The Metaphysical Menu: Part 2
Author’s Note: This is a long post, and not nearly as concise as I would have liked. Even so, there is much that I had to leave unsaid and/or undeveloped. If you’re interested in further reading on this subject, I recommend books by Edward Feser (Philosophy of the Mind, The Last Superstition, and Aquinas,) David S. Oderberg (Real Essentialism) and Thomas Nagel (Mind and Cosmos.)
Image by beate bachmann from Pixabay
25 minutes
Where We Stand So Far
In the last post I gave a semi-detailed overview of four possible cosmologies: polytheism, transcendentalist modalism, physicalism, and transcendent monotheism. I also suggested that the truth about the world has to fall somewhere within these four. But not every cosmology has an equal claim on our attentions. After addressing polytheism and pantheism, I will turn the bulk of my attentions to the two that seem most worthy of study.
Polytheism is Too Simple
Polytheism takes basic entities of human experience as real, but also posits the existence of unseen super-entities that in some way affect the lower ones. We earlier suggested that vulgar polytheism (paganism) has the virtue of preserving the reality of forms and kinds, and of giving some answer to the sense of wonder, magic, and mystery in the world. Yet it cannot give a coherent account of the gods themselves, and so cannot be pressed too far, without either asserting an irrationality (the gods emerged from chaos, so there;) or reverting to some other cosmology (the gods are manifestations of the Absolute (pantheism) or must have been created by the one God (in which case the gods are basically angels.)) For this reason, vulgar polytheism has few modern adherents. However, we did not agree with the typical historical explanation offered for polytheism: namely that primitive man believed in gods primarily because he lacked more scientific explanations. Instead, we speculated that his belief in the gods resulted from a real human need, and one that must be answered: the human heart wants to make the Divine particular, personal, and practical.
Pantheism is Illogical
Transcendental modalisms are those typically eastern philosophies — usually forms of pantheism — which view the world of experience as an illusion hiding some Total or Absolute reality. In some, “God” exists, but is identified with the Totality; a kind of absolute and eternal process. In others, “God” either does not exist, or is just a primitive name for a Nirvana-like emptiness or ultimate process. Though there are important differences between saying the Total is Brahman (Hinduism) and saying that the Total is Nirvana (Buddhism), and, likewise, between saying that the soul is but an illusion to be transcended, and saying that the soul (the atman) is a real point of focus on the way to an even more real personal dissolution into the Totality, still all of these eastern modalisms exist on the same metaphysical spectrum. They do not recognize a real distinction between Creator and creation, between the individual and the world, or even between one substantial form and another. They all see the material world as some kind of illusion. The more western versions might afford the material plane the reality of shadows of higher forms, but still the true forms are said to exist on some higher plane. Yet they agree that there is some great and singular mystery that the individual, by transcending his personal existence, might approach; some goal of existence higher than the illusion of particular things, and some notion of transcending the ego in order to be united to the Totality.
There are several problems with pantheism, and these seem insurmountable. First, if the Total is a process, then the process itself must be the basic eternal reality. But processes, by definition, entail passing from one state of actuality to another. But why would such a process get started, and why would it need to reach an end? If Brahman or the Demiurge emanates the material plane, he must do so either by choice or by internal necessity. If by choice, then He is not Brahman, but in fact God, the absolute self-existent being of transcendent monotheism who is entirely at rest in himself (because He is that being whose essence is to exist); in which case pantheism is false. If by necessity, then Brahman is incomplete in himself, and his long process of self-actualization, however many times it may repeat, cannot arrive at any state of being higher than that which began it. Moreover, on this view, there is no being which exists by its own necessity, in which case there is no reason for anything. including the process, to exist at all.
The second problem with pantheism is that it fails to account for the rational structure of the world. Why should science and other disciplines of reason work? If materiality is a kind of illusion, then the disciplined study of the world should not yield orderly and practical knowledge. Reason should not produce coherent results unless the world is orderly and coherent. But if it is, then it is also real, and therefore composed of distinct but casually connected objects and forms. Thus the eastern “truth” that there is no spoon cannot be correct,
Thirdly, it is not practicable. It is all well and good to deny reality and casualty, until you slip off the gold-domed roof of your temple and go hurtling towards the ground. Those who deny the visible world stop denying it when it counts. They must still eat, sleep, and look both ways before crossing a busy street. The claim to have secret knowledge and to live on a higher mystical plane that leaves ordinary, concrete things behind is only impressive when made within well-manicured gardens and well-built houses. The test of practicality undermines such claimes immediately. Try to deny water when you are dying of thirst. Try to deny your own personal existence without making use of your mind, will, and imagination. These things cannot be thought, only vaguely imagined. Nor can they be practiced in the real world.
