Thomas Aquinas – The world is divine
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The article starts with that but then provides no evidence for that claim as far as I can see. How does our civilization in large part rest on his ideas? What about other civilizations?
The claim about the validity of Aquinas' ideas seem to only make sense if we accept his initial assumption which is the existence of God. But, making claims like this seems almost as if designed to HIDE the existence of such initial assumptions. Call them axioms if you will. They are not "proven".
> Something is good if it fulfills its function
The confusion here is that there is no such thing as "universal good". It is always "good for something" and "good for somebody". Bad for something else, and bad for somebody else. So the claim seems to be that because something is good for somebody and bad for somebody else, there is perfection?
Yes there is often an "equilibrium". It is better to be in equilibrium than to be on the losing side of it. But that is not "perfection" (whatever that means). Maybe Aquinas was not aware that some species go extinct. How is that "perfect"?
I can't resist but quote from one of the great philosophers of our time, Mel Brooks: It's good to be King! :-)
I’d argue the Catholic Jesuits probably had a more profound impact on science than any counter-catholic Christian denomination - purely from their intellectual output
They were formed around the same time as the reformation, but obviously had vastly more money and power (not that this should discount their contributions)
Examples:
- Christopher Clavius (created our modern Gregorian calendar)
- Anathasius Kircher (somewhat helped pull geology and medicine from vague Natural Philosophy into actual disciplines)
- Rodger Boscovich (atomic theory and a lot of basic everyday lab work was first used by him)
- A lot of contributions to astronomy and mathematics by many priests
- Probably their biggest contribution was the communication to the west and preservation of Chinese and Indian cultural artefacts/traditions. Without their work later anthropologists would have lost entire fields of study
Protestants had, what? Max Weber? That’s more cultural than intellectual or scientific
I agree with you though the later scientific revolution and age of enlightenment were in spite of the Catholic church, but I’d also probably broaden that as in spite of Christian belief altogether
And how about Kepler, Boyle, Hooke, Leibniz, Linnaeus, Euler, Maxwell, Lord Kelvin. That's off the top of my head, and this isn't even a subject I've really thought about.
Can you find any protestant priests with major scientific contributions during the reformation?
I only mentioned Weber as there are no other major contributions I can think of that actually influenced protestantism/wasn’t primarily from the scientific revolution
Value is objective, as good is a matter of being the kind of thing a thing is. That a subject is making the determination doesn't mean it has no objective reality. The subjective is not a cause of value anymore than a telescope is the cause of the image of the moon. The telescope can distort the image, but it would be nonsensical to call it the cause.
To consign value to mere subjectivity only makes value more mysterious, not less, as all this does is assert it as a brute fact with no relation to reality. On the other hand, an objective basis grounds it in human nature.
Let's take another case that has people arguing on both sides in the US: universal health care. Some think not having it is an atrocity, and others see it is a threat to civilization. Who is to judge its objective goodness?
You make the call, and then will you just say the people who disagree with you have bad and harmful desires and that is why they don't see the truth as you can?
A person with pika desires to eat things with no nutritional value, like glass or polystyrene. A drug addict desires drugs. A pedophile desires sexual relations with children. These are disordered desires that do not advance the good of the subject: eating glass is not good for you; taking drugs is not good for you; having sexual relations with children is not good for you (both the sexual act in itself, but also that harming children like that is gravely opposed to justice and our social nature).
In the case of an armed conflict, our social nature entails justice, and so we can determine the moral features of a war according to justice. We can objectively say that the Russian invasion, broadly, is gravely immoral and that the Ukrainian defense of their country, broadly, is moral (it is still possible for Ukrainians to engage in immoral acts as part of their defense, of course).
W.r.t. universal health care, this is not something that is intrinsically evil, and so whether it would be good to institute universal health care will depend on particular circumstances. That there is debate over such things does not imply that there is no objective fact of the matter. Indeed, if that were the case, then genuine debate would be impossible, as genuine debate presupposes an objective truth. It would be nothing more than a battle of arbitrary wills willing things for no reason.
