I have pretty thoroughly embarrassed Edward Feser already, the preeminent advocate for Thomism today, the Medieval Dumbity that consists of purely armchair, and often pseudological, theorizing about natural reality, which ignores the entirety of the sciences and pretends facts and evidence don’t matter—and even don’t exist, contradicting its every conclusion. My interest was in showing the catastrophic failures of facts, science, and logic in Feser’s “Five Armchair Arguments” for a God, which devolved into exposing his failure to even comprehend anything I said, or indeed even comprehend how logic and science even work (see Feser’s Five Proofs of the Existence of God: Debunked! and then Feser Can’t Read (and Other Astonishing Facts) and Feser Still Can’t Read). Which you may notice is a recent theme in apologetics I’m illuminating this month (see The Blondé-Jansen Argument from Consciousness and How We Know Daniel Is a Forgery). I’ve now been clued in to a book by Gunther Laird that thoroughly debunks the entirety of Feser’s apologetic Thomist program in The Unnecessary Science: A Critical Analysis of Natural Law Theory. I concur this is probably now the definitive take-down and go-to for anyone questioning Feser’s methods and conclusions, or anyone being told by his gullible fans that he’s an undebunkable genius. Laird smartly surveys, even on just the basis of its own internal logic, why Thomistic Catholic theology, metaphysics, and ethical and political program are all bunk. Here I’ll just focus on some of Laird’s treatment of ontology. I might get into other aspects of this quite detailed book at another time.

Of Errors and Aristotle

Though Laird is (more or less) a layman, as an expert myself I can vouch for the fact that his analysis is usually accurate and astute. And even where it might fail, his writing and argumentation is clear enough that usually any keen reader can catch that, and thus does not have to rely on experts to catch it for them. This is setting aside trivial things, of course, that are just color or asides and not essential to any argument, such as Laird mistakenly thinking Classical Greeks wore togas (p. 26; the toga is a Roman garment, but did resemble the Greek himation, which was more like a coat worn over a tunic; but to be fair, movies, television, and Renaissance art have routinely made the same mistake as Laird, and this mistake, voiced only as a joke anyway, never matters to any argument he makes). Similarly, Laird thinks Positive Christianity, the Nazi sect Hitler (probably) secretly held to, should not count as real Christianity (p. 192), but this plays fast and loose with how words work, and is dangerously acquiescent to Christian whitewashing of their own history. Positive Christians followed the Gospel Christ as Divine Savior, and believed he was guiding them by Divine Providence into a future Utopia and Eternal Heaven—and called themselves Christians, and derived their creed from Anti-Semitic strains of German Lutheranism. It is a category error to mistake trivial sectarian beliefs, like trinitarianism (which only arose centuries after Christianity originated and which dozens of Christian sects still reject) or the virgin birth (which even 15% of American Christians don’t believe in), as essential to a religion being correctly called Christian. Such tactics are more typically used to hide the role of Christianity in history. I don’t endorse doing that. But again, Laird does not employ this point in any argument, so his being wrong about it ultimately doesn’t matter to the value of the book. One could find many other examples like these, but few are important.

More significantly, sometimes when Laird is mistaken, it is not clear if he is mistaken, or the person he is summarizing, and so for matters like that, I cannot vouch for Laird’s treatment in every case. For example, Laird declares “Aristotle…believed homosexuality was wrong,” but when he says that, he is actually just repeating (and citing) this as a claim made by Feser. So we cannot tell if Laird agrees with Feser’s claim about Aristotle (or even checked its accuracy), or if he has left out something in Feser that represented Aristotle’s position more accurately than Laird indicates. Only the latter would be a real problem. So one should approach Laird’s every description of Aristotelianism as only Feser’s (or Medieval Thomists’) likely erroneous beliefs and not anything the actual Aristotle actually thought or said, and not mistake Laird’s book as an accurate survey of real Aristotelianism. Which would only leave the question of whether Laird is fairly representing Feser. I did investigate several sample cases, and they all checked; Laird seems to have Feser not only spot on, but charitably to boot. But I could not, obviously, meticulously check every single instance, so there “might” be cases where Laird misrepresents Feser, so readers should always keep this in mind, in the event it becomes crucial enough to check.

In this particular case, if Laird is correctly representing Feser, what Feser said about Aristotle is false. And it’s false because of a fundamental and common failure to take history seriously—and indeed, a common theme with Feser (and, really, most Christian apologetics) is a disregard of professionally assessed evidence in any field, whether science or history. He never cares about research, evidence, or facts, beyond whatever he randomly finds that suits him. In reality “homosexuality” did not exist as a concept in Greco-Roman antiquity, but it was almost universally assumed sexual desire among men was natural and moral, and only being on the receiving end was disgraceful or entailed accepting a lower social status—but even then, still not immoral. This has already been ably covered by renowned classicist and philosopher Martha Nussbaum in her chapter on this very issue in Sex and Social Justice (Oxford 2000), an anthology of her work I highly recommend. Indeed, that chapter in particular is a product of her sharing the rare distinction of being one of the only philosophers in history to be called into court as an expert witness in philosophy. She also recommends K.J. Dover’s study, Greek Homosexuality (Harvard 1989).

