What have philosophers had to say about the problem of evil and the question of God throughout the centuries? Philosophy was alive and well in ancient Athens, approximately four-hundred years before Christ. Its best known philosophers were Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. Socrates, so far as we know, never wrote anything; his top student Plato, whose real name was Aristocles, presents the accounts by which most of us gain some idea of what Socrates might have been like (Xenophon, another student of Socrates, also wrote about his master). Aristocles was apparently called “Plato” by his friends, for he was (as some stories go) a superior wrestler in the Athenian Olympics and had broad shoulders: hence Plato—“the broad.” He went by Plato rather than Aristocles, apparently to avoid confusion with his top pupil Aristotle. When we read the Socratic dialogs, we are never certain exactly how many of the teachings were those of Socrates (the central character) and how much are those of Plato. Many scholars believe that Plato’s idea of the forms, for example, was his own and was not shared by his teacher.

Plato’s forms are widely known, if not always understood. He believed that behind the world of things, there was a level of subsistence in which these material objects participated. For example, we may look around us and see a red tee-shirt, a red car, and a red wall. These things would be red, according to Plato’s conception, because they participated in the form of “redness.” Even more true than redness are forms like justice, beauty, truth, and goodness. When we see an attractive painting, an appealing human body, or a stunning landscape, for example, these three things all participate or share in the form of beauty. Behind all things, therefore, is a level of abstract, perhaps even spiritual, reality. These forms are countless and yet they too have their origination in a single form that contains them all. This is the Form of the Good, and it is the highest of all forms. Centuries later, Plotinus merged neo-Platonism and Christianity—the Form of the Good became equated with God the Father—and many of the early Church Fathers likewise flirted with neo-Platonism, not least of which as Origen of Alexandria (185–254 A.D.). We shall come back to this point in a moment.

Unlike his tutor, Aristotle rejected the idea of the forms and held to a more empirical or common-sense philosophy of the world. Yet he also shared many ideas in common as well. Among his contributions to the discipline of philosophy is the notion that behind all things there are causes and that a minimum of four types of these causes are required to adequately describe and define any given object. These causes include the (1) material cause (mater—the substance out of which a thing is crafted), the (2) efficient cause (kinoun—the means by which a thing is crafted), the (3) formal cause (eidos—the identification of that thing), and the (4) final cause (telos—the end for which it was crafted). These four categories formed the basis of philosophy all throughout the Middle Ages, God being seen as that which supplies the final cause and accordingly supplying form to the other causes as well.

The New Testament as we have it today did not reach its finalized form until over three-hundred years after the life of Jesus. As Fr. James Bernstein describes it in Which Came First: The Church or the New Testament?: “If the writing of the New Testament had been begun at the same time as the U.S. Constitution, we wouldn’t see a final product until the year 2076!” It was 367 A.D. when we saw the first official ordering of the New Testament books as they appear today. During this time period, there was an ongoing debate over which books should be included and which passed over. Many books that made it in the final cut slid in by a narrow margin and other books that looked almost certain to be canonized were rejected at the very last minute. In addition to this controversy, paganism formed an ongoing threat to the emergent church, and neither Jesus, Paul, nor the Apostles were around to defend it. That is when the Apologists, as they were called, begin to defend the new faith, blending theological considerations with philosophical ones, in large part due to the Greek audience with whom it was communicating. St. Augustine (354–430) culled from both Plato and Aristotle; men like Origen were almost entirely in Plato’s camp. These early Church Fathers then were not only theologians, but well-educated philosophers of the highest caliber as well.

Just as Plato held that behind all forms is the Form of the Good—and Plotinus bridged the gap between Plato and Christianity—Aristotle spoke of the Unmoved Mover who appears at the end of time (rather than the beginning as we might typically conceive) and is that toward which all else is compelled. Aristotle’s Ummoved Mover is impassible: that is, he/it is not moved or affected by external causes but rather compels all things toward himself/itself by an attraction akin to (if not synonymous with) love.

