Open Theism Vs Unmoved-Mover

[JDaniel]

This seems to be the version of “meaning” I was using. I didn’t want MoM to be saying that objects possessed significance in themselves, which is why I asked what he meant.

Certainly. I’m glad you explained these definitions. MoM doesn’t appear to be kind enough to elaborate on his meaning of “meaning.”

Oreo:

Yep! I love MoM but, he can be SOOOooo mean sometimes! When you get to know him, you’ll discover that he will become a real, true friend to you, no matter what side you’re on. He’s a pretty serious, Christian thinker and is occasionally disheartened when certain people are not serious towards him in return.

You are very serious yourself. As soon as he realizes that you are not playing games, which he should by now, you will both make good sparing partners! I am looking forward to some good debates between the two of you.

One thing we always have to be cognizant of is the, usually newer, non-theist entrants who have a tendency to start out with what seems to be a great deal of anger, or, if it’s not anger, perhaps it’s pride or arrogance. Currently, we do happen to have a large number of terrific non-theists to engage with. You can tell who they are because they never seem to take below-the-belt shots at your religion. But, they will beat heavily on your beliefs! That’s philosophy; that’s what it is all about. That’s participation in the spirit of Plato, Socrates and Aristotle, et al.

I learn something every single day on this forum, from both sides.

I am looking forward to these threads. Let’s get going!

jd

 

[Jerry-Jet]

I think that all the one track mind types who think that God is not capable of changing or choosing or acting anyway He wishes worship a very small God.

What seems to be logical and wise to men is foolishness to God.

Even children in high school know of mathematical equations that can be solved with more than one variable as the answer.

Are you going to tell me that God is incapable of doing the same thing with His will?

God is able to change the variables but still come up with the right answer to solve the equation.

The way God works His will changes in that sense–but does not change in the providential sense since the equation works out!

I’ll tell all of you people out there who fancy yourselves a great theologians this: don’t think that your finite limited view of logic is so perfect that it limits God!

God may limit God–people never limit God and people who think that they grasp whatever limits that God places on Himself or knows exactly how those limits works is as delusional as Job was!

 

[MindOverMatter]

I think that all the one track mind types who think that God is not capable of changing or choosing or acting anyway He wishes worship a very small God.

Nobody said that God doesn’t act. I believe that God is one pure and perfect act for all time at all times. However, it would be a limitation on God to place God as wholly existing in time, as a product of one moment to the next, like us. In which case, time, physical reality, would be the cause of God, in the same sense that God would be no different then other existent entities; limited in knowledge and being.

 

[JDaniel]

Well, for one, if open theism represents the God of the Bible, it would mean that Aquinas metaphysics isn’t actually defending “Yahweh”, but actually replacing him with a different being, an un-biblical deity that isn’t known by organized religion or divine revelation. The God of “Greek Philosophy”. Aquinas would actually be more of a heretic (which i don’t believe), rather then a defender of the faith/philosophy synthesis. The faith/philosophy Synthesis is very important to our faith in terms of rendering it intelligible to outsiders. The unmoved mover is one of our greatest intellectual achievements.

I want to prove open-theism wrong. I want to show that Yahweh is the philosophical God of Aquinas. I want to prove that the seemingly changing God of the bible is consistent with the concept of an unmoved-mover. I am unaware that this has actually been achieved to a sufficient degree, and i am having difficulty making a synthesis myself. On the other hand many of the attributes of the biblical God are consistent with the God of philosophy. At the moment it “seems” that we are faced with a dilemma. To salvage the unmoved-mover, it seems we either have to turn much of the bible into poetic mythical stories and analogous representations of Gods mastery existence where it describes change in his being (this would cause problems with the Jesus). Or we must admit that the Bible has error; or we have to rebuke the Greek concept of an unmoved-mover and replace that being with a changing being. But such a being is rendered absurd by Aquinas himself!! Not to mention we would lose much of what makes are faith reasonable. But i do believe there is a better way of looking at it. However i want to see other peoples take on it.

Whats your thoughts?

