[Serious] Criticism of Aquinas' First Way or of the Proof of God from Motion.

[polymath257]

We owe an enormous debt to the Greeks for laying the groundwork for math and science as we know them today. These things didn't appear out of thin air in the 1700s. True, ancient postulates are ill-informed compared to modern scientific theories... but there is a reason so many of the scientific terms we use today are Greek words.

And Belaqua made an excellent point. Some of the ancients were way smarter than we take them to be. I used to think of ancients like ignorant children who hadn't discovered science yet. Then I read some of what they wrote and learned that I was the ignorant child.

Humans have been as 'smart' as they are now since Homo sapiens sapiens appeared on the scene. The difference is how and how fast we have accumulated knowledge.

The ancient Greek philosophers were incredibly smart people. They were attempting to understand the universe around them using limited tools and were the first to make a concerted effort to do so across several areas of knowledge.

But the concepts they used are NOT the modern concepts. For example, the notions of causality used by Aristotle are very different than what we would label 'causes' today. For example, the formal cause is not at all something most people today would call a cause at all.

Also, the notion of movement was much, much more general. ANY change was seen as being a movement, not just a change of position in space. So, a chameleon changing colors would have been considered a type of movement.

But, being the first to investigate a subject means that it is likely you will be wrong in many, even most, of your conclusions. That doesn't make you stupid. It simply means you are un-informed or ill-informed. And that is almost inevitable at the beginning of any study.

So, Aristotle was wrong in many, many ways. That doesn't make him stupid. it just makes him wrong. But making the first attempt was a crucial step.

I have always been impressed how Lucretius used the way dust moves in a beam of sunlight to argue for the existence of atoms. His argument was in many ways similar to the much later use of Brownian motion to show atoms exist.