Aquinas

To understand Aquinas's philosophy, such as his Five Ways, one must interpret Aquinas's arguments according to the Aristotelean metaphysics that underlies them. That's the main point of Feser's book Aquinas, and according to Feser, few modern philosophers interpret the arguments as such, instead interpreting them according to different metaphysics frameworks or even ignoring metaphysics altogether and taking a scientific, empirical view.

Feser devotes about ten dense pages to each Way, first describing the Way and then identifying various objections to the Way and how each objection fails according to an Aristotelean point of view. I gave an example of such an objection last Monday: To Aquinas, the common objection of the First Way, What moves God? makes no sense because God is unmoving.

And so it goes: many common objections to the Five Ways aren't objections but rather misconceptions. However, I won't describe the Ways here, nor will I enumerate the misconceptions; there are other things I find more interesting and I wish to move on. Suffice it to say if you're interested in sharpening your understanding of classical monotheism—and I think that's a worthwhile goal for nearly anyone—you can read Feser's book, settle for Feser's blog, or probably find other authors who have made similar points.

Instead, I'm going to jump straight to commentary.

After finishing the chapter on theology, I feel that Aquinas's Five Ways are solid arguments and atheists who argue against them are usually misguided. That differs from my opinion before starting Feser's book, back when I agreed with some of the common objections because I didn't interpret the Ways according to their Aristotelean premises. That said, Feser cemented my preexisting opinions that (1) Aristotelean metaphysics aren't compelling and (2) the God proved by classical monotheism has little to do with the God that monotheists actually worship.

Indeed, starting with the second point, I felt disappointed that the divine attributes turned out to be the well known infinite qualities such as immutability, eternalness, immaterialness, perfection, supreme simplicity, and so on. These attributes suggest God is another word for impersonal, unfeeling law or order, as in the kind of universal regularity that scientists try to discover through empirical investigation. Indeed, I find the Five Ways to be an interesting set of arguments for the claim that the universe is merely bound and that an absolutist view of things—rather than a relativistic view—makes the most sense ultimately. And here I use the word bound instead of finite because a thing may be infinite yet bound, such as how an endless string of 0's is infinite though possessing a fixed, limited quantity of information. Analogously, the Five Ways suggest the universe, irrespective whether it's finite or infinite, may be bound and thus ultimately subject to scientific law.

That brings me to my first point, which is that I don't find the Ways' underlying metaphysics to be compelling.

Pardon my metaphysics

At the heart of the problems I have with Aquinas's premises is his distinction between form and matter. To me, this distinction is dubious.

The key idea underlying form-matter dualism is that not everything can be material stuff alone—material stuff being matter and energy (and possibly spacetime itself?). Skipping past awkward, macroscopic examples of rubber balls highlighting the difference between rubber as matter and ball as form, there's the idea that concepts, like say, triangularity, necessitate the existence of something beyond mere material stuff. Such matterless things are forms. In the case of triangularity, a triangle is a conceptual thing independent of matter and thus exists as pure form.

Do forms exist as tangible things as though in another realm? Unlike Plato, Aquinas doesn't think so, and in any event we have no evidence for it. But maybe forms are merely mental—i.e., projections humans place onto the universe they observe. Not so, for even if all humans vanished triangles would still exist. For example, the angles of a triangle in Euclidean space add up to 180 degrees regardless whether there are any humans around to appreciate that fact.

So do triangles exist even if no material stuff exists anywhere in the universe? Aquinas thinks so, but this is an open question. Unlike the scenario whereby humans and only humans vanish, if all matter, energy and spacetime vanish then it's unclear what, if anything, remains. This leads to our most basic questions of what reality is all about.

For all I know, Aquinas answers the question correctly. But we can't be sure, and so (I think) it's better to build one's understanding of the universe around what one does know, even if that entails starting with the macroscopic stuff in the middle and using lenses to focus on bigger and smaller things over time. I just can't stop looking at things empirically.

Moving on

As Shelly Kagan jokes in the second lecture of his course on Death (which is open courseware, meaning you can freely read, listen to, or watch all the lectures—oh, how the Internet is a treasure!):

[You] will hear on several occasions over the course of the semester, I'm a philosopher. What that means is I don't really know a whole lot of facts.

Before starting Philosophy Monday on JEC, my intention was to read and blog about one book on polytheism (check!) and one book on monotheism (check!—though I'm ignoring the chapters on the soul and on ethics) and then move on to indulge myself in what really interests me: secularism. And in particular: secular ethics. My plan was to read and blog about Derek Parfit's quietly influential book, Reasons and Persons, which explores just how bizarre rational ethics is.

But those first two philosophy books have left me starved for facts, so I'm changing plans. Instead, I've started Sean Carroll's book, From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time. It's a popular-level science book about cosmology and time. I'm unsure how inspiring it will be for Philosophy Monday material, but on the other hand I've got other things on my mind worth writing about.