True. For example, if you have a metaphysical theory different from those you have described above, it becomes much more plausible to attribute strawman implications to those theories.
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Certainly did not fail at everything. It certainly did fail at chemistry.
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What does it mean for A-T to fail? I agree that it was massively more beneficial for scientific progress to adopt a Baconian ethos. I think we should keep that ethos when doing science. But the point of delving into A-T philosophy (at least for me) is to understand how science fits within the larger context of reality, including theology. I find the A-T (or classical) conception of God to be the most coherent and closest to what I think God to be (or should be conceived as) - namely, not just the greatest of all beings, but pure actuality - being itself, from whom all things have their being. (David Bentley Hart’s The Experience of God expresses more fully what I mean. Most atheists today do not really understand this conception of God.)
I feel that the naive adoption of the Baconian ethos led to many Christians effectively adopting a form of theistic personalism where God has to intervene directly in nature (i.e. creationism) or effectively be a deistic God. Instead of the ground of all being, God is a sort of superpowerful demiurge. In short, the Baconian approach can’t coherently explain how it is that God is immanent within creation without collapsing into a sort of occasionalism. I think this is partially why we have these disputes over creationism, and why there are complaints that Biologos and the like can’t explain clearly how God can providently act within nature without violating it’s laws.
What is your philosophical understanding of how the laws of nature work? Do you hold to a form of occasionalism?
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I certainly don’t. Is it possible to explain what “pure actuality” means? Or “ground of all being”?
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I am a Christian and I have no idea what this is supposed to mean either. It seems to be close kin to panentheism.
Yes. This is one key problem with the A-T argument I’ve seen here. It’s largely a negative claim. For example, let’s say we manage to model one ‘emergent’ property from an underlying ‘level’. Can that negate the original argument? No. One could counter that the model is either incomplete or that there are other cases were emergent properties are not modeled.
A related issue with the “accomodationalist” A-T proposal is that ‘higher-level’ phenomena do not run afoul of ‘lower-level’ laws, e.g. organism reproduction never occurs counter to conservation of energy or established thermodynamics. But why should that be the case if the properties of a higher-level system are not completely determined by lower-level interactions? Why couldn’t there be a case where a particular phenomenon can ‘bend’ or violate thermodynamics? Is ‘special sauce’ not a component of the A-T argument? How would they argue against ‘vitalism’ or similar proposals wherein some arrangements of matter are imbued with something additional? There’s no basis for that axiom from the metaphysics. It’s a post-hoc argument.
From a practical standpoint, I don’t see much benefit from this foray of A-T metaphysics into say, chemistry. I’m inclined to suspect that a great deal of attraction for metaphysical discussion in this area is driven not from interest with scientific work per se but from the desire to prop up A-T metaphysics generally, particularly on the “God” / religious side of things.
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Exactly. People certainly aren’t attracted to it because it works, because it doesn’t work.
“Pure actuality” is a highly technical term in philosophy. I’ve read about it but can’t say what is really means – & don’t think it is something humans can ultimately comprehend – but for me, it really drives home the point that metaphysics and calculus just don’t mix. You might think a technique that works with limits as something approaches infinity would somehow give some insight but… nope. 
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I think that’s a totally legitimate pursuit. It is an unfortunate problem of metaphysical theorizing that such proposals are practically impossible to ground. More evidence for the Ironic Designer, IMHO.
Greetings all,
I was discussing with Daniel in another forum and he asked me to post some of my thoughts on this topic. I’m a Thomist who’s familiar with the literature on chemistry, emergence, and reductionism. I’m not sure if I’m up for a protracted debate but this is my two cents.
Some historical notes
It’s true that the Aristotelian science was rejected in the seventeenth century. This in turn led to a decline in Aristotelian metaphysics. But we should keep a few points in mind.
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To a large extent, this failure was on the part of Aristotelians to properly separate their science from their metaphysics. I don’t think this should reflect on Aristotelianism as a whole. We can see why that’s not the case by the resurgence of the Neo-Aristotelian program today. Furthermore, the essentials of science were already in place during the Middle Ages. The scientific revolution extended the powers of science, it didn’t overturn what came before. Francis Bacon didn’t reject formal and final causes, he just thought they belonged to metaphysics instead of science.
