Today, certain lines of attack against classical proofs for God’s existence, such as St. Thomas Aquinas’ Five Ways, seek to undermine foundational metaphysical first principles such as causality, sufficient reason, or even non-contradiction.¹

Such attacks employ, for example, claims that (1) David Hume’s critique of causality is definitive, (2) the existence of the cosmos is simply a “brute fact,” needing no explanation, and (3) modern physics shows that the principle of non-contradiction is routinely violated at the submicroscopic level.

While some “self-evident first principles” appear to hold good for the macroscopic world of everyday experience, they are said to fail in the world of submicroscopic subatomic particles. The famous wave/particle experiments are said to prove that a photon can manifest both as a wave and as its contradictory particle at the same time and in the same place. Some physicists thereby claim that submicroscopic reality regularly violates this most basic metaphysical axiom: that a being cannot both be and not be at the same time and in the same respect.

Yet, these very experiments presuppose the universal validity of said principle, both at the macroscopic scale and at the submicroscopic scale–the latter of which being the level at which it allegedly reveals it is violated. That is, at the submicroscopic scale, the scale at which experimental readings are being taken, the principle is implicitly accepted as inviolable. If a photon manifests as a particle, the experimenter notes that it is a particle. He does not simultaneously allow that it might not manifest as a particle, but as a wave. Observations must be read as they are, not as possibly the opposite–or else, no inferences could be drawn from the experiments. The intelligibility of the wave/particle experiments presuppose the submicroscopic validity of the very principle claimed to be violated. Whatever the actual explanation, no inference against the principle of non-contradiction can be intelligible, since the submicroscopic observations on which the inference is based presuppose its validity.

Others deny the metaphysical principle that from nothing, nothing comes to be, by claiming that particles can pop in and out of existence out of nothing according to Quantum Mechanics (QM). Some speculate entire universes can be so created out of a quantum vacuum. But, according to QM, a quantum vacuum is not really nothing. It is merely the lowest energy state of a quantum field. By “nothing,” the philosopher really means nothing, nothing at all–not the relative “nothing,” which is actually the “something” of the quantum vacuum. Once clarified, the truth that you cannot get something from nothing becomes undeniable.

Still others assume Hume’s notion of “causality” as being a necessary association of mental impressions. Applied to modern science, this is seen as meaning that “given event A, event B will necessarily follow.” Granted, no such universal predictability exists, since something could always interfere with event B. Still, Hume’s notion simply is not the classical metaphysical understanding of causality. In classical metaphysics, if a being or event lacks a sufficient reason for its existence or coming-to-be within itself, then some extrinsic agent must be posited to account for what is lacking in self-explanation. That extrinsic agent is called a cause. Attacking a “causality” that is simply not the one being used by classical metaphysicians in no way furthers the argument of atheists.

Many atheists assume that the universe is its own explanation, and thus, a transcendent deity is unnecessary. More radically, some simply refuse to admit that the cosmos’ existence needs any explanation at all. Of course, the whole point of proofs for God is to disprove such claims and to demonstrate that finite being is unintelligible without an Infinite Being.²

Atheist Kai Nielsen writes, “It is certainly very natural to reject the principle of sufficient reason and to say that it has not been established that there must be … an explanation for everything.”³ The practical problem with Nielsen’s move is that we then have no way of knowing when anything at all needs an explanation. If some things have no explanation, perhaps, nothing has an explanation–thereby rendering all reality unintelligible, including the universal explanations of phenomena offered by modern science. The intellectual suicide of denying all reason is far worse than the claim that the cosmos simply explains itself–a claim of aseity, which can be dispatched by proper use of the proofs for God’s existence.

Attacking metaphysical first principles, modern atheists and agnostics reject the foundational insights of any proof for God’s existence. The natural metaphysics of human intelligence seeks to understand the created world in terms of the intelligibility of finite being. In attempting to grasp the “why” of finite phenomena, proofs for God’s existence arise naturally, since the mind of man rightly suspects that the things of this world do not fully explain themselves, and thus, need extrinsic explanation. Human intelligence follows the path from finite effects, searching for an adequate causal explanation. Metaphysical reasoning inevitably demands assent to the existence of an Ultimate Cause of all creatures, a Cause that is quickly recognized in terms of the classical understanding of God.⁴

The ultimate irony lies in skeptics attacking first principles used in such proofs, when these same atheists and agnostics necessarily use these same principles themselves in everything they say and do. Every statement in atheist arguments claims to express some truth. Yet, it is a basic principle of logic that the same predicate cannot both be affirmed and denied of the same subject at the same time. This is simply the principle of non-contradiction expressed in logical form. If any interlocutor wishes to make an argument against the proofs for God, he must do so in terms allegedly true. He cannot simultaneously be affirming that said claims are equally false. In a word, all arguments against God’s existence must obey the metaphysical principle of non-contradiction, or else, they are rendered meaningless. As in the case of the wave/particle experiments cited above, the attacks on the principle of non-contradiction presuppose the validity of the very principle they attack. So much for claims made against the principle of non-contradiction.

As to the need for reasons or causes, anyone making a philosophical claim must give reasons for his claim. No one can simply make a claim and expect it to be accepted just because he said it. The question instantly arises, “Why do you make this claim?” The claimant must give reasons for his claim, and the reasons must be adequate–or else, no one will listen to him. In other words, the reasons given for a claim stand as causes of the truth of the claim in the hearer’s mind. Absent adequate and sufficient reasons being given, the initial claim will be dismissed as warrantless–and properly so. Philosophical claims require adequate reasons for their truth. They do not stand of themselves. As such, they stand as effects of causes, which causes (or premises) are the extrinsic reasons for the claims’ truth being known in the mind.

Ironically, David Hume, the philosopher most famous for attacking the principle of causality, apparently could not write a book in English without using the word, “because,” or some equivalent expression, throughout–constantly explaining, as we all must do, why what he is saying ought to be believed.

In a word, the principles of non-contradiction, sufficient reason, and causality are all presupposed by those atheists or agnostics attacking their application in the proofs for God’s existence.

