Eternalism Destroys Thomistic Metaphysics

[Veritas6]

Hello, I read this argument about how eternalism of the universe “destroys” Thomistic metaphysics. It seems really complicated and it’s been bothering me:

“1. The traditional notion of god in classical theism is that of a timeless, changeless, immaterial mind, who also must be infinitely good, infinitely wise, and can do anything logically possible.
2. All of god’s will and desires must exist timelessly and eternally in an unchanging, frozen state.
3. That would mean that god timelessly and eternally had the desire to create our particular universe, and not some other universe, or no universe.
4. Our universe is not logically necessary; it didn’t have to exist, and god didn’t have to create it.
5. The theist would have to show that it was logically necessary for god to create our particular universe in order to avoid eventually coming to a brute fact.
6. There is no way to answer this question, even in principle, with something logically necessary.
7. Thus at least one brute fact must exist even if god exists.”

“For if the theist claims our universe isn’t necessary because there are other logically possible universes, the same would apply to god. The theist can say the universe doesn’t have existence as its essence, but technically neither does god. The theist just defines god as having existence as its essence, but obviously I can define the universe the same way. The theist can come back and say that is impossible because the universe came into being and undergoes change, but obviously that presupposes presentism is true. The theist has to prove presentism or possibilism at the very least. Most who try do not know what they’re talking about. Motion doesn’t disprove eternalism. Motion simply means something different on eternalism, it simply means that in spacetime, worldtubes are not all parallel. They are angled relative to each other, which means that at different times they are different distances. That’s what motion is.“

“There is no need to ‘cause’ something eternal into existence, since its existence is explained by the fact that it is eternal (in the eternalist understanding of the term, not to be confused with infinite duration). Also, on eternalism, causality is simply relations of matter and worldtubes in spacetime. It isn’t something external. So to image that an eternal block universe needs to be ‘sustained’ presupposes the A-theory of time. And no the Kalam absolutely does not work on the B-theory of time.”

I’m sorry about the long post, but would anyone understand what this person is saying? What is eternalism? I urge you to check out the link, this person is really hurting my Thomistic ideas of God. Thank you.

http://www.atheismandthecity.com/2017/10/why-im-atheist-13-reasons-arguments-for.html?m=1

 

[Veritas6]

Also a more “succinct” way of putting it from the article:

“Another way to look at this problem is another example of god’s contradictory nature, and this is especially true on the Thomistic conception of god the Catholic Church espouses.

(1) God’s nature is necessary
(2) the choice to create this universe is part of god’s nature
(3) the choice to create this particular universe is not necessary

So god’s nature is both necessary and not necessary. Since Thomists argue that god’s will is identical to his substance, it’s therefore identical to his essence. And since they claim god’s essence is necessary, and yet it isn’t necessary for god to will this particular universe, god’s nature entails a contradiction for being both necessary and not necessary.”

 

[AlNg]

, god’s nature entails a contradiction for being both necessary and not necessary.”

It is not necessarily a contradiction.
John is intelligent and John is not intelligent. This seems like a contradiction, but it might not be so.
John is intelligent in history and in historical studies.
John is not intelligent when it come to proving mathematical theorems in non-Euclidean geometry.
John is intelligent in inorganic chemistry.
John is not intelligent in organic chemistry.
Etc.
It is necessary for John to play football
It is not necessary for John to play football.
They are at different times and involve different teams.

 

[Fauken]

I may be no Thomistic expert, but from what little I know, this argument sounds like utter nonsense. What does he even mean by “God’s nature is necessary”? He sounds like yet another Atheist who thinks he’s come up with some grand zinger when he isn’t even dealing with St. Thomas of Aquinas’ thought. Where’s a citation from the Summa to show exactly what St. Thomas Aquinas is even saying?

 

[Bonaventurian]

I think he means that God is the only necessary being. Since His essence is existence, pure actuality. This issue is how they phrased it, citing God’s nature as if it were a separate thing from Him.

 

[Fauken]

That makes more sense at least, but it’s still wrong.

 

[Rabbi]

We have our own ideas as Jews.

