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.
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The Catholic Church makes some bold claims about what can be known about God via unaided reason. The First Vatican Council teaches:

"The same Holy mother Church holds and teaches that God, the source and end of all things, can be known with certainty from the consideration of created things, by the natural power of human reason…
 
If anyone says that the one, true God, our creator and lord, cannot be known with certainty from the things that have been made, by the natural light of human reason: let him be anathema."

In Humani Generis, Pope Pius XII reaffirmed this teaching and made clear what were in his view the specific philosophical means by which this natural knowledge of God could best be articulated, and which were most in line with Catholic doctrine:

"[H]uman reason by its own natural force and light can arrive at a true and certain knowledge of the one personal God, Who by His providence watches over and governs the world…
 
[I]t falls to reason to demonstrate with certainty the existence of God, personal and one… But reason can perform these functions safely and well only when properly trained, that is, when imbued with that sound philosophy which has long been, as it were, a patrimony handed down by earlier Christian ages, and which moreover possesses an authority of an even higher order, since the Teaching Authority of the Church, in the light of divine revelation itself, has weighed its fundamental tenets, which have been elaborated and defined little by little by men of great genius. For this philosophy, acknowledged and accepted by the Church, safeguards the genuine validity of human knowledge, the unshakable metaphysical principles of sufficient reason, causality, and finality, and finally the mind's ability to attain certain and unchangeable truth.
 
Of course this philosophy deals with much that neither directly nor indirectly touches faith or morals, and which consequently the Church leaves to the free discussion of experts. But this does not hold for many other things, especially those principles and fundamental tenets to which We have just referred…
 
If one considers all this well, he will easily see why the Church demands that future priests be instructed in philosophy "according to the method, doctrine, and principles of the Angelic Doctor," since, as we well know from the experience of centuries, the method of Aquinas is singularly preeminent both of teaching students and for bringing truth to light…"

Similarly, in his address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences of November 22, 1951, Pius XII says:

"[T]he human intellect approaches that demonstration of the existence of God which Christian wisdom recognizes in those philosophical arguments which have been carefully examined throughout the centuries by giants in the world of knowledge, and which are already well known to you in the presentation of the "five ways" which the Angelic Doctor, St. Thomas, offers as a speedy and safe road to lead the mind to God."

The Catechism of the Catholic Church reaffirms the teaching of Vatican I and of Pius XII that God’s existence can be known with certainty by the natural light of human reason, and even teaches, more specifically, that we can “attain certainty” about God’s existence via “proofs” which begin “from movement, becoming, contingency, and the world's order and beauty.” Most of these are, of course, among the approaches taken by Aquinas’s Five Ways. In Fides et Ratio, Pope St. John Paul II also reaffirmed the teaching of Vatican I and Pius XII on the power of human reason in theological matters:

"[T]he First Vatican Council… pronounced solemnly on the relationship between reason and faith. The teaching contained in this document strongly and positively marked the philosophical research of many believers and remains today a standard reference-point for correct and coherent Christian thinking in this regard…
 
Against the temptations of fideism… it was necessary to stress the unity of truth and thus the positive contribution which rational knowledge can and must make to faith's knowledge…
 
Surveying the situation today, we see that the problems of other times have returned…
 
There are… signs of a resurgence of fideism, which fails to recognize the importance of rational knowledge and philosophical discourse for the understanding of faith, indeed for the very possibility of belief in God…
 
[M]odes of latent fideism appear in the scant consideration accorded to speculative theology, and in disdain for the classical philosophy from which the terms of both the understanding of faith and the actual formulation of dogma have been drawn. My revered Predecessor Pope Pius XII warned against such neglect of the philosophical tradition and against abandonment of the traditional terminology…
 
Pope Leo XIII… revisited and developed the First Vatican Council's teaching on the relationship between faith and reason, showing how philosophical thinking contributes in fundamental ways to faith and theological learning. More than a century later, many of the insights of his Encyclical Letter have lost none of their interest from either a practical or pedagogical point of view—most particularly, his insistence upon the incomparable value of the philosophy of Saint Thomas. A renewed insistence upon the thought of the Angelic Doctor seemed to Pope Leo XIII the best way to recover the practice of a philosophy consonant with the demands of faith."

To be sure, the Church has not officially endorsed any specific formulation of any particular argument for God’s existence. All the same, in her authoritative documents she has gone so far as to speak of God’s existence as something susceptible of “certainty,” “demonstration,” and “proof”; has commended “classical philosophy” specifically as providing the best means of showing how this is possible; and has held up Aquinas and the general approaches taken in his Five Ways as exemplary. Pius XII even went so far as to imply that the “metaphysical principles of sufficient reason, causality, and finality”—to which formulations of arguments like Aquinas’s typically appeal—are not only “unshakable” but are so connected to matters of faith and morals that they are not among the things to be left to “free discussion” among theologians.

Quod erat demonstrandum?

Needless to say, many modern readers find all of this baffling. They find it baffling that anyone could be so confident that God’s existence is demonstrable, and baffling that anyone could think it demonstrable in the specific way in question—via arguments like Aquinas’s Five Ways and metaphysical principles like the principle of causality, the principle of sufficient reason, etc. Indeed, they think it obvious that God’s existence is not demonstrable, and obvious that arguments like the ones in question do not work.

Though this attitude is common and even held with great confidence, there is no good justification for it. There are three main problems with it. The first is that those who exhibit it typically do not even understand what writers like Aquinas actually said, and aim their dismissive objections at crude caricatures. I have documented this at length in several places, and will not repeat here what I’ve already said elsewhere (such as in my book Aquinas, in my Midwest Studies in Philosophy article “The New Atheists and the Cosmological Argument,” and in articles at Strange Notions like this one and this one.) Suffice it to say that if a skeptic argues that cosmological arguments essentially rest on the premise that “everything has a cause,” or supposes that Aquinas was trying to prove that the world had a beginning in time, or suggests that Aquinas never explains why we should suppose a First Cause to have divine attributes like unity, omniscience, omnipotence, etc., that is an infallible sign that he is utterly incompetent to speak on the subject.

A second problem is that those who are dismissive of the very idea that the existence of God might be demonstrable typically hold arguments for God’s existence to a standard to which they do not hold other arguments. For instance, the mere fact that someone somewhere has raised an objection against an argument for God’s existence is commonly treated by skeptics as showing that “the argument fails”—as if an argument is a good one only if no one objects to it but all assent to it upon hearing it. Of course, skeptics do not treat other philosophical arguments this way. That an argument for materialism, or against free will, or whatever, has its critics is not taken to show that those arguments “fail.” The attitude in these cases is rather: “Well, sure, like any philosophical argument, this one has its critics, but that doesn’t mean the critics are right. At the end of the day, the objections might be answerable and the argument ultimately correct, and we need to keep an open mind about it and consider what might be said in its defense.” In general, even the most eccentric philosophical arguments are treated as if they are always “on the table” as options worthy of reconsideration. Mysteriously, though, arguments for God’s existence are refused this courtesy. The mere fact that Hume (say) said such-and-such two centuries ago is often treated as if it constituted a once-and-for-all decisive refutation.

