Video Transcript: Aspects of Reality part 2 with Roy Clouser and Henry Reyenga
Dr. Clouser - subject and object,
Henry - and I remember at the time, and now I'm in my early 20s, and I'm like, what is he talking about? And I don't think I got that clear, better than
Dr. Clouser - because in English we use subject or object usually, in another sense, we use subject to mean, the subject is doing whatever we're talking about, seeing, hearing, speaking, thinking. And we use object for whatever they're speaking, thinking about. And subject to mean, that which is subject to these laws.
Henry - subject to these laws Like the active,
Dr. Clouser - Well I use, the term as active and passive,
Henry - you brought that in the last presentation, so this is cpnnected. So active is actively subject to the laws in the aspect.
Dr. Clouser - That's right. And passive means that is subject to the laws but in a way that we know only when we relate to and come in contact with it. Let me give an example. The earth is the third planet from the Sun. It has that characteristic, whether we know it or not, right? The earth also has the characteristic of being countable. If it didn't we couldn't know if it is the third planet from the sun. it would be anyway. But we wouldn't know it. So the passive property of being countable is just as real for our purpose. Not for the earth, the earth could exist without it, right. But all things are made in this theory, God has made all things so that they function under the laws of all the aspects at once.
Henry - So there's a passive aspect to any one thing.
Dr. Clouser - Yeah. But they are subject to the laws of all the aspects in two ways actively and passively. The planet Earth really has that property independently of us. But it's only the third only known to be in relation to us, we
can do the same thing. And other with every other aspect. Some things are passively spatial, but they're movable, right? Their passively physical, because we can weigh them, right, for example,
Henry – there biotic. A human could be weighed.
Dr. Clouser - Things, and this is an important one. All things have logical properties. That sounds weird. People say no, no, it's just propositions and arguments that have logical properties. No, objects around us are logically distinguishable from one another, right? They don't think logically, but they're able to be distinguished Logically, if not, I couldn't tell the walls from the floor from the door, I'd be in pretty bad shape trying to get out here. So things have properties actively or passively. That's not exclusive. They have some actively, and they have all the rest passively. They're simultaneous.
Henry - right, so they can have more than one aspect functioning, every aspect, in the science of reality or
Dr. Clouser - a real object, like the door over there really has quantity, it occupies a specific space. It can move in it. It has physical properties of being solid, It has weight, mass, specific gravity and other physical properties. Then when you say well, does it doesn't have sensory properties? The door doesn't perceive or feel but it can be perceived,
Henry - be perceived, it doesn't have a passive language voice again.
Dr. Clouser - That's right. It doesn't think but it can be thought of. It can be distinguished, we can form a concept of it right and this is the way you go through the rest of the rest of the aspects so that all things have some properties in all in every aspect. They function in some ways actively and passively and the rest only passively the point of all that is to try to get at the natures of the things we encounter in the world around us. So if were trying to get at the nature of the door. We're going to say that well that's more complicated because it's an artifact but natural materials are quantiified physically or biotically. It's biotic if it's wood. Physical if it's the doorknob. And we can we can begin to get a bead on parsing and taking apart the natures of the things. That we
Henry - Okay, so Let's see if I get this and please correct me if I'm wrong. I'm okay with that. Okay, let's take the sun, okay, in a lot of ways the energy the nuclear the fusions and all the other stuff that's happening there, you know, we
can actively see. But on the other hand, it's really important that it is being warm to us.
Dr. Clouser - Okay, sure.
Henry - So it's like, in some ways, when you look at the sun, it doesn't exist in itself, to specifically give us heat. Now, God made it that way. So it would, but from a scientific perspective is passive quality is very handy for us. very important God made it so its passive quality gives photosynthesis to the plants. And so there's an example where the, so a lot of times people will say, Well, I just want the active quality, I'm just gonna skip over the passive quality. But the passive qualities are very important.
Dr. Clouser - But without them, we don't know about the objects they would we notice, because it's perceived by us. Right? So it doesn't do any perceiving. I don't think the sun's a person who knows us. But but the sun is a is a physically qualified object we yeah, we understand some of the, the atomic, the characteristics of fusion that produced the light but it's perceivable by us, right. And it allows us to perceive other things, right.
