Why Being Rather Than Nothingness? — Another Perspective

Mr German has some interesting thoughts to add to Dr Martin's series "Why Being Rather Than Nothingness?", which I've been sharing.

From Crisis

By Jerome German 

Modern empiricism has impoverished “science” by dismissing metaphysics as pseudoscience, yet every scientific endeavor relies on foundational assumptions that cannot be proven or tested.

When I began to see Regis Martin’s “Why Being Rather Than Nothingness?” series showing up among my Crisis email reminders, I was immediately intrigued because (1) It’s Regis Martin! and (2) It is the question above all questions: the question every soul wants answered and doesn’t want answered.

How’s that? Well, we want to know the answer, but it scares us. A man I know, having escaped the throes of addiction, once told me that, when he was in that serious trap of self-abuse, he wasn’t sure if there was a God or not, but he was hoping there wasn’t. It’s no accident that Our Savior needed to insist that we “Be not afraid.”

Having made the decision not to read Professor Martin’s series until many were published, I was surprised to see it extend to eight installments. When I finally found the time to read them, I was not disappointed. Here was something totally different than what I would have written myself, which, in and of itself, made it quite a treat. I found his masterful series to be literary, lyrical, often poetic: attributes that spring from metaphysics if one but takes the time to scratch the surface.

And yet, it would not have been my approach. And so, I wrote this essay, and when I opened my email in preparation to submitting it, I saw that installment #9 was published. Will they continue indefinitely? We can only hope. [Editor’s Note: There will be a total of 16 installments in the series.]

In the second installment of the series, Dr. Martin writes, “Why being rather than nothingness? Not a scientific question, to be sure, but one which transcends science.” There is an inclination within me that led me to a 40-year career in industry practicing quality/process control, an inclination that, upon reading the above, grunted a soft Scooby-Doo-ish “Roh roh!”

Which sciences are transcended? Before we go any further, we should develop a working definition of what constitutes a science. In the dictionaries that I’ve consulted, all have reduced science to what can be observed and measured. By these definitions, Dr. Martin is exactly correct. Languages, it would seem, are like people: if one is living, one is also dying. Living languages are always philosophically terminal.

This was seriously frustrating to me, for I remembered what I had learned at preparatory seminary in 1965—and remembered it like it was yesterday—for it had so completely melded with what I intuited.

I was taught that science was said to be of three types: Pure, Observational, and Applied.

The dictionaries I had consulted yielded but a single commonality: methodology. Science, it would seem, is nothing if it is not methodological. Before the scientific method had evolved, science was observation and recording, something humans had been doing for millennia without gaining much understanding.

Science is methodology, a tool, a means by which we can organize and understand the implications of what we observe. As Catholics, this is important to us for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the monstrous lie that the Church is anti-science.

Galileo’s telescopic study of the night sky led him to emphatically embrace the Copernican theory that the earth rotated about the sun. The Church had allowed Copernicanism only as a theory; that is, an idea open to discussion among elite scientists but not to be promulgated to the public until more certainty could be established—a condition the arrogant, irascible, chronically-overconfident Galileo was determined not to honor. (Copernicus, a Catholic priest from Poland, had delayed publication for years, not fearing censure from the Church but backlash from academia.)

For nearly three-quarters of a century, Copernicus’ findings had met with no condemnation within the Church (though roundly condemned by Luther and Melanchthon in no unmeasured terms).

In fact, the Vatican’s Jesuit scientists, after obtaining a telescope and doing their own investigation, found Galileo’s telescopic discoveries compelling (but his antiquated insistence on perfectly circular orbits and his theory for what caused the tides were laughable to the Jesuits who were familiar with the seminal work of another great contemporary, Johannes Kepler, whose first law of planetary motion validated all observed phenomena related to the elliptical orbits of the planets).

Move to the 20th century and you have Belgian Catholic priest Fr. Georges Lemaître schooling Einstein on the expansion of the universe (think “big bang”). Einstein responded, “Your calculations are correct, but your physics is atrocious,” only to eventually concede to Lemaitre’s conclusions.

Returning to Dr. Martin’s statement, what is there that “transcends science”? Observation is the primal, the first and necessary starting point of all knowledge. And what is the first thing that we observe? Existence.

Observation is the primal, the first and necessary starting point of all knowledge. And what is the first thing that we observe? Existence.Tweet This

In the realm of pure science, we have mathematics, logic, and metaphysics (a subset of logic). It is only within a pure science that a thought experiment can be conducted—and not only conducted but proven to be accurate, assuming that the practitioners have actually created a science; that is to say, that said science rests firmly upon defendable assumptions known as axioms. Pure sciences work in the abstract, with abstractions serving as axioms. In the words of Einstein, from Conversations with Einstein (1970), “All great achievements in science start from intuitive knowledge, namely, in axioms, from which deductions are then made. …Intuition is the necessary condition for the discovery of such axioms.”

Intuition. Indeed. Science is a human activity, and among the sciences one stands alone in that it is supported by all the others: theology. The study of God draws from all sources because God is the source of all. Its raw material is revelation, in all of its forms; and its mode of operation is logical and inescapably metaphysical in nature.