Related to this is a tendency to approach the subject as if a successful argument for God’s existence should be the sort of thing that can be stated fairly briefly in a way that will convince even the most hardened skeptic. Again, no one treats other arguments this way. If a fifty page article on materialism, free will, utilitarianism, etc. fails to convince you, the author will say that you need to read his book. If the book fails to convince you, he will then say that the problem is that you have to master the general literature on the subject. If that literature fails to convince you, then he will say that the issue is a large one that you cannot reasonably expect anyone decisively to settle to the satisfaction of all parties.

By contrast, if you suggest that the existence of God can be demonstrated, many a skeptic will demand that you accomplish this in an argument of the sort which might be summarized in the space of a blog post. If such an argument fails to convince him, he will judge that it isn’t worth any more of his time, and if you tell him that he would need to read a book or even a large body of literature fully to understand the argument, he might even treat this (bizarrely) as if it made it even less likely that the argument is any good!

Then there is the common tendency to suggest that defenders of arguments for God’s existence have ulterior motives that should make us suspicious of their very project. Once again, the skeptic does not treat other arguments this way. He doesn’t say: “Well, you have to be very wary of arguments against free will or for revisionist moral conclusions, because their proponents are no doubt trying to rationalize some sort of activity traditionally frowned upon.” Nor does he say: “Atheist arguments are always suspect, of course, given that people would like to find a way to justify rejecting religious practices and prohibitions they find onerous.” For some reason, though, the very fact that a philosopher defends an argument for God’s existence is treated as if it should raise our suspicions. “Oh, he must have some religious agenda he’s trying to rationalize!”

Now there is no good reason whatsoever for these double standards. They reflect nothing more the unreflective prejudices of (some) atheists and skeptics, and in some cases maybe something worse—a dishonest rhetorical tactic intended to poison otherwise fair-minded people against taking arguments for God’s existence very seriously. But I submit that these unjustifiable double standards play a major role in fostering the attitude that there is something fishy about the very idea of demonstrating the existence of God.

A third, and perhaps not unrelated, problem with this attitude is that those who take it often misunderstand what a thinker like Aquinas means when he says that the existence of God can be “demonstrated.” What is meant is that the conclusion that God exists follows with necessity or deductive validity from premises that are certain, where the certainty of the premises can in turn be shown via metaphysical analysis. That entails that such a demonstration gives us knowledge that is more secure than what any scientific inference can give us (as “science” is generally understood today), in two respects. First, the inference is not a merely probabilistic one, nor an “argument to the best explanation” which appeals to considerations like parsimony, fit with existing background theory, etc.; it is, again, instead a strict deduction to what is claimed to follow necessarily from the premises. Second, the premises cannot be overthrown by further empirical inquiry, because they have to do with what any possible empirical inquiry must presuppose.

For example, Aristotelian arguments from motion begin with the premise that change occurs, together with premises to the effect that a potential can be actualized only by what is already actual (the principle of causality) and that an essentially ordered series of causes cannot regress to infinity. The first premise is in a sense empirical, which is why the argument is not a priori. We know that change occurs because we experience it. However, it is not a premise which can be overthrown by further empirical inquiry, because any possible future experience will itself be a further instance of change. (We can coherently hold, on empirical grounds, that this or that purported instance of change is unreal; but we cannot coherently maintain on empirical grounds that all change is unreal.) The other premises can be defended by various metaphysical arguments, such as arguments to the effect that the principle of causality follows from the principle of sufficient reason (PSR), and that PSR rightly understood can be established via reductio ad absurdum of any attempt to deny it. (See Scholastic Metaphysics for detailed defense of the background principles presupposed by Thomistic arguments for God’s existence.)

Now, the problem is this. Contemporary philosophers tend to work within a conceptual straightjacket inherited from the early modern philosophers. In particular, and where epistemological matters are concerned, they tend to think in terms inherited from the rationalists, the empiricists, and Kant. Hence when you put forward an argument that you claim is not an inference of empirical science, they tend to think that the only other thing it can be is either some sort of “conceptual analysis” (essentially a watered-down Kantianism) or an attempt at rationalist apriorism. And since arguments for God’s existence are obviously attempts to arrive at a conclusion about mind-independent reality itself rather than merely about how we think about reality or conceptualize reality, the assumption is that if you argue for God’s existence in a way that does not involve an inference of the sort familiar in empirical science, then you must be doing something of the Cartesian or Leibnizian rationalist sort.

As I argue in Scholastic Metaphysics, this is simply a false choice. Thomists reject the entire rationalist/empiricist/Kantian dialectic, and maintain an epistemological position that predated these views. But modern readers who are unfamiliar with this position, and falsely suppose that it must be an exercise in rationalist metaphysics, sometimes come to expect the trappings of rationalist metaphysics. In particular, they will expect geometry-style proofs, highly formalized arguments from axioms and definitions, which can be stated crisply in the course of a few pages and be seen either to succeed or fail upon a fairly cursory examination. When a Thomist does not put forward an argument in this style, the skeptic supposes that he has failed to produce a true demonstration. But this simply mistakes one kind of demonstration for demonstration as such, and begs the question against the Thomist, who rejects rationalist epistemology and methodology. (Students of the Neo-Scholastic period of the history of Thomism will be familiar with Thomist criticisms of “essentialism”—in Gilson’s specialized sense of that term, which is different from the way I or David Oderberg use it—and of “ontologism.” These are essentially criticisms of the Leibnizian rationalist approach to metaphysics and natural theology.)

Presenting theistic arguments in this pseudo-geometrical formalized style can in fact inadvertently foster misunderstandings, which is why I tend to avoid that style. You can, of course, set out an argument like the Aristotelian argument from motion in a series of numbered steps, as I do in my ACPQ article “Existential Inertia and the Five Ways.” However, the argument contains a number of crucial technical terms—“actuality,” “potency,” “essentially ordered,” etc.—which are not explained in the argument thus stated. Even if you somehow worked definitions of these key terms into the formalized statement of the argument, that would simply push the problem back a stage, since you would have to make use of further concepts not defined in the formalized statement of the argument. The idea that such an argument (or any metaphysical argument) could be entirely formalized is a rationalist fantasy.

The trouble is that by presenting such semi-formalized arguments—“Here’s the proof in ten steps”—you risk encouraging the lazier sort of skeptic in his delusion that if such an argument is any good, it should be convincing, all by itself and completely removed from any larger context, to even the most hostile critic. Naturally, it will never be that, because it will not properly be understood unless the larger conceptual context is understood. But the lazy skeptic will not bother himself with that larger context. He will simply take the brief, ten-step (or whatever) semi-formalized argument and aim at it any old objections that come to mind, thinking he has thereby refuted it when in fact he will (given his ignorance of some of the key background concepts) not even properly understand what it is saying. (That is why a reader of a book like my Aquinas has to slog his way through over 50 pages of general metaphysics before he gets to the Five Ways. There are no shortcuts, and I do not want to abet the lazy or dishonest skeptic in pretending otherwise.)

