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Aloysium
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You may be misinterpreting what is being said. Trying to prove the existence of God based on secular understandings is like trying to do calculus using roman numerals. (It can’t be done.)
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Bagheera
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Read Hebrews 11:1 for the definition of “faith”.
Correction. Then I would KNOW. In that case I could make an informed decision whether to want to build a relationship with God. The decision would be contingent upon some questions. If the answers would affirm that the christian/catholic beliefs of God are correct, then my decision would be negative. I would not want to be seen even close to the God of Christianity.
Obviously, God would know exactly what is sufficient evidence for each person. All of us have a different threshold of evidence, which we consider compelling. Some people need stronger evidence, others might need just some far-out story.
Is that too much of a requirement for God?
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Bagheera
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St_Francis
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What is the difference between reasonable expectation and reasonable faith?
It is not too much for Him to accomplish, but is too much to ask, considering what He has already done for us.
Look at your previous list:
Christ “manifested” on earth… check.
Resolved the problem of evil… check
Fulfilled many prophecies… check
Foretold His own imminent death, at a time when accalim for Him was very high… check
This is why I suggested looking up the word hearsay. Three of the gospels and much else in the New Testament is people telling *their own *testimony, what they themselves witnessed–not “second-hand stories.” Luke’s gospel also states at the beginning that he did research and vetted the “witnesses” he interviewed.
Moreover, this was all publicly proclaimed within living memory of others, none of whom disputed the accounts.
He has already fulfilled your requirements, but you reject the testimony. You want the being who created you to be at your beck and call, to fulfill your requirements–does this not strike you as a little bit presumptuous? Why should you have higher standards than others? Why should He appear before you to be questioned by you to see if He meets your expectations, to see if He will be accepted or rejected by you?
God has given us sufficient evidence–many people more brilliant than you or I have accepted that evidence but you reject it and want a Being so powerful He can create the universe out of nothing, that He can create *you *and give you life, to appear before you for your evaluation.
Wow… just… wow.
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Bagheera
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Nope. Why should it? Doubting Thomas asked for actual evidence, and he (allegedly) got it. Why not others?
His choice. I already explained that only objective, repeatable, physical evidence counts. I do not single out religious claims and I do not demand extraordinary evidence. I need the same kind of evidence for ALL claims. Can’t do better than that…
Yup! What is “sufficient” evidence for you is insufficient for others.
Some people are gullible, others are not. 
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St_Francis
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Christ also rebuked Thomas, and 2000 years later, he is still known as Doubting Thomas.
Well, I have done my best to explain the Catholic view in context, and am sorry that I can go no further, due to my own insufficiency.Yup! What is “sufficient” evidence for you is insufficient for others.
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polytropos
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Yes, but what is at stake is whether the arguments actually commit them, not whether, when they are committed, they are fallacies. Begging the question, for instance, is a formal fallacy, so you simply need to show that the conclusion is somehow assumed in the premises. The fallacy of composition is an informal fallacy which does not always apply, so you need to show that it is fallacious in a given case.Informal fallacies are also fallacies.
For instance, a brick is red and weighs two pounds. The fallacy of composition would be to say that a wall you build out of bricks weighs two pounds. But it would not be to say that a wall you build out of bricks is red. Some qualities can non-fallaciously be composed.
It is sometimes asserted that cosmological arguments (generally those that make use of some sort of “principle of sufficient reason”) commit the fallacy of composition. But such a claim is actually pretty unclear. For if the principle of sufficient reason applies to two objects in the same way that it applies to one object, then it would seem that it is not committing any such fallacy of composition; two red bricks are still red, but two two-pound bricks are four pounds.
All of which is, of course, irrelevant when you are analyzing Thomistic arguments, which do not rely on the principle of sufficient reason. The argument from motion does not compose anything at all, whether fallaciously or not. It begins from a single instance of change, not all change in the universe or any such thing.
Suffice it to say that I disagree, and this quoted bit amounts to one of those “simply unfounded assertions.”
