Metaphysics

William Hasker

• Éditeur: IVP Academic
• Année: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780830889976
• Sujet: Theologie & Religion
• Sous-sujet: Christliche Theologie

What is ultimately real? What is God like? Do human beings have minds and souls or only brains in bodies? Are humans free agents or are all human acts determined by prior circumstances? Through insightful analysis and careful evaluation, William Hasker helps readers answer these questions and thereby construct a world view to make sense of the universe and the people in it.

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Introducing
Metaphysics

What is there?” According to an eminent philosopher these simple words suffice to formulate the central question of all metaphysics.1 And his answer is even simpler: “Everything.” Obviously this is correct; whatever there is, is included in “everything,” while whatever doesn’t exist is really “nothing.” But it’s also obvious that both question and answer need much more explanation. So, let’s break the question “What is there?” down into some more specific questions—questions to which metaphysics will try to give detailed answers.

Metaphysical Questions

First of all, what is real? We all distinguish between things that are real, that really exist, and things that aren’t real. We can apply this distinction to persons, such as Paul Bunyan and Wyatt Earp; to activities, such as beaming aboard the Starship Enterprise and flying at supersonic speeds from Paris to New York: or to places, such as the land of Narnia and the Grand Duchy of Monaco. The second member of each pair, we say, is real or really exists, while the first member isn’t and doesn’t. Other examples are controversial: Is the Loch Ness monster real or not? And what of the yeti, the abominable snowman of the Himalayas? Some people believe in the reality of one or both of these, while others deny it and still others reserve judgment.

These, however, are still not the sorts of cases to which philosophers apply themselves when they ask what is real. But consider these questions: Is there such a being as God? Is a human being endowed with an immaterial self or “soul” which survives bodily death? Is there such a thing as a person’s performing an act of free choice, an act which is not determined or controlled by anything at all except the person’s own decision? Such questions as these take us right to the heart of metaphysics, and we will be concerned with all of them later in this book.

Second, what is ultimately real? What are the basic constituents of reality? We are familiar with the idea that things can be broken down into their constituents—for instance, a lovely perfume can be analyzed as a mixture of various organic chemicals, and these in turn as combinations of atoms of the various chemical elements, and so on. We tend to feel as we work through such an analysis that we are gaining insight into the real nature of what we are studying, that we are finding out what is “really real” in it. And we could almost define metaphysics by saying that a metaphysician is someone who pushes this kind of question just as far as it can go—to find the “ultimate reals” out of which are constructed perfumes and skyscrapers and planets and social structures and indeed simply everything.

Often this analysis of real things into their constituents is carried on in scientific terms, but a metaphysician may want to ask whether the constituents identified by science are the “ultimate reals,” or whether they can themselves be analyzed in terms of something still more basic. Sometimes what seems to be a strange or even preposterous statement about what is real turns out, when properly understood, to be instead a claim about what is “ultimately real.” Thus when a philosopher says that physical objects don’t exist, he probably doesn’t mean to say that there are no such things as trees, tables and baseball bats. It’s much more likely that what he means is that the “ultimate constituents” of such objects, what they really consist of, is something very different from physical objects as we ordinarily think of them. Perhaps trees and ball bats are ultimately made up of mental images, thoughts in people’s minds. Of course, this may still strike you as being strange and implausible, but it isn’t so obviously false and absurd as it would be to deny outright the existence of physical objects.

One may also ask whether the constituents identified by science are all of the “ultimate reals” that go to make up something. For instance, a physiologist can give an analysis of visual perception in terms of the focusing of reflected light by the lens of the eye, the reaction to this light by the rods and cones of the retina, the transmission of the visual information through the optic nerve and the processing of this information within the brain. But does this analysis include all of what is involved in seeing something? That is an important—and highly controversial—question of metaphysics.

Throughout these last paragraphs I have been assuming that we can indeed discover what is ultimately real by breaking things down into their constituents. But according to one group of philosophers this approach is fundamentally mistaken. The theory of wholism claims that wholes, complex entities, typically have a reality of their own over and above that of their constituents. Thus, analysis of a whole into its parts always falsifies its nature by failing to capture this “something more.” According to extreme forms of wholism, the only ultimately correct answer to the question “What is there?” would be “everything.” Any other answer would distort the truth by failing to capture the indissoluble unity of the Real (or, as some would say, of the Absolute). In this book I shall assume that the process of analysis is valid and that we can find out what a thing is by determining what it consists of. But the reader should be aware of the existence of the wholistic viewpoint.