Henry - And think of it the new American ideal 93 plus million miles away. Now, like, like 40 million miles away, we wouldn't be here to talk about it You know it's just fascinating how, you know, so but now back to practical life. Being clear about the active and passive natures of reality, helps in ministry, it helps I mean at some, you are exploring enterprise bi-vocational ministry. And when you have a product that you're trying to feature help, you want to know this active aspects and its passive aspects. I don't know if you should use philosophy in this way and you can correct me
Dr. Clouser - properties that are actually perfect. And that is a kind of property and laws, right, which, which is a very basic kind, that is it can't be subsumed under any other without running into some incoherencies and it can't be eliminated without running into incoherencies. But it's also the case that they are not reducible to one another into a rigid ontology. That is unique. I don't know of any ontology prior to him, that escaped all reduction. That is, estimating certain aspects as more real in the sense than others. The others depend on this, this doesn't depend on them, that kind of thing. And he sees them as equally real, especially with respect to their laws. Right? So for him, from the time of the Big Bang, from the instant of creation of the world by God. There have been laws for the things that exist now. And there are several different kinds of laws. One, we've talked about the laws that hold among the properties of properties of the same kind, right?
Henry - So okay, so I like all that what I've given is, there's a study that philosophy majors economically do very well. You mentioned in just in our chatting about a Michigan study that was a 52% of
Dr. Clouser - 51 or 2% of the people who graduated from the business school with MBAs and then went on to make it to vice president or above that was the way they had been philosophy majors. They were stunned.
Henry - Right, and other research shows they do it. I know that I have enjoyed my philosophy.. Dr. Feddes is a philosophy major. Now I bring this up, because I'm going to show you something that I do that philosophy helped me. So okay, so let's say I'm trying to promote online ministry training and I tried you and so
forth. But when I think about anything we do. I think about the, Dr. Clouser, along with the aspects intuitively because you So when when we talk about benefits and everything, I'm looking for the passive benefits, the active benefits. Now, why it doesn't surprise me that as you are in this class and you are studying philosophy the implications in the use for philosophy, you start getting you thinking, but you start actually, like, oh, there's, there's this aspect and that aspect of life, all of our life are all these aspects. And there's passive, like back to the concept of the sun, I mean, the sun, what are the benefits of the sun? Okay, if you think along this area, you can start, like looking at these aspects in our pretheoretical, or our experience, we can start with seeing how God made this in a beautiful array. Even if we don't study each one scientifically.
Dr. Clouser - That's true. That's very true. It can, it can have that effect. And it can be very beneficial in a number of ways,
Henry - a number of ways. So let's go get back to our list. The sensory, so I'm launching back in with Dr. Clouser in the aspects. So you wrote in the myth of religious neutrality, the term sensory is used in the way explained in chapter nine, that is to cover the qualities and laws of both perception touch, taste, sight, smell, sound, and the feeling elicited by perception. That seems a little deep to me, though, okay.
Dr. Clouser - We perceive objects around us as having not only sensory properties, I want to say that first. Our perceptions, there's a very popular theory, ever since modern philosophy arose, and what we are really perceiving are just properties, okay, in our own minds, and a thing is an arrangement of properties. And they're only sensory that so they'd have to be colors, tastes, touches, and so on. And what I'm getting at here is what's conveyed to us in normal sense, perception is a great deal more than that. So we not only see the color white, if
I'm looking at an object that's painted white. We also in that perception, see its spatial shape, we get an idea of its quantity as compared to other things. We also what's conveyed in that experience to us is that it's logically distinct from other things. And if I know the kind of thing it is, I may have a definition of it, maybe, right, but it has paths of logical properties that would allow that. It has a social function it and we go go through all the other. Yeah, It's economically, worth so much money, it belongs to somebody else in the legal sense. I may think it's aesthetically hideous. And I'm not think that I would trust it for this or that purpose. Those are all the those are properties that it has passively and all the other, right. So once you get this aspect theory, this list and you see how Dooyeweerd argues that they're not reducible to one another, that the program the agenda, trying to reduce them all to some one, or two is a God substitute programs because they don't believe there's a transcendent creator. There has to be a purely physical kind of thing that generates everything else. Or it's a purely physical plus purely logical, and they interact. Or it's the physical and mathematical worlds. And we get this long parade. Throughout the history of philosophy. It's this No, it's this
Henry - partnership of two aspects as you're bringing up.
