Thomists and Intelligent Design

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Intelligent design is a very scientific concept The root meaning of science is taken from the Latin word “sciens” meaning to know. True open science does not limit itself to knowledge of the empirical or physical. There are mathematical truths and metaphysical truths. The difference is they are understood at different levels of comprehension. These truths that are more abstractive such as mathematical and metaphysical truths are extrinsically dependent upon the physical for our initial awareness of them because of our present mode of existence: the union of body and soul. By the power of reasoning we go from initial sense awareness of physical reality to the “idea” and then onto deeper levels of comprehension. To impiricists this comprehension is sometimes called “semantics”. Prejudice and bias are forms of ignorance. If the knowledge we gain from our objective , not subjective reasoning about the physical world leads us to the knowledge of Gods’ existence is this “unscientific”? Isn"t the goal of knowledge the minds quest for truth? Many secular institutions are not prepared to teach “Creationism” It’s in our nature (a rational one) to desire to know the truth even a child asks “Why”, a scientist explores and even a liar doesn’t like to be lied to. The truth will indeed set us free! The Light came into this world, but the world preferred the darkness. Not all in the world live in darkness thanks be to God.👍
 
Hey all,

http://www.crossroadsnyc.com/files/EvolutionHanby.pdf

Professor Hanby here is most immediately engaging Michael Behe, but his critique may apply as well to Dembski, Meyer, et al. Basically, Hanby is saying that ID rests on faulty metaphysics and even shares some of the same mistaken metaphysical assumptions as Darwinian evolution.
  1. ID fails to protect the difference between God and the world. It treats God like a thing. “We do not know what God is, but we do know what God cannot be. We know that God is not a thing, not a species contained within a larger genus, not an item within the universe. And since God is not a thing, we can’t exactly think of him as beyond the universe either. The extrinsicist view of God doesn’t work.”
  2. ID has the wrong conception of Divine causation. *“Likewise, whatever it means for God to act or to create, it can’t mean simply ‘intervening’ like a bolt from the blue, or designing creatures like a scientist in a laboratory. Creation ex nihilo is not ordinary causality so much as the intrinsic basis of all causality, and God is neither an engineer nor a mason. This is why Aquinas insists that human craft, while it participates in God’s creative act, is nevertheless not an adequate analogy for God’s creation of the world.” *
Hanby says ID, along with other Thomist critics such as Beckwith, accuses ID of resting on idolatrous “mechanistic” understanding of God:

“The orthodox and coherent view is that God is not a being, one thing among others, but rather that God is the very act of being as such in all its fullness, in which everything else participates so long as form and existence are granted to it. Hence Aquinas says, “as long as a thing has being, God must be present to it, according to its mode of being.” However since God is not a thing in tension with other things, he goes on to say, “But being is innermost in each thing and most fundamentally inherent in all things…Hence it must be that God is in all things, and innermostly” In other words, just as a closed, mechanistic understanding of nature entails an idolatrous understanding of God as a finite object, so a properly non-idolatrous understanding of God, not as a being, but as the very fullness of being itself, requires a different conception of nature as nature. It calls for an understanding of nature intrinsically constituted as natural by its relation to the act of being that is not nature. Indeed that is precisely what creation was for Aquinas—an intrinsic relation of dependence.”
 
On the error of ID and Darwinism have in common:

*What I’m suggesting is that ID, and Darwinism too for that matter, are misled by their mechanistic ontology into asking the wrong question, namely, the very same question you would ask if you knew nothing of watches but happened upon one while walking along the beach, to cite William Paley’s famous example. The problem is that nature is not artifice, organisms are not machines, creation ex nihilo is not merely efficient causation, and God, if we have a coherent sense of that word, is neither a space alien nor a mason hovering outside the mechanism of the universe. And yet, because both Darwinian biology and ID insist that they are conducting science uncontaminated by metaphysics and theology, they give us mirror images of the same bad metaphysics and bad theology, suchthat nature is collapsed into artifice, organisms are mere machines, creation is simply causation, and God might as well be a space alien.
*
 
Nevertheless, ID does serve this purpose:

*“For irreducible complexity contains a real insight that gestures toward a different
question: not whether, beyond nature, there stands a designer, but rather whether the
picture of nature which leads to such a crude conception of God is the right one to have
held in the first place. The question, rather, is whether the whole’s transcendence of its
parts and the dependence of the parts on their wholes call forth something like an
Aristotelian substantial form, essential identity, or nature manifest in the coordinated
material interaction of parts but irreducible to them. This in turn leads immediately to the
question of whether there are principles of nature, principles in nature, inaccessible in
principle to analysis by biology. In other words, it forces the question of whether biology
alone, severed from metaphysics and theology, is adequate to understand the biological
world precisely as natural and biological.” *
 
This last point rings true. Both Behe and Dembski argue that Neo-Darwinian theory cannot, in principle, explain certain biological phenomena. They may be right, and at minimum, this calls for modifications to the theory. But what further naturalistic explanations can there be?
 
