Thomas Aquinas Continued

In my last post I was talking about St. Thomas Aquinas and Catholic thinking related to him. Aquinas has had influence in many ways, but is ignored in others. I compared two specific areas: the treatment of Catholic women by the Church because of Thomas’ opinion of them, and the misuse of his name for worldviews other than his belief in direct supernatural Creationism. But I made my point about women in the last post and now I want to say something about Creationism.

In Summa Theologica, Part I, Question 91, Article 2 (New Advent website HERE), Thomas stated:

The first formation of the human body could not be by the instrumentality of any created power, but was immediately from God.

The definition of “immediately” is HERE . It means instantly and directly. Thomas again talked about direct creation by God when he discussed the creation of woman from the rib of a man in Part I, Question 92, Article 4 which can be seen HERE.

But, a 2009 Vatican-sponsored conference on evolution excluded Creationists and Intelligent Design advocates.  The organizers said we weren't scientific enough, although they are the ones ignoring science as well as the words of Thomas Aquinas.  The science is revealing biological systems way too complex to be answered by chance genetic mutations even when natural selection is factored in.

The human condition is to have all kinds of ideas bombard us from inside our heads and out. Some of these take hold and we are convinced they are true. Sometimes the ideas are right and sometimes not. As our science research discovers more and more, we are overwhelmed with facts and opinions about them. As our communications improve, we discover new religions and cultures. How do we sort it all out? It takes time and effort and discernment.

Of course, people have argued about things for a long time and for philosophers, argument is a living. But all the worldviews can be hard to learn and follow, and facts can be lost or mangled in our minds after time. Concerning the relationships between philosophy, theology, Creationism, and Intelligent Design Theory (ID), a good series of posts is by Discovery Institute's Jay Richards, "Catholics and Intelligent Design," Evolution News, April-May 2011. Even if you don’t agree with him, he is very good at explaining the situation. The fourth post has links to all previous so I will give that one link HERE. He of course emphasizes ID compared to Creationism, but much of the biology of Creationism is linked to the ID scientific theory.

The arguments in Aquinas’ day (13^th century) didn’t concern materialistic evolution but whether man was made by angels, as St. Augustine had said, or according to Aristotle’s philosophy with which Aquinas was wrangling. The Greek elements of Fire and Air seemed a more noble make-up for man than Earth and Water, the ingredients of the “Slime” which was closer to the Biblical account of God’s action. Aquinas takes his stand with the answer (also Question 91):

On the contrary, It is written (Gen 2:7): God made man of the slime of the earth.

Some of the totality of Thomas Aquinas’ thought, and it is a lot, still resonates to this day. He had a lot of detractors in his lifetime, and we can wonder if Thomas sometimes got discouraged and felt he was wasting his time.  As a matter of fact, he had a mystical experience at the end of his life, put down the pen and never wrote again.  He said then, as quoted by Brian Davies, The Thought of Thomas Aquinas (1993), 9, “All that I have written seems like straw to me” (Wikipedia quote HERE).  And yet before that he used his gifts at a time when many were probably confused by the different interpretations and theories floating around in that day. He probably helped many get back to the faith or remain more solidly in it.

I’ve lately been reading Paul’s letters in the Bible and one of the things he says is:

Avoid foolish and ignorant debates, for you know that they breed quarrels. A slave of the Lord should not quarrel, but should be gentle with everyone, able to teach, tolerant, correcting opponents with kindness….(2 Timothy 2:23-25 NABRE).

I wonder sometimes if it is worth arguing about materialistic evolution. Since science changes so much, how long will these details be relevant? But in this day when scientism (belief that science is everything) is taking over like wildfire, I think science is a good approach for conversation. It is in this way people can think about whether biological life and diversity is beyond what can possibly be formed from the other currently known forces of nature. Though biology is complex, it can be appreciated on a certain level by everyone. Like it does with so many things, the Internet grants access to biologic wonder. With video searches, people can view muscle molecules contracting, DNA being copied, and a multitude of other biological functions. Then they can ask the harder questions: could these have formed in even billions of years? Was that time enough to randomly build a house or even make a brick? Did a computer chip form out of the primordial soup? Why then does the concept of billions of years answer the question of how and why we are here?

 

Ironically because science changes so much is one reason individuals need a more solid foundation in their lives. The researcher gets old like everyone else. My suspicion is that the Theory of Evolution has led many scientists to the sad conclusion that they consist of only atoms. But their inner feelings of fear and love must be inescapable. The unchanging and absolutely necessary foundation, hard as it is to believe for the hard-driving atheistic evolutionist, is Jesus Christ.

