Archive for the ‘Theology’ Category

Gnosis and Noesis Returns: the First Way of Aquinas

Wednesday, June 16th, 2010

(1) It may well have been to the relief of some and not noticed by far more that some months ago postings to this blog ceased to appear. One primary reason for this was I had come to the realization that the theory of gnosis of Seyyed Hossein Nasr that had de facto been the blog’s primary focus has an absolutely unacceptable thesis as its basis. That thesis, which I dubbed theomonism, is the conjoint thesis that (a) there is ultimately but one reality and (b) that one reality is God.

True it is that that thesis has the virtue of making the oneness with God, that Nasr’s version of mysticism understands us, if we are well-advised, to be seeking, be an immediate and evident truth: if both there exists but God and we exist, then we are but God.

But it also has the vice of being false, for it is absolutely evident that there are many real and really distinct things, beings, or existents; you are real and I am real, but I am not you. And, equally obvious, neither are you one with or identical to God nor am I. Being then quite simply false, the theomonist thesis can in no way serve as the foundation for any rationally acceptable gnosticism.

(2) Still I am, with this post and the immediately previous one, resuming my quest for an answer to the question that gave rise to this blog, that of determining whether or not it is possible for a human being to attain, in this life, the immediate knowledge of the divine that “gnosis,” as I with Nasr use the term, refers to. Now, however, I am going to begin much closer to the beginning, with, that is, a question which is logically prior to that of whether gnosis is humanly possible, the question of whether or not God exists.

Most immediately, I am going to begin with a presentation and an analysis of the proof, or attempted proof, of the existence of God offered by Thomas Aquinas and known as the “First Way;” this is, as I’m sure you know, the first of the five ways in which, Thomas tells us in his Summa Theologiae, God can be shown to exist. There is a handy English translation of Thomas’s exposition of his First Way available to you online at (you may have to paste the following URL into your browser):

http://dhspriory.org/thomas/summa/FP/FP002.html#FPQ2A3THEP1.

In today’s post I want to make fully explicit the logic of the Summa’s version of the argument. In the next post I will make fully explicit a major problem in the argument, not only as it is presented by Thomas but also as it is presented by Edward Feser, one of today’s foremost and most publically visible followers of Aquinas, in his The Last Superstition. A Refutation of the New Atheism (South Bend, Indiana: St. Augustine’s Press, 2008).

Thomas begins his exposition of the argument by telling us that “[t]he first and more manifest way [in which the existence of God can be proven] is the argument from motion. It is certain, and evident to our senses, that in the world some things are in motion.”

Noting, with Feser (p. 91), that “‘motion’ is the traditional Aristotelian term for what nowadays we’d just call ‘change’,” let us, then, set down the following as a premise of Thomas’s argument:

Some things are in motion.

That absolutely unassailable premise in place, Thomas continues, telling us that “whatever is in motion is put in motion by another.” Let’s set that down as another premise of the argument:

Whatever is in motion is put in motion by another.

This premise is not quite so immune to being assailed as the previous one and Thomas spends the next ten or so sentences attempting to justify it. For our present purposes, however, we can leave consideration of that piece of argumentation to a later post and pick up the main argument where Thomas himself picks it up, when he says, “Therefore, whatever is in motion must be put in motion by another. If that by which it is put in motion be itself put in motion, then this also must needs be put in motion by another, and that by another again.”

We can observe that, in raising the possibility that “that by which it [the thing in motion] is put in motion [is] itself put in motion” as but the antecedent in a conditional statement, Thomas may well have had in mind the opposite possibility, that “that by which it [the thing in motion] is put in motion [is] not itself put in motion.” In so doing he may well also have had in mind the following disjunction:

Either that by which the thing in motion is put in motion is itself put in motion by another
or that by which the thing in motion is put in motion is not itself put in motion by another.

