Statistical mechanics is one of the less discussed, but absolutely foundational modern theories of physics. The way it goes about its investigation is elegant in its first principles, although often complicated in its applications. Learning of its principles often drive people into madness. It leads one to see the world in a fundamentally new light. Its a theory so abstract that it has applications in every domain from a single atom, to the universe itself. The truths it uncovers seem to be so encompassing, it led Arthur Eddington to posit:

"But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation."

― Arthur Eddington, New Pathways in Science

So, what is this second law of thermodynamics? What even is statistical mechanics? And most importantly, how can this physical principle — that is so fundamental as to almost be metaphysical — show us how Aristotle and Aquinas had it right the whole time?

One Revolution Going on Another

Statistical mechanics is thermodynamics' more sophisticated younger brother. Thermodynamics — the field that studies fundamental relations between quantities like heat, energy, and density — was mostly developed during the industrial revolution in England. Many engineers discovered fundamental relations that were useful for designing engines. The basic task when making an engine was to input some energy and convert that energy to useful work. The amount of energy you can turn into work is called the engine’s efficiency, and engineers were interested in maximizing this quantity while keeping other metrics of interest such as power and speed. Maximizing an engine’s efficiency is rather strenuous, mostly because one runs into a wall with the laws of nature (more on this soon). Modern internal combustion engines only have about 34% thermal efficiency. This means if you put one gallon of gas in your car and run your engine, about 34% of that energy can be used to propel your car and run its internal features, while about 66% of that energy will get turned into heat or other random motion.

Sadi Carnot realized the challenge of developing a perfectly efficient engine was due to a fundamental limitation of nature. He observed that in any system, some energy inevitably gets wasted or turned into heat. No matter how hard someone tried, some energy would always get lost, no engine could be perfect. This is especially true in any real world application. One can make super efficient heat engines in labs, but they tend to be extremely slow (like, engines making one revolution a day, slow) and expensive to maintain optimal conditions, even if the efficiency is 99% (never 100%).

Carnot, although he was only using his work to make better engines, touched on something fundamental. The basic idea was that no matter how hard one tries to order the energy flow of a system, there will always be a component of disorder. This concept has a name that some may heard of: entropy, which is the subject of the second law of thermodynamics we heard about before.

However, this characterization of entropy does not really tell you what entropy is, and its far from technical. What does one even mean about the amount of “disorder” in a system? How does one quantify disorder? In order to get a feel for what exactly entropy is, we will have to look at thermodynamics’ much cooler younger brother. The subject that has brought many brilliant minds to their knees, and, seemingly, applies to every system in the universe.

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Statistical Mechanics

Statistical mechanics is quite aptly named. It has a lot to do with statistics, and it is a mechanical theory. That is, it follows the mechanistic philosophy of Newton. This means, it aims to explain phenomena in terms of mathematical laws that apply to fundamental particles (or whatever is considered fundamental in the theory).

My graduate statistical mechanics professor opened our first class with, “statistical mechanics is only about one thing: counting states.” I found this is more or less true, even in applications so contrived that leave one scratching one’s head wondering how we got from counting states to the current subject.

The basic idea of statistical mechanics exists in a separation between macrostates and microstates. Macrostates are states that hold macro quantities such as temperature, energy, or entropy (more on this later). Microstates are a microscopic configuration of the constituent parts of a system. We are typically interested in which microstates correspond to a certain macrostate.

To get us out of the abstract, imagine I have 2 cars on the highway. I am going to define a macrostate: 120 miles per hour (sorry non-American readers). This macrostate is defined by the sum of the speeds of the two cars. Consequently, there are many microstates that could lead to this one macrostate. The cars could both be going 60 m/h (60+60 =120), one could be going 40 m/h and the other could be going 80 m/h (40+80 = 120), or one could not be moving at all and the other could be going 120 m/h (0 + 120 = 120). Here, I just defined 3 microstates that all correspond to one macrostate. If the cars were going at a speed that did not add up to 120, then that would be a different macrostate.

This is really all we do in statistical physics. Connect microstates and macrostates in an increasingly sophisticated manner. One may notice though, that for a field whose name is statistical mechanics, we haven’t really done any statistics, only counting. Astute observation! Let’s get to that now.

The basic principle of thermodynamics, is that a system will be in the most likely state. What we mean is, it will be in the macrostate that has the most microstates connected to it. This principle isn’t as clear with the car example, so lets use a different one.

Imagine I have 100 coins. I flip each of them and ask you, how many coins do you think will be heads and how many will be tales? I’ll go ahead and tell you that the guess that would you give the best odds of being correct is saying half are heads and half are tails. However, guessing exactly which microstate will emerge that corresponds to the macrostate of 50 heads and 50 tails, would be very hard. What I mean is, maybe the first 3 coins are heads or maybe the first 2 are tails. Both of these configurations could still be a configuration with 50 heads and 50 tails ultimately. But if one looks at all configurations the coin could be in, most configurations have 50 coins that are heads and 50 coins that are tails.

The graph above shows is that if we look at ALL the possible ways the coins could be (all heads, all tails, first 50 heads, last 50 tails etc) and just count how many microstates (configurations of coins) correspond to a certain macrostate (how many coins are heads), we find that the macrostate with the most microstates is one with 50 heads and 50 tails. This makes sense when you think about it. For instance, there is only one microstate that corresponds to the macrostate of 100 heads and 0 tails. The only way to get the macrostate is to have all heads, but if you want 50 heads and 50 tails, there are MANY (10^29 precisely) ways to get that.

Notice, all we did was count states, and from that, we can deduce what macrostate we will be in given a random system.

This generalizes to any system, and gets more accurate as you get larger systems. The temperature of the room you are in could be deduced by looking at all the particles in the room and seeing what temperature corresponds to the most microstates. That temperature is the temperature of your room. It is the most likely configuration of the particles in it.

Entropy

Alright, now getting back to the big spooky word. Poems have been written on it, people on Linkedin throw it around to sound profound, and it may just be the end of us all: entropy. Entropy is just the logarithm of the number of microstates in a system. So if we call the number of microstates corresponding to a certain macrostate N, then the entropy of that macrostate is S = ln(N),1 where ln is the natural logarithm. If you’re anything like me, you can just ignore the logarithm and stay with the concept of how many microstates are in a macrostate. The logarithm is mostly for mathematical convenience — making sure really large numbers don’t run away from us.

So, the second law of thermodynamics is that entropy in an isolated system will always increase or stay the same.

This is indeed a sacred, almost metaphysical principle of the universe that is never violated in an isolated system and seems to hold whenever all our other theories do not. It has consequences in quantum mechanics, information theory, and cosmology.

People often call it a measure of disorder; I think that can be only understood in a certain way. For instance, water without ice in it has more entropy (so, higher disorder) than water with ice in it. The reason ice melts is that isolated systems move toward maximizing entropy, and the macrostate where the ice and the water become the same temperature is the macrostate with the most microstates (entropy). Well — I don’t know about you, but I would consider a nice clear glass of water more “ordered” than water with some old freezer ice in it. It’s certainly more uniform, and in my brain that can mean more ordered.

There is a good reason why people use the term “order”, but it requires a bit more investigation.

Information Theory

Most information theory textbooks you look at start with a discussion that does not really seem relevant to concepts like compressibility or correlations. That discussion is about sending a signal through a noisy channel. Surprisingly, you can model many information systems this way. The reason this model is so paradigmatic is because it sets up the fundamental problem of communication in information theory: finding a way to communicate something that has meaning in a sea of noise.

Although we communicate with noises, our communication is not merely noise. A language can be thought of as an agreed-upon set of sounds that correspond to some meaning. Different languages use different sounds for the same meaning. What is important is not so much the sounds, but the meaning. However, the sounds must be the agreed-upon sounds. If I am communicating in an echoey room, I run the risk of the information I am trying to communicate turning into mere noise if I speak too fast; there would be a gap between what I intend to communicate and what is communicated.

We can, therefore, make a distinction between meaningful information and noise. Meaningful information communicates something that has a meaning to both the one communicating and the one being communicated to, while noise does not have meaning to either.

Shannon Entropy

Let me be more exact. There’s an analogue of entropy in information theory called Shannon Entropy, named after Claude Shannon, the father of information theory. The mathematical details of what shannon entropy is will quickly get us staring at a tree in lieu of a forest.2The basic idea of shannon entropy is that a completely random system will have the highest shannon entropy. This is the same as saying the system is not compressible, which is the same as saying it lacks any sort of intelligibility or pattern. That was a lot of connection there, let me offer some examples.

Let’s use strings of characters as our example of information. The string of characters:

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

Has 0 shannon entropy. This is because it is a deterministic string. What I mean is, while looking at one letter, it is not at all hard to figure what letter would come next. This is highly compressable because I could just say, “type ‘a’ 15 times,” and that would be a perfectly accurate and much more efficient way to say what I said up there.

On the other hand

hg#y4p98ozfevi

has maximum shannon entropy. This is because there is no discernable pattern and therefore no neat, compressed way I could say the same thing I said above.

As one may imagine, language has a small amount of shannon entropy, this is why your phone can predict what you will type next!

The important thing to note from this is that any chunk of information that has information entropy less than the maximum must have some intelligible structure to it.

Information as a Fight Against Entropy

Now, I opened up this section with a discussion of noisy coupled channels. The reason this is important is because we have to realize that in systems that have a lot of random motion (noise), anytime one finds a microstate that is not a part of the most likely macrostate (the one with the highest entropy), something special is happening. The thing that’s happening is someone or something has gone out of their way to go against the second law of thermodynamics to give something form and intelligibility. In(form)ation doesn’t happen out of nowhere; it takes agents with intention to actualize that form out of pure chaos. To use an analogy from Aristotle, if an archer aims for a bullseye, there are a thousand ways to miss, but only one way to hit the target.

Take a second to process this. It is the most important conclusion of this essay. Anything not in its naturally “disordered” state implies some extra structure keeping it away from absolute chaos. Someone or something is working hard to fight off the second law of thermodynamics.

Hylomorphism

Now, this all has a striking resemblance to something Aristotle discussed 2500 years ago. One of Aristotle’s claims to fame was his theory of hylomorphism, which is a combination of two words: hyle (matter) and morphe (form). It is the idea that everything is composed of matter and form. There are rather intuitive ways to begin to understand this. For instance, I have a coffee cup in my hand. It is made of ceramic, but has the form of a coffee mug. This same ceramic could be a piece of a bathroom sink and thus have a different form. One could also imagine a coffee mug made out of glass as well, this would be something that has the same form (coffee mug) but with different matter (glass).

However, we are really only breaking the surface here of what Aristotle means by matter and form. For instance, Aristotle would say that the syllable “AB” is a hylomorphic composite, the matter is the letters, and the form is their arrangement. “BA” would be a different form with the same matter. Here we see Aristotle did not mean what we meant when we say material, and he may not mean what we mean when we say form (does anyone say form anymore?). This doctrine is far more profound.

Aristotle generally was against the atomists that thought everything could be split up into smaller and smaller pieces until one reached an indivisible particle called atoms — the ultimate pieces of reality. Instead, Aristotle thought everything was fundamentally made of potentiality and actuality, objects that have their physical analogue in matter and form. So, ceramic can potentially be a coffee mug, a tea kettle, or a bathroom sink, but giving it some form is what makes it actually one of those things.

You may rightly object that if I have a sort of amorphous hunk of ceramic it already has some form, and that is what it is actually. Aristotle, was not ignorant of this issue. He claimed everything had some form, but if one were to continually move form away (say by separating ceramic into atoms and then into protons and neutrons etc.) then one would get to prime matter. Prime matter is pure potentiality, it is completely indeterminant and has no form and can be used to form anything else. It is analogous to the fundamental particle for Aristotle.

Prime matter, in my opinion, occupies more of a mythic category than a scientific one, but if one keeps in mind what is at the bottom, one can see how potentiality and actuality apply at different levels of actuality, and the best way to do this is to look at thermodynamics.

Aristotle and Thermodynamics

Although we don’t have direct access to prime matter, we do have access to systems that seem to change in unpredictable ways and are substratum of many different forms — these are the systems statistical mechanics studies. A system studied in every statistical mechanics textbook is an ideal gas in a box. One can think of an ideal gas as a bunch of particles that move around at high speed and don’t interact with each other unless they collide. The air in the room you are in can be modeled pretty accurately as an ideal gas. Below I have a short video of a simulation of an ideal gas.

As we can see, there is really no form to it, as Aristotle would say, or we could say the gas is in a high entropy state. There’s no order or intelligibility to it. In fact, it is a kind of pure matter. It is the potentiality to receive form. It has form only fleetingly. What I mean is, it goes from form microstate to microstate with nothing really holding it together. This is a good idea of what prime matter is.

However, one can give this thing forms. Because there are so many particles in this box, it has the ability to receive many, complex forms like the following.

Now the analogy of particles in the gas as matter and the macrostate as form may be more clear. If we look at the macrostate that has a drawing of Aristotle it has far more intelligability. Also, mathematically, in order to be in one of the few microstates that depict a drawing of Aristotle, we need to be in a lower entropy state. We can therefore connect form with a decrease in entropy. If the maximal entropy of a system is the most chaotic or disordered system, then anything that has more order than that (or less entropy) has some form.

As I said above, only prime matter does not have form and Aquinas even posits that Prime matter could be said to not have existence because it doesn’t have form.3 So, even this chaotic system has a form, but the forms are transient. It moves from one form or state to another. Aristotle talked about matter “desiring form” in its less actualized state, and Aquinas would talk about something being prime matter in relation to a genus, like water being prime matter for all drinks for instance.4 Therefore, if a more base element can be considered like prime matter it can also be said to be more indeterminate.

Aquinas and Aristotle never use this language of indeterminacy and chaos, but does in his book Aristotle’s Revenge

The closer a substance is to the level of prime matter, the greater its indeterminacy… and thus the greater its unpredictability. 5

With the language above it is clear: a lower predictability means more entropy but a possibly greater ability to receive forms as Feser suggests. Conversely, higher actualization means greater determinacy / intelligibility / higher forms.

Medieval Entropy

Although Aristotle and Aquinas never used the word entropy, and certainly never knew about statistical mechanics, they did talk about the process of corruption, going from higher forms to lower forms. However, for them, this principle of corruption only applied to some objects. They both believed that the heavens, or the superlunar realm, was incorruptible. They believed the planets and stars either never moved and thus were never corrupted or moved in circles, the most perfect shape, forever. Conversely, they saw all the objects below the moon as full of opposing forces and prone to corruption. This is one of the reasons medieval cosmology said that the sublunar realm was affected by the heavens because the superlunar realm was not subject to decay and was therefore able to bring lower things into actualization — it was the proximate source of order.

For this reason, even in things corporeal, the preservation and continuation of things is ascribed to the higher causes: thus the Philosopher says (Metaph. xii, Did. xi, 6), that the first, namely the diurnal movement is the cause of the continuation of things generated; whereas the second movement, which is from the zodiac, is the cause of diversity owing to generation and corruption. In like manner astrologers ascribe to Saturn, the highest of the planets, those things which are permanent and fixed. So we conclude that God keeps certain things in being, by means of certain causes. 6

However, we don’t have that view anymore. Planets change and are corrupted just as things on earth are. Despite Aquinas having this special category of physical, uncorrupted objects, he still has things to say about things that are subject to decay in the Summa Theologica. He addresses this issue in the question, “Whether creatures need to be kept in being by God?”7 He answers the question in the affirmative, although he splits preservation into two categories: preservation by way of preventing corruption and preservation by way of directly sustaining. One can think of the distinction with a simple example. People who are alive and healthy must only be preserved by preventing corruption. You need to eat and sleep so that your body doesn’t decay and you die. But, your body still has the power to sustain itself given routine care. However, if someone is on a life support system, they are being preserved by an external agent, directly sustaining them. Without this life support system, the person would die.

One can think of the first kind of preservation as a battle against the second law of thermodynamics; maintaining your being in a universe where everything tends towards dissolution. The second kind of preservation is a unique and wholly other issue that has to do with the fact that God is the only being with the power of bestowing existence.

Aquinas says that God only sustains some beings in the first way, but he sustains all beings in the second way. That is because, for Aquinas, some things are immune to corruption, namely the objects in the superlunar realm. However, only God has the power of existence and must give it to all things to exist in the way a life support system may give someone the power to sustain their life when they have lost it.

However, since we learned the second law of thermodynamics, and we have seen stars explode, Aquinas’ first statement is incorrect; there are no beings in the physical world that can avoid corruption by their nature. Therefore, if Aquinas wants to remain faithful to his own system, then all beings actually need to both be preserved in their being by way of the removal of corruption and by the addition of existence.

Now I mentioned at the beginning of this paper a quote from a famous physicist that said that the second law of thermodynamics was so fundamental that any theory that attempts to overturn it is in trouble. Indeed, the second law has explained cosmology,8 gravity,9 and quantum entanglement.10 It is never violated. Even if one thing gives order to another thing, there would be some wasted entropy that leads to an increase in entropy in the process. For instance, if you forge a sword, you do so creating a lot of heat and wasting energy. This wasted energy is entropy, as well identified by Carnot. However, this creates a problem. As I order one thing, I must disorder another thing ad infinitum. So, what reservoir are we drawing this excess order from? For Aquinas, the answer was the celestial realm. They were unchanged, unbroken, solid. But we can think of no such thing in the physical world that is like this. Even if there is no more order in the universe, how did we even get this initial order in the first place?

I have a hard time coming up with an answer other than something incorruptable ordered the universe as to give us some starting entropy. Only this source can be a source that creates without any excess corruption. It therefore creates perfectly. We may call this source God.11 Or, I don’t know, maybe you can go back to incorruptable heavenly spheres if you like.

Conclusion

Whether or not one accepts Aristotle's metaphysics, statistical mechanics has given us something remarkable: a mathematical language for talking about form, determinacy, and corruption. The medievals lacked the mathematics, while modern physics often lacks the metaphysics. Perhaps each has something the other needs.

If my above thesis is correct that the entropy of a system is a proper measure of how much it is in-formed, and the second law of thermodynamics is indeed the most sacred law of modern physics. What I have done above is not offered an argument of premises and conclusions based on first principles, but a working definition that one can test and see if it lines up with their experience. One can give a mathematical definition of the alleged “occult” metaphysics of the middle ages.

And for the skeptics in general. I would like to ask: where does our store of entropy come from? How is anything at all ordered when the most sure law of the universe we see is that all things are much more likely to disordered, and we also see that every infusion of order requires an agent.

Perhaps this is why the second law of thermodynamics has such an uncanny status among the laws of nature. It is not merely a law about heat or probability. It is a law about the continual tendency of all things to lose their determination, their intelligibility, their form. Every act of creation, every work of art, every sentence written, every life sustained is a small victory against that tide. If that is not a fundamentally metaphysical principle, I do not know what is.

I spend hours on research and editing to make sure I can teach well about things I think are important. I don’t want to paywall my content, but if you’d like to show appreciation, feel free to put a couple dollars in the tip jar.

Buy Me A Coffee

The real problem of the disenchantment crisis is the way in which we see and treat the world. This is always a problem of symbols. We do not see the world “objectively.” The very fact of seeing entails a subject. Rather, we see the world in meaning. Now our meaning can be ordered correctly or incorrectly. We can see the world as Max Weber says we see it in terms of economic cost and opportunity or we can see things in the divine economy. Aquinas clearly saw the world in the latter. His five ways are a testament to this. He can seamlessly go from a basic, everyday principle of physics to the divine.