But is this merely a matter of linguistics? No. The reason we seek explanation of the truth of philosophical claims is precisely because we want intellectual assurance that the claims made are supported by reasons that reflect a real world foundation for their claimed truth. Otherwise, philosophical arguments would become nothing but the ravings of lunatics, bearing no relation whatever to extramental realities. If the laws of thought do not reflect the actual laws of being, then the mind becomes utterly useless as an instrument with which to know the real. More importantly, unless everything has a reason, we could never tell whether a thing has a reason or not–thereby effectively destroying the connection between thought and reality, since there would be no necessary reason why reality need correspond to thought. Science would be irrational, since no explanation for anything would ever be required.

A being lacking sufficient reason has no explanation for existence either within or outside itself, which means nothing differentiates it from non-being. Yet, the actual act of existence of every being does differentiate it from non-being. Since such self-contradiction is impossible, every being must have a reason for being.

How can we be sure of the truth of these first metaphysical principles, which permeate the foundations of, not only the proofs for God’s existence, but all aspects of the real world? Consider again the basic truth that from nothing, nothing comes to be. Does anyone genuinely doubt its validity once we remove the false concept of “nothingness” proposed by Quantum Mechanics? Its truth is immediately evident to every human intellect that is not playing games with words. We “see” clearly that absolute non-being provides no reason whatever for the coming-to-be of anything–and that is why it cannot come to be. Why do we see this so clearly? How can we be so sure?

The explanation of this absolute certitude about this basic principle of being is that the human intellect is designed to “see” being with perfect certitude, just as the sun naturally illuminates the sky. Were it otherwise, all the logic in the world could never assure us of any knowledge of reality whatsoever. The mind sees being, even if we cannot account for how its nature enables it to do so. Similarly, sight enables us to see even though there is no adequate explanation as to how this is actually possible. (Biological explanations alone do not actually explain sensory experience.) Once the human intellect first encounters any being whatever, it forms a concept of being that endows it with immediate grasp of its universal application–an application possessed with absolute certitude.

What if we were told that there is something on the other side of the cosmos of which we know absolutely nothing, even as to whether it exists or not? What could we say about it? Nothing? Not so. We instantly would know that either it exists or not. And, if it does, it is what it is, it cannot both be and not be, it needs a reason for existence, and lacking a full reason for existence within itself, something else must exist to make up for whatever is not fully explained by itself. These are immediately known first principle certitudes that we can and do, with apodictic assurance, apply validly to this hypothetical unknown entity on the other side of the cosmos.

As with Kant, these principles hold good for all possible experience; unlike Kant, these principles are transcendentally valid, that is, they apply universally to all being in itself. That is because they are based on the intellect’s grasp of the universal nature of being or existence itself–not on some limited essence which applies to only a certain limited expression of existence, such as “macroscopic,” “intramental,” or “phenomena.”

Once one encounters and grasps what is essential to water, that knowledge holds good for all possible water. Still, one might encounter some non-water, whose essence would be unknown. But, once one grasps what is essential to being, that knowledge holds good for all possible being. One will never encounter non-being.

Nor is there another system of philosophy or method of natural science that escapes the basic truths stated above, since every system or method asserts claims in absolute terms and must give reasons for its claims. Even claims that such and such is merely probable or possible assert in absolute terms the claim itself. To say that something is possible is to affirm absolutely a condition of reality compatible with it happening. He who says anything less says nothing at all. Philosophers love to affirm that they are right and everyone else is wrong. That itself is to accept the principle of non-contradiction. The moment they concede the need to give reasons for their brilliant insights, they thereby also concede the principles of sufficient reason and causality. Following the principle of non-contradiction, either the intellect is a trustworthy cognitive power or it is not. If it is not, then all knowledge is a useless charade–and even this inference itself is meaningless. Unless the intellect actually reflects being itself, it bears no relation to reality–again, making it utterly worthless, even less so than the subjective reality of an hallucination.

How is all this possible? Simply because the mind or intellect is made to know being, and to know it with certitude in terms of its basic principles. How is it made this way? We haven’t a clue. To know the answer to this would be to be the One who made the intellect, and we are not He.

But, if we cannot explain how the intellect comes to possess this immediate grasp of being, how can it actually be relied upon? Consider the example of skipping down the stairs two at a time. Presuming we can do this successfully, we know we are doing it in the very act of doing it. But, do we know exactly how we are doing it? Do we reflect on how we do it at that precarious moment? Likely not! Or else, we would doubtless wind up in the emergency room. In other words, skipping down the stairs and knowing that one is doing it are not identical to being able to explain precisely how we do it. Yet, that does not lessen the fact that we are doing it and know with immediacy the truth that we are performing the act–even though, at that same time, we cannot possibly be reflecting on how we are doing it without risking breaking our necks!

So, too, the intellect knows immediately, from the concept of being (which it forms from its very first experience of anything at all), the metaphysical first principles that (1) contradictions are impossible, (2) things must have reasons, and (3) failing to have reasons of themselves, things need extrinsic reasons or causes to explain themselves. These self-evident metaphysical first principles are necessarily employed even by those who deny their existence, and most certainly, validly apply to the Five Ways of St. Thomas Aquinas as well as to other legitimate metaphysical proofs for God’s existence and to any and all aspects of the real world.

In his newest book, Proofs of God: Classical Arguments from Tertullian to Barth (Baker Academic, 2016), leading theologian Matthew Levering presents a thoroughgoing critical survey of the proofs of God's existence for readers interested in traditional Christian responses to the problem of atheism.

Beginning with Tertullian and ending with Karl Barth, Levering covers twenty-one theologians and philosophers from the early church to the modern period, examining how they answered the critics of their day. He also shows the relevance of the classical arguments to contemporary debates and challenges to Christianity.

Today, I sit down with Dr. Levering to discuss some of the thinkers highlighted in his book and whether it's possible to actually prove God exists.
 

 
BRANDON: Let's start with a basic question. Why this book? And how would you classify it? Is it apologetics? Theological history? A little of both?

DR. MATTHEW LEVERING: I wrote this book because I know personally the pain of not merely not knowing whether God exists, but not knowing what the word 'God' is supposed to mean. For many people whom I knew during my childhood, 'God' has just as much meaning as 'the Great Pumpkin'. In case the reference needs explaining, in the 'Peanuts' comic strip authored by Charles Schultz, the character Linus believes fervently in the existence of the Great Pumpkin who each year, according to Linus, rewards the most sincere pumpkin patch by manifesting himself there. There is no way to disprove the existence of the Great Pumpkin, nor is there really any way to speak rationally about him—one either believes or one does not.

My view from experience is that many atheists see belief in God as precisely such a belief for which there is nothing rational to say. It is for this reason, I think, that serious discussion of whether or not God exists is now almost completely absent from elite universities, and is largely missing from the philosophy and theology departments of even many Catholic universities and colleges.

If one reads such publications as The New York Review of Books or other journals of elite culture, books that argue for the existence of God are generally not to be found, whereas a number of high-culture (and low-culture) figures weigh in with admiration of atheism. I notice that a number of recent high-culture books on death, for example, simply take it for granted that the universe is an absurdity and death an annihilation. Thus, it seemed important to examine the arguments for God's existence.

In my book, I examine the Western tradition of arguing for and against the possibility of demonstrating the existence of God. So I'd say that the book is neither apologetics nor theological history, because the goal of the book is to survey clearly and accurately the demonstrations (or counter-demonstrations) of God's existence set forth from 21 great thinkers, many of whom were philosophers.

In my introduction, I treat the Greco-Roman philosophical arguments about God, and then turn to the biblical witness (including Wisdom of Solomon and Romans). I then show that the first Christian theologians—the Fathers of the Church—were proponents of certain fundamental arguments for demonstrating the existence of God. I move from there through the centuries, treating not only proponents of the proofs but also philosophical critics such as William of Ockham, Michel de Montaigne, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, and Martin Heidegger.

The purpose is to encourage students of theology as well as educated readers in general to think seriously about this topic. And the purpose is also to show that belief in the existence of God is rationally justifiable

BRANDON: You titled your book Proofs of God. What do you mean by "proof"? Is it really possible to prove God exists?

DR. LEVERING: When we think of 'proof', we often think of mathematics or of natural science. In these ways, of course, one cannot prove that God exists. But there are demonstrations that begin with the finite or limited modes of existence that we see around us, and then reflect upon what is needed in order to be able to account for the existence of finite things, both in themselves and in their orderly relations. I will not rehearse these arguments here, but they are quite powerful ones.

I show in the book that Montaigne and Hume have to rely upon an absolute skepticism—the view that our intellects simply cannot know what is real about things—in order to undermine the arguments for God's existence. Unfortunately, modern scientists such as Stephen Hawking and Richard Dawkins do not have any idea what the classical arguments for God's existence were, and they present these arguments in laughably ignorant ways.

Even a great thinker such as Immanuel Kant is cut off from the classical tradition and misrepresents it gravely, despite the fact that his skepticism about our ability to know anything in itself (as distinct from in our minds) would have meant that he would not have accepted the demonstrations. Kant, however, does argue that God's existence is necessary for the working of practical reason, and this argument is not as negligible as some might think, though it is certainly not the most persuasive path.

It should be said that the kind of demonstration of God's existence that succeeds does not define or 'comprehend' in an exhaustive sense: God always remains transcendent mystery, even though we can demonstrate that he exists.

BRANDON: Many people dismiss proofs like these because they attempt to prove only a thin slice of God, the God of "classical theism" or the so-called "God of the philosophers." But do some of the arguments prove more?

DR. LEVERING: To know rationally 'that God is'—namely that an infinite cause and source of all things exists, that sheer infinite To Be (something we cannot conceive) is at the root of everything finite—is to know the 'God of the philosophers'. This God is testified to in Scripture both in Wisdom 13 and Romans 1. In this sense, the 'God of the philosophers' is biblically attested. There is nothing wrong with knowing even a very little about God. It is actually quite exciting. So I wouldn't say that the demonstrations reach only a 'thin slice of God'. They reach the living God, since if there were a 'God' who is not infinite To Be (pure, unrestricted, simple actuality), such a 'God' would merely be another finite thing in the cosmos or multiverse of finite things.

The arguments do not establish a personal relationship between us and God, and so in this regard they are tantalizing but far from enough. If we knew that God existed but this God never reached out to us, never personally acted so as to make himself intimately known, we could only be in a state of deep frustration.

Fortunately, there is no reason to think that the 'God of the philosophers' is not also the living God who has revealed himself as supreme love and supreme mercy.

BRANDON: What can we know about God solely from reason? For what do we need revelation?

DR. MATTHEW LEVERING: We can know that God exists and that God is not composite in being or restricted in being in any way. God is infinite, perfect, the fullness of actuality and thus infinite wisdom, goodness, life, eternal presence, and so forth. We need revelation to know that God is one infinite 'essence' in three distinct Persons and thus is perfect communion, without ceasing to be supremely one (not 'one' among many, but 'one' as undivided). We need revelation to know that God the Trinity is the provident Creator who makes all things with the Incarnation as the guiding pole: that is to say, God the Trinity from the outset wills to draw creatures into union with his very own life of Trinitarian communion.

Humans are not meant to live apart from an unfathomably rich personal sharing in the divine life. The generosity of this God is utterly stunning. Even more so when we consider that we are 'bent' away from God, insofar as we often really don't want anything to do with God or with anything but a self-serving love that is not truly love at all. We sometimes imagine that the amazing vastness of space and time shows that 'God', if he exists, could not really care this much for us.

But what the vastness of space/time and the incalculable multiplicity of creatures actually confirms is the wondrous generosity of God; he loves so much into existence. Material existence requires material decomposition, but God has not made all this for everlasting nothingness. His love meets our personal yearning for communion—our yearning to be known and loved and to know and love—and goes further than we would ever be willing to go.

The universe superabundantly manifests the greatness of God, but so does the smallest human cry for interpersonal communion. The truth is that we are always underestimating God, because we try to measure God on our scale, when we can't even measure the universe or even the complexity of a living organism on our scale.

BRANDON: When Christians and atheists debate proofs for God, they often focus on a small group of prominent thinkers such as Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Anselm, and Aquinas. But your book widens the discussion, offering a panoramic view that includes many other figures. Who are some of the thinkers who often get ignored in this discussion?

