The Material-Formal Cause of the Body of the Universe-#Three

 

This is a precise description, in terms of modern physics, of how the proper accidents of any substance (or substantial form), obey the laws created in them by God, and thus proceed to function according to the substantial form (nature) of the substance. I love and rejoice that Professor Tong uses the concept of obedience in his description of the atoms as they obey the fixed mathematical rules inscribed in the substantial form of the body of the universe. This obedience is true of all the elements (atomic structures). They obey the fixed mathematical rules of the substantial forms into which enter; plant, animal, human. In this way they climb, as it were, the ladder of the hierarchy of being and even mirror, as I like to think, in their very humble and completely material way, the completely spiritual hierarchy of the celestial choirs of angels from Seraphim to guardian angels, from the fiery plasmic elements down to the most lowly of the minerals, such as lead. And all of this God created, ex nihilo and in toto on Day one of Creation Week.

If the higher principles of Aristotelian-Thomistic metaphysics are followed, the disputes over time and space will be solved. For example, the dimensions erroneously linked with time as an absolutized space-time continuum are really two proper accidents of the body of the universe. Time is essentially related to motion, and most specifically, to the motions of the heavenly bodies: the sun, moon and stars, (especially the constellations). Space is more realistically termed place, as it is in Aristotle's categories. And the theories of mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot bear this out. His maps are all of very real places.

Computer simulations of cosmic models are able only to perform with the discrete-particle type of basic structure, and so, David Tong is forced to conclude that "we do not know the answer..." as to whether the underlying, really governing structure is discrete or continuous. Metaphysical principles seem to favor the continuum native of matter as substantial with the discrete particles as accidents in the Aristotelian sense. In the last analysis, I believe we will be able to say that both Plato and Aristotle were correct. Plato held for the ultimately mathematical nature of matter, but it is Aristotle's analysis of motion that would favor the continuous.