I think it is also appropriate here to spell out the connection between metaphysics and symbolism, which is a subject I have long been contemplating. When we get into it later, it will become clear that it often seems as if the subjects of symbolism and metaphysics are related. Although their methods may be distinct, the truths they get at seem to be two sides of the same coin.

I would argue that metaphysics is an attempt to describe the most fundamental underlying structure of reality using the tools of logic and language. It is an attempt at the objective world, trying to poke at what really is.

On the other hand, It seems to me that symbolism then is a sort of marination in the human mind of a worldview. It takes in the sensory data and reinterprets it according to metaphysical principles. What you end up getting is two ways of approaching truth.

If one follows the history of art, one can see it move with the history of metaphysics. Medieval art, for instance, was highly interpretative. It contains weird characters and exaggerated imagery that emphasize the interpretation over the facts. We see this especially in iconography. Elements of the icon are embellished to offer a more clear interpretation of the meaning of the event rather than the facts of the event. It is a sort of metaphysical filter on the facts. An expressed worldview.

One can see in renaissance and early modern art a return to the facts. Suddenly, the emphasis seems to shift from interpretation to creating 3D scans in the case of sculptures and trying to be a camera in the case of painting. It reflects the emerging emphasis on science in the age, here there is less marination in the human mind and more brute facts, and the symbology of it all is obscured.

Now, I don’t want to mock the more literal art. The world is in fact incarnational and supercharged with meaning, and this was the interpretation of many rennaissance artists. Instead, I just want to show the difference in a symbolic and scientific worldview. One considers the metaphysical realities and the other the physical realities.

Now of course, metaphysics is not just symbolism and symbolism is not just metaphysics. Just as some things are better articulated in images than they are in words. However, one may find if they look carefully in the scholastics an appreciation for the symbolic and doctrines that paint a picture that is far more fantastical than the world modern man lives in.

In this essay, I will focus on cosmic symbolism. This is symbolism that is universal in nature and gets at the primordial principles behind the universe itself before there are any particularities. This is different than a particular symbolism which examines how different elements of a story speak to one another as shown below.

Although there are different symbolic systems, all symbolism makes cosmic references, so this seems like a good place to start.

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Heaven and Earth

Symbolism and metaphysics are both elemental practices. They define a few elements and move on from there. The biblical authors make no attempt to hide the elements of their cosmos. They identify them in the opening sentence of Genesis. These are heaven and earth, things that were said to exist at the beginning. Heaven here is not necessarily the place we go if we die in a state of grace in this context, although it is not completely unrelated. Rather, let me offer a distinction that is adapted from St. Augustine’s Confessions Book 12.

1. Earthly Heaven: literally just means what we would call the sky, including the celestial bodies.

2. Intelligible Heaven: mostly the subject of this essay. Describes pure intelligibility or form. It is more the world of meaning and abstractions.

3. Paradise: God’s dwelling place, or saint Paul’s “third heaven”. The place that you go if you die in a state of grace.

Augustine himself in this book is partial to the interpretation of heaven in the book of Genesis being the intelligible heaven.

Meanwhile this is what I understand, O my God, when I hear thy Scripture saying, “In the beginning God made the heaven and the earth, but the earth was invisible and unformed, and darkness was over the abyss.” It does not say on what day thou didst create these things. Thus, for the time being I understand that “heaven of heavens” to mean the intelligible heaven, where to understand is to know all at once--not “in part,” not “darkly,” not “through a glass”--but as a simultaneous whole, in full sight, “face to face.”

- Confessions, Book 12, Chapter XIII

The reason Augustine says that understanding heaven means to understand all is because it is these heavenly intelligible patterns that are the source of a thing being what it is. This is why before God says “let there be light” the world is said to be full of darkness. There is simply matter with no meaning, full of darkness and void. Augustine continues in the same passage:

And by the invisible and unformed earth, I understand that which suffers no temporal vicissitude. Temporal change customarily means having one thing now and another later; but where there is no form there can be no distinction between this or that. It is, then, by means of these two--one thing well formed in the beginning and another thing wholly unformed, the one heaven (that is, the heaven of heavens) and the other one earth (but the earth invisible and unformed)--it is by means of these two notions that I am able to understand why thy Scripture said, without mention of days, “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.”

- Ibid.

So, Earth is just pure chaos, matter without form, pure darkness. Heaven is pure intelligibility, light, or spirit. Pure heaven does not make itself manifest in earth. It is too fine and delicate. You never see the pure intelligible form of chair, you only see instantiations of the form of chair made from matter. Therefore, the physical things we see, are meetings of heaven and earth1.

In the creation story, this is what God does in order to make his creation. He is meeting heaven and Earth in increasing degrees, culminating in his creation of man.

We can see this culmination symbolically. In ancient cosmology, things that were higher up were seen as more heavenly, hence the name they used for the sky: heavens. They had a notion that meaning came from higher up and expressed this in physical terms. In the creation story, God is creating things that are increasingly closer together on the axis of heaven and earth, up until the ultimate creation of man. This is a case where words fall short of good explanation, so I made a graphic to hopefully illustrate this clearly:

The creation of man following from a closing in of heaven and earth is no coincidence. It is meant to illustrate that we are the bridge of heaven and earth. This is clear when God takes dust from the ground (earth) and breaths his spirit into us (heaven).

The implications of this is broad. Since we live in both the heavenly and earthly realm, we have the ability to connect eternal heavenly truths with earthly matter. This is our ability to give meaning and symbols to otherwise benign matter. This is why Adam names the animals, he is mirroring God in giving meaning to matter. God gives him authority to do this because creation is an act that we desire to imitate in worship.

Matter and Form

The concepts of heaven and earth are mirrored in the idea of matter and form. I dare say they are even the same, although I may restrict form to intelligible form. Even Augustine, who no doubt studied Aristotle, used these categories when trying to describe heaven and earth, saying heaven is pure form and earth is pure matter. In ancient and scholastic metaphysics, matter is the idea of physical potentiality. Matter is what underlies a substantial change of an object, and form is the thing that constrains that matter to a specific actualization and makes it what it is.

To use a clear example, imagine a bushel of cotton. If i have a bushel of cotton, it has the potential to be a shirt, a towel, a bag, bedsheets, a blanket, or many other things. These would be different forms or actualizations of cotton, but the cotton is what determines what I can make. I cannot make a knife for example because I do not have the proper matter. However, cotton by itself in its raw form is not very useful and it does not really have any meaning or purpose per-say. I have to actualize the cotton to be a shirt and then the cotton is less indeterminate and has a purpose in the world. This is not arbitrary, it is the nature of creation itself. God does something similar in Genesis2.

However, the type of matter we create with and the type of matter God creates with is not exactly the same. God first of all made the categories of matter and form, or heaven and earth and then creates with them. Augustine specifies that the type of matter God is using as Earth must be different than the type of matter we think of, he posits that it must be something like potentiality itself. He also posits a type of form that must be like form itself. He further posits that these things must exist outside of time.

There are precisely two created things (according to Augustine and Aquinas) that were made by God but which exist outside of time. Those two things are the formless matter and the matterless form of the created world. The absolutely formless matter is outside of time because it's so unstructured that it can't change. It can't go as physics would say from state A to state B because it's so disordered that it's not in a state it's pure stuff it's the substrate of everything physical but you can't do physics about it. You might say it does not rise above the threshold of being inside of time. Augustine calls this in book 10 of the Confessions the earth of the earth. The other thing is what Augustine calls the heaven of heavens it is the mighty spinning movement of the world soul yearning to be near God it moves so rapidly in its clinging to its divine cause that it too escapes change you might say it rises above the level of being in time.

- 100 Days of Dante, Canto 3, 6:24-7:40

Here we see a direct parallel between the idea of heaven and earth and matter and form. For Aquinas later, it is from this he posits the necessity of prime matter. Prime matter is simply the idea of pure potentiality, it is purely indeterminate and unintelligible by itself and therefore cannot really be said to be any thing. It is a thing that is only really usable to God.

This notion, in my opinion, greatly clears up what Aquinas was trying to describe when he held to a notion of prime matter. As a scientist trying to map on his notion to my knowledge of the natural world, it seemed that no characterization I gave could meet a faithful Thomist's definition. They would always say stuff like, “Prime matter is unquantifiable and unintelligible.” I eventually just responded with, “To hell with prime matter, Aquinas just made something that doesn’t exist.” However, with eyes toward the symbolic necessity of a pure potential and void, the idea makes sense.

Conversely, there is the idea of the heaven of heavens or pure form without matter. For Aquinas, there were only really two things that were pure form without matter: God and divine ideas. However, I think for the purpose of what we mean by heaven (intelligible heaven as stated earlier), we should limit our search to divine ideas.

Aquinas put God as the exemplar cause of all things, meaning his ideas are what all things are modeled after3. This means, for Aquinas, there is a sort of perfect chair as in Plato, but contrary to Plato, the forms are not the cause of these ideals, but God is. One could sum this up as saying: the platonic forms are divine ideas and subsist in God. Things therefore, receive what they are (their essence) from God. This is similar (although has some subtle differences) to Maximus’ doctrine of logoi as I explained in this article.

Another part of heaven or intelligible reality for Aquinas is angels. For Aquinas, angels are non material beings. They are divine ideas that have an essence that is known in the divine mind but are brought into being or existence by an act of the divine will. (Since God is existence itself, anything that exists receives their existence from God, so God is the cause of Heaven and Earth and lacks neither of these perfections in himself4). These again are forms without matter, pure heaven with no earth.

However, God is immaterial and therefore his ideas have no material part. Without matter, these ideas cannot be immanentized in the world. In order for ideas to become physical, they need matter. That is why all things in the order of corporeal creation are composed of matter and form, which can be said to be the principles of heaven and earth.

This is again why man is so special. Angels are limited in their ability to effect their material world (although they mysteriously sometimes assume bodies5) we are the point of creation that is both heaven and earth, that is we have material and immaterial parts. Not only this but we are the only corporeal beings with the ability to learn particulars from universals. That is we are the only ones that can give meaning to matter or start to understand the divine ideas by seeing the universal (intelligible) principles in particular (corporeal) things6.

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Conclusion

So, there you have it. The scholastic system is not dry and boring, it is precise and complete without sacrificing some basic mysteries of Christianity. It is not merely trying to define things to death to make them common, it is using categories of reality that we can abstract from nature and categories we know from revelation to provide an account of the cosmos that can explain things like quantum mechanics and metaphysical categories of creation like angels, pure potentiality and void, and heaven. This holistic system is the true way to an enchanted cosmos. Only through adoption of a system like the scholastic one can someone look at the way particles work in a lab and draw conclusions from it that lead them to the nature of God (as shown in Aquinas’ five ways). Aquinas wasn’t this rational materialist type. He was likely more “enchanted” than the rest of us.

The argument misses something crucial. It is the unlikely, yet very real tendency for the transcendent to exist in the immanent — the universal in the particular. I write to you now in my mother tongue, on a certain website, using a certain computer, but I feel as if I am touching on something that transcends these elements and would point to the same truths in a different language, website, or keyboard, and I hope you agree. I am a lesser example of this phenomenon. Think of a painting. Who would dare say that Van Gogh’s Starry Night does not reach up into the sublime despite being undeniably particular. It is an instance of looking at one thing, but seeing much more in it. You don’t see paint and a canvas, you see the powerful, gentle heavens look down on the small Danish city. You see the wonder of it all, and the tranquility of the night sky. One painting shows the many realities contained in it.

Despite this, the gnostic urge endures. Our suspicion of the legitimacy of our perspective, or any perspective for that matter, stubbornly remains. There’s too much risk associated, it’s too personal, it couldn’t dare contain anything beyond itself. Instead, we strive to obtain a “view from nowhere” where all personal and subjective features are stripped away and all that’s left are the cold, hard, impersonal facts.

When we look at the Christian story, we see a different approach. In it, we find the purpose of man to name the animals. to give give meaning to matter, to connect heaven with earth. We meet a God whose hand you could shake, whose feet you could kiss, and whose laughter you could hear. You have a God who did one great act of love at one time, at one place to give life and salvation eternally, for every human being. With the scandal of being able to point to the transcendent God, the iconography embargo is lifted. If cameras existed in first century Palestine, you could’ve taken a picture of one thing, but seen all things within the subject. You could have beheld the Logos.

I say all this to make a point. That is, in Christianity, perspective isn’t arbitrary and something particular does not disqualify it from being universal. The means the meaning we make of the world, our perspectives, and our limits are part of the plan. To be scandalized by this is to be like Nimrod, striving to touch the heavens through power and a disregard for the ones around you, only to be scattered and confused in the end. It is the pursuit of loving humanity at the cost of loving your neighbor.

This realization, this understanding of the role we play — this fine line between the universal and particular is the subject of symbolism. It is a consequence of all things originating from divine ideas as St. Thomas said or different logoi originating from the one Logos as St. Maximus said. The world is super charged with the divine. It contains hints of infinity and we are the only ones that see it, with one foot in the material realm and the other in the spiritual realm.

Since the divine is divine and the infinite is infinite, the multitude of perspective does not take away form, but greatly adds to our understanding. How can beauty be exhausted by one painting? How can truth be exhausted in one book? Each new way of seeing the truth is a pickaxe that takes a chip of the infinite riches of the true, the good, and the beautiful.

A symbol is like a mini incarnation. It is the place where the transcendent meaning of the universe meets the immanent matter. It is a small place where heaven and earth meets. It is an echo of the world to come. So, give yourself some room to speculate. Let yourself dream. Name the animals like Adam. Name the things around you. Look for the chain of meaning in the world even if it feels arbitrary. Because, if we could point at God, then anything is up for grabs.

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To recap, Part I was a historical survey of how people decided to explain nature and her causes in different time periods and Part II contested the idea of universal laws and insisted that mathematical “laws” are abstractions from the things they describe. However, as I teased at the end of Part II, I had not engaged with the real laws of nature, the creme de la creme of physics. This is mostly because a lot of the philosophers I read unfortunately don’t do that. But, after months of rumination, 100s of WhatsApp voice messages between myself and my friend who is into Grand Unified Theories, and a subtle idea planted by an internet friend’s PhD proposal, I think I’m ready to tackle the big guys.

Symmetry

In order to begin to understand modern physics, you must understand symmetry.

Nobel Laureate Philip Anderson once said,

It is only slightly overstating the case to say that physics is the study of symmetry.1

Ed Witten, the covert Einstein of our generation, has catapulted physics forward mostly by his examinations of the symmetries of nature.

What exactly is symmetry? Technically, it is defined as some sort of invariant something that does not change under certain transformations. For example, a circle that is perfectly monochromatic does not change when you rotate it. If I had such a circle and asked you to close your eyes and tell me if I rotated the circle or not once you opened your eyes, it would be impossible. There would be no discernable difference in the circle once I rotate it. However, if I were to make a mark or a dot on a circle, you would be able to tell that I rotated it. We would say that the first kind of circle has rotational symmetry and the second one does not.

Emmy Noether, said to be the most important female mathematician / physicist (and probably like top 5 still when gender is not considered) gave us a great gift in 1918 where she used very rigorous mathematical techniques to show that all conservation laws are products of symmetries. That is, one can look at the physical system in question and quickly deduce the conservation laws by doing a mathematical analysis of the symmetries of the system.

It should be no surprise here that what was found was that pretty much all the physical systems we knew at the time had symmetries that lead to the typical conservation laws of momentum, energy, and angular momentum. It turns out the symmetries of the universe we lived in gave rise to all the conservation laws we knew of. So, we have our universal laws right?

The Space Stage

“Historically, physicists didn’t pay much attention to the stage on which physical processes happen. Space and time were simply featureless background structures. This changed when Einstein figured out that the structure of space and time is highly non-trivial if we look close enough.”

- 2

For much of the history of science, we assumed the universe’s geometry was flat, Euclidian space. We did this because that seems totally reasonable. Euclid and his elements seemed to describe the events that we see perfectly fine. However, that fantasy quickly faded as a physicist whose name would become synonymous with genius released a paper called Die Feldgleichungen der Gravitation (The Field Equations of gravitation) in 1915. What Einstein showed us in this paper is that spacetime is a dynamic entity. If particles are the actors and spacetime is the stage, then Einstein showed us the stage was less a solid foundation and more of a bouncy house. That is, spacetime can change its properties because of massive objects in it. So, spacetime is flat for a universe with nothing in it, but that is not the universe we live in. Spacetime has all sorts of bumps in it due to celestial bodies and even has really tiny bumps for non celestial bodies.

This creates problems for our conservation of momentum and energy. Why? Because Emmy Noether showed us that these conservation laws were due to symmetries namely

1. space translation invariance: the results of my experiment should be the same in China and the USA. If your theory has space translation invariance, it has conservation of momentum.

2. time translation invariance: the results of my experiment should be the same in 33 AD and 2000 BC. If your theory has time translation invariance, it has conservation of energy.

With curved spacetime, this is no longer true. One part of spacetime may have a different curvature than another. This means no space translation invariance and no subsequent conservation of momentum. Also, the curvature of spacetime may change in time, leading to a loss of time translation invariance leading to a loss of conservation of energy. What this means is global conservation of energy and momentum are not universal absolutes.3 They are properties of spacetime.

Just as in the last article where we showed Snell’s law is only true in special cases, the same is true for basic conservation laws.

A concrete example of this is a phenomena called redshifting. You may be aware that our universe is steadily expanding. What this means is that as photons travel through spacetime, they can get stretched out because they travel through spacetime. Since photons have energy proportional to their frequency, photons getting stretched out decrease their frequency and lower their energy. What this means is that if you have a certain number of photons in an expanding universe with energy E, after a certain amount of time they will have an energy E’ where E’ < E. Therefore, conservation of energy fails.

Not all is lost however. What we have lost with the advent of a variable spacetime is global symmetry, but we still have local symmetry. What this means is that if you zoom in enough on curved spacetime it will look flat and we will have all of the symmetries we normally know and love, but they will adhere locally, not globally. However, there are some global symmetries left.

The Only Universal Laws

One can show that there are certain types of symmetries that are never broken. These are internal symmetries. Internal symmetries, when it comes to particle physics, are symmetries associated with matter. For instance, the conservation of charge is an internal symmetry. I cannot have an interaction that produces more charge. I can’t put two electrons together and somehow get more charge. This rule holds absolutely.

The fact that these symmetries hold absolutely are quite remarkable and seem to harken back to an old Aristotelian principle, but in order to explain to you how this is the case, I need to teach you a bit of quantum field theory. Don’t worry, if all goes well we should avoid any math that goes beyond the 3rd grade.

I may not be the first to tell you that the most expensive ongoing physics experiment involves smashing various particles together over and over again. Typically the same particles at that. At first this may seem confusing. Why are we using enough power to supply a village for years to just smash particles together, especially particles that we have smashed together before?

We do this because the particles do a different thing each time you smash them together, and it has nothing to do — as far as we can tell — with the difference in the parameters of the collision. It seems that we can smash two particles together 10 times in the exact same way and get 10 different outcomes. Why? Because quantum mechanics. Just as in normal quantum mechanics, the wavefunction outcomes are not deterministic; in quantum field theory, the particle interactions are not deterministic.

