Cases of Metaphysical Malpractice: Stephen Hawking and His Critics

I haven’t read Stephen Hawking’s most recent book where he’s said to argue that a Creator-God is unnecessary nor have I read more than summaries of the efforts of certain Christian theologians to shoot down those arguments. I’ve read that Hawking argues gravity fills the need for such a God, but that’s irrelevant to the points I’ll raise in this article. When I speak of ‘being’ in this article, I’ll actually mean ‘created being’, which is a result of the contingent or freely-willed acts of God, those He takes as Creator and Sustainer of this world and the remainder of Creation. To finish off the preliminaries, I’ll argue that both sides misunderstand what metaphysics is and can be rather than dealing with particular issues. After all, it’s hard to do metaphysics right if you think you’re doing something else.

Metaphysics is the science of being and, by necessity, has to start with those forms and levels of being which can be directly observed, explored, and analyzed. St. Thomas Aquinas told us this in the Summa Contra Gentiles and other writings:

Metaphysics uses the specific sciences.

Physics and biology are certainly among the specific sciences, but I would add mathematics to that list of specific sciences rather than considering it some sort of body of truths which can be accessed directly by some immaterial entity labeled as ‘mind’, but I’ll not have to deal further with that issue in this article. In general, I would replace the term ‘specific sciences’ with ’empirical sciences’ and include all efforts to deal in a disciplined and systematic way with some realm of this world. History and linguistics would be empirical sciences. Yet, physics has a special role to play in metaphysics, as one might guess.

Hawking is right in starting an analysis of being by looking at our knowledge of physical being and the ways it interacts with itself. Some of his critics, at least from the ranks of Christian thinkers, would be right if they can be understood as saying that metaphysics is more than just the results of those specific sciences. I fear that some, maybe most, of those critics are actually saying that metaphysics is something completely independent of those specific sciences, but I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt. It would be particularly sad, a greater sign of the intellectual and moral decay of the modern age, if it proved the case that Catholic thinkers are truly doing what they seem to be doing — doing meta-physics by starting with the conclusions, the end-results, from the complex meta-physical analyses of the Medieval and ancient thinkers — analyses based upon the physical, more generally — empirical, knowledge of those earlier eras. The closest the the Catholic Church has come to making an ‘infallible’ statement about how to do philosophy is the claim in the encyclical Aeterni Patris that Aquinas knew how to properly do philosophy. The Thomistic way of doing philosophy starts off by responding to empirical reality. St. Thomas did make mistakes and didn’t always stick to his own rules, but he was no worse than human in his failures.

My worldview is based on an open response to modern empirical knowledge in light of my Christian faith. In this worldview, being is being is being. The various forms of being are found on a spectrum ranging from concrete thing-like being ‘down’ to abstract truths. We can observe directly the things on the concrete end of that spectrum but even naively observed concrete things have behaviors and form relationships that tell us something about more abstract levels of being. We are even born with some defective but truth-containing instincts such as the belief of infants that things have continuous and non-stop existence. (Some experiments have shown infants to be surprised by stage-magician tricks where objects seem to disappear when passing behind some sort of barrier.)

Metaphysics is the art and science of making sense of the full-spectrum of being by starting with empirical knowledge, that is — knowledge of explorable and testable realms of being. Metaphysics moves toward completion by ascending from knowledge of the empirical realm through ever more abstract realms. To explain a little more, you can’t understand the nature of metaphysical entities such as ‘time’ and ‘space’ and ‘matter’ unless you work from empirical knowledge of those entities as they are manifested in the concrete world we inhabit. You can’t understand ‘infinity’ unless you understand what physicists know of time and space and what mathematicians know of randomness/factuality and of various levels of infinity. You can’t engage in responsible metaphysics unless you work from the best available knowledge of concrete being, being that we can know more or less directly. If you don’t understand time and space and matter, how can you say anything intelligible or trustworthy about the realms of being which must be explored by speculative analysis? How can you speak responsibly of resurrected human beings unless you start from the best possible knowledge about man the physical and mortal animal?

Hawking is wrong that knowledge of directly observable being is the totality of knowledge of being. His critics, some at least, are wrong in not seeing what seems obvious to me — our traditional metaphysics is radically incomplete and we need to rebuild our systems of metaphysical thought honestly and courageously upon a new foundation that includes modern empirical knowledge. As I’ve noted elsewhere, this means that we need philosophers and theologians who have some substantial knowledge of modern mathematics and physics and biology and history and so forth.

I’ve written of these issues in my first published book — To See a World in a Grain of Sand, in a freely downloadable book — Four Kinds of Knowledge, and in various articles published on this website. If you wish to explore the blog articles, you might wish to start with the categories, Christian in the Universe of Einstein and Mind. You could read the particular articles and maybe move on to some of the followups: