Rene Descartes: Catholic attitudes toward him

[greylorn]

C:

Precisely.

No doubt. There was a time that I embraced atheism. I was a capitalist swine for many years, besides earlier teaching biology, zoology and botany. It made little sense to love money - actually, it was really a love of my own personal prowess in the economic marketplace - and love God. But, that lunacy is behind me. I asked for forgiveness and believe I have been forgiven.

You aren’t alone, brother.

One thing he and every one of us should try to remember is that we get people on here who make claims that might not be true: about themselves. We are, after all, anonymous.

I almost…almost…feel a certain sense of loss when I purposely skip by many of his longish posts because I suspect that there may well be some good stuff in them. But I have grown to feel about him the way you seem to feel about Scholasticism.

Well, that’s plain wrong. Anyone who restricts learning in that way is, to be sure, a philosopher in name only.

You seem to be young enough to live that through. The major problem that people who harbor problems with Aristotle and Aquinas seems, at all turns, to be related to simply not spending enough time with them. And, when one is studying physics, I admit, there isn’t much spare time to allot. Anyway, when you discover all there is to know about the universe, I hope you will share (at least some of) that knowledge with the rest of us.

God bless,
jd

JD,
I appreciate your openness. It is refreshing to be the subject of an objective and honest dialogue.

I sure got it that you dislike me, and suggest that you continue doing so. I am more at home with dislike than approval.

However, I still do not trust your integrity. You admitted, to your credit, that you do not fully read my posts. This is indicative of someone whose brain is made of concrete, who will not honestly evaluate an opinion contrary to his beliefs. And by your own admission, you’ve been evaluating me in terms of your personal feelings and blowing off my ideas.

I am unimportant. My ideas may fare otherwise.

I must wonder if you are complaining so vociferously about me because you feel unqualified to deal with my unread ideas. You could clarify by actually reading some and replying in an analytic, non-doctrinal manner.

 

[MindOverMatter2]

It is difficult to reply to you, because your arguments are based upon your beliefs, dogma, and doctrine.

That is complete and utter rubbish. My arguments are based on knowing the epistemological and factual difference between science, metaphysics, and theology. There is a rational distinction between these various modes of knowing. Your failure to acknowledge those distinctions is a result of your arrogance and pride.

I prefer facts and logic. A few tips.

You prefer a straw-man, which is dealing in neither facts or logic.

Being a Christian is not an inherent impediment to understanding science. I was one throughout four years of math and physics. However, being a nitwit is a severe impediment to understanding physics and pretty much anything else, and there seems to be no cure for it.

Then i guess there is no cure for you.

Finally, science is a general method for the discovery of truth.

The scientific method allows us to discover physical truths. Metaphysics & philosophy allows us to discover non-physical truths.

You seem to believe that it can only be applied to the material world, but this is not the case.

The scientific method is not metaphysics. Science allows us to discover physical truths about physical reality. The Scientific method cannot say anything about the soul or any non-material being, since that is not the natural object of science. Science is methodologically naturalistic. Any other conception of science that you have is purely your own invention.

Science, religion, and philosophy are all methods for the discovery of truth.

They are all genuine ways of knowing the world when they respect their epistemological boundaries.

There is no inherent restriction that I know of which says that one method can only be applied here, another method there.

Its been explained to you why that is not possible, i am not going to repeat it again.

Historically, religionists and philosophers have attempted to apply their methods to the physical universe, with no particular success. To do what they could not, Galileo invented the scientific method, which proved very useful in the discovery of physical principles. Because the 17th century Church got into a snit over the implications of his work (i.e. that the Church was wrong), we got a conflicted separation between religion and science, which lots of dogmatists whose minds have refused to leave the dark ages insist upon perpetuating.

While there was a conflict between the church authorities and Galileo, these events happened within a certain political context, and a proper understanding of history would reveal to you that it had nothing to do with the core teachings of the catholic church. But rather it was more due to flawed interpretations, pride, and a political agenda to preserve the then popular Aristotelian (a pagan) conception of the physical world, because it seemed agreeable with a literal interpretation of the bible, and thus made the faith seem more plausible as a political authority in the eyes of society at the time. Given that there was little distinction between church and state at the time, it is not surprising that people called on the power of church to suppress those ideas which could lead to them losing power. In other words the church had circular interests as well as religious ones. The same thing is happening today with philosophers such as yourself trying to blur the lines between your beliefs and science because you mistakenly believe that your beliefs will have more authority if you call it science. Insecure people will always seek those labels which are most popular, without any real understanding of what they mean or represent.

You might want to take a summer course in remedial English grammar while about it.

I guess i had this coming. If you cannot refute the messenger, attack his grammar!!

You might want to take a course in the history of science.

Evidently you think that I am guilty of bad manners.

Its not a matter of what i think; it is evident in what you write and others have pointed out that fact. on top of that you have a disrespect for both science and metaphysics. If you ask me, you use your false conception of science as an excuse to hate the church.