Physicalism and Transcendent Monotheism
Now it is an interesting point about physicalism that it regards itself as locked in combat with Monotheism. It is a rare physicalist who simply regards matter/energy as all that is, without also feeling a compulsion to deny the existence of God. On one level, this denial is simply a logical consequence of affirming physicalism. If all that is is physical, then there is no “room” for God in the inn of reality. Yet I will argue in a moment that there’s more to atheism than simply lacking a belief in God. In fact, physicalism, considered on its own terms, is an incredibly vulnerable cosmology, one that has little going for it. This vulnerability makes aggressive atheism almost a strategic necessity for the physicalist. But before considering this, let’s first look again at physicalism itself.
Physicalism On Its Own Terms
Physicalism is the view that matter, energy, and their various functional relationships are all that objectively exist. As I see it, physicalism has four basic problems -- with matter, with reason/ontology, with mind, and with intellect.
Physicalism’s Problem With Matter
The world of sense experience puts us in contact with material forms: water, soil, dogs, cats, people, chairs, etcetera. The physicalist wants to explain each of these things as mere combinations of matter in various functional relationships. To see why this is a problem, let’s look at a material form with which we’re all familiar: water.
Viewed on the scale of our experience, water is a substance that has certain consistent properties. It’s a liquid, solid, or gas within certain temperature and pressure ranges. It manifests consistent behaviors in each of its material states. It has a unique chemical composition: two atoms of hydrogen bonded to one atom of oxygen. And as long as we’re treating water as material form, it’s perfectly appropriate to consider it material structure. The problems for physicalism begin when it tries to understand water in terms of physicalism’s stripped-down view of matter. For if water is just particles in combination, then it is just hydrogen and oxygen. Yet neither the properties of hydrogen nor the properties of oxygen, either singly or in combination, are identical to the properties of water. Each of those elements has its own nature, quite different from water’s, such that it would not be possible without experience to predict all of water’s properties on the basis of the former. Likewise, the same elements in a different combination produce other substances, like hydrogen peroxide, with still different properties.
As we go down the material scale, breaking hydrogen and oxygen into their subatomic particles, we move further and further away from the very forms which put us in contact with the material world. The single electron and proton that make up hydrogen are not conceptually identical to hydrogen. The eight protons, electrons, and neutrons that make up oxygen are not conceptually identical to oxygen. Rather, it appears that material components in certain combinations produce certain stable, predefined forms that always lie in potential within the structure of matter. The issue here is that physicalism implies a material world that is purely quantitative, purely modular, in which each higher state is just the combination of lower states. However, both science and experience reveal a world that is information-rich, in which material forms activate and give shape to certain combinations of matter.
The same sort of thing can be seen several scales up, with amino acids and proteins. Complex combinations of amino acids in very particular arrangements become very specific proteins that perform very specific jobs. The various components of a living cell are not just associations of matter with a macro-effect; they are arrangements of matter actualizing a central “idea.” Likewise, the tissues, organs, and chemical processes present in any life form are all organized around the idea of the form in question. Matter, in other words, makes no sense apart from form. Material forms and their unique properties are what put us into contact with the material world in the first place, and yet it turns out that matter itself is incoherent without form as a referent. The material world is “form-rich” from top to bottom. “Mere matter” (or prime matter, as the Aristotelians call it) — that is, matter that has no form — turns out to be a mere abstraction; something whose existence we can grasp intellectually, but which cannot exist on its own, apart from form.
Physicalism’s Problem with Reason
And this gets us to the heart of the matter: physicalism wants to explain the world purely in terms of material and efficient causes (stuff, and arrangements of stuff,) but such an explanation leaves out formal and final causality, apart from which both material and efficient causes are incoherent.
