Several States Investigating the Catholic Church

Conversation Side Conversation
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There appears to be confusion in people’s heads about ontology (the way things are as we find them) and ontogeny (how things got to be the way they are). This makes it hard to talk about origins, because what things are now, become how they have always been. This is not so much a well reasoned argument, as a rigidity of thinking.

With their strong sense of ontology, this is a prominent in conversations with Thomists. See: A Catholic Approach to the Genealogical Adam.

Has this problem come up before in any other context? What is the best way to overcome it?

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In my ignorance I tend to have thought of William rather negatively, only in terms of (a) nominalism and (b) univocalism, both of which I think have done harm. And some of his later followers were occasionalists, which has relevance to divine action. But of course he is an example of many great thinkers at that time and somebody ought to retrieve his best ideas!

I feel bad about disagreeing with him, because he lived just down the road from where I was brought up.

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All I’d say on this here is that one should distinguish the tools of Thomistic metaphysics from the dogmas of Catholicism (just as one needs to separate Aristotle’s outdated physics from his useful metaphysics)… which isn’t to suggest that Catholicism is “outdated,” but simply that Protestants can benefit from scholasticism too.

And the thing about Thomism is that it has a highly developed philosophy of change and origins, of “becoming”, which unlike the post-scholastic poor excuse for metaphysics that informed Darwin and evolutionary theory, includes things beyond efficient material causation, which is absolutely necessary if we believe God to be the God of history, and that it’s going somewhere.

[Aside - on the other thread where you think of man as part of nature, one important aspect, picked up by Wright in his Bampton lectures, is that there is no fundamental distinction between world history, salvation history and natural history - all are under God’s ongoing government, which is relevant to the matter of nature’s “becoming” in Christ. A point to consider in the discussion of methodological naturalism!]

So A-T “does” becoming, but because it went out of fashion not only in science but in philosophy, relatively little work has been done to apply it to “change over deep time”. The new Thomistic analytical guys like Feser have done work on that, but of course are also having to wave the flag to keep the Thomistic boat afloat in academia. But remember that physicists like Heisenberg were able to adopt Aristotelian ideas successfully into quantum science, so Thomism is not science-averse.

According to Feser, one of the books that has grappled most with the idea of how things can evolve, and yet be real “things” rather than temporary epiphenomena, is David Oderberg in Real Essentialism.

The problem for us mortals, though, is that analytic philosophy is written in Linear B :scream:, and becomes even less comprehensible when it’s translating Thomistic ideas into that language. Aquinas himself is delightfully easy to read, though, once one picks up the basic concepts.