tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post7176727224410906247..comments2024-03-28T21:43:44.433-07:00Comments on Edward Feser: Four approaches to teleologyEdward Feserhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13643921537838616224noreply@blogger.comBlogger23125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-11689793577672148912009-10-07T12:27:41.623-07:002009-10-07T12:27:41.623-07:00Your post here strikes me as getting at the heart ...Your post here strikes me as getting at the heart of St. Thomas's view, and even St. Augustine's view (although as you noted in the following post, it may be more Augustinism that Augustine). I wonder if you can clear up a problem that I think is persisting in the interpretation of Aquinas.<br /><br />In the following linked article, David Bradshaw appears to be linking the concept of divine ideas in Augustine and Aquinas explicitly to the self-thinking thought of the Unmoved Mover:<br />http://www.uky.edu/~dbradsh/papers/Concept%20of%20the%20Divine%20Energies.doc<br /><br />In particular, Dr. Bradshaw says:<br />'My interest here is not in the Prime Mover as such, but in what all this implies about the meaning of energeia. In the Prime Mover we have a being which both thinks and is all possible intelligible content, existing as a single eternal and unchanging whole. The intelligible structure of things, however, is what makes them what they are. (This is the familiar doctrine that form is substance, articulated particularly in Metaphysics vii.17.) Thus one could equally say that the Prime Mover is present in all things, imparting—or rather, constituting—their intelligible structure, and thus their being. In light of all this, when we say that the Prime Mover is pure energeia, how ought we to translate that term? Activity? Actuality? Plainly the answer is both—and therefore neither. It seems to me that the closest we can come in English is to say that it is pure energy. Specifically, I have in mind the sense given in the American Heritage Dictionary as “power exercised with vigor and determination,” and illustrated with the phrase, “devote one’s energies to a worthy cause.” But of course no illustration drawn from ordinary objects will be adequate to the notion of a being that is pure energy, an energy that constitutes the being of other things.'<br /><br />At the same time, let us note that Aristotle assumes that one can sensibly speak of what it is like to be the Prime Mover. For example, he states that its way of life is “such as the best which we enjoy . . . , since its energy (energeia) is also pleasure,” and he goes on to add that it “is always in that good state in which we sometimes are” (xii.7 1072b14-25). Lest we think of the identification of the Prime Mover with energy as a sort of physicalistic reduction, we must remember that it is a being with mental states in some sense analogous to our own. That there is such an analogy is presupposed in the identification of its activity as thought (noēsis), for thinking is something in which we too engage, although in an incomparably more partial and limited way.'<br /><br />When Dr. Bradshaw subsequently says that "Since the beatific vision is strictly an act of intellect, it is no more a personal act than is the Aristotelian theōria upon which it is modeled," this seems to be what he has in mind.<br /><br />I take serious issue with that statement, and my argument would be exactly that it blows by the distinction from Aristotle that you pointed out, in that the Unmoved Mover is not an explanation of final causality in Aristotle but it IS in Aquinas. But it also neglects what Aquinas DID take from Aristotle <i>contra</i> Plato, i.e., that the ideas are not independently existent.<br /><br />While I don't fault what Dr. Bradshaw has said regarding the Eastern interpretation, equating the ideas with Aristotelian energeia and distinguishing them from the essence, I would fervently disagree with the claim that Aquinas is instead simply adopting Aristotle's noetic claims regarding the Prime Mover.<br /><br />If you have time, I'd be very curious to know your opinion, because as you may well know, Dr. Bradshaw is frequently cited as authoritative for those who reject Catholicism in favor of Eastern Orthodoxy. I personally know of at least one person who has converted to Orthodoxy from Catholicism and at least two others contemplating it, and this seems like a very bad idea if it is based on what seems to be a fundamental error in interpretation.