Metaphysics, Natural Theology, Philosophy, Philosophy of Science

The Nature of Reality and The One and the Many, Part Two

by Dave Seng

We cannot stop at a principle containing separate parts; there must always be a yet higher, a principle above all such diversity. – Plotinus.

In a recent post, I discussed the metaphysical problem of the one and the many. Although this question of reality has largely been forgotten in contemporary philosophical literature, it is very significant and does not seem to go away. After all, the human impulse to make sense of the many different and changing things around us is deep and profound. We can see this drive in almost every human endeavor. Whenever a historian creates a powerful story of the past using a multiplicity of evidence, he or she is confronting the question of the one and the many. When an attorney seeks an action in the court of law and gives diverse reasons or causes for that action, we see the question of the one and the many at work (or the legal question “how ought justice be correctly distributed?” is another form of the same question). The whole point of science is not to leave us with a diverse set of facts but to attempt a singular unified theory that makes the most sense out of those facts. That is why Aristotle devotes the first part of his Physics (a work about the foundation of science and the natural world) to the question of the one and the many. Even the postmodern critical theorist who wants to privilege the diversity of things to the detriment of unity and coherence still provides a narrative of why that is so (for to reject a “metanarrative” or to provide a “metanarrative” of another kind, is still to give a narrative in the attempt to make sense out of things). The question of the one and the many is with us today.

Some scholars think that the question of the one and the many was the original question of philosophy. One of the reasons for this is that it was the central question of the pre-Socratics who handed it over to Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and the rest of Western intellectual history. As the name suggests, the pre-Socratics were a group of philosophers that lived before Socrates. In fact, this group laid out the basic question that all philosophy and other fields still attempt to answer today. But who are these philosophers?

I can only give a brief overview of the pre-Socratics here. I will provide a list of resources at the end of this post for those who want to explore the topic further. For our purpose, and by way of introduction, I will discuss the important schools and ideas of the pre-Socratics, and in our next post, I will discuss the primary significance of Heraclitus and Parmenides. For now, let us examine the earliest of Western philosophers, Thales.

Thales, the first metaphysician in recorded history, lived around 600 B.C. and came from what is called the Ionian tradition. He lived in the city of Miletus on the western coast of Ionia (now Turkey). Thales and his followers have come to be known as the “Miliesian Monists” due to the fact that as they sought an answer to the question of the one and the many, they emphasized that all reality can be reduced to one basic principle. (Monism is the idea that all reality is in some sense one and unified in its essence or nature.) If all things have an essence or basic nature, they reasoned, so does the cosmos. In Thales’ case, he posited water as the basic essence of reality. It might seem odd that such an ancient thinker has become famous due his idea that water is the essence of reality. However, Thales is among the first thinkers in the Western intellectual tradition to ground his thinking on evidence, examination, common sense perception, and evaluation as authoritative in all matters of belief and conduct, what is now called rationalism. He did not turn to the Greek anthropomorphic gods, goddesses, or other mysterious forces to explain the natural world around him. He was the first to provide an argument based on evidence and reason regarding the natural world. We do not, however, know exactly why he chose water and not some other element. Perhaps he chose water due to the fact that all living things need it to survive, or that it exists in three different states (liquid, gas, solid), or that it is the most plentiful substance on the planet. After all, it is reported that Thales wrote a book about navigating the seas. The important thing to understand at this point is that Thales emphasized unity and “the one” when it came to the question of the one and the many and chose water as the essential nature of reality. Other early monists lived and worked in this tradition as well, such as Anaxemines (550 B. C.), who proposed that air was the basic essence of reality because it is a sort of life-principle, and Heraclitus (500 B. C.), who taught that although reality is always changing, fire was the one element that holds all things together and provides balance and order in the cosmos.

There also were pre-Socratics who emphasized change, the many, and the diversity we see all around us. These thinkers are known as “the Pluralists” because they sought to identify reality with a plurality of substances while maintaining that each particular thing is a Being and one and immutable. Of this school is Empedocles (450 B. C.), who taught that reality is combined of the four elements of earth, fire, water, and air and are held together by the force of Love which combines things, and torn apart by the power of Strife which separates. Among the Pluralists, we find the first atomists, Democritus (425 B. C.) and Leucippus (450 B. C.) who identified reality with an infinite number of indivisible material particles (atoms) moving randomly in space. The Greek word atomos means “uncuttable” or something that is irreducible. These thinkers believed that the universe came about by a mechanical combining or coagulation of an infinite number of atoms.

No matter which school of thought these pre-Socratic philosophers came from, it can now be understood why they are considered the first metaphysicians and cosmologists due to their investigation of nature and their desire to find a unifying reason or cause for the universe.

