How to Think Like Aquinas
Page 15
29. Straw man. Don’t want to contend with an opponent’s powerful argument? Then attribute a weaker one to him! This fallacy of setting up a flimsy “straw man” instead of facing a real argument can sometimes take the form of a false dichotomy as well, like the one I noted that atheists sometimes use, framing atheism versus theism as a battle between the modern, educated man of science and the uneducated, backwoods Bible-thumper. The fundamentalist serves as a straw man much easier to knock down than the likes of an Augustine or an Aquinas. Thomas, incidentally, had no taste for battling straw men. He often states the arguments of the objections more cogently than those who held such objections and makes clear which authorities they drew upon, be they revered Church Fathers, or Scripture itself, before showing how their arguments fall short.
30. Undistributed middle term. We’ll conclude with a formal logical fallacy that entails faulty deductive reasoning, because it is so commonly seen and sometimes with the most derogatory implications for its targets. Let me lay out an example in a syllogism:
White supremacists prefer candidate X.
You prefer candidate X.
Therefore, you are a white supremacist.
This is fallacious reasoning because the middle term is not “distributed.” It is not a universal term that applies to all cases. The reasons you prefer candidate X may differ completely from those of white supremacists or may coincide on issues that have nothing to do with race. To think like Aquinas, we must be aware of how prevalent illogical thinking is in our culture in regard to many of life’s most important matters, whether through unintentional ignorance or clear-sighted malice. We should strive to do our best to avoid such ignorance or malice, through our own ongoing efforts, ever in cooperation with God’s grace.
140They are numbered 11–15 in our memory tour since they continue within the memory house after the first ten locations we filled with the book’s ten main themes in our exercise in chapter 7.
141Summa Contra Gentiles, trans. Anton C. Pegis (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1975), bk. I, chap. 6, art. 4.
142In a most fitting, and perhaps rather humorous manner, in the “On the contrary” article in which Thomas provides logical arguments for God’s existence, the first authority he quotes is, in effect, God Himself: “It is said in the person of God: I am Who Am (Exod. 3:14).” From this unusual and ultimate appeal to authority, Thomas then proceeds to his famous five proofs that depend not on faith, but on reason alone.
143Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2008), 221.
144Summa Theologica, II-II, Q. 2, art. 10.
145Inductive reasoning starts from particular facts to reach general conclusions, while deductive reasoning, epitomized in the syllogism, starts from general principles known to be true to reach a conclusion about particulars.
146Summa Theologica, I, Q. 2, art. 1.
147I should note as well that even brain size has only a modest correlation with intelligence as measured by intelligence tests of people in the same age groups. It is estimated by some at a correlation coefficient of around 0.4, with 0.0 indicating no relationship and 1.0 indicating perfect correlation. I would suppose that St. Thomas did indeed have a large brain in keeping with his large body size (exact height and weight are unknown). We do know that Albert Einstein was of average height (reported to be between five foot seven and five foot nine) and average brain size, which does go to show that much more important than how much brain tissue we might have is what we choose to do with it!
148The English phrase for this tactic has been tracked as far back as the late seventeenth century to references to laying down a trail of strong-smelling smoked or kippered herring to train dogs or horses to follow a trail while hunting. When not acting as a logical fallacy, the technique is also used at times as a literary device, as in detective novels when the author lays out false clues to try to lead readers away from the true conclusion.
Chapter 12
Premises of Sand
Foundational Intellectual Errors Destroying Our Modern Culture
Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house upon the sand; and the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell; and great was the fall of it. (Matt. 7:26–27)
So, if the ten precepts of Thomas’s letter and our twenty logical fallacies are secured in the recesses of your memory, it is time to move along and memorize the first five of our “premises of sand”: the sandy “isms.”
Erroneous Isms 1–5 (Locations 31–35)
Still in the family room, next to the pool table is a recliner (location 31), and reclining there is a man who keeps shaking his head, saying, “Gee, I don’t know about God.” Next to him, on the couch (32), is a second man who firmly scolds the first man, saying “I have a thesis that proves there is no God!” You decide this room is not for you and head to the door that leads out (33), whereupon you are met by another convict, this one wearing a uniform with stripes, but oddly enough, also with sequins.
When you head out the door, you are most surprised to find that the adjoining “room” not only has cathedral ceilings but is a full-blown cathedral!149 At the back of this cathedral is a baptismal font (34), and dipping his fingers into it to bless himself is the largest construction worker you have ever seen. You can tell by his coveralls and the huge jackhammer slung over his shoulder. Indeed, you hope he doesn’t accidentally sling it against the beautiful marble font. In the center of the church in front of the two main aisles of the nave (35) you are surprised to see a very large person consuming a massive meal. You assume he is just getting started, because many sacks from many fast food restaurants are piled up around him. We, however, have finished this chapter’s tour, so let’s see just what we’ve really seen.
