Natural Theology

A.  Overview
B.  Thomistic-Aristotelian account of substance and accident
C.  Thomistic-Aristotelian account of change

II.  The Structure of Natural Theology 1:  Proof of the existence of a 'god-like' being

A. General overview: the structure of a natural theology
B.  Critique of non-empirical or a priori arguments for the existence of God
C.  The possibility of natural theology
D.  The five ways

III.  The Structure of Natural Theology 2: The Via Remotionis (Via Negativa)

A. An Interlude: the Dangers
B. Explanation of the Via Remotionis
C. Definition of a First Efficient Cause
D. Derivation of Negative Attributes

IV.   The Structure of Natural Theology 3: The Via Affirmationis (Via Affirmativa)

A. Foundation: the similarity of creatures to God
B. Types of predication of positive attributes to God
C. Types of literal predication: univocal, equivocal, analogical
D. Some positive attributes that St. Thomas derives and discusses in Summa Contra Gentiles 1

• The place of Thomistic-Aristotelian notions in current mainstream philosophy of science. A philosophy of nature provides a philosophical framework for interpreting the findings of the natural sciences. Surprisingly, many contemporary philosophers — some without even realizing it — are resurrecting key Aristotelian-Thomistic positions in philosophy of nature on crucial issues such as powers and inclinations, anti-reductionism, efficient and (even) final (or end-directed) causality in nature.
  
  
• The importance of a sound philosophy of nature for philosophical anthropology and moral theory. In addition to its importance for natural theology, Thomistic-Aristotelian philosophy of nature is crucial for philosophical anthropology. Contemporary forms of materialism and dualism simply do not do justice to who and what we are, and in fact can be the basis for tragically mistaken views which lead to lots of unhappiness and despair. We will explore this during the third part of the course. And what is relevant to philosophical anthropology is, a fortiori relevant to moral theory, which we will touch on in the fourth part of the course.
  
  
• Some background reading aimed at a more-or-less general audience:
              a.    Stephen Brock, The Philosophy of Saint Thomas Aquinas: A Sketch (2015)
              b.    Edward Feser, Aquinas (A Beginner's Guide) (2009)
              c.    Edward Feser, Scholastic Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction (2014) — for the more ambitious. Lays out the fundamentals of Thomistic-Aristotelian metaphysics in conversation with mainstream contemporary metaphysics. See also Feser’s blog for a wealth of material defending a wide range of Thomistic-Aristotelian positions against all comers, and doing a great job of it.
              d.    Edward Feser, Aristotle's Revenge: The Metaphysical Foundations of Physical and Biological Science (2019). This promises to be a much more technical work that I would not recommend for the general reader. But it will be an important book.
              e.    My own class notes on Aristotle and God and Nature, along with section 3 of “Oh My Soul, There’s Animals and Animals”  (a bit technical).
  

• A substance (aka primary substance) is something that exists in its own right (per se) (e.g., an aardvark), whereas an accident (i.e., quality or quantity or relation or time or place or action (acting) or passion (being acted upon) or posture or habit (e.g., being clothed in a certain way)) exists in (broadly speaking) something else (in alio), viz., the substance in question. Looking ahead, we can say that accidents are the actualizations of the various potentialities had by primary substances.
  
  
• Every substance is a this-such, i.e., an individual member of some lowest-level species. Another way to put this is that every substance has a nature, where a nature bespeaks unity and characteristic actions and passions as defined by their effects. Knowledge of these effects is one of the goals of scientific inquiry. For Aristotle, the paradigmatic examples of primary substances are living things, plants and animals. This is significant, because many philosophers (called 'reductionists') deny that living things are substances in their own right. Instead, they view living things as just complex arrangements of substances, but not substances in their own right.
  
  One way to understand this better is as follows. As a general rule, Aristotle thinks that artifacts are not substances properly speaking, but (sometimes clever) arrangements of substances. The reductionists treat living things and, in general, everything more complex than what they identify as the elemental entities as, in effect, artifacts. The reductionists are Aristotle's main philosophical opponents. In fact, Aristotle's philosophical analysis of change is aimed at showing, among other things, that primary substances themselves can come into existence and pass out of existence -- something that was denied by almost all of the pre-Socratic philosophers who were his predecessors and is denied by modern-day reductionists as well. So on the view of the reductionists, plants and animals are not, to use Artistotle's language, primary substances after all. Aristotle, by contrast, thinks of plants and animals as the most impressive primary substances there are.

