Yes, of course. I just don’t think accurate measurements go in the same category as “objective truth” that a person can allegedly know or deduce or infer about God. And my point was that even our measurements are tied to our experience. All knowledge is. I think we can say true things about reality based on our experience with reality. Reality is knowable. I think we can make math work and write proofs, but math and proofs are still human constructs. I’m just not convinced there is this absolute truth unshaped by our experiences (and the ways of conceiving the world that our experiences have wired into our brains) we can have access to if we just try to be objective enough. All human knowledge is mediated by human experience, which is at some level subjective and dependent on the capacities of the experiencer to interface with the reality.
Your attitude toward the dangers and evil in this existence is the correct approach. We are living in a dream world meant to allow us to grow spiritually and have opportunities to show out love for God. This existence is not meant to be permanent and that is written into the laws of the universe. The permanent existence is the spirit world whose laws and rules are totally different…although we don’t know what they are. Remember that before creation there was no matter-energy, no space-time, no laws of the universe…just the spirit world.
No. We live real existences in a real, physical world. The Resurrection in the Bible is to physical bodies. The idea that spiritual is better than material is Greek, not from the Bible or Christian thought.
This point is huge (and true); I’ll get back to it later.
Hi Christy,
Thanks for your response. I'm a scientist and a Christian. Thus I seek to understand reality from both sources of information as they each provide insight. The combination gives us the best understanding of reality...which may well be only an approximation to the true reality. One should not ignore the view of reality that comes from science. Before creation (or the big bang) what existed? God and the spirit world. He created this material world to temporarily generate human life...human beings that He produces by fusing a spirit, a soul, to matter.
By the way, the study of Physics clearly shows that matter is organized energy and energy is composed of waves in space, What we think is solid is actually due to the repulsion of electron clouds. It's all ethereal, held together by forces. All human efforts and achievements have no long-term meaning or importance. What is important in life is growing spiritually in my ways including the opportunities that come to us because of the suffering in the world from natural disasters and the action of both sinful and evil people. That is what I mean by a dream world.
May God bless you,
Marco
I think math is discovered, not invented or constructed like the rules of baseball. Aquinas said, “Nothing is in the intellect that was not first in the senses” but this does not mean everything is subjective or that the intellect cannot abstract. I think this is exactly what you do here when you categorically state “All human knowledge is mediated by human experience, which is at some level subjective and dependent on the capacities of the experiencer to interface with the reality.” Either this statement is self-defeating and/or forceless. I would note that the same reasoning that went into this view is similar to that used to deduce God’s existence based on change, act, potency, etc. Just as God not being a moral agent is alien to you, my thinking is entirely opposed to modern relativism. It is self-defeating and honestly I would describe it as intellectual suicide. The end of the intellect is to seek truth and that is what we do. Universals are grounded in the Divine intellect and we most certainly do not icreate or invent God. Reality goes in the other direction.
This is incorrect from aclassical standpoint. Avoiding pure materialism and Platonism is where hylomorphism shines. It says that all materials are composites of form and matter. The soul is the form of the body. The body is as integral to us as the wood is to a table. We believe the soul has an immaterial component, it can survive death but without a body the soul is in a radically diminished state. It is made to be in union with a body and though it survives death it is impoverished until the resurrection. God is spirit, angels are non-material. Humans are composites of form and matter. We are both material and immaterial.
Vinnie
Hi Vinnie, the philosophical opinion that you share may or may not be correct. I cannot say either way. I can say that before the moment of creation (the big bang) current science states that there was no matter-energy or space or time. There was God as the initial cause. God is spirit (whatever spirit is) and God instilled the soul/spirit into matter organized as we perceive a human being. I interpret the soul as using matter as an interface to this material world (this reality) but your statement is probably equally valid. The only thing I can say is that the Catholic Church encourages prayers to saints who are souls without body and they intercede with God for us. If so then they are not that diminished. Another point to consider is that a glorified body must be totally different from a material body as it needs to last forever and Jesus moved into a locked room with His glorified body.
I disagree with parts of your quote. As an example, there is the everyday solid table we touch and the scientific table made of interacting particles and empty space. Claiming the scientific table is the true table or true reality and the solid world is an illusion is wrong to me. If I rob you of money or some physical good, should you not be upset since I am just taking mostly empty space? Or I am jut one force field and blob of particles and energy interacting with another?
For me, physics ignore or methodologically excludes things in order to focus on abstract, mathematical models. it is like a metal detector. It finds metal (what is is designed to). That does not mean there aren’t plenty of other objects buried in the sand. A metal detector cannot give us a complete portrait of what is buried in the sand anymore than science can give us a complete portrait of reality.
