Weird Science and Bad Theology

There are a lot of scientific facts that seem so obvious to us that we forget that it’s new knowledge. So much that we learn in science class was only discovered in the past 200 years. Some, even more recently. Scientists discovered the mechanism by which anesthesia works in… 2019. It discovered how cells sense oxygen in 1996. The existence of different blood types was discovered in 1901. Viruses were discovered in 1892. There wasn’t even a scientific explanation of why to wash your hands until the late 1800s.

So it shouldn’t have surprised me to learn that we had pretty shaky ideas of the human body and reproduction for centuries, and those ideas in turn shaped a poor philosophical understanding of the soul and body and sex.

Karl Ernst von Baer discovered the human ovum, one of the largest cells in the human body, in 1827. Further, the fusion of spermatozoa with ova was first observed in 1876. That’s incredibly recent in the timeline of mammals reproducing. So, if we didn’t know how babies were made (other than cause/effect observation), it shouldn’t be that surprising that there were some pretty bad ideas around the “miracle” of birth.

In studying Aquinas, there are some pretty cringe, sexist ideas. But Aquinas and other medieval Catholic scholars were actually pretty egalitarian compared to the Greek thinkers they were studying. Oh, they still held sexist ideas of the female body and female position, but at least they thought her soul equal. And when I learned more about the poor understanding of anatomy and biology that pervaded Western science for a few thousand years, I can at least understand where their sexist view developed and seemed so “scientifically proven” to them.

The ancient Greek physician Aristaeus believed the uterus wandered about the female body; essentially, the uterus was a separate creature that woman just carried around. He thought its moving, hitting against the spleen and liver, could cause illness, and that it could be drawn back down near the vagina but placing pleasant scents near the vagina (although the actual term vagina didn’t exist until the 1680s). Even up through the 1800s was the idea that the uterus might shift and float in the woman’s body, causing distress or “hysteria,” named such from the Greek word for uterus.

Galen, a Greek physician and philosopher, believed in the “one sex model.” This posited that there is set of sex organs, and the different sexes are determined on if the sex organs are larger and on the outside of the body (man) or smaller and on the inside (woman). Because woman had the smaller organs, then it was assumed she was an underdeveloped man; thus, females were physically inferior to men, who were the full development of human.

[As an aside, men were always referred to as hotter than women, who were referred to as cold. Yet, scientifically, this is the exact opposite of their genital placement and purpose. Men’s testes are on the outside of the body to keep sperm cooler, while women’s wombs serve as warm incubators for babies.]

As Christian philosophers began studying man and woman, they had this scientific understanding of the sexes, yet they also had the Old Testament accounts of creation and the records of Christ’s teachings. St. Augustine taught that man and woman were created equal and that God’s grace fell on man and woman equally. He cited that Eve was created from Adam’s rib, his side, not his feet (inferior position) or his head (superior position). Man and woman were created to walk beside one another. However, St. Augustine also believed that as part of Eve’s punishment in the Fall, woman would be subject to her husband and be man’s inferior. This is a shift from the Greeks. Woman is supposed to be equal, and will be some day, but can’t be now because of the Fall.

Aquinas goes on to clarify that woman is a fully rationalized soul and has human intellect. As such, she is made in the image of God. For it is our intellect and our immortal soul that makes us made in the image of God, not in literally having a male form. He also states that husband and wife should share the “greatest friendship,” and have equal, though differing, roles in the marriage. He does make the argument that every institution needs one head that since the man is the “more rational” of the two, then the head of the family should be the husband. He doesn’t really have a basis for this assumption that it is always the man who is the more rational of the partners, other than cultural bias and the continued bad science of man being the physically more developed.

Now, if human sex organs are basically the same, just inversed in women, then what about reproduction? Sperm was understood as the essence of life; it was easily observed that ejaculation into a woman produced children. It wasn’t quite clear how it was produced, but it was clear that man was the one capable of producing it. So man was thought of as having the life force, the seed, and woman was the ground in which the seed was planted by man. Man was the active participant; woman was the passive. This ignores, I suppose, how some children came to look like their mother’s side of the family. But the understanding of human ovum and the combination of the parents’ sperm and egg to create life did not exist.

