Where Does Life Come From? Evolution and God's Creation (Aquinas 101)
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- Опубліковано 22 лип 2024
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Where does life come from? Is it caused by God? Or does it result from a vast and complex interaction of causes within the world? Could the answer be: both? In this episode of Aquinas 101: Science and Faith, join Fr. Dominic Legge, O.P., a Dominican friar from the Province of St. Joseph, as he examines evolution and the emergence of life in light of the Biblical accounts of creation and Thomistic philosophical principles about creation and divine governance.
The topic of evolution, especially as it relates to the human person, is complex and can be difficult to navigate. To better understand a sound Thomistic approach to the question, please visit this page: aquinas101.thomisticinstitute...
This video is an excerpt from Lesson 43: Evolution and the Emergence of Life (Aquinas 101) by Fr. Dominic Legge, O.P. To explore the complete module, including supplemental readings and lectures, click here: aquinas101.thomisticinstitute...
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This video was made possible through the support of grant #61944 from the John Templeton Foundation. The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the John Templeton Foundation.
*Scripture quotations are from The Catholic Edition of the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright © 1965, 1966 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.
The study of complex systems is key to understand this. It proves order can come from first causes in randomness. I am amazed St Thomas was already thinking about this so long ago!
That's the promoted idea. But, we are realizing that life had to have been zapped into existence by God. What we know about the complexity of even a simple cell seems impossible that it could have ordered itself. And the more we learn through honest science the less likely a random variation could be the cause. 1/3 of the top TOP scientists make this point, albeit secretly and quietly amongst themselves lest they lose their funding. I feel this will be revealed if science is ever divorced from greed.
I loved how much of the Bible and St. Thomas are cited in this video.
Very good perspective 👏
These videos have helped me reconcile science and faith.
Brilliant explanation as always!
Thanks for watching! May the Lord bless you!
Wonderful explanation! Thank you!!
Our pleasure! Thanks for watching, and may the Lord bless you!
Awesome, vídeo! This is a very good explanation that shows that there is no conflict with Christianity if life begun spontaneaously. Congratulations!
Life did not begin spontaneously
@@Miroshen Ah, yes. You is right. I made a mistake. Thank you for observation.
Just a retractatione. I mean that life begun to natural processes, not spontaneaously. If life did begin to natural processes, that doesn't mean there was no providence.
@@victorbrongel2038 if there is any evidence of abiogenesis, I’ve yet to see it. There are those who assume it because they operate with a view that excludes the supernatural from any consideration. But I don’t agree with that. Human free will is an example of supernature imposed by the immaterial mind on the natural world. If I were removed from the experience of being human I’d have trouble proving that. But as it is, and as I am, the truth is very plain for me and probably anyone who is open minded to such things.
@@Miroshen I agreed with you. In fact, consciouness is another fact that, in my opinion, is a immediate knowledge (even the philosopher atheist Thomas Nagel already demonstrate the problem in explain counciousness in a materalistic vieworld is almost impossible). In the case of abiogenesis, almost all biologians that try to explain the genese of life in natural processes, in fact, guide your researchs by a naturalistic metaphysics. But, indeed, explain the origin of consciousness and free will in natural processes is very hard (maybe impossible). Even that, if the scientists prove abiogenesis, this doesn't mean any conflict with Christianity.
Very interesting; thank you.
Our pleasure! May the Lord bless you.
Great video!
Thanks for watching! May the Lord bless you!
This makes sense.
This is really interesting Fr. I tend to think that the modern scientific conception of the world is kind of cold and undermines human dignity. But, you are showing a way to reconcile it with all the truths of the Catholic faith. I am still open to questioning the modern scientific vision, but of the seminal rationality is an intriguing one that suggests God could have informed the most basic matter to eventually produce complex intelligent life.
2:40 Yes, "overarching order" and not "everchanging sequence of different orders" ... opposite of Evolutionism.
Also, the overarching order was not that of a clockwork. Rather, if we compare St. Thomas to Paley, St. Thomas is clearly less Deist. A clockwork needs no more input from the clockmaker unless it's broken. It needs the mechanism, the winding, and it will work on its own. St. Thomas compared creation to an instrument of which the creator is also the player.
Very little actually cited directly from Aquinas here. Give a read of ST Prima Pars ques 65-92 and ask yourself how does Aquinas understand the creation accounts in Genesis, as literal 6 day creation or as compatible with modern evolutionary science? I think it is fair to say that Thomistic philosophy has moved well beyond what Aquinas himself understood as orthodox in that regard. That in itself is not a judgment call. It is however important to note that when attempting to reconcile new-Darwinism with Aquinas we do an injustice to simply ignore what he explicitly teaches in the Summa concerning the creation account in Genesis. Modern RC theology has moved well beyond Aquinas on that question. It remains to be argued if this is a coherent theological development of Aquinas' doctrine to its furthest conclusion or a major deviation from Aquinas' understanding of faith and reason. It always strikes me as odd when Patristic and medieval sources are employed to answer modern scientific questions. Have a read of the sources themselves. How Augustine and later Aquinas understood Genesis and the Bible is really quite different to these videos (which are excellent and I throughly enjoy btw).
