Do you reject St. Thomas's Aristotelian biology and physics, or both?
Robert Sungenis answers that he weighs Thomas one thought at a time, accepting most of his teaching, such as the five proofs of God. He rejects the Aristotelian scheme of substance and accidents as unproven, noting that gold turns out to be made of atoms that can be altered into other elements, and rejects Aristotle's biology as primitive.
A viewer asks whether Sungenis disagrees with St. Thomas Aquinas's acceptance of Aristotelian biology while agreeing with his physics, or disagrees with both.
Answer
I take Thomas one thought at a time. Most of what he says I agree with, like the five proofs of God, but I do not buy the Aristotelian idea that everything is substance and accidents; that is a metaphysical notion with no real proof. Thomas thought gold was a pure substance that could not be subdivided, but we found out five hundred years later that gold is made of atoms and quarks, and that adding an electron and a couple of neutrons turns gold into platinum, and removing them turns it into mercury. That is the periodic table, and it shows gold is not a substance in his sense. As for Aristotle's biology, it was in its infancy; biology is based on complex carbon chemistry Aristotle had not the first clue about, so no, I will not put my confidence in his biology.