The Relationship of Physics with Metaphysics
Progress in understanding nature promotes the knowledge of God
Progress in understanding nature promotes the knowledge of God
The remarkable yet risky power over nature is provided by modern physics. What amazes us today is how physicists manage to manipulate micromatter, obtaining technical results that appear miraculous to the layperson, such as computers, robots, electronic telescopes, and many other technological products serving medicine, industry, agriculture, and scientific research.
Through highly advanced physical investigations, we have realized that micromatter, which doesn't directly fall under our senses but is known indirectly through mathematical calculations and specially constructed technical tools, is quite different from macromatter, which includes material objects, living and non-living things, including our bodies, which fall under our senses daily.
Many things, especially non-living ones, appear solid, inert, immobile, and impenetrable to our senses, even though our senses are certainly aware of matter in motion or dynamic states, such as fire, electricity, vapors, light, or sound, or elastic, mobile, evanescent, thin, transparent, or fluid substances like air, clouds, ice, or water.
On the other hand, the world of micromatter, the subject of quantum physics, seems to possess power, forces, and energies enormously greater than those of the bodies and matter falling under our experience. Their nature doesn't appear solid, often dense, or palpable, or at least tangible or sensible like macromatter. Instead, it seems almost immaterial, without precise boundaries, elusive, imperceptible, ungraspable, and indeterminate, akin to the world of the mind or spirit. It appears as an object of pure mathematical imagination and not something inherently sensible."
Hence arises the temptation for the quantum or atomic physicist to form an idealistic conception of matter, akin to that of Berkeley: “esse est percipi” (to be is to be perceived). The physicist loses sight of the fact that micro-matter is an objective material entity or substance, existing outside and independently of the physicist's mind, a sensible and mobile substance composed of act and potentiality, essence and existence, matter and form, substance and accidents, quantity and quality, action, passion, movement, efficient and final causality, becoming, properties, dispositions, space, time, and action, all of which are accidents of substance.
If our senses do not perceive these entities, these infinitesimal particles, it does not mean that they are purely mathematical entities, mere objects of imagination or thought, mental entities produced by our minds simply because they are not perceptible. They are not perceptible not because, in principle, they are not sensible, but simply because, due to their extreme smallness, they elude our capacity to experiment or feel or perceive, which is only suited for macro-matter and objects of daily experience. If God were to create a sense organ - and He could do so quite well - that is proportionally sized for atoms or bosons, our senses would detect them.
It is important to clarify, contrary to idealistic or Leibnizian biases, that atoms, neutrons, neutrinos, protons, even antimatter, bosons, and elementary particles are by no means devoid of extension, dimensions, and weight. They are located in space with a given velocity or type of motion and thus have nothing in common with spiritual substance, which is itself beyond space and time.
Their invisibility to our most advanced microscopes has nothing to do with the invisibility and immateriality characteristic of the spirit or ideal entities but solely depends on the fact that our most advanced microscopes are unable to perceive them because they are entities too small for us to sense. Therefore, we only know of their existence through the effects they produce in our detection instruments, effects that are described using abstract diagrams, formulas, measurements, or mathematical calculations, and are detectable only indirectly, as the effect indicates the cause, thanks to those complex and refined technical instruments and physical-mathematical measurement systems. The risk lies in mistaking these abstract diagrams, which are nothing but mathematical entities of reason, for the material reality they are meant to measure and represent.
And if the result of the investigation is indeterminate, it is not because the position-velocity of the particle is indeterminate in itself; it is highly determined. It is we who cannot determine this knowledge due to the imperfection and inadequacy of our investigative means.
It's as if we were trying to recognize the identity of a person from 200 meters away. It's not that the person is indeterminate; it's us who, at that distance, are unable to recognize them. It's not that the particle is exempt from the determinism inherent in the physical nature and its laws; determinism exists. It's just that, due to the imperfection of our investigative method, given the material is too small, we can't see it and formulate it in a mathematical formula.
Since this world is represented through mathematical imagination, touching only on quantity, number, and extension and described in mathematical formulas, a physicist who is not attentive to physical reality but desires self-affirmation may be tempted to reduce the world of matter, nature, and physics to a world of imaginary entities of reason created by him. This carries the risk of considering himself authorized to control this ideal world of entities of reason, well-constructed formulas, and concepts, as if it were the real extramental world created by God, and thus taking the place of God in shaping the physical world not according to God's will but according to his own desires.
From Material Entity to Being as Being
The reduction of material substance to an extended, imaginary, and mathematical entity of reason in mechanical motion without purpose, solely caused by the agent, corresponds to the Cartesian idealistic frame. In physics, influenced by Descartes, this means that material substance is enclosed within its self-sufficiency. Therefore, if res cogitans (the thinking thing) leads to idealism, res extensa (extended thing) leads to materialism.
