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

0:12 Mark: Hey. This is the Partially Examined Life, episode 378, part 2. We've been discussing the theological bits of Thomas Aquinas from his selected philosophical writings, mostly the Summa Theologica. We have been discussing arguments for the existence of God. We definitely want to get to eternity and time. And do we have words for God in this next hour? So we were through the first one of his five ways. Of his five arguments for the existence of God, page 200 in text.

0:43 Wes: So in the second one is causality. Right. So we need an uncaused cause to get causation off the ground. That's my elevator summary of that. I don't think it's. There's anything more sophisticated in that argument than that idea. Otherwise we have an infinite series. It always comes down to this problem of the infinite series thing which we've discussed. And then the next one for modality. We need to persist I'm just going to say these just for comparison's sake, not to rush us, but just we need a persistent, necessary and self necessitating being to explain contingent perishables.

Right. Contingency in this world for the property one. We need like the most superlative property, the most actualized property to be the cause of properties as we know them in their imperfect form and things in this world. So you get the general idea. You can do. You can play this causality game with any of these different categories. You can do it with change, you can do it with necessity and possibility, you can do it with properties. And then the last one is in a kind of different category because that's teleology. Intelligent design argument.

1:51 Dylan: I don't think it's actually a refutation or I certainly haven't played it out. But the thing I want to observe about the causality argument and the infinite regress, again, the way I would put it is it's saying that there's no acting on self, there's no entity that acts on itself. To me, that is also the nub of the paradox. And ultimately the flaw is the notion that existence of something requires a true entity has no inherent activity and therefore it always has to have been acted upon something. Now the solution here is that God is the only thing that can have activity of its own. That part of its intrinsic existence is activity. And to me, that is the flaw of all of these arguments is that things in. That entities in their existence don't have intrinsically activity.

2:47 Wes: Well, yeah, so this is. Did we do this in the MA. Is it MacIntyre, that episode that we did this. The necessary beings. Right. So you could, this, this is like a common argument. You could say, well, there must be a necessary being, to use the more generic phrase. But it might be a philosophical atom, it might be scientific in nature. Yes, we.

3:07 Dylan: The.

3:08 Wes: The infinite regress terminates. But why does it have to terminate in God? Why can't it just terminate in whatever the most fundamental unit of matter is or something like. Or energy or something like that? Is that what you're getting at, Dylan, or.

3:22 Seth: No, I think I hear what Dylan's saying. I was just. While you were talking, Dylan, I was looking, trying to find another section. I thought there was a place where he discusses the notion of external or outside forces versus but again, maybe this has to go back to the idea that we're talking about. He's inferring from the observable world. And if you just think in terms of like rock sitting on the ground Right. It doesn't move unless it's kicked. I think that's the model he has in mind when he talks about the idea of cause and effect or change.

Although I did get a little wrapped up in the. Went down a little modus tollens, modus ponens hole when I was reading this section. But I agree with you that there's something about. It's confusing to think that we couldn't say, well, in the observable world, I cause change in myself when I go from sitting in a chair to standing up. What's the external cause of me standing up? And I think he would have to answer. He would say something like it's mind. Right there's. Or my will or something like that. Something which is non-physical, which provides the model for the heavens creating cause in nature and so forth.

4:35 Dylan: Sure, sure.

4:36 Seth: But I think you're right to point out that it's problematic or at least requires something more than an assumption.

4:41 Wes: It's the steak that you ate that gives you the energy,

4:46 Seth: the protein powder.

4:47 Dylan: So to me, that question of things not having active properties, active activity in themselves is the problem and the counterexample that I would give. I agree with you, Seth, that what moves us physically we would often immediately move to mind. Mind is what made me move, even if the steak was the material cause. My formal cause is my mind. But the way in which this gets you get around. Do you deal with this? I mean, just in physics. Electrons have internal fundamental characteristics. They're active characteristics. An electron has the characteristic of charge that it acts out in the world and also receives action from the world. It's not an inanimate unactive entity.

5:38 Wes: Yeah, that's just part of physics.

5:39 Dylan: But to me, this distinction of whether or not entities, the true entity, the thing that most exists is something that has action is really the root cause of this whole question. And we often have the picture of the world as being something that exists, as something that is eternal, inert and just itself. That its change has to do with something acting upon it. And to me, those two things, the way out of it and the way that to me makes a ton of sense is that things have their own activity to them.

