"In Hans Reichenbach's programmatic book, Aufstieg der wissenschaftlichen Philosophie ["The Rise of Scientific Philosophy"], we read: "The philosopher seems incapable of controlling his craving for knowledge." But is this not, we may say, an entirely appropriate observation? Our longing for knowledge is indeed beyond our control. Is this not what Plato had in mind when he compared the philosopher to the lover? The philosopher, too, is "beside himself" because he is moved to the core by the mirandum, the wonder of this world. We can wholeheartedly agree. What bedevils this insight, however, is the fact that Plato praises what the "scientific philosophy" rejects and disqualifies without feeling the need for further arguments: it shows a lack of discipline even to talk about things beyond our understanding!
Regarding the nature of the so-called "scientific philosophy", Pieper explains that "The most direct formulation is found in the positivist manifesto, Wissenschaftliche Weltauffassung ["The Scientific World View"], of the early Vienna Circle: "What is, is on the surface; everything is accessible to human perception." Thus it is nonsensical so much as to search for a "root" of all things or for their "ultimate reasons". In short, that mysterious object of philosophy is nonexistent. Only the objects of science are real; they are, in strict sense and without exception, the objects of perception."
~Josef Pieper: In Defense of Philosophy, Ch. 1. (Ignatius Press)
By Jacques Maritain
Preliminary Remarks
In the realm of culture science now holds sway over human civilization. But at the same time science has, in the realm of the mind, entered a period of deep and fecund trouble and self-examination. Scientists have to face the problem of over-specialization, and a general condition of permanent crisis which stems from an extraordinarily fast swarming of discoveries and theoretical renewals, and perhaps from the very approach peculiar to modern science. They have, in general, got rid of the idea that it is up to science to organize human life and society, and to supersede ethics and religion by providing men with the standards and values on which their destiny depends. Finally ─ and this is the point with which I am especially concerned in this essay ─ the cast of mind of scientists regarding religion and philosophy, as it appeared in the majority of them a century ago, has now profoundly changed.
There are, no doubt, atheists among scientists, as there are in any other category of people; but atheism is not regarded by them as required by science. The old notion of a basic opposition between science and religion is progressively passing away. No conflict between them is possible, Robert Williken declared. In many scientists there is an urge either toward more or less vague religiosity or toward definite religious faith; and there in an urge, too, toward philosophical unification of knowledge. But the latter urge still remains, more often than not, imbued with a kind of intellectual ambiguity.
No wonder, then, that the subject with which we are dealing ─ what is the relation of modern science to man's knowledge of God ─ demands a rather delicate, sometime complicated, analysis. In order to clear the ground, I shall begin with a few observations concerning the characteristic approach and way of knowledge peculiar to science as it has developed since post-Renaissance and post-Cartesian times, and become in our day, through an effort of reflection upon its own procedures, more and more explicitly aware of itself.
I don't disregard the differences in nature which separate physics from other sciences like biology or anthropology for instance. Yet physics is the queen of modern sciences, which, even when they cannot be perfectly mathematized, tend to resemble physics to one degree or another. So it is that for the sake of brevity I shall, while speaking of modern science, have modern physics especially in view.
Modern science has progressively "freed" or separated itself from philosophy (more specifically from the philosophy of nature) thanks to mathematics ─ that is to say by becoming a particular type of knowledge whose data are facts drawn by our senses or instruments from the world of nature, but whose intelligibility is mathematical intelligibility. As a result, the primary characteristic of the approach to reality peculiar to science may therefore be described in the following way: that which can be observed and measured, and the ways through which observation and measurement are to be achieved, and the more or less unified mathematical reconstruction of such data, these things alone have a meaning for the scientist as such.
The field of knowledge particular to science is therefore limited to experience (as Kant understood the word). And when the basic notions that science uses derive from concepts traditionally used by common sense and philosophy, such as the notions of nature, matter, or causality, these basic notions are recast and restricted by science, so as to apply only to the field of experience and observable phenomena, understood and expressed in a certain set of mathematical signs. Thus it is that physicists may construct the concept of antimatter, for example, which has a meaning for them, but neither for the layman nor for the philosopher.
The expression "science of phenomena" is currently employed to designate our modern sciences. Such an expression is valid only if we realize, on the one hand, that the phenomena in question are (especially as far as physics is concerned) mathematized phenomena, and, on the other hand, that they are not an object separate from, but an aspect of that reality in se which is Nature. Let us say that science is a genuine, though oblique, knowledge of nature; it attains reality, but in its phenomenal aspect (in other words, in the aspect of reality which is definable through observation and measurement), and by the instrumentality of entities, especially mathematical entities, which may be "real" and relate to what Aristotelian realism called "quantity" as an accident of material substance, or may be purely ideal entities (entia rationis) and mere symbols grounded on data of observation and measurement.
Such ideal entities are the price paid for a tremendous privilege, namely the mathematical reconstruction of the data of experience. I observed a moment ago that modern science has freed itself from philosophy thanks to mathematics. At first mathematics were used by the sciences of nature in the framework of sense experience only. It has happened, however, that for more than a century mathematics themselves, starting with non-Euclidian geometries, have been breaking loose, more definitely and more completely than before, from the world of experience, and insisting on the possibility of developing ─ in the realm of merely logical or ideal being (ens rationis) ─ an infinite multiplicity of demonstrably consistent systems based on freely chosen and utterly opposed "axioms" or postulates. Consequently the science of phenomena (particularly physics) became able to pick out among various possible mathematical languages or conceptualizations, which make sense only to the mathematician, and deal with entities existing only within the mind, the one most appropriate to a given set of phenomena (while other sets of phenomena may be made mathematically intelligible through quite another conceptualization). So it is that from the point of view of common sense everything in the world capsizes in the highest and most comprehensive theories of contemporary physics as in Chagall's pictures. Modern science of phenomena has its feet on earth and uses its hands to gather not only correctly observed and measured facts, but also a great many notions and explanations which offer our minds real entities; yet it has its head in a mathematical heaven, populated with various crowds or signs and merely ideal, even not intuitively thinkable entities.
These ideal entities constructed by the mind are symbols which enable science to manipulate the world while knowing it as unknown, for then, in those higher regions where creative imagination is more at work than classical induction, science is only intent on translating the multifarious observable aspects of the world into coherent systems of signs.
The fact remains that the prime incentive of the scientist is the urge to know reality. Belief in the existence of the mysterious reality of the universe precedes scientific inquiry in the scientist's mind; and a longing (possibly more or less repressed) to attain this reality in its inner depths is naturally latent in him.
But as a scientist his knowledge is limited to a mathematical (or quasi-mathematical) understanding and reconstruction of the observable and measurable aspects of nature taken in their inexhaustible detail.
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"Exclusive" scientists and "liberal" scientists
Now a distinction must be made between two categories of scientists, whom I would like to call, on the one hand, exclusive scientists, and, on the other hand, liberal scientists. This distinction has nothing to do with science itself, for in both categories men endowed with the highest scientific capacities can be found; but it is quite important from the point of view of culture.
"Exclusive" scientists are systematically convinced that science is the only kind of genuine rational knowledge of which man is capable. For them nothing can be known to human reason except through the means and intellectual equipment of science. Exclusive scientists may be of positivist persuasion, and consequently reject any religious belief, save perhaps some kind of mythically constructed atheistic religion, like Auguste Comte's religion of humanity, which its high priest conceived of as a "positive regeneration of fetishism," or like Julian Huxley's "religion without revelation," which mistakes itself for a product of the "scientific method." Or they may shun positivist prohibitions, and superadd to scientific knowledge of a genuine, even deep religious faith, but which supposedly belongs to the world of feeling and pure irrationality. In no case is it possible, in their eyes, to establish the existence of God with rational certainty.
To tell the truth, the assertion that there is no valid rational knowledge except that of observable and measurable phenomena is self-destructive (it itself is quite another thing than a mere expression of inter-related phenomena). No wonder, consequently, that in contradistinction to exclusive scientists, "liberal" scientists are ready to look for a rational grasping of things which passes beyond phenomena, and even (when they are perfectly liberal scientists ─ I think for instance of an eminent chemist like Sir Hugh Taylor, or an eminent physicist like Leon Brillouin) to admit the necessity of philosophy and of a properly philosophical equipment in order to make such grasping feasible, and so to complement the knowledge of nature provided by the sciences.
Nothing is more rational than the kind of extension of Niels Bohr's "principle of complementarity" implied by the cast of mind of these scientists. For, thus extended, this principle means simply that in two different fields of knowledge, or at two specifically distinct levels in our approach to reality, two different aspects in existing things (the phenomenal and the ontological aspect) call for two different explanations (for instance "Man's cerebral activity is stimulated by such or such chemical" and "Man has a spiritual soul") ─ which are moreover perfectly compatible, wince they have to do with two essentially diverse objects to be grasped in things (so the medical approach to a person as a patient and the aesthetic approach to the same person as a poet are both distinct and compatible).
Einstein belonged to the category of liberal scientists. For many years his notion of God was akin to that of Spinoza. Yet, as recent studies on him have shown, he came, with the progress of age and reflection, to consider the existence of that personal God whom he first doubted as required by the way in which nature lends itself to the rationalization of phenomena operated by science. As he said in an interview in 1950, far from being an atheist he "believed on the contrary in a personal God." Such a conviction meant in no way that the existence of God was supposedly a conclusion established by science, or a principle of explanation used by it. It meant that the existence of God is a conclusion philosophically established with regard to the very possibility of science.
Heisenberg and Oppenheimer are also liberal scientists. And so was, at least virtually, Max Planck, though it was under the cloak of science that every bit of philosophizing effort in him was concealed. He believed in an "all-powerful intelligence which governs the universe," but not in a personal God, and he thought that we could and should "identify with each other . . . the order of the universe which is implied by the sciences of nature and the God whom religion holds to exist." Such statements definitely transcend the field of experience and measurable data, though they remain inherently ambiguous: for how could an all-powerful reason govern the universe if it were not personal? And the God whom religion holds to exist is a transcendent God, who causes the order of the universe, but his philosophical "identification" with this order would make him consubstantial with the world, as the God of the Stoics was.
Such intellectual ambiguity is not infrequent, I have already mentioned the fact. Let us consider it now a little more closely. I would say that the ambiguity in question is essential in exclusive scientists so far as they take a stop outside science itself. They emphatically deny the validity of any kind of rational knowledge of reality which is not science itself. As a result, if they are not of positivist persuasion, and do not think that all we can know is phenomena alone, in other words, if, recognising that phenomena are but an aspect of a deeper reality, they endeavor to go beyond phenomena, they do so through an extrapolation of scientific notions which, brilliant as it may be, is essentially arbitrary; or looking for a "noetic-integrator" they borrow it from some kind of metaphysics unaware of itself and disguised as science ─ and there is no worse metaphysics than disguised metaphysics.
