Pointless Niceties in Wrangling with Catholic Pedantry
Alex O’Connor’s missed opportunity in criticizing Edward Feser’s Thomistic apologetics
On his popular YouTube channel, Alex O’Connor, the young, Oxford-trained philosophical atheist discussed Thomas Aquinas’s theistic argument for an “unmoved mover,” with the Catholic apologist Edward Feser.
In doing so, O’Connor wasn’t just too polite, especially for a self-confessed fan of Christopher Hitchens. On top of that, he missed the forest for the trees.
It’s understandable why O’Connor was gracious with Feser. First, O’Connor is a British intellectual, so naturally he’s inclined to understate things. Second, he may have gotten caught up in the arguments’ technicalities because of the conversation’s flow, although he evidently prepared his objections in advance.
More importantly, even though he doesn’t work for corporate media, O’Connor’s subject to the access media’s imperative that if you want to grow your platform by attracting big-name guests, you can hardly afford to trounce and humiliate them at every opportunity. O’Connor’s goal in criticizing Feser’s defense of Thomism, then, wasn’t to annihilate Feser’s arguments, but just to provide engaging content for his audience, without going as far as to alienate his guest.
The result, though, was that O’Connor helped to normalize something daffy.
Of course, Thomists like Feser give the appearance that they’re sophisticated philosophers, as they seem to delve into the nature of reality with complicated arguments. The problem is that their discourse is archaic, so it no longer makes any sense, and Thomists use the old jargon to disguise the upshot of what they’re arguing, rather like how the King James Bible’s odd diction still mesmerizes many Christians. That’s how the Church’s mystique works.
Aquinas’s First Way
The Thomistic argument in question, which Feser defends in his book Five Proofs of the Existence of God, is known as Aquinas’s First Way. This argument just restates Aristotle’s argument for a first cause of everything, so it depends on Aristotle’s metaphysics of potentiality and actuality.
In a nutshell, Feser’s formulation of Aquinas’s argument is that the change of anything requires a causal explanation, and nothing in nature is such that it can be the full cause of its changes. On the contrary, everything in nature has some potential that must be actualized by something else. A hierarchy of such natural causal explanations can’t go on forever but must bottom out in the positing of a fully actualized being, a perfectly independent, uncaused causer that initiates all those natural changes. And that ultimate causer is God.
Mind you, it takes Feser over thirty minutes just to state this argument, so encased it is in Aristotle’s and Aquinas’s archaic vocabularies that are alien to modern ears. Thus, Feser needs to clarify the difference between metaphysical potentiality and actuality, temporal and hierarchical series, primary and secondary (independent and dependent) causes, and so on.
For the remainder of the podcast, spanning another hour, O’Connor poses four technical, gotcha-style objections to the argument, to which Feser replies. For instance, O’Connor says that if potentials are real, there can be actual rather than just potential infinities, even though actual infinities are supposed to be paradoxical.
Moreover, says O’Connor, there can be no purely actual thing like God since God would need the potential, at least, to remain God.
Now, I’m not suggesting there’s nothing of value in those objections, but they represent a lost opportunity and they’re likely counterproductive. As I said, they normalize Thomism by making the technicalities of these theistic arguments seem important.
The Thomist’s archaic epistemology
The root of the problem with Thomistic Christianity is rather epistemological. In defending the argument, for instance, Feser is often led to say that if we want an “ultimate” explanation of change, we must follow Aquinas’s argument and posit God as an uncaused causer.
But why trust such an explanation that emerges from someone who’s sitting on a sofa? Why trust such a priori, deductive reasoning about empirical matters? Modern philosophers clarified the nature of these sorts of arguments. Immanuel Kant, for example, distinguished between synthetic and analytic a priori statements. The former would amount to necessary metaphysical truths about reality, while the latter would be mere stipulations or analyses of concepts that have more to do with our priorities in organizing our knowledge than with how the nonhuman world works.
What Thomists like Feser presuppose in defending Aquinas’s First Way, long after it’s been discredited by a host of modern philosophers, is that we can reason our way into discovering synthetic a priori truths, as in ultimate truths of reality that we don’t need to confirm empirically by observing how things are. Yet that very presumption became extremely dubious after the Scientific Revolution.
For one thing, this faith in metaphysical speculation seems to beg the question against atheism. Why trust in the adequacy of human reasoning to uncover the nature of reality unless the two were miraculously harmonious? Maybe we can understand reality just by sitting and thinking about it because God gave us this ability to reason so we could achieve that goal, and we’re made in God’s image.
Yet science has shown that the evolution of our species is largely accidental so that any such anthropocentric presumption is likely mistaken as a matter of fact. Our rational powers evolved to enable us to make sense of practical, terrestrial matters, not cosmological ones. More importantly, as I said, this human-centered presumption would be question-begging in this context since it would make the First Way logically circular.
