How do we really know that basic metaphysical principles, such as, that contradictions in being are impossible, are both certain and transcendentally true? That is, how do we have perfect certitude that they apply validly to every possible thing, including the God of classical theism?

Some have argued that the principle of non-contradiction (PNC), which states that the same thing cannot both be and not be in the same respect, applies merely to macroscopic reality – to the humans and horses and even bugs we see in the full size world of our normal experience. They claim, in the name of science, that at the submicroscopic level of subatomic entities, such as photons, the principle may be violated. For example, a photon presents experimentally both as a wave and as a particle, which seems to be contradictory.

The problem with this type of objection is that in order to make the observations that allegedly “prove” that a subatomic contradiction can be real, one must be certain that subatomic observations are what they are and are not otherwise. In other words, the observer must assume that the PNC is working at the subatomic level in order to judge, for example, that the photon is in truth behaving as a particle and not like a wave. It is bad logic to presuppose that the PNC is working at the subatomic level in order to “prove” that it does not work at the subatomic level!

What limits the extent of a principle’s application is the nature of that to which it applies. What applies to one kind of being may not apply to a different one. For example, a rule about chickens may apply to all possible chickens, but it may not apply to squid.

The PNC is a principle, not about any particular kind of being, but of being or existence itself. It does not matter what kind of being we consider, for example, whether macroscopic entities or submicroscopic ones. Once the mind understands what it means to exist, as opposed to not existing, it immediately and validly applies the PNC to anything and everything.

While it is possible for something to be a non-chicken, it is not possible for something to be a non-being. The PNC applies to both creature and God, not because they are like in nature – which they are not, but because both have being or existence. So, once we understand what it means to be, we know that the PNC applies both to creature and Creator and to every least existing aspect of every possible being. That is, it is transcendentally true.

The Problem with Some Logicians

Others object that the principle of non-contradiction is really merely a rule of logic, which says that the same predicate cannot be both affirmed and denied of the same subject. In this view, the rule may have universal conceptual validity within the mind, but what is to guarantee that it applies universally to extramental beings? How do we know that the PNC can apply validly to a transcendental entity, like the God of classical theism -- the reality of which would be utterly beyond the finite world in which we live?

The problem is that even such objectors, like the rest of us, find themselves unable to think of anything, except in terms of “being” or “non-being.” Even claiming that truth is merely a matter of probability still requires absolutely affirming the state of probability.

What makes the mind work this way? What makes skeptics keep trying to find contradictions in the God of classical theism, as if that would prove with certitude that such a being is impossible? They keep demanding that God obey the PNC in spite of being highly skeptical about its transcendental application to God.

We must recall that the concepts used in logic do not represent direct knowledge of things themselves, but merely abstract notions of things existing in the mind. What we first know, in fact, is not a concept, but real things in a real world – even if that real world is merely a really experienced bad dream. Even if someone is hallucinating pink elephants dancing on the ceiling, the hallucinations are still real as hallucinations. In knowing our own hallucinations, we, in fact, know something real in its own order.

It is objected by some that we simply do not encounter abstractions, such as “being” or “existence.” But, the concepts formed through abstraction, which are the ones logicians deal with, presuppose encounters with real things. You don’t form a concept of “animal,” unless you first have judged that you have encountered a real animal from which to abstract the universal form of animal.

The first knowledge we have of things is had in a judgment of existence, that is, that “something is real.” If I encounter a tiger, I judge that something is real and tiger-like in my experience. This judgment contains both the nature of the tiger and its reality or being, confusedly apprehended at first.

It is not the structure of my language that determines the content of my experience, but the reverse. That is, it is the content of my experience which has developed the structure of my language. First, we know things, and then we invent words to describe them. Even though my words reflect the structure of my experience, they do not determine it. Rather, as I reflect on what I perceive, I express language which I judge describes it correctly.

Unlike irrational animals, I not only have sense experience of some object, but I also am fully aware that I am judging that it actually exists before me. That is why it is correct to say that “I know something to be or exist,” not by sense knowledge alone, but by an intellectual judgment that this is true.

Rather than some presupposed theory forcing the description of experience, it is the experience itself as understood that forces the description of what is taking place. That is, first there is awareness of something there, second, self-reflective awareness of the awareness itself, and third, awareness of something (the self) having the awareness of something there.

Thus, the primary act of knowing things is a judgment of some kind of nature being real, that is, as existing. This is not to be confused with the concepts, empty of all existential content, which the logician studies in terms of their proper relationships. The logician’s concepts need not exist extramentally at all, once they are abstracted from really existing things or formed through a fictional combination of qualities taken from real things, as in the case of the unicorn.

That is, we first encounter some real being, even if it is merely a real mental experience, and only secondarily do we form the concepts of things that we use in logic.

We know full well that our judgment about whether something is really existing or not is not a mere judgment about relationships between concepts, but about real being itself.

This is why judgments about the nature of being itself do not fall under the purview of the science of logic, the practical science which determines correct relationships between concepts. The rule against contradictions in predication is simply an application to logic of the metaphysical principle of non-contradiction. Metaphysics regulates the science of logic, not vice versa.

That is why the Thomistic philosopher Jacques Maritain tells us that “…logic is the science of conceptual being and not a science of real being.”¹

The Foundation of Certitude

Nor is there any doubt about the reality of being as encountered in lived experience. I often tell people just to try sitting on a large roofing nail. One might doubt whether the experience is (1) merely one of a subjective psychosomatic symptom or (2) one caused by an objectively real extramental nail. But one cannot doubt the reality of the pain involved!

That is because doubt is the fear of error, that is, the fear that something may not be the way we think it is. But, this means that there must be a real distinction between what one thinks to be real and some distinct objective reality. For example, if I think my car to be in my garage, but it actually has been removed by a thief. But, in the direct experience of the nail-induced pain itself, although I might doubt the reality of the nail, I cannot doubt the reality of the pain, because my experience of the pain is identical with the pain’s very reality – thereby allowing no possibility of a real distinction between my experience of the pain and the pain itself.

This is why we have perfect certitude that we encounter reality or being in our first experience of anything at all. For, in experiencing something, there can be no real distinction between the act of experiencing and its own real content, regardless of whether the experience is merely of some subjective fantasy or directly of some external object. The lack of a real distinction between the act of experiencing something and the reality of the experience’s own content precludes the lack of conformity required for the possibility of error and its associated doubt – at least as far as to the fact that something, some reality, some being has been encountered.

I can doubt whether the pink elephant I hallucinate dancing on the ceiling exists extramentally, but I cannot doubt that I am experiencing seeing one. Also, in that selfsame act of experiencing anything at all, we know immediately in a general way what the nature of being is, since being’s nature is given to us with certitude as our mind conforms to the real being of its own experienced content. We do not know a mere concept of being, but being itself in this direct experience of it – in the mental act in which we judge, “Something is, something is real, something is existing.”

This immediately-given understanding of being we express in judgments, such as, the principles of identity (that being is being) and non-contradiction (that being cannot be non-being). Our mind finds itself conformed to being itself in the selfsame act by which we first encounter being and in every subsequent such act. That is also why even skeptical logicians cannot help but think of all reality in terms of being and non-being, even if they formulate denials of such knowledge in their scholarly tomes.

No Rabbits Out of Genuinely Empty Hats

Just as we are perfectly certain that being cannot be non-being, we are equally certain that non-being cannot beget being. Everyone who is intellectually honest knows and admits that you cannot get something from nothing. A few confuse the “nothing” of quantum mechanics with the “absolutely nothing at all” that the philosopher is talking about. But, when they say that you get protons popping into existence from nothing in quantum mechanics, the “nothing” they refer to is not really nothing at all: it is merely a “quantum vacuum,” which is the lowest state of energy thought to be found in physical reality. It is still something – not the “total non-being” to which the philosopher refers.

Even materialists do scientific handstands to try to avoid the suggestion that the cosmos was actually somehow generated from absolute nothingness. They do not seem to want to get caught in the position of trying to explain how a magician’s completely empty hat can generate a real rabbit.

The Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR)

The human intellect knows truth in the self-reflective act of knowing its own conformity to reality or being. That is why certitudes such as the PNC are possible. But the intellect or mind is always searching for reasons to assure itself that it is in conformity with reality or being so that it knows that perfect certitude has been achieved. The Thomistic PSR has to do with whether or not all things have reasons for being or for being true.

In seeking to understand whether all things must have reasons for why and how they exist, we must first make a distinction. Some things are directly evident to our senses and can be known to exist because of this. On the other hand, the principle of sufficient reason addresses the question as to whether all things must have reasons for their existence – reasons founded in being or reality sufficient to account fully for what exists.

Note the difference between what is known to be true from direct experience and what may still not be explained by that experience. For example, we may know that something exists by direct observation. Still, that does not mean that such a being is self-explanatory or is the reason for its own existence. For example, I know that the sun exists because I can see it. But that is not the same thing as to know why the sun exists, that is, whether there is a reason for it existing and what that reason may be.

Thus, the existence of what is directly experienced is truly affirmed in the sense that we have immediate knowledge of its presence. But that is not the same thing as its being able to explain why it is present or existent.

The plain fact is that we use our minds to reason to conclusions that we expect to be true. If we could not trust our reasoning processes to lead to true conclusions, then all human knowledge would be worthless – philosophy, theology, and all the natural sciences alike. But true conclusions demand true reasons leading to them. If a conclusion is true when it conforms to reality or being, then solid reasoning requires true premises – premises or reasons that faithfully reflect objective reality or being itself.

It makes no sense to trust the mind to lead us to know true being, and yet, not to trust the way the mind demands reasons for all things in order to reach that true being.

If (1) the mind demands reasons for things that do not fully explain themselves and if (2) we trust the mind to tell us the truth about reality when it reasons correctly, then the fact that the mind is not satisfied with things that fail to fully explain themselves proves that there must be a reason for everything.

In other words, since the mind demands reasons that conform to reality or being for any statement or thing that does not fully explain itself, it necessarily follows that a thing or statement must fully explain itself in order not to need extrinsic reasons.

I say, “thing or statement,” because, although the mind reasons in terms of judgments expressed as statements, those judgments are true solely when they conform to being. So, if a thing is explained by premises, which are expressions of judgments about being, true reasoning manifests the actuality or being on which something actually depends. Thus, I shall speak of true premises as actual extrinsic reasons for something actually having being or existence.

Just as the extrinsic reasons must conform to reality or being, a thing can fully explain itself only if that self-explanation itself conforms to reality or being. That is, it must be a real intrinsic explanation of why the thing exists as it does. To the extent a thing fails to fully explain itself, then, other reason(s) must exist to explain the thing’s being.

That being the case, it must be that all things either are fully their own reason for being, or else, to the extent that they do not have sufficient intrinsic reasons for being, there must be extrinsic reasons sufficient to complete their explanation.

This is merely a complicated way to state the principle of sufficient reason, whose metaphysical expression is this: Every being must have a sufficient reason for being or coming-to-be either within itself or from some extrinsic reason or reasons. And, since these reasons are grounded in being or reality, the PSR is itself one of the metaphysical first principles of being.

The principle that you cannot get something from nothing, or being from non-being, is simply an application of the principle of sufficient reason.

Thus, being itself must be known truly by the mind for the mind to be a valid faculty with which to know reality. That is why the mind must know true being in its true judgments and why being must have a sufficient reason for itself either in itself or from another. If a thing’s sufficient reason is “from another,” that is what we speak of as a “cause,” and hence, everything that does not fully explain itself (meaning, an effect) necessarily requires an extrinsic sufficient reason (meaning, a cause).

Some, especially scientific materialists who normally demand explanations for all observable phenomena, will claim that possibly some things, such as the very existence of the entire cosmos itself, are simply “brute facts” for which there is no explanation or reason at all. In so doing, they fail to grasp the necessary relationship between the mind’s validity as an instrument of true knowledge and the need for things to have existential reasons that correspond to the mind’s demand for reasons – as was shown above. In effect, a “brute fact” is no more possible than is the production of something from absolutely nothing, which latter truth every intellectually honest person knows is totally impossible.

Transcendental Nature of First Principles

For my own part, I have not the least doubt that these two first principles, (1) that being cannot both be and not be, and (2) that being cannot proceed from non-being, are apodictically true and apply to all possible beings. Nor do I think that, if these statements are properly understood, any intellectually honest, intelligent person can actually deny to himself either of them. Yes, the principle of sufficient reason has broader extension than the principle that you cannot get being from non-being. Yet, as shown above, even though it is not as clearly seen by all as is the principle that you cannot get being from absolute non-being, the principle that all beings must have a sufficient reason is equally valid and universal as is every other metaphysical first principle, simply because the laws of being are as universal as is being itself.

These metaphysical first principles apply to all beings, including the God of classical theism – for the simple reason that the mind clearly sees they must apply to any being simply in virtue of its existing. Some claim that being is a genus and, as such, cannot be analogically and transcendentally applied to God. This error arises from confusing logic and metaphysics.

In logic, any universal term, at best, rises to the level of a genus. But, any genus must be understood to be predicated univocally in all instances. Hence, the Thomistic claim that being must be predicated analogically and transcendentally is alleged to be invalid – which it would be, were it merely a concept of the type studied by logicians.

But, the understanding of being that the metaphysician forms is not formed through the normal mode of abstraction assumed by logicians. Rather, it is formed in a judgment of actually experienced being. From that being which is known in a judgment of real being, a mere concept of being is formed, which is then studied by the logician. As such, that logician’s concept would, indeed, be predicated merely univocally.

But, such a concept of being is merely a logical construct existing in the mind of the logician. It is an “artifact” constructed by abstraction from the real being of some existent thing or quality of a thing. What the mind initially and directly knows is not merely the concept abstracted from the thing, but the thing itself: Scio aliquid esse. “I know something to be.” Not, I know a concept of something to be.

When the mind grasps merely a concept of a thing, it abstracts some essence or essential quality from the really existent object of the judgment, and hence, leaves behind the very existence which differentiates the concept of being from the real being the mind first knows.

That is why being, considered as a mere concept, would be restricted to univocal predication, whereas the mind knows that real existence of real beings can vary analogically from being to being and that, whether finite or infinite, the laws of being apply to all real things. Logic is not metaphysics.

As Maritain puts it, “For by definition none of the real functions of being, but only its conceptual functions, are the proper and the direct object of logical study. There could be no more serious error than to suppose that the being of metaphysics is this being envisaged under the aspect of conceptual being….”²

That is why no one can resist applying such metaphysical first principles as non-contradiction and sufficient reason to all beings, including the Infinite Being. What has been called “the natural metaphysics of human intelligence” drives the mind to affirm the first principles of being as true and as applying to anything that exists in any way. But, they apply analogically, not univocally, since “being” is not a logical concept, but a metaphysical notion.

This is why even analytic thinkers have trouble resisting the temptation to look for what they think to be inherent contradictions in the God of classical theism. Yet, from their perspective, the law of non-contradiction need not apply to a transcendent being, such as God. If they really mean what they say, any alleged contradiction between an infinitely good God and the presence of evil in the world should be ignored – since, for them, contradictions in God might not be a problem! I have dealt with this false allegation against the goodness of God in another article on Strange Notions.

Without addressing the rest of the many details of the classical proofs for God’s existence, successfully defending the transcendental validity of these metaphysical first principles also defends common core premises essential to such proofs. Since many of the recent objections against the classical proofs for God rest on attacking the first principles of being, it should now be all the more clear that such proofs are effective and valid and that sound reason proves that the existence of God can be known by the light of unaided human reason.

For a more in-depth treatment of the themes discussed in this essay, see my longer article, “How Metaphysical Certitudes Anchor Proofs for God,” which appeared in the online Homiletic & Pastoral Review.