In actual fact the text of Aristotle on this point (in Nicomachean Ethics 7.5) is corrupt. Feser evidently trusted English translations (most of which composed by 19th century Christian bigots) that purport to imagine what was there rather than actually rendering the words of Aristotle. In fact, words are missing from the key part of the sentence Feser relies on; it now reads, as a sample list of behaviors caused by mental disorders, “pulling out one’s hair and biting one’s nails, and eating charcoal or dirt, and in addition to these, the […] of sexual pleasure [either with, by, to, for, or in] men,” and alas, we don’t know what “the […]” was (other than that it was some feminine noun in Attic Greek, and there may yet be more words as well missing), nor for that reason can we know what the correct preposition in English would be (“with”? “by”? “to”? “for”? “in”?). But whatever he originally did say there (and contrary to many a Christian bigot misreading other passages in his corpus, Aristotle never elsewhere discusses the general morality of homosexual acts or feelings), Aristotle explains these are blameless acts, not immoral; so Feser cannot justify citing this verse as an Aristotelian confirmation that gay sex is immoral or ought to be condemned (any more than “biting your nails”). In fact, Aristotle’s point is that these should be tolerated, as just lamentable quirks; perhaps gross or embarrassing, but nothing to bother punishing. But it’s also doubtful the missing text even reconstructs as “any” sex among men anyway. Given all we know of the ethics of that era, the missing word(s) surely intended something like nymphomania, an excessive pursuit of sex (something “habitual” rather than moderate; Nussbaum discusses the best candidates for the Greek words missing here), and may even have meant women pursuing multiple lovers (hence the plural, “with men”). Of course Aristotle was himself a bigot of his own time and made many false statements about what is proper or natural, so we shouldn’t be looking to him as always an authority anyway. But it’s very unlikely he ever thought or said gay sex was by itself morally wrong. That simply isn’t how the Athenian mores he always strains to defend operated.

Likewise, when Laird summarizes Feser’s discussion of Aristotelianism (e.g. pp. 28-29), what comes out again isn’t correct—for Aristotle; though it might correctly represent something Feser incorrectly claimed about Aristotle, or that Medieval Thomists did (since they rarely correctly represented or understood the actual works and thoughts of Aristotle). Here Laird says that for Aristotle (using Laird’s own analogy to illustrate what he or Feser thinks is the general position of Aristotle):

A cup of coffee might be actually hot and bitter, but it is potentially cool (if you leave it out for a while) and potentially sweet (if you put a lot of sugar into it). It is not potentially blood or radioactive fuel, because nothing you do to it will ever make it capable of conveying nutrients or powering a reactor.

This is not quite correct. Thomists might have thought Aristotle thought that. But the real Aristotle most definitely did not. This is more a Medieval misunderstanding. Aristotle himself would have argued that coffee is potentially blood, for example, insofar as an appropriate cause is brought to bear to change its form. Aristotle did not know about coffee (that was a later discovery), but he would have understood it more easily than radioactive fuel, so let’s assume coffee has just been successfully explained to Aristotle. He would have said that when coffee goes from the stomach to the heart, the heart would efficiently cause the coffee to become blood (Galen, centuries later, would correct him with more updated science, and we would correct his science even further; but here I am only talking about the conceptual understanding of Aristotle). Thus, clearly, coffee did have the potential to become blood in Aristotle’s understanding. But coffee cannot just “become” blood (in the way that, left unattended, it can become cool). Something has to efficiently change its form (like, in this case, particular biological organs).

Laird raises the analogy of caterpillars becoming butterflies, and summarizes the Medieval misnotion that Aristotle thought caterpillars were “immutably” what they are and thus could not under any conditions become, say, “a dog” or “a philosopher.” Incorrect. Aristotle himself would have said that there are conceivable conditions under which a caterpillar could become a dog or even a philosopher. The latter is technically indicated in De Sensu and De Anima, whereby what it means to be a philosopher, as in an intelligent animal, is entirely a matter of how the material composing a body is arranged into an appropriate causal form—what we would now call the geometric and causal structure of the brain, for example (although Aristotle mistakenly assigned this role to the heart, he was soon refuted and corrected by the anatomist Herophilus; on these points about the actual science in antiquity, see my book The Scientist in the Early Roman Empire). So if an appropriate cause comes along to reshape a material, for example to tinker with the internal organization of whatever is in a caterpillar (and Aristotle would have easily understood our discovery that this really meant DNA, since he toyed with similar concepts, which were developed further by Galen, at which point only missing the technicalia of how it gets realized in a chemistry), then a caterpillar would become an intelligent (indeed even philosophizing) animal. Possibly even a talking dog!