6:15 Wes: Right. And he's an Aristotelian and he understands that. Right. So organisms are paradigmatic example of that. And what's. What makes them substances, Their form causes them to be at work being themselves and all that. But forget about God for a second, because this argument to me is very intuitive. Right. We think of the word world as causal if we think of it according to a contemporary naturalistic framework, everything that we see in the world is cause. There are no miracles that don't just, you know, Unless, you know, there's something to quantum mechanics that you could say is uncaused.

I'm not sure about that. And if that's true, where does the causal series terminate? We don't have to agree that it terminates in God, but we do have to say, well, it doesn't terminate, or it does terminate in some most basic state of matter. For instance, if we're drilling down or if we're going backwards in time in a Big Bang or something else like that. And then so the question is, yeah, do we get down to something that is uncaused if we have the most basic feature of matter, that we'll call it a philosophical atom, or if we go backwards in time into the Big Bang, do we need an uncaused thing to set everything off?

Even if you don't want to call it God?

7:27 Dylan: I agree that there is. You get to a first point. But the only thing that I would say that you would end up asking is where did stuff come in the first place? And the answer could be that stuff has always been around. But the notion that the stuff didn't have its own cause, that everything else within the stuff is moving around on its own because of what the stuff is. That cause for the stuff is completely outside the stuff because everything else is contained within the stuff.

7:59 Wes: If stuff has been around forever, then it's uncaused. If everything has just been around here forever, it's not cause. And that's rather mysterious given that the way we generally think of the world is that things that it's a causal world.

8:14 Dylan: My contention is that that cause does not have any bearing on any of the other causes that are part of that universe. That's the only thing that's missing. So the thing that I'm disputing about the regression is that the notion is that that first cause has a bearing on all the other causes. And the only one that to me that would come in is its existence itself, not any of the other things. None of the activity within that stuff, that universe has any bearing is any result from the original the Big Bang. Okay. Nothing about what happened before the Big Bang has any bearing on what came after it in terms of causal chain.

9:01 Wes: Yeah, I think the way this. In our Macintyre episode, the idea is that the universe as a whole could be seen as the necessary being. But we should probably move beyond this. But go Ahead, Mark, we should identify

9:13 Mark: what your Alistair MacIntyre was after Virtue.

9:15 Wes: So I'm sure that not MacIntyre, but some M name. We did an episode, an analytic philosopher where we talked about necessary beings.

9:25 Mark: And I think we ran into something like what Dylan's talking about in our Avicenna Ibn Sina episode where he was willing to grant that chronologically time could just go back forever but you would still need. So it's this, the next argument about necessity that you would still need a necessary being, that is that to hold the whole chain. That that would be sufficient for an infinite chain, an infinite temporal chain to exist if there still had some ontological basis for it. So that was the argument. In fact, his notion of causality did not necessarily involve things being separated in time.

It was like, remember the nails caused the house, the matter itself. Right. You know, this is in turn follows with Aristotle's multivalent take on causality that you could have the material cause for something is a legitimate cause of that thing. It's just not before it in time. You can talk about the layers of composition of something being causal in this broader sense. We're also going to in the next argument, the third way based on what need not be and what must be. In other words, necessary and contingent that he's going to give the Avicenna argument there.

10:35 Wes: So the episode I'm thinking of is J.L. Mackie, the, The Miracle of Theism, arguments for and against the existence of God. And that was in 2011. Just so people don't make fun of me too much. It's 14 years ago. least I remembered something about it, even if I didn't remember the name.

10:52 Dylan: But I'm impressed.

10:53 Wes: But yeah, I think he's kind of. Yeah, Dylan's point, you know, your point was speaking to that possibility that he's. And one of his arguments against the, you know, arguments for the existence. Existence of God, which is, look, you could just say that you could grant that we need a necessary being in the sense of a being. That isn't right. The causal chain has to come to some sort of end. But you don't have to call it God and it could just be the universe as a whole and that you wouldn't say that the universe as the whole is kind of inserted into the causal chain within the universe.

Which I think was Dylan's point that there were any knock on effects from that necessity. Anyway, do we want to say anything about modality or any of these other ways of doing this? I mean the one different one is the intelligent design one. That's the fifth one. The goal driven ness exhibited in things that must be directed by some intelligence.

11:43 Mark: I mean, I guess since with the cosmological argument just went into that, do we actually think from a modern point of view that this makes sense? We should consider the. The necessary insufficient thing to be that. Right. If something could be different than it is, then it is contingent. It could exist. It seems like this goes right. In other words, it cannot change. And if something can change, then it is merely contingent that exists. There must be something that is unchanging underlying it, something that must exist to ground the contingent things.