In denying form, physicalism threatens reason itself. If there are no forms — no singular, distinct substances — then there are no things to think about. At best there are tropes, or semi-stable arrangements of matter corresponding to ideas in our minds. Yet, since everything is just a combination of particles, there really aren’t any dogs, cats, mountains, chairs, or persons. These are ultimately terms of convenience, concepts that we cannot do without but which are ultimately artificial. We have no ultimate basis for thinking that our thoughts about things actually correspond to things themselves. We have no basis for believing in “water” as a real thing, if physicalism is true.
To see what I mean, take the following proposition: Dogs have four legs.
Now if forms are just generalizations, then in what sense can the above proposition be true? Only in two senses: either as a descriptive proposition (a statement about all the dogs on earth,) or as a logical tautology (a statement that is true by definition, assuming we first define dogs as quadrupeds.) But nobody who says “Dogs have four legs,” means the statement as a tautology, nor a description of all dogs. Obviously, a dog can lose a leg and still be a dog, and when science textbooks describe canines as quadrupeds, they clearly intend to convey something more than a circular statement about an agreed upon definition of the word “dog.” But what are they trying to convey? Namely that dogs, in the normative case, have four legs. Dogs “have” four legs in the sense that the form of dog has four legs. For that reason, we know that a dog with only three legs has a handicap or a deficiency. We can compare this dog to essence of dog-ness, which essence our intellect grasps.
To take another example, when we say “Acorns grow into oaks,” we do not mean that every acorn develops into an oak, nor that acorns develop into oaks by definition (since we’ve simply decided to define “acorn” as “whatever happens to develop into an oak.”) We mean that acorns are ordered toward becoming oaks; in other words, that a mature oak is the telos or final cause of the particular life-form whose stages include acorn, sapling, and mature tree. Now physicalism cannot admit either final causes or formal causes in principle, and yet the world of material forms is incoherent without reference to them.
We could certainly take this critique further, but let us simply note that physicalism’s general reductionism leads to a general suspicion of any kind of pure reasoning. On the one hand, the very project of science is nested within deeper logical and ontological principles, such as the principle of sufficient reason, the principle of identity, the principle of contradiction, and general notion that we can grasp the natures of things and apply logic to them with confidence that these thoughts, observations, and logical principles have purchase in the world outside our minds. Yet it is not at all uncommon to find that principled critiques of physicalism or scientism simply “bounce off” the physicalist. “I have no use for metaphysics and philosophy,” says the materialist — as if he could avoid these things — before proceeding to make a series of metaphysical statements.
“Reality is mostly empty space!” But what do you mean by “reality?” Surely you don’t mean that all that exists is physical? What about the propositional content of this essay? Is it some kind of stuff? How does it exist in your mind and mine at the same time? Were it translated in German, into a different “matter,” how is it that the ideas would be the same, while the matter was different? “Man is nothing special, because the earth is an insignificant pale blue dot orbiting one star, among billions of billions of billions.” Surely you don’t mean that “significance” is some quantity? Please explain. “Many cultures have done X, and therefore X can be normal human behavior.” Wait, are you saying that because something is common that it is normative? Please elaborate! And these are just small matters of verbal logic. The problems go much deeper than this, though it would be tedious to list them here. Perhaps I should devote a future, list-style blog post just to the kinds of irrationalities that regularly appear in the mouths of materialists.
But, alas, if the mind is just the product of mindless, quality-less, practically extension-less particles, why should I trust any conclusion it comes to?
Physicalism’s Problem with the Mind
Physicalism finds minds problematic, and for several different reasons. Since physicalism denies formal and final causes, and proposes to explain everything in terms of quantities of small bodies in different arrangements, it necessarily excludes both qualitative data and essential categories of being from the realm of objective reality. But since even physical reality is full of both qualities and forms, these must be accounted for somehow. The upshot is that every accident of being (other than quantity) is shoehorned into the “Problem of Consciousness,” while forms, essences, and the like are styled as mere concepts; categories the human mind imposes in order to make sense of the physical world.
