School’s out forever?

John Farrell, Forbes science blogger extraordinaire (and friend of this blog), comments on my recent talk at Thomas Aquinas College, over at his own personal blog.  As you know if you’ve read or listened to the talk, I call for a return to Scholasticism within Catholic intellectual life as essential to sound theology and apologetics.  John has some kind words about my talk, for which I thank him, but he also expresses skepticism about the prospects of the metaphysics of the School and its Schoolmen (to use the jargon of the good old days).  Writes John:

My own sense is that Scholasticism can't work now because it presupposes an Aristotelian philosophy of nature that is simply not adequate to support what modern science has uncovered about the natural order.  Which is not to say it is no longer valid, but rather that it is too limited. [No one says Newtonian physics is wrong, but it only addresses a limited aspect of a much wider, broader nature.]

He qualifies these remarks in an update to the post as follows:

I think what fascinates me most is not the degree to which science has moved on--and that was a poor analogy on my part if that is how it came across. But rather, to the degree that Aristotle's philosophy of nature was itself inspired to some degree by his science (in particular his observations as a biologist), in what ways could a modern philosophy of nature be inspired by science now? And could it be useful in apologetics? 

End quote.  So, the School’s out forever?  Naturally, I beg to differ, and if John is channeling Alice Cooper I guess I’ll have to play Rodney Dangerfield in Back to School.    

I’m a bit puzzled by John’s statement that “Scholasticism presupposes an Aristotelian philosophy of nature that is simply not adequate to support what modern science has uncovered about the natural order,” since I and other writers whose work John knows and respects (e.g. William Carroll) have argued that there is no conflict between an Aristotelian philosophy of nature and modern science.  Indeed, we argue that the latter is best interpreted in light of the former.  I’m pretty sure John is familiar with those arguments in at least a general way, so it would be interesting to know exactly what he thinks is wrong with them.  Unfortunately, he not only doesn’t tell us, but doesn’t give the reader an indication that the arguments even exist! 

I’m also puzzled by the rhetorical question about how an Aristotelian philosophy of nature might be useful in apologetics, given that I never shut up about how crucial the theory of act and potency is to causal arguments for God’s existence, how crucial immanent teleology or final causality is to Aquinas’s Fifth Way, the role hylemorphism plays in the Third Way, etc.  (I’ve explained all this at length in Aquinas and in various academic articles, and of course here at the blog.)

Since I deal with the question of the compatibility of modern science and Aristotelian philosophy at some length in Scholastic Metaphysics, and since David Oderberg does the same in Real Essentialism -- to cite just two sources (there’s also, of course, the work of Bill Carroll, William A. Wallace, James Weisheipl, Charles De Koninck, and others) -- I’ll direct the interested reader to those books. 

It is also worth reminding the reader that it is not just Scholastics like me who think that a broadly Aristotelian philosophy of nature is, not only “adequate,” but indeed necessary in order to account for what we know from modern science.  For example, we find a recapitulation of the Aristotelian notion of causal powers in the work of non-Scholastic philosophers of science like Nancy Cartwright, John Ellis, Anjan Chakravartty, and Rom Harré and in the work of non-Scholastic metaphysicians like Stephen Mumford, Rani Lill Anjum, C. B. Martin, John Heil, George Molnar, and U. T. Place.  (You’ll find a primer on this recent work in Scholastic Metaphysics, and some of the important work being done in the mini Aristotelian revival currently underway in analytic philosophy can be found in anthologies like Tuomas Tahko’s Contemporary Aristotelian Metaphysics, Ruth Groff and John Greco’s Powers and Capacities in Philosophy: The New Aristotelianism, Daniel Novotný and Lukáš Novák’s Neo-Aristotelian Perspectives in Metaphysics, and my own Aristotle on Method and Metaphysics.)

It also needs to be emphasized that it is simply not the case that modern scientists have thought through the philosophical issues raised by their work and have found a non-Aristotelian way to answer them.  The truth is rather that they have in general become so hyper-specialized that they have largely lost sight of the most fundamental philosophical issues, and do not realize how amateurish, naïve, and conceptually sloppy their remarks often are when they do deign to address them.

To take just one example, consider that most fundamental notion of modern science, that of a “law of nature.”  It is routinely tossed around as if it were obvious what it meant for something to be a law of nature, and as if it were obviously unproblematic to think of scientific explanation as a matter of appealing to laws of nature.  In fact the notion is fraught with philosophical difficulty, as writers like Nancy Cartwright and Stephen Mumford have shown.  As I have noted many times, the notion of a “law of nature” was originally (in thinkers like Descartes and Newton) explicitly theological, connoting the decree of a divine lawmaker.  Later scientists would regard this as a metaphor, but a metaphor for what?  Most contemporary scientists who pontificate about philosophical matters not only do not have an answer but have forgotten the question.

