[Serious] Thomism: Then & Now

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

Still not getting it, sorry. Who's Chad Wooters when he's at home?

Boru

The original name for neo-scholastic.

Moderator Notice
Ah, thanks. You're now banned from this thread. 'Serious' tag means no insults of any kind.

Boru

[The Grand Nudger]

Here, I’d like to commend @emjay, for wanting to understand the 5W on their own terms. To me, it’s a bit arrogant to assume Aquinas was incoherent just because his ideas do not neatly translate into the familiar concepts of modern physics. IMO, trying to shoe-horn the metaphysics of the Summa into modern physics is like playing Go on a Chess board. Maybe you can do it, but the limitations of the board make any such game different from actual Go.

Who assumes as much?  The five ways are incoherent because they're all non sequiturs.

That they also contain false premises and a self referentially false conclusion isn't why they're incoherent, but it is why they're wrong, in addition to incoherent.

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as an addendum, we can't really lay all the blame for this on aquinas. The things he managed to get wrong he did so because those ideas he valued so much and wanted to synthesize with christianity were already wrong - but still highly useful as propagandistic tools of a religious institution.

[emjay]

...
So does Aquinas use circular reasoning, as some suggest? I say no. There is a difference between motivated and circular reasoning. As a man of faith, Thomas Aquinas would most certainly be motivated to reason towards a conclusion. Motivated reasoning increases the likelihood of making mistakes but that does not mean the outcome must be wrong. In contract to this, circular reasoning is when the initial premise and the conclusion form a closed loop. This is not the case in the 5W.
...

Firstly, in hindsight, I probably jumped the gun a little bit there, in my previous reply to you, thinking you had conceded it was circular reasoning, when that's not what you meant, so, sorry about that.

But since we're on the subject, I do still and have concerns on the subject, and so does my dad, who is following all of this with interest as well. Basically we both understand and accept the different concepts of an essentially ordered series and an accidentally ordered series, and that the former relies on a kind of simultaneous, as you put it elsewhere, "sustaining", causation. Aquinas' example being arm>moves>stick>moves>rock... where the simultaneous presence of each element is essential in order for the whole series to remain valid. Compared with an accidentally ordered series such as grandfather>begets>father>begets>son, where once the grandfather has begotten the father, the father can beget the son regardless of whether the grandfather is alive or dead (ie currently exists in the series or not).

At the moment at least, I accept the assertion that the essentially ordered series as defined cannot be infinite... that it needs a first element... such as the example I read somewhere of a lamp being plugged into an extension socket, and then another, and then another... at some point it has to be connected to the power... the first cause as it were... in order for the light to come on. Or another example, which seems kind of similar, a scene from the comedy Allo Allo... they're digging a tunnel, starting in a graveyard, and someone asks 'where do you put the dirt from the tunnel?', 'we dig graves', 'well where do you put the dirt from the graves?', 'we dig other graves'. End. Seemed kind of apt

Anyway, I don't have any objection to this logical concept of an essentially ordered series and the assertion that it has to be finite. Others with a formal logic/mathematical background may know better and I'm open to correction on that, but as it stands it seems perfectly logical to me as a concept. That's not the problem... the problem, or at least potential problem from both mine and my dad's perspective is firstly that it seems we're being asked to view causation in the real world in this highly unintuitive way (where an accidental ordered series is a far more intuitive view of causation), without any justification as to why, and that is a particularly big ask because several of the Five Ways rely on this essentially ordered series concept, not just one so it's something we realistically need to address before we even get into any of the particular Five Way arguments. The second problem is the potential circular reasoning that comes from the fact that the Bible seemingly describes exactly the same thing as the essentially ordered series, in Hebrews 1:3 "The Son is the radiance of God's glory and the exact representation of his being, sustaining all things by his powerful word", making Aquinas' reliance on the concept, as my dad put it 'suspect'.

So basically we just want to know where the idea of the essentially ordered series came from, and how it is justified in the arguments.

Also, I'd be curious to see if you have any more illustrative examples of a real world essentially ordered series... arm>stick>rock seems kind of limited and not totally helpful. My dad, looking at this, gave the example what if the arm move the stick which moves the rock which falls off a cliff into a pool of water and causes ripples. His argument being that once it's fell off the cliff it's no longer being moved by the stick and has therefore changed from an essentially ordered series into an accidentally ordered series. But I'm guessing that you may respond to that with something like its a different stack as it were of sustaining causality in each and every moment (ie a different essentially ordered series in each and every moment for each and every thing)... so while the arm is moving the stick moving the stone, that's one stack, once it reaches the edge of the cliff it perhaps becomes another stack, stone>gravity>?... something like that, is that what you mean?

