Jacques Maritain Center :
Characters in Search of Their Author /
by Ralph McInernyMy lectures seem always to be removing impediments on the path to natural theology, as if, against my philosophical bent, I were establishing the conditions of the possibility of natural theology. That continues to be the case tonight when I turn at last to the via manifestior, the proof of God's existence from motion.
The conclusion of the proof of God's existence drawn from motion depends upon the truth of the premises. Since those premises are not self-evident, they in turn must be proved. As it happens, the proof, which can be simply stated in terms of three propositions, depends for its intelligibility on a vast number of analyses, definitions, and arguments that have preceded its formulation. In the Summa theologiae, as I have observed, we are given brief statements meant to recall the philosophical knowledge already possessed by those beginning the study of theology. They are expected to recall the proof from motion that is found in Books 7 and 8 of Aristotle's Physics and responses on what has been established in the previous books.
This reminder brings to the fore the most obvious difficulty that you and I, living at the beginning of the third millennium, must have with this proof: Aristotle's Physics. If Aristotelian natural philosophy is the basis for the soundness of the proof from motion the claim must seem incredible. How, save in some Pickwickian sense, could anything of the natural science of the fourth century B.C. be said to be true? We have been schooled to think that the advances in natural science that came about with Copernicus and Galileo, with Newton, with Einstein, et al., have rendered such primitive efforts obsolete. Indeed, to call them obsolete might seem to concede too much, as if at one time Aristotelian natural science explained anything about the world.
When this difficulty is made explicit, we realize that it is part of the implicit intellectual atmosphere in which we all have been raised. Since none of us could possibly be immune to such an attitude toward the Greek science of the fourth century B.C., the problem must be confronted at the outset, on pain of making any subsequent discussion of merely historical interest. Perhaps anyone would agree that, if we conceded what Aristotle means by 'motion,' 'moving,' and 'being moved', and by the impossibility of an infinite series of moved movers, then of course it would follow that there must be a first unmoved mover. But haven't all these assumptions been consigned to the dustbin of the history of science?
That things are not always what they seem is the delight of infancy, the consolation of childhood, and a matter of dwindling hope as one grows older. But this received opinion about the past is put to strange purposes when a young person takes an introductory course in philosophy. It is not unusual for philosophers to see their task as disabusing their beginning students of the beliefs they bring with them to the classroom. The assumptions that these young minds are riddled with confusions derived from a multiplicity of sources but that now, finally thanks to what we call Philosophy 101 in my country, these students are going to have their minds cleansed of confusion.
Not an ignoble aim, of course, provided the confusion is on the student side of the lectern. Your senses sometimes deceive you. So do mine. What can be done about this? One of the first things we learn to do is to correct for such mistakes. The way to do so is usually fairly straightforward. The distance from us of an object, its color, its shape -- when we are mistaken about these, we correct the mistake not by taking leave of our senses but by appealing to them. In the Protagoras, Plato says things about the art of perspective before proposing an analogy of it in moral matters. Water distorted my vision and I thought the stick was crooked, but voilà! here it is, straight as a stick. The senses are self-correcting in the sense that the person whose senses they are can make the kind of appeal just alluded to.
But some philosophers move from the undeniable fact that our senses sometimes deceive us to the conclusion that we can never trust the judgments we make on the basis of them, because for all we know our senses are deceiving us right now. Just to be on the safe side, then, we should set aside all reliance on the senses. But this is somewhat like swearing off food because we sometimes get an upset stomach. More significantly, it sometimes sends people in pursuit of some apriori justification for trusting their senses.
Early in the history of philosophy the distinction between appearance and reality was introduced in a marked way by Parmenides. Reliance on our senses collided with the principle of coherence. If there really was a world in which there are many things that are always changing, then, Parmenides announced, being would have to be not-being and vice versa. Since that is untenable, he bade adieu to the world as grasped by the senses, calling it mere appearance. In reality there is only Being, period. Oddly enough, but significantly, Parmenides went on to give an account of the many changing things in the world much as his maligned predecessors had done. He called this the Way of Seeming and he clearly could not get along without it. Presumably, it is in the world of seeming that he and we and his book exist.
