Not so. St. Thomas’ entire argument is found in his enunciation of it. It has been mis-cast by some on the thread and elsewhere.
This doesn’t mean anything to me: => his “entire argument is found in his enunciation of it”. That reduces to: what he said is found in his saying of it.
???
As a logical argument it is excellent. While his cause-effect argument has been ineffectively beaten up - in many quarters, by people with ulterior motives - the fourth argument has only been poorly stated. Read again Post 33 above.
Well… “ulterior motives” is a cop-out form of defense; if the argument is misunderstood or miscast, that’s a problem, but just say so. Blaming criticism on “ulterior motives” is disingenuous.
Aquinas provides a textbook case of the composition/division fallacies:
“Now the maximum in any genus is the cause of all in that genus”
That just doesn’t follow of necessity, which is why this kind of claim is identified as fallacious. I understand the Aristotelian underpinnings of that statement from Aquinas, but to understand it is not to salvage it, logically. The reason we reject such inferences is that the real world provides lots of examples where that isn’t the case, even in abstraction (“maximal heat” is not the cause of all heat – heat is a by-product of other physical interactions in many cases, for example).
So as a matter of Aristotelian metaphysics, it’s a nice homage to the Philosopher. As real-world thinking about physics and metaphysics, it’s really, really obsolete, weak.
In reality, we do compare virtually everything against some perfection of its being. A best result for a math problem, a best car, a best airline, a best life, a best wife, etc. All of these, plus all of the rest, have some standard to be compared against, even though many people will compromise for less than perfection. That process of compromising has led us to believe that there are no real standards by which we can compare.
Well, I used the example of the perfect bowling score, specifically to highlight the problem with that – it’s tautologous when it’s not based on physical constraints. A “perfect bowling score” is perfect because that’s how we defined it. A “perfect airline” is no more an intrinsic feature of reality than a perfect bowling score – this is platonic idealism being projected onto the world around us. We do come up with metrics, qualitative and qualitative, but heat turns out to be a really good refutation of Aquinas’ point – there
is no “perfectly hot” ideal, and heat is semantically coherent as a relative term. Perhaps Aquinas would have been better off to choose “cold” as his example; at least then, you could point to Absolute Zero as a maximum.
The point being here that the “perfection” we’re are extrapolating to are just that, and
only that, in many cases – extrapolations. If we can say “this is hotter than that”, then by the simple act of
ordering “heat” in some scalar fashion, we have implied a maximum, either in logical or *de facto *form. But this is an artifact of measurement and ordering systems, not some Aristotelian “index of being”, or the manifestation of “great-making properties”.
As fire is to hottest, water is to wettest, and photon is to lightest, so, too, God is to that which is the “good-est”, or, “truest”, or, “wisest”, or, “most loving”. We could not have the higher genera without their highest causes, and their causes are not found here on earth. Their causes do not exist in the natural/physical realm. But yet, the genera exist. Any other surrogate standards fail utterly.
It’s instructive to note that the analogical predicates here are
physical,
quantitative,
objective measures (with the possible exception of “wettest”, which I take to be tautologous – whatever water is, “wettest” is the “mostest” of that). You’re mapping those scalars onto
qualitative measures, though, and that’s a problem. If “goodness” is a relative, qualitative construct, then the analofy fails, and fails badly. And you need to embrace this unwarranted foundation of Aristotle to make the analogy work – is “goodness” a scalar, with a logical maximum? It could be, I guess, but there’s perfectly no justiifcation for saying that
must be the case, so far as I can see. Aquinas depends on
intuition here, what “everybody knows” – except that not everybody knows it. And as the centuries progress, and we learn more and more, fewer and fewer know it. What Aquinas thought to be a timeless, enduring intuition, a solid epistemic foundation, wasn’t, and that intuition now just seems quaint in light of what’s transpired since.
-TS