As far as praying to the saints for intercession, I am guessing you know Catholics believe in theCommunion of saints and that the will and intellect do survive death. The idea is the substance is in a diminished form awaiting resurrection but it is also believed that the soul is being elevated by Divine grace while it awaits the resurrection of the body to become complete again. It is a further believe that Mary is not disembodies but was assumed into heaven body and spirit. I understand how non Catholics may see this as a lot of hair splitting.
Vinnie
Vinnie, nice discussion! One can study a table or any material object in great detail and thus make statements about material objects that are true. There is no exclusion. The observations and analysis are not abstract or theoretical. We can certainly use the table as it appears and that does not diminish, in any way, the truth about the composition of the table. The same can be said about paper money, our body, etc. If one follows carefully the experiments that were performed to come to present knowledge (some of which one can perform without specialized equipment) the conclusions about the nature of matter are unescapable. What scientific analysis cannot measure or detect are things that are not part of the created universe such as angels and souls…and God Himself. Scientists use tools made of matter and energy and they can only detect what is made of matter and energy. By the way, I am a Catholic.
all the best, Marco
It seems to me that nominalists are simply being realistic about our epistemic limitations. Science is the best path for discovering empirical relationships but our understanding of whatever it turns up is another matter. How do we make sense of observations? Sure there is peer review and independent testing but the phenomenon of understanding itself, as with any other aspect of consciousness, can’t be directly studied by way of science. We need other ways to make sense of how it is we make sense of anything at all. In my experience, Christy has a lot of useful insights into that.
I think I agree with everything you said except the first sentence.
I think it is true that we should really be cautious about our epistemic limitations. But if a nominalist makes a categorical statement even one such as that, it is self-defeating and carries no force. Do you agree with this argument:
- The Bible is the Word of God.
- We know it is the Word of God because the Bible claims to be
- Because it is the Word of God, it must be true.
I do not. This is obviously the case of circular reasoning. It is a logical fallacy. We are supposed to spot and reject such logical fallacies. Likewise, look at the following statements:
- There is no truth.
- I cannot speak a word of English.
- Only science can provide us with true knowledge.
- All truth is relative.
- You should never use the word ‘never’.
- I do not exist.
- It is wrong to impose your view on others.
Nominalism does something similar in claiming objective universal do not exist which makes science a fiction in our heads just the same. The purpose of the intellect is determining truth. Self-defeating propositions and philosophies aint it, no matter how fancy we dress them. Nominalism castrates science then expects it to be fruitful and multiply.
Vinnie
Pop sci presenters sometimes do hype some distinction of this sort, but it is not really a scientific dichotomy. In terms of infinite divisibility of material, the solid table is an illusion. But in terms of emergent properties, a physical table is just as scientific as it is commonly perceived. For both nature and engineering design, fundamental forces and familiar objects coexist as levels of reality. And of course, empty space seems to be itself something of an illusion.
I’m not all that interested in understanding the constructs of nominalism versus realism or how it applies to my views because I don’t feel the need to endlessly label and categorize myself. When I say “humans cannot access purely objective (or absolute) truth in an unbiased way” “or all human knowledge is constructed” “or all human knowledge is perspectival,” it’s not accurate to push that all into an alleged “there is no absolute truth” box and claim it’s self-defeating. I affirm there is such a thing as absolute reality and a hypothetical description of that reality that constitutes absolute truth, and I can affirn that reality is (sufficiently) knowable, and all the while also acknowledge that human minds will never access a description of absolute reality in a way that is unmediated by their own subjectivity and embodiment. It doesn’t follow to say, “therefore you are claiming all truth is subjective” if what I am actually claiming is that all human knowledge of truth is subjective (to some degree, there is always a continuum of how close we can get). Obviously, reality and truth about reality exist independent of human knowledge of reality or objective access to absolute truth.
I think this goes a long way to saying why it is so hard to pin down what is real or objective. Again, I’ve come up through the humanities, mostly not the STEM subjects. But from my interest in philosophy I can sign off on the points Leonard Suskind makes here:
I don’t like that formulation due to its bad consequences. I’m thinking in particular of a young man whose growth in the Spirit was obvious to those who had known him before, but who was roundly condemned by older folks as not being spiritual because he didn’t live up to a checklist of what was “good”. He had abandoned almost all drugs, stopped stealing from other individuals and families, started to obey driving rules, and other sharp changes, but because of some “unfinished business” didn’t qualify as “good”.
I’m thoroughly enjoying the discussion between Vinnie and Christy, this forum is something else, really.
