AquinasVsRussell

8/6/2019 AquinasVsRussell

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ThesisWhen considering a body of associated phenomena, we should endorse only that theory

which adequately explains the given phenomena without inventing new phenomena that requirenew explanations. When no such theory exists, we should refrain from offering an explanation andsimply admit there we do not yet understand the phenomena, either because there is not enoughevidence, or a sufficient theory has not yet been offered.

Classically speaking, the grandest phenomena is that of existence. Why does the universeexist? Why does life exist? How come Earth is so well-equipped to support life? The theory givenmost often as an explanation for this question is that there is a being (called God) capable of, at thevery minimum, initializing some chain of events that led to the construction of the universe as weknow it today. In some versions of the theory, God has more control over the details of theuniverse, and in the most popular versions, God is primarily concerned only with the actions of Homo Sapiens on the planet Earth, which is odd given what a small fraction of all activity in theuniverse may reasonably be attributed to Homo Sapiens. Either way, these more popular versionsof the God theory have too many features to be given an adequate analysis in such a short paper, sowe will focus on the version presented by the philosopher and theologian Thomas Aquinas in the13th century. We do this for two reasons: first, Aquinas version is the most abstract, and thereforeit is also the simplest. As such it comes very close to meeting the criterion presented in the thesis;second, Aquinas was thoughtful enough to provide proofs of his theory, which gives it the abilityto be discussed rationally rather than emotionally.

Aquinas argues Gods existence as a necessary pre-requisite for motion. Noting that allthings which are in motion must have been put in motion by some previous thing which was in

motion, and then claiming that an infinite regress is absurd by default, he invents a substancenamed God which has the capacity to initialize itself. This doctrine explains observable phenomenain a qualitative manner (all motion is caused by prior motion, but this God fellow is kind enough tokick-start the whole process, so we dont have to allow for infinite regresses, which are tricky tothink about), but its main weakness is that it raises the larger question of the mechanics of God.What are the inner workings of a self-causing substance? What are its properties? Can we obtain itsomewhere? Does its ability to cause itself necessarily preclude our ability to create it?

The de facto explanation offered to quell these new questions is that God is somehow beyond the scope of human knowledge, or exists outside the universe (whatever the hell that

means). The contention I hold is that this is not a legitimate explanation, but rather a failure toexplain. To be clich and quote Richard Dawkins, this tactic is an abdication of reason.Here I advocate the policy that, rather than invent explanations and then set the question of

their validity outside the scope of Reason, we simply withhold judgement until such a time as wecan formulate an explanatory tool that conforms to the criterion presented in the thesis, which weshall refer to henceforth as the Simplicity Criterion.

This criterion does not guarantee that our theories will be true, because new phenomena are


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subject to be discovered at any time, but by taking this minimalist approach, we can be assured thatwe will not be unreasonably far off. It ensures that we will not be found by posterity to haveinvented explanatory fairies and stashed them at the bottom of the gardens of scientific mystery inorder to ease our task. It forces us to maintain our intellectual integrity, and admit that we simply donot understand something if we cannot explain it without magic.

As an anecdotal example, we introduce Russells Teapot. Bertrand Russell challenged us todeny that there is a small china teapot in orbit about the Earth. The teapot is too small and is movingtoo fast and traveling in too strange a path for our telescopes (or other conceivable scientificapparatus) to detect it. We may assume (because weve already ascribed many unrealistic propertiesto this teapot, why not heap on a few more?) that this teapot contains within it the power toinitialize and sustain its own orbit; it thus qualifies as an Aquinian Unmoved Mover. If there is noway to detect the teapot, there is no way to measure any of its properties. We could not, for example say Ah, but it isnt small, its rather large. Nor could we say Ah, but this is a tin teapot,not a china one, and because we lack the capacity to scan all of the heavens at an arbitrarily fine

precision, we certainly cannot say Ah, but there is absolutely, without doubt, no teapot!.Thus, we cannot deny the teapot its existence. Under no means can we produce

counterexamples to any of the qualities attributed to it, because the definition of such a teapotincludes the property of immeasurability.

Lets embellish Russells challenge a bit and make it a stronger analogue of Aquinas model.Weve gone through all of the trouble to construct this teapot, and then to demonstrate that itsexistence cannot be denied, so we should make use of it by attributing some previously ill-understood phenomenon to its existence. In this way, the teapot becomes a very powerfulexplanatory aide. We could suppose, for example, that at some time in the extremely distant past,

the teapot deflected the path of some asteroid which would have otherwise merely grazed past theEarth. This asteroid was made of just such and such kind of chemicals, and because of theinterference of the teapot, had just such and such a trajectory, and upon impact, all the elementaryamino acids were created.

