[Serious] Thomism: Then & Now

[emjay]

...part of consciousness is choice, or at least the illusion of it, but a perfect being, in the sense of all these absolutes and 'omnis', looks constrained to one course of action only, with no capacity for mistakes or learning or anything of the sort, so no different really than determinism. Basically it doesn't look like it defines anything like a conscious Being in the sense we'd think of it.

Indeed. God's sovereignty is absolute and His intellect incomprehensible to us. That is why I follow the negative way. I see God in the outlines of the negative space where His absence is most keenly felt. .

Yeah, I saw you talk about that in another thread. I have to say, I've always found your perspective on all this intriguing and refreshing... completely different from the sort of Christianity around me IRL.

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Mereological nihilism posits that there is no object with proper parts. There are no chairs, no tables, no consciousness and no gods, too. That we like to carve things up, but that's not the way they are in reality.

Consciousness is a good example of that, regardless of whether people will argue it forever. Gods, and beings in general - such as the first, necessary, or ultimate being each of the five ways is powerfully motivated to conclude with, are also examples of proposed objects with proper parts. In fact, it's the overriding thesis of thomistic argument that these are the parts by which we can know of a god.

Okay, I think I see now... that's a bold claim. I'll have to think hard about that to get my head around it, but first impression is that sure there may be these fuzzy edges of definition, but there is something in reality... something for instance qualitatively different between consciousness itself and anything outside of it (ie mind vs matter)... so what I'm saying is, even if you can't put a box around it and say 'this is a thing' in mereological nihilism, in some situations at least, there clearly is some differentiable 'thing' there to explain (ie 'mind' or 'matter' in this example), even if that's not the case at the fuzzier edges when definitions/boundaries get harder to define. IOW some sort of undeniable core, at least for some 'things' especially if they are qualitatively different.