 

[MindOverMatter2]

However, I still do not trust your integrity. You admitted, to your credit, that you do not fully read my posts. This is indicative of someone whose brain is made of concrete, who will not honestly evaluate an opinion contrary to his beliefs. And by your own admission, you’ve been evaluating me in terms of your personal feelings and blowing off my ideas.

This sounds just like that greylorn guy that keeps blowing off peoples ideas because of his personal feelings towards Christians.

 

[greylorn]

As far as I can remember this is the first thread where I’ve met him, so you’re reacting against something I haven’t seen.

In this post he defended the basic human goodness of some atheists. He is not wrong to do so, though I think the context was bad - the desolation of atheists is not a “paragraph full of nonsense”, but something well-documented in postmodernist literature, which I took a whole class on at college. Some of the best people I’ve known have been atheists, ones with horribly childish notions of God, but good, sincere, authentic friends. He then complained about self-righteousness among Catholics, something I do ALL the time. He might be in a better position to make such a complaint if he were a saint himself rather than one who gave up the fight (not that I’m a saint - but at least I’m trying, and I hope I don’t put on airs of self-righteousness about it).

He then complained about grievances in his life from Christians, and unfairly extended it to the rest of us.

The rest of his posts have been constructive and insightful. I am a practicing Catholic, but I share his objection to scholastic philosophy (which I got a really bad taste for in college - I would end up getting so angry with it that it began to hurt my faith, and I dropped my philosophy major to stop short at a minor (I was also a physics major), and translating to the Eastern rite which has no place for the Western philosophical tradition helped rescue my religion from the nausea that anything connected with Aristotle gave me). Hopefully someday the Catholic metaphysical tradition will be re-thought in light of the science of today rather than the science of 2300 years ago, and the disdain that philosophers have for science (as I put up with for four years at college) can come to an end.

As Greylorn said, a philosopher is one who wants to understand the universe, but doesn’t see how a physics class might be helpful. I got a degree in physics because I wanted to be a better philosopher - I wanted to understand the universe. But the way to do that is in physics, and I have yet to see a coherent Catholic metaphysics based on modern physics according to the hierarchy of knowledge that Aristotle and St. Thomas wanted.

Cecill…

Being privy to a conversation about me is a new and entirely positive experience. Between you and JD, I read a perspective on myself unobtainable otherwise. Thank you!

Nonetheless, some self-defense is in order. I could not abide being a saint, as such a pronouncement would set a standard that conflicts with my nature. Were anyone to call me so much as a good person, I would be compelled to object. However, I do object to your opinion that I have given up the fight, and invite you to join me on an isolated battleground which you may be well suited to occupy all by yourself before long.

I first tried to deal with the errors I had found between Church and physics, by working within the Church. Not a good plan. I stayed a Catholic for several years until I could no longer honestly do so. (Had I known that the Eastern Orthodox Church was different, things might have gone otherwise, but I believed my Church, whose teachers said that the only difference was that the Eastern Church does not accept the Pope’s authority.)

Although I have developed a different theology, it is more consistent with Christ’s teachings than the Church’s, IMO of course.

Regarding my extension of grievances at the hands of Catholics to other Christians, I must have worded my complaint stupidly. I meant to extend it only to a handful of annoying CAF posters who often gang up to hijack interesting threads with which they disagree, or to attack any individual with whom they disagree, one of which I often am,

Their tactics are similar to those of socialists who have learned that a small but aggressive and noisy contingent can prevent conservative lecturers from speaking on campus. The CAF moderators seem to let them have their way, just like the campus chancellors. Unlike campus chancellors, our moderators have allowed me to defend myself, despite complaints.

The way the world works is that one thug can beat you badly, or to death, with a thousand “well meaning” onlookers standing around, onlooking. Yet, just one other man willing to take your backside makes all the difference in the world.

That said, the discovery of someone with a deep knowledge of theology and religion, with a physics major, who says what he means, is a delightful surprise.

 

[MindOverMatter2]

Good science is not going to explain spiritual reality separate from matter - angels, demons, and God. We just can’t do experiments on a purely spiritual being. Good science will tell us everything we could know about the physical world - but nothing more.

A man once asked me how I reconciled my research in physics with my believe in God. I told him they never even touched each other - entirely irrelevant to each other. That’s good science.

I wouldn’t say they are entirely irrelevant, since they can inform each-other. For example scientific truth helps me to know how best to interpret the bible, and this is why i am not a bible literalist when it comes to things like genesis. But what you have said is basically correct. Good science does not do metaphysics anymore than it tells us about objective morality.

Its a shame that you are not a Thomist, but i respect your understanding of science in regards to its epistemological limitations.

 

[Cecilianus]

Finally, science is a general method for the discovery of truth. You seem to believe that it can only be applied to the material world, but this is not the case.