There is really nothing specific from Aquinas in this reply, either. One cannot hand-wave at nearly thirty questions in the Summa as if reading Aquinas is a matter of gaining an impression from the text instead of making a specific, clear argument. And of course, you won't find anything in those questions or anywhere else in the Summa that argues that six literal days is a necessary interpretation.
Based on how our meager efforts into making and understanding complex systems, this does appear to be the most likely arrangement (as far as I can tell right now). Of course God creates our rational souls at the moment of conception. But given that God is One God in Three Divine Persons in perfect communion, all of Creation being causally in communion may be rather fitting.
Aquinas doesn't believe in the immediate animation, i.e. that the soul is created at the moment of conception. This seems right. Even some time after the conception, you can divide the totipotent cells in order to create infinite bodies, or you can create a chimera merging different possible bodies into one: how many souls has God created at the exact moment of conception? Probably, there is a soul only when you can no longer produce more bodies from a single group of cells, i.e. when there is not only matter, but when you see that a form was impressed to that matter. According to Aquinas, this happened a little more than a month after conception. According to Augustine, we just can't know when there is a soul in the body, but he thought that probably the soul was created some time after conception. The Catholic Church has not an official teaching on this matter, but we say that life must be protected since conception because of the virtue of prudence (i.e. exactly because, even if maybe there is not yet a soul there, you can't know with certitude if this is the case, so...). One alternative view: if you accept that god already knows every future contingent (even in case of real randomness), you can say that God create at the moment of conception the number of souls that he know it will be needed.
@@Pienotto Then how was Our Blessed Mother have an Immaculate Conception if not forgiven and purified at the moment of conception? A body can not be sinful or forgiven, only one with a soul. St.Thomas Aquinas did also not believe in the Immaculate Conception, however he was mistaken as it is an infallible dogma of the Church now.
@@Pienotto Also, they have the technology around the corner to be able to take a differentiated stem cell from an adult human and regress it to a totipotent stem cell (thanks in large part to cancer research). So that kind of mechanism is not a safe guide as otherwise we only have a soul when we die...and that doesn`t work. Also please pray that such technology never comes about, it is an unimaginable abomination.
Consider also that the soul is the form of the body. Being able to derive further humans from the body is not a principle of a human being in the sense that you could take a cell of a corpse and given the right (intrinsicly evil) technology, you could clone them and make more humans. Unless the Franciscans are right and we have three souls.
@@LostArchivist there are many theologians who still believe in deferred animation, as it is allowed by the magisterium, and no one see any incoherence with the immaculate conception (or the immorality of abortion). Our Lady was without the original sin. That's all. The fact that her soul was created, who knows?, one month after the formation of the zigote that would have been her body, is irrelevant. We say that she was preserved "since conception" not because we are assuming the immediate animation, but because there were many theologian who thought that she was purified from the original sin just an instant before the incarnation of Jesus (that is still the doctrine of the orthodox church), and not since the first moment of her life; indeed, we are affirming that she was preserved since the beginning of her life. Anyway, the original sin is not something that has to do just with the soul, it's about the whole human nature, and it has cosmic effects. Even in case of deferred animation, a zygote without a soul would still shows the effects of the original sin. It's not just about forgiving a soul, it's about restoring the nature.
@@LostArchivist imho, one can accept the idea that immediate animation is how the ensoulment *generally* works. But even in this case we have to accept that there are some cases of deferred animation. If you take a totipotent cell from a zygote, it will become another body. But if you put it with the others again in the zygote, it will not. You can repeat the operation infinite times per second. What are you doing? Are you creating and killing infinite babies every second? Of course not, you are just moving a *piece* of a single organism (as i can cut my hand, for exemple). But, so, when is, that single cell, an amputated part of the zygote, and when is it an organism on its own? It will become an organism only if you don't reunite it with the zygote. It will require some time. So, even if the first zygote was animated immediately, the second one will have a deferred animation. That's the normal case with homozygous twins. There are some interesting research about this, but I have them only in Italian, so...
5:08 _"it's possible for order to emerge from seemingly random events"_
Distinguo. Order as in symmetry, granted, irrelevant for DNA or RNA. Order as information, not granted, and that is what _is_ relevant to DNA and RNA.
What does one make of theistic evolution and the principle of the integral good?
Given a deeper metaphysical analysis, the evolutionary hypothesis doesn’t meet the criteria for a rational hypothesis. Fr. Ripperger has amply demonstrated this. Ultimately, one can marshall as much confirmatory “evidence” to that hypothesis as one likes, but on a metaphysical analysis, it doesn’t meet the rational criteria to be possible. And this is due to the fact that principles of logic and rationality are merely contractions, by the intellect, of principles of real being.
3:50, what kind of souls do fungi, viruses, batteria and every kind of protists have?
vegetative I guess, like plants. Of course St Thomas didn't know about the smallest organic forms so we cannot expect him to know how to classify them
It’s absolutely God
We recognize that... the question is how.
