The Third way: Encore

THE THIRD WAY: ENCORE IN A RELATIVELY RECENT ARTICLE appearing in The Thomist Father John Quinn contends that the Third Way's first part, the part in which Saint Thomas concludes to the existence of a necessary being (beings?) in order to explain the existence now of anything rather than nothing, is basically sound.1 Arguing that particular, univocal agents, each one itself corruptible, cannot in and by themselves account for either substantial change or the on-going cycle of generation and corruption-and, thanks to the latter, the quasi-perpetuity of natural species-Quinn thinks the Third Way is thus able to infer the existence of a universal physical cause of change, one which, evidently, must be a necessary being. He maintains, furthermore, that without such a universal generator (nowhere empirically identifiable, he admits) the universe of things possible not to be (" physical possibles ") would fall to naught, or be annihilated. Finally, he apparently views this defense of the Third Way as successfully meeting the objection, frequently raised nowdays, that its reasoning, "if each thing possible not to be at some time is not, and if all things are possible not to be, at one time in the pa.st nothing existed," commits the compos:ition fallacy (or, in terms of modern formal logic, involves an illicit quantifier shift) .2 Quinn, obviously, 1 John M. Quinn, O.S.A., "The Third Way to God: A New Approach," The Thomist 42 (1978), 50-68. •Indeed much of the recent literature on the Third Way has dealt almost exclusively with the question of its supposed composition fallacy. See, for example, the following: Rem B. Edwards, "Composition and the Cosmological Argument," Mind, LXXVII (1968), 115-17; ibid., "The Validity of Aquinas' Third Way," The New Scholasticism, XLV (1971), 117-26; and Thomas Mautner, "Aquinas's Third Way," American Philosophical Quarterly, 6 ,(1969), 800-01. However, as I will show later above (and in a way that has not been done before), the composition fallacy charge is logically ill-founded. 3~5 326 THEODORE KONDOLEON finds nothing wrong with this piece of reasoning, since, again, according to him, without a universal physical cause (also a necessary being) there would be no substantial change, consequently no generation of new substances and thus an eventual " collapse into nothingness." Since, in my view, Quinn's article, unfortunately, contains several major errors, some of physical philosophy, others of metaphysics, it warrants a reply. However, rather than confine the discussion of this paper to such a narrow, polemical purpose, I should like instead to locate my criticisms of Quinn's defense of the Third Way within a somewhat broader context, namely, one in which I consider the more general and fundamental question of the argument's overall soundness. As Quinn correctly sees, much of the Third Way's difficulty lies not with the composition fallacy charge to which one of its inferences is exposed (and which, I will show, it can successfully meet) but with its presumed capacity to justify its first part's conclusionthe existence of some necessary being. Central to this endeavor is the reasoning I have placed in quotation marks above; for it is here not only that the alleged composition fallacy supposedly occurs but also that we are faced with a very dubious premise, one that has proved particularly troublesome for most commentators on the Third Way to justify. While I will accept the truth of this premise and also the subsequent reasoning of the Third Way's first part, I will nonetheless argue (I) that its inference to the existence of a necessary being lacks the conclusive support of sound physical philosophy and (2) that what the Third Way's first part succeeds in establishing is only the existence of s01nething necessary, something which need not, however, be identified with an incorruptible substance whether spiritual M material. There are, moreover, certain difficulties with the Third Way's oft-neglected second part, the part in which Saint Thomas concludes to the existence of an uncaused necessary being whom he then confidently calls God. While these difficulties are largely of a hermeneutic nature, they can hardly be ignored in any discussion seeking to appraise the...