As regards liberal scientists the picture is basically different. I would say that the ambiguity we are discussing can still most often be found in them, but as something accidental, not essential to their cast of mind; so that, as a matter of fact, there are good grounds to hope that more and more of them will, in the process of time, free themselves from it ─ when philosophers will become more intent on meditating on the sciences and learning their languages, and scientists more familiar with the approach and language of philosophy (each one realizing at the same time that the language or languages of the others are valid instruments only for the others' work).
If a liberal scientist undertakes to go beyond the horizons of science and tackle the philosophical aspects of reality, he too is liable to yield to the temptation of making the concepts worked out by science into the very components of his meta-scientific enterprise. The trouble is that one can no more philosophize with non-philosophical instruments than paint with a flute or a piano.
But such a state of affairs is only a side-effect of the fact that scientists, however liberal, are prone, as everybody is, to overvalue the intellectual equipment they have tested in their particular field, and in the handling of which they have full competence. Liberal scientists do not, for all that, systematically deny the validity of another, perhaps more appropriate intellectual equipment; they are aware, moreover of the philosophical nature of their own effort of reflection upon science and its procedures; and by the very fact they are, at least implicitly, prepared to recognize the rights of that purely or genuinely philosophical approach in which they, still often hesitate to put their own trust. That is why the ambiguity of the way in which many of them go in for philosophy is accidental ambiguity.
Furthermore, being accidental, such ambiguity can be removed; the best proof of this is the fact that in actual existence it has been most explicitly removed in some scientists who, when it comes to philosophical matters, do not mind using themselves the strict philosophical approach. At this point I am thinking in particular of the Epilogue which the distinguished physiologist Andrew Ivy wrote for the book "the Evidence of God," in which he insists that God's existence can be rationally demonstrated with absolute certainty. Though a professional philosopher would probably have added a few considerations on knowledge through analogy and the non-restricted value of the notion of cause, these pages written by a scientist are, as they stand, a remarkable piece of philosophy which enters with perfect intellectual frankness and with the appropriate intellectual equipment a sphere inaccessible to the instruments of science, and which gives to a truth intuitively known to the intellect like the principle of causality its full ontological bearing, so as to recognize the necessity of a Prime Cause that absolutely transcends the whole field of experience.
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The crucial question
The crucial question for our age of culture is, thus, whether reality can be approached and known, not only "phenomenally" by science, but also "ontologically" by philosophy.
This question is still more crucial for the common man than for the scientist. For the impact of the habits of thinking prevalent in an industrial civilization, in which manipulation of the world through science and technique plays the chief part, results in a loss of the sense of being in the minds of a large number of people, who are not scientists but grant rational value to facts and figures only. Whereas exclusive scientists know at least what science is and what its limitations are, the people of whom I am speaking have no experience of science, and they believe all the more naively that science is the only valid rational approach to reality, nay more, that science has all the rational answers which human life can need.
Consequently, any rational knowledge of God's existence ─ either pre-philosophical (by the simple natural use of reason) or philosophical (by the use of reason trained in philosophical disciplines) ─ is a dead letter as far as they are concerned.
Persons whose intellect has shrunk in this way may adhere to some religious creed and have a religious belief in God ─ either as a gift of divine grace, or as a response to irrational needs or as a result of their adjustment to a given environment. But they are atheists as far as reason in concerned.
Such a situation is utterly abnormal. Religious faith is above reason, but normally presupposed the rational conviction of God's existence.
At this point we must lay stress on the nature of philosophy and contradistinguished from sciences, and insist that philosophy is an autonomous discipline, which has its own instruments; so that it is not enough to add to scientific knowledge even a most intelligent philosophical reflection; the proper philosophical training and proper philosophical equipment are necessary.
Let us say that whereas science, or phenomenal knowledge, offers us, with wonderful richness paid for by revolutionary changes, coded maps of what matter and nature are as to the multifarious observable and measurable interactions which occur in them, ─ philosophy makes us grasp, with greater stability paid for by limitation to essentials, what things are in the intrinsic reality of their being. Though carrying common sense and the natural language to an essentially higher level, philosophy is in continuity with them, and is based on the perceptive (not only constructive) power of the intellect as well as on sense experience. In other words, being is the primary object of philosophy, as it in of human reason; and all notions worked out by philosophy are intelligible in terms of being not of observation and measurement.
As a result, we have to realize that in the very universe of experience philosophy (the philosophy of nature) deals with aspects and explanations in which science is not interested. Thus matter (that is, material substances) is composed in the eyes of old but still valid Aristotelian hylomorphism, of two elemental pure and indetermined potentiality (materia prima), and determinative form or entelechy (which, in man, is spiritual soul); whereas for science matter (or mass, that is, a given set of measurable data expressed in mathematical equations) is composed of certain particles, most of them impermanent, scrutinized by nuclear physics. And it is up to philosophy to try to bring into some sort of unity our knowledge of nature, not by making science's explanations parts of its own explanations, but by interpreting them in its own light, whether it sorts out what pertains to real though phenomenal entities from what pertains to ideal entities in scientific explanatory theories, or points out the philosophical truths (sometimes to be improved and readjusted) which have some connection with these theories, and especially with all the treasure of facts and factual assertions which is mustered and continually increased by science.
