Ep. 378: Aquinas on God and Mind (Part One)

0:07 Mark: You're listening to Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys who at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 378 is something like, how does humanity fit into the universe? We read selections mostly from Thomas Aquinas's Summa theologica, written around 1268, as presented in Oxford's Thomas Aquinas Selected Philosophical Writings, compiled by by Timothy McDermott in 1993. For more information about the text and the podcast, please see partiallyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer, just a fool saying stuff in my heart. In Madison, Wisconsin, this is Seth Paskin,

0:45 Seth: compelled by reason's violence.

0:47 Wes: In Austin, Texas, this is Wes Alwan trying to make my nouns adequate to God. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, this is Dylan Casey

0:55 Dylan: being transformed by love rather than merely assimilated by knowledge. In Madison, Wisconsin.

1:00 Mark: This is one of the most influential important philosophers ever in your top 20 overall philosophers. And yet many years it took us to. We've done some of this before. In fact, I thought maybe we had done an argument for the existence of God episode, and I thought maybe we would exclude that from here, but instead we're leading off with that, that there was, I think we did like two pages of him before and at least we're getting the context now. This is a very interesting presentation, right, that some of it is from the Summa, some of it is from things he wrote before it, some of it's after it.

But every sing of these little chapters has a uniform presentation as here is a question or maybe a question with some sub questions and then based often on like, well, Aristotle says this or Boethius says that, but this other authority says something different. How do we reconcile these? And using his old brain to figure it out. So this time we're going to do some metaphysics stuff. We're going to do arguments, the existence of God, we're going to do can we describe God, Right, the negative theology issue.

2:04 Seth: And.

2:04 Mark: And then we'll do some stuff about human psychology, free will, mind and feelings. And then we're going to have a whole second episode that's already planned in which we do his ethics.

2:14 Wes: And just to say something about the structure of this mark that you were mentioning, this comes out of classroom practice. So he'll start out with a question and then he'll give the assertion of the opposite, basically of what he's ultimately going to argue for. And apparently these represent the types of objections that he's collected from his experience in the classroom. So arguing. Basically getting students to argue the opposite and then to rebut that. So it's not just artificial. It does seem like a weird structure because he's arguing against.

He starts out contradicting the thing that he wants to say, and then he has this. But against that, this very brief contradiction of the thesis that he's going to argue against. And then a longer reply. And then you get these bullet points, you know, you get these numbered points. Well, I think the editor has numbered them. But anyway, that respond precisely to the initial argument that he's trying to rebut, which seems a little bit redundant. So what I suggest we do is we should probably start with the reply because it. It makes more sense, and then join the initial negative argument with the rebuttal to it that comes at the end.

Do you know what I'm saying?

3:24 Mark: I guess I hadn't noticed that he was always starting out with a thing that he was ultimately going to argue against because it seems like where he ends up is usually some kind of reasonable synthesis that, okay, I understand why you said why somebody is saying this thing and why somebody is saying the other thing, you know, so let's retain some of the logic of the objection in the first place as opposed to merely smacking it down. But I just thought it was sort of inconsistent between the many questions we read that it was not.

3:51 Wes: I didn't take it that way. And if you. The hence part.

3:54 Mark: Yeah, the conclusion.

3:55 Wes: So can God's existence be made evident? Seems it can, but he's going to argue. Of course it can be made evident, which is to say it can be proved. But the argument that it can't. Right. There's three little points to that. And then in the hand section, those three points line up exactly with the three points in the first argument. So those three points in the hand section are always direct rebuttals to the three points that begin, you know, to the. Whatever number of points begin the argument. And if you join those up, I think, yeah, for the most part, I don't think he's doing a synthesis, but we could figure that out and see what's going on.

4:31 Mark: So unlike Cioran, he seems like it's going to be very formulaic, very mathematical. What did you guys think? Was this fun? Was this delightfully clear or was this painful?

4:41 Seth: Painful? It was clear. But it's like, well, here's a proposition about which Seth cares nothing, and here's what Aristotle had to say about it. So this is why we answer it this way. It Just, it wasn't interesting to me. But it's as good as. It's good philosophy for the time. It just. It feels. It's very religious, it's very medieval, and I don't find that interesting.

5:04 Wes: I think it's much more broader than the religious. So it helps to replace God. This is why the word absolute turns out to be so, so useful. You could just think of God as the ultimate reality. So when he's talking about, can we use words for God? I mean, it's hard not to think about. Okay, yeah. Well, how do we. How are we talking about underlying reality? Even if we're doing science, what does it mean to call things atoms or subatomic particles? In what way do we know them? So you could ask these same questions of any underlying reality or the things in themselves.