Everything that is not a quantity or an arrangement is assigned to the subjective realm of mental phenomena. In practice, this means that sensory experience, feelings, emotions, and thoughts are all filed under the category of “qualia.” The “problem of consciousness” as physicalists see it, is the problem of how to explain apparently immaterial phenomena as emergent properties of the brain. (It is not, as it really should be, the problem of why we should trust anything that comes to us by way of organized experience (experiment) if that very experience is a kind of mental illusion; but I digress!)
Now this is too large a subject to deal with here, but we can make a few observations: 1) All animals, not just humans, have some kind of conscious experience. Sense organs make no “sense” without the capacity to receive sensory data, and then act upon the sense data received. That is why all animals have locomotion — the ability to move themselves in response to sense impressions — and some organs for processing and receiving external data, and acting upon that information for the sake of the whole organism. Consciousness should not therefore be treated as some special, weird problem, but as one of the basic features of certain kinds of beings. 2) Conscious experience of the qualitative dimensions of physical reality is such an intractable problem for materialism precisely because materialists deny in principle the objective reality of anything that cannot be quantitatively measured. By denying formal and final causes, physicalists (starting with Descartes) ended up dividing the world into “objective” measurable things and “subjective” mental experiences, and the latter became a “spooky” problem. But if, in contrast to this, we conceive of material beings as substantial forms with particular natures and particular ends, then the matter activated by form already has meaning built into it from the outset. 3) Contra physicalism, not all mental phenomena is equal in character. Sensory impressions (“qualia”) are quite different from thoughts. While both have the “immaterial” quality of intentionality (being directed towards an end; which purely quantitative phenomena are not supposed to have,) senses and thoughts are not externally directed in the same manner. The smell of a rose, or of spoiled milk “points at” a particular material phenomena, whereas the idea of a triangle, or of justice, or the truth or falsehood of a particular argument is not directed at this particular triangle, argument, etc. Truths about being qua being, or the nature of a certain entity, or the content of a story, or principles of logic, or considerations about beauty, or morality, the transcendentals, any universal...the list of “mental phenomena” which necessarily transcend any particular material referent...have an infinite and bottomless character. That is because the human mind, unlike the purely sensory and pattern-recognizing capacities of other animal minds, has the facilities of intellect and will.
Physicalism’s Problem with the Intellect (and the Will)
If you’ve followed this essay so far, or have tried to follow it, or have even grasped some of it, or have understood, but disagreed with it...congratulations! You have an intellect!
The intellect is the peculiar faculty of man by which he extracts universals from particulars, and deals directly with the propositional and formal content of that which he extracted. It is the intellect that allows us to move from “Fido,” “Lassie,” and “Spot,” to the form of “dog,” and to see this concept as nested within that of “canine,” and canine as an example of mammal, etc. It is the intellect that allows us to grasp that the dog form includes four legs as a proper accident, and to therefore conclude that this dog with only three has a handicap. In the same way, the intellect can grasp the essence of anything, even of entirely new objects of experience. In grasping the essence of a thing, the intellect distinguishes between what is necessary to that thing’s being, and what is only incidental (‘accidental’ is the technical term). For example, the intellect moves from many particular drawings of triangles to the concept of triangularity: a polygon with three straight sides, whose interior angles necessarily add up to 180°. Never mind that there are no perfect triangles in the physical world; our intellects have no problem working in the immaterial realm of true triangularity. Our imaginations will always color the triangle, and give it a type, and a particular sub-species, but our intellects can move beyond these particulars to what makes a triangle a triangle.
Likewise, we can entertain such notions as pure vacuums, frictionless surfaces, and other concepts that have an application in the physical world, but which are rarely actually found in the physical world in a pure form. But even more than making useful immaterial models for material things, our intellects are able to move between individuals and essences; essence being that which is shared universally among the particular members of a species.
In other words, we humans not only have sensory experience of water, trees, mountains, cats, and people; we can also grasp the essences of water, trees, mountains, cats, and people. Not perfectly — our knowledge can always grow deeper, and we are under various limitations — but truly, nonetheless, and not in the purely particular, sensory manner of the other animals. Moreover, ideas, once grasped, can then be conveyed to other minds so that somehow the same idea exists in multiple minds at once. I do not simply mean that a certain set of coded signs has been copied from one person’s wetware to another’s; I mean that propositional content of one mind has been independently realized within another mind, despite the matter in the two brains being necessarily not the same matter.
