Tuesday, September 29, 2009

Periodic Table of Elements is All? No.

Giordano Bruno, a pantheist and materialist sometimes erroneously categorized with Galileo, said: "Matter is not without its forms, but contains them all; and since it carries what is wrapped up in itself, it is in truth all nature and the mother of all the living." (C. Gutberlet). Is this true? Is matter "all nature and the mother of all the living?" Is life—even human life—ultimately dependent upon matter? It seems so because without matter what would life or physical things be? Nothing? Is matter the principle and cause of everything as the atomists thought?



—Aristotle's Metaphysics 983b8-18, 984a17-20

Are we not more advanced today than those who thought that there are only material causes, e.g., the four elements—earth, water, air, and fire? After all, today we have over a hundred elements on the periodic table. Yet, are we not "men thus advanced" so we can more fully "investigate the subject?" Or do we think all the seemingly eternal elements on the periodic table are the principles and causes of everything? If this is true, then the efficient cause¹ of this blog is not me but the matter that makes me up; the material cause² is a hard disk magnetized in a certain way somewhere; the formal cause³, the words, are, e.g., light coming from your computer screen in a certain way; and the final cause does not exist since I apparently direct this blog to no definite end. From this it follows that everything is merely due to the random motion of atoms.



St. Thomas Aquinas's Compendium theologiæ, lib. 1 cap. 99

Therefore, matter cannot be "all nature and the mother of all the living" because matter is not eternal, time is a part of nature, and only something eternal can be the cause of time; how could something bound to time cause time?

The efficient cause of this blog is not the matter that makes me up; it is me. The material cause, sure, is the hard disk on which there are bits representing the characters that make up the blog. The formal cause of this blog is not matter but the words or characters themselves; if the words or characters were different, one would have a different blog.

Now, non-eternal things have a creator. Thus if something uncreated created matter, then that "something" would be "the mother of all the living," but not "all nature" because a creator cannot logically be its creation. This "something" is God, the final cause, I hope, of this blog.
¹²³⁴The four causes of Aristotle were the efficient cause, the force, instrument, or agency by which a thing is produced; the formal [HOBBES Decameron ii. 15 Another they call the Formal Cause, or simply the form or essence of the thing caused: as when they say, Four equal Angles and four equal Sides are the Cause of a Square Figure.]; the material, the elements or matter from which it is produced; the final, the purpose or end for which it is produced [final cause: a term introduced into philosophical language by the schoolmen as a transl. of Aristotle's fourth cause, τὸ οὗ ἕνεκα or τέλος, the end or purpose for which a thing is done, viewed as the cause of the act; esp. applied in Natural Theology to the design, purpose, or end of the arrangements of the universe.]. The First Cause, the original cause or Creator of the Universe; secondary causes, those derived from a primary or first cause.

Oxford English Dictionary

No comments:

Post a Comment