Summary for my thirty-something children.
If we always come back to Plato and Aristotle, it is because they have established once and for all, scientifically and philosophically, what the Cause is and how it can be accessed; this is what is known as metaphysics. Therefore, all science depends on it and all religion essentially relates to it.
Plato and Aristotle
It is still vital to talk about Plato (c. 428-c. 328) and Aristotle (384-322) because Western thought still refers to them, out of intellectual honesty, two and a half thousand years later. Both were precursors, one of the rigor of scientific discourse, logic and the metaphysical source of all physics, the other of the possible and relevant philosophical access of the mind to metaphysical reality.
Transcendence and immanence of God
Aristotle established physical science and showed that it is dependent on metaphysics: “if nothing is first, absolutely nothing is cause” (Metaphysics I, a c. 2), establishing a second science that he calls theology, and his distinction between power and act will be long-lasting, until the quantum mystery is resolved by defining distinct ontological planes (cf. Wolfgang Smith).
Plato went further in terms of metaphysics, showing that meaning (significance) is ungeneratable and comes to us from above (what he calls the world of Ideas). It is, fundamentally, the distinction between reason, which calculates and reasons under the guidance of logic, and intelligence, which receives meaning “from above”. It is one thing to reason (reason), it is another to understand reasoning (intelligence). This reception, common to all men, is a revelation in itself.
In a way, while Aristotle arrives scientifically at the necessity of transcendence (his first uncaused motor), Plato shows philosophically the reality of the immanence of this transcendence – which immanence resides in or is our very spirit, according to the tripartition of man: body, psyche, spirit.
Transcendent and yet immanent, such is the definition of God. Whether He is called “the cause before the cause (αἰτίαν πρὸ αἰτίας)” (Archimedes/Archytas), the “universal principle” (Philolaus), the sovereign Good (Plato), the “first cause” or the “first unmoving mover” (Aristotle), the “One-Good” (Plotinus) or, more recently used, the “First Principle” (Descartes), the “ultimate reason of things” (Leibniz), Non-Being (Guénon), Beyond-Being (Schuon), Ultimate Reality (Chenique), the Absolute, All Possibility, etc., He is, in the simplest terms, God, in philosophy as in religions. This wide variation in vocabulary is certainly not insignificant, but in all cases it maintains, on the one hand, the necessity of a primary, uncaused “Antecedent” and, on the other hand, its presence in the human mind.
If the recognition of Transcendence can suffice for scientific knowledge, it is because it does not form part of its object; on the other hand, once the Immanence of God in the human spirit has been recognized, one can no longer claim to think without Him. To really think (that is to say, not to reason or calculate, even if it is only ideas), is even always to adopt an absolute point of view, that of the immanence of God. To believe that this “absolute” point of view is our own, individual, is simply to have usurped it through an incredible presumption. Of course, man’s extraordinary mental capacities for reasoning and calculation can deceive him by obscuring the experience of this Immanence.
On the other hand, the presence of God in man and in his life, once recognized and accepted, relativizes all other subjects to the point that: God being, the rest is of no importance and, if he were not, nothing would be of interest!
Immanence of God and religions
The homo religiosis is an anthropological reality that we encounter always and everywhere; he makes the link between divine immanence and religion. This link resides in the conjunction of the individual “revelation” of every man (the divine immanence in his spirit) with a historical revelation, be it impersonal (Hindu Veda), transmitted through a man (Laozi, Buddha, Moses, Mohammed) or, directly, divine (Christ).
The presence of God, which can no longer be denied (its immanence in the mind), is then found in religion in the corresponding theological languages, according to the cultural variations of the peoples.
From then on, participating in the ritual practices of a given religion essentially becomes the expression of total humility in the face of divine greatness. What might appear “artificial” or “out of place” becomes, in the humble recognition of the transcendence and immanence of God, the ever-renewed reminder of one’s status as a simple creature.
This creature is both insignificant and mortal, but endowed with the spirit of God. It can become aware that its end is identical to its source. It comes from God and goes to God, which it has never metaphysically left.
In Christian language
Christian revelation, whose theology, on this unique basis, has synthesized and transcended Judaism and Greek philosophy, expresses itself on metaphysical realities in a way that metaphysical science could not have developed on its own, and sheds light on them. For example:
- Good, beyond essence (Plato), because bonum est diffusum sui (“good is diffusive of itself”), becomes “God is Love” (1 Jn 4:16).
