(August 12, 2020 at 9:50 pm)The Grand Nudger Wrote: He did think that his argument could prove something other than a first cause. He thought it proved a god. It didn't.
I could hold up a cat and say the magic words "and this we understand to be god" - and there can be no doubt that I've demonstrated the cat, but that still won't make that magic statement true. It's false even on it's own contrived terms. What tom concluded didn't follow, and wasn't actually what he, let alone we, understood to be god at all. He understood god to be christ. There's no escaping this fact of his thoughts or his argument, and it's why his argument isn't the successful argument. He fucked it up. Smart guys make mistakes, and this was just one of his many.
Set aside the fact that Aquinas was a Christian, and regardless of his motivations, the arguments in and of themselves could be said to lead to the existence of some First Cause/Unmoved Mover/Ultimately Necessary Being/Being/Pure Act/whatever. Maybe they're still not successful arguments, but there's no inserting the Trinity God going on here anyway (even if that's what Aquinas believed in).
And a cat (???), by the way, is a contingent being with potentiality and is not pure act, so this cat argument wouldn't have been a challenge for Aquinas.
