In Xenophanes we can discover the first clear instance of the Ionian speculative approach applied to natural theology. That for which there is little evidence in Anaximander is more explicitly stated in Xenophanes… Accordingly, it seems appropriate to call Xenophanes the first natural theologian. By this I mean that he is the first to attack the theology of the poets and to offer as a substitute a form of theology based upon argument. (p. 17)
What are
probably the most famous passages from Xenophanes illustrate the attack in
question. He writes:
But mortals suppose that the gods are born (as they themselves
are), and that they wear man’s clothing and have human voice and body.
Ethiopians make their gods black and snub-nosed, Thracians
red-haired and with blue eyes.
But if cattle or lions had hands, so as to paint with their
hands and produce works of art as men do, they would paint their gods and give
them bodies in form like their own –horses like horses, cattle like cattle.
Homer and Hesiod attributed to the gods all things which are
disreputable and worthy of blame when done by men; and they told of them many
lawless deeds, stealing, adultery, and deception of each other.
The target
here, of course, is a crudely anthropomorphic conception of deity. When ascribing bodily attributes and moral
failings to the gods, Xenophanes says, human beings are merely projecting their
own features onto them. Had he left it
at that, Xenophanes’ position would seem to be a precursor of Ludwig
Feuerbach’s nineteenth-century critique of theism as a mere projection of human
attributes onto reality. But he did not
leave it at that. Xenophanes’ beef with
this anthropomorphism is not that it is too theistic but that it is not
theistic enough. What he wants to
replace it with is not atheism but a purified, philosophical theism. He says:
God is one, supreme among gods and men, and not like mortals
in body or in mind.
But without effort he sets in motion all things by mind and
thought.
Let’s note
the several implications of these remarks.
We have, first, a kind of monotheism insofar as Xenophanes speaks of God
as one and supreme. It is true that he
immediately goes on to refer to other “gods” over whom God is supreme. But as Gerson notes, if the affirmation of
multiple personal beings who are higher than human beings by itself made
Xenophanes a “polytheist,” it would also make all those who believe in angels
polytheists.
That
Xenophanes attributes mind and thought to God entails that his conception of
God is not impersonal. That he takes God
to act through thought alone and to be unlike mortals in body indicates that he
conceives of God as immaterial (though one could argue that he may mean only
that even if God is in some sense corporeal, it is not the way in which we are
corporeal). That he takes God to act on
all things, and without effort, indicates that he takes God to be omnipotent.
So far we
have a set of attributes that would be recognized by all present-day
theists. But Xenophanes says more:
The whole [of god] sees, the whole perceives, the whole
hears.
It always abides in the same place, not moved at all, nor is
it fitting that it should move from one place to another.
The first of
these remarks implies that there are no distinct parts in God associated with
his seeing, perceiving, and hearing.
Rather, what he does he does as a whole.
This indicates a commitment to something like divine simplicity. The second remark, which denies motion to
God, indicates a commitment to divine immutability. The attributes of simplicity and immutability
are central to classical
theism, but rejected by contemporary neo-theists or theistic
personalists. Naturally, that Xenophanes
takes God to move all things without himself being moved also makes his
theology a precursor of Aristotle’s notion of God as the prime unmoved mover.
What is the
basis for Xenophanes’ conclusions? It is
not clear from the fragments we have.
Gerson takes him to be engaged in essentially the same sort of project
Anaximander pursued, namely reasoning to the existence of a first principle and
then deducing what that first principle must be like if it going to provide a
satisfactory explanation of the cosmos.
Anaximander had argued that this first principle must be apeiron – “unbounded” or “unlimited,”
radically unlike the things of our experience and without beginning or
end. On Gerson’s interpretation,
Xenophanes is engaged in a similar sort of reasoning, arguing from the world to
God as its first principle and deducing the divine attributes as corollaries of
his being this first principle of all.
For example, if God is to be the ultimate explanation of all motion, he
must not himself be in motion.
By contrast,
Werner Jaeger, in his book The Theology
of the Early Greek Philosophers, argues that Xenophanes is not engaged in
this sort of reasoning. Rather, his
approach is to deduce the divine attributes by way of a reverent consideration of
what it is “seemly” or “appropriate” to ascribe to deity (pp. 49-50). The idea would be, for example, that it would
be unseemly or inappropriate for God to be like us in body, or to engage in
deception, or to be in motion. Hence we
must deny these things of him.
Interestingly,
these competing interpretations of Xenophanes roughly correspond to two main
approaches to deriving the divine attributes in contemporary natural theology,
known as first-cause theology and perfect being theology. First-cause theology begins by reasoning from
the world to God as cause of the world, and then deduces the divine attributes
from considerations about what something would have to be like in order to be
such a first cause. This is the approach
we see in St. Thomas Aquinas, for example.
Perfect being theology begins with the idea that whatever else God is,
he is supremely perfect, the greatest conceivable being. It then proceeds to deduce the divine attributes
from a consideration of what something would have to be like in order to be
supremely perfect. This is the approach
we see in St. Anselm. On Gerson’s
interpretation of Xenophanes, he is essentially applying the method of
first-cause theology, whereas on Jaeger’s interpretation, he is essentially
applying the method of perfect being theology.
There is one
further aspect of Xenophanes’ position that should be noted. In his book Philosophy of Nature, Paul Feyerabend argues that in the process of
transforming the notion of God, Xenophanes also transformed the notion of
nature. For the traditional views
Xenophanes was criticizing not only effectively made the gods out to be part of
the natural world. They also thereby
gave the natural world a quasi-divine status, insofar as the heavens were thought
to be occupied by deities and “both for Thales and for the farmers of Boeotia
all things were in motion and filled with gods” (p. 143). As Feyerabend notes, “archaic thought does
not sharply distinguish between cosmological concepts and theological ones”
(Ibid.). But Xenophanes’ thought implies
such a distinction, taking, as it does, the fact that natural phenomena have
various limitations to make them per se
incompatible with divinity, rightly understood.
Feyerabend is critical of this development, but we needn’t and shouldn’t follow him in that judgment. On the contrary, in transforming the concept of nature in the course of refining the concept of divinity, Xenophanes anticipated Christian classical theism’s crucial distinction between the natural and supernatural orders.
Cool post. That’s all.
ReplyDeletehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Feyerabend
ReplyDeleteA counter-point from Dr. Edward Butler, not in response to this specific article, but to this particular view: https://endymions-bower.dreamwidth.org/55744.html
ReplyDeleteHey Prof and Hi Everyone
ReplyDeleteThis is a great post. I am inclined to cause as an approach because of its inherent intuity. And also its indispensability from our experience as well as scientific endeavours. An important part of the Causal approach is to establish its reality
I was recently reading about Causation in Aristotle's Revenge, it's a book that I find myself turning to again and again, I commented on another post in that regard, so I'll just post it again,
By chance do any of ya'll happen to know of any old or contemporary physicist who would agree with this point often made by Prof, logically it's airtight. I was just researching it
"They also fail to realize that the only way we can make sense of the idea that observation and experiment give us a rational justification for believing physical theory is if we suppose that our perceptual faculties are causally related to external reality (which is something else that Bertrand Russell emphasized)."
You don't have to provide the exact quote. Just the name, I'll take it from there. You could also take a swipe at it Prof ,if you get time.
Sorry for being a bit persistent Prof but with what you handle on twitter everyday, me trying to get the odd response is manageable I would think.
Besides it Keeps the blog lively, I think my research often takes me to hidden gems on the blog even in the comments, last night I found your reference to Henry Stapp in the comment section on AT philosophy.
Anyways if a scientist who has also made russells point about Causation happens to pop in to your head do drop his name.
Cheers
Anyone else could answer this question as well although Prof's answer would be preferable.
DeleteA few names come to mind, from different generations and angles :
Deletea) John Bell is perhaps the most striking. His critiques of Copenhagen positivism essentially make Russell's point from the inside: you cannot coherently speak of "measurement" or "observation" without presupposing a real causal interaction between apparatus and physical system. This is precisely why Bell insisted on replacing "observables" with "beables"; the orthodox vocabulary secretly smuggles in a causal realism it officially denies. A physicist sawing the branch he sits on, as it were.
b) David Bohm is another strong case. His whole project (Bohmian mechanics, but also his later work on implicate order) was built on the conviction that positivism was philosophically self-defeating for exactly this reason: if there are no real causal structures underlying phenomena, the very notion of empirical contact with reality collapses.
c) Max Planck is often forgotten in this context, but he was a fierce critic of Mach's positivism and argued explicitly that science presupposes a causally structured reality independent of the observer, otherwise the rationality of the scientific enterprise becomes unintelligible.
d) Erwin Schrödinger (in Mind and Matter and What is Lief?;), makes closely related points: the scientist's mind must be genuinely causally connected to a real world for science to be anything more than a coherent dream.
e) On the philosophy of science side, Mario Bunge argued at length that causal realism is not a hypothesis within science but a methodological precondition of it, which maps directly onto what Prof. Feser is saying. And Alan Musgrave's defense of scientific realism via the "no miracles" argument converges on the same point: the only non-miraculous explanation of why observation and experiment give us rational grounds for belief is that our perceptual faculties are genuinely causally hooked onto external reality.