Now being is not limited to the field of sense experience; it goes beyond. And the basic concepts of reason which deal with being as such, even though they apply first to the realm of experience, can apply too ─ in an "analogical" manner ─ to realities which transcend experience. As a result philosophy (this time I don't mean the philosophy of nature, I mean metaphysics) can attain to realities which escape sense experience and sense verification, in other words which belong to the spiritual or "supra-sensible" order.
Let us remember at this point that philosophy is but a superior stage in the natural use of reason, at the level of a knowledge which is not only knowledge but wisdom, and which (in contradistinction to common sense) is critically elaborated and completely articulated. Prior to philosophy, the natural use of reason is natural in an additional sense (in the sense of untrained and merely spontaneous); with philosophy it is perfected by reflectivity, fully mature, and capable of explicit demonstration, aware of its own validity.
It is by virtue of the very nature of human reason ─ either untrained or philosophically perfected ─ that the concept of cause and the principle of causality can lead us beyond the field of experience. As Dr. Ivy has rightly pointed out, if the child uses the principle of causality in asking why things exist, he does so not by reason of the transitory peculiarities of "childish mentality," but on the contrary, because he is awakening to genuine intellectual life.
There is, thus, a pre-philosophical, simply natural knowledge of God's existence. It can be described as starting from the primordial intuition of existence, and immediately perceiving that Being-with-nothingness, or things which could possibly not be ─ my own being, which is liable to death ─ necessarily presuppose Being-without-nothingness, that is, absolute or self-subsisting Being, which causes and activates all beings. This pre-philosophical knowledge can also be described as a spontaneous application of the principle: no artifact is possible without a maker.
And there is, in the realm of metaphysical wisdom, a philosophical knowledge of God's existence, which is able fully to justify itself and uses ways of arguing that proceed with full rational rigor.
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The philosophical proofs of God's existence
The "five ways" of Thomas Aquinas are the classical example of the philosophical approach to God of which I just spoke. It seems relevant to give at this point some idea of them, at least of the first and the last two.
The first way proceeds from Motion or Change. There is no fact more obvious here below than the fact of change, through which a thing becomes what it was not. But one thing can give to itself what it does not have, at least in potency, and potency cannot pass to actuation by itself alone. Everywhere where there is motion or change (even if it is self-motion as in living beings), there is something else which is causing, the change. Now if the cause in question is itself subject to change, then it in moved or activated by another agent. But it is impossible to regress from agent to agent without end; if there were not a First Agent, the reason for the action of all others would never be posited in existence. So it is necessary to stop at a Prime Cause, itself uncaused, absolutely exempt from any change for it is absolutely perfect.
In the same manner the second way, which proceeds from Efficient Causes at work in the world, and the third way, which proceeds from Contingency and Necessity in things, lead to a Prime Cause without which all other causes would neither be nor act, and which exists with absolute necessity, in the infinite transcendence of the very esse subsisting by itself.
The fourth way proceeds from the Degrees which are in things. It is a fact that there are degrees of value or perfection in things. But on the one hand wherever there are degrees it is necessary that there exist, somewhere, a supreme degree; and on the other hand one thing is good and another is better, but there can always be another still better, so that there is no supreme degree in the possible degrees of goodness or beauty, or finally being, of which things are capable. Goodness, beauty, being are not in their fulness in any one of the things we touch and see. The supreme degree of goodness of beauty, of being, exists elsewhere in a Prime Being which causes all that there is of goodness, beauty and being in things, a First Cause which does not have goodness, beauty and being, but is self-subsisting Being, Goodness and Beauty.
The fifth way proceeds from the intrinsic Order and purposeful Governance of the world. The very fact that in the material universe things are engaged in a system of stable relations and that a certain order among them exists and endures shows that they do not result from chance. A purpose in at work in that republic of natures which is the world. But such purpose cannot proceed from the things which compose the world of matter, and which are devoid of understanding. This purpose or intention must exist in an intellect on which things depend in their very essence and natural activities. Thus in the last analysis it is necessary to recognize the existence of a transcendent Intelligence, the existing of which is its very intellection, and which is the Cause of all beings.
I just summarized these ways to God in my own language and in the briefest possible fashion, leaving aside all particular examples, accidental to the demonstration, which were part of the imagery provided to Thomas Aquinas by the physics of his time.
The ways in question pertain to the philosophical order. The notion of cause has here its full ontological import, which connotes productivity in being, in contradistinction to the mere relationships between phenomena which science considers and in which a given phenomenon is a dependent variable of another. Furthermore, we are led by rational argumentation to a Prime Cause which in absolutely and infinitely transcendent, and which the very concept of cause, like that of being, of goodness, of intelligence, etc., attain only "by analogy" or in the mirror of things: what they mean in God has a proportion with respect to God similar to the proportion which what they mean in things has with respect to things; but we don't grasp it in itself. God exists as no other being exists, He is good as no other being is good, He knows and loves as no other being does...
It must be noted that considered in their very substance the "five ways' of Thomas Aquinas stand fast against any criticism. Modern philosophy has been in this connection the victim of a tragic misunderstanding. Descartes believed that from the sole idea of an infinitely, perfect being the existence of this being necessarily followed (the so-called "ontological argument"). Kant rightly stated that such "proof" was no proof at all. But he also stated ─ quite mistakenly ─ that all other proofs of God's existence implied the validity of the ontological argument and rested on it; as a result, no valid proof was possible. And Kant's successors followed on Kant's heels. Yet it is crystal clear that Thomas Aquinas' five ways do not start from the idea of an infinitely perfect being; they proceed in the opposite manner; they start from certain facts, quite general and quite undeniable; and from these facts they infer the necessary existence of a First Cause ─ which is infinitely perfect. Infinite perfection is at the end, not at the beginning of the demonstration.
