How can an Immaterial, Purely actual being (God) create a material world?

[greylorn]

…Well first of all, not Aquinas or any medieval Christians believed the world was flat.

“Sciences are differentiated according to the various means through which knowledge is obtained. For the astronomer and the physicist both may prove the same conclusion: that the earth, for instance, is round: the astronomer by means of mathematics (i.e. abstracting from matter), but the physicist by means of matter itself.” (S.T. Part 1, Question 1, Article 1, Reply to obj. 2) -Aquinas

Reply 1 of 2

Thank you for the corrections.

Given Aquinas’ claim that the earth was spherical, and given the Church’s acceptance of Aquinas’ logic, and the Church’s control over education in southern Europe well into the 15th century, I have to wonder why Columbus had trouble convincing regular seamen and much of the Spanish court that his ships would not fall off the earth’s edge. His difficulties seem to contradict your assertion that, “not Aquinas or any medieval Christians believed the world was flat.” I especially trust the “any medieval Christians” part. Given the well-documented level of human ignorance in medieval times, your assertion is of dubious veracity.

In any case, while my specific example re: Aquinas believing in a flat earth may be incorrect, it was one of several designed to make the point that the current God concept was the product of highly ignorant men. You didn’t refute the statement that Tom believed earth to be at the center of the universe, a belief which strongly affected theological thought and Church doctrine. (Ask Galileo if you don’t believe me.) One flawed example, designed to illustrate the point, does not negate the point.

Oh yes it Aquinas must have been naïve indeed to believe that “whatever is not present in the cause cannot be present in the effect” or “whatever comes into existence requires a cause” or “ The whole is greater than it’s parts”… You might as well doubt 2 + 2 = 4, the Pythagorean Theorem, or Newton’s Laws of Motion. Nobel Laureate Max Delbruck, a biophysicist, once said that they should award Aristotle a Nobel prize for discovering the principle implied in DNA.

It seems to me that the notion, “what’s not in the cause cannot be in the effect” conflicts with “a whole is greater than the sum of its parts.” Moreover, the whole/parts statement is ambiguous— “greater” means what, exactly?

The development of technology has proven the lie to the “whole > parts sum” notion time and again. Every space program has cleaned up many piles of useless rubble full of once-perfectly-fine rocket parts.

A falsification of the “what’s not in the cause…” statement sits in your mother’s garage. Disassemble a basic automobile; frame, engine, drive-train, steering gear, brakes, wheels, etc… You will find that none of its components possesses the property of self-sustainable, vectorable, and variable motion.

I don’t need to doubt Newton’s Laws, because they are known to be wrong. They are good approximations to the behavior of mid-range aggregates of matter. They break down when relativistic or quantum effects come into play, as with the very large or fast, or in the world of light and atoms. I mention this only to demonstrate that negating one example used to make a point does not negate your point either.

I’d like a reference to the material for which Aristotle deserves a Nobel prize. Although I don’t regard Nobel winners as authorities— weren’t they elected by the same nitwits who awarded President B.O. the peace prize?

Notice that while Tom addresses the principle of a cause and its effect, he fails entirely to deal with its implication, that a single thing cannot be the cause of anything. The entire argument is beyond the scope of CAF, but you can see it this way. We live in what is clearly a cause-effect universe (Newton’s 2nd Law, I think). A single thing cannot be the cause of any event. (The detailed argument and its implications are in my soon-to-be-book.)

 

[greylorn]

Let’s not forget, it wasn’t Scholastic Thomism that gave us Marxism, Moral Relativism, existentialism, and the rest…

Reply 2 of 2

I propose that it was indeed, “*Scholastic Thomism that gave us Marxism, Moral Relativism, existentialism, and the rest… *.” Get over your outrage for a minute and consider this:

Bad ideas do not survive long, except when they are shoved into people’s minds by force. People free to think will not always accept inherently contradictory beliefs on the basis of faith, which means, authority. Aquinas’ God-concept is severely flawed, in my opinion and others, and must have inevitably led to intellectual rebellion, once people were free enough to rebel and survive. The natural reaction to a flawed God-concept is atheism, which is exactly what arose when Darwin opened the door to it. If Marx hadn’t come along, someone else would have, because communist principles are a natural outgrowth of atheism. Likewise moral relativism, existentialism, etc.

Had Aquinas defined God (and soul) competently (which would have been an unimaginable feat of mind given the limited knowledge from which he worked), atheism would not have arisen, at least not with the concerted power it wields today.

I don’t really blame Aquinas. He did the best he could with what he knew. My complaints with him are rhetorical. The blame for the rise of atheism lies with the Church (IMO) which had the opportunity to rethink its theology at the onset of the scientific revolution, thanks to Galileo. It closed the door on that idea and stuck with dogmatism. The Church’s choice is, of course, mirrored in the thoughts of its intelligent followers, people like yourself, unwilling to think beyond the confines of doctrine, who operate from the principle that Aquinas made no mistakes and that the Church’s word on such matters really represents absolute truth. Ultimately, the real cause of atheism and its consequent ills lies in the rigid adherence to belief, instead of critical thinking, on the part of intelligent Christians.

If I recall my Bible lore more or less correctly, Christ charged Peter to build his church, not to sit on it.

 

[Luke_K]

Given Aquinas’ claim that the earth was spherical, and given the Church’s acceptance of Aquinas’ logic, and the Church’s control over education in southern Europe well into the 15th century, I have to wonder why Columbus had trouble convincing regular seamen and much of the Spanish court that his ships would not fall off the earth’s edge. His difficulties seem to contradict your assertion that, “not Aquinas or any medieval Christians believed the world was flat.” I especially trust the “any medieval Christians” part. Given the well-documented level of human ignorance in medieval times, your assertion is of dubious veracity.