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Aristotelianism wasn’t abandoned wholesale. Philosophers like Leibniz incorporated some elements of it into his thought. Other early modern thinkers didn’t disagree with Aristotelianism per se, but thought that that power of science was too limited and unable to get at the essences of things. I also think that scholasticism during these periods gets unjustly ignored. Philosophical progress does not move in straight lines. Later scholastics did a lot of work in math, physics, and social sciences that most people are not aware of. Modern thinking about this period seems to come from taking the judgements of figures like Locke and Descartes at their word. Nevertheless, Humean metaphysics eventually came to dominate the discussion. This leads to my third point…
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Most people nowadays would not want to endorse the metaphysics that replaced Aristotelianism. For instance, Newton thought that gravity was caused directly by God. Modern thinkers replaced Aristotelian causation with laws of nature that had to be actively enforced by God. The Humean shift replaced this “divine governance” with mere uniformities in nature. But mere uniformities can’t explain what actually happens in the world. Similarly, the Humean view entails skepticism about induction and causal knowledge which does not sit well with the power we want to ascribe to modern science. These shortcomings are what led to the second rise of Aristotelian metaphysics. We can see this in current work being done on causation, essences, intentionality, etc by Neo-Aristotelians.
This raises the question- if these other modern metaphysics are just as incongruous with science as Aristotelianism, why did science progress so much from the seventeenth century onwards? The most plausible answer (to me, at least) is that it seems like science can have success independently of a metaphysical program. For the most part, scientists can disregard philosophical problems in their research. It’s when we have to interpret their research in a wider context that metaphysics plays a role, and I think that the AT provides the best means of doing so.
You can read Nigel Cundy on why the mechanical philosophy of the seventeenth century doesn’t fit with modern science here
James Franklin on some of the ignorance surrounding the late scholastics
https://www.academia.edu/2404756/Science_by_conceptual_analysis_the_genius_of_the_late_scholastics
John Lamont on the fall and rise of Aristotelian metaphysics.
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On atomism and virtual parts
I’d first like to say that it’s a big mistake to view emergentism as being driven by religious motives. There are plenty of people without a theological dog in this fight who are just as anti-reductionist as I am. As far as ontological irreducibility vs. epistemological irreducibility in working out whether chemistry is reduced to physics, the point raised by Bishop and other anti-reductionists is that we cannot explain the behavior of higher phenomena solely in terms of lower level phenomena. You must use information outside of physics. This isn’t some armchair speculation, it is an argument grounded in current scientific practice. This sort of failure shouldn’t happen if reductionism was true.
Now I suppose that you could claim that this isn’t a failure of reductionism but a breakdown in the scientific model that we use- that is, our models do not truly reflect reality. If that’s true, though, then what’s my motivation for accepting reductionism in the first place? The science its using to supports its claims is just another model. This also ignored the fact that reductionists have been claiming they will be able to explain on higher level phenomena in terms of physics for decades and they have yet to deliver on that promise.
Here’s a few more examples of emergentism.
Covalent and ionic bonds cannot be separated in exclusive concepts.
Hybrid orbital representation does not fit into quantum mechanics.
Molecules shouldn’t have a shape according to QM.
I could offer a lot more if necessary. While this might not prove emergentism and disprove reductionism, at the very least it makes the thesis that everything is reducible to physics less plausible. Remember, reductionism is a universal thesis. It’s incumbent upon reductionists to explain away every failure to reduce physics to chemistry, and we seem to have quite a few.
Anyways, one way of looking at atomism is that atoms don’t undergo any substantial change when becoming part of a new substance. They are the same thing before and after. The AT position is different. Atoms don’t have their own causal powers after a substantial change. The causal powers of the atoms belong to the new substance, not the individual atoms. It seems like you guys keep misunderstanding virtual presence as potential presence. They are not the same thing.
On a side note, I don’t see why @vjtorley brought up the interstellar medium. The wikpedia article doesn’t prove his point. Daniel was clearly talking about fundamental particles, which means subatomic particles. Atoms, ions, and molecules aren’t subatomic. The AT position isn’t that atoms cannot be substances, just that they often aren’t substances. “Elementary particles/fields and even atoms for the most part exist only virtually as part of a greater object” is not the same as saying “Thomists are reluctant to think of elementary particles and fields as individual substances is because in practice, we almost never (if at all) find them existing by themselves (instead of as part of some other substance).”
