I’m not competent enough to dive into evolutionary biology and speak to it with any certainty. Nonetheless, as a metaphysician, I am very interested in the principles that set up the entire framework of existence and make reality possible in the first place. To that end, I believe David Berlinski, writer, philosopher, and mathematician has some interesting things to say about why traditional Darwinism can no longer account for the development of biological life on this planet.
Metaphysically, let us keep this in mind. The world is in fact made up of diverse things. Diverse things do not come together unless ordered. The world has an ordered unity and, therefore, there must be one Orderer of the world.
In Aristotelian and Thomist language, diversity is only an accident of unity. (Which is why earlier posts regarding the one and the many are important.) In this sense, an accident is that which exists not in itself but only in some substance as its property or attribute. In metaphysics, an accident is a feature or characteristic which does not belong necessarily to the nature of a thing. In the video, the puzzle that life moves significantly towards an end even in the face of the second law of thermodynamics (things move towards entropy) is brought up. I would offer that as diversity (the many) is an accident of the one (unity), entropy itself is an accident of the prior goodness and teleology of Being itself.
Interestingly enough, Berlinski, an agnostic, believes there are good reasons for Christian theism. Enjoy.
Scholasticism was the predominant system or method of theological and philosophical teaching during the middle ages, based largely on the Church Fathers and Aristotle. Classical and medieval writers using scholastic methodology wrote in a question and answer catechetical style. Although it has sometimes been forgotten, confessional Lutheranism has maintained a strong form of scholastic reasoning and apologetic methodology especially surrounding the doctrine of God and the classical arguments for His existence. For example, Luther approved of the cosmological argument. In fact, Luther, Melanchton, and Chemnitz reasserted the classical arguments for the existence of God as did the scholastic Lutheran thinkers Jakob Andreae, David Hollatz, Johann Gerhard, and Abraham Calovius among others. In the nineteenth century the confessional Lutheran, Ernst Hengstenberg promoted the classical approach to apologetics and so did Otto Zöckler who corresponded with Charles Darwin and defended classical Christian theism. In the early twentieth century, some of the leading proponents of classical Lutheran Scholasticism were theologians Leander Keyser, and Christoph Luthardt. As noted in Geisler’s essay (see below), the contemporary philosopher David Johnson is considered a Lutheran Thomist.
Lutheranism has a long history, of course, and has embraced other approaches to apologetics as well. I will not go into various methodologies here. I believe, along with Luther and the Lutheran Scholastics, that since reason is a minister to the Christian faith, it should be employed and used well, including the utilization of theistic reasoning and argumentation. The ministerial use of reason (Luther’s distinction) means that reason is a minister and support to Christian faith (which is also Aquinas’s position as well).
Further, Lutherans embrace the three ecumenical creeds (Apostle’s, Nicene, and Athanasian) which all begin with an affirmation of the existence of God. This makes sense, because, without a conception of God, miracles, the Bible, Christ’s atoning death, the Trinity, and virtually every other teaching of historic Christianity does not make sense. What good is it to argue from miracle that Jesus is the Son of God without the prior conviction that God is? Every major doctrine of the faith ultimately rests on our understanding of Almighty God.
The misunderstanding that many Lutherans have today—due largely to the errors of pietism and fideism—falsely teaches that Luther was opposed in all ways to the Christian development of the mind and natural reason. After all, he famously called reason “the devil’s whore.” Nonetheless, it should be remembered that Luther did promote the ministerial use of reason (philosophy) and his relationship to philosophy and apologetics needs to be carefully understood. It is true that Luther had both praise and disdain for Aristotle at times, and that he preferred Cicero in some cases (although not a Christian, Cicero promoted a cosmological argument for a divine creator in his The Nature of the Gods). As Luther developed, he became a critic of Nominalism and, later, further embraced his Augustinianism. A great book that addresses this aspect of Luther’s thought is Grace and Reason: A Study in The Theology of Luther, by B. A. Gerrish. It is not the case that Luther threw out the use of philosophy or rejected the idea that reason is not a support or minister to faith.
Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225 – 1274) is considered one of, if not the, greatest of scholastic theologians. I believe that Lutherans can learn much from St. Thomas. Among his intellectual accomplishments, Aquinas built upon the inductive and realist theories of Aristotle. Although Aquinas was a Christian Aristotelian, he successfully synthesized much of Augustine and gave us the great “classical” arguments for the existence of God such as a version of the cosmological argument (that the cosmos is a contingent being and depends on God for its existence), and the teleological argument (the cosmos exhibits design and was planned and designed by God), among others. Much of Aquinas’s arguments can be summarized this way: We know from experience that the world is contingent and it depends on something outside of itself for being or existence. Further, the order, harmony, and rationality of the cosmos must be the product of a mind or creator.
This is far too short of a summary of Aquinas and the Lutheran scholastics, but it must stand for now. In other ways, Aquinas comes very close to a Lutheran understanding of Sola Scripture (Scripture alone as authoritative for the Christian). After all, Aquinas was writing before the council of Trent. I do not want to make Aquinas into a kind of pre-Reformation Lutheran because that would not be fair to him. Lutherans do accept, however, that which is Scripturally true and accurate throughout Christian history. This is because truth endures across time and place. Lutherans have always wanted to keep, preserve, and care for the best of our Western Christian heritage.
At times, I have gone back and forth regarding my assessment of Aquinas. On occasion, I found his doctrine of God challenging and probably read too many critiques of Thomism, particularly from William Lane Craig. I keep coming back to Aquinas, however. One of the things that keep me coming back to Aquinas is his Aristotelian epistemology which is essentially correct. The mind has an innate, a priori capacity or potentiality to know, without which it would be impossible to know even first principles. It is a first principle that being is that which is, and that which is can be known. Regarding God as the foundation or ground of being, Dr. Mortimer Adler explains,
“Aquinas, for example, conceives “being taken simply as including all perfection of being”; and in the Judeo-Christian tradition, ‘being’ without qualification is taken as the most proper name for God. When Moses asked God His name, he received as answer: “I AM THAT I AM … Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you.” Used in this sense, ‘being’ becomes the riches of terms—the one which has the greatest amplitude of meaning.” (Syntopicon, Vol. I, Great Books of the Western World, S.V. Being.)
Here are a couple of essays that explain how Aquinas has been received in general Protestantism. I wish I could find more from the Lutheran side. The first is from Norman Geisler, who argues that evangelicals can learn a lot from Aquinas, and Carl Russell Trueman who reviews the book, Aquinas Among the Protestants. If someone knows of a Lutheran source which speaks to this topic, please post in the comments below, I would really appreciate it. I am attempting to do my own research on Thomism and the Lutheran Scholastics.
I’d like to thank Lutheran scholars Dr. Adam Francisco and Dr. Joshua Pagan for their email correspondence which served as an inspiration for this post.
There can be no change where there is no form.—St. Augustine
One thing that I have discovered in my reading of classical and contemporary philosophers is how those who consider themselves Platonists often have to modify their position to account for a more accurate understanding of concrete reality. For example, Plotinus had to adopt Aristotle’s categories of act and potency to account for change in the world, and Augustine, too, had to concede that form and matter must be united (in order to understand motion, change, and avoid some theological concerns). Contemporary Platonists are rarely strict Platonists. One way or another, everyone on the philosophical spectrum has to come to terms with physical reality. The question is, what is the correct approach? I believe Aristotle and Aquinas provide the best understanding of ontology (the nature of existing things) and metaphysics (the nature and properties of existence). I have already pointed out how Aristotle argues for the union of form and matter. Here, I want to explicate how and why Augustine, a Platonist, needs to modify his position in order to account for reality. Although it is rare to compare Augustine with Aristotle, in some ways he must adjust his overall approach and comes very close to Aristotle’s position.