12:16 Seth: I didn't read it. That sounds like a third version of the cause change arguments. What I thought he was saying is things can be necessary or contingent. If everything was contingent, at some point there would have had to be nothing. And that can't be. So the structure is the same where we say, well, we can't have an infinite regress. And in his case he's saying there can't be no being. If you turn this around and argued it in it from a different direction, you might say something like, because there is something, there has always had to have been something, there could never have been nothing. You know, that's kind of what this argument is saying.

12:53 Wes: I think that's right. Specifically. Yeah. Contingency requiring. Not everything can be contingent. There must be something necessary and then. But we need something that terminates the necessity chain.

13:06 Seth: Yeah, it's just that I guess you could look into the contingency and say, all right, well, if you have two things which are potential or a thing which might or might not have been, then you could say, well, for it to have been, there has to have been a cause. In which case you can make this devolve into the cause argument. But I think there is a way of reading it where he's just saying it can't just be the case that everything is totally contingent.

13:32 Wes: I mean, it does implicate causality. But it's about a specific aspect of that, I think, because. Right. He starts out saying we are talking about things generated and destroyed. And if they can be right, if things are perishable, then they need not be. And not only need they not be, they once were not. Right. So you didn't exist at one point, Seth, and you didn't have to exist. And your existence must be accounted for. But it can't just be that what precedes you is in the same. It's going to be in the same position forever. We have to get to necessity at some point.

Because as you said, Seth, you know, otherwise it could just be that there's nothing. There would be no reason for anything to exist. So it's a little bit. Yeah, I can't say that I can make full sense of it myself, but I'm sure there are modal logicians and contemporary analytic modal logicians who have written papers about this, but.

14:31 Mark: Well, I like using your strategy of de theologizing it, Wes, for this one, because at least it makes some intuitive sense to me that, for instance, if you have this crude picture of superstring theory that everything that is in the visible world is just a vibration of the string, well, at least the strings have to have been there forever. The strings could not have come into being, you know, so you have to have something metaphysically that's at rock bottom that doesn't change in order for there to be change sort of on top of it. I mean, that's because an intelligent being.

15:04 Wes: Yeah, well, it's not just that it's not changing, but it's necessary.

15:08 Mark: Yeah.

15:08 Wes: So then, yeah, modality is kind of spooky to me, so. And that's the problem. Like necessity and possibility are kind of opaque.

15:18 Seth: Yeah. What if you recast this in terms of like sort of try to talk in the language of modality. Right. So if something is contingent, there's a possibility that it exists, and there's a possibility that it doesn't exist. If everything were contingent, there is the possibility that it might not exist. Right. So in other words, there's a possible world in which if everything in the universe is contingent, meaning it could or could not exist. There is a possible world in which the universe is empty. There is nothing because it's that one possible world where all the things are contingent.

15:55 Dylan: That world doesn't exist. There doesn't exist a world in which no world exists. That's the part that I just find that that's where to me the fallacy is Right.

16:05 Wes: Well, it's a world in a possible world type of sense, a logical sense, not a physics sense.

16:11 Seth: I'm trying to give this a generous reading that doesn't turn it into the infinite regression argument. But you get the point is, you know, it's like we need something. There has to be some, otherwise we have this scary possibility.

16:22 Mark: So an alternate solution seems to be that we just say everything is necessary metaphysically, and then contingency is just an illusion of epistemology. So this is going to be Aquinas's solution when it comes to how we describe God, that it seems like if God's existence is his essence, if all of God's properties are his essence, then they should all mean the same things. When you talk about his goodness and you talk about his power, you're actually referring to the same thing. But clearly the word goodness doesn't exist, doesn't equal the word power.

So, well, it must be that. Well, we grasp him through approximations. And so we are, you know, using different notions to get up to this thing that is fundamentally unitary. And it could be the same thing that, like, I think if you have a Leibnizian version of God, God had to create. There's only one possible world, which is this one. So every single thing in it is in fact necessary. It's just from our point of view, we wouldn't see that.

17:26 Dylan: Sure.

17:26 Seth: And many people take that strategy.

17:28 Mark: And that does solve the problem in that there is at least one necessary being. All the beings, everything is one necessary being.

17:35 Wes: Does anyone want to say anything about these last two arguments before we go move on?

17:38 Mark: But some things are found to be truer, better, more excellent than others. Some comparative terms describe varying degrees of approximation of a superlative. So there is something which is truest and best and most excellent of things, and hence the most fully in being. And then he quotes Aristotle and we get into this whole theory of forms. And the fire must have been caused by the form of. Or the heat in the fire must be caused by the form of heat. So that.

18:05 Wes: Yeah, this is specifically about properties like.

18:08 Seth: Yeah, this one's not possession of.