Finally, metaphysics asks, what is man’s place in what is real? Out of all the different sorts of beings in heaven and earth, there is no doubt that we have a very special interest in the creatures we ourselves are, namely, human beings. That concern partly, no doubt, expresses our self-centeredness, and it is tempting to wonder what philosophy would be like if it were written by an ant or an electron. On the other hand, it just is a fact that in the world as we know it human beings are somewhat unique. Ants and electrons, after all, don’t write philosophy, and this is part and parcel of the reasons why both are several notches below humans in what has been called the “great chain of being.” If, on the other hand, we someday find that there really are extraterrestrial intelligences, their philosophical views will be of the deepest interest.

For the part of the universe we know, however, humans would seem to be either the highest, most complex and elaborate products of nature, or else the visible link between nature and something beyond nature: “mid-way between the brutes and the angels,” as Pascal put it. Which of these is true (or, conceivably, whether both might be true) is clearly a question of great importance. It will have significance for what we sometimes call the meaning of life, for how we ought to live and for what (if anything) we ought to worship. Not all the questions in this area, to be sure, are questions of metaphysics; some belong to ethics, some to the philosophy of religion and some to still other disciplines. But metaphysical questions—questions about what there is—lie at the very core of these issues. They are among the enduring questions of philosophy because they are among the central—and ultimately inescapable—issues of human life.

All these types of questions are illustrated in this book. Chapter two, “Freedom and Necessity,” asks about the real existence of causally undetermined acts of human free choice. Chapter three, “Minds and Bodies,” poses from several different directions the question of the ultimate constituents of human beings, their experiences and their actions; it also asks about the real existence of the immaterial, immortal human soul. Both of these chapters in their different ways contribute to our understanding of man’s place in what is real.

In chapter four, “The World,” we wrestle with the question of the ultimate constituents of the natural world and the implications of this for our understanding of science and the universe as a whole. Chapter five, “God and the World,” deals with that Being whose real existence is both supremely important and intensely controversial. It also takes up the relationships between that Being and the created world; thus it sets the stage for a final consideration of man’s place in what is real.

These are not all of the questions of metaphysics but they are, I believe, the most important ones. They are questions which are vital for each one of us as we go about the task of constructing a world view. We need to think as clearly and accurately about them as we possibly can.

Answering Metaphysical Questions

If the topics suggested here are some of the central questions of metaphysics, how shall we go about answering them? Unfortunately, this question can’t be answered in a way all philosophers would accept. Philosophers disagree about the correct methods for resolving philosophical questions almost as much as they disagree about the answers to the questions. So it’s not possible to give a complete account of the “right” philosophical method without taking sides between the various philosophers and philosophies—something I hardly want to do so early in this book! For present purposes I shall compromise by giving an account of philosophical method which is general enough to be acceptable (as far as it goes) to most philosophers, and yet specific enough to be of some help as we deal with various metaphysical questions in the subsequent chapters.

To begin with something absolutely fundamental, in philosophy we are seeking to have good reasons for the assertions we make. All of us have some beliefs that we accept on the basis of prejudice, or hunches, or because someone once told us it was so, or even just out of habit. When we are philosophizing, however, we won’t base our statements on such beliefs as these; instead, we will try to stick to what we have good reason to believe. Does this mean that all our statements must be proved? No, it doesn’t. To see why not, we must consider briefly the meaning of “proof.” Speaking generally, we prove that something is true if we can show its truth by reasoning based on other things we know to be true. That is to say, a proof is a special kind of argument, a process of reasoning whereby, on the basis of a statement or statements already known or assumed to be true (the premises), we are able to justify some new statement (the conclusion).

Now whatever we can prove (or have a strong argument for), we have good reason to believe; but not everything can be proved. In order to prove anything, we need to have premises which we already know (or have good reason to believe) to be true. Some of these premises may be things we have established by previous arguments, but not all of them can be. For in that case in order to prove anything, we should first have to prove the premises of our proof—but to do that we must first have proved the premises for that proof—and so on indefinitely. Obviously this is impossible, so if there is anything we have good reason to believe, there must be some things which we are entitled to take as true without first having proved them.