DR. LEVERING: The early Church Fathers deserve mention, because one sometimes finds an absurd dichotomy between (for example) the Greek East and the Latin West, or between the patristic period and the scholastic period, as though the latter in each pair had succumbed to rationalism. Indeed, Aquinas's best arguments are all found in Gregory of Nazianzus and John of Damascus, so it is a mistake to jump from Aristotle to Augustine and Aquinas. Sometimes the demonstrations of God's existence are thought to be a distinctively Thomist enterprise, and that is an error. If one is dealing with philosophical skepticism (i.e. in cases where the contention that we can know the real in itself is a non-starter), then Blaise Pascal and John Henry Newman provide helpful ways for getting out of the morass.

To my mind, it is important to actually know the arguments of Hume and Kant, especially Hume. One will then be able to see their weakness and the way in which they prop up the arguments of the more serious atheistic philosophers today.

BRANDON: In the book, you explore nearly two dozen approaches to proving God's existence. Which do you consider to be the strongest proof for God? What are some common objections to it?

DR. LEVERING: I think that Aquinas's five ways are the strongest proofs for God, but in saying this I should repeat that they are found already in the Greek Fathers. Objections to the five ways include the notion that 'being' is not real but rather is a mere predicate of an essence. To appreciate why Aquinas approaches 'being' as he does, one needs to consider two things: first, something cannot be and not be in the same way at the same time (this shows that 'being' refers to a reality not merely to a nominal predicate); second, the things we see around us are intrinsically analogous in their modes of being (a rock 'is' in a lesser way than a living tree, a tree 'is' in a lesser way than a living and self-moving frog, etc.). Aquinas's reflections on why finite things must have a non-finite source of their being are priceless, as are his reflections on the order found in non-rational things.

BRANDON: You don't just focus on theistic arguments in your book. You also cover major critics of these arguments such as David Hume. Why did Hume take issue with traditional arguments for God? Do his criticisms hold up?

DR. LEVERING: For an adequate presentation of Hume's views, I should point the reader to the book itself. But Hume's arguments depend upon denying that every effect has a cause. In Hume's opinion, we see effects that seem to have causes, but we have no grounds for extrapolating from this and deducing that all effects must have causes. Hume is aided in this opinion—which at bottom means that we know nothing about anything (radical skepticism) since all we know are the appearances of things—by a merely logical view of being, which allows him to get away with not analyzing what the deepest relationship of an effect to its cause involves.

BRANDON: You devote considerable space to thinkers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In fact, you describe it as "disproportionate treatment...by comparison with the other eighteen centuries." What are some of the key proofs from this period?

DR. LEVERING: The great thinkers of the first eighteen centuries are fairly well identified, or at least representative figures can be chosen. But it is in the last two centuries that atheism and the response to atheism emerges in full force within mainstream culture. In the last century, furthermore, it became fashionable among theologians (Catholic and Protestant) to dismiss demonstrations of God's existence as wrongheaded and not helpful.

So I found it important to direct attention to a relatively wide array of perspectives from the last two centuries, including influential but forgotten Catholic perspectives (Maurice Blondel and Pierre Rousselot, who argue that Aquinas's five ways would be enhanced by starting not with mere finite things but with the experientially known dynamisms of volition and intellect). Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and Barth have been so incredibly influential among theologians that they had to be treated. Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, though now generally seen as the pillar of a discredited preconciliar theology, restates Aquinas's five ways in a clear and intelligent way in critical dialogue with modern thinkers, and so he also deserved attention—especially since I think that the five ways remain the most persuasive paths.

BRANDON: What's the one message you hope readers take away from your book?

DR. LEVERING: God is worth thinking about. Don't be an atheist without pursuing every rational discussion of God, not with the goal of resolving all mystery but with the goal of testing the mind's true limits and the possibility that reality is greater than the empirical.
 
 

In today's Catholic Church, Platonism and Aristotelianism are often considered equal. It is a dangerous error that hails all the way back to the first neo-Platonists in the third century. Simply put, the true description of reality, rightly recognized by the Catholic Church, is that account given by Aristotle (not Plato!) and confirmed by Thomas Aquinas.

But too many Catholics speak of Plato and Aristotle together, as if their metaphysics are identical. They are in fact nowhere near this. And when this error of conflation was combined with the the Enlightenment and the Reformation, the byproduct was a surge in atheism.

These two sixteenth century forces staged a joint revolt against the metaphysics of Aristotle. And the overly close association of Plato and Aristotle was and continues to be a major piece of the puzzle: in our day, Plato is either falsely held to be Aristotle’s equal, or even his philosophical better.

Even among Catholics, it hasn't been articulated commonly, plainly, or clearly enough: to abandon Aristotelian metaphysics and ethics is to veer toward atheism. Aristotelianism alone accounts for the close causal interaction of formal reality—"being qua being" or existence as it really is—and our day-to-day material lives. Platonism flatly rejects such an interaction.

Often, well-intentioned Catholic theologians have been all too ready to consider Plato a practical Aristotelian simply because St. Augustine was a sort of Platonist. (In fact, he was the precise sort—a neo-Platonist—who popularized the conflation. But more on that later.)

At present, suffice to affirm that Plato was not any sort of Aristotelian, proto- or otherwise, except in the very most mechanical sense: Plato first posited “form” and “matter,” and from there said perfectly opposite things (compared against Aristotle) about them. In fact, Plato divorced form from matter. The divorce of form and matter comprises the position of anti-realism to which the Modern world has predictably returned—following the anti-Aristotelian metaphysics of the two forces of Modernism, what I call “Prot-Enlight,” and also the philosophy of Immanuel Kant (the perfect vindication of both the Reformation and the Enlightenment).

And this is in turn due largely to the unhappy fact that neither ancient thinker, Plato nor Aristotle, has been studied with any consistent degree of seriousness, anytime following the Late Middle Ages.