18:11 Wes: Yeah, it's just that there must be a cause of.

18:15 Dylan: It's another infinite. It's another causality, infinite regress. I mean, you characterized all of them, the first four of them, as being flavors of the same thing. And that seems right to me.

18:27 Wes: And in this case, you know, I guess I think it. Plato might say, well, it's the forms, it doesn't have to be God, but. Right. Plato would agree that we need in most superlative, actualized uber property to explain instantiation and particulars. But God serves that purpose.

18:44 Mark: For Aquinas, this is reminiscent of the ontological argument. I understand. He says, so there is something that causes in all of the things, their being, their goodness, whatever perfections they have. So it is a causality argument. But I think it works just as well. The reason that it would be intuitively satisfying for him is the same reason that the ontological argument is satisfying to him. To just say, because there is truth. Well, there must be a First truth, because there is good, there must be a greatest good, because there is. Yeah, et cetera. So I'm just pointing out, it's interesting that this is here, given that he just rejected the ontological argument.

19:19 Wes: But the ontological argument, you get it out of the definition, right? It's analytic. And I wouldn't call this an analytic argument. Right. It's not just the definition because we, we say, oh, a property is defined as such and such. And there it's included in the idea of property that there be this uber property provider. But anyway, teleology, intelligent design, I think we've discussed that enough on this show.

19:43 Mark: Just the fact that this is so short. The fifth way is based on the guidedness of nature. Goal directed behavior is observed in all bodies in nature, even those lacking awareness. For we see their behavior hardly ever varying and practically always turning out well, which shows they truly tend to goals and not merely hit them by accident. So this does sound like the notion of telos. And every. If the acorn is. Has the blueprint, well then somebody must have written the blueprint, something like that. Nothing lacking awareness can tend to a goal, except it be directed by someone with awareness and understanding.

Arrows by archers, for example. So I thought that was the whole point of telos, is that actually you don't need something external, beckoning, saying, hey acorn, I know you want to be a tree, I'm going to make you a tree. That in fact what I was giving is the inciting incident, the light, the water, that, you know, those are not intelligent. That external thing he's saying you need on top of that an intelligent agency to account for telos. And I don't agree.

20:44 Wes: For Aristotle you need the good. I mean, for Plato you need the good. For Aristotle you need the good. But he calls it the unmoved mover. Right? The unmoved mover works by making things want to be like him, they want to be good, and that's how they get there. Teleology. Yeah. Do we need this alien?

20:59 Dylan: It's what you're yearning for.

21:00 Wes: Yeah. Our impulse is to get beyond alienation. So we don't want to think it comes from the outside. Right. The telos must be internal. But good luck with that because even the internal telos would be alienated in some sense, would be external in some sense.

21:13 Dylan: The argument that would most address this, that we've encountered recently is a version of Tomasello's presentation of evolution in that articulating natural selection as being is the result of the activity of individual things. That are directed towards things that they, quote, unquote, need, starting from, like, chemicals resulting in people.

21:38 Wes: Yeah. So I think, you know, it's. The intelligent design is. Is of course widely now widely rejected, but I can see why someone at this time would say, yeah, you think that that rabbit just showed up accidentally.

21:52 Dylan: That rabbit just came out of the hat.

21:55 Wes: That rabbit just was pulled out of a hat. Yeah. Very good.

21:57 Mark: Can I just point out these positive arguments that we've been going through are bracketed by a very cursory treatment of the problem of evil. So one of the things that he starts things off with, it seems there is no God. For if one of two mutually exclusive things were to exist unbounded, the other would be destroyed. But the word God applies some unbounded good. So if God existed, no evil would ever be encountered. Evil is, however, encountered in the world. So God does not exist. And he ignores that in the positive thing until he then jumps to the end, to the.

Hence to the conclusion. And he just gives Augustine's version. As Augustine says, since God is supremely good, he would not allow evil in any the of his works if he wasn't sufficiently almighty and good to bring good even from evil. It is therefore a mark of his unbounded goodness that God allows evil to exist and draws from them good. So I know we've had a whole episode on the problem of evil. We don't have to dwell on it here, but like, that's just such a lame response.

22:55 Seth: This reminds me of at the beginning of the last episode, Wes, when you said, like, you know, that the replies were. Or mark, maybe it was a synthesis of, you know, it's like, well, we have A and we have B. And it appears that A and B are incommensurable. But, you know, A can be taken in two ways, right? He's always got like some subtle little thing. And it reminds me, do you guys remember, I know I said this before on the podcast, but I'm gonna say it again because it made me think of it. Do you remember there was a professor there, Seung, T.K. Seung at UT, but I think he went by swing. He used to always do that. Oh, Mr. Paskin, you so smart. Can be taken two ways. He and Mackey. You remember Professor Mackey?

