>>25312616
The fact this book irks you enough to type out a giant essay is proof enough that its effective.

>>25312616
They are shit evidentialist arguments.

The only good argument is TAG.

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>>25312616
In all seriousness you’ve been too mindraped by modernity to even understand the old arguments. Your objections as well as Kant and Occam’s rest on an implicit thought-being dualism which these premodern philosophers reject outright. It is not easy to get into the headspace necessary to understand them but picrel is a good introduction.

>>25312727
Aristotle’s argument is completely naturalistic and physical anon. As I said it depends on his theory of cosmic motion. It’s also cute that you think I’m lost in dualism when Fichte is a pure idealist who holds that all reality is a posit of consciousness. I’ve seen your post, or some version of it, hundreds of times and it’s nonsense. There are two great classical Godproofs - Aristotle’s, which rests on bad physics, and the Platonic which leads you by a ladder to the One Itself, which as Aristotle points out is the emptiest concept imaginable. The missing premise that motivates these proofs is moral and existential and once you grasp this you can throw the dogmatic proofs away.
>telling me to read Perl
I’ve honestly probably forgotten more about premodern philosophy than you will ever know.

>>25312745
>>25312616
Aristotle has a separate argument in DA thoughbeit.

>>25312745
metaphysics are the presuppositions to do physics, they aren't the mathematical models per se. Modern Physics is also bad physics, the models can't explain really how natural phenomenon originate. They can't even predict how gravity works.

>>25312761
No, without Physics 8 it can’t establish transcendence, that’s why he repeats it in Meta 12. The spheres have to be living animals moved by desire for the argument to work. Kant calls this sort of thing ‘arguing on a needlepoint’ in some of his letters to Reinhold and Fichte. The ancients didn’t have some privileged worldview that is incomprehensible to us benighted moderns they were simply naive, uncritical, too dismissive of skeptics. Geniuses too obviously, at least Aristotle was.

>>25312764
Why should there be such an ultimate explanation? And why is any such explanation final besides your claiming it must be? This reasoning is unjustified, it convinces no atheists besides really stupid ones like Feser.

>Why do theists continue to trot out the unmoved mover argument when it was debunked by Kant 250 years ago and even before that by Occam?

>The version of the ontological argument that Kant had in mind was the one put forward by Descartes... Now, if this argument works, then God's existence would be necessary because he would exist by definition... But, Kant argues, the ontological argument is unsound... Hence, the cosmological argument, which presupposes the ontological argument, must be unsound as well. Now, that one needs to do more than merely claim that the cosmological argument presupposes the ontological argument should be obvious enough from the fact that Aquinas, and most Thomists following him, explicitly reject the ontological argument while endorsing the cosmological. (pp. 237-238)

>When arguments like those defended in this book claim that God exists of necessity, they are not claiming that he exists by definition. That is not the only notion of necessity there is, and it is not the notion to which they are appealing. (p. 238)

>Consider a mirror which reflects the image of a face present in another mirror, which in turn reflects the image of a face present in another, and so on ad infinitum. Even if we allowed that there could be such a series of mirrors, there would still have to be something outside this infinite series—the face itself—which could impart the content of the image without having to derive it. What there could not be is only mirror images and never any actual face. By the same token, even an infinitely long series of instrumental causes could not exhibit any causality at all unless there were something beyond the series whose instruments they were. (p. 57)

>There is no necessity for there to be a supernatural unmoved mover because the universe could move itself of its own immanent essence, much as the sun attracts the earth in its own right and by its own nature.