Also, one slightly unexpected name: Percy Bridgman, the father of operationalism and thus ostensibly a positivist. His later writings show him increasingly uneasy, recognizing that the very act of measurement presupposes a real causal interaction; which quietly undermined his own earlier positivism from within. Worth a look if only for the irony.
Hope that helps point you in some useful directions!
Thank You so much Timacho.
DeleteHi Prof
DeleteSo while writing Aristotle's revenge were you aware of scientists who may have espoused the causal principle of were you only away of Russell
Thank you for this Ed. I agree about Anaximander—I think his famous quotes about the nature of the Apeiron has some of the intuition behind both cosmological and ontological arguments in it (it is Arche but we also know from its nature that it cannot not be).
ReplyDeleteIf I must fault the otherwise very good Gerson volume it should really be titled “The Cosmological Argument and Greek Philosophy,” this emphasis leading to some philosophers, especially Parmenides, getting a slightly dismissive treatment.
Ironically those Xenophanes quotes might capture something about Perfect Being theology which was neglected by Anglo-American philosophers of religion (possibly because of the faith and reason paradigm they were working in), namely that is is a kind of a meditative assent of the mind towards God in which predication of attributes is not so much a logical exercise as a devotional act. With this in mind it contains both negative and positive theological impulses with one side predominating depending on the thinker (Pseudo-Dionysus’ for instance emphasising the former as does Plato in the famous passages about the Agathon). So in Xenophanes’ case to think of God in a way that is “seemly” or “fitting” is not just a question of logical correctness but a morally virtuous act.
ReplyDelete"They also thereby gave the natural world a quasi-divine status, insofar as the heavens were thought to be occupied by deities and “both for Thales and for the farmers of Boeotia all things were in motion and filled with gods” (p. 143). As Feyerabend notes, “archaic thought does not sharply distinguish between cosmological concepts and theological ones” (Ibid.)."
ReplyDeleteHenk Versnel, esp. in his Coping with the Gods, and his followers like Tim Whitmarsh have written a lot on this theme. Because Greek speakers would use names of gods to refer to natural phenomena, e.g. “Demeter” for “grain,” often we cannot tell whether a name of a particular god functions only as metonymy or as a reference to the god or both. Thinkers like Anaximander and Xenophanes were "going beyond" and seeking to introduce, shall we say, clarity in the place of ancient ambiguities.
Interesting. I had never really heard of this account before, at least not in such detail. However, I don't think you're really being fair to Feyerabend, his criticisms of Xenophanes seem at least plausible. What exactly is Xenophanes' reason for rejecting anthropomorphic gods, other than that the idea offends him? He accuses Xenophanes of simply begging the question and presuming that defenders of the Homeric worldview would accept that his Single God cosmology is possible. And I do note that it is almost never argued for *why* this high, exalted, disembodied vision of deity is better than anthropomorphism. Even Ed's post here kind of subtly presumes that this is so, by using loaded language (anthropomorphism is "crude", transcendentalism is a "purer" kind of theism). Why? By what principles is this conception of God better, and why should we agree with those principles? One could just as easily turn around and argue the opposite, that a transcendent God is actually more morally problematic because it is utterly divorced from human experience and affairs, rendering it into a kind of Lovecraftian abomination beyond our comprehension, to whom our notions of morality are meaningless. Furthermore, Xenophanes' God is still portrayed as engaging in thought, hearing, and so on, so it is still portrayed as engaging in human activity despite supposedly being utterly transcendent. Maybe this is just metaphor, but if so, metaphor for what? It has to be at least comparably *like* human thought and hearing, otherwise it is meaningless and even misleading to use these words to describe what it does.
ReplyDelete"And I do note that it is almost never argued for *why* this high, exalted, disembodied vision of deity is better than anthropomorphism."
DeleteThe author of this very blog has written *extensively* about this. And he is just following on the Thomistic tradition.
Amazing, truly amazing.
I mean, sure, but I'd like to actually hear what those are, rather than continually hear that it's been done "elsewhere". The Thomists may indeed have arguments for this, but aren't these based on their pre-existing commitments to God as First Cause? I think my point is still quite fair - usually, it is simply taken for granted that anthropomorphism is a crude, disgusting viewpoint only suitable for barbarous fools, whereas transcendentalism is pure, intellectual, and sophisticated.
Deletebut I'd like to actually hear what those are, rather than continually hear that it's been done "elsewhere".
DeleteIf it takes a book length treatment to do it justice, then asking for it in a blog post is not a reasonable ask. If they give you the truncated, abbreviated treatment that obviously has gaps because it's truncated, you will just poke holes in the gaps and say "it's got holes". So, go to the book-length books that Feser has published where he addresses it in the depth justified by the question.
"I think my point is still quite fair"
DeleteNo it is not fair, it is fact extremely unfair given what Prof. Feser has written on the subject either throughout many posts on this blog or in book form. Or just given the classical theist tradition, going back to Plato and Aristotle. It is just your ignorance coupled with chutzpah maskerading as an argument.
@ EXE: you wrote "The Thomists may indeed have arguments for this, but aren't these based on their pre-existing commitments to God as First Cause? "
DeleteAFAIK Thomists do not stake out a pre-existing commitment to God as First Cause. They derive that conclusion. But their premises, I think, rely on a pre-existing commitment to the theory of Act / Potency. As crusty old Arthur Holmes said, Thomism is theory-dependent.
If you're interested, you can delve into Aristotle on things' having being "in act/actuality" and having being "in potency/ potentially." In my cup is water, having being as water in act. The contents of my cup are potentially air. But they don't just poof out as air. Something needs to act on them. Trace back thinking like this and either you get a regress of actors into infinity or you get a cycle or you get an actor not acted upon, at which point the series stops (or begins, depending on POV of explanation).
All the above refers a series of actors in the present, not to a series of actors going back in time.
It seems to me that the Act / Potency framework is not proved from yet anterior premises known to be true, but rather, is argued for from the claim that without the Act/Potency theory, we can't give ultimate explanations and we're left with a world that is irrational: we can't explain change AND continuity of identity.
Furthermore, Xenophanes' God is still portrayed as engaging in thought, hearing, and so on, so it is still portrayed as engaging in human activity despite supposedly being utterly transcendent. Maybe this is just metaphor, but if so, metaphor for what? It has to be at least comparably *like* human thought and hearing, otherwise it is meaningless and even misleading to use these words to describe what it does.
DeleteFeser has addressed this, relying on Aquinas: the use of analogy (which includes metaphor) applies to our statements of God's positive attributes. With worldly analogies, we can know directly both ends (analogues) of the analogy, and so we can think of the likeness in terms where it is possible to state with some clarity how X is like to Y, where it is like and where it is unlike. We can state the likeness in terms that are not entirely circular. With describing God, we know one analogue of the analogy, ourselves. What we can't do is state clearly, positively and non-circularly how God is like us in that attribute and yet how he is different. So we do it negatively: God has all the virtue and excellence of thought, but he does not have our limitations of thought. Being beyond us, we can't describe that specifically and positively, we would have to understand him thoroughly to do that, and that's just what we don't have - we aren't beyond ourselves. So, for God, we use analogy recognizing that one term of the analogy is known only imperfectly.
ficino4ml,
DeleteThat seems like a pretty good description.
@EXE adding: you might say that Aristotle was trying to produce a framework for explaining continuity and change, sc. how a thing can remain the same thing when one or more properties of it change. If x is F at time T1 but is not-F at T2, do we have two different x's? After all, not all that is true of the x at T1 is true of the x at T2, so the two x's seem not to be identical.
DeleteWhat to do? Heraclitus: deny that the two x's are identical. Everything is in flux. Parmenides: deny change is real, say it is only a function of appearance.
Aristotle tries to get past this by introducing the notion of active vs potential being. The x is F in act at T1 but is not-F potentially at T1. At T2, x is not-F in act. Depending on the nature of the change, x could be potentially F at T2.
@ Anonymous re analogical predication of names of God: it has always seemed to me that one can't construct a deductive argument, the conclusion of which is known to be true with certitude, if one doesn't know that the terms are univocal throughout. Your last sentence, "one term of the analogy is known only imperfectly," is consistent with what I just wrote. So it seems it's contentious to claim that conclusions of arguments that rely on analogical predication are known to be true with certitude. Yet Thomists tend to claim that the truth of some conclusions in natural philosophy is known with certitude - and so Vatican I.