Ever wonder what it is like to be in the next life, that is, to be dead? (I thought it best to leave the word “dead” out of the title of this essay.) Since this is something we all must face sooner or later, I thought it might be of interest to engage in some rational speculation about what a human being experiences, if anything, after he becomes unconscious for the last time.

This is not a theological enquiry. So, depictions of hellfire and eternal bliss, though they may be apologetically defensible, are not where this essay is going. Rather, I shall explore what natural reason might tell us about afterlife possibilities.

Now one can make the rather impertinent observation some have offered about the curious situation of the atheist at his own funeral: “All dressed up and nowhere to go.” That is, after all, the ultimate implication of most forms of skepticism, materialism, and atheism.

Reincarnation, or, Getting Another Bite at the Apple

On the other hand, we have the doctrine of metempsychosis or reincarnation offered by both the Vedic tradition in the east and Plato in the west. In that view, dying is followed by birth into another life. Plato, in his dialogue, the Timaeus, expresses his own version of metempsychosis, when he postulates that the form of life we reenter depends on how we live this present life.

“He who lived well during his appointed time was to return and dwell in his native star, and there he would have a blessed and congenial existence. But if he failed in attaining this, at the second birth he would pass into a woman, and if, when in that state of being, he did not desist from evil, he would continually be changed into some brute who resembled him in the evil nature which he had acquired, and would not cease from his toils and transformations until he followed the revolution of the same and the like within him, and overcame by the help of reason the turbulent and irrational mob of later accretions, made up of fire and air and water and earth, and returned to the form of his first and better state.”¹

Prescinding from Plato’s speculation about moving down and back up the ladder of living things and since we presently know what it is to experience our own human life, it is not all that difficult to imagine reentering the same kind of life we presently have.

Death Without Continuous Reincarnation

Far more intriguing is the prospect of trying to imagine what it is like to experience life after death when no immediate or proximate reincarnation occurs. Since (1) death entails the loss or corruption of the entire human body and (2) it appears that all we know in this life comes to us through the senses and brain, which are material organs of the human body, what would life after death be like? What could or would we know or experience either intellectually or sensitively in such a hypothetically disembodied state of being?

This last view is doubtless of greatest interest to the majority of those who share some form of the Christian religion, which dominates in Western Civilization. Now, I am not presuming the revealed content of that religious worldview, but merely am noting that its central doctrines entail the notion of death and some form of afterlife for the spiritual soul – but without any notion of proximate reincarnation. The Christian doctrine of bodily resurrection pertains to something that happens for most all men, not at their immediate time of death, but at the end of the world at some point in the future. Until that indeterminate span of time has elapsed, the spiritual soul must exist without a corporeal body. It is that purely spiritual condition of temporally extended human existence upon which I now focus my attention.

Indeed, among leading Christian figures we have, in the prayer attributed to St. Francis of Assisi, the beautiful truth expressed that “…it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.” One cannot but wonder exactly what this statement might mean to us, the living, who have no direct experience of what it appears to affirm.

What Reason Can Say About the Separated Soul's Experience

Certainly, most human beings admit to having no direct evidence of what it is like to be dead before we are actually dead. But we do have some (1) speculative philosophical arguments about what the separated soul can know and (2) possibly analogous experiences which some have reported to us about this condition of continued immaterial existence.

St. Thomas Aquinas offers a rather complete speculative explanation of what man’s spiritual soul can know after the soul’s separation from the body.²

St. Thomas affirms that the separated soul can no longer operate using sense powers or sense organs, since they belong to the body and the soul of the deceased is no longer the actuating form of the body, Thus, such acts as forming and understanding universal concepts abstracted from phantasms, which themselves are formed from physical sense experience, are no longer possible when we are dead. Still, he insists that “... the soul in that [separated] state understands by means of participated species resulting from the influence of the divine light ….”³ In other words, while the soul no longer can perform such acts by its own natural bodily powers, God can infuse such knowledge into it.

For the same reason, the separated soul can have knowledge of some singulars to which it is related in some fashion. This is not accomplished by abstraction from phantasms, but “… by the infusion of species by God, and in that way it is possible for the intellect to know singulars.”⁴ Such knowledge would naturally entail formation of judgments and self-reflective awareness of one’s own existence in the act of making of such judgments.

However, St, Thomas maintains that “… by natural knowledge [that is, unless God directly infuses such knowledge], … the dead do not know what passes on earth.”⁵ The notable exception is the state of the blessed in heaven, who see God, and who, through Him who sees all things, are infused with knowledge of things that take place on earth.⁶

But, What is it Really Like to be Dead?

While the preceding speculative musings may be of great interest to the philosopher or theologian, they do little to help us ordinary mortals to imagine what it is really like to be dead. The unfortunate fact is that we simply cannot imagine the spiritual experiences described above for the simple reason that imagining entails the use of the imagination, which is a sense power whose function depends on bodily organs, and thus, completely terminates at the time of passing into the next life. We need something that will help us to grasp precisely what it would be like to be a disembodied spirit that is still, in a meaningful sense, having a real life experience. How would it “feel” to be living, but without a body and without the body’s sense organs that we need for sense experience in this life?

I do not herein propose to demonstrate the spirituality and immortality of the human soul. Those are proper topics for other venues and I have addressed them myself elsewhere, including on this Strange Notions site. Rather, I propose here simply to give two examples of reported human experience that depicts the content of “disembodied existence,” namely, (1) those drawn from near death experiences and (2) those drawn from our own experience of dreams.

Near Death Experiences

I do not intend to give a broad analysis of NDE here, but merely want to show that those who claim such experiences often claim out-of-body events, some of which appear to be verified by others. For example, we have the rather common NDE claim of people feeling themselves “floating” up out of their bodies, say, on an operating table, and then “seeing and hearing” the doctors and nurses – being able correctly to report what they were wearing and actually saying and doing – all while being unconscious from anesthesia.

Perhaps, a case some readers may have seen reported is that of a migrant worker named Maria, who had a severe heart attack and was in cardiac arrest. She was able to look down from the ceiling and watch the medical team at work on her body. “At one point in this experience, said Maria, she found herself outside the hospital and spotted a tennis shoe on the ledge of the north side of the third floor of the building … [and] … was able to provide several details regarding its appearance, including the observations that one of its laces was stuck underneath the heel and that the little toe area was worn.” Her observations were later confirmed in exact detail!

Such experiences of being “out of the body,” and yet having accurate sense knowledge of objects and people which the patient cannot possibly perceive in their “medically dead” state, attest to the possibility of actual sensory experience of someone while in a seemingly disembodied state, that is, someone whose consciousness has actually separated from his body and yet is able to have continued and verifiable sense experience.

Such NDE experiences tend to confirm the possibility of “disembodied spiritual experience.” I do not claim that the people involved are actually dead, since clearly their consciousness subsequently returns to their bodies. But they do meet the criteria for some form of disembodied sense experience.

“Disembodied Dreams”

My final example of a “disembodied experience” can easily be verified by all of us, namely, as experienced in a dream. I suspect that most of us have had the experience of sitting in a theatre and watching a movie in which we become so engrossed that we literally “forget ourselves” and, as it were, start “living” on the screen in front of us. We lose consciousness of ourselves as having separate and distinct bodies sitting in seats, which are not part of what is taking place on the screen before us.

Similarly, we have probably all had dreams in which we were victims of some sort of bodily attack (as in a good nightmare!) and well aware of a sense of being in a body. In deep dreams, we can sometimes experience things as if we were in a body even though the experiences are not those of our sleeping body.

Moreover, I have certainly had many a dream myself in which it was like the theatre experience. I was watching often very vivid scenes of events, things, and persons engaged in various activities of which I was simply an observer, having no self-reflective bodily experience at all.

Nothing prevents God from giving us similar experiences of sensible reality, since anything our natural powers can do to actuate our subjective experience, God can do as well. Call it miraculous or merely how things work in the afterlife. Either way, the experience is that of a disembodied spirit and it can be fully as real, or more so, than any experience we have in this life – only in a disembodied form like that of a vivid dream -- one whose objective reality cannot be epistemically doubted.

I am not trying to offer a speculative defense of the reality of a spiritual afterlife in this essay. My sole purpose has been to show what it might be like to be alive and fully engaged in both intellectual and sensitive experiences in a spiritual afterlife, while awaiting what Christians believe to be a later resurrection of the body. Indeed, we might have to adjust the impertinent observation about an atheist at his funeral that I offered at the beginning of this essay. What if it turns out that the atheist is all dressed up and then shocked to discover that he does have somewhere to go?

Skeptics have long objected to Catholicism on grounds that it is obvious that the Blessed Virgin Mary, if real, could not possibly hear and answer all those hundreds of millions of prayers addressed to her personally every day by faithful Catholics and many other Christians.

Given that we can barely concentrate on but a single question at a time, this objection seems, on its face, impossible to answer rationally. This element of Catholic belief seems simply absurd.

Still, there exist several possible explanations as to how this central element of Catholic spiritual practice can be true. These explanations may also apply to other Catholic saints, such as the much overworked St. Anthony, who hear and answer nearly countless prayers each day.

First, there is the possibility that God simply answers the prayers on Mary’s behalf. In this way, the Blessed Virgin might appear to hear and respond to prayers from all over the world at once, while not requiring her to do anything that is impossible on her part – since the entire process would be accomplished by the infinite knowledge and power of God, not directly by Mary herself. Nonetheless, since Mary wills whatever her divine Son wills, her will would be in accord with everything that God thereby does for those whose prayers were addressed to her.

A second possibility results from the fact that time is limited in duration, whereas eternity is entirely outside of time.

It is extremely important to understand that, when we imagine Mary or the saints somehow knowing all these seemingly countless prayers at once, we are thinking about how we ourselves process such information through time in our present bodily state. For us, it takes time to hear and understand and to think of how to reply to a petition. And so, to think of handling all these prayers at once simply defies belief.

Yet, when the soul is free of the body and united to God in eternity, this temporal experience, which is so bound up with our bodily existence, no longer obtains. Trying to imagine all these prayers at once is very misleading. The soul’s actual existence in eternity does not have this daunting temporal component. It must be conceived in an entirely different manner. After death, the separated soul is no longer limited in time by dependence on its physical body. Through infused knowledge from God, the soul can know instantly that which would take much time to assimilate during bodily life.

Since time and eternity are incommensurable, it is also conceivable that Mary could actually hear and respond in the eternal now of eternity “after” the many billions of prayers were uttered throughout a lengthy, but limited, duration of earthly human existence.

Since God is entirely outside of time, Mary’s intercession even after temporal occurrence would impact past events. Her actions would produce effects retroactively, since God would know “ahead of time” that she would intervene on someone’s behalf. Literally, Mary would have the rest of eternity in which to address the prayers of her devout believers.

I do not make the mistake here of thinking of eternity as merely endless duration, but rather understand that the soul, even of Mary, that participates in the experience of God’s eternity, does so without the limitations of temporal duration.

One of the reasons we find it so hard to imagine Mary simultaneously knowing so many prayers is that it takes time for us to process such knowledge while in our physical bodies. But, united with God in his eternity, the soul’s knowledge participates without the passage of time, and so, would not be limited as it is in this life as to how many elements could be known “at the same time.” Regardless of the exact way in which time relates to eternity, God can act on the basis of the prayers to Mary, as well as her intercession which God would foresee and apply even to past events.

Third, and finally, just how much diverse knowledge can an individual person possess and respond to simultaneously? Such knowledge could be of immense magnitude. This possibility is drawn from a phenomenon unnoticed by most thinkers, but which is still very real. I take this possibility from what we know about the simplicity of cognition – both at the sensory and intellectual levels. I have written on this topic previously on Strange Notions here and here as well as in the Homiletic and Pastoral Review.

How Immateriality Enables Perception of Wholes

The key insight is that even mere sense perception is based on the immateriality of the knower, since even animals having solely sensory cognitive powers can still know things as unified wholes, that is, all at once. Such unified knowledge of wholes simply cannot be had by any purely physical instrument or mechanism.

Consider how physical instruments store or represent data on an extended medium, such as a computer disk or television screen. Each part of the medium represents one part of the object depicted. For example, to represent an entire carrot on a television screen, the surface of the screen is composed of hundreds of thousands of separate pixels, which are either illuminated or not. Individual pixels know nothing. An entire carrot can be “imaged” by a pattern of thousands of illuminated, but separate, pixels. Yet, the screen itself knows nothing. It takes a living rabbit, with a non-extended sense faculty to see the whole carrot at once as a single object.

The complete explanation is in a Homiletic & Pastoral Review article by me, but here are some of its insights:

 “And yet, our dumb bunny sees a carrot as a whole — with all its parts distinct from its other parts. Seeing something as a whole means apprehending the entire object and all its parts at once (at least as seen from a single perspective) — something no merely physical device can do. And neural patterns in the brain suffer the exact same problem as does a television set, that is, that distinct parts represent distinct parts of the object — be it an image or an externally-sensed object — so that no single part “sees” the whole object apprehended. Attempting to achieve unity would entail collapsing all the distinct parts on top of each other, which would only completely destroy the intelligibility of what was being viewed.”

Since a materialist philosophy depicts a world in which all things are extended in space-time, the fact that animals can sense things as a whole proves that animals must have some immaterial element in them which enables them to sense objects as a whole:

“The basic reason for this inability of material devices to “see” a whole in a unified manner is because every physical entity is extended in space. This means that it can intelligibly depict another object only by having one part of it representing one part of the object and a diverse part representing another part of the object. No single part can “see” the whole. This, in fact, is how artificial recording and observation devices as well as the corresponding neural receptor patterns in biological organisms work. This is true at the macroscopic level, as … [is evident from] … the television example. But, it would also be true at a submicroscopic level (assuming such artificial or natural physical “observation mechanisms” existed.)”

The materialist’s world of purely physical things is not a world in which experience of wholes is possible. Still, animals do experience things as wholes. This means that metaphysical materialism or physicalism is a false philosophy. The existence of certain sentient beings proves that some immaterial realities exist – and they exhibit their reality in cognitive acts of sense perception of wholes, such as is the case with the power of sight.

Role of Immateriality in All Cognition

The argument for sensation’s immateriality is fully developed in my Homiletic & Pastoral Review article. Moreover, I use this necessary immateriality of sense acts to show that the ability to apprehend cognitively many objects -- whether images or concepts or judgments -- in a single unified act is based on the various levels of immateriality of the involved cognitive faculties.

In one of my Strange Notions articles, I show that this immateriality of cognition is how God is able to know all things in a single unified act which is the divine essence:

“What has all this to do with God’s ability to know and to cause the near infinite multiplicity of the created world? Simply this. While we do not know exactly how the immateriality of God’s or man’s cognition enables them to know multiple, whole objects, or even how animals do it at their own merely sentient level of cognition, still, the fact remains that immateriality is the key to explaining how cognition can unify the complexity of experience into wholes, which can be experienced in a single, unified act of cognition.”

Basic Aristotelian philosophical psychology tells us that, because of the immateriality of their intellective souls, human beings are able to form concepts, make judgments, do reasoning, and understand multiple meanings of words in a single complex thought. This is why we do not say, “I hear all your words,” but “I get your meaning.”

Those meanings may be multiple and complex, but express a unified insight or thought, or even a group of related meanings or thoughts. All this is based on the immateriality of intellectual cognition, whose conceptual content, in turn, is abstracted from the images that arise out of initial sense perception. Still, the human material condition limits the quantity of things we can know simultaneously. On the other hand, God knows all things in a single, simple, eternal intellectual act, which is identical with the divine essence.

