[Serious] Thomism: Then & Now

[Neo-Scholastic]

I see this as an argument from ignorance. Natural "law" is simply order, not something purposefully directed. Order does not necessarily require intelligence.

Isn’t that what order is: being disposed towards a definite end?

As for 1-3, they are about logical contingency, though I doubt Aquinas would think this any different than linear time (not knowing modern Physics).

That’s fair. If asked to give an example, Thomas would likely have chosen a chronological sequence. For the 2W, the most common example is father-son relationships which obviously unfolds over time. At the same time a thinker as brilliant as Thomas Aquinas, were he asked today to give an example probably would have used a different example. That’s because, strictly speaking, an efficient cause is not temporally prior to its effect; but rather, the efficient cause is the thing that sustains the effect. For example, if a baseball shatters a window, the baseball is the efficient cause that is present as reason for the shattering of the window. This is in stark contrast to Hume’s notion of causality, which requires two temporally adjacent states.

Movement happens even without cause - though symmetries in spacetime do result in conservation laws. Conservation of energy allows the entire energy of the universe to be zero (negative gravitational energy, and positive mass-energy).

<emphasis mine> Just a reminder that movement, in this context, means “change”. So you are saying that changes happen for without causes, i.e. for no reason at all?

2) Causation as we know it breaks down when time breaks down.

This is a serious thread, which to me, means more than just not joking around, it means respecting the other participants by actually reading the posts you respond to. I have said, repeatedly that the 5W are not about time, and yet your objection is that causation breaks down with time. Sorry, but I am disappointed in you. ☹

3) The universe doesn't just go around creating "things". Things just change form. As far as Aquinas' argument is concerned, he has never seen a single thing "beginning to exist". Even anti-particle pairs "coming into existence" are associated with negative energy dip in the background. It adds up to nothing, and nothing caused it (beyond the structure of the universe itself).

The ontology of the 3W is moderate realism. https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/11090c.htm Your objection suggests to me that you are a mereological nihilist. Personally, I find that a bit like radical skepticism, self-induced helpless resignation after a failure to find warranty for strongly intuitive beliefs…such believing there are things.

4) This one doesn't need refutation. It is just silly.

Actually, I found it quite profound. The 4W is about value and reason. Reason requires being able to distinguishes between different kinds of things and evaluate degrees of perfection. The 4W proposes that the Unity and Perfection of God is the basis for unities and perfections in the world. Now, it doesn’t say all that in the 4W but that’s implicit in the argument and fairly easy to draw out.