RE: Can't prove the supernatural God
May 31, 2016 at 2:06 pm
(This post was last modified: May 31, 2016 at 2:17 pm by Ignorant.)
(May 31, 2016 at 12:42 pm)ChadWooters Wrote: I think you need to distinguish be essential and accidental properties. [1] To say that something is natural seems equivalent to saying that it has an essential form. [2] It seems to me that the glow-in-the-dark color of the rabbit's fur falls within the category of an accidental property, not an essential one. [3]
1) My hope was to show the difference between natural and supernatural without this more detailed distinction (we are hardly dialoging with realists/aristotelians). It might be the case that I won't be able to, but you are right to point out this important concept
2) Yes, it is equivalent as you say.
3) Yes, according to the Thomist-Aristotelian analysis, the color of the rabbit's fur is an accidental property. That a rabbit's fur is glow-in-the-dark is accidental. That a rabbit can make glow-in-the-dark fur might be natural. The biological capacity to make the proteins necessary for glow-in-the-dark hair through its own [new] biological machinery, if it is given to the rabbit, might be an alteration of that particular rabbit's nature. I'm not sure Aristotle or Thomas thought of that possibility, and I've been wrong many more times than they were. Just my thoughts.