@@stingingnettle9726 as a point if observation, "In biology, evolution is the change in the characteristics of a species over several generations and relies on the process of natural selection. " You have evolved. You can not deny it. You are not longer a a zygote, fetus nor a child. You have evolved . and you different then your mother and father.
@@stingingnettle9726 my hand to our living and loving God, you better have NOT!!! gone to a Catholic school, with THAT KIND OF IGNORANCE comin' outcha mouth!!!
@@stingingnettle9726
Population genetics drift over time (similar to the evolution of isolated languages), and there is countless evidence that shows that ape-like humans existed in the past. In fact, humans are biologically classified as apes and there is no biological characteristic that creates the need to put is in a different clade altogether. That's also the reason why the scientific name for apes is "Hominoidea" which means human-like.
@@stingingnettle9726 according to how humans are classified in science, they are, and so are you
6:16 Seminal reasons translate as embryo.
If you know Latin you know "seminal" comes from semen, seed, and if you know biology, you know a seed is a fertilised plant ovum, a plant embryo.
It also has a connotation of Platonic Form ... which embrya do incorporate of their respective created kinds.
Where does St. Thomas say that vegetables and animals have material souls vs spiritual souls in humans? I always thought souls whether human or animal or vegetative by definition are immaterial.
It's a matter of semantics, it depends on what you mean by "soul". We know that human souls survive death, then other things you want to call soul will necessarily have some different qualities from human souls.
@@tafazzi-on-discord by soul I mean the same as the video, the living principle of a being. I don't see why couldn't animal and vegetative souls be spiritual rather than material and still die. But if St. Thomas says they're material that's good enough for me
@German Rodriguez. St. Thomas doesn't hold the view that vegetative and sensitive souls are material in the sense that they are composed of matter. They are however dependent on matter for their existence. In *this* very specific sense they might be called "material." In other words, they are not subsistent and do not perdure when the soul and body are separated at death. In this sense, they are dependent on matter for their existence. However, they are not material in the sense of being composed of matter. Based on these distinctions, it is clear how confusion could result from calling a vegetative or sensitive soul "material". A better way to speak of the vegetative and sensitive soul is to refer to it as immaterial, but non-subsistent.
@@AnselmInstitute thanks for your answer, makes sense. Do you happen to know where in St. Thomas' writings can I learn about this?
@@germanr84 In Q 65 article 4, he makes reference to corporeal forms. In Q 75 art 2, St. Thomas talks about the human soul being subsistent. I suspect that this will be a helpful place to start.
I want to see how this fits with souls...
You can read about creation, generstion and corruption. And substantial change.
@@antoniomoyal I get those distinctions, I want to know about how this fits with souls and of course specifically with human souls, having such distinction as "human" would be innadecuate then and it would be only part of a broad categorization system that simply helps us organize ourselves through words but that has no true and objective value in reality. I mean if God creates "human souls" then those souls inform the available matter in a human way, and not in the way of other species, but if there is a development then souls have to be different to inform and animate matter in a different way.
One of our upcoming episodes will address this question, so stay tuned! May the Lord bless you!
Can you speak about transhumanism?
Will cyborg be post human?
If man evolved, how is it possible that there are millions of years of pain and death before the original sin?
Possible answer: If Christ's death could retroactively save those who died before him, does original sin also transcend time?
Thank you for your thoughts.
The “evidence” that man evolved from a lower species is basically non existent.
"millions of years of pain and death" well, that's true but it involves only animals not first humans (with a rational/supernatural souls) and in Genesis we read that the Original Sin is related to mankind only. If death existed before the Fall, is not a contraddiction
In a previous video I posted a comment asking the TI:
(i) to present the source, in the work of St. Thomas, of the statement that he postulated that inferior living beings can arise from inanimate matter, without direct and extraordinary divine intervention; and
(ii) how inanimate matter can be, at the same time, a material and efficient cause of the emergence of life, if it violates the axiom that it is impossible for something to communicate to others what it does not have.
Both questions remain unanswered in this video.
A "wider order", in which the "complex interaction" between inanimate bodies produces life, as second causes, seems to me a sophisticated way of saying that the nature of inanimate matter, or the lifeless cosmos itself, already has the potentiality of life in itself.
This sounds contradictory to me, because its nature is, precisely, inanimate, devoid of its own movement and self-oriented.
The thesis of this video suffers from a serious gap, in my view, and, to be honest, it comes dangerously close to a pantheistic view.
The problem with (ii) is that it assumes that we have an unobstructed view into the natures of things, so that when we say 'non living material' this is both true and exhaustive with regard to its capacities for development. If the description is true and exhaustive, then yes, it follows that living beings could not arise from it without a divine action. As an analogous example, if we were to observe a human embryo and conclude that because it does not exhibit any powers of sensation or reason, it does not have them, and therefore cannot develop them without special divine action. Instead, ensoulment is held to occur at conception and not at the development of the power. The point then is that the view into the nature of a material being (human, animal, plant or rock) is not unobstructed and immediate, and so we should not assume to create categories of being in our minds which are more rigid than those in nature.