 

[Bonaventurian]

“For if the theist claims our universe isn’t necessary because there are other logically possible universes, the same would apply to god. The theist can say the universe doesn’t have existence as its essence, but technically neither does god. The theist just defines god as having existence as its essence, but obviously I can define the universe the same way.

I guess I don’t understand what the author is trying to get at with this. In order for there to be a single, omnipotent God, He would need to be absolutely simple. And to be absolutely simple requires no contingency whatsoever, therefore God is pure being, His essence is existence. The same can not be said of the universe, because it is completely contingent. Even if we reduce the universe to a singularity, we would still have to account for it’s existence.

 

[Veritas6]

Eternalism is defined as things from the past and the future exist right now but are not present, as opposed to presentism, that only objects in the present exist rightnow.

From another article on that website:
“On eternalism god would have to eternally coexist with our universe, even though our universe’s existence wouldn’t be logically necessary, and there wouldn’t be a logically necessary reason god had to eternally coexist with it. It could have been different. So just as in logic and ethics, in metaphysics you will eventually terminate in a brute fact [of the universe] and no worldview is going to be able to avoid that.”

I think the author incorrectly assumes God needs to exist along with the universe, when He is outside of the universe and time.

 

[AlNg]

We have our own ideas as Jews.

How does it differ from Catholicism.

 

[Ana_v]

If it is any consolation, you do not need to be a Thomist. You could be a Scotist ; )

But in all seriousness, while there is much appeal in Thomism, not the least of which is that it has the advantage of including a thorough integration of philosophy and Divine Revelation in one systematic “package” that is ready-made …(whereas, if you want to be a Kantian, let’s say, and a Catholic…good luck with doing the heavy work of trying to integrate the philosophical system of Kant with Divine Revelation)…Thomism is not without its own problems. As the topic you brought up shows. More on that below. But let me give you some context.

I majored in philosophy and was taught by philosophy professors who were Aristotelian-Thomists. I minored in theology and was taught by theology professors who were Aristotelian-Thomists…with one exception: a professor who was essentially in the Noevelle Théologiae camp, with Balthasaar and Ratzinger.

He used to be a Thomist and eventually abandoned it as a school of thought. His main problems with Thomism are that he thinks it involves forcing our interpretation of Scripture to fit a pre-comitment to Aristotelian metaphysics, rather than reforming our metaphysics to square with Scripture. An example of this is the concept of Divine Impassibility (that God does not experience emotion or suffering) and how exactly it is understood, articulated and applied to theological questions (such as the question of "What did Christ mean when said “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” or questions about whether the so-called “anthropomorphisms” in the Old Testmant are all truly just mere anthropomorphisms)…

My professor would emphatically tell us that the reason why Patripassianism was condemned as heresy, is not because it taught that the Father could suffer, but because it taught that the Father and Son were not distinct persons and therefore the suffering of the Son was the same as the suffering of the Father. So the problem, he argued, as far as the heresy aspect, was its denial of the Trinity, not the idea of “Divine Suffering” in-and-of-itself.

His other problem with Thomism is Thomas’ view of predestination.

 

[Ana_v]

Now that I have given some context…

I once wrote the following email, titled “Are God’s actions identical to his essence?” As you’ll see it overlaps with the topic of this thread. For whatever it’s worth, I’ll share it with you.

Email:

"I dunno. But something doesn’t seem quite right.

If God’s actions are identical to his essence, because there are “no distinctions in God” or because of some particular understanding of Divine Simplicity, then his act of creation would be identical to his essence, would it not?

And would that not reduce creation to an emanation from God?..

I remember asking a question in Philosophy of God [taught by a Thomist] to the effect of “Was God Creator from all eternity?”

I think the answer we were given was something like “he is the cause from all eternity but the effect of Creation happened in time”.

It’s one of those answers you can’t really wrap your mind around.

I get the theological distinction between God’s ad intra and ad extra works and why we can’t Baptize in the name of the “Creator, Redeemer and Sanctifier”, and the whole who God is in himself…but the mystery still stands doesn’t it?

God.

There was an act of Creation.

God + Creation.

Doesn’t the coming-to- be of a thing constitute a change?

And why do we call God the First Cause anyway?

Is he First Cause only in so far as there exists an effect?

