Pints With Aquinas - 83: What is the soul? Does it survive death?

Episode Date: December 5, 2017

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What's up, what's up, what's up, Thomas? It's Matt Fradd here with Pints with Aquinas. Before we jump into today's excellent show, I want to let you know that I'm going to be giving away two free copies of Dr. Michael Argros' brand new book, which is called The Immortal in You, How Human Nature is More Than Science Can Say. If you want to be in the running to win this great book, all you got to do is go to the Pints with Aquinas Twitter account and retweet the very top post. That's the pinned post at Pints with Aquinas' Twitter account. That's how you enter the draw.

It doesn't matter if you live in another country that isn't America. We will send you this book to your doorstep for free. That's how you enter this week only. Enjoy the show. Welcome to Pints with Aquinas, episode 83. I'm Matt Fradd. If you could sit down over a pint of beer with St. Thomas Aquinas and ask him any one question, what would it be? Today, we're joined around the bar table by, with Dr. Michael A. Argros, who is Professor of Philosophy at Thomas Aquinas College. We're going to be discussing the soul.

What is the soul? What arguments do we have that the soul might survive death and all those sorts of things? Great to have you here. Enjoy the show. All right, all right, all right. Good to have you here back at Plants with Aquinas. Who's in your heart? from Thomas Aquinas College. This is a really fun discussion, partly because the two of us geek out over philosophy. So I think you'll enjoy that. But we're also gonna be talking about the soul. We don't actually read directly from Thomas Aquinas in today's episode. So I will read from him before, I'll read from Aquinas directly before we get into this interview to kind of set the stage a little bit, okay? Because I always say I love

hearing directly from Thomas Aquinas. I don't want someone to break Thomas Aquinas down for me unless I can also read him directly. So that's what we'll do. Thanks very much for listening. You know, you heard my big news a couple of weeks ago that I quit my job and now I'm going to be doing this full-time. This is ridiculous. I don't know why I'm doing it full-time. I just wrote to Goma from Catching Foxes. I said, well, we'll see how this goes. Either people will support me or I will go down in flames and then you'll know not ever to try this. Don't quit your job. So if you want to support Pines with Aquinas on Patreon, because you should, because you're awesome, and you want the thank you gifts that I give you in return, go to pineswithaquinas.com slash PWA. You'll see that I will give you different things like an amazing book. If you

support me at 10 bucks a month, I'll send you a Pines with Aquinas beer stein if you give 20 bucks a month and other things. That would be super good. So thanks very much. Let's read from the first part of the Summa Theologiae, question 75, article 2. Here, Aquinas addresses the issue whether or not the soul is subsistent, whether it's incorporeal, and that's what we discuss in today's show. So let me just read this. I'm not going to stop to explain what he means by it, and we'll just jump right into the discussion, and then, you know, if things don't make sense in this little reading, maybe hopefully our interview will shed light on it. So,

Aquinas' main answer here in Article 2 is this. It must necessarily be allowed that the principle of intellectual operation, which we call the soul, is a principle both incorporeal and subsistent. For it is clear that by means of the intellect, man can have knowledge of corporeal things. Now, whatever knows certain things cannot have any of them in its own nature, because that which is in it naturally would impede the knowledge of anything else. Thus, we observe that a sick man's tongue, being vitiated, which just means spoiled, vitiated by a feverish and bitter humor is insensible to anything sweet, and everything seems bitter to it. Therefore, if the intellectual principle contained the nature of a body, it would be unable to know all bodies. Now, every body has

its own determinant nature. Therefore, it is impossible for the intellectual principle to be a body, to be material. It is likewise impossible for it to understand by means of a bodily organ, since the determinate nature of that organ would impede knowledge of all bodies, as when a certain determinate color is not only in the pupil of the eye, but also in a glass vase. The liquid in the vase seems to be of that same color. Therefore, the intellectual principle, which we call the mind or the intellect, has an

operation per se, apart from the body. Now, only that which subsists can have an operation per se, for nothing can operate but what is actual. For which reason we do not say that heat imparts heat, but that what is hot gives heat. We must conclude, therefore, that the human soul, which is called the intellect or the mind, is something incorporeal and subsistent. Okay, hope that made sense. I think it's beautiful. There's a lot to unpack there for sure, and I think we'll do that somewhat in the show. Make sure you stick around to the end of the show so we can hear your questions answered here on Pints with Aquinas. Here we go. Dr. Argus, thank you for being with us. Oh, thanks for having me on the show. I appreciate it, Matt.

Absolutely. Now, I heard about you first, the other book you just wrote on cosmology with Ignatius Press, The First Cause. What was that one called? Who Designed the Designer. Yeah, what I read of that I really liked. And now you've got a new one out called The Immortal in You, How Human Nature is More Than Science Can Say. Pretty cool front cover.