Finally let us add that there are other ways, too, than the classical five ways. I myself have proposed a "sixth way." As a matter of fact there are for men as many ways of knowing that God exists as there are steps he may take on the earth or paths to his own heart. For all our perishable treasures of being and beauty are besieged on all sides by the immensity and eternity of the One Who Is.
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Sciences as witnessing to God's existence
Among all these approaches to God, one particularly significant for the man of our present civilization is provided by science itself. The sciences of phenomena ─ though they remain enclosed in the field of experience ─ bear testimony to the existence of God in a double manner. Here, as I previously noted, it is not a question of what science itself tells us, but of the very existence and possibility of science.
In the first place: if nature were not intelligible there would be no science. Nature is not perfectly and absolutely intelligible; and the sciences do not try to come to grips with nature's intelligibility taken in itself (that's the job of philosophy). They rather reach for it in an oblique fashion, dealing with it only insofar as it is steeped in, and masked by, the observable and measurable data of the world of experience, and can be translated into mathematical intelligibility. Yet the intelligibility of nature is the very ground of those relational constancies which are the "laws" ─ including that category of laws which deal only with probabilities ─ to which science seen phenomena submitted; and it is the very ground, in particular, of the highest explanatory systems, with all the symbols, ideal entities, and code languages they employ (and with all that in them which is still incomplete, arbitrary, and puzzlingly lacking in harmony) that science constructs on observation and measurement.
Now how would things be intelligible if they did not proceed from an intelligence? In the last analysis a Prime Intelligence must exist, which is itself Intellection and Intelligibility in pure act, and which is the first principle of the intelligibility and essences of things, and causes order to exist in them, as well as an infinitely complex network of regular relationships, whose fundamental mysterious unity our reason dreams of rediscovering in its own way.
Such an approach to God's to existence is a variant of Thomas Aquinas' fifth way. Its impact was secretly present in Einstein's famous saying: "God does not play dice," which, no doubt, used the word God in a merely figurative sense, and meant only: "nature does not result from a throw of the dice," yet by the very fact implicitly postulated the existence of the divine Intellect.
But science offers us a second philosophical approach, which, this time, relates to man's intellect. The sciences of phenomena, and the manner in which they contrive ways of knowing and mastering nature ─ ceaselessly inveigling it into more and more precise observations and measurements, and finally catching it in sets of more and more perfectly systematized signs ─ give evidence, in a particularly striking manner, of the power that human intelligence puts to work in the very universe of sense experience. Now the intelligence of man ─ imperfect as it is, and obliged to use an irreducible multiplicity of types and perspectives of knowledge ─ is a spiritual activity which can neither proceed from matter nor be self-subsisting, and therefore limitless and all-knowing. It has a higher source, a certain participation in which it is. In other words, it necessarily requires the existence of a Prime, transcendent and absolutely perfect Intelligence, which is pure Intellection in act and whose being is its very Intellection.
This second approach is a variant of Thomas Aquinas' fourth way.
To conclude, let us remark that our knowledge of the created world naturally reverberates in the very reverence and awe with which our reason knows the Creator, and on the very notion, deficient as it is and will ever be, that we have of His ways.
By the very fact that science enlarges our horizons with respect to this world, and makes us know better ─ though in an oblique way ─ that created reality which is the mirror in which God's perfections are analogically known, science helps our minds to pay tribute to God's grandeur.
A number of the most basic notions and explanatory theories of modern science, especially of modern physics, recoil from being translated into natural languages or from being represented in terms of the imagination. Nevertheless a certain picture of the world emerge from modern science; and this picture (unification of matter and energy, physical indeterminism, a space-time continuum which implies that space and time are not empty pre-existing forms but come to existence with things and through things; gravitational fields which by reason of the curvation of space exempt gravitation from requiring any particular force, and outwit ether and attraction; a cosmos of electrons and stars in which the stars are the heavenly laboratories of elements, a universe which is finite but whose limits cannot be attained, and which dynamically evolves toward higher forms of individuation and concentration... ) constitutes a kind of framework or imagery more suited to many positions of a sound philosophy of nature than that which was provided by Newtonian science.
Furthermore, at the core of this imagery there are a few fundamental concepts which, inherent in modern science and essential to it, have a direct impact on our philosophical view of nature.
In the first place I shall mention all the complex regularities (presupposed by statistical laws themselves), and the mixture of organization and chance, resulting in a kind of elusive, imperfectly knowable and still more striking order, that matter reveals in the world of microphysics. It makes our idea of the order of nature exceedingly more refined and more astonishing. And it makes us look at the author of this order with still more admiration and natural reverence. In the Book of Job Behemoth and Leviathan were called to witness to divine omnipotence. One single atom may be called to witness too, as well as the hippopotamus and the crocodile. If the heavens declare the glory of God, so does the world of micro-particles and micro-waves.