• At this stage of the discussion, for purposes of argument, a Thomistic-Aristotelian simply takes it for granted that there are higher-order substances with natures that somehow ‘absorb’ the natures of the lower-order substances that compose them into a higher unity with its own distinctive properties and principles of activity and passivity that are irreducible to the properties, activities, and passivities characteristic of their components. The problem is to give a coherent account of the generation and corruption of higher-level primary substances. On Aristotle’s complete account there are six levels of substances: elements (fire, air, water, earth), minerals composed of the elements, plants, animals (including rational animals, i.e., animals capable of abstract thought), intelligences (a.k.a. angels), and ultimately Pure Actuality (i.e., God). Differences between this schema of levels and those of contemporary science are important for science but not for the philosophical questions at issue here. So Thomistic Aristotelianism is resolutely anti-reductionistic, which is simply to say that it treats plants and animals, for instance, as substances instead of as mere aggregations of lower-level substances. This puts it at loggerheads with many (a majority of?) modern and contemporary metaphysicians and philosophers of science. On their view the only things that exist in their own right are the lowest-level entities, whatever they might be. Even though this difference is important even within physics itself, it will become even more important when we get to philosophical anthropology. For instance, Descartes, who was a pioneer in modern reductionistic views of the physical world, asserted that there is no such thing as pain in non-rational animals! ... because ‘animals’ are not as such substances, i.e., they do not exist in their own right with their own distinctive principles of unity and activity, but are instead complex machines (complex aggregations of substances) governed only by laws of local motion and hence without an inner psychological life. Aristotelians have a much more commodious notion of matter that allows beings like animals, which are potentially decomposable without remainder into just fire, air, earth, and water, to be sentient and to have complex inner lives. (Note, also, by way of preview, that both dualism and materialism lead to a radical split between the human "I" and the human body. This opens up space for all sorts of mischief in moral theory.)
  
  

IC. The Thomistic-Aristotelian account of change 

• So the Thomistic-Aristotelian account of change, which we now turn to, was motivated in part by the desire to establish a framework in which it makes sense for substances in the proper sense to come into existence and pass out of existence — something that reductionist philosophers deny is possible. And this motivation stems from the conviction that complex substances — and especially higher animals — are the most impressive unified beings in our experience. To summarize, the reductionists argue as follows: “Living things and complex non-living things come into existence and pass out of existence; therefore, they are not substances and do not exist in their own right.” Aristotle, by contrast, argues as follows: “It is clear that living things and complex non-living things are substances and, indeed, the most impressive of all substances; therefore, it is possible for substances to come into existence and pass out of existence.”
  
  
• Aristotle begins with the simpler case, that of a substance acquiring (or losing) an accident. Early this morning a certain man was not in Winona Lake and now that very same man is in Winona Lake. A change has occurred. So a change always involves a transition from lacking something to now having it (or vice versa). Aristotle calls the first the privation, in this case not being in Winona Lake, and the latter he calls the form, in this case the accident being in Winona Lake. But these two are not sufficient for a change. The privation and the form must both belong to the same thing, in this case the same man, who is capable of being in Winona Lake but also capable of not being in Winona Lake. This Aristotle calls this the matter or subject of the change. And so Aristotle says that there are three "principles" of change: privation, matter, and form.
  
  
• But while the presence of these three principles is sufficient to guarantee that a change has taken place in some subject or other, it is not, strictly speaking, sufficient to guarantee that a change has taken place within this subject. Socrates goes from being to the right of Plato to being to the left of Plato, but this change takes place in Plato, who is moving around, and not in Socrates, who is standing still. In this case, the actualization of a certain potentiality in Socrates is mediated by the actualization of a certain potentiality in Plato. In the unmediated change that occurs in Plato, the subject or matter of the change is acted upon in such a way that a relevant potentiality (or potency) is actualized. So every change is traced back to an agent, i.e., an efficient or acting cause, acting on a subject or matter and actualizing one of its potentialities by communicating to it a form that is the actualization of that potentiality. The technical language may at first be intimidating, but it turns out to be a description at a high level of generality of something that is thoroughly familiar to us. In other words, I should not be getting paid even a modest stipend to teach this stuff to you!
  
  
• What Aristotle, and St. Thomas along with him, next does is to extend this account of change from the easier case of qualified change (a.k.a. accidental change), i.e., a change in which an enduring substance acquires (or loses) an accident, to the more difficult case of unqualified change (a.k.a. substantial change), in which there is no enduring substance but in which a new substance comes into existence as the terminus or endpoint of the change. Arnie the Aardvark, pictured here with his mother Arlene, is a brand new substance with powers (e.g., sentient cognition, digestion, reproduction) and abilities (e.g., moving around on his own, vacuuming insects into his schnoz) far beyond those of the elements into which he will decompose without remainder upon dying. The world is truly amazing, isn't it?
  
