The Evolution Of Taiga Aisaka

Denizens of anime twitter will have noticed a recent flare up of the evolution/creation debate; the catalyst was a thread by the patron saint of Catholic weebs,
Brayden gives eight reasons why he rejects evolution derived from philosophical and theological conclusions. Here, I aim to show they fail even given Thomist assumptions. Before parsing through his specific arguments it would be useful to explain the thinking going on in the background here.
Thomism and Scientific Essentialism
Most of Brayden’s arguments derive from implications of a metaphysical view called scientific essentialism (SE) (n.b. Brayden himself might dispute this label as it’s from modern analytic philosophy and therefore doesn’t fully capture the medieval philosophical world he inhabits). SE is the view that objects we come to know about through empirical evidence have essences. That is they have properties which they must have to be the object that they are.
In formal philosophical language SE is the claim that for some objects if they exist, then it is metaphysically necessary that they have certain properties or relations but these properties or relations are only discoverable a posteriori.
For example, the numerical identity relation captured in the proposition [heat is mean molecular motion] is necessarily true. There is no possible world in which heat exists and is not mean molecular motion. Similarly for the proposition [cats are animals] there is no possible world in which cats exist but cats are not a species of animals. If we discovered that the objects in the actual world that we thought were cats were not animals but a type of demon would would say that cats never existed rather than that cats turned out to be demons.
The upshot of SE in regards to creatures is that plants and animals if they exist at all have certain essences by metaphysical necessity. I won’t go into arguments for SE as that would take me into tangential space involving theories of reference and the relationship between meaning and reference and the semantic content of sentences that I don’t want to get bogged down in. Just go with it for now.
It should be apparent that if objects have certain properties by metaphysical necessity then we have at least opened the door to the possibility of rejecting certain scientific theories on metaphysical grounds. If a scientific theory postulates that an object behave in such a way that is incompatible with its essential nature, then we would have metaphysical grounds to reject the scientific theory. We know objects have essential natures given SE.
Thomist/Aristotelian Metaphysics in Five Minutes
I now turn to what this has to do with Thomism. Thomist philosophers have a robust answer for why SE is true. Objects in spacetime have the properties they do in virtue of being form-matter composites with actual powers and potential powers. Forms can form composites with other form-matter composites or with prime matter to actualise a potency. The salient point is that the potencies that inhere within a given form-matter composite are restricted by its form.
For example, the form of gold cannot actualise any potency within a block of lead because the matter within a block of lead has had its potencies restricted by forming a composite with the form of lead. The unique restrictions of the form of lead entail no possible further composite in which the object can form a composite with the form of gold.
I will briefly explain what this Thomist terminology means but I recommend getting a grounding in it from somewhere else anyway if you’re completely unfamiliar as it comes up a lot in Catholic theology.
Take a bronze statue of the goddess Athena. It has certain properties such as being made of bronze, being extended in space, being a certain shape etc. The statue is made up of a hunk of bronze and we can talk about the hunk of bronze as having certain properties too.
However, the statue and the hunk of bronze have different persistence conditions. If the statue was melted down, the statue of Athena would cease to exist but the hunk of bronze that made up the statue would persist in existence.
Thomists (and Aristotelians) explain this by saying that the statue of Athena and the hunk of bronze have material sameness without numerical identity. They are made of the same physical matter but differ in the non-physical form that actualises the composite’s potency. The form-matter composite of the statue is made up of the form of a statue of Athena that actualises the form-matter composite of the hunk of bronze presenting as matter towards the form of the statue of Athena.
This stuff dovetails nicely with SE. Some species of cat essentially have the property of having fur because the form of catlike fur can only latch onto the form-matter composite of a cat presenting as matter. The potencies forms can actualise is a matter of metaphysical necessity not contingency. Therefore if a certain furry cat, Tibbles exists at all then it necessarily has the property of potentially growing fur (obviously there is a possible world in which it’s shaved off hence “potentially”).
So far we have explained how scientific essentialism (SE) opens the door to rejecting scientific theories on metaphysical grounds, provided a sketch of basic Thomist metaphysics, and explained how the two are related. With this metaphysical background in mind I move on to evaluate Brayden’s arguments against evolution.
Brayden’s Arguments Against Evolution
BRAYDEN’S FIRST ARGUMENT
This argument can be understood as an analogy with the above gold/lead case. Lead cannot become gold because lead does not have the potency of becoming gold within itself. Scientific study has shown that this is because lead and gold contain different chemical elements.
Here’s what I hope is a faithful paraphrase of Brayden’s argument,
1. If macroevolution is true, then the generation of organisms leads to the coming into existence of new essences by the actualisation of a potential
2. Given Thomism, new essences cannot come into existence through the actualisation of a potential
∴ 3. Macroevolution is false [By Modus Tollens]
Going back to our analogy, here the claim is macroevolution postulates something like lead being able to change into gold despite not sharing elemental properties therefore requiring a cause within lead that is able to change its chemical element. Metaphysically, this would entail the creation of a new essence. The same goes for macroevolution.
I deny premise 1. We can just take the evidence for macroevolution as evidence that the essence of the simplest evolutionary ancestor does in fact contain the potential to be actualised by all the forms we see in plants and animals.
This may seem implausible given the huge differences between primitive single-cell organisms and what we see today however consider that forms often actualise potencies in radical ways. When a tree burns down the matter in the tree gets actualised to become something very different. The radical difference is metaphysically accounted for in the fact that the tree is destroyed (just like the statue of Athena).
This objection works against Brayden’s second and third arguments which I would say are just variations of the first.
BRAYDEN’S FOURTH ARGUMENT
Brayden asserts that things requiring all their parts existing simultaneously is too complex a state of affairs for it not to have been brought about by God’s immediate creation. The only way I can think of for how you might defend this claim is intuition. I don’t know of a litmus test of complexity to justify a distinction between God using secondary causation or immediate causation.
My response, therefore, is quite simply that I do not share the intuition that things requiring all their parts existing simultaneously is too complex a state of affairs to not come about by macroevolution.
The rest of Brayden’s arguments are based on scriptural exegesis so I won’t go into them. It would be beyond the scope of this article.
Concluding Thoughts
It’s nice to see arguments against evolution from a Catholic rather than from an extreme protestant as usual. Seeing some arguments not purely based on biblical exegesis is also cool. Like most arguments ever made they don’t work but hey.