Tell us a bit about you first, maybe, and why you wrote this book. All right. Well, I've got a doctorate in philosophy from Boston College, and I've been teaching philosophy for, I don't know, 20-something years. And I teach at Thomas Aquinas College in Southern California, a small liberal arts school, where we do the great books. That's kind of more or less the curriculum. And why did I write this book? Well, because there are a lot of people out there these days convincing young people, especially I'm thinking of college students,

that they're nothing more than machines, they're nothing more than animals or piles of tissue, that there's nothing about them that elevates them above the rest of the natural world, that there's nothing for them after death, and so on, and convincing them that elevates them above the rest of the natural world, that there's nothing for them after death and so on, and convincing them that this is the worst part of it, that that's the conclusion of science. That's kind of masquerading as science when really it's just badly done philosophy. And I'm not the only one like this. There are people out there like Ed Fazer and others who are kind of tired of hearing about all these popular books out there by people like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens and the like

that are convincing young minds of these sorts of things, very successful books that they're writing. And we're in possession of the knowledge. We have the knowledge of the truth on the opposite side, and we're starting to feel an obligation to communicate it to more popular audiences, and not comfortable just with talking with our fellow academics about it. So that's one of the main motivations for writing a book like this. Well, good for you for writing it. Obviously, we're talking about the soul, the immortality of the soul, whether it's incorruptible. Maybe the very first thing we should do, Dr. Argos, is just define what we mean. You know, when people think of soul, sometimes they think of that thing that

floats within us. We're not really sure what it is we're talking about, so it might be difficult to make an argument for it. So what do we mean by soul? Okay, that's a great question. The thing that most people have in mind when they hear it is something that has to do with religion and something that's immortal and survives the death of the body and so on. And obviously, there's some truth to all of that. But the philosopher's approach to this is a little bit different. So if you go back to Aristotle, who's a pagan philosopher, lived before Christ, he doesn't have any clear revelation of any kind about the afterlife. He had an idea of the soul, too, and what he meant by it was just whatever it is in your body that is first responsible for making it be a living human body as opposed to a corpse, basically.

And when you define it that way, you see that other living things also should be said to have a soul, a first principle of being alive that's in the body of the animal. And he would even have said the same thing about plants. So you see how different that is from our ordinary understanding of soul. And if you start with that idea, you can eventually discover that the human soul is special. It's not just what makes us to be alive and animates our body. It turns out that in our case, it is something that can exist apart from the body. That's what's special about it. So what you won't find in Aristotle or Thomas Aquinas after him, you will never find an attempt

to prove the existence of the soul. And the reason for that is because what they mean by it is something they take to be obvious. The existence of it is obvious. So you actually find this expression in Shakespeare, as sure as I have a thought or a soul, one character says, I think it's Beatrice. And the idea is just as I know that I've got a thought, I don't have to prove the existence of my thoughts. I immediately experience them. I also know that I've got a soul that is something within me that is the first reason why I'm able to think and to be a thinking and sensing and living being. But then the special question comes up, how do you know or how do you decide or tell whether the human soul is something that can exist apart from the body or not? That would be the subsequent question. Right. So could we say, you know, if someone, again, is making this into too much of a religious

issue and you're having a discussion with someone over a beer and you're like, look, all I mean by the soul is it's the difference between a living body and a dead body. Would that be a good place to start? It's a good place to start, yeah. So it's the first thing. You have to say the first thing, because if you say it's anything in you that you have to say the first thing, because if you say it's anything in you, that's the reason why you're alive. Well, then your heart is your soul and your, you know, your blood is your soul. And that's not true. So the thing about those things is they're alive too. You want to go back all the way to the ultimate reason why there's life in you

at all, human life in you. And there you see that that doesn't decide the question right away in any obvious way. Somebody might hear that and say, oh, so you mean DNA? That's what it is, or something like that. That turns out not to be the case, and that's the kind of thing that St. Thomas and Aristotle can argue against. So what they will do, they won't argue for the existence of the soul, but they will argue for figuring out what it is. So, do you have a soul is not really a serious question for them, that's obvious, but what is it? That's a serious question for them, and they actually consider those things, consider various alternatives, and eventually arrive at a definition that the soul is, the human soul, is the form, what they call the form of the human

body. Right. So would, like, pre-Socratics, like atomists, you know, like Epicureans and such, would they, they would also hold that we have a soul, even though they would be materialists? Yes, so they would say that your soul is something like really fine atoms, like some kind of gassy substance that permeates your body, something of that sort. And so when you die, that gassy substance just rearranges. That's all that happens. That's right, yeah. And that obviously opens you up to all kinds of problems.

If you say that sort of thing, then why can't that gaseous substance find itself in a different kind of body? Why can't the human soul just put down this human body like an Iron Man suit and pick up another one? And that's not possible. Maybe it can, right? I mean, if the Buddhists are right. Yeah, right, right. But if it turns out it's the form of the human body, which is the kind of thing that, again, Aristotle and Thomas will argue for, then it can't possibly be put into another kind of body, because what it does for a living, so to speak, is it makes or forms that kind of body. So it'd be like saying, hey, can you take the form of a statue of Abe Lincoln, which is a shape,

the shape of Abe Lincoln's body, take it out of this material, put it in another material, and get a statue of George Washington? You can't do that, because if you take the form of Abe Lincoln, what you're going to get is a statue of Abe Lincoln. So the same thing would be true of the soul, if indeed the soul is the form of the body, the thing that makes it to be a human body. Okay, and the other thing, you know, we're not talking about is the ghost in the machine stuff, right? Like Thomas and the Church has taught that the human person is both body and soul, and so if a person dies, we don't call the body a human person, maybe not even a human body. And if we consider the souls prior to the resurrection of the body,

we wouldn't call them, you correct me here, Professor, you wouldn't call that a human body either, not even a human body, but a human person, would you? I think that's right. Now, there's some debate about that, but I think the doctrine of St. Thomas on that is just what you said, that if you said that a human soul is a person, which is kind of the view that Descartes had and the view that Plato had long before him, then what you'd be saying is, I am a combination, a human being is a combination of a person and a body.