One contemporary scientist who does see the problem is physicist Paul Davies, whose essay “Universe from Bit” (in Paul Davies and Niels Henrik Gregersen, eds. Information and the Nature of Reality: From Physics to Metaphysics), I happen to have been reading a few days ago.  Davies there writes:

The orthodox view of the nature of the laws of physics contains a long list of tacitly assumed properties.  The laws are regarded, for example, as immutable, eternal, infinitely precise mathematical relationships that transcend the physical universe, and were imprinted on it at the moment of its birth from “outside,” like a maker’s mark, and have remained unchanging ever since… In addition, it is assumed that the physical world is affected by the laws, but the laws are completely impervious to what happens in the universe… It is not hard to discover where this picture of physical laws comes from: it is inherited directly from monotheism, which asserts that a rational being designed the universe according to a set of perfect laws.  And the asymmetry between immutable laws and contingent states mirrors the asymmetry between God and nature: the universe depends utterly on God for its existence, whereas God’s existence does not depend on the universe…

Clearly, then, the orthodox concept of laws of physics derives directly from theology.  It is remarkable that this view has remained largely unchallenged after 300 years of secular science.  Indeed, the “theological model” of the laws of physics is so ingrained in scientific thinking that it is taken for granted.  The hidden assumptions behind the concept of physical laws, and their theological provenance, are simply ignored by almost all except historians of science and theologians.  From the scientific standpoint, however, this uncritical acceptance of the theological model of laws leaves a lot to be desired… (pp. 70-1)

Now the naïve atheist reading this blog for the first time may suppose that at this point I am going to exclaim triumphantly that there cannot be law without a lawgiver and proclaim victory for theism.  But in fact, like Davies I don’t accept the theological account of laws.  I think it is bad philosophy of nature and bad theology (insofar as it tends toward occasionalism).  I want rather to make the following two points.  First, when scientists like Stephen Hawking, Lawrence Krauss, and Victor Stenger confidently proclaim that we can explain such-and-such in terms of the laws of physics rather than God, they show only how comically clueless they are.  What they are saying, without realizing it, is: “The explanation isn’t God, it’s rather the laws of physics, where ‘law of physics’ originally meant ‘a decree of God’ and where I don’t have any worked-out alternative account of what it means.”  Hence the “alternative” explanation, when unpacked, is really either a tacit appeal to God or a non-explanation.  In short, either it isn’t alternative, or it’s not an explanation. 

Second, the original, explicitly theological Cartesian-Newtonian notion of “laws of nature” was intended precisely as a replacement for the Aristotelian-Scholastic philosophy of nature.  The Scholastics held that the regularities in the behavior of natural phenomena derived from their immanent essences or substantial forms, and the directedness-toward-an-end or immanent teleology that followed upon their having those forms.  In other words, regularities reflected the formal and final causes of things.  The early moderns wanted to get rid of formal and final causes as immanent features of nature, and thus replaced them with the notion of “laws of nature” conceived of as externally imposed divine decrees.   To keep talk of “laws of nature” while throwing out God is thus not to offer an alternative to the Scholastic view at all, but merely to peddle an uncashed metaphor.  So, “science has moved on” from Scholasticism (as John puts it) only in the sense that it has not only chucked out Scholasticism but has also chucked out its initial proposed replacement for Scholasticism, and has offered nothing new in its place.  This is hardly a problem for the Scholastic; on the contrary, it is a problem for anyone who wants to resist a return to Scholasticism.

Like other contemporary Aristotelians, I would say that the right way to interpret a “law of nature” is as a shorthand description of the way a thing tends to operate given its nature or substantial form.  That is to say, “laws of nature” actually presuppose, and thus cannot replace, an Aristotelian philosophy of nature.  There are other accounts of laws, such as Platonic accounts and Humean accounts, but these are seriously problematic.  Platonic accounts, which treat laws of nature as abstract entities in a Platonic heaven, push the problem back a stage.  To appeal to such-and-such Platonic laws as an explanation of what happens in the world only raises the further problems of explaining why it is those laws rather than some others that govern the world, and what makes it the case that any laws at all come to be instantiated.  Humean accounts, meanwhile, interpret a law as a statement that such-and-such a regularity holds, or would have held under the right conditions.  But in that case an appeal to laws doesn’t really explain anything, but only re-describes it in a different jargon. 

There is, of course, more to the story, and I discuss these issues in detail in Scholastic Metaphysics.  The point for the moment is just that whatever the right view of laws of nature turns out to be, contemporary scientists seem to be mostly unaware that there is even a problem here.  And that’s just one area where modern science raises philosophical problems that its practitioners mostly neither perceive nor try to solve.  As Paul Feyerabend once complained:

The younger generation of physicists, the Feynmans, the Schwingers, etc., may be very bright; they may be more intelligent than their predecessors, than Bohr, Einstein, Schrödinger, Boltzmann, Mach, and so on.  But they are uncivilized savages, they lack in philosophical depth… (See Imre Lakatos and Paul Feyerabend, For and Against Method, p. 385)

Needless to say, Hawking, Krauss, Stenger, and Co. are even worse than the generation Feyerabend was complaining about. 

As if calling in reinforcements, a reader alerts me today to philosopher of biology John Wilkins’ recent remarks about the Aristotelian hylemorphism implicit in the free use physicists and biologists make of the notion of “information” and related notions.  This is a point I’ve been making for years, e.g. in The Last Superstition and in earlier posts like this one and this one.  (James Ross has made a similar point as well.)  Wilkins is, accordingly, suspicious of “information” talk, whereas my view is that in at least some cases it does track what Dennett would call “real patterns” in nature, and thus points to the reality of immanent formal and final causes.  (In re: what Wilkins says about atomism and hylemorphism, see Scholastic Metaphysics, chapter 3, especially pp. 177-84.)  Either way, it reinforces the point that, the standard “heroic age of science” narrative notwithstanding, the Aristotelian philosophy of nature is by no means the historical relic John and so many others suppose.