KIDDNAPPED: an excursus to parts 2 and 3

As we have seen, the Moose claims that Aquinas's five ways would not work as demonstrations because they all begin from sense experience. More than that, he claims that Aquinas himself shared the skepticism of modern philosophy with regard to sense experience, and so did not even intend the five ways to be taken as demonstrations. Ignorant though I am, and unable to reckon with the deep things of philosophy, even I can see through that claim for the anachronistic--um, anachronism that it is.

In this post I want to develop an aside to this line of thought. It occurs to me that Ray's skepticism about the senses is not only historically wrong as applied to Aquinas, but more or less irrelevant.

Suppose we assume that Ray Moose is right, and that Descartes's evil deceiver could be tricking us into believing that we are sensing things when in fact we are not. For the purposes of argument, let's assume that the evil deceiver is tricking us, all the time. Everything that I think is real life is in fact a dream or mirage conjured up by this deceiver. What happens if we re-boot the five ways on this operating system?

The 1st Way. Strange though it may sound, my dreams do have some reality about them: they are real dreams, at least. And the images in my dreams do move. An image of a bird that is presented as over there is then presented as over here, and certain actions in my dream are presented as having a beginning, a middle, and an end. In other words, my dream has certain potentialities that are gradually realized as actualities: the dream is potentially this way, and then later is actually this way.

Well, folks, that is motion in the Aristotelian sense of the word. And the existence of motion in this sense is all the premise that Aquinas needs to get the first way off the ground!

The 2nd Way. On the supposition of the evil deciever--let's just call him the ED--the ED causes certain things to happen in my mind, and then these things in my mind cause certain reactions in me. By golly, we have a chain of efficient causes! And that's all the premise Aquinas needs to get the second way going.

The 3rd Way. My dreams are very ephemeral things. Sometimes I have an image of one thing, sometimes of another, and there is no necessity that any one image will continue to have even that shadowy sort of being that mental images have. The images in my mind are contingent beings.

How about that? I know that contingent beings exist, and that is the starting point for the third way! We're really on a roll here, despite ED's best efforts.

The 4th Way. My dreams have only the being that mental beings have, which is very slight indeed. I, on the other hand, am self-evidently a substance--that which "stands under" (substare) accidents like mental beings. So I have more goodness and nobility than do my dreams.

On the other hand, ED is obviously a higher and more powerful creature than I am, because he is able to create an entire virtual world for me to enjoy (or suffer) and can even place that world into my mind. I can't know anything at all outside my mind! So despite his proclivity for deceiving disembodied minds like me, Ed's nature is really nobler than mine, and thus has more goodness as a nature.

Bingo! We have a gradation of goodness and nobility, the very premise we needed to rev up the fourth way.

The 5th Way. The fifth way is the one that Ed's tricks really do comprimise. Aquinas's argument demands that we have real knowledge of real things that really act for real ends. But by an odd coincidence, we don't need the fifth way because we have already assumed its conclusion as true! Because we assumed that Ed is working me over, we already know that the things I "perceive" in the "world" are directed by an intelligent agent who caused them. It may sound odd to conclude that Ed is that which "all call God", but I think Aquinas would actually be comfortable with that conclusion at this stage of the game.

What do I mean by "this stage of the game"? More on that in the next post.

And the conclusion is.... Ray Moose and his buddy Ed can throw the works at us, and Thomas Aquinas's five ways are affected not at all. Every one of them concludes--unless you count the fifth way, in which case Ed supplies the truth of the conclusion for us.

In other words, Ray Moose's objection about starting from sense perception is not only historically ignorant, but just--well, irrelevant.

And the best thing to do with the irrelevant is: IGNORE IT. Maybe it will go away.