When Thomists say that atoms don’t “actually” exist in a substance, we aren’t saying anything like the atoms aren’t really there. We just mean that atoms don’t exist as substances. For example, the hydrogen and oxygen exist as parts of a water molecule, which is a kind of lesser existence. Of course we can “see” these atoms. But we see them as parts, not as substances in their own right.
In the case of H2O, one way that we can know that atoms are not substances is that hydrogen is flammable while water is not. Or rather hydrogen gas is flammable while water is not. Hydrogen should behave the same whether it is “actually” part of H2 or H20 if it was actually a substance. The same goes for oxygen. But neither does behave the same, so we should conclude that these atoms are only virtually present which explains why only some of their powers seem to carry over.
Now, something has account for limiting the powers of each atom in H20 as wells as the emergence of new properties, and Thomists think that is the form of H20. Appeals to structure or configuration of oxygen and hydrogen in H20 in order to explain the properties of water are really another way of using specific relations between the parts and the whole- in this case, the form is what gives the molecule something beyond the sum of its parts. The form is something “higher” that is responsible for uniting and ordering (i.e. bonding) its parts (atoms) as a new substance. Please note that I am not arguing for my position right now but explaining it. If you think that reductionism is false and that the properties of H20 cannot be accounted for by its parts, the explanation must be something above its parts.
Here’s some further reading
Patrick Toner is a Thomist. I think this article is very useful in discussing atomism, emergentism, and virtual presence.
https://www.academia.edu/11125978/Emergent_Substance
This paper from Ryan Miller is valuable as well.
https://www.academia.edu/37286269/Virtual_Presence_in_Metaphysics_A_Quantum_Physical_Model
I don’t know what philosophical traditions Robin Hendry and Paul Needham belong to, but they’ve done some important work on reductionism and emergentism.
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Yes, I think that’s about right.
Philosophers will, of course, categorize some of what scientists do as metaphysics. But, for the most part, scientists are not thinking about their problems in the way that metaphysicians think about them.
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Greetings and welcome. Nice posts!
I certainly wouldn’t characterize all critics as having primarily theological or spiritual drivers. But certainly many, many are despite the existence of exceptions. So that tends to inflate the numbers like the number of Christians influences the proportion of people who think the world is ~6k years old. Personally I don’t find the arguments compelling with regard to scientific understanding. Furthermore, I’m pretty sure A-T advocates would just as easily forward arguments accomodating cases of reductionistic success. They’ve already made accommodation for things like conservation of energy operating perfectly in harmony from individual molecules to macro systems in biology and the solar system. And that’s the typical problem of metaphysical programs. While bottom-up explanations can lack details or be computationally intractable, top-down explanations lack the requisite specificity to ground the framework.
I’m more of a contrarian-optimist. I’m willing to give scientific reductionism the benefit of the doubt because it’s made some progress and because any future successes are likely to have powerful impact in numerous areas. I’m contrarian to metaphysics that don’t feel helpful or useful or invoke ‘special sauce’ explanations (e.g. vitalism). I also think it’s a mistake to tie A-T metaphysics to ‘gaps’ in scientific understanding. First, because I can’t see that the metaphysics would be invalidated if most of the proposed gasps are filled (e.g QM of molecules). And consequently, because strategically, it’s a really poor ‘hill’ on which to ‘plant the flag’.
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Before I continue, I’d like to commend you for your thoughtfully-argued response. I greatly appreciate the time and trouble you’ve gone to, in composing it.
However, I have a major problem with the suggestion you make in the paragraph cited above. Thomists hold that water has one and only one substantial form - and it’s not the form of hydrogen, or of oxygen, but rather, the substantial form of water. (For non-Thomistic readers, a thing’s substantial form is that whereby it is the kind of thing it is - for instance, the substantial form of water is what makes water water, and not ammonia, say.)
What’s more, Thomists hold that substantial forms are simple: they cannot be broken down into component parts. Likewise, the substantial form of a thing is fully present in even the tiniest part of that thing: thus even the tiniest part of water is 100% water. What’s responsible for a thing’s extension in space and time is not form, but prime matter, which Thomists describe as pure passive potency. Prime matter is utterly featureless and nondescript, having no properties of its own. It is totally indeterminate. Indeed, it is quite incapable of existing on its own: at any given time, it has to be actualized (or realized) by some substantial form, which makes it this kind of thing (e.g. water), rather than that kind of thing (e.g. ammonia).