Deleteficino4ml,
DeleteIt appears to me that Anonymous was not claiming that analogical predications are known to be true with certitude and so there is no disagreement between the 2 of you. It can true that there are some conclusions that can be known with certitude while this particular one is not.
I would be interested in seeing EXE make his case for polytheism against monotheism now that you've explained some of the AT background.
@Anon, the one who spoke on the use of analogy:
DeleteHmm, I don't see how this approach can work. I see two major issues.
One, it is not clear at all what it means to "have the virtue and excellence of thought". It's especially clear how something could have these and not have thought. What are you actually trying to say here?
Second, if it is coherent, this statement seems to be a positive one after all! It asserts that God "has" something, namely the "excellence of thought" or the "virtue of thought". If we truly cannot speak of God except through negation, how on Earth can we know that He possessed these things?
It's especially clear how something could have these and not have thought. What are you actually trying to say here?
DeleteI assume you dropped the "not" in the first sentence there.
Let me give an example. Our thought is discursive: we move from one thought to the next connected thought to the next. Take a syllogism (in part because we are more clear on those as to why they are right-thinking). All A's are B's. All B's are C's. Therefore all A's are C's. This "works" in part because there is a middle term, B, that is shared by both premises. But our minds "work" by working on each statement distinctly, passing from one to the next to the next. We think discursively.
Without knowing HOW or WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE, we say of God that He doesn't think like that. His thought is simple. SOMEHOW, (we cannot say how) his thought encompasses A's and B's and C's all together at once but not confusedly. We can't describe it more closely than by saying "it's not discursive". We can say "it's simple" but all that means to us is "not having parts", a negative. We say his thinking is better than our discursive thinking, but we can't actually DESCRIBE how it works because we can't understand it, because it's better than ours.
So, it has the virtues and excellences of our form of logical thinking which moves from premises to conclusions, (it has all the "rightness" and "validity" of our logic) but not because it is just like our form of logical thinking.
@ficino4ml
DeleteI don’t think it’s quite right to say Thomists begin with a prior commitment to act and potency in the way one begins with unprovable axioms. The distinction isn’t a presupposition; it’s drawn directly out of what it means for anything to change at all. Feser makes this point repeatedly: if something goes from not‑X to X, then before the change it must have been potentially X and afterward actually X. That is simply what “change” means. To reject the distinction is not to propose an alternative theory but to make the very notion of change unintelligible. You can describe the contents of your cup however you want, but as soon as you say the water could evaporate, or freeze, or be displaced by air, you’ve already invoked a difference between what is actual and what is merely possible. The framework isn’t imported—it is discovered.
This is why denying act and potency ends up being performatively incoherent. You cannot coherently deny the reality of potency without relying on it in the act of denial. Your claim must move from being a mere potential assertion to being an actual one. If there is no such distinction, then your own speech act becomes conceptually impossible. This is the sense in which Aristotelian metaphysics is not theory‑laden in the pejorative sense; the distinctions are drawn from the structure of the world as it is encountered and from the conceptual preconditions of predication and change.
Once this is seen, the objection that Thomists “start with God” loses its force. The argument to a first actualizer comes only after the act/potency structure has been established. If change is real, then potencies must be actualized; if any actualizing cause has its own potencies that must be actualized by something else, then in a hierarchical series of here‑and‑now causes you cannot have an infinite regress of instrumental actualizers. You eventually reach something that actualizes without being actualized—pure actuality. That conclusion isn’t presupposed by the premises; it follows from the metaphysics of change. So while the act/potency distinction is indeed foundational for the Thomistic system, it isn’t a dogmatic starting point but a conceptual necessity arising from the very intelligibility of becoming.
Uh, sorry, but that really doesn't help me at all. For one, I honestly don't recognize the model of thought that you describe - certainly it doesn't cleanly map onto my own experience. I don't experience thought as a passing from one discrete statement to the next to the next. I can, if directed to, but it's not really natural for me. This is probably due to my being neurodivergent - instead I...well, I don't know if I can actually describe it. It's like asking a fish to describe what it's like to breathe underwater, I've never experienced anything else. I just sort of bounce around and draw in information from a bunch of different sources at once and try to amalgamate it into a coherent picture from the bottom up. At least, I think. The point I'm making is that this metaphor isn't helpful to me, because I don't recognize the half of the metaphor that's supposed to be recognizable.
DeleteBut even beyond that, this answer doesn't seem like it's actually saying anything useful. How can we know that God's thinking is better than ours if we can have no understanding of it? If we can't know what it's like, how can we evaluate it compared to our own thinking? This seems uncomfortably like making stuff up to support a preconceived conclusion rather than just accepting that it doesn't really make sense.
Bill: I disagree. Act and Potency are not the only way to give an account of change. Besides Parmenides, Heraclitus, and other philosophers of the time, Newtonian physics and Modern Physics are alternative accounts of what it means for change to occur. I won't sit here and claim that I know this field well enough to argue this whole field out with you, but I can tell when someone's taking a theory they like and trying to elevate it to the level of unquestionable fact.
DeleteAdditionally, your claim that denying Act/Potency is performatively incoherent doesn't add up. It's only true if I agree with you that Act/Potency is the only way to conceptualize change. You might as well say that nobody can coherently deny the reality of the God Thoth, Scribe of the Gods, the Thrice-Great, because nobody can either think or speak without formally participating in Thoth's divine activity, and so to deny Thoth's divinity is an act of affirming that divinity.
ficino: I won't pretend that I'm philosophically educated enough to argue about the validity of Act/Potency with you, so I will leave that to one side. It is in any event tangential to the main thrust of my question, because my question is actually about the nature of Divinity and what we ought to value in whatever-it-is-we-call-God. To put it simply, even if the Prime Mover can be proved to exist and be the ultimate cause of all things, why should we worship it, or indeed pay it any mind whatsoever? Aristotle's conception of the Prime Mover never did anything at all except contemplate. It was completely unlike us, remote, inaccessible and incapable even of being truly comprehended. Certainly it would be absurd to think that it could ever care about or relate to us mere humans. Essentially, what I'm asking is this - why should we value the fact that the Prime Mover is the ultimate explanation for everything, instead of being horrified by the fact that it is utterly alien and incomprehensible? Why is it better to have a pure, ideal god who sits in splendid isolation from everything we know and love, who we cannot in any way relate to, rather than a flawed, humanlike deity that we can relate to and understand, who is "like us"? What traits ought one to value in Deity, and why? After all, if the Deity is truly nothing like us, then what's to stop it from being something utterly horrifying and Lovecraftian? Even if we say that it is good and loving, if "good" and "love" cannot be predicated of it in any way that meaningfully related to our human concepts of such, then maybe its "love" takes the form of tearing us apart forever and ever. We can't say that it's not possible!
Delete@Bill: did you read all that I wrote? Much, though not all, of what you say is already in my posts to EXE.
Delete@EXE you wrote "maybe its [sc. the deity's] "love" takes the form of tearing us apart forever and ever. We can't say that it's not possible!"
DeleteIn Thomism and the traditions it draws on, "good" is convertible with "being." If we have being forever and ever, that's good. If we're being torn apart forever and ever, we would still be the recipients of the deity's gracious grant of an act of existence. Qua having being, it's good to have being, in hell or under any other circumstances.
Also, as a point of order, I take issue with the use of the terms "polytheism" and "monotheism". The terms as we know them were invented in 1660 by Henry More, for polemical purposes (denigrating non-Christian religions). They are neither neutral nor precise, imposing Christian understandings of deity onto the discussion, failing to capture what other religions are actually like. So, it is disingenuous for anyone to say that I am "arguing for polytheism". What I was actually doing is call into question the presumed superiority of Platonic-style transcendent monotheism, something that's too often taken for granted. It's very easy to be a chauvinist and dismiss those stupid old people with their anthropomorphic gods as just heathen idiots with no understanding of REAL divinity, but that idea is more the product of Early Christian polemics than a careful study of reality. Plus, given the fact that the overwhelming majority of Christians have an anthropomorphic view of God, it's very easy for this attitude to morph into semi-Gnosticism, where the unwashed and uneducated masses are looked down upon for their feeble ignorance, while we, the enlightened elite, get to know the REAL, hidden truth that contradicts everything they believe.
Delete@EXE
DeleteI think you’re missing the point of my argument. I didn’t claim that “act and potency is the only theory of change anyone has ever proposed.” Of course there are alternative models such as Heraclitus’ flux, Parmenidean monism, Newtonian kinematics, modern physics, etc. That was never in dispute. The claim is that all of those models already presuppose the actuality/potency structure in order to describe what they describe.