23:41 Mark: Not be confused with J.L. Mackie, but yes, not J.L.

23:43 Seth: Mackie.

23:44 Wes: No, not to be confused with MacIntyre.

23:46 Seth: They both went to Yale and Mackey was a little ahead of him. And he said, he told me once, he said when I met him at Yale, I thought he was a very bright undergraduate. And he says, I still think he's a very bright undergraduate. I can't believe I still remember that, but that made me laugh. Anyway, I keep thinking that this is a very pedagogical. It's sophistical in some sense, but it's also a very pedagogical. Like you guys, you know, it seems like it's this black and white situation, but in reality there's nuance to it. Like, you know, he's. This is the. What Dylan was saying about. He's just rationalizing. He's finding a way to rationalize the view and he wants to resolve the antinomies into this synthesis.

24:27 Wes: I don't agree that he's simply rationalizing, even though it seems that way. And I also don't agree that St. Augustine's argument is just ridiculous on its face. Although I do think, like, ivan's argument against St. Augustine is really one of the best. I think that's, you know, via Dostoevsky. If you parse it out, it's very good and it's very sophisticated. And it has to be sophisticated because Augustine's argument, I think, is quite sophisticated anyway. But just to give you an idea before we move on, of the way he does set up in the preamble, the second point after the evil thing is that, well, actually natural causation is enough.

So he gives us the naturalist's point of view. We only need natural causes for natural effects. And the argument against that is the teleological argument. And yes, as Dylan points out, once we have evolutionary theory, we seem to be able to explain such things without. Without teleology. Do you want to move on to eternity or.

25:26 Mark: Yes, let's do it. So just read these three sections here. Everything we've discussed in the previous hour and a half was. Was eight pages or so. Then we move to section 22, Eternity and Time, also from the Summa Theologica. And then the do we have words for God? Was the longest section, but it, luckily it is pretty redundant. So, yeah, let's. Let's talk eternity and time. We've already sort of run into this in that how could you have a first cause that is outside time, when causality seems to be a thing that happens within time? So how does that even make sense?

26:01 Wes: Yeah, so he gives us this view of eternity, which is it's not simply you sum up everything within time in a way. It's like standing outside of time and looking at it as if it were a static thing. So you could think of it as something like a film film reel. Right. Where temporality involves one frame showing up in front of the light at a time. There's successiveness, as Aquinas puts it, but from a God's eye point of view, it's just a film reel. Right. It's not one thing at a time. There's no successiveness. If you look at it from the outside, it's all there at once.

26:44 Dylan: And the film reel has parts the way in which. Just the way. But the film reel is a whole.

26:51 Wes: Yep. And this is the thing that, you know, in the. In the beginning he has an interlocutor say, well, that's this idea of it as a simultaneous whole. Boethius's definition. A simultaneous whole and complete possession of endless life. That silly. And then Aquinas is going to defend Boethius position. So he has to explain each of those things at a time. And, you know, he has interesting things to say about eternity because we could. So one of them is just that he's going to define time in terms of change and then he's going to say, well, we can get the notion of eternity from something that's free of change or invariable, which is a really interesting idea to me. We're not going to just get there without thinking of things first in terms of change.

27:38 Mark: Yeah. This made me want to read that McTaggart's essay on the unreality of time. Because part of that, what is time? Well, the only reason we know that things that there is time is because we observe change. And in fact, if our brains moved at a different speed, or maybe if our brains just paused and everything just paused, then time itself would. For, you know, the magical creatures that have not been frozen by this miraculous event would still be flowing forward, but as far as we would be concerned, time would have stopped. So it seems time is. On the one hand, something gets tied to. It's just like space, right? Is space a measure of things in space, or can space be an actual vacuum? That's the question with time. Is time just the movement of stuff? Or is time a substratum in which the things that are moving sit?

28:27 Wes: This is a very live issue in contemporary philosophy and like on new books and philosophy, I listened to an episode on people arguing about different positions on the philosophy of time, including whether do we think of the past as something that exists or doesn't exist? And that if we say the past doesn't exist, that gets very philosophically confusing. So anyway, not to get into that, but this is yeah, McTaggart. I think we'll cover that when we get to McTaggart. But it gets very interesting very quickly.

28:58 Seth: Mark, I liked how you just phrase that. How does this idea of eternity being a whole, is that the substratum piece of it as opposed to.

