[Serious] Thomism: Then & Now

[Belacqua]

Perhaps if Christian apologists found a better analogy or example of a truly essentially ordered, per se, series then maybe having such an example handy would help resolve the modern misunderstandings about the 5 Ways. 

It seems to me that the examples so far are good enough, overall. There is always a danger of mistaking an analogy for something bigger of course -- as in the clock example, the motor is the First Cause only of the movement in the clock, and not of anything more. The motor itself is caused by a variety of things, so we can't declare that it deserves the name First Cause in some kind of metaphysical sense. The fact that the causal series in the clock is simultaneous doesn't do any more than describe such a series -- it doesn't prove anything more about the universe. 

Frankly I think the misunderstandings concerning the Five Ways come largely from force of habit and from arrogance. I don't know how many times I've seen people pass confident judgment when they don't know what "cause" means. And from the sentences you quote in your reply, it's clear that Nudge still doesn't know the difference between a Final Cause and a First Cause. Why such resistance happens I can't say. 

One issue, I suppose, is that some people treat the Five Ways as if they are supposed to be self-evident syllogisms. As if when you read through to the end of one, the conclusion is supposed to be obvious. This is a bad mistake, I think. Because the terms and arguments are so obscure to modern people, each of the Five Ways ends up being more like the table of contents, or a semester's course syllabus. Each step requires study. 

On the flip-side, maybe the difficulty of finding an obvious and truly representative example reveals an hidden problem, perhaps some kind of category error. I say this because the best examples for per se series seem to refer to intellectual objects. And intellectual objects seem to lack any obvious power to produce change. 

Yes, this is a constant problem. The existence of intellectual objects, or things demonstrable only by metaphysics and not physics, is another thing that modern people have trouble with. It's impossible to get some people to recognize that God is not supposed to be a big physical body, for example. 

At the same time, change is axiomatic in natural science and left unexplained. And physical laws are assumed by our atheist friends [...] to be brute facts that require no further explanation. Perhaps. But as I see it, the Law of Sufficient Reason applies when science only describes the various ways changes happen but remains silent [intentionally*] about the metaphysical preconditions required for those changes to happen. 

Moreover, substances, as understood in Scholasticism, often include intangible qualities, like final causes, that are excluded in natural science. For those with physical reductionist leanings, the efficacy of this methodological exclusion seems to warrant ontological exclusion as well. In contrast to this, ontological exclusion of intellectual objects makes the world ultimately unintelligible.

Yes, I've been told straight out that any question not resolvable by science is "illegitimate." The fact that the limitations to science are there -- very properly -- are blown up to mean that all knowledge must stop at those limits. 

Frankly I don't think that science does exclude Final Causes, although modern people don't tend to think of them that way. I mean, scientists will admit that eyeballs are to see with. Properly working ones see well, and those that don't see well are considered to have a problem. Nothing about this requires an intelligent designer. 

So it makes me wonder if the 5 Ways say more about epistemology than ontology, i.e. maybe God or a god-like concept is required, even if taken for granted, to make the sensible world intelligible and have meaningful discourse about it.

Well, I think they are meant to be ontological explanations, but you're certainly right that they are attempting to make things understandable to us. The questions beyond the limits of science, the questions about intelligible objects, and the questions about how they all go together demand a greater epistemological range than science properly uses. So yeah -- we moderns need to remake our comfortable epistemologies somewhat even to grasp the Thomist arguments, much less argue whether they're right or wrong.

The fact that people keep demanding empirical evidence when it's not relevant, or refuse to consider metaphysical questions which can't be addressed in that way, are where the category errors come in. People continue to think that the lack of empirical evidence for God, as if he were Bigfoot, is a relevant argument. 

Hmmmm. I think you mean to say that there is near infinite number of final causes any object can or could have. 

Someplace I read that the Final Causes of water include floating boats, reconstituting instant ramen, and probably an infinite number of others. Maybe water holds the record for most Final Causes. 

IMHO that  makes them less chair-like somehow.

Yes, this is basic, I think. When the Final Cause is something decided by a person, then the finished product may manage to reach that more or less well. The whole idea of increased skill and better mousetraps operates on this ambition. Moreover, when the Final Cause is something abstract like justice or mercy, it is usually taken for granted that perfection is unlikely in this world. One of the main ideas about Jesus, after all, is that he was the only one perfect enough to balance justice and mercy perfectly. 

And when it's something decided by a person, the Final Cause is an essential quality of the object -- not accidental, I think. The color of a chair is accidental, but its sit-down-uponness is a defining feature.