>The kind of series which Hume (rightly) says might in principle be infinite is a series of things generated in time out of preexisting materials. Given Fido's parents, the matter out of which they are made, the causal powers they possess, and so forth, we can account for Fido's being conceived; and we can account for Fido's parents in the same way, and their parents in turn in the same way, and so on. But the Thomistic proof is concerned instead with what conserves a thing in existence at any moment of time, as opposed to being annihilated. Here the question is why Fido, or his parents, or anything at all—including the matter out of which they are made and their causal powers—persist in existence even for an instant, given that there is nothing in their essence that entails their existence. Even if each dog in the linear causal series of dogs extending backward in time was generated by some earlier dog, with the series going back infinitely, as long as the existence of each dog is distinct from its essence, each dog will also have to be conserved in being at each moment. Without a conserving cause, Fido or his parents would be nothing, and the same is true of any conserving cause whose own essence is distinct from its existence. An infinite series of such conserving causes can no more get you a real dog than an infinite series of IOUs can give you real money. Just as IOUs have to be backed at some point with real money, so too must any hierarchical series of causes which impart existence to Fido at any moment terminate in something which, since it is Subsistent Existence Itself, needn't have existence imparted to it by anything else. (pp. 119-120)

>Only motivated reasoning can justify the leap from the (valid) necessity for a first mover in any per se causal series to the necessity of a supernatural ens realissimum which is outside of time and space.

>The first actualizer in the series is "first", then, in the sense that it can actualize the existence of other things without its own existence having to be actualized. So, suppose this first actualizer had some potentiality that had to be actualized in order for it to exist. What actualizes that potential? Should we suppose that it is something other than the first actualizer that actualizes it? But in that case, the so-called first actualizer isn't really the first actualizer after all, contrary to hypothesis; it would be this further actualizer that is the first, or perhaps some yet further actualizer that is the first. Should we say instead that the first actualizer has some purely actual part that actualizes the part that is merely potential? But in that case, it will be this purely actual part that is the true first actualizer, and the potential "part" will not really be a part of the first actualizer, but rather merely the first of its effects. ... So, there really is no sense to be made of a first actualizer of the existence of things which is not purely actual. If we acknowledge a first actualizer at all, we have to acknowledge thereby a purely actual actualizer. And thus we have to acknowledge an actualizer that has all the divine attributes which follow from being purely actual. (pp. 58-59)

>If the purely actual actualizer were material, then it would be changeable and exist in time, which it does not. So, the purely actual actualizer is immaterial. If the purely actual actualizer were imperfect in any way, it would have some unactualized potential, which, being purely actual, it does not have. So, the purely actual actualizer is perfect. For something to be less than fully good is for it to have a privation... A purely actual actualizer, being purely actual, can have no such privation. So, the purely actual actualizer is fully good. To have power entails being able to actualize potentials. Any potential that is actualized is either actualized by the purely actual actualizer or by a series of actualizers which terminates in the purely actual actualizer. So, all power derives from the purely actual actualizer. But to be that from which all power derives is to be omnipotent. (p. 33)

>If you look at the original argument in Aristotle it depends on the necessity of something's always being in locomotion lest all change cease but this is scientifically incorrect. He argues that such a constantly moving entity (the outermost heavenly sphere) must be moved by a final cause and this is God... without Aristotle's astronomy the entire thing collapses.

>Change occurs. Examples are all around us. The coffee in your cup grows cooler. A leaf on the tree outside your window falls to the ground. A puddle grows larger as the rain continues. You swat a fly and it dies. These examples illustrate four kinds of change... That changes of these sorts occur is evident from our sensory experience of the world outside our minds. (p. 15)

>It is sometimes alleged that, even apart from considerations about inertia, relativity, and quantum mechanics, arguments of the sort I have been defending rest on outdated science. Sometimes this sort of objection takes the form of a sweeping assertion to the effect that Aristotelianism as a general worldview was refuted by modern science. Hence (it is concluded), an Aristotelian argument for God's existence is no more relevant today than Aristotelian astronomy is. The trouble with this sort of objection is that it is intellectually sloppy, running together issues that need to be kept distinct. "Aristotelianism", as a label for the system of thought that the early modern philosophers and scientists rebelled against, covers an enormous variety of philosophical, scientific, theological, and political ideas and arguments. It is true that certain specifically scientific theses associated with medieval Aristotelianism—such as geocentrism, the ancient theory of the elements, and the notion that objects have specific places toward which they naturally move—have been refuted by modern science. But it simply doesn't follow that every idea which might be characterized as "Aristotelian" has been refuted by modern science. For example, the thesis that change entails the actualization of a potential—which is a philosophical or metaphysical thesis rather than a scientific thesis—has in no way been refuted by modern science. On the contrary, since, as has already been pointed out, the very enterprise of science presupposes the existence of change (insofar as, for example, observation and experiment presuppose the transition from one perceptual experience to another), the Aristotelian would argue that any possible scientific theory thereby presupposes the actualization of potential. (p. 51)

>>25312616
What do you mean by "supernatural" here?

To be honest, I have a hard time understanding your objection or even what the target of your objection is.

>>25312745
>I’ve honestly probably forgotten more about premodern philosophy than you will ever know

Then you must know that what Aristotle means by "physical" and "natural" is not at all the same thing as contemporary naturalism and physicalism, and that you're guilty of a fallacy of equivocation, right?

And then invoking a natural/supernatural dichotomy is a loaded anchronism on top of this.

Looks to me like you are largely just name dropping while railing against a straw man in your head with no clear target of argument.

>>25312789
I only claimed there are obvious assumptions behind physics that we can think about.

>>25312797
Kant actually knew that people who advocated for the cosmological argument did not think they needed the ontological argument but he points out that the notion of an ens realissimum is necessary for the proof to establish God as the first cause, then he points out that this concept of a perfect being is transcendent and unknowable. Aquinas for example does this by a series of gross sophisms (“if its essence is existence it’s perfect, so it’s unchanging, if it’s unchanging it’s immaterial, so it’s formal, if it’s formal it’s an intellect” and so on). Aquinas’ proof in particular depends on his Necessary Being proof which actually is a version of the ontological proof as Kant understands it insofar as it proceeds from limited, contingent predicates to a being of all beings. So Feser as usual is talking about something he doesn’t understand and you’re an absolute cocksucker for copy-dumping this much from the book rather than writing your own post.

>>25312840
>If I make no argument and say the other side is a sophist, I am very smart.

I just realized I'm probably talking to Aristotle Alcoholic Anon. Please go back to arguing that Aristotle was a nominalist, that's funnier than this lame shitick.

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>>25312616
>Why do theists continue to trot out the unmoved mover argument when it was debunked by Kant 250 years ago and even before that by Occam?
Religion doesn't work on logic, if that was the case the global religions people practice today would be long gone centuries ago. Religion instead works primary on cultural and community aspects instead, no matter how illogical the religion is. Why do you think so many right-wing grifters talk positively about Christianity when they had no association with the religion prior to talking about politics? Cause the West has over 1500 years of history with it, doesn't matter if it was Constantine's political move or how Jesus did nothing the messiah was supposed to do.

>ITT some sperg tries to argue, in the most pseud way possible, that multiplicity can be prior to the One and potency to act.

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>>25312616
Your ideology has 33% of replacement fertility rates and already has jumped to 1 in every 20 deaths coming from euthanasia in places like Canada, a number expected to double in 2027 when assisted suicide for mental health and loneliness is allowed. And then there are the suicide and addiction rates, despite extreme material wealth. Never has an ideology so obviously refuted itself.

It does so on aesthetic grounds as well, from capeshit slop, to AI slop, to literal menstrual blood thrown at a wall hanging in galleries.

>>25312840
>When arguments like those defended in this book claim that God exists of necessity, they are not claiming that he exists by definition. That is not the only notion of necessity there is, and it is not the notion to which they are appealing. But Kant's claim would have merit only if it were the notion of necessity to which they were appealing. (Feser, p. 238)

>For the Aristotelian, a thing's contingency derives from the fact that it is a mixture of actuality and potentiality; what is pure actuality and has no potentialities that need to be actualized or could be actualized therefore exists necessarily. For the Neo-Platonist, a thing's contingency derives from the fact that it is composite; what is absolutely noncomposite or simple has no parts that need to be or could be combined, and is for that reason necessary. The Thomist would make a similar point, arguing that the first cause is necessary precisely because its essence just is existence, and thus need not have, and could not have, existence conjoined to it. All of these notions attribute to God a more than merely conditional necessity, but it is not the logical sort of necessity that we attribute to propositions. (pp. 238-239)