That Columbus nonsense is a myth fabricated by Washington Irving in his biography, A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus. I sent you a link to this Wikipedia article before, but I think it has been edited since then. Go down to the 19th Century part.

Here’s a good quote from The Beginnings of Western Science by David C. Lindberg that I read in my history of science class:

Cosmas Indicopleustes was not particularly influential in Byzantium, but he is important for us because he has been commonly used to buttress the claim that all (or most) medieval people believed they lived on a flat earth. This claim (as readers of this book must know by now) is totally false. Cosmas is, in fact, the only medieval European known to have defended a flat earth cosmology, whereas it is safe to assume that all educated Western Europeans (and almost one hundred percent of educated Byzantines), as well as sailors and travelers, believed in the earth’s sphericity. The myth of pre-Columbian belief in a flat earth, finally laid to rest by Columbus, was the invention of the American essayist Washington Irving, writing in the 1820s.

greylorn:

Although I don’t regard Nobel winners as authorities— weren’t they elected by the same nitwits who awarded President B.O. the peace prize?

Actually, no. The Peace Prize is awarded by a different group than the other prizes.

 

[Curious_Hobbit]

The whole story of Columbus’ countrymen being scared that he might fall of the edge of the earth came from a fictional tale written by Washington Irving. Here’s a good article on the flat earth issue: lewrockwell.com/woods/woods46.html

Also, remember that the Greeks knew that the earth was spherical and the medieval Christians adopted this view along with other scientific, cosmological, and geometric views.

You said, “Tom believed earth to be at the center of the universe, a belief which strongly affected theological thought and Church doctrine”

How did the geocentric view of the universe “strongly affect” church doctrine? Yes it was believed by the church and it was also the view of the scientific community at the time. Tycho Brahe was a geocentrist, and Galileo couldn’t answer objections (like the stellar parallax) from geocentrists. He wanted the church to change it’s view overnight because of a theory that he couldn’t successfully refute objections to. The church is a slooooooow moving institution for precisely these reasons, it wants to have plenty of debate of the years as new information surfaces.

“A whole is greater than it’s parts” is a self evident proposition. My human body is larger than my arm. A tire is smaller than the car it is a part of.

A car that I disassemble in my garage would not be disassembled unless I acted on it with the competent knowledge of how to take it apart. Put a mechanic and a 5 year old in a garage. The mechanic would be able to take the car apart because he/she has the proper tools and knowledge of how the car is taken apart. The 5 year old child doesn’t have the body strength, the knowledge of how to take a car apart, or the proper tools necessary to cause the effect of having a disassembled car. Thus, whatever is not present in the cause is not present in the effect. There are thousands of examples of this. If I don’t apply the appropriate amount of force necessary to move a 10,000 lb boulder, then it won’t budge. If I start a fire with a match and some fire wood, the fire wood won’t melt into water or turn into a rabbit because there is nothing in the act of me starting a fire (the cause) with match and wood that would produce the effect of wood turning into a rabbit. The wood, the fire, and the chemical change taking place don’t have the potential for rabbits or watery logs. Whatever is not present in the cause cannot be present in the effect.

Nobel laureate Max Delbruck was referring to Aristotle’s idea of Final causes. Things have specific goals, they are ordered toward specific ends. When people speak of DNA as being, “data” “information” “blue prints” etc. DNA aims at, it points to something beyond itself. It’s a “blue print” in that it points to the realization of a specific species, character trait, individual. For more on Delbrucks’ remarks, ( Max Delbruck, “Aristotle-totle-totle” Of Microbes and Life by Monod and Borek, Columbia Univ. Press 1971 p.55)

Aquinas and scholastic philosophy in general didn’t lose momentum because they were “bad ideas”, they were never refuted. Descartes came on the scene, He didn’t study medieval philosophy much, he wanted to make philosophy more methodic like science, He doubted everything until he could prove it’s existence, this immediately tossed aside Aristotle’s 4 causes and potentiality/actuality etc, and led to skepticism about the outside world while only being able to be sure of the self (cogito ergo sum). The view of the world as teleological, purposeful, goal-oriented, and containing final causes was pushed aside. Hume, Hobbes, Locke, and Kant furthered the mess in different ways. After the purposeful view of nature was cast aside, Darwin’s theory of evolution gave the post-enlightenment thinkers a more natural explanation for the origin of humans, a more comfortable route than God. After all of this we have many of our elites believing that matter is random, existence arbitrary, and life has no inherent purpose giving rise to skepticism, existentialism, etc.

Your last paragraph is silly.

 

[greylorn]

That Columbus nonsense is a myth fabricated by Washington Irving in his biography, A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus. I sent you a link to this Wikipedia article before, but I think it has been edited since then. Go down to the 19th Century part.

Here’s a good quote from The Beginnings of Western Science by David C. Lindberg that I read in my history of science class:

Actually, no. The Peace Prize is awarded by a different group than the other prizes.

Your corrections are accepted, thank you. I learned my history in Catholic schools, from textbooks with an imprimatur posted on the flyleaf. At the time, I completely trusted my teachers and the sources of their information. I was conned.

I knew that about the Nobel committee, but figure that there must be some cross-breeding amongst their members. IMO many of the science prizes awarded recently are of dubious value as well.