<br /><br />Thanks for reading,<br />Jonathan PrejeanCrimsonCatholichttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08623996344637714843noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-50000443895531456472009-10-06T23:47:00.937-07:002009-10-06T23:47:00.937-07:00No problem, Sarah. The main point of this post wa...No problem, Sarah. The main point of this post was simply to emphasize the differences between the approaches rather than make the case for their incompatibility.<br /><br />Are ID theory and an Aristotelian-Thomistic approach incompatible? That depends on what one means by "ID theory." If one means simply "being critical of Darwinism," then, no, of course there is no incompatibility. Nor is the use of probabilistic arguments per se incompatible with A-T. From my POV there are two main problems, though: First, ID theorists seem happy to take for granted a mechanistic approach to nature and want to argue on those terms. No A-T theorist can accept that. Second, the way ID theory tends to model the concept of a "designer" does not sit well with classical theism. And especially when coupled with a mechanistic view of nature -- which implies a certain view about how God is related to nature -- the result is arguably positively incompatible with classical theism and tends instead in the direction of what is sometimes called "theistic personalism" -- something else which no A-T philosopher can accept. I intend to write up a post on this latter topic soon.Edward Feserhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13643921537838616224noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-11654046435587740402009-10-05T18:19:22.830-07:002009-10-05T18:19:22.830-07:00This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.8noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-50093698921903395312009-10-05T13:48:56.815-07:002009-10-05T13:48:56.815-07:00I honestly do not understand why ID theory [or Pal...<i>I honestly do not understand why ID theory [or Paley's argument, for that matter] is antithetical to St. Thomas's teleological argument.</i><br /><br />Sarah, this may help<br />http://guweb2.gonzaga.edu/faculty/calhoun/socratic/Tkacz_AquinasvsID.htmlTheOFloinnhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14756711106266484327noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-3663925573904576572009-10-05T09:44:34.924-07:002009-10-05T09:44:34.924-07:00This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.8noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-62513678226516310242009-10-04T15:47:38.893-07:002009-10-04T15:47:38.893-07:00Dr. Feser,
I apologize. My first comment is ident...Dr. Feser,<br /><br />I apologize. My first comment is identified as Tweetie's, the second as Anonymous's, and the third as Sarah's. <br /><br />I understand that you're a busy person and I didn't and don't expect that because I asked a question you're *obliged* to reply! My no-answer comment addressed the comment of the person who used my question as a pretext to look down his nose at Dr. Behe, et al and begged the question.<br /><br />I honestly do not understand why ID theory [or Paley's argument, for that matter] is antithetical to St. Thomas's teleological argument. <br /><br />Aside from the quibble about your reference to Paley's and the IDers' conceptions of nature / teleology, the "four approaches" post is very beautifully written and helpful.<br /><br />Again, I apologize for the confusion.<br /><br />SarahSarahnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-1794642766131907722009-10-04T12:57:13.520-07:002009-10-04T12:57:13.520-07:00Hello Sarah,
I don't understand. What questi...Hello Sarah,<br /><br />I don't understand. What question did you ask that no one has replied to? (I don't even see your name on any comment posted above.)<br /><br />I should say re: my own occasional failure to reply to comments that it owes to nothing more than my being very busy. I apologize to those commenters who sometimes do not receive a reply. Please know that I do read and value every comment (apart from those made by the occasional troll).Edward Feserhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13643921537838616224noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-45898547529852587742009-10-04T02:25:51.435-07:002009-10-04T02:25:51.435-07:00Mike Flynn said...
