Open Theism Vs Unmoved-Mover

[Cecilianus]

Here is the post with quote marks.

What laws?

Attendance at Mass on all Sundays and other Holy Days of Obligation, firm adherence to all the dogmas and doctrines of the Faith, abstinence from meat on Fridays, especially in Lent, yearly Communion and Confession, and I have a feeling I might be forgetting one off the top of my head. But I don’t need to answer to you regarding my Catholicism.

Do you not believe that Aquinas should be regarded as Doctor of the Universal Church? Do you think he should not be patron of all Catholic universities, colleges, and schools? Do you think he should be de-canonized as a saint?

(1) Yes, he should be. That doesn’t mean he was infallible. (2) Yes, he was probably the smartest man who ever lived. Still wrong most of the time. (3) Of course not. Why would I think that?

We’re going to require, of you, some evidence for this bold assertion. Would you mind providing such as you can?

(1) Inertia, from which we must also get rid of his idea of teleology (at least when applied to moving objects). (2) Atomism, from which we conclude that his rejection of the vacuum and his idea of “motion” as continuous and simultaneous were wrong. Those are the only two I can think of off the top of my head, but it’s quite well-known that both his physics and his biology have been superseded. This is the first time I’ve ever heard that assertion called “bold” before.

Really. Wow! That’s another bold - atheist-like assertion, again, with absolutely no proof or evidence whatsoever. We’re going to require that you provide some; would you mind?

Was Aristotle divinely inspired? Was he even Christian? So how is acceptance of his philosophy an article of Faith? Has the Church ever claimed that we must accept the philosophy of Aristotle? I would recommend turning to the early Fathers where you will find some pretty harsh denunciations of pagan wisdom. Please quit the rhetoric and personal attacks; disagreeing with Aristotle is not an “atheist-like assertion”.

Addition I am making today (vigil of the Assumption): Look at my posts in the “does the Big Bang prove the existence of God” forum for my view of atheism before calling me an “atheist”.

Except that they apparently have disowned the sainthood and teachings of Aquinas, whose Summas are the official sumations of Catholic theology, natural theology (metaphysics) and philosophy of the universal Catholic Church.

Von Balthasar was named a Cardinal, a prince of the Church, for his theological work. Are you placing yourself above the teaching authority of the Pope? Name me one place where he “disowned the sainthood”, or even the teachings, of Aquinas, before making such serious charges against a man who, being dead, can’t defend himself. Point number two: The Summas are not “official summations” of anything. If you want an official summation of Catholic theology, look at the Catechism of the Council of Trent and the (relatively) new Catechism of the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church has no official philosophy; if Aquinas has primacy, it does not disparage the work of the great modern philosophers, none of whom happened to be Catholic.

Who was marginally Catholic, especially during the time he worked with the Nazi’s.

Actually he had converted to Lutheranism. Your claim is an ad hominem attack, not a valid argument. For charity’s sake I will point out that he did receive the sacraments on his deathbed, which is a little-known fact (since secular histories generally do not care about such unimportant things as the eternal fate of a man’s soul). But Aristotle was not “marginally Catholic”, he was downright pagan.

Hmmm. Heidegger was also quite big on Aristotle and Aquinas, and not very big on modern science and modern technology. No wonder the confusion.

He was more of a fan of Scotus than Aquinas - whom he singled out (along with scholasticism in general, really) as having contributed to the forgetting of being in Western philosophy - and more of a fan of Parmenides than Aristotle. I am perfectly aware of my divergence from Heidegger on certain points; if a hard-core atheistic Heideggerian chooses to take up this debate with me, I will take that moment to protest Heidegger’s errors. I have no need to now. Yet if I had to choose one and only one “philosophy” book (to the exclusion of “non-philosophical” works such as Wordsworth’s Prelude, which contains more true philosophy than all the works of many other philosophers combined) to take with me on a desert island, or to survive a cataclysm as the only patrimony of the philosophical tradition left to the world, it would without a question be “Sein und Zeit”.

Please explain this: “a puppeteer God”.