  
• Let's keep at it here. Let us suppose that the change in question is the generation, i.e., the coming into existence, of an aardvark. The matter of this unqualified change must thus be something capable of “taking on” both the form by which something is a mere aardvark-sperm or aardvark-ovum and the form by which something is an aardvark absolutely speaking like Arnie or his dad, Armand. But notice that the latter sort of form is not an accidental form, since it is constitutive of a primary substance and, unlike an accidental form, does not presuppose the existence of the substance that is generated. Rather, it is a form by which something is a substance of a given type — in other words, it is a substantial form that constitutes a substance as a substance of a particular natural kind and is the source of the unity, activities, and passivities that characterize substances of that natural kind as such (in this case, a living substance, an aardvark) -- and not just as a collection of elements or of minerals, etc. — or of strings, quarks, leptons, atoms, etc. Likewise, the matter or subject of such a change is not itself a substance but is instead something capable of becoming a substance — even a living substance, with its own distinctive character and principles of organization. In other words, the matter of this sort of change is primary or first matter that has a potentiality that is actualized by a substantial form. Again, this description is at a very high level of generality that provides a framework for thinking about the results of our empirical inquiry into the specific properties of each type of primary substance. Something like this general account must be true if plants and animals are primary substances in their own right with their own distinctive powers. (And isn't it obvious that they are? After all, does fire or air (or atoms or leptons) have sentient cognition or feelings or memory, etc.?)
  
  
• Now Aristotle -- and St. Thomas following him -- designates first or primary matter as the matter of an unqualified change in order to emphasize the fact that the substantial form of a material or corporeal substance subordinates all the elements and/or minerals to the new substance in such a way that the new substance is a genuine unity (or genuine mixture of lower-level substances), with its own irreducible powers and characteristic activities, rather than a mere aggregation of independent elemental substances. In other words, the elements entering into the constitution of a higher-level substance no longer exist as substances but have been “taken up” into the new substance and into the structures and processes which are peculiar to that new substance. In general, at whatever level of description we specify the material constituents of the new substance, those constituents, while contributing active and passive powers to the new substances, are not themselves substances. The substantial form dominates from the top all the way down, and from the bottom all the way up. This is most evident in the case of living things, but it is nearly as evident in the case of minerals composed of elements. In the case of plants and animals, the elements and minerals taken up into a living substance remain not in their substance but in their active and passive powers. Hence, even though primary matter never exists as such without any form, the unity of generated substances demands that the immediate subject of a substantial form be a matter capable of being totally “dominated by” the principle that makes a generated substance to be a substance of a certain natural kind. In our technical terminology, this is primary or first matter. (By the way, Aristotle uses the term 'soul' to designate the form of a living substance. It doesn't by itself imply, say, immateriality, immortality, intelligence or even sentience. More on this in the third section of the course.)
  
  
• In 2012 an eminent mainstream philosopher, Thomas Nagel, published a book entitled Mind & Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False. In this book, which was hysterically — in both senses — pronounced heretical by many contemporary mainstream philosophers, Nagel is mainly interested in the treatment of the cognitive and affective features found in the world, though what he says has wider application. His main thesis is that the currently popular materialist conceptions of nature cannot in principle accommodate the cognitive and affective features of higher (or complex or what Aristotle calls 'perfect' or 'complete') animals. And while he flirts with something like Aristotelianism, in the end he tentatively embraces a theory that is much more outlandish, viz., pan-psychism, according to which the only way to account for the rich psychological life of complex animals is to hold that all substances — yes, even fire, air, earth and water, or, to update, strings, subatomic particles, atoms, molecules, etc. — have psychological properties! The chair you’re sitting on is smarter than you thought it was. :-)  As for me and my house, I will go with Aristotle and St. Thomas.
  
  
• Let’s return to Aristotle and St. Thomas. As we have seen, one way to characterize change on their view is to say that change always involves the actualization of otherwise unactualized potentialities. An agent acts on some matter or subject for the sake of some end, thus communicating to the matter a form that is the actualization of some potentiality had by the matter. In the case of non-cognitive agents, the ends of their actions are built into them through the tendencies they have by nature. The case of cognitive agents, i.e., animals of all kinds, including human animals, will be treated later in the course and is more complicated.
  
