Pints With Aquinas - 79: Edward Feser Explodes Richard Dawkins' "refutation" of Aquinas' 5 ways

Episode Date: November 7, 2017

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Welcome to Pints with Aquinas. I'm Matt Fradd. If you could sit down over a pint of beer with St. Thomas Aquinas and ask him any one question, what would it be? Well, today we're actually joined around the bar table by Thomist philosopher Edward Fraser. And here's what we're going to do. We're going to look at Richard Dawkins' five quote-unquote refutations of St. Thomas Aquinas' five ways and let Dr. Fraser respond to them. This is a first in a two-part series of episodes that we're doing. So this week, we're going to just take a look at those first three ways of St. Thomas Aquinas and why Dawkins does not refute them at all. Next week, what we'll do is look at the final two ways that Dawkins responds to, and then we will show Edward Faser,

Richard Dawkins' central argument against the existence of God. And I think you'll find Edward Fazer absolutely destroys it. So these are two power-packed episodes. Buckle up, get a pint of beer, and get ready. All right, great to have you with us here at Pints with Aquinas, the show where you and I pull up a barstool next to the angelic doctor to discuss theology and philosophy. Before we get into today's show, I've got a very exciting announcement. I told you that once I got 300 patrons for Pints with Aquinas that I would raffle off a five-volume set of St. Thomas Aquinas' Summa Theologiae. All right, this is a big deal and it's a big outlay of cash, but I'm excited to do it. So this week we're going to be running a competition,

okay? And there are three different prizes that we'll be giving away. So the first prize, the granddaddy awesomest prize ever, is this five-volume set of St. Thomas Aquinas' Summa Theologiae. This will run you about $300 or thereabouts if you were to buy it. And then we have two runner-up prizes, and that is for Edward Fazer's new book, Five Proofs of the Existence of God, which we're going to discuss in the show. So three people this week and next week, we're going to run this competition for the next two weeks, can win these prizes. And the way you would do that is by going to pintswithaquinas.com and click on the top blog post. And there you'll be able to enter a raffle. At the end of the two weeks, the raffle will automatically select somebody and you will be the winner.

Actually, it'll select three people. So three people will be the winners. So again, go to pintswithaquinas.com, click on that top blog post, and there you can enter the raffle. And yeah, you could win, right? A five-volume set of St. Thomas Aquinas' Summa Theologiae, or you could win Faser's new book, Five Proust's Existence of God. Again, we're giving two copies of that away. So that's exciting. So go do that right now at pintswithaquinas.com. All right, let's get underway. Edward Faser, I guess I should say Dr. Feser, great to have you with us. It's great to be here. Thanks for having me.

So you've got one of those names where people aren't terribly sure how they should pronounce it. It's sort of like Peter Kreeft, Peter Kreeft. So how do you pronounce Feser? Am I getting that right? Right. Yeah, you got it pretty close. It's Feser. Okay. And as I always tell people, you can just think of Star Trek, set your phasers on stun. Excellent. And I add the remark, I had a student once gave me an evaluation, probably like 10 years ago now, and he wrote, set your phaser on fun. So I don't know how often I

live up to that, but anyway, I try. Well, hey, I want to begin before we respond to Richard Dawkins and what he had to say all those years back in The God Delusion regarding Aquinas' Five Ways. I want to say congratulations on your new book that you just published with Ignatius. It's outstanding. Thank you. Yeah. Five Proofs for the Existence of God. Did I get that title right?

Yeah. I was reading it on an airplane recently. I haven't read the whole thing because um you're a very good writer you're able to communicate i'm not just saying this complex you know ideas in a way that people go oh wow that's what it means like your discussion on on the distinction between universals and particulars even though i had grasped it to some degree when i read what you said it made me think to, why don't philosophers just speak in normal language? Because this isn't that difficult to understand. You've got a real ability to do that. So, thank you very much for

the contribution. I appreciate that. I appreciate that. You know, I mean, one of the things I was trying to do in that particular book was to, you know, as I put it in the beginning of the book, even though we end up at the deepest part of the deep end of the pool, so we get to pretty abstract and technical philosophical concepts, I always try to start out at the shallowest part of the shallow end of the pool and work the reader who's determined from the simplest starting points to the most technical abstraction. So to the extent I've succeeded, I appreciate you letting me know that. abstraction. So to the extent I've succeeded, I appreciate you letting me know that. Yeah, indeed. I would encourage everybody to go out immediately and buy that book because I'm not just saying this to make you feel nice about yourself. It's the best book on the existence of God I remember reading for a long time. Maybe not for the faint of heart, it's going to take some sort of determination to get through it because while you're a good writer explaining