However, its not complete chaos. Interactions that break the internal symmetries we talked about earlier are ruled out. So again, we can’t have two particles with a certain charge or lepton number and produce an outcome that gives a different charge or lepton number. However, any interactions that keep these conservation rules are fair game. That is, the results of the interactions only produce results that are within the conservation laws, but the results of these interactions even after the conservation laws, are not fully determined.4

The Kicker

“But Ben,” I hear you say. “Why are you telling us all of this? I mean, I could get this information from Sean Carrol or someone like that. Aren’t you the guy that is hellbent on putting all of modern science in Aristotelian-Thomistic terms? So far you have only explained to me some random facts about quantum field theory.”

Wow, what a great question from a very thoughtful audience member. Indeed, I am the guy that is on a conquest of changing the scientific language so that it stops being thomophobic. So, what does this have to do with any of that?

Well, when one is talking about laws of nature from an Aristotelian-Thomistic lens, I see two basic tenets, that correspond with the two building blocks of everything: form and matter. These tenets are:

1. Matter cannot be created or destroyed.

2. Laws of nature come from substances.

As regards to the first principle, when I was racking my brain for any universal laws that hold for all substances, I could only think of this first principle. It seems pretty reasonable. You may have heard something like it in your chemistry class. However, for Aristotle, matter does not mean what we mean when we say matter. For Aristotle, matter is the physical manifestation of potentiality. It is what something is made out of, and crucially, it is the thing that persists through change. So the thing that is neither created nor destroyed and persists through change could be considered the proper Aristotelian matter that is concerned. Here, we must look no further than internal symmetries. These are things like charge, lepton number, color, etc. These are things that can never be changed.

As regard to the second, it seems that any extra laws other than the first one is due to a substance and not a sort of divine decree given to inert matter. I see this principle shown not only in my previous article, but also in the fact that many so-called conservation “laws” are products of the configuration of spacetime. If one does find a conservation laws that transcends substances though, I would concede it is a type of Aristotelian matter. The reason I would say this leads into my next point which is

The laws that are universal are not deterministic. This is a profound consequence of our analysis. That is, just because there are universal laws that apply to any sort of particle collisions, they are not deterministic as I said earlier. I can make two particles interact 10 times and get 10 different outcomes. What that means is that in order for determinism to happen, one needs extra rules, such that only one outcome is possible. This conclusion is deeply resonant with Aristotelian-Thomistic metaphysics.

Our conversation started with Dr. McNamara answering all of my questions about phenomenology and ended with us gushing gushing about the beauty of the Christian life. This is a good one folks. I hope your enjoy listening to this conversation as much as I enjoyed having it.

I highly recommend subscribing to Dr. McNamara

Chapters:

0:00 - Intro / Anecdote

2:57 - Dr. Mcnamara’s Background

10:00 - Why fans of ancient and medieval philosophy should engage contemporary thinkers.

16:00 - Phenomenology

21:55 - Phenomenology as unifying the subjective and objective

27:45 - Taking the human perspective and symbolism in phenomenology

35:20 - Is symbolism objective?

36:52 - The symbolism of matter

38:50 - Objectivity and Relativity (also, how God sees the world)

48:50 - Is each human unique? Stein vs. Aquinas

1:11:35 - St. Maximus the Confessor and Edith Stein on theosis

1:18:50 - Stein and Maximus on sin

1:21:10 - Stein on the mystical Body of Christ

1:22:00 - Edith Stein and the Analogy of Being and Symbolism

1:29:00 - Stein on Sex and Gender

What is Mathematics? Are imaginary numbers real? Can the physical world be said to be mathematical in any capacity? What would Aristotle think of group theory? Can we know anything apart from its universal properties?

Join me with prof. Jean Rioux, former chair of philosophy at Benedictine University and author of the book Thomas Aquinas Mathematical Realism as we discuss these questions and many more.

Timestamps:

0:00 - Intro / and what is Math? and rough History of math

Math is not just any relation between quantities, because that would be everything.

7:00 - Are imaginary numbers real?

8:38 - How do we get different number classes?

11:30 - Platonic vs. Aristotelian conception of Mathematics

20:38 - How much does Math apply to the natural world?

33:30 - precision of geometry vs. whole numbers

40:00 - How we Mix concepts in Modern Math / Math is not a direction

48:00 - Minor disagreement about Objective truth

52:05 - Maths are sciences, Prof. Rioux’s conception of what modern math is

56:23 - Can we Know individual Objects? Principle of individuation.

1:00:19 - Potential vs. Actual Infinities

1:02:40 - Structural Realism debates on if knowing things Probabilistically is worth anything.

1:12:00 - Dealing with the Problem of Indeterminism.

1:15:50 - Learning to appreciate things for the sake of themselves.

So you think time is some sort of open figure rather than a circle? Amvrosy asked the elder.

That’s exactly it, answered the elder. After I have become enamored of geometry, I will liken the motion of time to a spiral. This involves repetition but on some new, higher level. Or, if you like, the experience of something new, but not from a clean slate.

- Laurus, pg. 308

Most people are told that time is basically linear; things in the past determine things in the future, and time doesn’t really repeat itself in any patterned way. However, both in our experience and on the edges of theoretical physics, we see a different idea of time. One where memories come flooding back from this same time of yesteryear and where the amount of time experienced is warped by near light speed travel; some even argue that quantum mechanics suggest some form of retrocausality.1 When advances in contemporary science and phenomenological philosophy suggested a more realistic conception of time, many pinned the idea of a linear notion of time to some sort of ancient naivety that has only recently been usurped by recent advances in science and philosophy. However, I would contend this linear notion of time is a blip in history that was primarily the error of the enlightenment. For many people before modern times, the idea that time was linear, or that only the past effected the present, was completely nonsensical.

The liturgical lifestyle lived by medieval Christians, for example, could not at all be called linear. The annual feast days and the liturgy of the hours was the heartbeat that set the rhythm of reality. This, coupled with the natural cycles of the world — seasons, days, years — clearly implied that time was cyclical, not linear. However, the linearity is not totally lost. Christianity includes in its worldview a vision of the eschaton, or the thing all of humanity is heading towards. For us, this is the last judgement. Therefore, life is not merely stuck in a pointless cycle without tending toward anything. Neither is it all a line that merely gets us from point A to point B with little interruption. Rather, life is a combination of both: a spiral. The cycles of the liturgical life move us in the direction of the union of heaven and earth — the thing the spiral tends towards — just as in Dante’s vision of purgatory.

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I. Final Cause

The nonlinear nature of time may be quite clear in a system of end times and liturgical regularities. However, this idea is not limited to only religious notions. In Aristotle’s four causes, he defines the principle of final cause. The final cause is said to be the thing that something is ordered towards, or the purpose of it doing one thing over another. For example, shirts are for wearing, seeds are for planting, and humans are made for eudaimonia (happiness). For Thomas Aquinas, a student of Aristotle, the final cause, despite its name, is considered the cause that is prior to all the other causes.

And this species of cause [final cause] is the most powerful of all the causes, for the final cause is the cause of the other causes. It is clear that the agent acts for the sake of the end. And likewise it was shown above in regard to artificial things that the form is ordered to use as to an end, and matter is ordered to form as to an end. And to this extent the end is called the cause of causes.2

- St. Thomas Aquinas

Here, Aquinas is stating that explanatory power is in the end of something or what it is tending toward, not merely the forces that get it there or what it is made of.

This is rather offensive to modern sentiments. Famously, the modern metaphysicians rejected the notion of final causes saying that only efficient and material causes were necessary. Everything was only atoms bumping into atoms. Anything that tended toward something did so out of pure chance or illusion. When I hit a ball with a baseball bat, the fact that the ball gets launched forward is only a product of the atoms in my bat hitting the atoms in the ball. There was no goal or intentionality in mind.

People that make this kind of objection typically misunderstand what Aquinas and Aristotle mean when they talk about a final cause. For Aquinas, even causes that do not involve living objects involve final causality. The efficient cause of an acorn being dropped by a squirrel to the ground leads to the final cause of the acorn sprouting another acorn tree. Aquinas uses final causality to connect causes with effects. The reason bread dough turns to bread when you cook it is because the efficient cause of heat applied to the dough is connected with the final cause of making bread. Asserting that there is no connection between the efficient and final cause typically leads to explanations that are either absurd or just collapse back to the notion of final causes.3

II. Final Cause in Providence

Once one learns to see the world in terms of final causes, a new notion of cause and effect opens up. One can see, in some cases, the future actually directing the past.

This is most easily seen in the idea of the last judgement as we discussed before. God’s providence guides things to his vision of the end. It may be such that when the final moment is here, everything that happened in the past will make much more sense when the cause of causes is revealed. “For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face (1 Cor 13:12).”

Andrew Willard Jones conveys this sort of eschatological view of history in his article The Liturgical Cosmos.

“Its [Christendom’s] meta-narrative was that of salvation history, the movement from paradise, through the stages of the Old Testament, into the New Testament, and on to the eschaton… Nothing lay outside of it [history] because it extended analogically from creation to glory, from inanimate matter to God Himself.” 4

- Andrew Willard Jones

As Jones mentions we can see this more readily in the Bible. With the revelation of Christ, much of the Old Testament scriptures light up. With the fulfillment of prophecy in mind, we can see many strange figures of the old testament, like Melchizedek for example, as a type for Christ. Seemingly disparate parts of the old testament come together to bring about a harmony that is reveled in its final cause.

If you are religious, it is no stretch of the imagination to see that God orchestrates events in order to brings about their final cause. In this way, we can see the future eschaton effecting the past. The things in the past orient themselves toward a future state even if the people in the past do not know exactly what they are being ordered toward.

III. Final Cause in Rational Agents

However, final causality extends past the providential. It is clearly exhibited in living things in general. For example, imagine you want to make tea. In order to do so, you will have to boil some water, get a mug, and put the tea bag in the mug. If someone is trying to observe how the tea was made, they may appeal to the enlightenment version of causality — the tea was made because all the components of the tea were moved in this way by these forces. All the causality would have to be an appeal to present forces on objects bringing them to this final state by mere coincidence. But there is a sense in which the future state of these things (their purpose in becoming tea) caused all those components to be moved. That is, you can see things like the tea bag, the mug, and the water being caused by this future state of you enjoying the tea.

Another, more fun way I like to think about this is with Ironman’s suite of armor. There are scenes in the movies where Ironman’s suit is distributed in different areas, but each part of the suit comes together to get Tony Stark in his full suit. Are there rockets and wings that actually move the suit pieces? Absolutely. Is that the best way to understand why the pieces of the suit are doing what they are doing? Not at all. The best way to understand a metal arm flying through the air is not, “Oh yea, sure. It has wings and rockets” rather it is more like, “Ironman needs his arm.”

IV. Final Cause for The Inanimate

However, as I said before, this notion of cause does not have to be reduced to rational creatures either. For instance, many systems in nature tend toward the lowest energy configuration possible. If you put many charged particles in a conducting material, they all move to the surface because this is the lowest energy configuration of the particles. Did the particles move due to the local forces they exert on one another, or did they move in order to reach this final state?5 I would say the answer is both. A better question may be: which one is prior? Aquinas says the thing they tend towards is prior, but Newton would say the local forces are prior. It turns out you can do the physics either way, but the method that entails a final cause from the outset gives a much more satisfying answer as to why the particles did what they did and not just what they did. It is not merely a descriptive answer, but gives increased insight into the nature of the universe.

Toward a Better View of Time and Causality

I would argue this rule we have of things only being effected by their histories is based on certain enlightenment philosopher’s formulation of causality. With the more traditional view held by many in the middle ages and antiquity of the primacy of final cause and with a view of an eschatological vision, time was highly nonlinear. The understanding of time and causation both of the future and the past was far more profound. Contemporary science seems to be reaching its limits using only linear conceptions of time. It is also not at all clear from contemporary physics (in many cases, but certainly not all) which way causality goes with time. A reconsideration of this older view of time could open up a deeper understanding of the concept and bring back a world where providence and patterns of reality are understood and seen at each level of reality.

Last time we met, we left off on a crescendo of ever more anti-Aristotelian philosophical accounts of laws of nature that climaxed with Isaac Newton and his quest to find the divine laws governing all bodies. Under the Cartesian microphysical assumption — later often tacitly imported into Newtonian physics — that what we typically call substances are reducible to “corpuscles” or atoms bumping into each other, the things that govern all bodies could govern all things since there are really just corpuscles. Furthermore, the nature of the laws governing the motion of these bodies were posited to be mathematical. Therefore, modern physics ensued. Looking for the fundamental laws governing all things we found great initial success. However, I would argue that the metaphysics of laws of nature as laid out by the moderns are merely (useful) approximations. In this paper, I will argue on the grounds of metaphysics and what we know of physics that the modern view of laws of nature — which I take as having their foundation in Descartes, Newton, and Hume — must be false in all but very special cases.

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What is in a Law?

Before I start my conquest, I should probably identify the target. What is a law? I would argue many contemporary physicists think of laws in a Newtonian way: that is as universal, mathematical principles. I would say the common metaphysical explanations of where the laws of nature come from are either

1. The Humean interpretation: a mere mathematical regularity. Nothing more, nothing less. Where did they come from? Why do they work? Don’t ask!

2. The law-giver interpretation: There is some sort of mystical law giver. Either God, the platonic realm, or whatever else you fancy.

Despite their differences, both Humean and law-giver interpretations of laws share a common explanatory structure: particular phenomena are explained by subsumption under universal laws that are taken to be prior to, and independent of, the natures of the substances they govern. I will refer to this shared structure—formalized most clearly in the Deductive–Nomological model—as the “modern nomological picture,” and it is this picture that will be my primary target. I will demonstrate using general principles of philosophy and discoveries in modern science that this nomological picture is false because laws are properties of the things they govern, not the other way around, and laws only work for intelligible systems.

CP-Violation

In Nancy Cartwright’s provocatively titled book How The Laws of Physics Lie, she invokes a law that many aspiring med students just trying to get their credits to take the MCAT dread: Snell’s law. Snell’s law is really pretty simple, it just states that the angle of refraction when light changes mediums is related to the angle of incidence and the two indices of refraction as shown in the image bellow.

One can deduce one angle or another if they know the know the indices of refraction of the two media and an angle1. Now, since Snell’s Law was dawned the name law, one would think that a law of nature is universal, that it applies to all of nature, right? Wrong. Snell’s “law” only works for isotropic media, meaning material that has uniform electromagnetic properties.

So is Snell’s law false? Well, its certainly not universal. One could say it is true in a restricted sense. You could say it is a law for all isotropic media, but it is certainly not general or universal. This is what is called a Ceteris Paribus law, translated from Latin as “all things being equal.” The main point is that if something is true with a qualifier it is not universally true.

Now you may rightly ask if there are generalized frameworks that exist for anisotropic (not isotropic) media. Indeed there are, but for anisotropic media, the equivalent of Snell’s law requires in-depth knowledge of the electromagnetic properties of the medium in question. Now, maybe one could call this more generalized framework a law. However, notice this supposed law is quite obviously a property of the object itself. Each object will have different properties yielding different results for angles of refraction. Therefore, I would argue, this is not some divine command from God reaching down from the platonic realm of forms as Newton or Descartes would posit, nor is it a mere regularity as Hume would say — it is a property of the object itself.

This is key to the Aristotelian view of laws of nature, summed up in the statement: The laws of nature are the laws of natures. What I mean by this is that the so called “laws” we have are wholly properties of thing’s natures, what they are in themselves. They are not divine commands, they are due to what a thing is. Snell’s law, for example, is a consequence of the nature of isotropic media, nothing more nothing less.

Hopefully this very quick example can sufficiently convince you to consider that laws are properties of objects. I will talk about this more in this article and in part 3, but I must cover a more subtle issue first.

Abstraction

I don’t know if you have read any ancient philosophy, but if you have, you would know everyone is awfully concerned with forms. You have probably heard that Plato thought the forms had their own realm, so that they could party with each other and not be corrupted by our lame, material nature. Plato said the forms were only inhabited by the material world imperfectly. He saw the aim of the philosophical life as moving past your material reality and grasping the true world of forms, where to know the form of something is to know all instances of it at once.

Aristotle was concerned with these forms as well, but he saw Plato’s idea of their dwelling place as a bit… insane. Aristotle, instead as the philosopher of reason posited that all things were made of matter and form. Matter was a type of potentiality, it was the kind of thing that could take on many forms; where form was actuality, it constrained the matter to be a certain thing or form. However, Aristotle acknowledged Plato’s problem. You never really see the forms in the physical world. There are no perfect circles, so how do we have knowledge of these forms? Plato said that before we are born we pre-existed in the realm of forms. We hung out with them and got to know their vibe before we were sent out to the material world. Therefore, our knowledge of these forms remain with us, although they remain dimly.

Aristotle did not see Plato’s account of knowledge of the forms as reasonable or necessary. Instead, using his categories of matter and form with potentiality and actuality, he constructed a new way one could know the forms. Aristotle said that one can know the forms by removing all sensible and particular qualities of a thing, and abstracting2 the form that is universal to all of them3. How does potentiality and actuality fit into all of this as I said it would? For Aristotle, the forms are never actualized fully in material things. It is our minds that see this potential and actualize what is potential (the forms) in order to grasp them more fully. Aquinas gives a good summary of this process in the Summa Theologiae

But since Aristotle did not allow that forms of natural things exist apart from matter, and as forms existing in matter are not actually intelligible; it follows that the natures of forms of the sensible things which we understand are not actually intelligible. Now nothing is reduced from potentiality to act except by something in act; as the senses as made actual by what is actually sensible. We must therefore assign on the part of the intellect some power to make things actually intelligible, by abstraction of the species from material conditions. And such is the necessity for an active intellect. 4

Aquinas is saying here that our intellects make the potential forms, that exist in physical objects for Aristotle, actual in our minds. This is how we have knowledge of the forms and this process is called abstraction.

Notice, what this does, and Aquinas mentions this explicitly, it entails that in the epistemological order of things, our knowledge of particular things is prior to our knowledge of universal things. Furthermore, our knowledge of the perfect (the fully actual for Aquinas) emerges from a process of our intellect.

This sort of flips the order of what is fundamental to the opposite of what people like Descartes and Newton thought. The mathematical principles we find in physics may be real, but they are abstractions from substances; they do not descend from the heavens via divine command, but are mere principles of substances. Although these mathematical principles may show general structure about the substance or relation of substances in question, they are not fundamental. To make that mistake is to live in the world of the abstract ideas and not the world of the concrete substances.

Before I go any further, I would just like to summarize the paper thus far. What we have learned from the first section is that laws of nature cannot be universal since they change based on particularities of what is being modeled. If we accept this to be true, it is then clear that substances are more fundamental than laws, and the way we can account for the origin of this mathematical structure we find in the world is using the Aristotelian-Thomistic principle of abstraction.

Problems with Abstraction

The thing with abstraction is although it does in fact give us knowledge about particular aspects of a real substance, using that knowledge to sort of model the substance can actually be problematic. Let me try to break down what I mean.