Finally, since human beings can grasp the essences of things, and also the consequences of different kinds of acts, we can choose among possible acts. Put concretely, having come to understand that a certain action will require an immediate sacrifice but will lead to long term happiness, while another (preferred) action will give immediate gratification but will lead to long term unhappiness, you can make the effort of will to actualize the first scenario, even though your senses and appetites resist it. You can overcome the pull of the senses and do X (what your intellect recognizes as the good,) and refuse to do Y (what your intellect knows is bad, but which you’re attracted to anyway.) Or you can fail to make this effort, and therefore suffer guilt, the interior experience of having failed to do something that you know you ought to have done. Free will, the immaterial capacity to actualize what one ought to do rather than what one’s sensory appetites pull one towards, makes perfect sense if the intellect is spiritual.
Naturally, those who deny the immateriality of the intellect, also chalk up to illusion the experience of free will. They want to say that immaterial (spiritual) capacities like intellect and will are just more examples of the general illusions of subjective experience. Just as there aren’t really any colors, smells, dogs, cats, rights, or wrongs in “objective reality,” there are also no “free” actions. We only think we’re free, just as we think that the Sun moves and the Earth stands still. Free will is a mental illusion, comparable to the optical illusions of seeing smoke on a hot highway, or a pencil bend in a glass of water.
But free will cannot be an illusion. Illusions involve mistaking one thing for another. Light bends the image of the pencil in the water, which we mistake for the pencil itself being bent. That is an illusion. But if physicalism is correct about the deterministic character of nature, then there is no possible object of reality or of experience that could escape the logic of determinism. There could be no “free” thing, real or imaginary. If determinism is true, freedom does not exist even in principle. There is no other “thing” which we could mistake for freedom. We should not even be able to think about freedom, any more than we can think of a seven-sided rectangular prism.
And yet we can easily grasp what freedom is, and what it would mean to consider multiple possibilities and choose among them. We can contemplate it, and consider its elements and implications. We also have direct experience of being casual centers; originating agents of change within the universe. There is nothing self-contradictory about the idea. It’s just that physicalism cannot admit freedom without admitting that the human intellect is immaterial. But, again, if free will is an illusion, then just what in the physicalists cosmology can it be an illusion of? It can have no possible referent. A unicorn is an imaginary creature, and like other imaginary creatures, it is a composite of actual or possible beings. But freedom cannot be like that. On the physicalist account, there is nothing in existence out of which to form this imagined capacity.
In any event, one should not multiply causes without necessity. If formal causes, final causes, consciousness, the immateriality of intellect, and freedom of will are direct data of human experience, and indispensable analytical concepts (such that materialists are forced to posit reductionist knock-offs like trope theory, supervenience, and telenomy as substitutes) then perhaps they simply are indispensable parts of reality. Perhaps the intellect and will seem to be immaterial because they actually are immaterial. Perhaps water seems to be a form because it is a form. And if the materialist/physicalist framework is forced by its assumptions to divide the world into the strangely contradictory realms of “objective” matter and “subjective” qualia, then perhaps we need to dispense with physicalism altogether, and go back to first the first principles to see where we’ve gone wrong.
Transcendent Monotheism and Philosophical Realism
Going forward I will argue that intellectual sanity lies in the direction of a monotheism that distinguishes God from creation, of a realism that recognizes a variety of substantial forms within that creation, and of an epistemology that recognizes the human intellect’s ability to grasp Nature’s essential structure (at least to a limited degree.) That there is a transcendent God can be known with certainty by reason. Meanwhile, reason that is worth the name means more than the reductionist analysis involved in the experimental sciences. I will then conclude my essay with some speculations of my own as to why physicalists tend not to be content to argue positively for their own worldview, but instead spend an inordinate amount of time trying to discredit theism and religion.
God’s Existence
Let us first begin with the fact of existence. Actual beings exist. On the one hand, if nothing existed, we would obviously not be able to note the fact. Yet that does not make existence a given; something we can take for granted. For when we turn our minds to any particular being — man, beast, planet, star, clod of dirt — we recognize readily enough that that being might not have existed. If this were not so, we would not ask ourselves, “Where did stars come from?” To ask ‘why’ of anything is to admit one of the four first principles of reason, the Principle of Sufficient Reason. (The other four are the Principle of Identity, the Principle of Contradiction, and the Principle of the Excluded Middle.)
