The Quantum Thomist

Musings about quantum physics, classical philosophy, and the connection between the two.
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Is Thomism really refuted by modern science? (Further Response)

Last modified on Sun Jun 6 11:33:19 2021


I reply to a reply to my previous post. I discuss the relationship between efficient causality, final causality, and potency to modern physics. In particular, I focus on what Aristotle and Aquinas meant by these terms, and make sure that we use their definitions. I also briefly touch on the topic of essentialism.

Is Thomism really refuted by modern science?

Last modified on Sun Jun 6 11:33:44 2021


I reply to a blog post I was recently alerted to which attempts to refute the suggestion that Thomism is not refuted by modern science. While demonstrating that the author of that post neither understands Thomism nor contempoary physics.

Why Is There Something, Rather Than Nothing? (Part 2)

Last modified on Sun Oct 28 16:54:59 2018


I look at a recent article by the physicist Sean Carroll on why there is something rather than nothing.

In this post, I discuss the second section of his article, where Carroll establishes his definitions, and asks the question of what do we mean by Why and what sort of answer we might expect.

Why Is There Something, Rather Than Nothing? (Part 1)

Last modified on Fri Mar 29 21:49:28 2019


I look at a recent article by the physicist Sean Carroll on why there is something rather than nothing.

In this post, I give an introduction to the topic. I will discuss the details in future posts.

Revision, Revision, Revision.

Last modified on Tue Oct 9 14:53:58 2018


I intend to spend the next few months revising my book. Please send me any details where you think that the arguments can be improved.

Is it Hatred or Love?

Last modified on Sat Sep 22 21:55:58 2018


I discuss protests against the US evangelist Franklin Graham's forthcoming visit to the UK, and muse on the nature of hatred.

Aquinas' first way and modern physics?

Last modified on Mon Jul 23 23:35:24 2018


One of the best known, most commonly discussed, and most commonly misunderstood arguments for God's existence is the first way of Thomas Aquinas. This is a variation of the Cosmological argument, based closely on the argument in Aristotle's physics. Aquinas based his argument on his development of Aristotle's metaphysics, and illustrated it with Aristotelian physics. We know that Aristotle got his physics wrong. So what does this imply about the first way?

Those who attack the first way generally belong to one of two classes: those who understand the argument and those who don't. The vast majority of atheists and deists who attack the argument don't understand it, and thus make trivial mistakes when trying to take it down. But there are some who do understand it, and usually they focus on two premises of the argument.

  1. Is it true that everything in motion has been put into motion by another?
  2. Is it true that the series of causes is a hierarchical rather than accidental series?

I was directed towards a series of comments by a particular individual on other people's blogs, by somebody who claimed to have a proof, based on Newton's laws of motion and the conservation of energy, that these two questions were false. I was asked to comment. That spawned this particular post.

This post is going to discuss four theories of physics: basic Newtonian mechanics, general relativity, Maxwell-Faraday electromagnetism, and quantum field theory. I will in particular highlight a dissonance between Aristotle's definition of motion and how it is used in these theories. I argue that it is that confusion of definitions which causes people to have doubts about the first way. The principle that everything in motion has been put into motion by another, when the correct definition of motion is used, is firmly established in modern physics, when the definition of motion consistent with the spirit rather than the letter of Aristotle is used. But is the sequence of movers a hierarchical series?

I even throw in a discussion of efficient causality and the second way for good measure.

The failure of nominalism

Last modified on Sun Jun 24 17:44:49 2018


Continuing my survey of alternatives to classical philosophy, and why they fall short in the light of contemporary physics, I take a look at nominalism, the belief that there are no universals (for example the species cat or the property red), but only particular objects (such as an individual cat or an individual perception of a colour). In this view, there is nothing linking different cats together beyond the name cat and an accidental similarity in arrangement of atoms.

The modern version of nominalism developed from the late middle ages, alongside what became classical mechanics. In the context of classical mechanics, it makes some sort of sense. Newton's laws make no mention of the type of particle we are dealing with, only the individual properties of that particle, and the classification of particles in terms of types or universals is thus seems to be redundant. If it is redundant, then it cannot be a feature of reality, but either an illusion, or something that exists only in the mental world but not the physical world.

However, quantum physics is very different. Here particles are individual excitations of continuous de-localised fields; all particles from the same field can be classified into one type, and their resemblance is not coincidental but logically necessary. The commutation relations linking the creation operators do make reference to the type of particle. Thus this idea has experimental consequences.

In this way, the realism against nominalism debate in philosophy is, perhaps surprisingly, something that can be settled by experiment. It is ultimately a matter of physics, leaving the philosophers just to pick up and sort out the pieces. Nominalism is disproved. This has significant implications for much of modern philosophy.

The empiricist philosophy against Quantum Physics

Last modified on Sat Jul 13 18:32:46 2019


The empiricist world-view is (as I define the term) that our knowledge can only come from sensed data. In particular, since we only ever observe properties of beings, this philosophy, if true, would mean that we can never come to knowledge of the underlying structure of the being. It would, in short, make both metaphysics and theoretical physics impossible.

There is a difference between an empiricist philosophy and an empirical philosophy. An empirical philosophy states that observation is important. We need it to come to a true knowledge, we can't make progress without it. The empiricist states that only observation is important. Everything else is either derived from sensual data or is an illusion.

This actually makes a profound difference our underlying intellectual of reality. If one accepts the empiricist assumptions, then whatever models we create are distinct from whatever it is that goes on in the real world (if there is such a real world). We can only ever understand our models. Therefore we can never understand reality. This is rather problematic, both for the theologian and for the physicist.

But for an empirical philosophy, our intellectual models can be a genuine representation of what happens in nature. What happens in our model corresponds to something that happens in nature. Thus much of what we understand about our mental representations of reality also applies to reality. This is good news, both for physicists and theologians.

In fact, we can go further than that. By assuming that reality is capable of being understood, we can limit how that representation can be made. Many representations add something to what they represent, for example a coordinate system. Other representations take things away. What we should suppose is that nothing that it added into our representation should be present when we map back to reality, and nothing that is taken away should be added when we return to reality. This simple requirement places strong constraints on what the true representation of nature could be.

Every observation is interpreted though a metaphysical prism; every scientific observation even more so. Therefore it is important to get the metaphysics right before trying to understand what we see, hear, smell and touch. Of course, we can subsequently fine-tune our metaphysics through what we learn about reality.

And this means that the empiricists are wrong. We can tune our models from other means than sense data alone. We can map back from our models to physical reality, and make predictions, beyond what we have already seen. And sensual data alone is not enough to understand anything, because we need some means of interpreting that data -- a means that could not have originally come from our senses.

In this post, I focus in particular on the philosophy of one of the early inspirations behind empiricism, Locke, and discuss some of the things that he got wrong.

Do we have the Right to Choose to Kill?

Last modified on Tue May 29 23:27:41 2018


The issue of abortion, which I feel particularly strongly about, has just hit the headlines again. Since I don't have any other platform, I am going to rant about it here.

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