God had long been seen as supreme, but a new emphasis was given to this supremacy and it was formally established in creedal statements that God was utterly perfect, the ground of all being and existence, both immanent (in all things/all things in Him) and transcendent (apart from His created order), and in possession of the familiar characteristics of omnibenevolence (all-loving), omnipresence (all-encompassing), omnipotence (all-powerful), and omniscience (all-knowing). Thus, after weathering attacks both from within and without, Christianity emerged into the Middle Ages with a solid philosophical undergirding to its theological claims, the logical ramifications of such doctrines as the Trinity and other uniquely Christian concepts having been worked out and formalized.

During the so-called Dark Ages from around the fall of the Roman Empire in 476 to 1000, the philosophical and intellectual traditions of European history fell silent. The Arabs kept learning alive, perfecting algebra and giving to the Western world its Arabian numerals (the kind you and I see nearly every day as opposed to Roman numerals like I, II, III, IV, and so on), but for the most part, the European continent subsisted silently, the only higher learning taking place in monasteries and that generally being confined to a relatively small canon of dusty books, Aristotle being among them. After some eight-hundred years of silence, the European world re-awoke; the entire stretch from the fall of the Roman Empire to the Renaissance is called the Middle Ages, but this is often broken up into early, middle, and late—thus, the Western world re-awoke during the mid- to late Middle Ages. These doctrinal themes were dusted off and revivified during this time, St. Anslem (1033–1109) proposing his famous ontological argument that would influence philosophers on up to the Renaissance (14th–16th centuries) and on into the Modern period (the 18th century Enlightenment). The 12th and 13th centuries saw the rise of Scholasticism, the folks who made famous the question: “How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?”

If we may be allowed a brief digression, author Dorothy Sayers (a friend of C.S. Lewis and company) claims in The Lost Tools of Learning that this question of dancing angels was more than a mere intellectual exercise: it was also intended to demonstrate something of theology and the non-corporeal nature of angels. She writes:

A glib speaker in the Brains Trust once entertained his audience (and reduced the late Charles Williams to helpless rage) by asserting that in the Middle Ages it was a matter of faith to know how many archangels could dance on the point of a needle. I need not say, I hope, that it never was a “matter of faith”; it was simply a debating exercise, whose set subject was the nature of angelic substance: were angels material, and if so, did they occupy space? The answer usually adjudged correct is, I believe, that angels are pure intelligences; not material, but limited, so that they may have location in space but not extension. An analogy might be drawn from human thought, which is similarly non-material and similarly limited. Thus, if your thought is concentrated upon one thing—say, the point of a needle—it is located there in the sense that it is not elsewhere; but although it is “there,” it occupies no space there, and there is nothing to prevent an infinite number of different people’s thoughts being concentrated upon the same needle-point at the same time. The proper subject of the argument is thus seen to be the distinction between location and extension in space; the matter on which the argument is exercised happens to be the nature of angels (although, as we have seen, it might equally well have been something else); the practical lesson to be drawn from the argument is not to use words like “there” in a loose and unscientific way, without specifying whether you mean “located there” or “occupying space there.”

For that matter, these debating exercises were a part of classical education for a good many years, a privilege afforded the nobility, holy men, and nuns in the convent. If you have ever watched or read many of Shakespeare’s plays, you will notice a lot of quick-witted word play, often occurring between the sexes, such as between Beatrice and Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing. Such was common to the educational curriculum in Shakespeare’s day, for a rounded education consisted in part of learning how to debate and debate well; one might be arbitrarily assigned one side of an issue and would have to defend it against another who had been assigned the other side. For example, we will say that Mary is a virgin priestess. She temporarily leaves the holy order and while away is raped. She then reapplies for her position as virgin priestess. This half of the room must defend the position that she should be allowed back; this half must defend the position that she should not be admitted. Thus, oratory and rhetoric were important parts of the trivium and quadrivium: that is, the seven liberal arts consisting of grammar, rhetoric, and logic (the trivium) and arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy (the higher quadrivium). These seven liberal arts were surrounded by none other than the discipline of philosophy, which encompasses and binds together them all.