Now, I submit that when we take account of these three factors underlying the common dismissive attitude toward the very idea of demonstrating God’s existence—the widespread misconceptions about what the traditional arguments for God’s existence actually say; the arbitrary double standard to which these arguments are held; and the common misunderstanding of what a “demonstration” must involve—we can see that that attitude is simply not justified. Meanwhile, the approaches to demonstrating God’s existence represented by arguments like the Five Ways in fact are—when fleshed out and when correctly understood—convincing, as I have argued in several places (e.g. in Aquinas and in the ACPQ article).

The Church’s insistence that the existence of God is demonstrable is not, in any event, an attempt to settle a philosophical issue by sheer diktat. It is rather a carefully considered judgment about what must be the case if Christianity is to be rationally justifiable. What the Church is doing is distancing herself from fideism by affirming the power of unaided reason and affirming the duty of Christians to provide a rational justification of what Aquinas called the “preambles” of the Catholic religion. (I’ve discussed the crucial role that proofs of God’s existence and other philosophical arguments play in Christian apologetics here and here.) It is not an expression of blind faith but precisely a condemnation of blind faith.

So, something Catholics and New Atheists can agree on. Isn’t that nice?
 
 
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: Unsplash)

Several people have asked me to comment on the remarks about causation made by atheist physicist Sean Carroll during his recent debate with William Lane Craig on the topic of “God and Cosmology.”  (You’ll find Craig’s own post-debate remarks here.)  It’s only fair to acknowledge at the outset that Carroll cannot justly be accused of the anti-philosophy one finds in recent remarks by physicists Stephen Hawking, Lawrence Krauss, and Neil deGrasse Tyson.  Indeed, Carroll has recently criticized these fellow physicists pretty harshly, and made some useful remarks about the role of philosophy vis-à-vis physics in the course of doing so.

It is also only fair to note that, while I have enormous respect for Craig, I don’t myself think that it is a good idea to approach arguments for a First Cause by way of scientific cosmology.  I think that muddies the waters by inadvertently reinforcing scientism, blurring the distinction between primary (divine) causality and secondary (natural) causality, and perpetuating the false assumption that arguments for a divine First Cause are essentially arguments for a “god of the gaps.”  As I have argued many times, both on my blog and in  my published works, the chief arguments of natural theology (i.e. Aristotelian, Neo-Platonic, Thomistic, and other Scholastic arguments) rest on premises derived from metaphysics rather than natural science, and in particular on metaphysical premises that any possible natural science must presuppose.  For that reason, they are more certain than anything science itself could in principle ever either support or refute.

Arguments like Aquinas’s Five Ways, when properly understood (as unfortunately, these days, they usually are not), no more stand or fall with the current state of play in scientific cosmology than they stand or fall with current gastroenterology or polymer research.  (On this point, see chapter 3 of my book Aquinas, my ACPQ article “Existential Inertia and the Five Ways,” my Midwest Studies in Philosophy article “The New Atheists and the Cosmological Argument,” and many other articles and blog posts.  Or see my YouTube lectures “An Aristotelian Proof of the Existence of God” and “Natural Theology Must Be Grounded in the Philosophy of Nature, Not Natural Science.” )

Carroll’s remarks during the debate are largely directed at the question of whether scientific cosmologists should regard theism as a good explanation for the sorts of phenomena they are interested in, given the standard criteria by which models in physics are judged.  Since I don’t find that a terribly interesting or important question, I have nothing to say about his criticisms of Craig on that score.

Having said all that, Carroll’s remarks, where they touch on philosophical matters, are pretty shallow, and he does clearly think that what he has to say somehow poses a serious challenge to theism in general, not just theistic arguments grounded in scientific cosmology.  So those remarks are worth a response.  The key passage concerns Carroll’s criticism of Craig’s claim that “If the universe began to exist, then there is a transcendent cause which brought the universe into existence.”  Carroll says:

"The real problem is that these are not the right vocabulary words to be using when we discuss fundamental physics and cosmology. This kind of Aristotelian analysis of causation was cutting edge stuff 2,500 years ago. Today we know better. Our metaphysics must follow our physics. That’s what the word 'metaphysics' means. And in modern physics, you open a quantum field theory textbook or a general relativity textbook, you will not find the words 'transcendent cause' anywhere. What you find are differential equations.
 
This reflects the fact that the way physics is known to work these days is in terms of patterns, unbreakable rules, laws of nature. Given the world at one point in time, we will tell you what happens next. There is no need for any extra metaphysical baggage, like transcendent causes, on top of that. It’s precisely the wrong way to think about how the fundamental reality works.
 
The question you should be asking is, 'What is the best model of the universe that science can come up with?' By a model I mean a formal mathematical system that purports to match on to what we observe. So if you want to know whether something is possible in cosmology or physics you ask, 'Can I build a model?'"

Now, it would take a book to explain everything that’s wrong with this passage.  And as it happens, I’ve written such a book; it’s called Scholastic Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction.  Since I’ve already said so much about these issues both in that book and elsewhere, I’m not going to repeat myself at length.  Let me just call attention to the key begged questions, missed points, and non sequiturs in Carroll’s remarks.

Carroll tells us that explanation in physics proceeds by way of building a “model” that describes a “mathematical system” reflecting “patterns, unbreakable rules, laws of nature.”  Fine and dandy; I’ve pointed this out many times myself.  If Carroll’s point were merely that, to the extent that theism can’t be formulated in such mathematical terms, it just isn’t the sort of thing the physicist will deem a useful explanation for the specific sorts of phenomena he’s interested in, then I wouldn’t necessarily have any problem with that.  That’s not what classical theism, properly understood, is all about in the first place.

But Carroll goes beyond that.  When he says that once you’ve hit upon the best mathematical model, whatever it turns out to be, “there is no need for any extra metaphysical baggage… on top of that,” he evidently means not just that you don’t need anything more for the purposes of physics, specifically, but that you don’t need anything more than that, period.  For he says that asking for more is “precisely the wrong way to think about how the fundamental reality works” and that “our metaphysics must follow our physics.”

The idea seems to be that once you’ve answered all the questions in physics, you’ve answered all the questions that can be answered, including all the metaphysical questions.  There’s nothing more to be done, not just nothing more for the physicist to do.

Now, why should anyone believe that claim (which is essentially just a version of scientism)?  Carroll gives no argument for it at all; he just asserts it with confidence.  This is a step down from Alex Rosenberg, who in The Atheist’s Guide to Reality did give an argument for a similar claim -- an argument which, as I noted, is extremely bad, but is at least still an argument.

Nor could there be a good argument for Carroll’s scientism, because scientism is demonstrably false.  For one thing, “scientism” is more poorly defined than Carroll claims theism is.  However we tighten up our definition of notions like “science,” “physics,” and the like, the resulting scientism is going to be either self-refuting (since it will turn out that scientism cannot itself be established via the methods of physics or any other natural science), or completely trivial (since, to avoid the self-refutation charge, “science,” “physics,” etc. will have to be defined so broadly that even the metaphysical notions Carroll wants to dismiss will count as “scientific”).

For another thing, to suppose that since physics confines itself to mathematical models, it follows that there is nothing more to reality than is captured by such models, is fallaciously to draw a metaphysical conclusion from a mere methodological stipulation.  The problem is not just that, if there are features of reality which cannot be captured in terms of a mathematical model, then the methods of physics are guaranteed not to capture them (though that is bad enough).  It is that there must in fact be more to reality than is captured by those methods, in part because (as Bertrand Russell noted) physics gives us only structure, and structure presupposes something which has the structure and which a purely structural description will of necessity fail to capture.

