Philosophy for Understanding Theology, Second Edition

by Diogenes Allen

each individual. Ockham was what we now call a conceptualist.

This view of perception (a direct intuition of sensible beings' existence and properties) is called "realism" in modern philosophy. It should not be confused with the realism that concerns the ontological reality of common natures in things.

The created world is sheer fact, utterly contingent on God's will with no metaphysical ground of necessity on which to construct a demonstrative philosophy with which theology must cohere.

Humanists sought to reintegrate us into the world of nature and history as the proper realm for the realization of our capacities.

powerful motive in the scientific revolution or search for useful knowledge

This attitude contrasts with Aristotle's theoria, which is to be contemplated as an end in itself.

Since the term humanism. is used today by some Protestants as a term of reproach, a few more remarks are in order.

existence. The theological foundation of Christian humanism is that human beings are made in the image of God.

reasons, considered only the mathematical properties of bodies as essential

All other properties of bodies as they appear to our senses-such as color, texture, smell, and taste-are the result of the size, shape, and motion of matter on our sense organs.

secondary qualities-secon...

change from potency to act)

Galileo gave a mathematical relation for bodies in motion, and his crucial revolutionary element was his treatment of time as an abstract parameter of motion.

Christian Aristotelianism had respected the integrity of nature and had developed foundations in nature for morals, society, law, and politics, and then related them all to our supernatural end. But with a new conception of nature, these human activities had to be rethought from the ground up.

it had to get its first push from somewhere,

operation. So Newton, as others, with the best of intentions, inserted God into those places where our science had no explanations to offer.

This violates the transcendence of God, who is not a being among beings. Natural causes are to be given for natural processes.

The difference between a believer and a nonbeliever is that the nonbeliever thinks that natural processes are "just the way things are," whereas a believer claims they are the way t...

natural causes. Newton and others who think of explanations of natural processes that refer to God and those that refer to natural causes as being on the same plane and interchangeable actually cause needless conflicts between science and religion,

In the modern period the emphasis is on epistemology.

His method of arriving at certainty is to begin by doubting everything that can be doubted until he finds that which cannot be doubted even by making the most far-fetched and improbable assumptions.

sense experience cannot give us certainty.

The second of the three great rationalists, Spinoza, took this connection-logical necessity-with utter seriousness.

One of the values of Spinoza's work is that it stimulated people in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to make a distinction between logical necessity, which is a relation between propositions, and physical necessity, which is a relation between sensible things.

Substance is infinite in every respect. There cannot be two or more substances

Mind and body are aspects of one substance, not different beings (or substances)

(This idea is called "double aspect" theory and is closely related to another theory concerning the relation of mind and body, "neutral monism.")

Leibniz, the third and last of the great seventeenth-century rationalists,

of the principle of sufficient reason.

for the reason something is connected to something else in reality is not that it logically must be connected but that ...

Leibniz's position is thus between those of Descartes and Spinoza. It is a distinctive type of determinism sometimes called "soft determinism" or "compatibilism."

interactionism nor the theory of occasionalism,

behaviorism,

John Locke (1632-1704) created empiricism,

Descartes because for Locke all our ideas have their origin in experience.

God. Certainty was not to be achieved beyond a very narrow range of things, but to demand it where it is not available and to lapse into doubt or even skepticism, as some Cartesians did, was self-defeating.

Locke does not limit experience to sense experience. Experience includes our awareness of our own processes of perceiving and reasoning.

sensationalism,

Locke's work, with its stress on probability, was a balanced position between skepticism and certainty.

He pounced on Locke's doctrine of abstract ideas, which was Locke's account of how general words (our old problem with universals) can apply to particulars.

an image, he concluded that there is no such thing as an abstract idea.

esse est percipi ("to be is to be perceived").

secondary ideas. Those ideas that represent qualities in external objects are primary ideas. Those ideas that do not represent qualities in external objects are secondary ideas.

"phenomenalism"

Montesquieu

So we too are bundles or collections of perceptions, which succeed each other

He describes the nature of this inquiry with great precision in a single question: How are a priori synthetic propositions possible?

An analytic statement is based on the identity of the subject and the predicate. Its truth depends on the principle of contradiction.