One more follow up to this:
Just more fantasy for your mind to play with.ive always thought of possible worlds in terms of being concurrent.
That’s a funny mental image.
I do believe in Christ as Lord and Creator, I just don’t believe the logic as defined by causality for the reasons outlined just previously,
Leibniz is wrong.
[INDENT]a. Omniscient (all knowing)
b. Omnipresent (either all-when or every-where, choose your poison)
c. Is Maximally GoodMy comment on Leibniz is a theological one. This world is not the ‘greatest of all possible worlds, but rather the worst’. Of course this is highly debatable.
I agree with you on the necessity part. Do you feel that God, as Maximally Good, chose to create or not to create? According to the Leibniz CA, he choose to do the Good.
My friend, with all due respect, continuing the logic of the [insert favorite flavor hear] Cosmological Argument, is it requires a God that can only make one choice, creator. That is not free will, no matter how many times it is called so.
I think it’s certainly possible for the world to be worse than it is. I mean, even Hitler didn’t kill his own mother.
Whether this world is the best God can do is a complex question. God cannot make anyone freely choose to follow Him. That would entail a contradiction.
A and C can be answered by appealing to God’s perfect goodness and omniscience, respectively. As for B, I’m not claiming that God has any compulsion to create anything.
I agree that God chose to create, and Leibniz would say the same. It’s not that God creating a world is better than Him choosing not to create any world. In fact, that would seem to compromise God’s self-sufficiency.
Right.
The fact that God is necessarily what explains the existence of the cosmos does not entail that God chose to create the cosmos by necessity. We speak of God as First Mover, not because He necessarily moves anything, but because He is necessarily the being that moves things if there is any motion at all.
I personally reject the notion that God’s will is by definition the Good. I believe this to be true for several reasons. I believe God to be a being of a perfect expression of free will. During Christs’ trials of Satan’s test of exercising his free will in the use of His Godly power for his own good vs. for the good of others. His response was clearly one of a response to a choice rather than a response he would give if his action determined the Good. After all, what difference would it have made to Christ as a trial which way he went if by definition that would have been good. There would be no test in this if Christ could have used his Godly power to aggrandize himself if that would have also been the ‘good’.
I am not sure what your referencing with “b” above. ‘b’ I said was God is omnipresent. That being said, my argument still stands:
This be my first entry into this forum. If’n I make a faux paus, please slap me back…
Obadiah-
This stands out to me. The TCA doesn’t state that it’s better for God to create than not to create. It only argues that given creation, it must have originated with God.
You stated B like this:
Maybe I misunderstood you, though.
The TCA does say that. The TCA etc… argument has unintended consequences when taken to its logical next step. There are many steps in the CAs that are stated previously and assumed by the creators of the arguments. This is an acceptable practice,one you do frequently with great success. However, if these arguments were in the beginning of the TCA (for example), than it is permissible to complete the logic. Otherwise, it is not an argument, it is an analogy.
I’m not sure what you mean by saying that the arguments were in the beginning of the TCA. Are you saying that some premise of the argument entails determinism? If so, which one?
No need to apologize. I’m afraid I still don’t understand what you’re saying. This is probably my own fault.
NowAg:
There’s no argument from authority here. But, there is an argument that says I am right and here’s a parallel from another thinker. This is used in philosophy all the time.
Do you see what you have just done? You have leaped from essentiality to accidentiality in the same sentence and seem to have merged their meanings. No one has said that Aquinas “bought the argument against an accidentally subordinated infinite regress,” nor am I asking you to. Aquinas fully understood what infinite regress meant, and that if we are here now, then no infinite regress could possibly have occurred yet: that is, at this point in time. Why? Because we can add more time and thus more events to the regress series.
OK. This is your challenge.
Is this your “proof”?
You, sir, are a man of your word!I’ll be “charitable” and give you as much time as you like to rebut the above argument.
NowAg:
But that is merely a portion of my argument. It seems that you are also including one, if not more, of Aquinas’s “ways”, as PSR arguments, which I disagree with and so does Craig. So, if a person alters one kind of argument - an argument from a precise definition of what “an infinite regress” actually means - to an argument that merely asserts that, somehow, such an argument is nothing more than an argument from PSR - it is more than merely unsound, it is a strawman - as you are re-defining the argument - or its words - however you wish. Do you not see that it appears that this is what you are doing?