If God is the prime mover, and I cannot originate any motion on my own without God moving me to do so, then I see no difference between that situation and a puppeteer pulling on strings. I would be very happy if someone could show that this is not the case, since then my autonomy and freedom would be preserved. (I know that this is not what Thomists think they are claiming - and the Church has forbidden us to accuse Thomist theology of Jansenism, in the same decree that it forbad accusations of Molinist theology (which rejects physical pre-motion) of being Pelagian. Yet it is a logical conclusion of what the Thomists are claiming; in other words, it is inconsistent to believe in physical pre-motion and human freedom at the same time. I say “Thomists” because my understanding is that this doctrine originates more with John of St. Thomas than with Aquinas himself, though I may be mistaken on this matter.

On what grounds? Please explain, don’t simply make unfounded assertions. You have made enough of them here to last us a very long time.

I tried to clarify that above.

What do you mean by this statement?

ditto.

Can you re-state this a bit more clearly? In its current form, it is the mother of all confusion.

If He predestines us to Heaven against our will, then we cannot freely choose Heaven. (Otherwise human freedom is not in fact an answer to the question “Why does God let some people go to Hell?”) If He predestines us to Heaven, but not against our will, then this predestination is not infallibly efficacious.

 

[JDaniel]

The actuality of matter is contrary to Aristotelian “physics”.

Please briefly explain; don’t just make assertions. I know I mentioned this in the post which I could not reply to because it was stripped from your reply.

The fact that numbers are independent logical entities - and include negative numbers, irrational numbers, complex numbers, and the numbers 0 and 1 - contradicts Aquinas’ view.

Not so. St. Thomas regarded mathematics as a tool in the general science of nature and as a separate kind of logical abstraction. Although he did not consider the “matter” of mathematics to be “real” in the same sense as physical matter, he did consider it to be a type of matter - from an imaginative perspective. The rest of the speculative mathematics you mentioned was simply not needed in any considertation, by him, with regard to any ways to know God from mobile and material being.

The fact that motion is not simultaneous over space (there is no “spooky action at a distance”,

Who on earth (or dead) are you talking about? Seriously, what is this all about?

is likewise contrary to Aquinas’ view. Aristotle’s teleological physics was also false.

It appears that if you are attributing the above to Aquinas and Aristotle, you are misunderstanding them severely.

The idea of an absolute state of “rest” towards which objects in motion are only in potency is also false, since absolute zero is impossible to obtain, and all objects are in motion relative to each other.

I now see that you clearly do misunderstand Aquinas. No where does Aquinas speak to anything like that. I’m not sure from where you are getting this stuff, but, it’s certainly not from Aquinas or the Church.

As far as I know the only thing that was corrected in Aristotle’s physics was John Philoponus’ realization that an object continues in motion because of something inherent in itself and not because the air is pushing it forward; I do not know if Aquinas accepted this or not.

It never came up, and was not needed, in Aquinas’s general science of nature.

Modern science is not “realist” in the philosophical sense; matter is what we study, and matter therefore cannot be either purely potential or unknowable, as it was for Aquinas.

Although Aquinas could not have known how matter was constructed for obvious reasons, on the quantum level, what he said about matter had more to do with “motion” than with the composition of matter.

We generalize the behavior of matter in mathematical terms, but “form” as such is unknown to us.

To some extent I would agree. But, from the extent that our more precise sciences of physics, chemistry and biology are pre-supposed by Aristotle’s and Aquinas’s “general” science of nature, should not be in doubt. That is the problem with starting science from some place in its mid-stream.

Nor do we study “thoughts in the mind of God”; while the laws of physics may be such (and are such, in fact), what we study is the world itself, the actual world that God has created.

What in the world are you talking about?

(I hold the very un-Thomistic view that God’s knowledge of the world is the world itself, without being mediated through any universal forms; so the statement that we “study thoughts in the mind of God” happens to be true. But what we set out to study is the real world regardless of whether it is a divine idea or not.)