these concepts, it can be dense at times for sure but uh yeah so thank you so much now you you once called i i think you have to remind me you said that dawkins wouldn't know metaphysics from metamucil is that right that's right that's right yeah yeah so uh that's good yeah it's it's nice to have a feisty discussion. There's certainly... He asked for it. He asked for it. He absolutely asked for it. Well, look, here's what we want to do, because I think Dawkins' misunderstanding of Aquinas' five ways, you know, very similar to many of the YouTube atheists out there and the misunderstandings they have of the five ways. So, we want to go

through those five ways one at a time. You know, in the God delusion, he gives, gee, two and a half pages or three or so pages to, you know, the most renowned set of arguments for the existence of God and pretty much dismisses them pretty quickly. Any initial thoughts before we get into them? pretty quickly. Any initial thoughts before we get into them? Well, to give Dawkins' due, that's two and a half to three pages more than the other New Atheist writers do, at least the New Atheist writers who wrote at the time he did. You don't even find that much in Harris and Hitchens and Dennett. So, you know, I'll give Dawkins that much credit. At least he knows he has to address the most prominent natural theologian in history, Thomas Aquinas. That's about the best I can say for those three pages.

They exist. Okay, well, that's, you know, one point for Dawkins, but it kind of goes downhill from there. Is there an atheist out there today that's done good work, in your opinion, of understanding Aquinas' five ways and trying to refute them? Well, you know, I mean, I guess the short answer is no, but I do need to qualify that. There certainly are serious atheist writers who make comments about Aquinas. I'll give you an example. J.L. Mackey in his book The Miracle of Theism, and Mackey's one of the most important and prominent atheists in contemporary philosophy religion. I mean, he's been dead for a while now, but, you know, he still falls within

the category of contemporary philosophy. Now, he, you know, he has several pages devoted to Aquinas' And he has several pages devoted to Aquinas' third way in particular in that book. And I think they're not bad pages, just looked at from a point of view of philosophy. And philosophers are notorious for thinking that a book can be good and worth reading, even if he agrees with not a single word of it. And that's true in Mackey's case. I think that what he has to say is serious. It's not polemical. It's not ill-informed and so forth. But it's nevertheless, he gets some really important things wrong. And furthermore, he only treats the third way, and he has nothing to say about the other

four ways. And in fact, he even goes so far as to say, if I remember correctly, that the first and second ways, first way in particular, has been made obsolete by modern science. Well, that's just a very basic error, as I show in the different things I've written about the first way. So, you know, Mackey, in short, gets about as good as you can get in contemporary atheist philosophy in addressing the five ways, but he still falls very far short. Okay. Well, thanks. Let's read what Dawkins has to say here. He begins by saying that the five proofs, scare quotes,

asserted by Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century don't prove anything, and are easily, though I hesitate to say so, given his eminence, exposed as vacuous. The first three are just different ways of saying the same thing, and they can be considered together.

All involve an infinite regress. The answer to a question raises a prior question and so on ad infinitum. So here's what he says about the first way. The unmoved mover, nothing moves without a prior mover. This leads us to a regress from which the only escape is God. Something has to make the first move and that's something we call God. Maybe I'll just read his three real quick here because I think he thinks they're all saying the same thing. The uncaused cause, nothing is caused by itself. Every effect has a prior cause.

And again, we are pushed back into regress. This has to be terminated by a first cause, which we call God. Thirdly, the cosmological argument, there must have been a time when no physical things existed, but since physical things exist now, there must have been something non-physical to bring them into existence, and that's something we call God. I could go on, but I know you've read this. So, where do you think Dawkins goes wrong in trying to understand Aquinas?

Well, I mean, let's, you know, his first sentence, he goes wrong in saying that they're easily exposed as vacuous. That's a pretty bold claim. But if Dawkins can make good on that claim, that's fine. But he doesn't get very far into the rest of the paragraph before he shows that he hasn't done his basic homework, in which case we should not take seriously this idea that they're easily exposed as vacuous. In the very next sentence, he goes wrong. He says the first three of the five ways are just different ways of saying the same thing. Well, that's just not true. It's true that they all end up at the same place. They all end up, obviously, at the existence of God. And to be more precise, they all end up with a conception of God as Aristotelian philosophers

like Thomas like to put it, as pure actuality, as a purely actual cause with no potentiality. So they do end up in the same place, but they start from very different places. And Dawkins doesn't see that because he just doesn't really know anything about the philosophical background within which Aquinas is writing. So, for example, the first way, called the argument from motion, whereby motion he really means change, is an argument that proceeds from the Aristotelian analysis of change as the actualization of a potentiality. That's doing the heart of the work there in the argument. So it's an argument from change specifically, where change is analyzed in terms of the actualization of potentiality.