And what you're suggesting there is that the body is not really part of what I am. It's just something that I'm using, like a driver in a car or something of that sort. But that, yeah, go ahead. Sorry, I was just going to say, didn't Descartes even think that he could locate where the soul was, some sort of gland? Yeah, the pineal gland. He thought that that was the special point of connection between the soul and the body. And he was, well, he was confused about a lot of things. But he saw that a human being is somehow composed of these two principles, the body and the soul.

somehow composed of these two principles, the body and the soul. But because he made each one of them an independently existing substance and didn't make one of them sort of the form of the other that gives it being, he didn't do that. As a result, he was always stuck with the problem that they don't really seem to form a single being. They're two beings working together or something of that sort. Again, like a driver in a car, the two of them don't form one entity. It's one entity using another. And that doesn't seem true to our experience of having bodies. My body is not just something that I'm using. It's actually me, as long as I'm alive in it. And that fits with the view of Aristotle and Thomas, again, that the soul is the form of the body. The statue is not just a lump of marble.

It's not just a shape. It's a shape in a piece of marble, or it's the two together. And that forms one statue. one being or one living being, a human being, by combining the materials for a human being with the thing in those materials that actually forms them or makes them to be human. Hmm. I wonder if just like Descartes, you know, turned non-rational animals into machines, essentially, I wonder if that's sort of kind of just what we've done like we've continued down the road of descartes we've picked up you know certain things that occam had to say we've kind of shaved away the things that don't seem necessary and now it's just like yeah this is us

like it's just it's just blood and atoms and anyone who wants to say any different like someone might say to you dr agris okay fine right we. Yeah, sure. I can agree with that. But this notion that it's immortal, where's the evidence for that? Yes, right. So that's the difficult question, which for Aristotle comes near the end of his book on the soul. He's got three, his book is divided into three books, three large chunks, and it's in the third part that he talks about that. And he considers that to be one of the most difficult questions that you can ask in all of philosophy, but in particular about the human soul. So in short, sort of in outline, the way the argument or the way the evidence goes is like this. If your soul has all of its activities in the body, if it does everything that it does in the body,

if all of its activities are activities of a body part, you can put it that way, then your soul is nothing but a form of your body. It can't exist apart from it. If its life and activity is all carried out in parts of the body, then its existence is stuck in the body and it can't be apart from that. But, on the other hand, if the soul, if the human soul has some activity that it does not conduct, that it does not carry out in a part of the body, and by means of a part of the body, then its existence is not completely, what would you say, submerged in the materials of the body. It has an existence even now that's at least partly not in the body,

and therefore it can exist without the body. That's sort of the general setup for the argument. Then it all comes down to the question, well, is there anything that the human soul can do that it does not do in the body? And the answer is yes. And part of the answer to that, or one example of that, is the act of understanding. And in particular, because you can talk about animals also understanding things in some sense of that word, I'll specify the understanding of universal things, universal truth. So when you understand not just this beautiful thing, but what beautiful means,

or you understand not just this triangle, but what a triangle is in general, you're forming universal ideas that are applicable to a possible infinity of individuals. So this triangle is right here, right now. This cat is right here, right now. And it doesn't apply to of individuals. So this triangle is right here, right now. This cat is right here, right now. And it doesn't apply to other individuals. But my definition of what a cat is, or my definition of what a triangle is, applies to all possible triangles or all possible cats. And so those kinds of notions that we can form, that's what I mean by understanding universal things and then universal truths that you can make out of statements formed from universal terms,

like every triangle has an angle sum of two right angles, that sort of thing, or every cat is an animal. If you make statements like that, you're making universal truths that you understand. That's the kind of thing that animals can't do, that machines certainly can't do, that we obviously can do. So like that expression from Shakespeare, as sure as I have a thought or a soul, I'm very sure that I have these universal thoughts. Then the final point is to see, well, why should one think that it's not my brain that's doing that, but something that's immaterial or incorporeal? Why would you think that? And the sort of illustration I give of the argument for that is to say, well,

can you draw a triangle on the blackboard or on a sheet of paper? Yes, you can. Can you draw what's common to all triangles on the blackboard? And just that, not just, not draw a triangle, but draw something that is common to every single triangle in the work. You can't do it. Every triangle you draw on the blackboard is going to be an individual with its own idiosyncrasies and peculiar characteristics and properties that do not apply to all triangles but are unique to this triangle. But you can understand what's common to all triangles,

so you're getting triangularity into your mind without getting all those individualizing and limiting characteristics there. That's an indication that your mind is not a corporeal entity. Because if you were to, say, try to get a triangle into your eyesight or your imagination, these other cognitive powers, you can get that kind of thing into your other cognitive powers, but not in a universal way there either. So I can imagine a triangle. I can't form an image in my mind of what's common to all triangles any more than I can draw it on the blackboard. And the reason for that is because as soon as you take triangularity and impress it on some

kind of material thing, like a blackboard or my imagination, it necessarily becomes an individual, this one as opposed to any other. Well then, if I can get triangularity or what a cat is or any other such thing into my mind without making it into an individual, it stays universal, that means that my mind can't be a material or a corporeal receiver of those things. That's what follows. Now, that seems to get us pretty much all the way to the finish line, except maybe for one difficulty, the one hang-up, which is this. It sure seems like, even when I understand universal truths, I'm using my brain.