I’ve also had four years of math, astronomy and physics - and now enrolled in a Ph.D. program - and I’d like to ask you how you could apply the scientific method to a case other than the material world. The scientific method is (a) empirical/observational, and (b) inherently quantitative. You can’t write an equation describing the properties of a soul or spirit, and there’s not way to measure God in a test tube. The limitation of the method of science has to do with the kind of subject-matter it can be applied to (bad pun, between the Aristotelian and modern senses of the term “matter”).

Science, religion, and philosophy are all methods for the discovery of truth. There is no inherent restriction that I know of which says that one method can only be applied here, another method there.

Yes, they are all methods for the discovery of truth, as are other disciplines like history. The inherent restriction comes from the subject to which the method is applied and the kinds of questions being asked. Physics may tell you a lot things about beings, but it never asks “What is Being?”. Try writing a paper on that question and submitting it to the Physical Review. Knowing physics is a good way (and, imho, the only way) to arrive at an answer to that question, but it isn’t itself a question of physics.

Likewise, religion is going to tell you that God created the world - but since everything He does He does through natural causes (except miracles), religion isn’t going to tell you a thing about how He created it - whether the universe began with a Big Bang or with a steady-state system following a “perfect cosmological principle” is a matter for science to discover with no help from religion.

Historically, religionists and philosophers have attempted to apply their methods to the physical universe, with no particular success. To do what they could not, Galileo invented the scientific method, which proved very useful in the discovery of physical principles. Because the 17th century Church got into a snit over the implications of his work (i.e. that the Church was wrong), we got a conflicted separation between religion and science, which lots of dogmatists whose minds have refused to leave the dark ages insist upon perpetuating.

I think the conflicted separation has to do more with the following factors: (a) the close unity that had been forged between Catholic dogma and the Aristotelian metaphysic, (b) the contemporary Catholic-Protestant disputes over the interpretation of Scripture and the resulting sensitivity on both sides to anything posed as a challenge to the literalistic interpretation of the Bible, (c) the historical fact that since the 1940s scientists have been overrepresentatively atheists, due in part to the secular interest of science and lack of theological relevance and also possibly reaction against the rise of fundamentalism, and (d) the real and unsolved conflict over issues like the human soul and the creation of man. I don’t have a problem with these conflicts because (a) I know I can’t solve them so I chose physics rather than biology, and (b) science doesn’t have a complete picture yet either. We don’t know the exact genetic route that man has taken yet, and biology cannot yet be reduced to physics, which gives purer scientists like me the right to turn up my nose at the softer sciences like biology.

Their chronic incompetence does not change the fact that the scientific method is a way of uncovering the truth which can be applied to any subject. It can be applied to theology as well as atomic structure, but I know of no one else who has done so. Surely there are many others.

You’ll be pleased to know that attempts to apply the scientific method to theology are greeted with equally mindless, dogmatic objections from atheistic and religious “scientists.” So there’s no need to leave your groove. Just keep whining. You might want to take a summer course in remedial English grammar while about it.

I fail to see how any empirical method could tell us anything about a spiritual reality. Can you please give us an example of an attempt to apply the scientific method to theology?

Note that disciplines like religious phenomenology (e.g., Mircea Eliade, Jean-Luc Marion, Rudolf Otto, Jacques Dupuis) and historical criticism whether in the orthodox or Modernist forms (Adolph Harnack, Alfred Loisy, Albert Schweitzer, Joseph Ratzinger) are not themselves theology, but rather disciplines useful for the study of theology.

 

[Cecilianus]

I wouldn’t say they are entirely irrelevant, since they can inform each-other. For example scientific truth helps me to know how best to interpret the bible, and this is why i am not a bible literalist when it comes to things like genesis. But what you have said is basically correct. Good science does not do metaphysics anymore than it tells us about objective morality.

That’s kind of what I meant.

 

[Cecilianus]

Nonetheless, some self-defense is in order. I could not abide being a saint, as such a pronouncement would set a standard that conflicts with my nature. Were anyone to call me so much as a good person, I would be compelled to object. However, I do object to your opinion that I have given up the fight, and invite you to join me on an isolated battleground which you may be well suited to occupy all by yourself before long.

My opinion is that you have given up the fight to become a saint, by leaving the Church. The closer you are to holiness the more you will object to being even called a good person. That sort of cynical attitude that you are adopting is what we call basic humility. Sanctity should not look like sanctimony, and I see (and am nauseated by) a lot of sanctimony around me. But on to your intellectual problem with the Church…

I first tried to deal with the errors I had found between Church and physics, by working within the Church. Not a good plan. I stayed a Catholic for several years until I could no longer honestly do so. (Had I known that the Eastern Orthodox Church was different, things might have gone otherwise, but I believed my Church, whose teachers said that the only difference was that the Eastern Church does not accept the Pope’s authority.)