Or is he First Cause even if there was no actual effect (the world)?

Can he be the cause of nothing?"

 

[Aquinas11]

The theist just defines god as having existence as its essence, but obviously I can define the universe the same way. The theist can come back and say that is impossible because the universe came into being and undergoes change, but obviously that presupposes presentism is true.

No , presentism is the idea that past and future don’t exist, only present exists. Theists argument that the universe “came into being” is necessarily an argument rooted in chronological past, so this argument is self-contradicting.

 

[Veritas6]

I think the author understands what presentism means, but he advocates an “eternalist” universe or block universe. If the past, present, and future all exist at once, he claims:
“There is no need to ‘cause’ something eternal into existence, since its existence is explained by the fact that it is eternal… causality is simply relations of matter and worldtubes in spacetime. It isn’t something external. So to image that an eternal block universe needs to be ‘sustained’ presupposes the A-theory of time.”

 

[Wesrock]

I think the author understands what presentism means, but he advocates an “eternalist” universe or block universe. If the past, present, and future all exist at once, he claims:
“There is no need to ‘cause’ something eternal into existence, since its existence is explained by the fact that it is eternal… causality is simply relations of matter and worldtubes in spacetime. It isn’t something external. So to image that an eternal block universe needs to be ‘sustained’ presupposes the A-theory of time.”

A world-block doesn’t get around Aquinas’ Five Ways, which would still indicate that the universe’s existence is still derivative and dependent upon God.

I’ve read the syllogism in the first post and I’d like to address it when I have more time, but the problem the blogger claims exists is that if God did not move from undecided to decided in creating then he must be predisposed to making this exact universe in a necessary way by nature, which either means he is caused to do so by an external actor (and so not God/uncaused) or that we must accept this as an ontological brute fact/special pleading and a violation of Aquinas’ Fifth Way.

That is wrong but I will need more time to elaborate.

 

[Aquinas11]

ARTICLE: "The problem is that a timeless, changeless being by definition cannot do anything; it’s necessarily causally impotent and nonfunctional. Change requires time, and time requires change. This is logically certain. And to create something, one must do something. Doing requires a change, regardless of whether that change is mental or physical. A being that cannot do anything cannot be omnipotent."

Ok I took a look at article. First paragraph is full of flaws (bolded above).

Let’s think about this. He says God must be able to “do something”. Let’s take a look at our experience and plain 101 logic. What do we know that “does something”? We do. We move our hands, such as in a punching motion or raise them above our head. We can kick our feet in a straight motion. We can bob our heads about a pivot point with torso. And how is our motion dictated? By prior cause - by the DNA we inherited by our parents which assembled our body, bones, joints, etc. Thus, we know from our experience that things that move are caused by prior things. Hence, his statement can’t be true that God must move. If he did? He would need a prior cause and wouldn’t be God. This isn’t based on theology. Just is just 101 common sense logic.

 

[Magnanimity]

On eternalism god would have to eternally coexist with our universe, even though our universe’s existence wouldn’t be logically necessary, and there wouldn’t be a logically necessary reason god had to eternally coexist with it. It could have been different.

This is not creation as St Thomas Aquinas understands it. This is deism, I suppose. For Aquinas, the act of creation is not the watchmaker analogy. It’s closer to the musician and music analogy. Music only is music as it’s caused to be music for every moment that it is music. If the musician stops playing the music, that music is not said to be anywhere or anything. It just does not exist at that point.

So for Aquinas, the act of creation is not this: once upon a time there was just God. Then he created and reality became God + a bunch of other stuff standing alongside him. That is simply the easy “watchmaker” picture that deism gives us.

Aquinas’s view is much more subtle and complicated. For St Thomas, existence is only proper to God. Existence is not proper (of the nature of) anything else that is. Anything not God only is by an “improper share” of the divine existence. The principle of aseity then applies strictly to God alone. All “beings” have this contingent sharing in the divine existence as the cause for their ever existing. As I understand it, that is the Thomistic vision—and this is quite different from the blurb on that website.