@@EventHT The "description" is true and exhaustive. Life is not indefinite. There is no gray area between the living and the non-living. Life consists of the cohesion and internal coordination of the movement of the parts that make up the entity (systems, cells, ribosomes, etc.) and in the self-oriented character of the external movement of the entity, in order to fulfill, at least, the basic operations of the vegetative soul.
The nature of each entity, which is nothing more than its essence or quiddity as a principle of operation, specifies the properties of its operation. Thus, a being endowed with a vegetable soul, possesses in itself, even if potentially, the virtues necessary to operate according to the perfections of its nature. The same with the human being, who possesses, from conception, in potency, all the capacities of his rational soul, which will be reduced to act in the appropriate time.
What am I saying? With the exception of Divine Grace, which perfects human nature for charity, the nature of each created being (living or not living) already possesses, from the moment of its creation, all the perfections proper to that being, and will not be perfected after creation, but by a new, direct and extraordinary intervention of God.
Thus, if we say that inanimate matter or the cosmos already contains in itself a "more comprehensive order" that makes it the immediate efficient cause of the emergence of life, even if as a second cause, we are saying that inanimate matter is not inanimate by nature, but it already has in itself the ability to generate life. This is a contradiction.
@@leonardovieira4445 The ideas of the types of soul are predicated on our observations. And again, these observations do not give us immediate access to the nature of the thing observed but are incomplete and deepen over time. An obvious example of this is the notion that the nature of dog (or other material living being) has developed such that we know it does not reproduce in perfectly exact and stable copies (fixity of kinds), but instead changes over time in dramatic ways. It is only with observations which span large periods of time that we can begin to deeply understand what otherwise seems so familiar to us.
Now, the human soul possesses in potency its powers from conception, yet it requires time for the actualization of those powers through a development of the material in 'stages,' before the completion of which it is not possible to know that the being possesses those powers. By analogy it is possible that what we have hitherto called the hierarchy of the types of soul are in fact stages of development over a much longer and more subtle process which begins with "non-living" matter that, nevertheless, by the creative power of God, already possesses the potency for higher levels of organization in itself which will develop over time and under the right conditions.
Of course there will be a difficulty with calling it 'inanimate' matter, because it will only be an inanimate 'stage,' but this is semantic and secondary to the question of nature: to what degree these categories of soul correspond in an exhaustive way to the visible cosmos. My suggestion is that, though we habitually think and speak as if we know the categories are absolutely exhaustive descriptions of the natures before us, there is more play in the joints than many realize.
@@EventHT It' clear to me. You are a nominalist. I think you're in the wrong area of discussion, friend.
@@leonardovieira4445 I agree that nominalism is a great error. But I am not a nominalist.
7:08 _"long and complex process of development"_
You are confusing biology and chemistry.
Miller Urey conditions can create amino acids. They will also quickly produce the disintegration of the same amino acids they produce. Quickly meaning within hours, not millions of years open to development.
You really believe that Creation and Evolution are compatible?? Dodge this: foundationsrestored.com/free-preview/
It's difficult to draw a line between living an inanimate things. On a different perspective this harmoniezes evolution and creation however evolution conceives the feasibility of life as we know it in any place that meet the requirements and yet the Fermi paradox explains how difficult has been to find other planets capable of sustaining life and has given scientific basis to explain how privileged (almost miraculously) is planet Earth as being capable of developing life and intelligent life as well.
Also this is kind of similar to the perspective of spiritual existent life in animist religions in different parts of the world however the animist in my opinion made the mistake of confusing deities with souls.
The Fermi Paradox deals specificially with the lack of hearing from extraterrestrial civilizations despite the sheer number of planets. Life itself is relative to that fairly easy to establish if one considers microbes of all kinds. We are what is according to the paradox, disturbingly rare.
In this case, knowing that God must infuse our immortal souls into each of us does not really alter that as God has made 2 types of intelligent creatures already we know of and everything logically possible is infinitely easy for God since He is omnipotent. That doesn`t mean God has made more intelligent species, but merely there are no metaphysical barriers from this regard. Even a multiverse with branching timelines, 5 billion dimensions and 1 million natural forces and all that craziness is just as easy for God as long as there are no logical contradictions keeping it from being so. I am exceedingly skeptical that is the case (I know that I just threw together all the outlandish possible things I could think of.), but it would be infinitely easy for God if He can and He wills it to be. All this hyperbole is to drive home that the bottleneck is Creation not the ability of our Divine Creator.
This is mainly food for thought for anyone who happend to read this comment chain.
May God bless you reading this in accordance with His Divine Will and Wisdom and in His Divine Mercy. Through Our Blessed Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.
Creation is His very work, nothing in creation since its beginning (in which the reality of beginning itself is God's creation) was not created by God through the Word. Creation is not a rotating platform of random chances (or for that matter, a fixed and rigid set of reality that is predestined in everything) in which God has to assert His power every now and then to correct or implement its course of destiny within the correct timing, in which case God is conditioned to act upon His own creation. Creation is God's action, every bit of creation is endowed with freedom and His truth completely within His divine providential power that always proclaim His existence and eternal Law just by simply existing; and hence the course of creation, including the birth of life, doesn't have to be a miraculous event as a literal reading of Genesis about creation, but it can in all shapes and sizes, develop naturally within creation since creation is God's action, in starting it and sustaining it.