I think your teachers were much closer to understanding the difference between Catholicism and Orthodoxy when they said that the only difference between the Eastern Church and the West was that they do not accept the Pope’s authority. In reality, the only difference really concerns a lack of understanding of each other’s doctrine and ecclesialogy. Papal authority over the East is “ordinary and proper jurisdiction”, but with “all rights, privileges and prerogatives of the Patriarchs of the Eastern Churches being respected” - that is, the Pope is basically the final appeal in a dispute, and only interferes in the East if something goes horribly wrong. This was also the case in the first millennium, and most Orthodox who know history don’t have a problem with it. In the West, the situation is different, because the Pope is also the Patriarch and local primate for all bishops of the Latin Rite.

I’m an “Eastern Catholic” - a member of one of the Eastern Orthodox Churches that professed communion with Rome at one of the various “Unias” (in our case, the Union of Uzhhorod in 1646), while still professing to be Orthodox. We have a different expression of theology and approach to our theological method than does the West, but this does not constitute disagreement with the teachings of the Catholic Church.

Which teaching of the Catholic Church is incompatible with physics? I believe the theological school of Thomism is, and that the underlying assumptions of most scholastic systems are irreconcilable with the approach of reductionism, but none of these are insisted on by the Church as dogma - only the way theologians of the day used the science of the day to give a coherent explanation of the whole of the universe.

Although I have developed a different theology, it is more consistent with Christ’s teachings than the Church’s, IMO of course.

I’m curious as to what your theology is. It isn’t that awfully juvenile process theology that some scientists like Freeman Dyson get infatuated with, is it?

 

[JDaniel]

It is difficult to reply to you, because your arguments are based upon your beliefs, dogma, and doctrine. I prefer facts and logic. A few tips.

Being a Christian is not an inherent impediment to understanding science. I was one throughout four years of math and physics. However, being a nitwit is a severe impediment to understanding physics and pretty much anything else, and there seems to be no cure for it.

Greylorn:

Pray tell, what was the purpose of your final sentence above (bolded)? The way it is worded clearly seems to indicate a hidden agenda screaming out to be told. That entire sentence could just as well have been deleted and your case would have been improved.

Finally, science is a general method for the discovery of truth.

Here I have a definite disagreement with you. Science looks for facts; and, if it doesn’t, it should. It may happen that when science discovers a fact, that it is a true fact and is true for that reason. But, in many, if not most, cases science does not report facts. Instead, it reports models, hypotheses, and theories. None of these are facts. Period.

To say that a certain piece of radioactive matter has this or that half life, is to state a fact. Its factuality can be shown with certainty by measurement with a Geiger counter and a few simple equations. But, to say that the Earth revolves around the Sun is not a fact: Instead, it is a model. That it - as a model - most succinctly describes the phenomena is doubtless, but, it cannot be absolutely shown to be a clear fact.

You seem to believe that it can only be applied to the material world, but this is not the case.

Well, that remains to be seen.

Science, religion, and philosophy are all methods for the discovery of truth. There is no inherent restriction that I know of which says that one method can only be applied here, another method there.

Sure there are. If what you are saying were true, why have three separate branches of study? Just include them all under one of those categories and be done with it.

Historically, religionists and philosophers have attempted to apply their methods to the physical universe, with no particular success.

On the contrary. I’d say, considering the lack of measuring instruments that they had to work with, they did a remarkable job.

To do what they could not, Galileo invented the scientific method, which proved very useful in the discovery of physical principles. Because the 17th century Church got into a snit over the implications of his work (i.e. that the Church was wrong), we got a conflicted separation between religion and science, which lots of dogmatists whose minds have refused to leave the dark ages insist upon perpetuating.

Here is another area of separation between us. But, we can take this to another thread and another time.

Their chronic incompetence does not change the fact that the scientific method is a way of uncovering the truth which can be applied to any subject.

Easy to say if one is predisposed to saying it.

It can be applied to theology as well as atomic structure, but I know of no one else who has done so. Surely there are many others.

That, alone, should tell us something, shouldn’t it?

You’ll be pleased to know that attempts to apply the scientific method to theology are greeted with equally mindless, dogmatic objections from atheistic and religious “scientists.” So there’s no need to leave your groove. Just keep whining. You might want to take a summer course in remedial English grammar while about it.

And the real purpose of this last paragraph? Shakespeare once wrote that “the better part of valor is discretion.” It has never been more true.

God bless,
jd

 

[JDaniel]

JD,
I appreciate your openness. It is refreshing to be the subject of an objective and honest dialogue.

I sure got it that you dislike me, and suggest that you continue doing so. I am more at home with dislike than approval.

However, I still do not trust your integrity. You admitted, to your credit, that you do not fully read my posts. This is indicative of someone whose brain is made of concrete, who will not honestly evaluate an opinion contrary to his beliefs. And by your own admission, you’ve been evaluating me in terms of your personal feelings and blowing off my ideas.

I am unimportant. My ideas may fare otherwise.

