Deep and Important

A lecture from Dr. Michael Tkacz

Where are the Thomists?

A few years ago I received a phone call from Dr. Stephen Meyer, then on the philosophy faculty at Whitworth College. He had just returned from an international conference devoted to challenges to evolutionary biology from Intelligent Design Theory.

There was a bit of urgency in Dr. Meyer’s tone, so I agreed to meet him. As it turned out, he had something of a complaint to make, for he opened our meeting by showering me with a series of questions: Where are the Thomists? Where are the Catholics? How come you Thomist guys are not out there defending us Intelligent Designers? After all, we are on the same side, are we not?

Asking Dr. Meyer the occasion of this outpouring of questions, he explained that he and the other organizers of the conference had invited several Thomists to participate and he was dismayed that, far from expressing sympathy with the Intelligent Design Movement and its challenge to Darwinism, they were quite critical of the Movement. Perhaps feeling a bit betrayed, he wanted to ask me, a Thomist, just what was going on.

The debate between Creationists and Evolutionists has been going on for a long time now and neither side has been especially interested in what Thomism—a minority position to be sure—has had to contribute to the discussion. To the extent that philosophers working in the Thomistic tradition are considered at all, both sides seem to have been dissatisfied.

Secular Darwinians often view Thomists as just another species of literalists attempting to substitute the Book of Genesis for good biology—indeed, the only difference between Thomists and Protestant Creationists, on their view, is that Thomists do it in Latin.

On the other hand, Protestant Creationists have often viewed Thomists as already half-way to secularism and naturalism—no doubt due to insufficient attention to the reading of scripture.

Now come the Intelligent Designers who have revived the debate with evolutionary biology on scientific grounds. This new challenge to Darwinism attempts to show that the biological evidence supports gradual evolution of species less than it does direct creation by a Divine Designer.

Given the philosophical sophistication of their arguments, it is perhaps natural that Intelligent Designers would assume that they had allies among traditional Thomists who are known for their systematic defense of the doctrine of creation.

Yet, Thomists have not generally been quick to jump onto the Intelligent Design bandwagon. As Dr. Meyer discovered, the Intelligent Design Movement has, overall, not been well-received in Thomistic circles.

So, the question is: Why? Why have Thomists, who share with Intelligent Designers so many of the same concerns about the secularization of our society, not been more supportive of the Movement? Why have so many Thomists hesitated to join Intelligent Design Theorists in their campaign against Darwinism?

Why do some Thomists, far from being supportive, appear even a bit hostile to the Intelligent Design project?

A bit of attention to the Thomistic philosophy of creation may help to answer these questions. More importantly, investigating the coolness of Thomism toward Intelligent Design Theory may help to move the debate away from its polarized Creation vs. Evolution state toward a discussion that is more philosophically productive.

A look at the Thomistic understanding of God’s relationship to nature may even suggest a third alternative to the already well-known positions of the Darwinians and Intelligent Designers.


Thomas Aquinas on Creation

Back in the days of Thomas Aquinas himself, there was a scientific revolution that seriously challenged the traditional Christian doctrine of creation. From the time of the early Church, orthodox Christians have held that the universe was created by a transcendent God who is wholly responsible for its existence and the existence of everything in it.

In fact, this is a teaching that Christians inherited from the Jews and shared with those of the Islamic faith. At the beginning of the thirteenth century, however, a great historical change came to Western Europe as the works of the ancient Greek natural philosophers and mathematicians became available in the Latin language for the first time.

Especially important among these works were those of Aristotle who had worked out the basic principles of nature and developed a methodology for scientific research that promised, in time, to unlock the secrets of the universe.

This scientific revolution caused great excitement among the Latin-speaking scholars in the then new universities of Europe. They avidly pursued research in many of the natural sciences and, essentially, founded the historical tradition of experimental science that continues today.

It was not long before progress was being made in such fields as mathematical astronomy, optics, meteorology, botany, zoology, and other sciences. At the same time, the new science was a cause for concern, for some theologians saw in it a challenge to the doctrine of creation. Specifically, many held that there is a fundamental incompatibility between the claim of the Greek naturalists that something cannot come from nothing and the Christian teaching of creation ex nihilo.

Indeed, the Greek philosophers used their fundamental principle as grounds for arguing that the universe is eternal: there can be neither a first nor a last motion. It certainly appeared to many of the contemporaries of Thomas Aquinas that one cannot have his Christian cake and scientifically eat it too; Christianity and natural science seemed to be incompatible and one must choose between the two.

Into this medieval debate comes Thomas Aquinas. He pointed out that the Christian conception of God as the author of all truth and the notion that the aim of scientific research is the truth indicates that there can be no fundamental incompatibility between the two.

Provided we understand Christian doctrine properly and do our science well, we will find the truth—not a religious truth and another scientific truth—but the truth, the way things actually exist and function. Yet, what about the apparent conflict between notion of creation from nothing and the scientific principle that for every natural motion or state there is an antecedent motion or state?

Thomas points out that the judgment that there is a conflict here results from confusion regarding the nature of creation and natural change. It is an error that I call the “Cosmogonical Fallacy.”

Those who are worried about conflict between faith and reason on this issue fail to distinguish between cause in the sense of a natural change of some kind and cause in the sense of an ultimate bringing into being of something from no antecedent state whatsoever. “Creatio non est mutatio,” says Thomas, affirming that the act of creation is not some species of change.

So, the Greek natural philosophers were quite correct: from nothing, nothing comes. By “comes” here is meant a change from one state to another and this requires some underlying material reality, some potentiality for the new state to come into being. This is because all change arises out of a pre-existing possibility for that change residing in something.

Creation, on the other hand, is the radical causing of the whole existence of whatever exists. To be the complete cause of something’s existence is not the same as producing a change in something. It is not a taking of something and making it into something else, as if there were some primordial matter which God had to use to create the universe.

Rather, creation is the result of the divine agency being totally responsible for the production, all at once and completely, of the whole of the universe, with all it entities and all its operations, from absolutely nothing pre-existing.

Strictly speaking, points out Thomas, the Creator does not create something out of nothing in the sense of taking some nothing and making something out of it. This is a conceptual mistake, for it treats nothing as a something.

On the contrary, the Christian doctrine of creation ex nihilo claims that God made the universe without making it out of anything. In other words, anything left entirely to itself, completely separated from the cause of its existence, would not exist—it would be absolutely nothing. The ultimate cause of the existence of anything and everything is God who creates, not out of some nothing, but from nothing at all.

In this way, one can see that the new science of the thirteenth century, out of which our modern science developed, was not a threat to the traditional Christian doctrine of creation. To come to know the natural causes of natural beings is a different matter from knowing that all natural beings and operations radically depend on the ultimate cause for the existence of everything: God the Creator.

Creation is not a change. Creation is a cause, but of a very different, indeed unique, kind. Only if one avoids the Cosmogonical Fallacy, is one able to correctly understand the Christian doctrine of creation ex nihilo.