Nash declared that Naturalism’s touchstone proposition is that

Nothing exists outside the material, mechanical (that is, nonpurposeful), natural order.

We see right away that in phrasing this, Nash put his Christian thumb on the scale. He made sure to throw in “mechanical” and “nonpurposeful” because that provides something juicy to attack. But how are they fundamental to Naturalism? In fact, I would argue that if Naturalism is true, then the world can not be mechanical. Mechanism and determinism are Trojan horses Christians like Nash try to give to the Naturalist camp, but which in fact are incompatible with it, as we shall see.

If Nash hadn’t had his pro-Christian thumb on the scale, naturalism’s touchstone proposition would have been simple and far-reaching:

Nothing exists outside the natural order.

Which means, quite simply, there is no supernatural order: no God, no heaven, no place for souls to survive death and depart to. One thing that might be added to the touchstone proposition, I suppose, is that the most reliable way to learn about the natural world is to apply the scientific method. In that case we would have

Nothing exists outside the natural order, and the most reliable way to understand that order is to apply the scientific method.

though I’m not sure what is lost in conciseness is worth the addition.

What is natural?

But I think there is a problem with using this as naturalism touchstone proposition. For in essence it defines naturalism by saying that everything is natural. But what does it mean to say that everything is “natural”. Does it really mean anything?

It might make more sense to say “everything is physical” rather than “everything is natural” — but even here we are burdened with the difficulty of explaining exactly what “physical” means. Well, we might declare that “physical” means whatever the physical sciences can study. Scientists are able to study what we routinely call “the physical world” because that world does things, and it leaves evidence of its doings. It is almost as if we are saying that if it doesn’t do something, if it doesn’t leave evidence of its existence, it doesn’t exist. Existence = Evidence.

But is this right? Certainly we can’t know of a thing’s existence if there is no evidence for it, but does that rule it out of existence?

It can’t. We had no evidence for the existence of neutrinos two centuries ago, yet neutrinos existed 200 years ago as certainly as they exist today. Even in 2007, things undoubtedly exist of which we currently know nothing.

Ah, but even if we were ignorant of it, neutrinos were doing things two centuries ago. Evidence logically requires an observer, and there were no observers of neutrinos then. However, in 1807 neutrinos were nonetheless doing things that in theory were observable. Existence = Possibility of Evidence.

But there is a problem with defining what is physical by its potential to produce evidence. God, according to theists, also produces evidence (the big bang, they claim, is one such example of God’s doings). That’s a problem because it means our definition of “physical” as anything whose doings are potentially observable is too broad: it doesn’t exclude clearly non-physical hypotheses like God.

It might be countered that God is excluded from being physical by His definition. After all, God is specifically “non-physical”. But the whole point is that we are trying to identify what distinguishes “physical” from “non-physical”, and the claim that physical things are those that yield evidence (or at least potential evidence) doesn’t work for making that distinction.

Of course, God can’t be detected directly. Yet neither can many things we definitely consider physical. We have no direct detection of the sun, only of its effects (photons, gravity etc), and this goes for a host of other “physical” entities.

What makes the God hypothesis different is how God is claimed to interact with the world. God’s way of doing things is not by moving but by thinking. God’s relationship to the world is that of a mind making things exist and happen by imagining what he wants. This gets us to the heart of the difference between naturalism and supernaturalism. The latter postulates mind before matter; the former matter before mind.

In other words, the difference between the two lies in a fundamental disagreement about when mind comes into the picture. According to naturalism, mind — intelligence, ideas, information — doesn’t exist in the beginning, and only comes into existence when organisms evolve with brains capable of creating sensations of thought. Supernaturalism tears the mind away from the brain and declares that mind was there in the beginning and created all. That is the crux of the disagreement.

Hold this thought. We’ll come back to it.

The Trojan Horse

Although I’ve identified the real distinction between naturalism and supernaturalism as a disagreement about when mind enters the picture, this has not been the usual approach to distinguishing the two worldviews. The typical approach has been to concentrate on naturalism as the belief that everything is physical or material. However, though it seems like we know what we mean by words like “physical” and “material”, as we saw earlier it is difficult to define them in a way that excludes what we don’t mean.

The attempt to get around this difficulty has led a good many thinkers to define “physical” as equivalent to our scientific knowledge of the world. The physical then becomes the same as the causal relationships found in our scientific theories — or at least those theories and laws which will be eventually found by scientists to be true. That scientific theories are “models” of the universe rather than the universe itself gets missed.