Really, you see a lot in here that early modern philosophy comes out, comes directly from, including in especially Descartes. And so when I read this first at St. John's I thought it was really boring this time. I did not. I thought it was really quite elucidating because of the way it joins so neatly into the early modern tradition, which is often just depicted, oh, Descartes just came along and smashed Aristotle, and that's what all those guys did and smashed the medieval philosophers. But they are obviously so steeped in someone like Aquinas and responding directly to his concerns and building off his concerns.

And there's also clarity here, as you mentioned, Seth. And I think it might be partly what the translator is doing. I don't know. The introduction, I think he kind of indicates how. That he's been very active in trying to make it accessible. So it reads a bit almost like contemporary analytic philosophy, which is quite surprising. So for better or for worse, there's the dryness of that. But he's a little bit more clear than Cioran.

6:37 Seth: Yeah. So let me clarify, just because I don't want it to sound like I'm not interested in philosophical topics. It's the constant appeal to authority. So it's like, well, Jerome says this. So we're going to take what, this one sentence from Jerome, and. And that's going to be, you know, the thing upon which we. Which we argue. So it's. This is not like an edifice of reason. It's more like a deduction from authority. And so, yes, that's. Some of the topics are interesting. But, you know, he's. He's making the argument from within a structure.

7:14 Wes: I don't think so in the. But against that, he Appeals to authority. So there's like there is a mixture of scripture in this and some of the appeals to scripture and appeals to other authorities like Aristotle. But his arguments aren't built off authority. The appeals to authority are in the initial section that he wants to argue against. And then they come up in the. But against that, which is just this very brief. Well, I can find an authority who contradicts your authority. And then in the reply section, it's just pure argument. There's no appeal to authority.

7:46 Dylan: Yeah, I kind of took that to be sort of just the structure of the way in which the rhetoric of it. And it wasn't meant to. Well, you could have a long discussion about how strictly deductive it was. Right. For me, I find it sort of so. So in terms of reading it, the structure, it works okay. I have a hard time not having everything that I'm reading come to me in the voice of Vizzini from the Princess Bride because it so calls out to be made fun of in just the way that Descartes of course, makes fun of the scholastics in the way in which they do things.

And what Wes just referred to about, you know, Descartes comes along and smashes all of them. Of course, the way he speaks of that is he probably believed it himself. That's the way I've always read Descartes. But that his contempt for scholasticism belied the fact that someone like Aquinas had done a lot of work that he was also standing on. I think, as Wes points out, I think it's worth working your way through and seeing the broader picture. I would say that when I read it and then reading a little bit about him, I'm not sure at all that Aquinas in any self conscious way thought of himself as being sort of getting beyond or doing anything more than clarifying a Christian God.

I mean, that's just sort of just a personal judgment. But it feels wrong to interpret him as something that is not actually understanding in his own mind and heart what God truly is.

9:26 Wes: Well, he wrote on. The guy wrote on average a thousand words a day. And there are millions of words. And there's stuff about psychology and the passions and this, you know, it's just. And he's concerned even in the reading we read today, like many medieval philosophers, he's concerned with philosophy of language. So yeah, I think overall it's much bigger than theology and I do think it's actually quite brilliant. I think he gets a bad rap and maybe because of this kind of alien presentation, it Is true. I get Stockholm syndrome for every reading. So then I have to defend it. So you have to take my words with a grain of salt.

10:01 Dylan: But no, it's true also. I mean, he of course is St. Thomas Aquinas. Right. I'm actually going to, I will probably visit his grave when I'm going to Toulouse. And it turns out his grave is in Toulouse.

10:13 Mark: Let's get into the first question. I think this will. So we've presented in a past episode here are sort of the four whatever arguments for the existence of God that he runs through. But we get a little context here because so before we even get to the arguments for the existence of God, like, is an argument possible? Is an argument necessary? So the first question is it self evidently that God exists? Which this might show you that I had a hard time. And maybe this is what Seth and Dylan are objecting to. Not seeing this as so far a tradition that is so far up its own ass that it does not, you know, that it sort of does not.