" ... It's not the ap...Mike Flynn said...<br /><br />" ... It's not the apparent exceptions that demonstrate design, but the consistent lawfulness of nature."<br /><br />"The difficulties Paley, Behe, and others have, coming from the mechanistic worldview, is that if material bodies have no innate tendency toward an end, they must be 'nudged" toward those ends by an outside agency. Newton thought his universal gravitation required a God to nudge the orbits now and then.'"<br /><br />Well. Apparently my question is so cretinous that it doesn't merit an answer, at least not an answer from those who are so certain they're my intellectual superiors. Alrighty then.<br /><br />St Thomas would never have stooped to so question-beggingly condescending to those with whom he disagreed and neither would Cardinal Ratzinger / Pope Benedict XVI. <br /><br />So much for that good old Catholic charity and humility.Sarahnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-785017044188796302009-10-03T10:03:28.819-07:002009-10-03T10:03:28.819-07:00This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.8noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-25520487337962193892009-10-02T11:55:39.706-07:002009-10-02T11:55:39.706-07:00Bjørn, no book, but there was an article in a UK m...Bjørn, no book, but there was an article in a UK mag <i>Faith.</i><br /><br />+ + +<br /><br />Behe teaches at a university just up the road from here. Maybe one of these days I should just drop in an ask him. <br /><br />There are two letters from Behe here that touch on teleology:<br />http://www.firstthings.com/article/2007/03/correspondence-6<br /><br />http://www.firstthings.com/article/2007/07/augustseptember-letters-11TheOFloinnhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14756711106266484327noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-39707758671577655112009-10-02T09:56:34.418-07:002009-10-02T09:56:34.418-07:00The difficulties Paley, Behe, and others have, com...<i>The difficulties Paley, Behe, and others have, coming from the mechanistic worldview, is that if material bodies have no innate tendency toward an end, they must be "nudged" toward those ends by an outside agency.</i><br /><br />Exactly. Which is why Behe puzzles me so much. He needs to read Ed's book on Aquinas.<br /><br />Mine just came in the mail....John Farrellhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/18280296574996987228noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-40941899852573715102009-10-02T04:04:45.071-07:002009-10-02T04:04:45.071-07:00Mike, indeed, I read the article as well, very goo...Mike, indeed, I read the article as well, very good!<br /><br />Will any of this also be published in a book any time soon?Bjørn Arehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01491085976273836365noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-9795909556551119972009-10-01T20:25:04.631-07:002009-10-01T20:25:04.631-07:00St. Thomas's understanding of the relation bet...St. Thomas's understanding of the relation between teleology in nature and God is clearest in the definition of "nature" that he gives in 2.14 of the Physics: "nature is nothing other than a ratio given to things by the divine art, that the things themselves might act for an end". So far as nature empowers the thing to act of itself and to achieve goods (ends) that are goods solely for itself, nature is autonomous and can be studied as such; but a reference to God is still contained in it by definition. In this way, the relation between the autonomy of nature and the dependence on God is a matter of what part of the definition of nature one chooses to emphasize. The quasi-genus of nature is "getting goods for oneself (actively or passively)" the difference seems to be that this is a mode of participating in the divine; and the difference on top of this is that the participation happens by way of begin in motion. <br /><br />James CAnonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-41839431596048966762009-10-01T16:44:10.671-07:002009-10-01T16:44:10.671-07:00Bjørn, thank you for the nice words. Did you also...Bjørn, thank you for the nice words. Did you also read the article that went with it? De revolutione scientiarum in 'media tempestas'? A glorious and likely ill-conceived attempt to imitate a medieval Question. <br /><br />As for James' book, it arrived in the mail just yesterday, complete with autograph. I had gotten interested in the topic when I was researching for <i>Eifelheim.</i>TheOFloinnhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14756711106266484327noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-1206206890499688082009-10-01T16:15:02.335-07:002009-10-01T16:15:02.335-07:00Mike, loved your "Quaestiones super caelo et ...Mike, loved your "Quaestiones super caelo et mundo".