Inconsistency is the tribute that confusion pays to reality. When Descartes is asking us through methodic doubt to the cogito he apparently forgets, and we perhaps do not notice, that in order to engage in such ferocious doubting, we have to see the words before us, turn pages, know French or Latin or translations thereof, and have acquaintance with the things all those words mean. The Wizard of Oz created deceptive experience much as Descartes feigned to doubt everything.
We get the world back from Descartes, but is it the world we were familiar with before we doubted it away? Colors are no more in bodies that pain is in the knife. All kinds of sensible properties are made merely subjective because it is only what is amenable to measurement that has objectivity. But then how do we measure? How do we see the ruler or read the dials? This takes me to my second point.
Such explanations of the things around us can seem to explain them away, as colors and secondary qualities are explained away early on in the scientific revolution. All that is left of them is their quantitative base. Thus the restored world, after the drama of methodic doubt, is not quite the world that was doubted away. This raises the question as to what the relationship is between the world of common experience and the scientific explanation of it.
In thinking about advances in the sciences we are likely to refer to the confusions of previous times which have been overcome thanks to progress in knowledge. There are myths as well, of course, such as that prior to Columbus people did not think of the world as round. There are accounts of early beliefs in the supposed magical or medicinal properties of things which have been set aside thanks to science. There is the suggestion -- less often the outright claim -- that the world of common sense and ordinary experience is destined to give way in its entirety to a scientific account. There is a fairly flat-footed way of addressing this suggestion.
Arthur Eddington, in a famous passage, asked what the relationship was between the table he was writing on and that table as he would explain it in terms of physics.{1} There was a dramatic contrast between them, almost as dramatic as the two tales of Pythagoras. His writing table had a solid surface which resisted the pressure of his hand upon it; its dimensions were fixed. If asked to give the size of his desk, he would answer the same today as he did yesterday. His desk was where it was and not somewhere else: it stood still. But when Eddington turned to a scientific account of that same table it seemed to dissolve immediately into a porous thing, a swarm of electrons, whose shape and position were constantly altering. The solid everyday table evanesced in this analysis. Which account of the table is the right one?
I am addressing, then, the suggestion that the everyday account of the table is mistaken and corrigible, and that what corrects it is the scientific account of the real table. And it does so by wholly replacing it. Why is this nonsense? If the ordinary table is taken away there is nothing for the scientific account to account for. The world into which we were born and in which we grew up is not so much doubted away as explained away. The defensible view is that scientific explanations begin by accounting for the things of our ordinary experience.
It will be said that I am speaking of pre-scientific knowledge, as indeed I am. But I am concerned with the suggestion that all our knowledge of the world before we undertake the study of physics is wrong and must give way to the true account of physics -- or to the truth that the development in physics is converging upon. And I have suggested that this would deprive the scientific explanation of having anything to explain. Reducing things to measurable properties enables us to gain a good deal of control over them but this is to give an exiguous account of the things that are.
What I shall mean by pre-scientific knowledge is the kind of knowledge about the world that scientists as well as ordinary folk live in, about which they know things that are true and which is presupposed by the scientific account but not replaced by it.
If it is the case that Eddington's ordinary knowledge of the world is presupposed by and not denied by his work as a physicist, it is also the case that truths about the world gained before the rise of science in our sense are not fourth-century B.C. truths, but simply truths about the world.
This is not of course to endorse the whole panoply of Aristotelian natural science. His astronomy has gone into the black hole reserved for discarded accounts. Perhaps even most of his natural science retains only historical interest. But is it plausible that everything he had to say about the natural world is false?
At the outset of his Physics Aristotle likens progress in our knowledge of nature to first seeing an object far off, knowing that there is something there, and, as it approaches us, gradually seeing that the something is alive, is human, is a male, is Albert Einstein. Our knowledge from being obscure becomes progressively less obscure and more distinct. Taking his cue from this, Aristotle offered the generalization that it is the nature of our knowledge that it begins with generic truths and seeks ever more specific knowledge of the thing first known generically. This is the reason why he begins as he does.
