Day 5: Walking With Aristotle
Day 5: Walking With Aristotle
It seems we need to stay within a philosophical system to engage. Unless one of us gives, I don’t see how engagement would work.
Hello from my new mental landscape. I put out the fires, pushed through, and the end is in sight. The thesis page count is met, and I am coasting downhill on conclusions. Relief is good. It would be premature to pop the champagne, but I am satisfied that this rite of passage into Aristotle’s world was worth it. The trick was to let go of what I know and remember that the goal is to see nature as Aristotle and then Aquinas did, no mass spectrometer, no scanning electron microscopes, no time-resolved femtosecond flash photolysis absorption spectroscopy. I am setting chemistry aside for the moment, like the cook who throws away recipes and measuring cups so she can cook from her heart.
I was struck by Aristotle’s distinction of artifacts, i.e., artificial things. Here’s a passage from Physics, Book II, Chapter 1 (192b8-20) on causes.
Of the things that are, some are by nature, others through other causes: by nature are animals and their parts, plants, and the simple bodies, such as earth, fire, air, and water (for these things and such things we say to be by nature), and all of them obviously differ from the things not put together by nature. For each of these has in itself a source of motion and rest, either in place, or by growth and shrinkage, or by alteration; but a bed or a cloak, or any other such kind of thing there is, in the respect in which it has happened upon each designation and to the extent that it is from art, has no innate impulse of change 20 at all. But in the respect in which they happen to be of stone or earth or a mixture of these, they do have such an impulse, and to that extent, since nature is a certain source and cause of being moved and of coming to rest in that to which it belongs primarily, in virtue of itself and not incidentally.
By “things that are” he means physical things that exist (not spiritual or abstract). For natural things, nature is the cause for Aristotle. (Aquinas goes a step further and acknowledges God as the cause of nature.) Things that are “through other causes” are the artifacts, whether it is lasagna, a house, or a statue of Aristotle.
But notice he follows right after that saying that “by nature are animals…” and all these other things, including earth, fire, air, and water, which are, for Aristotle, the elements. All the natural things have in themselves “a source of motion and rest.” But the artifacts? They do not have an internal source of motion and rest. They do not have an “innate impulse of change” at all, except that of the natural elements and materials from which they are made.
This is one of the ideas that has been so hard for me to appreciate. There is an internal difference in natural and artificial things. Okay, so I know that natural and artificial things are different, as I wrote here, “Is Anything Artificial in Naturalism?” However, since I take everything to be Lego’d together with atoms, I didn’t think there would be any internal difference. Whether God makes a tree through natural processes, or a man makes a table out of that tree, it’s the same stuff. Not so, says Aristotle. You cannot plant a table and expect a table to spring up from the ground six months later. Tou·ché.
We know that. Right? In a popular Voet and Voet college-level Biochemistry textbook, Chapter 1 "Life" states, "In all cases, our knowledge, extensive as it is, is dwarfed by our ignorance" (Wiley, 2011, p. 16). I worked on artificial photosynthesis in graduate school. Part of my conversion, as I’ve told the story so many times, is that I experienced a comeuppance looking out my lab window at a tree after spending weeks in the basement laser lab trying to get electrons to transfer in my nanocomposites. I was painfully aware that nature could do what I never could.
We can manipulate matter. We can envision the form in our intellects and produce the existing thing by uniting the form in our minds with the matter in our hands, but we cannot bring things to life. We do not create; we merely borrow. It is amazing what humans can do, for sure. I mentioned the other day that we use mobile phones without longing to know how they work, but the fact that we could make something like that is astonishing when you stop and think about it. Someone longed to make them work. A mobile phone would have blown Aristotle’s mind!
Aristotle recognized, however, that humans and the rest of nature are different. Aquinas adopted his natural philosophy and metaphysics to develop the Five Ways arguments for God’s existence, with God the Creator in mind (instead of nature). That’s what Aquinas means when he says we can know God exists through reason. That’s also what St. Paul means in Romans 1:20. “Ever since the creation of the world, his invisible attributes of eternal power and divinity have been able to be understood and perceived in what he has made.”
I just always thought that last part, “in what he has made,” was about atoms. It is about atoms, but more so that scripture is about wholeness, unity, and communion, not just for people but for all of nature and supernature.
Regarding atheism, this is where I am stuck trying to engage.
I practically set my hair on fire this week (and the last two years) learning the Aristotelian-Thomistic metaphysical framework. I committed myself to it in the same way I committed myself to chemistry.
Part of my frustration with philosophy is that, unlike chemistry, there are various philosophical systems to choose from. You don’t get to do that in chemistry. It’s a physical science. There is data. I don’t know how to engage across philosophical systems, or even more frustrating, I don’t know how to engage when the other person does not adhere to any system. I have come to regard the “philosophical system” as important for the sake of clear terms.
So, I can 1) devote myself to learning a different system, or 2) ask atheists to stay within the system I commit to if we engage. Unless one of us gives, I don’t see how engagement would work. I’m not just griping. I spent weeks getting into atheist’s mindsets (see my older posts), only to realize they were not committed to the same philosophical framework I was using. So, what do we do? On this issue, I am still very new. But I’m here now, among the elements, nature, and Aristotle.
>>>So, what do we do? On this issue, I am still very new. But I’m here now, among the elements, nature, and Aristotle.<<<
This is an excerpt from Kenneth Williford edited anthology: "Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion: A Philosophical Appraisal":
"It all turns on what one would think to be fairly straightforward matters: one has no good reason to believe in explanatorily gratuitous entities—tails that wag no dogs, so to speak; and, given competing explanatory strategies, ontologically conservative ones, especially if they have been successful in multiple prima facia disparate domains, are, ceteris paribus, preferable to those that require the introduction of categorically new entities (thus, e.g., naturalistic explanations of mystical and religious experiences drawn from Neuroscience, Psychology, and the Social Sciences, are preferable to supernatural explanations of them; cf. Fales 2010). In other words, parsimony, consilience, and observational continuity carry a lot of epistemic weight—more weight than the theist has yet been able to move. This is certainly in the spirit of Philo and would justify a motivated skepticism towards religious claims that cannot be extended to the “unobservables” sometimes postulated in the sciences. One should compare what is, in effect, Fales’ take on the demarcation problem with Glymour’s. Is there a debate to be had between them? In one sense, Fales does not see a demarcation problem: natural theology and arguments from religious experience can be treated with precisely the same epistemic tools with which we treat any common sense or scientific hypotheses; and when so weighed, they are found quite wanting. Religious hypotheses, then, are not categorically different from commonsense or scientific hypotheses; rather, they are just hypotheses about the world that have not fared very well epistemically speaking." (pg. 11-12)
I think the text outline here points to one way to resolve some methodological issues in the debates between Atheists and Theists. As the excerpt points out, there are a lot of debates and discussions about Science vs. Religion. The author highlights that many of these debates are misguided; we should not be asking whether science conflicts with religion, but rather which theory of the world can explain the data we see. In asking this question, we can treat religious hypotheses the same way as we do other metaphysical or commonsense hypotheses. We can weigh them using the theoretical virtues we generally think are truth-conducive.
This gives us a method (much like Oppy's) to resolve our disagreement. Theists have their theory of the world, and so do Atheists. To see which theory is better, we can weigh them up using respective theoretical virtues and see which theory can account for the data as a whole. Of course, not surprisingly, Atheists think that religious hypotheses of the world cannot bear the epistemic weight that scientific and other naturalistic hypotheses can.
Here's The Truth, do with it what you will: https://kaiserbasileus.substack.com/p/metaphysics-in-a-nutshell