This implies that one cannot move from physics to metaphysics. The physicist no longer sees in a living body, whether a plant, animal, or human, the imprint of the soul, and from the soul, one cannot reach the spirit, nor can the spirit lead to God. According to Descartes, if the senses perceive sensory truth, it's not due to their nature, which cannot overcome doubt, but due to divine light, which illuminates the soul at the moment of cogito (the act of thinking).
Thus, we have the paradox of an overly ambitious form of spiritualism where knowledge no longer begins with the senses but with self-awareness (cogito). However, this sets the stage for a physics that no longer ascends to metaphysics and theology but remains self-contained, giving rise to materialism. Metaphysics, on the other hand, instead of being the pinnacle of knowledge, it becomes the condition of the possibility of physics, while knowledge of God is already included in the cogito.
Cartesian metaphysics is no longer an inquiry into being but into the self, into the consciousness of one's own existence: being becomes being thought. Certainly, the object of physics remains the material substance, as that of mathematics is the ens quantum (quantitative being). However, the goal is no longer to arrive at being as being by abstracting first from the sensory and the mobile and subsequently from quantity, to reach being as such, which can be both material and spiritual - namely, soul, angel, and God.
Narrow and Broad Concepts of Science
Today, when people often talk about "science," they generally mean experimental science or mathematics. However, it's essential to understand that science, in general, is certain knowledge through causes. But this certain knowledge doesn't necessarily require that its object, conclusions, or theses be experimentally verifiable.
The concept of science in the sense of experimental science is thus a narrower concept of science that doesn't encompass the full meaning of science. Knowledge that doesn't need experimental verification but relies on reasoning can also be considered science. This includes cosmology or philosophy of nature, mathematics, metaphysics, and theology.
Even mathematics is certain not because we rely on experience, as its object is purely imaginable, but because we base it on deductive reasoning. Starting from premises evident to the quantitative imagination, it demonstrates a theorem or the result of a numerical calculation by using definitions and making explicit, in an incontrovertible manner, what is implicit in the postulates or initial data.
However, mathematics doesn't concern reality or actual beings; rather, it deals with quantitative entities abstracted from sensible and mobile entities, freed from sensibility and mobility. Mathematical entities are not perceptible and do not move but are purely imaginable and immobile, beyond time and space.
Physics is the knowledge that pertains to material realities, both living and non-living, including humans. It has two branches: cosmology and experimental science. Experimental physics, botany, zoology, experimental anthropology, and what Teilhard de Chardin called the "human phenomenon" fall under this category. Cosmology or the philosophy of nature is the science of mobile and sensible beings.
Its object is the world as a mobile and sensible being, and it also encompasses anthropology, which falls into the category of mobile and sensible beings. However, anthropology opens the door to metaphysics because humans are animated by a spiritual soul. Now, metaphysics is concerned with being, which can be both material and spiritual. Experimental science thus leads to cosmology, which in turn leads to metaphysics, the science of being as being.
Being can be either material or spiritual. Nevertheless, it's not the role of metaphysics to prove the existence of the spirit. Descartes believed that to know of its existence, self-awareness suffices. Undoubtedly, when I think of myself, I have an experience of my spirituality and highlight my spiritual being.
However, there's a significant leap from this to saying that I am a spirit, a res cogitans. Furthermore, to claim that my self-awareness is the starting point and foundation of my knowledge is another significant leap. Finally, to transition from this self-awareness to asserting that I find the idea of God innate in me is yet another significant leap. We should, however, question how we arrived at self-awareness and realize that the perception of my thinking self, the spirit, is the result of a prior journey that began in our early childhood with the perception of external things.
The initial object of my thinking is not my own self or the fact that I exist, but external things. If I doubt the truth of my senses, as Descartes did, seeking certainty in the awareness of thinking is in vain. Thinking what, exactly? Doubting? But doubting is not thinking. Therefore, the Cartesian “cogito” has no foundational value. I cannot base my certainty on doubt. I cannot derive certainty from doubting without first resolving the doubt. Descartes does not resolve the skepticism of the senses and claims to find the principle of certainty in the cogito, without even realizing that if I am sure of thinking and, therefore, of existing, it is because I previously experienced the certainty of sensory knowledge.
If Descartes had been consistent and logical in his reasoning, he should have said, "I doubt, therefore I am." But it's obvious that such a thesis is nonsensical. So, he masked doubt with "I think" (cogito) without specifying what he is thinking. He should have said, "I think external things." But since he deliberately doubts the truth of the senses, he suppresses the objects of the senses themselves. Thus, we have thinking (doubting) without an object: another absurdity, because either thinking has an object, or there is no thinking. This absurdity is the foundation of the so-called "modern philosophy."
