Arguments Against Thomistic philosophy

[pocaracas]

Hello,

I am a devout Catholic with an interest in philosophy. I am posting here in an attempt to find good articles/books/blogs that challenge my personal views. I personally see Thomism, especially as put forward by philosophers like Edward Feser, as the best method of rationally establishing Theism. However, I would like to challenge my personal views and see what others think. Do any of you know of any good replies to the traditional arguments for the existence of God? Especially as argued by Edward Feser in his books and posts such as this (http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2013/05/...gency.html) ?

Thank you for your time.

Philosophy, philosophy, philosophy!!!!

Lots of arguments from metaphysics, lots of "logic" based on macroscopic understanding of the Universe. Causes and effects...
Someone on this thread mentioned the randomness in Quantum mechanics.... one can go so far as to grant that there indeed was a prime mover to our Universe, but, given the total unknown of the mechanics of a Big Bang, hence the generic name of singularity, one can't really say much in the way of commonplace logic.
On the one hand, we have the school of thought that posits that the Big Bang produced space-time itself.
On the other hand, we have the school of thought that posits that the big bang happens in/at/to a piece of space-time.
On the other hand, we have those who think of the big bang/big crunch cycle.

Any of these is enough to break our logic.
The first because one is forced to consider a cause in the absence of space-time, something that, somehow, exists outside of what we consider to be the framework of existence. Was it Aristotle that spoke of forms? A realm of concepts and ideas that, according to some, must exist independently of human minds. I read something by Feser where he shoots down the potential notion that these concepts actually require human minds by noting that, if one human mind disappears, the concepts still exist in other humans... I wonder what happens if one takes this to the extreme of no minds existing at all. Do conceptual things, like perfect circles, friendship, maths, goodness, exist independently of the minds that think about them? Or do they only exist in the minds that think about them and share them? Do people discover these things or do they invent them?
I admit I haven't yet read enough about Thomistic philosophy, but I guess there's some case in the way of considering that forms exist even in the absence of any conscious thought, even in the absence of space-time.
Personally, I'd argue that they only exist in the minds of thinkers - thinkers that exist in space-time, minds generated in brains made of regular biological material, so ultimately, these concepts exist only in space-time. This way I reason that any reasoning based on concepts devoid of actual spatio-temporal existence is nonsense.

In the second case, space-time itself can be said to be the prime-mover, as Krauss reasons in his "Universe from nothing".
Sure, you can say nonsense like "you can't have a series of infinite events to the past", but you forget I said "space-time", not just time. Space-time is weird and counter-intuitive. If I move at the speed of light through space, time does not move to me. Photons do not age. It is possible for no time to pass... contrary to whatever any philosopher may have thought prior to 1905. Heck.... our commonplace logic is breaking at the relativity level!! Still, relativity does not break causality, it merely imposes somewhat different rules. The quantum world, however, is another matter. Space-time itself can be thought of as teeming with fields that randomly pop up particles into existence - now the counter-intuitive part: I said space-time pops up particles into existence. I didn't say "space" pops up particles into existence. Thinking about a 4-dimensional space is a headache, but good luck with that, Thom. One cool bit about Krauss' notion is that the original "nothing" which is just space-time would have zero energy - Our universe, after taking into account dark matter and dark energy, has, apparently, a grand total of zero energy.
Another cool corollary of this is the concept of multiple Universes - if one can exist and it's brought about through some random thing within space-time, then why can't the same phenomenon happen in some other part of space-time? Given an infinite space-time, one can have infinite Universes!

The third case has pretty much been rendered very unlikely by the observation that our current universe is expanding and the expansion rate seems to be accelerating, as if there's not enough stuff in the Universe to pull everything back together.


Well.... that was a bit too long, but such is the nature of these things.
Feel free to poke holes on all of this... I'm sure it's possible!