Dr. Clouser - Yeah, that's right. And then here's our first ontology that escapes that completely, and says no, things have properties, all the kinds, because the laws of all those kinds of laws govern everything in creation, and objects, as well as people and others have these these characteristics actively, or actively and passively or passive?
Henry - So I'm listening as kind of a flux for sort of like amateur. Okay, so, a couple of things. Is it possible this is a little sidetrack here? Is it possible that Dooyeweerd's thoughts of the laws that govern laws can be reduced, like someone could understand Dooyeweerd wrongly to see that he's basically create a new reduction? It's the law reduction.
Dr. Clouser – No, he makes it very clear that the law is law is his name for the order list, orderliness that we observe among the properties.
Henry – It's not like law that somebody would typically think of law.
Dr. Clouser - Okay. I'll try to do this system. A little while going find points here. We have what we observe isn't a law, it's things behaving according to the law. And often we can deduce at least part of that law. But the law is not a platonic
object, it's not something else, and another dimension of reality, a thing. It is the orderliness of things that God has built into it. So we were refusing to platonize
the laws of having the distinct reality law, they're, like the perfections. Nor is it merely the nature's of the objects acting in accordance with our nature, and we generalize it into a law. Law is a third kind of something that is its own sort of reality, it is the order of the creation. And one side of that law order is the laws of the hold for properties of the same kind. Another side are causal laws, causal laws don't have just one aspect, if I take a brick, and heave it through the window, then we can talk about the momentum of the brick the hardness, as opposed to the surface tensile strength of the glass, you can explain it physically, but it has way more properties than physical, It can destroy the window It was somebody else's property,
Henry - from a sensory perspective why now when if I throw a brick at you and hit you in the face, you feel
Dr. Clouser - that's right. It's biologically dangerous, right? It's socially disruptive, I've destroyed somebody else's property, there's a juridical side of that I can get arrested for doing this. So the action has all the characteristics, or potential characteristics. And if it doesn't have the capacity to actively as the the physical, it does have the physical ones that are actively passively it has the other is, it's still able to be judged an illegal act, it's able to be judged somebody else's property, and so on. And when we all realize that those causal laws are not absolute, in the way that the aspectial laws are, because sooner or later, you can throw a brick through the window, and it bounces off. it doesn't break the glass.
Henry - Okay, so I remember in my philosophy studies, so if I feel heat, is that sensory? Or is that thinking? I feel joy?
Dr. Clouser - Well, that is going to have potential in every aspect as well. You are perceiving the heat is qualified sensorally, that's a it's a perception, right? But you have at the same time, logically distinguish it from other perceptions. Okay, and the heat may be a signal that the buildings on fire, you can take that
as a symbolic, okay. And that whatever causes the heat, it could be, as I said, it could be the buildings of a fire could just be that somebody's making a nice pie, and then you feel the heat and then you smell the the pie. And it's okay, the heat is good. So, it has many different characters, types of characteristics at once.
We don't explore them all equally, but we can be aware of them. Henry - So now the sensory, is that reduced? Can people reduce the sensory
Dr. Clouser - people have actually not reduced the sensory? Yes, materialists reduce the sensory, the physical.
Henry - So they it's a marriage. It's a partnership between material and sensory?
Dr. Clouser - Well, they're their goal is to explain things that seem to be perceptual characteristics, and really only physical. So they're, they're reducing this, they're getting rid of that, that sensory aspect. On the other hand, there there's a philosophical tradition, they claim, everything that we know is sensory, and it's nothing else. There are no physical objects with physical characteristics. This is a rough approximation of the way George Barkley argued for this, kinda nuts.
Henry - I'm actually surprised that here, clouser at 80 years old, can pull these names. And I'm waiting to get him where he goes like, oh, I don't know that name. So, I don't know if I'm gonna get that today. But we'll say very good. So you're on this, Barkley did what?
