Knowledge and Faith (McInerny #4)

*Aspects of argument*

    McInerny lays out one of Aquinas’ five proofs for the existence of God. Before this, he states that for the medievals, “logic rides piggy-back on our knowledge of the world.” Logic works in “second intentions…relations established by the mind between first intentions, which were the grasps of the way things are.” With the proper uses of logic in mind, McInerny turns to Aquinas:

*Whatever is moved is moved by another
*There cannot be an infinite series of moved movers
*Therefore there must be a first unmoved mover

    McInerny points out that Aquinas was writing for beginners, but not in philosophy. His students had read Aristotle in detail, and already knew Aristotle’s motion argument. Aquinas was writing for beginners in theology. He doesn’t want to impart entirely new information, but rather wants to compare the truths pagan philosophers have come to know, with truths that have supposedly been revealed. The reader of the Summa theologiae (Aquinas’ big work) is expected to know certain things, and have a certain background. Proofs do not take place in a vacuum—they rely on a “vast fund of knowledge” shared by the teacher and student, part and parcel of “the culture in which they and countless others stand.”
    A three-sentence proof is a “distillation” of someone saying something to someone else in a specific context. The addressee is supposed to reenact the process the teacher has gone through to come to the knowledge, via the three sentences. The actual words are supposed to be as inaudible as possible, the truth being what is loud, the aim of the proof itself. The three sentences themselves cannot prove anything “anymore than a musical score can fill the ear with sound.”
    But what about changing one’s life? Does changing one’s mind entail this? I don’t think it’s so clear cut—after all, a person’s mind is in life, and life is experienced via the mind. But all that aside, I think if something only affects you in your mind, and not in your life, it’s completely worthless, and I’m not sure such a thing exists. If you count donkeys in your head all day long because it’s fun, well, that’s a part of your life.

*Intemperate Reasoning*

    One way to tell the difference between theoretical and practical thinking is the end result of each. For theoretical thinking, it’s “the perfection of thinking as such, truth.” It’s knowing the truth of something. The end result of practical thinking is something you’ve done or made—“the perfection of some activity other than thinking itself.” McInerny’s example: you’re told that the sun is 93,000,000 miles from earth. This does not spur us into action; we don’t say, “What? That far? I’d better hurry.”
    Practical science has to be differentiated from practical thinking, and the same with theoretical. Because we can think theoretically about a practical subject. For “I would define and describe a bird house in the same way that I would a robin’s nest, as if it were simply an item in the natural world.” Knowing the making of a bird house as a series of steps is to have practical knowledge “ in a fuller sense.” Actually working at the bench is the fullest sense of practical knowledge.
    So what about the relationship between knowing and being good?

Regarding the movement from truths about God and the soul to judgments about what we ought to do, Aquinas speaks of an ‘extension.’ “Any object of choice is a good, but not goodness.” The two statements “Guinness tastes good” and “Guinness is good for you” mean different things, unless you were nothing but the capacity to taste. These partial goods—taste, sight, the other senses—are sought out with the implicit understanding that they participate in the ultimate good, whatever a person judges that to be. A glutton “seeks to make the satisfaction of taste the be-all and end-all of his life”—sees that as the ultimate good. Theoretical knowledge—of one’s ultimate end—informs practical knowledge.
    “The practical use of reason depends upon and grows out of its theoretical use.” A person, who is a unit, perceives this fact, this “smooth flow” from the theoretical to the deed here and now. “a successful proof of God’s existence can lead on to the recognition that God is the ultimate end of the universe and more particularly of the moral agent. From such considerations, a morals that accords with the theoretical knowledge can develop.”
    But what if, after all, knowing God via reason is rejected?

*Truth and subjectivity*

    Kierkegaard famously believed that truth is subjectivity—“subjectivity becomes the very possibility of truth,” especially truth of God. He means something like practical knowledge when he speaks of a truth brought out by “an appropriation process of the most passionate inwardness…the highest truth attainable for an existing individual.”
    With this is mind (and he takes a kind of confusing detour into some other thinkers along the way), McInerny comes back to his claim that there is an objective appraisal floats free from antecedent convictions. He states that a person with a logical, successful argument can still get “bad moral marks”—he steals his neighbor’s pen to write the argument, for instance. I think these kinds of intersections between theoretical and practical knowledge and science, and notions of subjectivity, comprise his argument for ‘objective appraisal floats free.’ But I’m not sure how.
    Another nugget: “If God exists this is a truth of paramount importance. Anyone must agree that failure to acknowledge the one on whom the universe and all in it depend is not a minor defect. One would be out of tune with the reality of which he is a part.”
    Faith is akin to virtue and practical judgment. What? Yes, it’s true. Aquinas in contrasting theoretical truth with practical truth says that a theoretical judgment is true when in accordance with the way things are, while a practical judgment is true when in “conformity with rectified appetite”—an appetite schooled by moral virtue in view of man’s true end. “The appetite will draw a person towards the good it habitually pursues” unless molded by virtue, perfect or imperfect. If it is fixed in the true good, it is perfect. A concrete practical judgment is true when it’s in accordance with a habitual appetitive orientation to the true good. Boring. Faith is a habit of theoretical intellect; faith is “a virtue which enables one to judge well and truly of divine things.” McInerny goes on, and with the help of Augustine, says that for the truth of its judgments, faith depends on the will’s desire for happiness. In that way, faith is related to practical judgment and moral virtue, which of course are related to the will. Yawn.