Imagine a dust particle moving through the air. The dust particle is a real substance and there are real properties we can know about the dust particle. For instance: it has a mass, it has a shape and a rigidity, it has a charge, and so forth. In more philosophical terms, it has certain powers or dispositions, and providing a full account of it requires accurately accounting for all the things that could change its behavior.

But there’s really two problems here

1. Accounting for all causes and powers.

2. Modeling them mathematically.

In order to account for all causes and powers, we must have detailed knowledge of the dust particle and its environment. Is it charged? Are there other things around it that are charged? How is its shape effected by forces? What is the fluid dynamics of the room it is in? Did we miss anything?

On top of that, all of these aspects must be able to be modelled mathematically. Now, although the causes may respond with an effect in a mathematically proportional manner, trying to find a mathematical way to model the patterns of the wind, shape, or charge distribution will be a nightmare and may indeed be impossible.

What I mean is, even if the relationship F = ma is always obeyed, the chances that we can have a mathematical model for F are not very high. This is because the situation is highly particular and not susceptible to abstraction.

So therefore, you can only model something inasmuch as it fits in your model.

For example, the earth is kind of spherical, and in an attempt to calculate the surface area of the Earth, you may model it as a sphere. You will not get nowhere, but you will not get the surface area of the Earth, you will get the surface area of the Earth inasmuch as it is spherical. Aristotle would say you get the surface area of the earth qua sphere.

Should we despair and give up on science? By no means. We can get better. For instance, you can model the earth as a sphere with random triangles on the sphere representing mountains and you will be even closer! But, we should realize that nature is not fundamentally mathematical and what we are doing when we are modeling things in this way is modeling them inasmuch as they have the mathematical structure that we abstract.

You would be ridiculous to not have an interest in trigonometry if you are building a house, but you be even more ridiculous if you thought that trigonometry fully and perfectly described the house.

Intelligible Systems

What this means is that what we refer to as laws are really only precise in intelligible systems. That is, systems that behave in the way our abstractions should behave. The dust particle is not an idealized system because there are so many things that can affect the dust particle and they are of such a particular type that our abstractions could not be precise because we will have to include more and more causes and more and more particular features, such that we would more or less be running an experiment in the end.

This is a real problem and it is the difference between science and engineering. Science typically works in the realms of intelligible systems. It is privileged with a lab environment where everything can be controlled and people go to great lengths to make things neat.5

One of my favorite examples of this is the electromagnet for the muon g-2 experiment at fermi lab. It was crucial that the electromagnetic field in the region the experiment was conducted was as uniform as possible. Therefore, the electromagnet could not have been assembled in parts because that would contribute non-uniformity and instead it was preassembled and driven across America shutting down entire highways.6

Similarly, in theoretical models some things are left out. For instance, you do not try to learn about the law of gravitation in a situation as nightmarish as a dust particle. Instead, your physics textbook gives you two point masses in a vacuum. This is where the laws shine and the labs try to recreate these types of systems.

Engineers on the other hand may be more inclined to see my point here. They have to work in whatever conditions they are given and have to think of every possible variable and leave plenty of room for error. They do not have the privilege of clean, vacuum-sealed labs, but instead work in the real world where it is quite clear that the concrete substance has a much greater reality than the abstract laws. This is, for instance, why even though Formula One engineers know all the theory of aerodynamics and even have computers that can take in scans of their vehicles and run fluid dynamics simulations, they still put their cars in wind tunnels to get accurate measurements of things like drag coefficients and wind profiles.

Final Distinction

A clarification is in order. The claim that physical laws are often approximate should not be taken to imply that all mathematical structure in nature is merely heuristic. Aristotelian metaphysics distinguishes between substantial and accidental form. Many of the features that introduce approximation—irregular geometry, environmental coupling, material heterogeneity—belong to the level of accidental form. By contrast, some mathematical structures follow necessarily from a substance’s essential powers, meaning this thing could not be what it is without having a certain mathematical structure. The spherical symmetry of Coulomb’s law, for example, is not approximate but exact, grounded in the nature of electric charge itself. However, to find a perfectly isolated and neat instance of this coulomb force would necessitate and intelligible system.

Conclusion

What we learned here is that laws in general are not universal, and therefore, the word law is not great, and so we can therefore conclude that laws of nature are secondary to the substances they are extracted from. They are real inasmuch as they are abstractions from reality, but they are not fundamental. Furthermore, even in cases where we do have “laws” or abstractions of mathematical properties they have limit scope in which they apply precisely, since laws are only precise in the intelligible systems where our abstract notions of reality can become immanent, such as labs or thought experiments.

You may have noticed this is a sort of Thomist reading on Nancy Cartwright’s How The Laws of Physics Lie. However, there are things the book doesn’t cover. It mostly focuses on where notions of laws fail by looking at physics from 100 or more years ago. It ignores laws that may actually deserve the name and seem to actually be universal, such as conservation laws derived from Noether’s Theorem, and fails to give an account as to why something like the Principle of Least Action should be so widely and successfully applied. I do in fact have a response to this that requires little deviation from the principles I laid out here, but that is for the finale, Part III.

Further Reading:

• Nancy Cartwright, How The Laws of Physics Lie

• Ceteris Paribus Laws, SEP, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ceteris-paribus/

• Aristotle and Mathematics, SEP, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-mathematics/

• Edward Feser, Aristotle’s Revenge, Chapters 3.2 - 3.4

• Dodging the Fundamentalist Threat Xavi Lanao and Nicholas J. Teh

• Edward Feser, What is a Law of Nature?, https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2023/04/what-is-law-of-nature.html

• JW Rioux, Thomas Aquinas’ Mathematical Realism, https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-33128-2

The Oxford language dictionary says it is, “the branch of science concerned with the nature and properties of matter and energy.” Sure I can get behind that. But it is, perhaps intentionally, vague. How do we study “nature and properties of matter and energy”? This is a better question. The details on how to do this have changed throughout history. Most people agreed it had something to do with experience and reason, but today we have a very particular formulation of this. Today, we typically refer to physics as the study of fundamental laws of nature. Albert Einstein, the rockstar of theoretical physics said:

The supreme task of the physicist is to arrive at those universal elementary laws from which the cosmos can be built up by pure deduction. - Albert Einstein 1

Later admirers of Einstein (everyone) take this idea without issue.

“We seek an understanding of the laws of nature and of our particular universe in which everything makes sense to us.” - Sean Carrol 2

The question I want to ask in this series is: is this a good way to describe nature? As following laws, like a good citizen? Also, what exactly do physicists mean when they reference a law of nature? In this series, we will go over the history of the idea of laws of nature, scientific challenges to the idea, and my personal take on ways to describe nature and her behavior.

Quick note: In this article, you will see me oscillate between talking about perceiving of nature as acting according to some mathematical laws and talking about the ability of math to explain nature. These are related because if nature is explained by mathematical laws, then nature must be able to be mathematized in order to use these laws. So the problem is twofold: Are there mathematical laws of nature and can nature be mathematized? If either of these fail, then the notion of nature as being fundamentally governed by mathematical laws is false.

Origin of Laws of Nature

Upon reflection of the choice of language of modern scientists, one may find it odd to realize we are expected to believe that presumably unconscious entities such as fields and particles follow mandatory “laws.” This realization alone of course does not prove or disprove anything, but it may warrant examination of the reasoning of modern, mechanistic philosophies of nature. After briefly considering why this may be the case, we may find that our way of describing nature may be due to our modern fascinations with things such as laws, rights, and constitutions. Indeed, we will find something similar in the alternate viewpoint. Many pre-modern natural philosophers would make analogies of rocks falling to the ground because they find their ends in the ground as a man finds his end in contemplation of the truth. This may sound a bit like anthropomorphizing, but the modern alternative is much worse. C. S. Lewis puts this well in his book The Discarded Image.

The question at once arises whether medieval thinkers really believed that what we now call inanimate objects were sentient and purposive. The answer in general is undoubtedly no… Stones, by definition, could not literally strive or desire. If we could ask the medieval scientist 'Why, then, do you talk as if they did,' he might (for he was always a dialectician) retort with the counter-question, 'But do you intend your language about laws and obedience any more literally than I intend mine about kindly enclyning? Do you really believe that a falling stone is aware of a directive issued to it by some legislator and feels either a moral or a prudential obligation to conform?' We should then have to admit that both ways of expressing the facts are metaphorical. The odd thing is that ours is the more anthropomorphic of the two. To talk as if inanimate bodies had a homing instinct is to bring them no nearer to us than the pigeons; to talk as if they could ' obey laws' is to treat them like men and even like citizens.

- C.S. Lewis 3

The truth is, the notion of a natural law is just one interpretation of the world that arose from a particular social context. This shouldn’t be shocking, all ideas develop in a social context. The real question is: is this a good idea? That’s a question for next time. The question I want to answer now is: how did we get here?

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Natural Laws in Antiquity

The notion of natural laws as we speak of them today arise from a tradition of people giving the reality of mathematics a prior privilege. For example, in Plato’s Timaeus, he develops a mythology of our world being made of his famous intelligible forms by a benevolent demiurge. The intelligible forms were the true reality and everything else was illusion or a byproduct of decay. Pythagoras believed all things would be explained by mathematical principles. He also imbued this belief in his followers, we know this because one of his contemporaries explicitly said so.

The so-called Pythagoreans applied themselves to mathematics, and were the first to develop this science; and through studying it they came to believe that its principles are the principles of everything.

-  Aristotle Met. 1, 985b

We see remnants of this viewpoint today illustrated by the image below. It is the idea that everything follows some reductive mathematical laws and the more you know about the nature of math, the more you can reconstruct about the natural world.

There are, of course, issues with this view. For instance, our models of reality typically fall short of reality. I can approximate the surface area of the Earth by calling it a sphere, but what I have is an abstracted model of the Earth’s surface area, not the Earth’s surface area itself. Of course, we can make improvements to my approximation, but we will in the end rely on real data about the minute details of the Earth’s surface in order to attain real knowledge about the earth.

The flaws do not stop there. And luckily it is not up to me to point them out because someone much smarter than me considered the flaws and proposed alternatives to this view about 2500 years ago.

Aristotle

Aristotle went on to deconstruct this view. We will discuss this in great detail later, but for now, it is important to note a few things.

Aristotle differed from many of his more idealistic contemporaries in asserting more of a primacy of the real world. He believed that Plato’s forms existed, but did not have their own realm. Instead, they were embodied to a greater or lesser degree in the real, material world. When he looked upon the world, he did not necessarily see reality as a facade that was covering the perfect world of forms, but he did see how things were not always as they should be or how we imagined them. He therefore made a distinction between the intelligible world and the world of “change” which we inhabit. He then concluded that since the real world consisted of imperfections (deviations from intelligible object), math could only take us so far since it could only abstract intelligible properties of chaotic and complex objects.

The mathematician makes a study of abstractions (τα εξ αφαιρέσεως) for stripping away (περιελών) all sensible characteristics such as weight and lightness, hardness and its opposites and also hot and cold and the other sensible opposities, he leaves only quantity and continuity, sometimes in one, sometimes in two and sometimes in three dimensions, and the properties of these qua quantities and continuous, and he does not study them in relation to anything else.

- Aristotle (Metaph XI 3, 1061a28-35)

Now of course, we actually do have physical theories based on mathematical theories to denote properties of materials, but that is not the point he is making. He is saying that in order to use math on an object, you must view it as a mathematical object when it is not. The abstraction of the object may tell you about a certain characteristic of the object, but it cannot be exhaustive because the mathematical object does not exist in a vacuum by itself, but rather, it exists in concert with other properties and this object in its existence on earth is the true thing.

Instead of appealing to Platonic forms or mathematical laws to explain reality, Aristotle relied on describing the world in terms of substances that have powers that cause certain things. For instance, a ball falls because a ball is a substance with the power of gravitation. It likely would not bother Aristotle that we have developed mathematical laws for gravitation, but he would call it an abstraction in the sense he gave in the above quote. We would not be studying the ball in studying gravitation, but merely studying an accident or power of a ball in an ideal situation. For Aristotle, the abstractions come from the substances themselves, not the other way around.

Scholasticism

Aristotle remained an authority up until the scholastic period. The preference for Aristotle was mostly due to his more incarnational metaphysics. In a Christian age, where synthesis was of primary concern, this made explaining the reality of God becoming man and the consequences thereof a bit easier. Of course, Plato often had a more healthy respect for transcendence and that was borrowed where appropriate, but the prevalence of Aristotelian thought in scholasticism is undeniable.

Many scholastics held closely to the example of Aristotle. At the time, things were not said to follow natural laws, but instead things were said to really have powers in their own respect and tended towards certain goals or final causes. The world was truly animated with a diversity of entities with attributes that could be studied, but the entities were seen as real entities with real powers that emanated from the divine essence.

William of Ockham was one of the first people to criticize this view and assert that God’s will preceded his intellect and therefore could have made the ‘divine’ essences different than he did. This made the divine laws arbitrary and the natural ones even more so. Under this view, the essences still exist, but they exist under a sort of coercion by God and they could could have been different. This opens the door for more of a law interpretation: inert pieces of matter that have no choice but to do what they are told and have no powers in and of themselves.

Modernity

The modern period was characterized by a rebellion against Aristotelian thought, so it makes sense we would see the door cracked by Ockham in nominalism get thrown open by philosophers that soon followed him.

In order to understand the shift to a preference in thinking about nature in terms of mathematical laws, we must understand two things that accompanied it: the loss of authorities and heliocentrism.

Loss of Authority

"When we speak of the Middle Ages as the ages of authority we are usually thinking about the authority of the Church. But they were the age not only of her authority, but of authorities... Every writer, if he possibly can, bases himself on an earlier writer, follows an auctour: preferably a Latin one”

- C.S. Lewis4

The Middle Ages were characterized by a healthy respect for authority and tradition. Medieval Europe saw themselves as inheriting a wealth of knowledge in many domains from the works of the Roman empire as their common ancestor and the works of the apostles and church fathers as their spiritual guides. As mentioned before, chief amongst these authorities was that of Aristotle. His broad coverage of the foundations of many disciplines, some of which are still held today, secured his spot in the Medieval consciousness as a true authority. However, there was less of a distinction back then on an authority on certain topics. People typically regarded any educated and intelligent person as worthy of citation, and Aristotle, covering the things he did, was likely to be right about almost everything.

“Aristotelianism was often treated as a definitive interpretation of the natural world, rather than as a provisional account of the nature of the world which was to be augmented and corrected in the light of a continuing engagement with the natural order.”

- Alister McGrath 5

However, in the 16th century A.D., with new tools, people began to make empirical observations that contradicted Aristotle’s empirical observations from the 5th century B.C.. This primarily took place in the study of the heavens. For example, there were certain stars Aristotle said did not move and were therefore perfect. However, Danish astronomer, Tycho Brahe, observed that one of these “fixed stars” indeed moved contra Aristotle. With discoveries like these and the protestant reformation around the corner, authority was more welcomed to be challenged.

Symbolism of Heliocentrism

There’s another, more subtle point to note about the shift that happened in the modern age: the symbolism of the heliocentric universe. Often, people regard the discovery that the Sun is in the center of the solar system and not the Earth as a great disappointment to the people of the time. Nothing could be further from the truth.

It is normal for us these days to use phrases such as, “the world revolves around you,” as a sort of assertion of our perceived royal role in society. However, this sort of view is really only possible in a highly individualistic and liberalistic society. The medieval period was deeply religious and they saw a hierarchy in the created order that was reflected in the cosmos. We see these medieval models in works like Dante’s Divine Comedy and Milton’s Paradise Lost where Hell is at the center of the Earth. The reasoning for this illustration was simple: Earth is the lowest place in the cosmos, not the center of the universe. An unknown author in the middle ages with the alias Pseudo-Aristotle said in a work titled De Mundo.

higher is always greater than the lower, and the seven circles are successively encompassed by one another and are all surrounded by the sphere containing the fixed stars… After the Ethereal and Divine Element, which we have shown to be governed by fixed laws and to be, moreover, free from disturbance, change, and external influence, there follows immediately an element which is subject through out to external influence and disturbance and is, in a word, corruptible and perishable. In the outer portion of this occurs the substance which is made up of small particles

- Pseudo-Aristotle, On the Universe (De Mundi)

Here, the admirer of the great philosopher is asserting that things above the planets obey fixed, intelligible “laws”6 and are not subject to change and decay as the things on Earth. The author also suggests that each level in the cosmic hierarchy is more perfect than the lower, and Earth is at the bottom, being the most easily corruptible.

The transition from geocentricism to heliocentrism took around a century to develop from Copernicus merely positing the center of the solar system was the sun to Galileo providing strong empirical evidence for it, but during this change, people’s ideas about the relationship of perfect mathematical relationships with nature changed as well. Learning that Earth — previously the place of “decay and change” — was actually part of the heavens — the place of perfection — changed the idea of the use of math, which describes the world of forms, in nature7. It even drove Galileo to go so far as to say the “book of nature” was written in mathematical language.

"The ‘Book of Nature’ is only accessible and intelligible to those who are mathematically competent, in that it offers no accommodation to those who are unwilling or unable to learn its mathematical language. If nature is to disclose its wisdom, there is a significant restrictive entry barrier."

- Galileo 8

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Developments of Law

However, although the possibility of mapping math onto nature seemed to become more and more legitimate, the language of “natural laws” as we think of them today was not really used until the 17th century. Even then it took some time.

Richard Hooker

One of the first people to speak of inanimate matter as following “laws” was Richard Hooker in 1593 in his work Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity. As the title suggests, he was more concerned with politics than physics, but his definition of what he considers a law seems applicable to inanimate objects

“That which doth assigne unto each thing the kinde, that which doth moderate the force and power, that which doth appoint the forme and measure of working, the same we tearme a Lawe.”9

At this definition, it seems unclear to me if he is saying what gives something its essence is a law, or the essence is the law. He clarifies later.

“Whereas therefore things naturall which are not in the number of voluntarie agents, (for of such only we now speake, and of no other) do so necessarily observe their certaine lawse, that as long as they keepe those formes which give them their being, they cannot possiblie be apt or inclinable to do otherwise than they do”10

Here, he says that the law arises because of the form of an object. Although he is using the language of a law, he is saying it is derived from the form of the object, which would not bother any faithful follower of Aristotle.

Francis Bacon

Francis Bacon, referred to, “fundamental and universal laws which constitute forms” in Novum Organum (1620). Although he is a bit inconsistent on his articulation. He sometimes seems to use the word form how we would use the word law these days. In other places, however, you do not get this phenomenon. He seems to identify a law more with the powers of a certain essence. It seems like Bacon himself was a bit inconsistent of what he thought a law was. He was, nonetheless, thinking along modern lines. 11

Descartes

Descartes was the first one to truly assert that mathematical laws are prior to the substances themselves12.

Descartes in his 1633 work Le Monde described an alternate world that God creates and makes the implication in the final chapter that the laws governing this hypothetical world would be the same laws that govern ours. In other words, the laws of nature are not contingent and do not depend on the substances of our world. This is a monumental shift. Although he wrote this work in 1633, he did not publish it until 1664 out of fear he would get in trouble with the authorities of his time like Galileo did.

In his work, he states three laws which should be true in any conceivable universe.

1. Each individual part of matter always continues to exist in the same state until another body compels it to change.

2. When one body pushes another, it cannot give the other any motion which does not at the same time lose from itself, nor can it take away any motion from the other body without its own being increased by the same amount.

