Philosophy
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b Why is the universe just right for life?
c Does God have or lack being?
d Can the existence of God be proven?
5 Guanilo’s critique of Anselm’s ontological proof is which of the following?
a A contradiction
b A parody
c A wager
d A theodicy
6 Anselm is which of the following?
a An innatist
b An empiricist
c A fideist
d A polytheist
7 Anselm argues that God must exist in reality because otherwise…
a Human beings could never have thought of him
b It would be possible to conceive of a being greater than him
c Human beings would despair in times of great suffering
d There would be no infinite reward
8 How many kinds of being do you have, according to Anselm?
a One
b Two
c Three
d Four
9 Which of the following is a criticism of the ontological proof?
a The distribution of evil in the world is unfair
b The world might not have a beginning
c Thoughts are not beings
d God does not look kindly on gambling
10 Which of the following is the best metaphor for Augustine’s theodicy?
a Although candy tastes good, it isn’t good for you
b You have to climb up the ladder before you can slide down the slide
c A painting must have dark patches in order to highlight the bright patches
d Fossils prove that dinosaurs once existed
Dig deeper
Katherine Rogers, The Anselmian Approach to God and Creation (Edwin Mellen Press, 1997)
Alvin Plantinga, The Ontological Argument, from St. Anselm to Contemporary Philosophers (Anchor Books, 1965)
Thomas Williams and Sandra Visser, Anselm, Great Medieval Thinkers (Oxford University Press, 2009)
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Aquinas and God as cosmic creator
‘Poets and philosophers are alike in being big with wonder.’
Thomas Aquinas
In this chapter you will learn:
• the difference between a priori and a posteriori argument
• how Boethius reconciles human freedom with God’s foreknowledge
• how Aquinas uses motion to argue for the existence of God
• the meaning of brute fact
• how Aquinas uses purpose to argue for the existence of God
• how evolution accounts for the appearance of purpose
• the significance of the anthropic principle.
Thought experiment: the view from eternity
Your life has been steadily improving over the last year. You’ve sorted out your relationships, you’ve secured the job of your dreams, and now you’ve won a trip to an exotic island paradise on the other side of the world.
You can hardly believe how fortunate you are during your first day there until, just before nightfall, disaster strikes.
You’re just sitting down to a sumptuous meal when you hear a disturbance at the door. It’s the police. They force their way in, scan the crowd and head straight for you. After muttering a few words to you in a language you don’t understand, they haul you away and throw you into a dark, dank prison cell.
Days pass. You have contact only with two guards, who don’t speak to you. At last, another prisoner is thrown into your cell. He explains the situation to you in stilted English. An insanely paranoid dictator has taken over the island. Arresting all foreigners on charges of espionage, he whimsically executes about half of them and lets the other half go. Your case will be decided tomorrow.
You are terrified. That night you have a vivid dream in which a woman in a long robe decorated with Greek letters appears to you. Introducing herself as ‘Lady Philosophy’, she tells you not to worry. There is a God in heaven who knows exactly what’s going on. The future will unfold exactly according to his plan, which will be best for everyone.
Although you want to believe her, you see a problem.
‘This dictator is going to decide by his own free choice whether I live or die tomorrow,’ you object. ‘He could go either way according to his whim at the moment. So no one can know what he will decide. Or, if someone can know what he will decide, then he isn’t really free to go either way after all.’
Lady Philosophy shakes her head. ‘Someone who knows how the future will go does not cause the future to go that way,’ she insists. ‘Suppose I study the weather and accurately predict a tornado. I didn’t cause that tornado to occur.’
You shake your head in return. ‘I’m not saying God would cause the dictator’s choice; I’m saying he would guarantee it. Your prediction wouldn’t guarantee the tornado, because you could be wrong. But God can’t be wrong. Whatever he says will happen has to happen.’
Lady Philosophy nods. ‘What you’re saying would be true if God saw events before they happened. But God is eternal. This means he lives outside our timeline. He doesn’t have to wait for things to happen. He experiences all of time at once.’
‘What? How can that be?’ you ask.
‘God is like a man on a mountaintop watching a caravan on the road far below. In one glance, he sees the beginning, the middle and the end of the caravan. The caravan is like the past, the present and the future. To him, there is no distinction. But to us there is. Because we live in time, we have to experience events in succession, just like someone watching the caravan go by from the side of the road.’
‘So, you’re saying that, for God, tomorrow is already happening?’
‘Tomorrow, today and yesterday always have been and always will be. The passage of time is a human illusion.’ Lady Philosophy began to flicker a little as the dream drew to a close.
You turn over in your sleep, wondering whether you can trust an illusion for the truth about an illusion.