Either the former or the latter has to be the case, though not both. Now if the latter is the case, then it is also the case that there is an unmoved mover which, Thomas will eventually and no doubt too optimistically go on to say, “everyone understands to be God.” It seems plausible, that is, that Thomas had the inference from the latter possibility to the existence of an unmoved mover very much in mind and thought it to have been sufficiently obvious to not require an explicit exposition.

At any rate, Thomas went on to deal with the former, and remaining, possibility, that, again, “that by which it [the thing in motion] is put in motion [is] itself put in motion.” He states:

If that by which it is put in motion be itself put in motion, then this also must needs be put in motion by another, and that by another again.

This statement presents us with a mover/moved series that goes back, or regresses, from one mover that is moved by a previous one to that previous one and then to that previous one’s mover, etc. This obviously raises the question of whether or not this series goes back or regresses infinitely. Thomas tells us that it cannot, offering the following rather condensed sequence of arguments:

But this cannot go on to infinity, because then there would be no first mover, and, consequently, no other mover; seeing that subsequent movers move only inasmuch as they are put in motion by the first mover; as the staff moves only because it is put in motion by the hand. Therefore it is necessary to arrive at a first mover, put in motion by no other; and this everyone understands to be God.

Let’s start by noting that the argumentation falls into two, let us call them, movements. The first movement, concluding that the mover/moved series does not go back to infinity, is given expression in the first sentence, from “But this…” to “…by the first mover” and illustrated by the moving staff and hand. The second movement, concluding that there is an unmoved mover, is given expression in the second sentence, from “Therefore …” to “…to be God.”

Rendered more fully explicit, the first movement begins with the hypothetical syllogism:

If the mover/moved series goes back to infinity, then there is no first mover.

If there is no first mover, then there are no other, subsequent, movers.

Therefore, if the mover/moved series goes back to infinity, then there are no other, subsequent, movers.

He does not make explicit the next few arguments that are needed to reach the conclusion he has to reach. But what they have to be, or have at least to be equivalent to, to reach the conclusion he is after seems to me to be incontrovertible.

One of the needed arguments takes the form of another hypothetical syllogism:

If the mover/moved series goes back to infinity, then there are no other, subsequent, movers.

If there are no other, subsequent, movers, then no things are in motion.

Therefore, if the mover/moved series goes back to infinity, then no things are in motion.

The consequent of that conclusion, that “no things are in motion,” contradicts the first premise, introduced above, that “some things are in motion.” We have therein the sole premise of the second argument needed, an instance of the argument form known as “double negation”:

Some things are in motion.
Therefore, it is not the case that no things are in motion.

The third argument needed, a modus ponendo ponens argument, has the two conclusions most immediately arrived at as its premises:

If the mover/moved series goes back to infinity, then no things are in motion.
It is not the case that no things are in motion.
Therefore, it is not the case that the mover/moved series goes back to infinity.

Now, to the second movement: we introduced above and made use of the following premise:

If the mover/moved series goes back to infinity, then there is no first mover.

The converse is also true:

If there is no first mover, then the mover/moved series goes back to infinity.

The fourth argument needed, also a modus ponendo ponens argument, has as it first premise the latter statement and as its second the last of the conclusions arrived at.

If there is no first mover, then the mover/moved series goes back to infinity.
It is not the case that the mover/moved series goes back to infinity.
Therefore, it is not the case that there is no first mover.

The fifth argument is, quite obviously, another case of double negation:

It is not the case that there is no first mover.
Therefore, there is a first mover.

Note that the series of arguments thus far set forth have concluded only that there is a first mover, i.e., there is at least one. They have not ruled out there being many. In what follows, I will use the expression “the first mover under consideration” to refer to the one alone the existence of which the arguments have, if sound, demonstrated, with no assumption, at least not yet, that there is also at most one first mover.

That said, we’re not quite done yet, though the remaining steps are obvious. One is:

If the first mover under consideration is a moved mover, then it is posterior to a prior mover.
If the first mover under consideration is posterior to a prior mover, it is not a first mover.
Therefore, if the first mover under consideration is a moved mover, then it is not a first mover.