Further, menstruation was pretty much treated as some baffling woman problem that male physicians didn’t write much about. It was sort of related to the lunar cycles, through in many periods of history, due to illness, frequent pregnancy, and malnutrition, women didn’t have consistent periods. Popular opinions was that it was the female body detoxifying or regulating itself, even a form of cooling the body (because females are cold compared to men who are warm, remember). And when you don’t know the ovum exists, ovulation cycles don’t make much sense. Menstruation was finally linked to ovulation in 1831.

That something so basic as menstruation took so long to be understood baffles me. It was explained to me at nine or ten enough that it made sense. I’ve lived it out every month for 21 years, knowing that my body has eggs to be fertilized or is building up then shedding uterine lining in anticipation of hosting a child. How did these most brilliant minds not know for centuries? Part of me is angry and says that it’s because men were running things and that if women had, we would have had this figured out far sooner. But another part of me understands that almost all our “basic” science is fairly recent, and there’s only so much you can figure out before the invention of the microscope and other technology to aid research.

And I have no doubt that more research will be done and that 200 years from now, people will look back baffled at our bad conclusions drawn from poor science. We do science in an effort to understand God and his creation, including ourselves. Each discovery reveals more. But sometimes we don’t know enough yet, not as much as we think we do, and we draw very bad, harmful conclusions. It was thought that women were “less developed” than men, that they inherently, scientifically, were inferior. How much harm and pain and subjugation have men committed against women over millennia because of this? How much self-hatred and envy and bitterness have women put themselves through over this? It pains me to even think about it; some men were just cruel and sexists, but I think many more just sincerely believed in this inherent superiority that didn’t really exist.

Science now aligns with theology on the issue: man and woman were create equally and compatibly. While the woman is receptive in the reproductive act, she is not passive; she contributes an equal amount of DNA, and it is her body (not some roaming uterus creature) that grows and carries the child.

In his apostolic letter Mulieris Dignitatem, St. John Paul II refutes the idea that the domination over women is inevitable because of the Fall. Rather, if it is a result of the Fall, then it is clearly not how things should be, and we should be striving toward God and his perfect will for us:

       “When we read in the biblical description the words addressed to the woman: ‘Your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you’ (Gen 3:16), we discover a break and a constant threat precisely in regard to this ‘unity of the two’ which corresponds to the dignity of the image and likeness of God in both of them. But this threat is more serious for the woman, since domination takes the place of ‘being a sincere gift’ and therefore living ‘for’ the other: ‘he shall rule over you’. This ‘domination’ indicates the disturbance and loss of the stability of that fundamental equality which the man and the woman possess in the ‘unity of the two’: and this is especially to the disadvantage of the woman, whereas only the equality resulting from their dignity as persons can give to their mutual relationship the character of an authentic ‘communio personarum’.”

How I Know I’m Not a Rock

Who am I? We find lots of ways of answering that question, by personality, by relations, by professions and memberships and passions. But foundationally, who I am is a material being. I physically exist, so I have matter. I physically exist in a certain way, so I have form. I am capable of specific actions, so I have potency. All material things have matter, form, and potency. Form is what actualizes the potency. A ring is a form. As it can be made of the material of silver or wood, it is separate from matter. Both silver and wood have the potency of being a ring; the ring could not be made of helium. A silver ring is the actualization of the silver’s potency of being a ring. The potential has been acted upon and taken form.

A body has the potential for life; anima is the principle for life and actualizes the body’s potency. In Latin, anima, or in Greek, psyche, means “elemental air, breath, life, spirit, or soul.” It is the form of being alive. It is immaterial, but it is what makes some material alive and others not. A toad has anima; a rock does not. A person has anima; a corpse does not.