Just as immateriality enables animals to perceive sensible wholes in  single act of sense perception and just as God can understand all things in a single act of intellectual apprehension, so too, human beings and other finite intellectual substances (angels) can understand multiple things in a single act. Yet, in man, this ability to understand many things at once is limited by the material condition of his bodily organs.

But How Does Mary Know All Our Prayers?

Still, how does all this explain the fact that the Blessed Virgin can know and respond to hundreds of millions of prayers to her each day? While she was living as an ordinary human being on this earth, she could not do so. That is because physical matter limits the number of things we can know at once, even though our ability to do so in a unified way still demonstrates the immateriality of our cognitive powers.

The body that limits the soul in its intellectual activities. This limitation arises particularly because of the dependence of the intellect on the phantasm or image during the thought process.  And, since the image is apprehended under the conditions of matter, our power to apprehend multiple cognitive objects at once suffers from the limitations of matter. The mere fact that we cannot imagine the apprehension of so many experiences at once underlines the limitations inherent in the sense faculties which are dependent on material organs, since the imagination is an internal sense faculty.

But, after death, the separated soul’s knowledge is directly infused in it by God and no longer depends on the operations of either external or internal sense faculties. After death, the separated soul no longer learns through sense experience. After death, God can infuse into the soul multiple cognitive objects at once with virtually no limit other than the soul’s own inherent finitude.

“Just as animals and man can do this at our own finite and limited levels, by way of transcendent analogy, the same explanation must be applied to God so as to render intelligible how he can know all things and cause all things, even in their near infinite multiplicity – all the while remaining absolutely simple and undivided in himself. We do not need to know exactly how he does this, any more than we need to know how we do it – in order to know that it is true (1) that it happens and (2) that it can happen solely because of the immateriality of the cognitive powers involved.”

But, to return to our theme about the ability of Mary to answer a multitude of prayers, all we need know is that (1) freedom from matter is the key to knowing multiple sensory or intellectual objects at once, and (2) that once freed from the limitations of the body, the immaterial soul can know as many cognitive objects at once as God chooses to infuse into it. Hence, both Mary and the saints can have virtually unlimited knowledge of particular things at once, that is, in a single, unified experience – just as God can know all things in a single, unified experience.

While this may also be true of the other saints, who now exist as separated souls in a purely spiritual state, consider the following curious objection. Since Mary is dogmatically defined as having received a glorified body already in Heaven, would not that body, in virtue of its materiality, prevent her from knowing what lesser saints can now know in virtue of their purely immaterial condition?

Now, it may be true that Mary would be limited as to her knowledge insofar as it is gained through the operations of her glorified body’s senses. But, this in no way prevents God from directly infusing into her mind virtually unlimited intellectual and even sense knowledge, which is not dependent for its origination upon the function of bodily organs.

In this life, all knowledge comes through the senses and is limited in the conceptual order by the material phantasms which the body enables the imagination to form. It is understandable that these inherently material limitations as to how we learn and know things in this life would be superseded once the soul if freed from such intimate dependence on material organs, such as the brain. Such independence is easily achieved once God directly infuses knowledge, such as when he gives to Mary and the saints direct knowledge of the prayers of men – entirely independent of the role of the various sense organs of the body.

Conclusion

Therefore, whether (1) God answers the prayers of the faithful on behalf of Mary in her stead, or (2) Mary has an unlimited eternity in which to respond to prayers offered to her by humans living in time, or (3) Mary has virtually unlimited ability to know all prayers offered to her, because God directly infuses that knowledge into her intellect without dependence on the limitations of bodily senses, or (4) in virtue of some combination of the first three alternatives, the objection of the skeptics, who claim that the Blessed Virgin Mary cannot attend to massive numbers of prayers at once, is refuted.

Unlike many other articles dealing with miracles, this one is not actually expected to change minds about the reality of such phenomena. Rather, it is intended to show why miracles are believed and should be believed by believers as well as why miracles are not believed and likely will not be believed by unbelievers. The focus here is less on the extraordinary events themselves and more on the reasons why some people believe the reports about them, while others do not.

The extraordinary phenomena at issue include both preternatural and supernatural events. By the term, “preternatural, is meant events that exceed the common order of nature, although given other conditions, such events might be explained naturally. For example, while humans can fly in airplanes, such flight would be beyond their unaided natural powers.

The term, “supernatural,” is reserved for those events that cannot be explained by natural forces under any conditions whatever. They require the infinite power possessed by the God of classical theism alone, for example, causing the resurrection of a truly dead person. Strictly speaking, the term, “miracle,” pertains exclusively to supernatural events.

Preternatural events stand in an intermediate position between the purely natural and those that are supernatural.

I include preternatural phenomena in this essay, since such realities belong to many reports which natural science cannot explain, and hence, would challenge the metaphysical assumptions of many modern materialists. I realize that naturalists would claim to be impressed by genuine miracles alone.

The Reports

Many reports of miracles are dismissed because things like cancer cures can be explained as mere remissions. Yet, the resurrection of Christ is hotly contested as to fact, since it clearly entails a genuine miracle. Remarkably, there exists a book, Saints Who Raise the Dead: True Stories of 400 Resurrection Miracles by Albert J. Hebert, which presents details of many claimed actual resurrections of the dead down through history. Most appear to be found in the biographies of major saints of the Catholic Church.

Yet, how do we know that the “dead” in these alleged resurrections were actually even really dead? In most cases, absolute verification of death before the resurrection takes place could hardly be expected – especially in past centuries, since who would anticipate ahead of time that someone would be resurrected – thereby causing subsequent need to prove actual prior death?

Nonetheless, a rather strong indication of death is reported in a resurrection attributed to St. Vincent Ferrer (1350-1419). A woman became insane, slit her small son’s throat, dismembered his body, and roasted a portion, which she then tried to serve to her husband. St. Vincent prayed over the remains and the reassembled pieces arose as the living boy. This case was part of the saint’s canonization process.¹ In many other cases, the deceased was dead for days, hanged by the neck for days, suffered violent deaths, or even sealed in a coffin for long periods.² Undoubtable death was evident in most cases. Testimony affirming resurrections was recorded by responsible authorities in many cases, such as in a formal canonization process.

An oddly different set of extraordinary events is the reported appearances of dead persons to living ones in the form of souls allegedly coming from Purgatory or, rarely, even from Hell itself. These apparitions were predominantly visible phenomena or even fully physical presences as “living” human beings. Here again we have another work listing literally hundreds of such instances in Purgatory by F.X. Schouppe. Like the book on cases of reported resurrections, these accounts are assembled from many earlier books, records, canonical investigations, historical testimonies, and so forth.

And then, not surprisingly, we have a number of “encounters” recorded between Padre Pio and souls from Purgatory appearing before him, sometimes so physically present that others could see them.

I will add here a rather curious case of private revelation which is of interest both because it is relatively recent and because of the large number of attesting witnesses. The Miraculous Crucifix of Limpias is found in a church in Santander, Spain. During the period around WWI, thousands of eyewitnesses saw Christ’s body on the crucifix “come alive” and show powerful signs of emotion and suffering, including evident breathing and physical motions.

“The multiple albums that are found in the sacristy of the church of Limpias contain well over 8,000 testimonies of people who had seen the wonderful apparitions. Of these, 2,500 were sworn on oath. Among these witnesses were members of religious orders, priests, doctors, lawyers, professors, and governors of universities, officers, merchants, workmen, country folk, unbelievers and even atheists.”

What is the Point?

I am not trying to produce some kind of direct evidence to prove to the readers the truth of all these reports of preternatural or supernatural events described above. Rather, my focus is on the difference in the reaction of believers and non-believers to these reports.

Many believers are not familiar with all these reported “miraculous” events, but on hearing of them, tend to believe, especially when they realize that such reports have recurred often though history. But, why is there such natural sympathy on the part of believers, especially Catholics?

And why do non-believers express instant skepticism by offering various rationales for dismissing the credibility of such reports? Is it merely pure prejudice, as G.K. Chesterton seems to suggest?

“If we say miracles are theoretically possible, they say, “Yes, but there is no evidence for them.” When we take all the records of the human race and say, “Here is your evidence,” they say, “But these people were superstitious, they believed in impossible things.”

In fairness, I suggest that the Catholic mentality about such accounts of religious prodigies is received with greater acceptance for the simple reason that Catholics understand the nature of the Catholic faith. Now, what I just said is easily misunderstood, since I am not saying that belief in these reports is simply a matter of blind faith. On the contrary, there is a rational process going on here – but one that would, doubtless, not sound equally rational to the skeptic, agnostic, atheist, or unbeliever.

For Catholics, the persons offering these reports are seen to be very holy people for the most part -- indeed, saints! As such, it is expected that they will tell the truth. It is essentially as simple as that.

Moreover, all Catholics know that to tell a deliberate lie in a serious matter -- such as falsely claiming a miracle – is a mortal sin and matter for Confession. That hundreds of committed Catholics would tell such lies separately, and yet, en masse is a moral impossibility. While those who are not practicing Catholics may not understand this simple truth, those who are practicing Catholics will easily see that such uncoordinated mass deception over many centuries could never occur.

Oh yes, some will allege that the witnesses affirming these reports might be hallucinating, mentally obsessed or even psychotic, suffering delusions, or otherwise incapacitated from having normal observational objectivity. The difficulty with those sorts of explanations is the great number of such witnesses and the even greater number of such reports. A few cases may be explained in this skeptical fashion, but surely not in such vast numbers. Moreover, the psychological stability of those witnesses later declared as saints have withstood the careful evaluations of the canonization process.

Even a single authentic report of an apparition or miracle is sufficient to establish beyond question an entire order of reality generally rejected out of hand by skeptics. Unfortunately, for the skeptic, his corresponding task is to refute every single report – a task obviously impossible on its face. Even for the more nuanced position of naturalism, a single authentically-supernatural event (miracle) would constitute absolute refutation.

On the other hand, to the skeptic or agnostic, the entire order of such claims is instantly suspect, since they are not first attending to the standard of holiness and/or veracity demanded of the consciences of ordinary Catholics, say nothing of saints! Rather, what impresses their view is the seeming absurdity or impossibility of the claims themselves – claims which, on their very face, seem to demand incredulity.

Paradoxically, the very practice of his own faith enables the believer to see with conviction the essential truthfulness of all this devout witness testimony – something that is inherently obscure or unbelievable to the skeptic. St. Anselm of Canterbury’s insight, which reveals the inherent connection between true faith and rational intelligibility, now becomes clearly evident: Credo ut intelligam. I believe in order that I may understand.

Fatima: God's "Assist" for Skeptics

Almost as if God chose to answer the skeptics who complained that no easily verifiable major public miracles had occurred in modern times, the twentieth century witnessed the most public miracle of all time.

At Fatima, Portugal, on October 13, 1917, God dramatically removed many of the objections to belief that skeptics raise against the sorts of extraordinary phenomena treated earlier in this essay. As if to answer those who doubt events from hundreds of years ago, this massive “miracle of the sun” occurred in the early twentieth century, when modern means of photography, major newspaper coverage, and electronic communication were available – as well as having testimony taken nearly half a century later when many eyewitnesses were still alive.

Rather than an event observed by a single person or relatively few (except in the case of the Limpias Crucifix cited above), this miracle was witnessed by at least forty and, perhaps, as many as one hundred thousand persons. It was not a genuine motion of the sun itself, since that would have been observed by astronomers and drastically shaken the earth as well. It was some sort of massive visual experience that was not identically, and yet was largely similarly, experienced by huge numbers of those present – an experience that defies natural explanation by various skeptical hypotheses.

What many also do not understand is that the fact that all present did not see the exact same thing is, rather than a cause for skepticism, clear proof that it was a massive set of apparitions following the same theme, but with enough variation to show that no common external physical cause could be responsible. Some failed to see anything. Whatever caused this phenomenon was able to create a generally common subjective experience in tens of thousands of persons simultaneously, but also could make variations therein or even fail to cause any experience whatever in some.

Worse yet for skeptics, the event entails three distinct aspects – any of which by itself could be described as a miracle, but all three variables at once are decisive. They were: (1) the prediction of a stupendous miracle ahead of time (so that both believers and skeptics and reporters came by the tens of thousands from all over Portugal), (2) the visual phenomenon itself, and (3) the simultaneous sudden and complete drying of the people and the muddy ground, which had been rain soaked all morning. Some may try to explain one or another aspect, but the three simultaneously-joined, objectively verifiable, psychic, visual, and physical phenomena present an extraordinary event not seen in human memory.

So, the Fatima miracle stands by itself.

"Thank You, Father"

The following incident took place recently in an American diocese whose locale includes cemeteries dating back to the Civil War.

There is a house in the country on the top of a hill well off a main road with a long driveway from the road to the house. A mother and her son living there appear at their local Catholic pastor’s rectory, clearly upset and shaken – reporting certain disturbing “experiences” occurring in that house. These include such things as lights turning on and off by themselves, a child’s hand prints suddenly appearing on a clean metal door, and the father having an unseen force suddenly thrust him face first into a wall so hard that it dents the wall.

Having related these incidents, the mother and son convince their priest to go out to the house and say Mass and bless everything, which he does – first, by saying Mass and blessing the house, and then, by blessing a cemetery behind the house. The father then led the priest down a side trail -- maybe seventy yards -- to the foundations of an old house, where a thirteen year old girl had lived long ago. Three men had raped the poor girl and then hanged her in a tree next to that second house. They then buried her in a shallow grave right by a creek at that location.

And so, the priest also blessed the murdered girl’s grave.

After all this, having taken his leave, the priest is driving down the long driveway from the top of the hill where the main house is located. He reaches the bottom where it joins a country road. His car’s windows are shut with both heater and radio off. All is dead silence.

At this point, the priest hears clearly the voice of a young woman in his left ear, who says to him, “Thank you, Father.”

Since the reader does not know this priest, it is easy to be skeptical of the whole report. That is the reason, I suspect, that most skeptics and agnostics dismiss stories of Catholic and other miracles or preternatural experiences with a grain of salt – especially, since they know such things are impossible (as Chesterton noted).

Personally, I find absolutely credible the facts as related to me directly by the priest involved. This one incident, all by itself, is sufficient reason for me to believe that Catholic priests do have real powers. And this, in turn, tells me all I really need to know about the truth of the Catholic Church.

The reason I am convinced that the events happened exactly as related is because I have been a personal friend of the priest involved for nearly half a century. I know he is a good priest, who takes his obligations to the Faith and to tell the truth dead seriously. I know he is sane, sober, and has never told me of another similar experience. In a word, I am perfectly confident in his competence and veracity for reasons personally known to me -- reasons which the readers of this essay in no way share.

Conclusion

So it is with the general reaction of believers to the extensive reports of Catholic and other Christian miracles and extraordinary events. Believers know the moral rectitude of the vast majority of those in their faith who experience these things, report them to superiors, and the superiors themselves who conduct such serious matters as canonical investigations. Even if one doubted a few such reports in specific instances, the mere fact that hundreds of such extraordinary religious phenomena have been recorded in history constitutes powerful reason for believers to accept the reality of such preternatural and supernatural phenomena.

That is why believers believe in such reported miracles. Perhaps, also, it is this mechanism of “referred eyewitness certitude” that explains the vivid faith of early Christians that Christ truly rose from the dead. Indeed, this finally makes perfect sense of St. Paul’s unique report that the risen Christ “was seen by over five hundred brethren at once” (1 Corinthians 15:6, New King James Version), since such widespread eyewitness foundation would easily have convinced others that the Resurrection was a fact beyond all doubting.