3. When a body moves, even when its motion takes place most of the time along a curved line . . . each of its individual parts nevertheless tends always to continue its motion along a straight line. 13

These are basic conservation laws that mirror Newton’s a few years later. The first law is essentially Newton’s first law — an object in motion stays in motion — the second law is basically Newton’s third law — every action has an equal and opposite reaction — and the third law is more or less the principle of inertia.

At the time, natural philosophers were tasked with constructing a holistic view of reality that connected empirical observations with theological truths. Descartes was certainly offering a novel explanation for why things do what they do. Where previous philosophers and theologians spoke of substances and causes, where the substances were themselves divine ideas, Descartes gave a theological backbone to his theory by saying that the immutable laws reflect the immutable will of God14.

He also wrote, seemingly as an afterthought a rule for determining the motions of two bodies after a collision in one dimension.

Where A and B are the magnitudes or masses of the two bodies and u and v are their speeds before and after the collision takes place.

This equation is still used today to describe conservation of momentum in elastic collisions. It also represents a huge shift in the history of natural philosophy. It is the first concrete statement of a mathematical law of nature. There were plenty of mathematical models before, such as ones developed by Kepler, but this is the first equation that is meant to be more fundamental than the things it describes.

One may think this was seen as an undeniable breakthrough in the study of nature, but it actually received an onslaught of criticism in a way that may seem foreign to most people today.

“Descartes was certainly aware of the latter difficulty and attempted to block it by pointing out that the rules apply only to pairs of bodies wholly isolated from their surroundings. Since according to Descartes’s own principles no such isolated bodies can ever exist in nature, any apparent experimental falsifications of the collision rules are irrelevant. The isolated bodies whose motions are described by Descartes’s collision rules are therefore theoretical abstractions, incapable of separate existence, but useful as a theoretical tool for explaining the behaviour of the more complex systems which actually do exist” 15

Amongst Descartes’ Aristotelian contemporaries, the idea that you could isolate one particle from its surroundings was ridiculous. That was not a thing that occurred in nature, so the result was useless. Descartes only had a mere abstraction.

Descartes knew there were problems with his theory so he denied any quantitative results as he did not want to open himself up to empirical falsification. However, his successor took his basic principles and used empiric data to bolster his position.

Newton

Although the metaphysical revolution had already begun, it did not gain significant credibility until Newton. Newton, inspired by Descartes, wanted to further his ideas of laws of nature and give them the rigor they needed.16 In the opening lines of his famous Principia Mathematica Philosophia Naturalis, he gives a concise history of philosophy and states his purpose for the next 1000 pages or so

“Since the ancients (as we are told by Pappus), made great account of the science of mechanics in the investigation of natural things : and the moderns, laying aside substantial forms and occult qualities, have endeavored to subject the phenomena of nature to the laws of mathematics, I have in this treatise cultivated mathematics so far as it regards philosophy.” - Isaac Newton, Principia Mathematica, pg. 1

For Newton, science was not about looking at the natures of things in themselves, but looking at the real world and finding the true laws, the universal principles, that governed the things. From there, one could take these laws abstracted by inductive reasoning from nature and apply them to any system using deductive logic.

He was not oblivious to the difficulty in rigorously defining how one could get to universal principles using inductive methods. He takes the Baconian method here and acknowledges that our fundamental propositions must come from observation and can either be strengthen or weakened by new data. He states this explicitly in his fourth rule of reasoning.

“In experimental philosophy, propositions inferred by induction from phenomena must be considered true exactly or very approximately, despite contrary hypotheses, until other phenomena occur that make them more accurate or introduce exceptions.” - Isaac Newton, cited from 17

Newton was also aware of the problem of figuring out where the laws of nature came from. However, William of Ockham gave him the language to explain this over a century ago. He simply asserted that these were divine commands given to inanimate matter.

Newton solidified Descartes project by showing empirical results and connecting seemingly separate realms of inquiry by uniting the forces that governed the planets with the forces that governed a falling apple on earth. His project to mathematize nature opened up an entire now field of inquiry known as mathematical natural philosophy that would later come to be called physics. His standards for inquiry are still used today by most scientists.

Conclusion

Although it may seem like the categories we use to explain nature are the categories, we can see here that is not the case. There are alternate ways to explain the inner-workings of the universe. From the Pythagoreans’ faith in mathematical harmony, to Aristotle’s insistence on substances and causes, to the medieval synthesis of form and finality, and finally to the mechanistic vision of Descartes and Newton, we see a gradual abstraction of nature from something with a true essence with powers and purposes to something governed by divine rules. The language of law, once a metaphor, became the very structure of reality itself. The type of explanation Newton deemed desirable has become more or less the common view amongst modern scientists. However, I have shown that modern metaphysical notions are inadequate before and I will argue in the coming parts of this series that this may be the case again, given discoveries in modern science. In the coming essays will investigate questions such as: is nature mathematizable, does modern physics lend itself to an interpretation of universal mathematical laws, and what is a better notion going forward?

3:00 - Connections between Metaphysics and Symbolism

4:00 - Brief Detour on Political Theory and Metaphysics

6:15 - Getting Away from my Detour, back on Symbolism

7:30 - Touching on Magic and Science

13:10 - Regaining enchantment through Aristotelian/Thomistic Philosophy

16:00 - Aristotelianism as a cure to appeal to magic in Modern Science

18:02 - Giving the Moderns their flowers

21:00 - The Importance of Integrating new data

26:00 - Aristotelianism in Biology

27:40 - Aristotelianism in Information Theory

30:52 - Integrated Information Theory is just Aristotle

32:30 - Matter and Gravity in Mechanism vs. Aristotelianism

35:15 - Potential as The Fundamental

35:50 - Prime Matter

37:30 - The Mythic Character of Prime Matter

40:35 - The Symbolic Lens of Aquinas and Ben's Connection of Science and God

42:00 - Back to Aristotle and Science

51:00 - Reductionism is an assumption in Physics

55:20 - Causes vs. Laws

59:35 - Joao on how Real Essences Change epistemology

1:03:10 - Possibility vs. Potentiality

1:04:54 - Conservation Laws May Not Be Fundamental

1:16:20 - Harmony between micro and macro pictures

1:19:40 - Medieval Philosophy has Solved so many problems

1:25:50 - Intuition and Understanding Used to be the Purpose of Science

1:27:38 - Modernity is a Magician

1:32:30 - There's no Objective vs. Subjective

1:37:40 - Ben argues why people should take his symbolism seriously haha

1:42:00 - Conclusion: We Live in the Best time for Synthesis

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She’s not on anyone’s side except her own. In old folktales, the forest — the symbol of nature — is always the source of chaos containing strange beings that bring destruction to those who do not please them. The forest dwelling fair folk of Welsh legend, for example, could bless or curse at their leisure. Their powers were beyond our own and could usually only be wielded by the strong hero. Baba Yaga of the Russian fairytales seems to only serve her own interests which may only coincidentally line up with your own. These stories were an expression of the often cruel character of nature. Plagues sicken, predators lurk, and earthquakes shatter. What is there to like? We should change it.

This seems like a totally fair assertion. If suffering is entailed by nature, we should in fact take the good parts of it, use them for what we need and leave the bad things behind. But where does the buck stop? Do we change our nature? Do we make it serve our ends? There are many times where my nature or limitations are an inconvenience to say the least. For instance, I have been working on an essay in an area of philosophy of science that is new to me and my lack of knowledge gets in my way. The fact that my very being requires that I take time to learn and absorb things is a chore to me. So, why can’t I get rid of this obstacle?

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Limits

Aquinas, in his masterwork on the angelic hierarchy, once pointed out a principle difference between angels and humans. He said men reach their ends by many movements, but angels reach their end in one movement. The conclusion of this is that which takes us many steps would take an angel just one. For example, since I exist in time, I have to write this essay one sentence at a time and you have to read it in the same manner. Angels, however, existing outside of time, would see — at once — the entire essay in their minds. They would have no need for a sort of communication in sequential words because that implies one word is prior to the other, which would imply time. It would all be one to them. They would be a supercomputer of infinite speed, yet work nothing at all like a supercomputer.

God could have made us like the angels, but it delighted him to make us this way: with our human form. As a consequence, we change our minds, give up on diets, and learn lessons slowly. This was not meant to be a hinderance, but the awareness provided by the tree of knowledge of good and evil made it such that we saw our limitations, and instead of seeing God’s delight in them, we were ashamed of them. The fact is we are limited, but with confidence in God it is no issue. It need not scare us; it helps us love if anything. However, Adam and Eve — fearing their finitude — sowed themselves fig leaves to hide themselves from God. They had a desire to cover up their nature and hide what they now perceived as imperfections. The leaves act as a veil, an obscuring of judgement. You cannot judge something you cannot see or categorize. You do not know what makes a good 'hiufw' because you have no idea what it is. You can refuse people call your writing political commentary and demand it be called "Abstractions on current power dynamics." Since the latter presumably has never been done before, it has no choice but to be the best of its kind. These are the fig leaves in our lives. They cover up our perceived lack that is very much real without the knowledge that we are a beloved son or daughter.

Changing Reality

Although God offers us a way back through the cross. His nakedness, in a way, covers up our nakedness. His willingness to put on our limits shows that the limits have worth, and we can learn to live with them through Christ’s example. But of course, not everyone takes this route. After the fall, Adam and Eve's two sons, Cain and Abel, have alternate responses. Cain, upon realizing his reliance on God — and seeing his sacrifices do not get him the results he wants — kills Abel. He represents everything Cain is not and his murder pulls the fig leaves over the eyes of the rest of the world. There is no one to compare him to. Cain founds a city where he and his ways are paramount. He increases his power over his limits even further by employing the arts. He creates technology for his lack of power, makes music for his loss of the beatific vision, and cultivates livestock to satiate his desires.

The fig leaves have moved from a method of hiding oneself from the world to hiding the world from oneself. The experience of the world happens in the false idol of the city of Enoch. Its goods are seen as the ultimate goods, and the founding myth (in this case a murder) of the city changes the law from the natural law, to the temporal laws of power. Reality has been obscured, but at what cost?

Freedom in Virtue

God did not make us to hide, he made us to be free. Not only did he make us free in the sense that we may choose what we wish even if it destroys us, but he made us free to choose the good over the bad. A truly free choice offers no coercion to either side, but we can no longer be said to be free since sin clouds our judgement. Most of the time, we cannot put our rationality above our passions. Although our head is above our body physically, we often act as if our body is above our heads: letting the passions rule the intellect. Re-orienting our demeanor is hard work, and we cannot know which way is up unless we recognize the highest good. Therefore, we must cultivate virtue to have true freedom.

Virtues are the habits that enable us to attain our true ends. All the ink spilled on the subject in virtue can be roughly summarized in the following: once you identify the ultimate end, you can deduce the virtues as things which attain that end. For example, a good cup holds water, so water-tightness would be a virtue of cups. Ergonomics may be another virtue for ease of drinking. For humans, obviously, the ends are more complicated. Aristotle took a stab at it and concluded man's ultimate end was being a good, honorable citizen. Aquinas, however, comes in later and defines communion with God as the ultimate goal of the human life. Virtues are then things that allows one to be closer to God and freely choose goods that embody Christ and the saints. Citizenry isn't out of the picture in this context, but our purpose has been elevated to a higher place while retaining things that were lower.

Nature, Creation, and Symbolism

For both Aristotle and Aquinas, the ends of things are given by their natures. Now I was talking about nature as the wild earlier, but here I mean something different. A nature is what make something what it is. There are things and actions that are in something’s nature that define it. It is in a flower's nature to bloom, a frog's nature to jump, and a milkshake's nature to be devoured. In virtue theory, happiness is defined as the pursuit of your ultimate end that fulfills your nature. However, if Aquinas is right and our nature is communion with God, if we lack in our communion, it will make us unhappy. If we rebel against our ends we will become miserable, even if we attain temporary pleasures. Think of Fyodor Karamazov. For all of his pleasures, he is largely miserable due to his inability to control himself. He is ruled by his vices, he has not done the hard work to put his head above his body. So, we have two options: become virtuous or change our natures.

Our ultimate natures cannot be changed. As St. Maximus clearly says, we were made from God and are made for God, but we can hide behind the fig leaves so to speak. We can obscure, and we can build cities where the bridges between us and our ultimate end is invisible.

Although our ultimate natures cannot be changed, our proximate natures can be changed. What I mean is this: you cannot change the fact that we were made for communion with God — he will always be our end no matter what. But you can make the things that help bring us to that end arbitrary or obscure. Since direct, mystic-like communion with God is rare, there is a sort of veil between us and the bedrock of being itself, there are things in creation that bring us to God in an earthly way. This is more or less the idea of a sacrament. Although this is seen principally in the seven it is not only found there. Earth itself is a sacrament. It is a creation that happened through the logos. All things were created through him and he cannot create contrary to his nature (no matter what William of Ockham tells you).

"If we allow this biblical vision to sink in, it will change the way we think and live. We’ll see creation as it really is: the house that God built to be our temporal and temporary home, a place of pilgrimage where we come to know the Lord through his awesome creation as a loving Father, not just a wise Creator. "

- Scott Hahn, A Father Who Keeps his Promises, pg. 48

Therefore, since God made us as fleshly creatures and gave us a fleshly home, our salvation is fleshly (partially). That means that the construction of the world matters. Christ is trying to tell us something. He made the physical universe for us to get to know him. Decoding this message is primarily the job of symbolism. We see certain patterns, or logoi, in nature that, if we allow it, let's us get a glimpse of the ultimate pattern, or Logos.

Now of course God can intercede directly, but that would kind of defeat the purpose of creation. St. Bonaventure talks about different levels of participation in God's glory that starts at the symbolic level: seeing creation and inferring aspects of God from there. Creation is nothing less than a miracle designed by God for us to get to know our creator.

The Beast

However, symbols can be obscured, reality warped, and God forgotten. You can construct a polity that is not in line with reality. Where giving up on pursuing your true end is celebrated or normalized. It will be hard. We often get punished for working contrary to the natural law, but it is not impossible. Your box to cover up the real will burst at the seams, of course, and the only plausible way to keep your system is to ignore these counterfactuals, but this is the price you pay for going against nature. You must create a constraining system that allows you to cover yourself and the rest of society with the fig leaves. This is what the system of the beast is: the perfect system of nature that forgets the sabbath and forgets its God. It refuses to acknowledge things beyond its understanding, since that undermines its totality, and worships its own creation like a golden calf.

A potent image that illustrates this, I think, is cyberpunk. Everyone exists in the virtual world, and the city is only active at night because that is where the artificial light can rule and the true light is gone. You are comfortably in the cave and any seeping in of the fact that there is anything outside your cave is an imposition. You are allowed, through technological means and earthly power, to transcend your nature and shake off your limitations, leading to -like cyborg society. Instead of merely covering yourself with fig leaves, you make them your salvation.

Eventually, your ability to confront reality is atrophied, you give into your passions instead of perfecting you nature, developing a stockholm relationship with your new oppressor. You have spent so long outside the garden that it seems foreign to you, and just like the Israelites, you prefer the comfort of Egypt over the long journey to the promised land.

My Point

Ok, but I started this essay talking about technology, what does this have to do with technology? I am trying to make a distinction. God, at the creation of man, asks Adam to till and keep the garden. Notice a thing about gardening. You plant a seed and you tend it so it grows. You are perfecting the nature of the seed to make a more full expression of itself. You create tools in order to perfect the nature of God's creation, and in perfecting it's nature it can serve your own. This is distinct because your are creating with a healthy respect of your own nature, and the nature of creation as given by God. You cannot arbitrarily choose how to cultivate a seed, it is tied to the agricultural process. My point here is that creativity, artifice, and tools are good when you understand the nature of something, and you cannot truly understand the nature of something without understanding God. It is the difference between sowing seeds and sewing fig leaves. One thing perfects the nature of God’s creation, and the other obscures your nature out of self-hatred and fear.

However, the story of Christianity does not end in a garden. We are not meant to just return to the prehistoric times. Christ makes all things new and baptizes the city of Enoch to become the heavenly Jerusalem, but the thing is, this only happens if we remember our first loves, our creator, and find our true nature in Christ.

I believe that we have forgotten human nature. If man is meant to be a bridge between heaven and earth; the being that lets creation know itself, connecting universals with particulars — why would we outsource this to some AI model? If it delighted God to make man a creature in time — why do we demand to have things instantaneously? If we are made to hear God's voice — why do we only search for more noise?

Proper technology can only happen with a proper understanding of man, and a proper understanding of man can only be obtained with a proper understanding of man’s creator. God made us to create, to perfect the earth — we are part of his creation project. When we create with an eye to our nature we can make beautiful things. We can make medicine because we see that there is something lacking in our true nature, we can create cathedrals that invoke awe, or we can make tools that allows man to express himself. However, everything we create contrary to this, contrary to our true end, is just the folly of fig leaves.

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A Walk Through Rome

I recently took a trip to Rome, Italy. I was only there for two days. It was more of a side quest on my main trip to Spain, but I figured I might as well go visit Rome while I was in the area since the last time I visited I was not catholic and a lot of the importance of the place was, unfortunately, lost on me. I was mostly going to see the Vatican, show my wife the roman ruins, and eat an embarrassing amount of pasta. My last article I wrote (here) was introduced conceptually using the Pantheon, and I, honestly, completely forgot it was in Rome until I got there (I’ve had a busy month). Once I realized it was there, I insisted to my wife that we go on our way to the ruins and she happily obliged me.

On our stroll to the Pantheon, I willfully chose to not research any part of it. Although I am an avid nerd and tend to research everything I usually like to simply experience the things I go visit and learn everything firsthand. Given the name was still ‘the pantheon’ on google maps, I assumed it was still a pagan sanctuary of sorts, preserved throughout the ages. Although, halfway through my walk I thought I remembered a special triduum liturgy celebrated in the pantheon to represent Christ’s triumph over the pagan gods.

“They might have turned it into a church, but I don’t remember,” I told my wife.

“Really?”

“Yeah, I think they have a liturgy there, but I don’t know.”

I lovingly give my wife many sources of purgation, but one of the ones I am most proud of is the fact that she usually reads my writings, so she was aware of the thought I had given to this structure and could see my excitement grow as we neared our destination.

The Pantheon for The Pagans

The Politics of Paganism

As a refresher, my argument was that the oculus in the pantheon symbolizes the platonic/stoic idea of the divine logos. Modern scholarship speculates that the original structure was built as a dedication to a roman emperor, adorned with statues of the roman gods with the center-piece being a statue of the emperor. The oculus was the unseen “logos” that bound the pagan gods and the emperor together, launching them towards the heavens. The true ordering principle. This is, of course, a lofty idea in pagan thought. The gods were not unified, often they ruled through fear and power. So, what could be binding them together?

The fact is they did not really know. Plato has the best description in his book The Republic where he posits the idea of a polity where a “philosopher king” that pursues “the good” at all costs leads his people into higher heights. They have broken out of the proverbial cave of merely particular conceptions of the good and are concerned with pulling their citizens out as well. Here, everyone is moving toward the good — towards its contemplation. Plato concedes to his interlocutors that this system is unlikely, but remains an important examination to understand the right form of the polity. Therefore, even though there are lofty abstract ideals of the good and the unifying principle they stay in Plato’s disincarnate world of forms.

