Modern Age - Fall 2016 - 77

THOMAS AQUINAS ON CREATION AND SCIENCE

Accordingly, Thomas is able to conclude that there must be an
Uncaused Cause of the existence of all beings. These are key features of Thomas's philosophical argument for a Creator. Hence,
any appreciation of Thomas's analysis requires an engagement
with his sense of cause and with his metaphysical notion of being
(esse) as an actuality (actus essendi).

A

common objection to Thomas's approach to creation is that
the natural sciences are fully competent to explain all that
needs to be explained about nature and human nature and that
existence itself is simply a "brute fact" that does not require any
explanation or cause. To know whether the natural sciences are
fully competent to explain the world, however, requires an engagement with the broader philosophical topic of what the sphere of
competence of the natural sciences is. Even elementary thinking
about the scope and limits of the natural sciences requires us to
enter philosophical discourse. To claim that existence itself is a
"brute fact" is to make a philosophical claim. It may well be that
whether the world is created makes no difference to the practice of
scientific investigation, but, in another and more profound sense,
whether the world is created makes all the difference in the world.
Thomas's metaphysics of creation offers an important insight
into the proper autonomy of the natural sciences, since, for
Thomas, God creates things to have their own natures, their own
sources/causes of characteristic behavior, behavior that the natural sciences study. For Thomas, to be created means to have existence, to have being, from the primal source of being, and thus to
possess a unity and intelligibility essential for the study of nature.
In this sense, for the world to be created makes the natural sciences possible.
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Modern Age - Fall 2016

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