Aquinas's Philosophy of Religion

P. O'Grady

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137312815
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Philosophie de la religion

This is an exploration and analysis of Aquinas's contribution to the philosophy of religion. It examines Aquinas's contexts, his views on philosophy and theology, as well as faith and reason. His arguments for God's existence, responses to objections against God's existence and his characterization of the nature of God are examined.

1

Philosophy and Theology

1.1 Introduction

Debates about whether religious belief is reasonable or not have much popular currency. A slew of recent best-selling books have argued trenchantly that religious belief is irrational, inviting a variety of different responses. The academic discipline which concerns itself with such questions is philosophy of religion. Sidelined from mainstream analytic philosophy by logical positivism and subsequently methodological naturalism, this field has nevertheless seen a massive flourishing in the last few decades. Drawing on contemporary work in metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of language and philosophy of mind, those engaged in this discipline address a range of questions such as ‘Is it reasonable to believe in God?’, ‘What meaning does the term ‘God’ have?’, ‘What is faith?’, ‘How does faith relate to reason?’, ‘What should one make of the plurality of religious beliefs?’, ‘Does evil count as evidence against religious belief?’. Such a discipline faces challenges from several sides. Some contend that human reason has not the resources to adjudicate such questions. Others maintain that scientific inquiry is the only legitimate mode of answering them. Others again argue that only someone ‘internal’ to a religious tradition is in an appropriate position to judge that tradition.

One of the most significant figures in the history of this discipline is the medieval Italian philosopher and theologian Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225–1274). He laboured to bring together the best secular thinking of his age with the wealth of religious reflection in Christian, Jewish and Islamic thought. His work is regarded as a masterly presentation of classic Christian belief and is as intricate as it is voluminous. It excites strongly divergent reactions. For some, Aquinas is a party hack, trotting out indefensible doctrine at the behest of one of the most conservative organizations in history, the Catholic Church. Infamously Bertrand Russell dismissed Aquinas, in his History of Western Philosophy, as having little of the true philosophical spirit.¹ On the other hand, there are those who treat Aquinas almost as an oracle, who regard him as being right on all essentials and who think that different approaches are irrelevant and can be either ignored or their errors exposed. Neither pole is attractive. Russell’s challenge is unfair and biased (and elegantly demolished by Anthony Kenny).² Yet defensive ‘ghetto Thomism’ is at odds with Aquinas’s own intellectual liveliness and practice and does not engage with the larger intellectual community. So a way between these is needed, but is hard to chart.

Aquinas lived and wrote in a milieu which is intellectually far away from us. Modern social ideals of democracy and egalitarianism, scientific knowledge of the universe and matter, perspectives on historical development and modern theories of interpretation, psychological accounts of the unconscious and information technology were alien to him. He accepted slavery³, astrology⁴, the inferiority of women⁵, monarchy⁶ and the right to kill heretics⁷. Despite these differences from present sensibilities, he also had some of the most penetrating reflections on existence, the fundamental structures of reality, the nature of ethics and the nature of human existence produced in the Western philosophical tradition. So Aquinas needs to be understood in his context. This means grasping the conceptual scheme he inherited from ancient philosophy and noting the ways he altered it under the influence of his religious beliefs (for example, how his views on whether the world is everlasting differ from those of Aristotle). In recent years a wealth of important scholarship has been produced seeking to sensitively and accurately understand Aquinas’s writings in light of his context, and this work is invaluable for gaining a correct understanding of his views.⁸ Yet such scholarship, while necessary, is not sufficient. Aquinas announces an important intellectual goal while commenting on Aristotle’s views of the heavens. He notes that ‘the study of philosophy is not about knowing what people have happened to think, but rather is about the truth of reality’.⁹ Correct historical scholarship is instrumental to the first-order task of trying to find the truth.

