Tag Archives: Thomas Aquinas

Meaning of Life

Is There More to Life than Technology?

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

I own an iPhone 5. My family owns an iPad, two iPhone 4s, and multiple iPods. Oh, and we bought a Google Nexus 7 tablet for Christmas. We also have DirecTV with whole home DVR capability. This list could go on for a while – believe me.

I love technology, and, in fact, I work in the semiconductor industry. Semiconductor technology, in particular, has revolutionized our modern lifestyle, enabling all that is electronic in the world.

But what is the purpose of it all? Sometimes we forget that all of these gadgets are means to an end. The gadgets are not ends in themselves. The technology that produces these gadgets is also not ultimately an end in itself. The science that produces the technology that produces the gadgets is also not an end in itself.

With all of the gadgets surrounding us today, we sometimes forget what the purpose of all of it is. Our ancient ancestors, however, saw things a lot more clearly than we do today. They weren’t nearly as distracted as we are.

Thomas Aquinas, who lived in the thirteenth century, considered the answers that people of his day gave to the question: “What brings ultimate happiness to a person’s life?” Here are the answers:

  1. wealth
  2. honor
  3. fame
  4. power
  5. bodily health
  6. pleasure
  7. wisdom and virtue (goods of the soul)
  8. God

Notice the order. After studying each of these 8 answers, Aquinas listed them in order of least important to most important. Where are you spending your time?

Are you obsessed with building wealth? Aquinas would say that you are way off the mark – not even close to what brings ultimate happiness.

What about bodily health? We are clearly a culture obsessed with health. We want to postpone death as long as possible. But bodily health is not the ultimate good.

Of the earthly goods, wisdom and virtue are the highest, and the world would certainly be a profoundly better place if everyone used their technology to pursue them, but Aquinas argued that even wisdom and virtue miss the mark.

The only thing that our soul yearns for more than anything else is to know and experience the Perfect Good. According to Aquinas, the Perfect Good of man, the thing that will give him ultimate happiness, cannot be something which was created:

It is impossible for any created good to constitute man’s happiness. For happiness is the perfect good, which lulls the appetite altogether; else it would not be the last end, if something yet remained to be desired. Now the object . . . of man’s appetite is the universal good. . . . Hence it is evident that naught can lull man’s will, save the universal good. This is to be found, not in any creature, but in God alone.

Consider what Jesus said, “But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.” (Matt 6:33)

Speaking to God, St. Augustine said “Thou has made us for thyself and our hearts are restless until they rest in thee.”

C. S. Lewis advised, “Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you get neither.”

Put your technology in its place. You can certainly use it to gain a modicum of wealth, honor and perhaps fame. Use it to gain power over your life. Use it to keep yourself healthy and provide recreation. Use it to gain wisdom and virtue.

But ultimately, all of that is less than nothing, a positive impediment, if you aren’t pursuing God.

Philosophy

How Do We Know Reality?

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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?

Creeds

Why Do Christians Use Creeds?

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

All Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches, and many Protestant churches, recite ancient creeds during masses or services, but why? Why not just stick to the Bible?

Ancient creeds were developed by the early Christian church to summarize the central beliefs of Christianity. These were understood to be the beliefs that separated Christians from all other religions or worldviews.

It is important to remember that the Bible, as it currently exists, was not available to most Christians during the first 1500 years after Christ’s death and resurrection. Therefore, these creeds were incredibly important to encapsulate the core teachings of the faith.

Today, most Christians do have access to Bibles, and so what use are creeds? Thomas Aquinas lived in the period before Bibles became truly widespread, but he certainly had access to the Scriptures in the thirteenth century. His take on the role of creeds is quite helpful. Norm Geisler summarizes Aquinas’s views in his book Thomas Aquinas:

For Aquinas, the truth of faith is contained in Scripture. A creed “is not added to Scripture, but drawn from Scripture.” It is a later symbol of God’s revelation; “a later symbol does not abolish an earlier one, but elaborates on it.”

