Following Directions

26 Ramadhan 1437

The brief reference I made a couple of days ago to the Aristotelian notion of Final Causes came as a direct result of some of my reading back at the taman. I dipped extensively into a couple of the books I acquired recently by Ed Feser, his lucid introduction to Aquinas and The Last Superstition. Both are highly readable and models of philosophy done with clarity - and considerable insight. I'm not entirely sold on all the good prof's ideas, especially his approach to Natural Law, but on the fundamentals of Aristotle's (and Aquinas's) metaphysics I'm close to closing the deal.

My turning away from a kind of woolly agnosticism to a fragile theism, which took place some years ago, was not based on the idea that through reason alone we can arrive at an acceptance of monotheism. Rather somewhere inside the complex of ideas that led me on was a sense that a purely materialistic explanation of the way things are couldn't hold water as it failed to acknowledge the odd and obvious purposefulness of, well, everything. Now, in moments of clarity, the pervasive intentionality of all we are able to know is obvious, and supremely reasonable.

An instance not just of the single fingerpost, but of seeing signs everywhere one cares to look.