RE: Criticism of Aquinas' First Way or of the Proof of God from Motion.
April 26, 2021 at 12:07 pm
(April 26, 2021 at 9:09 am)polymath257 Wrote: 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.
And the problem is that people worshipped ancient people like they did Aristotle, and that's why Galileo got in trouble when he looked into the telescope and debunked Aristotle by seeing craters on the Moon because Aristotle said the universe is perfect. The clergy could not comprehend how Galileo could disprove a man they worshipped for hundreds of years by one look through the telescope, so they didn't want to look through the telescope themselves. Galileo also disproved Aristotle's claims that heavier objects fall faster.
And that's how people in the past worked: someone they worshipped said something and it had to be like that, they didn't research it, like Aristotle believed that men have more teeth than women, so it had to be that way because who is anyone to disprove the "great" Aristotle and actually count the teeth.
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
