Christianity and Philosophy, Part 7: Aristotle, Part 1

I'd like to talk a little bit about Aristotle it's difficult to talk about Aristotle in just a few minutes because his thought is so vast if you if you take a look at a collection of his writings it's a substantial volume of material that's come down to us and if you look at the table of contents in any edition of the works of Aristotle you'll see that his interests were very broad they were vast actually he was especially scientific mind for the ancient world his teacher Plato as you may recall and we did a prior presentation on Plato Aristotle's teacher Plato was much more interested in the interior reflection on the mind he was intrigued by the fact that the world plato was that the world of our senses focuses on or the world that our senses access is a world of changing material things that are always kind of coming and going they coming into existence and then they're passing out of existence the flower out in the yard or the grass or the or the sunlight in the sky it all kind of comes and goes and so the world around us is filled with process of movement of becoming and Plato was much more interested in turning his attention into the mind where he discovered things through the power of deductive reasoning he found things that seemed to transcend the changing 'no sus like for example if the mind contemplates or thinks about mathematical truths truths of logic deductive conclusions that we can make about mathematical entities like geometrical shapes or numbers or whatever those kinds of things have a kind of permanence and stability that the things of the sensory world don't seem to have the flower outside will will come to live and then it will die but it doesn't seem to have anything enduring about it whereas two plus two equals four is something that I'm quite confident my great-great-great grandchildren will still be studying and thinking about and assume as true not the particular flower that's outside it will have long since passed away and wouldn't be around anymore so the the the mind of Plato tended to gravitate toward those foods that have a stability in a permanence and in his mind an eternity about them that they don't seem to be conditioned by time at all that two plus two equals four is not something that's true because it's the year 2014 or whatever it's true always it doesn't seem to be the kind of truth that could be altered or could be changed whereas the world around us seems to be of a world of changing things and why is it like it is why does the world behave the way that it does why do it does it seem to operate according to certain principles when we can imagine another set of principles that it could operate by for example I can imagine a universe in which the speed of light is different than it is in our universe or gravity has a different kind of relationship or force exercise between two objects or whatever I could imagine a universe in which those things are different but I can't imagine a universe in which two plus two does not equal four or the interior angles of a triangle on a flat surface do not equal half the degrees of a circle those are things that deductively are certain and that I can't imagine a world in which they don't hold true but I can't imagine a world in which the scientific principles that operate in this one are not true so that led Plato to think that the things about which we can be most certain ensure are the things that the mind can reflect upon deductively within itself whereas the things that we can't be sure of are the things about the material world the sensory world and so for that reason plato was not so interested in the sensory world he was interested in the interior world Aristotle on the other hand was very interested in the sensory world he was very interested in science and he wanted to develop a way was very interested in developing a way to to overcome the problem that Plato saw that the world around us is changing so much so we can't have certain knowledge about it Aristotle wanted to say that we can find sure knowledge about the world around us and how can we do that well it's a very long story and let me just suggest one or two things about the way that Aristotle would proceed in this respect Aristotle thinks that even though the world around us is constantly changing he thinks it changes because there is a prince of of change in the world around us and that principle of change he would call matter matter is that potential in the world around us to become to be something different than what it is the the rain that falls from the sky has the potential of becoming the matter of the water that falls from the sky can potentially transform into being grass or being something else it can undergo what Aristotle would call a formal change or a substantial change but there's something that has to be changing though and what's changing is the matter so if you take a principle of change which is matter if you take that principle and you put it together with another principle which you'll call form or substance form or substance is a principle of a particular kind of nature like for instance let's take the flour that I was mentioning earlier the flour has a certain structure it has an interior structure or set of principles that are forming the matter to be the way that they are that's why the flower is a flower and not grass or not you know a tree or not a human being it's because for Aristotle it has a different kind of organizing principle or structure now that structure that underlying sort of blueprint or set of instructions in the thing and none of those are terms that he would use by the way he uses terms like form and substance those that underlying in forming principle that underlying tendency of the matter to become the the the flower rather than the grass or the cow or the tree or the human is what he would call form so if you take form and you put it together with matter you will get a changing thing that has a kind of structure or a a kind of stability about it at least for a while so while as long as that flower exists it has an identifiable structure and a predictable tendency about it if I know the nature of what a flaw is if I know what kind of thing that is as long as the matter is able to sustain that