Things get really interesting when we come to Parmenides and Heraclitus. It has been said that all of Western philosophy is just a series of footnotes to Plato and Aristotle. (Dr. Mortimer Adler once joked that it was Aristotle who wrote the footnotes.) Nonetheless, the metaphor might be more complete to say that all of philosophy is a series of footnotes to Parmenides and Heraclitus because of the foundational questions they raised about reality. The discussion between Parmenides and Heraclitus is so important that it will be the topic of my next post. For now, it is important to know that the problem of the one and many can also be understood as what philosophers call Being and Becoming, universal and particular, appearance and reality, unity and diversity.

Science still struggles to maintain a balance between these concepts (and we will talk more about that in future posts). For now, just one quick example of this tension between the one and the many can be seen in “chaos theory” and similar fashionable theories we see today. When scientists say things like chaos is an agent of order or that there is a thing called “sensitive chaos” they are really violating the law of noncontradiction and speaking nonsense. If chaos were to be an organizing process of a whole, or a creative agent, it would not be chaos. It is really a reformulation of the problem of the one and the many. If the one is many, it is not one. If reality is one, it is not many. The problem persists and it was the pre-Socratics who first pointed out this metaphysical situation. In additional posts, we will explore how Plato and Aristotle attempted to solve this problem (through the discovery of form or essence) and we will learn that how we answer this problem will affect how one does science and ultimately shapes our world view.

To dig deeper into the pre-Socratics, explore these resources:

Jonathon Barnes. The Presocratic Philosophers. Revised ed. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982

James N. Jordan. Western Philosophy: From Antiquity to the Middle Ages. Macmillan Publishing Co., 1987.

John Burnet. Early Greek Philosophy. Fourth Ed. Macmillan Publishing Co., 1930. (One of the best standard treatments of the pre-Socratics, although from a positivist perspective. Excellent selected fragments and commentary.)

Fredrick Copleston. A History of Philosophy. Baltimore: Newman Press, Vol. 1.

Logic, Metaphysics, Natural Theology, Philosophy, Philosophy of Science

Addendum: Being, Cosmology, and the Principle of Simplicity

by Dave Seng

Nothing comes from nothing. – Lucretius

[Note: I will follow up on my post regarding the problem of the one and the many soon. Before I do that, however, I wanted to develop this excursus regarding the question of cosmology and the principle of simplicity a little more.]

One of the greatest questions of Being (all of reality) is how it all started. What philosophers call Being, however, does not strictly mean physical nature as it can include abstract ideas such as mental concepts, consciousness, aesthetic theories, human rights, mathematical axioms and formulas, emotions and intuition, moral goods and the like. Being includes both concrete physical objects and immaterial entities. Nonetheless, the question about the cause of existence is central to the study of Being. Martin Heidegger believed that the question, “why is there anything rather than nothing?” is the most important and foundational question of all philosophical inquiry. Another way of looking at this question is what is known as cosmology. Cosmology is the investigation of theories regarding the explanation, nature, origin, and development of the universe. Many philosophers and cosmologists are interested in “first cause” types of theories or arguments. This line of thought explores whether or not there is an ultimate cause of all events and existence, which logically does not itself have a cause.

Philosophers, such as Aristotle and Aquinas, believed that the basic elements of the universe—time and motion—were eternal. They did believe in a “first cause,” but their first cause was the greatest in a hierarchy of causes and realms of being. Plato was one of the first philosophers to articulate the idea that the universe must have a temporal starting point.

In light of our expanding cosmos and what scientists tell us about cosmic background radiation, it would seem that Plato is closer to the truth. Most cosmologists and physicists today believe that the universe had some kind of beginning. One widely acknowledged possibility of the origin of the universe is the “Big Bang” theory. This theory is a cosmological model which states the present hypothesized expanding universe has resulted from an explosion of concentrated matter (the point of singularity) fifteen or twenty billion years ago. All space, time, and matter are a result of that initial detonation.

Of course, the Big Bang hypothesis raises some questions. In a common sense and scientific understanding of reality, which assumes cause and effect relationships, what caused the Big Bang? What caused the cause of the Big Bang? What caused the highly concentrated matter to exist in the first place? Why did it suddenly defy the laws of inertia? These are some big questions given the principle of causality—the basic belief that every physical thing or event that comes into being is caused by virtue of something outside itself. In other words, the principle of causality is the idea that every contingent thing (things which are dependent for their existence on something else) comes into being by something external to it.

Philosophers and cosmologists have addressed these questions in two basic ways. On one hand, some have explored the possibility of an infinite regression, the idea that what caused the cause of the Big Bang produces a series of causes that recede into infinity. Others, however, have investigated the evidence which suggests a significant possibility that the universe has a real actual first cause and definitive starting point in space and time. Logically, the answer must be one or the other—either an infinite series of events or an actual first cause.