To the contrary, it is the corresponding lack of confidence in devout witnesses and ecclesiastical investigations and historical records which probably causes unbelieving skeptics to dismiss the whole matter with total incredulity, while they spend their time and energy engaging in speculative disputations about the historicity of Scripture and the existence and coherence of the God of classical theism.

This is also probably why each side, from its own perspective, is so thoroughly convinced that the other side is dead wrong.

Materialist philosophers, starting in the fifth century B.C. with Leucippus and Democritus, have claimed that physical reality has simply existed without any temporal beginning, thereby avoiding need for any type of transcendent spiritual creator. With Christianity, though, came belief that the world began in time as well as the concurrent claim that a purely spiritual and utterly transcendent God was needed to explain its creation ex nihilo et utens nihilo.

Since the Christian God was held to have created the world “out of nothing and using nothing,” the metaphysical principle which says that when a cause ceases causing its effect ceases was taken to imply that God not only caused the world to be created from nothing, but also, were he to stop creating it, it would fall back into nothingness. Thus was born the Christian doctrine that God continuously creates (conserves in existence) the entire cosmos – even if it had no beginning in time. This has become a central claim of Christian metaphysicians, including St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274).

Responding to this Christian belief, the recent counterclaim, known as “existential inertia,”¹ has appeared. In essence, existential inertia provides a theoretical foundation for materialism’s constant stance that the world explains itself and has no need to be sustained by God’s conserving causation.

Like Newton’s law of inertia, which states that a body in motion tends to remain in motion and a body at rest tends to remain at rest, the concept of “existential inertia” maintains that (1) once a concrete object is in existence, it will persist in existence without any continuously concurrent sustaining cause, and (2) it would require new causal action to make it cease to exist. Thus, one of the most central theses of Thomistic metaphysics, namely, that all finite beings need an extrinsic cause to explain why they continue in existence, is replaced with an allegedly rational justification for Leucippus’s and Democritus’s original thesis of an eternal uncreated material world.

The Principle of Sufficient Reason

This fundamental metaphysical debate over how things exist requires examining the even more basic metaphysical principle of sufficient reason, since Christian thinkers insist that God provides to all finite beings their sufficient reason for continued existence. Instead, atheists maintain that concrete objects either (1) are their own sufficient reason for staying in existence, or else, perhaps, (2) since they already are in existence, they need no further reason for continued existence.

The Thomistic principle of sufficient reason states that everything needs a sufficient reason for its being or coming-to-be. “Sufficient reason” means an adequate and necessary objective explanation of something. Elsewhere, I maintain that all human reasoning follows this principle, since everyone knows that every claim anyone makes must somehow be supported:

To say that claims need support means that a statement or proposition must somehow be either (1) immediately evident or (2) that some extrinsic evidence proves it is true. A statement may be immediately evident either (1) because it is self-evident, as when I say every triangle has three angles, or else, (2) because it is immediately-known as when I say that I am presently experiencing some form of change or motion.

Human reason universally demands that what is not immediately evident must be proven through extrinsic evidence, which amounts to saying that reason demands a sufficient reason for everything – either in itself or from some other evidence.

And yet, since claims made in the form of propositions are made about reality, if the laws of reason do not apply equally to reality, reason becomes a useless instrument to know reality. Conversely, if reason is a valid instrument whereby to know the real world, then the principle of sufficient reason must universally apply to reality just as it does within reason itself.

Benignus Gerrity offers one of sufficient reason’s best defenses:

“The intellect, reflecting upon its own nature, sees that it is an appetite and a power for conforming itself to being; and reflecting upon its acts and the relation to these acts to being, it sees that, when it judges with certitude that something is, it does so by reason of compulsion of being itself. The intellect cannot think anything without a reason; whatever it thinks with certitude, it thinks by compulsion of the principle of sufficient reason. When it withholds judgment, it does so because it has no sufficient reason for an assertion. But thought - true thought - is being in the intellect. The intellect is actual as thought only by virtue of some being in it conforming it to what is; whatever the intellect knows as certainly and necessarily known, it knows as the self-assertion of a being in it. This being which compels the intellect to judge does so as a sufficient reason of judgment. Nothing, therefore, is more certainly known than the principle of sufficient reason, because this is the principle of thought itself, without which there can be no thought. But by the same token the intellect knows that the principle of sufficient reason is a principle of being because it is being, asserting itself in thought, which compels thought to conform to this principle.”²

Rejecting analytic philosophers’ attacks on metaphysical claims, philosopher Jacques Maritain, defends metaphysics’ prerogative to investigate the principles of being as such:

“We must beware of a fatal error, confusing metaphysics with logic. This mistake has, in fact, been made by the moderns, many of whom maintain that this being as such is a mere word, a linguistic residuum, or else that it is a universal frame whose value is purely logical, not ontological. According to them the metaphysician has fallen victim to human language, whereas in fact he passes through and beyond language to attain its intellectual source, superior to any uttered word. We must, therefore, understand clearly that the metaphysical intuition of being is sui generis and of powerful efficacy and therefore distinguish carefully being which is the object of metaphysics … from being as studied by logic.”³

The Act of Existence and Its Sufficient Reason

Having established the ontological principle that every being must have a reason for being or coming-to-be, the question now is whether a being’s continued existence is adequately explained by “existential inertia.”

“Sufficient reason’s” critical relevance to “existential inertia” becomes clear when one realizes that every being, even one allegedly possessing “existential inertia,” absolutely requires a sufficient reason for its existence or coming-to-be. That something persists in existence still requires a sufficient reason for that persistence.

Whatever other significations metaphysicians give to the term, “existence,” in this essay, I refer primarily to whatever it is in something that actually differentiates it from absolute nothingness. For this reason it is called an “act of existence.” Kant correctly points out that existence is not a predicate in the sense of adding a property to something. Still, existence is that act which differentiates all beings and their properties from non-being.

The act of existence needs a sufficient reason for doing whatever it does to make something be real.

Moreover, existence manifests the meaning of the term, “power,” since power refers to the ability to do or make something – and what existence does is to make something be real, that is to say, to make it to be an actual being.

So, the natural question is how great a power is required to explain that something exists in reality?

Sufficient Reason in Causes and Effects

While every being requires a sufficient reason, a logical distinction arises when we ask just “where” this sufficient reason is to be found. A sufficient reason’s locus for explaining something can logically be divided into three possibilities: (1) a thing may be explained by a sufficient reason entirely extrinsic to itself, (2) a thing may be explained by a sufficient reason entirely intrinsic to itself, or (3) a thing may be explained by reasons that are partially intrinsic and partially extrinsic to itself, with the combination of both intrinsic and extrinsic reasons constituting sufficiency.

By definition, any being whose sufficient reason for being is not totally within or intrinsic to itself is, to that extent, dependent upon another for its sufficient reason, and thus, it is called an “effect.” Conversely, any being which serves as an extrinsic sufficient reason is called, in that precise respect, a “cause.” Finally, anything whose sufficient reason for being is entirely intrinsic to itself is simply its own sufficient reason.

While St. Thomas Aquinas gives no direct argument to prove the power needed for a thing simply to exist, he does offer an argument regarding the power required to make something come into being ex nihilo et utens nihilo, that is, by way of direct creation.

In his Summa Theologiae, while answering an objection that only a finite power is needed to produce a finite creature by creation, St. Thomas proposes the following demonstration to prove that infinite power is required in order to create any being at all:

“It must be said that the power of the maker is measured not only from the substance of the thing made but also from the way of its making; for a greater heat not only heats more, but also heats more swiftly. Thus, although to create some finite effect does not demonstrate infinite power, nevertheless to create it from nothing does demonstrate infinite power.... For, if a greater power is required in the agent insofar as the potency is more removed from the act, it must be that the power of an agent [which produces] from no presupposed potency, such as a creating agent does, would be infinite; because there is no proportion of no potency to some potency, as is presupposed by the power of a natural agent, just as there is [no proportion] of non-being to being.”⁴

Now one might be tempted to agree with St. Thomas’s conclusion, but for the wrong reason – since it seems intuitive that “thrusting” a thing into being requires transcending a gap between non-being and being that has no middle through which to pass, and hence, requires infinite power to accomplish. But between non-being and being there is no real relation to measure, since all real relations require that both extremes in the relationship be real – and non-being is not real. Hence, this argument fails.

Rather, St. Thomas’s actual argument is cast in terms of potency and act and the principle that greater power is required to produce the act when the potency is more removed [magis remota] from the act. But, potency and act here can be replaced by the more evident concepts of non-being and being. For, something with fewer real properties may be changed into something with more real properties and that change can be measured in terms of the power required, since having certain initial properties can function as a basis against which to measure how many more additional properties are required to produce the thing that comes-to-be.

Thus, changing non-living matter into a cognitive organism requires more power than would be needed to change an already living organism into a cognitive organism, since the living thing already has more of the properties belonging to a cognitive thing. In that manner, the remoteness of the thing to be changed measures the power needed to produce that which comes-to-be in change.

But this way of reckoning does not apply to the creation of being or existence absolutely considered, since what does not exist at all offers no preceding qualities from which to measure the remoteness to that which comes-to-be, namely, something that really exists. For, the act of creation produces existence absolutely, not merely this or that form of existence. As St. Thomas puts it, “Now to produce existence [esse] absolutely, not as this or that [form of existence], belongs to creation.”⁵

Hence, while it appears possible to measure the remoteness of something with fewer or less perfect qualities of being to something with more or more perfect qualities of being, it is inherently and objectively impossible to measure the remoteness of non-existence to existence absolutely considered, since, as St. Thomas notes, “there is [no proportion] of non-being to being.”⁶

Since, then, it is impossible to measure the remoteness of non-existence to existence absolutely considered, it is impossible, in the case of producing being itself, to measure the power required for creation. Hence, the power required to create finite being is, by its very nature, immeasurable. But what is immeasurable is infinite. Hence, infinite power is required to create finite being, since there is no pre-existing being from which to produce it.

Now, it might be objected that “remoteness” assumes measurement between two really existing things, whereas, in the case of creation there is not even a real relation of remoteness, since non-being does not exist. But, this only underlines the impossibility of measuring the power required to create, since there is simply no standard of reference against which to measure or judge its limit.

Following a slightly different approach, the prior state of a being provides a limit against which to measure the qualities produced in the succeeding state, and thus, the power needed to produce them. In this way, what exists, but is non-living, provides a limit to the needed power insofar as something already has existence, even though it lacks the property of life compared to a resultant living organism. But non-being, since it does not exist at all, provides no such limit against which to measure the existence of that which comes-to-be after the effect is produced. Therefore, the power needed to produce being from nothing has no limit by which to measure it – meaning it is limitless or infinite power.

Why it Takes Infinite Power for Anything to Exist

While the preceding argument proves that infinite power is required to create being ex nihilo et utens nihilo, it still must be determined whether similar reasoning applies to what is already in existence, that is, why something could not simply continue to exist through existential inertia without the need for anything whatever causing it to be.

Even if one grants that infinite power is needed to cause a finite thing to begin to exist, one could still take the position maintained by materialists, such as Democritus, that no new beings ever come-to-be at all. Rather, matter is eternal and complex things are merely combinations of what already exists from all eternity with no cause of existence of anything being needed. No infinite power is required because nothing new ever comes-to-be from non-being. No power is needed to explain continued existence at all, since things just continue existing through existential inertia.

Of course, the preceding defense of existential inertia applies solely to the new existence of complete substances. Existential inertia has no defense against the coming-to-be of what I call, in another essay, “new existence” in the form of accidental changes, such as motion.

But complete beings or substances do not “just exist” without a sufficient reason, which “does something,” namely, by functioning as an adequate and necessary objective explanation of why they exist. The sufficient reason must have the power to account for this reality.

Since proponents of existential inertia insist that it would take some external cause to destroy a thing already in existence, the being in question must not be being caused to exist by another. That is because what is caused by another to continue existing would receive its sufficient reason for existing from another. Removing that extrinsic sufficient reason would “automatically” make the caused being cease to be, since it would have lost its extrinsic sufficient reason for existing and no intrinsic one was postulated. As St. Thomas puts it, “… with the cessation of the cause, the effect also ceases….”⁷

Thus, what must still be explained is this logically remaining intrinsic sufficient reason whereby any finite being continues to be actually real as opposed to being nothing at all. A finite existent does not just happen to exist, since it is “doing something,” namely actually existing. This means that it also must have a really existing intrinsic sufficient reason by which it has the power actually to exist.

So, the question remains: “Can the power (intrinsic sufficient reason) by which a finite existent exists be measured or is it immeasurable, that is, infinite?”

The principle of sufficient reason mandates that there must be a reason for something already existing to continue to exist. If continued existence required no sufficient reason, no power would be needed for existential inertia to occur. But since a real sufficient reason must be operative in keeping something in existence, this would mean that the finite being must continually actively account for its own existence.

Aside from the fact that the sufficient reason needed to account for finite existence is intrinsic to the being now under discussion, an argument similar to the earlier one above shows that it still requires infinite power to account for a finite being’s existence.

No matter how distant a given being is from another given being, non-being is more distant from both of them than they are from each other, since there is not even a proportion of non-being to being, as St. Thomas points out.⁸ This shows that non-being is immeasurably or infinitely removed from being.

It is inherently and objectively impossible to measure the remoteness of non-being to being, since there is not even a proportion of non-being to being. For this reason, it is likewise impossible to measure the power required in order to account for a finite being’s existing as opposed to its not existing at all.

Furthermore, as noted above, even though a being itself is finite, the lack of any real relation between non-being and being only serves to show that there is simply no standard against which to measure the power required to explain any finite being’s existing. As St. Thomas notes, the power required is known, not only from what is made, but also from how it is made – and there is no way to measure the act by which any being – regardless of what it is -- is distinguished from nothingness.⁹

The power required to explain why anything exists at all, as opposed to not existing, is, by its very nature, immeasurable, that is to say, infinite.

Even regarding a finite being whose existence does not have a beginning, but one where something is causing it to exist from all eternity, similar reasoning prevails. Infinite power is ultimately required to explain why any being whatever exists as opposed to non-being – if not in itself, then in its cause.

Therefore, to say that a finite being is its own sufficient reason for continuing to exist amounts to saying that it is infinitely powerful and essentially creating itself, which is impossible for a mere finite being to be and to do!

Thus, whether something (1) is caused by another or (2) explains its own existence, infinite power is required to explain its existence. But infinite power cannot reside in a finite being or even in a collection of finite beings. Therefore there must exist an Infinite Being, the God of classical theism, who alone can possess and manifest the infinite power required to create and conserve in existence all finite things, including the entire physical world.

“Existential inertia” turns out to be metaphysically impossible. Rather, all finite things are created by God and held in existence by his continued creative causality. Absent God’s conservation of all things in existence, they would all fall back into nothingness.

The bare existence of anything at all necessarily implies the existence of Almighty God as the only being possessing the infinite power needed to account for the existence of anything at all.

“Existential inertia” vs. Almighty God?   Almighty God wins!

In an earlier Strange Notions essay, I addressed the problem of how an all-good God could be compatible with the existence of Hell. While that analysis befits the extreme case, the purpose of the present piece is to address the exact role of responsibility God has in terms of the very real and human tragedy posed by the Covid-19 virus which is presently raging throughout the world.

This piece will not address the most ethical or medically correct methods with which to address this pandemic. Rather, its sole purpose is to understand the role that God plays in allowing, supporting, and/or causing Covid-19’s enormous toll of pain and anguish on mankind.