Another “simply unfounded assertion.” In any case, undefined does not mean that it does not make any sense to speak of causation out of the universe, just that we do not right now have a basis for it.
Something like the argument from motion is claiming that change in the universe can only be accounted for with reference to a purely actual Unmoved Mover. It follows that the Unmoved Mover would be immaterial and distinct from the universe. The fact that you might regard causation as “undefined” outside of the universe simply doesn’t matter. To claim it’s undefined is to plead agnosticism, not to claim that it is impossible (because that would be a separate, stronger/more difficult to prove claim). The argument would show that God has causal efficacy, though distinct from the universe.
(Claiming that that is a contradiction could commit the aforementioned formal fallacy of begging the question.)
But something like one of Thomas’s demonstrations of God’s existence is repeatable and objective. The claim is that the occurrence of change leads us to the existence of an Unmoved Mover, and you can “repeat” for as long as change continues to occur (and it would follow that God is here now as long as change does occur). Their “evidence” is not hearsay or Church authority.
If something genuinely violated the premises of the argument, it would then be falsified. But nothing has.
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Bagheera
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On the contrary. Since you wish to establish God’s existence, you need to show that the fallacy of composition does NOT apply.
Yes, indeed. Causation can only be applied to a single object or event, but not to a collection of objects of events.
Indeed, I did not enumerate all the different fallacies. Here Aquinas simply assumes that motion / change is an externally imposed phenomenon. (And adds a touch of “no black swan fallacy”
) Up until the special relativity was developed, people had no idea that there is no difference between a straight line, not accelerating motion and stationary existence. They did not know about the Brownian motion of molecules, which is inherent in the nature of the space-time-matter-energy complex. They had no idea of the conservation laws (matter / energy / momentum, etc…) The point is that lacking the necessary physics, they speculated.Fine, it was to be expected.
In Aquinas time they did not know any better. Today we know that change / motion are inherent in the physical world.
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polytropos
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Which I did. (However, I think you are wrong here. If I present an argument and you want to charge me of committing a fallacy, then you have to show that the fallacy applies. The point is that naming an informal fallacy is not sufficient to “show that the fallacy applies” because informal fallacies have other conditions. If someone says, “Leibniz is committing the fallacy of composition,” they have not actually spelled out the fallacy he is allgeged to be committing. For instance, appeals to authority are fallacious when there is reason to think the authority in question is biased or when there is not reason to think that the authority is in fact an authority. I have to show one of those two things in order to accuse someone of fallaciously appealing to authority. Without doing so, I’ve failed to make my case - and the obligation is on me to make a full case, not on the person I’m accusing to preemptively explain why the fallacies he didn’t commit aren’t fallacies.)On the contrary. Since you wish to establish God’s existence, you need to show that the fallacy of composition does NOT apply.
But I can’t even tell what you’re objecting to. Something like Aquinas’s First Way does not apply causation to “a collection of objects” (it makes claims about certain causal series, but these are specific claims with accompanying arguments, and are not instances of composition, fallacious or otherwise). And something like Leibniz’s cosmological argument uses the principle of sufficient reason, which is not causal.
This is simply false. Thomists specifically refer to “immanent causation,” ie. causation that occurs from within a thing. Otherwise, human beings and animals would be an obvious counterpoint to something like the First Way. A Thomist is also not committed to the idea, for example, that unstable atoms emit radioactive particles because something acted upon them externally.
But what has never been demonstrated is that there is a black swan. Hume attempted to show that the black swan (the uncaused event) was possible, saying, “'twill be easy for us to conceive any object to be non-existent this moment, and existent the next, without conjoining to it the distinct idea of a cause or productive principle.” But it’s unclear whether he shows anything. The fact that we do not know what causes an object to appear, change, or behave in a certain way does not imply that changes are occurring without causes.(And adds a touch of “no black swan fallacy”
For instance, suppose you have no knowledge of physics, but you are living on an isolated island and have a telescope. Quite impressively, you manage to derive Kepler’s laws, but have no knowledge of gravity. You do not know what causes the orbits of the planets to behave in the way they do; do you suppose that there is no cause or explanation for the behavior of the planets? Well, you could - it could be the black swan we’ve been looking for. But then when you get off the island, and learn about gravity, you would be wrong.