I can’t respond to this. What you are suggesting is simply not representative of Aquinas at all. I would certainly like to further this with you, as i do believe that you have some Catholicity left in you.

jd

 

[Cecilianus]

Cecilianus:

I would love to have responded to your previous post, but, by not using Quote surrounds, in your reply to me, that is simply much work is way out of the question. I just don’t feel like working that hard.

Mea culpa. I just rectified that.

The “nature” of matter. . . Hmmm. What is the “nature” of matter? And, on a related subject, what is the nature of “motion”?

It depends what exactly you mean by “matter”. If you mean matter in the ordinary, every-day sense of the term (substances and materials in the world around you), the nature of matter is described by chemistry (specifically, molecular orbital theory). If you hold a more expansive, broader view of matter that looks at what Aristotle would call the “material cause” of what we call “matter” - that is, we take a reductionistic investigation into the way matter and specifically chemistry works, then we get into the Standard Model. If you want to know ultimately what the nature of matter is, look at the Standard Model. (If you want to know even deeper into the nature of matter than the Standard Model, you have to wait a few years. Once CERN actually starts experiments again, we’ll know a lot more.)

The nature of motion is described by quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics is the answer to your question.

I’d truly love to know the “natures” of these items, too.

Species of matter, or mass/energy. Physics tells you the nature of the first and chemistry tells you the nature of the second.

Not at all. Are you putting words in my mouth?

Then why do you keep calling me an atheist? All I’m doing is defending the truth of science and the sufficiency of the scientific method within its domain (namely, physical reality).

 

[Cecilianus]

Please briefly explain; don’t just make assertions. I know I mentioned this in the post which I could not reply to because it was stripped from your reply.

For Aristotle, matter was purely potential insofar as it was material and not formed. Matter is what physicists are interested in. It is false to say that physicists mean something different by “matter” than Aristotle did and that we really study form; we have no concept of “form” as such and it’s not what we study.

Not so. St. Thomas regarded mathematics as a tool in the general science of nature and as a separate kind of logical abstraction. Although he did not consider the “matter” of mathematics to be “real” in the same sense as physical matter, he did consider it to be a type of matter - from an imaginative perspective. The rest of the speculative mathematics you mentioned was simply not needed in any considertation, by him, with regard to any ways to know God from mobile and material being.

I’m glad to hear that, though I wouldn’t think of math as having any matter at all - I just think of the numbers. Since the “matter” is imaginative there’s no disagreement there - maybe I insert “imaginative matter” into numbers subconsciously by thinking of them, though I don’t do it consciously.

If my views on Aquinas are incorrect, it means that my professors at school didn’t understand Aquinas either, since I minored in philosophy, took only classes in Aristotelian and Medieval philosophy, and with one professor made a regular (weekly) appointment outside of class to discuss it further. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if what I was taught was wrong, because quite honestly I had a good deal of trouble imagining that Aristotle and Aquinas could be so stupid. Yet my teachers all had Ph.D’s and studied with reputable philosophers - Fr. Armand Maurer, Fr. Joseph Owens, and students of Etienne Gilson and Martin Heidegger.

Who on earth (or dead) are you talking about? Seriously, what is this all about?

Aquinas, the way I was taught him, viewed motion as a single, simultaneous act in which the mover acts at the the same time as the moved is acted upon. So, for example, if I am chopping wood, my arm is moving the ax at the same time the ax is flying through the air. However, this would require that my arm cause a change over a length of space - since the ax is in a different place - simultaneously. This is impossible - there can be no simultaneous relationship between events; forces cannot act over a distance with a speed greater than the speed of light.

It was Einstein who referred to such impossible situations - such as the earth’s gravitational field affecting the moon simultaneously without a delay (of about 1 second) - as “spooky action over a distance”.

It appears that if you are attributing the above to Aquinas and Aristotle, you are misunderstanding them severely.

[see my original post since this was deleted by the program]

I now see that you clearly do misunderstand Aquinas. No where does Aquinas speak to anything like that. I’m not sure from where you are getting this stuff, but, it’s certainly not from Aquinas or the Church.