Newtonian physics, for example, says a body can accelerate under a net force; quantum mechanics describes possible states and actualized measurement outcomes; thermodynamics presupposes distinctions between equilibrium states that could obtain versus the one that does obtain. These frameworks don’t replace act/potency—they tacitly rely on it. They presuppose the very modal structure that Aristotle articulated explicitly.
So pointing to Newton or quantum theory doesn’t show that act/potency is optional; it shows that these sciences simply don’t operate at the metaphysical level where Aristotle is working. They describe how change unfolds, not the ontological conditions that make change intelligible at all. And those conditions include a difference between what something is doing or being now and what it is capable of doing or being.
Your Thoth analogy misses the mark for precisely this reason. My argument wasn’t, “Act/potency is real because it would be convenient for it to be real,” or, “Act/potency is real because everything implicitly participates in it.” I offered a performative argument of a very specific kind:
To deny act/potency, you must treat your denial as something that moves from being a possible assertion to being an actual assertion. That’s a modal transition. If you reject the reality of potency, you erase the distinction between possibility and actuality—and then your own claim cannot be what you need it to be: namely, something that becomes asserted, rather than something that was always asserted or never asserted.
This isn’t parallel to appealing to Thoth. It’s parallel to pointing out that you cannot coherently deny the law of non-contradiction while using it in the very act of denial. It’s a transcendental point: your denial presupposes the very distinction you’re trying to deny. And that’s precisely why the act/potency distinction isn’t a Thomistic presupposition but a conceptual necessity. Thomistic metaphysics begins with the data of change as such, not with God or with any other theological commitment. From there, once the modal structure of change is analyzed, the argument to a purely actual being follows.
Simply pointing to physics or prescientific thinkers doesn’t accomplish that, because none of those alternatives solve the modal problem; they rely on it. That’s why the Thomist says act and potency aren’t optional metaphysical furniture. They’re part of the conceptual preconditions for any coherent account of becoming.
@ficio-4ml
DeleteNo, I didn’t read all your posts to EXE—I only responded to one, and that’s on me. I don’t always follow every exchange in a thread. My assumption is simply that people generally write what they mean, and if they meant something different, they would have expressed it differently.
ALSO: I just replied to EXE, but I forgot to add my name. Thus, it'll appear as "Anonymous."
Regardless of what one names those believing in multiple gods, I still can't detect any attempt at an actual argument for the belief.
DeleteInstead I see a double-sided argument from ignorance. "I don't know exactly what monotheist arguments for God are, so they could be wrong" Also, "I don't know exactly what polytheist arguments for gods are so they could be right"
I'd like to see ficino4ml continue to engage with EXE since he is not sympathetic to Thomism, but is showing he has a basic grasp of the arguments and seems like he is fairly presenting them.
@Bill: I did not write that the AT theory of Act / Potency is a presupposition. I said that it's adopted because without it, we (or Thomists, at least) can't explain continuity and change. I am not sure why you argued against the objection that Thomists "start with God." I had written that I thought they derive "God exists."
DeleteAs to "theory," if I remember correctly, Feser uses the phrase "Theory of Act-Potency." Or uses the word, theory, in that connection, anyway.
I think it's fine to say, as you do, that the concepts of act and potency, or actuality and potentiality, and a distinction between them, follow from the metaphysics of change. But when you brought in the notion of a hierarchical series of here and now causes, you are bringing in parts of AT theory. In Platonism, soul is self-motion. In Platonism there is not an efficient cause that reduces soul from potency to act, although The One functions as a final cause in that system. And for appeals to hierarchical series of movers/causes to do their work, you need to deny Existential Inertia - that denial being another piece of theory. It's not clear that a denial of existential inertia is just part of the concept of change.
So philosophers may in the main allow that we talk about change using the notions of actuality and potentiality, but they may not accept all the premises used in the First and Second Ways. Some make use of concepts like "brute fact" and "emergent property," so it's a job to shore up Thomism as a system.
I'm not in the position to certify that there is no first unmoved mover "out there." I'm not convinced that the First and Second Way yield certitude about the existence of the god of classical theism.
@Bill, adding: of course Aquinas speaks of the final cause as the "cause of causes." Feser and others have argued that efficient causality can't get started without final causality. I was only noting that in Platonism, the soul is by nature "self-motion" (cf. esp. the Phaedrus).
DeleteFor people who work on Aristotle, the causality of the first unmoved mover is a bit of a puzzle, since it seems the FUM moves only as being desired, ὡς ἐρώμενον, by the outermost sphere, which in turn sets into motion all that is subordinate to it. It seems difficult to explain the efficient causality of the spheres, however many there are, if the unmoved movers don't exercise efficient causality. If the unmoved movers don't exercise efficient causality, then the spheres seem to have a "virtue", i.e. of setting subordinate things into motion (or causing them to change), which is not given to them by the first unmoved mover. Maybe you can explain whether the FUM is an efficient cause as well as a final cause.
@EXE:
Delete"Newtonian physics and Modern Physics are alternative accounts of what it means for change to occur."
This is completely wrong, and wrong in the complete-lack-of-understanding wrong. Not only physics (classical or not) does not give any alternative account of what change is, it does not give *any* account whatsoever of what change is. None at all. Physics can be *interpreted*, or read into, as presupposing it (as a Thomist would do), in a Parmedidean fashion (e. g. there is no such thing as change -- see the arguments alleging that GR implies this, which are just a recognition that mathematics models the mutable by the immutable), etc.
"I won't sit here and claim that I know this field well enough to argue this whole field out with you, but I can tell when someone's taking a theory they like and trying to elevate it to the level of unquestionable fact."
For starters, no one is taking "a theory they like and trying to elevate it to the level of unquestionable fact", this is just your usual mischaracterization of the facts. And second, even if anyone here was doing that, no, you wouldn't know it.
"It's only true if I agree with you that Act/Potency is the only way to conceptualize change."
He gave an argument for why that is, he did not simply assert it.
@EXE:
Delete"To put it simply, even if the Prime Mover can be proved to exist and be the ultimate cause of all things, why should we worship it, or indeed pay it any mind whatsoever? Aristotle's conception of the Prime Mover never did anything at all except contemplate."
The sentence about Aristotle is just incorrect; there is much more in the "contemplate" there. As for the question, it is answered at length by St. Thomas Aquinas in discussions of the virtue of religion; in a nuthshell, the worship is due to Him (and Him alone) on account of Him being the source of all that was, is and will ever be, on account of Him as being our ultimate end, on account of Him as being the ultimate governing principle of the whole order of being. Or to quote from St. Thomas "For it is He to Whom we ought to be bound as to our unfailing principle; to Whom also our choice should be resolutely directed as to our last end; and Whom we lose when we neglect Him by sin, and should recover by believing in Him and confessing our faith." Now you will probably disagree with this; but I hope at least you will spare me the idiocy of making analogies with Thoth or Zeus or whatever.
For those interested, if one types "existential inertia" in the search bar at the top left they will find a list of articles where Dr Feser argues against existential inertia. The first one I found is quite good: https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/search?q=existential+inertia
DeleteAlso, the Summa Contra Gentiles is a good place to see the reasoning behind the 5 ways at chapter 13.
https://isidore.co/aquinas/ContraGentiles1.htm#5
Specifically he explains how Plato and Aristotle were not in actual disagreement regarding act/potency wrt a first mover:
[10] It is to be noted, however, that Plato, who held that every mover is moved [ Phaedrus ], understood the name motion in a wider sense than did Aristotle. For Aristotle understood motion strictly, according as it is the act of what exists in potency inasmuch as it is such. So understood, motion belongs only to divisible bodies, as it is proved in the Physics [VI, 4]. According to Plato, however, that which moves itself is not a body. Plato understood by motion any given operation, so that to understand and to judge are a kind of motion. Aristotle likewise touches upon this manner of speaking in the De anima [III, 7]. Plato accordingly said that the first mover moves himself because he knows himself and wills or loves himself. In a way, this is not opposed to the reasons of Aristotle. There is no difference between reaching a first being that moves himself, as understood by Plato, and reaching a first being that is absolutely unmoved, as understood by Aristotle.
@ficino4ml
DeleteI actually think we’re closer than it might look at first pass. My point wasn’t that you were accusing Thomists of smuggling God in as a presupposition; it was simply to lay out the internal structure of the argument. Thomists press the act/potency distinction so hard because, for them, it’s the minimal metaphysical grammar needed to make sense of change at all. Once that grammar is in place, the question of a first actualizer isn’t an extra theological leap—it’s the natural terminus of the analysis. In that sense the order really is: change → act/potency → causal analysis → first actualizer. God isn’t assumed at the outset; He’s the conclusion of the chain.