form or that kind of substance then I can predict what it will do and I can have a science of it and that's the point here about science for Aristotle is that a science is about the forms of things the interior structure of things that does change because there's a principle of change there but we can have scientific knowledge we can have some certainty about things by studying their interior structure or their tendencies no that's a very short look at that aspect of of Aristotle's thought now the way I want to approach Aristotle here for just a few minutes since we're especially interested in his influence on Christian theology is I'd like to look at him in relationship to some of the problems in his thought and maybe by looking from a Christian perspective maybe by looking at some of the problems in Aristotle's thought very briefly we will be able to get into some of his thinking and the way that he proceeds in his philosophy again there's far too much to say about Aristotle than what I can say in these few moments but let me try to offer a little bit about Aristotle this way if we fast forward in history from Aristotle to the time of st. Thomas Aquinas so in the 13th century AD if we go back to the 13th century the the thought of Aristotle had been rediscovered the writings of Aristotle had been rediscovered and with their rediscovery came some concern and some fear about what was found there in the writings of Aristotle in particular in the time of Saint Thomas Aquinas there were several areas of Aristotle's thought that were especially disturbing and unsettling and those concerns about Aristotle tended to revolve around three questions or three issues the first issue had to do with Aristotle's understanding of the world the world around us Aristotle thinks that the world is constantly in motion and it is eternal it never had a beginning for Aristotle the world is an endless process of becoming that matter that principle of potentiality or or change that principle of change has always existed and that it has always been attracted to the perfection of God Aristotle believes in God and he believes in God because he thinks that the motion of the world requires the existence of God the way that works is something like this for Aristotle anytime you have something that comes to be or changes there must be something that is moving or causing that change so take any particular change let's go back to the flower that I mentioned earlier if I take the flower outside it grows up and now I see it in the yard now the question I might ask is well the flower wasn't there three days ago and now it's there how did that happen and someone will say oh well it happened because it rained outside and there's lots of seeds outside that are blowing around it's springtime and they're popping up all over the place they're flowers all over the neighborhood in the yards wildflowers that are growing in people's yards it's because there are seeds that have blown here from other flowers out there and they're settling into the yard and it rains and the sunlight shines on it the heat and the moisture in the soil and that causes the flower to grow we know that through observation that things tend to tend to happen under those types of causal relationships so the seed added to the soil added to the sunlight in the rain all results in a motion the motion is the growth of the flower all of those things that I just mentioned are causes for Aristotle their reasons why the flower has grown and so the flower will not grow if I just take a seed and I put it in a vacuum somewhere or I put it in a closet somewhere it'll never grow it has to be actualized the possibility of the seed has to be actualized by some moving cause but Aristotle thinks that you can't have an endless series of moving causes like for example if the seed grows into the flower because of the moisture and so on the moisture that comes from the sky or the rain it too must have a causal explanation and the sunlight must have a causal explanation in other words those are things that happen just like the seed growing is something that happens when it grows into a flower so it is all these other things have happened they've grown they've come to be so Aristotle things that you've got a series of things that are happening in the world but he thinks that you can't have an any any in eternal or infinite series of things that are moving other things you can't have that go on to infinity because then you'd never have an ultimate explanation of why there's any movement in other words you've got an eternal process of motion or an infinite series of movers with nothing to ground it nothing to support it nothing to ultimately explain its motion so imagine for example the the tides of the ocean coming in to the shore the tides coming in and they come in and they come in and someone says well what's the cause of that and you say well that tide is coming in or that that wave is coming in because of that wave and someone says well what about that wave and you say well that wave in another wave in another wave in another way and Aristotle thinks you can't go to infinity in waves that don't explain themselves being explained by yet another wave that doesn't explain itself you've got to ultimately have something that itself explained and for that self explained reality Aristotle calls it God and so just like with the the waves of the ocean they're caused by something outside of the water namely the moon and the gravitational relationship of the earth and the moon and the waters of the ocean bring about the effect of the waves and so the waves themselves don't ultimately account for their motion the moon has to be brought into the explanation so it is here with all the motions of reality they're not explained by by just their own selves or just by an endless series of them there's got to be something beyond them and Aristotle calls that God let me stop here and I'll continue this in a second presentation

Channel: Mark McNeil

Views: 836

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: Aristotle, Philosophy, God, Christianity, Christ, apologetics, truth, atheism, atheist, freethinker, reason, faith, Bible, Jesus, Mark

Id: 5CS5XV6COf0

Length: 13min 29sec (809 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 29 2014