Video Transcript: Aspects as Basic Kinds of Properties and Laws

We're now about to launch into a theory of reality, motivated and directed by  belief in God. I've explained that that doesn't mean that we're going to deduce  this theory from the Scripture, it means that the transcendent creator is the only  divinity that's going to be allowed to influence this theory, It's still a theory, it's still an explanatory guess, that people make. It's still fallible. But I think it's a pretty  good one. I'm impressed by it. Let's start where we left off last time talking about aspects of reality, I took that term, an ordinary English term and pressed it into a  technical meaning, technical use here is for these kinds of properties and laws.  I'm hyphenating that so that, you know, that that they go together. It's a kind of  properties related by that kind of laws, there are laws that hold among them  quantitative properties, represented by numbers, there are laws that hold among physical properties of things, the sensory, the logical, and so on. The laws, these laws we're talking about here relate properties of the same kind. And these are  the major kinds that people have distinguished, in the last, say, two and a half,  1000 years that people have been making theories. So we're going to start with  that we're going to say, we'll start with this because it's the best approximation  we have of just how people have seen reality around them. What the things that  we experienced exhibit to us, do they exhibit that they have quantity? Yes. Do  they occupy space? Yes. Do they have physical characteristics such as weight,  mass and solidity? Yes, some of them are alive. Some, some things perceived.  Human beings think logically, and have a formative capacity to take natural  materials and make something new out of those materials. That's the formative  or historical, one of the first things that they do is take sounds and marks and  paper and create language, they have the sounds, be symbols for other things.  They have social relationships, economic, juridical ones having to do with the  law, and aesthetic one's ethical having to do with right and wrong. So far as love is concerned, the juridical has to do with what's just the ethical with what's  loving. And finally, fiduciary, this is the aspect for which Dooyeweerd's term is  pistical, not a word you run into every day, he coined it, it comes from the Greek  pistis, which means trust or faith. So this is an aspect of everything, we trust  things all the time to do this not to do that not to fall apart, and so on. And they're all degrees of that. At the upper end, there's what we trust unconditionally, to be  the unconditional reality then so that trust is religious. But the all the lower forms of it are not. They don't just relate to theology or to the doing of theology. So  we're going to start with these aspects. Because they exhibit themselves in our  experience, we take naive pre theoretical experience, to be the world that God  made and put us into not what materialists dismiss as illusion, and call the  manifest image that we all have manifest image, all right. It's the world in which  we live. We don't just have images of things like streetcars and buses, they're  real stand in there way and you'll find out. So what we learned from this is if we  start this way with the world as God made it, as he made it, such that it presents itself to us, then we have to reject that metaphors, that theories of reality has 

been built around the metaphor of the necklace, remember, there? These are all the beads of the string, these are all the beads on the necklace. So what is the  string? If these are the beads? If these are the kinds of properties and laws that  

things exhibit, then what are those things at are very core of their being such  that they have these properties under those laws, and they exhibit just to our  experience, just the way that they do? What explains that? Well, we're not going to have a string in this metaphor, because that is an attempt to locate the divine  within the world. It's an attempt to say that what unifies all these is And then you  pick one or two, if you pick matter, you're a materialist. If you pick the  mathematical or logical rationalism, you pick some one of those and say, this is  self existent. This can't fail to be the way it is. This is what generates everything  else and orders it. When that is a role that belongs only to the transcendent  Creator, who has revealed Himself to us in Scripture, so we're going to reject the necklace metaphor, what metaphor would we use then? Well, it seems to me  that a metaphor of a necklace again, would be all right, if all the strands of it  were interwoven very tightly, no, one of which is what supports all the rest. And  then what supports the whole thing is the maker of the necklace, which is not  part of the necklace. That's the more appropriate metaphor for the way we want  to do theory of reality. We also have to notice that these properties are exhibited  by the things that have them in two senses, I started explained that last time, so  I'm coming back to that now. The solid bars down here represent what I called a  things having this kind of properties actively. And I'm distinguishing here active  over against passive. And the example I thought I gave last time won't hurt if I  give it again. Or if I didn't, let's do it. Now, quantitative, the Earth is the third  planet from the sun. It's the third planet from the Sun, whether you know that, or  I know that or even if no one knows that it would still be the third planet from the  sun. But the earth also has the passive property of being countable. And if it  didn't have that property, we could not count it. Did you understand why?  Because then we'd be saying, I tell them that that's the third property from the  sun. But it doesn't have the property of being able to be counted it that's self  contradictory. So it can't be right. So the Earth has the passive property as well  as an active one. Something can be spatially active or passive. It can be  spatially active, because it occupies a specific space and has a specific shape  to that space. And then we can say it's also movable, we can be pushed around, can be moved in space, that's a passive property, something can be passively  kinetic, or passively physical, physical, active physical properties are things like  solidity, weight, mass, things have those whether we know it or not. But  something can be physically passive, we can weigh it, we can find out what its  weight is. We can measure it, it's measurable, it's able to be weighed. So it  things have logical properties passively. And right away here, this makes a big  difference in our theory by the role in which it casts logic. Because almost every  other theory of reality I've ever encountered, does not recognize passive logical 