Throughout the span of the Middle Ages, the Church had gradually become a very powerful political entity and the still much talked-about Crusades (11th–13th centuries) were a product of this time period. The new heretics were no longer so much the “Godless pagans” as they were the Muslims. The Church grew more and more powerful and corruption seeped in; a monk named Luther made history in what we now call the Reformation (16th century) in protest of the sale of indulgences and other things that disturbed him about “Mother Church.” For its part, the Catholic Church underwent the so-called Counter-Reformation and during this period the Jesuit order was founded by Saint Ignatius of Loyola in 1534, also known as “The Society of Jesus.” These monks were known for the brutality of their logic: they were required as a bare minimum to take four years of language studies, four years of theological studies, and four years of philosophical studies. For debating exercises, they would go to a nearby town and challenge the local clergymen to a debate, wiping up the floor with their opponents’ limp bodies after chewing them up and spitting them out. Like the Scholastics, their logic was impeccable and highly practiced.

Yet things are not as they once were. The Reformation for the first time sees men on equal footing, not unlike the modern democracy that would soon form most successfully as an American experiment. What is more, philosophers begin to question the notion of Aristotle’s telos, or final cause, as one of the four main categories of classification. How can one presume to know the purposes of an infinite God? It seems like pure conjecture and a bit presumptious on our part, or so went the rationale of the day. Francis Bacon, one of the most influential Enlightenment thinkers, wrote in De Augmentis Scientiarum (the 1622 expanded Latin version of his 1605 Advancement of Learning): “tanguam virgo Deo consecrata, nihil parit”: that is, “teleology, like a virgin consecrated to God, produces no offspring.” His point was that we do not know the ends for which a thing is made and such discussion is unprofitable. But this also seemed to blur what the other three Aristolean causes might mean, now that they could no longer be defined by their ultimate end or purpose; it also seemed to leave a conspicuously large gap between God and man, the beginning (as some see it) of a decline in Christian sentiment.

Following closely on his heels was the French philosopher René Descartes and it is his arguments which will interest us most now that we have finally arrived upon our intended topic of discussion. In the Third Meditation in which Descartes is now getting around to his proof of the existence of God, he is sitting by the stove when he writes (in part):

For example, the ideas which I have of cold and heat are so far from clear and distinct that by their means I cannot tell whether cold is merely a privation of heat, or heat a privation of cold, or whether both are real qualities, or are not such. And inasmuch as [since ideas resemble images] there cannot be any ideas which do not appear to represent some things, if it is correct to say that cold is merely a privation of heat, the idea which represents it to me as something real and positive will not be improperly termed false, and the same holds good of other similar ideas.

He is ultimately leading up to an ontological argument, much like St. Anslem’s in which, while he may be able to deny that heat is the presence of something (a fire, in this case) warming him, he cannot deny that he at least has this sense perception and that if he moves closer to the flames, he will not only feel heat but pain. Now when it comes to the subject of God, however, He must be utterly perfect: in fact, He must be like St. Anslem’s talk of “that-than-which-no-greater-can-be-thought.” It is possible that his senses deceive him; he admits this possibility by imagining the (hypothetical) possibility that an evil demon is controlling his mind and deceiving him. But there is one truth that he can believe even if that were true and we commonly translate that to “I think, therefore I am.” In order to exist, Descartes knows he is not his own cause; he also realizes that he has a notion of God in his mind and he wonders how it got there. This notion is utterly perfect, in fact: it represents the greatest possible Being that could be conceived. Thus, Descartes continues in the 3rd Meditation:

And we cannot say that this idea of God is perhaps materially false and that consequently I can derive it from nought [i.e. that possibly it exists in me because I am imperfect], as I have just said is the case with ideas of heat, cold and other such things; for, on the contrary, as this idea is very clear and distinct and contains within it more objective reality than any other, there can be none which is of itself more true, nor any in which there can be less suspicion of falsehood. The idea, I say, of this Being who is absolutely perfect and infinite, is entirely true; for although, perhaps, we can imagine that such a Being does not exist, we cannot nevertheless imagine that His idea represents nothing real to me, as I have said of the idea of cold. . . .

