Comments for Feasting with Angels at http://www.thecatholicthing.org , comment 1 to 9 out of 9 comments http://www.thecatholicthing.org Fri, 24 May 2013 10:44:16 +0100 FeedCreator 1.7.3 http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2012/feasting-with-angels.html#comment-13755 "written by Mack Hall, October 02, 2012 The mediaevals - who, after all, invented universities -- would never have been as daft as we moderns who believe -- BELIEVE -- that a paint stripe on the ground will keep two cars from hitting each other." Neither do moderns. Moderns know that it represents an edict from their liege lord's to stay on one side of the road. Just as Medievals knew that a statue with a winged lion on it meant a bunch of rich merchants from a town called Venice that could build several hundred war galleys in a week. Medievals were perfectly aware of the concept of symbolism. - jason taylor Fri, 05 Oct 2012 18:39:46 +0100 http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2012/feasting-with-angels.html#comment-13716 "Angel of God my my Guardian dear,to whom his love commits me here,ever this day be at my side,to light and Guard,to rule and guide. Amen I depend on my Angel angel and have for years, call on yours my friend,we all could use the help these days! Jack - Jack,CT Wed, 03 Oct 2012 00:55:04 +0100 http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2012/feasting-with-angels.html#comment-13712 Platonism is really behind most of the thinking of contemporary science. As M. Cummings points out in his comment, currently the most physicists believe in what is popularly called "dark matter" and "dark energy", neither of which have any direct experimental evidence for them. Instead the existence of these entities is entirely inferred from mathematical theories of quantum gravitation. That is, in order for the quantum field equations to work, quantities must be added in at various points that have no known physical motivation. Thus the mathematics alone causes these physicists to assert the existence of entities for which there is no physical evidence. The attitude of most physicists is that if the math requires an entity, then - although we can neither sense it nor can our instruments measure it - it must exist. This is sheer Platonism. One finds similar attitudes to statistical reasoning in the life sciences, and even more so in the social sciences. If a theorem of statistics requires that a population be such-and-so in order for a certain trial to be true, then regardless of the actual population, it must have been such-and-so. In no way is this empiricism. It is boundless confidence in the application of math and statistics to reality. Yet there has never been a cogent explanation for why this application works. Eugene Wigner, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics, wrote a famous essay about this conundrum, titled "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences" (1960). He held that "It is difficult to avoid the impression that a miracle confronts us here, quite comparable in its striking nature to the miracle that the human mind can string a thousand arguments together without getting itself into contradictions, or to the two miracles of the existence of laws of nature and of the human mind's capacity to divine them." Many years later, an equally famous applied mathematician, R.W. Hamming, developed Wigner's thought in his essay, "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics" (1980). Hamming writes that "Is it not a miracle that the universe is so constructed that such a simple abstraction as a number is possible? To me this is one of the strongest examples of the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics. Indeed, l find it both strange and unexplainable." The present state of our physical science, reliant as it is on a completely unexplained Platonism, remains extremely nebulous. Putting together Wigner's and Hamming's words, it requires us to rely on the strange and unexplainable miracle that somehow mathematics can guide us to the truth about the world. Pythagoras has been vindicated by our present state of science: it was he who famously said "all is number." Of course, as a Thomist, I don't believe this one bit. Hippocrates Apostle, the late great scholar of Aristotle, spent the last years of his life recovering Aristotle's approach to mathematics as a science of quantities, rather than as a Platonic mystery play of numbers. But that is for another post. - G.K. Thursday Tue, 02 Oct 2012 18:03:41 +0100 http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2012/feasting-with-angels.html#comment-13710 James Collins, author of the Thomistic Philosophy of the Angels, was one of my mentors in graduate school at St. Louis U. He argued that the study of angelic nature was important for philosophy because it focused on the essential aspects of intellectual beings without all the "distractions" of contingent being -- allowing an examination of mind and will in their pure state, relation to matter, etc. He inspired my Master's Thesis on the angels, eventually published as "Active and Passive" Potency in Thomistic Angelology. - Howard Kainz Tue, 02 Oct 2012 14:12:37 +0100 http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2012/feasting-with-angels.html#comment-13708 The mediaevals - who, after all, invented universities -- would never have been as daft as we moderns who believe -- BELIEVE -- that a paint stripe on the ground will keep two cars from hitting each other. - Mack Hall Tue, 02 Oct 2012 12:19:53 +0100 http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2012/feasting-with-angels.html#comment-13707 What a great, instructive commentary. I started off thinking "geez, another embarrassing missive highlighting Catholic simple-mindedness and supporting Obama's patronizing guns-and-religion characterization of non-secularists like himself". Then I read and thought, and learned. This hit hard: "If, after all, it is possible for real beings not made of flesh and bone to exist, then there is a reality not subject to being shaped according to our desires, nor is it malleable by means of physical power." Scientists announce regularly new discoveries which, both individually and as a whole, demonstrate how LITTLE we really understand. If dark energy and dark matter make up 95% of the Universe--according to NASA's website--how can secularists so easily dismiss God, angels, miracles, near-death experiences pointing to heaven, the power of prayer not to mention ghosts and "supernatural" events. The nature we measure and define is only 5% of what's there! Thoughtful people should be increasingly humble before the "super" natural. This not-knowing should make is EASIER to accept religion. Great article. Worth circulating. - Michael Cummings Tue, 02 Oct 2012 07:34:20 +0100 http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2012/feasting-with-angels.html#comment-13705 I've always wondered what should be so difficult about believing in immaterial beings, when mathematicians commonly speak about immaterial objects as real -- mathematicians, when they are not consciously insisting otherwise, are Platonists in their assumptions. That is, they assume that they are discovering truths about objects that do in fact exist... Physicists are the same way when they talk about a "law" of nature. The law is discoverable from empirical analysis, but is not, strictly speaking, deducible from it, nor is it reducible to it. - Tony Tue, 02 Oct 2012 06:48:22 +0100 http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2012/feasting-with-angels.html#comment-13704 Angels without matter—that was a difficult issue for the Christian Platonist theologian/philosophers, because in Platonic thought perfection lay in the ἰdea, the ‘form’; and creatures, who and which, lacking such perfection, are individuated by matter. Thus, since angels are creatures and not perfect, they must, in the Platonist mind, have some matter. How little matter would suffice? Well, take the smallest point of matter easily seen, such as the head of a pin. Then ask how many angels could stand on the head of that pin? Along came the Aristotelian theologian/philosophers, who following Aristotle taught that differentiation need not lay in matter only. Matter is needed only within a genus to differentiate individuals. For the Aristotelian theologians, like Aquinas, each angel is sui generis. So, let’s give the medievals a break. They at least thought and explored reality in the search for explaining it, rather than limiting their assumptions to only the existence of the material and thereby dismiss out of hand what was not ascertainably by the physical sciences, but could be known by the meta-physical sciences. - senex Tue, 02 Oct 2012 06:30:01 +0100 http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2012/feasting-with-angels.html#comment-13702 A well-drawn, beautiful, and timely statement. Thank you! - Martha Rice Martini Tue, 02 Oct 2012 01:32:07 +0100