Not only is Scripture sufficient apart from the creeds, but it is also perspicuous. “The truth of faith is sufficiently plain in the teaching of Christ and the Apostles.” It is only because “wicked men have wrested apostolic teaching and the other Scriptures to their own destruction, [that] declaration of the faith against those impugning it is needed from time to time.”

The need for a creed arises out of the fact that “the truth of faith is contained in sacred Scripture, but diffusely, in divers ways and, sometimes, darklv.” Hence, “the result is that to draw out that truth of faith from Scripture requires a prolonged study and a practice not within the capacities of all those who need to know the truth of faith. . . . That is why there was a need to draw succinctly together out of the Scriptural teaching some clear statement to be set before all for their belief.”

For Aquinas, creeds summarize what is already contained in Scripture. Creeds make it simpler for Christians to know the “truths of faith.”

This simplification, though, has qualifications around it. Geisler explains in his book, Roman Catholics and Evangelicals, that the person who wants to promote creeds ahead of Scripture is making a mistake.

On the surface, creeds and commentaries may seem more clear than the Bible, but this is misleading for several reasons. First, they are only summaries of what the Bible teaches, and good summaries are often clearer than the whole text. Second, when the Bible summarizes a truth it is as clear, if not clearer, than any statement someone can make about the Bible (cf. Matt. 7:12; 1 John 5:12). Third, the comparison is false, since the Bible does not systematize most doctrines, as do human creeds and theologies. Hence, they cannot be clearer systematic statements than the non-systematic ones in the Bible for the simple reason that no fair comparison can be made between systematic and non-systematic statements. Finally, unless the Bible were clear enough to begin with, no one would be able to summarize or systematize it.

Put simply, a summary is built on the foundation of what it summarizes. As Geisler says, “unless the Bible were clear enough to begin with, no one would be able to summarize or systematize it.” While creeds are helpful in enumerating the central truths of the faith, they should never replace the careful study of Scripture itself.

Philosophy, Theology

Does God’s Mercy Cancel Out His Justice?

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

Christians claim that God is both merciful and that he is just, but how can both of these be true?  Doesn’t mercy cancel justice, or justice cancel mercy?

Thomas Aquinas, one of the greatest church fathers, addressed this very issue in his monumental work, Summa Theologica.  Thomas’s approach in Summa Theologica was to present an objection, and then answer the objection.  Here is the objection:

Further, mercy is a relaxation of justice. But God cannot remit what appertains to His justice. For it is said (2 Tim. 2:13): If we believe not, He continueth faithful: He cannot deny Himself. But He would deny Himself, as a gloss says, if He should deny His words. Therefore mercy is not becoming to God.

In other words, God is just and God cannot deny himself.  If God is just, and mercy is a relaxation of justice, then God cannot be merciful.  How does Thomas answer this objection?

God acts mercifully, not indeed by going against His justice, but by doing something more than justice; thus a man who pays another two hundred pieces of money, though owing him only one hundred, does nothing against justice, but acts liberally or mercifully. The case is the same with one who pardons an offence committed against him, for in remitting it he may be said to bestow a gift. Hence the Apostle calls remission a forgiving: “Forgive one another, as Christ has forgiven you” (Eph. 4:32). Hence it is clear that mercy does not destroy justice, but in a sense is the fulness thereof. And thus it is said: “Mercy exalteth itself above judgment” (Jas. 2:13).

Philosopher Peter Kreeft, commenting on Thomas’s words in his A Summa of the Summa, adds that

Mercy is expressed in forgiveness.  In the word “forgive” is the word “give.”  For forgiveness is not primarily an attitude or feeling, but a gift,  remitting of debt, and therefore it costs the giver something.  God’s forgiveness of human sin cost him dearly on Calvary.  Both justice and mercy were satisfied there.