A man on the recliner (31) who says, “Gee, I don’t know about God” serves to remind us of agnosticism. The a stands for “without,” and gnosis is Greek for “knowledge.” We simply have him saying “Gee” to remind us of the silent “g” in the Greek word gnosis. A man on the couch (32) who claims to have a thesis proving there is no God, should remind us of atheism. The con with sequins at the doorway (33) is there to remind us of consequentialism, the belief that consequences are what make actions right or wrong. (Apparently the judge or jury thought that some act of our convict was wrong.) Upon entering the cathedral, our burly construction worker at the baptismal font (34) serves to remind us of constructivism, which holds that man not only builds buildings, but builds, in a sense, reality itself! Finally, we come to an even burlier gent (35) consuming a massive meal to remind us of consumerism, the idea that material things can bring us happiness.
Location
Image
Premise of Sand
31. Recliner
A man says, “Gee, I don’t know”
Agnosticism
32. Couch
Man with a thesis that there is no God
Atheism
33. Doorway out
Convict with sequins
Consequentialism
34. Baptismal font
Construction worker
Constructivism
35. Front center
Man consumes huge meal
Consumerism
31. Agnosticism. Deriving from the Greek prefix a- for “without” and gnosis for “knowledge,” agnosticism claims that we cannot know whether there is a God. More extr
eme forms hold, in accord with other isms, such as relativism and skepticism, that we cannot know anything with certainty. Sometimes a person describing himself as agnostic means only that he does not know whether God exists (and may not have pursued the issue), without implying that God’s existence is inherently unknowable. In his Summa,150 St. Thomas succinctly demonstrated that we can validly reason a posteriori, from things already known and evident to our senses, to things unknown and unseen. As we saw above, in his five famous proofs, Thomas notes through observations that (1) things move or change, (2) there are effects and causes, (3) things exist for a time and then perish, (4) there are varying degrees of goodness or perfection in things, and (5) there is ordered or purposeful behavior in nature. Therefore, he argues, there must exist (1) a first or unmoved mover, (2) a first or uncaused cause, (3) a necessary being that cannot not exist, (4) a perfection of being from which lesser degrees of goodness flow, and (5) a first and final cause that provides for the order and governance of the entire universe.
Thomas holds that reason can indeed demonstrate God’s existence and tell us important things about His attributes, such as His being all-powerful, all-knowing, unchanging, simple, and loving. These serve as preambles to deeper revealed truths of the Faith. Once again, in the words of St. Paul: “Ever since the creation of the world his invisible nature, namely, his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made” (Rom. 1:20). This position is also Catholic dogma, as is made clear in the documents of the first Vatican Council (1869–1870): “If anyone says that the one true God, our Creator and Lord, cannot be known with certainty by the natural light of human reason and by means of the things that are made, let him be anathema.”151
32. Atheism. Atheism holds that it can be proven that there is no God. Its hold on modern culture is relatively small but growing. Recent research indicates that in the United States, in the brief period from 2007 to 2014, the percentage of self-reporting atheists nearly doubled from 1.6 to 3.1 percent of the adult population (while agnostics grew from 2.4 to 4.0 percent).152
Thomas’s proofs for the existence of God were just briefly mentioned. I will simply note here that though it was quite rare in the 1970s, I myself was drawn to atheism by erroneous philosophical arguments. Although it took me twenty-five years to find they were faulty, my reversion to Christ and His Church took place in a matter of days after I first encountered the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas!
Some of the most powerful atheistic arguments I encountered posited that the idea of God was self-contradictory, superfluous, or unnecessary. The supposedly self-contradictory nature of the idea of God is still found in modern best sellers on atheism that argue that God could not be both all-powerful and all-knowing, because, for example, if He knows what He is going to do tomorrow, He is powerless to do anything different. The supposed superfluity of God is summarized in the statement “Existence exists” and in the question “Who made God?” Those who proclaim, “Existence exists” argue that the visible universe is the ultimate starting point and foundation and it makes no sense to ask where it came from. The question “Who made God?” implies that God is no ultimate answer to how things came to be because it leaves open the question of His own origin.