The consolation of philosophy
As the Middle Ages progressed, philosophers developed a growing interest in cosmology – an account of the nature of the universe. Accordingly, they began to turn away from Plato’s innatist approach towards Aristotle’s empiricist approach.
Aristotle’s works, which had been lost during the early medieval period, became available towards the end of the period, as universities were founded in major cities such as Paris and Oxford. One of the most avid readers of Aristotle during this time was the Italian philosopher Thomas Aquinas (1225–74). Though Aristotle was a pre-Christian thinker, Aquinas wanted to use his ideas to support and defend all the major tenets of the Christian faith, starting with the existence of God.
Spotlight
Thomas Aquinas’s nickname as a postgraduate was ‘The Dumb Ox’, simply because the poor man had gone off to study in Cologne without knowing any German. This is rather ironic, considering that he went on to make an encyclopedic contribution to philosophy and is regarded as one of the most influential thinkers of all time.
Anselm’s ontological proof of God, which we examined in the last chapter, is called a priori, meaning that it is ‘prior to’, or independent of, experience of the world. As a follower of Plato, Anselm relies on innate ideas and reason alone to make his case.
Rejecting Anselm’s proof as unsound, Aquinas famously presents five a posteriori arguments for the existence of God, all of which are ‘after’, or dependent upon, experience of the world. The first and the fourth of the ‘Five Ways’ are the most important and influential.
Case study: Boethius and eternity
The thought experiment at the opening of this chapter is based on a true story about the Roman philosopher Boethius (480–524 CE). He was at the top of his game, with a successful career in the Roman senate and a thriving family, when the Germanic king he had been advising suddenly turned against him. After an excruciating year of waiting in prison, he was cruelly executed. While in prison, he wrote a book called The Consolation of Philoso
phy, in which he and ‘Lady Philosophy’ explore various philosophical puzzles concerning fate.
In his solution to the problem of how God can know the future without eliminating free will, Boethius develops a new concept of eternity. Prior to Boethius, many philosophers took ‘eternity’ to mean time without beginning or end. Boethius contends, however, that when we call God ‘eternal’ we don’t just mean that he lacks beginning and end, but that his entire infinite life occurs simultaneously – that is, without any distinction between past, present or future. He writes:
God is eternal; in this judgement all rational beings agree. Let us, then, consider what eternity is. For this word carries with it a revelation alike of the Divine nature and of the Divine knowledge. Now, eternity is the possession of endless life whole and perfect at a single moment. […] For it is one thing for existence to be endlessly prolonged, which was what Plato ascribed to the world, another for the whole of an endless life to be embraced in the present, which is manifestly a property peculiar to the Divine mind. […] So, if we are minded to give things their right names, we shall follow Plato in saying that God indeed is eternal, but the world everlasting.
Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, Book V, Ch. 6 (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/14328/14328-h/14328-h.htm)
According to Boethius, to be everlasting is to endure in a succession of moments without beginning or end, while to be eternal is to endure in a single moment without beginning or end. (It should further be noted that, when Boethius speaks of ‘the world’ being everlasting, he is referring to the universe as a whole, not just to the planet Earth.)
Since Boethius was a Christian, he presumably accepted the biblical story according to which God created the universe out of nothing. And yet, here we see him endorsing Plato’s view – also held by Aristotle and many other pre-Christian thinkers – that the universe has always existed.
The question of whether and how the universe could be everlasting soon became a hotly debated topic.
Cosmological proof
Aquinas’s First Way is also known as the cosmological proof. Although there are actually a number of different types of cosmological proofs, each rests on empirical observations concerning the universe’s basic operating principles.
Aquinas begins by pointing out that it is evident to our senses that some things in the world are in motion. He then raises the question, how did this motion come to be?
Suppose you see a stone moving across a level floor. It would naturally occur to you to ask: what’s moving that stone? Suppose you look closer and realize that a long stick or staff is pushing the stone. Now you have an answer to your question. But it would be strange for you to be satisfied with this answer because it prompts a new question – what’s moving the staff? Suppose you look closer and realize that a man’s hand is pushing the staff. Now you have an answer to your second question. Would it be strange to be satisfied at last?
Not necessarily. You now know how the stone is moving across the floor: someone is pushing a staff, which is pushing the stone. You don’t need to ask further what’s moving the man because he is capable of moving himself.
At a deeper level, however, you do have to ask what’s moving the man. In order for him to push the staff, neurons must fire in his brain, blood must flow through his body, muscles must contract, and so on. All of this has been going on in his body for a long time, and he didn’t start any of it. What moved the man?
