cannot be the only kind of change there is. (I have addressed this particular issue in detail elsewhere, e.g. here and here.)

C. Confusing general principles with specific applications of those principles: When a thinker, whether a philosopher or a scientist, puts forward a general principle, he sometimes illustrates it with examples that later turn out to be deficient. But it simply doesn’t follow that the general principle itself is mistaken. For example, people often think of the evolution of the horse as a neat transition from very small animals to ever larger ones, as in the kind of exhibit they might have seen in a natural history museum as a child. It turns out that things aren’t quite so neat. There is no hard and fast correlation between the size of a horse and where it appears in the fossil record. It doesn’t follow, however, that modern horses did not evolve from much smaller animals. That earlier accounts of the evolution of the horse turn out to be mistaken does not entail that the general principle that horses evolved is mistaken. (Intelligent Design enthusiasts are kindly asked to spare us any frantic comments about evolution. This is not a post about that subject. It’s just an example.)

However, though philosophical naturalists never tire of making this point when Darwinism is in question, they suddenly forget it when Aristotelianism or Scholasticism is what is at issue. For example, Aristotelians defend the reality of final causality the idea that natural substances and processes are inherently “directed towards” certain characteristic effects or ranges of effects. In previous centuries, the idea was often illustrated in terms of Aristotle’s view that heavy objects are naturally directed toward the center of the earth as their “natural place.” That turns out to be mistaken. This is often treated as a reason for rejecting the idea of final causality as such, but this simply doesn’t follow. In general, the deficiencies of this or that illustration of some Scholastic metaphysical thesis are simply not grounds for rejecting the thesis itself. (I’ve addressed this issue at greater length before, e.g. here, here, and here.)

The Limits of Physics

So that’s one set of background considerations that must be kept in mind when addressing topics like the one at issue: the begged questions, blurred distinctions, and missed points which chronically afflict the thinking of those who raise purportedly scientific objections to Scholastic metaphysics. Let’s move on now to the second set of background considerations, viz. the limits in principle to what physics can tell us about physical reality, and the unavoidability of a deeper metaphysical perspective.

As I have emphasized many times, what physics gives us is a description of the mathematical structure of physical reality. It abstracts from any aspect of reality which cannot be captured via its exclusively quantitative methods. One reason that this is crucial to keep in mind is that from the fact that something doesn’t show up in the description physics gives us, it doesn’t follow that it isn’t there in the physical world. This is like concluding from the fact that color doesn’t show up in a black and white pen and ink drawing of a banana that bananas must not really be yellow. In both cases the absence is an artifact of the method employed, and has nothing whatsoever to do with the reality the method is being used to represent. The method of representing an object using black ink on white paper will necessarily leave out color even if it is there, and the method of representing physical reality using exclusively mathematical language will necessarily leave out any aspect of physical reality which is not reducible to the quantitative, even if such aspects are there.

But it’s not just that such aspects might be there. They must be there. The quantitative description physics gives us is essentially a description of mathematical structure. But mathematical structure by itself is a mere abstraction. It cannot be all there is, because structure presupposes something concrete which has the structure. Indeed, physics itself tells us that the abstraction cannot be all there is, since it tells us that some abstract mathematical structures do not fit the actual, concrete material world. For example, Einstein is commonly taken to have shown that our world is not really Euclidean. This could only be true if there is some concrete reality that instantiates a non-Euclidean abstract structure rather than a Euclidean abstract structure. So, physics itself implies that there must be more to the world than the abstract structure it captures in its purely mathematical description, but it does not and cannot tell us exactly what this concrete reality is like.

That physics by itself only gives us abstract structure is by no means either a new point or a point emphasized by Scholastics alone. It was made in earlier generations by thinkers like Poincaré, Russell, Eddington, Weyl, and others, and in recent philosophy has been emphasized by Grover Maxwell, Michael Lockwood, Simon Blackburn, David Chalmers, and others.

Moreover, we know there must be more to causality specifically than physics does or could tell us about. The early Russell once argued that causation must not be a real feature of the world precisely because it does not show up in the description of the world physics gives us. For physics, says Russell, describes the world in terms of differential equations describing functional relations between events, and these equations make no reference to causes. “In the motions of mutually gravitating bodies, there is nothing that can be called a cause, and nothing that can be called an effect; there is merely a formula” (“On the Notion of Cause,” pp. 173-74).  Russell’s position has been the subject of a fair bit of attention in recent philosophy (e.g. here).

Now, I don’t myself think it is quite right to say that physics makes no use of causal notions, since I think that physics tells us something about the dispositional features of fundamental particles, and dispositionality is a causal notion. Still, as other philosophers have argued, higher-level causal features—such as the causation we take ourselves to experience continuously in everyday life, in the behavior of tables, chairs, rocks, trees, and other ordinary objects—are more difficult to cash out in terms of what is going on at the micro level described by physics. Hilary Putnam is one contemporary philosopher who has addressed this problem, as I noted in a post from a few years ago. Trenton Merricks is another, and argues that at least macro-level inanimate objects are unreal, since (he claims) they play no causal role in the world over and above the causal role played by their microphysical parts.

Merricks thinks living things are real, and certainly a Russell-style, across-the-board denial of causation would be incoherent, for a reason implicit in a fact that the later Russell himself emphasized. Our perceptual experiences give us knowledge of the external physical world only because they are causally related to that world. To deny causality in the name of science would therefore be to undermine the very empirical foundations of science.
 
 
NOTE: Dr. Feser's contributions at Strange Notions were originally posted on his blog, and therefore lose some of their context when reprinted here. Dr. Feser explains why that matters.
(Image credit: Write Science)