Quantum mechanics and consciousness - Part 7/8: Connections to Theism

7. Connections to Theism

In theology, there has long been a tension between the transcendence and the immanence of God. To avoid a deism which has only transcendence, to avoid pantheism which has only immanence, and thus to see how theism may be a coherent belief, it is necessary to give some rational account of how God may be both transcendent of and immanent in the world. One common account [12] has been to see God as the ‘Author, Sustainer, and Finisher’ of all natural processes. For thinkers ranging from Aquinas to Descartes “the action of divine conservation is construed to be an ‘extension’ of the action of divine creation”, but the means of this conservation is rarely explained further. Such accounts leave uncertain the question of exactly how, in an effective as well as in an abstract sense, the Divine is immanent in nature. They do not describe the actual relationship between the immanent Divine and the causal powers determined by physical investigation.

I suggest [13] that even the Divine and creation together can be considered two generative levels, by analogy to all the other kinds of generative levels we have seen to exist within physics, within psychology, and between physics and psychology. The Divine would be the ‘A’, the first in the sequence, as the ‘deepest underlying principle’, ‘source’, or ‘power’ that is fixed through all the subsequent changes to in created beings. This is in agreement with the fundamental concept of theism, where the Divine is the source of changes, but in itself is constant in essence. This essence or underlying power would thus be the Divine Love, and could reasonably be called the Substance of the Divine. Consciousness is therefore not the divine source itself, but an essential aspect of operations from that source. More details are in [14].

The existence, powers and changes in all finite beings follow the rule that the dispositions of an object are those generated derivatives of Divine Power that accord with what is actual about those beings. Consider two analogies. God provides life as the sun shines on the earth. The sun shining on the earth is constant, but the energy received by the earth varies by days and seasons. We know, however, that this variation is according to the earth’s distance and orientation: according to something actual about the earth, not because of variations in the sun. A second analogy is that God provides life as we are provided with food. Consider the way animals consume food in order to live. What an animal is capable of doing after eating depends on its digestive system and how it has assimilated the food. Different species will respond quite differently to the same food, according to how they are constituted. 

[12] J. Newman, Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (1870), London: University of Notre Dame Press, 1979. 
[13] I. J. Thompson, "The Consistency of Physical Law with Divine Immanence," Science & Christian Belief, vol. 5, pp. 19-36, 1993. 
[14] I. J. Thompson, Starting Science from God, Pleasanton, CA: Eagle Pearl Press, 2011. 

Previous post here.

Aristotle's and Aquinas' ideas about Substance and Form.

Something about Aristotelean-Thomist (A-T) metaphysics bothers me, and Jon Garvey reminds me of it again in a recent post.
He says above “substance” has to do (in A-T thought) with form.

To me, this is an abuse of language and of all metaphysical intuition!
Normally, we say thing is 'substance in a form', or a thing is made out of some substance and is arranged in some form. So 'substance' and 'form' are combined (metaphysically) to make a particular thing. A substance can be arranged in many possible forms, and a given form may be made out of many possible substances. But, if we specify substance and form, then we specify a thing.

But, as Jon points out, this natural way of speaking is completely up-ended in A-T language. There 'substance' and 'form' are practically identified! They are of course completely allowed to define words how they like. But, if I were starting a new metaphysics suitable for science, that is NOT how I would proceed. It is completely bizarre!

In fact, Aristotle bears some responsibility for this. He talks of things made of matter, and then 'form' as 'everything else that makes a thing what it is'. But that leave unclear how causal powers of thing are supposed to exist: since they are not matter they must be form. This conflates (in a stupid way) the ideas of 'form' as structure and 'form as causal power'.

Then Aquinas bears further responsibility. He sees the above problem. He wants to attribute causal powers to substance (a good idea, I say). But, rather than fixing Aristotle's definition of 'form', he then conflates (in a stupid way) the ideas of 'form' and 'substance'. He has no option left. But that results in the idea of a 'substantial form'. That might be ok, except (as I point out just above), any clean new metaphysics would distinguish 'substance' and 'form'. A-T is not clean in that respect.

Essence is that which makes something what it is.
Substance is that out of which something is made.
http://forums.catholic.com/showthread.php?t=812386

The format of Thomistic metaphysics then takes a somewhat dyadic structure of descending generality: (i) essence and existence, (ii) substance and accident, (iii) matter and form.
http://www.iep.utm.edu/aq-meta/ (much good Thomist presentation!)

In general, we can (must!) diverge from materialism. We can be guided by Aquinas’ insights, not to mention more general Christian insights. But that does not mean necessarily following the A-T system in all its glorious details. Instead, see my previous post for what a new kind of metaphysics could be that talks properly about substance and form.

Is God Simple?

The question of whether God is 'simple' is recently being discussed, again.

We all agree that 'God is One', and has an essential unity. The issue is whether there is any kind of internal structure to God.

