Nature of Metaphysical Arguments.
Now Aquinas’s arguments, like Plato’s and Aristotle’s, are metaphysical in character, not scientific; that does not mean that they are not rational arguments. They are different in the following respects.
They are like geometrical arguments in being all-or-nothing but unlike geometrical arguments they start with empirical premises rather than pure abstractions.
Scientific arguments start from empirical premises and draw merely probabilistic conclusions.
Mathematical arguments start from purely conceptual premises and draw necessary conclusions.
Metaphysical arguments combine elements of both these other forms of reasoning: they take obvious, though empirical, starting points, and try to show that from these starting points, together with certain conceptual premises, certain metaphysical conclusions follow necessarily. Using empirical starting points that cannot seriously be doubted. Ex.: More than one object is red.
Plato and Aristotle argued that given the nature of things as we observe them, there must necessarily be forms or universals that are neither purely mental nor reducible to matter.
As with geometrical arguments, metaphysical reasoning is not infallible.
Ex.: Parmenides would claim to doubt that change ever occurs. This sort of doubt derives from a competing metaphysical theory, rather than from scientific discovery.
The New Atheists’ criticism do not see the difference between a scientific hypothesis and a metaphysical demonstration; they thereby rule out metaphysical arguments, (scientism or positivism).
They have to defend their position not just assert it. The moment thy attempt to defend it, they will have effectively refuted it, for scientism or positivism is itself a metaphysical position that could only be justified using metaphysical arguments.
Assumptions scientific investigation takes for granted:
_There is a physical world existing independently from our minds.
_This world has objective patterns and regularities.
_Our senses are at least partially reliable sources of information about this world.
_There are objective laws of logic and mathematics that apply to this world.
_Our cognitive powers (concept formation, reasoning) afford us a grasp of these laws.
_The language we use can adequately express truths about these laws and about the external world; and so on and on.
Science, since its very method presupposes these assumptions, could not possibly defend them without arguing in a circle.
Their defense is a task for metaphysics, and for philosophy more generally; scientism is shown thereby to be incoherent.
The New Atheists (Dawkins in particular) try to frame the debate about the existence of God and the nature of the human mind as if they hinged on evolution. This is an attempt to very bad metaphysics indeed.
Aquinas does not argue that “everything has a cause”, nor does he argue that the universe had a beginning and that God was the cause of that beginning.
His aim is to show that given that there are in fact some causes of various sorts, the nature of cause and effect entails that God is necessary as an uncaused cause of the universe even if the universe had no beginning.
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