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>>25312893
It’s quite pathetic how you can’t formulate your own thoughts and just spam Feser at me, ignoring my arguments entirely. I expect you rely on secondaries to do your thinking for you in general and this is why you do not understand the primaries. What are you even trying to do with this post? Tell me something I don’t know you trad retard. You think Kant’s understanding of the ontological proof is merely Cartesian but you’re wrong, it applies to any ‘necessary thought-being’ and he explains this in the text. He was cutting to the essence of Godproofs which all posit a perfect, transcendent Being, or Being beyond Being and showing that it is unknowable in its transcendence because it can’t be experienced. Look at all that I just wrote from my own brain and reading. Please keep bumping my thread with senseless Feser spam.

>>25312880
We’re talking about philosophy anon. Are you unable to engage with philosophical argumentation?
>muh birth rste
That’s not an argument. Not that it matters but I am actually a Catholic who opposes contraception. I just think the unmoved mover argument fails snd explained why in the OP. I also deapise trads because you guys prostitute philosophy.

>>25312860
No I’m saying that all such argumentation is nonsensical insofar as it transcends experience (although within the confines of experience it is obvious that act is prior to potency). You can’t understand what I said in the op because you don’t know Aristotle and can’t think philosophically. For you it’s just part of the culture wars. You guys make fools of yourselves every single thread.

>>25312637
>a giant essay
>mfw it's a single paragraph
twitter, tiktok, and their consequences have been a disaster for the zoomer attention span

All these trads think I’m arguing for atheism because they can’t get through even one paragraph of fairly simple text. And all they can say in response is to hurl slogans at me and copy-paste excerpts from Feser which I argued against in the OP. Pope Francis was right about you guys.

>>25313007
NTA but he's probably posting those excepts because your arguments have already been answered in the very book in your OP pic. Like, literally the very first argument you made in your post:
>There is no necessity for there to be a supernatural unmoved mover because the universe could move itself of its own immanent essence, much as the sun attracts the earth in its own right and by its own nature.
To anyone who has actually read the book, that is just flat out wrong.

>>25313628
Thomism is dead. Balthasar saw it well. Look into Eastern Theology. Read st. Gregory Palamas, Lossky, Meyendorff, Dr. Bradshaw, Staniloe. You will see clearly why Western philosophy went its own way.

I've only been in /lit/ for like two weeks and I've realized that all the philosophical discussion boils down to people turning incredibly simple ideas into convoluted arguments by regurgitating terms of people who died centuries ago.

All of this impractical mental meandering is just a jewish method to justify being evil and lazy. There's no legitimate application behind it

>>25312616
Kant was uneducated about scholasticism and didn't understand what the terms meant

>>25313655
What gets me is that most of these trad kids think they’re genetically superior to other races even though they can hardly read or write. I know the op requires further explication I just didn’t want to tax their feeble attention spans with more than a paragraph. I overestimated them.

>>25313704
Kant qua uneducated in verba scholastica not per se but per accidens, firstly if we consider in acto but secondly for the potentia within Kant's own intellectus.
Conclusion: not a mortal sin pro ignorantia

>>25313738
i think you're just too reliant on other people's words and can't easily put them in your own without fear of sounding uncredible

>>25312616

Non of this bs would need to be said if God was a real thing. It would be apparent much like the Sun and the Stars.

>>25312616
The goal of "proofs" for God is simply to assuage the retards in the flock that there are proofs. They don't need to understand them and won't figure out that they don't work. Just hand them some lines to trot out and look smug and your tithes are secure.

>>25313704
You’re correct that Kant didn’t know much about scholasticism but you are wrong that his ignorance of the Summa Theologiae spoils his arguments. I’ve already tried to explain this several times itt but it’s wasted effort because you guys don’t know how to read. His critique of the ontological argument applies to any ‘necessary perfect thought-being” including Aquinas’ and he says in the text that people who make these arguments scramble what he calls the cosmological and ontological arguments in myriad ways. You would have to seriously read Aristotle and Kant to engage with this debate rather than hurling one-liners like a monkey that can talk.