I depend on my brain. So, you know, my students, they come to class and I ask them to demonstrate a mathematical theorem at the board. If they were out a little too late the night before, they might have trouble demonstrating. No, no, no, it would never, ever happen. But just hypothetically, or, you know, if somebody were to smack me on the head with a crowbar, I might find it hard to do geometry after that, or to get a little more sophisticated than that. If you were to actually form, what would you say, real-time images of my brain while I'm doing geometry

and get them up on a nice computer monitor for everybody to see, you would see that there was a tight correlation between certain centers of my brain and how active they are with the activity of my demonstrating certain theorems of geometry or whatever understanding I'm performing, which seems to be all pretty definitive evidence that I use my brain and I depend on my brain in order to understand even universal truth. And for most people, that's enough. That settles the whole question. They say, that's it. Then your brain is the thing that's doing the understanding, and therefore you're just a corporeal being, and that's all you are after all. Now, St. Thomas, Aquinas, and Aristotle were both fully aware of the dependence of the intellect

on the brain. This is what bothers me, right? Like this kind of like modern smugness, as if Aristotle was completely unaware that if someone took a sharp blow to the head that it wouldn't affect their cognitive ability. Yeah. Right. And they both actually take this into account. And they say, look, there's two different ways that your cognitive power in you can depend on a bodily organ in order to function. One is the obvious way. If the organ is itself the cognitive organ that's performing those cognitive activities. But another way is if that organ is

the organ of another cognitive power that is supplying the one in question with the objects to think about. So just to start sort of at the crudest level here, the most obvious level, can you argue like this? Let's see. Let's say we're in a closet and there's a light bulb in there so I can see you with the dark closet, but with the light bulb on, I can see you. You can say, well, if interfering with my eyes interferes with my seeing you, then my eyes are the organs by which I see you. Well, that seems to make some sense, but what if you say, if interfering with the light bulb interferes with my seeing you, then the light bulb is the organ by which I'm seeing you. That doesn't work, right? Doesn't

work. Why not? Because I do depend on the light bulb to see you, but not in the manner of depending on the organ performing the action, but on something that is making the object present to my other cognitive power, to the organs that are in fact performing the activity. Or maybe a little bit more sophisticated. If I'm counting objects that are presented to my field of view, and you're imaging my brain while I'm doing that, you're going to see various activities in there. You might see activity in one portion of my brain over here that's tightly correlated with my activity of counting what I'm seeing. Can you be sure that that's the place where I'm doing the counting?

Or could it just be that that's the place where I'm doing the seeing? And the seeing is the thing that is supplying me with things to count, with the objects to count. So similarly here, you'd say, my brain, I do depend on it in order to understand, but I have to form images. Even when I form an understanding of what a cat is in general, or form a definition of what a triangle is, I form words in English in my mind, in my imagination, and I even form images like triangles or an individual cat to help me out. I mean, this is the problem when you think of God, right? I mean, you can't not use images when you think about immaterialism. No, you use images there, and very often you use images of things

that are not God. So St. Thomas explains God negatively in many ways. He's often the via negativa there. So he'll say God is not a changeable thing. He's not a body. What are you imagining when you say God is not a body? A body. Well, a body of some kind. With a big red cross through it, yeah. Yes, right, yeah, exactly, just not this. And so you see that even when we can't form an image of the thing we're thinking about, we do form images of other kinds that help us to bring that thing to mind. Now, if that's true, and that's what St. Thomas and Aristotle both said, they said, and this fits with that question you were asking about Descartes,

are we a ghost floating in a machine? Well, no, there's a reason why the human soul is in the human body. It's not like it's an intellectual being that's been imprisoned in an animal body where it doesn't belong. It's the kind of intellect that gets its understanding of things with the help of the senses and the imagination. That's how it gets its objects. If that's how it gets its objects, then if you interfere with the organs of sense and imagination, you will necessarily interfere with understanding

because you're cutting off the supply line of objects to the intellect. I've heard the analogy... So that would just as well account for the other yeah go ahead i've heard the analogy too of the pianist and the piano creating the music and if you damage the piano then you won't be able to play the music and the soul in in a similar manner that the soul uses the brain yes yes that's right but i like yours too with the light bulb in the in the closet that's good Yes, yes, that's right. But I like yours too with the light bulb in the closet. That's good.

Yeah, yeah. So the soul does depend on the brain in order to understand, but not because the brain is doing the understanding for the reasons given earlier. Yeah. So if we get rid of universals, right, like if we take Occam's approach, is that one step closer to being able to more easily deny the soul? It would be one step closer.

