An interesting and thought-provoking article from Quodlibet Journal.
Read the rest of the article.Aristotle, Teilhard de Chardin, and the Explanation of the World
Aristotle, some three hundred years before Christ, noted the fact that everything which existed in the world was contingent, that is, it depended on something else for its existence. From the contingent nature of everything in the world he argued that there had to be a non-contingent or self-existent entity, a God, to account for those contingent things. He also argued that God could not love man. He had analysed friendship and love and he concluded that the only true love or friendship was between beings who were similar and equally good. This ruled man out. God could only love another being, another entity, who was similar to God.
While Aristotle was able to argue from the world up to God, he was unable to argue his way back down again from God to the world. God had to be perfect, but the world was obviously imperfect. Why would a perfect God make an imperfect world? Aristotle could not find a satisfactory explanation for our imperfect world.
The imperfection of the world has also been a problem for religion. A common religious explanation has been that God made the world perfect but that man messed it up. Now that we know that the world has evolved, this explanation no longer works. It never really worked. The buck would still have stopped with God, who made man.
A self-existent and good God could only love another self-existent and good entity, in effect another god. How could there be another god? God could not create another God. A created entity, a creature, would not be self-existent.
So we have a complex problem. A perfect God could need nothing. Love, not need, can be the only motive for God to act, for God to do anything. God could only love another self-existent and good entity. But the only explanation of the existence of our contingent world is God. So why would God make an imperfect world?
There is a possible resolution to this problem. While God could not create another god, He could initiate a process which could possibly lead to the self-creation of such an entity. A process involving self-creation, particularly one which extended its self-creation to the sphere of goodness, could possibly lead to the production of an entity which was both self-created and good, and so appropriate for God to love. Such a process of self-creation would have to be largely free from Divine interference, and would have to have the potential to lead to the production of an entity similar to God.
While God is spirit, and something which also had a spiritual nature would be the desired outcome of the process, a self-creating process which aimed at a spiritual outcome would have to be initiated at a lower level than spirit. It could then possibly work its way towards a more spiritual outcome by stages.
Something would have to be created as the basis upon which the self-creating process could be initiated. This initial stage would not need to be able to exercise very much freedom. It could be made subject to rigid deterministic laws, but the interaction of these deterministic laws could lead to a variety of possible outcomes. If initiated on a sufficiently large scale, and extending for whatever time was necessary, this initial stage could eventually produce an appropriate platform for the initiation of a subsequent stage, or stages, which in turn could exercise greater degrees of freedom.
A series of such stages could eventually provide a platform for the introduction of a spiritual stage which could exercise total freedom in the sphere of goodness. Such a totally free stage could possibly give rise to an entity which was perfectly good, a self-created and good entity which it would be appropriate for God to love.
Aristotle failed in his attempt to provide an explanation of man and the world. He did not have a progressive concept of the world and he did not have an accurate picture of the world, such as we have gained from Science.
What do we know that Aristotle did not know? Two things come immediately to mind. Most obviously, Aristotle did not know about the Big Bang or about evolution. Less obviously but more importantly, he did not possess the concept of a progressive process. His world was a static world, where any processes were circular rather than progressive, being based on the circular biological model, from seed to tree to seed.
We owe our progressive evolutionary perspective on the world primarily to Teilhard de Chardin.
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