>>25313757
All of my posts are written by me and arise from studying the primary sources. You guys are the ones who keep spouting cheap 'gotcha!' arguments from blogs. Kant and Aristotle agree that knowledge cannot transcend experience. Aristotle is able to get to God anyway, even though he rejects the Platonic 'unity-ladder' argument, because God becomes something like a force of nature - beyond nature, yes, but necessary to explain the eternity of the universe. This argument rests on bad astronomy as I explained. You guys think the argument is from something in motion to The Unmoved Mover but in Aristotelian physics any motion goes back, not to The unmoved mover, but to An unmoved mover, a substance. To take the powerplant example from the OP, the unmoved mover is the process generating the power from its own essence. But Aristotle saw that this per se chain depends on a per accidens, temporal chain (who pressed the button to turn on the power plant? etc.) and that this necessarily runs on eternally. It's the necessity of eternal motion that leads him to God and nothing else. But you would have to actually read Aristotle to understand any of this rather than relying on retards like Feser, an associate professor at a community college who can't even read Latin. Atheists usually do not know anything about Aristotle or Aquinas but on at least a gut level they can tell that the unmoved mover argument is nonsense and they are correct especially because most of you apologists don't even know how it works. I'm rejecting one argument and pointing you towards another, Fichte's, which I find much more interesting and convincing. Because this transcends these American political categories it is incomprehensible to you.

>>immanence isn’t occasionalism because it just isn’t okay?!
>>here’s an analogy figuring the sun as a legal person with rights

>>25313768
Interestingly Fichte would say that God is completely apparent even to atheists. God is implicit in freedom and 'atheists' aren't really rejecting God but an idol. The only true atheist would be someone who thinks he is completely determined by his environment and desires.

>>25314036
>jargon jargon jargon I have no idea what this thread is about but here is some jargon I picked up from a mixture of blogs and reddit posts

>>25312616
Who is God's "first mover" then? If the universe cannot exist on its own, then neither can God.

Kant attacked Anselm's ontological argument, not Aquinas's cosmological one. The Five Ways begin from empirical observation: change, causation, contingency. Kant leaves them standing. The real question is why anything exists rather than nothing. An infinite regress of causes is metaphysically impossible (Hilbert's Hotel). The universe began. It cannot be necessary. You need an uncaused cause. That is what Aquinas meant by God.

>>25313704
>Kant was uneducated about scholasticism
Wolffianism is literally protestant scholasticism influenced by Suarez. Read more.

>>25314081
>An infinite regress of causes is metaphysically impossible (Hilbert's Hotel). The universe began. It cannot be necessary. You need an uncaused cause. That is what Aquinas meant by God.
Did you not read the transcendental dialectic?

>>25314081
>Kant attacked Anselm's ontological argument, not Aquinas's cosmological one
He didn't really attack either per se, he extracted the fundamental logic common to whole classes of these proofs. Your claim that he did not attack the cosmological argument is bizarre. You should really read primary sources rather than parrot what you hear elsewhere and you do this because you don't actually care about philosophy as such, you just want a pseudo-intellectual beard for your tradcathery, which is itself a pseudo-religious beard for neofascism.
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/4280/4280-h/4280-h.htm#chap92

Over and over again anons say, "Kant didn't understand the scholastics" because they have heard this online. They never explain what Kant is supposed to have misunderstood, the one-liner is all they need or care about.

>>25314039
yeah know we got that you’re an illiterate. that was totally clear from the OP

The Aristotle janitor has to be the biggest lolcow on this board.

>>25314265
Your post was a non sequitur anon. You just saw Occam's name and started babbling about occasionalism because you've picked up this factoid that Occam was an occasionalist. It has nothing to do with the point I was making. Just like this anon here: >>25312880 is babbling about fertility rates and assuming I'm a hypermodern atheist even though the OP is meant to direct readers to a fresh, non-Aristotelian argument for theism. You don't actually understand philosophy, for you it's just
>based bearded monk tradwife b-based based based
>evil modernist trannie cuck liberal black
You can't even follow one paragraph of straightforward prose. These are the men of the future ladies and gentlemen.

