KIDDNAPPED

The folks over at Catholic Answers are not ignorant. In fact, they specialize in a kind of direct, clear, facts-checked style of writing that is the bane of ignorance. I was hardly surprised, therefore, to find that Catholic Answers has come under attack by Ray Moose. What took me off guard was the bold insidiousness of the attack.

A recent issue of Catholic Answer's This Rock Magazine features an article supposedly by the associate editor, James Kidd. Kidd supposedly maintains that Thomas Aquinas did not intend his famous "five ways" as demonstrations of God's existence but as five arguments about or perspectives upon God's existence, and procedes to find fault with the arguments on various grounds such as that we might just all be dreaming instead living in the real world.

I hear my reader’s voice: "You've got to be Kidding." But I am not.

James Kidd clearly did not write this. James Kidd is a very pleasant and intelligent man whom I never met once in a sushi bar in San Diego, a man whose firm conviction that sushi bars really exist in San Diego makes it impossible that he would pen the above-mentioned article. Are you sitting down? Cause this may come as a shock.

James has been kidnapped by Ray Moose. The whole article is a forgery.

The claim is outlandish, I know, but I can back it up by showing just how ignorant the article is, and therefore how impossible it would be for James Kidd to have written the thing. This will be the burden, not only of this post, but of several posts to come. For the present, I will focus on one particularly silly claim, namely that we can see that St. Thomas did not intend the five ways to be taken as true demonstrations because

Thomas never refers to the five arguments as "proofs" in the modern sense of the term. In the preceding article (ST 1:2:2), he asks "whether it can be demonstrated that God exists" (Utrum Deum esse sit demonstrabile). The word demonstrabile has a precise meaning in Latin as a logical, geometrical proof. Thomas then proceeds to argue that the existence of God can be established by this kind of proof. But in article 3, Thomas suddenly abandons the language of hard proof in favor of a softer term: "Deum esse quinque viis probari potest," usually translated "The existence of God can be proved in five ways." But, unlike the narrow meaning of demonstrabile, the word probari has a wider meaning that does not necessitate a rigorous, irrefutable proof. A more accurate translation would be "The existence of God can be argued for in five ways."

Ray Moose—I refuse to call the author “James Kidd”—rarely states a flat falsehood; he prefers to say what is only partially true, and then capitalize on the part that isn’t. This is a case in point. Probare is a “wider” term than demonstrare, but it is not a “softer” term. There is no opposition here between “hard proof” and “soft argument”; in fact, every demonstrare is a probare, even if not every probare is a demonstrare. This is why an objector in Question 46, Article 2 of the Summa can say that demonstrative probari potest quod Deus sit causa effective mundi, “It can be demonstratively proven that God is the effective cause of the world.” You can probare something demonstrative.

OK, back to the question about God’s existence. Unknown to Ray, St. Thomas takes up several of the same arguments for God’s existence in another book, the Summa contra gentiles. In the last part of book 1, chapter 9, St. Thomas outlines what he will do in the following chapters, and there he indicates what will be his first task:

Inter ea vero quae de Deo secundum seipsum consideranda sunt, pramittendum est, quasi totius operis necessarium fundamentum, consideration qua demonstrator Deum esse.

“Among those things which are to be considered concerning God in Himself, one must set out first, as a sort of necessary foundation of the whole work, the consideration by which it is demonstrated that God exists.”

Keep in mind that this is his introduction to the SAME ARGUMENTS as those he uses in the Summa, and he says that by this consideration it is “demonstrated” (demonstratur) that God exists.

Then we find the same movement of thought as in the Summa: first he takes up the position that proving God’s existence is not necessary, either because it is self-evident (ch 10) or because we can only know it by faith (ch 12); then he procedes to his arguments for God’s existence (ch 13). We also find the same move in terminology:

Ostenso igitur quod non est vanum niti ad demonstrandum Deum esse, procedamus ad ponendum rationes quibus tam philosophi quam doctores Catholici Deum esse probaverunt.

“Having shown therefore that it is not useless to try to demonstrate that God exists, let us procede to set out the reasonings by which both the philosophers and the Catholic doctors have proven that God exists.”

Whoah! Did you see how he changed from demonstrare to probare?! Does this mean that, somewhere between the last line of chapter 9 and the first line of chapter 13 he has changed his mind and doesn’t really thing that his arguments will demonstrate God’s existence?

Turns out, the answer is “No.” After reviewing two versions of the argument from motion in gruesome detail, he notes two possible objections. With regard to the second, he says,

Secundum est, quod supponitur in praedictis demonstrationibus primum motum, scilicet corpus caeleste, esse motum ex se.

“The second [objection] is that it is supposed in the demonstrations just given that the first thing moved, namely the heavely body, is moved by itself.”

In referring to the arguments from motion, he still uses the word demonstratio, “demonstration.” In other words, he thinks that—as the objector from Question 46, Article 2 put it—he has demonstratively proven that God exists, with no opposition between the words demonstrate and prove.

You see then how silly and ignorant Ray’s argument is! But this only scratches the surface; in my next post, I will touch on the most ignorant argument of all….