Dr. Clouser - Well, Barkley, somebody says you believe that there are objects that are physical and they're the real thing, okay, that tell me what you mean by physical. And so somebody says, well, it's solid, right, right. One thing can't pass through it without changing it. Right? He says, Well, wait a minute, solid. Isn't that the feeling of resistance? So when you? Well, that's a feeling come on. Now. Tell me something. It's not a feeling or a perception. And so you say well, if I have another object, that's solid it will pass through this one without partly destroying the old, right? Oh, but those are sights, right? Our visual perceptions of the way things. And he gradually put somebody in a position of having to conclude that they never really talked about anything, nonsensory at all. All sense perceptions, Barkley calls them things, a con-jury of sights all these sensations put together. And that's what we express what the world is. And we experience so we experience the world as it is. Except that we go beyond that we say no, well, there must be a physical reality behind sensations. Barkley said, how would you know? If all you have are sensations, how are you going to arrive at something else? Now, here's the kicker, he did this as a Christian, because he wanted to say that the fact that these perceptions persist in existing even when nobody's around to see them, and we know that we light the candle, everybody leaves the room, everybody comes back, the candles burnt down. So it was there, that proves that there is one mind that perceives everything all the time. And that's God.
Henry – It's still a reduction,
Dr, Clouser - reducing all the other kinds of properties and laws to the sensory. And he thought he could get an argument for God out of that. There's a
wonderful little Limerick, which summarizes his his position and the students who have trouble remembering the other parts of his position all like, like Limerick, they never forget the limerick. There was a young man who said, God must find it exceedingly odd when he sees that this tree continues to be when there's no one about in the cloud. Because if a thing is a perception, somebody's got to be perceiving it. Right. Okay. All right. And second part is a letter from God to the young man. Okay. So I was gonna give that second one.
Henry - So there's a second one. And,
Dr. Clouser - Dear sir, you're astonishments are. I am always about in the cloud. And that's why the tree will continue to be observed by yours faithfully, God. Amazing. If you didn't remember the limerick, it's an easy way to remember what Barkley was trying to tell you. David Hume takes that same position, and tries to wrap it around his neck. He tries to say if all we know are sensations, then we don't know that there's God. God is not a sensation. We don't know that human beings have a self or soul. We don't know. And Hume goes through and just demolishes everything everybody thought they knew, Christian or not.
Henry – Is Hume the guy who like did like what's hot, what's cold? What I'm trying to, somehow I remember see this is so many years ago, only one more thing about this. So now when it comes to how, in ministry, a lot of times when somebody will come to a pastoral care visit, you'll see like, you know, I just really feel abused, or I feel now on one level as a pastor or a minister or a bi vocational leader, we're letting them speak. And then we're finding out where they're hurt in pain. So God makes the sensory to be highly valuable to live. Many counselors and pastors and chaplains are going to be able to talk to reveal how that sensory perceive hurt, and what to do about it, who to forgive. How to how not to become bitter, you know, on the other hand, can be reduced. I remember one, one man who said, I finally came to realize that I have to forgive. So the sensory does not kill me. I saw, isn't that fascinating? I had with a point when I asked the Lord in fact, for this particular person, that was one of the most powerful examples of the self evident presence of God to be able to have the power to forgive so the sensory does not
Dr,, Clouser - includes your moods, your emotions, so yes, that's how the term came about under the Old English it was what we receive our motions. We perceive the motion of light the motion, and then our reaction is the emotion.
Henry - Look at that the kinetic with sensory You see how God has these laws And then you see how these realities and the different aspects combined together. Okay, the next one is the logical distinction, conceptualization,
Dr. Clouser - and here we have the human capacity actively to think logically. Whereas other things have logical properties passively, they are able to be distinguished they are able to be conceived, they may even be able to be defined. This is an aspect it is very difficult to try to get rid of, because any theory that tries to say, well, everything's really only physical No, it's really only sensory, is dissing the logical aspect. At the same time the thinker is using it to argue for his position. That's not exactly a coherent, consistent position, right. But it's not itself a logical fallacy, but it could very well be what we call self referentially incoherent. It's the kind of proposal, which when you make it, it blows itself up. The old expression that Shakespeare is someone was hoist on his own petard.the petard was a landmine, okay, so the guy who goes out to put the landmine for somebody else ends up blowing up into the air by themselves. That's what I think happens to theories that try to disregard the logical reduces the physical or something else. They're all caught on that. There all caught by that mess.