I love being able to sit at the feet of real Jedis.
Science shows that things don't arrange themselves naturally into higher orders of organizations, mainly due to the second law of thermodynamics, which says that disorder in a system always increases, and also due to other scientific facts when you study in detail what it takes to have a living being.
Therefore, science shows that, unless God intervenes directly in the natural course of things, life just doesn't show up.
It cannot be clearer than that. From the narrow point of view of the intrinsic potentiality of matter and the cosmos (laws of nature), what man's reason applied to observable evidence concludes is the exact opposite of a "comprehensive order".
How can being come from non-being? How can a being without an eye gain an eye from nothing? The real issue with your attempt to use Thomism to support evolution and make Catholicism "appealing" to apostates is that there actually is no scientific evidence of a species "evolving" into another species; you unthinkingly accept the secular scientific narrative.
*How can being come from non-being?*
Aristotle (which effectively means Aquinas as-well) actually answered this, as he was responding to a philosopher named Parmenides who asked the same question. The problem is that, evolution (and in the case of parmenides: motion) doesn't require that something come from non-being, but that this something arise out potentiality: a different mode of being. So it's not that something comes from non-being, but that it becomes actualized out of potentiality. The genes of a bacterium could potentially mutate into something else, and that potentially give it a stronger likelihood in surviving in an environment. Hence, the potentiality of mutation and higher suriviability is actualized by the process of evolution (whether by random mutation, epigenetic selection, etc).
*there actually is no scientific evidence of a species "evolving" into another species*
That's highly implausible, since we've seen how interspecies evolution is clearly established: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin's_finches
Now, I actually don't think abiogenisis (the beginning of life) was something that happened by a natural process and must have come from God creating first organisms or DNA ex-nihilo. But it's just wrong to say we don't have scientific evidence of evolution. God is not self contradictory, and thus scientific truths cannot contradict God. Truth doesn't contradict truth.
@@williamcurt7204
It is not a question of a potency being actualized. It’s a question of, through a deeper and wider metaphysical analysis, if the principle of sufficient reason (existence of a thing is intelligible/accountable in itself or in another) is violated.
But before we ask this, the real state of the question is: Does the hypothesis of evolution meet the criteria of being a rational hypothesis? This task belongs to the metaphysician. All the empiriological disciplines, whether empirio-metric or empirio-schematic, must assume this question and answer.
In addition, the reading of so-called evidence for evolution depends heavily on the state of the question I stated above. If the hypothesis is in violation of rational principles (which are principles of the real contracted for intellectual use), the marshaling of “evidence” for it is in vain. At best, one has a good example of the fallacy of affirming the consequent for a logic 101 class.
@@reginald4776 *It is not a question of a potency being actualized.*
Why?
*Does the hypothesis of evolution meet the criteria of being a rational hypothesis?*
Yes, because I think it's an example of potencies being actualized by some process. Unless you're some variant of idealist that denies the existence of external materiality, evolution is an, at least hypothetical, empirical description description of external material reality, understood by metaphysical analysis of change and motion.
@@williamcurt7204 Finches turning into different types of finches is not evolution. That actually is a good example of potentiality being actualized. But that is not a substantial change, it is accidental. The only way your position works is if all beings have all potentiality all the time. In this case, there is no longer substance and you have destroyed the Holy Eucharist.
I can say it more specifically, how does substantial being from non-being?
@@williamcurt7204
Because one has to contract the concepts of potency and act and render them fully intelligible within the framework of the theory of hylomorphism. This is done by bringing in the principles of non contradiction, identity, substance, causality, etc,. Given this analysis, evolution doesn’t stand as a rational hypothesis.
You’re mixing up an ontological analysis and an empiriological analysis.
But what is God and where did He come from?
Watch their other videos and you'll get some answers to your question. :-)
God is the cause of the universe and the unmoved mover. He exists ouside of time and therefore has no need for a cause.
God is what "to be" means. There is a lot to unpack there, but it is in any case impossible for "to be" to not be.
"zap inanimate elements." Does framing it this way do justice to the universal belief of Catholics prior to broader Catholic acceptance of evolution? Why not simply say: "spoke into existence"? Their unity and intelligibility comes from God speaking them into existence. The substantial form in things comes from the exemplar forms in the Divine mind. To suggest that creation should be understood as an ordinary subset of providence that is difficult to distinguish from other forms of providence seems to me an innovation within Thomistic philosophy. Whether it is a *necessary* innovation is a question that is too complex to address in this comment box. However, I think that the approach should be to assess the claims of science in light of what is possible based on Thomistic metaphysics. This requires an understanding of formal causes as the principle of actuality. It seems to me that the materialist philosophy of Spencer and Darwin is responsible for the idea that the world around us is in constant flux as their is no immaterial substantial form to cause things to be what they are. In this view, matter is the principle of actuality and there is no formal cause that actualizes the matter to be matter of a particular substance.