The discussion started with David Bentley Hart's recent book The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss.  One reviewer summarizes Hart's view as

First, there was a consensus among ancient philosophers and theologians regarding the simplicity of God. Divine simplicity can be stated in many ways, but it basically means that God has no parts. Or you could just say that God is immaterial (since anything material can be divided). Second, this consensus was shared by nearly all the world’s oldest religions. Third, this consensus is crucial for the Christian faith. It is, in fact, the only way to make sense of God, and thus it is fundamental for everything that Christians believe and say about the divine.

This kind of view, Vincent Torley reminds us, is a theological consensus. Torley quotes the Thomist philosopher Edward Feser:

As I have indicated in earlier posts, the doctrine of divine simplicity is absolutely central to classical theism. To say that God is simple is to say that He is in no way composed of parts – neither material parts, nor metaphysical parts like form and matter, substance and accidents, or essence and existence. Divine simplicity is affirmed by such Christian, Jewish, and Muslim thinkers as Athanasius, Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas, Maimonides, Avicenna, and Averroes. It is central to the theology of pagan thinkers like Plotinus. It is the de fide teaching of the Catholic Church, affirmed at the fourth Lateran council and the first Vatican council, and the denial of which amounts to heresy. (Classical theism, September 30, 2010.)

It should be noted that not only Christians, but Jews and Muslims, have traditionally affirmed the doctrine of God’s simplicity. According to the article on Divine Simplicity in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “the roots of [the doctrine of God's] simplicity go back to the Ancient Greeks, well before its formal defense by representative thinkers of the three great monotheistic religions— Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.” It adds:

…representative thinkers of all three great monotheistic traditions recognize the doctrine of divine simplicity to be central to any credible account of a creator God’s ontological situation. Avicenna (980–1037), Averroes (1126–98), Anselm of Canterbury, Philo of Alexandria, and Moses Maimonides (1135–1204) all go out of their way to affirm the doctrine’s indispensability and systematic potential.

I [Torley] might add that the doctrine of Divine simplicity isn’t an invention of medieval theologians. It actually predates Christianity:

Christianity is in its infancy when the Jewish theologian Philo of Alexandria (c. 30 B.C.E.– 50 C.E.) observes that it is already commonly accepted to think of God as Being itself and utterly simple. Philo is drawing on philosophical accounts of a supreme unity in describing God as uncomposite and eternal.

However, is it true?

Let me quote from George Porteous's book Emanuel Swedenborg: As a Philosopher, Metaphysician, and Theologian (text here), written in 1874:

Metaphysicians, since the sixth century, have all agreed that the Divine Being "is without body, parts, or passions," that He is a divine simplicity, divine essence or unity. The assertion that God is without parts, passions, and a form, amounts to the bold and blank declaration that "there is no God." It is this doctrine of the metaphysicians that is the basis of all that extreme imbecility exhibited and generated by the school-men and book-men respecting the nature of God and the faculties of man. The only hopeless mystics have been these metaphysicians. Though they lost the play of wisdom and insight, they endeavored to retain its gravity. They clutched at the reputation of being wise on the subject of Deity, and still they profess to know nothing of Deity! They built upon denials and assertions; and, in the words of the incomparable Droll—

     ^"They knew what's what, and that's as high As metaphysic wit can fly."

To every human note of inquiry they answered—"Mum!" To the painful utterances of struggling souls—to the voice wailing after God, "O that I might find Him," these cold men of the schools replied, "The substance of all our knowledge concerning God is the knowing what he is not, rather than what he is," and more modernly expressed by Bishop Beverage, "We cannot so well apprehend what God is, as what he is not."

God is represented on the one hand as a "pure idea," and on the other as a pure divine simplicity; now, as a "luminous abyss, without bottom, without shore, without bank, without height, without depth, without laying hold of, or attaching itself to anything—pure infinity then as a "formative appetency," a "metaphysical ens," an "infinite point," "the great ether of the universe." And solemnly let us repeat it, the framers of these definitions maintain that we cannot do better, when thinking (?) of God, than to think of Him after the fashion indicated above! Think of a luminous abyss, of a bottomless, fathomless, shoreless, bankless, depthless being! Truly this is mockery to the thought.

In striking contrast to this medley of absurdities, Swedenborg comes as a liberating angel, giving us, if not the absolutely true or final views, at least such views of God as redeem the nature of the Divine from the misapprehensions of a dull, scholastic theology, and an imbecile metaphysics, and show how God in himself exists, and what attitude He maintains to man. He clearly demonstrates that a being without body, parts, or passions, is not a being at all. His reasoning on this point, though more profound and less rationalistic and materialistic than John Locke's, is substantially the same. This great and gifted English philosopher has stated that whatever "has no form and parts has no extension, and having no extension, has no duration, and thus no existence." This is the severe logic of material reasoning: but it contains a spiritual application. Apply this reasoning to the doctrines currently taught about God. If God is without body, parts, or passions, He has no existence; for, as before observed, that which has no form, extension, and no duration, has no existence—no being—is not. When we say, " Our Father who art in heaven," we are, according to the stem logic of the preceding argument, addressing a nonentity. Do not mistake us. We are not insinuating for a moment that God has material parts or passions; all we are bent on advocating is, that God is a personality—is the infinite Divine Substance—is the only real substantial Being, with parts, and affections, and form, in ever hallowed and sublime activity. And this is Swedenborg's doctrine; yet without a knowledge of his doctrine of discrete degrees, and the nature of life, influx, and form, it is impossible, in the brief space allotted to a lecture, to give you anything approaching a clear and candid view of his position. Sufficient, however, has been advanced on the nature of God, as stated by Swedenborg, to quicken thought, and suggest volumes for your meditation.