However, if the theist doesn’t assume that human reason came from God, in trying to argue for God’s existence, why adopt such an archaically optimistic view of our rational capacities? This traditionalism is just as outdated as the Aristotelian and Thomistic intuitions.
Concepts like “potential,” “actual,” “independent,” and “cause” are all merely intuitive. The real technical discussion of natural changes would be scientific and would happen within an artificial, mathematical language. Again, the epistemological question would arise: Why trust that our home-grown intuitions are adequate to the task of understanding the nature of all reality?
Talk of what’s potential or actual or of what’s independent or dependent is part of ordinary, folk reasoning. These conceptions make sense of our daily experience, but who says the rest of the universe must conform to that experience? Hasn’t science shown, on the contrary, that the universe is inhuman in many respects?
What does a black hole have to do with our causal intuitions, or with our prejudgments about what’s possible or actual? Or what does the universe’s monstrous scale in space and time have to do with the scope of daily human experience? What do quantum phenomena have to do with the traditionalist’s causal presuppositions?
The whole Thomistic defense of Christianity is wrongheaded, and the wrongness in question lies in its conservatism. These “proofs” of God’s existence are anti-modern, in that they’re at odds with the naturalistic upshot of science and with the liberal’s secular ethos. But the proofs’ archaic status is concealed by the seeming technical sophistication of the arguments’ formulations.
O’Connor, therefore, comes across as having been tricked into taking the Thomistic arguments for theism too seriously. He’s like someone who’s unsure about wanting to buy a car, but who walks onto a used car lot and becomes trapped by the pressure to buy one, having succumbed to the tactics employed by the pushy salesman. The very atmosphere around a used car dealership amounts to a force that’s meant to open the customer’s wallet. Once you’re in that field, you’re in danger of losing your perspective because of the salesman’s tricks. But you can avoid those tricks just by steering clear of that entire area.
Similarly, Thomism is an outdated word game that’s used to disguise the grossness of the conservative Catholic’s social sentiments. One such sentiment is the Christian trust in a life plan that was laid out in ancient Judea, in the New Testament, at a time when most folks thought the Earth is flat and central to the heavens.
The conflict between the philosopher’s and the folk Christian’s gods
But O’Connor missed other, more decisive objections. He never got around to pressing the atheist’s standard point that the abstract notion of an uncaused cause is hardly the same as the Christian’s God.
Towards the end of his initial formulation of the argument, Feser himself concedes this point, although he adds that Aquinas later connected the metaphysical abstraction to Christian theology. Says Feser,
At the end of the First Way, Aquinas makes this remark, ‘And this we call “God.”’ And you might wonder why he would say that because there are all sorts of aspects of the divine nature that he hasn’t said anything about: God being all-powerful, all-good, and so on. He’s well aware of that, and he addresses those questions later on in the Summa Theologiae and elsewhere.
And later, in responding to O’Connor’s third objection, Feser elaborates on the theological side of this metaphysical abstraction, saying,
One of the implications of being purely actual is being atemporal or outside of time altogether. So, for Aquinas and the tradition I’m describing here, God is eternal not in the sense that he exists at every moment in time, but in that he transcends time altogether. So, there’s no past, present, and future for God. And if that’s the case, then there’s no literal sense to be made of the idea that he might potentially exist in the future.
But if God’s timelessness means he can’t be said to exist potentially in the future, what’s the sense of the Thomist assuring us that God exists actually in the present or at any other time? Actuality is bound up with space and time, so if God is immaterial and timeless, why affirm he’s an actual being? What’s the difference between immaterial and timeless “existence,” on the one hand, and non-existence, on the other?
More generally, these elaborations of Feser’s just pave the way for the classic contradictions between the philosopher’s “God” and the lay Christian’s God. One of the key lay theological attributes is God’s supposed living personhood. Christians call him “Father” or “King of the universe,” for example, and if those metaphors are supposed to have a basis in fact, God’s got to have a mind or a character to make sense of “his” goodness and sense of justice.
How, then, can we combine those personal attributes with the metaphysical statement that there’s no unfulfilled potential in God? What kind of person lacks the potential to change mental states, to suit different circumstances? Is God supposed to be angry, happy, and sad all at once?
In any case, it’s just as well for the Christian that Aquinas deals separately with the folk conception of a personal deity since his arguments for why we should link the uncaused cause with the heavenly father are flimsy.
Aquinas says, for instance, that “To be good belongs pre-eminently to God. For a thing is good according to its desirableness.” But that’s fallacious since it omits the possibility that we might desire what’s bad. Just because something’s popular doesn’t mean it’s good. Indeed, Aquinas is at odds here with the Christian doctrine of original sin since the latter implies that we often desire what isn’t good for us due to our corrupt nature.
