KIDDNAPPED, part 2

How even to begin? How to approach such an admirable depth of ignorance, such a blinding Ray of intellectual darkness? But I have promised my readers, so in this post I will present the silliest moment in the Moose’s recent article:

Finally, the five ways—not proofs—take as a starting point the validity of our sense perception, which is enough to disqualify them as proofs per se. We believe the information we obtain by means of our five senses is accurate, despite occasional mistakes (mirages, dreams, etc.). But while we usually have no good reason to doubt the accuracy of our senses, at the end of the day we accept the information on faith. There is no way to prove beyond all possible doubt that our senses are true; there’s always the logical possibility that Descartes’s "evil deceiver" is making you think you’re reading this article right now when in fact you are not. The only true proofs we do have—for instance, that vertical angles are congruent—are mathematical ones that hold true even if our senses are giving us false information. Thus, any argument that assumes the validity of sense perception (including the five ways) is conditional upon the accuracy of our senses.
Thus, it seems that Aquinas did not intend the five ways to be logical, mathematical demonstrations but arguments for something that we already accept.

Moose ick to my ears. It is very, VERY tempting to get into the whole can-we-trust-our-senses debate, but I won’t do it. The question here is not whether we can trust our senses, but whether Thomas Aquinas believed that we could trust our senses. Nonetheless, I can’t help putting these two statements in parallel:

“There is no way to prove beyond all possible doubt that our senses are true; there’s always the logical possibility that Descartes’s 'evil deceiver' is making you think you’re reading this article right now when in fact you are not.”—Ray Moose

“Ever since the creation of the world his invisible nature, namely, his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made.”—Romans 1:20

OK, let’s review some history. Way back in the day, Plato taught that our knowledge of the world comes from ideas that are infused into us before we are born. His student Aristotle disagreed, and argued instead that all of our knowledge comes to us through our senses; before a man has sensed anything his mind is a “blank slate”, Aristotle said, a tabula rasa.

Now, ya can’t get very far in studying St. Thomas Aquinas without knowing that he is all over Aristotle—wrote commentaries on all his major works. So, for example, we find that Thomas will quote Aristotle on the whole tabula rasa thing. In fact, Thomas bought into Aristotle’s whole account of how we come to know things, including the notion that ALL of our knowledge comes to us through our SENSES: it’s right there in the Summa Theologica, and you can read about it in English HERE or in Latin HERE.

So to say that Aquinas couldn’t have meant the five ways as demonstrations because they start from sense knowledge is—well, ignorant! It’s typical Ray Moose, folks; the best thing to do is IGNORE HIM.