We might trace the man’s vital functions back to his first moment of existence and credit his parents with setting him in motion. But then we would immediately have to ask the same question about them, and so on, and so on. We won’t be satisfied until we come at last to the beginning of the chain – something whose motion doesn’t need to be explained because it isn’t moving – an unmoved mover. Aquinas asks, what could this be other than God?
The Big Bang
The first question that arises for the cosmological proof is: why should the unmoved mover we are seeking be identified with God? Astrophysics today provides plenty of empirical evidence about the origins of the universe. Because we can observe the universe expanding, we know that it came from a cosmic explosion – ‘The Big Bang’.
Going back to our example, we can trace the stone to the staff, the staff to the man, the man to his parents, his parents to their parents, and so on back through the primordial soup, ultimately to the Big Bang. The Big Bang is the unmoved mover at which the explanation stops.
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. 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.
Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica Pt. I, Art. 2 Qu. 3 (http://www.newadvent.org/summa/1002.htm#article 2)
Granted, Aquinas could not have known about the Big Bang. If pressed on this point, however, he might argue that the Big Bang is not a satisfying explanation. We can further ask: where did the Big Bang come from? An atheist might insist that it randomly popped into existence out of nowhere. But this seems to be an evasion of the issue.
Theists, in contrast, have a much more satisfying answer. Of course, we can trace the causal chain all the way back to the Big Bang. But we can’t stop there. The Big Bang itself must have been created by God.
The atheist might object that this only pushes the problem back a step because now God in turn needs to be explained.
But this misses the crucial point with which we began – that only things that are moving need to be explained. While the Big Bang was itself moving, God was not. Because God is a non-physical being, he can cause motion without himself having to move. God is therefore the best candidate for the unmoved mover.
The everlasting universe
Some atheists are content to see the Big Bang as a ‘brute fact’ – meaning the end of the explanation. For atheists who are not content with this answer, however, there is another option.
While contemporary astrophysics has successfully established the Big Bang, it has not established that the Big Bang was the beginning. At present, we have no way of knowing what may or may not have occurred before the Big Bang. The Big Bang could have been the result of a prior universe collapsing, the latest in an infinite chain of expanding and collapsing universes. This ‘oscillating model’ implies that the universe is everlasting.
It’s difficult to conceive of a beginningless series of universes because everything we observe around us seems to have a beginning: the opening scene in a movie, breaking ground for a house, the birth of a baby and so on. But God himself is supposed to be beginningless – if it is possible to conceive of him as having existed for all eternity, then it is equally possible to conceive of matter as having done so. Plato and Aristotle were entirely convinced that matter is neither created nor destroyed, but rather cycles through infinite changes.
Elsewhere in his work, Aquinas himself admits that there is no way to rule out this possibility. Yet he thinks his cosmological proof should be persuasive. To those who are inclined to believe that the universe had no beginning, he would ask: why does this infinite cycle exist rather than nothing at all? He would argue that, even if the universe is everlasting, it cannot be a brute fact.
Does it make more sense to allow God to function as the brute fact at the bottom of the explanation? This is a deep question that everyone must answer for themselves. Meanwhile, Aquinas has another trick up his sleeve.
The teleological proof
In the Fifth Way, Aquinas turns from the origin of the entire universe to the organization of our little corner of it.
The Fifth Way is taken from
the governance of the world. We see that things which lack intelligence, such as natural bodies, act for an end, and this is evident from their acting always, or nearly always, in the same way, so as to obtain the best result. Hence it is plain that not fortuitously, but designedly, do they achieve their end. Now whatever lacks intelligence cannot move towards an end, unless it be directed by some being endowed with knowledge and intelligence; as the arrow is shot to its mark by the archer. Therefore some intelligent being exists by whom all natural things are directed to their end; and this being we call God.
Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica Pt. I, Art. 2 Qu. 3 (http://www.newadvent.org/summa/1002.htm#article 2)
The Fifth Way is called the teleological proof from the Greek word for ‘purpose’.
Have you ever observed the life of an ordinary squirrel? She gathers dry leaves and builds a nest high up in a tree to protect herself and her family from predators. She communicates with other squirrels through distinctive chirps. She collects acorns and buries them in the ground where she can find them again during the long, hard winter.
A squirrel is busy, busy, busy all day long. But does she ever stop and think, ‘I’d better keep busy so I can live happily ever after.’ No, she does not. Her brain is the size of a walnut. She doesn’t really think anything. She is simply programmed to do what she does.
The same is true for the rest of nature. Rivers flow, trees reach for the sun and geese fly south, all without an ounce of intelligence. Not only do individual members of the natural world achieve extraordinary results without thought, they all work together to achieve an interdependent system that will positively awe anyone who takes the time to notice it.
This complex and stunningly beautiful system could not have come about by chance, Aquinas asserts. It must have been created by God.