Callum wrote:

This is a good point. The Thomist argues from the PPC;

"For example, the materialist philosopher Paul Churchland argues that both the individual human being and the human species as a whole have purely material beginnings and develop from these beginnings via purely material processes. The end result, he concludes, must therefore be purely material.6 What this assumes, of course, is that if the total cause is material, so too must the effect be material. The mind-body dualist would agree with Churchland about that, but argue that since part of the effect (the human intellect) is not material, neither could the total cause have been purely material."

As well as agere sequitur esse;

"The thesis that agere sequitur esse can be understood as an application, in the context of what Aristotelian philosophers call formal causes, of the basic idea that the PPC expresses with respect to efficient causes. An efficient cause is what brings about the existence of something or a change in something. The PPC tells us, again, that whatever is in the thing that changes or comes to exist must in some way have been in the total set of factors that brought about this change or existent. In this sense, the effect cannot go beyond the cause. A formal cause is the nature of a thing, that which makes it the kind of thing it is.9 For example, being a rational animal is the nature of a human being. The characteristic attributes and activities of a thing flow or follow from its nature—as, for instance, the use of language flows from our nature as rational animals. The principle agere sequitur esse basically says that these attributes and activities cannot go beyond that nature, any more than an effect can go beyond its efficient cause. Hence, a stone cannot exhibit attributes and activities like nutrition, growth, and reproduction, because these go beyond the nature of a stone. Anything that could do these things wouldn’t be a stone in the first place. The principle agere sequitur esse, like the PPC, follows from the PSR. If an effect could go beyond its total efficient cause, then the part of the effect that went beyond it would have no explanation and be unintelligible. Similarly, if a thing’s activities could go beyond its nature—if, for example, a stone could take in nutrients or use language—then this activity would lack an explanation and be unintelligible.10 I noted above that the PPC is implicit even in the argumentation of some naturalistic philosophers who are otherwise unsympathetic with the metaphysical views defended by thinkers like Aquinas. The same thing is true of the principle that agere sequitur esse. Aquinas himself perhaps most famously deploys this principle when arguing that the human soul can persist beyond the death of the body.11 His reasoning is as follows: Intellectual activity, which is among the human soul’s activities, is (so Aquinas holds, on independent grounds) essentially immaterial. But for a material thing to carry out an immaterial activity would violate the principle that agere sequitur esse. So, the human soul must be an immaterial thing. And since immaterial things have, unlike material things, no natural tendency to decay, the soul does not go out of existence when the material body does. Of course, a materialist would disagree with the claim that intellectual activity is immaterial, but that is neither here nor there for present purposes.12 The point is that even a materialist could agree that if intellectual activity were immaterial, then the thing which carries out that activity would itself have to be immaterial. And indeed, the naturalist philosopher John Searle takes precisely that view in criticizing a theory known as property dualism. Property dualism holds that mental properties are immaterial but that they are nevertheless properties of a material thing—namely, the brain. The theory is essentially an attempt to acknowledge the problems with materialist theories of the mind without having to accept the dualist view that the mind is an immaterial thing. Searle’s criticism is that the theory is unstable. If the property dualist maintains that a mental property is something “over and above” the brain, then the trouble in Searle’s view is that such a property cannot be a property of the brain, but must be “a separate thing, object, or non-property type of entity”.13 On the other hand, if a mental property really is a property of the brain, then it cannot be something “over and above” the brain. Other critics of property dualism have complained that it is mysterious how an entirely material thing like the brain could give rise to immaterial properties."

 
Right. And complaining about the material giving rise to the immaterial does indeed seem intuitively right, which is what I'm getting at. But then couldn't it be directed against theism? Yet we know that God must have created material things, otherwise they'd exist as a matter of a brute fact.

What answer should be given, then? I gravitate towards saying that the immaterial has perfections that matter doesn't have (like the potency for universality) which would explain why the material cannot give rise to the immaterial; the whole argument for the soul is about the universality of conceptual ideas which cannot be material, anyway (or that it has another power that a material thing cannot have - self-reflection for instance) so maybe that's all that is. Or it's solution 3 and material things are necessarily lower than the immaterial; or maybe it's God's creation that is really different. But no one has answered yet. Would be interesting to know what Feser himself would say about this.