There is no need to prove that:

The first mover under consideration is a first mover.

The pertinent double negation argument is obvious:

The first mover under consideration is a first mover.
Therefore, it is not the case that the first mover under consideration is not a first mover.

Next, another modus ponendo ponens:

If the first mover under consideration is a moved mover, then it is not a first mover.
It is not the case that the first mover under consideration is not a first mover.
Therefore, the first mover under consideration is not a moved mover.

Finally:

If the first mover under consideration is not a moved mover, then it is an unmoved mover.
The first mover under consideration is not a moved mover.
Therefore, the first mover under consideration is an unmoved mover.

It is quite evident that all of the foregoing arguments are perfectly valid. That is, if their premises are true, then their conclusions must also be true. It is not, however, quite as evident that all of the foregoing arguments are perfectly sound. That is, it is not fully evident that all of the premises invoked are true and it is therefore not fully evident that all of the conclusions arrived at are true.

The next post will be devoted to the way in which the following critical premise is not evidently true.

If there is no first mover, then there are no other, subsequent, movers.

Please note, that in having said that the premise “is not evidently true,” I have not said that it “is evidently not true.”

In an earlier post, the Logic and the Argument from Evil: Logic of September 12th, 2009, I spelled out for those not familiar with the terminology of logic the basics needed to understand the foregoing. In the succeeding post, Logic and the Argument from Evil: The Argument, I used an obviously valid, but not so obviously sound, argument against the existence of God to illustrate the way I think logic should be put to work.

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Posted in Existence of God, Gnosticism, The First Way, Theology | 9 Comments »

A Few Steps Ahead of Myself: A Note on Infinite Causal Regress

Thursday, May 27th, 2010

I intend, in a forthcoming post or two, to say a few words about the lack of postings over lo! these past many risings and settings of the sun. For now, however, eager to get restarted, I want to post in this blog a criticism of an argument against infinite causal regress posted, without comment, in “Turretin on Infinite Regress,” in an interesting blog, Siris, at:

http://branemrys.blogspot.com/2010/05/turretin-on-infinite-regress.html.

Some preliminaries:

First, I am commenting on the Turretin post within my own blog because Siris has a 500 character limit on comments.

Second, the Turretin in question is, according to Wikipedia, one François Turretini (1623–1687), a Swiss-Italian Calvinist theologian.

Third, the argument against the thesis of infinite causal regress is perforce one in favor of the thesis that there is a first cause, i.e., a being which is the cause of everything else while not itself being caused by anything else, i.e., God. You are most likely familiar with the most famous version of the argument, that of Thomas Aquinas.

Preliminaries thus dispensed with:

“Turretin on Infinite Regress” takes the form of a single paragraph. I quote, reformulate, and critique here that only which is found in the first half of the paragraph.

The first half of the paragraph reads:

Neither can an infinite series of producing causes be allowed because in causes there must necessarily be some order as to prior and posterior. But an infinite series of producing causes rejects all order, for then no cause would be first; rather all would be middle, having some preceding cause.

My reformulation, the purpose of which is to more clearly exhibit the formal structure of its argumentation, reads:

1. Only series having a first member are series ordered as to prior and posterior.
Therefore, all series ordered as to prior and posterior are series having a first member.

2. So, all series ordered as to prior and posterior are series having a first member.
But all series of producing causes are series ordered as to prior and posterior.
Therefore, all series of producing causes are series having a first member.

3. But no series having a first member are infinite series.
And all series of producing causes are series having a first member.
Therefore, no series of producing causes are infinite series.

My critique: that the three arguments are perfectly valid is perfectly evident, for there is no way in which their several premises can be true and their conclusions false. That they are not just valid but also sound, however, is not, for the premise of the first argument is, it seems to me, false and all premises of a sound argument must be true. For a series to be ordered as to prior and posterior it is not necessary that it have a first member; it is necessary only that all the members be, well, ordered as to prior and posterior.