Please, feel free to explain it to me. You don’t know the effort I’ve gone to to understand this, yet every time I have asked for an explanation I have not been given one. I am starting to think that nobody else understands it either, simply from the unwillingness of everybody that I have asked to correct my misunderstandings.

Although Aquinas could not have known how matter was constructed for obvious reasons, on the quantum level, what he said about matter had more to do with “motion” than with the composition of matter.

Yet his understanding of motion was flawed, since he followed Aristotle in regarding motion as the actualization of a potency. Aristotle is wrong in this regard. All potencies have an actuality prior to the potency which they are teleologically oriented towards (it is in this sense that actuality is prior to potency), yet moving objects don’t have this teleological orientation. They just move in the direction they’re going and will continue to move this way forever until something stops them. There is no natural resting place for objects in motion. This is all I understand by the principle of inertia.

To some extent I would agree. But, from the extent that our more precise sciences of physics, chemistry and biology are pre-supposed by Aristotle’s and Aquinas’s “general” science of nature, should not be in doubt. That is the problem with starting science from some place in its mid-stream.

How do they presuppose the “general” science of nature? (I’m assuming that this is what you meant, not that they are presupposed by natural philosophy.) Scientists complete their entire education - through postdoctoral research - and win Nobel Prizes without having ever read or studied Aristotle. Sorry, but Aristotle just isn’t necessary to do science, so I fail to see how it could be presupposed by science.

What in the world are you talking about?

The claim that physics studies the formal aspect of formed matter, and that the forms of material things are deduced from higher forms which we call angels, and that these forms in turn are deduced from God as His thoughts. (By “deduced” I mean derived ontologically - we study them in the reverse order.)

 

[Cecilianus]

I can’t respond to this. What you are suggesting is simply not representative of Aquinas at all. I would certainly like to further this with you, as i do believe that you have some Catholicity left in you.

jd

Smiley-face aside, I would really like you to either accuse me of a specific heresy or stop impugning my faith. It is hard enough to maintain belief in Catholicism when everyone identifies it - without ground in any of the Symbols of the Church, canons of the Ecumenical Councils, or Papal Encyclicals (and yes, I have read, and own a copy of, Aeterni Patris) - with Thomism without you accusing me of atheism for defending the truth of science and my existential Scotist philosophical allegiance.

(Yes, I just made up the term “existential Scotist”, though it makes as much sense as existential Thomism or transcendental Thomism, and I didn’t make up the philosophy - Martin Heidegger wrote his habilitationschrift on Scotus. I do believe that phenomenology is phenomology - and Heidegger’s approach is phenomenological; he isn’t really an existentialist in the sense of the term that Sartre is, for example - and that rejection of science is not a phenomenological conclusion, just a quirk of Heidegger’s.)

 

[tonyrey]

“Why did God create us?”
“To love one another”.
“Why did He create us to love one another?”
“Because by loving one another we become fulfilled, creative, happy and live in harmony?”
“Why did He create us to be fulfilled, creative, happy and live in harmony?”
“There is no need to answer that question!”
“Why not?”
“Because that is the ultimate purpose of existence.”

We have penetrated to the heart of reality. Just as there cannot be an infinite regress of causes …<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< so there cannot be an infinite regress of purposes >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>…

I may have given the impression that the term “existence” applies to all existence. My statement should be more precise: “Because that is the ultimate purpose of our existence.”

God’s existence is in a different category altogether…

 

[JDaniel]

Smiley-face aside, I would really like you to either accuse me of a specific heresy or stop impugning my faith. It is hard enough to maintain belief in Catholicism when everyone identifies it - without ground in any of the Symbols of the Church, canons of the Ecumenical Councils, or Papal Encyclicals (and yes, I have read, and own a copy of, Aeterni Patris) - with Thomism without you accusing me of atheism for defending the truth of science and my existential Scotist philosophical allegiance.

