(March 7, 2014 at 6:36 pm)ChadWooters Wrote: Pardon my ignorance of advanced quantum physics, but I cannot imagine that to mean temporal persistence as long as big-bang cosmology holds to the idea that space-time itself came into being. Nevertheless, Aquinas’s 1st and 2nd way would still apply to an eternally existing physical universe, since they deal with the fact that things preserve their “whatness” even as they undergo change.
1) Big-Bang cosmology is known to be flawed precisely because of General Relativity fucking with it and 2) modern physics does not hold to the claim that the Big Bang was the origin of all time and space. Further, as I already mentioned, there are a dozen-odd (at least) fleshed out cosmological models - such as the Carroll-Chen model by the aforementioned Sean Carroll or the "Conformal Cyclic Cosmological" model by Roger Penrose) in which, YES, the universe persists infinitely in temporal duration as well. In fact, this is necessary given quantum mechanics and some of the features our universe has (again, a non-zero energy and time-independent Hamiltonian).
And how do you know things pertain their "whatness" throughout time? Under the B-theory of time (which modern physics holds to) I'm fairly certain that is not the case.
Chad Wrote:Don’t you think it is silly to have an apple before you and say it doesn’t exist?
I don't follow. That is nothing like what I said.
Quote:The adjective “existing” does not add anything to the apple, because you already have tacit awareness of the apple’s existence, without stating it explicitly. With respect to sensible things, people know them as both substantive and particular. You are aware that the apple has a material component even as you are also aware that it is a particular thing, i.e. an apple, and not say a flower or a pint of beer. To my mind, it is obvious that every sensible thing must have both form and substance. Most people can identify these as distinct properties in thought (abstractly), even if they are never distinct in actuality. And since real things continue in their “whatness” as material things, even as they undergo change, it makes sense to look for principles that preserve and inform the many and varied things in sensible reality. As for now, I call these two principles primal matter and intentional agency. I do not know what to call this synthesis other than God.
Again I don't follow, here because you seem to be agreeing with me. Objects don't have the property of 'existence', rather existence is the necessary precondition to having properties in the first place. One might go as far to say that it is only ontologically sensible to say that properties exist (a la Hume and bundle theory).
Quote:And I think it works, but then again, it’s an open question, yes?
Sure, in the same way that substance dualism and libertarian free will are open questions, yet rejected by most philosophers. The problem here is that to even do apologetics, much less something like ontological or cosmological-style arguments, one has to defend metaphysics from about 200 years of very powerful and convincing criticism before that conversation can even be considered, going from Hume to Kant to Wittgenstein and the like. And the reason this doesn't happen is because analytic philosophy has basically abandoned metaphysics, so if you really think you're up to it I'll be expecting you in my future philosophy textbooks.
Chad Wrote:Unlike the neo-Scholastics, I do not start with ontological proofs, although I do accept them as a consequence of my own philosophical studies.
You seemed to have missed what I was asking, though to be fair I didn't go in depth.
Remember, I was asking a metaphilosophical question about why you would even want a proof for God's existence in the first place? What do you think providing such an argument gets you? Let me lay it out:
If there were a successful proof of God's existence (that is to say an argument that is both valid and, apparently, sound), what do you actually think follows? Do you think it necessarily follows that therefore God exists? If so, and that's the easiest claim to debunk, then you're going beyond what I think most philosophers would think actually follows, even the Christian ones.
Plantinga, for instance and unlike our resident twat Rational AKD, doesn't think his modal ontological argument establishes the existence of God. Rather, he believes it establishes the rationality of belief in God. That's much more reserved and defensive, and rightfully so.