What we actually see in practice of the ancient pagan worldview is a world where power rules. The Greek and Roman myths tell stories of constant revolution and betrayal in order to obtain power or get what you want out of the other. We see the same thing in the roman empire. The emperors many times ran on power and fear. Their relationships only existed inasmuch as they could draw power from them. There was little honor since the emperors were usually assassinated by another who wanted to take the throne for themselves. They weren’t united under any common good, but simply united under the largest sword.

It reminds me of the regime of Sauron in Lord of The Rings. The orcs would only cooperate to the point in which it benefitted themselves. Often, they found themselves needing to cooperate in order to efficiently do the bidding of Sauron, but they only did this to avoid his wrath and to use the help of the other.

‘So that’s it, is it?’ yelled Shagrat. ‘You’ll do this, and you’ll not do that? And when he does come, you’ll bolt and leave me? No, you won’t! I’ll put red maggot-holes in your belly first.’ - LOTR pg. 1185

So, the question is: in a world where there is so much to fear, what can unify us?

The Revolutionary Idea

The answer is sacrifice. Sacrifice is the thing that unifies the world. One cannot have a marriage without sacrificing their will for the will of the other at times. One cannot have a city without people sacrificing for the common good. The same is true even at the cellular level. Cells join together to make organs. In a sense, they lose themselves, working together on their common project of building and maintaining the organ. However, some cells chose to rebel from their purpose, choosing their individuality over their common project: we call these cancer cells. They become a parasite on the rest of the body.

This is the story of Milton’s Lucifer. Instead of serving in paradise under a benevolent leader, he chooses to rule in hell. This shows us our true intentions putting our pride above our purpose.

We see the inversion of this world of selfishness on the other side in Lord of The Rings. The rule of the elves and the just kings of Gondor is through true authority — that is: virtue. They rule because they both have the ability and the charity to truly care for their people. In return, recognizing the authority of the leader and his benevolence, they are eager to serve him in return of the service he gives to the people. Here, the unity is through self-giving love on both sides.

This idea is the radical conclusion of Christianity. Christ tells us to love one another just as we loved him and shows us how to do this on the cross. This extreme act of love shows us the character of God and therefore shows us the underlying structure of reality. Not only this, but through the revelation given to the apostles we conclude that the trinity, the central mystery of the Christian faith, is a communion of persons in self-sacrificial love to such a degree that they become one substance1. This is the pattern the cosmos is meant to follow.

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The Pantheon through New Eyes

When I walked into the pantheon, I was utterly blown away, because the renovations of the pantheon show the story of the Logos and the discovery of the unifying force of nature.

Like I said, the pantheon was originally built by the decree of some emperor after its previous iteration was lost in a fire. Of course, we do not have any pictures of what the pantheon looked like back then, but the general structure—especially the iconic dome—was likely the same. Inside was likely a statue of the king in the front surrounded by smaller statues of the roman pantheon.

After the conversion of the roman empire, the Pantheon — like many pagan buildings — was neglected. In 609, the Byzantine emperor, Phocas, gave the building as a gift to Pope Boniface IV. Boniface was quick, not to destroy the structure, but to correct and complete the story it told. In the place of the statue of the emperor, the throne of the true King — the altar — was placed; instead of pagan deities, statues of the great saints were erected; and the church was not consecrated to earthly power, but to the martyrs—those who transcended earthly power.

In my previous article, I was making an argument of the oculus symbolizing the logos, so what changed there? Great question. Of course the oculus is still there to show the story from the unseen to the seen. It is a reminder of the radical revelation we had through Christ, and the practice of making other oculuses (oculi ?) with Christ at the center was common in the eastern church at the time of the renovation of the pantheon. So, how do you keep the history alive and show the victory of Christ? Apparently, almost a week before I had arrived to the pantheon, a new sculpture was added to do just this.

It was a crown of thorns sculpture set right under the oculus! This shows the true form of the Logos as I pointed out in my previous article!

The crown of thorns both symbolizes sacrifice as the means of unity and the way Christ unites all logoi in himself. In the bible, horns or spikes can be seen as symbolizing principles or logoi. As I mentioned in my previous article, we see this in the book of revelation where the dragon has horns on different heads — ununited principles — and the lamb, through sacrifice, unites the horns. The crown of thorns is the same symbol where all these disjointed principles (logoi) are met in Christ, the Logos (through sacrifice). The crown is split up into seven pieces like the seven horns on the lamb of revelation showing Christ’s victory over Satan. It is also a symbol of the suffering being shared with the martyrs, but still unified in Christ. The entire building is a triumph against paganism!

Conclusion

The story of the church of the martyrs tells a wonderful story of both the coming of Christ and his triumph over the pagan gods and worldly powers. While I was walking through the building I felt a profound sense of pride for my faith and gratitude for the work of God throughout history. Even though the building was changed from a pagan temple to a Christian church, the story the pagans were trying to tell is not lost, but fulfilled and rightly ordered. Just as all things will be with Christ’s return.

This last summer, I decided to dive into some of St. Maximus the Confessor’s theology and philosophy. I was interested in him because he had many comments on the consequences of Christ being described as the Logos in the first sentence of John.

In the beginning was the Word (logos), and the Word (logos) was with God, and the Word was God.

- John 1:1

Logos roughly translates in English to reason or logic. It is used all the time to describe different fields of knowledge. For instance, biology is bio logos: the logic of life. However, the term logos as was being used at the time, has considerably more baggage.

The apostle John was an educated, Greek-speaking Jew, and like many educated, Greek-speaking Jews at the time he would have had at least a passing familiarity with the ancient Greek philosophers who were deeply preoccupied with the idea of the logos. They used the word to describe a sort of divine unity in the universe. A principle of all principles. Cicero summarized the 3^rd century BC stoic philosopher Chrysippus in the following:

"The universe itself is God and the universal outpouring of its soul; it is this same world's guiding principle, operating in mind and reason, together with the common nature of things and the totality that embraces all existence; then the foreordained might and necessity of the future; then fire and the principle of aether; then those elements whose natural state is one of flux and transition, such as water, earth, and air; then the sun, the moon, the stars; and the universal existence in which all things are contained."

-Chrysippus, in Cicero, De Natura Deorum, i. 39

We do not see the word logos here explicitly, but he is referencing what other stoic philosophers would call the logos. It is the idea of a stable force in the universe that unifies all concepts and all matter together. The idea of this logos or unifying principle is implicit in the idea of a theory of everything: the holy grail of physics. Just as Chrysippus thought the fundamental forces of his time (water, earth, air, and fire) could be unified, there is the idea that the four fundamental forces of physics can be unified. However, this concept does not end at physical theories, but applies to ALL THINGS full stop. The Logos is the origin of all things, reality itself.

The Logos Becomes Incarnate

The very idea of the logos was shown in the art of the day. The pantheon, as shown in the image above, had many Roman gods surrounding a dome: an architectural representation of heaven. It is not hard to see why the dome represents heaven, just look up at the sky, or the design of an observatory and tell me what you see. At the center of the heavens, which can be understood as the axis or the point around which all things move, the highest heaven, is a hole. The axis is there, yet it is unknown. This is the idea of the great unseen divine logos. The center point. Since its power is so great it must not be seen right? Wrong. This is all turned on its head when the logos became incarnate.

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St. Maximus and the Logoi

St. Maximus, a 7^th century monk and theologian, saw the implications of this and created an entire metaphysics around the idea of Christ as the logos: the ultimate principle, and the logoi: little principles. He introduces the main theme of his worldview in the following:

"If by reason and wisdom a person has come to understand that what exists was brought out of non-being into being by God, if he intelligently directs the soul's imagination to the infinite differences and variety of things as they exist by nature and turns his questing eye with understanding towards the intelligible model (logos) according to which things have been made, would he not know that the one Logos is many logoi?"

-Ambiguum 7

St. Maximus here is trying to synthesize the explanation for the radical diversity in creation and the idea of the logos that was evident to him as a Christian and a Neo-Platonist. He concludes from this meditation that the one Logos is expressed in many logoi, little principles that find their origin in the logos, but are nonetheless principles. They are sort of divine ideas that preexist in the logos. Although the various aspects of creation may seem disjointed to us, they are all one to God. Just as when one grasps more universal principles, he can see the connection between two particular principles, God sees the unity in all his creation by virtue of knowing himself. This is central to St. Maximus theology. He sees every created thing as finding its origin and place in Christ, the divine Logos.

Christ as Alpha and Omega

For Saint Maximus, since all created things have a logoi, that includes humanity. In our logoi, God gave us a portion of himself, and the purpose of our life is to follow our logoi as the pattern Christ laid out for us. This is how Christ can know us better than we know ourselves because our ultimate identity comes from him (Jer. 1:5).

Therefore, our perfection is a movement towards God, the unmoved principle from which all things, including ourselves, emanates. St. Maximus was one of the first people to articulate this idea, which is referred to as theosis, or being unified with God through movement towards him. For St. Maximus, our imperfection, and need of movement towards a higher being is evident because he asserts, “what is self-caused is greater than that which is caused since it exists for the sake of nothing. Or itself is its own principle.” This is the same idea I mentioned in the pantheon. The logos is the unmoved principle. It is the axis in which everything turns around. This imagistic way of thinking about it can show the idea of that which is unmoved attracts other things to it, like the sun or the center of the galaxy1.

To Saint Maximus, this is what is meant by Christ being the Alpha and the Omega (Rev. 22:13). He is both the source of our being and the end of it. Just as we seek our origin as humans and an adopted child longs to find their biological parents, our hearts are restless until they rest in the Lord, our end.

Logoi and Transfiguration

So how do we achieve this movement towards the logos and what keeps us from reaching it? For Maximus the Confessor, the spiritual journey begins with baptism, which he sees as the moment that sets the potential for our theosis. Baptism lays out the path, but it must be followed—actualized—through our lives. In doing so, we amplify our own logoi, becoming who we are truly meant to be. This, ultimately, is what it means to be a saint: to live out one’s unique logoi in full fidelity. St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Dismas were profoundly different individuals, yet each fulfilled his role within the body of Christ. As St. Paul teaches, the body consists of many members, each with its distinct function, yet all are united in one body.

Therefore, sin is the denial of our logoi and its foundation in God. When we are lured by what Maximus calls ‘non-being’—that which is neither made for us nor conducive to our ultimate purpose—we stray from our path and risk being consumed by what we are not. In this way, Satan deceives us, offering a false narrative in which we exchange our true identity for lesser goods.

Maximus affirms in another text that it is only through the grace of God that we can follow this path. It is impossible for us to do this on our own.

In Ad Thalasium 2 he says:

"Yet he is still at work, not only preserving these creatures in their very existence but effecting the formation, progress, and sustenance of the individual parts that are potential within them."

For St. Maximus, the entire world is in some kind of transfiguration toward Christ. He was a principle defender against the heresy of Monothelitism and one of the reasons he defended the orthodox position to his death is he saw the entire world as a union of the two natures of Christ. He saw everything — the plants, birds, rocks, and people —being drawn towards Christ — their origin — slowly, in a redemption of the world. The entire world was being moved toward a union of heaven and earth through Jesus.

Symbolism of Logoi

One of the reasons I find St. Maximus’ theology of the logoi so compelling is not only its theoretical, lofty beauty, but its practicality in every day life. If Christ is this unifying principle, how did he unify? Christ shows us the practical means of unification and sanctification by love, through the cross.

In A Church

Think with me for a second about a medieval city. What is in the center of the city that brings people together but a cathedral, and what is in the center of a cathedral but a crucifix. What brings people together? Self sacrifice. That is the center of the community. That is the unifying principle. This is what Christ shows us on the cross and this is the solution to the logos problem, it fills the void in the pantheon.

In Revelation

We see this idea of self-sacrifice as unifying in revelation. The Beast in revelation is described as having 10 different horns on 6 different heads. This symbolizes disjointed principles not connecting and not making sense. A head can be seen as an idea or a logoi and in the iconography they’re typically seen as fighting one another. This is the world of paganism. gods of various domains fighting for dominance with no hope of integration on the horizon.

However, the response in revelation is the sacrificial lamb. The lamb, unites all the principles onto one head through sacrifice. This is the pattern of reality, we sacrifice our individual wills to become something higher, to be taken up as one body of Christ.

In The Eucharist

We see the same thing with communion. In the Catholic Church, we call the eucharist, “the source and summit” of the faith. Again, we see this idea of Christ, the eucharist, as the alpha (source) and the omega (summit). Not only that, but it is what brings us together and in partaking in the body of Christ — a sacrifice — we become a unified body of Christ, ordered towards the will of God. We literally see our diversity, in our different logoi, unified in Christ, the logos.

In the Catholic Church, we also use a monstrance to display the eucharist. It typically resembled the sun with the host in the center, again showing the different principles or Logoi united in the one principle of the logos.

Conclusion

Everything, when following its own logoi, mirrors a part of Christ. We cannot contain God in our minds, but what St. Maximus shows us in his theory of logoi is how everything, when following its logoi, shows the glory of Christ. We do not have the capacity to grasp the single divine principle in this life, but we can appreciate the various ways in which it manifests in creation.

What Maximus teaches us is how everything can bring us closer to Christ, and how being closer to Christ can bring us closer to everything. Truly, we cannot love God and hate our neighbor, because one emanates from the other. So, find the logoi in all things. The stars in the sky, the grass in fields, the vast oceans, or your dog. But also, never forget the truly unifying principle of self sacrifice.

At the end of the 19^th century, we seemed to understand physics pretty well. Yes, there was some work left to be done on the electromagnetic theory of gases and sometimes our estimations of celestial dynamics were off a bit, but who cares? We would get there eventually. Just some minor tweaks were needed here and there.

This systematization of reality was successful thanks to the “mechanical philosophy” built by moderns, namely Newton, under the inspiration of Descartes. The mechanical philosophy, in brief, says that all causation is mechanical; that is to say, all causation is from an object pushing or pulling another object as commanded by deterministic laws of motion. According to scientists of the day, this seemed to be all there was to reality. Mechanism’s immense predictive power proved this.

However, this all changed drastically when quantum mechanics arrived on the scene. Suddenly we had particles that found their metaphysical primacy in the system that they were a part of, and we certainly did not see anything that could be called determinism (or at least could be deterministic and local at the same time). At the time of quantum mechanics’ discovery it received backlash from the scientific community. Einstein famously said, “God does not play dice”. Referring to the incompleteness of the quantum wave function and proposing that there must be some “hidden variables” that actually make the theory deterministic. Fast forward to 2022 and the Nobel Prize winners of the year almost definitively prove this cannot be the case. In just a single century, not long after the establishment of the mechanical philosophy, it was torn down. Many scientists, in order to keep their mechanical view of the world, came up with interpretations of quantum mechanics that required no real change or indeterminacy in the world.

In this essay, I want to examine the question: is all this fuss about quantum mechanics warranted? Would we be less bothered by its conclusions if we had a different metaphysical worldview? What would Thomas Aquinas think of quantum mechanics? In this essay, I will show where the mechanical philosophy fails in modern physics; and how classical metaphysics, as defined by Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, can make ample sense of apparent contradictions caused by mechanistic assumptions. In order to understand this, I will go over basic tenets of classical metaphysics, the attack on these tenets from the moderns and how quantum mechanics seems to spell the doom of the mechanical worldview. I will then offer an alternative interpretation of quantum mechanics I will call the Thomistic Interpretation of the wave function.

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The Classical Worldview

In order to understand where we went wrong, we must first understand the original position. Up until the modern period the default philosophy was Aristotelianism. Aristotle was a student of Plato who was a student of Socrates. Western philosophy is considered to have really kicked off with Socrates. This can be seen with historians of philosophy talking about the pre-Socratic and post-Socratic periods. Although Plato and Socrates made profound contributions to philosophy, Aristotle sought to make their thought system a bit more systematic and precise.

Aristotle tends to have a more balanced worldview than many other philosophers. For example, where some people will say there is only empirical knowledge or only rational knowledge – Aristotle will give both credit and tell you how they are connected to each other. As Peter Kreeft said, “He is fanatically anti-fanatical and unreasonably reasonable.” Given his adept reason and precision, he was part of the education of every learned person in the west. Aquinas in the Middle Ages simply referred to him as, “the philosopher.” Below I will give a brief account of the elements of his metaphysics I would like to focus on.

Aristotle’s Four Causes

Aristotle, in his book Physics, discerned that his predecessors were referring to different types of things when they talked about a cause. For him, cause was simply a way that you could answer the questions why? or how? In order to exhaust such an explanation, he came up with four causes that I explain below. Note that all the causes are intertwined. I will allude to other causes when I am explaining another. There’s no good way to avoid this.

• Material Cause: Is that which underlies different formal causes. For example, if you have a ball of yarn, you could make a shirt or a towel or many other things. These things would all have different form, but they would all have the same material. For Aristotle, matter does not necessarily map 1 on 1 with what we mean by matter today. For example, your phone screen could be a type of material that takes on different forms to show images. Aristotle would hold this view because the phone screen is the things which underlies the various forms and persists even though the forms of the screen may not. Ok, all this talk of forms, what is that anyway?

• Formal Cause: Formal cause is what something is. Continuing with the example of the yarn, both a towel and a shirt are made from the yarn, but a towel is a towel, and a shirt is a shirt. Why? Because they have different forms. There is a distinction between types of forms that will be useful for this article that is: substantial form and accidental form.

  • Substantial Form: is something that has causal powers that cannot merely be reduced to its parts. A good example of this is water. Water is made up of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom. However, both hydrogen and oxygen are gases at room temperature while water is a liquid. Therefore, water has causal powers that cannot merely be reduced to its parts.

  • Accidental Form: is a less profound version of form. Many people think of form as being a shape or having a certain color, this more accurately describes accidental form. The shirt and the towel in my example have accidental form because the shirt has the same causal powers as cotton, but it now serves me as a shirt instead of just cotton. It merely has the shape of a shirt. Therefore, its purpose (final cause) is different.

• ·Efficient Cause: is the way something changes form or state. This is probably the easiest one to understand. The efficient cause that changes a ball of yarn to a shirt is a sewing machine and a sewer. The efficient cause that makes your truck go from still to moving is the motor.

• Final Cause: is what something is ordered toward. To continue with our towel example, a towel is made for drying while a shirt is made for wearing. A final cause is in relation to an efficient cause. So, the reason the sewer made the shirt was to sell it so that someone could wear it. For Aristotle, final causes explain why one thing happened rather than another and why causes can be associated with effects. For Aristotle, if final cause did not exist then there could be no relationship between cause and effect and science would be bunk. This concept is particularly opposed in modernity for various reasons, but beginning with a distinction should help clear up some initial objections.

  • Intrinsic Final Cause: is what something is ordered to by virtue of simply being what it is. Electrons naturally go toward protons and acorns are ordered towards eating or toward making oak trees. Everything has an intrinsic final cause by virtue of being what it is.

  • Extrinsic Final Cause: is what an outside agent orders something toward. For example, if I throw nun chucks in order to stop a criminal, then the final cause of those nun chucks midair is to stop the criminal. This one can really grind people’s gears because this is where you can start talking about God as the thing that gives other things extrinsic final cause, but you certainly do not have to, and Aristotle himself did not. But, you can simply recognize that things do things because they are ordered to do so by outside agents sometimes.

There is a crash-course on Aristotle’s four causes. If you have immediate objections, I would consult Edward Feser’s Scholastic Metaphysics. He can clear up any mistakes I made in my hasty articulation. A thorough defense of these would quickly bloat the essay. That being said, we are not quite at the finish line we must articulate what I would consider Aristotle’s foundational metaphysical assertion.

Hylomorphism

Core to Aristotelian-Thomistic metaphysics is the idea of hylomorphism which in Greek is the combination of the words for matter and form. In order to really get at what this idea means I would like to introduce the metaphysical concepts underlying matter and form: potentiality and actuality. Aristotle develops his doctrine of potentiality and actuality in response to the monists who deny one of the two realities. There are two types of monism: static and dynamic. The dynamic monists deny that an object’s nature can persist beyond some sort of change and the static monists assert that being persists because change itself is illusory.

To take this out of the abstract, let me give you an example that you have likely heard before. It is well known that our bodies are constantly shedding old cells and creating new ones to such a degree that we have nearly all new cells every 7-10 years. The dynamic monists would say that each time you shed a cell and gain a new one you are a different being; your being did not persist because there was a change. This idea, according to the monist, can be applied to everything therefore there is no being that persists in change. If the temperature of your coffee changes, the previous coffee is dead and the new one has come to life. The world is exhaustingly full of change.

The static monists do just the opposite. They say that all change is illusory, to the point that they assert that there is only one mega-being: the universe. In this view, change is illusory because there is nothing coming in and out of being all things we identify as change are the normal workings of the mega-being. They arrive at this conclusion by looking at something like ice. They say that for an ice cube to go from ice to water, the ice must go out of being and the water must come into being. However, since it is possible for something to go from being to non-being, our fundamental assumption must be wrong, and change cannot be real.

Aristotle swoops in as the philosopher of common sense, keenly aware of the manifest lack of this virtue in his opponents with the doctrine of hylomorphism. Hylomorphism holds both the reality of change and persistence in the concepts of form and matter which in term reflect potentiality and actuality. Going back to the ice cube example, for Aristotle, the ice cube is actually ice but can potentially be water or gas. These causal powers exist in the ice cube potentially and are actualized by an efficient cause such as heat. This relates to matter and form because Aristotle asserts that matter is what limits the potential forms of a thing.

Ok. We did it.

The Modern Revolt Against Hylomorphism

While the Aristotelian framework reigned for centuries, the early modern period brought a decisive break—one driven by a radically different vision of science and knowledge. In the late middle ages, the scholastics mostly employed Aristotelian metaphysics in their philosophies. Its basic tenets would have been known by the educated people of the day. However, during the early modern period, the landscape was changing. Although scholastics mostly agreed on the importance of Aristotelianism, Ockham’s nominalism put theological strain on concepts such as substantial form and final cause, asserting that things are what they are by divine decree instead of by divine essence or form. Also, Galileo’s success in applying mathematics to natural movement seemed to suggest an alternative to the science of his day: looking at something’s substantial form and discerning its causal powers. Instead, he opened up the door to begin speaking of laws of motion instead, where an object can do nothing but follow the laws.

Change was in the air. Some were excited — others were terrified. One of the men that held an optimistic view of the future was Sir Francis Bacon. Bacon was raised in living memory of the terrible black death, which completely upended the social structure of Europe, and in the horror of the event, he decided to write treatises on the use of science for the sake of technology. For Bacon, he saw the proper use of knowledge in extending man’s power. This may seem normal to us these days, but it was in sharp contrast to the purpose of scientific studies established by the church centuries prior, which was to further understand metaphysics and the nature of God through the study of the natural world. Bacon, instead, wanted to discern how to use nature in order to benefit mankind. He says this explicitly

“Now the true and lawful finishing-post of the sciences is just new discoveries and powers in the service of human life.” - Novum Organum Book 1, section 81

Instead of the study of nature elevating one’s mind to the divine, it was used to dominate nature for the purposes of man. As one could imagine, a certain notion of final cause could hinder this project. The point of the Baconian ideal was to use knowledge in order to bend the natures of the created order toward the self. For Bacon, even if final causes did exist, they would not serve the project.

“Science has been enormously messed up by this appeal to final causes, which obviously come from the nature of man rather than from the nature of the world—that is, which project the scientist’s own purposes onto the world rather than finding purposes in it·” - Novum Organum Book 1, section 48

Here, we see a revolution of epistemology which will further be bolstered by Descartes. Traditionally, man was seen as the bridge between the material world and divine principles. Indeed, we are the only beings that can get hit by an apple one day and derive an entire field of science from it. However, just because we are the only ones that can recognize these truths — straddling the corporeal and spiritual — does not mean they are any less real. For Bacon however, if it does not serve the practice of pragmatism, it is not real.

Descartes strengthened Bacon’s assertions by building the foundations of what today is referred to as the “mechanical philosophy”. This is likely what is familiar to many modern people. We often talk about mechanisms and many modern physics textbooks refer to some type of ‘mechanics.’ The basic idea of mechanics is that all causality can be explained by local pulling and pushing motion. There has recently been attempts to revive the mechanical philosophy after the havoc wreaked by quantum mechanics to its ideas (which we are approaching). However, the classical mechanical philosophy was convinced it had not only a heuristic for doing science as perhaps Bacon was suggesting, but a robust metaphysics. Included in the mechanical philosophy is necessarily a rejection of what we just described as substantial form. Descartes, in his book On First Philosophy said:

“For I freely acknowledge that the only matter that I recognize in corporeal things is whatever can be divided, shaped, and moved in every possible way—which is what geometers call ‘quantity’ and take as the object of their demonstrations. Furthermore, the only aspects of this matter that I shall take into account are just these” - Principles of Philosophy Book 2, Section 64

Here, Descartes is suggesting that there is no idea of substantial form needed in order to explain physics. There is only things that rely on motion, shape, and quantity. He also puts a primacy on the parts that make up an object rather than the whole.

Newton was heavily inspired by Descartes and developed his physics based on these rejections of Aristotelian ideas. Newton was certainly a genius and his methods were unprecedentedly successful. He was able to describe common phenomena as the product of local motion and pushing and pulling forces giving credibility to Descartes ideas. By the end of Newton’s project, physicists believed we would soon be able to learn the laws of motion for all objects.

The Static Universe

Over the years, the mechanical worldview took over natural philosophy. The sheer predictive power of this paradigm made people believe that nothing was beyond their grasp. Robert Boyle promoted corpuscularianism, holding that all material substances are composed of small particles called corpuscles. Unlike Aristotelian substantial forms, Boyle explained natural phenomena through the mechanical interactions of these particles based on size, shape, and motion rather than invoking any higher order causation. This new atomism seemed to reach its peak in Simone Laplace who stated that if there were ‘an intellect’ that knew all the positions and momentum of all the particles in the world and their governing laws, this intellect would know everything about the past and future states of the universe.

Millenia later, we had returned to a static monism. The concept of change had been rejected. The view of physics in the 19^th century was one of a machine where each part could do nothing other than follow its rules. Man’s conquest of nature seemed triumphant with the mechanical philosophy as the weapon of choice. The scholastics were wrong, we know everything… Or do we?

Malleus Quantum Mechanicum

In the late 19^th century, physics was a well-established and highly successful field. Innovative mathematical techniques were applied to explain things about the natural world with unprecedented accuracy. The century ended with an intellectual explosion of successful and elegant theories, namely Maxwell’s electrodynamics and Boltzmann’s statistical mechanics. Both groundbreaking theories that continued the mechanical tradition. It seems that the old gods were defeated and indeed, Aristotle and Aquinas were just as mistaken about metaphysics as they were physics. In fact, no one – except for theologians – thought of these philosophers much anymore. Out with the old and in with the new. However, the triumphant mechanical philosophy started showing chinks in its armor with the advent of quantum mechanics.

Indeterminism

At the center of quantum mechanics is the wave function discovered by Erwin Schrodinger. The wave function tells you what state your quantum system is in. However, there was an issue with the wave function that bothered scientists at the time. Max Born, in a 1926 paper trying to make sense of Schrodinger’s newly proposed wavefunction in a physical problem asserted that the only predictions the wave function could make were probabilistic ones. This was because the wave functions said that quantum states were in a combination of classical states at the same time. This came to be called a superposition. However, these states were never observed in nature. Therefore, Bohr asserted that the wave function was probabilistic.

Albert Einstein, a loyal determinist, famously refused this interpretation, asserting: “God does not Play Dice.”

Things got worse when there was increased evidence for the idea of a “collapsing” wave function where the fundamental character of a quantum state is changed by measurement. The quantum state would behave like a quantum state before measurement, and it would behave like a classical state after measurement. Before a measurement it would behave like a probability field of states or a set of potential states. It seemed like there was real change happening in the foundations of quantum mechanics – we could see the potential becoming actual.

Many scientists retaliated in an attempt to hold on to the static, deterministic ideal of the universe as asserted by Simon Laplace. Einstein, Podelskt, and Rosen in the famous EPR paper asserted that there must be some gap between the epistemic and ontic. They suggested that there were some “hidden variables” that could be used to make deterministic predictions, but we simply had not found them. Louis de Broglie also came out with a theory that particles had definite positions, but were only guided by a wavefunction. Many years later, Hugh Everitt introduced his many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics where he denies the principle of potentiality and actuality and asserts that all possibilities of a wave function are actual, they just exist in different worlds. However, even with these interpretations, scientists were unable to make a deterministic prediction in quantum mechanics. The deterministic approach seemed to be losing traction, but the microphysicalist approach had to survive. Right?

Entanglement

Wrong. A core notion of quantum mechanics was the idea that different systems could be separated. For example, if I have 10 particles, I could separate those 10 particles. Meaning they do not need to interact with each other and I can treat them separately. However, this notion of separability is untrue if your state is entangled. Entanglement is a fascinating concept that has trickled its way into pop culture. Most people think entanglement is interesting because it implies correlations. For instance, if I have two entangled particles and measure one of them, I then know the state of the other particle. This is simply deduction and is not profound. What is indeed a challenge to modern scientists due to the influence of the mechanical philosophy and microphysicalism is the fact that the entangled particles are now one thing and if you disentangle them they act distinctly different. In other words, the causal powers of the entangled particles cannot be reduced to the separate particles. Does that sound familiar?

The Thomistic Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics

Quantum Mechanics offered substantial challenges to mechanical philosophy. In order to make sense of these contradictions, people scrambled to make interpretations of the wave function that line up with mechanical philosophy. The shock of the conclusions of quantum mechanics seem to be contingent on the dominant philosophy of the time, so I would like to ask the question: what would Thomas Aquinas think about quantum mechanics?

Potentiality and Actuality/Measurement

As mentioned above, when the probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics given by the wavefunction was discovered suggested by Born, scientists rushed to discredit this interpretation — banishing indeterminacy from the real world. However, some scientists had a different hunch, namely Werner Heisenberg. In his book, “Physics and Philosophy” he writes:

"The probability wave of Bohr, Kramers, Slater ... was a quantitative version of the old concept of "potentia" in Aristotelian philosophy. It introduced something standing in the middle between the idea of an event and the actual event, a strange kind of physical reality just in the middle between possibility and reality." – Physics and Philosophy Pg. 21

Heisenberg had a hunch that the wave function represented a potentiality. He makes a misstep here and makes a dichotomy between possibility and reality, but for Aquinas and Aristotle, potentialities are still real, they are just not actual. Already in Heisenberg’s language you could see the dissonance experienced by philosophers at the time. They did not believe in the realities of potentials because mechanical philosophy had taught them not to. However, if the wave function is a sort of “potentia” and it has measurable effects that are distinct to when a state is measured and becomes actual, then we could say potentialities are real. This is exactly what we saw in the work that won the 2022 Nobel Prize. The work established the violation of bell inequalities which confirm the reality of the indeterminacy of the wave function.

Let me elaborate in order to pin down my argument a bit more. For Aquinas, there is always some indeterminacy in matter. This is because it is one thing, but has the potential to be something else. For Aquinas, describing an object’s potentialities is just as important as describing an object’s actualities. For instance, you may describe the properties of an ice cube, but a complete description would involve knowing the properties of the ice cube and knowing that there is an underlying material in water that allows it to be water or gas. This indeterminacy is more intense at levels closer to what Aristotle and Aquinas called, “prime matter” which is a formless matter which underlies all changes of an object. Since prime matter is without form, it is never really seen, but there can be objects that are just one step above prime matter.

To get more concrete, let me give you an example. Say you have a set of protons and neutrons. These could become all kinds of things. The set of possibilities is endless. They could become any element on the periodic table and you could fuse those elements to make many different molecules. The potentialities are so vast because protons and neutrons are closer to prime matter. Now instead imagine you had a glass cup. Pretty much the only other form you could give this glass cup is if you broke the glass or melted it down to make something else that was glass. Your possibilities are much more limited.

Therefore, it may not be unreasonable to suggest in the objects studied in quantum mechanics, which are defined as being small and fundamental objects, are indeterminant, and since these potentialities according to Aquinas are real. It is no surprise that you would observe something like the behavior of the wave-function. Furthermore, for Aquinas, measurement in quantum mechanics could simply be described as actualizing the potentials of the wave function. Therefore, collapsing it to an actual state.

Substantial Form/Entanglement

Also, Aquinas could easily explain what is going on with entanglement by employing the idea of substantial form as we discussed earlier. Since entanglement is defined by its non-separability, it follows the definition I gave of substantial form earlier as “something that has causal powers that cannot merely be reduced to its parts.” Therefore, this would be no bother to Aquinas. One property of entanglement, however, that still befuddles scientists is that entanglement can cause nonlocal effects. Local, as used by physicists, means an interaction or effect that can effect another thing only as fast as the speed of light. This whole idea is foundational to Einstein. Things can only feel the effects of other things at the speed of light. For instance, you only see a lightning strike when the light travels to your eyes, it does not happen instantly. Also, if the sun were to disappear immediately, the earth would not feel the lack of gravity for 8 minutes and 20 seconds – the time it takes sunlight to reach Earth. Therefore, nonlocal effects are effects that violate this.

In entanglement, we seem to see nonlocal effects. There are formulations of quantum mechanics that attempt to explain away this nonlocality. But again, I am not here to refute every formulation; I am here to offer an alternative. We see this nonlocal effects in the following types of experiments.

1. Two particles become entangled by local interactions

2. They get moved far away from each other

3. When one of the particles gets measured, the wave function immediately collapses and both of the particles are now in measured (actual) states. This happens immediately for both particles no longer how far away they are from each other.

This is a problem for modern science because we usually start from the assumption that every interaction is local and the entangled particles seem to interact with each other immediately.

So how would Aquinas explain this one? Well, Aquinas believed in what we call top-down causation. He believed not every cause happened at the level of parts, but some of it happened at the level of the whole instead. This type of top-down causation was banished when the idea of substantial form was banished. If nothing had causal powers that were beyond its parts, then no top-down causation could exist. Aquinas mentions these ideas explicitly.

“But since the soul is united to the body as its form, it must necessarily be in the whole body, and in each part thereof. For it is not an accidental form, but the substantial form of the body… the soul is a substantial form; and therefore it must be the form and the act, not only of the whole, but also of each part.” - Summa Theologiae, Part I, Question 76, Article 8, respondeo

Here, Aquinas is saying the soul, which is a type of substantial form, is present to all part of the body simultaneously and can act on each part as well as the whole. Since the soul is present to all parts of the body at once and it can act on the parts, it could principally have nonlocal interactions. All the arguments Aquinas makes about the causality of the soul is based on the soul having a substantial form, so he would not be bothered by the ideas of other substantial forms having top-down causality. Therefore, Aquinas could explain the non-local effects of entanglement like this.

1. Entangled particles have substantial form since they have causal powers not reducible to their parts.

2. A true substance form can act on its parts immediately.

3. Therefore, there could be non-local effects in entanglement.

Again, all we had to accept for this interpretation was an idea of substantial form and the following idea of top-down causation.

Now this is not to say that we have definitively proved Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophy of nature. There are many interpretations of the quantum mechanics that could kick it out. However, many of these interpretations require big jumps, like the idea of parallel universes or the fact that consciousness collapses wave functions. What I am claiming to do here is not to destroy any alternative view. Instead, what I would like to do is make the proposal that Aristotelian-Thomistic metaphysics offers a very common-sense interpretation of quantum mechanics where you must only accept the philosophical concepts laid out in this paper.

Conclusion

The story of quantum mechanics is often told as one of humanity's encounter with the fundamentally bizarre—a realm where common sense breaks down and reality becomes irreducibly strange. But perhaps this narrative says more about our philosophical assumptions than about nature itself. What we've discovered is not that the world is inherently mysterious, but that the mechanical philosophy, for all its historical success, was never the complete picture we thought it was.

We stand at an interesting moment in intellectual history. The mechanical philosophy achieved unprecedented success by deliberately limiting its scope, focusing on quantifiable, predictable aspects of nature while setting aside questions of purpose, potentiality, and formal causation. This methodological restriction proved scientifically fruitful, but it was never meant to become a complete metaphysics. The crisis in quantum mechanics suggests we've reached the limits of what mechanism can explain and maybe the medievals knew a thing or two.

If Aquinas were to encounter quantum mechanics, he likely wouldn't be surprised by its apparent mysteries. He would see his worldview vindicated. He would see it as a continuation of a world where wholes are not the sum of their parts, there is real change in the world, and things come together in unity.

References

Feser, Edward. Aristotle's Revenge: The Metaphysical Foundations of Physical and Biological Science. Neunkirchen-Seelscheid: Editiones Scholasticae, 2019.

Koons, Robert C. Is St. Thomas’s Aristotelian Philosophy of Nature Obsolete? South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 2021.

Simpson, William (2021). From Quantum Physics to Classical Metaphysics. In William Simpson, Koons Robert & James Orr, Neo-Aristotelian Metaphysics and the Theology of Nature. New York, NY, USA: Routledge. pp. 21-65.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-causality

https://www.earlymoderntexts.com/assets/pdfs/bacon1620.pdf

https://www.earlymoderntexts.com/assets/pdfs/descartes1644.pdf

https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/58881/pg58881-images.html

Born, Max (1926). "Zur Quantenmechanik der Stoßvorgänge" [On the quantum mechanics of collisions]. Zeitschrift für Physik. 37 (12): 863–867. Bibcode:1926ZPhy...37..863B. doi:10.1007/BF01397477. S2CID 119896026. Reprinted as Born, Max (1983). "On the quantum mechanics of collisions". In Wheeler, J. A.; Zurek, W. H. (eds.). Quantum Theory and Measurement. Princeton University Press. pp. 52–55. ISBN 978-0-691-08316-2.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qm-bohm/

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qm-manyworlds/

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qt-issues/#EntaNonlNons

https://cdn.preterhuman.net/texts/thought_and_writing/philosophy/Heisenberg,%20Werner%20-%20Physics%20and%20philosophy.pdf

What is Symbolism?

I think René Guénon put it pretty well when he called symbolism a ‘Sacred Science.’ I like to think of symbolism as a type of science. It tries to find what patterns underly reality. It finds abstract concepts that connect what happens on a human level with what happens at a cosmic level, giving it a fractal structure. It is a sort of human-centered metaphysics. It uses patterns that are familiar to humans to show the patterns of the world in a more intuitive way than analytic philosophy might. There are different symbolic systems, but they usually have a lot in common. In math, we can talk about a set of functions forming a basis. What we mean when we say this is that set of functions can describe a certain set of patterns. The same is true for symbolism, people will use different emphasis or words to explain the same thing (although do I think some symbolic systems are abused and lead to untruths, but that is not for me to evaluate here). The best way to learn what symbolism is, is to learn symbolism, so let’s get to it.

Symbolism of Writing

Anyway, what does this have to do with writing? Well let me take you through it. First, we have to develop our symbolic axioms. I am mostly in the symbolic school of Matthieau Pageau and I am a huge proponent of his book, Language of Creation. This article is mostly just an application of the symbolic principles he lays out in the book (also all of these figures except for one are from the book).

The symbolic axioms will be:

1. Heaven and Earth

2. Space and Time

I will explain these concepts on how they relate to the universe at large and the act of writing.

Heaven and Earth

When you are writing, you are using words to express meaning. This is a meeting of heaven and earth. Let me explain.

Pageau, in his book defines two basic symbolic axioms: heaven and earth. He gets this from the first words of the Bible, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” He posits earth as something that expresses heaven and heaven as something that informs earth.

As an example of how this works, think of a wooden chair. The chair has a certain form (heaven). Typically it has 4 legs and a back so that you don’t have lumbar issues in your old age. However, the chair must have some material (earth) to express itself in the world, which in this case is wood. Wood (earth) by itself cannot make the chair, it needs to be in-formed (heaven). Likewise, the information (heaven) of how to make a chair or what a chair is cannot make a chair either, it needs a physical expression (earth). Therefore, in order to have a true creation, heaven and earth must meet to make the actual chair.

Earth can also mean brute empirical facts without meaning and heaven can represent high ideas that are not rooted in reality. When they are separated they seem chaotic, but when someone connects an idea with facts it brings light and knowledge. We see this happen often in theoretical physics. Leading physicists will use abstract math that seems to have no application in the real world to explain cutting-edge experiments. Before, the data nor the math made sense, but since heaven and earth met, it gives us knowledge. This pattern is everywhere, anytime you see a field of facts and assign meaning to them or take raw materials to make something, this is what you are doing.

The same thing happens in writing. Separate words do not have much meaning. A dictionary, in-principle, has all the words you need to create your essay, but they are not ordered or informed in the right way. Similarly, you may have an idea, but it is not expressed rightly until you connect your ideas with the right words (heaven and earth). When writing an essay, you are giving your thoughts, ideas, and opinions a body. You are forming an expression so they can be enjoyed and shared by others. You must order your words well and express truths that line up heaven and earth.

We participate in this form of expression all the time though. This symbolism is fractal, meaning it works on smaller and larger scales of reality. It works on the level of essays, but also works on the level of sentences, words, and letters. Letters are just made of pen strokes, but we order them in a certain to give meaning. Random orders of letters are meaningless unless we order them to make words etc.

Meeting heaven and earth is the fundamental purpose of humans in the biblical narrative.

We see this in the way in which God orders the creation days. In biblical cosmology, things that were higher up were seen as more heavenly, while things that were lower down were seen as more earthly. With this in mind lets pay close attention to the ordering of the days of creation in genesis.

Day 1: light (heaven) and dark (earth)

Day 2: sky (heaven) and sea (earth)

Day 3: plants (heaven) and dirt (earth)

Day 4: sun (heaven) and moon (earth)

Day 5: birds (heaven) and fish (earth)

Day 6: animals that walk on the ground (heaven) and animals that crawl along the ground (earth) and man (a mix between heaven and earth)

Chart I made that illustrates heaven/earth in creation

You may also notice that the gap between heaven and earth gets smaller. The gap between light and dark vs. the gap between plant and dirt is much smaller. We can see creation is closing in on something as a mediator between heaven and earth. That’s us! The only ones that can see both corporeal and spiritual reality, we are the ones meant to make these connections. We see this when God tells Adam to name the animals. He is assigning meaning and ordering creation. We do the same thing in writing, we give these words, this computer, and this website meaning. So whenever, you write, if you properly connect heaven and earth you are living your purpose.

Time and Space

The other two symbolic axioms Pageau defines are time (change) and space (stability). Space is defined as stuff that is built when heaven meets earth. It is good stuff. Whenever you write an intro paragraph that has been brewing inside of you for two weeks and look back at it and say, “it is good” this is space. You have built well.

However, typically, you have to go through iterations, you have to tear a paragraph down to build anew. The tearing down part is defined as time. Time can also be thought of as the thing that makes something complete without having understanding.

In order to understand this we can think of the week. There are 6 days of creation (space) and 1 day of rest and acknowledging God (time). Here the sabbath is a symbol of time as a day of rest, renewal, and an acknowledgement of incompleteness (need for God). This is also part of the acknowledgement that the parts of you where heaven and earth do not meet need to die in order for you to be built anew (this is quite explicit in the death and resurrection of Jesus as well as in baptism and circumcision).

We see the relation of time and space in writing. As I am writing this piece, I am trying to express what I want to say, and when I go back, I see what does not express what I mean or is irrelevant (heaven not meeting earth), I delete it (time) to build anew (space). Here, we can see as you write and go through revisions after revision you are participating in this cosmic push-pull this battle between time and space.

Time is also a more feminine category while space (or really more the act of structuring a creating) is more masculine. You can see this in the tale of beauty and the beast. The beast meets the beauty, trimming him up, making him less beast-like and more presentable. My friend once told me he saw a woman so beautiful he began trying to improve his credit score because her very presence challenged him. This is the questioning or prune-up aspect of the feminine or the famed “girlfriend effect.” These two aspects of space and time or masculine and feminine must exist together to create something as it is meant to be. So, when writing have a viciously creative side that builds and a more adversarial part that trims the fat and makes your work more presentable.

The hope is, as your writing skills grow and you become more virtuous at uniting heaven and earth, there is more wheat and less chaff. This is the goal of our lives. We long to become who God sets us apart to be and as we go through life growing wheat and shedding chaff, we become the essay God wanted to write with our lives. So, be nice to your essay, work with it, not against it. Correct it when it needs correction, but be patient as God is with you and enjoy the process.

If you want much more expansive symbolism, I cannot recommend language of creation enough. I only scratched the surface here.

About 400 years ago, the renowned philosopher and mathematician, a real renaissance man, Rene Descartes had a dilemma. You see, Descartes lived in a time when many things seemed to be turned on their heads. The bubonic plague followed by the protestant reformation brought about a weird time in Europe, to say the least, and as the ever-mystical Carl Jung once said, "Changes of religion constitute one of the most painful chapters in the world’s history." When the church's foray into a scientific interpretation of cosmology turned out to be smashed by the blunt end of Galileo's telescope leaving its very authority to be questioned, Descartes, armed with nothing but a pen and a soul patch sought to answer the question: what can we trust now?

Well, I will spare you rummaging through his schizophrenic musings. He found that the only thing we knew for sure was that we existed in some capacity. We could not prove whether we were in a simulation or not, or if we could even trust our senses, but we definitely existed because something was reasoning through these propositions.

This is summed up in his infamous Cogito, ergo Sum; I think, therefore I am.

Although this seems like a mere twig to hang one's epistemological worldview on, this idea brought Descartes some comfort since before, he was unsure of anything at all. Still worried about his ability to trust his senses and live life normally, he resolved his troubles the next day, adding that since God existed for sure and would not deceive him, he could have faith that his life was somewhat real.

Although Descartes could sleep easily, the rest of the Enlightenment movement could not. The Enlightenment was built on skepticism using 'reason' and some Enlightenment thinkers saw that the endpoint of radical rationalism called into question the validity of science itself, the pride of the Enlightenment. Since Descartes could not trust his senses, how could one rely on experimental data? David Hume famously joins Descartes in his skeptical paradigm and comes to question even the idea of the self.

"For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe anything but the perception."

- David Hume Treatise of Human Nature

Once Descartes opened up the epistemological can of worms, it was hard to close it back. Although many contemporary philosophers have abandoned radical rationalism since they realized the inconsistencies it creates, Descartes's ideas echoed through the ages and the main themes of the Enlightenment such as "question everything" and "think for yourself" prevailed. Although many present philosophers realize the need to take some things on faith or as bed-rock truth such as the idea that you are not in a simulation or that you sense experience corresponds to reality. Some people decided to faithfully dedicate themselves to the Enlightenment ideal.

Against Skepticism

This brings us into the fashionable skepticism.

In philosophical literature, a distinction is made between general and selective skepticism.

General skepticism is the idea that anything that we cannot know with certainty we cannot claim to know. This leads to us ending up in the same cave as Descartes without God there to guide us out whenever we see fit. This obviously poses problems since we lose the ability to trust our senses or show that anything is real.

Selective skepticism is just what it sounds like. The skeptical principles applied to specific ideas. Although this can be a useful method it usually ends up undermining things that should be able to be taken to be true on common-sense. One classical example is as follows:

(1) I don't know that I am not in the matrix

(2) If I don’t know that I’m not in the matrix, then I don’t know that I have hands.

Therefore:

(3) I don’t know that I have hands.

Now when we examine this argument, we see that on the basis of logic and structure alone, it makes sense. One could easily conceive of how a matrix-like simulation could be indistinguishable from reality given the current-day success of VR. Therefore, how do you know you are not in the Oculus Quest 15? The honest answer is you do not know that. Or, to qualify, you do not know that with the kind of certainty skeptics and rationalist deem up-to-par. The reality is we do not have this cartesian knowledge of anything. If our very senses come into question, we cannot say that we know the sky is blue and if we question all authority we could not even say something like Greenland is an island in the northern hemisphere. If you question anything enough you can sound like an idiot.

Observe.

How do you know Greenland is an island in the northern hemisphere?

I saw it on a map.

How can you trust the map?

The map was made by cartographers.

But how do you know they're not lying?

I guess I do not.

Obviously this is conspiratorial levels of skepticism, but this is just the point. I cannot make an argument that will satisfy a skeptic in this situation. The only way to break the cycle is to appeal to faith or authority which the enlightenment sought out to destroy.

Therefore, we can conclude, selective skepticism NECESSITATES a bias, unless you want to throw out the chance of getting to know ANYTHING. This is a problem since bias was one of the things the enlightenment aimed to throw out.

I want to pause here to make this point extra clear. If you are being selectively skeptical, you must be biased. This is a distinction made not based on reason, but an internal dislike or lack of trust. However, the enlightenment was based on ‘reason alone’ so one can either:

1. Be fully skeptical and end up in a position like Descartes, but give up science since you cannot trust your senses.

2. Be selectively skeptic and give up the ‘unbiased,’ ‘reason alone’ enlightenment attitude.

It’s looking pretty dim for the enlightenment thinkers.

The question is where do we go from here? Well we go back to what we did before Descartes brought us in his cave of confusion. We believe what seems to us to be real until presented with evidence that suggests otherwise. This is the mode of most people. The world is built on trust. I know that Greenland is an island in the northern hemisphere not because I have been there or because I need to become a cartographer to verify. I trust that the cartographers are not lying to me until I see other evidence. I trust that the double slit experiments found what my quantum mechanics book says it found without having to do the experiment myself because I submit to the authority of smarter scientists who have come before me and the other scientists that verified their results.

Of course, if I see something that may undermine or call into question previous findings, I shall certainly prepare to invoke a new paradigm, but until then, I must work with what has been established. The Enlightenment thinkers didn't know this at the time, but this was the point of things like tradition and authority. It is true that these things can be abused and misused, but each generation cannot start off by proving everything form first principles, otherwise progress would be impossible.

Scientism and Being Epistemologically Consistent

Now that we have delved into the far-reaching consequences of selective skepticism, I would like to bring attention to my epistemological arch-enemy and a prime example of selective skepticism: scientism.

Scientism is a strange creature. Scientism is the idea that the only type of knowledge is the scientific kind. Any knowledge that is non-scientific is either not really knowledge or unimportant. It is a position of epistemology that has deep roots in the Enlightenment tradition, but did not reach its full formation until the late Victorian era. After Francis Bacon delivered his pep-talk in "The Advancement of Learning" on how to conquer mother nature and colonize the earth by going all in on the "natural philosophies," people quickly went to defend the usefulness and centrality of science, and with the leftover steam of Descartes skeptic streak, reductive epistemological theories were underway.

Many modern people that may call themselves scientists (philosophically, not occupationally) are typically better described as logical positivists. To understand the core of logical positivism, we must look at the positivist's verifiability criteria of meaning. Where they posit that all analytic knowledge (the kind you get from syllogisms and reason) is meaningless because all knowledge we have comes from the senses and is therefore empiric. Analytic knowledge was posited to just relate two bits of empiric knowledge. Therefore we can test any empiric knowledge we have when we need to by verification, running the experiment again, make sure we were not fooled. The positivists deem this empiric type of knowledge as the only source of knowledge.

To be sure, it is great when you get to verify something, but there are certainly things that are not empirically verifiable yet they are still knowledge. For instance, the statement that Alexander the great lived is not at all empirically verifiable since it is not repeatable, yet we could say that it is a valid and reasonable belief. On top of this, the statement that the only knowledge that matters is the empirically verifiable kind is self-refuting since that statement is not empirically verifiable. There is no kind of science experiment or repeatable data you could point to that would prove this.

Although this position is plainly refuted and you can find much more damming treatments of positivism or empiricism by properly trained philosophers, this position is still held by many lay-philosophers of our day.

However, being a logical positivist or a scientist leads to some very unscientific behavior. Especially when one sees the dogmatic position "science" seems to hold in the modern public eye.

For example, many people will cite science or reason as the place they derive things like morals, worldview, and politics, while providing no scientific reasoning and relying on numerous assumptions. I once heard a colleague say, “My moral are based on reason and science and not religion.” I had quite the Friday night asking him to elaborate and enjoyed watching him dig himself into a hole of self reference.

The inconvenient fact that the Enlightenment figures inadvertently found was there does in fact need to be some a priori principle or something you hold true by faith in order to get anywhere useful. These bedrock principles were once given by traditional religion such as the ones that C.S. Lewis refers to as the Tao in his book The Abolition of Man. Many times these bedrock principles could be shown just by man's very origin and their end, typically given by some myth, but in the wake of the enlightenment, the only thing that thinkers could agree upon was science and reason were pretty cool and the most important things to pursue.

Neil Postman says in his book Technopoly,

"That is especially the case with technical facts. Since this book is filled with a variety of facts, I would hardly wish to shake confidence in them by trying my experiment on the reader. But if I informed you that the paper on which this book is printed was made by a special process which uses the skin of a pickled herring, on what grounds would you dispute me? For all you know—indeed, for all I know—the skin of a pickled herring could have made this paper. And if the facts were confirmed by an industrial chemist who described to us some incomprehensible process by which it was done (employing, of course, encomial dyoxin), we might both believe it. Or not wholly disbelieve it, since the ways of technology, like the ways of God, are awesome and mysterious."

He even later states quotes George Bernard Shaw,

"In the Middle ages people believe in the authority of their religion, no matter what. Today, we believe in the authority of our science, no matter what."

This is not trying to disparage science, the scientific process, or the competence of actual scientists. This is simply to show that people tend to slap the word science on things and believe it whole-heartedly without themselves checking the science. For a person that subscribes to scientism, this sounds an awful lot like an appeal to authority.

Holes in The Foundation of Science

The other thing is that science can have flaws. Science relies on abductive reasoning which means picking the conclusion that best explains the evidence. There is no guarantee that we have all of the evidence or that the best explanation we find is the correct one. Especially in modern science. Once you see how modern scientific knowledge is attained, although the methods are thorough and the thoughtfulness impressive, it does not live up to its infallible standard that is held by many modern folk.

To give you an idea of the fragility of some scientific theories let me tell you about the Higgs Boson.

In 2012 we discovered the Higgs Boson at the CERN Large Hadron Collider. The particle was first conceived of in 1964 by Peter Higgs when he was looking for an explanation of why particles have mass. He came up with the idea of the Higgs field which was a field the permeated all of space and interacted with all kinds of particles to give them their mass. Physicists at the time were pretty sure the Higgs field would be the type of thing, according to our current paradigm with quantum field theories, that would induce mass in particles. All we needed to do was experimentally verify its existence.

However, there was one problem. The Higgs field exerted a force, but we did not know enough about its nature to be able to detect it. We deduced, using principles of quantum field theory, that the Higgs Boson should decay into two photons of energies that we had pinned down to sufficient precision. Therefore, whenever CERN was built and we made the conditions we believed would produce a Higgs Boson, we observed enough of these photons to convince us that they were not being produced from coincidence.

Now, all of the is to say. The only EMPIRICAL evidence we have for the Higgs Boson is that we saw two photons where we thought we might given our hypothesis. This is not direct evidence of the Higgs Boson. I am not calling into question the Higgs Boson's existence I just want to bring attention to how easily one could poke holes in the doctrine of the Higgs Boson. One only needs to come up with an alternative explanation to find two photons at that energy.

Now, to be clear the Higgs Boson seems to be a pretty likely interpretation given all the evidence that backs up Quantum Field Theory matched with that small empirical nugget. However, we are talking about probabilities here, not certainties. One could easily play the skeptic card the same way it was played about the map of Greenland and make someone without a solid training in epistemology come to question the Higgs Boson. However, the same skeptic mentality applied to science is typically frowned upon by the academy.

The Flat Earther Anomaly

Now is a good time for a review of how we got here.

1. Descartes sets an unattainable standard for certainty.

2. Worried about meeting this standard, philosophers retreat to the sciences as epistemological bedrock.

3. Science is far from certain. Scientific theories are just meant to be the most likely conclusion from the evidence.

This brings us to

4. Some people want the cartesian certainty and see the dogmatic use of science.

5. Therefore, they start distrusting in things like the scientific consensus on the shape of the earth because unfortunately we can only see the globe in two dimensions. They can appeal to faulty experiments and malpractice as possible loopholes for their preferred theory to survive in.

Weird how we got here huh?

When we take the consequences of this skeptical view mixed with the dogmatic way people throw around science we get flat-earthers. They have this Cartesian view of knowledge while they see the pitfalls of dogmatic scientism. For example, you can show a flat earther all kinds of evidence that the earth is spherical, pictures from several angles, the law of gravity and how it leads to spherical objects, how light refracts around a curved surface, etc, but they will realize that there are other explanations that fit the data and satisfy their distrust in the scientific enterprise. They want science to be an epistemically certain endeavor but are uncomfortable with the level of certainty science provides.

If Descartes was alive today and took his own philosophy seriously he would probably be a conspiracy theorist. If he could not trust his very senses what makes him think he can trust his neighbor, much less the news, and when he sees the dogmatic approach to science coupled with the lack of its certainty to his standards he would get suspicious.

We must all seriously examine our sources of knowledge and avoid biases on some authorities. I have heard far too many people tell me they derive their morals from 'reason' or 'science' while, after asking enough questions, they reveal they rely on axial assumptions like the rest of us. Many people will do this while criticizing other sources of axial knowledge such as religion and tradition, while their sentiments for their worldview may be even more 'fundamentalists' than the Westborough Baptist church's. In the end we must all strive for intellectual virtue and not hide our assumptions with smart-sounding language.