  
• Consider the following scheme:
  
  

  Type of Productive Efficient Causality	Potentiality	Actuality
  Qualified change (alteration, augmentation, local  motion)	Substance	Accident
  Unqualified change (generation/corruption)	Primary Matter	Substantial Form

  
  
• All of this sets the stage for a consideration of St. Thomas’s natural theology and for his account God’s efficient causality (i.e., creation ex nihilo and general concurrence with created causes). The latter is not part of this course ... though I suppose you could demand more philosophy ... :-) (As a teaser, even though creation, i.e., the act of creating ex nihilo, is an instance of efficient causality, it is not a change, since there is nothing that is acted upon. That is, it involves no subject or matter which is acted upon and whose preexisting potentiality is brought to actualization.)

• Stage One: Proof of the Existence of a 'god-like' Being (First Efficient Cause, Absolutely Necessary Being, Ultimate End of all Desires and Tendencies, etc.)
  
  
• The critique of non-empirical or a priori arguments for God's existence (chaps. 10-11)


• The possibility of natural theology (chap. 12)
 
• Proof of a First Efficient Cause — and of other god-like beings as well (chap. 13)
  
  
• Stage Two: Via Remotionis (Via Negativa)
  
  
• Explanation of the via remotionis (chap. 14)
  


• Derivation of the negative divine attributes (chaps. 15-27)
  
 
• Conclusion: The First Efficient Cause is a perfect being (chap. 28)
  
  
• Stage Three: Via Affirmationis (Via Affirmativa)
   
• Explanation of the via affirmationis (chaps. 29-36)
  
  
• Derivation of the positive divine attributes (chaps. 37-102)
   

IIB.  Critique of non-empirical or a priori arguments for God's existence

• Some arguments for God's existence are non-empirical or, in technical language, a priori. The most famous is St. Anslem's so-called "ontological" argument for God's existence. I will get to that in a moment. There are also arguments to the effect that God (under the title 'Perfect Being' or 'The Absolute') is the first object of human cognition, and that all our other cognition of created things is conditioned by our prior knowledge of God. Versions of this argument can be found, for instance, in the work of 20th century "transcendental Thomists" such as Joseph Marechal and Karl Rahner. St. Thomas rejects this position in no uncertain terms. In Summa Contra Gentiles 1, chaps. 10 and 11 we find the following argument and reply:
  
  
• Argument: "[6] Fifth, there is also the consideration that that through which all the rest are known ought itself to be self-evident. Now, God is of this sort. For just as the light of the sun is the principle of all visible perception, so the divine light is the principle of all intelligible knowledge; since the divine light is that in which intelligible illumination is found first and in its highest degree. That God exists, therefore, must be self-evident." (Chapter 10)
  
  
• Reply:  [7] So, too, with the fifth argument, an easy solution is available. For God is indeed that by which all things are known, not in the sense that they are not known unless He is known (as obtains among self-evident principles), but because all our knowledge is caused in us through His influence.
  
  
• Now for St. Anselm's argument. St. Anselm begins with Psalm 52:1, "The fool said in his heart: There is no God." He is a fool, St. Anselm explains, because anyone who asserts that God does not exist is asserting that even though we can conceive of a being greater than which none can be thought, as a matter of fact no such being exists in reality. But to assert this leads directly to a contradiction! For if such a being does not exist in reality, then we can indeed conceive of a greater being than it, viz., one that exists both in our thought and in reality. And so the thing we started with, viz., a being greater than which none can be conceived is not, after all, a being greater than which none can be conceived! So if we can conceive of such a being in our thought, then it must exist in reality as well!
  

• St. Thomas's response to this argument is a bit murky. I won't get into the specifics because I believe that there is something more important at stake here in the end. I have come to believe that St. Thomas's real reply to the argument is this: Even if Anselm's argument works, we should not use it in natural theology! The short reason why is that Anselm's argument yields a perfect being immediately and, because of this, bypasses the via remotionis. But St. Thomas thinks of the via remotionis as absolutely crucial, mainly because it impresses God's utter transcendence upon our imagination and our understanding in a way that is meant to have permanent consequences — one of which is to steel us forever against the temptation toward anthropomorphism, i.e., the temptation to think of God as just another being, but bigger and better than the rest of us. St. Thomas's implicit counter is this: If you want to see how God would look if  He were more like us, you should be reading and meditating on the Gospels and, most emphatically, not doing natural theology. In fact, a solid belief in the utter transcendence of the divine nature will enhance our wonder and awe at the miracle of the Incarnation. I will get into this a bit more below.
  