The second way, though, has a very different starting point. It's arguing from the existence of what Aristotle calls efficient cause, the generating cause of a thing. That's a more specific idea than the idea of change. So the starting point is different. And the third way has yet a very different starting point, again. And in the third way, he's arguing from contingency and necessity and from generation and corruption. What that means is Aquinas starts from the fact that things come into existence and they pass out of existence, which shows that they are contingent, meaning they're the kinds of things that could fail to exist and depend on other things for their existence. And he argues that there couldn't be anything that's like that

unless there's something that's not like that, something that exists in a necessary way. So we do have significantly different starting points. The first way, again, starts from the idea of change and the analysis of change as the actualization of potential. The second way starts from the idea of efficient causation. And the third way from the existence of contingent things that are generated and corrupted. Those are not just different ways of saying the same thing. And what one might say about one of those arguments by way of criticism wouldn't necessarily apply to the other. So that's the first error Dawkins makes. He just hasn't read Aquinas at all carefully. It's pretty clear

that all he did was kind of flip open an anthology that had the five ways in it and read through it quickly and assume that it meant whatever happened to pop into his head at the moment. He evidently hasn't read. This is pretty clear from what we'll see later in the text here. He hasn't read other things Aquinas has said. He hasn't even bothered to turn the page from the five ways, as we'll see in a moment we get later in the text. But he also clearly hasn't read any commentators on Thomas Aquinas or any of the secondary literature. So that's the first problem.

Interrupt me any time you want to, by the way. No, this is great, yeah. Okay, great. I can just keep going here. So when he talks, for example, about the unmoved mover argument, the first way, well, I mean, the way he puts it, nothing moves without a prior mover, this leads to a regress and so forth. It's not wrong necessarily, but it certainly doesn't get at what's distinctive of the argument, which, as I said, has to do with this analysis of

motion or change as the actualization of a potential. And Dawkins evidently thinks that by motion here, Aquinas just means movement through space. But Aquinas actually has a more subtle analysis of motion than that. As I noted earlier, he thinks in terms of change in general, and movement from one position in space to another is just one example of change. There are three other kinds as well, and they all reflect the idea of the actualization of a potential. Now, if you don't get into that, you're just not getting into the argument. And Dawkins doesn't. So he doesn't even really understand the thrust of how the argument's supposed to work,

as we'll see when we get to what he says later in the text. When he talks about the second way, and he characterizes it as resting on the premise that every effect has a prior cause, well, that's not quite what Aquinas says. He doesn't say every effect has a prior cause. Well, that's not quite what Aquinas says. He doesn't say every effect has a cause. When atheists criticize this sort of argument, they often say, oh, it rests on this claim that every effect has a cause, and that's a trivial claim, because sure, why would you call it an effect unless you already know that it has a cause? Well, it might be a trivial claim if that's what Aquinas was saying, but that's not, in fact,

what he says. He talks about the fact that things that come into being have efficient causes, but he doesn't characterize it as either the premise that everything has a cause. That's a straw man, but the specific straw man that Dawkins uses is instead the assertion that every effect has a cause, and Aquinas doesn't put it that way either. That would indeed be a trivial premise, but that's not the premise he actually gives. And then what he says about the third way, he makes a much more serious mistake. He says with respect to the third way that it rests on the avoids making such a claim whenever he argues for God's existence. is tracing the history of the universe back to a beginning point, to a Big Bang, say, and then asking what caused the Big Bang. And the way he characterizes it here is, oh, Aquinas is saying there must be a time when no physical things existed.

But Aquinas actually denied that you could show that through philosophy. This was kind of a big deal in the Middle Ages, and you had a debate between, I mean, you had this debate in Islam, for example, between different Islamic thinkers, but you had it in Christianity between thinkers like St. Bonaventure on the one hand and Aquinas on the other, where Bonaventure thought that you could and should argue for God's existence by way of arguing for a beginning of the universe and then arguing that God is the cause of the beginning. And Aquinas said, no, we can't show that philosophically. We only know that the world had a beginning through the book of Genesis. We don't know it through philosophical analysis, so we shouldn't argue that way. And in fact, he wrote a book.