29:09 Mark: I mean, that's another thing. And I think it's tied with these problems that we're going to have. How do we talk about God? Because we want to say God is a whole. God is absolutely simple, but yet we have different words to describe him. Well, time itself, eternity is, I think, unless you were not already attached to this idea that God is simple, you would not have to say that eternity is simple.

29:32 Wes: So time is not, not a whole because it's successive. It's one thing after another. It's just the. The frames of the film reel.

29:41 Mark: It's just one thing after.

29:42 Wes: But the real is a whole. Yeah, so. And he says that at the end of the. The in reply section. Basically the wholeness of eternity is its lack of successiveness, its lack of these numbered parts, which you can't think of as adding up to the whole in the way maybe a parts of parts of an animal add up to whole.

30:01 Dylan: Two things about time. Time itself is actualized successively in a present instance, which is never complete. And then he goes on to talk about the simultaneous whole. Am I right to understand in this section that time is something of its own existence as opposed to the numbering of activity such that it would be an abstract, but not of its own existence?

30:27 Wes: I mean, he says in the response, so the interlocutor said, wholeness and completion are the. Well, that's not going to make a lot of sense. I think the response here, right, to say it's whole is to deny its time and to deny that it involves any temporal instantaneity. So these little moments that it's been cut up into, from our point of view, maybe the best way to think of it is like a container. And inside we only get this one piece at a time as we're being run through the projector, so to speak, which is not entirely anachronistic because it's kind of the way Leibniz thinks of this in our little monad screens in front of us where we're getting a projection.

But there's no wholeness or completion in that. All we ever have as existent, it seems like, is the present moment. Nothing else exists. The past doesn't exist, the future doesn't exist. It's just this moment. But from the outside there, eternity, the whole Thing exists.

31:27 Dylan: Yeah. And I'm remembering why I was wondering about this, because he does. On page 210 when he starts his reply, he characterizes time. He has a definition of time, which is a numbering of change. We derive our knowledge of eternity from time, which is the measure of before and after in change. For in all change there is successiveness, one part coming after another. And from our numbering antecedent and consequent parts of change, there arises the notion of time, which is simply the numberedness of before and after in change. So that helps make sense of why eternity is the whole and the time is a kind of illusion with respect to that whole.

Right. Because it is the numbering of change within it. And the notion of. And that the past and the present and the future are all in a partial rendition of the whole because it's all occurring, it's just a numbering of the change. But time, in this way, at least in this section, is that the time is completely derivative of the notion of change. Change doesn't happen in time. Time is a numbering of change.

32:43 Wes: Yeah, I mean, here's another analogy, and it's like projection again, but I'm thinking more of like the projection of. Of maps. Suppose you could map everything that's ever happened and will happen onto a static something. Static. You could project it into an image where you just get this big static structure and you could draw lines in that structure between some past event that's causally related to another event. But it. The line shows up as something geometrical within a static structure. So that's a way to project out. Yeah, successiveness.

33:16 Dylan: It'd be like taking your film strip and just putting it on the wall. Right?

33:19 Wes: Yeah, exactly.

33:20 Dylan: And then you could take an arrow in our super universe and point from one place to another and talk about them related to one another.

33:27 Wes: Yeah, But I'm thinking here not just one local series of events, but everything in the universe that's ever happened. And then you project that into a big super film strip or whatever you want to call it. You could do it in a planetarium, actually. It would be cool, like the biggest planetarium ever, because it's got to capture everything in time. But yeah, so that's another way of trying to think about how you can look at time, which involves change from the perspective of a being who is outside of change and can see it all at once as just a static structure.

34:04 Seth: Right, yeah. Another way to put that. He says this on section 2 or in the hence page 213, the present moment persistently underlies time altering state continuously. The present correspond to what corresponds to what moves, which remains in substance the same. Blah, blah, blah. Time consists in the passing of the present moment as it alters states. Eternity, however, remains unchanged in both substance and state. So it's that time differs from eternity in the sense that there is a present in time, a now. And that perspective doesn't exist in eternity because it's a whole and it's, you know, presumably for anyone who could perceive it, it's simultaneous. So I thought that's just interesting. An interesting way to kind of distinguish the two concepts, at least.

34:58 Wes: Yeah. This is a really weird idea, right, though, because he's going to compare the present moment to substance and then to everything that. And I think of the present moment here as like the light of the film projector. And then it has properties that change. Right. There's an unchanging substance underneath changing properties. And the present moment is the unchanging substance. And everything that's fed through it as things change are like prop. It's changing properties. That's a really cool analogy. I thought so.

