Thank you, Lucretius, for taking the time to try to explain this to me. I’ve now read some explanations of this translation of Thomas Aquinas’ Fifth Way. Aquinas’ argument seems to be this: What unintelligent natural bodies do seems to follow certain laws, laws are an indication of an intelligence, hence God must be that law-making intelligence.
Whether Aquinas was suggesting that an intelligence directly controls the actions of all natural bodies, or whether an intelligence created the laws which govern the actions of all natural bodies, it seems to me that his argument loses all credibility when we understand the nature of matter.
What St. Thomas and Aristotle think of matter, they think of something more rich and empirical. How modern philosophers such as Galileo and Descartes define matter is a dumbed down, qualitative reification of what matter really is. Basically, they defined what they called “secondary qualities” out of objective existence and put them into the mind, leaving what they called “primary qualities” in the “objective” world. Primary qualities are quantitative, that it, they can be measured and mathematically modeled (size, shape, mass, etc.). Secondary qualities are sensations that can’t be measured in principle (color, taste, smell, etc.). The early moderns thought that matter was actually just primary qualities, and secondary qualities were imposed by the mind on the world (primary qualities=objective, while secondary qualities=subjective).
The problems with this view are many. One, for example, is that they are essentially defining out aspects of the outer world and placing them in the mind, simply because early science couldn’t create predictive models that can be used to make technology (remember, primary qualities can be mathematically modeled, while secondary qualities cannot). Of course, when you think that the outer world is a black and white coloring book that we view through a stain glass window, you end up turning secondary qualities into another substance. So, therefore, since secondary qualities are immaterial (by defining material as non secondary qualities), and that secondary qualities only exist in the mind, therefore the mind must by immaterial (substance dualism). But of course, how exactly do these substances interact is a mystery. And thus the mind-body problem was born (there is a reason why such a problem didn’t exist in any other philosophy system until Descartes).
Another problem is simply that it is not empirical. I see red in the apple. Common sense tells me that the apple is red, not that my mind is imposing red onto the apple in my consciousness. The fact that “red” doesn’t make sense to blind person should tell us that secondary qualities are just as objective as the primary qualities. Also, since I receive primary qualities with secondary qualities, then why should I doubt that one is objective and not the other? The early moderns simply argued that we should say that primary qualities are objective because of science (and technology). But that just begs the question, since science is based on the objectivity of primary qualities, and that is what is precisely what is at issue.
The ‘laws’ which govern the actions of natural bodies are just systems of describing those actions.
David Hume argued that the “laws of physics” were just statistical descriptions. The problem with this view is that it smuggles in the notion of
telos while denying it. The fact is that proto-science in the Medieval period only happened because they argued for a teleological worldview. Hume said that you can’t prove that our thoughts on causality are in any way connected to reality. Which is true. However, science started out by assuming you can (based on Christian dogma). Or to be more specific, science only would have happened in a society that assumed final causes were real. Hume simply took advantage of his ancestor’s scientific metaphysics since he knew that it already worked (that is, it created effective technology). But, to deny these metaphysics makes science nonsense philosophically. Science under Hume’s philosophy simply cries out “why do I work? Why do these “laws” actually model reality? Is it because these laws are, you know, based in reality? Why should we assume that phenomenon will repeat itself intelligently?” Einstein writes:
You find it surprising that I think of the comprehensibility of the world… as a miracle or an eternal mystery. But surely, a priori, one should expect the world to be chaotic, not to be grasped by thought in any way. One might (indeed one should) expect that the world evidenced itself as lawful only so far as we grasp it in an orderly fashion. This would be a sort of order like the alphabetical order of words. On the other hand, the kind of order created, for example, by Newton’s gravitational theory is of a very different character. Even if the axioms of the theory are posited by man, the success of such a procedure supposes in the objective world a high degree of order, which we are in no way entitled to expect a priori. Therein lies the miracle which becomes more and more evident as our knowledge develops
Classical metaphysics make sense of science and also justifies it. Modern metaphysics does not, but rather takes advantage of the fact that classical metaphysics started science and justified it. Science is not even about truth anymore: it’s about power. The entire modern world is built in part of power struggles (but this is a different topic).
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), they think that science has proven them right, when it has not, and cannot.