Are there certain truths, general though they would necessarily be, that cover all the things in nature, that is, all the things that come to be? The Physics is that first exploration.
After he reviews what his predecessors had to say about nature, much of it seemingly fantastic and falling somewhere between myth and explanation, Aristotle asks what, despite the wild diversity of views, his predecessors agreed on. There are agreements, he suggests, despite the undeniable diversity. All the accounts he has reviewed speak of change as involving something subject to contrary states. Change occurs when the subject loses one state and gains its contrary.
Is this true? Maybe. That is all he seeks to derive from this distillation of underlying assumptions. A probability. He then undertakes his own analysis of that which has come to be as the result of a change. You see before you someone who has acquired a profound and lasting admiration for that analysis. It seems to me quintessentially Aristotelian. In seeking to say something about all natural things, Aristotle must begin with an example that can be taken to stand for them all. He proposes that we ask what is involved when we say that a man becomes musical.
It is tempting to review that marvelous analysis here. You all know the upshot of it. Any change involves a subject that takes on a characteristic it previously lacked. Thanks to another example -- whittling wood -- these three elements are called matter (ὑλή), form (μόρφη), and privation (στερησις). These principles of change will be extended to changes of quantity and place as well as quality. And of the product of change it can consequently be said that it is a composite of matter and form. It is when Aristotle asks whether the subject of such changes can itself come into being that, on an analogy with the subject of incidental changes, he will call the subject of the change whereby a substance itself comes into being prime matter.
What is to be made of this analysis? It enables us to enunciate the truth that anything that comes to be as the result of a change is composed of matter and form. Since this is the first, the least, the most general thing that can be said about a natural thing, it would be wrong to regard it as profound. As general, it can be endlessly specified, and that is the task of the subsequent works Aristotle devoted to the things of nature. Within the Physics itself we find discussions of kinds of cause and of chance events, of motion, time, place. And eventually we find the proof that is our subject tonight.
This analysis may be called pre-scientific knowledge, if by science we mean a quantitative account, but it is surely not without a clarity and precision that goes beyond the ability to speak Greek. It represents a cognitive gain, however modest. And it is true. Our retrospective problem is not that it is false, but that it discusses change so differently than our physics. In much the same way we do not know what to make of Aristotle's definition of motion, since our laws of motion simply bypass such a task.
Aristotle's definition of motion, as you know, is the act of a being in potency insofar as it is in potency. We might call it the actualizing of a potency but that could seem to introduce a synonym of the definiendum into the definition. Aristotle's definition is fine just as it is. Motion belongs to the thing moving, but it turns out that for it to move is for it to be moved. The seven ball at rest on the table could be in one of the pockets but the possibility will only become actual if something moves it. Actualizes that potency. The pool ball cannot do it itself. Moving things are moved things. Could the universe be made up only of moved movers? That is the question that leads Aristotle to argue that there must be a first unmoved mover if there are to be any moved movers, if there is to be the whole set of moved movers.
Obviously the proof from motion has to be understood in its own terms and, I suggest, when it is, the proof clearly works. (Obviously this is a promissory note which invites objections and indeed expects them.) Say I am right in this. What reactions can be expected?
Impatience, first of all. It is difficult for us to imagine that things said about the natural world so long ago have stood the test of time. We are too used to the notion that all that has been superseded.
Sometimes, benevolent misunderstanding. One seeks to understand the proof without grasping the meaning Aristotle assigned to the terms and to the propositions.
Of course, if I am right, the fact that this proof was formulated in the fourth century B.C., and by Aristotle, is incidental to it. Anyone can reenact the thinking of the Physics and decide whether the analyses, definitions, and proof make sense. Any comparison with contemporary physics should be postponed. This is not merely to put off the evil day, but to locate what Aristotle is doing relative to contemporary science.