Like, why would we, why would we even think that it is self evident that God exists? Well, because if you are living and breathing religion in a society that lives and breathes religion, then you might like, of course, like just look, look at the sun, right? We ran into this in the laws, in Plato's laws. Like a lot of people were just like, it is just so obvious when you think of the cause of anything, right? When you think, and this is ultimately what he's gonna. One of the things he's gonna come down on. When you think of causality at all, you are thinking, well, there must be some sort of first cause.

Like that is just inherent in everything we. Every word that comes out of our mouth assumes that there is a God. So that is at least I think, the point of view from which they would.

11:35 Wes: This specific proposition is about the ontological argument. So he's going to say the cosmological argument works, the argument from causality works, but the ontological argument doesn't. That's all this section is about St. Anselm's ontological argument. He wants to say it does not work. So God is not self evident in the sense that you can just deduce him a priori from his definition that he's that than which nothing greater can be thought. And then so the question for this section is, yeah, does his rebuttal work? Is it detailed enough to work?

I mean, we know that the details of how we rebut the ontological argument come from contemporary quantifiable logic. With quantification in it. Maybe. Let's get into the detail of it. I'm getting. I'm being too vague here, but shall we briefly just say what Anselm's argument is? He alludes to it. I mean, he describes it, but he doesn't describe it in detail. So the idea is just that if you can define God as that which nothing greater can be thought, if he doesn't exist, then he's not as great as if he does exist and therefore he must exist. It just follows from the definition.

And that's what it means for God to be self evident.

12:44 Dylan: That's the second one in his initial presentation.

12:48 Wes: Yeah. And his rebuttal is that. Look, first of all, people do not talk about God that way. That's not how they think of God. They don't think of God in this very abstract way. So that definition is just the philosopher's definition. But the second part of the rebuttal is that say, basically we would have to show something already existing that meets the definition before we can draw any conclusions from the definition. So that's a little hint that he understands the quantification aspect of this. Right. That to say to define God is that which nothing greater can be thought.

And then to try and get a conclusion out of it, you have to kind of sneak in the idea that he exists in the premise there exists an X such that is right there in the definition. It really just assumes what it wants to conclude. So if God existed and he were that which greater than nothing can be thought, then he would exist. Then he would have to exist. But if he exists in thought as that, it does not follow that he has to exist. So I think it's a successful rebuttal of the ontological argument, but it's not the most detailed type of rebuttal.

I think Kant gives a more finely textured rebuttal of this argument.

13:59 Seth: This section also has my favorite sentence that I read in reply. A self evident proposition, though always self evident in itself, is sometimes self evident to us and sometimes not. That literally, and I mean literally, not figuratively, makes no sense. Sometimes something that's self evident is not self evident.

14:19 Wes: He's talking about analytic propositions. Yeah, as is the subject in the predicate. So there can be such a thing as an analytic proposition that I personally do not understand it to be analytic. I think many of my logic students in college were in that position trying to do proofs.

14:37 Seth: I understood the intent of the sentence, but. And maybe it's the translation, maybe it's Saying sometimes things that are self evident are not self evident. That's what it sounds like to me, like the whole notion, self evident.

14:50 Dylan: But that's exactly what it says. And in this way it just makes me think a ton of Aristotle. There's all kinds of Aristotle that reads like this, where the opening sense of the paragraph amounts to. Sometimes it seems like things are this way and sometimes it seems like things are that way. And that's just a way of saying, we're going to talk about this for the next. For the rest of the paragraph. We're going to unpack what it means for it to be this way and it means for it to be that way. Just sort of. It's kind of, to me, a kind of awkward, if only because it's so plainly factual about what we're going to talk about.

15:25 Wes: For the next paragraph, he's arguing against someone, right, who says that God must be self evident. And the third argument for that is that truth is self evident, and to deny that admits it, right? It's a variation of the law of non contradiction, and God is truth in himself. So if God is truth itself, then doesn't the law of non contradiction apply to him? That's the clever little argument that his interlocutor locutor has come up with. And what Aquinas is trying to do here is he's trying to tease apart the epistemological from the ontological and say that we can be in this certain epistemological position and not have it have ontological consequences.

Just like with Saint Anselm's. Just like with his refutation of Saint Anselm's argument, we don't get ontological conclusions in these cases out of our epistemological positions. Just because we think of God as a certain way doesn't mean he exists. And just because we don't know an analytic proposition to be such doesn't mean that it isn't such. In any case, that God exists doesn't turn out to be something that is self evident to us, whatever it is in itself. So God can be truth without it automatically being a kind of necessary truth that we're aware of as following analytically.