Neo-Platonists and Straussians

As mentioned above, the first historical which equated Platonism with Aristotelianism were the neo-Platonists, who were the contemporaries (and in some cases, collaborators) of the Church Fathers, like Saint Augustine. Rather than emphasizing all of the plain errors in Plato's metaphysics, corrected by Aristotle, the neo-Platonists, especially those at Alexandria, highly exaggerated the few likenesses between Plato's and Aristotle's ontologies.

In other words, neo-Platonism generally regards Plato as an Aristotelian and vice versa. This falsity influenced many students in the early Roman empire, and continues to do so.

One factor that partly excuses neo-Platonism's false equivocation between Plato and Aristotle was the widespread disappearance and general unavailability of Aristotelian texts during this period (the third through the sixth century A.D.). The neo-Platonists wrongly but honestly assumed that Plato's student, Aristotle, had incorporated more of his teacher's system into his own metaphysics than he actually had. Where there existed a hole in Aristotelian scholarship, the neo-Platonists assumed (wrongly, most of the time) that Aristotle probably agreed with his teacher Plato.

And this is understandable enough.

But in today's academy, there is no longer any excuse for this equivocation. In any of today's colleges and universities willing to give Plato or Aristotle a read at all, which is far too few, the influence of cultish twentieth century thinker Leo Strauss prevails. What Strauss and the Straussians did to the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle was to re-bundle them, as neo-Platonism had, into a “package deal.” The Plato and Aristotle package.

And since none of the Straussians gave a sufficiently close or accurate read to either Plato or Aristotle, they tend(ed) to buy the neo-Platonist myth of the close lineage between the two metaphysics. (For whatever reason, Straussians studying the Medieval period in philosophy tend to focus on neo-Platonic-inclined Arab scholars like al-Farabi or Avicena instead of Aristotelian-leaning Averroes or Thomas Aquinas. And this tends to re-solidify the wrong impression inaugurated by the neo-Platonists.) The Straussians have not helped matters.

Prot-Enlight and Immanuel Kant

Naturally, it would require a much longer, drier article to enumerate fully all of the parties involved in the phenomenon of falsely aligning Plato and Aristotle—and what motivated each of these parties. Instead, what merits our attention is the Modern world, where the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the philosophy of Immanuel Kant “undid” most of the corrections Aristotle made to Plato's thinking.

Long after the neo-Platonists, but long before the Straussians, two distinct sixteenth century groups wanted not necessarily to characterize Aristotle as a Platonist (or vice versa) but rather to kill Aristotelianism outright. In the main, Aristotelianism stands for reality’s incipient freedom and morality, its intelligibility, and its teleology. These three prongs not coincidentally characterize the Catholic view of reality. The Protestant reformers and the Enlightenment secularists wanted to depart from Aristotelianism for quite differing, even opposite, reasons.

But they shared at least one common goal: to unyoke the Modern world from the “thralldom” of Rome. Doing so involved the development of a Prot-Enlight ontology which viewed man’s nature as unfree (determinism), nature as unintelligible, and reality as purposeless (random or “non-teleological”). Perhaps a follow-up article, explaining how each they achieved this, and how a German philosopher would vindicate both 150 years later, is warranted.

That German philosopher, Immanuel Kant, vindicated both the Enlightenment and the Reformation by returning (in non-Platonic language) to Plato’s divorce of matter and form. In other words, what is knowable about this world constitutes practical knowledge, but is unimportant; what is knowable about reality constitutes pure knowledge, is important, but unknowable from this world. Such Kantianism falsely claimed to justify the overturn of Aristotle. Even into our age, this claim has fooled most of the world.

Jacques Maritain and the Way Forward

To date, the clearest and most definite argument put forth against the equation of Platonism with Aristotelianism was that of twentieth century Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain. Maritain appraised Plato’s metaphysics as both vastly important for its undeniable contributions to the truth, and yet vastly wrong where it became too specific. (Plato was certainly the “big picture thinker” par excellence!) Such specific calculations about reality required Aristotle’s corrective hand, Maritain reasons.¹

The only metaphysics sufficient to explain this intuitive truth of existence would have to be capable of positing a much closer causal connection between ideal reality—what Plato called the “really real”—and our material existence. Aristotle’s did this, and Thomas Aquinas’ perfected upon it by use of the concept of analogia.

The practical aspect of Maritain’s philosophy, aside from its bright distinction between Plato and Aristotle, was its popularity among non-philosopher Catholics.  Readers of Maritain among the Catholic laity are able, en masse, to understand, from a truly Aristotelian perspective, just

how are we to explain the relationship between [material] things and their forms? Plato replied by calling them likenesses or participations of the forms. But these terms, which later will receive in Scholasticism a profound significance, are in Plato’s system nothing more than metaphors devoid of any strictly intelligible content…[which is] a pregnant conception which, in Aristotle’s hands, was to be purged of all internal contradiction, but which, as presented by Plato, seems self-contradictory…

By rightly pointing out the self-contradiction in Plato’s metaphysics of divorce—divorce between the world and meaning, between material objects and their forms, between reality and semblance—Maritain points us away from Kant, and back to the truth—that is, back to Aristotle and St. Thomas.

Conclusion

When the world embraces anti-realism, a divorce between form and matter, Aristotelian realism is abandoned and atheism naturally follows. The view of a rational, causal, meaningful universe requiring a God drops away…and you wind up with irrational, anti-philosophical worldviews, like the self-contradictory scientism of Laurence Krauss.

Now, this is truly a "strange notion," that the apparent winning philosophy has lost. In the hearts and minds of the West, the philosophia perennis has been passed over in favor of dozens of differing strains of Modernist alternatives over the last five centuries. In truth, only part of this blame can be attributed to the usual suspect one finds beneath popular falsities and behind the executioners of priests and philosophers: old-fashioned, prophet-slaying mobbishness.

In this particular case, the killers and deniers of the truth have been aided—and in that sense exculpated—by confused Modern philosophers themselves, who ought to know better, and who long ago popularized the supposed "closeness" of Plato and Aristotle.

