St. Thomas' Motion Argument and Modern Physics

  • Thread starter Thread starter raikou
  • Start date Start date
Status
Not open for further replies.
belorg said:
So, if a Thomist is speaking about potentilaity moving towards actuality, he is actually claiming that “nothingness” moves to “somethingness”?

Or

If

1 all things exist in the eternal knwoledge of God
2 those things change

then

God changes and is not immutable.
Click to expand...
God knows things in their whole being, not temporally, not along a timeline, not knowing them in this moment as potential, not in another later moment knowing them moving, not in a final moment knowing them at their final end, act. He knows their full reality as a temporal progression. Knowing them, he desires his apprehended knowledge be objectively present to him (he likes/loves all he knows) and wills the reality of his apprehension to face back at him objectively. So he speaks it (to it) and it IS. He apprehended a changing and contingent being, and that is what we are. He apprehended a being that could apprehend him (know God knowing me), and we have the fulfillment of the apprehension as our final end, as our full actuality (seeing him / knowing him face to face).

We are like him in the order of operations, first apprehending (understanding) within ourselves, knowing it is true, then desiring participation with the true outside ourselves and freely choosing means (causes) of participation.

Potentiality is not nothingness, it is the fullness of me at a snapshot in time, I am me at every moment. When a baby being baptized I am potentially one who knows I am me and one of the chosen people. When I am old I am in Act knowing I am me and one of his people. To God I am apprehended and actual as temporally actualizing, the same way I understand a Cake in its fullness (eggs being cracked, flour and sugar measured, milk and oil, mixing, baking, frosting, seeing, and eating). He knows it and it is, in its entire process. We are the temporal actualization of the Cake.

John Martin
 
belorg said:
I meant that there is nothing wrong with your open-minded appraoch.
Click to expand...
O.k., thanks for the clarification. Yes, upon seriously studying things I have changed my mind, and have switched from a position of biological ID to a full-blown embrace of evolution, and even of an origin of life by natural causes. See my article for Talkorigins.org, a leading evolution website:

talkorigins.org/faqs/abioprob/originoflife.html

Following that, I have seriously studied naturalism, to a depth in which most naturalists themselves do not study it (most theists do not sufficiently study theism either), but ultimately I have found it too weak as an alternative to theism.

Alas, I have discovered that truly open-minded people are rare, both among believers and among non-believers. Members of both groups can be overly dogmatic in their views and defenses of world views – non-believers even while proclaiming to have shed (religious) dogmatism. Atheism often views itself as the worldview of reason, the rational worldview, which has shed ‘superstition’ (as if religion and superstition were one and the same). The problem with that self-proclaimed ‘rationality’, as I have observed on numerous occasions, is that it often provides illicit cover for closed-mindedness and irrationality. Of course it may require a certain extent of open-mindedness to become an atheist after one has been a fervent believer (if that is a justified switch of worldview is a different matter), but often, when people have settled into that new worldview, they are just as closed-minded and dogmatic about it, and even irrational in its defense, as many religious believers (as I have often observed in discussions about the fine-tuning of the laws of nature, for example). Yet even when atheists are closed-minded, dogmatic and irrational, they don’t realize it and even feel good about it because, after all, in their mind they are firmly on the side of ‘rationality’ and ‘science’ anyway – and believers are all (allegedly) irrational and superstitious, so what’s the point of seriously engaging with their views. I hope you are not one of those types (for whose attitude of thinking I have zero respect).
 
Eleve said:
Fair enough. AFAIK Aquinas is not committed to libertarian free will.
Click to expand...
No, he isn’t.
Who said anything about nothing having potential? Christians don’t think that the universe came from nothing; they think that it came from God.
Click to expand...
That’s the whole point, Eleve, the Thomist God is immutable, so nothing can ‘come from Him’.
 
belorg said:
No, he isn’t.

That’s the whole point, Eleve, the Thomist God is immutable, so nothing can ‘come from Him’.
Click to expand...
it seems to me that you consider Him to be less a person and more an unchanging object, in Thomas’s view.
i don’t see the problem you are seeing. as the ‘prime mover’ and origin of all and everything he needs nothing else apart from Himself. so He is unchanging in that respect, He is All.
but as a person, not an inanimate object, He can will what He wants. and what He wants is this creation. but it doesn’t change Him as He was already unchanged and sufficient always before Creation.
 
belorg said:
So, if a Thomist is speaking about potentilaity moving towards actuality, he is actually claiming that “nothingness” moves to “somethingness”?

Or

If

1 all things exist in the eternal knwoledge of God
2 those things change

then

God changes and is not immutable.
Click to expand...
You know better than that. If you are going to pretend to summarize what Thomas taught, please get it right - even if you don’t agree with it. There was nothing and to potential before creation. I know you understand that. You just don’t agree. Fine, but get it right. 🤷
 
belorg said:
No, he isn’t.

That’s the whole point, Eleve, the Thomist God is immutable, so nothing can ‘come from Him’.
Click to expand...
If it is metaphysically impossible to be a cause without changing, then you would be correct.
 