In the physical and contingent world, matter and its forms must begin at their creation. Since matter and its forms can not exist separately, philosophers and theologians, of both Platonist and Aristotelian varieties, think that God could not have made them separately. It can not be thought, according to Augustine, “that God first created matter without form and then gave it form” (138). To explain this, he offers us an analogy of how music works. “Song is ordered sound, and although a thing may very well exist without order, order cannot be given to a thing which does not exist … We do not first emit formless sounds, which do not constitute song, and then adapt them and fashion them in the form of song (139). Thus, Augustine believes that God made form and matter at the same time. God “concreates” matter and form, puts them together at the same time and is the one who puts the form into matter. For Augustine, the form is not a separate entity, as Plato believed, but put into the matter by God. Augustine clearly modifies his Platonism at this point.
Struggling with the theological and philosophical implications of the created world, Augustine tells us “For the matter of heaven and earth is one thing, their form another. You [God] created the matter from absolutely nothing and the form of the world from the formless matter. But you created both in one act, so that the form followed upon the matter with no interval of delay” (italics added, 157).
The above passages are best read in light of Aquinas because Augustine provides the foundation for the Thomistic doctrine of concreation. Concreation simply means “created together.” In fact, it was Augustine’s teaching that form and matter had to be created at the same time, and that form must follow upon matter, that leads Aquinas to coin the term “concreation” meaning that God created Form and matter at the same time. Why do both Augustine (a Platonist) and Aquinas (an Aristotelian) believe that form and matter must have been created at the same time? Simply because it is impossible to have form without matter, and matter without form. Both Platonists and Aristotelians must face the concrete facts of reality.
Aquinas is helpful here. When examining Augustine’s position of concreation, Aquinas says “if formless matter preceded in duration, it already existed; for this is implied by duration … To say, then, that matter preceded, but without form, is to say that being existed actually, yet without actuality, which is a contradiction in terms … Hence we must assert that primary matter was not created altogether formless” (344). Neither, however can the form of a material thing be created without matter. Aquinas reminds us, “Forms and other non-subsisting things, which are said to co-exist rather than to exist, ought to be called concreated rather than created things. (245)” The old Aristotelian adage, “no form without matter, no matter without form” still holds true.
Even more fascinatingly, Augustine believes that the form must be in the material object itself in order to account for change. “There can be no change where there is no form” (129), according to Augustine. This parallels exactly what Aristotle and Aquinas hold to. Without the potentiality of form, something can not change. If the acorn does not have the form and potency of the oak tree, it will not grow into a majestic oak tree.
Aquinas was one of the first great thinkers to realize that Platonists must modify there position at times. He tells us in his Summa Theologica, “Consequently whenever Augustine, who was imbued with the doctrines of the Platonists, found in their teaching anything consistent with faith, he adopted it; and those things which he found contrary to faith he amended” (446). Clearly, Augustine understood the metaphysical and theological problems which arise when form and matter are separated. For Christians, Christ shed real human pH typable blood on the cross—not some Platonic version where the real blood exists as an ideal in the transcendent realm. The union of form and matter has significant implications when it comes to Christ’s atoning death. For rightly believing Christians, Holy Communion makes no sense without the union of form and matter.
Christian Platonists such as Augustine, do need to modify their position in order to correspond to correct theology. They also need to modify their position to account for a correct understanding of ontology and metaphysics. When I read contemporary Christian Platonists, such as J. P. Moreland and Peter van Inwagen, they too make similar adjustments to their ontology and metaphysics. It is simply very difficult to account for a pure separation of form and matter in physical reality without going into one error or another. Reality has its own intractable way of being. Aristotle was on the right path by adopting a common-sense approach which accounts for reality as we know and experience it. As T. S. Eliot discovered after converting to Christianity, reality is the determinant of order.
Works Cited:
Aquinas, Thomas. The Summa Theologica, Volume 1. Great Books of the Western World. Vol. 17. Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc., 1999
Augustine. Confessions. Great Books of the Western World. Vol. 16. Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc., 1999.
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