We Are All Philosophers

A Christian Introduction to Seven Fundamental Questions

John M. Frame

• Publisher: Lexham Press
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781683593119
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

1

WHAT IS EVERYTHING MADE OF?

One of the first things we want to know about our world is its ingredients. We are curious about what goes into a chocolate cake, what materials are used to build our houses, what chips animate our smartphones. At one level, we answer these questions by personal experience, and we expand that experience by asking questions of other people and consulting other sources. When we ask the question more technically—How many milligrams of sodium are in this cookie?—we turn to scientists for more expertise. Their perspective takes us to further dimensions of reality: everything is made of the elements of the periodic table, and those in turn are collections of subatomic particles of various kinds. A recent theory says that everything is ultimately made of vibrating strings. But in my unscientific way, I ask what the strings are made of, a question that I’ve never seen an answer to.

As we ask the question more and more abstractly, at some point it becomes philosophical. Many of the questions we today consider scientific, such as those about astronomy and biology, were once considered philosophical: the philosopher Aristotle did not consider it beyond his proper arena to write books about the heavenly bodies and the parts of animals. But today, the term philosophy is reserved for the most abstract questions there are. Although the range of the term philosophy today is different from its use in the ancient world, questions of a highly abstract level have been with us since the beginning of the discipline.

THALES’ METAPHYSICAL WATER

The first Greek philosopher, Thales, is famous for saying “all is water.” The Greeks, who did not have our modern periodic table, acknowledged four elements out of which they thought everything was made: earth, air, fire, and water. That simplified somewhat the question of what the world is made of: there were only four possibilities. We don’t know the reasons for Thales’ choice, but we can imagine him arguing with his colleagues and students that there is a huge amount of water in the oceans, lakes, and rivers, and that it even comes down from the sky. Thales probably didn’t know how large was the percentage of water in the human body, but he may have made an observation about that, and about how difficult it is for us to survive without water.

But another philosopher, Anaximenes, thought that all was made of air; and he may well have replied to Thales that we can survive without water longer than we can survive without air. And look at the huge amount of air in the expanse around us.

But someone might have asked each of these men, How do you know that everything conforms to your thesis? Thales didn’t have any way of judging how much water there was on the moon, planets, or stars. (We still debate that question.) And even if we could show that the earth and the heavenly bodies are all made of water, how can we be sure that that is the end of our quest? How can we be sure that water is truly an “element,” that it is not in turn made up of other ingredients?

Anaximander, another Greek philosopher of roughly the same generation, was more modest than Thales (it’s all water) and Anaximenes (it’s all air). He argued that we really don’t know what the whole universe is made of. He thought it best to say that the basic ingredient was apeiron—the indefinite. We don’t know what it is, but everything else somehow comes out of it.

These philosophers asked the question of ingredients, what Aristotle called “material cause,” at the most abstract level. They wanted to find a substance that made up everything, but was not itself made up of anything else. They were seeking, in other words, to define “being.” Being, whatever it is, is the most fundamental reality there is. Everything is being. So if we are to gain a truly complete knowledge of the universe, it seems that we must be able to describe, even define, being itself. The earliest Greek thinkers believed that they could approach this issue materialistically, by considering the physical ingredients that pervade the universe. If everything is truly water, as Thales believed, then being itself is water and water is being.

But another problem arises: Thales’ being-water is not real water. It is what we might call “metaphysical water.”2 Normally, when I wash my hands, I put water on them (with soap, as Mom always insisted) and then dry them off. My hands become wet with water, and then become dry, as I remove the water. But with Thales’ water I am never dry. The soap is water too, and the towel, and the sunshine that warms my hands and evaporates the remaining moisture. Thales’ metaphysical water is not distinct from anything else in the world. It doesn’t have the familiar properties we associate with water; it doesn’t have water’s distinctions from other realities.

What is it, then? Thales’ metaphysical water is simply being, nothing more or less. It is not really distinct from any other kind of being, because there is no other. The most that can be said for his thesis is that on Thales’ view water is the best description of being—that being is more like water than it is like anything else, even granting the differences between metaphysical water and literal water. But as we have seen, that assertion is debatable.

This means that (at the abstract, philosophical level) the question of ingredients boils down to the question of being: What is this world, really? Here the philosopher seeks a God’s eye view of the world, an ultimate answer to the question “What is being?” But clearly Thales didn’t answer that question. His answer is that being is something like water—but also not literal water. As it turns out, for him water is a metaphor for the ultimate character of the world. But Thales was looking for an answer, not a metaphor.

ARISTOTLE’S BEING AND NOTHINGNESS

The great philosopher Aristotle is famous for distinguishing four “causes.” When he talked about “material cause,” he usually did it in his usual common-sense way. Statues are made of stone, tables out of wood, and cakes out of flour and other ingredients. But even he could not avoid raising this question to an abstract, philosophical level: What is everything made of?

