Quote of the Day

Concepts create idols.  Only wonder comprehends anything.

- St. Gregory of Nyssa

PTSD

When I was a child, the Morgans lived three doors down from us.  Mr. Morgan had white hair, a white beard, and was older than my grandfather.  The few times I saw him, he was either just sitting on his front porch or tending to the flowers in his front yard.  My mother told me Mr. Morgan had been a veteran of World War I and had shell shock, which she explained resulted from experiencing the traumatic horrors of war. She explained that some people didn't believe in shell shock, that they believed that victims faked the symptoms because they were looking for attention or special treatment.  My mother said this to me with a look on her face and a tone in her voice that conveyed the utmost compassion for Mr. Morgan.  My mother's compassion taught me that shell shock was real, that it was serious, and that victims deserved our utmost compassion.

Quote of the Day

"We are given mathematics, by which to know the universe, language, by which to know one another, and love, by which to know God." 

- @akenoTenshi

Why Study History? - Gordon S. Wood

To possess a historical sense does not mean simply to possess information about the past. It means to have a different consciousness, a historical consciousness, to have incorporated into our minds a mode of understanding that profoundly influences the way we look at the world. History adds another dimension to our view of the world and enriches our experience. Someone with a historical sense sees reality differently; in four dimensions.

-  Gordon S. Wood, The Purpose of the Past: Reflections on the Uses of History (New York: Penguin, 2008), 11.

Reality: A Quote from Simone Weil

"One can never really give a proof of the reality of anything; reality is not something open to proof, it is something established. It is established just because proof is not enough. It is this characteristic of language, at once indispensable and inadequate, which shows the reality of the external world." 

- Simone Weil

Pope Francis Quoting Thomas Merton

“I came into the world. Free by nature, in the image of God, I was nevertheless the prisoner of my own violence and my own selfishness, in the image of the world into which I was born. That world was the picture of Hell, full of men like myself, loving God, and yet hating him; born to love him, living instead in fear of hopeless self-contradictory hungers”. 

- Thomas Merton, quoted by Pope Francis in his address to the U.S. Congress

The Five Ways of Thomas Aquinas

When I was in Catholic grammar school, one of the parish priests, Fr. Joyce, would visit our classroom periodically and teach for an hour.  He had no prepared lesson plans that I knew of, but he loved philosophy and would sometimes teach us simplified bits of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas.  In the sixth grade, he told us that Aquinas had written five proofs of the existence of God which he wrote on the blackboard.   When I read the proofs on the board, I said to myself, "No, they don't prove the existence of God to me."   I believed in the existence of God without question, but these proofs didn't persuade me.

Note that Aquinas lived in the 1200s and wrote in Latin.  When I was in my fifties, I had read an article that pointed out that the Latin word for proof was "prober," which means. "to probe."  Aquinas was not so much as proving the existence of God but probing, that is, seeking.  That insight makes all the difference.  Aquinas was not attempting to "prove" the existence of God in a mathematically logical or scientific sense.  In fact,  Aquinas says that we cannot know God without Revelation. The same article claimed that the modern usage of the word "proof" was not used, or at least was not in common usage, until after Descartes and the Enlightenment in the late 1600s.  As well, note that Aquinas did not call them Five Proofs but rather Five Ways.  The Encyclopedia Britannica does not call them proofs but rather, demonstrations.  The traditional Catholic claim of Aquinas "proving" the existence of God was an attempt to impose a post-Cartesian way of thinking on pre-Cartesian ideas.

I now appreciate the genius--the mystical genius--of Aquinas!  He was exploring the Religious Sense.  He was probing the infinite, the mysterious infinite.  Suddenly,  a doctrine which I first experienced as oppressive and authoritarian became a principle of light and freedom.  

Of course, I have had no formal education in theology, much less Aquinas.  The Wikipedia page (2018) for The Five Ways says, "Many scholars and commenters caution in treating the Five Ways as if they were modern logical proofs."  It also says, "Aquinas did not think the finite human mind could know what God is directly; therefore, God's existence is not self-evident to us.  So instead the proposition God exists must be "demonstrated"from God's effects, which are more known to us."  This is not to say that examining them in that light is not academically interesting."

The Five Ways

1. the argument from motion

2. the argument from causation

3. the argument from contingency

4. the argument from degree

5. the argument from final cause or ends

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Ways_(Aquinas)