Atheist Quotes (3)

Atheist Quote number 3 (of 101) from the Atheist Blog:

I believe in God, only I spell it Nature. - Frank Lloyd Wright


In the proof of God's existence, St. Thomas first tried to answer the twofold objection of evil and need. The above quote is something associated with the second objection. It runs thus:

"...it is superfluous to suppose that what can be accounted for by a few principles has been produced by many. But it seems that everything we see in the world can be accounted for by other principles, supposing God did not exist. For all natural things can be reduced to one principle which is nature; and all voluntary things can be reduced to one principle which is human reason, or will. Therefore there is no need to suppose the existence of God." (Summa Theologica, Prima Pars, A. 3, Q.2)

In the time of Aquinas, science is still associated with philosophy, being called philosophy of nature. For him, and until the time of Newton (who called one of his masterpieces as "Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica"), Natural science is a handmaid of metaphysics, the former serving the latter. Hence, for metaphysics, all things are reducible to an ultimate principle.

Wherefore, St. Thomas replied thus:

"Reply to Objection 2. Since nature works for a determinate end under the direction of a higher agent, whatever is done by nature must needs be traced back to God, as to its first cause. So also whatever is done voluntarily must also be traced back to some higher cause other than human reason or will, since these can change or fail; for all things that are changeable and capable of defect must be traced back to an immovable and self-necessary first principle, as was shown in the body of the Article".

In a word, nature and will are not the ending, and that it needs to be reduced to the first principle of nature and will, which are clearly caused.

Now, for modern science, still the attitude is to content with proximate causes, because the latter are but correlates to the effects that are being investigated. It learned a lot from the arguments of Hume and the other skeptics (hey, this is labelling) that all we have is probability and not certainty. Hence, if what is considered proximate cause is merely a cause by probability, what more the ultimate ones? Hence, science stops there.

This attitude is not consistent with the practice in gravitational physics, which posits the existence of dark matter, from the "effects" on surrounding matter.

Frank Lloyd Wright's statement is a clear manifestation that the term God is understood by many differently. We will commit the error of equivocation if we talk about it to different people in the same way we thought it should be understood. That is why I wrote that we should not rely on definitions, nor reason through them.