Tag Archives: Aristotle

#10 Post of 2013 – How Do We Know the Universe Hasn’t Existed Eternally?

Post Author: Bill Pratt

For those of you who look to science to answer every question, cosmologists are pretty unanimous in agreeing that our universe is not eternal, and in fact begun about 14 billion years ago. You may not like this answer, and so go running toward alternative cosmologies to escape the standard big bang model of the universe. Unfortunately, there is no salvation there either.

As summarized nicely on the Wintery Knight blog, “The Borde-Guth-Vilenkin [theorem] shows that every universe that expands must have a space-time boundary in the past. That means that no expanding universe, no matter what the model, can be eternal into the past. Even speculative alternative cosmologies do not escape the need for a beginning.”

So it would appear that science is no help to those who want to desperately cling to an eternal universe. What about philosophy?

The dominant ancient metaphysical traditions have also demonstrated why the physical universe cannot be eternal. Here we quote from Edward Feser in an article he wrote for First Things:

In general, classical philosophical theology argues for the existence of a first cause of the world—a cause that does not merely happen not to have a cause of its own but that (unlike everything else that exists) in principle does not require one. Nothing else can provide an ultimate explanation of the world.

For Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, for example, things in the world can change only if there is something that changes or actualizes everything else without the need (or indeed even the possibility) of its being actualized itself, precisely because it is already “pure actuality.” Change requires an unchangeable changer or unmovable mover.

Feser goes on to consider other great thinkers of the past:

For Neoplatonists, everything made up of parts can be explained only by reference to something that combines the parts. Accordingly, the ultimate explanation of things must be utterly simple and therefore without the need or even the possibility of being assembled into being by something else. Plotinus called this “the One.” For Leibniz, the existence of anything that is in any way contingent can be explained only by its origin in an absolutely necessary being.

But why can’t the first cause, the necessary being, “the One,” be the universe itself instead of God? What is the difference between an eternal Creator and an eternal universe?

The difference, as the reader of Aristotle or Aquinas knows, is that the universe changes while the unmoved mover does not, or, as the Neoplatonist can tell you, that the universe is made up of parts while its source is absolutely one; or, as Leibniz could tell you, that the universe is contingent and God absolutely necessary. There is thus a principled reason for regarding God rather than the universe as the terminus of explanation.

So, positing the universe as an eternally existing thing that is the cause of everything else both collides with modern science and with classical metaphysics. I happen to think the metaphysical arguments are stronger, but maybe you prefer the science. Either way, it don’t look good for an eternal universe.

How Do We Know Reality?

Post Author: Bill Pratt

I know this seems like a ridiculous question to normal people, but this is actually a very live and contentious debate among the professors teaching your children at the university. So you need to pay attention to these debates, lest your college expenditures be flushed down the drain!

The classical Christian answer to this question comes from Thomas Aquinas, the brilliant thirteenth century theologian and philosopher. His answer to this question is conveniently summarized for us by another brilliant Christian philosopher, Norm Geisler, in his book about Thomas Aquinas, called, strangely enough, Thomas Aquinas. So how do we come by knowledge?

Aquinas believes that knowledge comes either by supernatural revelation (in Scripture) or by natural means. All natural knowledge begins in experience. We are born, however, with an a priori, natural, innate capacity to know. Everything that is in our mind was first in the senses, except the mind itself.

How do we know something for certain?

Knowing something for certain is possible by means of first principles. First principles are known by way of inclination before they are known by cognition. These include: (1) the principle of identity (being is being); (2) the principle of noncontradiction (being is not nonbeing); (3) the principle of excluded middle (either being or nonbeing); (4) the principle of causality (nonbeing cannot cause being); and (5) the principle of finality (every being acts for an end).

By these first principles the mind can attain knowledge of reality—even some certain knowledge. Once the terms are properly understood, these first principles are self-evident, that is, they are undeniable.

Aquinas believed that all certain knowledge can be reduced to these first principles. Without these first principles in place, no knowledge is possible. In fact, the world becomes completely irrational and incoherent.

So how is reality to be studied? According to Geisler,

Like Aristotle, Aquinas believes it is the function of the wise person to know order. The order [that] reason produces in its own ideas is called logic. The order [that] reason produces through acts of the will is known as ethics. The order [that] reason produces in external things is art. The order [that] reason contemplates (but does not produce) is nature.

Nature contemplated insofar as it is sensible is physical science. Nature studied insofar as it is quantifiable is mathematics. Nature or reality studied insofar as it is real is metaphysics. Metaphysics, then, is the study of the real as real or being insofar as it is being.

It should be incredibly clear from Aquinas’s thoughts (and Aristotle’s) that the modern idea that physical science is the only discipline that produces knowledge is utterly false. Physical science is only applicable to the study of nature “insofar as it is sensible.”

Logic, ethics, art, mathematics, and metaphysics are all separate disciplines from the physical sciences. To subsume these areas under physical science is an error that has profoundly negative consequences for mankind. If physical science is king, then men will be obsessed with technology (what physical science produces). Ethics, logic, art, metaphysics, and even mathematics will all serve technology.