I know that the problem of Free Will has been dealt with by both sides, but, not to my satisfaction - but only because I do not have the familiarity that I should have with the question. Spock’s thread on the subject has been terrific. I got off of it due to some sidetrack stuff, but, plan to go back and keep reading.

There are apparently biblical precedences for both sides. That being said, an acceptance of the open-theism position would cause the definition of God to dramatically change. I can’t see that it could change. God must remain omniscient. God must remain omnipotent. God must remain all-loving. And, we must have absolute Free Will. If we alter the attributes of God, we do so at our peril.

Is it possible to have absolute free will yet appear to be pre-determined? Is pre-determination possible, and yet have free will? In a sense, the open-theism position seems to be a sort of “quick-fix” for an apparent dilemma. Is God immobile, or mobile? When we abstract from mobile being, we immobilize it first. Yet, we have to be able to return the abstraction back to its rightful owner, which means re-animating it. How?

jd

 

[MindOverMatter]

Is it possible to have absolute free will yet appear to be pre-determined? Is pre-determination possible, and yet have free will?jd

Its not easy. There are no quick fixes.
However, I know that “destiny” in principle is not a contradiction in respect of truth, thus knowledge of future events cannot be a contradiction or a restriction on freewill.
Do you want to know my justification for this position?
You will have to wait until tomorrow.

In a sense, the open-theism position seems to be a sort of “quick-fix” for an apparent dilemma. jd

It does seem like a quick fix, and thats why i don’t trust it.

Is God immobile, or mobile? When we abstract from mobile being, we immobilize it first. Yet, we have to be able to return the abstraction back to its rightful owner, which means re-animating it. How?jd

Keith Ward seems to want to say (in his book “Pascals Fire”) that perhaps change is a perfection that his creation shares in. It seems to me that perhaps he saying that God is both sort of changing in time and is at the same time transcendent of time but only in the sense that he is generating it by his presence. It sounds fun, but this does not solve the knowledge problem, not to mention that his theory comes in to direct problems with the fact that God would have to have existed and infinite number of moments ago into the past. If the future is infinite perhaps some how they might be such a thing as “future echoes” which come back in to the past? Also God cannot be a product of ultimate truth, but must be synonymous. But then again, the future cannot happen unless its “true” that its going to happen, and the truth contains the details of contingent events, so perhaps some how God has infinite knowledge of the future by some necessity of being the infinite generator of time. However these ideas…i just don’t know. I think my theory about destiny is more plausible (Peter kreeft inspired me by the way). In any case, traditionally speaking, in order for God to have knowledge of the future, God must transcend the future; he must transcend all time. But this seems to effect our freedom, and around and around we go.

 

[Cecilianus]

Once one understands the meaning of the term nothing, there is every reason to believe that it is impossible. In fact the idea of something coming out of nothing is just as improbable and meaningless as 2+2 equaling 2 million.

In other words its impossible.

This is incorrect. Things come into existence from nothing all the time - “virtual particles” arise spontaneously out of the vacuum. (They are called “virtual” not because they lack reality but because they lack a cause.) They are predicted by quantum theory, necessary in quantum electrodynamics to preserve the correct charge of the electron, and verified experimentally in the form of Hawking radiation.

The question is not how did the universe come into being from nothing but how did it preserve its existence - virtual particles can only remain in existence according to the parameters determined by the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, i.e. depending on how much energy they have. The best qualitative explanation we can give is that since gravitational potential energy is negative, the total energy of the universe must have been zero during the first 0.0000000000000000000000000000000000000000001 seconds (sorry; I can’t do superscripts) after the Big Bang until the coupling strength of the gravitational force constant dropped below those of the other interactions, leading to the distinction or separation between gravity and the other forces.

 

[Cecilianus]

And now for my own answer to the question posed originally:

I have never heard of “open-theism”, and naming an alternative to theism (monotheism) sounds simply wrong. What we must believe is the simple theism of the Saints and of Holy Scripture - which to my mind is completely incompatible with the “god of the philosophers”.