In the second place comes the notion of evolution of the whole universe of matter, and, in particular, evolution of living organisms. Like certain most general tenets of science, evolution is less a demonstrated conclusion than a kind of primary concept which has such power in making phenomena decipherable that once expressed it became almost impossible for the scientific mind to do without it. Now if it is true that in opposition to the immobile archetypes and ever-recurrent cycles of Pagan antiquity Christianity taught men to conceive history both an irreversible and as running in a definite direction, then it may be said that by integrating in science the dimension of time and history, the idea of evolution has given to our knowledge of nature a certain affinity with what the Christian view of things is on a quite different plane. In any case, the genesis of elements and the various phases of the history of the heavens, and, in the realm of life, the historical development of an immense diversity of evolutive branches ("phyla"), all this, if it is understood in the proper philosophical perspective, presupposes the transcendent God as the prime cause of evolution, ─ preserving in existence created things and the impetus present in them, moving them from above so that superior forms may emerge from inferior ones, and, when man is to appear at the peak of the series of vertebrates, intervening in a special way and creating ex nihilo the spiritual and immortal soul of the first man and of every individual of the new species. Thus evolution correctly understood offers us a spectacle whose greatness and universality make the activating omnipresence of God only more tellingly sensed by our minds.
I do not believe, moreover, that science fosters a particularly optimistic view of nature. Every progress in evolution is dearly paid for; miscarried attempts, merciless struggle everywhere. The more detailed our knowledge of nature becomes, the more we see, together with the element of generosity and progression which radiates from being, the law of degradation, the powers of destruction and death, the implacable voracity which are also inherent in the world of matter. And when it comes to man, surrounded and invaded as he is by a host of warping forces, psychology and anthropology are but an account of the fact that, while being essentially superior to all of them, he is the most unfortunate of animals. So it is that when its vision of the world is enlightened by science, the intellect which religious faith perfects realizes still better that nature, however good in its own order, does not suffice, and that if the deepest hopes of mankind are not destined to turn to mockery, it is because a God-given energy better than nature is at work in us.
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References
Maritain, Jacques. The Degrees of Knowledge. New translation, New York: Scribner, 1959.
Schauder, Karlheinz. Weltbild und Religion bei Albert Einstein, in Frankfurter Hefte, June 1959. (Quotation taken from p. 426).
George, Andre. Autobiographie scientifique de Max Planck. Paris: Albin Michel, 1960. (Quotations taken from pp. 14, 122, 215, 217).
Heisenberg, Werner. Physics and Philosophy. New York: Harper, 1958.
Oppenheimer, Robert. "The Mystery of Matter," in Adventures of the Mind. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1959.
The Evidence of God in an Expanding Universe, edited by John Glover Monsma, by forty American scientists (with an Epilogue by Dr. Andrew Ivy). New York: Putnam, 1958.
From Super Boethium De Trinitate
By Thomas Aquinas
Lectio 2, Q. 5, A. 2 (Translated by Armand Mauer; Toronto, 1953)
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Does Natural Philosophy Treat of What Exists in Motion and Matter?
We proceed as follows to the second article:
It seems that natural science does not treat of things that exist in motion and matter, for
1. Matter is the principle of individuation, Now, according to Plato’s doctrine, which is followed by Porphyry, no science treats of individual things but only of universals. Therefore, natural science does not treat of what is in matter.
2. Again, science pertains to the intellect. But the intellect knows by abstracting from matter and from the conditions of matter. Therefore, no science can treat of what is not abstracted from matter.
3. Again, as is clear in the Physics, the First Mover is considered in natural science. But The First Mover is free from all matter. Therefore, natural science does not treat only of what is in matter.
4. Again, every science has to do with what is necessary. But whatever is moved, as such is contingent, as is proved in the Metaphysics. Therefore, no science can treat of what is subject to motion; and so neither can natural science.
5. Again, no universal is subject to motion; for as is said in the beginning of the Metaphysics, it is not man in general who is healed, but this man. But every science concerns that which is universal. Therefore natural science does not treat of what is in motion.
6. Again, some of the things with which natural science deals are not subject to motion; for instance, the soul, as is shown in De Anima, and the earth, as is proved in the De Caelo et Mundo. What is more, all natural forms neither come into being nor perish, and for the same reason they are not subject to motion, except accidentally. This is shown in the Metaphysics. Therefore everything that physics considers is in motion.
7. Again, every creature is mutable for, as Augustine says, true immutability belongs to God alone. So if it is the task of natural science to consider what is in motion, it will be its business to consider all creatures, which clearly appears to be false.
On the contrary, it is the work of natural science to reach conclusions about natural things. Now, natural things are those in which there is a principle of motion; and, as the Metaphysics says, wherever there is motion there must be matter. So natural science treats of what is in motion and matter.
Moreover, these must be some speculative science dealing with what is in matter and motion, for otherwise the teaching of philosophy, which is knowledge of being, would be incomplete. Now no other speculative science treats of these things, for neither mathematics nor metaphysics does so. Therefore, natural science treats of them.
Moreover, the fact is clear from the statements of the Philosopher in the Metaphysics and the Physics.
Reply: It was the difficulty of this problem that drove Plato to posit Ideas. Believing that all sensible things were always in flux, as Cratylus and Heraclitus taught, he thought there can be no science concerning them, as the Philosopher says in the Metaphysics. So he claimed that there were substances separated from the sense world, which might serve as the objects of science and of definitions. He made this mistake because he failed to distinguish what is essential from what is accidental. For it happens that by accident even the wise often fall into error, as is said in the Sophistic Refutations. Now, as is shown in the Metaphysics, we find in a sensible substance both the whole or the composite itself, and also its nature (ratio) or form; and it is the composite that is essentially generated and corrupted and not the nature or form, except accidentally. As the Metaphysics says, “It is not house that is made, but this house.