This theory has many conveniences. Chiefly among them, it settles many scientific problemsin chemistry, biology, and geology without undermining the legitimacy of current and widelyverified theories in those fields. Particularly, it settles the problem of abiogenesis (that is, where didthe amino acids come from? What got evolution going?) while leaving evolution and plate tectonicscompletely intact. It is far simpler than the notion of an intelligent designer, because rather than

derive infinite intelligence out of nowhere, the teapot has only to derive finite motion out of nowhere (although if the teapot is to remain undetected, this motion must become more and moresubtle as technology improves, and this raises questions about possible teapotian intelligence; butthis becomes impressively silly in short order, so I must digress).

But convenience carries a price. 19th century scientists assumed (quite arbitrarily, because itmade little difference in the mathematical models used at the time) that electromagnetic waves (suchas light, radio, x-ray, so forth) needed a substance to travel through in much the same way that


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mechanical waves (such as sound and vibrations) did. No known substance had adequate properties to be a carrier for electromagnetic waves, so they invented one: the Luminiferous Ether.

In 1895, Michelson & Morley did experiments on some of the properties of the Ether andobtained a very strange result. Their experiment was to measure how the speed of light wasaffected by the Earths position. Under Newtons laws of motion, light traveling in the direction of the Earths orbit should move faster than light traveling in a direction opposite the Earths orbit. Amore concrete analogy is this: a baseball thrown forward from a moving car will have the carsspeed, plus the additional speed given it by the person doing the throwing. This can be described assuch:

Speed of Ball = Speed at which ball was thrown + Speed of Car at time of throw

Likewise, the speed of a baseball being thrown backwards from the car will go much slower, because the initial speed of the car is working against it. Remember this time we measure the speedof the ball in the opposite direction of the car, so it makes sense to think about the car havingnegative speed in that direction. (I.E. Going forward at 50mph is equivalent to going backwards at-50mph). We can express this motion with the following equation:

Speed of Ball = Speed at which ball was thrown - Speed of Car at time of throw

The speed of light traveling through the Ether was found not to be affected by the direction the lightshines in relation to the Earths orbit. This is like saying that the baseball, when thrown forwardfrom a moving car will necessarily travel as fast as a baseball thrown backwards from a moving

car. This result put the whole of theoretical physics on high alert: there was clearly a big problem, but where? Fortunately, Albert Einstein resolved the problem when he published his SpecialTheory of Relativity in 1905. Relativity removed the Luminiferous Ether from the scene altogether,and with it the need for electromagnetic waves to have so many of the same properties asmechanical waves. Namely, electromagnetic waves were now without need of a medium: theycould travel through empty space. More importantly, they travelled through empty space at a fixedspeed, which is entirely counterintuitive. This is something that commonly happens when wesubstitute unnecessarily convoluted explanations for simpler ones: we learn that the universe doesnot have to conform to our intuition. It is often this desire to bend the universe to our intuition

which is responsible for the creation of explanatory unicorns such as the Ether.

Likewise, regarding the teapot, while it may be impossible to give an irrefutable proof or denial of its existence, this criterion of simplicity compels us to be inclined towards doubting theteapots existence, because it is simpler that we do not yet understand what formed the first aminoacids than it is to suppose them the work of some agent which, by definition, exhibits qualitiesfound nowhere else in the universe, and is also undetectable and hence conveniently non-


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investigable. Here, our criterion encourages us to reserve judgement until new evidence isdiscovered, new explanations are offered, or at worst to leave the problem unanswered so thatfuture generations of scientists will not think us fools. Even doubting the teapots role in theorigins of life, why postulate the existence of something which has no measurable effect on the realuniverse?

But, enough about teapots. Lets look at Aquinas argument in detail. If were going to makethe claim that Aquinas argument violates the Simplicity Criterion, we need to do two things:demonstrate where it makes unreasonable, arbitrary, or unsupported claims, and show what asimpler explanation might look like.

Aquinas model is very strongly analogous to Russells construction of the number system.Let us give Aquinas the benefit of the doubt (for we know now that non-moving things likemagnetic fields can cause motion in previously immobile metallic objects) and abstract his meaningof the word motion to something more along the lines of action or event. We will nowreformulate his claim in more favorable terms: All events are caused by some previous event.Obviously this can not go back infinitely into the past, so there must have been some initial eventG , which is also capable of causing itself.

In this way, we can think of Aquinas model of the universe as a sequence of dominoes, eachof which is positioned such that upon being knocked down by its predecessor, it will knock downits successor. Under Russells definition, numbers have a similar property. Every number has asuccessor, and we can think of knocking down the successor as adding one to the number. SoAquinas model could be expressed in terms of Russellian numbers by thinking of the initial eventG as being equivalent to the number 0, and the current state of the universe as some positivenumber n , and the chain of events between Creation and the current state of the universe as the

numbers 1 through (n - 1) . In these terms, what Aquinas is claiming is that the number 0 has thefeature that it is its own predecessor. That is, 0 is inherently different from other numbers in that itis not susceptible to the laws which govern those numbers, namely that every number has a

predecessor. The analogy breaks down here, because Russells 0 clearly has a predecessor, namelythe number -1 . That being said, what Aquinas proposed is that there are two distinct classes of events: those which are caused by other events, and those which can cause themselves. Both of these classes events have the ability to cause other events, so there is some kinship among them.

Now to make a judgement like Aquinas, that there exists some element G in this sequencesuch that G is its own predecessor, decency would require that we had the capacity to observe the

sequence of events in its entirety. But in fact, we are only privy to a finite subsection of thesequence. What is important, is that for this subsection, both theories are equivalent. That is,whether there exist two types of events (those which cause themselves and those which must becaused) or there exists only one type of event (those which must be caused), the results we observewill be the same. Neither raise contradictions with the observable universe.

The advantage of the simpler explanation is that once we understand the mechanics of eventcausation, we can, in principle, understand the entire future and the entire history of events (though


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in practice our accuracy will be limited by available technology). With Aquinas model, there is ahard limit on what we can know. No matter how much we understand about event causation, thereis that one pesky event G which is forever un-investigable.

Objections

Several important objection arises here, and I will address each of them promptly.

Surely some events cause multiple subsequent events? A pool ball may knock into the 9 ball and then later knock into the 11 ball, but these are not the same event.

We address this concern by treating the successor of a domino as the class of all eventscaused by that domino. That is, the domino (say) D 10 is how we represent all events caused by anyevent contained in domino D 9. Likewise, every event contained in D 10 will go on to cause other events, and these we will represent as D 11 . This is analogous to the notion that the number 10

precedes the number 11 and succeeds the number 9. Indeed, it borrows heavily from the Russelliandefinition of number, which is the class of all objects having the same relation to another object.

For example, a collection of brothers all have the same relation to their father, that of son tofather, so we would group them together in a single class. In the sequence of numbers we say thata number n precedes a number (n + 1) if and only if n and (n + 1) represent classes, and everymember of the class n bears the relation R to some member of the class (n + 1) . Likewise, we saya number (n + 1) succeeds a number n if for every element in (n + 1) there exists an element in n which bears the relation R to it.

Some experience with mathematics will help one overcome the dizzying effect of this style of

thinking, but so too will a a familiar example. Let us think of parents as causing children. Now letn represent some group of people (any group will do). The class (n - 1) will represent the parentsof these people, because each member of the class (n - 1) will be a person with the relation of parent to child to some person in the class n . Likewise, the children of the people in the class n can be grouped into the class (n + 1) because for each of them, there is someone in the class n who

bears this relation to them. This example is merely an illustration, and should not be taken with toomuch zeal, for it completely breaks down in pre-organismic biology where there is not necessarilya well defined notion of parent or child.

What about the Big Bang? Didnt the COBE experiments pretty much verify that the universebegan at a definite time in the past?

We address this concern by noting that the model presented here is independent of time, anda good thing too, because another result from the COBE experiment was to show that time is afeature of our universe resulting from the initial conditions of the Big Bang. Our model is not atemporal chain of events, but rather a logical chain of events, and it tells us that the inner workingsof the Big Bang are in principle something we can study, even though we may be severely limited


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in practice . In particular, it tells us that time is a logical successor to the Big Bang, even though our Simplicity Criterion forces us to admit that we dont know anything about the logical predecessor of the Big Bang. Not that we may never know, but simply that we dont know anything yet .

Isnt it fundamentally weird to suppose that there are infinitely many events previous to the present (whether logically or temporally)? How do you get off saying thats simpler than having aninitial starting point?

Yes, it is extraordinarily weird, but thats precisely the point. The real universe oftensurprises us by how weird it really is. Wasnt it fundamentally weird for the Earth to be round

before the 15th century? The point is that the universe operates how it operates regardless of whatwe think is weird.

When we say our model is simpler than Aquinas we mean that Aquinas proposed a secondclass of events because of its implications, whereas we endorse a single class despite itsimplications. Aquinas event G is a way of bundling all of our unknowns up into a single body,and sealing them off from explanation. Our model is an attempt at providing explanation.

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AquinasVsRussell