properties. It recognizes only the the active ones. So the theory holds that only  propositions and arguments have logical properties. A proposition is either true  or false. If it's a genuine Proposition. Proposition arranged as premises of an  argument relate to the to the conclusion, by entailing the conclusion though they don't entail the conclusion. If they do, it's a valid argument that they don't it's  invalid. But that's all logic has to do with we are told just arguments language.  Not so object, every object that we experience has passive logical properties,  the passive logical property, for example, of being distinguishable from other  things. If it didn't have that you couldn't distinguish it, you would not have  recognized as an individual. Things have the property, the logical property of  being conceivable, we can abstract or notice any number of properties that a  thing has distinguish each of them and form a concept that combines them. My  concept of this thing is that it has the following properties. So, logic is an aspect  of the whole of reality, not just our thought, or just those arguments and  propositions. Similarly, we have the ability to form natural materials and make  other things out of them. This is going to be our view of artifacts. And  Dooyeweerd's going to have a very compelling theory about artifacts and how  the nature of the of the raw material changes as it undergoes formation. I know  of only one other thinker who tried to give us a theory of artifacts to explain how  a thing is different, when a natural from what it is as a natural material, and  when undergoes transformation and become something else. Aristotle tried it  couldn't make it work and gave up. I think Dooyeweerd's view is very  convincing, so we'll have a look at that. So, this is also very important to  distinguish the active from the passive, something can be passive economically.  A rock doesn't economically value anything, but it can be economically valued, it can be passive, it can be bought and sold, something can be juridically passive.  You and I are juridically active. We want to know what laws are, as citizens we  take part in voting for people who make them so that we have a say in  lawmaking and so on. But then something can be juridically passive. My  automobile belongs to me. It's juridically mine, somebody steals it, they have  committed a crime, a breaking of the law because they did something unjust.  Same thing is true about all the others, something can be ethically passive.  Ethics has to do I said last time, with raw real of with love relationships, human  love life, humans love or hate a whole range of things all over the whole  spectrum of their experience. We love or hate, things are loved or hated. I can  say, that suit of clothes that I bought from so and so back in whatever year, I  really loved that that was best suit I've ever owned, Or remember the car I  bought, I hated that sucker. That thing gave me nothing but trouble from the day  I got it. That's all ethical. It has to do mainly however of course, with the way we  treat other humans. We're to treat them in love and not hate. We're to love our  neighbors as ourselves. That's an ethical commandment. The religious ones at  love Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength. There's no limit 

to that. No limit. Our whole being were to love God, what our neighbor, it's a  balance between our neighbors, interests, benefits and our own. We're not to  put our neighbor above ourselves all the time, it doesn't say that it says balance  the two as yourself. So that's the difference between the moral commandment  and religious? Well, what I want to do now is go into some of these aspects  more thoroughly. But before I do, there's more that you need to know. First of all, I've already tried to explain that we have a different take on these just the  because the divine, which is only God that generates them that can produce  them has produced a world in which these are true. The Divine stands outside  creation. The Divine isn't identical with any of these. It's not that it's the quantum quantitative properties of things qualify the nature of whatever is self existant, or  the physical does, or the sensory or the logical and so on. And that's the way  philosophy has always been done by people who did not know God.  Unfortunately, it was continued that way by people who did. And I'm saying,  friends there's another way to go. Because we're not deifying any of these, none of these are what generate all the rest. And none are what all the rest depends  on. We went through that last time. This is a bit of review. This being so we can  see why it is that people who don't know God, when they're confronted with this, say, well, it has to be some one or two of these has to be the nature of the divine reality. What else is there? What else could it be? Since they don't know God,  outside of all of these? What else could it be? So it's got to be what one then  they pick whatever looks most plausible to them to be the nature of the divine  reality that which produces everything else. And so what they do is engage in a  process that is called these days. A reduction argument, that sounds as though  it might be a diet plan for losing weight or something, but that's not what it  means. What it means is that we take the aspect or two that we regard as the  nature of what it is the self existent. And now we reduce everything else to this.  That's one way of arguing for the divinity of this. Everything else can be  explained in terms of this, this can't be explained in terms of the others. That's  one sense of reduction. Here's another sense of reduction. This one is the one  that generates all the others. So we can learn, we can trace out causal  pathways, we can show that these others depend on this one. And this one  doesn't depend on them. That's the second thing. We could also try to reduce it  this way, we can argue there really are no other aspects. There's only this. And  that's a very strong reductive argument to try to get rid of the other kinds all  together, and say, there's only this one that I, this is the one I've put my money  down. I take this one, this is what explains everything. That's a very difficult thing to do. Because unless you allow that whatever aspect you pick is accompanied,  at least by the logical aspect, what you end up doing is offering logical  arguments for the conclusion that nothing has any logical properties, and there  are no logical laws. And that's an absurd position to be in. There are people  there. So these are all senses of reduction, trying to show the superiority of one 

or two of the aspects over all the rest, so as to conclude that that one or two is,  in fact, the divine reality, they all depend on, the nature of the divine reality. Now, what I want to do next is go through the kinds of incoherencies that arise when  people try these reduction arguments. So we'll take a break here, and we'll  come back and look at what's wrong with reduction arguments.