Like Plato, he distinguished between form and matter. At the common-sense level, the stone in the statue is its matter, its material cause. But then the sculptor shapes this stone into a new form, perhaps the form of Socrates. So the object is no longer just stone; it is a statue of Socrates. It is the form that makes the object what it is and dictates its purpose (its “formal” and “final” causes).3 But the matter is what the statue is made of.

Now the stone also has ingredients: chemicals of various kinds. At each level, matter is made of other matter. But at some point the analysis reaches bottom. Aristotle believed that underneath everything there was a “matter” common to everything in the universe. He called it “prime matter,” the matter standing underneath all other matter and underneath all form. Prime matter is the ultimate bearer of form. But to be prime matter, that matter could not itself have any form.

A problem occurs here: for Aristotle, we have seen, the form is what makes the object what it is. Without any form, then, the object isn’t anything. It is nothing. It doesn’t exist. But what about prime matter?

We are tempted to say that because prime matter is the ingredient of everything in the universe, it is the most pervasive sort of being. It is like Thales’ metaphysical water, the essence of everything else. But we should resist that temptation. Aristotle’s prime matter cannot be being at all, because it has no form. For Aristotle, only form confers being on something. Prime matter has no form, for it is what bears form; it is what lies beneath all form. Since it has no form, it is not being at all. It is nonbeing, nothingness.

The Greek philosophers had a passion to understand being in general. But to understand anything, you have to understand what it is contrasted with. You don’t understand blue if you have no idea of how blue is different from red. So you don’t understand being unless you understand how it is different from nonbeing. But Thales, Aristotle, and other Greek philosophers failed to describe any intelligible difference between being and nonbeing. Thales’ metaphysical water characterizes everything, so one cannot make a distinction between water and nonwater. The same is true of Aristotle’s prime matter. It characterizes everything equally, so that we cannot describe it as being or as nonbeing. On the one hand, prime matter is what everything is made of, the most pervasive kind of being. On the other hand, it is not being at all, but nonbeing. But if you can’t distinguish being from nonbeing, you have made no philosophical progress. Indeed, we are up against a brick wall: it seems that being is made of nonbeing, and vice versa, so that “being” and “nonbeing” are both meaningless expressions.

Parmenides bit the bullet. He promoted the idea of a universe that consisted entirely of being, with no nonbeing at all. He eliminated from his system anything that he thought involved nonbeing: change, generation, destruction, plurality. It seemed obvious: being is, and nonbeing is not. But what is being, in a universe where it cannot be contrasted with nonbeing? And if there is no nonbeing, what is meant by saying that there is “no” change, “no” generation, “no” destruction, and “no” plurality?

So though the Greeks sought mightily to understand and distinguish being and nonbeing, they ended up making them virtually equivalent, and therefore mutually destructive. That is, of course, philosophical suicide.

ATOMISMS

Another method among the Greek philosophers to find the ultimate ingredients of the world was to chop the world down into its smallest pieces. The atomists thought that when they discovered the tiniest constituents of the world, then they would know the ultimate nature of the world and of being. So Democritus, Epicurus, and others postulated that the world consisted of tiny, material entities. These were called “atoms,” which means “unchoppables.” Since they cannot be further chopped, they must be the ultimate constituents of the world. Everything else in the world can be traced to the material properties and the motions of these entities.

On Democritus’ view, these atoms move through space in a single direction. But Epicurus pointed out that if they are all moving in parallel lines they will never meet. But they must meet, if they are to bump into one another and thus create larger objects. So Epicurus speculated that atoms occasionally “swerved” from their usual parallel path. The swerve is entirely unpredictable,4 irrational in effect; but it accounts for the world we live in. This amounts to concluding one’s philosophical quest by saying the world “just is.”

Nobody has ever actually seen an atom. Atoms are just our imagined image of what the world would look like all chopped up. Nobody has ever seen an atom swerve, either. That event is just a metaphor for what we imagine all events to consist of. So as Thales’ water was a metaphor for being, so Epicurus’ atoms (plus their swerve) are a metaphor for describing what happens.5

MINDLIKE ENTITIES

But atomism is not dead. G. W. Leibniz was part of the rationalist philosophical movement of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and he confronted a problem similar to that of Thales and Aristotle.6 Leibniz, like the Greeks, tried to find the ultimate constituents of reality, but the material causes were elusive, as they were for the Greeks. Philosopher John Locke had said that material substances were impossibl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Chapter 1: What Is Everything Made Of?
• Chapter 2: Do I Have Free Will?
• Chapter 3: Can I Know the World?
• Chapter 4: Does God Exist?
• Chapter 5: How Shall I Live?
• Chapter 6: What Are My Rights?
• Chapter 7: How Can I Be Saved?
• Appendix: Letters on Philosophical Topics
• Bibliography