Remember Aristotle’s categories? One included “material cause” and referred to the thing out of which something is crafted. Thus, Descartes wonders if the idea of God is “materially false”—if it is just an idea that does not exist in reality. But how could this be? For like St. Anslem argued, if God is that-than-which-nothing-greater-can-be-thought, then a God that does exist in reality is greater than a God that does not exist except as an idea. So, if God truly is “that-than-which-nothing-greater-can-be-thought,” then it follows necessarily that He does in fact exist and is the ground of all of our being. Thus, we continue with the paragraph where we left off above:

This idea is also very clear and distinct; since all that I conceive clearly and distinctly of the real and the true, and of what conveys some perfection, is in its entirety contained in this idea. And this does not cease to be true although I do not comprehend the infinite, or though in God there is an infinitude of things which I cannot comprehend, nor possibly even reach in any way by thought; for it is of the nature of the infinite that my nature, which is finite and limited, should not comprehend it; and it is sufficient that I should understand this, and that I should judge that all things which I clearly perceive and in which I know that there is some perfection, and possibly likewise an infinitude of properties of which I am ignorant, are in God formally or eminently, so that the idea which I have of Him may become the most true, most clear, and most distinct of all the ideas that are in my mind.

Here we see Descartes admit that while God is utterly perfect and not lacking in any way, he himself is not perfect. He then examines how this idea might have gotten there and how he might explain his own existence: his parents gave birth to him. But how did they come to be? And their parents? And their parent’s parents? He eventually concludes that God must necessarily exist, but if so, how is it that a perfect God created an imperfect being like himself?

Theology leading up to and following Descartes (1596–1650) had in its description a so-called “Great Chain of Being,” often appearing in the poetry of Alexander Pope (1688–1744) among the more famous places this once very prevalent idea may still be found. Basically, this idea was that God created the best of all possible worlds and that His creation extended from Himself as supremely perfect down to the smallest of creatures with no gaps between. Mankind falls somewhere in the middle of the so-called great chain between the totality of God and the nothingness that exists at the lowest level. This chain cannot be broken, for it represents the most perfect of all possible worlds. In Pope’s own words from his “Essay on Man”:

Vast chain of being! Which from God began,
Nature’s aethereal, human, angel, man,
Beast, bird, fish, insect, what no eye can see,
No glass can reach; from Infinite to thee,
From thee to nothing. — On superior pow’rs
Were we to press, inferior might on ours;
Or in the full creation leave a void,
Where, one step broken, the great scale’s destroy’d;
From nature’s chain whatever link you strike,
Tenth, or ten thousanth, breaks the chain alike.

It was also this conception in reverse that made Darwin’s theories easy to swallow: rather than descending from God, there is a great chain that ascends from nothing upward. I believe that Arthur Lovejoy has written on the subject in his book Great Chain of Being, though I have not had occasion to read it for myself. In any case, we have God, through the angels, with man in the middle, and probably amoebas and other single-celled creatures near the bottom of this chain. With this in mind, let us back up a few decades from Pope and pick up again with Descartes. He wonders how God, who is utterly perfect, could have created an imperfect creature who makes mistakes. It appears easy enough to explain upon reflection:

I am in a sense something intermediate between God and nought, i.e. placed in such a manner between the supreme Being and non-being, that there is in truth nothing in me that can lead to error in so far as a sovereign Being has formed me; but that, as I in some degree participate likewise in nought or in non-being, i.e. in so far as I am not myself the supreme Being, and as I find myself subject to an infinitude of imperfections, I ought not to be astonished if I should fall into error. Thus do I recognise that error, in so far as it is such, is not a real thing depending on God, but simply a defect; and therefore, in order to fall into it, that I have no need to possess a special faculty given me by God for this very purpose, but that I fall into error from the fact that the power given me by God for the purpose of distinguishing truth from error is not infinite.

