RE: The Best Logique Evidence of God Existence
July 16, 2019 at 9:17 am
(This post was last modified: July 16, 2019 at 9:19 am by Belacqua.)
(July 16, 2019 at 8:22 am)Bucky Ball Wrote: Saying you are confident things exist in no way addresses anything about non-existence. We can conceive of (and indeed in some systems it is asserted are impossible ie "God cannot created a 3 sided rectangle" (therefore it does NOT exist). Reality is not JUST about "existence".
Oh, I see what you mean. Yes, some things don't exist.
But throughout the present discussion, I've been basing the argument on the brute fact that some things exist. That's true, I think -- some things exist. The fact that some things don't exist doesn't change what I've been saying.
Quote:"Hence, since God is first in the order of agents, He must act by intellect and will".
Did you see two paragraphs after that quote?
"For effects proceed from the agent that causes them, in so far as they pre-exist in the agent; since every agent produces its like. Now effects pre-exist in their cause after the mode of the cause. Wherefore since the Divine Being is His own intellect, effects pre-exist in Him after the mode of intellect, and therefore proceed from Him after the same mode. Consequently, they proceed from Him after the mode of will, for His inclination to put in act what His intellect has conceived appertains to the will. Therefore the will of God is the cause of things."
Here, Thomas explains that effects proceed from God only if they pre-exist in him. And it's true that will is the thing that follows from intellect, but these don't operate in God as they do in people, who are full of motion and emotion. God is unchanging, so all of this is simultaneous and eternal. This is all argued in more detail later on, but the point is that everything already exists in God, since he is existence, and he doesn't change in order to bring things about, as people do.
Quote:his god "did" all sorts of things "sent his son" etc etc ... he's hardly an unmoved mover.
Are you arguing that he's unmoved because he did things? That's not what "unmoved" means. Here, "unmoved" means that nothing causes God to move -- not that he takes no actions.
The simplest explanation is the Neoplatonic one: God takes no action (he is unmoving) but he causes movement in other things (he is a mover), because they desire by their nature to be like him. Usually when people say "unmoved mover" this is what they mean -- he himself cannot be made to move, but all things move because of him.
Quote:The real question in all of this, is not cause or First cause ... it's the problem of the Principle of Causality. Where did *that* come from. How could a First Cause cause Causality, if the principle was not already in place. THAT is the real question, and there is no answer for it.
The laws of nature, of logic, and the principles by which the world works (Logos) are "somethings" that exist. Since the First Cause is existence itself, and causality exists, then it is dependent on the First Cause. As I've been saying in this thread all along.
As for whether we should call him Thomas or Aquinas, there's no rule about that. People in those days generally used their first names. Nobody called Leonardo "hey, da Vinci," for example. "Da Vinci" and "Aquinas" both come from the names of their home towns. But modern people do both.