In this series, I am sharing with you some thoughts I had on my daily walks. And yes, I really do think about such things on my solitary walks. Walk with me as we explore connections among ideas that have stimulated the minds and stirred the hearts of people from ancient times to today. Thinking won’t solve every problem, but no problem will be solved without it.

Misplaced Realism

In my account of Solitary Walk II, I mentioned a thought I did not pursue. Early modern natural science rejected Aristotle’s hypotheses about why things behave the way they do, calling them “occult” (that is hidden or non-observable) only to replace them with their own occult entities. Instead of things being moved by inner strivings toward ends and given structure by intelligible forms, the new scientists postulated tiny material particles that relate to each other the way the parts of a machine relate in the macro world. And they treated this imaginary model as if it described what is truly real. I don’t know for sure whether Galileo, Gassendi, and Newton took these models realistically or merely as guides for further discovery. But many of their followers took them literally, and that is the way westerners have been taught physics and chemistry ever sense.

This misplaced realism has had a profound cultural and religious impact on the modern world. Treating the material/mechanical model as truly describing the constitution and activity of the real world dramatically changes our relationship to the natural world. The external world gets evacuated of every spiritual, mental, psychological, and aesthetic quality. These qualities are transferred to a God outside and beyond nature or inside the human mind.  The world becomes a material machine that exists and runs on its own. Matter becomes the enduring substance of the world and effectively takes the place of the sustaining power of God. We can no longer see God doing anything or feel God’s presence. And the loss of a sense of divine presence and activity in the world lies at the origin and growth of modern agnosticism and atheism.

But the material/mechanical model should never have been taken realistically. The model has not and cannot be shown to be true by the mathematical methods of modern science. And there are good reasons to think it false.

Whence the Concept of Matter?

Consider the idea of matter, beginning with common experience. We encounter the world in two fundamental ways. On the one hand, we think the intelligible world of ideas, patterns, concepts, feelings, imaginings, and our own minds. These things exist inside our minds and do not conform to the physical laws that describe the external world. They do not occupy physical space. It takes no more space to imagine a galaxy than to imagine an electron. On the other hand, we experience the world as brute resistance, impenetrable by mind, unordered stuff out of which every physical thing is formed. We cannot think matter. We experience it as a dumb medium that impacts the five senses only to unload (or download!) the information encoded in it.

Let’s consolidate. The only world we can think, understand, or feel exists within our minds. Where else could we get in touch with it? And yet, there are two reasons we naturally believe that there exists an external world. First, we do not have a sense that we generate the countless ideas and endless variation of things that constitute the world we experience. Second, we experience the world as offering resistance to penetration by our minds. It confronts us with an apparently unthinking and unthinkable substance, a mere medium, which we call matter.

Let me make one more important distinction. We often confuse the concept of “the physical” with the concept of “the material.” We can experience and at least partially understand physical things. A physical thing, whether a rabbit or an atom, is a combination of a thinkable, intelligible order and what common sense calls matter. No physical thing is purely material. Matter is the physical stripped of all intelligible order. So, kicking a stone or pounding your hand on a table does not prove that there is a material world. At best, it points to the physical world.

Matter is Not a Scientific Idea but a Philosophical One

Ancient Philosophy

Plato reasoned to the necessity of matter by deducing the necessity of a place or space where the intelligible forms—the ideas of things—can exist as physical. What we would call “matter” is for Plato emptiness not substance. For Aristotle, the concept of matter is necessary to account for continuity of existence through the process of substantial change. For example, a burning log loses its substantial “log” existence and becomes smoke and ash. Matter is the unchanging stuff that accounts for the continuity within the change. Otherwise, substantial change would result in annihilation and re-creation from nothing. Matter never exists on its own. It exists only as a contributing cause to the existence of physical things.

Thomas Aquinas

Thomas Aquinas adopts Aristotle’s rather than Plato’s concept of matter. Aquinas agrees with Aristotle that matter is necessary to account for continuity through substantial change—log to smoke and ash. However, whereas for Aristotle both matter and form exist eternally, for Aquinas God created matter from nothing. God alone exists eternally and possesses the power of self-existence. Created matter functions within the created world much like eternal matter functioned in Aristotle’s eternal world. However, two great differences stand out. First, created matter, because it is not self-existent, cannot function as the ultimate ground of the persistence of the physical world through all changes. Second, matter cannot be purely opposed to mind, absolutely unintelligible. For whatever God creates, God thinks and understands. For us, matter may be an unintelligible medium for information or mere resistance, but God sees right through it. Everything that exists, exists within God’s mind. So, the distinction we make between form and matter is secondary, relative to our experience of the world and not absolute. For God—and therefore in truth—there is no non-mental world.

Escaping the Material/Mechanical Model

Once we understand that the material/mechanical model is a philosophical postulate—not an empirical observation or a scientific theory—and that taken realistically it contradicts the Christian doctrine of God and creation, we can get free from its mesmerizing power and begin to recover our sense of God’s presence and activity in the world. Realizing that the power that holds the world together is not matter but God’s continual command of “let it be” opens whole new vistas of perception. We now can perceive the presence and activity of God in the presence and activity of physical things. The beauty, rationality, purpose and goodness we see in the world can be received as the beauty, rationality, purpose and goodness of God. The durability of the world can be felt as the faithfulness of God.

Next Time: We will take another walk. Can the order and activity of the world best be explained as that of a big mindless machine or of a living organism. Do plants have souls or are they machines within machines?