I'm simply confused about the question. Perhaps I am missing something. You said, "there has to be a thing that has that same property to a maximal possible degree." Are you, or was Aquinus, attempting to make the assertion that God was a thing? Is there any evidence for this? Or are you actually trying to talk about temperature in an atheist forum? Wouldn't this be better addressed in a science forum? I am a bit lost here? What was the point of the post? Perhaps if you actually quoted Thomasa's argument in full? Why was he arguing about temperature?

@FlatAssembler

A slight derailment: The correct possessive of Aquinas is Aquinas', not Aquinas'es. Nothing to do with any side of any arguments presented in this thread, it was just driving me spare.

Boru

And how does Aquinas mean that fire is something that is hot to a maximal possible degree and the cause of all heat? Not all fires are equally hot. And the centres of stars are way hotter than fire is. And fire is not the cause of all heat: stars (such as the Sun) are not fire, yet they are the cause of almost all heat in the universe.

There was alot that Saint Tommy didn't know about. It just might have interfered with his lifelong project of making christian dogma fit pagan philosophy, which he believed was superior to anything the church possessed.

(June 23, 2023 at 5:16 pm)The Grand Nudger Wrote: There was alot that Saint Tommy didn't know about. It just might have interfered with his lifelong project of making christian dogma fit pagan philosophy, which he believed was superior to anything the church possessed.

I concede that Thomas Aquinas probably could not have known there was no fire on the Sun, but you would have to be an idiot to think that all fires are equally hot (maximally hot). Obviously, some fires can melt steel while others cannot.

The god that he was angling for was hotter than the hottest fire and colder than the coldest cold. Whatever you can think of, god is that, and is the most of that, and the most of that in a different way than anything else that is that.

I think it's probably easier to understand if you consider that the god he was angling for was the unitarian All of a hellenist civil administration and political religion. They had effectively come up with an idea of god that was a big political game of "yes, and" because they were trying to rule over a diverse empire and lacked the military power to cover it all. It was massively syncretic. So whatever some malcontent in nothereistan said god was, they;d say "yes and"...and then proceed to appropriate that tribal god for their pantheon both ideologically and physically in the form of temple structures and how they played into the classical worlds taxation schemes.

St Tommy comes in after all of that, looks around and decides the philosophical underpinnings of christianity in his time were garbage, and the rest is history.

(June 23, 2023 at 5:12 pm)FlatAssembler Wrote: And how does Aquinas mean that fire is something that is hot to a maximal possible degree and the cause of all heat? Not all fires are equally hot. And the centres of stars are way hotter than fire is. And fire is not the cause of all heat: stars (such as the Sun) are not fire, yet they are the cause of almost all heat in the universe.

It isn’t so much just fire as it was ‘things that are hot’. He wasn’t talking about the vehicle (fire), but about the quality (heat).

Boru

In all seriousness, though, I think that, when trying to refute the Argument from Degrees, we are arguing with a word salad. The other four of the Quinque Viae are arguments, albeit flawed ones. The Argument from Degrees is just a word salad.

Just like when arguing with Flat-Earthers. You can respond to their response to "Why do constellations shift as you move north or south?". Flat-Earthers respond with "Because the stars are only 3'100 miles up in the sky.", and that is conceivable, but wrong. You can reasonably respond to that with "Sir, if stars were only 3'100 miles up in the sky, constellations would indeed shift. But they would also change their shapes. There would be perspective distortions and, unless you assume all the stars are equally high, there would also be parallaxes.". But you cannot reasonably respond to that word-salad about optics that Flat-Earthers use to "explain" the illusion that ships appear to sink as they go over the horizon.

Nope, they're all trash. To put a fine point on it, it wasn't so much that Tommy was arguing these things...but that he was trying to explain how his god fit in those arguments. It never occurred to him that they were trash because, as already explained, everything the church had was worse and he was a superfan of pagan philosophy.

He wasn't a philosopher, he was a syncretist. It was already widely believed by the intellegentsia that this stuff was worthy, he was just trying to make christianity fit the worthy thing. That he's remembered as a philosopher by the christian apparatus is a damning statement on how little they had in the way of philosophy.