(November 16, 2016 at 11:13 am)theologian Wrote: Now for the First Way, you've failed to point out how the exception contradicted the premise.I did so previously. If everything that moves must have been acted upon in order to move, the moment we introduce something that moves but is not acted upon, we have invalidated the premise. The existence of an unmoved mover means that it's impossible for everything that moves to have been acted upon.
I don't know how to make it any clearer because it is so simple. Logic should not tell us that there needs to be an exception in order to solve the problem. Logic should tell us to scrap the premise because it is unworkable. Logic should definitely not tell us to assign a quality to an unproven variable in order to allow that variable to solve the problem by presenting itself as the proof. That is circular.
You keep explaining the five ways using this reasoning. Your response to my post was to explain all the ways in which we run into limits that seem to confound us, then claim that God has a specific quality that overcomes this limitation. But you don't explain how we can know that God has this quality aside from one version or another of "he has to have this quality."
Quote:For the fifth way, science doesn't invalidate it.I wasn't saying that science invalidates it, I think it invalidates itself. But there was a time when that argument could have been used to explain many things that have different explanations now because we discovered them (the germ theory of disease, for example). Knowing that natural explanations replace supernatural ones all the time but that the reverse does not happen should give us the confidence to reject the teleological argument.
Quote:Now to comment on your general comment, that we assume God's attribute and then we identify it with the conclusion of the Five Ways, let me do some answering. What is sure is that we didn't first define God as the Unmoved Mover, First Cause, Necessary Being, Perfect Being, and Supremely Intelligent Being. Instead, we have arrived at the conclusion that the Unmoved Mover, First Cause, Necessary Being, Perfect Being, and Supremely Intelligent Being exists, starting from the senses and then using sound Metaphysics and valid logical demonstration,and then we call those God.The most charitable explanation I can see is that Aquinas wondered about these things and, frustrated over the dilemma that they all posed, proposed a God with those qualities as an imperfect solution. But I don't think that's what happened. I think Aquinas was quite confident in his belief in God but could not demonstrate him and so he fell back on the idea that if we can determine that he is required, then he exists. That's what makes the exercise so telling-- that he has to invest God with qualities that break the logic of his examples in order for the examples to "prove" God. I wonder what would happen if he'd followed the examples to their logical conclusion and simply declared them unsolveable? In Italy in the mid-1200s?
In any case, the examples do not work unless God has a quality that invalidates the premise. The method by which you arrived at the answer does not change that. And I honestly do not know what "sound metaphysics" is. Is there a consensus on how metaphysics is researched, tested, and validated?
"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