Can something come from nothing

[Neo-Scholastic]

Hi Chad. I've just read the five ways for the first time now just to see what I've been missing out on. I won't get to them in my course proper for a long time to come though, or the intricacies of the logic that surrounds them and how they're usually argued, but no harm in giving my first impressions at this point. First thing's first though, do you find all five of them convincing? And just to be sure, I presume you're talking about the third way in the above post?

Yes, I am talking about Necessary Being.

Are they convincing? As for me, I didn’t sit down to read the Summa for the first time one day, and say to myself, gee, by sheer force of Aquinas’s logic there must be a God! From the perspective of modern materialism and analytic philosophy the 5 Ways seem strange and misguided, as you have already noticed.
Materialism is a cultural artifact of not only philosophical speculation but a reaction to ecclesiastical power in the 18th century and the rise of industrial culture in the late 19th and early 20th century. It became the default metaphysic. What started as an epistemological convention became, without rational justification, an ontological conviction. Today, we take for granted.

The whole reason I became interested in philosophy was because I feel deep inside the mystery and wonder of the human condition. So I studied which in the Anglo-American world means analytic philosophy. Ultimately, I found myself completely disillusioned. It is a dead end. I truly believe that anyone who pursues that route to its ultimate conclusion will see that it inevitably leads to an impoverished, nihilistic, and bleak picture of reality. But I digress…
I think that to truly understand the 5 Ways you must step back from the materialist interpretation and start at the place from which all philosophy begins, as a conscious being alone in a phenomenal world that is wholly Other. By the time I came to the 5 Ways, I had already rejected modern materialism in favor of, what I believe to be, I believe to be a richer, more comprehensive, intellectually satisfying and emotionally rewarding philosophical tradition. That rejection is based on two existential choices I have personally made. First, I choose to believe that the phenomenal world reflects a rational order. Second, I choose to believe that in some way conscious experience meaningfully corresponds to the phenomenal world. YMMV.

It is a mistake to fit the 5 Ways onto the Procrustean bed of materialism. You have to approach them on their own terms. Aquinas didn’t put them at the beginning of the Summa to ‘convince’ anyone. The readers of the time had already accepted the Christian faith and the 5 Ways only set the stage for a deeper contemplation of the Divine.

Now to some of your specific observations about the 5 Way:

As for me, the first argument to go is number five... evolution and natural selection are a non-intelligent 'designer'. So that's the argument I'm most confident in rejecting.

From the perspective of modern materialism, your conclusion makes sense. And even modern believers who promote the 5 Way, often find that the best they can get is some kind of Demiurge, a pale imitation of the Christian God and not one Aquinas would have recognized.

The second most doubtful for me is number three; because at the atomic level of nature at least, energy cannot be created or destroyed, it can only change its form. So I'd argue that at that level nothing ceases to exist, it only does in our perception...

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we perceive one configuration of atoms one way, another configuration another way, and a dispersal as ceasing to exist, but that doesn't mean the atoms are gone, it just means they are no longer in the arrangement/form to be perceived (and mentally classified) as they previously were by our minds.

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So that leads me to ask, if you had to choose one, are you a direct realist, an indirect realist, or an idealist? Going lower, quantum stuff... particles popping in and out of existence seemingly randomly, adds further doubt for me about number three.

And to me, the strange and wonderful quantum world only makes the idea of a Necessary Being all the more compelling. It would seem that the most fundamental level of which we are aware is primal matter which has unlimited potential but is devoid of form.

Number four I can't really get my head around yet. It seems to me that all value judgements are relative, but not necessarily to a fixed standard.

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For instance it is in our nature as humans to be constantly/usually searching for something or working towards a goal, and when we find it/realise it we soon take it for granted and start searching for the next thing, seeing it as relatively better than our current state... the principle of 'the grass is always greener on the other side'. So the concept of a perfect being does not make sense to me; if it is perfect then it has everything and can be in no 'better' state... it should 'want for nothing' and as such would have no reason to do anything. Yet, Gods as described do do something that implies want (ie creation), and therefore incompleteness... not perfection.

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Granted I don't know exactly how perfection is defined in terms of God, and I will get to that later in my course, but as it stands, that is my objection.

Number 4 cannot be understood apart from Formal Cause and moderate realism.

Furthermore, where the logic is along the lines of 'if it can be conceived it exists't... it is to the word 'conceives'. IMO to conceive of something means to create a logically coherent concept, not just name/label some random/arbitrary collection of properties... which is what seems to be happening when you define something as absolute truth, love, goodness etc and call it God. Putting that aside, as I said, I don't understand that argument at all yet so I won't take a position on it yet even if it can be logically conceived as a coherent concept.

Conception is about your conscious mind participating with and conforming to, however imperfectly, the Divine Mind. It’s not an abstract description of things in the world. It’s an active relationship with the Divine Mind behind phenomena.

Numbers one and two are subject to the same potential quantum doubt as before, but not being well versed in that subject I won't take that any further at this point. To me, they are the strongest of the five arguments, but nonetheless I personally still have doubts... though I doubt my particular doubts will be shared by many people. Mine come from the perspective that we are causality detectors by 'design'... that it is our nature to seek and find causality even when it is not there... we know nothing else other than to see the world in these terms. But, from the neural view, causality itself is never detected per se, only inferred by our brains. What we actually do is detect and associate coincidences, which our brain infers as causality.

Your notion of causality rests on a pre-commitment to the notion that the phenomenal world does not reflect a rational order. Why make that assumption? And having made that assumption, to throw out causality, where does that leave you with respect to the acquisition of knowledge? Just something to ponder.