16:55 Mark: So I gave the intro question to this episode is how does humanity fit into the universe? Rather than saying, well, there are some distinct questions, and they're given by. This whole reading is made up of distinct questions. I could have just listed those because I think the presentation here is not just, well, you've all heard Anselm's argument, of course, we all believe God exists, but I think that particular one is a bad argument. Here's a better argument by presenting it is itself evident that God exists. It's about. And this carries through the remaining questions that we're going to consider here.

It's about our relationship to the divine, that we are somehow implanted with the idea that God exists. But he ends up concluding that the awareness that God exists is implanted in us by nature in no clear or specific way. So you might think that it was implanted by just so this is very much relevant to Plato's meno problem. Just whenever we have any sort of. We can just a priori determine truths of reason. What does that mean? Does that mean everybody knows them? Clearly everybody doesn't know math. You know, the slave how Plato is not really successful in showing at least the.

Unless you really prompt the slave boy, he can't give you the mathematical thing. So it is, I think going through this exercise of. But including. I don't think Aquinas seriously doubts that there is something that right, God is truth. He wants to. This is why I say it's a synthesis. He wants to acknowledge that yes, actually this probably is a good definition of God. That's not the way everybody thinks of God. You know, it doesn't mean the fact that this is true, that this is how we approach it and. Or this is going to be sufficient to get us over the epistemic hump to.

To fully believe.

18:40 Wes: He rebuts this by saying to the person who wants to say God is truth itself. He'll say that it's not self evident that there is a first truth. It's self evident that there are truths in general. The law of non contradiction is self evident, but it's not self evident that there is a God, that there is a first truth. He doesn't want to end up saying that God is self evident in Himself, that his subject and predicate are identical. He is his own existence. That's a section we didn't read which is very interesting, but. So at this ontological level, God's essence and existence are somehow interestingly combined.

But at an epistemological level, his existence, his essence does not imply his existence for us and the way in which God is vaguely implanted in us. This is about the phenomena. This is, you know, he's going to repeat over and over again. Something Aristotle said is that we know the phenomena. These are the things more familiar to us. And then we have to reason to the unfamiliar to essences, just as we do in Modern science, we start out with water as what we know is, you know, liquid and clear. And then we have to get to H2O. We start out, in Aquinas's case, with God, with no knowledge of God.

What we have is that the desire for happiness is what he calls the kind of imperfect awareness of God. Happiness turns out to be God. Our happiness turns out to be only in God, in the way that water turns out to be H2O. We do some investigation as rational creatures. Faith, of course, is very important as well. God falls out of happiness. Happiness is the phenomenon or the desire for happiness. Sorry, yeah, it's important to line up everything in that final. Hence with all the points that started the section, because they're just specific, they don't make much sense until you join them up with the thing that they're replying to.

20:34 Mark: So can God's existence be made evident? It is not already evident just by thinking the notion of God, you're not guaranteed that God exists, or rather you are not brought to the conclusion rationally that God exists.

20:48 Dylan: Yeah. And shouldn't we read that next question as effectively going off of the third point just before it so was paraphrased? It is self evident that truth exists in general, but not self evident that there exists a first truth, which the first truth is what he's pointing to as God. So isn't this then coming saying, well, can't we make that first truth evident?

21:15 Mark: Yes, it's not self evident.

21:17 Wes: The first section is can we prove God via Anselm? Can we prove him analytically, logically?

21:23 Dylan: This I have to stop you because I saying it's Anselm just doesn't do anything for me. I don't remember Anselm's argument. I don't think anybody knows.

21:32 Wes: I've already summarized it and that's what it's responding to. So if we can't go off the summary of that which nothing greater can be thought, that section makes absolutely no sense. That's what it's responding to. And he does summarize it in that section. He summarizes it very briefly, but that is the whole point of that section. The second one, the second section is can God's existence be made evident? Yes, via the cosmological argument, which, you know, again, if that's an unfamiliar phrase, it's just that we can reason from God's effects to his existence. Yes, God can. The existence of God can be proved according to Aquinas, just not logically, not analytically, but through effects in the same way that we would take phenomena in science and reason to some model of those phenomena.

22:22 Mark: I think the reaction that we're having, Wes, is that in a way that makes a lot of sense to you have translated the weirdness that we're seeing here into the very familiar. Oh, we know ontological argument, we know cosmological argument. So for instance, the argument by effects, that could mean quite a few things to me. That could mean the teleological argument and the design argument, or it could mean the straight cosmological argument or it could mean something more like what? And sort of Aristotelian. Think of the way that Descartes talks about.

