Thomism and Intelligent Design

Yep, there's a sense in which Aquinas was the first to speculate on the notion of a substrate universe that somehow provides the laws of physics for our universe. Existenz and The Matrix are movies playing off similar theme. It's silly, of course, to think that there has to be a substrate universe, or that any of the problems that Aquinas wants to solve can be so handily waved away by saying "things are different for god." But it was an interesting philosophical turn none the less.

Aquinas is right up there with Darwin on my list of original thinkers. Though Darwin was not, in my opinion, quite as original, he was the epitome of an excellent observer.

I think I had never even heard about Thomism before and so found this extremely interesting. But I'm a bit baffled, because I have always thought that, while this was an exceptionally eloquently put explanation, it was describing just more or less what I have thought is the essence in Theism. Just shows my almost complete lack of education in these matters - I guess.

Apropos of nothing, and I apologize for this unwarranted intrusion, I want to suggest that what we consider consciousness is actually the process of forming memories of our experience. Experiments have shown that we make decisions before we're aware of them, at least at the muscular level, and it should be clear to the casual observer that whether we're picking up our socks or answering the phone we don't think consciously finger by finger or word by word. We often surprise ourselves.

Our conscious account clearly lags by a second or so behind our actions. I'd suggest that what we experience is the formation of our memories (and note that it's trivially true that we can't recall anything which didn't undergo that process).

I've always enjoyed Tkacz's article. (It's especially amusing in his recounting the miffed sense of betrayal from the ID proponents.)

Sorry folks, The Matrix is inspired by a much older Hindu tradition of story telling, of Maya, which according to the pedestrian modern interpretation is translated as "Illusion" which it is not. Not to also forget the ancient pagan thinking that always sees the struggles of human existence as a game of sorts. Matrix-III ends with the opening line of the Brihadaranyaka Upanisad, quite possibly the most deceptively simple but maddeningly complicated work of thought ever written.

Hinduphiles are used lift off without ackowledgement. Star Wars anyone? Yoda = Yoddha or warrior in Sanskrit.

I hadn't heard of Thomism before - interesting, but I still find the author's treatment of cause and effect suspect. I suppose it depends on how you define the term, but "change" does not necessarily imply causation, and "no change" even less so (the existence of the universe not being attributed to natural change, as the author suggests).

In the natural world, there are many changes which have no apparent cause (at the QM level). But even where there is an apparent cause, thinking about causation can drive you crazy. For example, ball A hits ball B, and you surmise that ball A "caused" ball B to move. But what does that really mean? If you are not aware of any underlying physics, it means that whenever you have observed ball A hit ball B in the past, ball B moves correspondingly. In your experience, the events are 100% correlated, and that becomes a "cause" in your mind. When you learned Newton's laws, you understood that interaction in terms of forces, masses, momentum, etc. When you reduced it further, you understood that A and B were made of myriads of particles with charges, and the electrostatic repulsion "caused" B to move. Reducing it still further, you learned that there are more detailed particle interactions and carriers of force that "caused" the macro event. But no matter how far you reduce it, at the bottom of the reductive heap it seems that you always end up with two or more things that are "correlated", and since you can't dig deeper, you have no explanation as to why they are correlated - you just assume that there's a "cause" there somewhere, when there's only a correlation. You could play that game forever - reducing and explaining, but where are the ultimate causes behind all those correlations? Reductionism only explains things in terms of other things, and merely expands the detail of the original macro correlation (although in very useful ways). Eventually, you begin to wonder if anything really causes anything else at all. What does it really mean for something to "cause" something else, and how is that fundamentally different from correlation?

If this Thomist God "caused" the universe to exist, then is the existence of the universe correlated with something? (I suppose theologians would probably say his "will").

Jeff: In Thomist theology, and indeed since Augustine, there is a distinction made between primary (sometimes the same as the "final" cause) and secondary causes. The former is the raison d'etre of something, while the latter is the (what used to be called) efficient cause. The created world has God as the primary cause, no matter what the secondary causes operating within it. God did not create the universe through the operation of secondary causes.

There is another strand of thought that suggests that for God, Will and Act are the same thing. I do not know what to make of that.

Interesting. It almost seems like a language thing. The word "cause" seems to faintly imply an anthropocentric or conscious source, where as "correlation" does not. If by virtue of my free will, I decide to throw a ball, then I caused it to move. But if the ball moves as a consequence of being hit by another ball, then that is a correlation, or a secondary cause as you put it.

If all the details of the unconscious physical world around us are only correlated and not "caused" (from the bottom up), then that is consistent with top-down models of the universe - i.e. primary causes would originate from some "will", and correlated details expand as observed. Sounds wild but hey, this is metaphysics, not science.

