Know rabbits and you end up knowing God
Areview in the Times Literary Supplement was so dismissive and offensive that I sent off straight away for the book. It was Five Proofs of the Existence of God, which the reviewer, Simon Blackburn, a retired Cambridge professor of philosophy, called little more than “deceptive illusion”.
The author of the book, Edward Feser, so Professor Blackburn gleefully points out, is a Roman Catholic, and would thus be game for “persecutions and the auto-da-fé”, given half a chance
A previous book by Professor Feser, The Last Superstitition was reviewed in the TLS by Sir Anthony Kenny, the former Master of Balliol. He concurred with the view that Feser’s book was the “strongest argument ever made against the New Atheists”, and something more besides.
Feser’s new book does not examine the celebrated five ways of arriving at the existence of God sketched by Thomas Aquinas. It does examine one of Thomas’s arguments (going from the contingency of things to the need for a non-contingent, cause). But Feser’s other proofs rely on Aristotle, the neo-platonists, Augustine of Hippo and, perhaps a surprise, Leibniz (1646-1716).
The Aristotelian argument for the existence of pure act to account for the changing potentialities in the universe convinces me. But I was more interested in the argument that takes its starting point from St Augustine.
This concerns abstract objects (such as universals, propositions and numbers). Are they real, and if so, where do they reside?
Universals make possible our ability to talk to others. When we speak of a rabbit (as depicted here on the Lady and Unicorn tapestry in the Musée de Cluny, Paris), we mean no particular rabbit. But our interlocutor shares an idea of rabbitiness. Old Plato suggested that universals existed in an unseen world of ideal forms, though it is hard to imagine rabbitiness existing without being attached to a real rabbit or being conceived in someone’s mind. Feser shows why the opposite notion, “conceptualism”, which sees abstractions as a mere function of the mind, is insufficient, and why what he calls scholastic realism is the only way to go once Plato’s myth is blown.
By realism here, he means the reality of abstract objects as thoughts of some mind. If every human being died, an abstract object such as the proposition “Caesar was killed on the Ides of March” would continue to be true – but only in the mind of an all-knowing intellect, whom we call God.
This is no doubt the case, but what I am most struck by is that things are knowable. I can’t say I am impressed by “laws” of nature, as if the behaviour of oxygen could have differed if some law of physics had been tweaked originally.
Nor do I see that some imagined possible worlds are possible at all. On the contrary, the things we encounter are stoutly dependable. That excellent marriage of oxygen and hydrogen that we call water happens all over the place. Water behaves impeccably and its properties are there to discover. Even if no one is looking, it exhibits those properties.
The regularity of behaviour that water shows is even more obvious in the geometry of things. Euclidian triangles always do have angles that add up to 180 degrees. We are able to know this, and such knowledge is a pleasure.
It seems to me that the knowability of physical properties, and of the structures behind them, shares something with the knowability of universal concepts. A common path of knowledge leads us on a journey of becoming aware of God behind it all.