What I find really amusing is that the people I know who practically worship science are, for all intents and purposes, nominalists and anti-essentialists (even when they don’t even know what those terms mean, I mean they de facto are nominalists and anti-essentialists and I would argue that this applies to the vast majority of the contemporary population).
It never ceases to amaze me. I feel the same kind of amazement when I see people who are otherwise very grounded and strongly empiricist affirm things like the multiverse, often only because it doesn’t conflict with their preconceived belief that the universe came about purely by chance, a view that the multiverse conveniently allows them to maintain.
But nominalism doesn’t only affect how we view God and theology, for example I argue that the modern uncertainty surrounding the concept of human nature is closely connected to the decline of classical essentialism in Western philosophy, and understanding this shift requires tracing the transition from the pre-modern to the modern intellectual framework.
In classical and medieval thought, especially in the traditions of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, reality was understood as possessing real essences or natures. Every type of being had a defining structure, and knowledge consisted in grasping these stable forms. Human beings, for instance, were classically defined as “rational animals,” meaning that rationality belonged to the very essence of humanity. Ethical reflection therefore depended on understanding what human beings are by nature.
Within the classical Christian worldview, the human being possesses a real and stable nature grounded in creation. According to the biblical account in the Book of Genesis, humanity is created imago Dei, meaning that the human person reflects God in a unique way within the created order. This implies that human nature is not an arbitrary construct but a meaningful structure given by God. Classical Christian philosophy, influenced by Aristotelian metaphysics and developed by thinkers such as Thomas Aquinas, therefore affirms essentialism: the idea that things possess real natures that define what they are.
If such an essence exists, then human beings cannot legitimately redefine themselves at will. Technological interventions may restore or heal what has been damaged, but they cannot alter the fundamental nature of humanity without violating the order of creation. The concept of a real human essence thus places metaphysical limits on attempts to redesign the human being.
The rise of nominalism, though, introduced a significant disruption to this framework, as nominalist thinkers argued that universals (such as “human nature,” “essence,” or “species”) do not exist as real structures in reality but are merely names used by the mind to classify individual things. Once universals are treated as linguistic conventions rather than ontological realities, the idea of a fixed human nature becomes far less stable.
From this perspective, humanity can begin to appear not as a given form but as a flexible category. If “human nature” is only a conceptual label, then altering the biological or cognitive structure of human beings does not seem to violate an objective order. The human organism becomes something that can potentially be redesigned according to human intention.
Christian theology interprets this philosophical development within a broader spiritual narrative. In the Genesis account of the Fall, the serpent tempts the first humans with the promise that they will become “like God.” The core of the temptation is not merely disobedience but the desire for self-divinization, that is, the aspiration for the creature to transcend its created condition and determine its own nature independently of God.
From this perspective, the philosophical shift toward nominalism and anti-essentialism does more than alter metaphysical theory: It removes the conceptual barriers that once protected the idea of a given human nature, making possible a cultural horizon in which humanity increasingly seeks to become the author of its own essence. In Christian thought, this aspiration echoes the primordial temptation of Genesis, the promise that human beings can become their own creators.
This is also why I believe that modern man is becoming increasingly blind and deaf to God. The capacity to encounter God is closely connected to the recognition of one’s own limitations. As long as one remains aware of their condition as a creature, and recognize that their nature is not something that can simply be reshaped or redefined at will, they preserve a cognitive and spiritual disposition that remains open to God’s action.
The real problem arises when modern man begins to adopt an increasingly anti-creaturely understanding of himself.
Which is exactly the direction I went in the objective moral arguments I just put forward. Rejecting final causality is probably the single greatest intellectual blunder in world history.
Vinnie
Yes, and the problem is that this intellectual and philosophical perversion once belonged only to the elites, whereas today it has spread even among the broader population.
Moreover, intellectual perversion often leads to spiritual and moral corruption. Human beings are hylomorphic: when the intellect and the spirit become corrupted, the body tends to follow.
Edit: with this I’m not saying that all (or even most) nominalists are perverse people, far from it, but when nominalism is coupled with materialism it certainly tends to be a rather dangerous cocktail (spiritually speaking).
Well, I am specifically reacting to worm theology that says we can’t expect people to be good because we’re all just pathetic sinners whose attempts at righteousness are offensive to God so grace, grace, grace, put up with spiritual abuse and sick immorality from Christian leaders, because we are all sinners, and you are really no better. No. Some people are more good and more righteous than other people, and I’m talking about character and orientation of a person’s heart, not keeping a list of rules or being performative. If you say you are united with Christ in spirit and you are still utterly selfish and disposed to do evil things, it’s not normal and justifiable “fallen humanity” stuff. You are a bad person.