Classical Theism's Defense of God's Goodness

In defense of God’s goodness, classical theists will point out that God is not a moral agent as mere creatures, such as men and angels are. As Creator, he is free to take back the gift of life he has given to men. Yet, it is also possible that the physical and moral evils we see in the world are caused by the actions of free creatures. Since God has chosen to create creatures with intellectual natures, both angelic and human, such beings are inherently free.¹ With freedom comes the possibility of deliberate fault or sin. And thus, what God has created with perfection in the first place may become corrupted by free creatures’ misuse of their freedom. Such theological doctrines as original sin describe how free agents, such as human beings, could introduce real evil into a world originally created by God as good.

Evil that appears in the world may be (1) the result of a free agent’s misuse of freedom in a particular act that results in both his own corruption and evil effects that are of his making, (2) the result of some kind primeval fall by an angelic order of beings that infected the rest of subsequent creation, or (3) the product of a human original sin that perverted the natural goodness of later men and the order of nature itself. Some such scenario could be responsible for such natural physical evils as the Covid-19 pandemic together with all its suffering and death.

But skeptics rightly probe more deeply and ask precisely how God can be the ultimate cause of all things, and yet, claim no moral responsibility for something as horrific as the Covid-19 pandemic?

Thomists typically explain that creatures have genuine secondary causality, whereby their actions are properly their own, even though God sustains them in their execution. Thus, evil is introduced to the world either (1) through chance interactions of secondary causes, or else, (2) through the free agency of either angelic beings or men. In either case, the impression is given that evil’s responsibility is assigned to the secondary causes and not to God himself.

But is this the complete story? Surely, many natural agents appear to act to achieve something good for themselves. For example, a lion, seeking to eat, may interact with a gazelle, seeking to drink at an oasis, in a way much to the disadvantage of the gazelle. And, while neither lion nor gazelle is seeking anything evil, evil accrues to the gazelle as a result of their “chance” interaction. “Chance” events, in Aristotelian philosophy, do not mean events with no causation whatever, but something that  happens outside the natural tendency of a given agent. Thus, while the gazelle goes to the oasis for water, its chance crossing of paths with the lion results in an unwanted outcome, namely, being eaten by the lion.

The bottom line of such causal confluence is that each agent, while acting so as to produce its own natural results (or, what Thomists argue are perfective ends), may well interact with other natural agents so as to produce an outcome outside the natural tendency of one, or both, agents involved.

Similarly, moral evils committed by free primeval angelic spirits and/or first true human beings might have introduced original disorder into creation, thereby explaining resultant cataclysmic physical and moral evils. While God is responsible for creating the perfection of such free agents in the first place, he is viewed neither as responsible for their misuse of freedom nor for the evil effects resulting therefrom.

But, do these typical explanations really entail that God in no way causes the evil we find in creation, especially as witnessed in a malevolent pandemic such as Covid-19? Quite to the contrary, God’s hand remains in every last detail of creation as is clear from the 1913 Catholic Enclycopedia explanation of Divine Providence:

“God preserves the universe in being; He acts in and with every creature in each and all its activities. In spite of sin, which is due to the willful perversion of human liberty, acting with the concurrence, but contrary to the purpose and intention of God and in spite of evil which is the consequence of sin, He directs all, even evil and sin itself, to the final end for which the universe was created.”

God not only causes the very being of all creation, but he keeps every particle of it in existence at all times. Moreover, as it changes and undergoes motion, God is the cause of the very existence of all that comes-to-be as new in finite reality.

This means that, while creatures, acting as secondary causes, are true causes of their own actions, such actions could never take place without God (1) sustaining the being of those agents and (2) also acting as the ultimate cause of every new quality of being that results from their actions.

The Nature and Role of Chance Events

As for chance events explaining evil in the world, many people do not realize that chance has two meanings: (1) an event taking place somehow spontaneously without any real cause, and (2) the classical Aristotelian notion of chance described above as something happening outside the natural tendency or intention of an agent.

Today, many people think of chance events as things happening without any real cause. Specifically, some interpret Heisenberg’s Indeterminacy Principle as meaning that there are subatomic events whose manifestation is not dictated by any actual cause. Other leading physicists, including Schrödinger and Einstein, maintained that this renunciation of deterministic causality was physically incomplete. Far more importantly, this denial of causality at the subatomic level is metaphysically impossible, since that would amount to having being come-to-be from non-being. Metaphysically, if “chance” means something happening without an actual cause, then there are no such “chance events” at all.

The other meaning of chance (described earlier) is philosophically tenable, since it merely refers to something interfering with an agent’s movement toward an expected outcome, whether the agent is intelligent or not. For example, one goes to the bank to make a deposit and accidentally meets a creditor who instead demands the money. Such an encounter of diverse causal orders would be called a chance event, but one whose outcome would in no way escape predictability to someone knowing the paths and intentions of both parties.

Similarly, a rock rolling down a hill encountering another rock that blocks its expected path would also be called a chance event, even though the outcome is perfectly deterministic in nature.

From the above, it should be clear that neither type of event called “chance” escapes the foreknowledge and will of God as described in Divine Providence, since (1) “chance events,” understood as being purely spontaneous or acausal simply do not exist and (2) God knows the tendencies and interactions of all agents. And, since all natural agents conform to the will of God in determining the course of causal events in creation, it is clear that God would be responsible for the course and outcome of all events, whether called “by chance” or not – barring, of course, interference by free creatures.

Still, Why Does God Enable Free Agents to Choose Evil?

Since most authors realize that the world as understood by classical metaphysics would flow deterministically from God if no free agents existed, the central thrust of explanations of evil focuses on the existence of such free beings. If free beings are really free, then it must be possible that they misuse their freedom, and thus, could introduce moral and physical evil into the world. From that initial appearance of free deviation from God’s plan of creation could then be explained the presence of subsequent physical and moral evils, whether they flow directly from evil choices, or, in some hypotheses, even by some sort of temporally antecedent effects anticipated by God’s eternal vision.

Therefore, while God does not directly cause such great evils as the Covid-19 pandemic, his creation of free beings – angelic or human – might explain how such evils come to be without having to blame God himself for consenting to these evils.

As noted earlier, the problem remains that no creature – not even a free one – can perform any act, whether it is viewed as secondary causality or not, without God sustaining its nature and enabling its activity. Thus, while God may not consent to or affirm the freely chosen evil intention of a free agent, he nonetheless sustains the activity of all the physical powers and actions by which an evil deed is performed. He may not will that the evildoer do evil, but he does permit and support all the physical powers by which the evil deed is committed – and even sustains the power of choice of the free agent in committing the evil deed.

I do not intend to argue here whether human freedom is possible, since that is a distinct issue which I have addressed elsewhere. The question at hand is why does God allow and support such evil choices and how is he not therefore responsible for their evil? And this is especially problematic in the case of explaining the connection between evil choices and the appearance of a blind, non-living, demonic virus, such as now plagues humanity.

Various hypotheses have been offered as to how creatures’ free choices might have resulted in evil entering the world. Theologically, Christians consider the possible effects of Lucifer’s rebellion or Adam’s original sin. Like a symphony orchestra whose conductor permits a small section to continue playing off tune, eventually the entire enterprise may go off tune – and, perhaps, there is a similar progressive cascade of moral evil precipitating ever greater physical and moral evils in the created world.

Even without some free creatures’ initial misdeed, perhaps, God created a world in which cosmic and biological evolutionary scenarios entail such “chance” interactions (in the Aristotelian sense described above) that physical evils result, as in the case of the lion surviving by eating a gazelle. In more dramatic terms, might God have planned a world in which earthquakes, volcanoes, and tsunamis would occur -- or even a Covid-19 virus would evolve -- for the greater good of reminding mankind that life is short and he still has need for his Creator?

In fact, this world might actually have been planned by God so as to enhance human freedom by making naturalistic evolution a plausible hypothesis for atheists who prefer not to believe in him!

“Since naturalistic evolutionism is the near-universal refuge of atheism, an evolutionary world becomes a world where persons experience maximum moral freedom, including freedom to deny God’s existence and moral law.”²

God may have many reasons to permit free choices which lead to real physical and moral evils. The principle here is that while an evil means is never permitted to attain a good end, nonetheless it is licit to permit evil to occur so that a good end is attained, provided one does not directly promote the evil means. This is like a father letting his young son smoke a cigar, not because he wishes him to smoke cigars, but because he knows that if the son gets really sick from smoking this cigar, he may learn not to smoke them in the future.

The key here is whether the father has the son’s true interest at heart and, analogously, whether God’s Providence always permits the introduction of evil into creation so as to attain some greater good as a result, for example, by creating conditions conducive to the raising up of the greatest saints, as I have suggested elsewhere:

“Free agents’ greatest qualitative perfection manifests when they choose moral good while self-deceptive evil beckons. Naturalism’s possibility, the unintended side effect of creature’ maximum secondary causality, offers illusory emancipation from moral constraint.”³

Thus, those who resist this atheistic self-deception and accept moral constraint can achieve a higher sanctity than if God’s existence was so manifest as to nearly force puppet-like obedience to the wisdom and justice of his commandments.

Why COVID-19 Does Not Tell Us Whether God Exists

The existence of a global pandemic, such as Covid-19, does not, in itself, determine whether such worldwide suffering and death proves or disproves God’s existence. This fact should be the key take away from this essay.

The key is to understand that an all-good and all-knowing God could have sufficient reason to permit the existence of such a grave evil as Covid-19 -- so that some greater good might be obtained. Why, then, is this not a sufficient explanation of the presence of Covid-19 in the world?

One must first grasp that to the agnostic, atheist, or skeptic the existence of an all-good, all-knowing God may simply not be viewed as a real rational possibility. I say this not to challenge such persons’ individual reasons for their rejection of all proofs for God’s existence. Rather, I am simply pointing out that the reason they see Covid-19 or any other massive form of human suffering as incompatible with the God of classical theism is not so much because of the inherent horror of the evil itself as it is because of the conviction that no God exists whose nature could possibly justify such evils. That is, in their worldview, there simply is no credible proof that an infinitely good and provident God is real. So, how could there be any rational justification for Covid-19 – not to mention Hell?

Conversely, the classical theist, who is convinced that the one, true God exists and that he is all-good and all-wise, can easily conceive that Divine Providence can know and will an end so good as to justify permitting the existence of virtually any evil imaginable. For, theists take seriously the infinity of God in every respect, and hence, would not dare to think that our finite knowledge of the situation can trump the knowledge and benevolence of what God intends.

That is why the question of whether one views Covid-19 or any other great evil as determinative of God’s goodness and power and knowledge depends, not so much on the nature of the finite evil at issue – not even of Hell itself, but upon one’s prior intellectual commitment as to whether or not God actually exists and whether he possesses the infinite perfections and attributes ascribed to him by traditional metaphysics.

In a word, I think that the fundamental distance between the way skeptics and theists look at reality as a whole helps explain why unbelievers see the Covid-19 pandemic as just one more proof that God does not exist, whereas believers understand that an all-loving God is reminding us that life in our modern technological age remains radically contingent and desperately in need of its transcendent Creator.

The concept of certitude itself is not very popular today. Most skeptics, agnostics, and atheists view natural science as providing the surest available rational knowledge, and yet, because of this very fact, view all knowledge, at best, to be a matter of very high degrees of probability – never of absolute certitude.

The inherent epistemological limitation of natural science is its inductive method, since observation of particular events can never produce universal certitudes – as famously argued by the Scottish skeptic, David Hume. Thus, those thinkers who claim to attain absolute certitude today tend to be viewed as being epistemologically naïve.

I aim here, not to demonstrate all possible absolute certitudes, nor even the most important conclusions of speculative philosophy, such as God’s existence or the human soul’s spirituality and immortality. Rather, I propose to show that (1) some cognitive starting points of philosophy entail certitudes, and (2) the proper use of reason necessarily implies some absolute certitudes about reality, which constitute universal metaphysical first principles.

What is certitude? Formal certitude is the firm assent of the mind to a proposition together with clear knowledge that the evidence for the assent excludes error and the possibility of error. Such knowledge will be made evident in the examples that follow.

Scio Aliquid Esse

The seventeenth century French philosopher, René Descartes, insisted that what we first know is expressed as “Cogito, ergo sum; I think, therefore, I am.” In so doing, he recognized that, in the act of knowing, there is reflexive consciousness of the self as an existing knower. But what Descartes missed is that in every perceptive act of knowing – the kind first experienced in sensation – what is immediately known is given as an extramental object.¹

The equally French contemporary Thomistic philosopher, Jacques Maritain, corrects Descartes’ omission by restating the initial proposition as “Scio aliquid esse; I know something to be.”² In so saying, he affirms what is first and primarily known is something presented to the knower as an extramental sense object. It is solely in knowing such an object that I become conscious of my own act of knowing – and thereby, reflexively, of myself as the knower. In fact, direct experience tells us that both intramental and extramental objects are known clearly and distinctly, while they are also known as radically distinct from each other.³

Contemporary naturalists would argue that what is known is not directly something in the physical world, but rather some sort of representation inside the brain, presumably caused by an external object. And yet, to know that some internal image constitutes a representation of an external object would require somehow knowing both terms of that relationship. That logically requires directly knowing the external object at some point.

In fact, that is how we developed the scientific explanation of perception – by first knowing the extramental physical world, and from studying it, coming to the conclusion that sensation begins in an external stimulus caused by external objects and tracing the causal sequence from the external sense organs along nerve pathways to the inside of the brain, where, it is assumed, an image is somehow formed and known.

Of course, were it actually true that all the mind knows is the internal images of the brain, then the whole of science would be about images in the brain – in which case science would tell us nothing at all about an extramental physical world.

Still, prescinding from the question of whether what we directly know is some external object or merely an image inside the brain, it is immediately evident that what we know is not thought itself, but thought about something that is real in some way. Scio aliquid esse: I know something to be.⁴

This immediate experience is sufficient to give us absolute certitude that something is known to exist – regardless of its exact ontological status.

Even skeptics pay tribute to the realization that true knowledge consists in conforming the mind to reality. Error arises when what is known by the self does not conform to the really existing thing. Doubt arises when we fear that what we know may not conform to reality itself. But, in the act of perception, there can be no lack of union between the knower and the known, or else, no knowledge at all would occur. Knowledge actually occurs solely when there is union of knower and thing known.

This is why we cannot doubt the immediately known contents of perception.⁵ As children, we never doubted that the physical things around us were anything but real, since they are given to us as external in sensation – except for such internally-experienced entities as images or emotions. The external world around us is the primary given of sense experience, intellectually judged as such.

But Descartes rejected this whole world of things as his starting point. Rather, he took thought itself as his immediate knowledge – even forcing himself by convoluted reasoning to prove that extramental things exist, only after proving to himself God’s existence! Small wonder that Descartes’ inquiry, which starts with a subjective intramental starting point, namely, thought itself, inevitably led to subjective idealism – the denial that the mind can reach objective extramental reality.

Realist epistemology insists that Descartes made the fundamental blunder of thinking that the mind’s primary object is its own thought. Rather, thought is always of something other than the act of knowing itself. For this reason, we naturally distinguish between knowing a cow and knowing an image of a cow. The image is always secondary to direct experience of the extramental object.

Still, whether Descartes is right or wrong, what is absolutely certain is that in any act of knowing, what is immediately given is something existing in some way. That is sufficient for our purposes.

The Rules of Reason

No debate about reality’s nature can escape the use of reason. Defenders of naturalism and skeptics alike are bound by the rules of reason. One need not be a professional logician to know that (1) he cannot contradict himself and that (2) claims need to be supported in some fashion.

To say that contradictions are not permitted means that the same predicate cannot be both affirmed and denied of the same subject. I cannot simultaneously say that the moon is made of green cheese and that it is not, when speaking either of the whole moon or of its exact same part.

