Wouldn’t that preclude him from making miracles also? After all, miracles happen in a temporal process.
No, this paragraph is merely highlighting the difference between God’s activity and the manner in which ancient Greek philosophers defined change.
Perfect!:
We have Adam and Eve’s teeth somewhere? That is news to me. Where?
That is the permitted area of inquiry. You are reading this wrong.
It is not empirical science and therefore philosophy.
Ahhh, assumptions again. What if every 150 years Adam and Eve grew new adult teeth?
Professor Tkacz’s article from 2008 is dated and I could not find that he published any follow-on articles. Today, some Thomist philosophers not only support intelligent design but also oppose theistic evolution. Father Michael Chaberek’s book Aquinas and Evolution published on April 28, 2017 being a good example.
aquinas.design
I think they really did not understand the concept of front loaded design and kept using the God as tinkerer as the main objection. It is important to consider the effects of the fall, man’s free will, and God’s miraculous interventions as He deems necessary.
Not in the way you think.
His article isn’t dated; he makes no claims that have since been disproven, arguing as he does from basic philosophical and theological principles that are well established.
I haven’t read the book, but reading his website I see so many fundamental flaws that I find his analysis useless. For example, he argues that a base species would have more potency while a derived species would have more act, but this conclusion is not warranted by either Thomistic reasoning nor scientific study. The two species are both in potency and act with regards to different forms, not with regards to more or less being. A bird is not “more in act” than a lizard in general, but it is “more in act” with regard to feathers and flight, and “less in act” with regard to scales and venom. There is absolutely no reason to suppose a vertical path in theistic evolution.
Here he is setting a line between living and non-living, saying that living things (and individual species) have substantial forms in a truer sense than non-living things, but this line is arbitrary in several ways. If a wheel is not a substance but rather an accidental form of wood, then there is no fundamental reason to suppose that dog is a substantial form as opposed to being an accidental form of carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus, ect. Real substantial change doesn’t occur between forms of matter, as all forms of matter are accidental forms, but there is indeed a substantial difference between spiritual, subsistent forms (rational souls) and material life. In fact, Aquinas already believed in abiogenesis when he spoke of earthworms be generated from the soil itself (a misunderstanding in the sciences of his day).
So Aquinas not only allowed for the emergence of entirely new species of animals, but attributed it to the natural powers of the stars and elements (we will leave aside the fact that our understanding of the science behind these powers is better now, and accept that he was speaking based on the scientific observations available in his day) rather than special Creation by God.
In terms of today’s understanding of what is “the earth”, I would read this is to say that of all the chaotic activity of material processes, behaving in accordance with their inherent properties, only those that culminated in the forming of earthly creatures were allowed in order to create the different kinds of life that exist.
I have no idea what this would mean. It implies the killing of a pre-existing animal and the idea that a soul travels around in a body. The soul and the body are one thing, which is why when we think and act biochemical changes occur. Neurochemistry does not cause the thinking and the thinking is not a force that moves matter; they are one and the same in what is human being.