Touchstone
Antony Flew, well know former atheist who wrote the highly influential paper “Theology and Falsification” in 1950, and later the book The Presumption of Atheism, has in recent years abidicated all his atheistic convictions, though he is not a Christian … not yet, anyway.
Among his comments in his latest book, There is a God, are the following:
“Although I was once sharply critical of the argument to design, I have since come to see that, when correctly formulated, this argument constitutes a persuasive case for the existence of God.” (p. 95)
“But since the early 1980s, I had begun to reconsider. I confessed that at that point atheists have to be embarrassed by the contemporary cosmological consensus, for it seemed that the cosmologists were providing a scientific proof of what St. Thomas Aquinas contended could not prove philosophically; namely, that the universe had a beginning.” (p. 135)
So in what way are Aquinas’ problems foundational?
As you know, medieval philosophy is a domain unto itself; When Aquinas uses the word ‘truth’, we have to take care to provide special processing, and resist the reflexive connotations that modernity has put in place for the term. If you go to a court of law, and they ask you if proposition
X is “true”, they are asking for affirmation (or not) of the correspondence between
X and the actual state of the world, as best can be objectively ascertained. “Is it true you were in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania last night?” The “truth” of that proposition ("you were in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania last night) on modern semantics obtains from the physics involved. If the physics comport, then it’s true – my physical location yesterday evening was in Philadelphia proper, or nearby suburbs that are typically considered the “Philadelphia area”, for example.
But for Aquinas, ‘truth’ obtains elsewhere. “True” for him fits with a different sense of our term – we might say “Jim is a true baseball fan”. And by that, I don’t (just) mean that Jim can be described by physical observation to do things that fans of baseball are thought to do, but rather that Jim is an
authentic baseball fan.
This is a fundamental, foundational difference. And it’s not problematic just because there’s a difference; different senses of a term are something to manage, but they can be managed. Rather, this Thomist conception of ‘true’ introduces an implicit dependency on God, or perhaps more precisely, on telic authority. One cannot be a “true baseball fan” in the Thomist sense of ‘true’ without some notion of “authentic”, some means of idealizing “baseball fan”, and that implicates authority, normativity (and here readers of Aquinas should be hearing him say “and this we call ‘God’”).
For Aquinas, for whom ‘truth’ is fully transcendental, and convertible with ‘being’ (!), truth cannot be divorced from its transcendental
source – God, the origin/essence of truth. Without going farther into a discussion of
that (which I’m happy to if we need later), for Aquinas truth nets out to be a transcendental dependency on God. As a practical example of what I mean, consider this sentence:
*
I cannot express myself in English.*
That is problematic in a
transcendental way – we must affirm that the speaker can express himself in English as a means of denying it. For Aquinas, to express ‘true’ is to affirm God as the predicate for the term itself, the very basis for ‘being’ and participation in ‘being’.
All of which to say, that’s a disastrously large beg to the question – the Big Question™. Philosophically, it’s a kind of “argumentation by definition” – true is only meaningful with God as an axiom in Thomistic philosophy. Not God in the “Nicene Creed” sense (necessarily), but God in the Thomistic sense: that which is needed to make ‘true’ meaningful, by way of participation.
That’s a fixture of Thomistic metaphysics, and because of that, it is “horizontal” problem for Aquinas. It doesn’t just differ from the modern conceptual basis for ‘true’, it adopts a concept of true that is
ontologically predicated on God. Of
course if you define “true” that way, and conceive your “transcendentals” in those terms, you can’t help but end up in the places Aquinas did. But this is mysticism at its core, and not rational epistemology.
Anyway, I hope that gives you a sense for what I mean by “foundational”. Thomistic metaphysics are (I think) fascinating, but ungrounded epistemically. Philosophically, the epistemic burden begins at first principles: you have an axiom? Ok, provide a warrant, through necessity or self-evidence. If you can’t, then accept that it doesn’t qualify as an axiom, and it matters not if you call it “metaphysical” rather than “physical” as starting point. In all of my reading, I keep digging and digging to see where the medieval metaphysic Aquinas adopts and extends gets
grounded. I trace some things back to Aristotle, and others. But I can’t find any grounding beyond intuition, and mystical intuition at that. That’s just not a serious ground for a metaphysic. If it is, then metaphysics is just a euphemism for “that which I fancy”.
Modern materialist philosophy is predicated on metaphysics, too. But the grounding is clear, and minimalist: we have “faith” that reality is real, and reality is rational/intelligible to some extent, because we
must – we cannot do otherwise than to accept that. That necessity, a physiological one, is the ground, the “bootstrapping” metaphysic for materialist philosophy (and the epistemic predicate for science, too, non-accidentally). By comparison, Thomistic metaphysics, and medieval metaphysics, tracing back to Aristotle, Plato and other ancients, appear to be ungrounded, “hung on a skyhook”.
-TS
As to why I do not answer every post, well, I was under the impression that I am free to choose whom to talk to, and do not have to explain my reasons why I ignore some people.
