The Physics Of Blessings: Ideas In Our Reenchantment & Rectification

This belongs to the realm of supposition. I do not know if it’s true, only that it seems possible.

I do know that there must be a “Reenchantment of the World“, as John Carter says, or a Rectification, as Alexander Macris says. I also know that science is busted, stalled, in thrall to a stale false bad idea of mechanistic materialism, which needs replacing.

This article is written in that spirit.

First, a brief (and thus incomplete) review of Aquinas’s Second Way for proof for the existence of God. Now, the example I’ll use is the standard example, which has become a cliche, but it has value nonetheless because it is simple to understand.

Grab hold of a stick and use it to push a rock. What caused the rock to move? Well, you pushing on the stick. But what part of you pushed? Muscles in your arm contracted, in accord with your will. By what mechanism did your muscles contract? You somehow activated your nervous system, which sent a signal to the muscles and then certain chemical reactions take place, causing the muscles to contract.

How do these chemical reactions take place? Without lapsing into jargon, one thing pushes another, with the proteins being operated on from below by molecules, and they by the atoms which comprise the molecules, and they in turn by the protons, neutrons, and electrons and whatever fields are in operation, and they, again from below, in whatever comprises these, and so on, down we go.

But not forever. This efficient causal chain, which operates simultaneously but which has a definite order or precedence to each element in the chain, cannot go on to infinity. Because if it did, then nothing could ever get started. It would take forever for anything to get going. I have written about it before, but Infinity is much bigger than you have imaged, and much bigger than any of us can imagine. We should always be very, very nervous when invoking Infinity. At any rate, since the chain is not infinite, it has to have some base, it must have some place of origin which is the First Cause in the causal chain. And this we call God.

And this is so for every efficient causal chain, as is obvious.

What caused the nervous system to send the signal? You did. How did you get the thing going on your end? Well, let’s save that for the end.

Taking all this for granted—you have to assume you did not have breakfast to read further—there is nothing in this proof that says how long each efficient causal chain is, except that it is finite.

All we know is that God is the anchor of every efficient causal chain, which is the conclusion of the Aquinas’s argument. But there are no details of how God brings out the first cause in the chain. He may delegate. Suppose he does.

There are any number of purely non-material beings composed of will and intellect; which is to say, angels and demons. These creatures are all different from one another, by which I mean they have different knowledge and capabilities, a point made clear in scripture. There are also many philosophical arguments for this premise, also given by Aquinas and others, but we’ll pass these by as granted, because if you have got this far you are unlikely to quail against the powers of angels and demons.

Now nothing can happen without God’s permission. He knows. So if he delegates to angels and demons to take over, as it were, after the initial causal chain is set in motion by himself, God knows what each of these creatures will do. If God being immaterial can cause material things to change, it seems angels and demons can, too. There is plenty of anecdotal evidence for this ability in scripture.

How does God start an efficient causal chain in motion? And, supposing we have answered that, how do angels or demons, or a chain or collection of the same, for there is nothing stopping multiple creatures from cooperating in the chain, continue the chain? What powers do they bring to bear? How does immateriality effect materiality? At what point does the immaterial become the material?

I have no idea.

But neither does any scientist have any idea how it is that, say, quarks or strings or whatever is “below” them, starts things in motion. For instance, we hear that strings “vibrate”. How? By what impetus? Or by what will or causative force? No answer. Indeed, science has largely given up on cause in those instances where our knowledge of it fades into the murk. (In Class we’ll learn why this mysterious missing cause cannot be probability.)

Both science and theology are in the same causal ship (named SS Uncertainty). With the advantage that theology has an excellent metaphysical argument, whereas in science there is none, except for what I call the Great Bluff.

It works like this: a scientist acknowledges that a materialistic explanation for a thing (like consciousness) does not exist, but promises it will some day arrive; he then argues from that promissory note that therefore the explanation is as good as already here, so we should give up on non-science explanations. Or he uses the note to say that all other explanations, like the theological one advanced here, are necessarily wrong because strict materialism must be true. I trust you see the fallaciousness of all this.

Point is, granting that God sometimes delegate powers of continuing an efficient causal chain, we have an explanation for why certain places and things can seem cursed or blessed. Because there are entities at these places are “in” (affecting and not residing materially) these things participating in the causes of and originating at those places. These entities can be up to no good or to good. (Aquinas gives another argument for how angels can be in a “place” and be immaterial, which we’ll skip.)

Our world is fallen, which I also take to be granted and obvious. It would seem, then, that there should be many more places and things which have entities attached to them that are up to no good. And indeed we see shrines, altars and other markers to designate these kinds of places all through history and all over the world. This includes charms, talismans, “lucky” objects and the like. Of course, the untold number of stories associated with these objects and places could all be fictions, and passed off as mere superstitions. Doubtless many are. But all? Perhaps. Perhaps not.

It is a matter of faith either way, and I don’t mean of the old-fashioned religious kind. Faith comes because we must accept some kind of theological or materialist explanation, a metaphysics, for which empirical proof there is none. (This we also learned in Class: there is no empirical proof for all our of deepest beliefs, that all rests on faith.) There is no escaping faith.

Which brings us to blessings, the effects of which should now be obvious. A blessing removes the “curse”, or removes entities up to no good associated with the object or place. God must cooperate in this blessing, of course, and so must agree with the motives of the man giving the blessing. In short, a blessing removes the demons and replaces them with angels, or perhaps with nothing except God himself.

Is this true? I don’t know. I do know that there must be some explanation of how the immaterial affects and interacts with the material, and I think Aquinas is right about the origin of efficient causes. Intellect and will, argue many (and convincingly, I think, by men such as Ross, Searle, Feser, and to a point even Stove), are not material. But they are not ghosts in our machines: they are us.

The argument for how the immaterial affects the material will ultimately be metaphysical. Traditional science has consigned metaphysics to Outer Land and pretends not to notice those men who have visited it and came back with strange tales. Science needs to embrace a new metaphysics so it can explore this interface.

We will explore these ideas.

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