OK, OK, OK. I was not trying to “impugn your faith”. Rather, I was beside myself that you would call for the ousting of Saint Thomas Aquinas, saying that you find the failure of the Church to rid itself of him as sickening (or something to the effect that it made you “nauseous”). And in your diatribe you just seemed to come across as just another newcomer atheist, who always start out by displaying their attitudes and making crowing, assertive statements that are designed to impugn the Faith. I see from whence you are coming, now, and I’m OK.

I wish you could get some good Thomistic training, but, take care of your studies now as that can come later.

(Yes, I just made up the term “existential Scotist”, though it makes as much sense as existential Thomism or transcendental Thomism, and I didn’t make up the philosophy - Martin Heidegger wrote his habilitationschrift on Scotus. I do believe that phenomenology is phenomenology - and Heidegger’s approach is phenomenological; he isn’t really an existentialist in the sense of the term that Sartre is, for example - and that rejection of science is not a phenomenological conclusion, just a quirk of Heidegger’s.)

I think I can agree with that.

jd

 

[JDaniel]

It depends what exactly you mean by “matter”. If you mean matter in the ordinary, every-day sense of the term (substances and materials in the world around you), the nature of matter is described by chemistry (specifically, molecular orbital theory). If you hold a more expansive, broader view of matter that looks at what Aristotle would call the “material cause” of what we call “matter” - that is, we take a reductionistic investigation into the way matter and specifically chemistry works, then we get into the Standard Model.

That’s not really what Aristotle (and Aquinas) meant. Think, for a few moments, about matter as “physical matter”, envisioning not knowing what matter is composed of. Now, think of substantial change. It would seem that “change” is so simple, by the standards of physics, as mere chemistry, or mere quantum mechanics. But, does chemistry or quantum mechanics really explain “change”? Is change merely the expulsion of electrons, from atoms, and the grabbing of electrons from other, compatible atoms (at the molecular level) to fill the missing holes, or unfilled electron shells? Or, is it merely the loss of protons or neutrons and electrons (on the quantum level)? Or, can something be said that is more fundamental than either of these?

And, if there is, then, perhaps the “mechanisms” by which change occurs can be explained by physics and chemistry. However, when we first look at change, don’t we see it first on a macro level? And, on the macro level, isn’t it as less intelligible to us but more certain? Now, when we burrow down to the quantum levels, it becomes more intelligible to us, but then becomes less certain. After all, we can see change at the macro level and our basic understandings don’t change much if at all, as time passes. But, we cannot see change on the quantum level, thus, the explanations of quantum level phenomena change quite often. We can only infer that what we believe is taking place is actually taking place precisely because it is too small to actually see (sense).

If you want to know ultimately what the nature of matter is, look at the Standard Model.

But, here too, explanations of the beginning of the universe abound. And now they are calling this “multi-verse” thing a “theory”. In science, a theory is something more certain than a hypothesis, but less certain than a Law. Yet, nothing much more than a dialectic - not even a hypothesis - and it is called (at least by some Physicists) a “theory”.

(If you want to know even deeper into the nature of matter than the Standard Model, you have to wait a few years. Once CERN actually starts experiments again, we’ll know a lot more.)

I contend that what CERN and LISA will show us is not what is the “nature” of things, but rather, what they might show us is how a thing operates and what it might be made up of. When I think of the “nature of a thing”, I think in terms of the thing’s essence - what is it here to do.

The nature of motion is described by quantum mechanics.

Including the nature of coming to be? Or, the nature of substantial change?

Then why do you keep calling me an atheist? All I’m doing is defending the truth of science and the sufficiency of the scientific method within its domain (namely, physical reality).

I will admit that at first I thought that you were an atheist in sheep’s clothing. You are currently sounding much more like a theist, I’ll grant you that. I promise I will stop calling you an atheist in the hope that you won’t let me down. (I’d put a smiley face, but, I don’t think you like them - and that’s fine with me.)

jd

 

[Cecilianus]

That’s not really what Aristotle (and Aquinas) meant. Think, for a few moments, about matter as “physical matter”, envisioning not knowing what matter is composed of. Now, think of substantial change. It would seem that “change” is so simple, by the standards of physics, as mere chemistry, or mere quantum mechanics. But, does chemistry or quantum mechanics really explain “change”? Is change merely the expulsion of electrons, from atoms, and the grabbing of electrons from other, compatible atoms (at the molecular level) to fill the missing holes, or unfilled electron shells?