I must wonder if you are complaining so vociferously about me because you feel unqualified to deal with my unread ideas. You could clarify by actually reading some and replying in an analytic, non-doctrinal manner.

Greylorn:

The above is another in a long line of perfect examples. I rest my case!

God bless,
jd

 

[Cecilianus]

Here I have a definite disagreement with you. Science looks for facts; and, if it doesn’t, it should. It may happen that when science discovers a fact, that it is a true fact and is true for that reason. But, in many, if not most, cases science does not report facts. Instead, it reports models, hypotheses, and theories. None of these are facts. Period.

Wrong.

Something is not a “science” in any sense of the term unless it is universal - that is, unless you can make predictions from it. Even the scholastic theologians before the birth of modern science knew that; you’ll read it in Thomas Aquinas. Reducing knowledge to a collection of facts is called empiricism, and if you follow it consistently the consequence is complete skepticism. Read Hume to see why.

Science happens to be an inductive science - explaining facts by discovering the mathematical structure behind them.

Why in the world wouldn’t you want science to work like this? Limiting yourself to reporting facts doesn’t tell us anything new. The way science DOES work, we grow in knowledge.

I’m a theorist; the research that I have done in the past relied very little on “facts”. I solved equations, and grew in knowledge about the universe when I plugged in empirical numerical values (for the mass of a proton, the average velocity of particles at a certain radius in the galactic disk, and the average velocity of particles in the dark matter halo) into the equations I had solved for.

Models, hypotheses, and theories are all constructed to explain facts. Without them, we have no science.

 

[Cecilianus]

If I misunderstood the point of what you were saying, then please just correct me.

 

[Cecilianus]

To say that a certain piece of radioactive matter has this or that half life, is to state a fact. Its factuality can be shown with certainty by measurement with a Geiger counter and a few simple equations. But, to say that the Earth revolves around the Sun is not a fact: Instead, it is a model. That it - as a model - most succinctly describes the phenomena is doubtless, but, it cannot be absolutely shown to be a clear fact.

Why not? It IS a fact, in the non-technical sense of the term. It’s something we know is true.

And sure, it’s also a model. And models are sometimes replaced with better models, that is, one that fits the data better (i.e., models that are truer, that is to say, less false). This doesn’t mean we throw out the old models as “false”, though - they’re just less useful, less precise. For example, we teach the Bohr model of the atom to high-schoolers all the time.

Words are ways of knowing truth, or symbols of reality with a coherent meaning in a language game. The more simplistic “correspondence theory” just doesn’t work as well.

If it bothers you that I don’t adhere strictly to a correspondence theory of truth, consider that the definition I gave holds true for theology as well, where infinite and ineffable realities are expressed in finite words. To quote Paul Evdokimov, “dogmas are verbal icons of truth” - they are not “truth” themselves in the sense of limiting or exhausting the realities they express.

That’s why we can say apparently contradictory things about God, all of it true. That’s why St. Dionysious the Areopagite could write his Mystical Theology. God is Being (ipsum esse), but God is also Beyond-Being (read Plotinus, Eckhart, and all of the Greek and Oriental Fathers of the Church to read about the “mystery of the nothingness of God”). God is “ineffable, inconceivable, incomprehensible, ever existing yet ever the same, You and Your Only-Begotten Son and Your Holy Spirit”, and yet we dogmatize about Him.

 

[greylorn]

I’ve also had four years of math, astronomy and physics - and now enrolled in a Ph.D. program - and I’d like to ask you how you could apply the scientific method to a case other than the material world. The scientific method is

(a) empirical/observational, and

(b) inherently quantitative.

You can’t write an equation describing the properties of a soul or spirit, and there’s not way to measure God in a test tube. The limitation of the method of science has to do with the kind of subject-matter it can be applied to (bad pun, between the Aristotelian and modern senses of the term “matter”).

Reply 1 of x to Post 64

Cecill…

Since we have plenty of common interests I’ll reply to all your posts in the context of our shared knowledge of math, physics, and astronomy (where I did my best work). I invite you to make similar discussions. If you go over my head with something I do not understand and cannot research, I’ll request an explanation.

I’m time-strapped this weekend, trying to finish a book on these subjects that’s been 50 years in the writing, so I’ll limit this reply to your first paragraph. The issue it addresses is well-put and fundamental. We must resolve it before you’ll make sense of much else that I write.

Let’s clarify terms. You wrote, “and I’d like to ask you how you could apply the scientific method to a case other than the material world.” I would have used physical world. This is an important semantic issue, especially for non-physicists who might be reading this exchange. Material is a specific term which refers to matter. But we know that physics encompasses the study of more than matter— electromagnetic radiation, gravity, nuclear forces, charge— even space, and energy itself.

The people who thought about the nature of God and soul a few millennia ago knew nothing of these things— they only knew about matter. They rightly concluded that God and soul were something else, and gave it the name, spirit.

Now ask yourself honestly— if they had known as much physics as we do, might they not have regarded the substance of soul, and of God, as pure energy?