I develop these points in detail in Chapter 0 of Scholastic Metaphysics.  I also show, in that chapter and throughout the book, that the appeal to “laws of nature” so routinely made by naturalists like Carroll, simply does not and cannot do the work they suppose it does, and papers over a mountain of begged metaphysical questions.  In fact the very notion is fraught with philosophical difficulty, as writers like Nancy Cartwright and Stephen Mumford have shown.  As I have noted many times, the notion of a “law of nature” was originally (in thinkers like Descartes and Newton) explicitly theological, connoting the decree of a divine lawmaker.  Later scientists would regard this as a metaphor, but a metaphor for what?  Most contemporary scientists who pontificate about philosophical matters not only do not have an answer but have forgotten the question.

One contemporary scientist who does see the problem is physicist Paul Davies, who, in his essay “Universe from Bit” (in Paul Davies and Niels Henrik Gregersen, eds. Information and the Nature of Reality: From Physics to Metaphysics), writes:

"The orthodox view of the nature of the laws of physics contains a long list of tacitly assumed properties.  The laws are regarded, for example, as immutable, eternal, infinitely precise mathematical relationships that transcend the physical universe, and were imprinted on it at the moment of its birth from “outside,” like a maker’s mark, and have remained unchanging ever since… In addition, it is assumed that the physical world is affected by the laws, but the laws are completely impervious to what happens in the universe… It is not hard to discover where this picture of physical laws comes from: it is inherited directly from monotheism, which asserts that a rational being designed the universe according to a set of perfect laws.  And the asymmetry between immutable laws and contingent states mirrors the asymmetry between God and nature: the universe depends utterly on God for its existence, whereas God’s existence does not depend on the universe…
 
Clearly, then, the orthodox concept of laws of physics derives directly from theology.  It is remarkable that this view has remained largely unchallenged after 300 years of secular science.  Indeed, the “theological model” of the laws of physics is so ingrained in scientific thinking that it is taken for granted.  The hidden assumptions behind the concept of physical laws, and their theological provenance, are simply ignored by almost all except historians of science and theologians.  From the scientific standpoint, however, this uncritical acceptance of the theological model of laws leaves a lot to be desired…" (pp. 70-1)

Now some atheists may suppose that at this point I am going to exclaim triumphantly that there cannot be law without a lawgiver and proclaim victory for theism.  But in fact, like Davies, I don’t accept the theological account of laws.  I think it is bad metaphysics and bad theology (insofar as it tends toward occasionalism).  I want rather to make the following two points.

First, when scientists like Carroll confidently proclaim that we can explain such-and-such in terms of the laws of physics rather than God, what they are saying, without realizing it, is: “The explanation isn’t God, it’s rather the laws of physics, where ‘law of physics’ originally meant ‘a decree of God’ and where I don’t have any worked-out alternative account of what it means.”  Hence the “alternative” explanation, when unpacked, is really either a tacit appeal to God or a non-explanation.  In short, either it isn’t alternative, or it’s not an explanation.  This stock, naturalistic “alternative explanation” would be quickly dismissed if it were not so routinely and confidently put forward by otherwise highly intelligent, educated, and widely esteemed people.

Second, the original, explicitly theological Cartesian-Newtonian notion of “laws of nature” was intended precisely as a replacement for the Aristotelian-Scholastic metaphysics of nature.  The Scholastics held that the regularities in the behavior of natural phenomena derived from their immanent essences or substantial forms, and the directedness-toward-an-end or immanent teleology that followed upon their having those forms.  In other words, regularities reflected the formal and final causes of things.  The early moderns wanted to get rid of formal and final causes as immanent features of nature, and thus replaced them with the notion of “laws of nature” conceived of as externally imposed divine decrees.  To keep talk of “laws of nature” while throwing out God is thus not to offer an alternative to the Aristotelian-Scholastic view at all, but merely to peddle an uncashed metaphor.

So, whereas Carroll glibly asserts that “now we know better” than the Aristotelians did, what is in fact the case is that Carroll and other contemporary naturalists have not only chucked out Aristotelian metaphysics but have also chucked out the early moderns’ initial proposed replacement for Aristotelian metaphysics, and have offered nothing new in its place.  This is hardly a problem for the Aristotelian; on the contrary, it is a problem for anyone who wants to dismiss Aristotelian metaphysics.

Like other contemporary Aristotelians, I would say that the right way to interpret a “law of nature” is as a shorthand description of the way a thing tends to operate given its nature or substantial form.  That is to say, “laws of nature” actually presuppose, and thus cannot replace, an Aristotelian metaphysics of nature.  (Again see the discussion of the metaphysics of laws of nature in Scholastic Metaphysics.)  There are other accounts of laws, such as Platonic accounts and Humean accounts, but these are seriously problematic.  Platonic accounts, which treat laws of nature as abstract entities in a Platonic heaven, push the problem back a stage.  To appeal to such-and-such Platonic laws as an explanation of what happens in the world only raises the further problems of explaining why it is those laws rather than some others that govern the world, and what makes it the case that any laws at all come to be instantiated.  Humean accounts, meanwhile, interpret a law as a statement that such-and-such a regularity holds, or would have held under the right conditions.  But in that case an appeal to laws doesn’t really explain anything, but only re-describes it in a different jargon.

Consider, in light of these points, what Carroll says about causation later on in the debate:

"Why should we expect that there are causes or explanations or a reason why in the universe in which we live? It’s because the physical world inside of which we’re embedded has two important features. There are unbreakable patterns, laws of physics -- things don’t just happen, they obey the laws -- and there is an arrow of time stretching from the past to the future.
 
The entropy was lower in the past and increases towards the future. Therefore, when you find some event or state of affairs B today, we can very often trace it back in time to one or a couple of possible predecessor events that we therefore call the cause of that, which leads to B according to the laws of physics.  But crucially, both of these features of the universe that allow us to speak the language of causes and effects are completely absent when we talk about the universe as a whole.  We don’t think that our universe is part of a bigger ensemble that obeys laws.  Even if it’s part of the multiverse, the multiverse is not part of a bigger ensemble that obeys laws.  Therefore, nothing gives us the right to demand some kind of external cause."

Now in fact it is Carroll who has said absolutely nothing to establish his right to dismiss the demand for a cause as confidently as he does.  For he has simply begged all the important questions and completely missed the point of the main, traditional classical theistic arguments (whether or not he has missed Craig’s point -- again, I’m not addressing that here).  One problem here is that, like so many physicists, Carroll has taken what is really just one species of causation (the sort which involves a causal relation between temporally separated events) and identified it with causation as such.  But in fact, the Aristotelian argues, event causation is not only not the only kind of causation but is parasitic on substance causation.

Yet put that aside, because the deeper problem is that Carroll supposes that causation is to be explained in terms of laws of nature, whereas the Aristotelian view is that this has things precisely backwards.  Since a “law of nature” is just a shorthand description of the ways a thing will operate -- that is to say, what sorts of effects it will tend to have given its nature or substantial form -- the notion of “laws of nature” metaphysically presupposes causation.