You'd have trouble denying them. You run into all kinds of problems. But yes, that would get you one step closer. But you would still have other properties that would cause you trouble. So the fact that the human intellect can think about itself, can understand itself, the whole intellect understands the whole intellect, that is impossible to reconcile with the idea that it's a power in a body it's so crazy when you consider the history of philosophy and

how one philosopher builds upon the others either insights or flaws because i mean you think of like david hume who says that like well you actually can't know that you exist you know like because you never experience the self and i'm just thinking about this sort of slow progression from Descartes to Locke, Pugh, Kant. Yeah, it's... Well, I think that's actually a good indication of the truth of Aristotle's doctrine and St. Thomas's explication of it is that if you start denying some of the fundamental principles in that doctrine, you're going to end up basically denying your own existence. That's the end of that road. Yeah, and when somebody says that to you, like, it's, well, it's absurd to think that you exist.

Like, oh, maybe you are, you know? Yeah, that's right. Maybe we should run back to Aristotle. Maybe we should be doing that and start again because, yeah. Well, and then wouldn't it be, you go. Well, I was just going to say, I'm actually teaching a seminar this year on some of the more modern philosophers, and I just got through reading Descartes recently with my students, and they said, well, he's crazy for a lot of reasons. But this idea that he exists and he knows he exists and he can't doubt that, that seems to be pretty solid.

And certainly no one would—he must be right that that's the most certain thing in the world, because nobody would ever deny the existence of themselves. Okay, hold your breath, kids. Hold that thought. We're going to be getting to Constant Hume in the not-too-distant future. I mean, I can understand the impetus for, well, modern philosophy. Like, you've got the new scientific instruments. You have the sort of Protestant Reformation, these religious wars. There's this desire to throw off the old Aristotelian philosophy

as we're discovering all these big truths about the world. We hit the Enlightenment. We've got this incredible uh sense that that the intellect can lead us the whole way and then it's like it leads us back to plato's cave except and you tell me if i'm right here like instead of like at least in the in plato's cave you've got the forms right and then those things that we experience participate in those forms but then when it comes to people like uh like like like well Kant, it's like our mind is the cave and there's no exit. Like you can't get out of it to look upon the forms.

I mean, you've got the noumena and the phenomena. So there's got to be something that presents the phenomena to me, but I have no way of contacting that. So to your point earlier, when you say we can't know universals, wouldn't it also follow? earlier when you say we can't know universals, wouldn't it also follow, and I think Aquinas makes this point when he talks about how, you know, if you had color in a pupil or color on a lens of a glass, it would distort not only our understanding of universals, but reality, matter itself. Would that also be true? Yes, and that's actually from Aristotle in book three of his De Anima. He gives that argument that you're mentioning there for the incorporeality of the human mind, saying if the human mind had a corporeal nature, then it would automatically have certain qualities in it and a nature in it that it would always have

to be understanding, and that would interfere with its understanding of other things. And as to your point about Kant and so on, I think that's right, that sort of a common denominator in the modern project there is to say, well, what we really know is just what's in our own minds, and then we're hoping we can deduce the existence of an external world from there. Right. It's been said that no one came up with an argument for the existence of the world. No, sorry, no one denied the existence of the world until Descartes came up with a proof for it. Yes, that's exactly, that's well said. I don't know if you know who Ralph McInerney is. Yes, I do.

He's the late Ralph McInerney. He taught at Notre Dame, and I think he had a kind of a joke with his class about how the modern philosophers would start with assuming that they know nothing but what's in their own minds and try to prove the existence of an outside world. And he said, what modern philosophy does is it shows you how to go out of your mind. Oh, wow, that's brilliant. I'm not going to forget that. Yeah, I think it's important to our listeners that they recognize just like what an, like Kant, Immanuel Kant was an A-bomb in the history of philosophy right I mean since the time of Kant I mean that's totally influenced how we do

philosophy you can either ignore him right or or say he's wrong and you continue being sort of a sort of an epistemological realist saying we can know things in the external world. Or what do you do? You either give up. You either say, well, reason is so handicapped, so let's study language. Or you just kind of give up the whole enterprise altogether. Yeah, yeah, that's right. Because we have a bunch of geeks who listen to this podcast, Dr. Argros. That's why I bring this up, and I'd love your thoughts on that. Okay.

Well, God bless the geeks. I'm one of them. Kant is interesting because he's right to say that there are many properties of things only as known by us, properties that don't belong to things in themselves. And sometimes we fall into mistakes if we attribute those properties to things as known to the things themselves. So an example would be universality. And that was a big question among the ancients and medieval philosophers. Are there universal things? Is there, take Plato for example, is there triangularity itself or cat itself existing by itself somehow, separate from all others in which the others participate. And Aristotle is the first one to say after Plato,

no, actually that doesn't exist outside the soul, as long as we're talking about things like specific species of animals and figures. He had a different thing to say about goodness itself. He agreed with Plato about that. But about something like what a triangle is, he said that exists separately from individual triangles, only in the soul. And so the soul is the place of forms. It's not right to think of a separate realm of those things. And he had reasons for saying that. But Kant comes along and says pretty much every property that we are familiar with that belongs to things belongs to them only as known by us.

We contribute everything to the things. Now, what that ends you up with is there's no knowledge at all. You're trapped in yourself, and you have to be a solipsist. You don't even know that there are other human beings in existence. That's just sort of a strange hypothesis of yours that you're tempted to form. I'm cutting you off. I don't mean to. I'm just getting really excited. You can continue, and I'll make my point after.