Well of course some of this channel is going to be innovation. St Thomas didn’t just sit there and quote St Augustine to the t, as was popular among the dominant Neoplatonists within the Church of his times. Rather, instead, he took the most advanced pagan/secular wisdom he could find (Aristotelianism) and applied to Catholicism to produce better theology and develop better doctrines. This was such a radical move that the Bishop of Paris (he taught in Paris for a decent portion of his career) had all his books burned because of their radical new theology. So, if you want to sit here and be a hardline ‘Thomist’ and think that St Thomas and the scholastics had all the answers 800 years ago and the Holy Spirit has gone to take a nap since then, then you will be nothing like St Thomas Aquinas, but rather like his chief opponents who defended the dominant theology of the Church past. If St Thomas were around today, he would be gathering the best of all the relevant secular scientific information, and the best of modern and post modern philosophy and doing as St Paul says, testing all things, keeping what is good, and discarding the rest. Aristotelianism was cutting edge in 1200. It is not anymore. Categories like form and matter and traditional understandings of substance don’t fit well with what we now know about atomic and subatomic particles, for example. A very traditional understanding of essence and platonic style forms does not fit well now with what we know about species, evolution, genetic engineering, interspecies change, selective breeding, the possibility of inter species breeding, etc. So we need great Catholic theologians like St Thomas to make sense of all of this and update our metaphysics. Otherwise we will all be idiots, according to St Augustine, who said that if, as Christians, we don’t accept the obviously observable scientific truths of our day and reject them in favour of a fundamentalist or literal interpretation of Genesis, then we will be fools and we will be laughed at as fools. Instead, he said, we just confirm our interpretation of the Bible to the obviously observable scientific truths. And anyone who does otherwise gives Christians a bad name. When St Augustine said that, he was referring (as far as I can tell) to knowable truths about the stars, as astronomy had come far enough by his time to disprove a literal interpretation of the Genesis creation account with regards to the stars and the firmament. He is the father of the western theological tradition, so I think we should apply his wisdom and the wisdom of the methods of St Thomas to improve our metaphysical understanding, rather than being foolishly dogmatic and assuming that Aristotle nailed all of metaphysics a priori, basically somewhat arbitrarily, with very little empirical knowledge, all in Ancient Greece thousands of years ago, while simultaneously getting almost all of his physics wrong. Maybe his metaphysics have some holes too, and great theologians need to tackle them now. It would be a shame if so much time had passed and we knew no more than the ancient Greeks or Scholastics. God lead Israel gradually towards a greater fullness of truth, and has done so with the Catholic Church since it’s foundation. May God bless us and guide us and St Joseph protect us.
Also: it’s not just evolution, literally the foundations of the material world suggest that there is no immaterial substantial form to cause things to be what they are. Our senses cannot perceive it because they are limited, but all living things are made up of cells that are constantly in flux. And all of those cells are made up atoms that are constantly in flux. And all of those atoms are made up quarks and other subatomic particles that are constantly in flux and so on and so on. We have literally achieved the Alchemists’ dreams, in a sense. It turns out it’s unprofitably expensive and kind of useless, but we can transform literal elements into other elements by changing the number of protons and/or neutrons in the atom. And it turns out that that’s what the sun and all stars are doing constantly. There doesn’t even appear to an immaterial substantial form prevent lead from turning into gold or differentiating one from the other. They can and do change under the right circumstances, and it’s really just a matter of what subatomic particles happen to be bonded to other subatomic particles (for completely understandable reasons) at the time that determines the properties of an element. So the old system of metaphysics doesn’t work. Something that appears to have lots of matter and little form can be much more stable than something that appears the opposite if we just place them in the right circumstances. The conditions on planet earth actually aren’t the norm or objectively representative of most of the universe, as it turns out. So we need updated metaphysical models. Perhaps the 2nd Person of the Trinity, the Logos, the Truth, through Whom the world was created, is the Truth that holds all the atoms together in their particular configurations to produce elements and life and human beings. I don’t know. But we have to think about it and try to figure it out like St Thomas did rather than spitting off scholastic platitudes that don’t work with what we’ve learned anymore. May God help us.
@@nickkraw1 "As was popular among dominant neoplatonists of his times" Who do you have in mind and why don't you take the trouble to get specific and cite some examples? Ah, that's right because you don't know what you are talking about.. The person most quoted by the Thomistic corpus is not Aristotle (around 2k times); it is Augustine (around 3k time). So, yes authorities matter and no Aristotle is not a greater authority for St. Thomas than Augustine. (The third most quoted is Pseudo-Dionysius. That is a fairly strong representation of the neoplatonists as authorities. On neo-platonism in St. Thomas' Summa, read Aquinas' Neoplatonism in the Summa Theologiae on God: A Short Introduction by Wayne J. Hankey. This little introduction explodes the pseudo principle that the default reading of St. Thomas should be purely Aristotelian without the influence of neoplatonism--which itself absorbed much of Aristotle and sythesized him with Plato.)