I'm not sure if this is already ruled out by the ontological argument term, but like the fact that we see goodness in the world and then we say something must be the ultimate cause of that goodness. That's not a straight ahead cosmological argument. This is a sort of semi Platonic, like oh, there must be, there's, there's forms in the world. Well, there must be a master form that lords over those forms and there's that kind of talk. So it's not merely yes, he does talk about the chain of causes. Causes. But he talks about more than that.

23:21 Wes: Well, you'll have to show me where he does that in this section. He does it in section three. Section three is that. Sorry, the article three is the teleology section where he explicitly brings up teleology. I don't see it in Article 2, but. Well, you can show me.

23:37 Mark: Let's take a look. Right. The God exists can't be made evident. Well, somebody says it's an article of faith, it's the unseen. Moreover, the central link in a demonstration is a definition. But as John says, we can't know what God is, but only what he isn't. So we can't demonstrate that God exists. Again, these are, as you said, the initial things he's going to disprove. Moreover, if we could demonstrate God to exist, it can only be by arguing from his effects. Now God and his effects are incommensurable, he being limitless and his effects limited and the limited not being able to measure the limitless.

So since effects incommensurate with their cause can't make it evident, it doesn't seem possible to demonstrate that God exists. So right there, some of the things that we're starting with involve conceptual apparatus that are not just there is a chain of causality. Either it goes on infinitely or it doesn't. There is, you know, when we're talking about effects. The effects have to have to have some relation in character to the causes. And so you could talk about commensurability. You could talk about there has to be more reality in the cause than in the effect.

All this kind of Aristotelian stuff is soaking in here.

24:49 Wes: His argument is that they don't have to be commensurable. This is the other guy that's part three. So the third thing is that the interlocutor wants to say God is incommensurable with his effects. So we can't reason to God that way. His reply later on in the hen section is, yes, I grant you that we can't get comprehensive knowledge of God because He's a cause of those effects, but we're only worried about existence here. We can prove his existence through his effects. Yeah, that's the hence response to that particular bullet point.

25:21 Dylan: So the first three are generating the evidence that he's ultimately going to show is wrong.

25:27 Wes: Yes, every single time in the hence section. If that doesn't seem right, I encourage you to join up everything in the hence section to this first section. Because each of those things rebuts in detail. So in each case he's just going to say the same. I mean, it's a very simple section. He just wants to say we can know God through His effects and we can know him only imperfectly. But yes, we can prove his existence through his effects.

25:53 Dylan: So we just, for I don't know the simplicity, the first three, it says God is going to say there are three reasons why God's existence can't be made evident. And the first one is that God can't be seen because St. Paul says he can't be seen. The second one is that because of what Damascene says, we can't know what God is at all, but we can only know what he isn't. The only way you can get to know God is by saying what he's not. And so because you can only say what he's not, that means you can't say what he is.

26:25 Mark: Right. Because the central link in a demonstration is a definition. So that's interesting to me. Just as a. Where did that come from? Is that an Aristotelian thing? Why was that floating around? And you can try to apply it to ordinary phenomena that if you want to say, I want to prove that water exists, well, then I somehow have to know what water is and point at it and show it to you.

26:49 Dylan: Yeah. And so it amounts to saying that one says, well, God isn't self evident because we already know the only way you can talk about him is talk about what he's not. And therefore you can't talk about what he is because you don't have a definition for him.

27:04 Wes: Yeah, the central link being a definition. This is about analytics instead of being analytic. Again, so it's a syllogism. All men are mortal, Socrates is a man. Socrates is mortal. You take it really, it's a universal statement associated with a definition. And then his rebuttal to that, this idea that the central link in every demonstration is a definition, he's going to basically give what is a. What we would think of as wait. Well, wait, there's a place for causal reasoning. Not everything is just about logic. So he'll say in the Hence section, the rebuttal to this. We can argue from effects to causes. And when we do that, instead of using a definition, the effect takes the place of the definition. So we don't just try to tease out what's in the definition into some property. We look at it an effect and reason backwards to something.

28:00 Dylan: Well, it's basically science, right? That's what that one is. That one is I did an experiment and because the result of the experiment was something that's evidence for its cause, now you have the same problem. You're going to run into the same problem that you get with someone like Hume who's going to say that effects don't give you cause. Right. But that's what that one is.

