Did Aristotle Fail in Physics? Part 2
Terms for Premise A: What is Physics? What is World View?
Now I’ll address terminology for Premise A. Here’s the argument from Part 1:
Premise A—>An organismic world view causes a failure in physics.
Premise B—>Aristotle held an organismic world view.
Therefore, Aristotle failed in physics.
What is Physics?
Jaki has a strict definition of “physics.” He calls it an exact science. I reviewed this definition in the first chapter of Science Was Born of Christianity, and below this post I have included the list of references. For Jaki, physics is the most exact science, even more so than chemistry and biology. He also contrasts modern physics with the qualitative physics of ancient natural philosophy, i.e., Aristotelian physics. He calls physics the study of objects in motion. Since motion is continuous, such a study requires infinitesimal calculus.
This branch of mathematics deals with change as it approaches infinitely smaller intervals. It has two sub-branches: differential calculus and integral calculus. Differential calculus deals with rates of change. Integral calculus deals with accumulated quantities during change. For example, when you glance at your speedometer in your car, you read an instantaneous speed (mi/hr or km/hr), but in fact, your glance occurred in a short time interval, maybe on the order of microseconds. We cannot measure instances during continuous change because that would mean we stop the motion, and to stop motion is to have no motion at all. To measure continuous change, mathematics needs to deal with the smallest time interval possible, infinitesimally small, approaching zero.
When Jaki wrote that Aristotle had a “failure in physics,” he meant that Aristotle did not develop physics as an exact science. That sounds unfair, right? I think this is where some readers miss Jaki’s purpose. His reason for asking the question is to find out what hinders, stifles, and thwarts the quantitative study of objects in motion. His approach to history was first to get the facts straight and then to interpret them. He was not trying to see who won the race to modern science. He wanted to know why physics, so defined, came about in the first place. The Scientific Revolution in the 1600-1700s marks a significant change in the way man interacts with nature, the intellectual spark that began modern science as a viable self-sustaining discipline of physical laws and systems of laws.
Fr. Jaki was the Benedictine priest, physicist, and theologian who was awarded the Templeton Prize in 1987 for being “a leading thinker in areas at the boundary of science and theology” and “in recognition of his reinterpretation of the history of science.” It seems to me that his work has not been appreciated enough.
Jaki thought ancient Greece came closer to a birth of modern science than any other culture. Aristotle and his predecessors achieved enormous success, especially in biology (as I mentioned in Part 1). Additionally, Democritus had ideas about determining area and volume by dividing objects into an infinite number of parts, and Archimedes “came tantalizingly close to formulating the basic propositions of infinitesimal calculus” (Science & Creation, 103). He worked out infinitesimals for cones and spheres. Had those propositions been applied to motion in a way that could measure statics (states of things) and dynamics (states of things changing), quantitative physics could have developed in ancient Greece. Why did it not, then? What kept them from seeing it? That is Jaki's question.
Modern science was a revolution away from a qualitative and descriptive analysis of nature to a quantitative assessment of motion. It is, after all, quantitative modern science that is responsible for the explosion of technology in the last two hundred years, an astonishingly short time in human history. The question at hand is whether an organismic world view could ever be successful for the emergence of quantitative physics as we know it today.
What’s a World View?
Think of a world view as a set of fundamental beliefs that make up your total outlook on the world, the lens through which you organize how you accept what exists in the universe. By “beliefs” in this context, we mean the word as derived from the Latin, credo, which means to believe, to trust in, to give credence to. A belief is more than an opinion. It is more like a comprehensive idea that you devote yourself to when you assess the world. Sometimes Jaki used the word Weltanschauung (a noun borrowed from German) instead of world view.
How does one prove a world view true? This is another of Jaki's teachings. You don’t do it with physics. Jaki’s use of the term “world view” is somewhat like Graham Oppy’s phrase, “big picture.” (See “Is Anything Artificial in Naturalism?”) Oppy’s idea is that everybody takes the same data and interprets it differently according to whichever world view glasses they don (Atheism, 116-117). He thinks atheism wins because it explains as much as theism but has less metaphysical commitments, namely that God exists. Jaki would have found this myopic. Over the course of human history, different cultures gathered different data and analyzed it through different world views, usually deriving from their religious beliefs. Jaki was insistent, however, that a world view must stand on its own legs, which is to say a philosophy should be able to support itself through its own methods of reasoned discourse and not depend on its proofs from physics. A world view is a priori whereas physics must be a posteriori.
This is entirely consistent with Aristotle’s teaching in Book I, Chapter 1 of his Physics. We start with observation of what is general and proceed to discover what is particular. We interact with wholes in nature and then study its parts.
I could expand Premise A to state that all world views cause a failure in physics, but that would not be true. The absolute correct world view would not. Human knowledge is limited, so we can never assume we have it all exactly correct. Hence, Jaki insists that no world view should ever be used when observation, testing, and quantification will do. Let the numbers speak for themselves. As Catholics like to say, truth will not contradict truth. We don’t need to concoct some fanciful lore through which to view the world.
Gander and Goose
To leave you with an interesting thought, Jaki admitted that what is “good for the gander is also good for the goose,” reversing the idiom in his typical turning of phrases. In a lecture delivered at the Plenary Session of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences (he was a member) in November 2002 titled, “From World Views to Science and Back,” he maintained that Christians should not impose biblical world views onto science either. Consider situations in the history of Christianity when people of the time did not understand the implications of imposing their less-than-complete assessment of nature onto science. Galileo Affair? Darwinism? Creationism? Intelligent Design? Need I say more? Just don’t do it.
Thank you for walking through this with me. This will guide how I will approach the philosophy of matter and elements. What it means for all of us of, however, is that we are free to explore the physical sciences as sciences. I have been saying for a long time (and even teach a course on it) that for the believer “science is the study of the handiwork of God.” The science and religion conflicts stem from people trying to interpret science through a certain world view. Jaki often quoted Wisdom 11:20, that God has “disposed all things by measure and number and weight.” It’s like God is telling us to trust our ability to observe and calculate.
Next time for Part 3, I will explain what Jaki meant specifically by “organismic world view” and how Aristotle got there. That will complete Premise A. Then I will work on Premise B to show that Aristotle held an organismic world view.
Such clear and illuminative explanations - really enjoying this! Can’t wait for the next episode 😄,thanks so much!
I liked your quick description of derivative and integral calculus. I often feel in school we get so caught up in the formulas, algorithms to apply to solve equations, etc. that we forget what the math is actually about!