It's a short book, but it's still a book against the idea that you could demonstrate that the world had a beginning. And he's pretty forceful in his language, almost saying like this, to argue in the way Bonaventure or now William Lane Craig or others do could end up making the Christian faith look ridiculous because he thought it was such a bad argument. That's right, yeah. And sometimes people, some people are aware of, you know, who aren't Aquinas specialists of this line of Aquinas, this famous line where he says that, you know, you shouldn't, I'm not quoting here exactly, but he says you shouldn't use bad arguments in defense of religion because you only give the infidel, the non-believer, an occasion to scoff, to ridicule religion. And the specific example he has in mind is this idea

that you can demonstrate through philosophical arguments that the world had a beginning. So, this is a very, I mean, this is a howler, this is a very serious error on dawkins part and exposes that he doesn't know what he's talking about because um you know it's it's like characterizing dawkins as say if you characterize dawkins as a lamarckian or something right oh dawkins is the guy who thinks that um evolution proceeds by way of use and disuse you know lamarck's famous and ridiculed theory of evolution dawkins would rightly say you don't know the first thing about how i understand evolution he would rightly criticize somebody who said that. But he makes an equally grave mistake when he characterizes Aquinas, because Aquinas not only doesn't argue

that way, he explicitly rejects, and indeed rejects with some vehemence, even to the point of sort of almost mockery, the idea that you should prove God's existence by arguing that the world had a beginning. So, he gets Aquinas very badly wrong in that line. And this gets to the distinction between an essentially ordered series of causes and an accidentally ordered series of causes. And he seems not to understand this, just like almost every YouTube atheist I've seen criticize the five ways doesn't get this distinction either. So would you quickly make, by the way, those listening, you should get Dr. Faiz's book, Aquinas, A Beginner's Guide, because that was the first time I read and understood this distinction. It was, you did a great job doing that. Would you just briefly maybe explain that distinction

for our listeners? Yeah. In fact, Matt, you know, if you want, maybe you should go ahead and read the next two lines because this is directly related to that in Dawkins' God Delusion. Yeah. He says, all three of these arguments, by the way, we have to say that Dawkins is an excellent writer, isn't he? No one wields the English language like the English. He says, all three of these arguments rely upon the idea of a regress and invoke God to terminate it.

They make the entirely unwarranted assumption that God himself is immune to the regress. Right, right. Yes, and so this brings us to the issue you raised, the difference between what's called a linear causal series and a hierarchical causal series, or also called the difference between an accidentally ordered causal series and an essentiallyical causal series, or also called the difference between an accidentally ordered causal series and an essentially ordered causal series. Okay, so what's that all about? Well, this is a distinction that, again, if you don't understand this, you're just not going to understand Aquinas. And Dawkins not only gives no evidence that he understands it, but he gives evidence that he doesn't, namely the lines you just read. So this is a distinction that goes back at least to Aristotle, but it was developed by philosophers in the

Middle Ages like Thomas Aquinas and John Duns Scotus. And the idea is this, that in an accidentally ordered or linear series, that's the kind of series that would be illustrated by, to use Aquinas' example, a father who begets a son, who in turn begets a son of his own, who in turn begets a son of his own, and so forth, and where the series extends forward and backward in time, backward into the past, forward into the future, and so forth. Now, that's distinct from a hierarchical or essentially ordered series, which is illustrated, as Aquinas does, with the example of a hand which uses a stick to push a stone, which may in turn push a leaf or what have you, but where, in this case, the action, the causal action, takes place simultaneously. At the very moment when the

stone is being moved by the stick, the stick is in turn being moved by the hand. Okay, so we've got this distinction between causal series, which extend forward and backward in time, that's the linear kind, and the kind that exists simultaneously, the hierarchical kind of causal series, or the essentially ordered causal series. And the key difference here is this. I mean, there are a number of differences we can note, but the really crucial one is this, that in the one kind of series, the linear or accidentally ordered kind of series, the causes and effects in the chain have independent causal power. So, let's say Al begets Bob and Bob begets Chuck and Chuck begets Dave and so forth. Once Bob is begotten by his