To some, this may be a contentious claim, perhaps under the influence of postmodern scepticism about achieving any such truths. But typically such postmodernists tend to confuse making a determinate claim about reality with holding that claim in a dogmatic fashion, mistakenly attacking the latter by abandoning the former (e.g. I can hold that it is raining, and defend it fallibly, but if I leave it open and indeterminate what I mean by it is raining – perhaps in a postmodern space of possibility, drawing on the lexical connections between raining, training, straining etc. to problematize bipolar meaning – I don’t seem to be saying anything at all). Another possible objection to bringing Aquinas into a contemporary pursuit of truth is that it invites an ahistorical treatment of Aquinas, attempting to domesticate him, as it were, to the modes and methods of contemporary debate. I would hope to avoid such a distortion, but nevertheless show the relevance of his views to these debates. To deny that such a process is possible seems to commit one to a strong form of cultural or historical relativism, where terms like ‘God’ or ‘nature’ are so different as used in different contexts, that engagement across these contexts is not possible.¹⁰ I think Aquinas’s own practice of discussing thinkers from very different backgrounds and the presence of Aquinas in contemporary debates speak against the strength of this kind of objection. Therefore, while seeking to give an accurate and sensitive account of various positions held by Aquinas relevant to philosophy of religion, I also want to attempt to assess them. I believe the best way to do that is to bring them into dialogue with contemporary philosophy of religion – to view them in light of the best contemporary reflection on similar issues. Describing how this might be possible and what problems there may be with it is the concern of the rest of this chapter. In the next section I shall discuss the situation of contemporary philosophy of religion, in the following place Aquinas in relation to philosophy of religion and finally discuss various possible objections to Aquinas’s philosophy of religion.

1.2 Characterizing philosophy of religion

The academic study of religion includes sociology, psychology, history, comparative religion and theology, among other disciplines. One way in which philosophy of religion differs from empirical and comparative work on religion is in its evaluative stance. This means that the claims to truth made by religious beliefs are scrutinized and assessed and the reasonableness or otherwise of these beliefs is tested. Straightaway this process can be challenged, for example, by those who think it is of the essence of religious belief not to connect to rationality. Some might claim that religious claims are subjective, not answerable to the tribune of reason and therein lies their importance. They say that there is much more to humanity than just reason and that religion inhabits that greater province. Others fasten on to the alleged irrationality of religious beliefs to dismiss them – as in attempts to show they are not scientific and hence dismissable as on a par with fairy stories. Those who contend that religious belief is not scientific tend also to be impatient with philosophical argumentation which does not appeal to observation. Therefore, those who think of religion as essentially subjective, whether positively or negatively, tend to be dismissive of attempts to submit it to rational investigation. Wittgenstein, who valued religious belief highly, was scathing about traditional philosophy of religion, and Dawkins, who does not, says, ‘the five “proofs” asserted by Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century don’t prove anything, and are easily – though I hesitate to say so, given his eminence – exposed as vacuous’.¹¹

But the question whether religious belief is essentially subjective, what that might mean and how one might argue for such a claim is exactly the kind of thing which concerns philosophy of religion. There is clearly some overlap in this with theology, but one way in which these disciplines differ is in the resources they regard as acceptable in their pursuit. Theology gives a special role to scriptural resources and a kind of authority to tradition which philosophers, by and large, do not. Philosophers use the resources of conceptual analysis and logical argumentation to carry out their tasks. Historically there has been a greater connection between theology and philosophy than exists currently. There is also the split in contemporary philosophical practice between so-called analytic and continental approaches. Contentious and hard to define as this is, broadly speaking analytical philosophers privilege clarity, explicitness of argumentation, limited goals and have heroes such as Russell and Quine. Continental philosophers challenge assumptions they see implicit in traditional philosophy, seek to overcome the tradition, express themselves in new idioms, address big questions and have heroes such as Hegel and Heidegger (counterexamples to all these claims exist – but I am sketching a general picture). Insofar as contemporary theologians engage with philosophy, it tends to be with continental philosophy. However, in the last number of decades there has been a great deal of activity in analytical philosophy of religion, including discussions of topics which would have been in the tradition remit of theology such as clarifying God’s attributes, analysing ways of making sense of the Trinity and suggesting models for the Incarnation. This recent work begins to look very much like the kind of work produced by Aquinas, and these contemporary philosophers of religion begin to look afresh back to Aquinas, Scotus, Ockham, Suarez and others for inspiration.¹²

From its beginning, Western philosophy has engaged with the question of God. The catalogue of great thinkers from classical Greece to the end of the medieval period treated questions about God as central to their project. It was integrated into their general metaphysical debates and connected to questions about knowledge and language. Technical discussions about the nature of knowledge, kinds of causation, scope of knowledge, theories of reference and categories all interconnected with discussions about God. With the rise of modern philosophy, two tendencies worked to undermine this centrality. The first is the advance of natural science, which slowly but inexorably replaced theology as the main dialogue partner for philosophy. The second is the rise of scepticism and atheism as genuine possibilities. By the beginning of the analytic-continental divide (usually held to be the first decades of the twentieth century), the analytic tradition had completely sidelined philosophical interest in God (Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, Carnap, Quine), while the continental was perhaps more attuned to the impact of God’s demise (Heidegger, Sartre, Camus), but God was still intellectually outré.