Next, consider what the study of physics means. While it began with the study of matter, men soon learned to apply calculus and the experimental method to light and heat, discovering thermodynamics and the general principles of energy behavior as described in the three laws thereof. Ultimately, physics is about anything that interacts with matter, or with anything else that is physical.

From the perspective of a physicist, the inevitable definition of physical is, having the property of interacting, or being able to interact with, any other physical forms, such as matter, electric charge, magnetic fields, radiation, and space itself.

Is not God physical by this definition? To declare otherwise would say that God cannot interact with the components of the universe He is said to have created.

I agree with you that a method which depends upon physical observation seems of little use in elucidating the characteristics of something which is non-physical and cannot be observed, but I regard God and the human soul as perfectly physical. I’m not smart enough to write a set of equations which describe soul’s interaction with, say, dark energy, but you might be.

Moreover, if the soul is interactive with the human brain-body system, as I assume, there will be equations which describe that inherently physical interaction. It will take a neurologist with serious mathematical skills to find them, but surely you do not believe that because we know of no such things now, our ignorance precludes their existence?

Of course we cannot stuff God into a test tube. Look to your own field, astronomy. Last I heard, no one had figured out how to get so much as one gram of a burning star into a lab here on earth. Likewise neutron star cores or black hole chunks. The field is entirely dependent upon inferential observations, which collapse into ridiculousness if the theoretical foundation upon which the observations depend proves false.

Consider what happens to astronomy if, for example, the speed of light is not constant? What if the laws of physics are not the same in black holes or pulsars? What if the strength of the strong nuclear force is a function of velocity?

I submit that by studying the only scripture which is absolutely certain to have been written by God and no other-- the physical universe-- we can understand more about our Creator than we have imagined. Certainly more than the inventions of ignorant men would allow.

I seem to recall that you do not include your physics knowledge when thinking about God. You have a considerable God-given talent there. Few are capable of understanding things which you can understand. In that context, you might want to read Matthew 25:14-30. Pay particular attention to its conclusion, which seems to apply to you.

 

[JDaniel]

Wrong.

Cecilianus:

Then here we shall simply disagree, I suppose. But, maybe that’s because I was immersed in soft science! (I kind of thought you were into theoretical physics.)

Something is not a “science” in any sense of the term unless it is universal - that is, unless you can make predictions from it.

Hmmm. ‘Predictions.’ Perhaps you can help me: if I calculate the mass of a proton, what will that help me predict?

Even the scholastic theologians before the birth of modern science knew that; you’ll read it in Thomas Aquinas. Reducing knowledge to a collection of facts is called empiricism, and if you follow it consistently the consequence is complete skepticism. Read Hume to see why.

No thanks. (I was not keen on him the first time I read parts of Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, many years ago.) But, I am not here arguing for any sort of reduction to anything. What I am arguing for has to do with Truth and Fact. Models are not either. Those words are, I think, largely mis-used. Only a fact is Truth. A model may, in one degree or another, closely correlate with Truth/Fact, but, it is still a mere ‘model’.

Science happens to be an inductive science - explaining facts by discovering the mathematical structure behind them.

Interesting, most of Aristotelian and Thomistic philosophy is inductive as well. But, the “mathematical structure” behind a fact is simply another form of “model.” Any universality comes from reification, i.e., abstraction. My senses engage the factical; but, the factical does not include the mathematical unless I wish to ultimately find some use for the object, or, the information.

Why in the world wouldn’t you want science to work like this? Limiting yourself to reporting facts doesn’t tell us anything new. The way science DOES work, we grow in knowledge.

This is true. And so it is for many ‘ologies’.

I’m a theorist; the research that I have done in the past relied very little on “facts”. I solved equations, and grew in knowledge about the universe when I plugged in empirical numerical values (for the mass of a proton, the average velocity of particles at a certain radius in the galactic disk, and the average velocity of particles in the dark matter halo) into the equations I had solved for.

As I asked above, help me with this (I’m a “soft-science” biologist, remember?).

Models, hypotheses, and theories are all constructed to explain facts. Without them, we have no science.

But, they are not the actual factical. They are no more than the best explanation - at that time. All are subject to disproval. The Fact is not.

God bless,
jd

 

[JDaniel]

If I misunderstood the point of what you were saying, then please just correct me.

C:

Was this intended for me? Sorry. I saw it too late. I hope I am not impinging on your soul in any way.

God bless,
jd

 

[JDaniel]

Why not? It IS a fact, in the non-technical sense of the term. It’s something we know is true.

C:

How?

And sure, it’s also a model. And models are sometimes replaced with better models, that is, one that fits the data better (i.e., models that are truer, that is to say, less false). This doesn’t mean we throw out the old models as “false”, though - they’re just less useful, less precise. For example, we teach the Bohr model of the atom to high-schoolers all the time.

Still?