The Principle of Sufficient Reason states that whatever exists (or exists in a particular manner) must have sufficient reason for existing. To illustrate this concretely, imagine the following scenario: You are walking through a barren, stony landscape for hours when you suddenly come upon a willow tree. The willow is bent over at a forty-five degree angle, and there are no other trees around for miles. If you’re an even remotely curious person, the leaning willow tree will suggest a number of obvious questions: How did a tree get here? Why is it bent at that angle? Where does it get water? Several possible answers are: A seed blew from far away and landed in a crevice of the rocks. The tree may be bent because of a persistent northwestern breeze, or because willows tend by their nature to grow in this way, or some combination of the two. There must be an unseen water source below the surface, but not so far down as to be out of reach of the willow’s roots. In any event, you will not find it reasonable to look at the willow in the rocky wasteland and just shrug, as if its presence here were simply necessary.
But what is true of this willow is true of each willow on earth, and of each tree on earth. It is equally true of each rock on the stony landscape, and of the wind, and of the sun, and of the material properties of each. Each requires an explanation sufficient for the kind of thing it is, as well as for the fact that it exists at all. And this extends upwards and downwards throughout all of the universe, to each and every being we find, so long as that being is not the sort of being that is sufficient unto itself. It extends to every historical event, and to every particular organism. Now the practical fact that we have to take many events and objects for granted, that we cannot constantly be asking “why, why, why” of each and every being, does not change the principled truth that each being requires a sufficient reason for being, or for being in a particular way. The whole collection of these beings is called the Universe, or Nature. While Nature is a rather grand and overwhelming collection of things, it is still a unity composed entirely of beings that each require a sufficient reason for their existence.
Another way of stating the point is that we are surrounded by beings — and this includes the total collection beings in Nature— whose essence is distinct from their existence. Such beings are not necessary, but contingent. Now not everything that we can grasp is contingent. Logical and mathematical truths, for example, have to do with realities that cannot be otherwise. 1 + 1 must equal 2, and the argument, “All zogs are troogles, Mitz is a zog; therefore Mitz is a troogle,” must be logically valid in any conceivable universe. Yet there needn’t be zogs, or dogs, or logs. Each of these is a great “might not have been.” And neither logic nor numbers are substances; actually existing beings. Logic and math deal with necessary truths; but reality is full of beings whose existence is not necessary; that is, contingent beings. The existence of actual beings that are also contingent entails the existence of a necessary being, one that is intrinsically necessary in-and-of-itself; a being in whom there is no distinction between essence (what it is) and existence (that it is.)
Such a being cannot be a member of some category of beings, nor can it be the total set of every contingent being. A total set — even an infinite set — of contingent beings would still fail to satisfy the ontological conditions for necessary existence, since the total set cannot contain a necessity lacking in each of its constituent members. To say that it could be necessary is really no different than the old joke about turtles stacked on turtles all the way down. In other words, we do not get around the need for a necessary being by positing the physical universe or its totality (even if conceived of as infinite in extent) as the necessary being. The necessary being must exist (or nothing else can exist), and yet it must be wholly other than anything in the universe, and other than the universe as a whole. If such a being did not exist, nothing else ever could. But if contingent beings exist, they entail a necessary, primal entity that enjoys its being in a manner radically different from contingent beings, and yet in some way analogous to it.
And we can go further:
This being must be singular. If we posited two such beings, they’d have to differ in some manner. But if they differed, then one would lack some perfection possessed by the other. Yet if that were the case, then either the one lacking would itself be contingent, or else both would be contingent, in which case we would have to go still further until we found the truly necessary being. Eventually we must reach one being whose act of existence is identical to his essence.
This being must be pure act. There cannot be any element of becoming, or potentiality, or process in this being. It must be pure, unadulterated actuality.