By the mid-twentieth century, philosophy of religion had retreated to a narrow defensive attempt to show that it actually could exist in the face of challenges which argued it was meaningless. Kenny paints the picture well:

A chapter of A.J. Ayer’s juvenile Language Truth and Logic (Gollancz 1936) and four pages on theology and falsification by Anthony Flew called forth a hundred articles of defensive commentary and tentative refutation. But the positivist criteria by which these writers judged theology meaningless had already been abandoned by everyone except theologians.¹³

The demise of positivism led to a renewal of interest in metaphysics in the analytical world. One avenue for this is in ‘naturalism’, where philosophy allies itself with natural science and seeks interdisciplinary advancement, abandoning claims to have a separate province for itself. Metaphysics, then, arises out of the exigencies of the scientific project. Much of this naturalism is explicitly atheistic, holding that nothing exists beyond the bounds of ‘nature’, denying any supernatural reality. Those who challenge naturalism and pursue metaphysics in a different way see themselves as having much in common with the metaphysicians of the tradition. For example, two recent opponents of naturalism (who do not concern themselves with philosophy of religion) aligned themselves with the metaphysical views of Plato (J.J. Katz) and Aristotle (L. BonJour) respectively.¹⁴ This renewal of interest in the metaphysical tradition has helped reverse the kind of defensiveness depicted by Kenny and fostered constructive work in analytical philosophy of religion.

I want to draw attention to three issues in contemporary philosophy of religion which connect directly to Aquinas’s work. The first is work on classical theistic argumentation. This means examining the kinds of argument which are given to attempt to demonstrate that God exists. Such arguments have existed since Greek antiquity. One modern issue is the attempt to clarify the status of such arguments. What do they attempt to do? Are they genuine attempts to get any fair-minded judge to accept their conclusion? Are they regarded as dialectically compelling? Are they held to be psychologically compelling? Or are they rational reconstructions of considerations which would render justified beliefs which are held on some other ground? Are they person-relative, or intended as binding on all thinkers? What is their relationship to religious practice and belief? Can they be properly understood in isolation from the kind of culture (form of life) which produced them? Do they have any contemporary validity, or do they belong to the history of (defunct) ideas? Very different views are defended by contemporary philosophers of religion on these issues, and understanding what Aquinas himself thought about them is a matter of interpretative controversy. The most famous and important of these arguments include the ontological argument which seeks to show that God exists using purely a priori argumentation, that is, using concepts solely deriving from logic and language. Aquinas rejected this argument [ST 1.2.1, SCG 1.10–11]. Neither did he deal with issues arising from religious experience as a means of showing that God exists. His favoured means of arguing to God relies on his views about causation, presenting several versions of what is now known as cosmological arguments. He also used the argument to a designer, but one which is importantly different to later famous versions of the same. Contemporary philosophers of religion are also interested in these arguments, not convinced by the general kinds of objections provided by David Hume and Immanuel Kant, and hold that each argument needs to be judged on its own merits. This has occasioned a renewed interest in looking at the specifics of Aquinas’s arguments.¹⁵

Critics of Aquinas note that his arguments tend to end rather quickly with something along the lines of ‘and this we call God’. They argue that this is too fast, that even if the arguments are correct, the conclusion may not resemble anything like the classical picture of God. On this Aquinas would agree, but then point to the wealth of argumentation he provides to specify what being God means. This is the domain of discussions of the divine attributes, the second issue to which I want to draw attention and which has seen a significant proliferation of work in the last couple of decades.¹⁶ What is God’s relationship to time? Does God change? Does God have parts? How does God know the world? How does God create the world? Is God currently in causal contact with the world? Is freedom possible if God controls the world? What does this say about the existence of evil? These are problems that arise for theists even prior to atheists accusing them of incoherence or posing versions of the problem of evil. Contemporary philosophers of religion who defend theism disagree radically on these issues, and it emerges that Aquinas’s views are not widely shared even among theists, who regard them as presenting too austere a conception of divinity.

Finally there is the question of the relationship of faith to reason. This relation depends, of course, on ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Philosophy and Theology
• 2  Aquinass contexts
• 3  Reason and Faith
• 4  Arguments for Gods Existence
• 5  Objections to Gods Existence
• 6  Gods Nature: The Way of Negation
• 7  Gods Nature: The Way of Eminence
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index