MATCH MUSINGS AND THE NATURE OF REALITY
------------------------------------------
By FRATER BOVIOUS
Guest Writer to Joe Catholic
 |
Aristotle and Aquinas Have Some Tea
(Mr. Paley was not invited*) |
Below you will find a picture of the Lady of Guadalupe cigar matches that I received in my stocking at Christmas. Are they sacrilegious, or are they, in some small "s" kind of way, sacramental?
(CARROLLTON, Cradle of Civilization) -
Teleology (from Greek
telos, end, and
logos, science), like afternoon tea, is something quaint in the minds of many, something that people
used to do before Starbucks and
Hume. Except, of course, for the fact that no one really strays far from the concept of final causes in their day-to-day real world life.
Take these lovely matches for example. What are they for? Clearly they are for many things, but principally for me, they are for to light cigars. And so, do I take these matches, hold them aloft, utter an obscure latinate prayer to
St. Elmo and bid my cigar "Alight!"?
Not hardly. It's way more magical than that. I strike them on the side of the box, which has a scratchy surface that was put there intentionally for the purpose of creating enough friction, that is, heat, to cause a chemical reaction within the head of the match resulting in a series of very small controlled explosions and resultant flame using the wood as fuel and which I then bring near to the cigar and thereby cause the cigar to light. As you can see, it's very magical.
I mentioned that these matches are for "many things". I did not say for "infinite things", meaning that I would not expect these matches, upon being struck, to recite Hamlet's Soliloquy or to suddenly grow wings and fly about the room. Principally, I expect them to make fire. The fire then can be used to do many things, such as light a cigar, charcoal, a candle, etc
"It's just a match," you say. "What's so magical about that," you ask? The fact that it is all so intelligible.
Scientism of today - Oh, what is Scientism? Well now, if fideism is faith without recourse to reason, and rationalism is reason without recourse to faith, then scientism is science without recourse to faith or reason. Anyway, scientism holds that there are no such things as final causes, or final causation - the idea that things work toward a final end or purpose. Things are simply, or simplistically, just random. This is a weak statement of the scientism position, but basically this randomness supposedly accounts for natural selection which is misunderstood as being evolution (when it is simply a process which may explain or support the theory of evolution, but I hear people yawning) and which in any event does not explain a rock.
However, no one actually lives as if randomness were the fundamental principle governing the universe. In fact, the two concepts "randomness" and "fundamental principle" cannot coexist.
Think of it like this - what about a match might disappoint you? If you come home from work, and the matches have not vacuumed, dusted, did the laundry, etc., would you be disappointed? No, what disappoints you about a match would be when it fails to light, or breaks when you strike it - in other words, when it does not meet your expectations; it has not accomplished its end. We think in terms of final causes, we build things in terms of final causes, we have expectations of things and others because we know they are ordered to a particular end or purpose. Sometimes things don't do what we expected, but we do expect that there is a reason or outside influence or something that prevent the match from performing its function.
I submit that no one could possibly live as if randomness were the fundamental principle governing the universe.
If you think about it for a bit, things are only intelligible in the framework of cause and effect, and specifically in terms of formal cause, material cause, efficient cause and final cause. It's rather handy that the universe works this way, since we are equipped such that we can make sense of it all.
But, that is a topic for a future Afternoon Teleology.
Meanwhile, sacrilege or sacrament? Allow me for a moment to simply define the idea of a sacrament as something which points to, and makes present in some way, a mystery. And let me define mystery as something which we can perceive in some manner, but which we cannot readily nor fully explain. These are working definitions, mind you and not rigorous by any means.
The fact that the Lady of Guadalupe matches have successfully lit at least three cigars thus far points to a reality about the universe - the universe is intelligible, and the things that make up the universe all work toward an end. It seems particularly fitting to me that Our Lady, whose end was to be the instrument by which God entered Time in the person of Jesus Christ, should grace this box of matches, consideration of which points back toward God.
Resources:
*(For a hint as to why Mr. Paley was not invited to tea, see this briefest of dismissals of the design argument
in the wiki on Hume. Contrary to what many think today, Aquinas was not
a proponent of the argument from design for the existence of God. This is not to say that the argument from design is wrong - rather it is to say both proponents and detractors are missing the point.)