A corpse is no longer a person. A person requires both a material body and a soul. I am an ensouled body. And I am an embodied spirit. If either are separated, I am not a human being. I cannot identify myself by just my body or just my soul. This will have ramifications on how I view personhood, my body (it’s not just a vessel of the soul), and my identity dually rooted in the material and immaterial.

So are human souls special, or are we just one among all living things? We certainly share something in common with all living things. But just as living bodies are different, so are souls. A human body is more complex than a moss body; a human soul is more complex than a moss soul. A plant soul as the capacity for nutrition, growth, and reproduction. An animal soul has that as well as capacity for sensation and motion. A human body has that as well as potential for consciousness.

Consciousness is awareness of oneself. It enables us to conceptualize individual, abstract, immaterial ideas. But what does it mean to have a potency beyond the material? It means our form, our anima, has an actuality that is separate from the material. This will have ramifications on my relationship to God and existence beyond the material. The soul can exist independent of the body; my soul is immortal and has knowledge of immaterial things.

Putting Things in Motion

The fundamental argument of Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae is the existence of God. Aquinas argues that to demonstrate if God exists, one could show through cause and effect. Effects depend on a cause; if effects are known, then a cause must exist and thus, be able to be demonstrated. Because the effects are not equal to their cause, we cannot perfectly understand the cause, only demonstrate the cause’s existence.

He then offers five proofs for God, relying on Aristotle’s prime mover. The prime mover is the cause of motion but itself is not moved by a prior action. The cause must exists before and outside of its effects. If the universe is an observed effect, then it must have a cause before and outside of itself.

Aquinas’ quinque viae or five ways to prove God via cause/effect are as follows:

• Motion 🠈 Unmoved mover
• Cause/Effect 🠈Uncaused cause
• Contingency 🠈 Non-contingent necessary source
• Gradation of perfection 🠈 Absolute perfection
• Order 🠈 An orderer

We can observe motion--something changes into something else. There must be something that causes that change. And something that causes that to act. The chain cannot go back forever, so there must be a mover that begins the chain of motion without something causing it to move: an unmoved mover. Similarly, we observe effects--the result of a cause. At the end of the chain of cause and effect must be the first cause, a cause that is not an effect itself: an uncaused cause. 

We observe things come and go. People live and die. Stars burn and burn out. Buildings are built and demolished. The generation of something new comes from an effect of something else. If this were true for everything, there would be a point where nothing existed, and then something/everything would come from nothing. For there to be a cause of first generation and final destruction, there must be an eternal agent beyond generation or destruction: a non-contingent source. 

We observe varying degrees of quality. A well-made dinner is better than a poorly-made dinner. A healthy dog is better than a sick dog. Happy is better than sad. Because there are degrees of quality means there must be the standard: absolute perfection. Further, what is most in a genus (true, perfect, being, etc) must be the cause of all else in that genus, as everything that is less than most genus has degraded in some form. 

Finally, we observe repeatable, predictable behavior, such as physics. This cannot be due to chance since the behavior would not be predictable. The behavior must be set: ordered. Chaos cannot order itself since it is non-intelligent and has no notion of how to set behavior. Therefore, behavior must be set by something outside that which is ordered and something intelligent, capable of ordering: an orderer. Sometimes we forget how what we commonly experience is rare and specific: an existing universe, rules of physics, life. 

If this unmoved mover, uncaused cause, non-contingent source, perfect, orderer is what we call God, then there are other attributes of God that we can observe and demonstrate. The next arguments of the Summa work through God as: simple, perfect, good, infinite, immutable, eternal, one, intelligent, alive, free (will), loving, merciful, just, provident, powerful, happy, and triune. I won’t go into the arguments for every attribute (I don’t want to paraphrase the entire Summa), but each relies back on the Five Ways. It also relies on the concepts of matter, form, potentiality, and act, which I will look at more in the next post about the human soul.