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• St. Thomas holds that even though we cannot establish that God exists through non-empirical or a priori arguments, we can still prove the existence of a God under certain 'god-like' descriptions empirically or a posteriori. That is, we start with simple empirical premises such as Something is being moved (or changed) or Something causes something to be the case or Something is contingent in the sense of containing within itself the principles of its own corruption. Now the ideal scientific explanation is a demonstration propter quid, where we go from a theoretical understanding of essences as causes to various effects.  However, even in natural science we have no choice but to begin with the effects and then to reason our way back to their causes. Only in this way, often aided by the construction of a theory, are we in a position to see the effects as emanating from their now understood causes. (Think of explanations in particle physics or in chemistry, for instance.)  This second sort of reasoning is what St. Thomas, following Aristotle, calls a demonstration quia, which works from effects back to their causes. This, according to St. Thomas, is the only sort of proof that natural reason can muster for God's existence, but it can be done. More specifically, we use certain general features of the natural world as starting points for arguments that reason back to God, under an appropriate description, as their ultimate cause or explanation.  As already noted, however, this does not in itself give us knowledge of God's essence or attributes, except with respect to whatever it would take to explain the effect in question. For instance, the first way of Summa Theologiae 1,q. 2, a. 3 reasons back to God under the description 'first mover', as the ultimate cause of motion or change, while the second way reasons back to God as the 'first efficient cause' ultimately responsible for all other exercises of efficient causality.
  
  

• In Summa Contra Gentiles 1 St. Thomas takes up this challenge in chapter 13. Since his purpose here is to engage in a discussion with the best non-Christian philosophers, we find a much more detailed argument for a First Cause than we find in the so-called five ways of Summa Theologiae 1, q. 2, a. 3, where he has a very different purpose in mind. Nevertheless, I'm having you read the simpler formulations in the Summa Theologiae. We can't spend too much time on them, and we really don't need to. I can only assure you that these arguments and others like them are being defended vigorously even as we speak. (I have already made mention of Edward Feser's recent book Five Proofs for the Existence of God.)
  
  
• Notes on the first and second ways:  Notice that in these two first two 'ways', the relevant causes are ordered essentially rather than temporally. That is, these are not arguments for a temporal beginning of the world; in fact, St. Thomas in other places makes it clear that on his view it cannot be proved through natural reason alone that the world had a beginning in time. Instead, it is a mystery of the Faith that the world had a beginning in time -- or, better, that time itself had a beginning. (St. Thomas also notes that if we could prove that the world did indeed have a temporal beginning, then it would be obvious that there is a First Cause.) Rather, these arguments are meant to show that any instance of motion or change or efficient causality demands a hierarchy of simultaneously acting causes, and that this hierarchy must have an upper limit (an unmoved mover or first efficient cause or, better, unactualized actualizer) if any change is taking place or being effected at all now. The arguments, in brief, try to establish that (a) every change requires as an ultimate cause a being that effects change in other things but is not itself changed, and that (b) the operation of any cause within the universe requires the simultaneous existence and operation of a transcendent first efficient cause, which acts but is not acted upon. The key premise in both cases is the one that says in effect that the effect we see is inexplicable unless the ordered series of causes has a first member. The idea is that there is in the end no complete explanation for any perceptible effect (or exercise of efficient causality) unless the explanation invokes a finite series of movers (or efficient causes). Is this plausible? I believe that it is. One indication of this is that in the sciences we keep pushing back the limits of explanation almost by habit, looking for an ultimate stopping point at least in the order of natural causes. Particle physics is an interesting case in point. This is a matter that is at least worth pondering. I will leave it at that for now.
  
  
• A note on the third way:  In the third way St. Thomas seems to reason as follows: If each entity is such that at some time it does not exist, then there is a time at which nothing exists. Sharp contemporary commentators point out that this inference, when formalized in the most natural way, is formally invalid.  After all, it seems that one could have an everlasting succession of things that satisfied the antecedent, in which case the consequent would be false. Now despite the acuity of the commentators, this is a pretty obvious counterexample to one way of portraying the logical form of the inference — which right away should give us pause. Even though St. Thomas is not infallible, he is pretty damned (well, blessedly) smart and not likely to commit the simple error of mistaking a formally invalid argument form for a formally valid one. One might even begin to suspect that his argument depends crucially on the content of the antecedent and not on the validity of one possible formal representation of the inference.
  
  (Consider:  Any sound argument can be represented as a formally invalid inference.  Here's one:  God exists; therefore, I should be very careful about how I treat other people. That looks pretty good to me. But let p = God exists and q = I should be very careful about how I treat other people, and then the inference will be represented as p; therefore, q — not exactly your paradigmatic formally valid inference.)
  