35:28 Mark: If heaven is eternity, am I going to get to heaven and they'll be like, Mr. Torrance, you've always been in heaven. And they'll show me the picture of me in 1920 in heaven, that it'll be just like the shining. Because eternity. Yeah, you exit time. You don't just like.

35:42 Seth: Then if the present is only in time, that means the past and the future obviously are also only in time. And everything in eternity is simultaneous. Time is a book. Eternity is a painting.

35:53 Mark: I mean, it saves storage space for heaven. You know, if it's really only one thing, you don't need it.

35:58 Wes: So, yeah, past, present and future events are the properties of the current moment as substance.

36:07 Seth: Yeah. I mean, you would only be able to describe something as past or future from the perspective of the present.

36:13 Wes: Right. From inside.

36:15 Mark: All right. Our last 10 minutes or so. Do we have words for God? Passage 23. I think I've sort of. Of brought up some of the main points here, but we had a. Our Maimonides episode, which he. He does explicitly refer to Maimonides. Seth, if you recall, you and I And Dan, Danny Lobell were, you know, that it was. I wrote that song, Double Negative Theology about it, that it is. And I really find this attractive, that if. That God is incommensurate with the world that we experience. So that if you think God exists at all, you have to say that God is so much better. Even the word exists doesn't do justice. You know, existence is like things in time.

36:56 Dylan: This.

36:56 Mark: This exists because later it won't exist. But what he has is only analog, analogically, like existence. And so certainly anything that we would say about his goodness, his. His power, those are analogical at best. But Aquinas wants to argue that, no, he does not want to be a pure negative theologian. He does think that some things, like when we refer to God in a way, like God has a body and God holds you in his divine arms, like. Yes, okay, those are analogy. Those are just metaphors. But if you want to say God is good. No, he actually is good.

Not just that. The things on earth and the things above are so different that you couldn't possibly use the word good to sensibly refer to both of them. Even though he admits that, well, God has to be good in a different way. Right? We are good because we, like, do good deeds, because we have the possibility of being bad. And God doesn't have any of that.

37:52 Wes: So when we say God is like a lion, we're saying he's powerful in his doings, like a lion is. And that's an analogy. But when we say he's good, we're not just saying he's analogously good to the way my milkshake is good. In fact, I mean, we might reverse it and say when I say the milkshake is good, it's just on analogy from God. Because God. God is the thing that is principally good in a way, he wants to reverse it. So the word good apply is more applicable to God than it is to anything in this world. And what is good in this world just flows out of God.

It's an imperfect rendition of the goodness that's in God. And then when we represent him, we can't know him in Himself, and we have to represent him imperfectly. And so naturally, we do it through words that really only apply to creatures, only to things in creation. And they're not perfect. Right. They don't get at the thing in itself. They don't perfectly represent Him. But they do represent Him. They're not just simply analogies, like the lion thing.

38:55 Seth: Yeah. The problematic that he's trying to address makes more sense. Not if you say, can we use words for God, which we clearly do. But the second question he posits, which is, do any of the words we use for God express what he essentially is? And the problem here is that if you can use a word and it captures the essence of what something is, that's essentially indicating that that Thing is limited. It has a limitation in that its essence can be captured in language. And he's sort of chafing up against that concept. We don't want to say, like, we don't want to be able to say anything about God and say, yep, that's all there is to him. That pretty much sums it up.

39:34 Wes: But he does say we can say what he essentially is even though we say it imperfectly.

39:39 Seth: Well, I think the point is we can use language to point to what he essentially is.

39:45 Wes: He uses the word express. So we can express what God essentially is even though we do it imperfectly. We know him through his outpourings.

39:52 Dylan: Right.

39:53 Wes: So his aliveness is part of his substance. And what comes up later. Right. If we call him wise, he really is wise, not just by analogy, but it is very different from what we mean by wisdom in a human being. Because wisdom is just a property in a human being. And for God, it's part of his essence and his substance. Yeah, but, yeah, when we call him wise, though, we still do get at his essence.

40:19 Dylan: But what you just said is sort of the nub of the whole problem, right, Is in language, can we express an essence in the way in which we name things?

40:29 Mark: Well, we always express an essence. He has this empiricist sort of picture that we express things the way that our minds apprehend them. Them, he says, in regard to what they express. These words apply literally to God, indeed more properly to him than creatures, and so primarily to him. As regards their manner of expressing it, they don't apply literally to God, for their manner of expression is appropriate only to creatures. So this is a very strange distinction.

40:55 Wes: The manner of expression being. Yeah, the use of, say a word like wisdom or good in this deprecated type of way for finite beings. But just, yeah, we, when we name things, like we call something a human being and its definition is rational animal. We suppose, you know, from the Aristotelian point of view, we do capture the essence that way by giving such definite. Even if we don't like that particular definition.