(Sorry for the dups. I have a poor connection. Feel free to delete as desired)

The following made me crazy:

"Without order and design in nature, then, there cannot be natural science. So, the followers of Darwin who argue that evolutionary theory removes all need for positing a design in nature are inconsistent. Presumably, they make this claim on the basis of natural science which, if their claim is true, is impossible."

I don't see the the inconsistency. Order there must be otherwise we wouldn't be here to write about such matters. Whether it occurs by design or not is precisely the issue. Darwinists are right in arguing that evolutionary theory removes "all need for positing a design". Thus, from the standpoint of science, design in the sense that Takacz writes of is not ruled out but neither is it essential.

I find it annoying that believers writing about such matters can never resist the temptation to take a gratuitous slap at darwinists.

Just my guess, but I suspect that much of this animosity results from an unspoken anxiety about whether a caring divinity exists at all. Until Darwin, the idea of humanity's divine origin was unassailable. Afterwords, darwinism gave the atheists and skeptics powerful tools for assailing this belief. The net effect was to undermine the old certainties.

Theological anxiety is founded on thinking Darwin is just Epicurus in Victorian dress. They fear the notion that everything is chance. Darwin did not say anything at all like that - all variation is down to natural law, in biology, and he is making no wider claims about the nature of the universe.

Epicurus is the all purpose evil demon in theology. This is because he represents the notion that order arises without a mind underlying it. Any attempt to make out a case for unintended order in any domain immediately triggers the Epicurean Conditioned Reflex in a theologian or religious figure.

Epicurus is the all purpose evil demon in theology.

I think that's actually often true; and (with regard to this particular point) it's notable that until Newton mainstreamed design arguments, they are rarely found outside the limited context of arguing against Epicurean views of divine providence (i.e., the claim that there actually isn't any, even if there are gods). Some of the Cartesians, Malebranche in particular, have arguments that look very much like Paley-style design arguments (right down to the watch) -- but it would never have occurred to Malebranche to use them as an argument for God's existence. He's using them instead to argue that Lucretius's explanation for the order of the world is absurd.

In fairness to Tkacz, he's not presenting an argument for the inconsistency but simply summarizing the conclusions of Thomistic arguments on the subject. (To fit the actual view of Thomas Aquinas, Tkacz's use of 'design' has to be very broad. I think a flaw in his exposition here is that it's ambiguous whether the phrase "order and design" is a hendiadys or not.)

I had never heard of Thomism before either, and I find the entire idea rather intriguing. Apparently I'm not as informed on this topic as I once though. I'm really enjoying the reads about Aquinas.

It seems to me that Aristotle and Thomism are enjoying a revival of interest in the U. S. Thomism is big on the notion of natural law -- the idea that human nature is infused with an inherent and objective teleology and moral sense that's valid across all cultures and independent of religion.

Thus, because of Church-State seperation issues, the culture warriors here see natural law theory as a way of incorporating these religiously-inspired assumptions into the legal fabric without infringing on the First Amendment establishment clause.

In fairness to Tkacz, he's not presenting an argument for the inconsistency but simply summarizing the conclusions of Thomistic arguments on the subject. (To fit the actual view of Thomas Aquinas, Tkacz's use of 'design' has to be very broad. I think a flaw in his exposition here is that it's ambiguous whether the phrase "order and design" is a hendiadys or not.)

It's really hard for me to read him as generously as you do. Any way you cut it, design implies agency. If his intent was to summarize what Aquinas would have held rather than put forward his own view on evolutionists, he could have said that explicitely.

Any way you cut it, design implies agency.

This is certainly false, and could only be regarded as true by equivocation; we regularly use 'design' to indicate the organization of things. Even biologists will occasionally use it in that sense, which is perfectly neutral. I don't know if Tkacz intended it in this neutral sense; my point was that he would have to in order to match Thomas Aquinas's actual discussion.

Tkacz, however, does say explicitly that he's summarizing the Thomistic view, and multiple times in this article; for instance, what do you think "a look at the Thomistic understanding of Godâs relationship to nature" means? Three times in this one section he refers the reader to Aquinas. How much more explicit does he have to make it?

As a layman, I'm hard pressed to understand how 'design' can be used in a piece intended for lay readers without the implication of intent.

In any event, I agree that the Takacz piece is a good one that does a service by presenting a reasoned view in which religion and science are not at odds. In a publication intended for believers, that in itself is refreshing.

As I say, my annoyance is with less than generous rhetoric, which lumps all Darwinians into the enemy camp, as in the following:

A look at the Thomistic understanding of Godâs relationship to nature may even suggest a third alternative to the already well-known positions of the Darwinians and ID theorists.

To suggest that all Darwinians have the same position is a strawman characterization. It's simply rhetoric intended to placate readers by positioning Thomism as the ultimately reasonable alternative to those Darwinists, who are all atheists, or the I/D supporters, whose theology is deficient.