dad Al, if Al dies, Bob can still grow up and have a son of his own. He doesn't need Al still around to do it. You know, obviously people can have children even though, you know, you can have a child even though your dad is dead or your grandfather, your great-grandfather, what have you. And the reason is that Bob, in our example, has a built-in causal power. He has generative power. He has built-in power to produce a son of his own. Contrast that with the essentially ordered or hierarchical series, like the hand pushing the stick pushing the stone, where the stick can push the stone, but not under its own steam. It has the power to move the stone only insofar as it borrows that power from the hand, and the hand in turn from the person whose hand it is. And so if you don't have the hand using the stick as an instrument, the stick will not be able to do anything. Okay. And so the key difference between these two kinds of cause and effect series is the difference between having built-in causal power and have

only derivative causal power. And it's the second kind, the kind of series where the later causes in the series, like the stick and the stone, have causal power only in a derivative way. That's the kind that Aquinas is concerned with when he says that the series has to have a first member. Another way of putting it, what he's saying is that you can't have a series of causes with borrowed or derivative causal power unless there's something that they borrow it from or derive it from. Can't have borrowed causal power without something to borrow it from. That's the key idea here. And when you tie this into the idea of changes involving the actualization of a potential, the way all this works out is

Aquinas is saying, look, there couldn't be any change going on here and now that involves the actualization potential. Well, that couldn't happen at all unless we trace it back to a first mover in the following sense. If we've got one potential actualized by another thing and that other thing is itself going from potential to actual and there's some further thing making that happen, the only place the buck can stop is if there's something that can actualize all those other members of the series without itself having to be actualized, because it already is, always and already is, fully actual with no potentiality.

Only something that's like that can give causal power without getting it. It can actualize without having to be actualized itself. Otherwise, we have a vicious regress in the sense of we just keep deferring explanation without really getting to an explanation. So, tying this back to Dawkins, when Dawkins says that Aquinas just makes an entirely unwarranted assumption that God is immune to the regress, well, it's not entirely unwarranted at all. It follows directly from Aquinas' analysis of the way a hierarchical or essentially ordered series of causes is supposed to work, together with his analysis of change as the actualization of a potential. Now, someone might try to attack that argument in different ways, but Dawkins doesn't even know

what the argument is. When he says it's entirely unwarranted, he's simply ignoring what Aquinas says rather than answering what Aquinas says. Thank you. The next thing Dawkins does is what many other atheists do. They read the five ways in isolation from the rest of Aquinas' work and expect him to be arguing for the God of Christianity or a personal God. He says this, even if we allow the dubious luxury of arbitrary conjuring up a Terminator, isn't that beautiful, to an infinite regress and giving it a name simply because we need one, there is absolutely no reason to endow that Terminator with any of the properties normally ascribed to God, omnipotence, omniscience, goodness, creativity of design, to say nothing

of such human attributes as listening to prayers, forgiving sins, and reading innermost thoughts. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, that's a good place to pause. Now, once again, as with his assertion that Aquinas is arguing that there must have been a time when no physical things existed, as I already said, that line alone, it really should be an embarrassment to Dawkins. It just shows he hasn't done his homework. But if anything, what he says in the passage you just quoted is even worse. Because, you know, you might actually have to read something other than the Summa Theologiae, which is where the five ways are taken from, in order to see that Aquinas doesn't believe that the world had a, that you can show through philosophy that the world had to have a beginning. Actually, you know, elsewhere in the Summa, you would get that from

that. But you, you know, you wouldn't, you might not get that from the immediate context of the five ways. But with this passage you just read, Dawkins, and I mean, this is going to sound harsh, but there's really no less harsh way to put it without, and still be accurate at the same time. There's really no less harsh way to put it and still be accurate at the same time. Dawkins just makes a fool of himself when he says that there is, quote, absolutely no reason to endow that terminator with any of the properties normally ascribed to God, omnipotence, omniscience, goodness, etc. Okay, well, what that shows is that Dawkins either wasn't actually reading Aquinas' own book,

the Summa Theologiae, or he was reading it and didn't bother even just to turn the page, literally. attributes, has to have power, has to have omniscience, has to be eternal, has to be an immaterial or incorporeal thing, and so on and so forth. He walks through the different divine attributes and gives pages and pages and pages of dense philosophical argumentation for each of these claims, both in the Summa Theologiae and in several other works. He devotes literally hundreds of pages to arguments, and they're philosophical arguments. They're not just appeals to scripture or anything like that. That's just a cartoon, a caricature of Aquinas. Philosophical arguments to the effect that the cause of the world, anything that is an unmoved mover, anything that's a purely actual cause of the world would have to have all of these divine attributes that Dawkins says Aquinas gives, quote,