Furthermore, what “allows us to speak the language of causes and effects” has nothing essentially to do with tracing series of events backwards in time.  Here again Carroll is just begging the question.  On the Aristotelian-Scholastic analysis, questions about causation are raised wherever we have potentialities that need actualization, or a thing’s being metaphysically composite and thus in need of a principle that accounts for the composition of its parts, or there being a distinction in a thing between its essence, or nature, on the one and its existence on the other, or a thing’s being contingent.

The universe, however physics and scientific cosmology end up describing it -- even if it turned out to be a universe without a temporal beginning, even if it is a four-dimensional block universe, even if Hawking’s closed universe model turned out to be correct, even if we should really think in terms of a multiverse rather than a single universe -- will, the Aristotelian argues, necessarily exhibit just these features (potentialities needing actualization, composition, contingency, etc.).  And thus it will, as a matter of metaphysical necessity, require a cause outside it.  And only that which is pure actuality devoid of potentiality, only what is utterly simple or non-composite, only something whose essence or nature just is existence itself, only what is therefore in no way contingent but utterly necessary -- only that, the classical theist maintains, could in principle be the ultimate terminus of explanation, whatever the specific scientific details turn out to be.

Carroll has not only failed to answer these sorts of arguments (which, again, I’ve only alluded to here -- see the various sources cited above for detailed defense).  He doesn’t even seem to be aware that this is where the issues really lie, and that they have nothing essentially to do with scientific cosmology.  That’s not entirely his fault.  As I have indicated, in my view too many people (and not just Craig) put way too much emphasis on scientific cosmology where the debate between theism and atheism is concerned.  That just opens the door to objections like Carroll’s, since it makes it sound (wrongly, but understandably) like theism as such is essentially in competition with the sorts of models Carroll pits against Craig.

NOTE: Dr. Feser's contributions at Strange Notions were originally posted on his own blog, and therefore lose some of their context when reprinted here. Dr. Feser explains why that matters.
 
(Image credit: YouTube)

The central problem with atheistic materialism is nothing, really. Metaphysical nothing, to be exact.

Any worldview, including atheism, should be able to give some sort of coherent answer to the rudimentary question of why the universe exists. I don't mean “why does this universe exist rather than another?” I mean, “why does there exist anything, rather than nothing?”

Dr. Victor Stenger, in a recent Huffington Post piece on how to debate religion, claims to have an answer. It turns out to be the standard materialist response given by many atheist scientists:

How can something come from nothing?
 
"Nothing" is notoriously difficult to define. To define it you have to give it some property. But then if it has a property it is not "nothing." So this is an incoherent question unless you define nothing as an empty vacuum.

There are several reasons why this answer is wrong, even incoherent and self-refuting:

Reason #1: Vacuum States Are Something, Not Nothing

 
The first reason his answer fails is because a vacuum is something, not nothing. We speak of it like it's nothing, just as I might say that there exists nothing in the space between Mercury and Venus, or that there's nothing in my glass after I drained it.

But in all of these cases, we're using “nothing” loosely. Obviously, there's air in my “empty” glass, and there's radiation, light, gravity, and such travelling through “empty” space. It also possesses dimensonality, which nothingness can't. We can say that there are nearly 60 million kilometers of empty space between the sun and Mercury. If empty space were nothing, it would be incoherent (and impossible) to quantify it spatially.

Likewise, vacuums are something: namely, they are physical states that periodically contain matter, and are not completely empty voids:

"Although the average value of a field in a particular region may indeed be zero, quantum theory predicts that there will be fluctuations around this zero value. Each fluctuation signiies the brief appearance of a 'virtual' particle. Hence, even in a true vacuum, matter fields may appear briefly. Even if the matter fields involved in the vacuum state are rather peculiar and certainly not observable in the sense that 'real' particles are, it is a mistake to think of any physical vacuum as some absolutely empty 'void.'"

Of course, even if they were completely empty voids, in the sense of lacking any particles, they would still exist, possessing width, breadth, and length, etc. So we can imagine something more empty than a vacuum state, and even that would be something, not nothing.

Stenger claimed that the only coherent way to understand nothing is as “an empty vacuum.” Of course, for a vacuum to be described as empty, it must first exist, and therefore, be something. This is easily illustrated by visualizing two people: one has an empty bag, while the other one doesn't have a bag. Which of these people has nothing?

This is similar to the analogy that the physicist Stephen Barr uses to explain the difference between a vacuum state and metaphysical nothing:

"An analogy may help here. A checking account is a system that has many possible states: the zero-dollar state, the thousand-dollar state, the negative-thousand-dollar state (if one is overdrawn), the million-dollar state, etc. And this system can make transitions from one state to another. For instance, by a finance charge or by accruing interest. Even if your checking account happens to be in the zero-dollar state one day, the checking account is nevertheless still something definite and real, not 'nothing.' It presupposes a bank, a monetary system, a contract between you and that bank, all being governed by various systems of rules.
 
Imagine the day on which your bank account balance is zero. Then imagine a deposit the next day that raises it to one thousand dollars. A quantum theory of the creation of a universe (in Hawking’s version, or Vilenkin’s, or anyone else’s) is akin to this transition from an empty account to one full of money. Obviously, therefore, the “nothing” that Hawking makes part of his theory of the creation of our universe is not nothing in a metaphysical sense. The “no-universe” of his speculations is like the “no-dollars” in my account. It exists within the framework of a complex overarching system with specific rules. So we can see that, if true, the way of thinking put forward by Hawking does not threaten the classical doctrine of creation out of nothing."

Here's another way of thinking about this: imagine that tomorrow, scientists (somehow) discovered another universe that was only a quantum vacuum. They would excitedly announce that they had discovered something, and they would be right. They would have discovered something: namely, a universe whose existence we would have to account for somehow.

This is the most glaring problem with Stenger's answer (and the answer given by most other atheist materialists). But there are other problems, too:

Reason #2: When We Say “Nothing,” We Don't Mean “Vacuum States"

 
There is a related, but more fundamental problem with Stenger's answer: it isn't responsive to the question asked. If I asked you what a rock eats, you would rightly answer “nothing.” And you wouldn't mean that rocks eat vacuum states. You would mean that they eat nothing, that they don't eat. If I asked what you know about quantum mechanics, and you said “nothing,” you wouldn't mean that you know all about vacuum states. For that matter, when Stenger says “Nothing like this has ever happened,” he isn't talking about empty vacuums.

In all of these cases, we see that we can meaningfully speak about “nothing” without referring to vacuums. So when Stenger claims that it “is an incoherent question unless you define nothing as an empty vacuum,” the most charitable thing that can be said is that he has no idea what he's talking about.

Stenger is simply changing the question. He's asked how the materialist can get from utter, metaphysical, non-existence to a universe. He doesn't answer this. Instead, he changes it to an argument about whether matter can appear within a quantum state (inside of an already-existing, empty universe). But these aren't even remotely the same question.

