(April 24, 2015 at 8:46 am)pocaracas Wrote:(April 24, 2015 at 8:34 am)Mezmo! Wrote: The legal metaphor of natural laws is based on the idea of a law giver.huh?!
(April 24, 2015 at 8:34 am)Mezmo! Wrote: It is appropriate to ask why such laws consistently hold true. The typical atheist answer is that they just do. The more curious and critical response by believers is that there is a cause for each observable fact. This is known as the principle of sufficient reason.
Why shouldn't those laws hold true, absent of such a "cause"?
I'd guess that a cause would be required to keep changing the laws... that they seem immutable is a testimony to the absence of such a "cause".
In fairness to Aquinas, he did not have available to him some of the come philosophical terms used today. This leads to a simplistic dismissal of the fifth way. Were he alive today I believe he would have specifically identified intention as the mental property responsible for the consistent relationship between causes and effects. The notion here is that sensible bodies have dispositional properties (potential final ends) such that in the presence of certain efficient causes their actions are directed toward certain final ends. So to answer your question, the physical universe as a whole and each part within it displays various theologies, otherwise it would be absurd. My point is that some principle links causes to their effects, rather than no reason at all. For example, it is natural for the curious person to wonder why a billiard ball moves in a specific direction in response to the action of the cue. At a macro level, this can be explained by vector sums and mechanical forces. At deeper levels the inquiry turns into the interaction of atoms, etc. If you carry this process down to the Plank (sp) scale physical explanations no longer apply. Yet at every level anyone can witness the influence of teleology.