So here’s my problem. Water is P + W, where P is prime matter (pure passive potency) and W is the substantial form of water. Hydrogen is P + H, where H is the substantial form of hydrogen, while oxygen is P + O, where O is the substantial form of oxygen. You say that hydrogen and oxygen are still present in water. That would make sense only if W = H + O (or rather, 2H + O, as water is H2O). But according to Thomists, W has no components: it is simple. Hence H and O are not “in” W.
Nor can you suggest that maybe water is P + 2H + O + W, where W lies “on top of” 2H and O, as a supervening form. Were that the case, you could still say that hydrogen and oxygen are still present in water, as parts. Albert the Great would have probably been happy with that suggestion, but not his pupil, Aquinas, who insisted that each object has one and only one substantial form, and no underlying forms (as many Scholastic philosophers believed).
You also write:
… we should conclude that these atoms [hydrogen and oxygen] are only virtually present which explains why only some of their powers seem to carry over.
As we’ve seen, the only thing that water has in common with hydrogen and oxygen is P: pure passive potency, which is totally indeterminate and devoid of any active powers at all. So one should expect water to retain none of the active powers of hydrogen and oxygen - and yet, many of its chemical properties (e.g. mass & number of nucleons and electrons) do carry over from those of its constituent atoms. The same goes for me and my corpse: why does my future corpse weigh the same as I do, and have the same shape and size as I do, if it has nothing in common with me but pure passive potency?
An Albertian could account for the above facts, but a Thomist, I respectfully submit, cannot. Thus Toner, in the essay you cite, writes:
Whenever an atom becomes part of a substance, it is not merely changed into another atom, it actually ceases to be a substance at all.
Indeed, he holds that “the atoms [out of which a philosopher’s body is composed - VJT] are no longer present when “they” compose a philosopher.” He declares that “when atoms come to compose an object, they undergo a substantial change,” and that “once composition occurs, the only object that remains is the emergent substance: nothing remains ‘down there’ at the microphysical level (with any causal powers of its own).”
Toner tries to circumvent the difficulties I have raised by appealing to spatial parts, where a spatial part “is simply a geometrically defined section of the substance.” For this reason, we can speak of “the ‘nominal presence’ of atoms in a substance.” He argues that in a molecule, “the molecule has spatial parts, and those spatial parts have many qualitative properties in common with the original atoms that correspond with those spatial parts.” But what he fails to explain is why these properties carry over, when the substantial forms of the constituent atoms have been annihilated: they are no longer there. Again, Toner writes that “the causal powers that once belonged to nominal atoms belong to it no longer: they now belong to the molecules of which the nominal atoms are spatial parts.” But once again, why does the new form of the molecule have some of the same causal powers that the old forms of these atoms did? It seems a remarkable coincidence - especially when we consider the persistence over time of quantitative powers as well.
So I’m afraid I don’t find the Thomistic explanation very enlightening.
Getting back to Toner’s original dilemma: he considers the case where an unfortunate philosopher is thrown bodily through a window, and asks: what caused the shattering of the window? He considers three possibilities:
First, the atoms and not the philosopher. Second, both the philosopher and the atoms. Third, the philosopher and not the atoms.
He rejects all of these, before proposing a fourth: the atoms are no longer present when “they” compose a philosopher. Hence it is the philosopher, after all, who causes the shattering of the window.
Let’s go back to the three options discussed by Toner. He dislikes option one, because it epiphenomenalizes the philosopher, while option two involves causal overdetermination, and option three sounds odd, as it makes the atoms causally inert while they happen to compose a philosopher, but causally active in cases when they don’t happen to compose a philosopher.
