Cosmos-Liturgy-Sex

I continue now with my posts on why philosophical materialism and, by implication, contemporary atheism, undermines human reason and science. I shall explore in this and the next couple of posts the reality of formal causality in nature, which is implicitly or explicitly denied by philosophical proponents of the proposition that all that there is to know can be known by modern science.

The concept of forms or ideas is not understood in our day by most educated people, so a bit of historical exegesis is necessary. One has to go all the way back to Plato, following Socrates, to get at the origin of the concept of forms and of formal causality. I shall enlist the aid of the Catholic philosopher and Lonergan scholar Hugo A. Meynell, in his essay “How Right Plato Was,” [In Meynell's Redirecting Philosophy, University of Toronto Press, 1998, pp. 241-51] to briefly bring out salient features of Plato’s doctrine and its contemporary relevance.

Meynell says that it is characteristic of Platonic forms:

1) that they correspond to universal terms; 2) that they are realities as opposed to appearances; 3) that they are intelligible as opposed to sensible; 4) that they make knowledge possible; 5) that they are permanent as opposed to changeable, ‘being’ rather than ‘becoming’; 6) that mathematics as well as ethics and aesthetics have to do with their apprehension.

These characterizations require a bit of unpacking. To say with Plato, as in points one and two, that forms are realities that correspond to universal terms is to say that there are objective realities that correspond to predicates applied to many subjects. So, we speak of “virtue,” or “health,” or “good,” applying these terms to many subjects and assuming that they have common or universal meanings. These universal meanings, according to Plato, correspond to formal realities. For instance, we say of a man or a woman that he or she is healthy. Does health have a completely different meaning for each of them, or does it have a common meaning? Plato answers that though health is realized in different subjects to different degrees, there is a common meaning to the term “health” and an objective reality that is common to or shared by all who are healthy. There is an objective reality or “form” corresponding to the universal term “health.” The same can be said of “good,” or “justice,” or “virtue,” or “beauty.” These are all terms with common meanings that correspond to objective realities or forms that individual things in the material world, the world of sense, can share in or participate in to varying degrees.

Needless to say, such universal realities as “health” or “virtue” or “goodness” are beyond the capacity of science to discover. These are objective realities, in the Platonic view, but science cannot prove or disprove their existence or scientifically demonstrate their meaning. They are, as said in point three above, intelligible realities, but they are discoverable by theological and philosophical reason not by scientific reason. Also, as intelligible realities rather than sensual or material, they can be shared in by individual beings.

What if we were to deny that there are such things as formal realities corresponding to universal terms? This is what the late medieval nominalists, following William of Ockham, did at the Catholic universities in England (Oxford and Cambridge). The British Empiricists would bring this nominalist tradition of thought to its fruition, ending in the skepticism of Hume. Plato was right to see, as in point four above, that the objective existence of forms is necessary for human knowledge. And Hume, assuming the rejection of forms as part and parcel of his Anglophone tradition, was right to see that his tradition of thought should end in skepticism toward all knowledge.

This gets at the fifth characteristic of forms mentioned above: they must be eternal and unchangeable, otherwise their meaning would be fleeting and so equivocal that they could not be known. If there are no “supersensual,”  eternal forms of goodness, truth, virtue, beauty, justice, health, etc., these realities could only be ephemeral constructs of our minds. They could have no set and discernable meaning. In reducing reality to that which is available only to fleeting sensory experience, a reduction that is essential to the nominalism of Anglophone thought, Hume had to come to skepticism. I have described Hume’s basic position enough now in this series of posts that I don’t need to reiterate it here, except to say that he failed to understand that sensory objects are “in-formed,” and so can correspond to a universal intelligibility that we can understand by intelligent reflection on our sensory experience.

So, there are objective correlates, “forms,” to universal terms (though not, as Plato realized, to all universal terms). Science cannot discover the forms that are correlated to terms that are related to ethics or aesthetics. Only theology or philosophy can do that. Only theology or philosophy, then, can discuss in a meaningful fashion goodness, or virtue, or truth, or justice, or beauty. But is science absolutely powerless to discover the reality of forms? Not when it comes to the sixth characteristic that Meynell describes: the mathematical dimension.

Indeed, science only “works” because it presumes the reality of that which transcends the sensory and the material. It  presumes the existence of universal logical laws (or forms), and the explanations that science provides are not complete until mathematical “form-alization” is achieved. Science ultimately, contra to the myth of modern Anglophone empiricism, deals with ideal meanings which correspond to human intellectual judgments applied to the parsing of our sensory experience.

