Two crucial components of this picture of human knowledge are the theses that concepts are irreducible to sensations and mental images, but can nevertheless be abstracted from imagery by the intellect. As I have discussed before, a key difference between the Aristotelian-Thomistic position on the one hand and early modern forms of rationalism and empiricism on the other is that each of the latter kept one of these Aristotelian-Thomistic theses while rejecting the other. Rationalism maintained the thesis that concepts are irreducible to sensations and mental images, but concluded that many or all concepts therefore could not in any way be derived from them. Hence, rationalists concluded, many or all concepts must be innate. Modern empiricism held on to the thesis that concepts derive from mental imagery, but concluded that they must not really be distinct from them. Hence the modern empiricist tendency toward “imagism,” the view that a concept just is an image (or an image together with a general term).
These
fateful moves are key to understanding the later trajectories of the
rationalist and empiricist traditions. The
notion of innate ideas gave rationalism confidence that it had the conceptual and
epistemic wherewithal to ground an ambitious metaphysics. But rationalist metaphysical systems can be
so bizarre and revisionary that they are open to the objection that their lack
of an empirical foundation leads them to float free of objective reality. Modern empiricism, by contrast, has usually
been much more metaphysically modest.
But it has also had a tendency to be too
modest, to the point of collapsing into skepticism even about the world of
common sense and ordinary experience.
Here the critic can charge that collapsing concepts into imagery has
prevented modern empiricism from being able to account for any knowledge beyond
the here and now.
Now, both
approaches can be and have been modified by various thinkers in ways that seek
to avoid problems like those mentioned – though from the Thomistic point of
view, only a return to the broadly Aristotelian conception of knowledge from
which they each in their own ways departed can afford a sure remedy.
But general epistemology
is not my concern here. What I want to
do instead is note two general approaches to natural theology that might
loosely be labeled “rationalist” and “empiricist,” even if their practitioners
don’t necessarily all self-identify as such.
They are approaches that are, from the Thomist point of view, deficient
in something analogous to the ways in which rationalist and modern empiricist
epistemology and metaphysics in general are deficient. And like those views, they represent opposite
vicious extremes between which, naturally, Thomism stands as the sober middle
ground.
On the one
hand we have an approach that aims to establish admirably ambitious traditional
metaphysical conclusions – such as the existence of God and the immortality of
the soul – by way of an essentially rationalist methodology. One example would be Plantinga’s
ontological argument for God’s existence, and another would be Swinburne’s conceivability
argument for dualism. Plantinga’s
argument proceeds by considering what might or must be the case in various
possible worlds, and on that basis aims to establish the existence of God in
the actual world. Swinburne’s argument
begins with what we can conceive about the mind, and draws the conclusion that
its essence or nature must be of an immaterial kind.
From the
Aristotelian-Thomistic point of view, both these arguments get things precisely
backwards. We don’t start with
possibilities and then reason from them to actualities. Rather, we start with actual things,
determine their essences, and then from there deduce what is or is not possible
for them. We don’t start with what we
can conceive and then determine a thing’s essence from that. Rather, we start with a knowledge of its
essence and then determine, from that, what is actually conceivable with
respect to it, and what merely falsely seems
to be conceivable.
From the
Thomist point of view, while the metaphysical conclusions of such arguments are not too ambitious, the method for arriving at them is. We cannot do so entirely a priori. To be sure, once
we do establish the existence of God (through arguments of the kind I’ve
defended at length elsewhere),
we discover that he is such that, were we fully to know his essence, we would
see that his existence follows from it of necessity, just as the ontological
argument claims. But what we can’t do is
jump directly to such an argument as a standalone proof of his existence. Similarly, when we first establish that the
intellect is by nature immaterial, we will see that it is indeed conceivable
for it to exist independently of the body (topics I’ve dealt with e.g. here
and here). But in that case the appeal to conceivability
is rendered otiose as grounds for establishing the intellect’s immateriality.
On the other
hand, we have arguments that proceed a
posteriori, but are way too unambitious
in their conclusions. This would
include, for example, arguments that treat God’s existence as at best the most
probable “hypothesis”
among others that might account for such-and-such empirical evidence, or even
fail to get to God, strictly speaking, as opposed to a “designer” of some
possibly finite sort. And it would
include arguments for survival of death that put the primary emphasis on out-of-body
experiences and other phenomena that can at best render a probabilistic judgment.
Thomists
tend to put little or no stock in such “god of the gaps” and “soul of the gaps”
arguments. At best they are distractions
from the more powerful arguments of traditional metaphysics, and thus can make
the grounds for natural theology seem weaker than they really are. At worst, they can promote serious
misunderstandings of the nature of the soul, of God, and of his relationship to
the world. (For example, they can give
the impression that it is at least possible in principle that the world might
exist without God, which entails deism at best rather than theism. And they can give the impression that the disembodied
soul is a kind of spatially located or even ghost-like thing.)
For the Thomist,
the correct middle ground position is to hold that the soul’s immateriality and
immortality, and the existence and nature of God as understood within classical
theism, can all be demonstrated via
compelling philosophical arguments, but that the epistemology underlying these
arguments is of the Aristotelian rather than rationalist sort. (Again, I defend such arguments for the
existence and nature of God in Five
Proofs of the Existence of God, and have argued for the immateriality
and immortality of the soul here
and here. Much
more on the latter topics to come in the book on the soul that I am currently
working on.)
Related reading:
The
rationalist/empiricist false choice
Is
God’s existence a “hypothesis”?