1. God is not “unchanging”. His Divine Nature is, but His nature is an abstract philosophical concept - reality of the mind only. He lets Himself be moved - changed - by prayer.
2. God is not the “prime mover”. We are not puppets incapable of doing anything until He pulls our strings. He created us free and independent. The “prime mover”, if we have to resort to using such a disgustingly Aristotelian term, of my own actions is my soul. (The reason why I hate using Aristotelian terminology is because it would implicitly require accepting Aristotelian physics. We have real science now.)
3. God is not “pure act”. He is perfectly capable of not creating or doing anything if He so chooses; He didn’t have to create the universe, and an incessantly dynamic god like that of process theology is just as wrong as the incessantly static god who is “unchanging”. Being is not the same as doing, and for clarity’s sake we should not call it “act”.
4. God is not the conclusion of a scientific proof. Science does not concern God; it “has no need of that hypothesis”. By science I mean real science, not the defunct Aristotelian system based upon faulty physics. (Aristotle’s idea of motion was incorrect, for example.)
5. God is not Being. I exist, and am not God; God exists, but He is not “existence”. I exist just as truly as God exists. I mean the same thing by the word “exist” in both cases - the pious attribution of “analogy” does no true reverence to Him since it is untrue. I have no concept of existence other than simply existing, so to say that existence is “analogous” in God is simply pious atheism. To say that God is Being is either pantheism (if we grant that we, too, exist) or monism (if we deny God the dignity of being able to create other beings). It is a denial of His creation.

 

[MindOverMatter]

This is incorrect. Things come into existence from nothing all the time - “virtual particles” arise spontaneously out of the vacuum.

You just said two contradictory things. First you said, that particles arise out of nothing, and then you said things arise spontaneously out of a vacuum. A vacuum is not nothing. You are being very misleading.

In any case its imposible for science to “know” that a thing can come out of nothing, since a true nothing is not a being which can be measured, but is instead a negation of being. It doesn’t exist.

 

[MindOverMatter]

1. God is not Being. I exist, and am not God; God exists, but He is not “existence”. I exist just as truly as God exists. I mean the same thing by the word “exist” in both cases - the pious attribution of “analogy” does no true reverence to Him since it is untrue. I have no concept of existence other than simply existing, so to say that existence is “analogous” in God is simply pious atheism. To say that God is Being is either pantheism (if we grant that we, too, exist) or monism (if we deny God the dignity of being able to create other beings). It is a denial of His creation.

Just because you exist, is not the same as indentifying ones self with existence. You participate in the nature of existing, but you are not existence itself. God is existence, for God is the highest of all beings and is the basis of all beings. Things come in to existence. You do not exist as trully as God, for God is a neccesary truth. God is ultimate truth and being. You began to be, and thus the truth that you exist is contingent and inferior to the being of God and is ontologically dependent on his being, his existence, for God is that which is most real. Thus existence is rightfully attributed to God, for nothing exists outside Gods being, him being the timeless and eternal basis of all that which begins.

 

[MindOverMatter]

1. God is not “unchanging”. His Divine Nature is, but His nature is an abstract philosophical concept - reality of the mind only. He lets Himself be moved - changed - by prayer…

This is an assertion. The real truth of the matter is this: God is the cause of all being and time. Thus God created time. God is not moved in time, for God cannot increase or decrease in being. God has no potentiality to be; rather God is “being” in itself, and thus transcends the reality of time and space. God is perfect being and act, for he is the cause of time and is not caused. God is not changed by prayer, but rather Gods nature is Good, and has eternally acted for the Good of man. There is no abirtrary Good. All good is neccesarily given by God for the good of the creature from all eternity according to Gods nature, and has been decided from the beginning because of Gods very nature as love; for Gods being is love. For the sake of freewill and the good of the creature, some good is potentaily actual, and is actuallised given the fact that people pray; but such a good had already been willed from all eternity.

1. God is not the “prime mover”. .

Yes God is the Prime Mover, and this has been demostrated to be so because of his attributes as being the creator of all things. Logical Neccesitity proves this to be the case

 

[Cecilianus]

You just said two contradictory things. First you said, that particles arise out of nothing, and then you said things arise spontaneously out of a vacuum. A vacuum is not nothing. You are being very misleading.