Descartes does not spend a great deal of time talking about evil in his Meditations, but we can clearly see a line of thought very like that of our student who speaks to the professor who we are led to believe has probably never read Descartes or any of the other thinkers that are often compulsory reading in survey courses required for one’s general education requirements. In any case, following Bacon in discounting Aristotle’s telos, or ends for which we are made, Descartes writes:

In considering this [question of my imperfection] more attentively, it occurs to me in the first place that I should not be astonished if my intelligence is not capable of comprehending why God acts as He does; and that there is thus no reason to doubt of His existence from the fact that I may perhaps find many other things besides this as to which I am able to understand neither for what reason nor how God has produced them. For, in the first place, knowing that my nature is extremely feeble and limited, and that the nature of God is on the contrary immense, incomprehensible, and infinite, I have no further difficulty in recognising that there is an infinitude of matter in His power, the causes of which transcend my knowledge; and this reason suffices to convince me that the species of cause termed final, finds no useful employment in physical [or natural] things; for it does not appear to me that I can without temerity seek to investigate the [inscrutable] ends of God.

We now leave Descartes and go on to his philosophical “next of kin,” if we may speak metaphorically. (In chronological order, we have Bacon (1561–1626), Descartes (1596–1650), Hobbes (1588–1679), and Spinoza (1632–1677); by category, Bacon and Hobbes are classed as empiricists—actually, Bacon is seen as an early fore-runner to empiricism—and Descartes and Spinoza are classed as rationalists: thus, Spinoza is Descartes’ philosophical “next of kin.”) This philosopher’s name is Spinoza and he dealt the death blow to Aristotle’s notion of teleology as well as answering the question of evil directly and in a much different way. We will not spend long discussing him and even less time culling quotes. What we will say was that he was Jewish but ended up being excommunicated from the synagogue for his heretical ideas about God. His most famous work is called the Ethics, though to our ears it sounds much more like a work of metaphysics: that is, it seems to deal as much or more with ontology as it does morality. The reason for this is because ethics was once seen as a much vaster topic of inquiry, following the so-called “form” of nature.

The long and short of it, without going into the laborious details (for Spinoza is often difficult to understand), is that he was a panentheist. “Panentheism” is distinguished from “pantheism” mainly insofar as it emphasizes the idea of “everything in God” more so than the other way around. He said that God had an infinite number of attributes, of which two were existence and mind (the only two attributes of which we as humans are modes, or manifestations). Essentially, substance is “that which is” and it can neither be created nor destroyed but has been eternally existent. This substance, then, is God or Nature. We, as human beings, are merely modes of this substance. To illustrate, think of the color yellow. Does it exist by itself? Or rather must something else first exist that has the property of yellowness before yellow can exist? In other words, something has to be yellow for us to speak of the color: the color does not exist otherwise (and perhaps not at all, but this post is already too long-winded to be chasing such rabbits). Like the color yellow, we are modes of the one eternal substance: we do not exist except as it exists; put another way, we do not exist except as God exists: we exist through and in God.

Before culling our quotation regarding evil, the last part of his philosophy we will make explicit is that we do not possess free will. We tend to anthropomorphize God—create Him in our own image—in order to better understand Him. But He is infinite and has infinite attributes of which we possess only two. It is more than a little presumptuous, then, for us to imagine with our two little attributes of mind and body (in response to Descartes’ dualism) that we know anything of such a being. We know only that He is infinite and thus He cannot change, for to change would imply a transition from one thing into another and an utterly perfect being could not become more perfect—thus, if an utterly perfect being were to change, it could only be to become less and that is impossible. We do not have free will, though it appears from our perspective that we do. For if we truly knew the nature of God and considered all the factors, we would see that things could not be otherwise than what they are. God is utterly perfect and cannot do anything imperfectly. Thus, all that is or could ever be necessarily follows from His nature. And since His nature is unerring, nothing ultimately errs and everything is predetermined: it is simply that we, as mortal beings, cannot comprehend it and thus entertain the illusion that we have free will.

