I've been looking into Aquinas' arguments about the contingency
of the world. He was opposing an interpretation of Aristotle, popular
in his day, that the world is NECESSARILY the way it is, as deduced
from the necessity of God as necessary first cause. Your reflections
are welcome. Quotations and my comments follow:
I've been reading some interesting stuff in Aquinas' _Summa
Contra Gentiles_. There is one passaage that show both the blessing and
the curse of Aquinas' Aristotelian thinking:
Book I, Ch. 85, Sec. 3
"Moreover, God wills the good of the universe of His effects more
principally than He does any particular good, according as a fuller
likeliness of His goodness is found in it. But the completeness of the
universe requires that there be some contingent things; otherwise, not
all grades of beings would be contained in the universe. Therefore, God
wills that there be some contingent things."
Book I, Ch. 85, Sec. 4
"Furthermore, the good of the universe is seen in a certain order . . . .
But the order of the universe requires that there be some changeable
causes, since bodies are part of the perfection of the universe, and they
donot move unless they be moved. Now, contingent effects follow from a
changeable cause, for an effect cannot have a more stable being than its
cause. Hence we see that, even though the remote cause is necessary,
provided the proximate cause is contingent, the effect is contngent, as
may be seen in the things that happen among sublunary bodies, which are
contingent because of the contingency of the proximate causes even though
the remote causes, which are the heavenly motions, are necessary. God,
therefore, wills something to come to pass contingently."
Aquinas and other critics of the notion that this world is the
way it is of necessity paved the way for empirical investigation of the
world (at least the sublunary realm), to see exactly what kind of
contingent order it is. This THEOLOGICAL/PHILOSOPHICAL argument was
thus amenable to the rise of science.
Yet in the same breath, Aquinas seemingly uncritically embraces
the necessity of remote causes (i.e. superlunary heavenly motions). This
THEOLOGICAL/PHILOSOPHICAL argument was later a source of great woe when
church and university establishment refused Galileo's contention that
the heavenly motions are mutable, and refused the empirical method that
was bearing fruit in the sublunary realm.
It seems to me that an either/or dichotomy in the relationship
of science to philosophy/theology is a flawed one. Science needs
well-grounded theological/philosophical assumptions based on rational
argument and empirical observation; theology/philosophy needs scientific
input about the observed world. Good and bad can be found in each.
Dennis