five proofs of the existence of god feser

Fro example, is the world fundamentally comprised of substances or events? What is it to be a “cause”? What is the nature of the universals referred to in scientific laws-concepts like quark, electron, atom, and so on? Do they exist over and above the particular things that instantiate them? Do scientific theories really give us a description of objective reality in the first place, or are they just useful tools for predicting the course of experience? Scientific findings can shed light on such metaphysical questions, but can never fully answer them. There is also the question of how to interpret what science tells us.

Nor is it these presuppositions alone that philosophy examines. The rational investigation of the philosophical presuppositions of science has, naturally, traditionally been regarded as the province of philosophy. But then the very existence that extrascienfitfic vantage point would falsify the claim that science alone gives us a rational means of investigating objective reality. To break out of this circle requires “getting outside” of science altogether and discovering from that extrascientific vantage point that science conveys an accurate picture of reality-and, if scientism is to be unjustified, that only science does so. Since scientific method presupposes these things, it cannot attempt to justify them without arguing in a circle. For scientific inquiry rests on a number of philosophical assumptions: the assumption that there is an objective world external to the minds of scientists the assumption that this world is governed by regularities of the sort that might be captured in scientific laws the assumption that the human intellect and perceptual apparatus can uncover and accurately describe these regularities and so forth. Indeed, that science is even a rational form of inquiry (let alone the only rational form of inquiry) is not a claim that can be established scientifically.

The claim that “the methods of science are the only reliable ways to secure knowledge of anything” is not itself a scientific claim, not something that can be established using scientific methods. Scientism faces a dilemma: it is either self-refuting or trivial. But despite the self-confidence of its advocates, there are in fact no good arguments whatsoever for scientism, and decisive arguments against it. It isa key ingredient in the New Atheism. The view that science alone gives us genuine knowledge, so that any philosophy or metaphysics worthy of consideration can only be that which is implicit in science, is known as scientism. Edward Feser, Five Proofs of the Existence of God: Aristotle, Plotinus, Augustine, Aquinas, Leibniz (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2017), 273-275

Five proofs of the existence of god feser