If God is "good", who is he good to? For everybody, in equal amounts? Most intruding armies believe in, and preach the goodness of God, who helps them kill their enemies.
> The claim about the validity of Aquinas' ideas seem to only make sense if we accept his initial assumption which is the existence of God.
Not at all. Aquinas does not begin with the existence of God. Rather, he shows how the existence of God can be inferred from basic metaphysical principles. So you have things exactly backwards.
It is a common misconception that the existence of God must be assumed or that it is a matter of faith.
> The confusion here is that there is no such thing as "universal good". It is always "good for something" and "good for somebody". Bad for something else, and bad for somebody else. So the claim seems to be that because something is good for somebody and bad for somebody else, there is perfection?
No. What determines the good is the nature of a thing and its telos. To be a good human being is to more fully actualize human nature and its end. What it means to be a good turkey is to more fully actualize turkey nature and its end. Perfection is the case when a thing fully actualizes all its potential as the kind of thing it is; there is nothing left to actualize. (Accidentally, turkeys can exist for the sake of the good of others animals, but this is secondary to what is intrinsically good w.r.t. a kind of thing.)
In the case of God, the nature of God is to exist, and God is goodness itself (a transcendental).
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I encourage you not to be flippant about metaphysics. It deserves and requires no less attention and seriousness than any other science, and indeed more, as metaphysical principles by definition underpin all of reality. Get them wrong, and things go wrong.
Thomas Aquinas' actual first cause argument is trivially refuted by the possibility of infinite regress.
Your musings about the nature of a thing and its telos, is an attempt to impose a human conceit about how we understand reality, on reality itself. The "human nature" that you're talking about "fully actualizing" is a concept that exists in human minds, not reality. While you might appeal to some sort of Platonic ideal, there is no evidence that any Platonic ideal actually exists.
Any musings about "the nature of God" establishes nothing more than a concept in someone's mind. That concept has no existence, other than that granted by the thinking of people who have that concept. In particular, a concept created relatively recently by humans, did not create those humans. Let alone the world that those humans live in.
These arguments are all sophistry. They do not, and cannot, establish any meaningful existence to the kind of God that is described in your favorite selection of religious texts. And they are only persuasive to people who are easily persuaded due to the conclusion fitting their preexisting religious beliefs.
> Thomas Aquinas' actual first cause argument is trivially refuted by the possibility of infinite regress.
Except it doesn't. That you claim it does means you are familiar with some caricature of the argument (Dawkins & co. are famous for these, but they are not alone). You even come across such claims in philosophy departments where actual knowledge of Aquinas is conspicuously absent and consequently where misconceptions easily flourish. This is basic stuff about Aquinas, not some rarefied debate about his finer points.
> Your musings about the nature of a thing and its telos, is an attempt to impose a human conceit about how we understand reality
First of all, I was correcting a misunderstanding of Aquinas, not defending telos. However, it is clear you are unfamiliar with the subject yourself. First, what you think of telos appears to be something like conscious human purpose (which is a species of telos, but not telos in the general sense). In fact, you need telos to explain the very regularity of efficient causality that empirical science presupposes. Why is it that striking a match predictably results in fire? Why doesn't it result in an elephant or a million dollars or something else each time, or nothing at all? It consistently results in fire because the match is causally ordered toward the effect of fire that is actualized by striking. The cause-effect relation is itself teleological. Furthermore, what characterizes minds is intentionality, and intentionality is teleological. Without telos, you have no intentionality, and without intentionality, you have no rationality.
Second, given that Aquinas is an Aristotelian when it comes to the problem of universals, the notion of Platonic ideals is simply nonsensical and irrelevant in this context. Human nature is instantiated by human beings, and it is actualized as we develop and grow, to a significant degree by our choices and actions.
> Any musings about "the nature of God" establishes nothing more than a concept in someone's mind. ...etc, etc...
This just sounds like a convoluted way of saying you think God is a fiction. Okay, sure, you think God is a fiction. So what?