It's clear why he wants to shift the debate: Stenger, a physicist, seems to know very little about philosophy (or history, but that's a matter for another day), so he's simply redefined the question to make it about physics. But the actual question isn't a question about physics, but about something more basic: metaphysics. A related question would be: how and why is there a universe that physics can study? Obviously, that's not a question that physics can answer, since physics necessarily assumes the prior existence of this universe in order to operate.

Reason #3: Stenger's Answer Renders Materialism Incoherent

 
Stenger is a materialist, and he's giving a classic materialist (non-)answer to the problem of “nothing.” But to see the absurdity of this question, I wish someone would ask him: “what exists besides the material world?” Just imagine the dialogue:

What exists beside the material world?
Nothing.
Oh, a vacuum?

Since a vacuum is part of the material universe, this answer would be equivalent to saying, “outside of my house is the rest of the inside of my house.” In other words: utter incoherent. It would also be a refutation of materialism, to the extent that he would have to affirm that in addition to the material world, there are also vacuums that somehow exist immaterially.

And of course, if he have any other answer—if he said that there exists something other than the material world—then he would also be rejecting materialism. So you can see why understanding “nothing” as “an empty vacuum” is nonsensical, right?

Reason #4: The Materialist Approach to Nothing is Anti-Scientific

 
Stenger isn't the only physicist with a problem with “nothing.” Neil deGrasse Tyson hosted a debate on nothing last year, and none of the participants were able to come up with a suitable definition. The philosopher Jim Holt pointed out that if you equate “nothing” with “lacking matter,” this would mean that mathematics, physical laws, and consciousness are nothing.

Stenger seems dimly aware of the problem of rectifying his materialism with the existence of mathematics, but his answer is that “Logic and mathematics are exhibited by particles of graphite or ink on paper, or particles of chalk on a blackboard.” Even if that were true (which, of course, it's not), it wouldn't save his position, since mathematical truths exist prior to being discovered or exhibited. Otherwise, he'd have to conclude that mathematicians somehow make 2 plus 2 equal 4, rather than discovering that it does.

The Deeper Problem: Atheistic Materialism v. Science

 
The fourth reason I mentioned points to a broader problem: atheistic materialism is deeply anti-scientific. Later, in the same piece, Stenger dodges the question “Where did the laws of physics come from?” by saying:

"What we call the "laws" of physics are not something inherent in the universe. They are not commandments that material objects must obey. They are principles that physicists build into models to describe their observations. We should not assume that any of the ingredients in the models of physics correspond one-to-one with actual objects of ultimate reality. Of course, they must have something to do with reality to agree with observations. But we have no way of knowing exactly what that something is, so we waste our time arguing about it."

In other words, if he can deny that the laws (or “laws”) of physics are actually true, he doesn't have to explain where they come from, or why they exist (a question that physics, by definition, can't answer). But he can't actually deny that the laws of physics are true, or he would undermine his own authority as a physicist. So we end up with this mishmash, instead: the laws sort of correspond to reality, and sort of don't.

Of course, this still suggests that reality behaves in some sort of mathematical and ordered way (or physics wouldn't work, and wouldn't correspond to reality at all). And of course, he's failed to give any answer to why the universe would be behave in such a mathematical and ordered way, other than to claim that we're wasting our time asking questions that he can't answer.

I'm reminded of the biologist Richard Lewontin, who candidly admitted that he and other scientists accepted materialism in spite of the evidence, rather than because of it, simply to avoid any reference or need for God:

"Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism.
 
It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door."

The debate is often presented, even by Lewontin, as a feud between science and religion. That's not the case: rather, atheistic materialism undermines science as much as it does religion.

If you believe in God, then you can give a coherent account of why there exists something, rather than nothing, and you can explain why that something is ordered and coherent. That gives you the foundation upon which to do real science (which is why, as a matter of historical fact, modern science was born in Catholic universities and monasteries, and why most of the finest institutions around the world were founded by religious groups). If you reject this foundation, you risk ending up in Stenger's incoherence, undermining the truth of mathematics, denying the truth of the laws of physics, and incapable of answering why the universe exists.
 
 
Originally posted at Shameless Popery. User with permission.
(Image credit: Atomic Toasters)

It is a well-known fact that Charles Darwin, the author of that famous, and at the same time infamous, book entitled On the Origin of Species, used to be all over the religious map during his lifetime (1809-1882). Darwin’s personal beliefs remain ambiguous. I think what expresses his ambiguity best is what he wrote in a letter to J.D. Hooker (1861): “My theology is a simple muddle; I cannot look at the universe as the result of blind chance, yet I can see no evidence of beneficent design, or indeed of design of any kind, in the details.”

Did Darwin ever become an atheist? Again, the evidence is rather ambivalent. Even if he did become an atheist, such may have happened after he developed his theory, but not necessarily because of his theory; in his own words, it was the devastating loss of his ten-year-old daughter Annie that made him an agnostic. However, being an agnostic or even an atheist would not really affect the validity of his evolutionary theory.

Where Did Darwin Go Astray?

 
It is not my intention in this article to analyze Darwin’s shortcomings in either biology or theology, but I do think there is a strong flaw in his philosophy, which may have been the ultimate cause that steered him in the wrong direction in terms of both his biology and his theology.

My starting point is one of the statements he makes in his autobiography. When he expresses his doubts about the claims theism makes, he says that the theory of natural selection makes him wonder whether “the mind of man, which has, as I fully believe, been developed from a mind as low as that possessed by the lowest animal, [can] be trusted when it draws such grand conclusions.” And again in a letter to W. Graham in 1881, “Would anyone trust in the convictions of a monkey’s mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?”

I would say Darwin does make a great point here: If the human mind is the mere product of natural selection, we cannot trust any of the conclusions it draws. Curiously enough, though, Darwin applies this insight only to any theological conclusions one might make but not to his own biological conclusions. He doesn’t seem to realize that when he discards theistic claims, he should also discard his own evolutionary claims, because he strongly believes that both are the mere product of natural selection.

It seems very obvious to me that even Darwin’s own theory of natural selection has run into trouble here, by cutting off our reason for reasoning, because once I take natural selection to be the only power shaping me and my mind—in the same way it shapes my DNA—I would have reason to doubt what my rational capacities are really worth. And evolutionary theory happens to be fully dependent on these very capacities—which fact gives it a rather shaky basis.

Somehow, as far as I know, Darwin never fully realized how serious this complication is.  I call that Darwin’s “blind spot.” Darwin was not able, or perhaps not willing, to think outside the Darwinian box, so he missed out on the vast meta-physical territory located outside his physical box. Does this mean that his theory is in serious trouble? It is not, if we take his theory for what it is worth, but it is, if we stretch its scope beyond what it is supposed to cover. Let me explain.

Is Darwinism in trouble?

 
What Darwin did—and what made his evolutionary theory so revolutionary—is that he approached all aspects of life as natural phenomena, which are to be explained by natural causes and physical laws, embodied in objectively testable theories. He was right: If science does not go to its limits, it would be a failure. Thus, modern biology was born. I consider this a great part of Darwin’s legacy, but again, it may not be the end of the story.