The resulting confusion is a boon for naturalism’s foes. To see how this works, let’s return to Faith & Reason. Nash quotes William Halverson, an advocate of naturalism, as follows,

The world is, to use a very inadequate metaphor, like a gigantic machine whose parts are so numerous and whose processes are so complex that we have thus far been able to achieve only a very partial and fragmentary understanding of how it works. In principle, however, everything that occurs is ultimately explicable in terms of the properties and relations of the particles of which matter is composed. Once again the point may be stated simply: determinism is true. [Halverson, Concise Introduction to Philosophy, p 394, quoted by Nash p 47]

Halverson accepted the Trojan horse. Indeed, he embraced it.

To put it bluntly, he is wrong. Both in his understanding of the nature of the world and in his understanding of Naturalism, Halverson is mistaken. The last sentence above encapsulates his error. He jumps from the observation that “in principle . . . everything that occurs is ultimately explicable” to the unwarranted assumption that such explanations control the world they explain and therefore “determinism is true”. The fact that a certain species can create extremely useful explanations of the world doesn’t mean that those explanations control the world or constitute its blueprint.

If we understand that the mind is the product of biological evolution then we are forced to accept that our understanding of the world can not be of the same nature as the world itself. The most useful explanations, for us humans, are of course deterministic explanations, but it is a mistake to assume that deterministic explanations can ever be perfect matches with the world (that is, that they can be “True”). To make that assumption is to fall for the supernatural fallacy that there exists some kind of “intelligence” embedded in the nature of existence. It is to map human knowledge against the physical world and then confuse the knowledge-map with the world, without realizing what you have done.

Meanings and relationships are, quite simply, created by the brain when it creates “objects” out of what is perceived. Knowing the world in such a fashion is useful and valid — if it weren’t our brains would never have successfully evolved as they have. But the crucial observation here is that our “minding” works perfectly well regardless of the actual nature of the world — one might almost say it works in defiance of the nature of the world. What physical reality inherently “is” doesn’t matter to the process of knowing which evolved in us. At any rate, what the world “is” will always remain ultimately unknowable. What we “know” is not the world but our knowledge of the world.

I don’t blame Nash and other Christians for applying the determinist tag to Naturalism: like Halverson, too many 20th century advocates of Naturalism have done the same. They are wrong, as an effort to understand intelligence in terms of biological evolution makes clear. The Trojan horse should be rejected.

The End of Knowledge

Another quote from Halverson is quite revealing.

If the theoretical goal of science — an absolutely exhaustive knowledge of the natural world — were to be achieved, there would remain no reality of any other kind about which we might still be ignorant.

I gather that Halverson may see practical limitations that will prevent this so-called “theoretical goal of science” from being achieved, but it is clear that he finds such a goal achievable in theory.

I do not. Halverson misunderstands the nature of human knowledge and, as a consequence, the nature of nature. Nevertheless, Halverson may at least have managed to progress a step beyond Bertrand Russell, who did in fact aver (in Has Man a Future, I believe) that someday science would discover absolutely everything there was to know about the world. In that book, Russell did not even see practical limits to complete knowledge.

Other naturalists have gone several steps past Halverson. They will tell you that science will never have complete knowledge, not just for practical reasons, but additionally because at the quantum level existence is random. At the quantum level existence doesn’t match up with the human desire for deterministic explanations, physicists have concluded.

A New Touchstone Proposition

The philosopher C. D. Broad observed,

If you start with a sufficiently narrow and inadequate view of nature you will have to postulate a God to get you out of the difficulties in which it lands you. E.g., if you insist that living organisms are mere machines, you have to postulate God to construct them out of unorganized matter.

Machines are unavoidably artifacts, the deliberate creation of some intelligent being or beings. But why should nature or anything in nature be considered a machine? It can only happen by confusing blueprints and maps. Machines follow a blueprint — a design — which was invented. But the natural world was not invented: it has a design which scientists can describe and map, but not a blueprint. The “design” observed by scientists is in fact an explanation, not a blueprint. If you get confused about this you end up with the mistaken assumption that design we observe in the natural world is of the blueprint variety.

Knowledge is a simulacrum of physical existence. Human knowledge stands in for the physical world in a very useful way, one which enables us to make intelligent decisions. But no description of the world controls or encompasses the world itself. If naturalism is true, it would be silly to think otherwise.