For Aristotle, contrary to Thomists, did not believe in immutable essences; for him, anything can be anything, if you can shape it up into the right form. Thus an intelligent dog was potentially possible. It just would have required tinkering beyond the knowledge of anyone in his day. Aristotle would say a caterpillar can’t become a dog only because no efficient cause exists (known to him) that would make the requisite changes in the caterpillar’s form; but not because such a change was categorically “impossible.” Whereas, Aristotle would explain, if no changes are made to that form, that form as-is already contains the innate activating potential to become a butterfly. That potential did not come from an “essence.” It came from the form, which is literally how the material is shaped. Which means in the broadest sense of that term, e.g. not just exterior shape, but interior arrangement. Which can be quite elaborate, e.g. in On the Motion of Animals, Aristotle himself uses the analogy of robotic theaters, run by elaborate systems of ropes and cogs, as a complex causal shape. That’s what he means by a form. The difference between a statue of a man and a real man, therefore, came down to the way the interior of each is shaped. Hence a mind can exist in a statue if its interior is reshaped into the requisitely complex form (i.e. a working organ whose form has the causal output of “intelligent sensation and thought”).

The only point where Aristotle might have prescribed limits to what changes in form can do is at the “basement” of his theory of matter, the four elements. But even there he seemed open to possibilities, as he says in On the Heavens that it is not yet known whether all elements exist potentially in other elements. And many philosophers then correctly understood atoms to be at least in principle reorganizable (e.g. water could be re-formed into earth, if the requisite changes were made to the shape, hence “form,” of an atom or molecule). Aristotle never weighs in on this (as I just noted, he punts). But if his own theory were applied to, for example, his tutor Plato’s theory of elements, wherein what makes each atom a different element is its physical shape (the Platonic Solids), Aristotle would have agreed every element is potentially one of the other elements: one need merely impress an efficient cause to change its physical shape. Reshape an octahedral atom into a hexahedral atom, and air becomes earth. That does not mean Aristotle would have believed any such efficient cause actually existed, but he would have agreed it was conceptually possible. And since Aristotle believed all substances derive their properties from the mixture of those basic elements, and all forms exist solely as the shapes and arrangements of those substances, Aristotle would have believed everything was potentially anything.

This is important to recognize, because not understanding Aristotle is one of the things I caught Feser at in my own critique. He seemed stalwartly obsessed with confusing Aristotle’s theory of forms with Plato’s theory of forms (in fact Aristotle developed his physicalist theory of forms to refute Plato’s), or some confused mentalism (where forms exist only in minds, the very position Aristotle actually rejected), or some even more confused materialism (where only actual things exist, when in fact Aristotle went out of his way to repeatedly explain how and why potential things also exist, as potentials in things), and likewise with confusing the Medieval theory of immutable essences with Aristotle’s actual theory of forms. Aristotle did use the word “essence” in describing his theory of forms, but he never used it in this Thomist sense. That was their misunderstanding of Aristotle, resulting in one of the most ridiculous and most decisively refuted theories of physics in human history (a point I made in my original critique of Feser). We can’t blame Aristotle for that. His actual idea was in fact quite presciently consistent with where physics has indeed ended up. Aristotle was, essentially, correct. The Thomists, not even remotely. And had Aristotle been alive in their day, he’d have made quick sport of them.

It is precisely this failure to correctly understand Aristotle (as well as failing at competency in logic) that lead Feser to construct five unsound arguments, every one based on scientifically refuted polychotomies, which were already proved false by Aristotle’s theory of forms over two thousand years ago. There is no essence, there is only shape; and where there can be shape, all universals potentially exist, as a logically necessary outcome. By assuming the “only” possible explanation of universal properties is “either” Platonism (where mystical “forms” float around in another dimension somewhere), a kind of absolute materialism (where no potential forms exist, only what actually exists exists), and a kind of mentalism (where a “mind” is needed to realize the existence of forms in the world), Feser’s every argument collapses onto the broken horns of a false lemma. Because he left something out: Aristotle’s actual theory of forms, which explains all universal properties as merely the logically inescapable potentiality of all shapable things to be reshaped. Which happens to correspond with the actual current state of physics. All substances and properties (literally all of them) have been reduced to differences of physical structure. (Indeed, when you reduce everything to spacetime, as you can in superstring theory, whereby even fundamental particles are just knots and vibrations of an interdimensional space, all known universal properties inevitably emerge with logical necessity, requiring no “mind” to explain anything.)