[Neo-Scholastic]

Belacqua gave good examples that I will poke into shortly. That said, I would not use the arm/stick/rock as an example of simultaneous cause since mechanical force travels down the stick, in time, as a compression wave.

[emjay]

Belacqua gave good examples that I will poke into shortly. That said, I would not use the arm/stick/rock as an example of simultaneous cause since mechanical force travels down the stick, in time, as a compression wave.

Yeah, I was just speaking generally... I know that the First Way is the closest one you could relate to normal physical causality as we generally understand it. For instance I've seen it argued that along the lines you've said, there A transfers kinetic energy to B and from then to C, so that every essential ordered series in that case is actually accidental. But since that sort of argument wouldn't apply with the other ways, I didn't see the point in bringing it up... at this point at least.

[HappySkeptic]

Another common misconception is that the A/T causal chain is a temporal chain, with one thing leading to another in time. It is not that. It is an essential series, not a temporal one. That means that in order for Z to be the case, Y must be the case. In order for Y to be the case, X must be the case, etc. In fact all these things may have come into existence at the same time, or not -- that's not important. The important thing is that the thing farther down on the chain depends for its existence on the things that are higher. 

So for example, the existence of the sun depends on the existence of Hydrogen atoms. You can see this because if the sun stopped existing, this wouldn't make hydrogen atoms impossible. But if hydrogen atoms stopped existing, then the sun would be impossible. So the existence of hydrogen atoms is prior in an essential chain of causation. The time order isn't a part of the argument. 

Those are the main two misconceptions I've seen on this topic. There are others. I don't know why these errors are so basic and yet so difficult to dispel. 

(By the way, I love your screen name. I am no longer so young either!)

I disagree with your argument.  Time absolutely is part of causality.  I won't argue which is primal (physicists disagree), but either time determines what we understand as causality, or else causality determines what we understand as time.

[emjay]

@Neo-Scholastic

Just to say, I've talked further with my dad about it, looking at @Belacqua's post as you suggested for clarification, and I think we both understand it now, so thanks to him for that. My dad no longer has any more questions (it's a shame in a way... I was enjoying his input into all this), and found the clarification of how the word 'cause' is (mis)used in this context, something he thought would be more aptly called 'requirements', helpful... as well as the example of the Sun and the hydrogen atoms as an example of a relevant essentially ordered series. As for me, at this point I think there are still probably some more subtle points to understand from continuing to study the underlying classical philosophy, but on the whole I think I understand the argument in general.

[Neo-Scholastic]

@Neo-Scholastic

Just to say, I've talked further with my dad about it, looking at @Belacqua's post as you suggested for clarification, and I think we both understand it now, so thanks to him for that. My dad no longer has any more questions (it's a shame in a way... I was enjoying his input into all this), and found the clarification of how the word 'cause' is (mis)used in this context, something he thought would be more aptly called 'requirements', helpful... as well as the example of the Sun and the hydrogen atoms as an example of a relevant essentially ordered series. As for me, at this point I think there are still probably some more subtle points to understand from continuing to study the underlying classical philosophy, but on the whole I think I understand the argument in general.

Requirements is good. I kinda like necessary and sufficient condions. That might work for any cause considered essential.

[HappySkeptic]

Requirements is good. I kinda like necessary and sufficient condions. That might work for any cause considered essential.

I think the difference is that requirements are general statements, while causes are specific.

For a star to shine there must be hydrogen, but there doesn't need to be hydrogen everywhere -- just in that star.  The cause of the star shining is the hydrogen in that star, not the hydrogen in the next galaxy over.

[emjay]

@Neo-Scholastic

Just to say, I've talked further with my dad about it, looking at @Belacqua's post as you suggested for clarification, and I think we both understand it now, so thanks to him for that. My dad no longer has any more questions (it's a shame in a way... I was enjoying his input into all this), and found the clarification of how the word 'cause' is (mis)used in this context, something he thought would be more aptly called 'requirements', helpful... as well as the example of the Sun and the hydrogen atoms as an example of a relevant essentially ordered series. As for me, at this point I think there are still probably some more subtle points to understand from continuing to study the underlying classical philosophy, but on the whole I think I understand the argument in general.

Requirements is good. I kinda like necessary and sufficient condions. That might work for any cause considered essential.

Cool. Yeah, necessary and sufficient are the next things I need to get onto I think... they are still confusing to me. In my videos I started at Plato's Parmenides and then went through Aristotle's Nicomachean ethics... so basically I started midway through the playlist because that's what we were talking about, but now it's time to go back to the beginning I think - to Heraclitus and Parmenides on their own (ie outside of Plato's Parmenides) as well as Plato's forms etc.