Regarding postmodern philosophy, what good thing do you think a Thomist or any non-relativist should learn from it? What is *distinctively* postmodern that we should take away from postmodernism? Here again, why don't you take the trouble to get specific rather than noting broad trends and making insipid generalizations.
Regarding your uninformed comment about form and matter not fitting with our knowledge of subatomic particles: you obviously are completely unfamiliar with the work of William Wallace. Wallace is a bit of a legend within Thomist philosophy and wrote precisely on the interaction between Thomist metaphysics and the recent findings of science. He held that form and matter are constituent principles of nature just as St. Thomas did and he held advanced degrees in modern science. Read his modeling of nature for an education and (better still) read his two volume work on the history of natural philosophy among the scholastics and early moderns.
Regarding your rant about Platonic forms and species: I am not talking about Platonic forms. I am obviously talking about Aristotelian formal causes and also noting how St. Thomas synthesized this with an account of the Divine Ideas as Exemplar Causes (see the book by Gregory Doolan on this topic). So your rant reflects that you are unfamiliar with St. Thomas on these points.
Regarding "our knowledge" of species: St. Thomas understood species intelligibilis in a way that linked formal causation to both cognition and substantial forms in things. The idea is that there is a formal identity between the two but that the forms exist in different "modes" in the thing and in the intellect. Like a concept, the substantial form does not change and is immaterial. Now this is different from the materialist account species found in Darwin wherein there only an accidental form and it changes based on a certain amount of change in the matter (the amount of change necessary to constitute a new species is not agreed upon among scientists and poses an unsurmountable problem for even identifying what a species is). Based on all of this, Darwin and St. Thomas were not even talking about the same thing in using the word "species" because their philosophies were so radically different. To claim that we should change St. Thomas' metaphysics to align with the neo-darwinian synthesis is foolhardy. Better for a Dominican to maintain St. Thomas' synthesis and from that synthesis to then answer scientific questions.
Regarding your uninformed (I am noticing a pattern here) suggestions about fundamentalism: I do not read Scripture as a fundamentalist. I do read it in Hebrew and Greek, but not as a fundamentalist. A fundamentalist does not take into account genre. That is precisely the point made by the PBC document On the Interpretation of the Bible in the Church. I am not suggesting that we ignore either genre or science, so it would be best to leave off intemperate and uncharitable suggestions to the contrary. Such intemperance and lack of charity don't reflect well on you or whatever you think you are defending.
What I am suggesting is that Thomistic metaphysics should determine how we read scientific data. Although this point may seem controversial to people with only a rudimentary understanding of St. Thomas, the jewels of St. Thomas metaphysical wisdom is not something that St. Thomas' disciples should lightly discard. The question then becomes a question of getting subtle points about St. Thomas' metaphysics correct. If you would spend less time ranting and more time reading you could contribute to a meaningful discussion on this point (For example, you might read Lawrence Dewan's Form and Being or his St. Thomas and Form as something Divine in Things. Or you might read Wippels work. Or you might read the fantastic articles of Gyula Klima.)
Regarding St. Augustine: Yes I am aware that he did not take the creation account to entail a literal 7 days. Nor do I. He also held that the earth is 6,000 years old (which I do not). So you aren't providing information that moves the discussion forward here.
Regarding Aristotle's metaphysics assumed apriori: Here there is some anachronism. If you are going to use Kantian language then you must say that Aristotle metaphysics is know aposteriori not apriori. And no he did not get all of his "physics" wrong. This sad trope has been put to rest among those who are actually familiar with both modern science and Aristotle's physics (Part of the issue is that he used the term physics in a sense that is different than the modern sense). So, no, his account of change and motion are not obsolete. Act and potency are essential for any natural philosophy.
I don't have the time or the virtue of patience necessary to work through mistakes in your last long paragraph, but it could be handled in more of the same way that I handled what is above.
Its both.... it's not a rib from Adam.
Also other dimensions affects us and we them.... we're too dumb, even with the Holy Spirit, to work this out in just one dimension.
The story about the rib makes a lot more sense in the Gnostic scriptures, aka. The Nag Hammadi. I believe it's the Apocryphon of John that I'm thinking of that goes into the subject.