Final Causes in Theism

Jon Garvey today advocates Broadening the vision of theistic evolution:

So I suggest that not only the human race, but science itself, would be better served by taking final causation into account. 

This is almost what I am suggesting in theistic science here. We have to work out more clearly, however, what exactly we mean by final causes. Jon reminds us of the classical view that comes from Aristotle via Aquinas:

Final cause has, for the Thomistically-challenged, to do with God’s purpose for each of his creatures, and in classical theology this extended to the simplest of inanimate things. God made water to wet things, the sun to light the earth and so on, as well as imposing the form of, say, a fish, on matter in order to help populate the sea.

The problem is that this view of final causation and God's purpose can just as easily be part of deism as well as theism. Remember that in deism, God created the world for it to run by itself. God may sustain the world's existence as a whole, but is not involved in the details. In theism, by contrast, God not only creates the world, but sustains it in existence by even now enlivening each individual thing in the world (inanimate, animate, and/or human). Deism is 'hands off' or 'remote hands', whereas theism has God providing (directly or via others) the very life and loves of every creature, all the time.

In theism, final causes are not so much the plans that God may have originally had for the use of object and creatures, but are the present consequences of the loves and enlivening powers and dispositions that sustain those beings. Past and future things cannot be causes, even final causes:

1. Past ideas cannot be themselves causes. 
2. Only powers that are present can be causes.
3. Future events can never be causes.

That is, only if God is presently enlivening and causing water to wet things, can 'wetting things' be the final cause of water. Only if the sun is now being sustained by God's love to produce light, can we say that 'producing light' is the final causes of the sun. Only if fish are even now being actively sustained from the love of God, can we take the final causes of fish to be that of populating the ocean.  

God may have done things in the past that contribute to God's plan for water, the sun, or fish. But, in theism at least, those cannot be the final causes of present fish unless that plan is informing the present love that generates and sustains the fish.

What is past is now dead. Its only function is to constrain the next stages of the development of the world.  What is future does not yet exist.  Future events in a plan, even in God's plan, can never themselves be present causes: only the love (or some disposition) that has that plan in mind.

Then, we can agree with Jon Garvey, when he continues:

Who is going to do that if not theistic scientists, and theistic scientists who actually believe in final causation and let it influence their approach to their work? And what groups today are committed to such an approach? I fear it is not the likes of BioLogos, by reason of their naturalistic approach to both science and theology, nor ID or YEC folk, because of their specific sociological agendas.

But somewhere, there may exist successors to the nineteenth century characters I named in my essay – who would no doubt appear to most people, by their philosophical and theological approach, to be throwbacks to the mediaeval age. They’d be more concerned to understand nature in its relationship to God’s will than to manipulate it to our own. They’d even follow the “unscientific” quest to determine some of that will in individual cases. But by that token, they might even be of more long-term practical use to the world than science has actually been thus far.

Let's do it.

What is Mental Substance?

There has been a debate, seemingly forever, about the nature of the mind, and what it is made of. We know that it must exist, have causal powers, have or produce consciousness, and be intimately interlinked with brain function at least most of the time.

There are very many arguments that tell us that the substance of the mind cannot be material. Mental function cannot be derived from physical causality and still depend on rationality and teleology, because physical processes are formulated not to depend on reasons or purposes. Minds must therefore be non-physical, if they are indeed to depend on rationality and purpose. But 'non-material' and 'non-physical' are negative characterizations, and do not tell us what minds actually are!

Descartes postulated that minds were 'essentially rational': that rationality was the essence of mind. Just as spatial extension was the essence of matter. However, this still does not tell us the substance of mind, or what the causal powers of minds are specifically. There obviously are causal connections between mind and body, but Descartes' characterization of 'minds as rationality' does not tell us what these are.

But now we can use the basis of ideas described in my recent posts "Mental dispositions and desires" and "Are propensities the substance of things". In the first-mentioned post, mental activity was taken to consist of the operation of persistent dispositions or desires or propensities. In the second-mentioned post, persistent propensities were taken to be the substance of which a thing would be formed.

Combining these, we conclude:

mental activity is the operation of mental substances such as the persistent mental dispositions.