Philosophers are still debating this ancient question and have come up with some very complex reasoning about whether an infinite series is possible or not. At this point in the conversation, however, I think it is worthwhile to apply the law of noncontradiction and the principle of simplicity to these questions. The law of noncontradiction states that nothing can both be and not be at the same time and in the same respect. Applied to the Big Bang model, which claims that a single compressed piece of matter and energy spontaneously created the universe from nothing violates the law of noncontradiction. The universe, in the point of singularity, would have had to exist prior to the detonation. It would have to exist and not exist at the same time and in the same respect which is impossible. It can not be and not be at the same time. Furthermore, nothing is not an entity. In philosophical terms nothing has no existence or being whatsoever—it does not exist, it is not a thing, it has no ontological properties, it has no potential. One can not even think of nothing because to think of it is to think of something. Because nothing is “not a thing” it has no causal powers. “Nothing,” as Martin Luther once quipped, “is not a little something.” To exist or “to be” means to stand out of nothing. Self-creation of contingent things is impossible which is why we don’t see it in our everyday experience. As many philosophers throughout history have stated, “nothing comes from nothing.”

Given the force of the principle of causality and the law of noncontradiction, we have a very good reason to apply the principle of simplicity with regard to the origin of the universe. The principle of simplicity states that one explanation ought to be preferred over another by virtue of its employment of fewer and/or simpler ideas. Many philosophers accept the notion that the simplest explanation that makes sense out of most of the facts is the best. It would seem, then, that since a self-created universe is impossible (employing the law of noncontradiction), the simpler theory, and one to be preferred, is one of an actual temporal First Cause. God must exist as the ultimate cause of the contingent, physical universe. Any attempt to show the possibility or impossibility of an infinite series of causes neglects the law of noncontradiction, leaves unanswered the questions of how the series started due to the fact that all events have antecedent causes (do the laws of inertia apply to an infinite series?), and how the condensed matter and energy came into existence in the first place, which is the entire question at hand.

The idea that the cosmic evidence points to a divine creator is certainly not new. It is, however, important and significant. It is the logical implication of the principle of causality, the law of noncontradiction, and the principle of simplicity. Taken together, we find that a First Cause makes the most sense out of the given data and unifies our experience of reality both simply and profoundly.

Natural Theology, Philosophy of Science, Resources, Uncategorized

Resource: Reasons to Believe

by Dave Seng

If you are interested in the intersection of the Christian faith and the facts of science, you might find this resource helpful. I’ve found this site helpful as I have investigated various interpretations of cosmology and issues surrounding the origins and development of the universe and its being and becoming as an orderly system. Christians fall in many different schools regarding the origin of the universe such as the literal 24-hour position, the so-called “Old Earth” school, and what is known as the “Framework Hypothesis”. There are other positions but those three are the most significant. Reasons to Believe belongs to the Old Earth tradition of creation and believes that an old earth interpretation of the Biblical data makes the most sense out of reality as we know it.

It is possible to be a solid Christian and belong to any one of these groups (24 hour, Old Earth, Framework). The reason is, for those of us who belong to a Reformation tradition (such as Anglican, Lutheran, or Reformed), the matter is not a confessional issue. Neither is it mentioned in any of the ecumenical creeds. Christians have the freedom to apply the ministerial use of reason in their investigation of the critical issues central to the creation of the cosmos and Biblical revelation.

I personally don’t agree if everything that Reasons to Believe promotes but we never should accept everything anyone puts forward uncritically. We should always think rationally and carefully about the things we are learning and discovering. That said, if you are curious about the Old Earth interpretive scheme or just want to learn more about the origins of the universe, I think you’ll find Reasons to Believe a helpful point of departure. I think it would be of particular interest to those interested in natural theology.

Reasons to Believe

Metaphysics, Natural Theology, Philosophy, Philosophy of Science, Resources, Uncategorized

Resource: The Quantum Thomist

by Dave Seng
Photo courtesy of Nathan Perkins

A large part of this blog seeks to explore the intersection of physics and metaphysics from the standpoint of classical philosophy (I am not a physicist). Metaphysics is the study or theory of reality — what the ancient and medieval philosophers called Being. The questions metaphysics seek to explore are: What is reality? What can be counted as real? Are there things such as numbers, mathematics, or the logical axioms and propositions of all human reasoning that are not strictly empirical? In what ways do the physical laws and rules of logic point to extra-empirical, supernatural, or a transcendent reality?

Lately, I’ve been reading through this website called The Quantum Thomist by Dr. Nigel Cundy. If you are interested in how the study of physics points to metaphysics and transcendent reality, read this site. Dr. Cundy is a physicist who understands the connection between physics and metaphysics. I hope you enjoy it.