Many atheists and agnostics today insistently argue that it is altogether possible for non-believers in God to be morally upright. They resent the implication that the denial of God will lead inevitably to complete ethical relativism or nihilism. And they are quick to point out examples of non-religious people who are models of kindness, compassion, justice, etc. In point of fact, a recent article has proposed that non-believers are actually, on average, more morally praiseworthy than religious people. In this context, I recall Christopher Hitchens remark that, all things considered, he would be more frightened of a group of people coming from a religious meeting than a group coming from a rock concert or home from a night on the town. God knows (pun intended) that during the last twenty years we’ve seen plenty of evidence from around the world of the godly behaving very badly indeed.

Though I could quarrel with a number of elements within this construal of things, I would actually gladly concede the major point that it is altogether possible for atheists and agnostics to be morally good. The classical Greek and Roman formulators of the theory of the virtues were certainly not believers in the Biblical God, and many of their neo-pagan successors today do indeed exhibit fine moral qualities. What I should like to do, however, is to use this controversy as a springboard to make a larger point, namely that Christianity is not primarily about ethics, about “being a nice person” or, to use Flannery O’Connor’s wry formula, “having a heart of gold.” The moment Christians grant that Christianity’s ultimate purpose is to make us ethically better people, they cannot convincingly defend against the insinuation that, if some other system makes human beings just as good or better, Christianity has lost its raison d’etre.

Much of the confusion on this score can be traced to the influence of Immanuel Kant, especially his seminal text Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone. Like so many of his Enlightenment era confreres, Kant was impatient with the claims of the revealed religions. He saw them as unverifiable and finally irrational assertions that could be defended, not through reason, but only through violence. Do you see how much of the “New Atheism” of the post-September 11^th era is conditioned by a similar suspicion? Accordingly, he argued that, at its best, religion is not about dogma or doctrine or liturgy but about ethics. In the measure that the Scriptures, prayer, and belief make one morally good, they are admissible, but in the measure that they lead to moral corruption, they should be dispensed with. As religious people mature, Kant felt, they would naturally let those relatively extrinsic practices and convictions fall to the side and would embrace the ethical core of their belief systems. Kant’s army of disciples today include such figures as John Shelby Spong, John Dominic Crossan, James Carroll, Bart Ehrman, and the late Marcus Borg, all of whom think that Christianity ought to be de-supernaturalized and re-presented as essentially a program of inclusion and social justice.

The problem with this Kantianism both old and new is that it runs dramatically counter to the witness of the first Christians, who were concerned, above all, not with an ethical program but with the explosive emergence of a new world. The letters of St. Paul, which are the earliest Christian texts we have, are particularly instructive on this score. One can find “ethics” in the writings of Paul, but one would be hard pressed indeed to say that the principal theme of Romans, Galatians, Philippians, or first and second Corinthians is the laying out of a moral vision. The central motif of all of those letters is in fact Jesus Christ risen from the dead. For Paul, the resurrection of Jesus is the sign that the world as we know it—a world marked by death and the fear of death—is evanescing and that a new order of things is emerging. This is why he tells the Corinthians “the time is running out” and “the world in its present form is passing away;” this is why he tells the Philippians that everything he once held to be of central importance he now considers as so much rubbish; this is why he tells the Romans that they are not justified by their own moral achievements but through the grace of Jesus Christ; and this is why he tells the Galatians that neither circumcision nor uncircumcision means anything; what counts is the “new creation.” The new creation is shorthand for the overturning of the old world and the emergence of a new order through the resurrection of Jesus, the “first fruits of those who have fallen asleep.”

The inaugural speech of Jesus, as reported in the Gospel of Mark, commences with the announcement of the kingdom of God and then the exhortation to “repent and believe the good news.” We tend automatically to interpret repentance as a summons to moral conversion, but the Greek word that Mark employs is metanoiete, which means literally, “go beyond the mind you have.” On Mark’s telling, Jesus is urging his listeners to change their way of thinking so as to see the new world that is coming into existence.

It is indeed the case that Buddhists, Hindus, Christians, Muslims, Jews, atheists, and agnostics can all be “good people.” In terms of what we privilege today, they can all be tolerant, inclusive, and just. But only Christians witness to an earthquake that has shaken the foundations of the world and turned every expectation upside down.
 
 
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Pew Forum recently released the results of their study on religion in America. In accord with many surveys over the past fifty years, this poll showed that the vast majority (over 90%) of Americans believe in God but that an increasing number prefer their own spiritual experience to the dogmas and doctrines of traditional Christianity. Also, there is, among Americans, a general acceptance of positive, life-affirming beliefs but a deep suspicion of negative ideas such as divine judgment and hell.

The director of the Pew Forum summed up the findings as follows: Americans are wary of dogmas precisely because we live in such an ethnically, culturally, and religiously diverse society. To place a stress on doctrine, it seems, would lead to conflict and, at the limit, violence in such a pluralistic context. Another commentator observed that the embrace of positive beliefs is a concomitant of the premium that we place on choice and the right to choose. After all, who would ever opt for belief in hell and judgement? I would like to say a word about each of these points.

The reticence about making religious truth claims in the public forum is, of course, a consequence of the Enlightenment. Almost all of the philosophers and social theorists of the modern period—from Descartes and Spinoza to Kant and Thomas Jefferson—were mortified by the wars of religion that followed the Reformation, and they accordingly wanted to find a means of controlling religious violence. Their solution, adopted in most of the modern political constitutions, was to tolerate religion as long as it remained essentially a private matter, something confined to the hearts of individual believers. The result of this “peace treaty” was what Richard John Neuhaus characterized as “the naked public square,” that is to say, a political forum stripped of properly religious assertions and convictions. The events of September 11th simply confirmed for many in the West the wisdom of this arrangement. Since religious people cannot defend their claims rationally, the argument goes, the public appearance of religion will always be accompanied by some form of direct or indirect violence.

I have always found the either/or quality of this analysis tiresome: either religious antagonism or privatization; either September 11th or bland toleration. Our problem is, as Stanley Hauerwas put it, that we have forgotten how to have a good argument about religion in public. The most dramatic indication that rational discourse has broken down is, of course, warfare between the disputants. Once conversants have resorted to fisticuffs, we know that the careful process of marshaling evidence, presenting argument and counter-argument, responding to objections, and avoiding contradictions, has been abandoned. But there is another sure sign that rationality has been left behind, and that is the slide into an anything-goes, your-opinion-is–just-as-good-as-minde sort of toleration.