I’d go for option one, but I don’t agree with Toner that it epiphenomenalizes macro-level objects, such as philosophers. I would say that philosophers exert genuine causal powers when they do things that can’t meaningfully be ascribed to their constituent atoms - like composing philosophical essays. In other words, agent causation is when we need to invoke macro-level causes like philosophers. In the case above, the unfortunate philosopher was thrown through the window. At the time, she might not have even been awake, and hence there would have been no question of her exercising causal powers. But if she deliberately smashed her fist through the window, then the proper explanation, from a teleological perspective, is at the level of the agent’s intentions. The atomic-level explanation describes what happens only at the efficient-causal level. So that’s how I’d answer Toner’s question.
Cheers.
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Out of curiosity, in your view, are there any macro-level material objects that are not epiphenomenal? You say that persons are not epiphenomenal, but it is unclear that you can say the same thing about persons’ bodies, much less rocks or panes of glass.
In other words, this sounds similar to me to when Van Inwagen (I think) says the only things that exist in nature are physical simples and living beings.
This is assuming that H and O are present “as parts”. Are they? I’m not sure all Thomists would agree. They might think of H and O as present only “in power” in H2O. And there seems to be no contradiction between something being simple and having a lot of powers: to take an extreme example, God is simple yet omnipotent.
I’ll have a full response tomorrow, but there are different types of parts that a substance can have (like virtual parts). The whole idea of form is that it it unifies parts.
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Now to respond to some of your earlier points:
I’m not sure you read my original reply to your question. To add to what I wrote there, I think it’s not quite right to say that you have prime matter “in common” with your corpse. @AnonymousThomas might correct me, but prime matter shouldn’t be thought of as some atomistic underlayer of secondary matter which we see around us. Rather, prime matter always exists in the real world as limited by its form, and hence having limited potency instead of infinite potency (as is the case with prime matter). Thus, when you die, you undergo substantial change, but there is a limited amount of things that you can transform into, because the matter of your body doesn’t have infinite potency. Thus, your corpse retains some similar properties to the current you but different in other properties. In A-T philosophy, form, not prime matter, “controls” above anything else about what changes can or cannot happen.
That’s not the only possibility. And it seems to be positing a sort of occasionalism which most Thomists wouldn’t approve of.
To take an example: X_1, X_2, ..., X_n come together as a result of some chemical process or catalyst Y undertaken in environment Z. They turn into molecule A which has properties a_1, a_2, ..., and thus its own set of causal powers, different from its original “ingredients”. Did God ordain the causal powers of A? Yes, but no different than that God also “ordained” the causal powers of X_1, ..., X_n, Y, Z. There’s no need to bring in God in the picture for this level of description, in my opinion: God is still acting through secondary, not primary causality.
Which is why I tend to think of photons and cosmic rays as substances of some kind. I haven’t thought carefully enough about this. Robert Koons seems to think (at least tentatively) that they are only accidents of whatever body emitted them, but this is by no means representative of the “orthodox” Thomist view. There is no orthodox view in Thomism regarding what photons are, because Aristotle’s science is now agreed to be outdated and not talking about photons as we conceive them today.
I tend to think that when a smaller body of water is taken out from a large body of water, the latter only undergoes accidental change. But of course this is not the case when two bodies of water of comparable size are separated from each other. It is probably a substantial change. Still, is there anything fundamentally objectionable with the idea that there is constant substantial change going on around us in the case of small objects like raindrops and puddles?
I think that individual atoms that are trapped in an ion or neutral atom trap are probably best regarded as a substance in themselves. But those are not regular situations of most atoms. Most atoms (for example the ones that make up the table your computer is on) only exist within a larger body which has its own structure and rules. In any case, since many Thomists have no problem saying that your organs (which are clearly visible, separately identifiable and touchable) only exist as part of your body, I don’t see a strong reason why they would find it objectionable that atoms can be seen as parts of a molecule.
Emergentism is a real thing, but these do not seem to be good examples of it. A-T philosophy also does not have a monopoly on emergence. Science has a fairly robust conception of emergence too, independent of A-T.
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@AnonymousThomas, first of all, thank you so much for taking the time to explain all this. My exposure to A-T came from a scholastic-leaning homeschooling mom 
While I enjoy my share of philosophy, I get a lot more out of epistemology than metaphysics. For some reason I just can’t seems to figure out the point of ontology and to some extent causation. I’m not trying to be overly argumentative, but I just don’t get A-T (or perhaps even metaphysics as a whole, for that matter).