This being must be spiritual/immaterial. Matter/energy is by its very nature limited (even if we posit an infinite quantity of it) since each material entity undergoes substantial and accidental change. Any kind of “stuff,” or any amount of stuff, is contingent; therefore the being who is not contingent cannot be some kind of stuff. Now the word “spiritual” just means “positive actual essence that is non-material.” “Spirit” is not a verbal placeholder for something we don’t know. It is simply the commonsensical word for the positive side of immateriality, something we know by direct personal experience.
This being must be intellectual and volitional (i.e. it/he must be personal.) Though we cannot fully develop the correct kind of teleological argument here, it can be shown that Nature, being composed of beings who are immanently ordered toward ends (that is, which have final causes as part of their very nature,) entails an ordering intellect. This is not a matter of saying “some things, like really complicated animals, are designed, so there must be a Designer.” Such “Intelligent Designer” arguments are deeply problematic, because they fail to distinguish immanent teleology from the sort of “creation” in which human beings engage. When Sarah makes a hammer, she takes substantial forms (wood, metal) and arranges them according to a form and a purpose in her mind. Meanwhile, wood is still wood, and metal still metal. However, wood and metal are substances with their own immanent ends — their own “physical intentionality” — which no mere extrinsic arrangement (either by man, or by the assembling powers of nature) has the power to impose. As we said earlier about water, natural substances are forms, substances with an inherent “aboutness” built into their very being. According to Aquinas, it is this intrinsic aboutness that entails the constant action of the same intellect and will that sustains them in existence. Since we cannot fully develop this argument in a paragraph, let us at least note that the universe is orderly, rational, and beautiful, all of which implies a sustaining cause in which these qualities exist in some analogous, but non-contingent way.
This being must be all-good. Goodness and Being are transcendentals, the same reality under different modalities. To say that a being is good is to say that it enjoys its being without diminution or distortion. Thus we naturally call a well-drawn portrait a “good portrait” and a poorly drawn portrait a “bad portrait.” We mean the former better corresponds to the being of the subject, while the latter fails to do so. In the same way, we might call a well-built table a “great table” while calling a table that fails to do its basic job a “bad” table. Evil, including physical evil (which has no moral character) means a diminution, privation, or distortion of a good that ought to be there. Evil is not a thing that can exist on its own, but only as a privation of some good. Good, on the other hand, is a property of any existing being acting according to its natural ends. Thus our three-legged dog from before has something “wrong” with it (though not morally wrong,) because dogs are supposed to have four legs. Cancer is a physical evil, because the body’s cells are ordered to operate in a coordinated way for the flourishing of the whole organism. Lying is a moral evil, for the human mind and intellect are ordered toward the truth, and, for that reason, we ought to choose to speak in conformity with the ends and purposes of speech.
Now the necessary being is by definition Pure Being. Since that is the case, this being cannot contain any diminution of being, and therefore cannot by its very nature do evil. Since this being is pure act, he possesses all of his attributes to an infinite and undiminished degree, and is therefore all-good. Indeed, he is the very definition of goodness.
This being is the creator of the world. As we saw earlier, Nature is composed of contingent beings that entail a necessary being. The necessary being is the one being in existence that simply must be, whereas contingent beings don’t have to be. And this is a very important distinction: there simply must be a basic, purely actual being that cannot not be. Were this not the case, then nothing could exist, or ever would exist. Existence itself entails some being whose very essence is to exist. But that being cannot be Nature, for Nature is contingent. Thus the basic dividing line of reality is between the necessary being, and all of the other beings.
So far so good, but if the latter are contingent, and if the former is the only thing which just is, then the latter must have been brought into existence by the former. Moreover, if contingent beings are not necessary in-and-of-themselves, then their continued existence requires the continual sustaining activity of the necessary being. We can therefore say with certainty that the necessary being caused the contingent beings to come into existence, and causes them to have the forms of being that they do. Within the system of Nature, there can be any number of proximate causes — one contingent being bringing another into being, or affecting change within it, such that this contingent being can be explained in terms of that contingent being — but each member of the series requires a creating and sustaining being that is radically distinct from the series of contingent beings.
Who Is God?
Now a being fulfilling the criteria above would be wholly different from any pantheistic notion of the Absolute, and would also be wholly different from any notion of a very-powerful-but-still-contingent being (i.e. a god.) This being would not be the universe, or some local power within the universe. He would not be “a god;” he would be THE GOD. Let us summarize his attributes, as arrived at entirely on the basis of reason:
God is One, All-Powerful, All-Good, Personal, Spiritual, Eternal Being, Who created all things.