>>25314269
I'm definitely not a janitor. I would get you guys permabanned for your no-effort, one-sentence posts if I had that power. But I realize this psychotic /pol/ paranoia is all part of the package with you guys.

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>>25314286
>permabanned

>>25313645
Why would experience be one way, and not any other, and always have act prior to potency, if this is not the case vis-á-vis
what is prior to experience?

Why posit any noumena outside experience if, by your own argument, potency can spontaneously actualize itself outside of experience, so that phenomena might just be self-actualizing and self-standing. Why posit any noumena in the first place? As Hegel and others of Kant's immediate successors pointed out, the entire philosophy hinges on dogmatically presupposing that appearances are appearances with some reality behind them. But if the relationship between appearance and reality is arbitrary, then the appearance might as well be a self-causing apparation. The whole limiting relationship makes no sense, and to the extent it is thought at all is not beyond experience.

Now if what is merely potential can become actual for no reason at all, then anything can happen whenever, all the time. But that would render philosophy and science useless, so it is self-defeating. Moreover, all evidence speaks against it.

So, not only is the whole argument grounded in mere dogmatism, the dogma is also incoherent.

>>25313655
I'm 44

>>25313738
Nobody said that

These posts are all the same guy. You can tell because he spergs out at anyone who disagrees with him (or who he takes to be disagreeing with him) as a "tradcath," as if any disagreement must come from some monolithic boogieman.

>>25314031
If I understand you the way I think you want me to understand you, it's ridiculous how badly you feel the need to argue this in the first place

>>25314296
I knew it was you Aristotle Alchey. Did you actually read the book you're commenting on, or is this like your thread on Palamas where you admitted 150 posts in that you had never read him, and weren't even responding to a real position you could cite, but were responding to "something I saw on Discord once."

>>25314296
you have to be 45 to post here

>>25312856
He almost always smokes you retards, and then I see really sad posts like this attempting to gaslight him and readers of the thread. Obviously he just provided an actual argument, what are you talking about? Can't you read? Are these posts made by bots?

Like this
>>25313684
>that is just flat out wrong.
So the other anon (or you) can post the relevant excerpt if it's so interesting instead of random passages about types of contingency (for the second time!)

>>25314299
Brilliant deduction. You should be a detective. I try to have serious discussions about philosophy and all I usually get are tradcath zoomers as you can see for yourself in this thread.
>>25314294
>Why would experience be one way, and not any other, and always have act prior to potency, if this is not the case vis-á-vis what is prior to experience?
If you understand what scholastics mean when they talk about act and potency you would see it's practically a tautology. It's not a case of experience 'being one way and not another'. What merely could be can only be understood in terms of what actually is, so to say 'act precedes potency' does not violate Kant's strictures. It's not positing a 'noumena' any more than Kant's transcendental discussion is positing a 'noumena', it's just thinking about the logical conditions of nature.
> by your own argument, potency can spontaneously actualize itself outside of experience
You think Kant is making a claim about the origin of the universe (it just popped up spontaneously) when he's actually denying that such questions can be answered by reason. In the OP I was pointing out that a natural substance is regularly an unmoved mover in its own right in Aristotelian physics and the only way to get to The unmoved mover, God, is by astrotheology. I am not saying that potency "can spontaneously actualize itself", I don't understand how you could misread such a simple post in such an extreme way.
> Why posit any noumena in the first place?
Who is positing noumena? Talking about act and potency or Aristotle's physics is no more 'noumenal' than the transcendental deduction. It's simply a way of thinking through the logical conditions of nature and experience.
>As Hegel and others of Kant's immediate successors pointed out, the entire philosophy hinges on dogmatically presupposing that appearances are appearances with some reality behind them
I agree that Kant's thing-in-itself does not make any sense, the OP is directing people to Fichte. Kant is extremely important thoughbeit.
>So, not only is the whole argument grounded in mere dogmatism, the dogma is also incoherent.
You didn't understand much of it at all.
>>25314404
>is this like your thread on Palamas where you admitted 150 posts in that you had never read him, and weren't even responding to a real position you could cite, but were responding to "something I saw on Discord once."
You're confusing me with someone else. Even though I have in the past been an idiot while drunk, not making bad arguments but losing my shit arguing with you morons, I hate discord and even in the deepest drunken stupor would never say that I go there.