 

[IWantGod]

Hello, I read this argument about how eternalism of the universe “destroys” Thomistic metaphysics. It seems really complicated and it’s been bothering me:

People confuse Aquinas’s metaphysical arguments as just being another version of the kalam cosmological argument. And that is because they are either not very good at grasping metaphysical concepts or because they have no real vested interest in understanding Aquinas or Aristotle for that matter. That’s why most rebuttals are usually straw-men.

In reality Aquinas’s metaphysics was developed to make rational sense of what it is to be something and what is required for there to be something rather than absolutely nothing at all. Thus in essence to have a valid metaphysics is to have a rationally consistent notion of being, and in fact it is the study of being which is not to be confused with the scientific study of particular natures and their particular causes. Metaphysics deals with being in general and what is required for there to be something.

Any philosophy that attempts to answer ultimate questions will usually result in the inference of something eternal. But, depending on what you mean by eternal, Aquinas understands that it is not enough to claim that something has always existed in-order to conclude that something naturally exists. Something can be truly contingent (something being made to exist rather than naturally existing according to it’s own nature) and eternal at the same time. And so it is simply not enough to argue that we live in a block universe (and that’s assuming the person who makes such a claim really understands what that even means).

So for Aquinas it’s simply a matter of figuring out what can be said to be a contingent being and what that means, and also what can be said to be a necessary being and what that means. Aquinas has no interest in proving that the universe has a beginning.

To be continued…

 

[Neithan]

What is this “brute fact”? That’s pseudo-theism.

Drill down into the premises and assumptions and you’ll find stuff like this in every atheistic objection. There’s no need to dress it up and try to dazzle your audience with your brilliance as this blog does (although atheists are under significantly more psychological pressure to feel like they are brilliant or possess extraordinary knowledge).

There are essentially only two arguments: the problem of evil, and the explanatory power of nature. Chalk this up to the second category and in the end, it asserts something without explanation.

 

[Wesrock]

1. That would mean that god timelessly and eternally had the desire to create our particular universe, and not some other universe, or no universe.
2. Our universe is not logically necessary; it didn’t have to exist, and god didn’t have to create it.
3. The theist would have to show that it was logically necessary for god to create our particular universe in order to avoid eventually coming to a brute fact.
4. There is no way to answer this question, even in principle, with something logically necessary.
5. Thus at least one brute fact must exist even if god exists.”

God never moved from being undecided on what to create to being decided. Yes, we believe that his will is eternal. However, God’s will is voluntary as it has no external cause and follows from his knowledge, with both will and knowledge being intrinsic to (and identical to) God’s essence. God was not caused to create, it’s not something involuntary or done without God’s knowledge. Therefore, our reality is not a brute fact

“For if the theist claims our universe isn’t necessary because there are other logically possible universes, the same would apply to god. The theist can say the universe doesn’t have existence as its essence, but technically neither does god. The theist just defines god as having existence as its essence, but obviously I can define the universe the same way.

No. God isn’t just defined that way arbitrarily. It necessarily follows that that which is actus purus, uncomposed, non-contingent (the universe does not meet any or all of those things) must be absolutely necessary in an underived sense and must have no distinction between its essence and existence.

The theist can come back and say that is impossible because the universe came into being and undergoes change, but obviously that presupposes presentism is true. The theist has to prove presentism or possibilism at the very least. Most who try do not know what they’re talking about. Motion doesn’t disprove eternalism. Motion simply means something different on eternalism, it simply means that in spacetime, worldtubes are not all parallel. They are angled relative to each other, which means that at different times they are different distances."

This doesn’t get around the argument from actuality and potency, for even on a worldblock the worldblock would not be considered self-actualizing. Plus it fails Aquinas’ other arguments.

“There is no need to ‘cause’ something eternal into existence, since its existence is explained by the fact that it is eternal (in the eternalist understanding of the term, not to be confused with infinite duration).

Eternity for a worldblock isn’t self explanatory or uncaused (this begs the question against Aquinas’ Five Ways which shows it couldn’t be).

Also, on eternalism, causality is simply relations of matter and worldtubes in spacetime. It isn’t something external. So to image that an eternal block universe needs to be ‘sustained’ presupposes the A-theory of time.

He doesn’t understand what Aquinas means by causation.

I feel like this response was sloppily put together. My apologies for that.