You’re right, though, that once Thomists start talking about essentially ordered causal series, they’ve moved beyond the bare fact that change involves potency and act. That’s part of the broader Aristotelian account of causation. The point of a hierarchical series is simply that some causal structures operate simultaneously rather than sequentially. A hand moves a stick which moves a stone; the stick has no independent power to move anything apart from the hand. Remove the primary cause and the instrumental causes stop immediately. The Thomistic claim is that many features of the world—especially the ongoing actualization of potencies—fit this sort of structure better than a picture of isolated agents acting on their own.
On existential inertia: Thomists don’t treat its denial as a freestanding postulate. They think it follows directly from the same act/potency analysis. If a thing’s essence is not identical with its act of existence—if it’s a composite—then its existing at any moment is the actualization of a potency inherent in that essence. And if that’s right, its existence can’t simply sustain itself. It requires something already actual in the order of existence to account for that ongoing actualization. That’s why Thomists see the rejection of existential inertia as a consequence of the framework, not an optional add‑on.
Where other systems diverge—Platonism with the self‑moving soul, or contemporary appeals to brute facts and emergence—is precisely here. They offer alternative accounts of how potency becomes act. The Thomistic critique is that these alternatives either covertly rely on actuality already present (and thus reintroduce the very principle they deny) or else leave the transition from potential to actual unexplained. A brute fact can mark a stopping point, but it doesn’t explain why potency becomes act rather than remaining potency.
So yes, philosophers can accept the vocabulary of act and potency while rejecting the Thomistic package. That’s exactly the contemporary landscape. The Thomist’s contention is simply that if you follow the implications of the act/potency framework consistently, you end up with something whose actuality is not derived—pure actuality—as the only coherent endpoint of the explanatory chain. Whether one finds that compelling is another matter, but the claim is that the conclusion isn’t a theological embellishment; it’s the metaphysical completion of the analysis of change itself.
@Bill, thank you for the clarifications and exposition.
Delete@bmiller: it's a little misleading for Pegis to insert "[Phaedrus]", since Aquinas did not have access to the text of that dialogue and does not refer to it. But yes, that's a dialogue where Plato talks about soul as self-motion and about soul as moving other things.
I don't know what Aquinas means by "Nihil enim differt," since there is a difference between "something first that moves itself" and "a first that is entirely immobile." A first mover that moves itself would not be Pure Act, would it? But the unmoved mover is Pure Act.
ficino4ml,
DeleteI'm interested in why you think the FUM would not be the ultimate efficient cause of all motion since that is exactly what The Second Way argues?
You even state that you understand that the FUM causes the motion of the spheres that subsequently cause the secondary motion of entities.
ficino4ml,
DeleteI don't think that it follows that if Aquinas did not have access to Phaedrus that he did not have knowledge of its content from other commentators.
Regarding the snippet from the Summa: Aquinas is making the point that The First Way is a conclusion drawn from the motion we observe in material objects that are continuous objects within a spatial continuum. Both Plato and Aristotle held that God is immaterial and so not a continuous material object within a spatial continuum and thus able to be the ultimate cause of the motion of such objects without violating the observation that such objects require something else to cause them to move, without resulting in infinite regress and avoiding circularity. One should notice all of the references to Aristotle's Physics, in which seeks to find the reasons for physical things and their reasons for motion. It seems to me Aquinas is saying that if one accepts that the FUM is the ultimate and immaterial cause of all physical motion his point has been made.
@bmiller: a while ago I was talking about Aristotle' unmoved mover/s. In Metaphysics Lambda Ari says that the unmoved mover moves as the object of desire. Usually people interpret this as its being the supreme final cause. But the unmoved mover does not "pull" or "push" or "twirl" the sphere that desires it (those are Ari's three forms of effecting locomotion). So I was asking about the efficient cause of the sphere's movement.
DeleteAs to the passage from SCG about Plato, it comes in an argument seeking to prove the proposition that whatever is moved is moved by another. Shouldn't Aquinas just have said that Plato was wrong to say soul is moved by itself?
ficino4ml,
DeleteI guess I don't understand the problem. You've stated that you understand the manner in which the FUM causes all things to move including the spheres. Isn't an efficient cause the cause of a thing being in existence? And so isn't the FUM the efficient cause of the existence of the motion of the spheres?
Shouldn't Aquinas just have said that Plato was wrong to say soul is moved by itself?
Well since we can't ask him, I'll just assume his intent in the passage was to stay within the limits on what the argument set out to prove as I mentioned above and to show that Plato and Aristotle were not in disagreement wrt this particular argument. Do you think he got something wrong?
@bmiller: The usual interpretation of Metaphysics Lambda is that the first unmoved mover in that discussion is a final cause and not an efficient cause. Feser wrote a piece arguing that the FUM in Physics VIII is an effiicient cause. I can't investigate right now whether we can identify the two. In Feser's view and that of Thomists and, he says, later Aristotelians, we can or should identify them.
Deletehttps://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2016/06/prior-on-unmoved-mover.html
ficino4ml,
DeleteThanks for the link. It seems I have been talking about the Aquinas First Way argument which is based on efficient cause as explained in Physics VIII, and as the link affirms. I haven't looked recently at the argument from Metaphysics, but I assume it is not in conflict with the argument in Physics. This is from the article you linked:
But that is not Aristotle’s argument. Though he brings in the idea of final cause when he comes to the question of how exactly the Unmoved Mover relates to the world, the idea of final cause is not itself what leads him (in Book 8 of the Physics, for example) to conclude to the existence of the Unmoved Mover. Rather, he essentially reasons in terms of efficient causes. (This is why Thomists and other later Aristotelians could quite plausibly argue that the Unmoved Mover really is an efficient cause as well as a final cause.) And efficient causes have to exist in order to explain their effects.
So it seems Feser is asserting that Aristotle argues that the FUM is both the ultimate Final Cause and the ultimate Efficient Cause.
ficino:
Delete""In Thomism and the traditions it draws on, "good" is convertible with "being." If we have being forever and ever, that's good. If we're being torn apart forever and ever, we would still be the recipients of the deity's gracious grant of an act of existence. Qua having being, it's good to have being, in hell or under any other circumstances.""
This is exactly my point, though! The Classical Theist God is "good", but the word "good" is used in a sense so utterly different from how nearly every human being understands that term that it might as well be meaningless. If, in your system, it is perfectly coherent to say that the all-good, all-loving deity expresses that love towards you be ripping you apart, burning you to ashes, and then reconstituting you to suffer again, over and over forever, then I submit that there is no way to distinguish between your God and Nyarlathotep, the Crawling Chaos. Congratulations, you have made "God is good" correct, at the cost of evacuating it of its common meaning. God is good and loving, if you define goodness and love in a way that no sane human being would ever accept.
grod:
DeleteOK. So, I went and looked up what Aquinas said about the virtue of religion. Through reading this, it becomes clear that Aquinas' view of religion is based on the deeply hierarchical worldview in which he lived:
"Since virtue is directed to the good, wherever there is a special aspect of good, there must be a special virtue. Now the good to which religion is directed, is to give due honor to God. Again, honor is due to someone under the aspect of excellence: and to God a singular excellence is competent, since He infinitely surpasses all things and exceeds them in every way. Wherefore to Him is special honor due: even as in human affairs we see that different honor is due to different personal excellences, one kind of honor to a father, another to the king, and so on."
So, for Aquinas, the claim that we ought to worship God is based on the "self-evident" belief that persons of superior "excellence" (which here clearly includes social status) are owed honor by virtue of that excellence. But I would deny this, as would almost everyone in the modern world. For one thing, the claim that social superiors are more excellent that their social inferiors is utterly laughable. That might have been easy to believe in the Middle Ages, but nowadays? With everything we know about monarchs? A King is just a man like any other, and it doesn't matter that Aquinas wouldn't have accepted that characterization - in that case he'd just be plain wrong. Secondly, even if you restrict "excellence" to mean exclusively superior talent, virtue, etc, I would also deny that anyone is OWED honor simply because they excel in virtue. If I save a child from a burning building, it is fair enough that people honor my bravery. But it is absurd to suggest that someone who refrains from doing so is thereby doing something morally wrong. I am not OWED that honor and respect, even if it seems good to give it.
@EXE:
Delete"So, for Aquinas, the claim that we ought to worship God is based on the "self-evident" belief that persons of superior "excellence" (which here clearly includes social status) are owed honor by virtue of that excellence. But I would deny this, as would almost everyone in the modern world. For one thing, the claim that social superiors are more excellent that their social inferiors is utterly laughable."
The opening statement is just plain and completely wrong. If it were true, it would be right to worship a king, but St. Thomas is very explicit in that *worship* is only due to God. And for the last sentence, even in the quote you pasted St. Thomas says "Again, honor is due to someone under the aspect of excellence: and to God a singular excellence is competent, since He infinitely surpasses all things and exceeds them in every way". First, he is speaking here of honor not worship, and he says that honor is due to "excellence" of some kind. Social superiors are more excellent than social inferiors *in the aspect* of social rank (which has a degree of arbitrariness and convention to it), not superior unqualified and simpliciter, and contrary to what you say this is indeed self-evident and no one denies it -- the entire social order is based on it. The "singular excellence" that God possesses differs not merely in degree but in kind, since He is the source of our being, our final end and the providental ruler of the entire order of being -- this is what justifies worship, over and above mere honor.
