(January 10, 2017 at 7:20 pm)Jörmungandr Wrote:(January 10, 2017 at 3:36 pm)Neo-Scholastic Wrote: Finally, none of the Five Ways exists in isolation of one another. While each one ends with the statement "...and this everyone considers to be god," the type of god one gets is the summation of all Five Ways. On its own, the best the 2nd Way gets you is Pantheism. However in light of the 1st, 3rd, 4th, and 5th Ways, the physical universe is disqualified as the "god" in question.
Actually, that's exactly what the five ways do, they exist in isolation from one another and there is no logical dependence between the conclusion of one and another. It is a leap that you and Aquinas make that all the ways address the same object.
You point is well taken. That seems to be a common opinion since Aquinas did not explicitly draw the connection between the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd Ways. Each Way demonstrates the existence of something logically prior to all other things. This means that either there are three things, each of which is logically prior to the other two, or there is a single thing that is logically prior to everything else in three distinct ways. The former makes no sense whereas the later does.