Plato realized all of this long ago. In his Republic, he issued a criticism of the sciences whose essential insight, as described by his modern commentator, A.E. Taylor, is still valid for us today. Taylor describes this essential insight: “in all the sciences the objects we are studying are objects we have to think but cannot perceive by any of our senses. Yet the sciences throughout direct attention to these objects which are, in fact, forms, by appealing in the first instance to sense” (quoted by Meynell, p. 243).

Many people presume that science is just an inductive, measuring, taking-a-look-at-sensory-things that leads to technologically useful information. But that is not what science is at all. Science discovers ideal meanings through the a priori hypothetical postulation of ideal concepts whose explanatory value for material causality is tested and verified or falsified (this is somewhat Popperian, though Meynell himself is not afraid to invoke a modified Popperian view). So, science can give such positive in-form-ation as the chemical structure of water, or the atomic weight of silicon. These scientifically described realities are, in fact, eternal, ideal realities instantiated in particular, individual compounds or elements. The chemical structure of water is invariant and would be what it is even if there were no water; likewise, the atomic weight of silicon. These descriptions correspond to ideal, supersensual realities, even though their explanatory value is realized through intelligent description of the sensory-perceived action of chemical compounds. But isn’t this idea of supersensual forms corresponding to atomic weight or chemical structure abstract and unreal? Exactly where do these ideal meanings exist? They cannot exist in physical nature, merely, because they do not require the existence of physical nature in order to have their ideal or formal reality. They cannot exist in the human mind, merely, because they are more than human mental constructs. Where, then, precisely, do they exist, and how? I shall address these sorts of questions in the last post in this series.

The standard inductive account of science is historically and philosophically inaccurate. It fails to recognize that the entities of science transcend direct access to our senses. Meynell himself gives a description of the process of scientific investigation, more true-to-fact than standard empiricist or materialist theses, that it is worth quoting in full:

…the scientific community has arrived at a peculiar conception of things in various fields. What is characteristic of this conception? (1) It is in terms of entities and properties which, while they are (at least provisionally) verified in experience, are not themselves direct objects of experience. Newtonian mass is not exactly the weight you feel when you lift an object, but it is logically related to a ‘force’ and an ‘acceleration’ which similarly are not directly perceptible; and no sensation, or imaginative picture based on sensation, could really be of a photon with its paradoxical part-wave part-particle nature. And even the child’s conception of an elephant as a large animal with trunk and huge ears is hardly the same as the zoologist’s conception of it, as member of a species related more or less closely with other mammalian species, and having evolved in morphology and habit to survive within a certain range of environments. The elephant of the zoologist, scarcely less than the photon of the physicist, is not so much a direct object of experience as an intellectual construction rather comprehensively verified in experience; one might in both cases, with only a little poetic licence, say that the entities and properties concerned can be grasped only “with the eyes of the mind.” (2) It is plausible (here a subjective idealist would disagree) to say that the aspects of the world so envisaged constitute the real world, or at least tend to constitute it (since scientific theory is in a constant state of revision), in contrast to the merely sense-related world of ordinary experience. We may say that by means of scientific inquiry we come increasingly to know things as they really are, as really related to one another, “in their causes” as Aristotle would say, as opposed to merely as related to ourselves. (3) It seems to follow from this last point that the existence of such things and properties makes knowledge properly speaking possible, if by ‘knowledge’ one means well-grounded apprehension of the truth about what really is so. (4) Mathematics (at least in the case of physics, chemistry, or astronomy) is par excellence the discipline by way of which these entities and properites may be grasped. It is by now a cliche, of course, that “mathematics is the language of science.” In each of these four respects, it seems evident that the whole development of science constitutes a massive vindication of Platonism.

Of course, Meynell is not unaware that modern science is, in fact, in its origin the off-shoot of the revival of Christian Platonism in the Renaissance. But that is beside the point for the purposes of this post. The main issue to be emphasized here is that science cannot work without connecting to “supersensual,” formal entities. And its descriptions are not complete until they express formal, invariant, “supersensual” meaning.

Science is not the only path to formal realities, as I have said. It deals with mathematical forms, but mathematical forms are powerless to encompass biological explanation or to account for such realities made present to human experience as the objects of moral and artistic endeavor. In the next post, I shall consider the biological aspect of forms, which brings Aristotle rather than Plato to the foreground, and requires us to consider forms in their causal efficacy and not simply in their bare reality.

A final post in this series will consider a cosmological argument for the existence of God that starts from acceptance, based on intelligent consideration of empirical experience, of the reality of forms.