"I would also deny that anyone is OWED honor simply because they excel in virtue. If I save a child from a burning building, it is fair enough that people honor my bravery. But it is absurd to suggest that someone who refrains from doing so is thereby doing something morally wrong. I am not OWED that honor and respect, even if it seems good to give it."
This is a complete hash of an absurd attempt at an illogical argument that goes from honor being due to excellence to moral rights and wrongs. What in the blazing hells are you yapping about?
By the way, you can "deny" whatever you want, as much as you want. Your denial is because you view Prof. Feser and the commentariat here as political enemies (not without justification, I could add), so this is just politics by other means. I am not here to convince you, but simply clarifying the disagreements -- which mostly consist in showing that you know nothing of what you are talking about.
Grod:
DeleteSeems to me like you're the one missing Aquinas' point. He himself says "Now the good to which religion is directed, is to give due honor to God". For Aquinas, worshipping God, honoring the King, and honoring your father are all the same kind of thing, namely giving people the honor they deserve by virtue of who they are and their place in the cosmic hierarchy. Worship is just the special kind of honor that is due to God by virtue of Him being God, the same way that kingly respect is the kind of honor due to a King by virtue of his Kingship. Therefore, your argument of "well then we should worship Kings" doesn't work, because on Aquinas' schema, the two deserve different things because they have different places in the Hierarchy. Your attempt to claim that worship is somehow totally different from honor doesn't work at all, since Aquinas himself says that the point of religion is to give God honor. Unless you're suggesting that Aquinas doesn't think religion has anything to do with worship?
"Social superiors are more excellent than social inferiors *in the aspect* of social rank (which has a degree of arbitrariness and convention to it), not superior unqualified and simpliciter, and contrary to what you say this is indeed self-evident and no one denies it -- the entire social order is based on it."
Yes, this is my point - that Aquinas thinks people deserve honor based on their social rank. Your attempt at distinguishing social excellence from excellence simpliciter is also deeply anachronistic. The Medievals placed an enormous amount of importance on breeding - if you were of good stock, you were likely to be good, and if you were lowborn, you were likely to be stupid, vicious, and unworthy of holding public office, a man whose opinions are of little value.
I reject this idea as absurd and classist, and I'm willing to bet that you do too. I was steelmanning the claim by suggesting that it wouldn't work even if excellence were only taken in terms of skill.
"This is a complete hash of an absurd attempt at an illogical argument that goes from honor being due to excellence to moral rights and wrongs. What in the blazing hells are you yapping about?"
If I am owed honor, then anyone who refuses to give me honor is doing a morally wrong thing. The point I was making is this - Aquinas' argument goes like this:
1.People deserve honor commensurate with their excellence, that is, their position in the social/cosmic hierarchy
2. God is on the top of the social/cosmic hierarchy
3. Therefore, God deserves superlative honor, and this is what worship is.
I deny premise 1, and I would deny it even if it were reformulated in terms of people deserving honor by virtue of the good things they've done. This was my attempt at steelmanning the claim, by interpreting "excellence" in a way that is not absurd and unbelievable. It would not be immoral for someone to refuse to give me honor for doing something good, even if it might be considered a bit curmudgeonly.
@EXE:
Delete"Seems to me like you're the one missing Aquinas' point."
No I am not. I do not deny that worship is a species of honor and worship is the honor due to God. What I wish to emphasize is, as St. Thomas himself does at many points, is that even though worship is a species of honor, the honor due even to the most exalted creature like the Most Holy and Blessed Virgin Mary (*hyperdulia*), is different than what is owed God (*latria*) because God while a being in the sense that He exists, He is wholly transcendent, so the relationship we have with Him is of a different kind than the relation we have with other creatures, even if they are our betters in every conceivable way, so the honor due to Him is also of a different kind. So while in a sense, it is correct to say that God is at the top of the pyramid of being, it is also true that there is a radical discontinuity between God and everything below him (that is, every creature whatsoever), and thus there is a radical discontinuity between the honor due Him and the honor due to creatures on virtue of their excellences.
"Your attempt at distinguishing social excellence from excellence simpliciter is also deeply anachronistic. The Medievals placed an enormous amount of importance on breeding - if you were of good stock, you were likely to be good, and if you were lowborn, you were likely to be stupid, vicious, and unworthy of holding public office, a man whose opinions are of little value."
No it isn't, it is in fact you showing your prejudices and ignorance. Personal excellence in the way St. Thomas is using the term in the quote you pasted cannot be reduced to social excellence; the Gospel, and how the medievals tended to understand it in particular (for example, in the canonizations of Saints and the specific virtues that were extolled), wouldn't make sense if it was. This is in fact denied in so many ways, that is beneath me to refute you.
"I deny premise 1, and I would deny it even if it were reformulated in terms of people deserving honor by virtue of the good things they've done."
Fine, I will chalk this up as a fundamental disagreement between us. As long as you are consistent and do not appeal to some form of it, and ask of me or anyone else to give anyone honor, in any form, on account of their excellence, whatever it may be. Sons do not have to honor their fathers and daughters do not have to honor their mothers; students do not have to honor their teachers; citizens do not have to honor their kings; thieves do not have to honor the police; beneficiarys do not have to honor their benefactors; on and so on. Their failure to do so is just being a "curmudgeon". Understood.
Grod:
DeleteSo that we don't get lost in the shuffle, here's how this went:
1. I said that Aquinas' argument for why we should worship God is based on his view that all are due honor commensurate with their "excellence", and it is clear from his examples that he is defining that so that it at least *includes* social status, even if that's not the only form of excellence.
2. You denied, or at least gave the appearance of denying, that worship was a form of honor:
"First, he is speaking here of honor **not worship**, and he says that honor is due to "excellence" of some kind."
"The "singular excellence" that God possesses differs not merely in degree but in kind, since He is the source of our being, our final end and the providental ruler of the entire order of being -- this is what justifies worship, **over and above mere honor**."
In two statements here you distinguish worship from honor as if it is something meaningfully different. Were you confused, or were you simply speaking unclearly? Because the plain reading of your words here would suggest that they are claiming that worship and honor are separate things entirely. It is not impossible to interpret them in a way compatible with knowing they are the same kind of thing, but if so you communicated that very poorly.
3. You then claim that you accept that worship is a kind of honor.
So what is it?
Now, to the actual meat of your response:
Delete-Your first point is to emphasize the transcendence of God, and make it extremely clear how utterly, unfathomably far above creatures He is, and thus the Honor He deserves naturally should be far greater than the honor due to any man. OK, but that dog won't hunt unless you first establish that superiority merits honor. God can be as Ultimate and Supreme as He likes, but that doesn't mean anything for religion unless you can establish that this places an obligation to worship upon us. Frankly, it seems a little ridiculous to suggest that the Supreme Creator would have any desire for worship - a desire for honor is a decidedly *human* trait, and one often associated with pretty bad humans to boot.
-No, I'm afraid you are wrong about the Middle Ages here. For one thing, Aquinas is clearly not using excellence in the sense of personal excellence in the quoted passage, at least not primarily. He specifically states that honor is due to Kings and Fathers, without using any kind of qualifier. There is no indication that the honor merited is conditional on anything at all, no indication that only virtuous Kings and Fathers deserve it, no indication that Kings and Fathers deserve it because they are virtuous. They simply deserve it because of what they are. Certainly they recognized that it was not IMPOSSIBLE for a lowborn person to be virtuous, but they clearly regarded it as a rarity, with the default assumption being that breeding determined morality. If you seriously wish to argue that the Middle Ages were not deeply classist, then I can't help you. Ask literally any Medievalist and they will disabuse you of this notion very quickly. Heck, even language testifies to this - the term "villain" originally referred to a peasant or serf, and gradually attained its present meaning of "evildoer" through the fact that for many long centuries, low birth was presumed to imply low moral character. The opposite is true, too, we even continue to use the word "noble" as a synonym for "good"!
"Sons do not have to honor their fathers and daughters do not have to honor their mothers; students do not have to honor their teachers; citizens do not have to honor their kings; thieves do not have to honor the police; beneficiarys do not have to honor their benefactors; on and so on."