This is in exact analogy to the way physical things are formed of physical propensities (like gravity, electromagnetism, etc), which makes them to be physical substances. Minds are made of persistent mental dispositions. Those dispositions are the underlying motivations, loves and desires which make the person behave the way they tend to do. This claim may be summarized as:

The mental substance is Love

More precisely: mental substances are the underlying persistent loves which cause mental activities. By 'persistent', I mean at least lasting in time from one event to the next event after some discrete non-zero time interval. Maybe persistent loves last longer, such as for a whole lifetime: that remains to be investigated.

In this account, we may take consciousness to be a feature of the operation of loves and dispositions, and not that minds is made out of consciousness as if it were a substance. I argue that consciousness cannot itself be substance, on the basis of the Aristotelean ‘metaphysical grammar’ we are following. Only something dispositional like love or power can be a substance.

There is much talk in 'consciousness studies' about how the appearances of things, qualia, are missing from current physical theories. Consciousness is then claimed to necessarily exist in addition to the physical. This last step, I suggest, is a category mistake. 'Consciousness' is an operation, not a substance. It does not 'exist' in the way substances exist, as William James long ago realized.

Love has causal powers, and can make changes in physical things (as we all know!). Love always motivates from some purpose. In humans, we think it ought to be possible to link love with rationality and foresight, in such way that purposes and reasons come to have causal powers in both the mental and then in the physical realms. But exactly how these things occur has yet to investigated. 

Note finally that, though I have following an Aristotelean logic, I have arrived a position almost of the opposite of that formulated by Thomas Aquinas. Above, I take minds to be essentially some mental substances, in some forms or structure. Aquinas, however, takes minds to be the forms of things that is conjoined with potency: material potency in the case of embodied creatures. So, is mind the substance, or is it the form? 

The resolution of this conflict will be explained later in more detail, and will depend on realizing that Aquinas, by the term 'form', refers to much more than shape or structure. In fact, he takes 'form' to refer to the general/deep causal principles that makes a thing what it is: its 'substantial form'. This, in my opinion, stretches the meaning of 'form' much too far, but is what he must do without the concept of substance I have been recently describing.

Pure Act or Pure Love: which better describes God?

Here is a selection of a my own comments following Edward Feser's post Is [the] God [of classical theism] dead? I continue trying to resolve some fundamental differences with the Thomists, but it was difficult. I wanted to give them a chance to defend in their best way.

I do not here include anyone else's replies. The links are to my comments.

First the existing argument from Thomas Aquinas (emphasis added):

“God brought things into being from no preexisting subject, as from matter…
    Now, the order that obtains between act and potentiality is this: although in one and the same thing which is sometimes in potentiality and sometimes in act, the potentiality is prior to the act, which however is prior in nature to the potentiality. Nevertheless, absolutely speaking, act is necessarily prior to potentiality. This is evident from the fact that a potentiality is not actualized except by a being actually existing. But matter is only potentially existent. Therefore, God who is pure act, must be absolutely prior to matter, and consequently the cause of it. Matter, then, is not necessarily presupposed for His action.
    Also, Prime matter in some way is, for it is potentially a being. But God is the cause of everything that is…Hence, God is the cause of prime matter—in respect to which nothing [else] preexists. The divine action, therefore, requires no preexisting matter” (Summa Contra Gentiles, Book 2, Chapter 16).

If someone told you that being G was 'pure actuality', then you would think that it would be devoid of potentiality, capacity, power, and (hence) causal powers.

However, Feser claims about God that "it is precisely because He is pure actuality that He is the source of all causal (or actualizing) power." This is to repeat Aquinas' argument.

But I do not understand the inference here. There must be much more to God than 'pure actuality'. That does not seem to be a good characterization of his essence. What is missing? Can it be given a philosophical characterization (rather than by a theological accretion of attributes)?

I still have a problem, however, with the meaning of 'pure' in 'pure actuality'. (And how it is thereby supposed to refer to something essential about God.)

Normally, a 'pure A' means 'devoid of not-A'. Purely red means devoid of not red. Purely intellectual means devoid of not intellectual.

However, here, 'pure actuality' refers to something with no potentiality for changing itself, but still lots of power for changing other things. This does not seem to be a good sense of words. I am surprised that Aquinas uses it!

I agree that powers (whatever they may be) must be grounded in what exists. And that they cannot be grounded in 'pure potentiality'. From many examples, that is clearly ridiculous. I also agree that 'actuality' is practically synonymous what 'what exists'.

But then, how does the term 'pure actuality' get us close to identifying God? A god who is devoid of some potentialities (those for himself), but who is positively enthusiastic about other potentialities (those for others). Do you see the problem?

By 'potentiality' I refer to any capacity or power in onself to make a change, whether in the agent, or in another (patient).

I agree that god does not change himself. But, if he is defined as 'pure act' after Aquinas, is it possible for him to have in himself any powers to change others?