We live in an age that has relegated metaphysics to the dust bin, brushing it off as a pseudoscience. If metaphysics is a pseudoscience, by association, so is logic. And this is where the real insanity of our age careens off of the road and gets lost in the woods—where the diabolical nonsense of the 20th century still holds us hostage.

That hostage taker is something called logical positivism (1920s and ’30s, Vienna, Austria), an approach to knowledge that does a really good job of disproving itself; and yet the damage it has done lingers on and on. The central claim of logical positivism, that “Only empirically verifiable statements are meaningful,” is not empirically verifiable.

The whole nonsense is a nonstarter by its own definition. And yet it continues to produce young, college-miseducated, confident atheists like nothing before or since.

It should be noted that while the world was going crazy—with logical positivism making its debut in a big way in the United States in 1936 with Language, Truth, and Logic by A.J. Ayer—in the Catholic academic community, the 20th century brought nothing less than a renaissance of metaphysic thought. There was Pope Leo XIII (Aeterni Patris), Jacques Maritain, Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, and let’s not forget Fulton Sheen, who called Aquinas, “The greatest mind that ever lived.”

It is a simple fact that even scientists who dismiss metaphysics still rely on it—often unknowingly. For example, science assumes that: reality exists; the universe is orderly and intelligible; cause and effect are real; causal relationships are consistent; the laws of nature are stable; local observations generalize; logic is valid; reason can grasp reality—the list goes on and on—none of which are experimentally proven; they are metaphysical assumptions. Einstein knew it.

It is a simple fact that even scientists who dismiss metaphysics still rely on it—often unknowingly.Tweet This

The pure sciences are, first and foremost, abstract. To disconnect the abstract from the measurable is to place all of scientific method in the dustbin of history—because science without mathematics and logic is a collection of paleolithic sketches on cave walls.

Returning to our friend, the impetuous Galileo, it has been written of the whole incident that it was a collision between Galileo’s inductive reasoning approach and the Church’s deductive reasoning approach. In this fairy tale, it is said that the Church persecuted Galileo because she rejected inductive reasoning and clung to her deductive reasoning view of the Earth as the center of the solar system: that God the son had become man, the only species of creatures so honored, and so the Earth must be the center of the universe.

Such a teaching was, of course, never held in any definitive way by the Church. And far from discrediting deductive reasoning, it only shows that non-sequitur premises make for indefensible outcomes. But the anti-science fairy tale goes on and on, with Galileo’s name popping up nonstop in popular media—Galileo, hero of modern science who fought the persistent, self-imposed ignorance of the Church.

Attacking from the opposite front, some like to say that the Church baptized Aristotle’s thought; that we have attempted to make the vulgar sacred. It’s true. That is the point of metaphysics—that the vulgar can besacred. God created the world, and He saw that it was good.

Aristotle objected to Eastern religion with its duality—it’s supposed balance between ultimate evil and ultimate good. He reasoned that existence is good, nonexistence bad. That reasoning is the premise from which all else flows—when God had completed creation, He saw that it was good. Ultimate evil, Aristotle writes, cannot exist because it would destroy itself because destruction is the essence of evil. All evil is subtractive; all good is creative, supportive, sustaining.

God is love. Creation is an act of love and existence its result. The vulgar can be sacred, for all that exists was loved into existence. To the extent that Aristotle taught truth, that truth can only come from God.

My quest for a dictionary that might contain even a trace of classical thought led me to Webster’s 1828 American Dictionary of the English Language. Let’s take a look.

SCI’ENCE, noun [Latin scientia, from scio, to know.]

1. In a general sense, knowledge, or certain knowledge; the comprehension or understanding of truth or facts by the mind. The science of God must be perfect.

2. In philosophy, a collection of the general principles or leading truths relating to any subject. Pure science as the mathematics, is built on self-evident truths; but the term science is also applied to other subjects founded on generally acknowledged truths, as metaphysics; or on experiment and observation, as chemistry and natural philosophy; or even to an assemblage of the general principles of an art, as the science of agriculture; the science of navigation. Arts relate to practice, as painting and sculpture.

…No science doth make known the first principles on which it buildeth.

Science cannot exist without axioms; and without existence, there are no axioms. Existence is deeper than axioms, more fundamental. The good professor was right—transcend science the question does, while simultaneously attempting to penetrate its core. For science—methodological, abstract-directed, axiom-driven, intuition-laden science—only exists because we seek answers, and when we cease to seek the answer to the reason for existence, science has failed its fundamental task.

Why has the modern definition become so narrow? One can probably credit the immense success of the physical sciences in the last two centuries, which begs the question: What is the difference between caveman observations and modern observational science? Method. The physical sciences are nothing without the scientific method. The irony of all ironies is that pure science is methodical, that it is mathematics, logic, and metaphysics—deductive reasoning disciplines—that are the essence of methodology itself.

In the classical sense, metaphysics is a real, foundational science. In the modern empirical sense, it remains indispensable because every science rests on assumptions it cannot itself prove—metaphysical assumptions.

…No science doth make known the first principles on which it buildeth.

Anyone who tells you otherwise is just an observer.