Even so-called “paraconsistent logics” are merely ones that try to maintain some limited coherence while ignoring or side-stepping such inconsistencies by denying the so-called “principle of explosion” that says that “if contradictories are true, then any statement is also true.” Yet, it is precisely because admission of any contradictories does lead to all statements being true that no exceptions to the principle of explosion can be admitted – ever. Or, as has been pointed out, in paraconsistent logic, “negation” is not really negation, but merely a subcontrary-forming operator.

Obviously, statements become unintelligible if they are ever permitted to mean the contradictory of what they say! Thus, the intelligibility of every possible proposition requires that its content be affirmed and not denied, thereby making the governing rule here absolutely universal.

Nor is it merely an axiom to forbid contradictions, since it is impossible even to posit an axiom without affirming what is proposed and denying its contradictory – and that includes positing the principle of non-contradiction itself. Thus, even to posit ¬(p ∧ ¬p) as an axiom is to presuppose that its contradictory is false, and hence, is to presuppose the very principle being posited.

To say that claims need support means that a statement or proposition must somehow be either (1) immediately evident or (2) that some extrinsic evidence proves it is true. A statement may be immediately evident either (1) because it is self-evident, as when I say every triangle has three angles, or else, (2) because it is immediately-known as when I say that I am presently experiencing some form of change or motion.

Failing to be immediately evident, any claim must have extrinsic evidence, or else, will rightly be dismissed as mere assertion with no reason to be believed at all. If you make a claim that is neither immediately evident nor supported by any extrinsic evidence, no one will listen to you. Nor should they.

These are the basic rules of reason that govern all rational arguments about anything. Everyone, including skeptics and agnostics, are bound by these rules – or else will have their statements derided as not worthy of any belief at all. These rules apply to all rational discourse between intelligent agents – governing all coherent communication between human beings, be they natural scientists, philosophers, theologians, or the proverbial man in the street.

The Rules of Reason are the Rules of Reality

But, do these rules of reason apply merely to logic and the mind alone? Why is reason the sole natural instrument we use to discover the true nature of reality? If these rules of reason do not apply to reality as well as to reasoning, then what is the usefulness of reason? If the rules of reason must apply infallibly within reason itself, must they not also apply to all extramental things as well?

If reason says that I cannot affirm and deny the same predicate of the same subject in making meaningful statements, then it must be that things, if they are real beings, cannot both be and not be in the same respect. Why is this so? Because, if affirming a predicate of a subject is to have any meaning in the real world, it must mean that some existential property is real in relation to whatever the subject of the proposition refers to in reality. And, if denying the predicate means anything in the real world it must mean that some existential property is not real in relation to that same subject. Hence, to say you cannot affirm and deny the same predicate of the same subject in a proposition must mean that, in the real world, you cannot have a property be both real and not real at the same time.

In a word, this necessarily implies the reality of the principle of non-contradiction. To deny what I have just said would amount to saying that the logical form of non-contradiction has no meaning in terms of reality – in which case the mental reasoning process would be absolutely irrelevant and useless in respect to reality, as I just stated above. Moreover, just as the rational principle must apply to every possible predicate – or else, every possible statement is true, so must its metaphysical corollary, the principle of non-contradiction, apply to every possible being. That is, just as its logical formulation must be universal, so too, must the ontological formulation of the principle of non-contradiction be universal. Otherwise, reason would not equivalently reflect reality – leaving rational understanding of the world unattainable.

The Principle of Sufficient Reason

As for the need for reasons in the domain of reason itself, nothing gets a “free pass” here. Reason itself demands a sufficient reason for every claim or assertion that goes beyond what is immediately evident in sense experience itself. Claims of “brute facts” are simply not accepted in the realm of reasoning. Every truth claim that goes beyond what is immediately evident in sense experience itself requires some rational justification.

Moreover, if such a need applies solely to reason itself, then reason becomes irrelevant to the search for ontological meaningfulness. If reason does not match reality, why deceive ourselves by using this fraudulent power at all?

As shown above, some statements are immediately evident, such as those that are self-evident or those immediately evident from experience. I gave an example above of a self-evident statement: “Every triangle has three angles.” This statement must be true since the definition of triangle entails having three angles.

So, too, if the nature of a real being requires a certain property, it is self-evident that it possesses that property. For example, if man’s nature is that of a rational animal, then rationality must be an existential property of man. Or, if a thing’s essential nature included its existence, such a being would necessarily exist. Essential definitions of real beings would be meaningless if they failed to include every necessarily entailed existential property of the thing defined.

It is also immediately evident that the reality of motion or change is “self-manifested” in the very act of being experienced.

That is to say, the fact of motion is immediately evident. But, what of statements about the facts of immediate experience which make claims beyond the facts themselves? For example, what if one says that motion is perfectly self-explanatory? Or, on the contrary, that motion requires a mover other than what itself is in motion?

There is a critical distinction here between the immediately evident fact that the motion itself is real and, on the other hand, any explanation as to why the motion is real. For it is not self-evident that self-motion is inherent in the essential nature of motion. That is, if it is claimed that motion’s self-movement is an essential property of motion, that claim itself must be rationally justified before it can be accepted as true.

Thus, even self-evident statements require an active defense of their self-evidence, or else they will not be acknowledged as self-evident. They cannot be merely asserted as a “brute fact.” Rather, the reason that they are their own evidence for being true must be defended by reason.

In the examples given, claims are being made beyond what is immediately given in experience. Whether motion is self-explanatory or needs a cause is not immediately evident merely from apprehending motion itself. As said earlier, such claims demand actual proof – or else, no sane person would simply accept one of these mutually-exclusive claims without adequate evidence of its truth. In a word, such claims demand a sufficient reason for belief beyond the mere statement itself.

Now, that sufficient reason could simply be that a given property belongs to the subject’s very nature, in which case, the claim would be proven to be self-evident. But if the property in question does not belong to the subject’s nature, then the claim is still in need of some explanation for the property being present, even though it does not belong to the essence or nature of the subject of the claim. In either case, some sufficient reason for the claim must be produced, which is the opposite of a “brute fact” – since “brute facts” require no explanation at all.

Therefore, claims about reality, which go beyond what is immediately given in sense experience itself, must either offer a reason why they are self-evident (1) because something about the very nature of the subject requires them to be true or (2) (hypothetically) some other intrinsic reason not based on the nature of the subject must explain why they are true. Or else, such claims are not self-evident, but rather (3) require extrinsic reasons explaining why they are true. In every possible case, some sufficient reason for the claim must be given – or else, there is no reason to take the claim seriously, since it is being made with no adequate reason or reasons for accepting it as true.

Since all such claims are claims about reality, the reasons needed for them to be true must be reasons pertaining to the real order of being, or else, such “reasons” are totally irrelevant as to why they would support the truth of the claim about reality being made, since it is a claim about reality, not merely about the way reason functions.

Moreover, this analysis is universally true and universally applicable, since it belongs to the very nature of how statements are understood and rationally defended.

If all this is true, then all beings must have a sufficient reason for their nature, properties, and existence either (1) within themselves (intrinsically) or (2) from something outside themselves (extrinsically, from a cause). This is, in fact, a statement of the metaphysical first principle of sufficient reason.

Moreover, if the above given inferences are not true, there is no reason to reason about anything, since the rational order would have absolutely no direct correlation to the real order of existing things.

Implications for the Science of Metaphysics

What all this means is that the universal fundamental rules of reason must also be the universal fundamental rules of reality or being. If statements cannot contradict each other and if statements must either be actively self-explanatory, or else, be explained by other statements, then this necessarily implies that beings cannot both be and not be and that beings must either be their own reason for being, or else, something else (a cause) must be their reason for being.

In a word, the principles of non-contradiction and sufficient reason must be universally affirmed by anyone who recognizes the rules of reason are correct and applicable to the real world. And if these most basic metaphysical principles are universally applicable to reality, as are the basic rules of reason, then they may be employed by metaphysicians as universal first principles necessarily applicable to all beings.

This means that the universal foundational principles of metaphysics are secure and certain. It means that the search for the ultimate existential basis for all finite beings is well-founded both in reason and in reality. It should then be no surprise that classical metaphysics employs these basic existential truths to lead the mind from the reality of finite beings, whose essences do not include their existence, back through a search of extrinsic reasons for their contingent existence, and ultimately to a First Cause for everything finite, the Infinite Being -- the God of classical theism.

But, it is All Backwards!

This essay has shown that the very intelligibility of rational thinking requires that the rules of reason are universally applicable to extramental reality: that logic has no meaning at all unless its rules that correspond to the metaphysical principles of “non-contradiction,” “sufficient reason,” and “causality” apply with equal universality and certitude to the real world as well as to the mental world.⁶

But, the Thomistic metaphysician – while accepting the truth of this necessary connection between the rules of reason and the rules of being – would immediately point out that this whole explanation is reversed from reality.

That is to say, it is not the rules of reason that dictate the rules of being, but it is the rules of being that dictate the rules of reason.

What the mind of man first knows is the concept of being – abstracted somewhat confusedly, but with certitude, from the first things it encounters in experience. This applies even to the subjective certitudes of experience described at the beginning of this essay. It is these initial certitudes (1) that being cannot be non-being and (2) that being must have reasons either in itself or from another, which force the mind to form the rules of reason that govern all our correct thinking and rational communication with others.⁷

Still, whether non-Thomists will accept this explanation or not, the very fact that all rational persons must accept the basic rules of reason, and that these rules of reason necessarily imply their universal application to extramental reality or being, is enough to establish with certitude the foundations for that very metaphysical science which is so anathema to contemporary naturalism. And it also shows us how certain absolute certitudes are possible.

Although this article will address the content of certain theological doctrines, it is written from a purely philosophical perspective. This is the same method used consistently in my book, Origin of the Human Species, in which I examine how evolutionary theory comports with divine revelation and philosophy. What characterizes philosophical analysis of theological doctrine is that reason alone is the method employed. Thus, while the philosopher as such cannot say whether the Trinity is factual, he can still examine whether it appears rationally possible.

The Scandalous Problem

Here I will examine the theological doctrine of hell to see whether it is compatible with the God of classical theism, who is claimed to be all good, all loving, and all merciful.

Many skeptics seem to think it is obvious that an all good and loving God could not possibly consign a fallible human being to the unimaginable, interminable, excruciating pain of physical fire and other torments in the form of punishment known as hell – a sanction for sin from which there is no appeal and no hope of future release. Surely, no good God and no compassionate human being could possibly even contemplate such unmerciful treatment of a human soul, merely because she made errors of choice during a single short lifetime.

One Aspect of the Solution

I do not intend to address every possible solution to this specific variation of the well-known problem of evil – a topic I have dealt with in more general terms elsewhere. Among possible solutions, it is argued that God permits evils, including physical suffering, for some greater good, which the human mind cannot grasp. Since metaphysics proves that God is all good, it necessarily follows that any evil found in the world cannot be his fault. Perhaps, the misuse of free will by certain creatures (angelic or human) has led to the introduction of evils unintended by God. Perhaps, man’s misuse of free will calls forth from divine retributive justice a punishment which seems severe, but which must be measured in terms of the infinite goodness which grievous sins offend – thus requiring the eternal pains of hell as a just punishment.

Pointedly, since God is the transcendent Law Giver, he is not bound by the natural laws that apply to creatures. Rather, it belongs exclusively to him to administer retributive justice to those who violate his laws – natural and divine. This means that it is good that God punish the wicked as part of his overall plan of creating and governing a good and just world.

But Why the Pains of Hell?

Still, I focus here on the specific question posed by some skeptics as to why an all good God would submit departed souls to eternal physical pain and suffering, even in its most agonizing form of physical fire?

Certainly, it appears at first glance that such suffering is nothing but an act of pure vengeance on the part of God. Indeed, does not Scripture declare, “Revenge is mine, I will repay, saith the Lord”¹? But, how can revenge be reconciled with the concept of a loving God?

Yet, while revenge is not an act permitted to mere mortals, it does have a legitimate meaning properly reserved to God as the ultimate administrator of retributive justice. Retributive justice is not just “getting back” at someone, but the restoration of the proper order of things – an order in which each person gets exactly what he deserves, including proper punishment for his evil deeds. Moreover, it must be understood that this right belongs in its highest instance to God alone as creator and supreme lawgiver.

Should such retributive justice include the fire of hell? And, if so, how can this be reconciled with the belief that God is all good and loving and merciful?

The Specific Solution

Most skeptics’ accusations against the punishments of hell are made on the supposition that even the Christian understanding of creation does not justify such eternal sufferings.

I will show that this divine retribution is consistent with the general order of creation presented in Christian sources as well as with the infinite goodness, justice, and mercy of the God of classical theism.

Among the central doctrines of Christianity is that man’s last end – the ultimate purpose of his very being – is to be united with God for all eternity in a face to face encounter with the divine being, what Catholics call the Beatific Vision.

But, in this present life, we do not enjoy the Beatific Vision. Does that mean that we are already in hell? Well, yes and no. Yes, in the sense that we are presently lacking the ultimate end of God’s intention in creating our nature. But, more importantly, we are not now in hell, in the sense that this is neither a punishment nor necessarily an eternal condition.

The essential meaning of hell is (1) that we finally understand fully that the Beatific Vision is the sole reason for our creation as human beings and the sole thing fully worth accomplishing in our existence, (2) to know that this end will for all eternity be denied to us, and (3) to know that this ultimate failure of our existential purpose is totally and completely our own fault and no one else’s.

All this being the case, why does not God simply punish bad lives by letting us merely fail to accomplish our intended final bliss in exactly the manner just described? Why is the threat of extreme physical punishment seemingly arbitrarily and capriciously attached to this natural spiritual sanction for a wicked life?

Man is a Rational Animal

Man’s uniqueness is that his spiritual, rational soul is embodied in an animal nature. Being an animal means that our nature is that of a sentient organism. We have senses. Our sensitive appetites help us achieve the good of the individual and of the species by making us seek sensible goods and avoid sensible evils. The natural good that accompanies attaining the sensible good is pleasure. The natural evil that accompanies experiencing sensible evil is pain. Thus, we are strongly motivated to seek pleasure and avoid pain.

It is not merely man’s spiritual soul that is aimed at his last end, but rather it is his whole human nature – spirit and matter, soul and body – that either attains his last end or fails to attain it through his own fault.

For this reason, we should not be surprised to discover an important role is played by bodily sense knowledge with respect to how and whether man reaches his last end, the Vision of God.

If we believed that missing our last end meant merely never seeing God in his very essence – never having the Beatific Vision, that might not be a sufficient reason for many people to lead virtuous lives. Such a “purely spiritual” motivation might not move us the way that we, like other animals, can be intensely motivated by desire for pleasure and, even more so, fear of agonizing pain!

Many would say that they do not presently miss God’s presence all that much in this life anyway, so why worry about missing him permanently in the next? In truth, we are not moved decisively in this present life toward God in all our choices -- despite many of us knowing, in theory at least, that he is the highest good.

In a word, to many people in this life, if all they thought the end of life entailed was attainment of the Vision of God, they might well be inclined to forgo that final destiny, since they would easily not value it as much as the earthly pleasures they know would never lead them to such alleged heavenly bliss!

But God made man to fear physical pain – and properly so, since it moves us to avoid dangers to our well-being both as individuals and for the sake of our species’ survival.

Therefore, it makes eminent sense that God would use man’s intense fear of great pain to motivate him to reach his last end. Once in the next life, man will clearly know the value of the spiritual reward of the Beatific Vision. Those who fail to attain that true last end through their own fault will then have the appalling realization of failing to attain the very purpose of their existence. But, in this life, the intensity of most human beings’ motivation is focused on sensible rewards and punishments, on pleasure and pain.