• It cannot be because 'actual' means 'exist', since ordinary existing things are not sources of powers. 
• It cannot be since god = pure actuality and god is the source, since i am asking an ontological question not a theological one. 
• It cannot be because every coming-to-be requires an actual thing to do that, because that has nothing to do with where the powers originate. 
• It cannot be because the original actual being can have no potentiality, since that directly blocks answering the question. 

I agree that a purely actual being will be devoid of all passive potencies. The question is, is it not, for the same reason, devoid of all active potencies as well?

I think of myself as a classic theist. I just think that Aquinas at various points was let done by the poor development of Aristotle's ontology (physics and metaphysics).

It you look at http://www.newadvent.org/summa/1025.htm for example, at the first section discussing whether there is power in god (my subject above!), all the crucial steps are based on ideas of 'perfection' and 'fittingly', etc. Aquinas does not have the philosophical machinery to give a robust answer, so he wings it, in order to get to the right answer. (Most of his final answers are quite good: it is the logic in the middle that is poor).

A 'normal ontology' need not badly constrain God, if the ideas in it came from God in the first place. Since much religion is to get us to listen to God, we should not be afraid to use the ideas we get. (At least, then, they would be consistent)

Now I propose a resolution of this problem, by means of

Actual powers:

How about this resolution of problem?

We take (at least for now) God to be immutable, in the sense that his essence is constant for all time. He never changes: he is famed for his constancy.
This implies that the essence as it actually exists at one time, exists as such for all times. It has NO potentiality to change himself. For these reasons, we may reasonably characterize God as 'purely actual'. Aquinas would define God as Pure Act, as our most direct description.

But we also take God as the source of all life, love, power and activity in the universe. He is essentially omnipotent. That is, it is from his own nature that God is the source of all power. But is this compatible with being purely actual?

Maybe we can resolve this by being clearer on what about God is purely actual? Some characterize God as 'love itself'.

Let us conceive of God as a 'fixed and immutable actual love'. 

Does that make sense? Does it help above? For our analysis, consider love as a specific kind of active power.

Certainly, a fixed and immutable love makes a good eternal essence for God. It makes sense for religion (find your own quotes). This love is always for others, so never changes itself: as we thought all along.

A God whose essence is love itself can then certainly give and share that love to creatures in the universe. This also makes sense for religion.

But a 'fixed actual love' is certainly not 'pure act' in the Aristotlean-Thomistic sense. Sorry about that, but tough for A-T ontology. It is a 'fixed energy source' (imagine your local star, for a metaphor). It is purely actual, with absolutely no passive powers, but is 'full' of active powers to create and share.

The one thing we should know about God

God is Love

All the theistic religions teach that God loves the believers, who are those who follow his commands and love him in return. They also teach that God is continually producing goods and trying to give them to believers and unbelievers alike. This strongly suggests that God loves them all, in the sense of desiring good for them all. This love persists whatever may have been the reason for the unbelief and, hence, whether or not the love is even accepted or reciprocated by the person. God offers a ‘covenant of love’ to all.


Love Itself


It is another step now to assert not only that ‘God loves all’ but that God is Love Itself. This is certainly not an a priori or obvious truth, and it is most explicit in Christianity (notably in 1 John 4:16).  Many now seem to have gotten the message, and the identification of God with Love is now one of the central tenets of theism. We therefore adopt 

Postulate 6  God is Love.

To say that God is Love, is to say that God’s inmost nature is to be loving, however it may initially appear to us with recalcitrant wills and limited vision. If God’s inmost nature is Love, then, because he is being itself, that being must also be Love itself. As was discussed previously, this Love that is God is not a mere emotional state of attraction or feeling good but rather a burning desire to give all of his own to be used by finite beings, for their delight for a long as possible. It is an unconditional love and is not based on feelings or emotions. God loves us all because God is love. The idea that God is Love is not traditionally recognized in philosophical theology. It was not present in Aristotle’s concept of an Unmoved Mover who kept the world in motion. Aquinas allows that ‘in God there is Love’, but makes God’s loving to be unlike ours: to be an act rather than a ‘passion of the appetitive soul’. Most systematic theology starts by defining God as the omniscient and omnipotent being, and the connection between such and a God of Love takes a while to construct. Now, however, the identification of God with Love Itself is taken as one of the primary postulates of our theism. Pope Benedict XVI published “Deus Caritas Est" (“God is Love”) in 2005, asserting in its first sentence that “these words .. express with remarkable clarity the heart of the Christian faith.”

Sadly, this cannot be emphasized enough, since it is even denied in the more recent deist and pandeist views. Love is not just a biochemical response to certain stimuli, but the underlying nature of all spiritual beings. And of God, more so.

Love and substance


We now apply an  ontological power analysis of  to the case of God. In that analysis, we saw how the underlying power or propensity of a being could be identified as the substance of that being. That analysis dealt with physical dispositions since it was based on generalizing how science analyzes causes. Once we allow that non-physical beings can exist, exactly the same logic follows for mental, spiritual and divine beings.  We therefore argue:  

1. The underlying power or propensity is the true substance of that being.
2. The underlying power or propensity of God is love.
3. Therefore, love is the true substance of God. 