Since Feser kept confusing Aristotle’s theory of forms (which Feser’s premises violate the Law of Excluded Middle by excluding) with Plato’s theory of forms, or switching tack and confusing it with mentalism (insisting Aristotle said universals only exist in minds, which isn’t true; Aristotle said they exist in the shapes, the physical organization, of things), even after having these errors explained and demonstrated to him multiple times, I cannot think of him as even a bright thinker now, much less a genius. He seems rather unintelligent here. Or stalwartly delusional. In any event, whatever is blinding him, the mistake is the mistake. When you fix that mistake, by putting actual Aristotelianism back into his lemmas, in all five arguments, Feser’s conclusions no longer follow. Or rather, all that does follow from any of his own arguments is that spacetime is the fundamental ground of all being. None of those five arguments produce a mind or an intelligence, but at most only something whose description happens to exactly fit spacetime itself—which is fundamentally amoral and mindless…and hardly worthy of worship. This I have all explained already elsewhere. But I have to mention it here because Laird’s summary of Feser’s summary of Aristotle’s theory of forms does evince much the same mistake. Which might be Laird’s. But given my previously surveyed evidence, more likely it’s Feser’s. Although to be sure, you’d have to consult Feser.

One could go on with many more examples. For instance, Laird does seem to think Feser’s description of how Aristotelian ethics works is correct (pp. 199-227), when in fact it would be completely unrecognizable to the actual Aristotle, who did not argue to what’s right from any of Feser’s nonsense about essences or forms or “the telos of rationality,” but was entirely an empirical consequentialist who identified human happiness as the ultimate telos (both biologically, as in he declared it the purpose of human beings, and morally, as in he declared pursuing that end the motivation for any and all moral action), on the grounds that that is the only reason anyone does anything for itself and not for some other goal, and that it is, as a matter of empirical fact (take note), the only goal for which any other goal is pursued. In Aristotle’s actual moral philosophy, even being rational is only pursued insofar as it assists the more fundamental good of the individual’s holistic wellbeing. Feser’s Catholicism simply cannot be derived from this. Feser’s depiction of Philippa Foot’s moral philosophy (as quoted on p. 228) is also incorrect. Likewise Laird seems not to know (and I guess, therefore Feser doesn’t know?), that Aristotle was in fact a nominalist regarding language (pp. 203-04). And so on. But you get the picture.

Confusing Cognition with Ontology

From here on, when Laird is describing the ideas of Feser, I won’t assume he agrees with them even if it seems like he does (Laird in fact asks his readers to take that stance)—such as when he describes Feser’s notion that Aristotle reduced universals to human thoughts or actualized forms (rather than, as Aristotle actually did, to the set of all potential and actual forms, i.e. the physical shapes and organization of things). But again, understanding the actual position of Aristotle is crucial to understanding Feser’s most catastrophic mistakes. So we have to do that. But I will first add a general point: that in all of what follows (and likewise above), even if you think I am wrong about Aristotle (which is unlikely—ancient science is my top field specialty, earning me a Ph.D. from Columbia University—but regardless), in each and every case I am still describing a coherent metaphysical position regarding universals that Feser therefore still illegitimately excluded from the premises in all five of his arguments, thus rendering all of them unsound. So trying to quibble about “what Aristotle really said” does not rescue him from his mistake. It’s just the worse that he seems never to grasp anything Aristotle actually said.

For example, after (incorrectly) explaining that “Aristotelian Realism holds that universals…really do exist independently of us” but they “only exist objectively inside the objects which possess them, and that it is only human minds that abstract them and consider them as universals” (p. 38), Laird says (p. 39):

[E]ven Aristotle’s realism is not entirely satisfying. For instance, it seems unable to deal with propositions and numbers. [E.g.], the proposition ‘Socrates was mortal’ is true even after he no longer exists in the material world. Similarly, relationships between numbers and other elements of mathematics would seem to exist independently of the material world.

The real Aristotle actually accounts for these things perfectly well. It is only Feser’s incorrect notions about Aristotle’s theory of forms that do not (in this case, either his mistaken mentalist account of Aristotle’s theory of forms, or his mistaken materialist-absolutist account of same, or both). Were he here to speak for himself, Aristotle would have explained that the proposition “Socrates was mortal” is a statement about an actual past physical form and its actual potentialities at that time (absent any change in Socrates’s form, it was causally inevitable that he would die), which therefore does not depend on Socrates still being around. And when asked regarding the idea developed by modern analytic philosophy that a proposition is an abstraction of all possible statements that mean the same thing (all the ways, in all the languages, that we can say “Socrates was mortal”), Aristotle would explain that that refers then to potentials: a proposition simply references all potential ways the same thing can be said, any one of which (like my typing “Socrates was mortal” right now) is an actual instantiation. All that is needed for that to be possible is the potential, which resides in physical things: the human brain, obviously; but even in matter itself, insofar as any lump of matter is a potential brain, as then any lump of matter contains all potential propositions—but only as potentials in things, not yet as actual things.