Now, no inference, conclusion, or enthymeme [1] can be based on doubt. The initial certainty is the certainty of external things. We must start from there to establish knowledge and genuinely find the experience of the spirit. Only on the assumption of knowledge of things can self-awareness - which is indeed a spiritual experience but incommunicable because the mind does not have a concept of its own spirit - be realized. Therefore, it is not needed to prove the existence of the spirit.
To demonstrate the existence of the spiritual soul, we need inductive reasoning, which, starts from the fact that we represent external material things by the concept, and then examining the nature and origin of the concept we conclude the existence of the soul.
So, it is from the knowledge of the quiddity of a material thing (quidditas rei materialis) that we arrive at the discovery of the spiritual substance. The experience of one's self is a wholly personal and incommunicable matter. It is true that we can invite others to have the same experience. However, the essence of our spirit remains obscure, and in any case, to have some knowledge of it, we proceed by analogy with already known material substances [2].
If we abstract these three properties from the mobile, sensible, and quantitative being, we focus on the being as such, which exists or can exist in any way. Since the earliest stages of our reasoning, we all form, at least implicitly and unconsciously, the notion of being or something that includes all others because it is the broadest of all and has multiple meanings. We imply that everything we understand, conceive, or think about, even non-existent or fantastic or invented things, is considered as beings or something.
Even what lacks existence, like nothingness, or what is a deprivation of reality, like evil, is understood as if it were a being. Even the products of our thoughts, our concepts, ideas, and judgments, although they are not existing things outside us, are considered as beings, entities of reason, and then we have the science of logic.
Now, being appears to us as having an essence in the act of being. In the being, we find the "what," the “quod,” the subject, and then we find the essence, which is what makes the being what it is or what the being is, the quiddity. Finally, we find being, which is the act of being, actus essendi, esse ut actus, an act in relation to which essence is a potentiality of being since the being of a given entity is the act of that given essence, which is the potentiality of being, the potential to be that given entity.
The Degrees of Being
The mind not only broadens knowledge by moving from the consideration of a physical being to a metaphysical one but also elevates it to a higher plane of existence by shifting from the consideration of a material being to a spiritual being. Plato was the one who discovered the superiority of intellectual knowledge over sensory knowledge. He made this distinction between the intelligible (noetòn), the world of ideas, and the sensible (aisthetòn), the world of appearances, images, imitations (mimesis, Ed.), and participation (metexis, Ed.). The intelligible, or the ideal, which for him is the spirit, appeared to Plato as superior because it is one, perfect, simple, universal, incorruptible, immutable, and intuitive.
However, under the influence of Parmenides, an advocate for the One and the only absolute and unchanging Being-Thought, Plato found it challenging to explain the material multiplicity and mutability, which appeared to him as unintelligible, illusory, and contradictory. On one hand, he undervalued the dignity of the senses, limiting them to forming mere opinions (doxa). On the other hand, he granted too much power to the intellect and thinking by considering the abstract universal essence of intellect, which he famously called "idea" or eidos, meaning "vision," as a subsisting reality.
The certainty of mathematical knowledge remained because it was an object of imagination brought into the ideal realm and freed from sensory perception. However, for Plato, physics as a science was impossible because sensory perception is subjective and does not provide certainty.
On the other hand, Platonic metaphysics does not guarantee true foundations because it is certainly the intuition of the ideal being, but it is not derived by abstraction from the experience of the sensible entity. Instead, it is derived from simple self-awareness, which can easily mistake its own ideas for reality.
Furthermore, it's essential to distinguish the elevation of one's gaze or knowledge from the physical to the metaphysical and the theological, from the elevation or ennoblement of one's being. The increase of our being has limits, while the increase of our knowledge is limitless; it must and can always grow and progress further. Our being is finite, and our knowledge is related to the Infinite. The risk here is the belief that because we can know the Infinite, we can become infinite ourselves or replace the true Infinite, which is God. However, this is the serious illusion of pantheism and atheism. Becoming adults would mean becoming independent not only in certain things but in our very being, like God.
However, this is an illusory process driven by pride. The transition from childhood to adulthood, the increase in bodily size, the acquisition of knowledge and virtue, the ability to do what a child cannot do, allowing the adult to become independent from their parents, is seen through the lens of pride as the full development of one's personality. In this view, the self no longer feels created by God and dependent on Him but rather self-founded, self-sufficient, self-asserting, and self-existent. This is the path of the Cartesian self, as demonstrated by the history of philosophy, which deduces knowledge from self-awareness and articulates and develops the original claims of the self.