  So let's look at the third way a bit more closely. First of all, the argument focuses at the beginning just on things that are 'contingent' in the sense of being subject to generation and corruption, and not on all things that are possibly such that they exist and possibly such that they do not exist. For instance, angels as St. Thomas conceives of them, need not have existed, but they are nonetheless not subject to generation and corruption and hence are not in the relevant sense such that they have the potentiality to exist and the potentiality not to exist. That is, they do not contain within themselves principles of generation or corruption. This is why they are not naturally subject to aging and dying; by the same token, neither can they reproduce. So as far as the present argument is concerned, angels would, so conceived, count as necessary beings.  (See the second half of the argument, which allows for the possibility that some 'necessary' beings are dependent for their existence on another.) Interestingly, the same holds for primary matter, which is a principle of generation and corruption for material substances but is not itself subject to generation or corruption according to Aristotle. (How could it be? What would it come from? What would it be corrupted into?)
  
  Now with this background in mind, take another look at St. Thomas's argument. What he is arguing is that it is impossible for every being to be contingent in the sense of being subject to generation and corruption. Presumably, this would include the matter out of which material substances are composed. Now assume with the argument that everything that is subject to generation and corruption is such that at some time it does not exist. (The commentators seem willing to concede this premise.)  And suppose that the primary matter that enters into the composition of material substances is itself subject to corruption. Then at some time the matter that enters into the composition of material substances did not exist. Since all material substances have this matter as a component, there would be no material substances after that time. Furthermore, spiritual beings like angels either (a) would have their own brand of matter subject to corruption, in which case the same argument would hold for their matter and hence for themselves, or (b) would not be subject to generation or corruption and hence would not exist given the assumption that every being that has ever actually existed has been subject to generation and corruption.  Hmmm ..... it looks like maybe St. Thomas's argument is a bit stronger than it seemed at first. In particular, while it might not in general be valid to argue that if everything is such that at some time it does not exist, then there is a time at which nothing exists, it might indeed be valid to argue that if everything that has ever existed — and I do mean everything, including primary matter — were subject to generation and corruption, then nothing would exist now. So there must be at least one necessary being, i.e., being not subject to generation and corruption.  At this point, the second half of the argument comes into play, showing that the fact that a being is not subject to generation and corruption is not sufficient to explain its existence. Some necessary beings may indeed have their esse (i.e., existence) and necessity from another. But this regress cannot go on to infinity. So there is a necessary being whose esse and necessity do not derive from another.  "And this everyone calls God."  Note, though, that at this point, in the absence of further arguments, it could be that primary matter is itself the ultimate necessary being. This is why we need the via remotionis.
  
  I do not claim to have shown that the argument is a good one. After all, is it fair to count all of primary matter as a single being, as it were? Perhaps. Perhaps not. (Actually, the argument would work if it were always the case that a substance's share of primary matter ceased to exist upon the corruption of that substance. In that case all generation would eventually cease and corruption would continue along its merry way until everything was corrupted.)  All I am saying is that this argument is a lot more interesting than some very smart contemporary commentators have claimed. (Notice, by the way, that there is a similar argument in Summa Contra Gentiles 1, chap. 15 that does not make use of the offending premise.)
  
  
• A note on the fifth way:  St. Thomas argues that the fact of end-oriented action in nature entails an intelligent orderer. In this he seems to agree with all those atheists who are eager to banish every vestige of real-world teleology from the natural sciences for fear of having to admit the existence of an intelligent God. (I say 'real-world' because some might claim that even though, because of our cognitive limitations, we have no choice but to employ teleological explanations, we should not conclude that there is any real teleology out there beyond our explanations.) Is this a good argument? I don't know. I would have thought that an Aristotelian could just claim that the principles that give rise to teleological explanations are basic intrinsic facts about substances and that they don't require further explanation. But what do I know? St. Thomas believes that such principles ineluctably point back to an intelligent being, and that the Aristotelian I am imagining is wrong to take natural teleology as a 'brute fact' about the world that requires no further explanation. I discuss this a bit further at the end of one of my unpublished papers.
  

• Anthropomorphism: The position according to which God is a being who has perfections proportionate to those of creatures, only to a much higher degree (God as superman or, better, as super-angel).  This is the target of the via remotionis. A position that answers to this conception of God has recently been put forward by some Christian (mainly Evangelical Protestant) philosophers under the title "The Openness of God." These philosophers reject all or almost all of the negative divine attributes that St. Thomas derives in the via remotionis. It is fairly clear that St. Thomas thinks of Anthropomorphism as the worst mistake that philosophers can commit in natural theology. And, as we saw above, this is a danger that he thinks St. Anselm's natural theology at least tempts one toward by establishing God's transcendent perfection in too easy a way, i.e., without a robust via remotionis.
  