Any mindless universe will thus necessarily contain all propositions, as the potential computations of potential computers that can be shaped into existence in that universe; but when none of those propositions are actualized, and especially when none of those computers are, in no way is that universe thereby “conscious” or “intelligent” or “possessed of knowledge.” That a computer can potentially exist and compute everything does not mean it has computed everything or even anything at all. Meanwhile the universal truths that propositions articulate are not identical to propositions about them; those universal truths exist in the things themselves. Regardless of whether anyone ever utters any instantiation of any proposition about Socrates, he remains mortal, by virtue of his physical form (and “was mortal” by virtue of his physical form in physical timespace). (Aristotle did not know about the modern analytical definition of a proposition, but his theory of forms does indeed encompass it, through the now-established neuroscience of cognitive modeling: see my discussion of the ontology of propositions in the science-based philosophy of Patricia and Paul Churchland.)

Likewise, relationships between numbers are geometric facts (and thus logically necessary truths), which exist potentially in all matters of fact that realize those geometries (e.g. any single area of space that contains one ball, can potentially contain another, or any single ball can potentially become two balls; and all propositions about two things will be physically true about both those scenarios, because those propositions describe the physical fact of there being two things and all that logically entails). This is true of all mathematics (as I also cover in Sense and Goodness without God, and have shown in Defining Naturalism and Defining Naturalism II), though it is easier to conceptualize using direct and simple geometric facts, e.g. any actualization of a triangle in a flat plane will have three angles that sum to 180 degrees, by virtue of the fact that all those words describe potential physical facts that when actual will necessarily exhibit all the properties they describe and logically entail. No extra thing needs to be added for that to be the case (we need no Platonic Realm of Forms, we need no Mind to Think Thoughts). It is not as if you can have a triangle in a physical space and it not obey the laws of geometry. That is literally logically impossible. Nor is there any “thing” you can “take away” and suddenly triangles no longer obey those geometric rules (e.g. if you deleted all of Plato’s Forms and removed all minds from a physical world, flat triangles would still sum their angles the same way—so nothing more is needed to explain why they do).

“But what if we warp space, then a triangle’s angles will not sum to 180.” Indeed. Aristotle did not know about that (even Euclid had not yet published, albeit he would soon, but non-Euclidean geometries would soon be imagined and developed by at least the 1st century A.D.., as evidenced by Epicurean treatises on the philosophy of mathematics recovered from Herculaneum, and Menelaus’s formalization of spherical trigonometry). But Aristotle would have readily grasped it when explained to him. And he would immediately have told you it confirms everything he is saying: the only way to change the rules about triangles is to physically change their shape. And indeed, the rules will change precisely in respect to how that shape is changed (exactly as non-Euclidean geometry has since proved is logically inescapable). Thus, forms exist in the material shapes of things (including of spacetime itself), and that’s it. There is no need of gods or humans to be around to notice this, no need of a Platonic Realm. It’s simply true, regardless. That we notice this is how we can use this information through the process of abstraction. But abstractions in the mind are not identical to the universals in Aristotle’s system; abstractions are how humans perceive universals, and think about them. The universals themselves exist independently of anyone’s thoughts. They exist in all things, as the sum of all their potential and actual shapes, ergo forms.

This is how all mathematics is inescapably an inalienable property of every physical universe (see All Godless Universes Are Mathematical and my discussion of the ontology of mathematics in How Can Morals Be Both Invented and True?). The only way to make a universe that doesn’t obey some math, is to physically change its form so that that math no longer applies there (e.g. remove all flat planes, thereby ensuring nothing obeys Euclidean geometry). But even then it still potentially applies: by the mere fact that you could, potentially, change it back (every non-Euclidean space has the physical potential to be flattened out into a Euclidean space; there is nothing that exists that would make that outcome logically impossible). This is Aristotle’s realism: the only way to change anything (the properties of anything, the rules anything conforms to, the existence or non-existence of anything whatever) is to change some physical fact of the world, ultimately something about its shape (hence, form). The only way to get Socrates to be immortal, is to physically change Socrates in such a way that his form no longer causes death. The only way to get magic spells to work in a universe, is to physically change that universe in a requisite way that would cause that effect (which is why genuinely supernatural things almost certainly cannot exist: it all just reduces to technology).

