![]() With universals dismissed, scientific theology and its route to God tumbled. He used his razor to argue first that universals are entities beyond necessity because “fathers are fathers because they have sons”, dogs because they bark etc. Occam’s razor advises that we should only accept the simplest solution to a problem, as long as it works. William of Occam is most famous for insisting that “entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity”. Fortunately, William of Occam had a tool sharp enough to sever the link. If its fusion with science had survived then science in the West might have suffered the same stagnation under the weight of dogma that it suffered in so many other parts of the world. By a clever manipulation of the universal idea, Aquinas even claimed to have incorporated the Eucharist miracle into his theological science.Īquinas’s theology came to dominate Christianity. Aquinas also imported Aristotle’s universals as ideas in God’s mind so their study became a route to the divine, so theology became a science. Its cornerstone was five proofs of God constructed with Aristotle’s chains of reasoning but the Christian God replacing both the prime mover and final cause. Aquinas imported Aristotle’s framework to construct a kind of scientific theology whose closest parallel today might be the “experimental theology” in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials novels. He extended the universal idea into every category of being, so universals of redness, roundness, chairness, fatherness and so on was what made objects red, round, fathers or chairs.Īristotle’s prime mover was more of an it than a him, but was nevertheless enthusiastically incorporated into Christianity by the greatest theologian of the Middle Ages, Thomas Aquinas. So cats became cats because they were filled with a feline universal, dogs with a canine universal and so on. However, he based his categorisation on the notion of invisible but real universals, which are kind of invisible essences of objects. He again capped this otherwise infinite regress with the prime mover.Īristotle was also keen on categorising and provided the first stab at biological taxonomy by dividing plants and animals into categories. ![]() So, the purpose of trees was to provide wood, the purpose of wood was to provide fire, the purpose of fire was to warm humans. He also believed that some causes lay in the future, in the form of the purpose of objects or actions. ![]() More than a thousand years earlier, Aristotle attempted to pull a thread of science out of observations such as “everything that moves is moved by another” But he also drifted into his metaphysics by arguing that, to avoid an infinite regress of movers, there had to be a first cause or prime mover. That there was such a discipline seems very odd today, but throughout most of human history, there hadn’t really been a distinction between the natural and supernatural. The Franciscans sent him to the University of Oxford to study the science of theology. We know little of William’s early years, only that he was born in the Surrey village of Occam and given to the Franciscan order as a child. If captured, they could face excommunication, imprisonment or even a slow death on a burning pyre. Two were senior members of the order whereas the third was a little-known English scholar, William of Occam. On the night of May 26th, 1328, three Franciscan friars slip out of the papal city of Avignon and ride south to the Crusader port of Aigues-Mortes.
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