(FWIW, according to Aquinas and others — and you see this in Exodus 3:14 as well — God cannot be conceptualized strictly speaking, except by means of analogical devices, as God, according to Aquinas and others, "is" the act of existence. Concepts are abstracted essences; "to be a sunflower" or "to be an alligator" signify the concepts "sunflower" and "alligator", but "to be" does not. There is no concept for "to be", strictly speaking.)
> These arguments are all sophistry.
I would encourage that you attain at least basic proficiency in the subject matter before drawing such hasty conclusions, but you don't seem to respond well to encouragement, so I'll leave it at that.
I respond just fine to encouragement. It is unwarranted intellectual arrogance that I react poorly to.
The world is full of too many arguments for any person to master. We therefore must find ways to evaluate arguments from first principles, to help us decide which arguments are worth further investigation.
Here is such a principle. Any argument about physical reality which is not rooted in physical evidence can only result in a correct conclusion by coincidence. And any model of physical reality, no matter how accurate in experience, may prove to be wrong upon the discovery of more physical evidence.
As an example, Kant argued that Euclidean geometry was a necessary property of space. This was widely accepted, and was in perfect agreement with experience. And yet his a priori conclusion about physical reality, was later found to be false.
Therefore, only arguments based on physical evidence should be considered for the question of how the universe was created. And there must be room to question even them. Which means that conclusions from the philosophy that you accept, should only be accepted by others if better arguments are presented which come from evidence. And, even then, our acceptance should come with an asterisk.
That's one principle. Here is a second.
Any argument that results in a false conclusion, must either start with a false premise, or include a mistake. We can conclude this entirely without examining the argument.
You have presented an argument that there can be no rationality without intentionality. However even a basic acquaintance with the philosophy of mathematics demonstrates a system which contains rationality without any form of intentionality. Therefore your conclusion about rationality is wrong. And therefore your conceptualization of a teleos, and insistence on its necessity, is likewise wrong.
It may be interesting. It may be entertaining. But it is clearly a poor intellectual foundation from which to try to understand rationality.
By all means, you're free to entertain yourself by continuing to try to understand the world through made-up ideas about how things must be. Just don't expect others to take your claims seriously.
It is illustrative that people arguing for religious truths never bona fide accept the possibility that they might be wrong. They might say for argumentative reasons: "I don't assume God exists ..." but then they in effect continue with "But let me proove to you why it must be true that "God" exists". :-).
I put "God" in quotes above because it is not clear what people using that word in fact mean by it. Oh, God is "everything". Oh, God is "perfection". God is Love. God is Pure Goodness. What have you.
The problem with such arguments or "definitions" is that if God is Love, then Love must also be God. If God is everything then everything must also be God.
So they are arguing about properties and attributes of "God", but they are not defining clearly what it is they are arguing about.
But no careful thinker should accept that those two set of ideas are a priori the same thing. It is absolutely true that, if you accept the Bible, then the God of the Bible is the only possible candidate for the uncreated cause. But there are many possible belief systems with an uncreated cause, where the Jews are not the chosen people of that uncreated cause.
Excuse my poor knowledge and understanding of all this stuff - but he's absolutely depending on Aristotle, taking existence of telos as a foundation, doesn't he?
And from this, inventing a God isn't a far stretch - if something axiomatically has an intrinsic purpose, it's probably not too hard to state that there should be something with agency to define it all, or something that's has a perfect nature, or however else one wants to define "God".
This said, are any of those books a good read for someone who doesn't think there's any purpose, reason or goal to all of this?
Not the GP, but I suspect the GP meant that Aquinas's Summa and Aquinas's Contra (his major works) starts with discussing first whether there is a god.
> are any of those books a good read for someone
I am not Catholic. I wouldn't recommend Aquinas.
However, I would recommend "reasonable faith" book by William Craig. Or if you want his lectures to listen to, you can start from his lectures on the existence of God[1]
If you are talking about how can one believe in God in an "axiomatic" way, yet still be rational and warranted, I suggest Plantinga's "warranted Christian belief" or his more popular level book "Knowledge and Christian Belief".