This is what Aristotle argued, across all his treatises discussing these subjects. One can now extend his reasoning to show that even a complete nothingness logically necessarily contains all potentials, and thus Aristotle’s realism can explain even a physical universe arising from nothing (see The Problem with Nothing: Why The Indefensibility of Ex Nihilo Nihil Goes Wrong for Theists). Likewise all discussion of possible and alternative universes (indeed all fictions and counterfactuals and hypotheticals) are just discussing potential physical rearrangements of the existing universe (or the potential physical outcomes of other nothing-states). (I cover the physicalist, and quite Aristotelian, ontology of fictions and complex abstractions in my old article on Moral Ontology.) Once you understand how Aristotle included potential universals in the set of all universals, and argued that all universals just are the factual structure of things and its logically inescapable consequences, you’ll realize it’s Aristotelian Realism all the way down. We have no need of anything else, to explain anything whatever about universals. Feser (in Laird’s summary) then confuses this with Aristotle’s theory of abstract reasoning, and falls completely off the rails. Because he is confusing Aristotle’s theories of cognition with Aristotle’s theories of ontology. Not the same thing.

Likewise when Laird paraphrases Feser’s lament that (p. 39):

Since Aristotle’s brand of realism requires abstract objects like universals to always be present, or ‘instantiated in’ at least one material object, it seems unable to grapple with other abstract objects that seem to exist only potentially materially, or independent of material things altogether.

Here we see again Feser’s misunderstanding of Aristotle’s theory of universals. Yes, Aristotle’s realism requires universals to always be present, or ‘instantiated in’, at least one material object; but any object will do. Because potential universals are also real, and therefore they do exist in all things. Thus all possibilities (all possible histories, all fictions, everything whatever) are contained within the physical reality of any universe. Because any universe can potentially be (or could potentially have been) reshaped into any of those alternatives. All one need do (or have done) is change the requisite physical facts (changing the actual forms, the actual shapes and arrangements, of things). Even if some physical thing prevents that, it is only because that physical thing is there, and not because it is logically impossible—because it is always logically possible for that thing to not be there. Therefore, as long as there is anything whatever, all universals exist. Potential and actual. Yes, Aristotle himself did not see how this was true even for nothing-states; he was, after all, an eternalist (he believed there was always a universe, and by that means all potentialities have always existed and always will). Though we now can see that actually even nothing-states contain all potentials, owing to their lack of any actual thing to stop those nothing-states behaving in any way whatever. Thus, Aristotle’s theory could even explain existence ex nihilo. And without a Prime Mover!

By contrast, note that even a God could not change the laws of geometry, or make logically impossible things happen, or in fact anything whatever without changing some underlying fact necessary to bring it about. But if God can only change effects by changing forms, who needs God? All we need are the forms—the actual physical organization of things (matter-energy and space-time), actual and potential. Those forms explain everything by themselves. No God needed. That’s Aristotelian realism.

Science-Ignoring Hocus Pocus

Almost everything Feser argues is completely ignorant of every pertinent science. He ignores every advance in knowledge made by the sciences, declares things science has already explained inexplicable, and then conveniently introduces his pseudoscientific claptrap to save the day—and presents exactly no evidence for his bonkers theory being true. He thinks he can just “argue” to the scientific truths of nature from the armchair. Facts, evidence, studies…useless. Who needs ’em? This is an explicitly medieval, and wholly backwards, methodology. It is as if Feser had never heard of the Scientific Revolution, or the last four hundred years proving it decisively superior to the old crap methods of medieval Thomists. “Science, schmience. Medieval hocum is where it’s at!”

For example, here is Laird’s summary of Feser’s argument for immaterial souls:

Contemporary classical theists like Feser…hold that [any neuroscientific explanation of how humans engage in abstract reasoning] is self-refuting. According to them, whatever neural patterns may be associated with any given universal could not represent that universal unless there was already a mind to interpret them as such. Feser uses the example of writing to illustrate this point. The word ‘triangle’, just written out here, symbolizes both the concept of triangularity and the pronunciation of the word. But on its own, ‘triangle’ is just a meaningless bunch of pixels on a computer screen (as I write this) or blots of ink on a page (as you read this). If you were to show that word to a non-English speaker, it would be meaningless to them unless you translated it into their language, and if you were to show the word to a pigeon, ant, or some other non-sentient animal, it would never be anything but meaningless to them. What applies to pixels and ink would assumedly apply to electrochemical signals in brain: they would require a mind to actually signify anything. Thus, the mind itself cannot be reduced to neural patterns in the brain or any other material ‘symbol’, and must be immaterial, making the human mind immaterial.