<br /><br />Have you read James Hannam's recent book "God's Philosophers"?Bjørn Arehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01491085976273836365noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-41971664934576103622009-10-01T15:15:56.513-07:002009-10-01T15:15:56.513-07:00I read elsewhere once that expecting to find evide...I read elsewhere once that expecting to find evidence of God in the minute examination of the details of nature is like expecting to find Frank Whittle by examining the components of a jet engine. The existence of Whittle is not an engineering problem; and neither is the existence of God a scientific one. It's not the apparent exceptions that demonstrate design, but the consistent lawfulness of nature. That is, Darwin's "laws" are better support for the Fifth Way than Behe's apparent exceptions. After all, gravity does not account for all motions; electromagnetism is also in play. <br />Just so, natural selection may not account for everything in biology. That doesn't make theokinetics the only alternative. <br /><br />The difficulties Paley, Behe, and others have, coming from the mechanistic worldview, is that if material bodies have no innate tendency toward an end, they must be "nudged" toward those ends by an outside agency. Newton thought his universal gravitation required a God to nudge the orbits now and then. (The math describes an unstable system.) This becomes the modernist "God of the Gaps" game, in which theistic mechanists hunt for oddities that "can't be explained" while other mechanists go about explaining them, thus chasing the theists from one pocket to another. <br /><br />But as then-cardinal Ratzinger wrote, we mustn't imagine creation as a tinkerer at a workbench, but rather in the sense that thought is creative. To have designs on something means to have plans or intentions [ends] for it. It needn't mean engineering drawings or schematics; not when you have commanded that "the earth bring forth" the living things.TheOFloinnhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14756711106266484327noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-82241200028480273402009-10-01T10:16:55.637-07:002009-10-01T10:16:55.637-07:00The very idea that eyes might not really be for se...<i>The very idea that eyes might not really be for seeing makes no sense and is not even theoretically possible. If eyes are typically associated with seeing, then that can only be because it is in their nature to see. And that in turns entails that their natural end or final cause is seeing.</i><br /><br />If I read this correctly, then under Aquinas's view, it's possible that the eye came about randomly, and wasn't <i>intended for</i> seeing, but is nevertheless <i>for</i> seeing inasmuch as it, by its form or physical nature, sees as opposed to doing something else (much as ice predictably cools things as opposed to doing something else). Am I right about this?The Deucehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09664665914768916965noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-7683216020529475332009-10-01T08:46:36.662-07:002009-10-01T08:46:36.662-07:00Nicely put, Ed.Nicely put, Ed.Francis Beckwithhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03765632359220115150noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-56128967514360732252009-10-01T06:51:35.388-07:002009-10-01T06:51:35.388-07:00This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.8noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-4188489621435883862009-09-30T23:04:46.474-07:002009-09-30T23:04:46.474-07:00"For Paley and ID theory, it is at least poss..."For Paley and ID theory, it is at least possible that natural objects have no end, goal, or purpose; they just think this is improbable."<br /><br />It seems to me that Paley and the IDers don't suppose that teleology is more or less probable, but that teleology is real and that it is probable that man can discover marks or signs of that real teleology.tweetienoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-12251780043973123452009-09-30T22:58:12.962-07:002009-09-30T22:58:12.962-07:00"do you deny that Paley and IDers regard thei..."do you deny that Paley and IDers regard their inferences as probabilistic?"<br /><br />No. At the same time, it's my understanding that Paley and the IDers thought / think their inference[s] is / are, well, I guess I'd say unambiguous marks of design that man can perceive and apprehend among the myriad more ambiguous marks that can be known by the light of reason. In other words, the universe is designed, the biosphere we inhabit is designed, and there are marks, or signs, of that universal design that may be "scientifically" studied. <br /><br />Or so it seemeth to me....Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-29456570667491439242009-09-30T22:38:20.497-07:002009-09-30T22:38:20.497-07:00How, exactly? E.g. do you deny that Paley and IDe...How, exactly? E.g. do you deny that Paley and IDers regard their inferences as probabilistic?Edward Feserhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13643921537838616224noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8954608646904080796.post-90227733576563075412009-09-30T22:29:26.684-07:002009-09-30T22:29:26.684-07:00"For Paley and ID theory, it is at least poss..."For Paley and ID theory, it is at least possible that natural objects have no end, goal, or purpose; they just think this is improbable. The reason is that they accept an essentially mechanistic conception of nature, viz. one which denies Aristotelian formal and final causes and models the world on the analogy of a machine."<br /><br />I own three and have read two of the books you've written: Philosophy of Mind, Last Superstition, and Aquinas -which I've read several chapters of. <br /><br />I really do find the references to Paley and the IDers' conceptions of teleology and nature as machine perplexing and, I confess, a little irritating -because the characterizations seem to me not true and more than a little biased. Which is really quite disappointing. <br /><br />Oh, well....Tweetienoreply@blogger.com