An Apology - Part Two

This is not to say that some good may come of these modernist developments; and Father Spitzer must be given credit for squeezing the most out of modernist philosophies to disprove their own positions leading to atheism.  Thus, and in this way, the methodology of disjunction can be useful.  There is only one serious flaw and it is serious:  it is the basis of all disjunctive proofs upon the ground of probability only.  This is because Father Spitzer has further reduced logic to inductive science which must always admit of the possibility of an exception to the rule.  Thus Father Spitzer begins with the dichotomy of:

Conditioned Reality vs. Unconditioned Reality

These two categories encompass all of reality in the domain of empirical-physical science.  Thus an individual cat, or a particle such as the electron or a field such as the electro-magnetic lines of force surrounding the earth, or a wave of light and so on, all of these individuals are dependent upon or conditioned by some other conditional reality for their existence.  Thus the cat is conditioned by and dependent upon the cells of its body, and the cells, in turn, are dependent upon or conditioned by the atoms which in turn depend upon the protons, neutrons, electrons, quarks and so on to the ultimate nano-particle.  This is Father Spitzer's modernist version of the 3rd way of St. Thomas. (See ST, I, q.2, a3)  What makes it specifically modernist is the note of the hypothetical.  In fact, Father Spitzer's major premises or two dichotomies are both hypotheses (see p.113).  This is a radical departure from Traditional Catholic philosophical principles whose first principles of all knowledge assure absolute certitude for the truths both of reason and of faith if the truths of reason are firmly and emphatically based upon Thomistic realism rather than modernist idea-ism or ideology. 

Here is St. Thomas on the 3rd way of demonstrating God's Existence.  Compare and contrast it with that of Father Spitzer:

"We find in nature things that are possible (this is Father Spitzer's "conditioned") to be and not to be, since they are found to be generated, and to corrupt and consequently they are possible to exist or not to exist..."  Implicit here, as also in Father Spitzer, are the principles of act and potency.  Think of human reproduction or procreation.  Before a child is formed or generated in the maternal womb - by the union of man and woman, the child, such as you or me, did not exist.  And as soon as we began to exist, we contained the possibility, indeed, because of Adam's fall, the inevitability of eventual death.  This is the order of generation to which St. Thomas refers.  And here is an important point, which the argument, of Father Spitzer omits:  even the parents of the new being of the child, were also non-existent, until their parents came together.  And so on, all the way back to Adam and Eve - just as the geneaologies of scripture reveal! 

But - and here is the core of the demonstration -  if everything, that is, if, in Father Spitzer's terms, all of reality were dominated by the principle of potency or were conditioned, then it would be impossible for anything to exist - including you and me!