Yes.

Or, can something be said that is more fundamental than either of these?

No; the exchange of electrons (and protons, in acid-base reactions) seems to me to exhaust the nature of change, for physical reality.

And, if there is, then, perhaps the “mechanisms” by which change occurs can be explained by physics and chemistry. However, when we first look at change, don’t we see it first on a macro level? And, on the macro level, isn’t it as less intelligible to us but more certain? Now, when we burrow down to the quantum levels, it becomes more intelligible to us, but then becomes less certain. After all, we can see change at the macro level and our basic understandings don’t change much if at all, as time passes. But, we cannot see change on the quantum level, thus, the explanations of quantum level phenomena change quite often. We can only infer that what we believe is taking place is actually taking place precisely because it is too small to actually see (sense).

But the macroscopic event is just the sum total of everything that goes on at the quantum level - nothing more. The probability density of an object “sharpens up” as it gets bigger and bigger.

But, here too, explanations of the beginning of the universe abound. And now they are calling this “multi-verse” thing a “theory”. In science, a theory is something more certain than a hypothesis, but less certain than a Law. Yet, nothing much more than a dialectic - not even a hypothesis - and it is called (at least by some Physicists) a “theory”.

I honestly don’t think that the neat and nice “hypothesis, theory, law” model is anything more than something we teach to high-schoolers. (Was it you that said - in the Big Bang thread - that you were a high school science teacher?) I certainly don’t see those kind of sharp divisions within, say, the models and equations of condensed matter physics. We know that the Standard Model - with its classifications of particles and so forth - is true. We are also in almost unanimous agreement that there is some deeper underlying unity that explains the Standard Model that we haven’t discovered. That’s a better model of how science works - we discover something true; we realize that something doesn’t add up; we discover a deeper model that includes and explains why the original model is true. Newtonian mechanics has never been proven false; we’ve only shown that it’s a special case of a more comprehensive theory (of two more comprehensive theories, actually: Einsteinian relativity and quantum mechanics). Einstein’s special theory of relativity is itself a special case of general relativity.

Regarding the “multi-verse” theory, that’s one attempt to explain Bell’s Theorem, and it has been neither empirically verified nor even (so far as I know) tested. (I don’t know how you COULD test that theory.) The fact that it’s called a “theory” to me just shows what I’m saying - that scientists don’t really care about “the scientific method” in that tripartite model. Sure, they make predictions and try to predict or postdict conclusions of theory, but to us “theory” means a mathematical model - regardless of how proven or unproven it is; we speak of the Theory of Relativity, which is proven but still studied, and also Superstring Theory, which is just math without any empirical element yet - and is opposed to “experiment”, which is how we test theory.

For me how a thing operates and what it might be made of IS the essence of something. Essence conveys the idea of being, or “what it is”. “What it is here to do” I would call the purpose of something. Why God created it may be interesting, but it doesn’t tell us anything about matter itself - unless this purpose is something intrinsic to the matter, in which case CERN should be able to discover it.

Including the nature of coming to be

*? Or, the nature of substantial change?

By “motion” I mean what the English language means by “motion”, which is “getting from one place to another place”. Neither “coming to be” nor “substantial change” are motion in anything but a technical, philosophical sense. I had never seen the word used that way until I began to study philosophy.

I will admit that at first I thought that you were an atheist in sheep’s clothing. You are currently sounding much more like a theist, I’ll grant you that. I promise I will stop calling you an atheist in the hope that you won’t let me down. (I’d put a smiley face, but, I don’t think you like them - and that’s fine with me.)

jd

Thanks. If you still have any doubt look at the thread “Does the Big Bang prove God’s existence?” I am the same Cecilianus arguing for theism there.