Oh, I was just going to say that that ends you up in madness. I mean, and nobody really believes that. Even Kant, finally, he thought he believed it, but he couldn't really believe that. I compare that sort of thing sometimes to Zeno and his motion paradoxes. Did Zeno really think there was no motion? I don't think so. I think it's better to say he thought that he thought there was no motion paradoxes. Did Zeno really think there was no motion? I don't think so. I think it's better to say he thought that he thought there was no motion. He thought that he had to say that,

but he knew that there was motion the same way the rest of us do. He just couldn't get his act together. He was kind of an intellectual schizophrenic, and that's what you end up becoming. I remember Father Andrew Union, my first philosophy professor, says, here's how you disprove Zeno, and he threw his marker at the wall. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. That kind of takes you back to Samuel Johnson, that great literary figure of the 18th century in England there.

I think his friend Boswell, who wrote that famous Life of Johnson, Boswell asked him how he would refute Barclay, I think it was, who says basically there's no material things outside your soul. Everything's just in your mind and so on. And Johnson just said, I refute him thus, and he kicked a rock. That's brilliant. That's it. Here's the analogy I was going to use. I don't know if you've ever had the pleasure of speaking to someone that you're not sure if they're inebriated or not but it's outside a pub and it's one in the morning and they maybe they're homeless you're not sure but you know you strike up a conversation and at the beginning they seem

kind of with it and you're talking to them and then they they do something it's a it's a it's a twitching of the head it's a it's a slurred word and then you're like oh oh wow like you're completely off your head and then you turn around you go and i kind of feel wow, like you're completely off your head, and then you turn around and you go. And I kind of feel like, you know, conversing with modern and contemporary philosophy has sort of been like that. Like, okay, okay, I think I'm with you, Descartes. Yeah, I get it. You're the cogito.

I can see that. And then, you know, okay, now God doesn't exist. The self doesn't exist. Okay, you are insane. I need to go. Yeah. Yeah. There comes a time when the project,

if there was something gone wrong with the project at the very core, at the very beginning, then as it develops further, you're going to work those defects out and they're going to become very clear. So it's a little bit like working out a math problem or doing your taxes or something. You make a tiny mistake in the beginning you might not notice, but then you get to the end and you say, wait a minute, I owe $700 million? That's not right. That seems excessive. Okay, that's awesome.

I'm so enjoying this conversation. I wonder if just before we wrap up here you know just is there something else you want to address because I know you probably have been given a million and one questions from people what do you think is the most compelling argument for the soul not being

subsistent like there's got to be I mean obviously you disagree with it but what's the best argument that shows that we are material after all, and once we die, it just lights out? Yeah, I really think maybe there are two best arguments, and what actually convinces people the most or puzzles people the most maybe are not quite the same thing. quite the same thing. Most compelling kind of evidence or strongest argument might actually be the one that I was mentioning before that, hey, everything that you do, you do in your brain, basically. Every cognitive function that you perform, that's all in your brain. And so there really is no sign in you of any kind of incorporeal power. I think that argument fails for the reasons

I gave earlier, but that's the one that seems just in terms of cold evidence, just sort of the strongest. But then I think you've also got something which is stronger that convinces far more people or persuades them far more. But in a way, it's not even an argument. It's more like a prejudice. And it's what I call scientism, not science, but scientism, which is kind of the irrational belief that science has the answers to all questions, is the only answerer of questions, and also the solver of all problems, in a more practical note there. But if you think that, and this goes back to what you were saying earlier, Matt, about how science is so spectacularly successful, that modern science now, that we easily fall into thinking that it answers all questions and that if you don't have a scientific answer, you don't have a real answer. But then we forget that, well, let's see where that goes. If you think that's true, then you're going to think that the human soul and all that sort of talk is bunk,

because when you get the MRI out or the x-ray machine or any number of other instruments of scientific observation, you can't find the slightest clue or the slightest hint that there's anything out there that should be called a soul. That just seems like an old-fashioned word that has no place anymore. And that's because you've narrowed the field down to just talking about things in the terms and conditions and principles of modern science. And you haven't realized that you've necessarily made your consideration of the world and of yourself particular. You think that you're considering everything because what can't science talk about? Science can give an explanation for every single thing that you can experience out there. To some extent, that's true, but it can't give the whole explanation. So sometimes I'll compare it to giving a grammatical analysis of Shakespeare. I can analyze all of Hamlet. I can explain every

single sentence in there in terms of the rules of grammar. So since the rules of grammar explain the whole of Hamlet, does that mean that the rules of grammar give a whole explanation of Hamlet? No, that doesn't follow. And the same thing is true in our case, that there's not a part of my body that science can't say something about and give an explanation for. Does that mean that the scientific explanation is the whole explanation?

No. Now, here's the thing. The word science used to mean any kind of sure, exact, rational knowledge of things. Nowadays, it means the particular form of that that we get through the techniques of modern science, which are very particular. So I'd say there's some truth to saying that you can have a scientific understanding of the soul, but by scientific you'd have to mean that broader sense where you say, now I just mean any rationally and carefully obtained knowledge

procured through careful reasoning and distinctions and founded on experience, something like that. And that's something that you could say about philosophy. So natural philosophy is science, but it's science in an older and broader sense of the word that's not tied up with verifying hypotheses and so on. So anyway, that I would think is probably the thing that's actually most pervasive, the reason people disbelieve in, say, the incorporeality of the human soul or even the existence of soul, is because they've narrowed down their understanding of the world to whatever modern science can say about it, and they don't realize that that's actually a narrowing down.