absolutely no reason to believe. So it's really just embarrassing. I mean, Dawkins makes errors of such magnitude and so many errors that it's really quite amazing that anybody takes him seriously as a commentator on arguments for God's existence. He simply does not know what he's talking about. Now, that's not to say that an atheist couldn't reasonably try to challenge Aquinas' arguments for the omniscience or the omnipotence or whatever of the unmoved mover. Okay, fine, let's, you know, we can have that debate. But Dawkins doesn't even

rise up to the level of addressing the arguments. He doesn't even rise up to the level, you might say, of ignoring the arguments. Because to ignore something, you have to know about it and then just turn your eyes away from it. He doesn't even know about them. He doesn't know what he's talking about. And, you know, that may sound harsh, but I'm sorry, it's true. The textual evidence shows that it's true. Yeah. Well, the next thing he does is he kind of takes an aside before looking at the fourth and fifth way of Aquinas by trying to pit the omnis against each other in order to show that God is an incoherent concept. I might just have you respond to that. He says, incidentally, it does not escape the notice of logicians that omniscience and omnipotence are mutually

incompatible. If God is omniscient, he must already know how he is going to intervene to Yeah, right. So Dawkins strikes again, right? And once again, illustrates only, demonstrates, I will say this, Dawkins does demonstrate something absolutely conclusively in this passage and others, and what he demonstrates is that he doesn't know what he's talking about. The problem, well, one of the problems here is this, is Dawkins is evidently assuming that Aquinas has a model of God's relationship to the world, where God is sort of continuously observing what goes on in the world as it happens. And also, I guess, Dawkins thinks that for Aquinas, God looks into the future through a

crystal ball or something and sees what's going to happen tomorrow and a year from now and a hundred years from now and so forth. And then he kind of steps in and intervenes, tinkers with the machine of history, as it were, that this is how he causes miracles to occur. And so, this is how Dawkins generates this idea that there's a conflict between omniscience and omnipotence. You know, the idea is, well, gee, if God is all-knowing, he already knows what's going to happen in the future tomorrow. If he already knows about it, why would he have to intervene to change it? And yet, the fact that he's omnipotent is supposed to show that he can intervene and change it and so forth. But all of that just rests on a complete mistake. That's not the way, for Aquinas, how God knows the world. He doesn't know the world by a kind of observation,

and he doesn't know the future by looking into a crystal ball or something like that. That's far too anthropomorphic or human-like a model of knowledge to attribute to God. Rather, for Aquinas, for one thing, God is entirely outside time and space altogether. He's not in time, so he's not observing things happen as they happen in time. He's outside of time altogether. To use an analogy that I use in my latest book, Five Proofs of the Existence of God, and that I like to use in other contexts, the relation between God and the world can be thought of as analogous to the relationship between the author and the story that the author has written. Think of an author

who comes up with a story, beginning, middle, and end, a whole novel, say, in one single act of thought. That's kind of how God is related to the world, the way the author is related to the novel, to the story of the novel. And then the way God knows the world is not by a kind of observation, but rather he knows it by way of knowing his own mind, knowing himself as cause of the world, just like the author knows the story, not by reading it, but by virtue of being the author. So, if you ask the author, gee, what happens in chapter three? The author doesn't have to say, well, you know, I haven't really read the book yet, so ask me after I read the book. Well, he knows it because he wrote it, right? So, he knows his own mind, he knows his own thoughts

as the author of the novel, and knowledge of the novel is kind of a byproduct of that. For Aquinas, that's how God knows the world. He knows himself as cause of the world. He knows what he has caused, and because of that, he knows what happens in the world. And he knows it beginning, middle, and end. He knows that part of the story is that he causes a certain miracle at this time, doesn't cause a miracle at another time, and so forth. But he knows it all in one single act. It's not a matter of him having to step in and tinker with things where they've gone wrong, they didn't go according to plan and so forth. That's not Aquinas' model of God's knowledge. And here, by the way, Aquinas, Dawkins is evidently working with this, he has this obsession with William Paley. You'd think that no one ever wrote on God's existence apart from William Paley, or that if some did, like Aquinas, that they were

just prefiguring Paley or something. But so, if you're thinking in William Paley terms, then, you know, you think of the world as like the watch, and God is the watchmaker who's sitting there observing the watch and thinks, oh, I need to speed it up, it's slowed down or something, or I need to slow it down, you know, or whatever. But that's not how God relates to the world. And Dawkins' objection here on pages 77 to 78 of his book assumes that it is. That's the problem. Yeah, well put. Thank you. Okay, well, that is going to do it for this week. Next week, as I say,