We are not, I conclude, forced by Turretin’s argument to accept as true the conclusion that “no series of producing causes are infinite series” or the further conclusion that all series of producing causes are finite, i.e., terminate in a first uncaused cause.

A postliminary: the text of Thomas Aquinas’s best known arguments for the existence of God, the so-called “five ways,” are to be found in the third article of the second question of the first part (prima pars) of his Summa Theologiae. A link to an excellent online translation is:

http://dhspriory.org/thomas/summa/FP/FP002.html#FPQ2A3THEP1.

I will be using Aquinas’s and related arguments, both pro the existence of God and con, as the springboard for an exploration of the question of whether or not there is a God. There being a God, after all, is a necessary condition of there being a positive answer to the question of whether or not it is humanly possible to have a direct knowledge of the divine in this life, the question which motivated the bringing of this blog into existence.

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In the Beginning Were We: The Matter of Our Pre-Eternal Existence

Tuesday, October 13th, 2009

In my previous planned and on-topic post, the “The Mutual “Inness” of the Human and the Divine” of September 30, I said that in this post I would “have something to say about the ‘fall’ and [about] our having ‘become forgetful beings’” that I quoted Nasr speaking about. I think now, however, that before I do that, it will be better if in this post I take up Nasr’s thesis that we have a “pre-eternal existence,” a thesis that he brought up before he brought up the “fall” and our “forgetfulness.” Our temporal existence, after all, would be the existence we have after the fall in question.

Nasr brings up our “pre-eternal existence” in the following paragraph (The Garden of Truth, p. 5), already quoted in the previous post.

Not only were we created by God, but we have the root of our existence here and now in Him. When we bore witness to His Lordship as mentioned in the Quranic verse, “Am I not your Lord?” the world and all that is in it were not as yet created. Even now we have our pre-eternal existence in the Divine Presence, and we have made an eternal covenant with God, which remains valid beyond the contingencies of our earthly life and beyond the realm of space and time in which we now find ourselves.

He has not, at least up to this point in The Garden of Truth, offered us a full spelling out of just what “pre-eternal” means in his vocabulary. But it is clear, from the claim that “[w]hen we bore witness to [God…] the world and all that is in it were not as yet created,” that we existed, that we were, when creation took place. Let me hypothesize, that is, that he holds that, enjoying a “pre-eternal existence,” we existed “in the beginning.” Or, let me put it the other way around: “in the beginning were we.”

I am, of course, hypothesizing that there is a parallel between Nasr’s understanding of human beings, even in our plurality (thus the “we”), and the understanding of the “Word,” i.e., Jesus, expressed in the Gospel of John, 1:1 and 1:2.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning.

(I have used the “New International Version” translation, at: http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/search=John+1&version=NIV)

I don’t know to what degree the parallel is intentional or to what degree it can be extended. I have no reason, at least as of now, to think that Nasr thought that we human beings, even in our plurality, have a role in creation that the Gospel of John 1:3 assigns to the “Word” or Jesus:

Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made.

Yet, it seems clear, in the beginning were we. And there is more. As the Nasr paragraph quoted above quite unambiguously says, we clearly were and are with God, “in the Divine Presence.” There is moreover, the thesis of Nasr, which I have dubbed theomonism, according to which there is, “ultimately,” but one and only one real being and that being is God. Someone adhering to that thesis is saying (on the further assumption that we in fact exist) that we are God. (I discuss Nasr’s theomonism in the “The Mutual “Inness” of the Human and the Divine” of September 30th and earlier in the “Nasr’s Gnosis and “Theomonism” of June 28th, 2009.)

Nasr, in other words and in summary, could have said:

In the beginning were we, and we were with God, and we were God. We were with God in the beginning.

There is yet more. In a previously discussed (in the “Where We Are Coming from and Where We Are Going to: 6″ of August 23) paragraph (The Garden of Truth, p. 7), Nasr himself draws explicit attention to the parallel:

Now, no matter how we seek to go back to the origin of our consciousness, we cannot reach its beginning in time, and the question again arises what our consciousness, its origin, and its end are. The spiritual practices of every authentic path, including Sufism, enable those who follow and practice them earnestly and under the appropriate conditions to gain new levels of consciousness and ultimately to become aware that consciousness has no beginning in time (but only in God) because “in the beginning was consciousness,” and it has no temporal end because “in the end is consciousness.”