Next, Aquinas says, following Aristotelian teleology,
Now everything seeks after its own perfection; and the perfection and form of an effect consist in a certain likeness to the agent, since every agent makes its like; and hence the agent itself is desirable and has the nature of good. For the very thing which is desirable in it is the participation of its likeness.
Aquinas wants to say here that everything that persists in being formed by the type of thing it is is “good” or excellent in conforming to that structure. Thus, the wettest rain, as it were, is the best rain, or the heaviest rock is the most paradigmatic instance of that type of thing. And in conforming flawlessly to the divine pattern, God is the best being of all.
But that’s just the naturalistic fallacy, which confuses the ends of processes with goods or “perfections,” based on the personification of what are potentially inanimate causes and effects. At best, natural functions are only figuratively or subjectively good, not objectively so. Just because a pattern exists doesn’t mean it’s good in any moral sense. Hence, God’s moral qualities don’t follow from Aristotelian teleology.
Aquinas is more explicit in trying out this trick when he argues that God has a will:
There is will in God, as there is intellect: since will follows upon intellect. For as natural things have actual existence by their form, so the intellect is actually intelligent by its intelligible form. Now everything has this aptitude towards its natural form, that when it has it not, it tends towards it; and when it has it, it is at rest therein. It is the same with every natural perfection, which is a natural good. This aptitude to good in things without knowledge is called natural appetite. Whence also intellectual natures have a like aptitude as apprehended through its intelligible form; so as to rest therein when possessed, and when not possessed to seek to possess it, both of which pertain to the will.
The notion of “natural appetite” is sheer personification as it posits a pseudo-will, at best, the idea being that in persisting according to a form or pattern, instances of a type “strive to achieve” what’s excellent or normal for that type. In recognizing and striving after intelligible forms, intellectual beings just have a higher class of will than, say, rain or rocks.
Of course, the personification involved in talking about “aptitudes,” “appetites,” and “possessions” just begs the question. What Aquinas misses because of his archaic understanding of the cosmic scope is that life is anomalous in nature, and willpower belongs literally to living things, and only, at best, figuratively to nonliving things. Why think, then, that a mere uncaused cause is necessarily alive and acting out of willpower or intelligence or a preference for the good?
There’s nothing like a sound argument to that effect in Aquinas’s “systematic” reasonings.
Counterproductive niceties
Finally, O’Connor missed the chance to point out that modern physics supplies nontheological stand-ins for these ultimate explanations. Instead of indulging the Thomist’s confused and outdated metaphysics, why not posit that the known universe emerged from a gravitational singularity that “exists” immaterially and timelessly in the black hole of another universe? Or why not say that all natural things emerge from the fluctuations of vacuum particles, according to quantum mechanics?
Here, you see, we’d have impersonal uncaused causes that follow from science rather than from the Bible. Why prefer the latter to the former in the twenty-first century?
What I’m suggesting here is that there’s a danger of getting lost in philosophical technicalities and missing the big picture. Should Thomistic theology still be normalized? Is Aquinas’s First Way still intellectually respectable? Those basic questions aren’t at the forefront of O’Connor’s nerdish enthusiasm for technicalities that only flatter apologists like Edward Feser.
Christopher Hitchens went for the jugular in his debates with apologists, cutting through niceties to the dire essence of theistic religion. It’s a shame that the imperative of retaining access to big-name guests degrades discussions even in independent media, by artificially inflating dubious sides of certain debates.
I actually have a lot of respect for Feser's stuff, because he was the only philosopher who could answer the question whether hydrogen and oxygen are in water or not. He said they are potentially in water, not actually. I mean, as atoms they are there, but as materials not. Hydrogen and oxygen are gaseous at room temperature, hydrogen we can burn and oxygen we can breathe. Water is fluid, cannot burn, cannot breathe, so clearly these materials are not there in an actual sense, but they are there in the potential sense because we can take them out. This was the book Aristotle's Revenge, a Thomistic take on modern problems and it is surprisingly good.
He even made a good reply to the challenges from Newtonian physics. The first problem is language. In Latin movere means to change, not to move, to move is loco movere, change place, locomotion. So Newtonian movement can be seen as an unchanging state of motion, which requires external force to change.
Look, modern philosophy practically failed. Wittgenstein destroyed analytical philosophy, Derrida destroyed continental. So our grand 500 years revolt against Aristotle is ultimately unsuccessful. We cannot really brag about modern philosophy for this reason. The problems that seemed solved ultimately turned out to be unsolved. Wittgenstein told us to shut up, Derrida deconstructed absolutely everything, which is also a way to tell us to shut up. So at this point why not re-read Aristotle.
Hylomorphic dualism is obviously true, the universe contains not only matter but also information, and information is not reducable to matter, because showing four fingers, or the pixels on the screen in the shape of 4 or IV are the same information. And information is not even simply intent or message, because DNA is also information. So information is an irreducible part of the universe.
Now what I could never figure out is how Feser connects the potential/actual to form/matter.