There’s no argument from authority here. But, there is an argument that says I am right and here’s a parallel from another thinker. This is used in philosophy all the time.
Do you see what you have just done? You have leaped from essentiality to accidentiality in the same sentence and seem to have merged their meanings. No one has said that Aquinas “bought the argument against an accidentally subordinated infinite regress,” nor am I asking you to. Aquinas fully understood what infinite regress meant, and that if we are here now, then no infinite regress could possibly have occurred yet: that is, at this point in time. Why? Because we can add more time and thus more events to the regress series.
But, he also said that if an infinity did become actual, somehow, then there could be (at some time) an infinity of accidentally subordinated movers. A series of accidentally subordinated movers would be, e.g., a series such as of children, parents, grand parents, great-grand parents, etc., etc. etc., etc. This is an accidentally subordinated series. Then, times the number of species, past, present and future. Eventually, we could come to an actually infinite series, but, as for right now, we are still regarding a potentially infinite series.
OK. This is your challenge.
Is this your “proof”?
For Aquinas, me, the Scholastics, and the Church that is not a PSR. Here, you seem to be confusing Final Cause with PSR. They are not the same, although they can be sometimes similar and a cause of confusion.
The action (ughh) of coming to be is an action from essential subordination. It is an action of perfect simultaneity. As an example, a TV set consists of 500 parts, transistors, resistors, circuits, switches, picture tube, etc. The first mover is the flipping on of the off/on switch. That permits the electric current to flow from the source all the way to the cathode ray tube. e.g. Now, each part is atemporally in a series. Without any prior part, none of the ensuing parts would “light up”, so to say. So, there is a temporal simultaneousness. But, if the off/on switch failed, none of the ensuing parts would fire up and the cathode tube would remain dark.
That is a relatively decent definition of essential subordination, each ensuing part of the TV set essentially subordinated to its previous part, or parts. Without it, or them, there would be no TV set - unless one were to re-define the thing as “furniture”.
Further, First Movers do not consist of potency and act. That would be a contradiction. Potency is the privation of act (actuality). So, they cannot appear in the same vessel, so to speak. In saying that, one could assert that there is a point when they do. It could be said, with some difficulty, that they co-exist at the very moment of change from one to the other. Of course, that would be an anthropomorphism - that we would tend to see the moment of change in slow-motion. In fact, moreover, the matter which pre-existed the moment of change is the material cause, which is a cause by itself in that it possesses the potentiality. The cause which brings about the change is called an efficient cause. Next is the formal cause, which is the result of “combining” the material cause with that which it did not possess but had the appetite for. Formal cause = act or, actualization.
The fourth cause is called the Final cause. It is the purpose of the motion; it is the ultimate reason(s) for the action, not just a mere PSR. The PSR has more to do with rhetoric than with any actual action. It is a different kind of “principle”. A metaphysical/causal principle is that from which anything flows and is underived. It is not an axiom. The PSR is more an axiom or, Law, of sufficient reason, but, not a cause of it. In fact, it is meaningless without all three words being present simultaneously. Thus, it is derived and, so, cannot be a principle in the metaphysical, or natural-philosophical sense.
You, sir, are a man of your word!
jd
This is a gross oversimplification. There are a lot of steps between the conclusion and the first premise. I am of the mindset the TCA began from “It seems that”. The conclusion you have issue with is NOT implicit in the TCA, but rather a conclusion of the TCA argument relative to the subject of God’s Free Will.
No. I am have stated several times an argument that shows the xCA and PSR collapses as the consequences of the argument bear the fruit of attributing to God the attribute of having NO Free Will. This is a serious problem. Step by step…and using the TCA because this is the RCC forum and I would like to understand how my Catholic Brethren understand the TCA… As Aquinas develops his TCA he lays a foundation:
[INDENT]a. Omniscient (all knowing)
b. Omnipresent (either all-when or every-where, choose your poison)
c. Is Maximally Good