In Gnosticism, the true God is said by Jesus to be nameless, because if anyone were to have god's name, they would hold power over God; and no one can hold power over God. He's thus referred to as either the Godhead or the Monad. The Godhead creates via a process known as emanation, whereby he creates "Aeons" from himself in pairs. These are sort of akin to archangels that represent the attributes of God. The Aeons form a system known as the Pleroma or Eiperon. This is akin to the Jewish notion of the Kabbalah. The Aeons can also emanate, but are supposed to do so in pairs with the obvious consent of the Godhead. One of the Aeons, Sophia, decided to break this rule and inadvertly created a hideous thing. Trying to hide it away in the abyss, she called out to it, "child, come here!" which sounded like "Yaltabaoth", and the creature assumed this to be it's name. Yaltabaoth eventually steals Sophia's power (described as some kind of light) and uses it to create a world of his own. He then creates a firmament in the heavens that separates the world of his creation from that which is above; which is basically like a dimensional rift. He then creates the Archons (rulers) to worship him and declares himself to be the most powerful being in existence; thus becoming the Demiurge. In a plan to get back the power of light that was stolen, the Pleroma creates a sounding that thunders down and reverberates to engrave an image of the Godhead in the firmament. Being prideful, the Demiurge decides to show off how he is more powerful than the Godhead by breathing life into a creation made from this image. In doing so, the power of light is inadvertantly breathed into Adam. At this point, he's ticked off and decides to trap Adam in the Garden of Eden until he can figure out what to do to get it back. A minor problem with the Garden of Eden is that there is a "tree" there that's instilled with the power to break the control that the Demiurge has over Adam's naive mind, so he tells him not to eat from it. He lulls Adam to sleep and isolates the power of light in one of Adam's ribs to create the first woman; the goal being that he'll lay with the women and incarnate within her child to get the power back. While Adam is unconcious, he sees a reflection of the Godhead (more specifically, a part of Sophia) within himself as Eve. She has a brief greeting with him before her spirit wanders to a nearby serpent. She tells him that the Demiurge lied about the tree being deadly, and that once he ate from the tree he would know right from wrong. The spirit leaves the serpent, and Eve takes a bite of the fruit from the tree before handing it to Adam. Once he takes a bite, Adam becomes enlightened in a sense and immediately realizes that he's naked. This tips the Demiurge off to the fact that Adam ate from tree, and now he's lost any chance he had at getting the power back, so he's absolutely pissed. Adam blames the woman and the woman blames the serpent, so he starts cursing all of them left and right with suffering before kicking them out of the garden of eden.
Tldr; the old testament god and new testament gods are different according to Gnostics, and the former one was the imperfect (not necessarily "evil" per se) Demiurge, who happens to be prideful, jealous, and prone to violent outbursts.
Imo, God does not create "ex nihilo". He creates with speech from the apeiron; aka. the primordial waters, cosmic ocean, quintessence, prima materia, aether, etc. that we nowadays mathematically describe as the quantum field. The term "god" itself even comes from the proto-indo-european word "guht", which literally means "that which is invoked". This lends an entirely different metaphysical meaning to the scripture that says, "in the beginning was the Word, and the word was with God, and the Word was God". In old Arabic text, the Word was "Be!", and in Hindu, it was vocally "Aum" (Om), which seems to be related to "Amen".
"One that is invoked" not "one that invokes"
The problem with this view is that it puts God as being dependent on something else, something that is also eternal by it's nature (as this quantum field you're talking about would have to be eternal if God did not make it, and if God DID make it, then that would be God creating ex nihilo). God is not dependent on anything, as that would put something as greater than him, or show him to be lacking in some way
Nowhere in the Bible does it say that God created the primordial waters, and it does quite explicitly state that he separates the waters from the waters to create the firmament and recesses the waters to create the land.
The notion of primordial waters isn't unique to Christianity either. It's in every religion, and referred to by many names; the primordial waters, the cosmic ocean, the apeiron, the aether, the abyss, chaos, the quintessence, the prima materia, somethingness, etc. They're all talkinging about an infinite formless substance that permeates all of space. In Gnosticism, this is hinted at being the body of God and God creates by contracting his infinite self and emanating
@@bitskit3476 very interestigng
Another interesting thing imo is the rooster/serpent dichtomy that occurs in all religions. The pheonix/griffin/simurgh and the dragon, Ziz and Leviathan, Fjalar and Jormungandr, Anzu and Tiamat, Ahru Mazda and Ahriman, Horus and Apep, Vishnu's Garuda and Shiva's Sheshan Naga, Perseus (in Hermes attire) and Medusa, etc. The union of these two is the cockatrice or basilisk, whose origin is depicted by the orphic world egg and is associated with Abraxas, as well as Protogonas-Dionysus-Phanes, and Aion.
The Christian god seems to be very related to Saturn, which is the planet of Cronus/Khronos and associated with the sea goat via Capricorn in the Zodiac.
The sea goat of Capricorn (ruled by Saturn), is not only a symbol of Poseidon, but also of the Sumerian/Babylonian "Enki", who was the father of Marduk. Marduk is the "calf of the sun", who like Yahweh, rides in a chariot driven by 4 different beasts (depicted as a single 4 headed angel in Ezekiel's vision) and breathed life into clay (and the blood of Kingu) to create the first man after slaying Tiamat (the primordial serpent of the abyss). God doesn't do this until revelations, much like how Thor doesn't fight Jormungandr until Ragnarok. Marduk also slays Tiamat with thunderbolds and a mace; and is often associated with the bull calf of the sun and the eagle, just like Zeus.
In Ezekiel's vision, the 4 heads of the angel pulling the chariot of god are of man, lion, eagle, and bull. If we pair the eagle with the bull (symbolic of both Marduk and Zeus), the man and lion can be paired together to form the lion headed man, the leontocephaline, which is often depicted as wrapped in a serpent and represents Arimanius / Ahriman, who is the serpent counterpart to Ahru Mazda.