(November 20, 2016 at 10:25 pm)theologian Wrote: You hold that in Five Ways of St. Thomas, there is a premise that says "everything is caused" or "everything is moved".To clarify, "everything that moves is moved by something else" and "everything that begins has a cause" is creating an absolute condition. Then an exception is introduced with no reason other than to overcome the condition. That I phrased it as I did on the third or fourth go-round does not invalidate the point I made the first two or three times, and you have still not answered it without resorting to unproven assertions about God or his nature.
Quote:The Five Ways doesn't argue for a beginning.Yes, it does. It looks to find a starting point that our "understanding" leads back to, which you then assert is God.
Quote:What's unproven here?All of it. Every part of the statement I quoted is unproven. It's hardly even coherent, to be honest.
Quote:Evil actions and evil intentions shouldn't be thereBut they are, so they exist and can be quantified. Some actions are more evil than others, as are some intentions. So we can grade evil on a scale the same way we can with good.
Quote:The proof of that is simple: It is no GOOD to have one million dollar in your mind only. Hence, every truly good things must be real. Thus, being is being as looked on itself, being is truth as looked on the intellect, and being is goodness as looked on the will.Unproven assertion that is barely a step up from word salad. You have no way to prove anything that you just said, you simply state it as if it must be true. If you need this much presupposition in order to support Aquinas, no wonder his arguments are a lost cause.
Quote:Does it follows then that what is not observed is not real?It follows that what is not observed is not evident, and that it cannot be confirmed or verified or studied. If you want to go down the path of "anything can be real as long as we can imagine it" then there is a very long line-up of Gods awaiting your recognition.
Quote:What's unproven here?All of it. And your explanation was more of the same. You continue to support your ideas with assertions that are unproven. The lack of a natural explanation for something does not require that we assume the supernatural. Human history is one of people making supernatural claims to explain things that have ended up having a natural explanation. Always. Never the other way around. Yet you aren't able to "see and understand" what that fact is telling you.
Quote:The problem with that is that it is not true that belief is the only reason for holding Five Ways as true,It has to be, since they do not stand on their own logically.
Quote:Do you know the principle of non-contradiction?The paragraph that followed this is just more of the same nonsense. Let's just cut to the chase: there are no standards or methods by which metaphysical claims can be tested, validated, or falsified. There is no method of peer-review that all 'metaphysicists' can agree on. They cannot even agree on which God is the real one, which on its own should indicate that its a useless 'science.'
Quote:Well, metaphysics is laborious.So is biology. And physics. And genetics. And lots of other fields of science where millions of people manage to follow a system of discovery and experimentation that yields repeatable results that work, regardless of beliefs. And where all of the presuppositions in the world will not make a whit of difference in determining what is true and what is not. The problem with metaphysics is not that it's laborious. The problem is that it's an imaginary field of study.
"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