Henry - First talk about the logical I mean, logic, thinking, Descartes, I think, therefore I am. Now that's interesting. The I Am statements in the Bible are like, God, gives his name that I am the I am and the logical, can that be reduced,
Dr. Clouser - Descartes was trying to find a truth that was so certain for everybody that it couldn't be denied. He wanted that as a fixed basis to build an epistemology. So a theory of knowledge. This is how we know other things, right? But there's got to be one thing that just couldn't be wrong. So when he says, Here's my candidate, whenever I speaking in the first place, first person say, I do not exist. That's incoherent in the sense that I had to exist to make a statement, right. And that's not a logical truth. Some people misunderstood him to be claiming, this is a logical tautology. And it's something that can only come out True, true, true and a truth table. And Bertrand Russell says it doesn't do it. So his argument fails, right? No, that's very short sighted. What he's actually doing there is noticing another sort of incoherence. And it's one I call self performatively. incoherent, okay. And that means that the claim you're making is incompatible with the actions you took to make it. So we're aware of is that it's actually simple. Sure. Suppose I have a beaker with water and the temperature of the water, right? So I stick the thermometer in it and there you go, it's 78 degrees. Okay. No, no, it changed when, I put the thermometer in. The thermometer can't help to change the temperature of the water. That's not the temperature the water was. We now know what it is, but not what it was before. Putting the thermometer in is an operational performance that it takes to know something, it destroys what it is we want to know. And that's what I'm saying is going on there. But take heart never distinguished and didn't call it that. He just but, but what
Henry - He's adding himself the thermometer into this.
Dr. Clouser – He's saying as soon as I say I don't exist? That has to be false, because I had to exist to say it. I think that much is right. But it applies to a lot of other things, too, we can find that, that incoherence all over the place.
Henry - Right. In fact, it's probably not really observed that that's the problem.
Dr. Clouser - In fact, what I argue at the end of the book, but I'm finishing up now, is that any attempt to take any, anything anyone whose nature is any one of the aspects, take any natural thing in the cosmos, the crawler, whose nature is qualified mathematically, spatially physically, sensorally, and so on, to say that is, the divine reality the Self existant reality generates everything else runs into exactly that incoherence. It ends up that the person claims, makes a claim on behalf of a candidate for divinity that he could not know to be true, given the process. Right, the active activities he has to engage in, in order to try to argue for it right.
Henry - It's almost as if he has to recuse himself. From that one aspect, the actual being the observer puts him at a compromised position or being the active agents in there. So who reduces the logical then?not really Descartes. though.
Dr. Clouser - No, no. There are very few people who who do that other than materialists. David Hume came close. He was in favor of everything sensory. And he dismissed logic he disses it when he says this, whenever we incline toward one conclusion rather than another, which is only because it strikes more strongly on our fancy. It's not for reasons that doesn't follow from an argument. Now that seems to dismiss things. On the other hand, he uses logical distinctions all the time. And he's logically very sharply criticizing other people. Which is, we don't we don't go by logic at all. Or we do. You're claiming one and doing the other? Right? So there are people who have tried to dismiss it. More often people have tried to say that self existent, right, and maybe that plus matter, or that plus sensations or something else, but that's one of the things that just couldn't fail to exist, and couldn't be any different from what it is. And so more often, it's been deified than denied. And it's been deified by Christians who want to say, that's the correct way to think of logic, it is self existent. But that's okay. Because that's part of God.
Henry – Well now, I feel like I've seen it in person circles, where logical propositions connect in these logical laws are connected to another. So if this is
right, then that's right. And then that's right. And then that construct of the Enlightenment is thrown on to our personal lives, or it's thrown on to theology or thrown onto the Bible. And then what you get is, is this more about how the laws of logic must be right? Or is God must be tamed by these laws? Is CS Lewis says that, you know, God's not a tame lion. But it seems like there's some people believe logic, you know,
Dr. Clouser - I mentioned that there's an old Christian tradition that says that logic is absolute, but it's, that's okay, because it's part of God's being, right and then, so the logical laws are not, not created by God. I have to tell you that when I read Colossians 1, it makes it sound as though that's false. Colossians 1 says God has created everything visible or invisible. That should include all the laws of creation as well, right? Now the the comeback from the Christians who want to say no, it's part of God it's uncreated. But that's okay. It's part of God is to say, But this is, it's alright to invest in God. But it's a law we find in the world, right, we find creatures exhibiting conformity to this, then I'm saying, according Colossians 1, we should regard it as creations created by God, to come back with these other guys goes like this, oh, then if God created those laws, he can break them. Right? So is it true that God can be all knowing and totally stupid? Is it the case that God can be all good, and be the most wicked being? Maybe he can exist without existing and they get?