That being said, let us hear his solution to the problem of evil which has been described as the final nail in the teleogical coffin. At the end of the first half of his Ethics, Spinoza writes:

After men persuaded themselves that everything that happens, happens on their account, they had to judge that what is most important in each thing is what is most useful to them, and to rate as most excellent all those things by which they were most pleased. Hence, they had to form these notions, by which they explained natural things: good, evil, order, confusion, warm, cold, beauty, ugliness. And because they think themselves free, those notions have arisen: praise and blame, sin and merit. . . . Whatever conduces to health and the worship of God, they have called good; but what is contrary to these, evil.

In essence, these things are all names we give to our personal preferences, projecting these preferences onto God. Yet we possess only two of the infinite number of attributes of God and if we truly understood things, we would not make such foolish statements. We are guilty of the grossest form of reductionism, reducing God to a mere man and saddling Him with all our many prejudices. This answer, then, is the one Spinoza gives to the problem of evil.

We have said that Spinoza is not always easy to understand. Specifically, this factor has much to do with the precision definitions he assigns certain words we normally think of as being more or less synonymous and then the way he uses these subtle variations to prove his points as one would an algebraic equation. For example, he casually flings the terms substance, attributes, and modes around in ways that can soon become not only tedious to follow but also somewhat confusing if we have not cleary delineated them in our minds. For example, he talks about substance as being “that which is” for lack of a better way of describing it. Essentially then, substance is one in the same with God—it is the “stuff” from which all other kinds of stuff that exist are comprised. By attributes (of this substance), he appears to mean those qualities that are perceived by the human intellect. Substance is one and eternal, but it can be conceived by the intellect differently as different attributes of a single whole. Modes, by contrast, are the actual manifestation of the attributes of substance and can only be conceived on a modal basis: that is, mind can only be conceived as that which is not bounded and is non-corporeal and body as that which has extensionality (takes up space by “extending” in different directions).

Here is a prime example:

P10: The being of substance does not pertain to the essence of man, or substance does not constitute the form of a man.

Dem.: For the being of substance involves necessary existence (by IP7). Therefore, if the being of substance pertained to the essence of man, then substance being given, man would necessarily be given (by D2), and consequently man would exist necessarily, which (by A1) is absurd, q.e.d.

. . . . .

But in the meantime many say that anything without which a thing can neither be nor be conceived pertains to the nature of the thing. And so they believe either that the nature of God pertains to the essence of created things, or that created things can be or be conceived without God—or what is more certain, they are not sufficiently consistent. (Book II, P10).

Spinoza appears to be saying that the essence of man—that which makes a man a man and not a bird or a bee or a rock or a tree—is not the same as substance, which we know to interpret as a flashing red light for “God.” That is, man is not God. But since God is all that there is, then the essence of man—what makes a man a man—depends upon God but cannot be thought of as being God itself, for substance (God) is infinite and man is but a single mode, or expression, of that substance, like the color yellow is merely a property of a sunflower and could not be said to have any existance apart from the sunflower (or similar yellow object). The color yellow is not really existent in any concrete way apart from the colored object—so too, man does not exist in any concrete way apart from God but is merely a color, if you like, that is given off by the Divine substance. (Of course, we looked at color in a slightly different way through the eyes of Locke in the last issue.)

Thus, the conclusion of our excerpt above: “And so, they believe either that the nature of God pertains to the essence of created things [that yellow is God, we might say, instead of God being yellow], or that created things can be [that they can exist] or be conceived without God—or what is more certain, they are not sufficiently consistent.” So then, people either say that all things are God (and thus confuse the finite with the infinite) or else that things exist separately from God. The real truth, however, lies in the notion of panentheism: God is not all so much as all is in God—and from Spinoza’s point of view, to say that things exist apart from God, as Christians might, is equally imprecise and misguided. Yet I like what he says next in a mercifully clear passage:

The cause of this, I believe, was that they [those who are misguided] did not observer the [proper] order of Philosophizing. For they believed that the divine nature, which they should have contemplated before all else (because it is prior both in knowledge and in nature) is last in the order of knowledge, and that the things that are called objects of the senses are prior to all. That is why, when they contemplated natural things, they thought of nothing less than they did of the divine nature; and when afterwards they directed their minds to contemplating the divine nature, they could think of nothing less than of their first fictions, on which they had built the knowledge of natural things, because these could not assist knowledge of divine nature. So it is no wonder that they generally contradict themselves.