Further building on the interaction of mercy and justice, Kreeft explains that

mercy, as a property of love, is more primordial than justice.  Justice [as God applies it to mankind] is finite, and proportioned to desert; love can be infinite.  Our very existence is due to love and generosity, not justice, for we were not even there to deserve anything, even existence, before God gave us the gift of existence.

In summary, mercy is more basic than justice, and mercy can therefore complete justice.  To be truly merciful is not to negate justice, but to fulfill it.  Nothing better illustrates this concept than what God did on the cross for mankind.

Philosophy, Theology

Who Is God? Part 2

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

In part 1 of this post, we looked at Edward Feser’s first 2 gradations of conceptions of God.  In this second part, we will finish looking at the last three gradations and than talk about why this is important.

Grade 3: God is not an object or substance alongside other objects or substances in the world; rather, He is pure being or existence itself, utterly distinct from the world of time, space, and things, underlying and maintaining them in being at every moment, and apart from whose ongoing conserving action they would be instantly annihilated.  The world is not an independent object in the sense of something that might carry on if God were to “go away”; it is more like the music produced by a musician, which exists only when he plays and vanishes the moment he stops.

None of the concepts we apply to things in the world, including to ourselves, apply to God in anything but an analogous sense.  Hence, for example, we may say that God is “personal” insofar as He  is not less than a person, the way an animal is less than a person.  But God is not literally “a person” in the sense of being one individual thing among others who reasons, chooses, has moral obligations, etc.  Such concepts make no sense when literally applied to God.

According to Feser, “Grade 3 is the conception of classical philosophical theology: of Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas, and other such thinkers.”  Grade 3 captures Aquinas’s doctrine of analogous language to describe God.  “God is not personal, or good, or powerful, or intelligent in the same sense in which a human being is, but He can nevertheless correctly be described in these terms if they are understood analogously.”

Grade 4: God as understood by someone who has had a mystical experience of the sort Aquinas had.

Here, Feser is referring to an experience that Aquinas reported late in life where he experienced God in a deeply profound way that made him feel like all his previous conceptions of God were totally inadequate.

Grade 5: God as [those in heaven] know him now, i.e., as known in the beatific vision attained by the blessed after death.

Feser adds that grades 4 and 5 are only attainable if “granted supernaturally by God,” while grade 3 is “about the best we can do with unaided reason.”

So where does this leave us?  I think I want to address two audiences.  First, since Grade 3 is the highest Christian conception of God without being granted a supernatural vision from God, it follows that Grade 3 is the conception that skeptics should address when they are challenging the attributes of the Christian God.  A skeptic who is constantly challenging grade 1 or grade 2 is not dealing with the best of Christian philosophy and theology; he is ducking the fight to score easy points.

Second, since Grade 3 is the highest Christian conception of God without being granted a supernatural vision from God, it follows that Grade 3 is the conception that every Christian adult should attempt to understand.  Merely stopping at grade 1 or grade 2 is an intellectual cop-out.  Grade 3 stretches human reason about as far as it can go and so it represents the apex of Christian theology.  That’s where all Christians should want to be, at the apex.

Philosophy, Theology

Who Is God? Part 1

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

Is God a bearded old man living in the sky somewhere or is he completely unknowable?  Both of these conceptions of God are held by various religious believers.  When presenting a Christian conception of God on this blog, we have striven to follow the traditional, mainstream views of the church as elucidated by Augustine, Aquinas, Anselm, and similar thinkers.  If I were a skeptic of Christianity and wanted to critique the Christian conception of God, this is the conception I would address.

Edward Feser, in his book The Last Superstition, laments that very often skeptics do not even attempt to engage the traditional conception of God, but a much simpler conception.  To help readers understand his point, he offers five gradations of conceptions of God, from simple to more complete.

Grade 1: God is literally an old man with a white beard, a kind if stern wizard-like being with very human thoughts and motivations who lives in a place called Heaven, which is like the places we know except for being very far away and impossible to get to except through magical means.