Earlier we identified the dispute between naturalism and supernaturalism as a dispute about when mind enters the picture. The supernaturalist maintains that mind — in the form of God — is there from the beginning, and essentially thinks the world into existence. The naturalist puts the world first and sees mind evolving later on. The supernaturalist says mind before matter; the naturalist says matter before mind.

As I wrote in “Can General Atheism be Proved?“,

Naturalism maintains that intelligence is a product of brains and that brains are a product of evolution. It follows from this that intelligence did not exist anywhere in the universe until organisms with brains evolved into being. Supernaturalism maintains the contrary: that intelligence existed well before brains were created. Intelligence (whether personified in a being or not) necessarily lies behind and prior to physical existence, according to the supernatural canon.

This brings us to my proposal for naturalism’s touchstone proposition:

Intelligence is a product of brains and brains are a product of evolution; therefore intelligence did not exist until organisms with brains evolved into being.

Defined this way, naturalism is a falsifiable hypothesis, which can be evaluated (as I argued also in “Can General Atheism be Proved?“) by

. . .investigating the world to determine whether the evidence we find fits better with the notion that intelligence existed at the beginning of the universe (before brains existed), or whether intelligence appeared with the evolution of organisms with brains. I maintain that such an investigation can be done, and that doing it is a rational process which will lead to a rational answer.

Summary: intelligence is a biological phenomenon caused by brains, and its existence is due to the evolution of organisms with brains. Everything else in the natural worldview follows from that.

It is the kind of philosophical mumbo-jumbo that drives people away from philosophy. Whatever the distinction is supposed to be, it’s probably a poorly chosen one. But let’s see if we can figure it out. Being, one must suppose, refers to abstract Form or Ideas existing in our minds (Plato was enamored of mental talk like this) while becoming must refer, in the Platonic canon, to material things: always changing, growing, decaying and generally being messy (something Plato wanted nothing to do with).

Plato’s attitude toward bodily things strikes me more as the product of mental illness than of a rational thought process. Only a diseased mind, cut off from the rest of the self or warped by infection or chemical imbalance, concludes that mental imaginings alone are real, that the body is nothing. Indeed there is something very unreal about such an attitude, something pathological. Nor is the foolishness of the Platonic attitude difficult to show even relying strictly on reason — which brings us back from parenthesis to Aquinas.

Aquinas understood the distinction Plato was trying to make between being and becoming, and he strenuously objected to it. Plato had to try to wash matter — the material world of bodies — out of the picture as if it didn’t exist. But it does exist, Aquinas said, and Plato’s philosophy can’t account for why.

If I understand him correctly, Aquinas maintained that Plato’s abstract ideas (the abstract idea of a tree, for instance) have in themselves (whether held in our mind or in God’s) absolutely no power to bring real, material trees into existence. The particulars of the world can’t be thought into being by thinking universals, no matter who is doing the thinking. But not being able to explain how matter comes to exists is only part of the problem. In the Platonic system, Aquinas saw, there could never be a satisfactory explanation of why matter exists.

To use more modern terms, Plato thought of us as a soul making incidental use of a physical body. We are decidedly not our bodies: they are just an impediment for the soul or mind that is the real us. Aquinas rejected this. We are, he said, a unity of body and soul, mind and matter. Both are equally essential if we are to be what God intended: spiritual beings who “know” the world.

Anton C. Pegis says in his book, Introduction to St. Thomas Aquinas,

Where the Platonic knower is a pure reason, and the Cartesian knower a pure mind, the Thomistic knower is, as knower, the composite of soul and body. Let us say this in another way. Man as a knower must be partly material in order to be adequately a knower.

Pegis follows this with a telling comment:

Of course, such a notion is bound to sound scandalous to modern ears. For we are the heirs of generations of philosophic speculations according to which man is a thinker and a mind. ²

For Thomas Aquinas a mind cannot “know” the world because the mind works in abstractions and universals, whereas the world is a population of physical particulars. The mind can only know — or think in terms of — these abstractions. We were given bodies, says Aquinas, precisely because we must have bodies in order to get our hands on particulars, to be a “knower” and not just a “thinker.” Pegis observes,

“…what we call the decline of mediaeval philosophy was really a transition from man as a knower to man as a thinker — from man knowing the world of sensible things to man thinking abstract thoughts in separation from existence.”²

Why Know the World?

Let’s summarize so far. Plato said the goal was to be a thinker thinking not about the material world (never real anyway), but about the eternal, nontransmutable ideas and ideal “Forms” — “the emptiness of abstract thought closed on abstractions”² as Pegis believes Aquinas saw it.

