An alternative reading of Thomas' "Quinque viae"

I'm not sure if you all agree philosophy - especially when concerned with theological matters - belongs to the science-section.
But I'm not sure where to put it really.

Anyway: this semester I had a course in which we read a few section of the Summa theologia - partly in Latin! - from Thomas Aquinas.
In this work he elaborates his infamous 'quinque viae', his 5 ways to demonstrate the existence of God.
But while these are often thought to be attempts to 'prove' - he doens't use that word - the existence of God, they can also be read a bit differently.

Now, it is probably impossible to say Thomas meant for this alternative reading to be. There are some obvious reasons to stick to the more conventional reading.
Thomas was a 13th century Benedictine monk and he formulates these 'quinque viae' in a Quastio that deals with the problem wether or not God's existence can be demonstrated - a stance which he affirms and then elaborates in these 5 'ways that show us God'.

But even in spite of these obvious motivations, one aspect about these 'god proofs' should strike the modern day reader: in none of his 'demonstrations' does he actually mention God while elaborating them. He puts forward 5 logical-metaphysical arguments which he hold to be at work in reality and than concludes them with some variation on 'And this is what people call God'. Actually: one of these argumentations doesn't even end with such a formulation - it was either forgotten by Thomas or by a very early transcriber of this gigantic corpus.
So you could also read these 'quinque viae' from an anthropologic point view: Thomas concludes that people see God into phenomena - it is rather odd that he refers to what 'people' think and thus doesn't even speak for his own right.

Well, the Church sure didn't really know what to make of him.
The integration of the Aristotelian - and thus "heathen" - corpus that had been refound was a controversial project at the time and Thomas took this further than anybody had ever done.

Shortly after his dead numerous statements of Aristotle were officialy declared blasphemous, including elements that had been recuperated by Thomas.
But it only took a few decades for the minds to change radically: Thomas was reinstated by the catholic church and became a saint very quickly and even went on the obtain the title of supreme teacher of Christian faith.

Among modern day philosopher it's bon ton to state that Thomas wasn't a philosopher but rather a theologian - from a quantitave point of view this is cerainly reasonable. And yet he did write one of the very rare works of medieval philosophy which is completely devoid of theologic matters, De ente et essentia at the wee young age of 18 or so.
So in some way, the supreme teacher of a religious doctrine is at the same time a transitional figure between a world in which "science" was fully incorporated by and made subordinate to the contect of that religious doctrine and a world in which "science" has reclaimed its autonomy.

Well, the entire question of the relation between 'science' - say: non-doctrinal rational inquiry in the broadest of senses, "philosophy" should you prefer that term - and 'theology' - understood to be a science itself! - forms one of the principal issues of "medieval" philosophy from the age of the Churchfathers up until the aftermath of Galileo, with Descartes as the first true post-medieval thinker.

So the idea that demonstrating the existence of God through the sciences is blasphemous was cerainly true during certain ages, but far less controversial during others. Godproofs are actually quite common.

Thomas' brilliance lay in his intuition to treat the domain of the sciences as the effects of God. That way he could do justice to many aspects of Aristotelianism that were superior to the neo-platonic (Augustinian) concepts of his time. And through Aristotle's notion of a hierarchy in the sciences based upon their level of abstaction he was also able to argue that a study of this "creation" through scientific rather than theological inquiry would have to lead to the same conclusions. Theology, the sacra doctrina studied God through the Revelation, metaphysics lead to the scientia divina which found God through the understanding of the nature of his creation.
Given the context of the time, what Thomas really did was give a huge promotion to "science".