Darwin’s theory would be in real trouble, though, if we lose sight of the fact that all scientific theories only achieve local successes that cannot claim any universal validity.  Yet, Darwin gave his biological claims much more power than they actually had; he tried to give them universal validity. He claimed that his biological theory explained not only biological phenomena, but also all other phenomena outside the biological realm—such as sociology, psychology, and even religion. Darwin himself may not have explicitly done so, but his “disciple,” the philosopher Herbert Spencer, definitely did.

I think it’s needless to say that, in all such cases, the boundaries of the underlying theory are being grossly overstepped. Whenever this happens, we end up with an “ism,” an ideology similar to atomism, physicism, evolutionism, materialism, scientism, and so on. All “isms” tend to go overboard; they love to simplify the vast complexity of reality into a simple model; they replace reality with one of its specific maps.

Darwin Himself Is “More” Than a Product of Evolution

 
When he came up with the theory of natural selection, Darwin somehow didn’t realize that he was “more” than one of the products of natural selection. The philosopher Peter Kreeft, for instance, places this philosophical truth in the right context when he says that a projector must be “more” than the images it projects in the same way as a copy machine must be “more” than the copies it makes—or put in more general terms, the knowing subject must be “more” than the known object.

In a similar vein, when Darwin discovered the law of natural selection, he must have been “more” than the theory he discovered. If he were not, he would run into a serious problem of circularity. Even if the theory of natural selection in itself is not the product of natural selection, it still is a product of the human mind (Darwin’s, to be precise).

So I think we should come to an important conclusion: Even when they study the human brain as an object of science, scientists also need the human mind as the subject of science—for without the human mind, with its intellect and rationality, there would be no science at all. One would need a mind before one can study the brain! We have definitely entered meta-physical territory here—unfortunately located on Darwin’s “blind spot.”

Darwin could have cleared the confusion he had created for himself if he could just acknowledge that the human mind is not a product of natural selection. The human brain (including its intelligence) may be a product of natural selection, but that doesn’t mean the human mind (including its intellect) is too. As a matter of fact, the theory of natural selection must assume the human mind, but it can neither create it nor explain it. The brain cannot study itself; we do need a mind to study the brain. So the mind must have another origin than the brain. I would even go further and claim that the mind must be something made in God’s image, a take-off of the Creator’s mind.

Whereas it was Darwin’s conclusion that we cannot trust anything we know about God, I would rather argue the opposite—that we cannot trust anything we know at all if there were no God.
 
 
(Image credit: The Guardian)

NOTE: Dr. Feser's contributions at Strange Notions were originally posted on his own blog, and therefore lose some of their context when reprinted here. Dr. Feser explains why that matters.
 

A reader wrote me to ask:
 

"Please could you elucidate the distinction between a fact and an opinion? I am a secondary school English teacher and there is a lot of rubbish written on this part of the curriculum that would lead to such absurdities as, for example, the atomic weight of sodium is a fact, but the proposition 'raping babies is wrong' is merely an opinion."

 
The manner in which “fact” is commonly pitted against “opinion” seems to rest on multiple confusions. In particular, it seems to rest, in part and in several ways, on a failure to take note of the distinction between metaphysical questions and epistemological questions. It also seems to rest in part on a rather crude and dogmatic application of the so-called “fact/value distinction”—a distinction that is, where ethics is concerned, dubious in any event. Finally, it often seems to rest as well on a failure to distinguish science from scientism.

Let’s walk through this. When people say that such-and-such a claim about sodium (for example) is a “fact,” it seems pretty clear that part of what they mean is that it is objectively true that sodium is that way. That is to say, that sodium has such-and-such chemical properties is a state of affairs that holds completely independently from human convention or subjective tastes. It seems that another part of what they mean, though, is that this objective truth about sodium has been discovered by means of unimpeachable evidence, airtight scientific arguments, and so forth. These two claims are of logically distinct types. The first is a claim about the way the world is—all it a metaphysical claim—while the second is a claim about how we know about the way the world is—call it an epistemological claim. And this difference entails a corresponding difference between two different senses of the word “fact”:

Fact (1): an objective state of affairs

Fact (2): a state of affairs known via conclusive arguments, airtight evidence, etc.

In the same way, when people say that such-and-such is “a matter of opinion,” it seems clear that what they mean, in part, is that it concerns something that is not known via conclusive arguments based on airtight evidence, etc. but is at best believed in on the basis of controversial arguments. But it seems that they also at least sometimes mean that it not a claim that could be objectively true in any event—that its truth could only ever be a matter of convention or subjective taste. Here too we have claims of two logically different types, where the first is an epistemological claim and the second a metaphysical one. And as with “fact,” we need therefore to distinguish between two senses of the expression “matter of opinion”:

Matter of opinion (1): a state of affairs determined entirely by human convention or taste, about which no objective claims can be made

Matter of opinion (2): a state of affairs not known via conclusive arguments, unimpeachable evidence, etc., but at best believed in on the basis of controversial arguments

Now part of the problem with most “fact versus opinion” talk is that the people who engage in it do not make these distinctions. One result of this is that they fallaciously assume that if something is a matter of controversy, then there must be no objective fact of the matter about it—that is to say, that if it is a Matter of opinion (2) then it must therefore be a Matter of opinion (1) and therefore must not be a Fact (1). That this is muddleheaded should be obvious from the following example:
 

"The existence of Pluto is a “fact” in both of the senses we have distinguished. But though it was always a Fact (1), it was not always a Fact (2), for Pluto’s existence was of course not known for most of human history. More to the present point, during the period in which there was debate over what the relevant observations really showed, the existence of Pluto, though still (as it turns out) a Fact (1), was not a Fact (2) but only a Matter of opinion (2)."

 
In general, it is perfectly possible for something to be a “fact” in the first sense but not in the second sense, and therefore perfectly possible for it to be a “fact” in the first sense and at the same time a “matter of opinion,” in the second sense of that expression. It is also, for that matter, possible for something to be a Matter of opinion (1) but a Fact (2). For example, that the speed limit on most highways in California is 65 MPH is a matter of human convention, and that my favorite Scotch is Laphroaig is a matter of taste. But someone could easily acquire airtight evidence that these things are so.

So, that is one problem with most talk about fact versus opinion—it fails to make these crucial distinctions between metaphysical vs. epistemological senses of the relevant terms. But there are other problems too. Precisely because people fallaciously infer from something’s being a matter of controversy to the conclusion that there must be no objective truth about it, they tend to fall for a rather crude version of the “fact/value distinction.” They conclude that, since people disagree about morality, morality must be entirely subjective, so that even judgments like “Raping babies is wrong” must be true only as a matter of taste or convention. We all agree about “facts” but don’t all agree about morality, therefore (so the "reasoning” goes) morality must be a matter of mere “opinion” rather than “fact.” Once we make the distinctions noted above, the fallaciousness of this “reasoning” becomes obvious. And as I show in my essay on classical natural law theory and property rights, there is ample reason to reject the fact/value distinction in any case.

Finally, as the example my reader gives suggests, there also seems to be a tendency to think that what is “factual” is what can be established by means of empirical science, so that what cannot be established in that way must be merely a “matter of opinion.” The scientism implicit in this tendency is difficult to justify even when endorsed by professional philosophers. In the thinking of the average non-professional who casually pits scientific “fact” against non-scientific “opinion,” it is nothing more than a prejudice picked up from the surrounding culture. Certainly it embodies no actual rational basis for rejecting the possibility that solid philosophical arguments can rationally justify moral, aesthetic, and theological claims—thus showing such claims to be entirely “factual” in both senses of the term even if one agrees that they are not the sorts of claims which could be established on empirical scientific grounds.

