| HN Mirror

Oh, Ludwig Feuerbach.

If I restrict myself to the topic at hand, then I have to say I don't see how he manages to construe the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo (CEN) as intrinsically opposed to contemplation or speculative knowledge—science that seeks knowledge for its own sake and not merely to master nature—or how he construes it as essentially utilitarian. I have a suspicion that this is a corollary of his position that God is merely a projection of Man, but my understanding is that this position is a consequence of Kantian skepticism and the resulting agnosticism. If you can't know things in themselves, then all you have left is science as mastery of nature.

One difficulty with the claim that somehow CEN is intrinsically opposed to theory is the failure to explain the entire Christian intellectual tradition. Since we're talking about science specifically, it becomes impossible to explain the enormous successes of the sciences in the West and historically the relative poverty of their success in every other civilization. While the stirrings of science occurred in a number of civilizations—and we should give them their due—and while the Greeks may be argued to be the most successful of the bunch, nowhere but the West, whatever its faults, do we see the flourishing of a sustained and vibrant scientific culture. If we take a broader and classical view of science, one embraced by the Greeks, to include any systematic body of knowledge, then this period of flourishing extends far into the centuries preceding the rise of modern science and includes the intellectually vibrant Middle Ages. Indeed, without the Middle Ages, it is difficult to imagine how modern science could have emerged in the first place. Without arguing that this could only have happened in the West (that is Jaki's position, as far as I understand it), it suffices to note that it did happen in the West and it did so in a culture that embraced CEN.

The fact that neither Jewish civilization, nor Islamic civilization for that matter, ever truly had a sustained and sophisticated philosophical or scientific culture does not support Feuerbach's thesis. Again, his claim is that CEN is intrinsically opposed to theoretical endeavors (which includes philosophy). But all I need to show is one example of where CEN did not stifle science.

Here I would add that one thing that stifled science in the Islamic world is not CEN, but the belief that Allah is essentially pure will, and a pure will that can contradict itself. Accepting that kind of creator can only discourage speculative science. Here, we can appeal to Feuerbach's own words when he says that the origin of a thing tells us about that thing. A world created by a self-contradicting creator doesn't inspire much confidence in the intelligibility of what he's created.

In stark contrast, Christianity (certainly Catholic Christianity) conceives of the world as utterly intelligible. To put it somewhat poetically, the world is divine thought or divine word and therefore intelligible and knowable through and through (we have to note both the immanence and transcendence of God to avoid both pantheism and deism). When John says "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.", the original Greek uses the word "λόγος" for word. Anyone familiar with Greek knows that the English translation of λόγος is utterly inadequate to express its meaning (the Latin "verbum" does a better job). In Exodus, when Moses asks God who he should say has sent him, God responds with "I Am" (or "Ehyeh", from which we get Yahweh). God is revealing himself as Being itself and in revealing himself is making himself known. So God himself is intelligible and therefore Being is intelligible. (Aristotelian metaphysics dovetails nicely because while Aristotle managed to provide us with a rich and robust theory of being, he stops short of discovering the act or principle of existence which Gilson argues was stifled by pagan eternalism. We have to wait for Avicenna for that to happen, later refined by Averroes and finally Aquinas.