God's Will or God's Reason?

St. Thomas believed that in addition to the individual men-Tom, Dick and Harry-there is also the universal manhood or human nature, which exists as-an Idea in God's mind. He was therefore confident that reasoning about such universals could lead to reliable knowledge about empirical reality-that is, about individual things in the world. But at the end of the Middle Ages two monks, John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham, declared religious and intellectual independence from the dominant system of St. Thomas. In place of St. Thomas' rationalism they substituted their own empiricism and voluntarism. For God's Reason and Intellect they substituted His Freedom and Will.

Dun Scotus' voluntarism consisted in the argument that God's Will predominates over His Reason. If God were bound by Reason, Scotus says, then there would be an authority higher than God, which is impossible. So God is absolutely free to create thin~s any which way He likes. And so logical deduction is much less useful than observation in finding out about creation.

Ockham was famous for the philosophical principle known as Ockham's Razor: Do not multiply entities (especially universals) beyond necessity. His point was that universals(words, ideas, definitions) such as human nature do not really help in puzzling out the facts of God's universe. People are what they are, not because of some preconceived idea or pattern in God's mind but because God chose to make them that way. So again observation, not deduction from ideas, is to be preferred in learning about the real world.

And so, in their promotion of observation, Duns Scotus and Ockham opened the way for the Renaissance-the discoveries of Copernicus, the experiments of Galileo, the explorations of Columbus and the rest, and even the art of Leonardo and Michelangelo.

Bibliography

Duns Scotus: Philosophical Writings, The Liberal Arts Press, New York, 1964.

Ockham: Philosophical Writings, The Liberal Arts Press, New York, 1964.