28:22 Wes: I mean, we'll get the details of this in Article 3, where there's the five ways of proving God, including the fifth way, which is the teleological intelligent design way that Mark mentioned. But we'll get a whole rundown of how we might use effects to get a God. But it'll come up again thematically again and again in this, that the perfections that we see in creatures, the sorts of words that we might, that we can use for creatures, including good or the word good, are first and foremost applicable to God. And so when we see something as good, when we have that in the phenomena in a imperfect way, that's like a little clue via which we can get at God in an imperfect way.

So we know God by knowing the world. And then correlatively again, yeah, encourage people to think about this in terms of science. When we know something about the phenomena, we know something about the underlying reality. And then how does that work? How do we, you know? And we can come up with all kinds of arguments. Well, we don't know things in themselves, we just know the phenomena. The phenomena. It's all appearances. Let's be constructivists of some sort. But the Aristotelian position is that, and probably natural science as well I think is that yeah, we do know something of the underlying reality by knowing the phenomena with, for Aquinas, with God as well.

29:46 Dylan: Well, and this is the way the third one is interesting to me and it parallels the one before it that we had quoted that it's self evident that truth exists, but not self evident that there exists a first truth which would. And then this third one has to do with completeness. So, you know, the objection was that because God is bigger than anything or incommensurable. I'm just paraphrasing that is bigger that you can't know God because he's limitless and you can't know God in His completeness. And therefore you can't know that God exists because the implication there is that you need to know him in his completeness.

And the third one just basically says the evidence from the effect can make clear that the cause exists, even if you don't know everything about all the cause. And that's interesting because it makes me wonder how much of the cause as a result from the resulting effects do you need to know to be confident about the cause? And that seems to be like sort of the underlying concern. What leads you to be questioning whether or not God exists or not is because of you're navigating to some sort of knowledge about something that's incomplete. And that sounds like science again.

31:07 Mark: Yeah, Just to point out where we're going here, I think we've sort of referred to it in offhand ways. After these arguments about the existence of God, eventually we're going to. The last question is, do we have words for God? So can we even talk about. Can we. So it's ultimately, can we have knowledge which we're saying from here. I mean, you might think that it's just a. We're rationalists, we just can know. In fact, I'm not even sure how to judge that. Well, it's evident that there's truth, but it's not self evident that there is a first truth. Like I don't think Descartes would agree with that. I think Descartes would say it is self evident that there's a first truth. The very notion of truth assumes that there must be some sort of ultimate source of truth. Right. This seems a very Platonic idea.

31:47 Wes: Well, in the Meditations. Right. Think about how he gets God in the Meditations. It's a kind of a weird hybrid, right. The. It's Saint Anselm's argument, his version of that. God put the notion of God in our minds and then therefore we can talk about external objects. We can guarantee the veridicality and relationship between our representations and the external world. So he builds off that very. You know, he kind of reverts back to Anselm in a way, but he's doing something weird with it, which is more reminiscent of Aquinas. I want to say something about incommensurability.

Incommensurability means there's no common denominator. The references to the mathematics of the time and ultimately to Euclid. Right. There's a. If something can't be expressed as a ratio of integers, then there's incommensurability. So for instance, like the, the diagonal of a. Of a square. For instance, square root of 2 diagonal

32:40 Dylan: of a square is income.

32:41 Wes: Yeah. It's an irrational. You get an irrational number relative to the side of the. To the square. And so the idea with God is that someone might say, well, there's no reasoning from appearances to God as a cause because it's something like incommensurability in mathematical. In math, God is like an irrational number and you're never gonna take the sides of your square and add them up to God.

33:06 Mark: So yeah, so the, the interesting sentence for me to. There is in the middle of that. Fine. The. Hence point two. We cannot even ask what it is until we know that it exists. But rather we use the name of the. What we use the name of the thing to mean. So we cause, cause, cause. There must be a first cause. That's where we're going to go with the cosmological argument. But the incommensurability concern is that how could. Causality is something that takes place in time. We, we're familiar with it. You know, it is self evident that there is causality, but it is not self evident that there could be a first cause because we don't understand what that could mean.

We don't. That means there's an uncaused cause and there's something that just doesn't make sense in our head about that because every cause we've witnessed has a prior cause. So it is only through this a priori move of, well, there couldn't be an infinite series. And so this is what Kant says, like, well, yeah, an infant series doesn't make sense to us, but uncaused cause doesn't make sense to Us either. Neither of these solutions is definitive.