Feser notes that Grade 1 “represents a child’s conception of God, and perhaps that of some uneducated adults.”  This does not mean that Grade 1 is totally without merit.  “Some individuals, and certainly young children, find it difficult to understand God in anything but grade 1 terms, and such imagery can be more or less useful in giving them at least a rudimentary idea of Him.”

Grade 2: God doesn’t really have a bodily form, and his thoughts and motivations are in many respects very different from ours.  He is an immaterial object or substance which has existed forever, and (perhaps) pervades all space.  Still, he is, somehow, a person like we are, only vastly more intelligent, powerful, and virtuous, and in particular without our physical and moral limitations.  He made the world the way a carpenter builds a house, as an independent object that would carry on even if he were to “go away” from it, but he nevertheless may decide to intervene in its operations from time to time.

Feser explains that “Grade 2 represents the conception of some educated religious believers, of popular apologetics, and of arguments like Paley’s ‘Design argument.'”  Grade 2 is better than Grade 1 because it eliminates the “limitations inherent in physical imagery, which cannot apply to God.”

There are are three more grades to go and we will cover them in part 2 of the post.

Islam, Miracles

What Did Thomas Aquinas Have to Say about Islam?

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

Between AD 1258 and 1264, Thomas Aquinas wrote Summa contra Gentiles, a book at least partially aimed at arguing for the truth of Christianity against the falsehood of Islam.  Recall that Islam was founded and spread in the seventh century, about 600 years before Thomas wrote.

In an interesting section of book I, Thomas argues that the veracity of the miracle accounts in the Bible are supported by the successful spread of Christianity around the world.  In essence, he is saying, “How else could Christianity be so successful unless the miracle accounts were true?”  Here is Thomas in his own words:

This wonderful conversion of the world to the Christian faith is the clearest witness of the signs given in the past; so that it is not necessary that they should be further repeated, since they appear most clearly in their effect. For it would be truly more wonderful than all signs if the world had been led by simple and humble men to believe such lofty truths, to accomplish such difficult actions, and to have such high hopes. Yet it is also a fact that, even in our own time, God does not cease to work miracles through His saints for the confirmation of the faith.

Thomas points out that given the humble roots of Christianity, it would be more miraculous for the religion to have spread without miracles than with them.  The miracles of Jesus and his apostles provide a reason for the initial spread of Christianity.

Thomas then goes on to differentiate the success of Christianity with the success of Islam.  He argues that Muhammad offered no miracles to prove he was from God, and that his sole appeal was based on the carnal pleasures he offered his followers, including military power.  Here again is Thomas:

On the other hand, those who founded sects committed to erroneous doctrines proceeded in a way that is opposite to this, The point is clear in the case of Muhammad. He seduced the people by promises of carnal pleasure to which the concupiscence of the flesh goads us. His teaching also contained precepts that were in conformity with his promises, and he gave free rein to carnal pleasure. In all this, as is not unexpected, he was obeyed by carnal men. As for proofs of the truth of his doctrine, he brought forward only such as could be grasped by the natural ability of anyone with a very modest wisdom. Indeed, the truths that he taught he mingled with many fables and with doctrines of the greatest falsity. He did not bring forth any signs produced in a supernatural way, which alone fittingly gives witness to divine inspiration; for a visible action that can be only divine reveals an invisibly inspired teacher of truth.

On the contrary, Muhammad said that he was sent in the power of his arms—which are signs not lacking even to robbers and tyrants. What is more, no wise men, men trained in things divine and human, believed in him from the beginning, Those who believed in him were brutal men and desert wanderers, utterly ignorant of all divine teaching, through whose numbers Muhammad forced others to become his followers by the violence of his arms.

Thomas makes some important distinctions between Islam and Christianity based on their respective beginnings.  It is paramount for all of us to understand these differences as we increasingly dialogue with the world about Islam.