This is to conclude that divine Love is the substance of God. It is the substratum in terms of which he exists and is the subject of all his properties. We are not saying that ‘God was formed out of this substance (love)’, because there was never such a forming event in the past. Rather, God is love itself and always has been. We say that we can intellectually distinguish (in God’s present being) the Love that is the basis or substance of that being.   (You may perhaps feel qualms at using the same logic for all cases including that of God, but this is justified when we follow from the previous post that we are an image of God and hence have some functional and structural similarities. More of this later.)

Then, because created objects are a kind of image of God, we can conclude that something like love is the substance of all things in the world. In a nutshell, ‘Love makes the World go Around.’ This is not to say that love is the direct mover of every natural object and the immediate instigator of every natural event. Rather that something like love does these things. For minds, the ‘something like love’ can be loves, desires and motivations that we know are significant in human life. For physics, the ‘something like love’ could be deepest principles of energy, force and propensity that keep the physical world moving. These are grand claims: that desires, propensities and energies are ‘images of love’, and that they respectively are the substance of humans as well as of all animate and inanimate objects. Fleshing out and understanding the details of these claims, especially concerning the relations between the mental and the physical, is the task of theistic science. This task, I take up in my new book "Starting Science From God".

Adapted from chapter 11 of Starting Science From God.

Can we know the nature of God?

There are several ways of describing how much we can know about God.
1. Apophatic or ‘negative theology’: We can know nothing of the true Divine nature.
2. Cataphatic or ‘positive theology’: We can know something of the nature of God.

Within the positive approach, there are two options:
2a. Our knowledge refers only by analogies
2b. Our knowledge (at least in part) does truly refer to God.



1. Apophatic Theology
One well-established religious tradition—apophatic or ‘negative theology’—that refuses to make statements about Divinity. This is the via negativa.
This is almost self-contradictory, like saying "Nothing can be known about God". Not even that statement itself!

2a. Knowledge by Analogies
There have historically been many analogies for how we might be related to the divine, and the bible is nearly full of metaphorical descriptions of divine and spiritual things.

Aquinas uses the negative approach in part when he says that common terms such as ‘life’, ‘wisdom’, even ‘existence’ can only be applied to God analogically. He combines the via negativa with an analogical account of the way we know God. According to him, God does not have wisdom but has something analogous to wisdom. We talk about love with humans and love with God, but these are not strictly the same thing. Rather, God has something that is like the love that we know. It is sufficiently like love that we do call it love, but it is strictly distinct. Terms in his theology are not univocal, but analogous. According to Aquinas, this is all that can be given.

This would make establishing a theistic science difficult. None of the terms we might want to use in our arguments actually refers properly to God under the negative or analogical traditions. I, therefore, do not follow it.

2b. Unequivocal Knowledge
Duns Scotus (1265-1308) was one opponent of Aquinas on this issue. Scotus holds, for example, that ‘being’ is a univocal notion applicable to everything that exists without restriction. This to return to the position of Parmenides, for whom being is the central concept. According to Scotus, we should be able to unequivocally describe God with terms such as being, love and wisdom. Scotus’ view has become the dominant view in later Western history, and we will need it within theistic science. That is, we should try to avoid using analogies at the most fundamental level of explanation.

So I will attempt to form a cataphatic or positive theology and one, moreover, in which we can actually describe God to some extent.

I want to start with whatever can be truly attributed to God and then use well-specified analogies and similarities to deduce what attributes can then be truthfully attributed to us. I believe we have sufficient concepts given to us via revelation that we can make statements about God that are mostly true. We do not, of course, claim to make statements about all of an infinite God. We only claim that our terms do properly refer to God and at least approximately describe the nature of God.

That should not blind us, however, to the crucial role of analogies in learning new ideas concerning nature and divinity. In fact, some analogies are so important that they link not just our ideas, but also nature and divinity themselves. We call these relations correspondences. Later I will discuss how such relations are more than analogies and how they are important descriptions of structures and dynamics within theism. And, using theistic science, we will unequivocally describe things related by such correspondences and then see why the various analogies do hold. In this way we will have the univocal language of Scotus, while simultaneously agreeing with Aquinas that particular analogies are essential to understanding the relations between divinity and created things.

Adapted from chapters 7 and 11 of Starting Science From God.

Final Causes: Needed, or Always Present?

There has been renewed blogging and forthcoming debate concerning Aristotle's Four Causes, and how they might be necessary to understand living and non-living systems in nature.

