Aristotle on Medved

Yesterday I appeared on The Michael Medved Show with Skeptic magazine’s Michael Shermer.  (Unfortunately, the podcast seems to be behind a paywall. [Update: A reader kindly calls my attention to this link, where you can listen to the show.])  It was billed as a “debate,” though I would describe it as more of a friendly discussion.  Shermer was very polite and even complimentary about my book Five Proofs of the Existence of God, which I appreciate.  (Shermer says: "It's a good book... well-argued, well-articulated.")  Naturally, he does not agree with the book, but as every philosopher knows, you can find a book interesting and worth reading and thinking about even if you don’t agree with it.  But as it happens, we did end up agreeing on a few things, such as the weaknesses in certain pop arguments for God’s existence.

Medved started things off in an unusual and, I think, very interesting way.  His first question to me was about what I thought was the weakest of the five arguments I defend in the book.  Now, naturally I don’t think any of the proofs is weak.  But some of them require more in the way of background argumentation for their key premises, and thus are bound to be less convincing to a determined skeptic.  Based on that criterion, I cited the Augustinian proof, though perhaps on further reflection I’d opt for one of the others. 

Anyway, Medved then asked Shermer what he thought was the argument from my book that is the most challenging to his own, skeptical position.  His answer was the Aristotelian argument.

I don’t want to make too much of this, and I don’t know exactly how challenging or weak Shermer thinks the argument is at the end of the day.  But it is an interesting response nonetheless.  Aristotle’s argument for an Unmoved Mover is often quickly dismissed or ignored altogether on the grounds that it rests on archaic physics.  But it doesn’t, as I show in the book.  When people come to see this and consider more carefully the basic idea of the argument, I find that they often find it much more interesting than they had initially realized it was. 

This was certainly my own reaction when I first began to examine the argument (in Aquinas’s version) more carefully back in my atheist days.  Indeed, the Aristotelian proof, along with the rationalist proof, ultimately convinced me that atheism was false.  I have found that many of my readers over the years have also come to give up atheism after being convinced by the Aristotelian proof. 

As I noted in The Last Superstition, atheist philosopher Antony Flew attributed his late conversion to philosophical theism in part to a deeper examination of Aristotle.  (Flew’s atheist critics at the time ignored this aspect of the story, preferring to turn the Flew controversy into yet another tiresome debate about “Intelligent Design” theory.)  Flew was influenced by the philosophical theism defended in David Conway’s important book The Rediscovery of Wisdom: From Here to Antiquity in Quest of Sophia, in which Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover plays a key role.  As I noted in my recent review of his book The Lagoon, Armand Marie Leroi there states: “Had I a God – had I a God – it would be Aristotle’s God.” 

Aquinas famously described the Aristotelian argument from motion as the “more manifest” way of demonstrating God’s existence, and the attraction and interest it has even for some otherwise highly skeptical readers perhaps provides some confirmation for this. 

It is worth adding that secular readers who are not at all attracted to Aristotle’s theology nevertheless often find themselves attracted to other elements of his philosophy – hence the neo-Aristotelian revivals in metaphysics and in ethics within contemporary academic philosophy.

Mid-twentieth-century Catholic critics of Neo-Scholasticism thought that the Aristotelianism of Thomists and other Scholastics couldn’t speak to modern people.  Part of the problem with this is that what ultimately matters is whether an Aristotelian position on some issue is true, and if it is true, then it ought to be defended and applied, whether or not it is popular.  But another problem is that it simply isn’t the case that a modern audience can’t take Aristotelian ideas seriously, as examples like the ones just given indicate.