If it is true, as I have suggested, that the scientist lives his life in a world knowable by him in a way that is prior to and presupposed by what he says about that world as scientist, we have an arena in which such analyses as Aristotle's fall. If we call them pre-scientific, this must not be taken to mean that they are destined to be superseded by a scientific analysis. Just as the things Eddington says about the table in his study are true and are not rivals of what he says about it from the view-point of mathematical physics, so the analyses of the Physics can be true without being rivals of science as it has come to be.{2} Surely no one would want to adopt the view that he knows no truths about the natural world save those that he learns from science. He couldn't learn those truths if that were true.
An advantage of having said even these few things about the most famous proof of God's existence is that earlier considerations may now make more sense. That there is a first unmoved mover that moves all the moved movers may not set every pulse racing. It can seem terribly removed from our ordinary lives, it may seem not to make any difference. That is the dissatisfaction that Kierkegaard addressed -- at least in part; I do not mean to reduce his literary effort to this -- and Newman as well. How does such reasoning relate to the anguish with which we sometimes wonder whether there really is a God?
One of the merits of Newman's Grammar is that it relates the proof to the one proving, reminding us that so to dispose of one's time is a moral act. But who will not feel the force of Pascal's contrast of the God of the philosophers and the God of Abraham and Isaac? It may be worthwhile to ponder that contrast.
First of all, it goes without saying that, for a believer the theology of the philosopher is going to seem a poor thing. Absent is the whole context of sin and redemption and longing for God.
Second, Kierkegaard is right that when a believer sees the object of his faith simply as an occasion for speculation and learning, he is in a confused condition. And the proof of the prime mover is clearly an exercise in theoretical thinking.
But when Greek philosophy is looked at, not through the lens of Christianity, but in itself, the picture alters somewhat. The whole philosophical undertaking is meant to assuage a desire to understand that it is not confined to theoretical matters. Furthermore, to stay with Aristotle, we have had occasion to note the way in which the theoretical wisdom of metaphysics becomes the object of the contemplation which is the fullest perfection of the kind of entity we are. There may be little unction in Aristotle, perhaps a Macedonian reticence, but the notion of philosophy as a way of life is as strong with him as it is with Plato.
Anselm's proof in the Proslogion was prompted by the request that he come up with a shorter form of the proof he had advanced in the Monologion. The so-called Ontological Proof sought to make the denial of God's existence a logical absurdity.
Pascal's Wager is another effort to make short shrift of the question. If one lives his life as if God exists, and he does, things will go well in the next world; however if one lives his life as if God does not exist, and he does, things will not go well in the next life. If one lives one's life as if God exists, and he does not, there will be no next life in which you could regret your choice. So there is only one way to lose: living as if God does not exist. Best to put one's money, and one's life, on the assumption that God exists.{3}
Not a very edifying approach to the question. Pascal himself seemed embarrassed by the passage. He counseled prayer and masses and other devotions to dispose oneself properly.
The shortcuts philosophers have offered have not enjoyed much success. A philosopher who rejects these shortcuts, and then faces up to the many obstacles to establishing such a proof as that from motion as cogent, must wonder what the masses of men -- and philosopher before they have fashioned a cogent argument of God's existence must do. Given the manifest importance of God, if he exists, it does not seem desirable to leave the matter in limbo until a philosophical proof is had.
Videbunt multi et timebunt et sperabunt I Domino . . . .
-- Ps. 40:4
A feature of philosophy as it is engaged in by Thomas Aquinas and the tradition in which he stands, one that sets it off most dramatically from the main currents of modern and contemporary philosophy, is its untroubled anchoring of philosophical thought in the ordinary thinking that everybody engages in all the time. The starting points of philosophy are to be found, not by sweeping away or casting a skeptical eye on the thinking of ordinary folk, but by seeking there the well-spring of human thinking as such. The amazing assumption is that everybody already knows all sorts of thing.