41:21 Mark: And he uses that example of like, well, we're picking out two. We're picking out a single essence, but we're picking it out in different ways by saying rational and animal. And in fact, every identity state statements by saying, you know, this thing is a rational and it is animal. We're not literally saying, of course that rational means animal, but we are picking out the same thing in two different ways. And so we could do the same thing with God pointing at these different Properties that he has. But. But there's a problem in that he's already established that for God his qualities are his essence.

So does that raise anything? Right, We've seen a rational animal. The essence of that is both rational and animal. So is it any more difficult to say that God's essence is his power and his goodness? And to say then is it exactly comparable to say, man is rational animal, God is powerful goodness or something?

42:16 Wes: The difference is that our properties are, as Dylan pointed out, are slightly off kilter, right? So we use wise for Socrates, but wise prime for God. And wise prime is not accessible to us. What we know here on Earth is wise for Socrates, and we can only guess at wise prime. We can only kind of reason backwards to that from what we get here on Earth. So we do know him in a sense, and we do get at his essence in a sense, but we do it with these adjectives which are impoverished because we know them only by God's effects, right? The good things here, effects of God's goodness, but they're not as good as God.

42:59 Dylan: Again, you just pointed the thing that I was thinking of immediately, which is we know about causes from effects. We have access to effects and we get to causes. But these are all versions of you cannot perceive the whole and you learn about the whole by understanding or learning about the parts. It's partly epistemological and understanding and getting to what kind of beings result in the epistemological constraints that you have. You can know parts of things. You can know things in quantities of time, parts of the film strip, but we also can perceive in those effects that there's something that they are part of. They're connected in time or space or other ways to other things. And we consider those other things as somehow being the more true thing. I mean, this is the Platonic part of it.

44:00 Wes: Here's the scientific analogy, right? I want to know. I have this spherical thing in front of me, a basketball, and I say, okay, what is it really? And I say, okay, there's these little tiny spherical things inside called atoms, even though I know that's not accurate, but let's say that it is these little tiny spheres inside the big sphere and the little tiny sphere, the sphere on the micro level is a model term. It's causally inferred, and it's really on analogy to what we experience. Wise for God is a model. It's a term in your model. Wise here on Earth is a phenomenon that we are trying to model.

So they are related, but we shouldn't confuse them and say that they're one to one. And it's not to say that we don't get at the essence of things by using that model. We do in science as well. When we say H2O, we do get at the model. Even though we think about these models in terms on analogy to macro level phenomena, which we know that's not entirely accurate, but we still get at the essence.

44:57 Mark: All right, I think we should shut down. I mean, any final thoughts on what we've done so far?

45:03 Wes: Yeah, I love it, but you guys don't.

45:07 Mark: I found it kind of painful. It's like reading a legal brief or something like that. I didn't find it confusing. I actually like the name dropping. I want to know about more about Pseudo-Dionysius. I think that's the greatest name for

45:23 Wes: a commentator or as I like to call them in my notes, pd. PD Said my buddy PD Yeah, no,

45:31 Mark: I want to understand better how Aristotle gets simplified and applied. I listened to a little bit of our De Anima episode. I think that's probably good preparation if we, since we have a couple more days before we're going to talk about the psychology to try to make that transition. Because we found De Anima pretty baffling back in the day when we read it and read all the secondary sources to prop this up. It doesn't feel like in this you should have to read secondary sources. I don't know. Did you end up reading any west for what we've covered so far?

46:03 Wes: Just the Stanford article, which is really pretty simple and straightforward. I mean, it doesn't add too much, but there's some interesting context. And then, you know, around medieval philosophy, which is way more interesting than I thought it would be. And I think we should do some of these guys like Duns Scotus and all these other people, but. And then I downloaded a bunch of articles that I didn't read. Like, you know, medieval theories of causality, Medieval theories of conscience just basically went on a binge of downloading articles which I knew I was never going to have time to read, but just. It sounds really interesting. Oh, conscience. What's the medieval theory of conscience? Is it like Freud's theory in any way?

46:40 Mark: All right, so we're going to have at least two more discussions of Aquinas. At least one of them will be next. Maybe we'll take a break before the moral stuff and do some other things. We'll have to figure that out offline. We would love to know what you want us to cover. Pel@prially thinwoodlife.com comment on the blog post at partiallyexaminedlife.com or the X, the Facebook, the Instagram, many ways of reaching out to us. We would of course love you to give us a nice rating review on the itunes store, the Apple podcast or wherever you listen to this. Thanks