[1] https://www.reasonablefaith.org/podcasts/defenders-podcast-s...
I prefer modern apologetics like Peter Kreeft who taught at a Catholic university for a long time. https://www.peterkreeft.com/topics-more/20_arguments-gods-ex...
My other favorite writer was Cardinal Ratzinger before he became Pope Benedict. The current Catechism was edited by him when he was the head of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. https://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG0015/__P9.HTM
The basic Catholic argument is that God created the world and mankind out of love. We are incapable of understanding why there is suffering and death. But we believe God sent his son to partially reveal his plan. The bulk of his teaching is the “sermon on the Mount.” Matthew chapters 5 to 7. https://bible.usccb.org/bible/matthew/5
And yes, you can indeed argue for the existence of God from telos, but this isn't question begging. The teleological argument Aquinas is famous for (his Fifth Way) is not the Paley-style argument some people think it is. Feser's article "Between Aristotle and William Paley: Aquinas’s Fifth Way" discusses this at some length, beyond what his book "Aquinas" discusses (you can find it in this book [2] along with other material worth reading).
> This said, are any of those books a good read for someone who doesn't think there's any purpose, reason or goal to all of this?
I understand that you lean this way, but perhaps a better stance is to be fair and open minded toward the subject. Apart from the books I already listed (which are indeed good), I might even suggest beginning with this popular polemical tract [0] (polemical because it responds to the snark and ignorant condescension of people like Dawkins), and later, if you are interested in an introduction that focuses specifically on the existence of God from five different philosophical positions, you might find [1] interesting.
> Therefore it is necessary to admit a first efficient cause, to which everyone gives the name of God.
> Therefore we cannot but postulate the existence of some being having of itself its own necessity, and not receiving it from another, but rather causing in others their necessity. This all men speak of as God.
> Therefore there must also be something which is to all beings the cause of their being, goodness, and every other perfection; and this we call God.
> Therefore some intelligent being exists by whom all natural things are directed to their end; and this being we call God.
So he argues that there is a first mover, a first efficient cause, an independent necessary being, a cause of all other beings, and an intelligent director but he just assumes that each of those things is the god he believes in who has a son named Jesus, etc...
Well, maybe his assumption is wrong and those things are actually aspects of Mother Nature, or an Invisible Pink Unicorn, or The Five Fairies. How could we possibly tell the difference?
And if we assume or believe that there is a single cause for everyting, how does the rest of the stuff like " must also be something which is to all beings the cause of their being, goodness, and every other perfection; and this we call God" follow from that?
They BELIEVE there is a single cause for everything but why do they believe that? I assume because they WANT to believe it. But even so what makes them believe that "single cause" is "the cause of their being, goodness, and every other perfection"? What about all the imperfections? Oh, it must be the Devil. Then why did God create Devil? (Or is Devil perhaps a 2nd God?)
It seems we just created "Devil" because we could not otherwise explain "God". And all the while we were quite confident that, we simply cannot be wrong. :-)
For such a grandiose claim, I was honestly thinking of another churchman, though not a medieval monk: Augustine of Hippo
Free will as a mental phenomenon (rather than political freedom), Christian original sin, Western prudence and chastity are some notions that I think were extremely heavily influenced by him, or originated from him.
You people are sure allergic to anything religious.
The author's main point isn't that so he or she didn't support it. I don't think it's true, though he is an important figure in philosophy and theology still.
Should the author also first attempt to prove the existence of Aquinas? And that he was a monk? Before writing about him? Does he need to prove that Aquinas wrote the work the work usually attribute to him? Does he need to prove there is a god? Just to talk about Aquinas' view? But I agree his intro is a bit overestimating.
X triggers y which revolutionized how we do z and changed the world to our 'current understanding'.
In this case the writer is trying to push a theological, conservative narrative, and Aquinas fits perfectly! Wow!
Otoh one could argue that Aquinas biggest achievement is showing the natural world cannot be explained solely from the bible, thus necessitating less convoluted explanations (Occam's razor) this paving the way for science through falsification.