Yeah, that's excellent. I really hope that you keep writing books for a long time. This is your second book, is it? It's my second book, yeah, that's right. I really hope that you keep writing books for a long time. This is your second book, is it? It's my second book, yeah, that's right. Yeah, please keep doing that. That would be great, if you don't mind. So the book, again, to our listeners is called The Immortal in You, How Human Nature is More Than Science Can Say. I'll be sure to have the links everywhere in the show notes so that people can go out and get it right away. It's been so great having you on. Thanks for your time. Oh, thank you, Matt. And if you ever happen to be in Santa Paula, California, we can actually go grab a pint. Oh, that'd be good.

What's your favorite point? What's your favorite beer? Oh, I like, oh, geez, what is it? Sierra Nevada. I don't know if that's, it puts me in a shameful place, but let's see. What else do I like out there? I'm more of a whiskey guy, but when it comes to... Oh, okay. Yeah, when it comes to beer, I like a stout. Oh, I see. Yeah. I like the India Pale Ales.

I don't know. Yeah, we've got Lagunitas IPA. Anyway, now I'm lapsing into advertising. No, we need to start like a philosophy brewery where all of the names of the different brews are named after like sort of philosophical thoughts and philosophers. That is a great idea.

I know there's one out there called Three Philosophers. Maybe we could, I was going to say, Maybe we could come up with one called Epicurus, and it doesn't give you a hangover or something. All right. Well, God bless you, and thanks so much. Thank you. Oh, my goodness. I hope you enjoyed that episode as much as I did.

Remember what I said at the beginning of the show, hey? By the way, we're about to go into Q&A, but I just want to say one more time. If you want to be in the running to win a copy of Michael Argyros' brand new book, The Immortal In You, which discusses all the things we discussed today, but a great length, all you got to do is go to the Pines of Aquinas Twitter account, this week only, retweet the very top tweet. That's the pinned tweet, and you can be in the running to win a copy of this book. All right, let's get into some Q&A.

Hey, thanks very much to everybody who supports Pines with Aquinas on Patreon. If you want to support me on Patreon, go to pineswithaquinas.com, click support. And there you can see the thank you gifts, the very awesome, I might add, thank you gifts that I give you in return for being so generous. Thank you very much. All right, we are going to take some of your questions this week, and I'm trying to get through these one by one. We've got many questions here. Here's one from my mate, Adrian Boudreaux up in Canada. Love you, Adrian. You're a good man. Say g'day to your beautiful wife, Rachel, for me. Okay, so here's what you say. Here's one I'm curious about. Do you think, do you know what Aquinas says about extraterrestrial life? Does he say anything about this? If not, what do you think he would say about them? That's a very good question.

I don't know. I don't think he does address extraterrestrial life directly. In fact, I'm pretty convinced that he doesn't. Certainly, as you know, Adrian, the church is open to the possibility. You know, think about this, right? Back in the 13th century, as far as Aquinas was concerned or others were concerned, there did not exist other countries, say like Australia or New Zealand. I mean, they were open to the possibility, but you have to think that New Zealand and Australia seemed as far away from them as Mars does from us and other planets do from us. And so, I'm certain that missionaries were rather shocked when they encountered different peoples and wondered how they could have fit into God's plan, but no doubt they do. And so, certainly, it's possible that aliens exist.

So, we might say, well, okay, suppose there are rational but non-human creatures that exist, and suppose they fall into sin, like we've fallen into sin, because maybe they haven't, right? That's a possibility. But what then? So, actually, here's something that Aquinas does address. This is in the third part of the Summa Theologiae, question three, article seven, in the third part of the Summa Theologiae question 3, article 7, and he asks whether one divine person can assume two human natures. And so, because you think about like, what could Christ, you know, become incarnate again, or could the Father become incarnate to save these people? And the answer Aquinas gives to this question is yes. I'm not sure if you know that or not, everybody, but that's here. Let me read it to you.

Okay, so here's the direct question. Whether one divine person can assume two human natures. And here's what Aquinas says. Quote, whatever the father can do, that also can the son do. Whatever the Father can do, that also can the Son do. But after the incarnation, the Father can still assume a human nature distinct from that which the Son has assumed. For in nothing is the power of the Father or the Son lessened by the incarnation of the Son. Therefore, it seems that after the incarnation, the Son rather, okay, so the Son, not the Father, The son, rather, okay, so the son, not the father, but maybe you'd say the same about the father, but the son can assume another human nature distinct from the one he has assumed. The power of the divine person is infinite, nor can it be limited by any created thing. Hence, it may not be said that a divine person so assumed one human nature as to be unable to assume another. That's pretty cool, hey?

So suppose there's this, I mean, I think it wouldn't, it's not absurd to think that it's theoretically possible. You understand what I'm saying? I'm not saying it's probable, not saying that at all. I'm just saying it's philosophically possible that prior to Christ's coming to earth to save us, that he assumed another human nature somewhere and saved a whole other rational race that we don't know about. Again, there's a difference between being probable and possible. So, I'm not saying it's probable, but I do think it's possible. All right. So, that's a fun question. Thank you very much, Adrian. I hope that was a help. All right, let's see here.