Now anything can be thought of without all the items that are not essentially related to it. Consequently, forms and natures, though belonging to things existing in motion, are without motion when they are considered in themselves; and so they can be the objects of sciences and of definitions, as the Philosopher says. As he proves, the sciences of sensible reality are not based upon the knowledge of certain substances separated from the sense world.
Natures of this kind, which are the objects of the sciences of real beings, are thought of without motion; and so they must be thought of without those conditions by reason of which motion belongs to mobile things. Now, because every motion is measured by time, and the primary motion is local motion (for without it there is no other motion), a thing must be subject to motion inasmuch as it exists here and now; and it exists under these conditions insofar as it is individuated by matter having determinate dimensions. Consequently, natures of this kind, which make possible sciences of things subject to motion, must be thought of without determinate matter and everything following upon such matter; but not without indeterminate matter, because on its notion depends the notion of form that determines matter to itself. Thus the nature of man, which his definition signifies and which is the object of science, is considered without this flesh and these bones, but not absolutely without flesh and bones. And because individuals include determinate matter in their nature, whereas universals include common matter, as is said in the Metaphysics, the above-mentioned abstraction is not said to be the abstraction of form from matter absolutely, but the abstraction of the universal from the particular.
Natures of this sort, thus abstracted, can be considered in two ways. First, in themselves; and then they are thought of without motion and determinate matter. This happens to them only by reason of the being they have in the intellect. Second, they can be viewed in relation to the things of which they are the natures; and these things exist with matter and motion. Thus they are principles by which we know these things, for everything is known through its form. Consequently, in natural science we know mutable and material things existing outside the soul through natures of this kind; that is to say, natures that are immobile and considered without particular matter.
Replies to opposing arguments:
Reply to 1. Matter is the principle of individuation only insofar as it exists with determinate dimensions, and in this sense natural science indeed abstracts from matter.
Reply to 2. The intelligible form is a thing’s quiddity, for, as the De Anima says, the object of the intellect is the quiddity of a thing. Now, as is said in the Metaphysics, the quiddity of a universal composite, like man or animal, includes within itself common but not particular matter. So the intellect regularly abstracts from determinate matter and its conditions; but in natural science it does not abstract from common matter, although matter itself is considered in natural science only in relation to form. For this reason the natural scientist is more concerned with form than with matter.
Reply to 3. Natural science does not treat of the First Mover as its subject or as part of its subject, but as the end to which natural science leads. Now the end does not belong to the nature of the thing of which it is the end, but it has a relation to it; as the end of a line is not the line but is related to it. So also the First Mover is of a different nature from natural things, but it is related to them because it moves them. So it falls under the consideration of natural science, not in itself, but insofar as it is a mover.
Reply to 4. Science treats of something in two ways: in one way, primarily and principally; and in this sense science is concerned universal natures, which are its very foundation. In another way it treats of something secondarily, as by a sort of reflection; and in this sense it is concerned with the things whose natures they are, inasmuch as, using the lower powers, it relates those natures to the particular things possessing them. For a knower uses a universal nature both as a thing known and as a means of knowing. Thus, through the universal nature of man we can judge of this or that particular man. Now, all universal natures of things are immutable; and so, in this respect, all science is concerned with what is necessary. But some of the things possessing these natures are necessary and immutable, whereas others are contingent and subject to movement, and in this respect sciences are said to be concerned with the contingent and mutable.
Reply to 5. Although a universal is not mutable, it is nevertheless the nature of a mutable thing.
Reply to 6. Although the soul and other natural forms are not themselves subject to motion, they are moved accidentally, and they are, moreover, the perfections of mutable things; and for this reason they come within the domain of natural science. But even though the earth as a whole is not moved (for it happens to be in its natural place, where a thing is at rest in virtue of the same nature through which it is moved to a place), nevertheless, when its parts are outside their proper place, they are moved to a place. Thus the earth falls within the domain of natural science both by reason of the immobility of the whole earth and by reason of the movement of its parts.
Reply to 7. The mutability characteristic of all creatures is not with respect to any natural motion, but with respect to their dependence on God, separation from whom entails destruction of their very being. And that dependence falls under the consideration of metaphysics rather than under that of natural philosophy. Spiritual creatures, moreover, are mutable only with regard to choice; and this sort of motion is not the concern of the natural philosopher but rather of the metaphysician.
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Source: Dominican House of Studies, Super Boethium De Trinitate.
■ Recommended reading:
■ See also: "Boethius," in A History of Western Philosophy Vol. II, by Ralph McInerny. The Jacques Maritain Center.
“… the speculative sciences are differentiated according to their degree of separation from matter and motion.
“Now, there are some objects of speculation that depend on matter for their being, for they can only exist in matter. And these are subdivided. Some depend on matter both for their being and for their being understood, as do those things whose definition contains sensible matter and which, as a consequence, cannot be understood without sensible matter. For example, it is necessary to include flesh and bones in the definition of man. It is things of these sort that physics or natural science studies. On the other hand, there are some things that, although dependent upon matter for their being, do not depend on it for their being understood, because sensible matter is not included in their definitions. This is the case with lines and numbers—the kinds of objects with which mathematics deals. There are still other objects of speculative knowledge that do not depend upon matter for their being because they can exist without matter; either they never exist in matter, as in the case of God and the angels, or they exist in matter in some instances and not in others, as in the case of substance, quality, potency, act, one and many, and the like. The science that treats of all these is theology or divine science, which is so called because its principal object is God. By another name it is called metaphysics; that is to say, beyond physics, because it ought to be learned by us after physics, for we have to proceed from sensible things to those that are non-sensible. It is also called first philosophy, inasmuch as all the other sciences, receiving their principles from it, come after it….”