I would only deny that it is morally wrong to refrain from giving honor in reasonable circumstances, certainly it could still be seen as rude or churlish. Plus, your examples are not good ones. I would deny that parents are owed automatic honor from their children. This is simply a patriarchal ideal, one that I see no compelling reason to accept. Note that I am not giving free license to be a brat here, I am saying instead that honor must be earned rather than being automatically owed by virtue of position. Bad parents do not need to be respected (and generally are not). The same applies to students and teachers; honor/respect should not be automatic. Kings? The very existence of monarchy is unjust. I will shed no tears over broken thrones. Democratically-elected leaders also do not receive automatic honor, they need to earn it by good governance - as a matter of fact, that is rather a central feature of democracy. Thieves never have and never will "honor" the police, and it's absurd to expect them to do so. They *fear* the police because of the harm they will inflict on them if they are caught. Honor has nothing to do with it. Beneficiaries are not *obligated* to respect their benefactors, but if they do not, they are probably going to quickly find themselves without a benefactor. I still do not see why this should be a *moral imperative* rather than a practical one.
EXE,
DeleteIf, in your system, it is perfectly coherent to say that the all-good, all-loving deity expresses that love towards you be ripping you apart, burning you to ashes, and then reconstituting you to suffer again, over and over forever,...
I was hoping ficino4ml would answer since he has taken the time to actually read what Aristotle and Aquinas wrote even though he claims he disagrees. Maybe he's too busy and will respond later, but in the meantime I'll remind that you can easily use the search box at the top left of this site to see if your arguments have been addressed by Dr Feser. It took me only a couple seconds to type in "The Good" and find that the 5th returned article seems to address your complaint:
https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2010/10/laws-evil-god-challenge.html
Let me know if I can help any further.
See, the thing is that my objection here is not concerned with arguing that the A/T view of Good and Evil is either correct or incorrect. It is instead rooted in the fact that A/T's view of Good and Evil is radically alien to human experience, and violently contradicts our commonsense notions of such. Let me put it a bit more formally:
DeleteLet Good(A) be the commonsense understanding of Goodness - being kind like a good father or a good friend, being generous, gentle, taking care of orphans and widows, caring for the poor, and whatever you choose to put under this.
Let Good(B) be the A/T definition of Good (Desirability, Being because Convertible with Goodness in God, etc)
Let Evil (A) be the commonsense definition of Evil (hurting others, selfishness, etc).
Let Evil (B) be the A/T understanding of evil (privation, lack of a specific good or actuality).
My point is that, even if you can set up this fancy philosophical system to prove decisively that God is Good(B) and could never be Evil(B), that has absolutely no relation to whether God is necessarily Good(A) and could never be Evil(A). This is why I said it is possible that God could be "good" and yet be some kind of horrifying Lovecraftian abomination. Worse, Scholastic philosophy typically suggests that Good(B) is the REAL definition of Good, and that Good(A) is at best an inferior and degraded copy of it filtered through human fallibility. Well, if you go down that path, you have "saved" the Goodness of God at the cost of making goodness itself into something alien and horrifying, utterly remote from any human understanding. All our talk about God being a loving, good father is worthless and false, because he our commonsense notions of Good and Evil do not apply to Him at all.
@bmiller and EXE: yes, I am swamped by deadlines now, so must apologize for not contributing more to this thread. Carry on, gents, and catch you down the road, f
Delete@EXE:
Delete"So that we don't get lost in the shuffle, here's how this went:"
You forgot the most important thing, the original context of the question, which boils down to what is the difference between God and gods, and the worship, if any, due to Him and they. That is what we, or me at least, am after.
"So what is it?"
Both. This is tied, to analogical predication as a middle ground between equivocation and univocal predication, a subject I do not want to get into. For my purposes here, you can take me as speaking unclearly: worship is a species of honor, but the honor due to God is in a sense qualitatively different, that there is even a specific latin word for it in Catholic theology (*latria*), to the honor due to say, the Saints, or more proper speaking veneration (*dulia*) or even the Most Blessed and Holy Virgin Mary, an obscure mother in the Palestine of the first century of no social rank whatsoever and yet the greatest creature God has made, and thus owed an even greater form of veneration, *hyperdulia*.
@EXE:
Delete"Frankly, it seems a little ridiculous to suggest that the Supreme Creator would have any desire for worship - a desire for honor is a decidedly *human* trait, and one often associated with pretty bad humans to boot."
Just an aside, but this is one of the many spots where one can tell for sure that you have no understanding of what St. Thomas' is talking. Who suggested that God has a "desire" for honor or worship? On one meaning of "desire", God has none; if you are talking about a "Human trait", this is explicitely *denied* by St. Thomas. There is nothing we can do to add to God's glory, nothing we can give Him that He does not already possess. We ought to worship God because that is what is just, what is due to Him, and it is rational (that is, it is good) for us in virtue of the kind of things we are, i. e. rational animals, to do what is just.
"No, I'm afraid you are wrong about the Middle Ages here."
What I said was, and I repeat, "Personal excellence in the way St. Thomas is using the term in the quote you pasted cannot be reduced to social excellence; the Gospel, and how the medievals tended to understand it in particular (for example, in the canonizations of Saints and the specific virtues that were extolled), wouldn't make sense if it was." I never said the Middle Ages were not "deeply classist", whatever this means exactly. If your whole 50 years of life does not expand beyond a circle of a few miles radius' and there are few if any options for upwards social mobility, and this goes on for centuries and centuries, it is natural to view the social hierarchy as a given. And of course, the ruling class has an incentive to keep it that way. This is all true, and it is true of every age, whether it is medieval or our own; the forms it takes, and the particular pathologies it engenders, are different. But the understanding of the middle ages (or whatever age) and what their thinking was is not reducible to such crude and shallow analysis; but I have zero wish to disabuse you of your cartoonish version of history fabricated for polemical purposes.
"I would deny that parents are owed automatic honor from their children."
Once again, I just wish to establish *where* the diference is exactly. You are in a Catholic blog and this is the fifth commandment; one could try to probe more, say, what do you mean by "automatic"? It is also obvious that "honor" has a *much* wider range in St. Thomas than you are taking (yes, thieves ought to honor the police). But put that aside. Now what you *seem* to be getting at, is that there is a honor due to actions done and honor due merely in virtue of the office (or rank, or relation to) one has, and the latter is what you wish to deny. Am I correct? If you do not deny that honor is due to actions, then just rerun your argument above with a patched up major.
@EXE:
Delete"My point is that, even if you can set up this fancy philosophical system to prove decisively that God is Good(B) and could never be Evil(B), that has absolutely no relation to whether God is necessarily Good(A) and could never be Evil(A)."
Stop right here. This is false and Prof. Feser *explicitly* treats this in many of his blog posts (but maybe not in the linked article by bmiller, would have to check).
EXE,
DeleteI'm afraid I don't follow. If one concedes that God is perfectly good, then how could he also be Lovecraftian evil? They are not analogically similar which is the AT position of how goodness in creatures is similar to the goodness of God.
That is the reason I provided the link to Dr Feser's article. It specifically addressed an "evil god" argument that appears to be the point you are making. This is from that post:
He could intelligibly reject the whole metaphysical picture – the privation view, the convertibility of the transcendentals, God as Pure Actuality, the whole ball of wax. What he cannot intelligibly say is “The God of classical theism might in principle have been evil.” Again, the metaphysical system underlying classical theism simply rules out the very idea of an “evil God” on entirely principled and independently motivated grounds – not as a matter of mere ad hoc stipulation – and thus rules out Law’s “evil-god challenge” on entirely principled grounds.
Would you like some more info on "The Principle of Analogy"?
bmiller:
DeleteThe issue lies in the fact that the very concept of "goodness" used in AT descriptions of God is so alien from common human experience that it includes a vast number of things that we humans would label as evil. In effect, you are relying on an equivocation between "Good" and "Evil" in the strict AT sense and what "Good" and "Evil" mean to the vast majority of humans. I submit that there is a vast disconnect between these two senses, and that while it is possible to prove that God is good in the AT sense, that this sense does not at all map onto what the vast majority of people mean by goodness. Thus, God can be Good(AT) and at the same time Evil (Common Sense). The same is true of terms like "Love". Technically, to say that God loves you actually means something like this:
1.Everything God wills is good.
2.Everything that exists is willed by God.
3.Since you exist, God wills you to exist.
4.Everything that exists is in some sense good.
5.Therefore God can be said to will your good.
6.To love is to will the good of another.
7.Therefore God can be said to love you.
While it may be logically coherent, this concept of love is extremely bloodless. It is totally devoid of any of the things we humans associate with love, such as a feeling of care, a desire to help and aid the other, affection, tender concern, etc. It is perfectly logical to "love" someone in this sense and desire also that they be slow-roasted over an open fire for my amusement. On this view, *everything* God does is an act of Divine Love. Everything that happens, including plagues, natural disasters, stillbirths, etc, are all manifestations of God's goodness and love. But obviously, the vast majority of people would find such things to be monstrous evils. You see the contradiction?