Thus, the realistic possibility of knowing that we may fall through grave sin into an eternal pit of most intense physical pain would be, for most mortal men, the strongest possible motivation to live an essentially good life – a life best ordered to avoiding the physical suffering of eternal damnation.

God's Love

Is letting sinners go to hell then truly an act of simple retributive justice on the part of God? Is God seeking merely to punish their moral evil by allowing them to fall into the pits of hell?

On the contrary, it is the greatest act of love on God’s part to make certain that men are motivated as strongly as possible to seek and attain what is, in truth and in fact, the greatest possible happiness -- the eternal Beatific Vision.

In other words, we humans do not properly value what will make us happiest in the long run, and thus, through our own craven ignorance of proper goods, fail to attain the perfect bliss God wills for all men in his act of creating them. Hence, God makes certain that we are properly motivated to seek our true and most perfect end, by graphically placing before us the sensible horror that confronts those who willfully fail to attain their proper last end.

But Most People Don't Even Believe in Hell!

That is quite true. And, even among those who should do so – based on their religion’s public doctrines, a large number do not believe in hell’s physical reality. Of the roughly 7.6 billion people on Earth as of 2018, about 55% belong to Judaism, Christianity, or Islam – all of which religions have some real notion of hell. That makes for some four billion people. If even half of this total take the torments of hell seriously, as probably do, that makes a total of about two billion people – or roughly a quarter of the world’s population – that believes in the real pains of hell.

Therefore, a good portion of humanity is motivated by the physical pains of hell to seek salvation seriously. Fear of hell can well be the beginning motivation that leads one to those religious practices, which, in turn, may lead to a more mature and deeper appreciation that one’s highest motivation should be, not fear of hell, but love of God because of his infinite goodness and perfection.

St. Thomas makes much the same point: “From becoming accustomed to avoid evil and fulfill what is good, on account of the fear of punishment, one is sometimes led on to do so likewise, with delight and of one's own accord. Accordingly, the law, even through punishing, leads men to being good.” (Summa Theologiae, I-II, q. 92, a. 2, ad 4.)²

Thus, the fear of hell may set one on a path leading to virtuous living for its own sake. This, in turn, can lead to the true understanding that union with God is the essence of heaven and our proper last end.

While eternal life for the inhabitants of paradise in Islam is usually associated with sensual pleasures, Islamic teaching also affirms that “the most acceptable of them with God shall look upon His face night and morning.” (Al-Qiyama 75:22,23)

In other words, for at least a quarter of mankind, belief in a literal physical hell serves the purpose of leading men in the direction of virtuous living. The net effect of this motivation toward salvation would naturally also lead many to understand the true value of our last end as being the Vision of God. From this would naturally also result an increasing number of souls seeking to please God by living more and more holy lives, that is, to achieve genuine sanctity.

Thus, if one wonders why God would make the torments of hell central to the beliefs of what is, de facto, only, perhaps, a quarter of mankind today, the answer might just be that God is actually concerned with the spiritual quality of human perfection. That is, God may be concerned not merely with the quantity of the saved, but also with the qualitative perfection to be found among those who are saved.

Oddly enough, while beliefs about the eternal torments of hell are used by skeptics as reason to disbelieve in God’s goodness, those same beliefs may motivate far greater numbers of souls to follow an upward journey of religious understanding that leads them eventually to the most holy religious insights and practice, that is, to sanctity itself.

In a word, the doctrine of hell creates a world designed to produce the greatest of saints – a qualitatively more perfect end than might otherwise be possible without hell. It is perfectly within the prerogative of God to design his creation so as to produce the most spiritually perfect creatures. Since the fear of hell, a hell which is licit in itself as a form of divine retributive justice, can serve as a licit means to that more perfect end, it is fully justified.

The Doctrine of Hell and Free Will

The Catholic Church dogmatically defines that those who die in a personal grievous sin descend immediately into hell³ and that the punishment of hell lasts for all eternity.⁴ Nonetheless, while the majority of traditional theologians do believe hell to entail a physical fire, it also remains true that the Church has never condemned the speculation that hell’s “fire” is constituted of purely spiritual pain, such as exclusion from the Beatific Vision and the pangs of conscience.⁵

Moreover, the Catechism of the Catholic Church declares that this “exclusion” from the Beatific Vision is essentially a form of “self-exclusion.”⁶ Such self-exclusion is expressed by Lucifer in Milton’s Paradise Lost, when he proclaims, “Better to reign in hell than to serve in heaven.” It is a measure of final obstinacy and pride that refuses to abandon serious sin and accept divine forgiveness.

It is true that the rational appetite, or will, must always choose the good. But does that mean that no free person in full possession of his faculties could refuse the highest good, God himself, so as to “self-exclude” himself from heaven and go to hell as a result?

This question reveals a basic misunderstanding of the nature of the rational appetite or free will. The good is defined as being as desirable. So, the rational appetite naturally desires every possible good. That is to say, the will is necessitated to seek the universal good or happiness. But the human will does not desire any particular good – no concrete good or action – necessarily in this life, since particular goods are good under one aspect, but not under another.⁷

Finite goods can always be refused, since there are elements of imperfection about them which may be possessed by some other goods. Hence, we choose between various goods, like chocolates in a box, where each has qualities lacked by others and vice versa – thereby, forcing us to choose between them.

But with regard to direct knowledge of God in his essence, St. Thomas Aquinas concludes that “the will of him who sees God in his essence of necessity adheres to God, just as now we desire of necessity to be happy.”⁸ (Summa Theologiae, I, q. 82, a. 2, c.)

God is known in his essence solely in the Beatific Vision. Yet, it is self-evident that the final refusal or acceptance of God must take place before God is embraced fully or rejected completely. Hence, God is not known in his very essence before the soul reaches heaven. What the soul knows before that time must then be some finite good, such as knowing the truth that God is the highest good. But, any finite good can be refused.

The problem is that we often choose lesser and improper goods even when we know that they are opposed to God’s law or to God himself – or even to our own true good! In fact, the very basis of our experience of free will is the fact that we can choose between various finite goods and even choose sinful goods that we know are opposed to the true good, or even the goodness of God himself!

Unfortunately, this is precisely why a hardened sinner, who still has essential possession of his rational faculties, can freely exclude himself from heaven by stubbornly rejecting the law of God or even some finite representation of divine majesty and love -- even on his deathbed.

How Many Are Lost?

But how many people actually go to hell? On that question, the closest the official Magisterium comes to offering an answer is found in the encyclical by Pope Benedict XVI, Spe Salvi, in which he suggests that, while a few souls go directly to heaven and a few go directly to hell, the “great majority of people” go to a place of temporary purification before entering the Vision of God, the place Catholics call “purgatory.”⁹

Curiously, even Islamic writings seem to have some notion of limited duration of punishment in hell, a concept similar to the Catholic conception of purgatory. Indeed, one optimistic text proclaims that almost all people will be removed from this state of suffering:  “From every one thousand, take out nine-hundred-and ninety-nine.” (Bukhari 4:567)

Since there is no way to be certain just how many, if any, souls actually go to hell, it is also possible that those who – through no fault of their own – are ignorant of its existence, may find themselves more likely to end up in some form of purgatory, rather than hell itself.

Conclusion

On careful reflection, the notion of hell as a place of eternal punishment for the souls of the wicked after death turns out to be (1) a just application of retributive justice by a Divine Lawgiver who stands ontologically above the natural law of his creation, (2) a natural sanction that is actually self-imposed by a will stubbornly opposed to the righteous laws of Infinite Goodness, and (3) a powerful tool designed to use the natural avoidance of pain – both spiritual and physical – as a motive to follow God’s laws and prepare souls for a spiritual ascendancy leading to the direct vision of God himself, which is man’s perfect happiness.

Hell, then, is not something evil in itself, but a natural byproduct of the order of being, one which aids in bringing many human beings to the highest state of natural – or even supernatural – perfection through holiness of life. God’s divine providence aims to produce the happiest creatures possible.

Ever since the time of Charles Darwin’s thunderous appearance on the human stage, evolutionary materialists have envisioned a world in which man appears without any rational need either for the God of classical theism or for a spiritual and immortal human soul. Human beings are finally to be classed as merely highly-developed subhuman hominins, whose mental abilities do not differ in kind from those of other primates. Human intellectual activity is thought to be merely a highly-evolved form of sentient activity, which, in turn, is ultimately reducible to highly-evolved neural patterns and activity within an advanced primate brain.

Still, a curious hangover from earlier Platonic times has haunted this view of the world, something philosophers have long wrestled with, known as the “problem of universals.”

The Problem of Universals

Today many philosophers debate the exact status of universals. While it is clear that a universal term is one thing predicated of many, this linguistic reality gives rise to important and controversial philosophical questions. Do universals exist only in speech or are they something that exists independently in the real world? If they exist in the mind, what do they ontologically constitute within the human person – merely some biological phenomenon, or a spiritual product evincing human spiritual immortality? Or, do they exist independently of the mind? If so, are they merely something really common found within things? Or, do they actually exist in a world of their own, independent of both men’s minds and natural objects – as Plato claims?

Down through the long history of Western philosophy, major and minor thinkers have sought to give answers to these sorts of questions. Proper evaluation of these many positions would properly require a lengthy professional journal article or even a book – far beyond the scope of this present short piece.

Instead, what I propose to do here is to examine the actual cognitive objects involved in this extensive discussion, not with a view to declaring a winner in the debates between the various positions, but simply to show that the basis for the debates entail two distinct cognitive entities which are clearly incommensurable with each other, namely, the image and the concept.

Image and Concept

One might wonder why I am now talking about the concept (also called an “idea”) rather than the universal. It is because we encounter the universal first in the form of the universal concept, which is the intellectual representation of something that is common to many and can, therefore, be predicated of many individuals. Hence, I will be talking about the concept, or universal concept, as the cognitive object in and through which the universal is understood. Thomistic philosophers maintain that the universal concept is a spiritual in nature. Since the human intellect produces this spiritual concept, they then use this fact to argue for the spirituality and immortality of the human soul.

The image is viewed generally as an internal sense representation, such as one has when he closes his eyes and imagines a “picture of a cow.” More technically, for Thomistic philosophers, an image is any sense impression of one of the internal senses, especially the imagination or sense memory.

For many, the distinction between a concept and an image is not clear, leading to such common depictions as that of forming a picture of a “blindfolded lady holding scales” in one’s “mind,” when having an idea of justice.

The Scottish skeptic, David Hume, who has greatly influenced the thinking of many modern materialists, was guilty of such confusion. Hume distinguishes between “impressions,” which he views as vivid and lively perceptions, and “ideas,” which are products of imagination and memory, making them less vivid and lively. But both “impressions” and “ideas” remain experiences, with ideas being merely weak resemblances of direct experience. One might rightly think that Hume has primarily in mind sense experience, when he speaks of “impressions.” Still, he also includes such things as love, hate, and acts of will.

Indeed, it is quite predictable that modern evolutionary materialists would find themselves unable to think of ideas or concepts as anything other than the same kind of neural activity that they conceive sensation to entail. Suggesting that intellectual knowledge could be radically different in kind from sense knowledge might be the belief of medieval theologians and philosophers, but such byproducts of assumed metaphysical dualism appear to have no place in modern science and its philosophical interpretations, according to these scientific materialists.

The Differences

For evidence of the radical differences between images and concepts (ideas), I shall turn to the work of Fr. Austin M. Woodbury, S.M., who taught philosophy for decades at the Aquinas Academy in Sydney, Australia, which he founded following World War II. Woodbury, who studied under Fr. Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, distinguished himself by thoroughly systematizing the work of St. Thomas Aquinas in a manner not found in the writings of Garrigou-Lagrange or other contemporary Thomists.

Woodbury enunciates many clear differences between images and concepts, thereby underlining the radical epistemological and ontological distinction between them. The following seventeen distinctions are based on his work.¹

1. An image is solely of how something appears to the senses, as having this color or that shape or sound. But, the concept gives us the very nature of something, for example, a mammal is understood as an animal that gives milk.

2. An image always exhibits singular sensible qualities, for example, a particular color or shape or loudness or smell. But, a concept may have no sensible qualities, for example, justice, truth, or goodness. Even a sensible quality, considered as universal, may have no sensible qualities, for example, color, as such, is colorless and loudness, as such, is silent.

3. An image is always singular, for example, this pig or this car. But, the concept is always universal (unum-versus-alia: one against others), an understanding that applies to many things, for example, triangularity or mankind.

4. An image has no degrees of extension, that is, that is, the number of individual things to which it applies. For example, the image of this horse applies to this horse only. But, a concept has degrees of extension. Horse, as such, applies to all horses; animal applies to all animals. Yet, animal has greater extension than horse, since it applies to all animals, including all horses.

5. An image can be produced extramentally, as say, a statue or painting of a given height, color, and so forth. But the concept cannot be produced extramentally, since there is no single statue or painting that can physically be all horses at once. How does one make a painting or statue of “living?” That is why abstract art looks so bizarre! You can make a statue of Lincoln, but you cannot make a statue of humanity, since you cannot express all mankind at once physically in a single statue.

6. An image makes no distinction within itself. For example, an image of horse does not distinguish its vegetative powers from its sentient powers. But we can abstract its vegetative powers from its sentient powers and consider the conceptual distinction between them.

7. An image is always concrete. It is this triangle on this board at this time, with its exact shape, color, and size. The concept is abstract. It abstracts from all the singularizing aspects of the image. The concept of animal abstracts from the concrete accidental qualities of the zebra image that may be associated with it.

8. Images constitute the fleeting, changing sense content that accompanies conceptual knowledge, which is stable. Writing a paper on animals may evoke many associated images of various individual cows, horses, stables, hunters, and so forth – constituting a disconnected kaleidoscope of sensible images connected only by the underlying conceptual theme.

9. Images follow the laws of association of images, as in sailors and ships, whereas concepts follow the laws of reason, as hammering is understood as a cause with a loud noise being its effect.

10. Images can vary without changing one’s logical train of thought, whereas changing concepts under consideration can destroy the logic of thought. Thus, imagining horses, chickens, or mice does not affect thinking about animals, but shifting from animals to plants would distract from thinking solely about animals.

11. Image clarity does not assure clear thinking, but clear thinking – even with confused images – can still lead to true understanding. Conversely, conceptual confusion will lead to false conclusions no matter how vividly and clearly it is associated with images.

12. Despite variations in images, concepts may remain stable. Thus, whether one imagines squirrels, bats, or mice, the concept of animal is unaffected. Also, verbal images may vary while conceptual content is untouched. For example, homme, Mann, uomo, homo, and hombre all signify “man,” despite the varied verbal image.

13. Images alone do not permit speech to take place. Speech is based on concepts, not images. The same word, animal, may evoke an image of a horse to one person but a mongoose to another person. If the word stood for the image, its content would be equivocal! That is why one does not say, “Did you get my images?,” but rather, “Did you get my meaning, that is, the conceptual content intended?”

14. If we thought only in images, translation from one language to another would be impossible. The image does not convey a single, defined meaning. The image of a man does not reveal whether it stands for an adult, a male, Homo sapiens, intelligence, a criminal, or any of a number of other significations. Words themselves are purely arbitrary, meaning nothing unless you already know their meaning or assign them a new meaning.

15. The judgment establishes a relation of affirmation or negation between a subject and a predicate. Such a relation is not an image.

16. Reasoning entails apprehension of a nexus between premises and a conclusion. This nexus is not an image.

17. While an image represents an individual entity existing in space, the concept represents the nature outside of a given space and time.