we're going to look at the final two ways of St. Thomas Aquinas, see what Dawkins says about them, let Fazer respond. And then in his book, The God Delusion, Dawkins has a central argument for atheism. So everything depends on this one argument. We're going to go through that argument and let Edward Fazer respond. But as we wrap up here today, we're going to take some Q&A. All right, well, we'll just do maybe one or two question and answers this week. It depends on how intricate they are or how complicated they are. Let's see. By the way, if you want to ask me a question and you want to answer it on the show, go to patreon.com. And if you become a supporter of Pines with Aquinas, I will respond to them. Here's one from James McPheeters. I think I got your name right.

You said, I was wondering if you could ever comment more on the unity and division of the Orthodox and Catholic Church. It seems in the Catechism 838 that we can't have Eucharistic communion, but I thought you said on a podcast that we can. So my question is, do we both have the Eucharist, and if so, should we freely be able to partake in communion together? If St. Thomas Aquinas talks about this at all, that would be wonderful to learn about. I know, well, a couple of things here. We are not in full communion with the Orthodox Church. Now, there are at least 20 Eastern Catholic churches, right, like the Byzantine Catholic Church, the Melkite Catholic Church, and so forth, that we can receive the Eucharist in. It turns out I was wrong. I think I said in an episode in the past that one can receive the Eucharist in an Orthodox church if you could not attend a Catholic church and that that would fulfill your Sunday obligation.

Two things to be said here. One, I'm wrong. I'm wrong. It's always good, isn't it, to admit when we're wrong? I expect that of other people and so I'm going to do the same thing right here. One, I'm wrong. I'm wrong. So it's always good, isn't it, to admit when we're wrong? I expect that of other people, and so I'm going to do the same thing right here. In the 1967 directory on ecumenism, it said that Catholics could fulfill their Sunday obligation in an Eastern non-Catholic liturgy if one could not attend a Catholic church. And so that's created a lot of confusion. It created confusion in me, and that's why I made that comment. But it turns out that's not true. Well, it was then. It isn't anymore. Under current law, the Code of Canon Law, it says in Canon 1248, a person who assists at a mass celebrated anywhere in a Catholic rite, either on the feast day itself or in the evening of the preceding day, satisfies the obligation of

participating in mass. So this means that to fulfill one's Sunday obligation, you have to attend a Catholic mass. And again, that could be in the Roman Church or an Eastern Church. But it doesn't suffice if it's merely a valid celebration of the Eucharist, even if that celebration looks almost identical to a Catholic Mass or the Divine Liturgy. So it would appear that you cannot fulfill your Sunday obligation by going to an Orthodox church when you cannot attend a Catholic mass or an Eastern Catholic liturgy. So there you are. That said, the Orthodox do have a valid priesthood and so do have valid Eucharist. If one was to attend, so here we go, now I'm going to begin to speculate. So if there's someone out there who knows more than me, feel free to correct

me. But since the Eucharist is valid, you may ask the Orthodox whether you can receive, but they're going to say no. I'm almost certain of this, they're going to say no. That said, the Code of Canon Law does say that we may administer the Eucharist to a Protestant. Actually, a Protestant, but I was meant to say Orthodox, but even a Protestant. And so that might surprise you. So when could that be given? Well, in Canon 843, all right, let's read numbers three and four here, uh, under actually Canon 844, it says Catholic ministers administer the sacrament of penance, Eucharist, and anointing of the sick licitly, that means legally, okay, to members of Eastern churches, which do not have full communion with the Catholic church,

if they seek such on their own accord and are properly disposed. This is also valid for members of other churches which or anointing of the sick to an Eastern Orthodox member, even though they are not in full communion with the Catholic Church. In the fourth paragraph here under Canon 844, it says, if the danger of death, so this is something separate to what I just said, okay? So this is separate thought here. If the danger of death is present, or if in the judgment of a diocesan bishop or conference of bishops, some other grave necessity urges it, Catholic ministers administer these same sacraments licitly also to other Christians not having full communion with the Catholic church who cannot approach a minister of their own community and who seek such on their own accord,

provided that they manifest Catholic faith in respect to these sacraments that are properly disposed. Okay, so I've said two things here, at least canon law has said two things here. Number one, Catholic ministers can administer the sacraments of Eucharist, Confession, and Anointing of the Sick, licitly, again, that means legally, to members of Eastern churches, okay, under certain circumstances. And I said, because the Code of Canon Law has said, and I'm sure this is going to shock many of you, that Catholic ministers can administer these sacraments. Okay. These same sacraments, Eucharistic, Eucharist, Penance, Annuling of the Sick, even to Protestants. When?