Truth claims, by their very nature, are public because truth, by its very nature, is universal. It would be ludicrous to say that 2+2= 4 for me but not for you or that adultery is wrong for me but not for you. Therefore, if I were to tolerate your view that 2+2 just might be equal to 6, or that adultery is, depending on the circumstances, acceptable, then I have stepped out of the arena of rationality and public argument, and I’ve essentially given up on you. It’s glaringly obvious that the perpetrator of violence is a disrespector of persons, but the perpetrator who "tolerates" irrational views is just as disrespectful, since he’s despaired of reason.

And now just a brief observation about our unwillingness to accept the tougher, more “negative” features of the religious traditions. In a thousand different ways, we reverence choice in our culture. We choose our political leaders, the products we purchase at the store, the kind of films that we watch, the sort of people with whom we associate. And we revel in the wide variety of choices available to us. But there are certain realities that are so basic in their goodness, beauty, and importance that they are not so much chosen as given. Beethoven’s 9th symphony, the Swiss Alps, Dante’s Divine Comedy, the French language, and moral absolutes are goods that give themselves to us in all of their complexity and compelling power. We don’t choose them; they choose us. We don’t make demands of them; they impose a demand upon us. We wouldn’t presume to excise those sections of Beethoven that are “unpleasant,” or those features of French that are too difficult, or those dimensions of morality that are hard to live up to.

Similarly, Catholics hold, religious truth is a supreme value of this type. Catholics can't, therefore, speak of choosing sections of revelation that they like, while leaving behind that which bothers them. Rather, like the atheist embracing Beethoven’s 9th symphony, we must let it, in all of its multivalence and complexity, claim us. Challenging ideas, I know, for us Americans, but important ones if we're to re-inaugurate a healthy, rational, public square.
 
 
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A recent cover story for “Newsweek” magazine, penned by political and cultural commentator Andrew Sullivan, concerns the “crisis” that is supposedly gripping Christianity. Weighed down by its preoccupation with doctrines and supernatural claims, which are incredible to contemporary audiences, compromised by the corruption of its leadership, co-opted for base political ends, Christianity is verging, he argues, on the brink of collapse.

The solution Sullivan proposes is a repristinizing of Christianity, a return to its roots and essential teachings. And here he invokes, as a sort of patron saint, Thomas Jefferson, who as a young man literally took a straight razor to the pages of the New Testament and cut out any passages dealing with the miraculous, the supernatural, or the resurrection and divinity of Jesus. The result of this Jeffersonian surgery is Jesus the enlightened sage, the teacher of timeless moral truths concerning love, forgiveness, and non-violence. Both Jefferson and Sullivan urge that this Christ, freed from churchly distortions, can still speak in a liberating way to an intelligent and non-superstitious audience.

As the reference to Jefferson should make clear, there is nothing particularly new in Sullivan’s proposal. The liberation of Jesus the wisdom figure from the shackles of supernatural doctrine has been a preoccupation of much of the liberal theology of the last 200 years. Hence, Friedrich Schleiermacher turned Jesus into a religious genius with a particularly powerful sense of God; Rudolf Bultmann converted him into the prototype of the existentialist philosopher; Immanuel Kant transformed him into the supreme teacher of the moral life. And this approach is very much alive today. Deepak Chopra and Eckhart Tolle, to give just two examples among many, present Jesus, not as the God-man risen from the dead, but rather as a New Age guru.

The first problem with this type of theorizing is that it has little to do with the New Testament. As Jefferson’s Bible makes clear, the excision of references to the miraculous, to the resurrection, and to the divinity of Jesus delivers to us mere fragments of the Gospels. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were massively interested in the miracles and exorcisms of Jesus and they were positively obsessed with his dying and rising. The Gospels have been accurately characterized as “passion narratives with long introductions.”

Further, the earliest Christian texts that we have are the epistles of St. Paul, and in those letters that St. Paul wrote to the communities he founded, there are but a tiny handful of references to the teaching of Jesus. What clearly preoccupied Paul was not the moral doctrine of Jesus, but the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. And in the evangelical preaching of the first disciples—preserved in the Acts of the Apostles—we find, not articulations of Jesus’ ethical vision, but rather affirmations of the resurrection. St. Peter’s “you killed the author of life, but God raised him from the dead, and to this we are witnesses” (Acts 3:15) is absolutely typical. And from this followed as a consequence the affirmation of the Lordship of Jesus. One of the commonest phrases in the writings of Paul is Iesous Kyrios (Jesus is Lord), which carried a very provocative connotation indeed. For a watchword of Paul’s time and place was Kaiser Kyrios (Caesar is Lord), meaning that the Roman emperor was the one to whom final allegiance was due. In saying Iesous Kyrios, Paul was directly challenging that political and social status quo, which goes a long way toward explaining why he spent a good deal of time in jail!

And this leads to the second major problem with a proposal like Sullivan’s: it offers absolutely no challenge to the powers that be. It is precisely the bland and harmless version of Christianity with which the regnant culture is comfortable. Go back to Peter’s sermon for a moment. “You killed him,” said the chief of Jesus’ disciples. The “you” here includes the power structures of the time, both Jewish and Roman, which depended for their endurance in power on their ability to frighten their subjects through threats of lethal punishment. “But God raised him.” The resurrection of Jesus from the dead is the clearest affirmation possible that God is more powerful than the corrupt and violent authorities that govern the world—which is precisely why the tyrants have always been terrified of it.

When the first Christians held up the cross, the greatest expression of state-sponsored terrorism, they were purposely taunting the leaders of their time: “You think that frightens us?” The opening line of the Gospel of Mark is a direct challenge to Rome: “The beginning of the good news about Jesus Christ, the Son of God” (Mk 1:1). “Good news” (euangelion in Mark’s Greek) was a term used to describe an imperial victory. The first Christian evangelist is saying, not so subtly, that the real good news hasn’t a thing to do with Caesar. Rather, it has to do with someone whom Caesar killed and whom God raised from the dead. And just to rub it in, he refers to this resurrected Lord as “Son of God.” Ever since the time of Augustus, “Son of God” was a title claimed by the Roman emperor. Not so, says Mark. The authentic Son of God is the one who is more powerful than Caesar.