Woodbury defines a “common image” as an image of a singular thing according to sensible appearances that happens to be similar to other singular things.² While useful for the instinctive life of, say, a mouse, enable it to avoid all cats, it is not to be confused with the intellectual understanding of the nature of a cat, which belongs to the radically distinct universal concept.

Implications of This Radical Distinction

While philosophers may still argue about the exact epistemological and ontological status of the universal concept, what should now be clear is that its nature must be radically distinct from that of the image.

Those philosophers and scientists who reduce all human knowledge to sensation have constantly confused the image with the concept – believing that all thought must be understood merely in terms of images and their associations. In turn, images, for materialists, are grounded in neural patterns or activity – so that concepts, ultimately, were presumed to be basically reducible to just forms of neural activity in the brain. And, since images were thought to be common to man and beast alike, no essential differences between humans and other animals could be based on human intellectual abilities.

But, once it is clear that conceptual knowledge is radically distinct from sense images, the possibility, that human intellectual knowledge is essentially distinct from, and superior to, mere animal manipulation of images, again emerges. The old arguments of ancient philosophers for the qualitative differences between human beings and lower animals become more rationally acceptable. Whatever credence may be given to such arguments, the seventeen distinctions between the image and concept listed above make it clear that it is no longer reasonable for naturalists to claim that universal concepts are merely sophisticated or common images somehow constituted of neural activity in the brain.

Conclusion

Because it is grounded in the individuating, quantifying nature of matter, the image always presents itself under the conditions of matter by being imaginable, concrete, sensible, singular, and particular. For this reason, Thomistic philosophers maintain that images manifest dependence on the physical organs of sensation. There is no indication that the sensory powers which we share with the rest of the animal kingdom make us any more than merely material beings.

On the other hand, the universal concept shows none of the characteristics proper to material beings. It is not imaginable, concrete, sensible, singular, or particular. In a word, the concept appears to be not material in nature and, entirely unlike the image, shows no signs of being dependent on matter. Concepts appear to be spiritual in nature. From the fact that human beings – alone in the animal kingdom – have the intellectual ability to form such universal concepts, Thomistic philosophers propose arguments demonstrating the spirituality and immortality of the human soul.³

Perhaps, humans are, after all, God’s special creatures, superior in nature to all lower forms of physical creation, including other animals. Perhaps, men are placed on earth – not as coequal species to other living things – but as stewards responsible for overseeing the welfare of all subhuman creation within their power, including lower animals.

While irrational animals may possess sensitive, but mortal, souls, they do not possess spiritual and immortal souls. Such spiritual souls would have to have been endowed by our Creator solely to genuine human beings, whose essential superiority is marked by our remarkable species’ unique ability to think in terms of universal concepts – an ability totally absent in the rest of this planet’s sentient organisms.⁴

Scientific materialists propose certain epistemological and ontological claims, allegedly in the name of natural science, that conflict with man’s common sense experience of the world. This article will show (1)  that such claims are not based on sound natural science, but the assumed philosophy of materialism, (2) that the materialist/atomist worldview is fundamentally flawed, and (3) that hylemorphism offers scientifically-compatible alternatives that align with reality.

Materialism's Epistemological Blunder

Human knowledge begins with sense experience, including that of immediately-given extramental  physical reality. Scientists make observations and take measurements of this world and stoutly maintain that a vast physical cosmos exists.

Yet, sensation’s scientific description begins with external physical objects, which impact external sense organs (in vision’s case, the eyes), causing chain reaction impulses through the retina and optic nerve, resulting in changes in the brain’s occipital lobe. This leads many to think that all we really know through sensation is some sort of neural pattern, image, representation, or even “hallucination” inside the brain – a representation, but not a direct experience, of external physical reality itself.

To save natural science from epistemological idealism, many scientific materialists argue that science remains objective, because the brain rather accurately represents external objects. They will cite many scientific tests which appear to confirm that the internal image quite perfectly represents external reality -- so that scientific measurements can be taken as accurate and our depiction of physical reality is “scientifically correct.”

Still, if literally all we know are internal neural patterns or images of external reality, how can we verify their conformity to external reality at all? Even by millions of experiments?

To determine whether A conforms to B entails knowing both A and B. Just to know A, but not B – and still make any judgment at all about A conforming to B – is obviously impossible.

The irresolvable problem is that to judge the conformity of internal experience to extramental reality absolutely requires some direct experience of external reality – even as the basis for all further observations and testing of exactly how the physiology works as well as it does.

Materialism's Encroachment on Science

Scientific materialists often fail to distinguish between (1) the neural changes in the brain and (2) the subjective experience of sensing. The former are physically observable neural patterns; the latter are subjective experiences that cannot be subject to physical observation.

Science traces physiological phenomena from the external world into the brain. Science can say the physical sequence terminates inside the brain. But science cannot say that knowledge takes place inside the brain, because knowledge is not itself an observable phenomenon. Science can look at neural patterns “from the outside,” but it cannot look at subjective sense experience “from the inside.”

Sensory neural activity is located inside the brain. But, the only way to infer from that fact that all knowledge is located inside the brain is by illicitly adding the assumption that sense knowledge is a purely material phenomenon, which can be spatially located. Such an assumption does not come from natural science, but from the philosophy of materialism.

When metaphysical materialism’s philosophical claims are gratuitously added to the findings of natural science, they turn scientists into bad philosophers and make their proclamations the conclusions of bad philosophy, rather than good science.

The Immateriality of Sense Experience

If sense knowledge is claimed to take place solely in the brain, this means that (1) the act of knowing and (2) the object known must be physically located inside the brain. And yet, as I have shown elsewhere, sense experience itself cannot be a purely physical entity.

While material things are extended and located in space, sense experience is immaterial in that it is neither extended in space nor physically located. This does not mean that sense experience is spiritual in nature, since spiritual entities are not only not extended in space but also are existentially independent of anything that is extended in space. Still, sense experience depends on material organs for its operation.

Sense experience must not be confused with a sense image. Sense experience begins with direct apprehension of an extramental object, such as a menacing lion. But, a sense image is merely an internal representation of some previously experienced sensed object. The present discussion is primarily about sense experience of extramental things, not images – although both are immaterial entities as evinced by them not being extended in space.

Sense experience is of the whole object seen (in the case of vision). When we see a tree, we see the whole tree – top and bottom, left and right side – all at once in a single act of sensing. The only way any physical entity can represent the whole of any other physical entity is by one part representing one part and another diverse part representing a different part. Thus recording devices store images of objects by using many thousands of diverse bits, each representing a different part of, say, a tree. TV screens and computer monitors do the same, because hundreds of thousands of bits are needed to fully present a screen image.

The old electron gun televisions sweep the screen rapidly with electrons, creating an image composed of illuminated phosphors. While we see the whole picture all at once, the only way to unify the whole image on the screen itself is to collapse the deflection current of the vertical and horizontal output stages, thus making all the electrons hit the same central point on the screen – thereby, creating a single point of light. The image is destroyed. (This phenomenon occurs briefly when you turn off these sets.)  Such a result is unavoidable, since any extended image can be represented on any extended medium solely by having diverse parts of the medium representing diverse parts of the image. Otherwise, all data converges into an indecipherable mass. “Unity” destroys the “image” in purely physical media.

This is because any physically extended image or extramental data must be composed of distinct parts, since all material entities are composed of distinct parts in space. But, if sense experience is of the whole, and yet simple and completely unified, this requires that all such distinct parts be conjoined onto a single “receiving material point” (if that is even possible). But, to do that, all the distinct parts of the data must be so conjoined as to cancel each other’s distinct content, which would make the single “receiving point” totally lacking in any distinct parts, and hence, absolutely incapable of representing the image or data at all. In a word, all data would be so overlayed upon itself as to lose all intelligible or decipherable content. Such analysis would apply even to the most infinitesimally-small physical particles, since whatever is material is extended in space and, as such, has distinct parts.

What this means is that sense experience of an external physical entity is not itself extended in space, whereas any physical entity is always extended in space. Thus, the sense experience of a physically real entity must not itself be a physical entity! And if the sense experience is not a physical entity, this also means that the subjective sense experience cannot be identical with physical brain activity!

Thus, materialism’s central claim that to be is to be physical is dead wrong.

Materialism can be easily tested in our own experience. We see the physical world around us all at once – in a single act that somehow unifies its entire content. We know that material things -- extended in space -- can never unify experience without placing its content on top of itself so as to render its parts indistinguishable and unintelligible. Therefore, we have immediate experience (seeing a whole in a unified act) taking place in a way that contradicts materialism’s basic tenet that all reality is extended and located in space (even energy or force fields).

Moreover, since what is not extended in space is also not located in space, this means that the inference that sense experience is located inside the brain cannot be true. Sense experience of extramentally-given objects simply cannot be located at all, even though it is associated with neural patterns located inside the brain.

Only Partially Dependent on Brain Activity

While sense experience is dependent upon sense organs for its actualization, it is not physically identical to those bodily organs or to the neural activity taking place in them. If brain or end organ activity ceases or is damaged, sense experience ceases or is impaired, which shows some form of dependence of sense experience on brain activity.

But, sense experience actually does something that no purely material entity can do, namely, the immaterial act of unifying the experience of external physical reality, or the internal image, into a simple whole. Therefore, its immaterial nature – precisely because it is immaterial and unitive -- must be superior to that of any purely material organ or neural activity. Now, an inferior cause cannot produce a superior effect, that is, materiality cannot account for immateriality. Thus, while it cannot exist without brain activity, sense experience must get its immateriality from some other source than material brain activity.

Since sense experience is neither located nor extended in space, the fact that it is associated with neural activity that is limited to the inside of the brain offers no reason to assume that experiential content itself must be limited to the inside of the brain – especially given that our immediate experience is primarily of an extramental physical world. But the real question is how can such direct experience of the world take place in spite of being associated with intracranial brain activity? Is there an ontological basis for saying that our senses somehow enable us to directly apprehend extramental reality? To answer this question, we must recognize that materialism misses a central immaterial component of all reality, a component that helps explain how the senses allow the sentient knower to know to its physical environment directly.

What has thus far been discovered is an immaterial act of sense experience, somehow existing “within” us, but not identical with the neural brain activity that scientific materialism mistakenly confuses with sense experience. The question now is how can this immaterial sense experience directly reach an extramental physical world, when the brain activity associated with it is located inside the brain?

Another Materialist Fiasco: No Substantial Forms

As explained elsewhere on Strange Notions, scientific materialism’s “twin sister,” atomism (the claim that all reality is nothing but tiny physical particles) fails to explain a reality that few want to give up, namely, their own existence as living substantial unities. In a video on atheistic materialism I showed that, according to the logic inherent in their own basic claims, atomists, such as Richard Dawkins, do not really exist. Atomism exists as a philosophy, but atomists don’t!

Combine oxygen and hydrogen and you get water. But are water molecules substantial unities, or not? Are they single things, distinct from everything else – or, are they still just oxygen and hydrogen atoms, temporarily sharing outer orbit electrons? If you say they are still separate atoms -- just sharing electrons, that is what atomism implies.

Atomism maintains that nothing really exists above atomic level (whatever ultimate physical particles these “atoms” may really be). That means that no macroscopic, substantially-unified things exist – not cockroaches, not kangaroos, not horses, and not human beings (including Dr. Dawkins). There may be amazingly-complex chemical bonding found in dynamic functional unities based on DNA rules (organisms), but none of it constitutes a substantial unity -- a real being distinct from other things: just countless infinitesimal particles doing a cosmic dance with different sets of temporary partners.

But what if those hydrogen and oxygen atoms really form an existential bond creating a single substantial unity? What if sequoias and zebras and Dr. Dawkins really do exist? Then, what makes them one being?

Here Aristotle’s hylemorphism rescues materialists from the irrational consequences of their doctrine.

Hylemorphism recognizes the necessity of some unifying principle in macroscopic things. This necessary principle is called “substantial form” -- an immaterial co-principle of material beings that makes them substantially one, puts them into a species, and accounts for how they act. Being one substance means that every bodily part shares the same substantial form. For human beings, the form of one’s stomach is not “stomach-ness,” but “humanness.” The form of one’s big toe is not “big toe-ness,” but “humanness.” The human substantial form, or soul (life principle), makes us one being by pervading every iota of our being that is truly “us.”

Some “parts” are not us, such as one’s intestinal flora or the hydrochloric acid in our stomachs. But, if one excluded every part of us reductively, there would be no “us” left to be human. So, whatever in us that is human shares the same immaterial substantial form (soul). If we lose a hand or foot, we are not less human, but there is a little less of us (quantitatively) to be human. Thus, form is present everywhere, and yet, physically is nowhere, since it is immaterial. Substantial form acts throughout the whole substance to make it be one single being of the same nature throughout its whole reality.

How does the substantial form’s immateriality enable sentient beings to directly experience extramental reality? Just as sense experience is not locatable in space, neither is the soul. The soul operates through its faculties, such as sense faculties that enable us to directly know extramental things – as they are given to the end organs of the senses. (Thus, we do not know Alpha Centauri as 4.3 light years away, but as its light is now externally present to the eyes.)

Once materialism’s “located in space” spell is broken, the immaterial soul and its immaterial faculties enable us to interact as a whole with extramental physical things – without having to specify the location of the sense faculties any more than one must physically locate the soul in one’s big toe. The soul and its powers are present in the organism and to extramental reality through its activities, but without us being able to “empirically verify” its exact location, because it has none.

There is no “mechanism” by which sentient organisms directly experience extramental things, since sense experience is not a mechanistic physical thing. Yet, clearly, sense experience exists, is immaterial in nature, and gives direct experience of bodies – as they are extramentally-given to the end organs of the senses.

Materialism's Evident Falsity

While materialism is hugely wrong elsewhere, including its denial of the human soul’s spirituality and its denial of God’s existence, I presently focus on points where materialism’s falsity is most manifest: (1) its failure to recognize that sense experience must be immaterial, and (2) its failure to recognize that substantial forms are real and absolutely needed to explain how real things can exist above the submicroscopic level.

Elsewhere on Strange Notions, I have offered proofs for the human soul’s spirituality and immortality as well as proofs for God’s existence. But those topics have a long history of contentious debate, which can confuse those who do not understand them thoroughly. The present article’s advantage is that it employs phenomena anyone can immediate experience.

No one can honestly deny the unity and wholeness of his sense experience, and no sane person denies his own substantial existence. These immediately-evident experiences, when combined with a little thought about the nature of matter and atomism as explained above, lead to a powerful conclusion that purely physical matter is not all that is real.

We do not live in a world of complex piles of atoms in which nothing has any substantial unity. Rather, substantial forms enable macroscopic things to be real and to be classified according to internal principles of unity and common activity. We do live in a world in which the human intellect can penetrate and classify reality based on whole, substantially-unified beings – from atoms to atomists -- whose natures are revealed through their activities.

Hylemorphism provides realistic solutions to the mistakes of materialism. Materialism traps the materialist inside his own brain from which hylemorphism frees him by pointing out that immaterial sense experience is not spatially located. The human immaterial soul explains the substantial unity of man in which his immaterial sense faculties can be present to the whole body and to extramental reality.

Hylemorphism rescues atomists’ personal existence by affirming the reality of substantial forms, which make them substantially-unified macroscopic beings.

Materialism is empirically contradicted (1) by our ability to sense wholes and (2) by our immediate experience of our own substantial unity – which phenomena are easily explained respectively by (1) immaterial cognitive faculties,  and (2) immaterial substantial forms. Materialism’s failures are remedied by the hylemorphic worldview.

Why would anyone want to be a materialist when materialism cannot even explain how a whole (substantially unified) dog can see and chase a whole (perceptually unified) cat?