In summary, then, there seem to be four errors underlying the common tendency to pit fact against opinion, to identify the former with science, and to relegate moral judgments and the like to the latter category. First, it fails to distinguish the relevant two senses of “fact.” Second, it fails to distinguish the two relevant senses of “opinion.” Third, it unjustifiably assimilates moral and other value judgments to “matters of opinion” in the first sense we distinguished. And fourth, it unjustifiably assimilates “facts” in both senses of the term to scientific facts. When we clear up all these errors, we can see that a great deal of what is said in the name of fact versus opinion is, as my reader puts it, “rubbish.”
 
 
Originally posed at Edward Feser's blog. Used with author's permission.
(Image credit: Liechty Buffalo Ranch)

NOTE: Dr. Feser's contributions at Strange Notions were originally posted on his own blog, and therefore lose some of their context when reprinted here. Dr. Feser explains why that matters.
 

Does God have obligations to us? No, He doesn’t. But doesn’t that entail that He could do just any old thing to us? No, it doesn’t. But how can that be? To see how, consider first another, related false dilemma: the famous Euthyphro problem.

The Euthyphro dilemma goes like this: God commands us to do what is good. But is something good simply because God commands it, or does He command it because it is already good? If we take the first option, then it seems we are committed to the possibility that God could make it good for us to torture babies just for fun, simply by commanding it. If we take the second option, then it seems we are committed to saying that there is a standard of goodness independent of God, to which He refers us when He commands. Neither option seems a good one from the point of view of theism. The first makes morality arbitrary, and the claim that God is good completely trivial. The second conflicts with the core theistic claims that God is the ultimate cause of all things, and in particular the source of all goodness. So, we have a problem, right?

Actually, we don’t, because the dilemma is a false one – certainly from the point of view of Thomism, for reasons I explain in Aquinas. As with all the other supposedly big, bad objections to theism, this one rests on caricature, and a failure to make crucial distinctions. First of all, we need to distinguish the issue of the content of moral obligations from the issue of what gives them their obligatory force. Divine command is relevant to the second issue, but not the first. Second, it is an error to think that tying morality in any way to divine commands must make it to that extent arbitrary, a product of capricious divine fiat. That might be so if we think of divine commands in terms of Ockham’s voluntarism and nominalism, but not if, following Aquinas, we hold that will follows upon intellect, so that God always acts in accordance with reason. Third, that does not entail that what determines the content of morality and God’s rationale for commanding as He does is in any way independent of Him.

The actual situation, then, is this. What is good or bad for us is determined by the ends set for us by our nature, and given the essentialist metaphysics Aquinas is committed to, that means that there are certain things that are good or bad for us absolutely, which even God could not change (since God’s power does not extend to doing what is self-contradictory). Now God, given the perfection of His intellect, can in principle only ever command in accordance with reason, and thus God could never command us to do what is bad for us. Hence the first horn of the Euthyphro dilemma is ruled out: God can never command us to torture babies for fun, because torturing babies for fun is the sort of thing that, given our nature, can never in principle be good for us. But the essences that determine the ends of things – our ends, and for that matter the end of reason too as inherently directed toward the true and the good – do not exist independently of God. Rather, given the Scholastic realist understanding of universals, they pre-exist in the divine intellect as the ideas or archetypes by reference to which God creates. Hence the second horn of the Euthyphro dilemma is also ruled out.

Keep in mind also that, as I noted in my post on Law’s “evil-god challenge,” the metaphysics underlying the arguments for classical theism lead to the conclusion that God is not one good thing among others but rather Goodness Itself. Given divine simplicity, that means that what we think of as the distinctive goodness of a human being, the distinctive goodness of a tree, the distinctive goodness of a fish, and so on – each associated with a distinct essence – all exist in an undifferentiated way in the Goodness that is God. As I put it in an earlier post, “in creation, that which is unlimited and perfect in God comes to exist in a limited and imperfect way in the natural order...The divine ideas according to which God creates are therefore to be understood as the divine intellect’s grasp of the diverse ways in which the divine essence might be imitated in a limited and imperfect fashion by created things.”

Divine simplicity also entails, of course, that God’s will just is God’s goodness which just is His immutable and necessary existence. That means that what is objectively good and what God wills for us as morally obligatory are really the same thing considered under different descriptions, and that neither could have been other than they are. There can be no question then, either of God’s having arbitrarily commanded something different for us (torturing babies for fun, or whatever) or of there being a standard of goodness apart from Him. Again, the Euthyphro dilemma is a false one; the third option that it fails to consider is that what is morally obligatory is what God commands in accordance with a non-arbitrary and unchanging standard of goodness that is not independent of Him. (As Eleonore Stump points out in her book on Aquinas, its role in resolving the Euthyphro dilemma is one reason theists should take seriously Aquinas’s doctrine of divine simplicity.)

Now, let us return to the question of whether God has obligations to us. To be obliged is to be subject to a law, where, as Aquinas says, “a law is imposed on others by way of a rule and measure” (Summa Theologiae I-II.90.4). Moreover, “the law must needs regard principally the relationship to happiness,” that is to say, the realization of what is good for those under it (ST I-II.90.2). But God has no superior who might impose any law or obligation on Him, there is no good He needs to realize since He is already Goodness Itself and therefore already possesses supreme Beatitude, and there is accordingly no rule or measure outside Him against which His actions might be evaluated. He is not under the moral law precisely because He is the moral law. “[A]ll that is in things created by God, whether it be contingent or necessary, is subject to the eternal law: while things pertaining to the Divine Nature or Essence are not subject to the eternal law, but are the eternal law itself” (ST I-II.93.4, emphasis added).

But to understand what this means is precisely to understand that God can only ever will what is good for us. For as noted above, God can only ever will in accordance with reason, and it would be perverse and irrational to will to create some thing without willing what is by its nature good for that thing. If “nature does nothing in vain” (Aristotle, De Anima III.9 432b21), then neither does God, the Author of nature. He allows evil, but only because He can draw good out of it (ST I.2.3). Thus, Aquinas, says, “as ‘it belongs to the best to produce the best,’ it is not fitting that the supreme goodness of God should produce things without giving them their perfection. Now a thing's ultimate perfection consists in the attainment of its end. Therefore it belongs to the Divine goodness, as it brought things into existence, so to lead them to their end.” (ST I.103.1)

In this way God loves us and loves us perfectly, because to love is to will another’s good, and God cannot fail to will what is good for us. Since moral goodness concerns the will, it follows that God is morally good, and perfectly so. But His moral goodness is not like ours, since it does not involve fulfilling obligations, acquiring virtues, or the like. Contrary to what some theistic personalists seem to think, that does not make His moral goodness somehow inferior to ours. It makes it infinitely superior.
 
 
Originally posted on Dr. Edward Feser's blog. Reprinted with author's permission.
(Image credit: Guim)