Another question from Thomas. I'm going to butcher your name, Thomas. I am so sorry. Weingartner. Weingartner or Weingartner. It's so good to hear from you, mate. Thanks for your question. You say, I was wondering if you could answer this question. What was the role of St. Thomas and the Catholic Church in the development of science?

That is such a huge question. It seems to me that St. Thomas' thinking is the basis for scientific thought and the scientific method. I often see him get some credit for this, but it seems to me that the church is unfairly seen as an enemy of science when it seems to me it is its foundation. All right. Look, I don't read these questions. is unfairly seen as an enemy of science when it seems to me it is its foundation. All right, look, I don't read these questions, you know, before I answer them. So, let me just say this. I'm not going to be able to do justice to this question at all. Okay, so the word science from the Latin is scientia, okay, and that just means knowledge. And so, When Aristotle and the medievals spoke about science,

they're speaking essentially of philosophy. There wasn't this distinction between philosophy and science. One of the great shifts in the history of philosophy is the shift from medieval philosophy to modern philosophy. One of the biggest reasons for this shift is the new instruments that were being used in science, the new discoveries that were being discovered by Copernicus and others. You also have the Protestant Reformation, which played into it as well. So, there was a big upheaval here. And at this point, I mean, science, when we say science, we're talking about a method of investigation, right, that discovers the causes of natural things. And I wouldn't say Aquinas founded that at all, if that's what you're insinuating.

If anyone, I think maybe we'd say Aristotle, okay? But I think, you know, one person I think I want to talk about is Albert the Great. He was a Dominican. He's actually a doctor of the church, and he is the patron saint of natural sciences. So Albert the Great is a scholastic thinker. He, no doubt, helped introduce Aristotle to Thomas Aquinas, who was his student. And I'm not sure if you know this or not, but he actually wrote a Summa. I think I said this in another episode. He wrote a Summa of his own. Sometimes we think that Aquinas came up with this idea of a Sumer. Well, he wrote a Sumer Theologiae of his own. I forget. A Sumer Theologiae, blah, blah, blah, something, something, something,

Sciencia, something, something, something, I forget. But he is a big champion of the natural science. Here's something, I'm just pulling this up now. Here's something he says when he's discussing plants. He says, quote, experiment is the only safe guide in such investigations. Here's another thing he said here. He says, so basically, he also stressed this idea that God often works through secondary causes. Think evolution, for example. So, here's his question. In studying nature, we have not to inquire how God the Creator may, as He freely wills, use His creatures to work miracles and thereby show forth His power.

We have rather to inquire what nature, with its imminent causes, can naturally bring to pass. All right. So look, that was definitely not a sufficient answer. We could do an entire podcast on that episode, but I hope it was the beginning of one. Thank you very much. Let's take one more question. Okay, let's see. This question comes from Juan Posada. I think that's how I pronounce it. Forgive me if I didn't. Oh, hey, Juan. I just realized this is Juan.

We chatted on the phone. Hey, man, thanks for your support. You said, I would love to hear if St. Thomas ever mentioned, wrote about his personal relationship with his guardian angel and any advice as to how to develop one. You know, I don't know if he wrote specifically about his personal guardian angel. As you probably know from reading Thomas Aquinas, he doesn't often write, you know, personal accounts of his spirituality. Let me just...

Okay, but in the first part of the Summa Theologiae, question 113, 113, I'd recommend taking a look at that. The question is the guardianship of the good angels. And the very first article here is, are men guarded by angels? Is each man assigned a single guardian angel? I'm just looking at it right now. And this is the first line he says from that answer. He says, each man has an angel guardian appointed to him. We're going to do a whole show on this because this would be really fascinating. But that's pretty cool to know that. As far as how to develop a personal relationship to your guardian angel, here's a prayer in my Byzantine prayer book. Because I think, I mean, if you want to develop a relationship

with your guardian angel, one way would be to, you know, become accustomed to praying to your guardian angel. Here's the prayer. So, maybe you like this, maybe you could write it down and memorize it. It says, Oh, angel of Christ, my holy guardian and protector of my soul and body, forgive me all my sins today. Deliver me from all the wiles of the enemy, that I may not anger God by any sin. Pray for me, sinful, unworthy servant, that you may present me worthy of the kindness and mercy of the all-holy Trinity and the mother of my Lord Jesus Christ and of all the saints. Amen. So that's one prayer. Of course, there's the traditional Catholic prayer, you know, angel of God, my guardian dear, to whom God's love

commits me here ever this day or night, be at my side, delight, to guard, to rule and guide. So that's what I'd suggest on that. A couple of pieces of advice. Hope that's a help. And as I say, thanks for the heads up. I think that's a good idea. I think I'm going to do an entire episode on this one too. So much to cover, so little time. God bless you. Thank you very much for tuning in to Pines with Aquinas. Chat with you next week. And I battle with my consciousness

I battle with my selfish flesh Whose wolves am I feeding myself to? Who's gonna survive? Who's gonna survive? Who's gonna survive? to survive and I would give my whole life to carry you to carry you

and I would give my whole life to carry you to carry you, to carry you And I would give my whole life To carry you, to carry you To carry you, to carry you To carry you