Henry – So really, this one. And some of the reductions of Thomas Aquinas picking up on Aristotle comes into play.
Dr. Clouser - That's, that's the tradition in which this occurs. I want to say that there's a reply to that criticism. If God created the laws of logic, and those laws really hold for creatures. That's how we need we need to think that's how we need to analyze the world as it presents itself, and make theories and so on. It does not follow that if God created them, he can break them. Because if God created them, they don't apply to God at all. And nothing can break the law that doesn't, that the law doesn't apply to. You and I can't violate the laws of non contradiction. In reality, we can in our fault, we can construct a theory that's inconsistent, we don't notice it. Somebody else says, ha, look what you did. Okay, but we can actually be and not be in the same sense at the same time. We are subject to that law. So we can violate it. That law doesn't even apply to God, which is why he can't violate it. Right, right. So we're not saying God can violate those laws and all sorts of silly things result, right.
Henry - But one more thing I'm just gonna talk about real quickly. Last night, we were at, at a social gathering where we were doing some witnessing, and this discussion came up about miracles. And it was totally not logical. For one of the
one of the people sitting there that how can there be miracles is not logical. Logic, defines this, and why would God break it and allow someone to break his own laws?
Dr. Clouser - He said it about God doesn't seem reasonable to me that God would set a framework of laws over creation. And then step in and break one.
Henry - Yes. And so I mean, what do you say about that?
Dr. Clouser - I said, I didn't think God breaks laws in the, in the in causing miracles. You see every law, physical law that holds for the cosmos as we know it, holds within a closed system, given these conditions, and and this and that, then if there's no nothing else interferes with it, this will be the result. But every miracle is, by definition, done by God, and therefore, the circumstances do not form a closed system. It's open, the power of God intervenes, and you get a different result than you would have otherwise gotten? Think of it this way, if I hold that marker pen marker up. It's not breaking the law of gravitation because it's not an unsupported object. The law says that within the gravitational field of the Earth, unsupported heavier than air objects are going to fall to the ground. But this isn't violating the law, because it's not an unsupported object. If I take my hand away, and God holds it there, it's still not an unsupported object. It doesn't violate any law, you just have a different source of power, supporting the pen. I think most of the miracles, if not all, most, certainly fall under this kind of description. Jesus turns water into wine. Well, yeast and grape juice do that just fine all the time. Jesus did it faster. Okay, the power of God intervenes to speed it up. How's that break the laws? It seems to me it requires the laws remain the same. That's why the water turns into wine. And it's unusual. So it gets your attention. I think the objections to miracles doesn't come down to very much. Nobody believes in God because they believe in miracles. They believe in miracles because they already believe God is real and can do them. So I like what Calvin said about this one place. If scripture contain no miracle stories, people would say, wait a minute, you claim this comes from God. If it really came from God, he have done miracles to attest the prophets spoke by his authority, but there are miracle stories in the Bible. So people say how can we believe that? It has miracle stories in it, I think that's what I find people doing?
Henry - Well, this was good, we're gonna end part 2 here. Because we launched next into the historical, which is extremely interesting. And I can't wait to talk more about it. I think we've had enough for today. And as we launch into just thinking about the aspects, the practicality. In ministry as we think about this, this last one, I mean, to think about people have done that, how, like, you know, I've seen like, people smart, where, you know, some people think they're more
logical than somebody else. And they become the answer man in every conversation. They're the ones with a clearest logic and people like that are out of balance, so even in naive experience, all of this philosophic thinking in the scientific theoretic area has a lot of implications for you in ministry. So until next time, we'll see you then