God in Proof. Nathan Schneider
Читать онлайн книгу.
motion, he explains, but only one, the motion of a living soul, doesn’t depend on being moved by something else. A soul—the soul of an immaterial god—must therefore have been the first motion of all. (Actually, there must be at least two such souls: one causing good order and another causing erratic evil.) “And judging from what has been said,” Plato concludes, “there would be impiety in asserting that any but the most perfect soul or souls carries round the heavens.”14 These souls, as human souls must, obey the eternal laws of the universe—which include the laws of the city. When you believe in such gods, you can’t help but believe in the city’s laws too.
For the earlier Plato, arguments about the gods were a matter of pleasurable, rational speculation, a conversation among philosophers. Here, proofs are servants to the social order. But the underlying idea is the same: pure reason is what rules the world, not the whims of an Olympian soap opera. As Frederick Copleston puts it in his canonical history of philosophy, “‘Atheist’ means for Plato, first and foremost, the man who denies the operation of Reason in the world.”15 It is a definition that might rub many actual atheists nowadays the wrong way. What’s more, in the eyes of his own society, it was Plato who could seem like an atheist for exchanging the meddlesome gods of the poets for law-abiding, reasonable ones. But others, in the centuries to come, would conclude he must have had inspiration from above.
∴
When I was in middle school, my parents decided that we should begin taking family trips to Europe. Planned summer activities were unfortunately a doomed proposition where I was concerned; I hated every summer camp I was ever sent to, and being stuck with my parents, together with whichever grandparents could come along, was sure to bring out the brat in me, and it did.
Each trip had some special significance. Paris, for one, gave my mother a chance to revisit the years she had spent in France studying medieval French epics. Germany, I found when we got there, was my father’s turn. He had taken German as a student and spent a summer hunting down in situ altarpieces by the medieval sculptor Tilman Riemenschneider. (He was able to show me why, at a fortuitous exhibition in Munich: faces with joy disguised in melancholy.) His choice to go there, and to learn that language, was especially rebellious for someone coming from a post-Holocaust Jewish family, as he did, that avoided buying German-made things.
The idea of a trip to Italy came from my father’s mother, but a last-minute medical mishap prevented her from coming. In Florence, Venice, and Rome, we did what you would expect; we went to a lot of museums and churches. The churches were especially a problem because there was one around every corner, and it was hard (for everyone but me) to resist going inside. It turned out, though, that my parents were really good at visiting churches. They stayed away from the tour groups and found some piece of art that even I would have to admit was interesting, especially when one of them explained it to me. They were still always too slow. But even through my boredom I got the message: Something about this is important.
The day in Italy I have the hardest time forgetting was when we went to Vatican City, mainly because of its unpleasantness. The crowds are overwhelming—thousands of people from who-knows-where who mostly only care to see the Sistine Chapel, yet have to soldier through nearly the entire Vatican Museums on the way. Until, that is, they find something that catches them, something they’ve seen in books a million times and are pleased and surprised—once they push through the huddle of others around it—to encounter the real thing. One of those is relevant here. It’s Raphael’s fresco The School of Athens, on the wall behind you and to the left, as I recall, when you enter the Apostolic Palace’s Room of the Segnatura.
Among the many heroes of ancient thought that the fresco gathers under marble arches, Plato and Aristotle stand at the center. They are side by side, with the younger Aristotle slightly to the fore of white-bearded Plato. They speak with their gestures. Plato holds the Timaeus to his body and points his right index finger to the sky. Aristotle, who was once Plato’s student, looks back at the master and, balancing his Ethics outward against his thigh, holds the palm of his hand toward the earth.
This is the standard caricature of the two prototypical philosophers: Plato sought truth and order in the utopian clouds, while Aristotle cataloged marine life on the shores of the Aegean. For both, however, the cosmos is basically rational, mathematical, teachable, and learnable. They preferred clear argumentation to epic poetry and believed in a truth higher than the gods of temples and legends. The job of their philosophy was to seek after that truth, that universal reason. They had no scripture, bishops, or savior, yet still their God would land them in the heart of the popes’ palace centuries after they had died.
The foundation of Aristotle’s philosophy is the system of logic that, for almost two thousand years, provided Europe with its definition of reason. His best-known principle is the syllogism, the basic unit of deduction and proof, whereby a conclusion can be safely and inescapably drawn from accepted premises. Take the simple example that philosophy students inevitably encounter:
1)Socrates is a man.
2)All men are mortal.
3)Therefore, Socrates is mortal.
This kind of reasoning promised to escape the flaws of human bias, frailty, and confusion, lending authority to all that he wrote. If he can be trusted with logic, why not trust what he says about the universe?
Building on the logical works are Aristotle’s theories of physics and what came to be called metaphysics—literally, “what comes after physics.” Aristotelian cosmology eventually ascends to a divine being he claimed to know neither by faith nor tradition but exclusively by thinking.
Like Plato’s Laws, Aristotle begins with a meditation on movement in the world. One thing moves another. Moving things form a chain reaction of causes and effects and effects becoming causes, a churning and eternal cycle. There was no beginning; motion cannot have come from nonmotion, he reasons, so the universe must always have existed, always in motion. But every motion has to be caused by something. This is important. Wisdom, says Aristotle, is knowledge of causes.
The sequence of things causing other things cannot be infinitely long, however, even if it goes on eternally; you can turn a chain necklace round and round your neck but only because it has a finite number of links. Aristotle held that an infinite number of anything is impossible, for any number of things will still be less than infinity. Besides, if you start counting infinitely many causes away, you’ll never reach the effect. So if there’s a finite number of causes, one of them has to be first, and it holds all the others in place. To stay on your neck, a necklace needs to have a clasp.
The journey upward, through the sequence of causes he finds in the world, brings Aristotle past the stars and planets. He takes them to be the eternal gods hinted at in the myths of tradition, going about their orbits in perfect order, forever. When he reaches what moves them, the journey comes to its destination: that which is also eternal but eternally unmoved by anything else. He wonders, in a tangent, whether there could be many such beings (47 or 49, or maybe 55) but concludes not, repeating a line from the Iliad: “Too many kings are bad—let there be one!”16
This unmoved mover isn’t simply the finger pushing over the first in a line of dominoes at the beginning of time. This mover—call it God—is the whole purpose of the whole game, through all eternity. It’s the final cause of everything, though never by physically, materially acting on the world. As every domino falls, this is the overriding reason, the gravity. While “all other things move by being moved,” Aristotle explains, the first and final cause isn’t moved by anything else, even while it moves everything. It “produces motion as being loved.”17 His God is pure thought, pure purpose, and the sum of all that the universe aspires to.
This is a God mired in the daunting system of the theories, definitions, and assumptions of Aristotle’s entire corpus, veiled from the uninitiated like the secrets of a mystery religion. And for what? There can be no friendship between people and God, and there is no need to bother with prayer or worship. Though Aristotle describes God as a soul something like human