In any case its imposible for science to “know” that a thing can come out of nothing, since a true nothing is not a being which can be measured, but is instead a negation of being. It doesn’t exist.

“Nothing” has two meanings. The first meaning - the way you are using it - is pure negation of concept. Here the word functions purely grammatically. The second meaning - the way all of us are using it - is the absence of being considered as a concept. Consider the following exchange. “What are you thinking about?” -“Nothing”. “Nothing” could mean either that I “not thinking” (I am absent-minded), or that I am a philosopher pondering the nature of the vacuum. You are using the word “nothing” in this first, purely grammatical sense. We are all using the word “nothing” in the second sense, in which case it means the vacuum.

However, it IS true that there is no cause for a particle coming into being from the vacuum, and in this sense we are using the word “nothing” in sense no. 1 when we say that it arises from nothing. However, the reason that there is no cause is because there is no material cause (to use Aristotelian terminology), and therefore no formal cause to act on the matter, and as with all quantum interactions there is no efficient cause. (And as with all physical, non-living processes, there is no final cause - a fiction we threw out when we discovered physics.)

 

[Cecilianus]

Just because you exist, is not the same as indentifying ones self with existence. You participate in the nature of existing, but you are not existence itself. God is existence, for God is the highest of all beings and is the basis of all beings. Things come in to existence. You do not exist as trully as God, for God is a neccesary truth. God is ultimate truth and being. You began to be, and thus the truth that you exist is contingent and inferior to the being of God and is ontologically dependent on his being, his existence, for God is that which is most real. Thus existence is rightfully attributed to God, for nothing exists outside Gods being, him being the timeless and eternal basis of all that which begins.

Who or what is it that “participates” in the “nature” of existence? (1) I must first exist in order to be able to participate in anything (or else what are you talking about as the subject of your sentence?), and (2) what is the nature of existence? (Pared down from all qualities that distinguish existence from all determinations of being, we are left with nothing (sense #2) - and hence begins the dialectic of Hegel’s Logic. The best step short of Nothing (sense #2) is presence - but this requires something else to be present to.)

Existence is a mental concept. You do not find pure “existence” lying out there to be handled and grasped. Being - existence - is a word that denominates something about things like you and me (I am being deliberately vague because existence is not a predicate, as Kant taught us, and there is nothing prior to existence, as I pointed out above.) Likewise, truth is a statement about propositions. I do not know of any meaning of “truth” - except in a loose poetic sense - which would make sense of your statement “God is ultimate truth and being”. If that statement has any meaning, it wasn’t communicated to me.

The fact that you exist is not the same as the identity between one’s self with existence.

True. But I have existence, and no-one would say, “I have God”. I exist, so are we to make a new verb, “to God”? Existence as an abstract noun is derived from a verb. “God” is not a verb, and makes no sense as one.

Thus existence is rightfully attributed to God, for nothing exists outside Gods being, him being the timeless and eternal basis of all that which begins.

I exist outside God’ being, because I am not God. That is why my being is MY being and not God’s; otherwise I would be identical to Him. Is God not capable of giving me my own being, or am I an accident (the nine Aristotelian predicables) subsisting on God’s shadow, as a color or shape exists in an object without any reality of its own?

 

[Cecilianus]

This is an assertion. The real truth of the matter is this: God is the cause of all being and time. Thus God created time. God is not moved in time, for God cannot increase or decrease in being. God has no potentiality to be; rather God is “being” in itself, and thus transcends the reality of time and space. God is perfect being and act, for he is the cause of time and is not caused. God is not changed by prayer, but rather Gods nature is Good, and has eternally acted for the Good of man. There is no abirtrary Good. All good is neccesarily given by God for the good of the creature from all eternity according to Gods nature, and has been decided from the beginning because of Gods very nature as love; for Gods being is love. For the sake of freewill and the good of the creature, some good is potentaily actual, and is actuallised given the fact that people pray; but such a good had already been willed from all eternity.

God does move in time, as He did in the person of Jesus, and also during His revelations to mankind, because He exists in the time He created as well as in eternity. Changing does not involve an increase or decrease in being. I change all the time and remain who I am. (By “being” I mean substantial being.) Accidental being is not God Himself, so it does not diminish His dignity or perfection to change accidentally. Is God some sort of static concept, like the Idea of the Good? No, He is a Trinity of Persons. If He does not move in time, then Who spoke to Moses in the burning bush?

God is perfect being and act, for he is the cause of time and is not caused.

 

[Cecilianus]

Yes God is the Prime Mover, and this has been demostrated to be so because of his attributes as being the creator of all things. Logical Neccesitity proves this to be the case

Would you please mind demonstrating this for me, then? In the seven years I’ve been a Catholic nobody has ever actually led me through the proof, instead of just retreating behind their arrogant shell of “as everyone knows, St. Thomas Aquinas proved that…”

In the “natural theology” class I took in college devoted almost entirely to this proof, the best that the professor could do - based on the texts either in the SCG or the ST - was that there could not be an infinite regress of movers, with “motion” taken as a simultaneous cause-and-effect relationship (a false premise, by the way, as we know from physics), and therefore a separate question from the Second Way, where causes and effects can be temporally separated. No one has ever given a reason why my soul must be “moved” by God. It seems to me to be the prime mover. Why must God be pulling on my strings like a puppet? And - contrary to the conclusion of the argument - if He is a Person and not some magical philosophical principle where the buck stops (the two ideas are either mutually exclusive, or there is no reason why the buck couldn’t stop with me), then who is pulling God’s strings? (But He is a Person, and therefore - by the dilemma posed in the previous sentence - He is not the Prime Mover argued for in the First Way.)

 

[Kim_in_Montana]

MindOverMatter;5526110:

This is an assertion. The real truth of the matter is this: God is the cause of all being and time. Thus God created time. God is not moved in time, for God cannot increase or decrease in being. God has no potentiality to be; rather God is “being” in itself, and thus transcends the reality of time and space. God is perfect being and act, for he is the cause of time and is not caused. God is not changed by prayer, but rather Gods nature is Good, and has eternally acted for the Good of man. There is no abirtrary Good. All good is neccesarily given by God for the good of the creature from all eternity according to Gods nature, and has been decided from the beginning because of Gods very nature as love; for Gods being is love. For the sake of freewill and the good of the creature, some good is potentaily actual, and is actuallised given the fact that people pray; but such a good had already been willed from all eternity.

God does move in time, as He did in the person of Jesus, and also during His revelations to mankind, because He exists in the time He created as well as in eternity. Changing does not involve an increase or decrease in being. I change all the time and remain who I am. (By “being” I mean substantial being.) Accidental being is not God Himself, so it does not diminish His dignity or perfection to change accidentally. Is God some sort of static concept, like the Idea of the Good? No, He is a Trinity of Persons. If He does not move in time, then Who spoke to Moses in the burning bush?

Was that intended to be a syllogism? The conclusion doesn’t even seem related to the premise.

God wills us good in a general sense from all eternity, yes, but that good didn’t come into being until He granted it to us because of our prayer. It is not “potentially actual” (a phrase which doesn’t make sense even within an Aristotelian framework), it simply doesn’t exist until God gave it to us. (If “potential” means “doesn’t exist yet”, then something potential is no different than something nonexistent. By the principle of excluded middle, there can be no intermediate between being and non-being as Aristotelians sometimes think.)

There is no particular “necessary good” for the creature; there are lots of good things which we could desire or pray for, and they are not all “willed by God from the beginning”.

I like your reasoning and the distinctions you are making here. They make a lot of sense to me.

My tentative thoughts are… that you and MOM are both partially right. Is that possible?

Basically, what I have wondered is, can God have all of His commonly ascribed attributes, yet choose not to use them at some times and for some purposes? Can and does God limit Himself?
I believe we have evidence that He does. He limited Himself in the Person of Jesus while here on earth. He says things like, “I will remember your sins no more…” Can God actually forget? Maybe He chooses to.

