To the editors:
I have long thought it self-evident that an infinite number of angels could dance on the head of a pin, because angels are by definition incorporeal beings. Professor Bernard Welt’s commentary [Letters, July 14] on Cecil Adams’s earlier discourse [December 23] sheds additional light upon this important matter; but I must take exception to Professor Welt’s premature closure (“So there.”) on the subject. At least two points require further clarification.
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First, it is simply too facile to proclaim that the spirit/matter dualism–including its modern variations–to which this controversy refers is “an ‘artifact,’ as scientists say, due to our a priori assumptions, and not to the nature of the physical universe.” This won’t do, for several reasons. To begin with, the conclusion simply begs the question, by assigning sole authority and singular reality to the “physical universe.” Furthermore, whatever habits of thought about this dualism may have developed over time, I doubt that speculation about it originated in “a priori assumptions.” It seems more likely that such speculation was prompted by individuals observant of and curious about, say, the difference between rocks and plants, or between fish and human beings, or between a human being and a corpse. None of these phenomena in themselves constitute a proof of that transcendent spiritual realm in which reside incorporeal beings called angels. On the other hand, neither do they lend themselves to a material explanation; science cannot explain, on the basis of its own a priori assumptions, why there is something rather than nothing, how inorganic matter becomes organic matter, or how brain becomes mind. The world, in short, does not explain itself; it may or may not be evidence for something or Someone other than itself. One may illatively attribute its existence to a transcendent Creator, or to a cosmic accident, but there is no ground for assuming that the former theory more than the latter originates in “a priori assumptions.” Nor is it particularly helpful to dismiss theories by referring to them as “artifacts.” Of course they are artifacts; the important question is: Are they true?, i.e. Do these theories correspond to the way the world is? This raises another perennial controversy–realism vs. nominalism–that engaged scholastic philosophers; but to deny (as modern deconstructionists and other philosophical skeptics are disposed to do) any possible correspondence between thought and reality undermines the scientific enterprise no less than the theological.
Philip Bess N. Artesian