Sophia Dei

When I was in the process of joining the Catholic Church, I asked myself, why Catholic and not Orthodox? They both have the Real Presence and succession back to the apostles. But it didn’t take long for me to know: my mind was Western; I needed the Western Church. My heritage is Western; I already belonged to the Western Church and her daughters.

The Eastern Church is comfortable resting in mystery; the Western Church wants to dissect and categorize. Both lungs have their scholars and mystics, but the Western Church maintains that Roman heritage of rational inquiry. We like to study and define and order. The Church teaches, contrary to popular opinion, that faith and reason work together. How could truth contradict truth? Faith without reason leads to superstition and blind following. Reason without faith leads to relativism and nihilism. If you think you’ve thought of something original regarding Christianity, there’s a saint to thought it and said it better in the third century, and it’s cited in the catechism.

St. Thomas Aquinas is often considered the epitome of Catholic rationalism. He was a thirteenth-century philosopher and mystic whose writings still instruct the Church on faith and reason. But that also makes him intimidating. Can I really understand his logic? How can I ever get through such long, dense treatises? I often joke that even Thomas Aquinas couldn’t get through the Summa Theologiae (he died before he finished writing it, and the last section was pieced together from his notes).

I want to know the rational arguments of the faith. I want to know them so well that I can explain and integrate them. But, I never had a formal logic or philosophy education, so the format or language of works like the Summa can be challenging. A few weeks ago, I started attending a new study group that is studying Aquinas, and I’m so exited to actually learn some of the most basics arguments.

Although Thomas Aquinas lived in the 1200s, his arguments are rooted in the Western scholastic tradition. The earliest Western philosophers (pre-Socrates) sought rational explanations of the universe, specifically the cause (or first principle). They observed the material world for solutions. Pythagoras added numbers—materials could be sorted into formal, delineated categories. The observed classical elements (fire, air, water, earth) could also be combined and subtracted. Sophists added rhetoric, so that there was a formal way of debating the studied topics.  Many philosophers of this time argued that there was no objective truth and that morality was ever-changing and only useful in specific contexts.

Next came the Classical period of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. Socrates developed the critical method of questioning one’s thinking and applying logical checks to arguments. Plato studied knowledge and how it is acquired. He also wrote extensively on virtue. Aristotle applied logic to each branch of inquiry. He is considered the father of empiricism (sensory observation), proposing four types of causes—material, efficient, formal, and final. Their influence affected the philosophers of the Roman Empire. By the fall of the Romans and the rise of Christianity, schools of thoughts such as the Neopythagoreans and Neoplatonists had emerged. In particular, the Neoplatonists argued that mind exists before matter, and the universe has a cause (more on that later), thus the material universe must have a singular mind.

Early Christian thinkers were influenced by the Greek/Roman tradition. St. Augustine in particular has a lot of Neoplatonist influence in his arguments for the existence of the soul, nature of the material world, and concept of God as one.

In the 1100s, scholasticism rose as the new school of thought. It emphasized dialectical reasoning to analyze and critique. St. Anselm argued that God could be proved using logic. Aquinas’ mentor St. Albert the Great, was one of the most influential thinkers of the time and now patron saint of the natural sciences. He made contributions to logic, theology, psychology, metaphysics, meteorology, mineralogy, and zoology. Albert studied Aristotle and synthesized pre-Christian and Islamic thought into Christian philosophy. For him, and later Aquinas and other Thomists, natural philosophy, logic, and reason have universal elements (experiment, observation, deduction) and a pantheistic or an Islamic scholar is capable of contributing to those areas as well as a Christian.

While we treat the Renaissance of as a rediscovery of ancient thought, there has always been a tradition of philosophy rooted in the classical thinkers. The observance of nature, the search for God, the understanding of virtue and truth, and the knowledge of knowledge have always been a part of the Christian faith, and they are all intertwined. They are different aspects of the same grand search.

“The study of philosophy is not that we may know what men have thought, but what the truth of things is.” -St. Thomas Aquinas