Aquinas said a pure thinker can’t know the objects of the physical world: to do that the mind must be combined with a body. If our task was only to think, and not to know, then Plato’s scheme would suffice. Nonetheless it would not explain why we have bodies — or how they come to exist from universals.

Bodies are necessary to know the world. This is Aquinas’ key observation. Since we do have bodies, it follows, said he, that God created us with bodies because He intended for us to know the world.

But why? What is the purpose of knowing the world? Not, Aquinas maintained, for “the good of the body itself, since matter serves us rather than making us its servant.”³ Rather, it is because the soul alone “is unequal by itself to the task of accomplishing the work proper to an intellectual substance.”³

And this is where we part company with Aquinas. We don’t understand why — the real why — of existing as an “intellectual substance” with “work proper” to accomplish.

Why should God create us for such a task? What intellectual work does God need accomplished? Is it not work He could do Himself, and so much more quickly? Or is it because God lacks a body that He cannot do this work of “knowing” the world? — just as Aquinas maintained we humans could not do it if we were only Platonic thinkers.

This is a serious problem. How can God create a world — or even infuse a pre-existing material chaos with “order” — but then need us humans as body/soul beings to “know” this world? Doesn’t God “know” it already? If he doesn’t, how could He create it?

The Platonic story fails because it has to pretend that matter is not material — that it doesn’t really count. But why matter exists Platonism can’t begin to explain.

Aquinas bravely attempted to rectify this nonsense. But he leaves us without a way of explaining why the world must be known. Why does God need us for this task, and how can it be that God should need us for this task?

Now, maybe God doesn’t have to have a reason or purpose for creating the beings he peoples earth with. Perhaps God was just bored. “Let me create a creature with a mind and see if it can figure out the plan behind my world — that should be entertaining for a few thousand years, hopefully.”

But in all honesty, it wouldn’t be very entertaining, even for God.

If we want a solution that works, it’s pretty simple. All we must say is, “Yes, we have minds able to know the world, and we have them precisely for the benefit of our bodies.” This is the line of thought Aquinas summarily rejected, because he wanted the material body to “serve us rather than making us its servant” — thus he identified the body as “it” and the mind as “us”.

After all was said, Aquinas was unable to present us as a true composite. He fell back towards Plato.

Why Do We Have Minds?

We have a benefit Aquinas lacked: we know about evolution. This allows us to see immediately that the body can obtain a great survival advantage by developing a mind capable of knowing the world.

The mind exists for the benefit of the body. It comes into existence out of evolutionary pressure.

This answer, so obvious to scientists, does not appeal to philosophers and theologians. But it explains why we exist as bodies with minds — and this is something Plato and Aquinas cannot do.

Furthermore, evolution makes it clear that the body comes first, and the mind evolves after. We are not thinkers that picked up bodies along the way; we are not minds driving bodies around like they were automobiles; we are not ghosts in machines. We are living bodies that happened to develop minds.

To phrase it philosophically, evolution reveals that we must reject the primacy of the mind for the primacy of the body.

Now many philosophers post a very big objection at this point. They often voice it in terms of “free will” or “determinism” or “mechanism.” If we are bodies that through evolution developed minds, if the mind evolved physically, then that turns us into mere robots. We can’t have free will. We are reduced to a behavioristic and deterministic view of humankind which deprives us of any dignity. (One might think this objection is summed up nicely in the phrase “Beyond Freedom and Dignity” which is the title of a book by behaviorist B. F. Skinner.⁴)

But it is an objection based on their premises, not ours.

It is the Platonic, Thomistic, and Cartesian philosophers who have dunked the body down in the mud and elevated the mind up to the heavens. Today, presented with the idea that we are first and foremost bodies, they object, “You’re dunking us in the mud!” Depriving humans of dignity! they exclaim. Turning us into mechanisms!

No. That was their doing. Every time they pushed the mind higher and closer to God, they deprived the body of a little more dignity, pushed our faces a little deeper into the puddle. They propelled our mind up so high it obtained absolute free will, but correspondingly they denied our body almost everything: it became nothing but clockwork, deterministic, merely stuff for mind to manipulate and explain.

Turns out we were bodies all along.

Now we have to be rescued from this intellectual mud philosophers shoved us into. They denied bodies essence or real life, and now they object that in defining humans as body beings we are relegating ourselves to a lifeless state, without dignity, without value!

They are philosophically stuck on their own flawed premises.

