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cho_pilo
Guest
I don’t have a clue about any philosophical first-cause or unmoved-mover. And I’m kind of inclined to think that there probably is some fundamental ground of Being, but again, I don’t have a clue what it is.
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tonyrey
Guest
You’re on the right path! In the words of Rudolf Otto: the “Mysterium tremendum et fascinans”… 
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John21652
Guest
Mate, I studied such stuff at University and I don’t have a bloody clue either!
All I know is someone/something must have ‘lit the match’ in the first place.
No watch; someone will come along and debate matches.
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Khalid
Guest
I’m a specialist, insofar as that term can be properly applied, in Aristotelianism, from whence that argument derives (along with Thomism, which developed it, and is my sub-specialty), but I’ve been awake since this time yesterday. I’m posting this so I subscribe to this thread and not forget of it, and I’ll come in here and give everyone a layman’s crash-course in act and potency, the four causes and the five ways when I awake.
Here is a diagram of the argument from the primum movens (better translated as “unchanging changer” in modern vocabulary, I think, instead of the literal “first mover” or traditional “unmoved mover”). It should explain it well enough to understand, this first way of St Thomas’ five. It’s over half a meg, so it takes a while to load. It’s designed to be printed in mass at a printer’s shop, and folded in to a tract for atheists, agnostics, deists, etc.
Link at imageshack.us/photo/my-images/696/linje.jpg/ if the display is broken (I think it is, too large for the forum).
Here is a diagram of the argument from the primum movens (better translated as “unchanging changer” in modern vocabulary, I think, instead of the literal “first mover” or traditional “unmoved mover”). It should explain it well enough to understand, this first way of St Thomas’ five. It’s over half a meg, so it takes a while to load. It’s designed to be printed in mass at a printer’s shop, and folded in to a tract for atheists, agnostics, deists, etc.
Link at imageshack.us/photo/my-images/696/linje.jpg/ if the display is broken (I think it is, too large for the forum).
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DaveBj
Guest
But who made the match in the first placeMate, I studied such stuff at University and I don’t have a bloody clue either!
All I know is someone/something must have ‘lit the match’ in the first place.
No watch; someone will come along and debate matches.
(Running and hiding now. . .)
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Texas_Roofer
Guest
For religious people it simply points to god as the origin. However for the science it is a problem. See in Darwin’s “Origin of Species” each species comes from another species. So either species existed for ever, which is unlikely. Or all species originate for one source which means your cousins are wheat and grass that is a problem. The last option is multiple origins which should allow us to see these origins today and or reproduce these origins.
FYI – There is also a physic part to this but the physics part is much weaker. It involves the initiation of the big bang.
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Khalid
Guest
No, that first species had to come from somewhere. Even the most atheistic evolutionary biologists acknowledge that Darwinism provides absolutely no answer to where the first cell of life came from, nor was it meant to (although in Darwin’s time, the cell was conceived essentially as the ancients conceived an atom, something after which no further division was possible: he didn’t realize that the cell was a life of its own).
The (miserably failed) materialist study of the origins of life is called “abiogenesis”, with various “abiogenesis hypotheses”, but the fact that it’s failed miserably doesn’t keep them from going at it and trying to salvage and re-interpret the data: it’s the modern materialist’s motto: “it’s an emergent property: we don’t understand it, our science doesn’t understand it, it contradicts our science, but have faith - science will eventually figure it out”. (That is, voodoo science.)
They use that to explain “identity”/“self” and “mind” as often as they invoke it for “origin of life”. Dawkins and Sagan are famous for saying that life may have been put on this planet by ultra-evolved intelligent space aliens, and that this is more reasonable than God…
…But what did the space aliens evolve from? What caused the abiogenesis of life on their planet? Ockham’s razor slices that thesis apart.
It comes down to: either 1) there is a first cause, or 2) there is an infinite regress. An infinite regress is logically impossible in a past-finite universe, which is now established beyond doubt (although scientists hung on to steady-state theory, so there wouldn’t be an ex nihilo creation, far longer than the Church held on to Ptolemaic geocentrism, and a new pseudoscience hypothesis is forwarded at least once a year to try and make the universe or multiverse past-infinite, even at the cost of self-contradiction, so a Theistic foot can’t get in the door: the most prominent current examples of this are the ludicrous chaotic inflation theory [quantum fluctuation universe, hypothesis piled upon hypothesis in a house of cards sliced and diced by Ockham’s razor] and using imaginary numbers in the Einstein field equations to attempt to remove the possibility of there being an actual “singularity” in time, per se, so that one couldn’t go back to the Planck time and say, “Ah ha! This is where time began,” instead, having a constant curve through the dimensions).
Hilbert’s Hotel thought experiment in transfinite set theory illustrates this point about “infinities” well, even though al-Ghazali (an Islamic theologian) disproved the concept of a past-infinite universe in the 13th century using nothing but basic arithmetic.
The (miserably failed) materialist study of the origins of life is called “abiogenesis”, with various “abiogenesis hypotheses”, but the fact that it’s failed miserably doesn’t keep them from going at it and trying to salvage and re-interpret the data: it’s the modern materialist’s motto: “it’s an emergent property: we don’t understand it, our science doesn’t understand it, it contradicts our science, but have faith - science will eventually figure it out”. (That is, voodoo science.)
They use that to explain “identity”/“self” and “mind” as often as they invoke it for “origin of life”. Dawkins and Sagan are famous for saying that life may have been put on this planet by ultra-evolved intelligent space aliens, and that this is more reasonable than God…
…But what did the space aliens evolve from? What caused the abiogenesis of life on their planet? Ockham’s razor slices that thesis apart.
It comes down to: either 1) there is a first cause, or 2) there is an infinite regress. An infinite regress is logically impossible in a past-finite universe, which is now established beyond doubt (although scientists hung on to steady-state theory, so there wouldn’t be an ex nihilo creation, far longer than the Church held on to Ptolemaic geocentrism, and a new pseudoscience hypothesis is forwarded at least once a year to try and make the universe or multiverse past-infinite, even at the cost of self-contradiction, so a Theistic foot can’t get in the door: the most prominent current examples of this are the ludicrous chaotic inflation theory [quantum fluctuation universe, hypothesis piled upon hypothesis in a house of cards sliced and diced by Ockham’s razor] and using imaginary numbers in the Einstein field equations to attempt to remove the possibility of there being an actual “singularity” in time, per se, so that one couldn’t go back to the Planck time and say, “Ah ha! This is where time began,” instead, having a constant curve through the dimensions).
Hilbert’s Hotel thought experiment in transfinite set theory illustrates this point about “infinities” well, even though al-Ghazali (an Islamic theologian) disproved the concept of a past-infinite universe in the 13th century using nothing but basic arithmetic.
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John21652
Guest
But who made the match in the first place
(Running and hiding now. . .)
:clapping:Or, what was ‘the match’?
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anodos
Guest
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