theologian Wrote:Please see if I understand your point here. Are you saying that c contradicts the conclusion? If yes, is the reason why it contradict the conclusion is because in c, it says if everything are moved?I'm saying that the concept comes down to "this state always requires this condition, which leads us to a logical dead end." Now the most obvious way to deal with a premise that leads to a logical dead end is to discard it. Another way to deal with it is to introduce an exception, but the very existence of that exception invalidates the premise. There may be other ways to attack the problem, but that approach doesn't work.
Each of Aquinas' five ways run into that problem on some level, which I think is the result of starting from a conclusion and trying to find a logical framework that will support it. I suspect that he went through a great many examples before finding the five that seemed to work in his mind. But they all require at least one unproven assertion or presumption, and without them you don't necessarily end up with God.
theologian Wrote:If there is an Unmoved Mover, First Caused, Uncaused Necessary Being, Perfect Being and Super Intelligent Being, and there really is per St. Thomas' 5 Ways, why it can't be called God?It sounds as if you are asking "if there is a God, why not call him God?" But as I have explained, the five ways might point to a cause, but that cause does not have to be a being. And I am assuming that St. Thomas was not arguing for an ambiguous small-G "god" but for a God who is a supernatural person capable of creating and populating a universe.
As for the rest of your description of God, how do you know all this about him? Is it written somewhere? Is it verifiable? Is it another logical proof that requires that we start with at least one unproven presumption, without which the premise leads us nowhere? If we arbitrarily define God beforehand and then design logical proofs that only work if the definition is accepted without question, the only limit to the God(s) that we can prove is our imagination. If we don't define God at all, then we can easily end up without one.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould