[Serious] Thomism: Then & Now

[Neo-Scholastic]

Yes, in trying to talk metaphysics with physical analogies, nothing is going to be 100% right. ...
Yep, I have yet to find the perfect way to say it. Modern people just don't think that way naturally, so it's hard to express in an intuitive way. If you think of a good example please let us know!

Indeed. Perhaps if Christian apologists found a better analogy or example of a truly essentially ordered, per se, series then maybe having such an example handy would help resolve the modern misunderstandings about the 5 Ways. On the flip-side, maybe the difficulty of finding an obvious and truly representative example reveals an hidden problem, perhaps some kind of category error. I say this because the best examples for per se series seem to refer to intellectual objects. And intellectual objects seem to lack any obvious power to produce change. At the same time, change is axiomatic in natural science and left unexplained. And physical laws are assumed by our atheist friends, such as @TheGrandNudger, to be brute facts that require no further explanation. Perhaps. But as I see it, the Law of Sufficient Reason applies when science only describes the various ways changes happen but remains silent [intentionally*] about the metaphysical preconditions required for those changes to happen.

Moreover, substances, as understood in Scholasticism, often include intangible qualities, like final causes, that are excluded in natural science. For those with physical reductionist leanings, the efficacy of this methodological exclusion seems to warrant ontological exclusion as well. In contrast to this, ontological exclusion of intellectual objects makes the world ultimately unintelligible.** Lacking a metaphysical ground for intangibles, “things” like trusses, kidneys, or acids cannot be identified or understood as discrete kinds of things with discrete qualities and properties. So it makes me wonder if the 5 Ways say more about epistemology than ontology, i.e. maybe God or a god-like concept is required, even if taken for granted, to make the sensible world intelligible and have meaningful discourse about it.

*methodological naturalism confines its inquiries to efficient and material causes.
**This seems true by definition.

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If we're tracking things all the way down the rabbit hole to fundamental forces or particles...and the buck stops there, it would seem we have a plurality of final causes.  Is there any reason other than insistence that cause beyond that, one more layer down, is a set of one?

Hmmmm. I think you mean to say that there is near infinite number of final causes any object can or could have. I don't disagree. At the same time, within that nearly infinite set of final causes, only a few of them are very good. I think the final cause of my heart is pumping blood whereas Hannibal Lecter thinks its dinner. Likewise books are clearly over-qualified to serve as door-stoppers. Do you think, perhaps, the fitness of an object to a specific final cause plays a part? And can one exist by degrees, maybe even shades between potential and actuality...a kind of "statistical" existence rather than a binary one. For example the final cause of a chair is to provide seating. But we all know there are weak, tippy chairs that could barely support a teenage girl and hard wooden chairs that are so uncomfortable you cannot sit for very long. Both function but poorly. IMHO that makes them less chair-like somehow.