Words are ways of knowing truth, or symbols of reality with a coherent meaning in a language game. The more simplistic “correspondence theory” just doesn’t work as well.

The problem is, we must be absolutely sure we are communicating precise meaning, and not non-sense. Remember, there are many who believe in a geocentric model of nearby space.

If it bothers you that I don’t adhere strictly to a correspondence theory of truth, consider that the definition I gave holds true for theology as well, where infinite and ineffable realities are expressed in finite words. To quote Paul Evdokimov, “dogmas are verbal icons of truth” - they are not “truth” themselves in the sense of limiting or exhausting the realities they express.

But he is not describing ‘words’. He is speaking about “dogmas.” And, believe me, I am not at all bothered by your non-adherence to correspondence theory. Correspondence is not the universal application for truth, as you aptly described.

That’s why we can say apparently contradictory things about God, all of it true. That’s why St. Dionysious the Areopagite could write his Mystical Theology. God is Being (ipsum esse), but God is also Beyond-Being (read Plotinus, Eckhart, and all of the Greek and Oriental Fathers of the Church to read about the “mystery of the nothingness of God”). God is “ineffable, inconceivable, incomprehensible, ever existing yet ever the same, You and Your Only-Begotten Son and Your Holy Spirit”, and yet we dogmatize about Him.

Of course we can. But, here we are trying to describe, or rather, define, the undefinable, for finite being. On the other hand, there are many ideas about “being,” per se. But I think that is another abstract. It is our attempt to extract the intelligible from a factical.

God bless,
jd

 

[Cecilianus]

Reply 1 of x to Post 64

Cecill…

Since we have plenty of common interests I’ll reply to all your posts in the context of our shared knowledge of math, physics, and astronomy (where I did my best work). I invite you to make similar discussions. If you go over my head with something I do not understand and cannot research, I’ll request an explanation.

Wonderful.

I’m time-strapped this weekend, trying to finish a book on these subjects that’s been 50 years in the writing, so I’ll limit this reply to your first paragraph. The issue it addresses is well-put and fundamental. We must resolve it before you’ll make sense of much else that I write.

Let’s clarify terms. You wrote, “and I’d like to ask you how you could apply the scientific method to a case other than the material world.” I would have used physical world. This is an important semantic issue, especially for non-physicists who might be reading this exchange. Material is a specific term which refers to matter. But we know that physics encompasses the study of more than matter— electromagnetic radiation, gravity, nuclear forces, charge— even space, and energy itself.

The people who thought about the nature of God and soul a few millennia ago knew nothing of these things— they only knew about matter. They rightly concluded that God and soul were something else, and gave it the name, spirit.

Now ask yourself honestly— if they had known as much physics as we do, might they not have regarded the substance of soul, and of God, as pure energy?

No. And neither do I.

Energy is either motion, or the potential quantity associated with a force. You can’t describe consciousness or divine grace in terms of energy.

Furthermore, traditionally motion was regarded as a state of being in potency (motion, or change, is in potency to the end state of the process), and likewise matter was regarded as being in potency to form (the “first potential principle of a substance”, if I remember Aristotle’s metaphysics right). They also had no problem layering potencies on top of each other (why they could talk about formed matter and unformed or “prime matter”). So the idea of matter being in potency to motion would probably not have surprised them much or changed their views much. Both are still in potency to form, like a soul, in the case of corporeal beings, and incorporeal forms strictly speaking do not engage in motion (of either the classical sense - because both matter and form are required for change - or the modern sense, since forms do not exist in a place).

My own view of the matter is that a moving object is in potency only relative to something exterior to it, namely its surroundings, while the principle of inertia still holds true, and that matter is in potency only with regard to change, but that ontologically a substance’s being comes from, or is, its matter (this is a medieval Franciscan view), concerning which the “form” is just a description.

When I say “matter” I usually mean particles with mass, but when I say the “physical world” I mean the world of mass-energy. Just a semantic difference; science concerns them both. But science cannot explain the phenomenological reality of consciousness. No matter how precisely you figure out the wavelength of a photon, it is not going to tell a blind man what it feels like to see the color red (the qualia of red, to employ the philosophical terminology).

 

[Cecilianus]

Next, consider what the study of physics means. While it began with the study of matter, men soon learned to apply calculus and the experimental method to light and heat, discovering thermodynamics and the general principles of energy behavior as described in the three laws thereof. Ultimately, physics is about anything that interacts with matter, or with anything else that is physical.

Yes, but with a qualification - physics is about anything that interacts with matter (or anything else that is physical) by a force.

From the perspective of a physicist, the inevitable definition of physical is, having the property of interacting, or being able to interact with, any other physical forms, such as matter, electric charge, magnetic fields, radiation, and space itself.

Is not God physical by this definition? To declare otherwise would say that God cannot interact with the components of the universe He is said to have created.

I don’t believe that God interacts with the components of the universe He created by physically pushing on it, or through the electromagnetic or weak force or any other sort of quantitative force, except maybe when He is performing miracles (and note that miracles, like anything else in the natural world, ARE subject to the laws of physics).