Again and again, Sullivan says that he wants a Jesus who is “apolitical.” Quite right—and that’s just why the cultural and political leaders of the contemporary West will be perfectly at home with his proposal. A defanged, privatized, spiritual teacher poses little threat to the status quo. But the Son of God, crucified under Pontius Pilate and risen from the dead through the power of the Holy Spirit, is a permanent and very dangerous threat.

That’s why I will confess that I smiled a bit at Andrew Sullivan as I read his article. Like the young Thomas Jefferson, I’m sure he thinks he’s being very edgy and provocative. Au contraire, in point of fact.
 
 
Originally posted at Word on Fire. Used with author's permission.
(Image credit: The Blaze)

A few weeks ago, Stephen Hawking delivered a lecture at the California Institute of Technology titled "The Origin of the Universe," and you’re likely to have heard about it because, according to mainstream media outlets, Hawking has put God out of a job. In an article headlined “Stephen Hawking lays out case for Big Bang without God,” NBC News describes the presentation:
 

Stephen Hawking began the event by reciting an African creation myth, and rapidly moved on to big questions such as, Why are we here? He noted that many people still seek a divine solution to counter the theories of curious physicists, and at one point, he quipped, “What was God doing before the divine creation? Was he preparing hell for people who asked such questions?”

 
It’s somewhat annoying that Hawking implicitly uses the argument “Some religious explanations are silly (such as myths about gods laying eggs that become the universe), therefore all religious explanations are silly.” Surely he would know that Cal Tech is the site where Fr. George Lemaitre discussed the first incarnation of the Big Bang theory seventy years ago with a skeptical Albert Einstein (who felt that the idea of the “beginning of the universe” smacked too much of religion).

Fr. Lemaitre firmly believed in following the scientific evidence where it led, and this did not exclude God from his view of the universe. The NBC News article also describes Hawking as claiming that Pope John Paul II told scientists visiting the Vatican to study the universe but not the beginning of the universe since that is "holy" (this claim is also found in Hawking's A Brief History of Time, 120). There's no way to verify that this exchange took place because Hawking claims that it was said in a private audience. My money is on the Pope telling the scientists that there is a difference between studying the scientific question of the beginning of the universe and the philosophical/religious question of the origin of the universe, something Hawking apparently fails to grasp.

If Hawking wants to exclude God’s creative activity from the beginning of the universe, he’s going to need a pretty good argument. Does he have one? Unfortunately, this particular NBC news article is short on specifics. The articles says only that Hawking believes that a variant of string theory proves that multiple universes can come into existence from nothing and one of those universes will, by chance alone, have the physical properties necessary for life to emerge.

The problem with appeals to string theory is that the theory is as malleable as pizza dough and is almost impossible to empirically verify. Famed Cal Tech physicist Richard Feynman, whom Hawking mentions in his talk, said, “For anything that disagrees with an experiment, [string theorists] cook up an explanation—a fix-up to say, ‘Well, it still might be true’”(quoted in Lee Smolin. The Trouble With Physics: The Rise of String Theory, The Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next, 2007, 125.)

Lee Smolin, whose cosmology influenced Richard Dawkins’s proposal to explain away God in his 2005 book The God Delusion, writes, “The scenario of many unobserved universes [in string theory] plays the same logical role as the scenario of an intelligent designer. Each provides an untestable hypothesis that, if true, makes something improbable seem quite probable.”

The other problem with Hawking’s proposal is the answer to the question “How did the universe begin to exist from nothing?” The metaphysical principle “out of nothing, nothing comes” would preclude an entire universe emerging from nothing through a singularity. The NBC article is confusing because Hawking’s preferred model for the beginning of the universe (the Hartle-Hawking “no-boundary” model, pictured below) does not include a singularity.

The model has a beginning but it has no beginning point or boundary to the universe’s past. Asking what occurred before the beginning of this model is like asking what is north of the North Pole (time just goes in the other direction just as once you reach the North pole you start to go south).

The model simply exists without a beginning event that needs an explanation. The problem with this model is that Hawking relies on imaginary numbers, or the square root of negative numbers, for the time variables in order to preserve a purely spatial representation of the beginning of the universe. While imaginary numbers are helpful in abstract mathematics, it becomes absurd to measure a real entity such as the flow of time using something like “3i” minutes. Even Hawking admits that this is something of a mathematical trick and that “when one goes back to the real time in which we live . . . there will still appear to be singularities” (Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time, 144).

Hawking may have one alternative proposal for the beginning of the universe, but does he have any argument against the idea that God created the universe? The article alludes to one when Hawking makes the joke which Augustine first made about “what was God doing before he created the universe?” Augustine answered the question by noting that before creation there was no time so God was not “doing” anything within a temporal realm.

In other venues, such as the television show Curiosity, Hawking uses this observation as a springboard to argue that time did not exist at the Big Bang, so no cause is needed because causation only applies in time. According to Hawking, since all causes operate in time, not even God could make the universe while he exists timelessly.

However, the cause of an event does not have to be temporally prior to an event in order to be the event’s cause. In his Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant writes, “The greater part of operating causes in nature are simultaneous with their effects...If the cause had but a moment before ceased to be, the effect could not have arisen.”

To understand this, consider a hammer smashing a window. In this case, it is clear that the hammer is swung before the window smashes; the window doesn’t smash before the hammer hits it. However, if the cause (or the hammer moving through the air) disappeared even a microsecond before it touched the window, then the effect would never happen. Instead, there has to be a moment where the cause and effect “overlap” and both happen at the same time. Likewise, the cause of God creating the universe and the effect of the universe coming into existence are simultaneous events that happen at the first moment of time.

Stephen Hawking is a brilliant expert in the area of physics, but just because someone is an expert in how one part of reality works does not mean he is an expert in how all of reality works (or what is called metaphysics). Hawking's claims in this area should be reviewed carefully and not taken solely on his scientific authority.
 
 
Originally posted on the Catholic Answers blog. Used with author's permission.
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