This is face-palmingly ignorant. And it illustrates the bankruptcy of Feser’s methodology, and why it has been replaced in the modern age with actual science. Of course, one should be smart enough to notice that cognition is not about just hearing a sound; when humans cognate what a triangle is, they are not just hearing “TRI-ang-gull”, they are perceiving a visual-tactile representation in their mind of what that word signifies. Thus, neural cognition is not like just “writing” words. It’s not just processing symbols (and yes, John Searle was just as ignorantly wrong about this). So the analogy is obvious bullshit even before we ask what science has actually discovered about this. This is shit reasoning. And no respectable philosopher should be embarrassing themselves with silly word games like this. Shame is the only proper emotional response to it.

For even Aristotle noticed what I’m talking about, and thus got closer to what modern cognitive science has actually found to be the case. Though Aristotle did think there was something immaterial about intellection (this is now known to be untrue), he did not believe actively thinking things was possible without a body (forming a working soul giving and receiving data through a sensating body). Thus, for Aristotle, intellection was conceptually separable from a body, but dead is dead. A person’s memories dissolve at death, as also skills and desires, and thus any ability to process thoughts. Hence without physical form, Aristotle says, the intellective soul exists “only potentially, not actually” (and we would even now say the same thing: the pattern of arrangement of a person’s brain conceptually exists immaterially, as a potential shape of any material; but the mere blueprint of a brain cannot itself think: it has to be realized in a material). In this context, in De Sensu, De Interpretatione, and De Anima, Aristotle explains that words are just signals for perceptions, and perceptions contain far more content than the word (thinking about triangles entails thinking of a triangle, not just the word “triangle”), and derive from experience: seeing many triangles imparts in us a database of triangles against which our mind pattern-matches to abstract out just the triangularity, which we always perceive as actual specific triangles but also understand range across all possible triangles, which we can then reconstruct in our minds’ eye, even triangles we have never seen, owing to our understanding of how to move around and reassemble the parts (science has since proved all of this correct, and successfully reduced it to the activity of biological neural networks).

Aristotle credits all this to a complex physical form in the organ of thought (we would now say: neural structure of the brain). He does not draw the conclusion Feser does (that one’s actively working mind “must” be immaterial, e.g. “There are two distinct features with which we characterize the soul,” Aristotle says, “(1) local movement and (2) thinking, discriminating, and perceiving,” all of which—movement, perceiving, and the resources and motivation required to actively think and discriminate—he explains are physical, requiring a particular form in the body), and yet Aristotle didn’t even know anything about neuroscience (that would begin a century later under Herophilus). So even to someone as ignorant as Aristotle it was obvious there is something going on in the physical activity of the physical organ of the mind (in his view, the heart) that is producing all of this; and it wasn’t just seeing the letters T-R-I-A-N-G-L-E in their heart. It was seeing actual triangles; and thus imagining more triangles, using the same physical organ to tinker with the attributes, just as with a hand drawing in sand. And just as science has now confirmed is actually the case, Aristotle traced this as physical imprints on the eyes from the world, in turn physically imprinting the mental organ (forming usable memories), followed by a physical manipulation of physical, visual information independently of contact with the eyes (i.e. employing the imagination: using memory and motivation for actively thinking). (And likewise, he would say, tactile information, from physical sensation of triangles, to physically imprinted reproducible tactile sensations of triangles in the mind, to physically manipulable tactile sensations of triangles in the mind.)

Between crank medieval Thomists hundreds of years ago, and the ancient Aristotle thousands of years ago, who do you think science has empirically discovered was right? Yeah. That’s right. Aristotle. And we’ve even extended his analysis of sensation, abstraction, memory, and motivation to intellection, thus proving he was wrong about there being any role at all for any immaterial mentality, and that he should have stuck with the same model he used for the rest of human cognition. We have an extensive science now of the cognition of concepts and their manipulation and examination in neural computation; entirely physicalist (as I summarize in my refutation of Victor Reppert’s similarly science-illiterate attempts to argue much the same thing as Feser, in his case by attempting to retool the long-debunked bad arguments of C.S. Lewis). Indeed, we have refuted Feser’s silly notion with actual computers now: where we can trace every single causal part of the system (all the circuits, all the machine code), thus proving nowhere does any magical “other” cause come in to bring about any effects. The behavior of computers can be fully explained without remainder in purely physical materials and causes. So the inference that there has to be an immaterial mind involved has been empirically refuted.

Consider, for example, Shakey the Robot, and subsequent iterations, who can learn things like how to see and categorize triangles without any preloaded information (beyond the kinds of things natural brains have already evolved to contain in their neurology from birth). They can learn these kinds of things entirely through experience. And then walk toward any triangle when prompted. An example of prompting would be to teach such a robot that the word “triangle” meant what it had already learned was triangular, and that the phrase “walk toward” correlated with movement in the direction of the thing then named; a modern robot can then reliably walk toward triangles, of any discernible shape, when asked—thus they can learn how to abstract, and reason about abstractions (and can do so before even learning any “word” for the thing it is thinking about). Much as Aristotle predicted, owing to the causal shape, the physical form, of a given robot’s “mind” (literally just transistors and electrons), robots now are able to think and reason about triangles and even triangularity. And every single thing they do is explained without remainder by a purely physical-causal computer system. So, we know for a fact, no immaterial soul is needed.