Metaphysics also deals with angels
Plato deserves credit for discovering the existence of angels, starting from the consideration of the power of our intellect, which intuitively grasps the immaterial ideals above the sensory and the material. In this way, Plato recognized the self as a spirit, even while it guides a body.
However, Plato realized that there was a need to admit completely immaterial spirits that are separate from matter, specifically the Ideas, which are entities by participation, with the highest Idea of the Good, which is God, Being by essence (to pantelòs on) [3]. God is the absolute Spirit who participates in multiple pure spirits, which he calls "Ideas," and which the Bible calls angels. On the other hand, spirits united to a body are humans.
Aristotle essentially embraced this Platonic view but made some corrections:
1) We refine the analogical notion of being to the third degree of abstraction, starting from the physical (abstraction from the sensible mobile) and moving through mathematics (abstraction from quantity).
2) It is possible to grasp the necessary and unchanging (physical laws) even in sensory knowledge because perception is not subjective, but objective, and becoming is not contradictory; it has its identity, being the actualization of potentiality. Matter is not non-being; it is not emptiness, nor is it space, but potentiality (dynamis). Thus, Aristotle founded physics as a science.
3) The ideal (to alethès) is not the real (to on), but a representation or a paradigm of the real. This way, Aristotle is the founder of logic as distinct from metaphysics.
4) The soul is not merely a motivating spirit of the body, like a helmsman guiding a ship, but it is the immaterial, incorruptible, substantial form of the body, forming a single substance with it. Thus, Aristotle is the founder of psychology.
5) Plato's lesser gods are not the Ideas, but separate substances (usiai coristai), what the Bible calls angels. These substances should not be seen as mere abstract or ideal intellects, even if represented by the Muses or daimon, participating in the human mind's knowledge of their own being. Instead, they should be considered as real subjects, possessing wills, being true spirits or persons, which means they are active and moving substances through intellect and will.
Aristotle's metaphysics is the metaphysics of being (on). He was aware of Parmenides but, scandalized by his monism of unequivocal being (einai), he did not recognize the metaphysical importance of einai and the fact that, while the eternal and univocal Parmenidean Pantheism was incorrect, the intuition of being as absolute being was true. The mistake lay in confusing being with the divine being, thought with being, denying becoming, and reducing the contingent to the necessary. Under the pretext of unity and identity, all differences, distinctions, and diversities were removed.
Aristotle, in this way, viewed being (einai) only as the copula in judgments. However, Thomas Aquinas, following the light of Exodus 3:14 and without even recognizing the potential offered by Parmenides' einai, realized that God's proper name is not ens (entity) but esse (being). Namely, Ipsum Esse, as the act of being (esse ut actus). This did not negate God as the first, highest, supreme, and most perfect being corresponding to the "Most High" God of the Bible, the transcendent God in the heavens.
So, Thomas understood that the notion of being is derived from the verb "to be." It is indeed expressed in the copula of judgments, but the copula, far from signifying being only when accompanied by subject and predicate, as in all our ordinary judgments, signifies being in itself, esse, einai.[4]
For Aristotle, the copula "conveys meaning" only in the sense that in a judgment, it has meaning only when preceded by the subject and followed by the predicate. Thomas Aquinas does not deny that this happens in our ordinary judgments when it concerns an entity whose essence is distinct from being. However, this means that the copula can also convey meaning by itself, allowing being to be predicated alone, without the addition of a nominal predicate. For example, when we say, "God IS."
In this way, Thomas gives metaphysics its most authentic object, which is not an entity but rather the being itself. Based on Exodus 3:14, he derives God's name not so much from the notion of entity but rather from that of being as the act of essence, seen as the power of being. This is something that Aristotle did not consider, even though he came close with his notion of God as the “Thought of Thought,” which evidently presupposes a subject that identifies its thinking with its being and must necessarily be the subsisting Being.
On the other hand, as is known, Aristotle grappled with the problem of the origin of becoming but not with that of being. For him, matter and form were taken as given facts, existing from eternity, without him inquiring about their Creator. However, if he had only reflected that matter and form exist but could potentially not exist, he would have wondered Who caused and willed their existence.
Fr. Giovanni Cavalcoli OP
Fontanellato, October 1, 2023
[Source: https://padrecavalcoli.blogspot.com/p/il-rapporto-della-fisica-con-la.html]
[1] According to Descartes, the "ergo" in the famous "cogito, ergo sum" is not a conclusion but a simple explication or clarification of the "cogito," initiating what will become the identification of thought with being, which characterizes idealism.
[2] See St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Part I, Question 87, Article 1.
[3] See St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Part I, Question 50, Article 1.
[4] Comment on Aristotle's "Peri Hermeneias," Book I, Chapter III, Lecture V, paragraphs 71-73, published by Marietti, Turin, 1964, pages 28-29.