How do you know that chemistry is higher phenomena than physics? I’m a chemist who teaches both chemistry and physics undergraduate course and I have a hard time distinguishing between the two fields much of the time. On the ground level, it’s increasingly difficult to tell physics, chemistry, and biology apart so I have difficulty figuring out why reducibility is concern.
I understand the issue of reducibility of chemistry to be, more specifically, the question of whether all chemical phenomena can be completely explained by quantum mechanics. The trivial answer is, of course not, we don’t have analytical quantum mechanical solutions to any multi-electron systems (essentially anything other than hydrogen atoms). On the other hand, I don’t know of any chemical system where quantum mechanics does not apply. The argument comes off a little like “irreducibility of the gaps”. Don’t get me wrong, I lean towards irreducibility of chemistry (and as a chemist, selfishly towards the reducibility of biology 
) but I don’t know that it matters one way or another since it would probably be just as easy to expand the definition of “physics” to include the chemistry bits that aren’t currently reducible and poof it’s reducible again. The definition of physics and chemistry seem more flexible than the metaphysical systems.
Hmm, but I think generally the idea of covalent and ionic bonds are considered a “less correct” model of reality than the quantum mechanical “areas of varying electron density between nuclei”. The idea of a chemical bond is just a convenient approximation, much to the chagrin of my students who memorized rules for Lewis structures.
Hybrid orbitals are similar. They are a convenient rough approximation we tell freshman and sophomore chemistry students, but I don’t know of any chemist that thinks orbital hybridization is more accurate than molecular orbital theory, for instance.
I’m not really sure what “molecules shouldn’t have shape according to QM” means, but computational chemists certainly use ab initio quantum mechanical calculations to find the shape of molecules. It’s entirely possible I’m missing something here.
I don’t think anybody is arguing that atoms don’t undergo changes when they bond to form a molecule, but I would certainly argue that they retain their identity within the molecule. There is a stark difference between having two H atoms and an O atom within a molecule and having a Ne atom within a molecule, even though they contribute the same number of subatomic particles (give or take a couple neutrons). The properties of water and hydrogen/oxygen gas are very different, but they aren’t unexpected or unexplained by physics.
I have no idea what it means for atoms to cease to have have causal powers. I don’t have a firm grasp of what causation really means but I’m thinking here about vibrational modes within the water molecule. If the hydrogen and oxygen atoms have no causal powers, how are there motions of the nuclei relative to each other (i.e. one atom causing a movement in another atom due to electrostatic repulsion) if all the causal power is in the water molecule as a whole?
OK, that makes more sense, but I’m still hung up on the fact that the chance of finding an atom existing on its own vs a part of a molecule is entirely dependent on the properties of the atom (e.g. electron configuration).
So how is that different than saying “molecules are made of atoms”?
You lost me here. Why would we would think that H2O and H2 and O2 need to behave the same? A hydrogen atom in H2 is in a different electronic environment than a hydrogen atom in H2O, but we know that both are hydrogen atoms (spectroscopically). Water is a liquid because of the electronegativity difference between the oxygen and hydrogen atoms and the small size of the hydrogen atom which combine to create exceptionally strong dipole-dipole interactions between the water molecules. Molecular hydrogen and oxygen are a gases because there is no electronegativity difference, therefore no dipole, and therefore only transient intermolecular forces, which are not generally strong enough to overcome the thermal energy of collisions. In all of this, nothing is unique to the molecule per se and instead depends strongly on the identity of the atoms involved. I don’t get why anybody would expect atoms to behave the same in radically different environments. To me the question is, is there something fundamental about the identity of the atom that changes as the molecule forms, and the answer is a resounding no! A foundational principle in chemistry is that atoms don’t change identity under chemical reactions, including the formation of molecules. You don’t put two hydrogens and one oxygen into a water molecules and get one hydrogen and a fluorine out when you break it apart.
What does “limiting the power of each atom in H2O” mean? To me, “specific relations between the parts and the whole” sounds a lot like “atoms combine to form molecules”, I don’t know what “substance” and “form” and A-T add to our understanding of water.
This doesn’t make any sense to me, where would this “form” come from? All the experimental and theoretical evidence I’m aware of says that atoms unite and order themselves into molecules.
Thanks again for all the work on this. It’s probably obvious I haven’t thought about the metaphysics of chemistry much.
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