This will seem naïve to those influenced by the hermeneutics of suspicion that has become the mark of the academic. It is as if we are constantly thanking God -- if there is a God -- that we are not like the rest of men. Thomas Aquinas emphasized that it is from truths known to all that philosophical thinking too takes its origin. The philosopher, having reflected on their inescapable presence in his and everyone else's thinking, labels them principia per se nota, precepts of natural law. These labels may be unfamiliar to most people, but what they label is not. These principles are what one falls back on ultimately. They are latent in all our judgments and seldom need to be distilled from them and stated in all their elegant abstraction. When they are, they can seem the skeleton of language with the flesh removed. "A thing cannot be and not be at the same time and in the same respect." "Two things which are similar to a third thing are similar to one another." "One should do the right thing and avoid the wrong." "You shouldn't take what belongs to another." "It's wrong to get drunk." My list becomes more informative as it goes on, however abstract it still remains.
Perhaps such truths as these are only called into play when disagreements seem endless. Telling someone that a thing cannot both be and not be something or other at the same time is not the fare of ordinary discourses. Unless the circumstances are appropriate, it might even be a mark of madness to enunciate such undeniable truths. That there are twenty-six letters in the alphabet is true enough but the occasions are rare when one might want to mention this. So it is, I think, with what Thomas calls the common principles or starting points of human thinking, theoretical and practical. That is my first point: although they do not know their philosophical labels, everyone knows what is labeled by self-evident principles are first principles of practical reasoning.
My second is this. When, late in adolescence, we begin the study of logic, we are being introduced to an art that will enable us to do well what we have already been doing. Discursive thinking is synonymous with human thinking. The occurrence of "and so," "well then," "therefore" are staples of conversation. We make inferences all the time. Why logic? Because often our inferences are mistaken, and even when they are not, we may not have reflective knowledge of why this is so. Of course, logic does not help us initiate our first act of discursive thinking. It presupposes that we have been engaging in it, willy-nilly, more or less effectively, all along.
There are two kinds of philosopher: one kind denies the obvious, the other kind states the obvious. I am of the latter kind. Perhaps there is a third kind: one who simply ignores the obvious. Chesterton said that something has to be very big in order to be invisible. So too it is the most obvious that can be overlooked when it is not implicitly denied.
Nothing is more obvious than that human beings know the common principles of theoretical and practical thinking and that these truths are latent in the discursive thinking in which they are everywhere engaged. Ordinary people, untutored in logic, successively navigate from what they know to its implications all the time. That they, like philosophers, are often mistaken does not detract from the point, since the ability to recognize and correct mistakes is also part of the standard equipment of human beings.
Given these two points, can we add a third and say that ordinary folk, out of their experience of the world and themselves, come to recognize the existence of God? When St. Paul, in our favorite passage, told the Romans they could and had done this, was he addressing philosophers? Sometimes he did, of course, like those Stoics and Epicureans in Acts, but that does not seem to be the case in Romans. He seems to be saying that ordinary folk can come discursively to knowledge of the existence of God. A wag could say that the inference might take as its premise the existence of all those churches in Glasgow, but it would be an important point. Even in these twilight years of Christendom, ordinary folk may be prompted to such thoughts by the vestiges of belief that rise up architecturally around them. A former church becomes a theater might set our minds going. Does this muddy the water? Is the presence of religious belief an impediment to the discourse Paul speaks of? It doesn't seem so. The Romans, after all, had gods galore. Religion, pagan and Christian, Jewish or Muslim, can prompt even its adherents to discursive thinking about its fundamental presupposition.
Given the inadequacy of philosophical proofs for the existence of God, given the paucity of information they can give us, it can be expected that the term of ordinary thinking about the origin of things, of one to whom I am accountable, would, if articulated, be subject to criticism, particularly from the point of view of Christianity. Thomas Aquinas says both that it its relatively easy for people to come to knowledge of God and that such ordinary knowledge is woefully inadequate to its object. After all, some have thought that God is a tree. Sophisticates need not smile at this. From the point of view of faith, there is even so much more in heaven and earth than is dreamt of in their philosophy. But that points to my next and final lecture.
FEBRUARY 17, 2000
{1} Arthur Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World (New York: Macmillan, 1928).
{2} This analogy suggests itself: as Eddington’s ordinary table is to the scientific account of the table, so the philosophy of nature is to natural science.
{3} Pascal, Oeuvres complètes, 550-551.