To employ scholastic terminology, that would confuse God’s “first causality” with the “second causality” of the natural world. To employ more modern terminology, you are making a “God of the gaps”. God, through His divine nature (setting the Incarnation aside, which again is subject to the laws of human psychology, biology, and physics), does not interact physically with the universe, and this is why it is possible to do physics without recourse to theology. This is true even for the creation of the Universe - it is compatible with God’s creating it for the universe to extend backwards in time infinitely, as an eternal universe. (The universe is not eternal, however, for three reasons - a) the revelation in Scripture of creation in a moment of time, b) the kalam argument of the Arabic philosophers, who said that we would never get to where we are now if an infinite amount of time had to have passed first, and c) the evidence of modern astrophysics, pace the highly speculative Hawking-Hartle solution to the Wheeler-DeWitt equation, which is where you get the notions of imaginary time and so forth from.)

I don’t pretend to understand well how “first causality” works. As I do understand it, God creates and sustains the world in one act, an act which is the “act of being” by which things exist. Being itself is a participation in God who is “Being Itself” (ipsum esse) - or, in Meister Eckhart’s words, a thing’s existence is the same as God existing it, as if “exist” were a transitive verb. I think I can understand this a little bit, because one afternoon in an amateur’s attempt to practise phenomenology after reading far too much Hegel for my own good, it seemed that the farther I bracketed and pushed back the experience of subjectivity as subjectivity, I got to a point where the act of subjectivity seemed like a surging forth from nothingness into being, or the eternal act of creation of the consciousness or self. God “interacts” with the world by creating it, but this is not deism because He is also immanently present everywhere in the world (“not so much that God is in the world, but that the world is in God,” as St. Thomas says in the Summa Theologiae), and intimately tied to the being of the world, and somehow by this process of existing the world into existence, He guides it through what we call divine Providence.

continued…

 

[Cecilianus]

I agree with you that a method which depends upon physical observation seems of little use in elucidating the characteristics of something which is non-physical and cannot be observed, but I regard God and the human soul as perfectly physical. I’m not smart enough to write a set of equations which describe soul’s interaction with, say, dark energy, but you might be.

If they are physical, which eigenstates can you put them into, or which operators can act on the “wavefunction” or God or the soul? Which properties do they have - mass, velocity, momentum, charge of any sort?

God, like consciousness, is perfectly simple. There is no “more” or “less” of Him (or of consciousness as consciousness), and therefore no quantitative aspect to spirit whatsoever.

To understand this better, in a purely non-theological context, I recommend studying phenomenology - the sort pioneered by Husserl, not the sort you are probably familiar with (same word for two completely different disciplines!).

Moreover, if the soul is interactive with the human brain-body system, as I assume, there will be equations which describe that inherently physical interaction. It will take a neurologist with serious mathematical skills to find them, but surely you do not believe that because we know of no such things now, our ignorance precludes their existence?

No, I do not believe that absence of evidence is evidence of absence. And I do not know how the soul interacts with the body as an agent - I’m guessing something a bit more sophisticated than the pineal gland or pre-ordained harmonies . However, unlike most people in the post-Cartesian universe, I do not regard the soul and body as separate substances (though, pace Spinoza, I should note that I also don’t regard spirit and matter as two perspectives on the same reality). Right now, I’m just me - a rational body with selfhood. When I die, we can start talking about a soul separately from the body, but not really until then.

Philosophically it would seem that pure spirits like angels and ghosts do not have any way of interacting with the physical world, but empirically it seems they do - for example in the case of demonic possession or infestation, where a pure spirit will (possibly using a human body?) interact with other objects in the room and engage in other preternormal activity. How a demon would do this nobody knows. Insofar as it is relating to the physical world, there is a physical explanation. It will probably take a lot better empirical understanding of how the brain works before we can understanding the age old body-spirit problem, not just sophisticated mathematics.

Of course we cannot stuff God into a test tube. Look to your own field, astronomy. Last I heard, no one had figured out how to get so much as one gram of a burning star into a lab here on earth. Likewise neutron star cores or black hole chunks. The field is entirely dependent upon inferential observations, which collapse into ridiculousness if the theoretical foundation upon which the observations depend proves false.

Which is still observational, which is the gist of my rhetorical point.

Consider what happens to astronomy if, for example, the speed of light is not constant? What if the laws of physics are not the same in black holes or pulsars? What if the strength of the strong nuclear force is a function of velocity?

I submit that by studying the only scripture which is absolutely certain to have been written by God and no other-- the physical universe-- we can understand more about our Creator than we have imagined. Certainly more than the inventions of ignorant men would allow.

But I also hold, with the medieval Church, that God wrote two books - the book of Nature and the book of Scripture (in the more general sense, divine revelation given to us in Christ), because I believe in nature and spiritual reality.