From Wikipedia, these four causes are listed at

1. A thing's material cause is the material of which it consists. (For a table, that might be wood; for a statue, that might be bronze or marble.)
2. A thing's formal cause is its form, i.e. the arrangement of that matter.
3. A thing's efficient or moving cause is "the primary source of the change or rest." An efficient cause of x can be present even if x is never actually produced and so should not be confused with a sufficient cause. (Aristotle argues that, for a table, this would be the art of table-making, which is the principle guiding its creation.)
4. A thing's final cause is its aim or purpose. That for the sake of which a thing is what it is. (For a seed, it might be an adult plant. For a sailboat, it might be sailing. For a ball at the top of a ramp, it might be coming to rest at the bottom.)

These were the causes that Aquinas took as existing universally. The early natural scientists such as Boyle and Newton thought that all this was too complicated, and that in their new 'corpuscular philosophy' they only needed material causes (namely the corpuscles) and the efficient causes (namely the energy and momentum of those particles). If asked, they would want to deny formal and final causes, since those seemed to refer to overall system properties of an object or organism, and not to its mechanical parts.

Edward Feser has recently been trying to revive the theory of all four causes, and has often claimed that the particular lack of final causes in modern physics is the source of many of its problems in understanding the nature of living organisms.

Feser says that he is encouraged in this respect by the renewed emphasis in the philosophy of physics on dispositions:

Recall first that for the Aristotelian-Thomistic (A-T) tradition, the fundamental sort of final causality that exists in nature is the “directedness” of an efficient cause toward the generation of its typical effect or range of effects. It is similar to what contemporary writers on dispositions and causal powers like C. B. Martin, John Heil, Brian Ellis, Nancy Cartwright, and George Molnar have in mind when they speak, for example, of the way dispositions are “directed toward” or “point to” their characteristic “manifestations,” or the way causal powers are “directed toward” their characteristic effects. Hence the directedness of brittle objects toward shattering, of soluble objects toward dissolving, of the phosphorus in a match head toward generating flame and heat, are instances of finality as that is understood in the A-T tradition. The A-T view is that unless we regard such “directedness” or “pointing” as immanent or inherent to the natural phenomena that exhibit such dispositions and causal powers, we have no way of making it intelligible why they have the manifestations and effects that they typically do. Causes and effects, dispositions and manifestations would become inherently “loose and separate,” so that any effect or none might follow upon any cause. Such Humean fantasies are for A-T an inevitable result of the abandonment of immanent final causes.

I have also contributed to this study of dispositions, starting with my 1988 paper "Real Dispositions in the Physical World". This and related papers are available at the website www.generativescience.org. A recent book "Philosophy of Nature and Quantum Reality" studies them further, especially concerning quantum physics.

However, and this is my main point, the case for the four Aristotelean causes in modern physics is, in various respects, both weaker and stronger than Feser makes out, especially concerning his aim to base a new understanding of living creatures using 'form-matter dualism' (hylemorphic dualism).

The stronger case for the four Aristotelean causes comes from a closer examination of physics, and also on the recognition that there is something universal about the four causes.  Boyle and later Laplace may have thought that they were getting rid of final causes, but in fact they had not. Even in the most simple corpuscular ontology -- according to which the world is made of particles like billiard balls that collide with each other -- there is still a need for final causes. That is because the corpuscles have to be 'perfectly elastic'. This 'elasticity' is exactly a disposition, of the kind that Feser was referring to in the paragraph I quoted. Elasticity is a final cause, strictly speaking. We might even say that the "corpuscles desire to maintain their original shape". Furthermore, the corpuscles have a form, namely that shape of the corpuscles. Admittedly, 'form' in Thomist philosophy has many more components than just that shape, but the shape is definitely one ingredient that explains the behavior of the bodies while interacting.   I discuss the dispositions of classical physics in Chapter 3 of my book.

The weaker case of the the four Aristotelean causes is clear when we compare mechanistic and wholistic explanations of the behavior of living organisms. There are two main options:

• Maybe the final causes are those that depend on the final causes of the microscopic parts. This is the mechanistic or reductionist explanation.  
• Or maybe the organism's final causes are more global or macroscopic aims, such as eating, growth, reproduction, or even mental desires for pleasure or satisfaction. These are the 'organismic' or 'wholistic' final causes.

In contrast to Feser's claim, we see that it is not the absence of final causes which leads to the reductionist account. Rather, it is the choice of specific final causes as the source of the observed behavior. Are the important final causes those related to the organism (and its desires) as a whole, or only those of its microscopic parts? The modern predilection is to choose the microscopic final causes. Hence the desire to read books about brain cells, neurons, and genes. It is the reason why the idea of a selfish gene has become popular.

This choice (between microscopic and macroscopic final causes) is the important choice to be made when trying to understand living creatures. We do not automatically understand them better by trying to postulate the existence of final causes, because (in fact) final causes never really went away. 

The true issues are are clearly manifest, for example, in Syphax's post "Lingering questions about hylemorphic dualism". Here we see the tension between the causes arising from the microscopic parts of an organism, and the causes relevant to the whole organism. Are both kinds of causes present, or only the microscopic causes? And if more than microscopic final causes are effective, how to we understand (for example) the laws of conservation of energy and momentum? These are the interesting questions.