It is pretty clear from this passage what Spinoza thinks of empiricism (which we discussed in the previous issue): there is a reason he is considered a rationalist philosopher—reason comes before nature and shares a one-and-one relationship with it. Nevertheless, his comments above are not so unlike certain statements that Jesus made about the Kingdom of God.

Let us double back once more and conclude with a look at the so-called death of teleology. Spinoza’s final nail (along with those driven by Hobbes, Descartes, Locke, and other Enlightenment thinkers) did not deal any kind of death blow to God. Spinoza was sometimes accused of atheism, but in truth, what he advocated was substance monism, or, as we have been repeating, panentheism. He was not an atheist: he did not embrace Christian or Jewish theology, but he did not reject God either. All of the rational arguments for the existence of God—including that classical trio (ontological, teleological, and cosmological)—can, if successful, only demonstrate the necessity of a First Cause or a Highest Power. As St. Aquinas clearly states in the Shorter Summa: “The existence of God and other like truths about God, which can be known by natural reason [at least if we grant the premises of the arguments], are not articles of faith, but are preambles to the articles; for faith presupposes natural knowledge, even as grace presupposes nature and perfection the perfectible.” All of Aquinas’ arguments, as with those of the philosophers and theologians that came both before and after him, can only demonstrate the necessity of something being first in magnitude, temporality, or causation. Matters of Christian theology, such as salvation, sin, atonement, and the Trinity, are still matters of faith. They may be framed within a rational system, but to grant the premises one must take that initial step of faith.

The point of the Enlightenment philosophers in driving the final nails in the teleological coffin was not to invalidate the necessity of some kind of Primordial Mover or even Present Sustainer or even perhaps Personal Redeemer, but rather to suggest that such a Being remains unknown and incomprehensible to the light of pure reason alone. How then, can we speak of teleology—the ends for which things are made—in a rational system of thought without the admission of faith? If we are to build a purely rational framework, the teleology of Aristotle is outside our grasp. We may speculate, but like Locke’s virgin consecrated to God, our speculation yields no offspring (save further speculation). Of course, we may believe as well, but our belief hardly constitutes a form of a priori knowledge, nor, for that matter, even a posteriori knowledge, for who has seen the face of God or spoken with Him one to one?

We will conclude with this account of Francis Bacon’s system in Bacon to Kant: An Introduction to Modern Philosophy. This text, prepared by Garrett Thomson, is a secondary text to our primary readings; in theological terms, it stands to the actual texts from these authors something like a commentary stands to Scripture. Therefore, it is incredibly helpful and clarifying, but no substitute for first-hand reading. Below is what Garrett writes about Bacon’s system on page 121.

THE CLASSIFICATION OF KNOWLEDGE

The classification of knowledge is undertaken in the second part of the Advancement of Learning. According to Bacon, such a classification should be based on the faculties of the mind. There are three faculties: reason, memory, and imagination. Correspondingly, there are three basic forms of knowledge: science or philosophy, history, and poesy. It is doubtful that Bacon should have treated “poesy” as a form of knowledge at all, because it is wishful imagination or “feigned history,” rather than cognition of the actual world. By the term “history” Bacon means the knowledge of particular facts. History should be contrasted with science because of its concern with particular rather than general truths.

The field of philosophy or science is divided in two: rational theology and natural philosophy. Rational theology should not be confused with divine theology. Rational theology is the attempt to infer the existence of God. In contrast, divine theology is revealed knowledge of God’s nature, and as such, it is not a part of the general field of science, because it consists of revealed knowledge. Natural philosophy is divided into the theoretical and the practical. The first is the scientific inquiry into causes (which Bacon called “natural science”); the second, the inquiry into the production of effects, which he called “natural magic.” Natural science, the inquiry into causes, is further divided into physics and metaphysics. The first deals with efficient and material causes; the second with formal and final causes [recall Aristotle’s four causes mentioned earlier in our discussion].