It was not until I was in my early forties that I found that Thomas had masterfully answered such arguments more than seven hundred years ago. As for the first, he notes that a contradiction arises only if we conceive of God as limited by time, as we are, having yesterdays, todays, and tomorrows rather than being fully actualized and existing in the eternal now. He provides this simple analogy: “He who goes along the road does not see all who come after him; whereas he who sees the whole road from a height, sees at once all travelling by the way.”153 As for the superfluity of God and the self-sufficiency of the universe, Thomas makes clear that since no natural thing can give itself its own existence or sustain it, there must be a being whose existence is uncaused, necessary, and the font of all things that do not exist necessarily. Astute and retentive readers might also note that to ask, “Who made God?” is an instance of the petitio principii, or begging the question, since it smuggles in the idea that God is something made that requires some previous cause, while Thomas explains thoroughly that reason shows us that God is the necessary, uncaused first cause, the source and font of all further causation.
33. Consequentialism. Consequentialism is an ethical position that judges the rightness or wrongness of our behaviors by their consequences. It can be contrasted with the deontological view of ethics that focuses instead on following moral rules and duties, deriving from the Greek deont, meaning “being necessary.” Consequentialism is very prevalent today in various forms. Utilitarianism is a variant that holds that ethical behaviors are those that produce the greatest pleasure for the greatest number of people. One problem with such views is that they tend to bolster the notion that “the end justifies the means,” implying that any behavior may be justifiable if it leads to some desirable end.154 An infamous example is captured in a phrase from around the time of the bloody French Revolution: “You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.” A version is often attributed to Vladimir Lenin. Eventually, millions of human lives were sacrificed to the failed omelet of Communist Russia. Consequentialism may utterly disregard the kind of moral restrictions, duties, and rights that undergird deontological views. Further, it runs counter to prudence, which enables us to achieve virtuous ends only through virtuous means.
Still, to think like Aquinas about our moral actions is to transcend both consequentialism and deontology, for Aquinas teaches a eudaimonism,155 or virtue ethics, that holds that morally right actions are those that lead to our ultimate happiness and fulfillment as human beings in a limited sense on earth and in the complete sense in heaven. Thomistic virtue ethics require that we follow God’s laws as beings made in His image and likeness. Moral acts do follow the right rules and do lead to the best consequences in the long run, but they are grounded in the perfection of the human powers God has granted us through development of virtues that not only perfect our own powers but share them for the glory of God and the benefit of our neighbor. Pope Pius XI made this point quite clearly in this comment regarding St. Thomas:
He brought the whole science of morals back to the theory of the virtues and gifts, and marvelously defined both the science and the theory in relation to the various conditions of men who desire to live the common everyday life and those who strive to attain Christian perfection and fullness of spirit, in the active no less than in the contemplative life.156
Thomistic virtue ethics transcends the prevalent but paltry consequentialist view that “no action is wrong if it causes no direct harm to others,” with the view that actions are right when they help make us and our fellow man the best people we can be, in accordance with our natures as rational animals, made in God’s image and likeness, and adopted, through Christ, as His sons and daughters.
34. Constructivism. There are different varieties of the theory of constructivism employed in education, psychology, and other social sciences. In its most innocuous form, constructivism holds that each person builds his own knowledge base through interactions with the world. In its extreme form, it holds that there are no objective, external facts or truths, because all knowledge is “socially constructed,” built by particular groups of people to meet their particular needs. The constructivist’s answer to Pilate’s question “What is truth?” would be that it is whatever a particular group’s consensus has decided it will be — for them, at that particular time. Constructivism is closely related to relativism and other isms we will consider here. As for a brief Thomistic assessment of the foundations of constructivism from Thomas himself:
He who teaches does not cause truth, but the cognition of truth in the learner, for propositions which are taught are true before they are known, because truth does not depend upon our knowledge but upon the existence of things.157
From the Thomistic perspective, consumerism promotes an inordinate focus on material goods at the expense of higher, spiritual goods. The consumerist mentality keeps our focus at the sensory level common with the animals, rather than the realm of intellect and spirit. It encourages curiositas, excessive care about lesser things that impedes our studious focus on the things that matter the most, and covetousness or avarice, illicit desires, and actions to obtain them.
Thomas himself was certainly no consumerist, as a couple of incidents from his life ring out loud and clear. Surely, you’ll recall our story from chapter 4, when Thomas voiced his preference for a copy of St. John Chrysostom’s Homilies on the Gospel of St. Matthew over all the riches of Paris. Another story tells of a rich man who conversed with St. Thomas through the streets of Paris and insisted that Thomas allow him to buy him a generous gift. St. Thomas requested that he buy him all the caged birds being sold on the street so that he could set them free!