34:05 Dylan: Well, that's why it's effectively a paradox. Okay? Yeah. And that's why I use the phrase of. I glossed incommensurability as being a problem of God being bigger than it. The solution for incommensurability in mathematics is you make numbers bigger, is you take the irrationality of the inability of having a single measure based upon natural numbers and ratios of them as fractions for the sides, and that not having a common measure with the diagonal. The move is you just make numbers bigger. You add irrational numbers to numbers and you say that they're numbers.

That's what the move is. And in that way, incommensurability just means it's bigger. You need to come up with marks or the notion that the denominator is not sufficient. And that's the same problem that you have with first causes. In order to have a first cause, you have to have something that's called an unmoved mover. And it just doesn't make any sense. It's a complete paradox. You just have to say, well, that's what you have to have. You just say, well, there must be an unmoved mover, because there has to be a beginning, because how could it possibly not have a beginning?

35:12 Wes: Right.

35:13 Mark: So we don't know what it is. We can't understand it.

35:15 Wes: Let's look at the actual arguments in an Article 3, shall we? Yeah, the very famous Five Ways of Proving God. Yeah, I mean, I think, Dylan, you're right to say bigger than and then associate that with the unmoved mover, because bigger than, ultimately the God's incommensurability has to do with his infinity. And I don't know if in modern mathematics we would treat the relationship of finite things to infinity as the same way as the sides of a square to an incommensurable diagonal. But you can see the. Hey, the decimal points go to infinity, right?

The numbers after the decimal point. So anyway, the first one is. We get five here. The first is from change. They sound really redundant. And they are, I think the way to categorize these five different arguments. Change, causality, modality, properties. And then the last one is teleology. So you get really kind of. We're working off different Aristotelian categories and we're doing something that looks almost causal in each case, but it's a little bit different.

36:17 Mark: Yes, it's just that Aristotle notion of causality involves all this. Any change involves something being a potential that is actualized. So that just adds some complicated words here.

36:30 Wes: I mean the argument from change is right. So we need kind of a first unchanging changer to get change off the ground. He leaves out the changing room. Where's the changing room? There's something to change. It must be changed by something else. He does put in all that unrealized. He tries to justify that. He gives a little mini proof of why something must be changed by that in terms of unactualized potentiality. But that's like a parenthetical. The changer in most cases must be in turn be changing, be changed by something else. We can't do that forever. It'll that we have an infinite regress, that we need a first changer that isn't changed, and that's God.

37:10 Dylan: So that's the argument. Is there anything to the point that the notion that there has to be something that is unchanged is the mistake that the existence of something that is inactive in terms of the infinite regress is just the problem?

37:26 Wes: God is somehow active, right? He's the most active thing without being changing. That's another weird paradox.

37:34 Seth: Well, there's two things that are problematic about just two things that are problematic. It's that he says that anything that gets changed has to be changed by something else. So there's no such thing as kind of, I guess what you would call self caused change. The other thing is, you know, underlying this is you're going to have this notion of the eternal unchanging, you know, world of eternity and God and so forth. This proof is coming from, so to speak, the observable world. So he's trying to infer from things that are presumably demonstrable, like scientific right in the observable world.

And he's trying to get out of the observable world and get to infer to something else here. So the question is if everything has to be changed by something else, and if in the observable world nothing can change itself, which would essentially mean that you could change, it would end the chain of change. You're right. We have to avoid the objectionable conclusion that change is eternal and there has always been an only been change, then we have to presumably posit something which itself can cause change, but which is unchanged and that clearly cannot be in the observable world.

So I mean, Dylan, your point is correct about the way the move is being done, but I feel like in terms of the reasoning, what would happen if we said that things that if we didn't have the notion of the eternal chain of change like what if we said that wasn't a problem?

39:11 Mark: Like if we said that they're individual. Every time you have an individual mind. I think this is one of the possible interpretations of that. Plato's argument in the Laws about. It's not that there has to be an original unchanging change. It just there has to be some sort of possibility of a self moving self, self changing, something that can initiate change. Maybe that's just noose, maybe that's mind. Every single organism that it appears, that is the change. And so we don't need an ultimate changer. It is, in other words, it is self evident that there is a source for change, but not self evident that there is a primary originary unchanging changer.

39:48 Wes: So we understand he does try to prove that for something to change, it must be changed by something else. So if something. Right, he's not saying there's a self changing. Right. Like you could say an analogy to God being self causing. You might want to say, well, God is. Maybe God changes and he's self changing and that. And we ground the infinite regress that way. He doesn't want to ground it that way because change always comes from something else. Why? Because change actualizes a potentiality and the actualization has to be in something else.