- The world of Ideas (Plato) or the immanence of God in the human spirit becomes “the light which enlightens every man coming into the world” (Jn I:9).
- This immanence of God in the human spirit is formulated by St. Augustine as follows: “The Spirit is that of the Father and the Son and ours” (De Trinitate, V, 14).
More generally, the unique triune God, showing that a Person (the Father, the Son) is only pure Relationship (paternity, filiation) and that a pure Relationship (of Gift, of Love) can be a Person (the Holy Spirit), opens up to a metaphysics of relationship that can go beyond the limits of a more common metaphysics of being.
In physics
The primary Cause (meta-physical) cannot be part of physics, whether in Aristotle or in the current astrophysicist, Marc Lachièze-Rey (1950-): “The founding process of the Universe, if there is one, could not have taken place within the framework of the Universe since it resulted, precisely, in the creation of this framework. […] physics cannot conceive of what could have happened before, whether this before is chronological […] or foundational, explanatory […]”1.
Aristotle’s final cause (the purpose for which a thing is made), which forms the basis of his physics, is rejected by modern science, but reappears in heterodox scientific options: intelligent design or the arguments of irreducible complexity (Behe, 1952-) and specified complex information (Dembski, 1960-), the anthropic principle (Carter, 1942-), or the theory of morphogenetic fields (Sheldrake, 1942-), or vertical causality2 (Wolfgang Smith, 1930-2024).
The physicist Bernard d’Espagnat (1921-2015) goes so far as to suggest research upstream of the relativity of time, such as “eternity” and “continuous creation”. He also suggests bringing together, from his “extended causality”, the Aristotelian final cause (“reality being primary in relation to time, the causality it exerts cannot be subject to a strict condition of anteriority”), from his “veiled reality”, the power and the act of the Stagirite and, following Heisenberg (1901-1976), reinforced by the recent theory of decoherence, the materia prima (“I call matter the primary substrate of each thing, from which it comes and which remains immanent to it”, Phys., I, 9, 192 a 31-32. Idem in Wolfgang Smith, Physique et métaphysique, Paris: L’Harmattan, 2018.)) of the “wave function of the Universe”3. He also proposes, rightly in our opinion, to compare his “veiled reality” with Plato’s cave myth4, with a parallel between the Platonic Good and the “real”; it is, far from any idealism, the “realism of essences” of Plato5. This is also what the physicist Bryce DeWitt (1923-2004) suggested:
To take quantum mechanics literally is to consider this theory as true reality, i.e. as belonging to the Platonic realm of ideal essences.6
Footnotes
- See Marc Lachièze-Rey, ‘Les origines’, Recherches de science religieuse, 81, 4 (1993), pp. 539-557. Quoted by Pierre Gisel, ”Sens et savoir du monde. Quel discours théologique sur la création? (What theological discourse on creation?), Laval théologique et philosophique 52(2), p. 359.[↩]
- Instantaneous phenomena, i.e. beyond the speed of light.[↩]
- Bernard d’Espagnat, Traité de physique et de philosophie, Paris: Fayard, 2002, 19-5-2 (“Causalité élargie”).[↩]
- See also “Physique et réalité”, in M. Cazenave (ed.) Unité du monde, unité de l’être (Paris: Dervy, 2005, pp. 109-110) where non-locality (as demonstrated by the physicist John Bell, “any realistic theory reproducing certain quantum predictions is necessarily not local”, ibid.) makes any theory “ontologically interpretable” rather than “scientifically convincing”. Hence: “one can really wonder if […] it is not the Platonic myth of the cave that is the expression of the truth” (p. 110).[↩]
- It is this Platonic realism of essences that is joined by the analytical realism of a Frege: ontological realism of the world of the mind, its drittes Reich – third realm alongside that of (internal, subjective) representations and the (external, objective) world – which constitutes the condition of possibility of effectively shared knowledge.[↩]
- Quoted by Simon Diner, “Après la matière et l’énergie, l’information comme concept unificateur de la physique ?”, De la science à la philosophie, Paris: Albin Michel, 2005, p. 121.[↩]