  
• Obscurantism: The position according to which God is so utterly different from creatures that none of the perfections belonging to creatures in any way resembles any perfection belonging to God (God as wholly incomprehensible). This is the target of the via affirmationis. St. Thomas has more respect for philosophers, like Moses Maimonides, whom he accuses of falling into this mistake than he has for the "Anthropomorphites," as David Hume calls them in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. This is because the whole point of the via remotionis is to establish God's transcendence as the context within which the via affirmationis is carried out. I will put it in even stronger terms: As I see it, St. Thomas believes that a natural theology is inadequate if it never along the way tempts us toward Obscurantism. Still, he argues, one must not succumb to that temptation. This, as he sees it, is the point of Wisdom 13:1-10 and of Romans 1:18-25. And it was reaffirmed by Vatican I: "If anybody says that the one true God, our Creator and Lord, cannot be known with certainty in the light of human reason by those things which have been made, anathema sit" (Denzinger 1806).
  
  

• We have (sorry, St. Anselm) no "positive quidditative" concept of God — the sort of 'natural kind' concept that allows us to begin scientific inquiry immediately with a preliminary taxonomy of substances that we have a direct grasp of. (Think of our ordinary pre-scientific concepts of various species of animals or plants or minerals, on the basis of which natural science has with time constructed theories about smaller, often unobservable, components of such things.)
  
  
• So we cannot know a priori, or wholly independently of our sensory experience, that there is a perfect being.
  
  
• However, given that there is an First Efficient Cause (and/or Absolutely Necessary Being, and/or Unactualized Actualizer, etc.), we can argue "negatively" that a First Efficient Cause must lack various sorts of imperfection or finiteness characteristic of things that we do have positive quidditative concepts of. In other words, these names or descriptions of preeminence give us a sufficient toehold, as it were, for the via remotionis. The via remotionis is constituted by the series of arguments found in Summa Contra Gentiles 1, chapters 15-27, culminating in the claim, defended in chapter 28, that God is a perfect being..
  
  
• In this way — and in this way alone, according to St. Thomas — we can come to know, a posteriori, that there is a perfect being (that than which no greater being can be conceived) — though notice that 'perfect' functions here negatively ('wholly lacking imperfection'), since its positive content has yet to be filled in. In addition, we have, through the arguments, come to a deeper appreciation of God's utter transcendence. As they say, God is not just one more being among many or just a bigger and greater being than the rest who is, as it were, in competition with creatures. Rather, He is Subsistent Being Itself (Ipse Esse Subsistens) and the source of all other being. (If we were to continue in natural theology beyond what we will be able to do in this course, our next topic would be creation ex nihilo — literally, God's calling into being, and conserving in being, everything other than Himself that exists. And He brings this about without acting on any preexisting stuff or passive potentiality of any sort (not even, to use Lawrence Krauss' peculiar notion of creation ex nihilo, preexisting abstract mathematical structures). The whole world of creatures, visibile and invisible, is called into being wholly gratuitously out of nothing.
  
  As we will see when we get to the via affirmationis, God's transcendence is, as it were, a cloud that overshadows everything we say about God and that counteracts the temptation toward Anthropomorphism. 

• First Efficient Cause = A being that acts (or causes or effects change) and is not acted upon (or caused or moved) = 'God' in a general and vague sense.  That is, when used of a first efficient cause, 'God' is  functioning as a general or common term, and not as a proper name, and its content is undetermined beyond the description under which the being in question is proved.
  
  (Note:  As emphasized above, the argument for the existence of a First Efficient Cause is temporally vertical rather than horizontal; that is, it is not an argument for a temporal beginning of the world, but an argument for the necessity of an First Efficient Cause in order for any change to be taking place in the present.  Second, we can do just as well with the notion of a Necessary Being. So it is not the case that the whole edifice depends on just one argument for the existence of a god-like being.)
  

• Negative attributes derived by the via remotionis, given the definition of an FEC:
  
 
• An FEC has no passive potentiality, i.e., cannot be caused or acted upon in any way (Chap. 16 & 19)
  
 
• An FEC has no beginning and no end and is not intrinsically measured by time, i.e., is eternal (Chap. 15)
  
   
• An FEC is imperfectible and incorruptible (Chap. 16)
  
 
• An FEC is not the matter of which the physical universe is composed (Chap. 17) (Take that, David of Dinant!)
  