Why does Feser not know this? Why is he so massively ignorant of the very science he wants to pontificate on? Why does he refuse to even find out? Why does he never reason like a rational person, “I wonder how brains compute using abstract ideas like triangularity? I think I’ll research what cognitive scientists and AI researchers have discovered about this so far, so as to find out.” Nope. Science, irrelevant. Then he declares “We don’t know!” (we do) and then insists “It must be magical souls!” (it isn’t). This is profoundly unintelligent behavior. Yet it typifies apologists, who arrogantly presume they know better than the entirety of actual experts and the whole database of accumulated human knowledge. And then they just get angry when we point this out—rather than realizing their methods are shit, and that they’d better get with scientific empiricism like the rest of us, and make an effort instead to learn how things actually work and what we actually already know, before reaching conclusions.

As I’ve explained before, no method is valid that does not predicate itself on trying genuinely hard to prove its conclusions false before believing them true (see Advice on Probabilistic Reasoning). The only “genuinely hard” way to try and prove Feser’s conclusion false is to research whether abstract reasoning has been performed in pure machines on their own, as well as whether any neurological models of similar operations have been empirically confirmed in human brains. There is no damned excuse for not doing this. I mean, seriously.

Conclusion

This has been just an incidental dive into the problem. Christian apologists like Edward Feser (or, for example, Alvin Plantinga) are just irrational throwbacks to a time when armchair reasoning could solve the mysteries of the universe (it never actually did), completely dismissing, and taking no trouble at all ever to explore, any of the vast, empirically established findings science has already achieved in these matters. They don’t care about evidence. Worse, their entire careers are predicated on pretending none of this evidence even exists. And they replace it with terrible, illogical reasoning that they promote as brilliant. And indeed, Laird goes on from the point I just left off to document this, case after case, all throughout the entire corpus of Edward Feser, from ethics to metaphysics.

And if you ever read Aristotle for real, you’ll notice during all of this how Feser insists we should all go back to Aristotle—and yet every single thing he then recommends is exactly not what Aristotle would. Just as I’ve shown here regarding cognitive theory and the ontology of universals, but even with respect to ethics: hardly anything Feser advocates about moral philosophy is a position Aristotle ever took or would ever have endorsed. It’s crazy. “Abandoning Aristotelianism, as the founders of modern philosophy did, was the single greatest mistake ever made in the history of Western thought,” Feser says (no, really; his exact words). And yet Feser is the one who has abandoned almost the entirety of actual Aristotelianism, whereas it is modern philosophy that has built reliably on his foundation and more or less vindicated and perfected nearly his every substantive point—from ontology and cognition to ethics; and even, as I point out in Chapter 3.1 of Scientist in the Early Roman Empire, epistemology: for Aristotle advocated embracing science, the view that empiricism should trump armchair thinking every single time, and that the latter is only what one should resort to when empirical science hasn’t yet gotten there.

For the subjects tackled here, this has revisited the problem I had with Feser the first time around: whenever I catch him making anti-scientific assertions that violate the basic canons of logic, and prove it, he tries to ignore or deny everything I discovered. I demonstrated he was using in all of his Five Armchair Arguments for God a demonstrably false premise, in one formula or another always a provably false assertion that he has exhausted all possible ways to explain some fact, which amounted to something about universals—which he accomplishes by completely ignoring the one way that science ended up proving correct: Aristotle’s actual theory of potential and actual forms. What we call universals are simply the instantiations of physical facts (facts regarding the spatial and causal geometry of objects and systems of objects), which require nothing more to exist than that. Those physical facts will always have those properties because of the laws of logic and geometry; nothing more need be posited to explain it, nor can anything be taken away that would change it. And potential facts entail exactly the same outcomes as actual facts, since potential facts are simply the positing of what will happen if those potential facts became actual facts, which will always necessarily be the same thing. And this carries all the way up to the human mind, whose ability to record and pattern-build and manipulate these physical facts, through physical, causal models of them, is already a demonstrated ability of purely physical computers and, on abundant evidence, our purely physical brains. To just ignore all this and declare it’s not so is simply choosing to not participate anymore in human knowledge of the world. It is, rather, a practice of mere denial, wholly akin to flat eartherism and anti-vaxx lunacy. This should not be respectable.

-:-

For more on Feser’s travesties see also Joe Schmid’s excellent collection of related critiques. And now the new volume by Joseph Schmid and Daniel Linford, Existential Inertia and Classical Theistic Proofs (Springer 2022).