(August 13, 2020 at 6:36 pm)The Grand Nudger Wrote: There's no reason to take the god part off, there are superior versions of the argument from contingency and we could use those - but these are also flawed. Cosmological arguments can't get around the fallacies, they can only accept them and say that we're wrong about logic, somehow. Probably one of gods mysteries. 1 in 3 and 3 in 1 and that sort of thing.
It most definitely was what I was asked to explain, lol. At least toss me a few peanuts, I'm dancing for your amusement.
Quote:You can bring up theological objections to this, fine. But the arguments in and of themselves appear to be valid (at least I'm not seeing how the conclusion fails to follow from the premises in each of the arguments, when we're considering the arguments in fully fleshed out form of course). So can we concede that this particular counter you're using is a misunderstanding of Aquinas' view of God? Or do you want to keep arguing that I'm the one not getting you?
Now that we're agreed that aquinas intuited his conclusion, rather than arguing for it, and that non seqs are not valid arguments can we be done with this fawning horseshit over saint tom and your inability to see how the argument is invalid? You see it just fine. Grandizer-1, Tom-0.
Didn't agree that it's a non-sequitur. Again, God is defined as the ground of being that is pure act, the first cause, the unmoved mover, etc. You don't see this definition explicitly in the summaries of the actual arguments, but this is what God means to Aquinas. By your reasoning, even Plantinga's MOA is not valid then (because maximally great being is not necessarily God). And I don't much care for Aquinas the man himself, but I do care that if we do want to critique these arguments we take the time to first understand the reasoning behind them and then critique according to that understanding, not by the use of wild rhetoric and clever tactics.
You can have the point back. I don't much care for this kind of win.