Only in, so there's certainly stipulations here, if the danger of death is present. So not just if the danger, so if this person isn't about to die, then they have to wait, right? They have to accept the Catholic faith. They have to be brought in to full community with the Catholic church. Okay. But if the danger of death is present, okay, and these people, of death is present, okay, and these people, right, say a particular Protestant, manifests Catholic faith in respect to these sacraments and are properly disposed, then they too can even receive these sacraments. So anyway, there's much that could be said, that we could say on the difference between Orthodox and the Catholic faith. There is much we have in common, but there is still much that divides us. We shouldn't exaggerate what divides us, but nor should we brush over it.

So if you leave the Catholic Church for an Orthodox Church, then you are essentially apostatizing and leaving the church Christ established. Again, much more could be said on that, but we'll have to leave that for another day. All right, what else can we do here? We'll do one more question and then we'll wrap things up. David Arth, thank you, David, for being a supporter of Pints with Aquinas. You said this, I'll do a faith question and a secular one. As for a career involving handling money, can one successfully serve both God and mammon? Is it as simple as staying in moderation or does a job, for example, a stockbroker lead inevitably down a darker path? I am a big fan of Italy and Italian culture, especially all things Roman. what are, would be some of your favorite places

to visit in the eternal city? Okay. So there's two questions there. Okay. So first we cannot serve both God and mammon. Christ expressly says this. Okay. Mammon, by the way, just kind of means financial gain or money, huh? But that does not mean that we cannot work in a profession that deals exclusively with money. I mean, here I am on Pints with Aquinas literally and unashamedly asking you for money, right? Like by becoming a supporter of Pints with Aquinas on Patreon. Okay. But there's a difference between working in the financial business or working for money and quote unquote serving money. We have to remember in the epistle of James, he says that the love of money is the

root of all evil. Sometimes that's misquoted, right? And it says money is the root of all evil. It isn't, right? It's morally neutral, okay? Like a brick is morally neutral. But if I throw it through your window, then I've committed an evil act, all things being equal. Well, the same thing when it comes to money. We can use money, and we ought to. This is a blessing given to us by God, like other blessings, like clothing, like shelter, like transportation. But if we begin to sin, so you use this example of someone being a stockbroker or whatever. Well, if we compromise our faith, if we put money in the place that God ought to be, then we sin. If we put anything in the place God ought to be, that might be our spouse, that might be our career,

that might be any number of things, then we're committing the sin of idolatry and we ought to repent of that. Again, much more could be said, but I hope that's the beginning of an answer. You're a big fan of Italy. Okay, well, so am I. My wife and I went to Italy this past July. There's obviously many places to visit in Rome. Let me just mention one, and it's a fantastic restaurant in Rome. It's called, and I'm going to do my best not to butcher this, Trattoria del Palero. Yeah, when you have an Australian accent, it's even worse. Okay, people. Now, this is a really neat restaurant. It was actually suggested to me by Jason Everett. He had it suggested to him by a friend of his who is a Swiss guard. And what's cool about this restaurant

is there's this old lady, okay? Everyone calls her Nonna, okay? She basically makes different meals every night and you show up, sit down, and she gives you what she's made. In other words, there are no menus. So if you want something different, go somewhere else. But if you want what Nonna, this beautiful old Italian woman, has made that night, then you sit down and she gives you what she's made. And you get like a three or a four course meal, I forget. But it was super cool. My wife and I had a great time. I'll tell you what I'll do. In the show notes, so if you go to pintswithaquinas.com, I will throw up a photo of my wife and I eating there. And I'll also show you a photo of my wife with this beautiful old woman who made all of our dinner. And I'll put a link there so you can look up that restaurant for yourself and maybe head there next time you're in Rome.

Sound good? Okay, that does it for this week. Please tune in next week when we'll hear from Edward Fazer again. And as I say, this is the first in a two-part series. And I'm raffling off the five-volume set of the Summa Theologiae as well as two copies of Edward Fazer's new book. If you want to enter the raffle, go to pineswithaquinas.com. And that is where you can, you know, learn how to enter the raffle go to pineswithaquinas.com and that is where you can uh you know learn how to enter the raffle i guess what else to say all right god bless chat with you next week I love myself too. And I would give my whole life to carry you