Is that the world we want to live in?

Have Aristotle’s Metaphysics Been Proven Wrong?

Post Author: Bill Pratt

OK, those of you who have never thought about Aristotle and don’t even know what the word metaphysics means are probably already yawning, but hang on for a minute.  Briefly, why should you care about Aristotle?  Because the medieval Christian theologians (Thomas Aquinas being the most brilliant example) built their conceptions of God and humans with the help of Aristotle’s ideas.  They combined what they learned from special revelation (the Bible) with Aristotle’s philosophical ideas to bequeath us the conceptions of God and humans that most orthodox Christians still hold today.

It was Aristotle’s metaphysics, in particular, which aided these learned men of the church.  What is metaphysics?  In simplest terms, the study of being.  Metaphysics helps answer the ultimate questions.  According to the great philosopher Jacques Maritain in his book The Degrees of Knowledge, metaphysics deals with “objects [in the mind] abstracted from, and purified of, all matter.”

Maritain continues:

These are objects of thought which not only can be conceived without matter, but which can even exist without it, whether they never exist in matter, as in the case of God and pure spirits, or whether they exist in material as well as in immaterial things, for example, substance, quality, act and potency, beauty, goodness, etc.  This is the wide domain of [metaphysics], knowledge of that which is beyond sensible nature, or of being as being.

Questions of God, causality, goodness, existence – all of these are the domain of metaphysics.  So hopefully now you have an idea of why Aristotle and metaphysics are important to Christians.  And, of course, since Aristotle and metaphysics are important to us, they face constant attack from skeptics of Christianity.  One of those attacks goes like this: “Aristotle’s ideas were all disproven by Descartes and other philosophers of the Renaissance 400 years ago.”  If Aristotle’s metaphysics, and thus the metaphysics of Aquinas and other medieval Christian thinkers, have been refuted, then our conceptions of God and man are completely wrong-headed and need to be radically revised.

Has Aristotle’s metaphysics been refuted?  Not at all.  What the Renaissance thinkers did was refute some of Aristotle’s scientific ideas.  Again we learn from Jacques Maritain:

Despite what certain popularizers may say . . . , these charges do not stand up in the case of the philosophy of Aristotle when carried back to its authentic principles. . . . It should be recognized that too great a confidence in the intelligibility of things and in the processes of reason . . . has played its part (and perhaps an overwhelming part) in the errors of ancient science. . . . [However] there is no necessary link between the mechanics, the physics and the astronomy of the ancients on the one hand, and the metaphysics or natural philosophy of the scholastic tradition on the other.

Maritain further explains:

The whole structure of the experimental science of the ancients has doubtless crumbled and its collapse may well appear to anxious minds to spell the ruin of everything the ancients had thought.  But in reality, their metaphysics and their philosophy of nature, in their essential principles at least . . . , have no more been affected thereby than the soul is changed when the body disintegrates.

The fall of Aristotelian experimental science was not also the fall of Aristotelian metaphysics.  The latter was not built on the former, and thereby was quite able to stand when the former collapsed.  This means that the classical Christian conceptions of God and man remain intact and as strong as ever, and skeptics must still deal with them.

Who Is Portrayed in the Earliest Existing Biblical Painting?

Post Author: Bill Pratt

The earliest existing painting portraying a biblical scene was found in a building called the House of the Physician in the ruins of the city of Pompeii, a city destroyed in AD 79 by Mount Vesuvius.  The painting is a striking rendition of the scene from 1 Kings 3 where two women lay claim to the same child and Solomon wisely determines who is the real mother of the child.

According to art expert Theodore Feder, this painting was likely commissioned by a non-Jew living in Pompeii in the time period just before the city was destroyed.  What makes this painting even more fascinating is that Feder thinks he has discovered the identities of two individuals who are in the bottom left of the painting and who are portrayed admiring the wisdom of Solomon.

In a recent article published in the Biblical Archaeology Review, Feder argues that the two individuals shown admiring Solomon are none other than Socrates and Aristotle, two of the most famous Greek philosophers of antiquity.

I believe these two figures are stand-ins for Socrates and Aristotle, introduced as a way of associating the wisdom of Solomon with that of the Greek philosophers. Put another way, their presence in the composition attests to the respect Greek philosophy could accord to Hebrew wisdom. Such a juxtaposition in art of wise men from the two civilizations was unprecedented, has rarely been done since, and is of great cultural and historical significance.

That Solomon was painted along with Socrates and Aristotle was a testament to the great respect that the Hebrew Bible was afforded as a book of wisdom in the 1st century Roman empire.  Feder concludes his article with this statement:

In selecting an episode from the Hebrew Bible, the patron departed from the canon of classical religious subject matter and elevated one from the Scriptures of a people whose influence at the time was spreading throughout the empire and would one day, in its Christian formulation, pervade it.