Maybe He chooses not to know all the details of the future, in order to give us free will. And yes I realize that knowing does not equal causing.
But, just in my limited understanding, this would all seem exceedingly dull from God’s point of view if He is such a mastermind that He knew everything immediately. And if he knows, how can He be responsive? How can He React to my prayers in any sort of meaningful way?
Also, how can He be creative? To me, creative implies being continually acting, responding, and changing.
Yes, not His essence, but His accidents…

I don’t see how we can speak of Him as a personal God if He’s actually just some computer that had this all settled billions of years ago.

I believe He is involved in our lives today, much as He was involved in the whole evolutionary process; setting out the parameters, letting things evolve, giving a nudge here and a bump there, so that things follow His overall plan.

I would like to know if there are logical problems with this theory and if it goes against the commonly-taught attributes of God.

Good conversation! I’m glad it got back on track. I’ve been enjoying it!

Kim

 

[MindOverMatter]

We are all using the word “nothing” in the second sense, in which case it means the vacuum.

Your using the term nothing to speak about a being that exists. Yet you were trying to imply that quantum events come out of nothing irrespective of that which exists. I don’t understand what it is you are trying to imply? Its either one or the other. The only meaninful sense in which one can use the term nothing, is in respect of being. For example, there is nothing in this room.

However, it IS true that there is no cause for a particle coming into being from the vacuum, and in this sense we are using the word “nothing” in sense no. 1 when we say that it arises from nothing. However, the reason that there is no cause is because there is no material cause (to use Aristotelian terminology), and therefore no formal cause to act on the matter, and as with all quantum interactions there is no efficient cause. (And as with all physical, non-living processes, there is no final cause - a fiction we threw out when we discovered physics.)

They have no physical cause, this much is true. But there is an “Existential Cause”. For example, there is no being in existence that derives its nature and act from nothing, for nothing is simply nothing. It is not a being. It is simply a meaningless statement to say that something has derived its existence from that which is not real. This is not a scientific statement; its poor philosophy. At most the scientist can say that it has no physical cause in the “mechanical” sense of the term. But to say that it has no cause whatsoever is to go beyond what science is suggesting. One is assuming that there is only one kind of cause, an assumption which has no basis in scientific reality. The fact is, Quantum events are contingently real, because their reality is only meaningful in that they come to exist, and their nature is as such only because they participate in the reality of being; they gain their functionality, act, and nature, in accordence with the existential-reality that they come into, as opposed to non-existence. Thus they are contingent on that which is already being by nature as opposed to that which is being by participation. One must admit a neccesary reality that is existence by nature, and is the giver of “natures”. Otherwise one must rest upon the ideology that all potential beings come into an “actual-nothing”, out of an actual nothing, a nothing that is by definition of its nature “not real”. Feel free to accept this if you so wish but it is not a reasonable position on which one can make logical inferences about anything. The science of Quantum physics is not opposed to all forms of causality. That is not what Quantum physics is teaching.

 

[MindOverMatter]

Who or what is it that “participates” in the “nature” of existence?

That which God has created.

(1) I must first exist in order to be able to participate in anything ?

True

and (2) what is the nature of existence?

God

Existence is a mental concept.?

So you don’t exist?

You do not find pure “existence” lying out there to be handled and grasped.

Well things exist. We gain are very concept of existence from our experience of existing things.

 

[MindOverMatter]

I do not know of any meaning of “truth” - except in a loose poetic sense - which would make sense of your statement “God is ultimate truth and being”. If that statement has any meaning, it wasn’t communicated to me.?

A person who says that there is no such thing as an ontological neccesary truth, is not somebody that can be reasoned with.

It is true, that in order to account for beings that begin to exist, there must be a neccesary being that is being in itself, and is thus ultimate truth in so far as God is the root of all contingent truths, in so far as such a being is apposed to nothing. God is the ontological difference between nothing and something

True. But I have existence, and no-one would say, “I have God”. I exist, so are we to make a new verb, “to God”

We do not have God. We participate in Gods nature as existence; God generates our being and sustains our being in his being. To come in to existence, is in the correct sense to come in to God.

