Where can I find a first-class apologist?

[Wesrock]

[Thanks ]

As an aside, let’s backtrack to a different, non-human example of a lion bringing down a gazelle and eating it. The lion is acting according to its nature, which is good. The gazelle is killed and suffers a physical evil. Neither animal is rational so there is no moral component here, but still, the lion is not a deficient, bad example of a lion. He might be, however, if he killed every other lion he came across. Likewise, a human being harvesting grain for food (or slaughtering a cow) may be acting consistent with his ends as a rational animal even if an evil has befallen the grain (or cow). What makes a deliberate, rational choice good or evil isn’t whether an evil befalls some other being (living such as a grain or cow), but about whether the human has perverted his own ends as a human being. It does become more difficult and emotional when we bring humans into an example, but when one man murders another man, doing violence against another man is considered (in Thomism) to be a perversion of the killer’s own nature, and therefore a moral evil. We can become more nuanced about this, whether it is self-defense, capital punishment, negligence, but what is at issue is whether a deliberate, rational choice to act (or not to act) is consistent with that human being’s ends as a human being or a perversion of them.

We need to beware the temptation to think of evaluating what it is for a human to be good as goodness as such or in a Platonic way. The entire basis for judging whether something is good or bad is in whether the being is manifesting the perfections proper to what it is: a triangle as a triangle, an oak tree as an oak tree, a dog as a dog, a human as a human. A human being does not have triangularity, but this is not a deficiency in him being what he is (a human being). Likewise a triangle doesn’t have “humanness”, but this has no bearing on whether it is a good triangle or not.

And now we can arrive at the question of God and what it means for God to be perfectly good and for that we need to take a tangent. Again, a whole other topic could be made to discussing the Aristotlean-Thomist understanding of act and potency and the cosmological arguments based on that principle (the argument from motion, St. Thomas’ First Way). In this post I’m not going to try to prove it or discuss it at length. I will attempt to briefly get through the gist of it as it is relevant to our understanding of goodness as discussed above (in fact, understanding Act and Potency is probably a prerequisite in order to fully understand the basis of everything above, but we are where we are) and God as perfectly good.

 

[Wesrock]

Aristotle’s distinction between act and potency is essential to his understanding of the metaphysical principles of change and is a response to earlier philosophers who took to various extremes, those being that (a) everything is static and persists and there is no such thing as change and (b) that there is no such thing as persistence, everything is always change, there is no carry over, no persistent identity, etc… Aristotle through his act and potency distinction developed a rational explanation for how objects persist while also undergoing change. Again, I’m rushing through this, this could have its whole topic.

As a being I am in Act, I have actuality. What is actual is what I am right now. My height, weight, hair color, present set of molecules, all of these things when actual are what are in this moment. I also have potentiality, all the ways I could be. Different mental states, different weights, different sets of molecules, etc . . . These could bes are not actual in the moment, but it is still something real about me. Another example: I have a rubber ball. The ball is actual. The ball has the potential to become a puddle of melted rubber if it is heated. That potential is not actual at the moment, but it is still something real about the ball. Note that if you don’t have an actual object, there’s no potentiality. The potential to become a melted puddle doesn’t exist if there isn’t a rubber ball in act. Furthermore, there is a principle of causality here, insofar as a potential cannot actualize (bring into existence) itself. The potential of a rubber puddle does not make itself real. Something else that is actual (like a flame) has to be applied to a being in act (the rubber ball) in order to actualize the potential for the rubber puddle, and if the potential is actualized, you then have an actual rubber puddle. In short (and again noting I’m rushing) we have the principle that any potential that is actualized is actualized by another. From this principle we can come to understand the cosmological argument from motion (motion is a classical word for change). If a being in act is being actualized by another, and that being is being actualized by another, and that being is being actualized by another, this cannot proceed to infinity. [We can have a discussion of hierarchical causal series vs linear, again, another topic.] It cannot proceed to infinity because, if it did, there’s no explanation for the actuality of anything in the system at all. We encounter the same issue if it is circular. The only explanation for having a being who is not self-actualizing (any given object of our experience) is that there must be some thing which is not being actualized by something else. Furthermore, if this thing had any potentials that could be actualized the potentials could not actualize themselves, so if it had potentiality it could not be the explanatory term. Therefore it must be Pure Act, without passive potency (the capacity for it to be changed). And it would necessarily follow that if there was no passive potency then nothing that could be done to it and nothing that it did would change it.

 

[Wesrock]

I’ll admit I’ve been typing for nearly two hours now and I may have begun to rush ahead so I can post and get to bed. This act and potency/cosmological argument section is very rushed, and again I did not type that all up as a sufficient demonstration, I just wanted to sketch a brief understanding of the Prime Mover as Pure Act, and consider it with what was discussed before. The point is that (with sufficient space) the Thomist would argue that by necessity there must be a being that is Pure Act, and that once you understand what this means you understand that this means it perfectly is what it is (Pure Act, Subsistent Being, yadda yadda), that it lacks in nothing. Furthermore, it cannot be changed to be lacking in being what it is, nor can anything it does make it less than what it is. And to perfectly manifest itself as what it is, lacking no perfections proper to what it is, is just what it is to be perfectly good.

We’ve arrived at what, at least at this time, appears to be a cold and indifferent understanding of what it means for God to be perfectly good. There are some further questions that need to be more closely. Can God create a world that has evil? Can God create a world of gratuitous evil? Is God obligated or required by nature to create a perfect world? Does God have virtue? Is God moral? Is God selfless? Can we say that God loves? Does God create good and evil?

I’m going to stop here, as I feel I’ve gotten a bit sloppy in the latter half of my post, it would be better to start fresh another day. It is your topic, but I would caution against getting bogged down in the details of whether the act and potency distinction is correct and whether the argument from motion follows. Those are, again, good questions and interesting discussions we could have, I just think it would distract from the goal of at least understanding how Thomists respond to the Problem of Evil. Up to you, and I do have those other questions I’d like to get to. It’s investigating those questions that bring us back away from a cold and indifferent understanding to an understanding which, in my opinion, is a transcendent, immanent, and warm picture which avoids anthropomorphic (and limiting) conceptions of God.

[Fin. For this post anyway.]