~St. Thomas Aquinas: Commentary on Boethius’s De Trinitate, q. 5, a. 3, Reply.
(From An Aquinas Reader, ed. Mary T. Clark)
METAPHYSICS is “the knowledge gathered by a naturally transcendent reason in its search for the first principles, or first causes, of what is given in sensible experience….As metaphysics aims at transcending all particular knowledge, no particular science is competent either to solve metaphysical problems, or to judge their metaphysical solutions.”
~Étienne Gilson: The Unity of Philosophical Experience.
“But the case of pragmatism is only one particular case of a larger problem. In the last analysis, we have to consider the way in which philosophy has been challenged, not by science but by a masked metaphysics of science. Julian Huxley is convinced that philosophical and religious assertions are nonsense or useless hypotheses. And so they are for him, it is true. Philosophers can understand the biological contributions of Julian Huxley, and recognize the truth of biology as well as the truth of philosophy and religion, but I dare say Julian Huxley does not understand our books and so feels firmly justified in denying philosophy all admittance to the field of knowledge. But philosophy is able to return the challenge. It indicts the very method of the antiphilosophical scientists as inconsistent with their own scientific method, and indeed rather naïve. For they criticize philosophy and religion in the name of science, which by their own confession has no knowledge or criteria regarding such matters, and which might pass judgment on them only on condition that it become philosophy. These men are in the same position as an automobile driver who would insist that planes are worthless, because he knows how to drive and because to fly is not to drive.
“To live in a state of doubt is a highly civilized attitude as regards the infinite potentialities and future constructions of science in its deciphering of phenomena. But to live in a state of doubt as regards, not phenomena, but the ultimate realities the knowledge of which is a natural possibility, privilege, and duty for human intelligence, is to live more miserably than animals, which at least tend with instinctive and buoyant certitude toward the ends of their ephemeral life.
“It is a great misfortune that both a civilization and education suffer from a cleavage between the ideal that constitutes their reason for living and acting, and that implies things in which they do not believe, and the reality according to which they live and act but which denies the ideal that justifies them. All modern democracies have suffered from such a cleavage. The task and mission of youth is to solve the problem at their own risk, to reunite real and ideal and make thought and action as one.”
~Jacques Maritain: Education at the Crossroads.
THERE is a multitude of assertions which are, in themselves, reformable: not only the hypothetical or probable assertions, but also the assertions themselves with which explanatory theory (I do not speak of that which is mere verification of fact) constructs itself in the sciences of phenomena, which are a knowledge of the observable as such, and refrain from piercing the crust of the observable. However far indeed one may extend it the observation remains inevitably limited, it is impossible to extend it infinitely far: so that, in itself, every system of rational interpretation of phenomena on the plane itself of phenomena can have to give way to a different system, occasions by new observations and more fully comprehensive. No scientific theory is irreformable or absolutely true; it is true only relatively to the state of science at the different stages of its progress. In the rationalization of the observable effected by the sciences of phenomena, truth is the adequation of the intelligence with that which falls under an observation as complete as possible at a given time of human history.
It is altogether different with knowledges such as philosophy and theology. Philosophy (metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of nature, moral philosophy…) is capable of emitting irreformable assertions, in other words absolute truths, because it bears on intelligible being itself, or the real attained purely and simply (and not only as to the observable as such). When it says the true, and to the extent that it says the true, that which it says is absolutely true, and true for always. This is that to which the primary and most deep-seated ẻlan of the intelligence tends, and that for which it is most fundamentally thirsty.
When we say that truth is the adequation of the intelligence and of that which is, this is understood therefore primarily and above all of the adequation of the intelligence with “that which is” purely and simply, as it is the case for philosophy and theology. And it is understood secondarily (by extension to a type of knowledge enclosed completely in that which appears to the senses) of the adequation of the intelligence with “that which is” under a certain relation only (under the relation of observability), as it is the case for the sciences of phenomena.
Philosophy, which bears on the intimate intelligible structure of that which is, absolutely speaking, and theology, which bears on the intimate superintelligible mystery of Him Who is, absolutely speaking, are types of knowledge exceptionally difficult in themselves. This is why man has so often erred in them.
In science, knowledge
less elevated and more narrow, which is a late fruit of human thought
(it began only in the sixteenth century to disengage itself in its
proper nature), and which bears on the rational interpretation and the
rational organization (above all, there where it is possible,
mathematization) of that only which appears to the senses, man errs also
but does not cease to correct his errors with an inviolable regularity,
because the retracing of the intelligence imposed by such a type of
knowledge requires particularly rigorous methods and specializations;
but the truth which we have then to do is truth only secundum quid, approximate truth.
The
Scientists know this; the noninitiated do not know it. Let us turn, in a
last remark, to the side of the human community. If the idea that no
higher knowledge, neither philosophy, nor theology, is capable of
absolute truth became generally accepted, the result would be that the
world of culture would find itself, ─not through the fault of science,
─mystified by science. For it is the assertions of science, haloed with
its dazzling application, which a multitude of people who are not
scientists would take then for “the truth” (absolute) of which by virtue
of the very nature of the intelligence they experience unconsciously
the need; whereas the scientists would continue to know, and better and
better, that, however precious the progresses of science may be,
irreformable assertions and absolute truths are not of the domain of the
latter.
~Jacques Maritain: On the Church of Christ, Chap. IV, n. 4.
