Aristotle's Failed Philosophy

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From the Editor

Aristotle's Failed Philosophy

By: David Deschesne

Editor/Publisher, Fort Fairfield Journal

There are many people in the world who believe they are so educated and so smart that they can derive all truths about a matter here in this physical realm simply by using philosophy. Philosophy is essentially a person using logic, rationalism and reason to deduce certain facts based upon known information. The problem is, we as humans rely exclusive on five finite, sometimes unreliable, underdeveloped or inapplicable senses (sight, sound, taste, touch, smell) to form our conclusions.

Atheists deny the existence of God by stating since God cannot be seen, He does not exist. Using our sense of sight to judge the veracity of a matter is a topic for another editorial so I will not get into it here. By eliminating God or Holy writ from their world view, atheists substitute philosophy as their religion and the works of the great philosophers as their divine texts—the roadmap to absolute truth. One such prophet the atheists have adopted is Aristotle, the father of modern logic. However, atheists and those who use philosophy as the unequivocal guide to all that is true will be dismayed to find that Aristotle got a lot of things wrong...using philosophy.

Aristotelian logic is the basis for all modern logic-based thinking. It primarily uses deductive reasoning to conclude the truth of a matter. One of Aristotle’s great methods of logic was the Law of the Excluded Middle, where he uses philosophy to conclude that an object cannot both have a property and its negative in the same respect at the same time. For example, people who do not believe Christ was God use the Law of the Excluded Middle to claim Yeshua (Jesus) was not God because He could not be a man and not a man (God) at the same time. However, as science has shown today, the Law of the Excluded Middle cannot always apply and at sub-atomic sizes, logic breaks down and becomes a completely unreliable tool.

One of the greatest paradoxes in our physical reality is the concept of wave-particle duality. That is, tiny things like electrons and light photons behave both as electromagnetic waves of energy and as solid particles at the same time. Depending on which measuring device or test you use, you can determine a photon is either a particle or a wave. The fact is, at those sub-atomic levels everything behaves as both particles and not particles (waves) at the same time. This is a scientifically proven fact, so Aristotle’s Law of the Excluded Middle fails to adequately describe physical reality in all cases at all times. “Aristotle is generally credited (probably unreasonably) with holding up the progress of physics for about 2,000 years.¹

Like other philosophers of his time, Aristotle used simple philosophy to determine and “prove” the earth was the center of the universe with the sun, all our planets and the starts all revolving around our tiny planet.²Of course, today we know that is not true.

Aristotle also used philosophy to determine the brain was not the body’s control center by observing chickens often running around after their heads were cut off.³Today, we realize that the brain is the control center and it is simply muscle reflexes that cause decapitated chickens to remain animate until the oxygen supply runs out in their blood.

Aristotle’s physics, enshrines the “common sense” notion that heavier objects fall faster than lighter objects. But remove friction from all considerations, and indeed heavy and light objects, subject exclusively to the force of gravity, fall at exactly the same speed.⁴“The Aristotelian tradition also held that one could work out all the laws that govern the universe by pure thought: it was not necessary to check by observation. So no one until Galileo bothered to see whether bodies of different weight did in fact fall at different speeds.”⁵

Aristotle also believed, using philosophy, that matter was continuous, that is, one could divide a piece of matter into smaller and smaller bits without any limit: one never came up against a grain of matter that could not be divided further.⁶However, first-year high school physics has shown that matter can only be divided down to the size of an atom and still retain its original properties. After that, further division brings electrons, protons, neutrons, leptons, quarks and neutrinos which are all indistinguishable from each other regardless of which form of matter they make up.

Aristotle claimed there is no such thing as a complete vacuum, or void. However, science has shown us that between the electron and its respective nucleus, there is nothing but empty space. If we were to scale up the atoms in a human body to the size of stars, there would be as much empty space in between them as there is between the stars in our universe.

Aristotle and Newton believed in absolute time. That is, they both believed that one could unambiguously measure the interval of time between two events, and that this time would be the same whoever measured it, provided they used a good clock. Time was completely separate from and independent of space.⁷However, as early as the 1960’s NASA scientists disproved this philosophical theory by observing what is now known as “Gravitational Time Dilation.” In Gravitational Time Dilation, time is seen to speed up in an area of a weak gravitational field when compared to a timepiece in a stronger gravitational field. Identical atomic clocks do not remain in sync when at different elevations above sea level. On earth a clock ticks a fraction of a second slower at sea level than a clock on a mountaintop. The further you remove a clock from a gravitational field, the faster it will tick in relation to the clock within that field. Also clocks tick slower the faster they are going when compared to an identical clock at rest (in relation to the moving clock). So, once again, science has proven Aristotle’s philosophy to be in err.

Aristotle used philosophy to make the determination that atmospheric vapors are what made the moon appear larger when on the horizon compared to directly overhead. However, scientific observation has shown that the moon’s size is the same no matter where it is in the sky and the apparent size difference is an illusion created inside the observer’s mind and has no connection with reality.⁸

The truth is, basing our reality on our finite human senses and using philosophy to determine reality is highly unreliable, much to the chagrin of those atheists who have chosen to worship themselves and man as the source of all knowledge—an error vividly illustrated herein by analyzing one of their great prophets, Aristotle.

Notes:

5. A Brief History of Time, p. 15

6. op. cit. p. 63

7. op cit. p. 18

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