Grod:
DeleteI notice that you've grabbed onto the one area in which I said something that's inaccurate and chosen to ignore the two paragraphs above it. Sure, fine, have your point about worship just being "good for us" rather than desired by God (doesn't really seem to comport with the Bible, but that's a whole other kettle of fish). My broader point still stands - Aquinas' argument only stands up if honor is owed to people by virtue of their excellence. It doesn't matter how super-special-chocolate-fudge-awesome this kind of honor is, that doesn't change anything about the argument.
Maybe it's true that Aquinas' concept of excellence cannot be REDUCED TO social position, but it clearly INCLUDES it - otherwise, explain why he states in an unqualified manner that honor is due to Kings and Fathers? And if you look at the actual literature about the Medieval period, it's clear that it was generally regarded that social status was at least largely responsible for moral status. It's not about taking the social order as given, it's about taking the social order as indicative of moral order. The fact that occasionally a saint would be canonized from the lower classes doesn't change the overwhelming view of people from that period, and what that view was is not remotely controversial.
Hmm. Since we're talking so much about honor, let's see what Aquinas' actual position...actually, this is long enough that I'll dedicate its own comment to it. See below.
https://www.newadvent.org/summa/3103.htm
Deleteshows Aquinas' treatment of Honor as a concept.
Of particular note is Objection 2 and Aquinas' response to such:
"Objection 2. Further, honor is due to a person in acknowledgment of his virtue, as stated above (Article 1; II-II:63:3). But sometimes those who are above us are not virtuous. Therefore honor is not due to them, as neither is it due to the demons, who nevertheless are above us in the order of nature."
So, it is clear that Aquinas does indeed regard social superiors as inherently more dignified than those beneath them, and thus deserving of honor because of their higher rank in this Hierarchy of Dignity. He also acknowledges the role of virtue as being worthy of honor, but explicitly denies that it is the only reason to honor someone.
Also relevant is Objection 4 and its response:
"Objection 4. Further, it is written (Tobit 1:16) that Tobias "had ten talents of silver of that which he had been honored by the king": and we read (Esther 6:11) that Assuerus honored Mardochaeus, and ordered it to be proclaimed in his presence: "This honor is he worthy of whom the king hath a mind to honor." Therefore honor is paid to those also who are beneath us, and it seems, in consequence, that honor is not due properly to those who are above us."
"Reply to Objection 2. A wicked superior is honored for the excellence, not of his virtue but of his dignity, as being God's minister, and because the honor paid to him is paid to the whole community over which he presides. As for the demons, they are wicked beyond recall, and should be looked upon as enemies, rather than treated with honor."
"Reply to Objection 4. Private individuals are sometimes honored by kings, not that they are above them in the order of dignity but on account of some excellence of their virtue: and in this way Tobias and Mardochaeus were honored by kings."
Here he does acknowledge that virtue is deserving of honor, but also in the same breath reaffirms that there is an "order of dignity" to which honor is owed. In other words, yes, virtuous commoners are also to be honored, but nobles and kings are to be honored even if they are wicked, by virtue of their rank. So, it is true that Aquinas thinks that honor is deserved by virtue of social position, albeit not exclusively.
"Stop right here. This is false and Prof. Feser *explicitly* treats this in many of his blog posts (but maybe not in the linked article by bmiller, would have to check)."
DeleteNope. The specific article does not address the fact that the Scholastic conception of goodness is not comparable with the common sense interpretation, it ignores it. For your part, you need to do more than just vaguely gesture in the direction of Feser "having done it somewhere else". That's not terribly convincing to anyone.
Curses, a formatting error mixed up my quotations from Aquinas! For ease of reading, I'll reprint them here:
Delete"Objection 2. Further, honor is due to a person in acknowledgment of his virtue, as stated above (Article 1; II-II:63:3). But sometimes those who are above us are not virtuous. Therefore honor is not due to them, as neither is it due to the demons, who nevertheless are above us in the order of nature."
Reply to Objection 2. A wicked superior is honored for the excellence, not of his virtue but of his dignity, as being God's minister, and because the honor paid to him is paid to the whole community over which he presides. As for the demons, they are wicked beyond recall, and should be looked upon as enemies, rather than treated with honor.
Objection 4. Further, it is written (Tobit 1:16) that Tobias "had ten talents of silver of that which he had been honored by the king": and we read (Esther 6:11) that Assuerus honored Mardochaeus, and ordered it to be proclaimed in his presence: "This honor is he worthy of whom the king hath a mind to honor." Therefore honor is paid to those also who are beneath us, and it seems, in consequence, that honor is not due properly to those who are above us.
Reply to Objection 4. Private individuals are sometimes honored by kings, not that they are above them in the order of dignity but on account of some excellence of their virtue: and in this way Tobias and Mardochaeus were honored by kings.
EXE,
DeleteIt seems you are just repeating your assertion without interacting with my post. Specifically, if the goodness we attribute to men is analogically similar to the goodness of God, how is Lovecraftian evil analogically similar to the goodness of God?
@EXE:
Delete"I notice that you've grabbed onto the one area in which I said something that's inaccurate and chosen to ignore the two paragraphs above it."
I honestly do not know what you are talking about here and what are these two paragraphs that I have "chosen to ignore".
"The fact that occasionally a saint would be canonized from the lower classes doesn't change the overwhelming view of people from that period, and what that view was is not remotely controversial."
This is another aside, but this right here is another tell-tale sign of your rank prejudice and ignorance. It is not "occasionally a saint would be canonized"; the feasts of the saints ruled the liturgical calendar and the very regimented life of your typical medieval peasant. Jesus was a carpenter and is mother was of no social rank. St. Paul says to the elect that he is writing to, that of the chosen there were not many that were great in the world. A medieval peasant would hear this and many things like this at every Sunday mass. There is not a strong correlation between social rank and the saints and martyrs (say, turn to the third part of the Divine Comedy). This is not deny that yes, you can clearly see "moral worth" (how did we go from honor to moral worth?) being tied to social rank. And?
"So, it is true that Aquinas thinks that honor is deserved by virtue of social position, albeit not exclusively."
Two posts to say something I never disagreed with; in fact, why exactly did you understand me to disagree with that? Yes fathers are owed honor in virtue of being fathers and kings are owed honor in virtue of being kings, etc. and etc. even if they are bad fathers and bad kings. What to do in such cases, whether and in what conditions it is lawful to resist and disobey them, etc. are all separate questions. As I said, you can deny the principle (your 1. in your argument), and if I am understanding you right you want to deny it because it implies that social rank is owed honor, something you seem to find abhorrent. Fair, a fundamental disagreement; I think you are laboring under a deep misunderstanding (because I suspect the disagreement is really political), but it is not something I care to clarify further. As I said, the conclusion you wish to deny can be arrived at by patching up your argument with a weaker major which you have not denied (or if you have I missed it).
"That's not terribly convincing to anyone."
This one is rich; you criticize a position without the least awareness of what people have said but the problem is me in that I did not do the work for you. Of course.
Well, it seems that EXE has left the conversation regarding the goodness of God. I'm guessing that he is unfamiliar with the AT theory of Analogical Predication. I assume this because he's contented that even if one accepts AT theory, one could find out that God could the agent of unspeakable evil when in fact the theory rules out any evil, not only unspeakable evil, whatsoever. That is why I linked to the "evil god" article in order to demonstrate that AT theory ruled this out.
DeleteSpecifically, when we speak of the goodness of God it is not exactly the same as the goodness of men since God and men are different and that is called univocal predication. Neither is the goodness of God something completely different than the goodness of men which would be called equivocal predication. Instead the goodness of God is similar to, but not the same as the goodness of men in the sense that the goodness of God is perfect while the goodness of men are derivative and less perfect which is called analogical predication.
This is spelled out in the chapters 30-41 in the Summa Contra Gentiles:
https://isidore.co/aquinas/ContraGentiles1.htm#30
The point is that one cannot claim without contradiction that one accepts AT while also claiming that God can be responsible for evil as AT explicitly rules that out.
I love these kinds of posts. It always delights me to see the geniality (and the always interesting thoughts) of our classical philosophers (a lot of the pre-Socratics are an interesting piece of history in metaphysics and so on).
ReplyDeleteThese posts also bring a reflection within them and, sadly, reminds us of something very important: how we have become distant from this fruitful and lovely philosophical endeavour and its ends. We are missing the mark that our predecessors saw as the true terminus of knowledge. How have we come so far as no other generation has and yet lost the 'brightness in the eyes' for a philosophy that matters, delivers us from ignorance, and brings meaning to life?
We will not last (and definitely cannot push much further than we think) if we continue to turn a blind eye to the contemplative and investigative ways that moved our prime philosophers on their adventure through reality and the reality of God. No matter how 'advanced' we are, mundane goods will not satisfy the soul's thrist for knowledge. Only the knowledge of these realities can bring us true eudaimonia.