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Comment by bloaf | Hacker News Reader

I did elaborate, in that very post.

I read Aquinas and realized that the whole ancient conception of a soul is tied together with the ancient concept of vitalism. Within vitalism you need something to explain why living matter is different than non-living matter, and that something is the presence of a soul! Hey presto, add a few layers of philosophy and divine revelation and you arrive at the Christian immortal soul.

(In this case "god of the gaps" does not refer to the Catholic God himself, but instead it refers specifically to the concept of the soul)

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So your refutation of Aquinas's reasoning is that he starts on a foundation of Artistotle, and Aristotle (a pagan non-Christian) has shaky foundations? Why did you leave out the fact that Aquinas didn't cite Aristotle as infallible, nor rely on Aristotelian foundations as such, but rather took Catholicism as a starting point, which is inherently a-philosophical, and just tried to explain it using Aristotle as a starting point?

It sounds to me like you're drawing distinctions without a difference.

Aquinas, in his Summa, makes a series of assertion-of-fact about souls. Specifically, he claims that the soul explains (or "is the principle of") certain otherwise-unexplained phenomenon.

It doesn't matter how he got there (i.e. whether he was arguing with someone online, or trying to explain catholicism in terms of Aristotle, or if he was just an LLM stochastically putting ink on parchment), the fact is that inventing a supernatural thing that explains a bunch of unexplained phenomenon is precisely what I meant by "god-of-the-gaps style reasoning."

> the fact is that inventing a supernatural thing

And therein lies my point: the purpose of Aquinas was purely to explain preexisting Catholic theology, using Aristotle as a starting point. He invented nothing.

You can say "the Catholic Church invented the soul to explain [etc]" and then I'd just push it back to Christianity itself, and if you'd concede on that, we'd have resolved my initial argument.

Looking through a historical lens, dating back to the Renaissance, the notion of reasoning one’s way to God without faith or the Church was itself heretical. Doubtless things have happened since then, but I agree it was seen as important start from preexisting Catholic theology.

Can you explain what you're referring to about the heresy here? My impression is that Christianity traditionally taught that natural theology is possible but is incomplete, in the sense that people could rationally conclude that God exists, but that they would not learn "enough" about him without revelation.

Many Christian theologians attempted to demonstrate the existence of God rationally, so I don't know what about that process would have been considered heretical in its own right. I'd agree that the claim (associated with Deists, for example) that one could have a complete religion based exclusively on reason with no revelation, or that all purported divine revelations are untrustworthy, would have been considered heretical.

not Christian, However see maimonides.

The first rabbi who goes the above path - and during his time, his books were often burnt.

> the notion of reasoning one’s way to God without faith or the Church was itself heretical

It still is, according to Catholicism, which says you must have reason and faith in the divine revelation it claims to preserve, which reveals some aspects of God and reality that we cannot reach or conclude with pure reason alone, such as the Blessed Virgin Mary's Immaculate Conception (BVMIC for short) or the Trinity (T for short).

FYI, the Summa is a pedagogical treatise. It should be read as one.

Vitalism is utterly foreign to anything found in Aquinas or Aristotle. Check out Edward Feser's Aquinas for a beginner-friendly discussion of what they say.

> Vitalism is utterly foreign to anything found in Aquinas or Aristotle.

This is simply not true, and I've quoted the passages from Aquinas that explicitly assert metaphysical differences between living and non-living matter in this very thread.

You gravely misunderstand what you are reading. If you wish to understand what Aquinas means, you ought to understand what Aristotle means by substance, form, and soul, what powers are in this context. You appear to be sneaking in a Cartesian dualism here.

If you want a tidy introduction to metaphysics of this sort, consider this one [0].

[0] https://a.co/d/3g8SgTf

Please see my reply to your other post. He does explicitly assert metaphysical* differences, but this no no way implies what you think it implies.

*Assuming by metaphysical you mean formal.

I was asking for more elaborating because the larger context goes beyond Aquinas. At the very least, it seems like cherry picking, especially considering other Popes explicitly use the “god-of-the-gaps” term when they refute the very idea.

But what makes humans special is the immortal soul, which Aquinas says animals don’t have. It’s something other than vitalism or metabolism.

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