Questions abound. What is the relationship of the consciousness of which he speaks and the conscious being(s) having that consciousness? What is the relationship of that consciousness to the Word of Christian theology? What is the relationship of that consciousness to Muhammad? What is the relationship of the Word of Christian theology to Muhammad? Etc. I am not yet prepared to answer them (though I have my hypotheses). But you may rest assured that I aim to do so in the future.

In my next planned and on-topic post, I will have something to say about Nasr’s theses of our “fall,” I assume we may put it, “out of” God and our having “become forgetful beings” as a consequence that I raised in the September 30th post.

***

If you wish, you can easily purchase The Garden of Truth through Amazon.com by clicking on:

The Garden of Truth: The Vision and Promise of Sufism, Islam’s Mystical Tradition

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Posted in Gnosticism, Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Sufism, The Garden of Truth, Theology | 4 Comments »

The Matter of My Ontology

Monday, June 22nd, 2009

The second of the three questions appearing in a good friend’s challenging comment on my June 7th post, conveyed to me in an email and reproduced in my June 14th post, was the following: “What is your apriori ontology that drives all this epistemology?” The latter reference, of course, is to the varying sets of epistemological presuppositions underlying the different versions of gnosticism that I defined in the June 7th post.

For the time being I’m going to waive specific discussion of the assumed “a priori” character of the ontology driving the epistemology. I do this first because the issue of the “a priori,” as opposed to the “a posteriori,” is one that is as complicated as it is important and so is deserving of a fuller treatment than I am at this stage prepared to give it. I do it, second, because the question he was asking, with the “a priori” removed, is still an appropriate and important question: “What is the ontology that drives all this epistemology?”

The subtitle of the blog, “An On-going Essay in Neo-Aristotelian Philosophy,” offers one clue as to the nature of the ontology driving my epistemology, for Aristotle famously articulated and defended a set of so-called “first principles,” including the Principle of Contradiction, which I would rather call the Principle of Non-Contradiction, and the Principle of Excluded Middle.

I prefer to set forth an expanded set of such principles, an informal statement of which follows:

The Principle of Non-Contradiction: No being whatsoever both is and is not, in any one respect and at any one time.

The Principle of Alternation: Any being whatsoever is or is not, in any one respect and at any one time.

The Principle of Excluded Middle: Any being whatsoever is or is not, but it does not both be and not be, in any one respect and at any one time.

The Principle of Implication: If any being whatsoever is then it is, in any one respect and at any one time.

The four principles are in fact logically equivalent to one another. However, another “first principle” of Aristotelian (and neo-Aristotelian) philosophy, though not traditionally identified as a first principle, is not logically equivalent to the four given. It may be called and, in a relatively loose formulation, it may be formulated:

The Principle of Ontological Realism: There exists a genuine multiplicity of changing things.

In a stricter formulation, all that we really need at this point in our deliberations, it may be given as:

The Principle of Ontological Realism: There is at least one being.

There is in fact more to the ontology that I bring with me to this blog even at the outset. I think I can, however, let the exposition of my ontology stop here for the time being, for I think I can now get to what I take to be the primary thrust of my friend’s question (I trust he’ll correct me if I’m wrong), that of whether I begin my reflections adhering to a thesis analogous to the Principle of Ontological Realism, i.e.:

The Thesis of Theological Realism: There is at least one divine being.

The answer to the question of whether I begin my reflections adhering to the Thesis of Theological Realism is: I do not. Neither, however, do I adhere to the opposed thesis, that there is no divine being. It is my hope, though, that at some time in the future I will be able to adhere to one or to the other, on a fully rational basis.

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Posted in Ontology, Theology | No Comments »