The overriding priority of Catholics is to evangelize the Good News of the Gospels, and we must find a way to work together to carry out our commission. Sometimes I get very discouraged and heartsick about our problems in the Church, particularly the child abuse scandal. Yet I believe our new Pope is trying to reform the Church as others accomplished in previous dark times. He talks about hope which is uplifting to me.  We know our Lord Jesus has conquered evil. Thomas Aquinas would have agreed:

Our help is in the name of the Lord, the Maker of Heaven and Earth (Psalms 124:8 NABRE).

Can Man Understand?

Can the human being really understand God? The verses from the Bible that come to mind are from Isaiah 55 (NABRE):

8 For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the LORD.
9 As high as the heavens are above the earth, so high are my ways above your ways and my thoughts above your thoughts.

This is not to say we shouldn't try to understand God in some way. It is not right to shrug our shoulders and say that if we can't know Him we might as well move on to some other interest (science, for example). We have to juggle a little, and not let a concept either dominate us or be immediately rejected. Pope John Paul II wrote a very interesting encyclical called Fides et Ratio. He describes the interaction between faith and reason, and it is worth reading.

I've been reading Church history about the reaction of the magisterium concerning evolutionary theory. Though I started in Darwin's time, the relation of science and philosophy to Christianity actually goes much further back and I'm becoming increasingly aware of its relevance to my interests. So I'll just give a very general overview here.

When philosophy began in the West, some 600 years before Christ, it was an attempt to understand things in terms of reason, not mysticism or mythology. It therefore included the study of nature which we now consider science. The first Greek philosopher was Thales of Miletus (Wikipedia biography HERE) who lived around 600 BC. The famous Greek philosophers followed in this order: Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, who died in 322 BC. Aristotle worked out a "Natural Philosophy" in which the natural world was defined in terms of movement (in rather complicated interactions of place and time) .

Greek philosophy became known to scholars throughout the ancient world. It did not take very long after Christianity spread for someone to try to combine the understanding of Christ with this Greek thought. Frederick Copleston, in A History of Philosophy, Vol. 2, lists Maricanus Aristides (Wikipedia HERE) as one of the first to do so in about 140 AD. Then came Justin Martyr who used philosophy even more openly, and Clement of Alexandria, a scholar who lived in Alexandria, Egypt between 150 and 215 AD. He headed a school for teaching Christian theologians known as the Catechetical School of Alexandria. Pope John Paul considered St. Augustine, who elaborated on Plato's philosophy about 400 AD, to be the first to truly produce the "first great synthesis of philosophy and theology" (Fides et Ratio, Sec. 40).

St. Thomas Aquinas (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy HERE) combined Aristotle with Christian understanding in the 13th Century. Others disagreed with their speculations, and there has been wrangling throughout history on the importance of reason in contrast with faith. In particular, a monk named William of Ockham (Wikipedia HERE) placed more emphasis on faith than intellect in order to know God (as I understand it). Ockham, though, seems these days to have the reputation of cutting away faith altogether in favor of science, in which case he is misunderstood. He was concerned that Aquinas, in his effort to incorporate what Aristotle called Universals, limited the free will of God. (Universals were supposedly essences of things which existed outside physical things, such as "red-ness" for all things that look red.) If God could only create according to Universals, Ockham felt He would be limited in choice.

Well, philosophers and theologians have wrangled for centuries about God and our relationship to Him and how we understand Him. Of course, with the scientific revolution, people have wondered more and more if we could "cut away" God altogether and be left with nothing but the material world. Many indeed have done just that in their personal worldviews. But now biology is showing that some things cannot be explained by the laws of physics and chemistry, at least as we know them now.

Many think that physics and chemistry will never be able to explain the codes of DNA, and how the DNA is arranged in ways that resemble the computer systems created by human intelligence. Many, however, believe scientific research will eventually be able to explain everything.

This, in a very condensed version, is where we stand now.

Faith OR Reason?

I talked in the last post about Catholic philosophy and modern science. When persons claim that faith has more to do with belief than reason, they are often accused of being "fideists" (description at Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy HERF). Some people seem to claim (in so many words) that if you have faith in God without studying philosophy, your belief is not adequate. That claim in itself is unreasonable.

People come to God in many ways. There are masses of faithful who live and die never having studied philosophy. These people can have as real a relationship with God as professors. Yet, others take the journey to God by means of reason. They may not have an emotional conversion experience, yet they convert all the same. There is a sense, though, in which the stress on philosophy can lessen the importance of relationship, and that is a mistake. We need some balance of both heart and head.

Faith is a mystery, a word which probably makes philosophy professors shudder. Yet the Bible gives us some beautiful passages about it to get us on track. One is Ephesians 2:8 (NABRE):

8 For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not from you; it is the gift of God;
9 it is not from works, so no one may boast.

This means, for one thing, we need to get rid of all pride in order to believe well. God gave us intellect, and we are to use it. But we are so susceptible to making pronouncements that put us above others, we must be very careful. The focus is always on God Himself.