But not just philosophers: most of us are stuck here. If it were just a few lifeless intellectuals, no one would care. But society as a whole is stuck, and it shows worst in our religious thoughts and ideas.

This is the crucial distinction between atheism and theism. Theism has decided that the physical world can’t stand on its own. It can’t because it is just “stuff” that obeys blind laws. Newton’s laws of motion for example; but really, any “laws” that scientists have discovered will do. Scientists discover these laws, but who created them? Since material “stuff” is raw, robotic, devoid on its own of value — because theists pushed value to a spiritual world — there must be something else to give this stuff value and laws to obey.

Then when atheists deny that there is a God or spiritual realm beyond our physical realm theists are shocked. To them atheists are proclaiming that we are nothing but raw, robotic stuff, devoid of value, obeying laws that never had a lawgiver!

If atheists were theists, this would indeed follow. If we remove God, a big hole forms in the universe.

But we are not theists. We are not Cartesians, we are not Platonists, we are not even Thomists. That’s the whole point: we have rejected their basic premises. No big hole forms where God used to be because our universe — based on our premises — never needed God to provide value or save us from mechanism in the first place. There’s no place for a hole.

Which means also there’s no place for God. No need. Value doesn’t come from without but within. Depriving us of value within — a result of theistic premises (so that it can be provided from without by God) — merely devalues us, and then makes us dependent on a questionable entity. And it shifts the purpose of life from earth and life to heaven and afterlife. Why does everything shift away from earth? Because our theistic premises have turned earth and our bodies into robotic, meaningless stuff — pushed all the meaning to heaven. Not here but in heaven will our life be fulfilled. And we must not really be bodies, but heavenly souls.

This is solely the result of theistic premises.

Atheists premises, on the other hand, leave us and our earthlife whole. Our bodies really are us and they really are valuable; they are not robots or mechanisms, and therefore we are not. Our life must be fulfilled here on earth, or never fulfilled at all. Thus moral behavior really matters — not because God will punish us in some imaginary beyond, but because moral behavior is necessary if we are all to obtain fulfillment on this blue planet of ours, which is the only place fulfillment is possible for us.

These premises are laid out elsewhere and perhaps don’t belong in an introduction to Aquinas. But to me it seems important as we approach Aquinas’ five ways⁵ (his “proofs” of God) to have a bit of background: that theistic premises are not the only premises possible, that there is a pleasing alternative to theism, that if there no God it is not a disaster. It might even open a new and better door.

The Nature of Knowledge

One atheist premise is that the nature of information (and the nature of the way human thinking works) makes it a logical fallacy to conclude that matter is a mechanism, or deterministic in any Cartesian sense. Truth is always a comparative, not an absolute. This means that scientific “laws” like Newton’s laws of motion are not laws per se, not bits of absolute truth however much we like to think so.

All scientific endeavour aims at creating useful descriptions of the world — which allow us to get things done successfully or open the door to future successful descriptions. These descriptions are hypotheses and we choose our hypotheses on the basis of how useful they are compared to competing hypotheses. How do we determine which hypothesis is more useful? By testing and replicating the test: in short, by the scientific method. If one hypothesis is consistently more useful, for our purpose at hand, than competing hypotheses, then we adopt it. If its usefulness over competing hypotheses is overwhelming, and if its consistency with related successful hypotheses leads us to feel we can’t imagine a more useful challenger, scientists will call it a “theory.” If it seems to cover a basic and useful relationship of things, it might even be called a “law.”

But we mustn’t forget that all theories and laws are nothing but very successful, well established hypotheses. They are not absolute truths. They can never be, for the method doesn’t allow that kind of a determination. Why? Because hypotheses are always tested for usefulness against other hypotheses. Laws compete against other laws: all scientific ideas are verified in competition with other ideas.

It is important to note that there is no way to verify science directly against the world itself, except by the process of comparative usefulness. This hypothesis worked, it was useful; that hypothesis did not. But just because one works doesn’t mean a third hypothesis might not also work. In such a case scientists create controlled experiments to test both hypotheses and determine which one is more useful more often.

This is how science works. It runs on the premise that truth is a comparative, not an absolute. If there is absolute truth out there, science has no way of confirming it. It can only confirm comparative truths.

Science works, in other words, precisely because it abandoned the old philosophical tradition of trying to divine absolute truth. In thousand of years, on the other hand, philosophy has made little progress. It is as much a mess as ever. Why? Perhaps because it has failed to recognize that truth is relative, and that hypotheses can only be verified by their usefulness compared to competing hypotheses.

Now, atheists hypothesize that there are no absolute truths about the world. There are, of course, millions of absolute truths bumping around in our heads. All thoughts have an absolute kind of quality, but that is the nature of thoughts. The question, however, is whether any of these absolute thoughts match the real world. The atheist premise is that they do not, and they cannot. To put it another way, there is a mismatch between information and the world itself.

In this world as atheists imagine it to be, the scientific method is the only way to knowledge because it is optimized for discovering comparative truths. Optimized, that is, for the specific kind of world atheists postulate: a world with no absolute truths, with a mismatch between thought or information and the physical world itself, and a human mind that evolved over millions of years not to discover absolute truth, but to develop practical, useful hypotheses about the world.

This hypothesis about information may seem remote from atheism, which after all is only the denial of God. But when we study Aquinas and his five ways⁵, we’ll see why this is indeed at the core of atheism. It is not enough to deny God; we must also overthrow the theistic premises that underlie belief in God. An atheism that rejects God without rejecting the underlying premises of theism is doomed to self-contradiction.

Once we understand what thought is we realize that rather than being primarily a “knower” — though that is a part of us — we are primarily “behavers” and “experiencers” in a phenomenal world that is in an absolute sense unknown and unknowable. This is simply because it is not informational in nature, whereas the mind’s modus operandi is by necessity informational. Yet this mismatch makes no practical difference to science. (But it makes a huge difference to philosophy and religion.) The whole genius of our mental processes is that they are ideally suited for developing useful hypothesis in comparison to alternatives and testing them by their usefulness — and the nature of the world itself simply doesn’t matter.

There is no paradox here. the practicality of the human mind, and of its scientific method, is in line with what we should expected from evolutionary pressures, which are inherently biased toward what is useful, what works. Evolution provides a completely consistent and testable explanation of the origin of our minds and the mental currency of information, and why human thinking takes a form optimized to “know” a non-informational world.

For Aquinas, we have bodies because bodies are necessary to serve the mind in its quest to know the absolute truths of God’s world. For atheists, our minds exist because we are bodies, and because developing minds was a practical and useful benefit under evolutionary pressures. For Aquinas and theists, real meaning and value come from heaven; for atheists they come from earth and from us. For theists, our lives are a temporary stop on our way to God’s realm; for atheists life is all there is or need be and afterlife is a cruel deception. For Aquinas life without God is worthless; for atheists the concept of God renders life worthless.

——— FOOTNOTES ———

1. Aquinas picked up this distinction from “The Consolation of Philosophy” by Boethius (480 – 524) See Philosophy in the Middle Ages, edited by Arthur Hyman and James J. Walsh, Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1974, p.115: “One of Boethius’ many incisive statements gave rise to another distinction much discussed by later medievals. Commenting on the difference between God and creatures, he states that in beings other than God, ‘being’ (esse) and ‘that which is’ (id quod est) are different. In making this distinction Boethius has in mind that while individual substances are composed of various parts, none of these parts make a substance to be what it is. Its determinate characteristic is provided by a unifying and determining principle–its being (esse). Though, for Boethius, this distinction serves only to describe the relation between a substance and that principle which makes it to be what it is, Aquinas finds in it a supporting text for his own distinction between ‘essence’ and ‘existence’.” Aquinas may also have been indebted to other Aristotelians such as Avicenna (980 – 1037) and Averroes (1126 – 1198). For example, on page 283 of Philosophy in the Middle Ages, we read: “Analyzing substances existing within the world, Avicenna had distinguished between their essence and existence, affirming at the same time that essence is ontologically prior to existence and that existence is something added to essence….Rejecting this Avicennian distinction, Averroes held that individual substances exist primarily and, though the mind can distinguish between essence and existence in them, ontologically speaking, the two are one. Thus, while for Avicenna essences were primary, for Averroes primacy belonged to individual substances.” Finally, someone with a bit of common sense!

2. Introduction to St. Thomas Aquinas, edited by Anton C. Pegis, NY: The Modern Library, 1948, p. xxiv

3. Introduction to St. Thomas Aquinas, edited by Anton C. Pegis, NY: The Modern Library, 1948, p. xxiii

4. Skinner, B. F. Beyond Freedom and Dignity, Bantam Books; 11th Print edition (1972)

5. In his Summa Theologica, Thomas Aquinas presented five “ways” by which the existence of God could be proven. (It is not to be thought that these proofs originate with Aquinas. Most can be found in Islamic, Jewish, and Christian philosophical traditions well before Aquinas.)