It's like energy transfer. He even uses the example of heat, right? There's heatable wood, and you put the wood, the heat into the wood, the heat has to come from somewhere else. It would be a contradiction for the wood to be actuality and potentiality at the same time. So change is about this transition from a state of potentiality to a state of actuality. And it must be actualized from the outside. So whether you buy that, you have to go one of two routes. If you want to reject his argument. You have to accept the infinite regress, or you have to accept the idea that something might change without being changed by something else.

Those are your two routes to go to object.

40:52 Dylan: My only quibble with it is even with the firewood thing is it all depends on what you call the it. And so the notion that you have a system, that self contains all of its energy, is a standard physical system, right? In fact, we do all kinds of all the physics reasoning, all of it assumes that there's a whole for which you're taking talking about the arrangement of the components of it within. And all of the energy is contained in that. Every energy argument works that way. And so the part that I've always found kind of weird about this cosmos on the one hand, you have Newton being kind of Newtonian argument.

No action happens without some kind of external force on it is that you still have a system in which you have the woods burning in one part of the room, and there's another part of the room, the woods. Now there's no wood that's burning. Basically, you have differences. You have difference that's going on in the whole system, all of which leads to change and flow. I mean, the very currents that are going on in the ocean are this way. You have change, you have difference within the system that is leading to motion, leading to action. Our bodies are the same way.

And it's not the case that it's all just from the outside.

42:11 Mark: Well, it's. Right. It's triggered. Has to have a trigger from the outside, otherwise it would already be fulfilling its potential. So most of the action. Yes. When you have an acorn that has the potential to grow into an oak tree, most of the action there, if you want to describe it, is describing that organism that undergoes that growth. But unless you had the triggers of the light and the water and things, then it wouldn't happen. You wouldn't be able to explain what happened. So I think this is why we're saying that there has to be some sort of outside trigger. Otherwise the change would already have happened or it would be happening constantly. Right. We need something to.

42:47 Wes: Yeah, maybe the case for Dylan's sake, like a case of he can explain this to us for the sake of an atom where you have a lot of. Right. There's energy in the system and it's active. And then will it throw off an electron without some external intervention?

43:01 Dylan: Right.

43:01 Wes: Maybe for radioactive material. Does it just do that as a matter of random chance without any changer? Okay, so that's an example.

43:09 Mark: But Aristotle didn't know about that. And he doesn't. Well, it is central to his point of view that that would not happen.

43:15 Dylan: Yeah. So, I mean, one way you would do it is you would say, well, okay, so you have the universe as a box, and the universe has all of the change within it. And then you, of course, have the question, well, where did the universe come from?

43:28 Wes: And the. All the energy in it? So, yeah, the energy was.

43:31 Dylan: Where did the energy in the universe come from?

43:33 Wes: Yeah, that sounds right to me. You'd have to go back to that. Did you want to say anything about the other arguments? The causality, I think, is it's similar to the change, and it's very recogniz. We need a first cause I think

43:45 Mark: I'm concluding from so far that our second half is not going to move to philosophy of mind. We're going to keep talking. We're going to take up a full two hours or close to it with this theological stuff. Because what is interesting about this is not that it can be just reduced to the arguments that we're familiar with, but because we've actually now spent the time engaging with Aristotle and engaging with Plato's forms in a deep way, so that we're, you know, wanting to picket these little things. And I think it is. That's what actually makes Aquinas interesting to me is the fact that there are these pseudo Aristotelian things that we could use brushing up on at the very least. Or that's just a completely strange world

44:27 Wes: to us and we should get to eternity.

44:29 Mark: Yes, for sure.

44:30 Wes: I thought this is for me, kind of a bit of a nostalgia tour because of St. John's and just kind of flashing back to talking about eternity in classes. I don't know if Dylan. It's the same for Dylan, but yeah.

44:40 Mark: So I think we'll get through the eternity thing and we'll get through the do we have words for God thing, as in our second hour. And that's. That's about it.

44:48 Wes: If that.

44:48 Mark: Maybe we'll need a part three just for that. In any case, let's wrap up here. Please come back and listen to part two next week if you subscribe through our website or through Patreon, you can get that part two next in your ad free citizen feed. Either way, we are so grateful for you listening. Thanks.

45:06 Dylan: Thanks. Good night.

45:07 Seth: Thank you.

45:08 Wes: Thanks.