a short note about the genetic fallacy and the world without the Word

We should not think that the cloud is some vaporous exhalation from the earth, or an evaporation of water, or some condensation from the air, or anything airy at all, which is produced from bodily substance; rather, we should think of it as a knowledge of the divine nature, made accessible to us and reaching down to us, which it is more appropriate to call, as David does, [God’s] splendor.

—St Anastasius of Antioch

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People are liable to regard a statement like this with no small amount of incredulity, but we should consider that we might not always know better. Philosophers since Plato’s day have observed that it’s impossible to learn something we believe we already know.

Furnishing an explanation for the existence of some phenomenon by accounting for its material constituents is an example of the genetic fallacy. And even on its own terms, it still fails to account for why these particular material factors indeed led to the existence of the phenomenon in question. It is plausible to invoke the laws of physics to explain a natural phenomenon, or the laws of heredity and natural selection in respect to an organism, and so on. But those laws themselves, which are providing the explanation, can never be explained in this way and the explanation is, therefore, always inherently unsatisfactory at best, and generally ad hoc and circular to boot. After all, the apparent “laws” that purportedly govern and explain the evolution of phenomena are really just post hoc descriptions of just what those phenomena in fact have done in the past. We know this because if the behavior of electrons changed, the laws governing the behavior of electrons would, by the same token, have to change as well.

On top of this, as Plato and Aristotle already observed, living organisms are always assimilating and expelling matter, changing coats of substance in order to remain themselves. Hence, the view that a phenomenon has been explained when its atoms have been accounted for can’t possibly be correct even from within the framework of material and efficient causation.

on the Four Causes and The Advancement of Learning

In the Phaedo dialogue, Plato satirizes the argumentum ad lapidem that simply ignores these issues:

I might compare him to a person who…when he endeavoured to explain the causes of my several actions in detail, went on to show that I sit here because my body is made up of bones and muscles; and the bones, as he would say, are hard and have joints which divide them, and the muscles are elastic, and they cover the bones, which have also a covering or environment of flesh and skin which contains them; and as the bones are lifted at their joints by the contraction or relaxation of the muscles, I am able to bend my limbs, and this is why I am sitting here in a curved posture—that is what he would say, and he would have a similar explanation of my talking to you, which he would attribute to sound, and air, and hearing, and he would assign ten thousand other causes of the same sort, forgetting to mention the true cause, which is, that the Athenians have thought fit to condemn me, and accordingly I have thought it better and more right to remain here and undergo my sentence; for I am inclined to think that these muscles and bones of mine would have gone off long ago to Megara or Boeotia—by the dog they would, if they had been moved only by their own idea of what was best, and if I had not chosen the better and nobler part, instead of playing truant and running away, of enduring any punishment which the state inflicts. There is surely a strange confusion of causes and conditions in all this. It may be said, indeed, that without bones and muscles and the other parts of the body I cannot execute my purposes. But to say that I do as I do because of them, and that this is the way in which mind acts, and not from the choice of the best, is a very careless and idle mode of speaking. I wonder that they cannot distinguish the cause from the condition, which the many, feeling about in the dark, are always mistaking and misnaming.

That’s not, of course, to say that no knowledge can be gained through an inquiry into the purely material and efficient causes of phenomena. Only don’t let anyone tell you that science has fathomed the mysteries of existence. The scientific method as such is essentially predicated on such a circumscription of research to these axes of existence. But by the same token, the circumscription in question was a methodological postulate and not a discovery. For this reason, no amount of research from within a methodology that brackets out dimensions of existence that cannot be reduced to material and efficient causation can have anything to say about dimensions that cannot be so reduced. A carpenter can’t build a house with only a handsaw and, similarly, science alone can’t explain the world.

a rhapsody on Nature as “The First Testament”