Linusthe2nd said:
You know better than that. If you are going to pretend to summarize what Thomas taught, please get it right - even if you don’t agree with it. There was nothing and to potential before creation. I know you understand that. You just don’t agree. Fine, but get it right. 🤷
Click to expand...
Whether or not Belorg is correctly summarising Aquinas, he does raise two apparent contradictions that you need to deal with rationally.
  1. The problem of something coming from nothing.
  2. The problem of there being a relationship between a being that does not change and a being that is changing.
These two problems are normally avoided in these debates.
 
Linux said:
Whether or not Belorg is correctly summarising Aquinas, he does raise two apparent contradictions that you need to deal with rationally.
  1. The problem of something coming from nothing.
  2. The problem of there being a relationship between a being that does not change and a being that is changing.
These two problems are normally avoided in these debates.
Click to expand...
  1. Since nothing comes from nothing, how can this be a problem?
  2. Why is this a problem?
 
Eleve said:
Why can’t things come from an immutable God?
Click to expand...
Let G be an immutable God.
let U be the universe.
So we have G, who becomes G+U. That’s a change, sin’t it? But G cannot change, so He cannot become G + U
 
Eleve said:
You misunderstand the Doctrine of Divine Immutability. Sure, it’s possible that God could change from to , or whatever. But classical theists only claim that the intrinsic properties of God are not subject to change.
Click to expand...
Belorg is talking about an immutable being changing from a state of not cuasing the universe to the potential state of cuasing the universe. If God is timless, is the cuase of change, then it is not possible for Gods intrinsic nature to have potential states.
 
Eleve said:
You misunderstand the Doctrine of Divine Immutability. Sure, it’s possible that God could change from to , or whatever. But classical theists only claim that the intrinsic properties of God are not subject to change.
Click to expand...
I don’t think you are really grasping my argument, Eleve.
It is of course not because Obama pops into existence that God changes. But if God becomes God + Obama, that’s a change. And its a chnage in the intrinsic properties of God, because some property of God becomes Obama. That’s what it means for Obama to come ‘from God’ as you say Christian doctrine holds.
 
Ummm… no? Christian doctrine does not hold that God at any point became God + the Universe. God created the universe, but it isn’t part of him.

We don’t identify things with their creations. I am not myself, 529 posts on Catholic Answers, a handful of term papers, a recording of Lasciatemi morire, a sandcastle, and so on.
 
Linux said:
Belorg is talking about an immutable being changing from a state of not cuasing the universe to the potential state of cuasing the universe. If God is timless, is the cuase of change, then it is not possible for Gods intrinsic nature to have potential states.
Click to expand...
That’s only part of what I am talking about, Linux. I think the problem you are describing could be overcome by having God always creating, so that he does not have to change from ‘non-causing’ to ‘causing’.
The deeper problem is that, if, as Eleve claims, creation is from God (which would be creatio ex deo and not creatio ex nihilo) then something from an immutable God becomes the changing universe, which mean God is not altogether immutable. And that is the basic problem for Thomism.
 
Eleve said:
Ummm… no? Christian doctrine does not hold that God at any point became God + the Universe. God created the universe, but it isn’t part of him.
Click to expand...
Then the universe is not created from God, but from nothing. And we are back to the basic problem of the white rabbit.
We don’t identify things with their creations. I am not myself, 529 posts on Catholic Answers, a handful of term papers, a recording of Lasciatemi morire, a sandcastle, and so on.
Click to expand...
The 529 posts on CAF, your term papers, your sandcastle etc are all things that you created by modifying already existing stuff. And that is not what we are talking about. We are talking about material appearing from nothing, which contradicts ex nihilo nihil fit, or material that is somehow a modification of God’s being, which is impossible since God is immutable.
 
Theists don’t say that matter can’t come into existence. They just say that there needs to be some cause for it to do so.

Ex nihilo nihilo fit is not the doctrine that everything has to be made out of some pre-existing matter. It’s the doctrine that there has to be something in existence before there can be anything else.
 
Eleve said:
Theists don’t say that matter can’t come into existence. They just say that there needs to be some cause for it to do so.
Click to expand...
If matter can come ibnto existence from nothing, then ‘nothing’ has the potential to become matter, and this potential is uncaused, which contradicts the Catholic doctrine that God is the cause of everything.
Linus is trying to get around this by claiming that potentiality does not exist, but there clearly is a diffrence between complete nothingness and potentiality, so pptnetiality is something, hence in a way it exists.
Ex nihilo nihilo fit is not the doctrine that everything has to be made out of some pre-existing matter. It’s the doctrine that there has to be something in existence before there can be anything else.
Click to expand...
The problem is that under Thomism there is no logical connection between the something in existence (God) and the other things that come into existence.
 
belorg said:
If matter can come ibnto existence from nothing, then ‘nothing’ has the potential to become matter, and this potential is uncaused, which contradicts the Catholic doctrine that God is the cause of everything.
Linus is trying to get around this by claiming that potentiality does not exist, but there clearly is a diffrence between complete nothingness and potentiality, so pptnetiality is something, hence in a way it exists.

The problem is that under Thomism there is no logical connection between the something in existence (God) and the other things that come into existence.
Click to expand...
Please cite where Thomas makes this claim. I believe you constructed a strawman of Thomism.

The logical connect is the four causes, material, formal, efficient, and final.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top