Twice now.

*cough*

The correct title is: Aquinas: A Beginner’s Guide

The correct author is: Ed Feser (one “s,” not two)

I now retire the field, head hung low. I should know better by now than to allow myself to sound superior in fisking someone else’s blog post. God, in His mercy and providence, makes a point of deflating me when I do that. Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.

The fellow is dead. Didn’t realize that, as I hadn’t heard of him before arriving at this page.

In that case, I can’t very well recommend to him that he does more reading! (He can, one hopes, discuss the matter with Aquinas personally.)

But if anyone wants a better understanding of Aquinas’ five ways than the misunderstandings of Mr. Clark, I once again recommend Ed Fesser’s Aquinas for Beginners.

I think Clark should read Aquinas for Beginners by Ed Fesser for a better understanding.

His first objection is to Aquinas’ statement: “It is certain and evident to our senses that in the world some things are in motion,” and goes on to state nothing in particular about it. He says that “Empiricism…faces insuperable objections” and lists some, but none are relevant to Aquinas’ statement, for Aquinas is not defending Empiricism defined in any way that is defeated by the objections Clark raises, but only is trying to establish that changes happen to things in the universe.

Indeed, I’m not sure that Clark understands that this is what is meant by “motion” when Aquinas uses it in that context: An ice cube, remaining perfectly still but melting, is “moving.” The rationality of the argument requires understanding what Aquinas means by essence, existence, potency, act, accidents, and substance, but I am not confident that Clark understands that “motion” in Aquinas’ argument means “a thing which is in act reducing a property of some thing from potency to act, in accord with the essence of the thing.” Clark’s statement that “the complete argument would include a great amount of physics and metaphysics” seems to betray the misunderstanding, because he’s right about metaphysics, but physics? Not really.

The key philosophical insight here is that only a thing which already IS can induce change in another thing, because a thing which IS NOT, being nothing, cannot do anything to itself or to anything else. This is not a matter of physics; it is a basic intuition without which the universe is unintelligible.

The statement, “For the final cosmological argument to be valid, all the subsidiary arguments must be valid. Now, while this is theoretically possible, it is not probable. Surely Aristotle and Aquinas must have made a mistake somewhere….” is pretty lazy. The argument is sound until proven unsound; and anyway Aquinas and Aristotle did not gain their reputations by having easily-detected errors, or by tossing work out still full of mistakes like an ill-considered blog post. Where’s the error?

Clark states that Aristotle “defines motion by potentiality, but he also explains potentiality by the concept of motion.” This is not quite accurate, especially if Clark intended to implicate Aquinas in the same breath. Aquinas and Aristotle define the change in location which is motion as an example of the reducing of a potential to act (e.g. “The thing was HERE, with a potential to be THERE…and now, it is actually THERE”). This is not circular reasoning; it is mere subsetting. Motion is one example of a reducing of potential to act, but there are others involving no motion (in the modern sense of the word) at all.

To say that a student “may study Aristotle’s Physics to determine whether the argument is circular” is more laziness. The argument isn’t in fact circular…but Clark didn’t even do the obligatory work of stating that it was and showing why. He just insinuated that it was, and then suggested someone else do the work. (And he was careful to imply that it was a lot of work, and not worth doing. Was this to discourage his reader from checking to see whether he was right?)

Clark’s third objection is also incorrect. Clark states, “Toward the end Aquinas talks about a series of motions and movers, and says that this series cannot go on to infinity. The reason it cannot go on to infinity is that if it did there would be no first mover.” But that is not the reason Aquinas uses. If it were, Clark’s objection that this was circular reasoning would be valid. But in fact the real reason Aquinas gives that the series cannot be infinite is rather different, as one can learn by reading what Aquinas says elsewhere about the matter.

The real reason is that there are two kinds of “movers”: Instrumental and Primary, with the distinction being that the former moves something but not by any power of its own, and thus is itself being moved by the latter type, which is the real source of the event. For example, if I poke a rock with a stick, we would say that the stick was the Instrumental Cause of the rock being moved. But the stick did not choose to bump the rock of its own accord: I was using it as an instrument, but I was the one doing the poking. The stick is only the Instrumental cause of the rock moving. Aquinas is saying that if everything in the universe was an Instrumental cause — something that can do nothing on its own, but only by being an Instrument of another more fundamental cause — then nothing would ever happen because by definition Instrumental causes do nothing. An infinite regress of Instrumental causes is useless; a Prime cause is required, which moves everything else through their instrumentality. Once you find that Prime cause, the ability of all the Instrumental causes to influence one another is perfectly intelligible, but the idea that there is no such thing is in conflict with the fact that any potency has ever been reduced to act, ever. P and Not-P are mutually exclusive and one of them must be true; Not-P is false, therefore, P is true.

None of the above requires causation to take place over time, by the way. It remains true even if causation from a Prime Cause through all Instrumental Causes is simultaneous.

Clark’s best objection is the fourth: That any predicate said about God means something different than said about man.

But a reasonable counterargument is that it is different as a matter of degree, but not so entirely qualitatively different to render the use of the same predicate about both useless by analogy. God’s goodness is not like man’s goodness, but the two are not so unrelated as to allow God’s goodness to be evil, or to allow God’s goodness to be tapioca. God’s goodness is still good, and more so than man’s, but in a fashion that were we to understand it we would recognize it as good, and our own goodness a faint reflection (but not a thing entirely unconnected).

Clark’s fourth objection thus fails, for the proper relationship between man’s good and God’s good is the same found in an a fortiori (the kind Jesus used on occasion): If man can be good enough not to feed rocks to his kids, how much more good is God? But the syllogism involving “motion” (defined in the Aquinas sense) relates the motion of created things to the moving of them by their Creator. If a stick can be said to have moved the rock, how much more is it true to say that I moved the rock? If things (Instrumentally) cause other things to resolve from potency to Act, how much more is it true to say that the Prime Mover causes all things to resolve from potency to Act (as a Prime, not an Instrumental, Cause)?

And Clark’s fifth objection is directed at something Aquinas never said. Clark seems to suggest either that Aquinas intended that his five ways proved the Judeo Christian God in all His attributes and glory — which Aquinas explicitly denied — or that Aquinas neglected to note that merely being a “Prime Mover” is rather less than what Christians believe about God. He did in fact note exactly this, and stated that Natural Reason was sufficient to demonstrate some, but not all, of the things Christians said about God (e.g. that He is the first cause of all that exists, the creator of heaven and earth). Aquinas added that Revelation was God’s merciful gift to us, to reveal what Natural Reason could not, and also to correct any errors in our Natural Reasoning that might occur as a result of human fallibility, insufficient data, inadequate training, inadequate time for reflection, and the like.

Clark’s final judgment is: “This assertion that the cosmological argument is valid, absolutely sound, a formal demonstration, and not merely a probability argument does not hold true of any cosmological argument published in any book.” But this judgment is extremely suspect, and will remain so until Clark demonstrates that he has both read, and understood, all the relevant books.