We are connected with God, but we are not characters in God's novel

Continuing the previous discussion about how we have viewed, and should view, the relation between God and the world:

One view is that we are related to God as are the characters in a book to the Writer of the book.  Edward Feser, a new Aristotelean-Thomist philosopher, encourages us to use this metaphor:

On the classical theist conception of God, God is not one causal factor in the universe among others, not even an especially grand and powerful causal factor. He is not a “first” cause in the sense of being followed in a temporal series by a second cause, a third cause, a fourth cause, etc. Rather, He is “first” or primary in the sense of being the fundamental cause, the necessary precondition of there being any causality within the universe at all, just as the author of a story is the “first cause” of what happens in the story, not in the sense of generating effects in the way the characters and processes described in the story do, but rather in the sense of being the necessary precondition of there being any characters or processes in the story at all.

The same metaphor was developed at some length in the talk by physicist Stephen Barr at the 2012 Science and Faith Conference: "Can Science Inform Our Understanding of God?", the video for his talk being available on youtube. This metaphor of a Writer and his book characters has the virtue of emphasizing some of the great philosophical / ontological differences between us humans and God. God is (thereby) not just another person among us persons, or another object among the world's objects, but can be the necessary precondition for the existence of any of us persons or objects.

This Writer metaphor, however, has a serious defect, and one which I believe is fatal. This is that a writer can never love his characters in any manner which respects their freedom. And the characters can never love return love to God-as-writer in any way which gives delight to God. The ontological chasm between God and creation, having been made great, is now in fact too great to be bridged, even by love. Even God (who is love) cannot now make anyconjunction which should be of love.*

I wonder whether Thomas Aquinas has something to do with this separation. Was there something in his views which emphasizes separation rather than conjunction? I read more about Aquinas in an article by Elizabeth Johnson, for example:

One of the strengths of Aquinas's vision is the autonomy he grants to created existence through its participation in divine being. He is so convinced of the transcendent mystery of God (esse ipsum subsistens) and so clear about the sui generis way God continuously creates the world into being that he sees no threat to divinity in allowing creatures the fullest measure of agency according to their own nature. In fact, it is a measure of the creative power of God to raise up creatures who participate in divine being to such a degree that they are also creative and sustaining in their own right. A view to the contrary would diminish not only creatures but also their Creator: "to detract from the perfection of creatures is to detract from the perfection of divine power.'' (SCG 3.69.15) This is a genuinely noncompetitive view of God and the world. According to its dynamism, nearness to God and genuine creaturely autonomy grow in direct rather than inverse proportion. That is, God is not glorified by the diminishment of the creature but by the creature's flourishing in the fullness of its powers. The nature of created participation in divine being is such that it grants creatures their own integrity, without reserve.  

This participatory relationship has strong implications for the question of agency. The power of creaturely forces and agents to act and cause change in the world is a created participation in the uncreated power of the One who is pure act. Conversely, God's generous goodness and wisdom are seen especially in the creation of a world with its own innate agency.  

Admittedly her article comes from part of a polemic by the American Association for the Advancement of Science in their 'perspectives' about evolution, but I still believe what she says about Aquinas.

If so, then Aquinas has a serious problem in his theory. He wants to be "allowing creatures the fullest measure of agency according to their own nature". However, our agency requires us to have things which only God has: we need being, we need love, we need wisdom -- we need life in general. And God, in theism, is being itself, love itself, wisdom itself, and life itself. Aquinas does indeed recognize this about God: he acknowledges the 'aseity of God'. The word 'aseity' come from 'a se - ity', where 'a se' is latin for 'in itself'. But he does not acknowledge that we have to receive love, receive wisdom, receive life from God. This cannot be done arbitrarily 'at a distance', but must be done by the actions of God. And the actions of God require the presence of God. So it is certainly not the case that "nearness to God and genuine creaturely autonomy grow in direct rather than inverse proportion."

Aquinas seems to follow the traditional view of God creating the world, that is by fiat, taking literally the commands 'fiat lux: let there be light,' and so on. He, and other theologians since, have usually separated the question of how God sustains the existence of things from the question of their dynamical properties. These properties are taken to give rise to secondary causation, which is assumed to be independent of whatever primary causation there is from God.

The creation of substantial objects nevertheless involves God giving them their being (since he is being itself). There can be no power without substance nor without some kind of presence. It is impossible that God sustains merely the existences of things while at the same time remaining completely absent. In the theism of my book, the immanence of God, by which all things are sustained, is less an abstract  metaphysical principle and much more the immediate and mediate re-generation of life by continual influx from God. The sustaining of being by re-generation does allow this, as long as the beginning of the chain is in the presence of God.

The fact that God sustains all beings by such 'influx' can be the meaning of Matthew 5:45: "He ...  sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous." Alternative imagery in the same verse refers to light rather than liquid flow: "He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good."

For more discussion of these things, and the broader picture, see www.beginningtheisticscience.com.