>>25312616
This is extremely retarded and ignorant. If you're going to deconstruct you need to go as far as you can, not this gay ass half measure. The ignorance of the dark ages is timeless.

Never get tired of watching puffed up pseuds slapfight. It's the only reason I still visit this wasteland.

>>25314503
>So the other anon (or you) can post the relevant excerpt if it's so interesting instead of random passages about types of contingency (for the second time!)
Yeah it's extremely annoying how they keep copy-pasting passages from that book when the OP and other posts in the thread is meant to argue against Feser's reconstruction. I really think these kids have serious brain damage. Feser thinks the per se chain of causes must stop and he is correct, an infinite per se chain is logically impossible, but to get from this per se chain to God depends on eternal motion, as you can learn for yourself by reading Physics 8. Take Feser's warmed cup of coffee or whatever it was - it's warmed by the heater, which is warmed by the power plant. What's causing the power plant to produce electricity? God? No, a chemical reaction. And what is the cause of this? Per se, simply the nature of the chemicals involved. Per accidens someone had to bring the chemicals into contact. It is by this per accidens chain that Aristotle gets to God. So it's just another example of these trad faggots being exposed as illiterate.

>>25313628
>ut I am actually a Catholic
Man, are you actually? Do you find it easy to square that with what you think about philosophy? seems like the church made Thomism nearly mandatory for a while last century, though maybe backed off now, and I never hear about the idealists from other Catholics in favourable terms. I know you've mentioned their God-proofs, do you think they fit well with church teachings? or just that they are better than the classical ones

>>25314528
>a chemical reaction. And what is the cause of this? Per se, simply the nature of the chemicals involved. Per accidens someone had to bring the chemicals into contact. It is by this per accidens chain that Aristotle gets to God.
I found your posts about this (from last year, I think) pretty helpful in squaring what I had read from modern Thomists with what I was reading myself in the Metaphysics. But in this particular case, do you not think someone like Feser would say that the chemicals must have that nature for a reason, or something to that effect, and the cause of those properties gets you back on the essentially ordered chain he wants to take up to God? I know this is not what Aristotle's argument is, but, if that makes sense, then I suppose it at least means it fails on its own merits rather than just being a misreading of the big Stagirite

>>25314280
No that’s not what happened you illiterate LLM huffing nigger. lol.

>>25314543
>Man, are you actually? Do you find it easy to square that with what you think about philosophy? seems like the church made Thomism nearly mandatory
They were heavily shilling Thomism for about a century there in a failed attempt to circle the wagons against the modern world. John Paul II was a phenomenologist and if you read Benedict XVI's Introduction to Christianity it has more to do with Heidegger and Kierkegaard than Aquinas. Catholicism has a very positive attitude toward philosophy and philosophy is always changing. That said the theology really is couched in scholastic terms so if you want to understand it you need to read them. I do not care very much about theology, I leave that to priests and theologians, though I do like philosophy. You do not have to be a Thomist to be a Catholic there are non-Thomist scholastics in the Church even today as well as Catholics who are interested in philosophy but hardly read the scholastics.
>But in this particular case, do you not think someone like Feser would say that the chemicals must have that nature for a reason, or something to that effect, and the cause of those properties gets you back on the essentially ordered chain he wants to take up to God?
He can say that but there is no justification for the question. A genuine proof, like a mathematical proof, produces conviction in anyone who can understand the premises. Kant noticed that this was never the case in metaphysics and set about trying to figure out why this is. I've seen trads argue that there is a moral aspect to understanding Godproofs but plenty of atheists are highly moral as it is, and besides if it depends on some sort of 'feel' or subjective state of mind then it's not really the rational proof it pretends to be.

