Proving What We Already "Know"

[Neo-Scholastic]

Things "are" as they "act".

A table is solid to most things.  It is partly see-through to X-rays, and almost completely transparent to neutrinos.  That "empty space" is filled with electron clouds that experience repulsive and attractive forces.  That isn't empty.

What we perceive with one sense or with one type of test isn't all of reality.  It is exciting that physics can drill down into the nature of things at different sizes and levels of interactions.  Every one of them are "real" in the context they are explored.

That's fair enough, and you could say the same thing about the solar system or the universe-- nothing is truly empty, because gravity exerts an influence at all points in space.  But in the context of my normal daily view of things, the solar system is basically empty space with a few objects in it, and a lot of forces.


I could describe a tiger's claws as a collection of shaped fields which disrupt the membranes of skin and vein, also a collection of high numbers of fields (or particles or wave functions or whatever).  But that's not the context I'm considering when the tiger is running toward me.  In fact, if I was foolish enough to take the time to ponder the "real" nature of tigers' claws at different sizes and levels of interactions, I suspect I'd experience a radically different truth in a very short time span.

Careful, my atheist friends...in Thomist philosophy, the distinction between act amd potency leads to the metaphyical necessity of something that is fully "in act", which in Thomism is God. Not that you're near there yet. But once you start to realize that "act" is both existence and the creative force of making manifest...then a whole beuatiful realm starts to unfold in the conteplative mind of a believer.