The doctrine of final causes seeks to explain natural phenomena by citing the purpose for which they were made. Bacon does not deny that natural events have final causes and that they are the intentional outcome of the purposes of God. He holds that God is the first cause of nature. However, Bacon does object to inquiry directed towards final causes because “Inquiry into final causes is sterile . . . and produces nothing.” The investigation of nature yields knowledge of secondary causes only. By studying nature, we learn nothing about God’s intentions, only more about nature. In particular, science is directed towards discovering the form of things, like the form of heat or of cold.

A form is a state or configuration of matter. These last points seem to indicate a weakness in Bacon’s classification. He should not have admitted the study of final causes into metaphysics, which, after all, is a subdivision of natural science. Knowledge of final causes should be restricted to revealed divine knowledge and should not be considered a part of rational philosophy and science. Consequently, Bacon’s considered opinion must surely be that metaphysics is only properly concerned with formal causes and not at all with final causes.

I have taken the liberty to create a schema to make Bacon’s system palatable for those more visually inclined:

To further elaborate: if you follow the tree down, you will see that final causes have ended up under “Natural Philosophy” which today we call “science.” Thus, many scholars (including Garrett) think that Bacon must have misspoke himself and only meant formal causes but not also final causes. Recall also that telos roughly means “end”—thus, the end for which something has been made or its “final cause.”

In any case, perhaps you can see a bit more clearly the rationale behind modern science putting to death teleology. It was not because of atheism, though some today fear that it was the eventual cause of so many in the scientific community becoming atheistic. It was, rather, because revelation cannot be proven by reason. Under reason, as Garrett has reminded us, we see “Rational Theology,” which consists in part of apologetics. Yet the teleological, cosmological, and ontological arguments can only establish the necessity of a Supreme Being: they cannot reveal what revelation claims and that men must take on faith. If it can only be rationally demonstrated that a First Cause or Higher Power of some sort is necessary, that tells us next to nothing of the personality or lack thereof of this Being, to say nothing of His character. How then can we know the end for which things are made? Aristotle claimed to be able to, because his Unmoved Mover sat at the end of time and thought about thinking, drawing all beings unto itself by their love of its utter perfection. It was itself indifferent to persons, because it lacked nothing in itself. Aristotle accepted this God, as it were, by faith and thus his God was known to him. Natural Philosophy—now known as science—could not demonstrate the rational necessity of a God even as well understood as Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover.

One may very well believe in “Divine Theology,” but it is in nowise a matter of reason—rather it is a matter of faith. Once accepted, it may be fit into a rational system, but an initial act of faith is required to “grant the premises,” as it were. For the Scholastics, natural philosophy (scientific inquiry) was largely deduced from the writings of Aristotle and Plato as well as the Scriptures; for the Englightenment thinkers—particularly as charted out by Bacon—natural philosophy was inductive, starting from empirical observation and rational reflection (much like Locke’s system we mentioned in the last issue). So then, the Scholastics took on faith the writings of the ancients and used those as syllogisms, if you like, for deductive observations about the world. This method seemed very limiting to those who followed them and they sought the “book of Nature” instead, starting from their observation and reflection and building upward from an inductive system. Approaching the world in this way from induction re-opened the question of creation and put to death a cosmology, once agreed upon by the common consensus of virtually everyone, on which all could agree. If we do not all accept the same books as authoritative—and if nature is now the book that we have agreed to read—what can be said definitively about the ends for which things are made? Thus, Leibniz alone of the Enlightenment thinkers still embraced teleology and his reasoning is explained by the title of the final section of his Discourses on Metaphysics: “37. Jesus Christ Has Revealed to Men the Mystery and Admirable Laws of the Kingdom of Heaven and the Greatness of the Supreme Happiness God Prepares for Those Who Love Him.” That at least is the rationale of the Enlightenment thinkers.