(August 12, 2020 at 8:42 pm)brewer Wrote:(August 12, 2020 at 8:06 pm)Belacqua Wrote: Please tell us the reasons you reached this conclusion.
The perceived motivation of the person making the argument is not a reason to call the argument flawed. That would be an ad hominem fallacy. Even badly motivated people may make logical arguments which are sound and valid.
The argument states that everything contingent depends for its existence on the existence of something else. For anything at all to exist, there must be existence. Therefore existence itself is not contingent on anything else. Therefore existence itself is the first cause.
The parts that are specific to a given religion require additional arguments, and are not included in the first cause argument, so please show the logical flaw you perceive in only the argument as stated.
Flawed because he inserted god into the argument where a god was not needed for the premise to be understood. He inserted god because he had an agenda to attempt to justify the existence of god to the non religious.
A justification for believers was not necessary. (I think good ol Tom indicated this himself)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmologic...rarguments
Or are you saying that Thomas did not insert god as the contingent/cause?
Thomas made the case that one thing has to be logically prior to all contingent things. He says that the word for this non-contingent thing is God.
But as I've already said, any other statement about God is not included in that argument.
So you're objecting to things that aren't in the argument.
If you'd like to use a different term than God, you could just leave it at "First Cause." This is all the argument attempts to prove. It's perfectly plausible that a person could accept the first cause argument and reject everything else that Christians say about God.
So, to repeat the question, what is there in the argument itself which you conclude is flawed?