But what are these basic or foundational truths, as they are sometimes called? This is one of the central questions of the branch of philosophy known as epistemology, or the theory of knowledge; we certainly can’t try to settle it here.2 For our present purposes we can best operate on the basis of a couple of rules of thumb which will enable us to proceed without first settling the question of which truths are basic.

The first rule is this: We may take as premises for a metaphysical argument anything we know, or have good reason to believe, to be true. This would certainly include ordinary perceptual beliefs, such as my belief that I am now seeing a tree, as well as the many sorts of beliefs that are justified through sense perception, including beliefs about historical facts and the well-established results of science (always to be carefully distinguished from the speculations, conjectures and opinions of scientists). Another broad category of beliefs can be classified under the headings of logic (“No statement can be both true and false”) and mathematics (“7 + 5 = 12”; “If equals are added to equals, the results are equal”). These seem to be justified not by sense perception, but by some sort of rational insight or understanding.

There are still other beliefs which don’t readily fit into any of these categories. For example: “Nothing begins to exist without a cause.” This is something all of us seem to believe, but what are our grounds for accepting it? We might be tempted to think it is justified through experience, but actually this is very questionable. Just what experiences have we had that entitle us to assert concerning every single thing in the universe, that if this thing has not always existed then something caused it to exist? Things do sometimes make their appearance inexplicably, and if we decide to look for the cause we are not always successful. Our conviction that there must be a cause somewhere, even if we can’t find it, seems to be a conviction we bring to our experience, rather than a conclusion drawn from experience. On the other hand, there doesn’t seem to be anything logically contradictory in the idea that an object should just originate spontaneously out of nothing. So why are we so convinced that this can’t happen?

That nothing begins to exist without a cause is just one example of the sort of belief I am referring to. Another example is this: “Nothing we do now can change the past.” This also is not something we can very plausibly claim to have learned through experience, nor does it seem possible to prove it without assuming as a premise some other principle which is less obvious than the thing we are trying to prove. The status of principles such as these has been and continues to be a hotly debated issue in metaphysics and epistemology. And once again, it’s an issue that I can’t attempt to settle in an introductory chapter. For our present purposes, the best way of looking at such principles will be to consider them as metaphysical data, that is, as fundamental assumptions that we seem to bring to experience rather than derive from it, and which we seem firmly to believe in without being able to prove.3 Such beliefs are not immune to challenge, if anyone wants to challenge them (in philosophy, nothing is immune to challenge!). But certainly they must be taken very seriously in any attempt we make to reason out the nature of the world in which we live.

We have now identified, in a rough and general way, several kinds of beliefs that we are entitled to assume as premises in metaphysical arguments. But is there any guarantee that by following these guidelines we shall arrive at truth and at conclusions which are acceptable to all reasonable people? The answer is that there is no absolute guarantee of this. Notoriously, one person’s unchallengeable truth is another’s questionable assumption, and for someone else it may be an outright falsehood. This is not to say that “truth is relative,” but simply to point out that there is no person or group of persons whose belief in a statement can be taken as an absolute guarantee that the statement is true.

This leads to our second rule of thumb for doing metaphysics: No belief, no matter how firmly held or apparently well supported, is beyond the possibility of challenge or questioning. Another way of putting this is to say that philosophy is, ideally, a completely nondogmatic subject. Nothing is accepted merely on authority, no matter how reputable; and no assertion, however outrageous, is ruled out of court if it can be supported with good reasons.

The point about the role of authority or authorities in philosophy requires more discussion. One might be tempted to say that authority has no place at all in philosophy, but this can’t be entirely true. None of us lives life or forms beliefs without considerable reliance on authorities of various kinds. It is important to distinguish the various kinds of authorities and see how they function.

One type might be termed legal authority; in this I include not just the law in a narrow sense but rather all situations in which some person or group of persons has the right simply to decide something which henceforth is so just because it has been decided that way. Thus a network executive has authority to decide whether a soap opera will be pre-empted in order to cover a presidential news conference, the city council has authority to determine what shall be the speed limit in residential areas, and so on. Now legal authority, in spite of its great importance for life in general, has no place at all in metaphysics, nor, for that matter, in science or mathematics. These disciplines deal with matters which are as they are independent of any decisions which can be made by human beings (a point which seems to have escaped the notice of the state legislature which, as legend has it, passed a law fixing the value of the mathematical constant π!).

But this is not the only kind of authority. Such fields as science, history and medicine, while not based on legal authority are nevertheless heavily dependent on authorities of another kind. Obviously a historian coul...