Theists, provide your arguments for God.

[Belacqua]

perhaps @Belacqua's deity only wants the philosophically literate to be saved? 

I'm an atheist, but we can talk about what different theologians have said. I don't know of anyone who says that being philosophically literate is a requirement. 

Though ironically that wouldn't save Aristotle, as humans didn't start to create @Belacqua's religion for another 3+ centuries. 

I don't have a religion, but I enjoy studying them. It's true that according to many Christians Aristotle would not go to heaven. Dante, for example, who has enormous respect for Aristotle, puts him in Limbo, which is not terrible but also not complete joy. There are lots of Christians who think that everybody gets saved in the end. Eternal hell is still a topic that they debate about. David Bentley Hart, a much-read Orthodox theologian, recently published a book on Universalism that has been getting some attention among different Christians. 

Even more confusing for a philosophical illiterate like me, is what his semantics about etymology have to do with my post, since the word he chose to focus on was in the post I was responding to, and not used by me in any other context? 

When talking about First Cause arguments -- whether the world has to be begun by something or not -- it makes sense to look at what the arguments have said. The problematic translation of the word "cause" has led many people on line to argue about mistaken versions of these arguments. It's interesting to me that when we translate the word correctly, many of the objections to the argument appear to go away.

Perhaps @soulcalm17 can answer @Belacqua's question about his use of that word? Especially as they are championing entirely different deities.

soulcalm17 and I approach these issues very differently. For example, he seems to be arguing for a creator who made the world at a certain point in time. The Aristotelian/Thomist arguments, on the other hand, deal with essential priority, not temporal priority. So the issue of a temporal beginning point, like a Big Bang, is not relevant to the argument. 

I am not championing any idea. I realize that on the Internet, if someone says "Mr. X has said," it is often interpreted to include the notion "and therefore you must believe it." But that's not what I'm doing, and I think my posts are clear on that. Describing someone else's argument in order to discuss it is not saying that it must be true.