I exist outside God’ being, because I am not God.

You are not God. But you participate in Gods neccesary existence. No being can exist outside of God

That is why my being is MY being and not God’s.

You have nothing that you can call your own. It has all been given to you by God and is sustained by God. God permeates all things.

otherwise I would be identical to Him.

No. If You were identical to God, you would neccesarilly exist. You only particpate in Gods being by Gods will. God neccearily exists by nature of his being, in all things. But it is inccorect to say on this account that all being is God. God is neccesary being; neccesary truth. God is existence.

Is God not capable of giving me my own being,

God has given you being, and in some sense it is Qualitatively yours in regards to having a created nature that is not God. You are qualitatively different to God, which is true; but ontologically speaking, you particpate in Gods nature, which is “existence”. No being is independent of Gods will and sustenance. So no; there is no such thing as a being that exists independently from God.

or am I an accident (the nine Aristotelian predicables) subsisting on God’s shadow, as a color or shape exists in an object without any reality of its own?

You are a creation of neccesary existence.

 

[MindOverMatter]

Would you please mind demonstrating this for me, then? In the seven years I’ve been a Catholic nobody has ever actually led me through the proof, instead of just retreating behind their arrogant shell of “as everyone knows, St. Thomas Aquinas proved that…”.)

If you really want to know, look up the history of all my threads. You will finds threads that are devoted entirely to proofs which are derivitive of the five ways.

In the “natural theology” class I took in college devoted almost entirely to this proof, the best that the professor could do - based on the texts either in the SCG or the ST - was that there could not be an infinite regress of movers, with “motion” taken as a simultaneous cause-and-effect relationship (a false premise, by the way, as we know from physics)

Claiming that something is false does no good accept to give the mere apperence that you know what you’re talking about.

Perhaps you can give us some evidence?

and therefore a separate question from the Second Way, where causes and effects can be temporally separated. No one has ever given a reason why my soul must be “moved” by God.

You do not understand Aquinas.

It seems to me to be the prime mover. Why must God be pulling on my strings like a puppet?

Nobody is saying that God is. But it is true that God actualises all events and sustains them in existence in an ontolgical sense. This has nothing to do with physics.

And - contrary to the conclusion of the argument - if He is a Person and not some magical philosophical principle where the buck stops (the two ideas are either mutually exclusive, or there is no reason why the buck couldn’t stop with me), then who is pulling God’s strings? (But He is a Person, and therefore - by the dilemma posed in the previous sentence - He is not the Prime Mover argued for in the First Way.)

You do not undertand the metaphysical grounds upon which Aquinas makes his arguements. I advise you to study metaphysics as Aquinas understand it.

 

[Cecilianus]

Your using the term nothing to speak about a being that exists. Yet you were trying to imply that quantum events come out of nothing irrespective of that which exists. I don’t understand what it is you are trying to imply? Its either one or the other. The only meaninful sense in which one can use the term nothing, is in respect of being. For example, there is nothing in this room.

That is false. The vacuum is not a “being that exists”, and yet it is a concept which physicists do in fact talk about. If you need help imagining it, think of a big blank black space with nothing in it. The absence of being is “nothing”. We can talk about the absence of being as a concept, and it is from this absence of being that virtual particles arise. The vacuum - this absence of being - has some very specific properties, e.g. it has a negative energy, it is replete with imaginary or virtual particles, and it is characterized by NOT being a real particle. (Please don’t get caught up with the terms “real” and “imaginary”; these are just words we use. Virtual particles - which are the same as imaginary particles - are just as real as real particles are, but they can’t exist for long.)

St. Thomas also uses “nihil” as a positive concept too, except in terms of Aristotelian “potency”. See the doctoral dissertation by Sr. Mary Consilia O’Brien, O.P., entitled “The Antecedents of Being”.

Aristotle’s rejection of the vacuum is known to be false, and can be proved false by philosophical reasoning as well - if there are no empty spaces to move into, then no motion can take place. Yet we see motion. (“Motion” here means what English speakers mean by motion, or local motion, not “motion” in the general Aristotelian sense of “change”.)