 
• An FEC is simple and lacks ontological composition, i.e., has no composition of any of the types of composition — each instantiating the basic actuality/potentiality duality — that are characteristic of finite beings within Thomistic-Aristotelian metaphysics, to wit: (Chap. 18)
  
 
• composition of integral (material or bodily) parts (Chap. 20)
  
 
• composition of essential parts (form and matter) (Chap. 20) — a first cause lacks even the sort of matter had by the celestial bodies, which is on an Aristotelian view subject only to change of place
  
 
• composition of substance and accident (since accidents perfect substances) (Chap. 23)
  
 
• composition of genus and difference (since the difference perfects the genus) (Chap. 24 & 25)
  
 
• composition of esse and nature or essence (essentia) (since an FEC cannot receive esse (existence) from another — and this distinguishes God from angels as well as from everything else) (Chap. 21 & 22)
  
  
• An FEC is not the form or structure of the universe, either as a whole or with respect to any particular bodily thing (Chap. 26 & 27)
  

• Univocal vs. Equivocal Causality: God is an equivocal cause of creatures, since creatures do not have their attributes in the way that God 'has' (better: is) his attributes. For God's attributes are His imperfectible substance or nature — and not accidents that perfect a perfectible substance.  (In general, a univocal cause is one that communicates its own nature to the effect, as in generation, whereas an equivocal cause is one whose effect is different in nature from the cause.)
  
 
• Still, creatures are 'traces' or 'representations' — though imperfect traces or representations — of the divine being, analogous to the way in which artifacts instantiate the ideas or blueprints of the artisans who design and make them. For the divine ideas are themselves indicative of modes in which God's being can be represented or imaged by finite creatures.  (Intellectual substances, such as angels and human beings, are said to be 'images' of God rather than mere 'traces'.  But we can't go into that distinction here.)
  
 
• So we can come to a limited knowledge of those positive attributes of God that are reflected in His creation, but we must always be mindful of His transcendence as established by the via remotionis. Notice that this does not tell us anything about God's inner life, so to speak, or His plan for the world. These are mysteries of the faith that we can know only by His revealing them to us.
  
  

• Literal predications

• Names that signify pure perfections (e.g., 'wise', 'intelligent', 'good', 'living', 'powerful', etc.)
  
 
• Names that signify in the mode of supereminence (e.g., 'First Efficient Cause', 'Perfect Being', etc.)
  
  
• (Merely) metaphorical predications:
  
 
• Names that signify perfections but express a mode that can belong only to creatures (e.g., 'lion', 'rock', 'fortress', 'paper towel', as in "God is a paper towel that wipes away our sins").  It is precisely the via remotionis that gives us the division of biblical predicates about God into literal and metaphorical. So, for instance, 'faithful' befits God in a way that 'rock' does not, even though Sacred Scripture calls God a rock in order to signify His faithfulness.
  
  

IVC.  Types of literal predication: univocal, equivocal, analogical

• Univocal predication: Predication of a form or concept that is the same in species in both subjects (e.g., 'Simba is a lion' and 'Ponto is a lion')
  


• Equivocal (by chance) predication: Predication of two wholly disparate forms or concepts that just happen to be associated with the same linguistic term (e.g., 'This is a bat' said of the animal and 'This is a bat', said of the instrument for hitting a pitched ball).
  
 
• Analogical predication: Predication of two forms which, though different, are ordered to one another in some non-accidental way (e.g., 'This is intelligent' said of you as a student and of your term paper; 'This is healthy' as said of an animal and of food).  So we have two different concepts here, but concepts that are ordered in a certain way. The reality of health in the animal is the end toward which healthy food is ordered. In the case of human and divine wisdom, a human being's being wise is ordered toward God's wisdom, which is (a) perfection of wisdom in which human wisdom participates, (b) the first efficient cause of human wisdom, and (c) the ultimate end toward which human wisdom moves one.
  

St. Thomas's thesis: Terms that are predicated literally of both God and creatures (viz., the pure perfections) are predicated of them analogically, always under the shadow of God's transcendence as established by the via remotionis.  This is why St. Thomas and others say strange things like 'God is Wisdom'.


Dynamics of positive predication: God is wise ..... but not wise like Socrates (via remotionis) ..... God is Wisdom Itself  —  the abstract term 'wisdom' reminds us of God's simplicity but doesn't capture his subsistence (unlike ordinary instances of wisdom, He's not an accident that exists in another), whereas the concrete term 'wise' reminds us of God's subsistence but doesn't capture his simplicity (unlike the wise beings of our experience, he is not composed of his substance and the accident of wisdom which perfects that substance).

IVD.  Some positive attributes that St. Thomas derives and discusses in Summa Contra Gentiles 1

• goodness
• uniqueness
• intelligence
• power
• freedom
• love
• mercy
• justice
• providence
• blessedness ........This is precisely what God offers us a participation in = human beatitude