This strong unity between revelation and creation became already problematic prior to the beginning of the rennaissance - when the Plague ravaged 1/3rd of Europe's population, it became hard to maintain that this was the work of a benevolent God. Which is one of the reasons why nominalism came on the scene - a new deep distinction between faith and science.
What Galileo did was to trespass this line again, but now from the other side: he maintained that his math - a product of man - was so of such a nature that if it told the earth moved around the sun, it meant this was actually physically the case. A dictate to God - hard to stomach for a doctrine that was alreadt falling apart.

pinhedz wrote:
So, does this mean that if I lack a bullet proof explanation of my own for the origin of the universe, that I must accept any explanation presented by anyone else?

No, it doesn't.

I'm unfamiliar with this particular quote - Kant only wrote 7 gazillion pages, so this ignorace makes me blush just a little -, but even without any precise knowledge of the context in which this phrase is found I'm pretty confident that that's not what he means.

His emphasize obviously lies on morality. That he mentions religion in the same breath makes perfect sense if you keep in mind that his conception of religion in his critical period is based entirely on the moral philosophy he has come to develop. Start reading Die Religion innerhalb die Grenzen der blossen Vernunft - not sure about its English title, probably something like Religion within the bounds of pure reason and you'll notice that the opinion part is concerned with drawing a picture of the 'condition humaine' from a moral p-o-v.

So you don't have to understand religion in the sense of a doctrine which has the absolute answer of how the universe was made.
Knowledge about the origins of the universe exceeds human factulties according to what Kant wrote in the Kritik der reinen Vernunft.
And there are good reasons to assume that Kant's own vision of these matters was quite different from what we are being taught by christianity: Kant helped put forward one of the first versions of the theory that our solar system emerged from a nebular structure, for instance.

Normally you should find numerations in the margin of your copy, a bit like the system you find the Bible.
For the second edition kritik der reinen vernunft they will start with a B.
That makes it handy to indicate what section you're speaking about exactly.
In Aquinas' days, for instance, the exact composition of the Aristotelian Corpus in volumes and chapters was different than ours today.
So you'll often find references he makes - he rarely quotes but rephrases very briefly and adds a reference - to Aristotle, but finding the referent in a modern copy Aristotle's work will proof to be quite hard.

Kant is very wordy indeed. He is often said to have been a terrible stylist.
I'm not sure I really agree with that. Not because I think Kant was such an elegant writer, but because almost all philosophers are poor stylist - Plato, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche are noteworthy exceptions. The kings of stylistic horros are post-modern French philosophers. But that's usually because they write so extensively to hide they have nothing to say!

As for your remarks on 'speculative reason': you distinguish between verificationism (most noteably associated with the Wiener Kreis, early 20th century) and falsificationism (formulated by former Wiener Kreis-accolyte Karl Popper in Logik der Forschung).
I would agree with you to some extend: as long as the matter at hand is a 'closed system', a domaine in which we are confronted with a set of problems for which we have already marked out the limits within which we will search for an answer. Outside of such a domaine, falsificationism and verificationism really are quite hard to tell a part.

To illustrate: you refer to developping a theory of chemistry first - e.g. how atoms bond and such.
But you could only work out an attempt at such a theory if you have already accepted certain basic notions - the idea of atoms, that they can bond and so on.
Suppose you would present this problem to a group of brilliant students that were thaught at the State University of a depostic totalitarian state.
The head of State hated chemistry in school and therefor has ordered it never to be thaught in his empire.
So we have before us a group of say 15,000 students which are trully brilliant from every point of view, except for the fact that they don't have even the simpelest idea of chemistry. They litteraly have never heard of things like cells, atoms, molecules and such.
Now, we divide them in 2 groups: one will procede by randomly testing in a lab we provide them with and thus they will try to formulate a theory.
The second group will only be allowed in the lab after they have formulated a theory and a set of experiments they will use to test the theory.

I think it's clear to see that the theories developped by the second group will be equally random and undirected as the experiments conducted by the first group. As they could come up with the wildest ideas imaginable, there's no way to tell that falsification will prove to be more fruitfull than verificationism.

If we did give them chunks of our theory of chemistry and than tested them with formulating some problems, the second group might indeed be using a more sound methodology.