I am not a pro when it comes to metaphysics but if I said that I don’t have some knowledge I wouldn’t be truthful. What I state might throw some light on some problems concerning nature, the fact that it can’t be destroyed, also the various theorys that are floating around in the scientific world.
The question was posed by I assume a college student: " If God can exist without being caused, why can’t matter?"
I made an attempt to answer: Matter has potency (a capacity to become) and it can not be or become all that it can become at one time. eg. Ice can become water, water can become steam yet it remains matter. Its’ state of existence changes. If existence was its nature it would be all that it could be at one time and not subject to time and change. Matter is in constant motion, it does not explain itself and is moved by another.
God is Pure Being, does not have a capacity to be He Is. We can say we are because He is. when we speak of God we must necessarily think of Him in an existential way. In other
words “that He is” and not "What He is.’
Matter is sustained by God who is infinite, so it accidentally appears infinite when actually matter is essentially finite. I might add that matter is never being but becoming, potency and act, God is Pure Act
 
Hey ynotzap,

You sed above:
ynotzap said:
… True open science does not limit itself to knowledge of the empirical or physical. …
Click to expand...
Scientists need to acknowledge their metaphysical presuppositions, something which Darwinists are especially loathe to do, but ID’er need to do as well. Hanby says this:

*Yet this call to disentangle metaphysical claims from scientific claims is almost invariably misunderstood, and my concern is that ID and Neo-Darwinism share a similar misunderstanding of this distinction. As I result, I will argue late that the real insight inherent in ‘irreducible complexity’ has largely been missed.

There is indeed a difference between metaphysical, theological, and scientific claims, but the characterization of this difference is itself a philosophical and not a scientific
determination. For the distinction rests on presuppositions about any number of matters that exceed the competence of science. Among such presuppositions are judgments as to the nature of matter, causality, and nature, the nature and limits of reason, the goods of scientific inquiry in relation to broader human goods, and the validity of the question of Being per se as distinct from investigation into particular beings, judgments, that is, regarding the possibility and importance of metaphysics. Such determinations are the presuppositions of science, not its conclusions, and they exert profound internal pressure on the shape of the scientific enterprise from the outset.*
 
Kilbourne said:
I encountered this article several years ago: catholic.com/magazine/articles/aquinas-vs-intelligent-design

At the time I thought Prof. Tkacz was being unfair to ID because he wasn’t directly engaging William Dembski, especially his book The Design Revolution. If you are going to attack ID on philosophical grounds, one ought to read the leading philosopher behind the movement.

Since then I have encountered Thomists (Feser and Beckwith) who who do engage Dembski: edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2011/03/thomism-versus-design-argument.html

biologos.org/blog/intelligent-design-and-me-part-i-in-the-beginning

I am still digesting their critiques. In the mean time, I have this question of Thomists: Is it legitimate at all to try and detect design in any given natural phenomenon? If so, how would Thomists put such an enterprise on a solid metaphysical foundation?

Kilbourne
Click to expand...
Adaptability comes with a price, namely suffering. Accident could be in favour or against you so its average impact is zero. That is suffering which is the key point in evolution. Old saying, no pain no gain. What we have today is the result of suffering of our old ancestors. Shortly, adaptability=suffering=evolution, hence suffering is beautiful.
 
Evolution is god’s creation.
It will be perfect.
It will adhere to god’s laws of physics and chemistry etc.
At the end of the day, the godless emergence of man through evolution will be a possibility for some unfortunate people to choose.
“Do not put the Lord your God to the test”
Mathew 4 1 11.
QED
Evolution will be scientifically perfect, and your faith in God will have to stand on it’s own.
One of the drives of evolution is to escape pain.
Including the pain of ignorance.
It just so happens that this usually coincides with a leaning towards religion and god.
The only proofs seem to be intellectual one’s, and coincidences that arise from
evolution and religious teaching taking the same direction.
Neat and ‘Materially’ unprovable.
But blindingly obvious to some.
 
quote: Is it legitimate at all to try and detect design in any given natural phenomenon. If so how would Thomists put such an enterprise on a solid metaphysical foundation.

It is very legitimate. By design I assume you mean intellectual purpose, intent and order. It is a natural phenomenon for human intelligence to seek the truth. As a Thomist might say “the natural object of appetency of the intellect is truth” Human experience is the criterion of all our knowledge. Human experience includes objective reasoning based on objective observation of the world around us. It relies on our senses in detecting the physical world. Human experience also includes subjective thinking based on what we think is real which may or may not be consistent with what we observe to be consistent with reality. This kind of thinking is conditioned by many factors, imagination, predjudice, ignorance etc.

Metaphysics includes the fields of thought concerning Cosmology, Ontology, Epistemology, Logic, and Psychology. It also deals with universal first principles and seeks to explain reality. These first principles are self-evident, no need to rationalize. They are found to be operative in every field of thought, they are universal. eg.: the first universal principle: the principle of contradiction" a thing can not be and be at the same time. This principle is used to detect the truth. It can annihilate a falsehood. Another principle “you can give what you don’t have” This principle is used to refute Material Evolutionists. It makes a distinction between animals and humans. This is a case of subjective thinking but in our society it is treated as fact. It is a theory. The whole is the summation of all its parts is another self-evident principle. By using all of the metaphysical studies, and applying these universal principles the Thomists offer to the world its findings. I’m not infallible but this I believe is how the Thomistists can put the enterprise on a solid metaphysical foundation. Personally I have found it to be very accurate and enlightening in explaining reality. I also found it to be consistent with my Catholic beliefs. One confirms the other. ST. Tthomas Aquinas synthesized reason and faith. He showed it is reasonable to believe. Using the philosophies of the Ancients and correcting them in their errors and using his own (name removed by moderator)ut he gave us a deep insight into reality.
 
correction "you can’t give what you do not have. Missed it in editing, sorry.
 
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