*That God Exists*

    Hasn’t all of Aristotle’s talk of a First Mover in the fourth century B.C been assigned to the “dustbin of the history of science?” McInerny claims that there has been a suggestion that “the world of common sense and ordinary experience is destined to give way in its entirety to a scientific account.” Arthur Eddington asked “what the relationship was between the table he was writing on and the table as he would explain it in terms of physics.” Which account—the one of the solid table, or the one of the table involving floating electrons—was right? The answer should be obvious. It’s nonsense that a scientific account of a table corrects a real account of a table, because “if the ordinary table is taken away there is nothing for the scientific account to account for.”
    Aristotle starts with what “his predecessors agreed on…change as something involving something subject to contrary states.” He seeks from his “distillation of underlying assumptions” only “a probability” that they are true. McInerny then discusses ways we can see Aristotle’s Proof from Motion not as antiquated but as reasonable. He never proves it, though. If he did, I wouldn’t need to be giving a book report of these lectures—they would be very famous. In any case, looking at Aristotle’s natural science and metaphysics we see that this wisdom “becomes the object of contemplation which is the fullest perfect of the kind of entity we are.”
    Finally, there is a “well-spring of human thinking”: that of ordinary folk. The “hermeneutics of suspicion” is a kind of “denying the obvious.” McInerny seeks to state the obvious. “Although they do not know their philosophical labels, everyone knows what is labeled by self-evident principles and first principles of practical reasoning.” We don’t go around saying that one thing cannot be and not-be at the same time—it’s taboo (but also hilarious, and something I want to do now). It is true that the alphabet has 26 letters, but “the occasions are rare when one might want to mention this.” Although not always mentioned, ordinary folk can come to know things. Paul in Romans seems to suggest they can come to know the existence of God via reason. They can, but Aquinas says that “such ordinary knowledge is woefully inadequate to its object”—but it can still be had. So, we continue.

* Faith (Revelation) and Natural Reason*

    Final lecture. A discussion of Pope John Paul II and the church’s Fides and ratio (1998), and some more stuff.
    I used to think the argument that we have to have faith (and do have faith) in many things—including science—was pretty good proof that faith and reason are not so separate (and are definitely not diametrically opposed). In a court room, we have faith that the witness really was at the scene; we have faith that a picture of the body is really a picture of the body. In science, we have faith that these studies were done, and done accurately. We have faith in their findings, and so do other scientists. If you object to the practice of religion, then, you should also object to the practice of science. But McInerny has something to say here: “while it is true that it is practically impossible for a scientist to verify personally everything that he holds as scientifically true, it is possible for him to verify personally anything he holds as scientifically true.” He could show that it is true, unlike a believer and the Trinity, for example. The type of scientific faith just sketched is not itself entirely ‘true,’ though. Its truth can’t often be found outside a relationship between people. For instance, a marriage—“a promise is a commitment to make something true.” ‘In sickness or in health’ is not predicting something will be the case 5 or 10 years down the road—the two people pledge “to make it the case.” They cannot know, in any scientific way, that it will work out. But they do know it will work out, in a way, or else they wouldn’t do it. This interpersonal trust is like religious belief.
    The will is involved (and this is cool): the intellect assents to either self-evident propositions or demonstrated propositions; the will assents not to any of those, but to something that “prompts assents to the good involved in so assenting.” It wants the good that the proposition offers, and is not concerned with choosing between two contradictories. For the believer, this good is the promise of an eternal happiness and life and allows the mind to give assent to revealed truth. Now—and this seems to be how natural theology for McInerny becomes possible—because the mind is moved by will, not intellect, towards the object, the assent does not stop the mind from continued pondering. “The intellect is not yet brought to its proper term; it is not yet at rest. It can roam and seek to be fulfilled in understanding. (Does this mean you can come to believe with the will that God exists, but think with the intellect that he doesn’t? Aquinas answers, “The will most firmly assents [to what one believes]. Faith seeks understanding; the intellect answers the call.) And after all this, the whole edifice of the discourse of theology “depends on truths accepted on the basis of faith.”
    Saying ‘preambles of faith’ indicates the presence of naturally known truths within revelation. The inclusion of these truths within “the deposit of faith” seems at first to subsume both fields under one heading. However, the preambula fidei are not the whole of philosophy because it is Christian philosophy’s subject matter, not end. “Theology, though not faith, presuppose philosophy.”
    The pope in Fides et ratio defends reason. Philosophical truths come across by natural reason are autonomous, not totally separate from, revealed, supernatural truths. McInerny ends the lectures with reason and truth. Christianity is not concerned with “a mind incapable of the truth.” Truths come about in people who both know and believe things, and there is “commerce” between knowledge and belief.
    As for the McInerny himself, he finally states, “Mine has been a modest task, modestly performed, but for all that of fundamental importance.”
    Ralph McInerny died on January 29, 2010, at age 80. His last post was as Professor of Philosophy, Professor of Medieval Studies, and director of the Jacques Maritain Center at University of Notre Dame. This has been my last post on him.