>>25314612
Fair enough. I'm a Presbyterian and it's rare to find anyone with other than a suspicious attitude towards philosophy here, if they care at all, so I just wonder how it works at other churches.

>He can say that but there is no justification for the question.
I don't know, "But why does Uranium have specifically this fission barrier?" is itself definitely reasonable questions and if you think that needs to have a reason (and obviously we all do) then it seems pretty hard to pick a place to stop and say that nature just is like that, although for us that point is always conveniently beyond the current frontiers in particle physics. But even if we found out tomorrow that LQG is just how it is and there's no more scientific investigating to be done it would still be hard to swallow that "it just is that way" is where inquiry ends, and then the essentially ordered causes argument would come into play. Not saying I think it works on its own merits just that it is potentially its own thing. But maybe you disagree even with this.

I am someone who isn't interested in philosophy but due to being introduced to the unmoved mover argument I have come to believe in God for the past 15 years. Anyway the idea that the world is necessary somehow and the first mover is interesting since respectable people promote it as a possible solution but it doesn't make any sense to me so I do not care.
I can't understand high level philosophical argumentation anyway so why should I spend my time on it? It seems more plausible that God created the universe than anything else.

>>25314635
>reasonable questions
A reasonable question

>>25314404
You're thinking of someone else

>>25314474
Sure, pal.

You write like a redditor

>>25314509
You said:

>No I’m saying that all such argumentation is nonsensical insofar as it transcends experience (although within the confines of experience it is obvious that act is prior to potency)

What exactly is beyond all experience? You're positing it. You've obviously never thought about it or experienced it however, by definition lol. So why is what true of literally all thought and all intelligibility not true tout court?

Certainly sounds like an appeal to some noumenal shadow realm beyond the thinkable or sayable. But since you cannot say anything about it, or even think this unthinkableness, why posit it? Whereas act is prior to potency in all reality that isn't some bizarre self-contradictory bare dogmatic posit. Seems good enough for me
>B-b-but to be hecking critical you have to dogmatically posit unthinkable realities you can say nothing about!!
No.

>>25312616
What does OP think about fine tuning?

Ironically when trads say you need moral conviction and virtue to comprehend their proofs of God’s existence they are conceding the point to people like Kant and Fichte. This is exactly what Kant means when he talks about ‘practical data’.

>>25312681
TAG is the biggest load of shit I have ever heard. Hence why everyone who promotes it is an insane creationist like Jay Dyer, Van TIl, Greg Bahnsen etc. It's worse than the existentialist arguments

>>25312616
When you suggest that the universe could move itself by its own immanent essence, a scholastic philosopher would counter that you are conflating the power to act with the reason for existence. For Aquinas, the core of the argument isn't about physical movement or billiard balls hitting one another; it’s about the distinction between essence (what a thing is) and existence (that it is). Because a physical universe is composed of parts, changes, and is inherently contingent, its existence is not self-explanatory. Even if the universe has an "immanent essence" that allows for self-attraction or motion, the scholastic argues that this essence still does not possess existence by its very definition. Therefore, it requires an ens realissimum—a reality whose very essence is existence—to sustain it in being at every single moment. To them, Kant’s critique of the cosmological argument (that it secretly smuggles in the ontological argument) fails because they see existence not as a mere predicate, but as the fundamental act of all acts.

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Interesting side note: Aristotle didn't believe in a single unmoved mover which "neo-thomists" have acknowledged. Read Étienne Gilson.

>>25315427
That sounds like special pleading if it's applied only to arguments for God. I am not sure about writing the entire idea off though. Modern Western thought is fairly unique in thinking discursive method can guarantee truth (if anything can, which is perhaps why it also tends towards skepticism since it can't). The basic idea that someone who is intelligent (in the modern sense) and skilled in dialectic, rhetoric, etc. is only going to produce more advanced sophistries without virtue is more universal and seems prima facie sound. It is the person who knows how to do much (instrumentally) but not what is worth doing who is most dangerous.