And all of this without saying a word about religion! Now if there is a religion that somehow arrived (without the complex and difficult machinations of philosophy) at the existence of a being matching the criteria above, this would indeed be quite interesting. In fact, it would be extraordinary and well-nigh unbelievable; like an aboriginal people “stumbling upon” the idea of a quantum computer. For if the being above were to give itself a name, that name might be something like “I Am Who Am.” But surely such a scenario is impossible, particularly for pre-modern nomads who lived before Greek philosophy…
In any event, there is such a being, and His existence can be known by reason reflecting upon Nature. Without the existence of God, nothing else can exist. And when God’s existence isn’t acknowledged, the human mind must substitute something else for Him. There are only so many options: Nature-as-God (pantheism), Nature as an infinite irrationality filled with rational causes (physicalism), or some combination of the elements of the two (polytheism). A transcendent monotheism which acknowledges the reality of a hierarchy of substantial forms is the only option that allows us to believe in reason (including the project of science) and to follow reason to its ultimate conclusion, without contradiction.
Physicalism and Atheism
Why are physicalists so often hostile to the idea of God? Consider for a moment how strange this is. If physicalism is really a robust and proven worldview, then it should have no particular feelings about the discredited theory that there is a God. It should regard God in more or less the same way that monotheists regard Zeus… something that does not happen to be true, but which evokes little in the way of an emotional response. At best, atheist hostility should come out only when God is being used as a pretext for pushing some kind of injustice or irrationality on the public. Now in fairness, God’s name is often used for just this purpose. Politicians invoke God when they want to attack neighboring nations, or manipulate the ignorance of crowds. Pseudo-scientists invoke God to account for the missing elements in their arguments; God as the filler of intellectual gaps. Yet even making allowance for these cases, there is still too much hostility from the physicalist camp toward an entity who — if physicalism is true — has no place in existence.
My opinion here is admittedly based on anecdotes. However, a thousand and one examples of angry and sarcastic atheists, atheists who cannot hold the scales evenly long enough to calmly ask themselves why so many brilliant thinkers have believed in God, leave me with the strong impression that they protest too much. Atheists often attack God in the way that you attack a thing that you find threatening. That you find real, and dangerous. It is hard to avoid the impression that at least some so-called atheists actually believe very much in God, and hate Him. They do not want to live in a universe where God exists, and where Nature is Creation. Physicalism may be weak, reductionist, and inherently amoral, but at least it isn’t God!
Some of this may just be the product of intellectual confusion, or of encounters with bad examples of theists. I do not blame some physicalists for finding religious people annoying; I myself find many religious people incredibly annoying! But I also recognize that the irrationalities I see in many religious people are paralleled by equal forms of irrationality in many atheists. And if there is wishful thinking and emotionalism within theism there is also plenty of it within atheism.
In any event, it seems to me that an honest atheist, a physicalist who was comfortable in his own intellectual skin, would at least find God fascinating, and would hunger to understand robust theism. Were he really interested, he could easily find thinkers like Edward Feser, David Oderberg (former atheists), Etienne Gilson. Jacques Maritain, and so on, just as I can easily find robust physicalist thinkers like Thomas Nagel, while distinguishing between them and popular intellectuals like Richard Dawkins (who cannot even be bothered to properly understand what God he does not believe in.) Purely out of intellectual honesty and normal human curiosity, the honest physicalist would read and study his best non-physicalist counterparts.
And yet this seems rare; so rare that when Anthony Flew discovered towards the end of his life that there was, in fact, some kind of God, he admitted he’d never even seriously studied Aristotelean thought before that! Never?! One of the world’s leading atheist thinkers never made a serious study of a pre-Christian thinker who arrived at the idea of one God? This is just incredible, but it is likely very common, and is an instance of what I mean.
Could it be that physicalism is not strong enough on its own to do too much reading outside of its comfort zone? Perhaps what some physicalists fear, when opening up the metaphysical menu, is turning to a new page, and finding there more delicious and substantial entrees than are dreamed of in their philosophy.
© 2021 Joseph Breslin All Rights Reserved