Another verse is from John 6:29:

28 So they said to him, "What can we do to accomplish the works of God?"
29 Jesus answered and said to them, "This is the work of God, that you believe in the one he sent."

These verses may seem contradictory, but I don't think they are. God teaches us by varying the approach. Unfortunately, we grab onto one idea or the other, then fight about it. I think the passages when contemplated together may mean that our work is at least in part reason because everyone thinks, but while you think, don't forget mystery. To give examples, if you simply as a child accepted Jesus as soon as your parents or priest told you about Him, perhaps it was because you trusted these authority figures, and perhaps an element of faith which is beyond our understanding also had a part. In fact, that part may be a factor in the learned professor's conversion though s/he is unaware of it. Yet to follow historical philosophical thought, to question and reach your own conclusion that God exists is certainly a help in strengthening that faith.

Modern science does not completely understand consciousness, even though they have learned much about the brain. My belief is that neither consciousness nor the soul will ever be understood completely by human beings. There will always be mystery, and for that reason we need faith.

Philosophy 101

They say life is what you do when you are planning something else. That happens with blogs, also. I had started reading about the history of the Church response to evolutionary theory and wanted to post about it, but got sidetracked. I hope to get to that subject, but while reading one of my favorite Intelligent Design (ID) websites, I read a post by Michael Egnor on Evolution News relating to philosophy.

Now, my expertise in philosophy is at the 101 level, but a lot of philosophy has been flying around in evolutionary circles, and I'm sure not everyone who speaks about it is an expert. So, I'll give my own opinion.

I won't go into the details of Michael Egnor's post, but he recommends a book about philosophy which addresses the New Atheist arguments. The book is by Edward Feser, The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism, (St. Augustine's Press, 2008). The New Atheists are people like Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Daniel Dennett who are contemporary authors with various backgrounds. They argue that today's science has replaced religion and traditional religious (Catholic) philosophy such as that of St. Thomas Aquinas, who built his own system on that of Aristotle (the Greek philosopher).

The main point of Feser's book, to make a sweeping generalization, is that Aristotle worked out a philosophy that claimed to prove that change can happen in this world, but ultimately depends on an Unchanged Changer. And Aquinas built on Aristotle's work. as can be found in his five proofs of God, one of which depends on an Unmoved Mover.

Feser explains that today's scientific mindset tries to ignore Aristotle's metaphysics (which investigates the properties of reality, Wikipedia description HERE), and yet unconsciously uses it. For example, the New Atheists tell us that scientific experiment is the only way to understand reality, yet they take for granted the reasoning behind experimentation--that one thing is caused by another. In other words, they are missing a certain concept in their understanding. They take an alternative philosophy in which there are no Universals in the sense Aristotle means. (Universals are essences of things that occur in the world, for example, "red-ness" for things that are red and "human-ness" for humans.)

Feser makes very interesting arguments, but I have thought in my limited study of philosophy that he and other philosophers like him are also missing at least one fundamental concept. They talk about Aristotle's philosophy of change, where there has to be, by logic, something (or someone) that is First and causes change. But a person would still have believe that there is a source of change other than physical energy and matter to get to that point.

The equation above is for Gibbs free energy and it is important because it is used to calculate physical / chemical change. It comes to us courtesy of J.W. Gibbs (Wikipedia HERE), who is pictured at top right and lived from 1839-1903. The triangle is the symbol I learned in high school to designate change (the Greek letter delta). The G is called Gibbs free energy, the H is enthalpy, or the tendency of things to change from a higher state of energy to lower (such as water falls from a higher to lower state in a waterfall). T is temperature and S is entropy--the tendency of things to become more disordered. When you plug in the values for each situation you evaluate, you can tell whether a physical change, such as a chemical reaction, will happen or not (if Gibbs free energy is negative, it will happen).

If I understand Feser correctly, he would say it is a Prime Mover that causes change, at least the first in a long line. If we don't accept that, our reasoning is faulty. But I think that most scientists, especially materialistic ones (those who think the world consists only of matter and energy which are interchangeable through Einstein's equation E=mc^2), would look at the Gibbs equation and say it explains what causes change. This can go all the way back to the Big Bang (BB), that explosion being caused by a great concentration of energy, and even before the BB. To them, there is nothing sacred in the BB as far as the formation of the universe goes. It could be that energy forces and mass continue to alternate in various proportions endlessly (and in fact, this is what they think). Both Aristotle the philosopher and Gibbs the scientist assumed that change comes from a cause.

One either believes our universe is made of only mass and energy, or one believes there is a God. Feser does a good job in showing the ridiculous logical consequences of a materialistic mindset, but I don't think he fully gets to the bottom of what causes it. Though the materialist's reason may be faulty on some level, in my opinion the deeper problem is lack of faith.

Faith is a mystery, and I will talk more about it (I hope) next post.