So what one is essentially committed to in claiming that there might be a black swan is that the world is fundamentally unintelligible. This is not a statement about epistemology and whether we can understand the world. One is committed to believing that, at some level of reality, things basically happen for no underlying reason. This would also entail that something like physics could succeed at describing the world to the point that it observes uncaused events, at which point further study would be pointless.
Nothing here contradicts Aquinas’s metaphysics, though. Much of Aristotle and Aquinas’s physics were false (although less than they are usually given credit for), and modern physics has displaced it. But modern physics has not displaced their completely general metaphysics.
It would depend what you mean. Aquinas would not deny that change and motion occur in the physical world, or that things in the world cause other things to change; his metaphysics is predicated on such facts. If, by “inherent,” you mean that all motion can occur without an Unmoved Mover, then I do not think “we know” that.
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Bagheera
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There is a basic assumption that “free will” exists. If that assumption is true, then causal chains coming from the exercising of that free will are “fresh”, uncaused by the previous state of affairs. After all if the “will” is caused / determined by the previous state of affairs, then it is not “free”. Of course the decision is influenced by the state of affairs, but it is not determined by them.
Also there are not only the deterministic laws of nature, there are many stochastic laws, too. One of them is the second law of thermodynamics. The fluctuation of entropy is not a deterministic process. As such new causal chains appear all the time, which are not determined by the previous state of affairs.
The micro-world (which was unknown in the times of Aquinas) is not deterministic, it is stochastic. These examples all point to the lack of global causation. Of course there are “local” causal chains. The world is simply more complicated then we know at this time. And the lack of existence of “global” causation does not make the world unintelligible, just more challenging.
But we are getting too fragmented. I suggest you present the “best” argument of Aquinas and we can concentrate on it. Either spell it out, or provide a link, and then we shall start the conversation on a common platform.
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polytropos
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This is not really problematic. Figuring God as a first cause of all change does not entail that changes are not intermediately explicable without reference to God. And nothing rules out the possibility that God initiate causal chains in accordance with the wills of free agents. If such a claim is false, we would have to find out what is wrong with the philosophical justifications for a per se causal series necessitating a purely actual first mover.
Somewhat paradoxically, if such an objection were successful, it would fall apart in light of any materialistic philosophy of mind that denies the reality of free will.
But a stochastic law is just indeterministic. It does not mean that what it models is uncaused. Indeed, quantum mechanics appears indeterministic, but again, if the events it models were truly uncaused, then there would be no point to study it further; there would be nothing more to figure out.
The fact that new causal chains appear is true, but does not violate any of Aquinas’s metaphysics. That a cause F could lead to either causal chain {A, B, C, …} or {X, Y, Z, …} indeterministically does not imply that the activity of F was not caused itself.
I have debated Aquinas’s First Way here (though it begins a bit later in the topic, around ~95ish posts in I believe). I am honestly not too interested in debating here, since that topic was pretty lengthy and recent. The gist of this thread seems to be “why try to provide a rational basis for faith when it’s so clearly fallacious?” and I’ve basically contended that there is no reason to regard the arguments as obviously fallacious.
I suppose I’d say that some good and accessible defenses of Thomistic cosmological arguments can be found here. It is kind of tough to find a suitably comprehensive defense of Aquinas’s arguments in one place. Here you can find an analytic defense of some of the arguments (if you skip to page 141, Feser’s paper is the first), but they are unfortunately largely cut off by Google. Let me look around and see if I can find something suitable for our purposes.
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Bagheera
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It refutes the notion of a SINGLE causal chain, which would necessitate a “first cause”. If there are new causal chains, then the “first cause argument” is simply an unsupported assertion. There could be several causal chains, neither of which is connected to a “first cause”.
Maybe there is “free will” and maybe there is not. We simply cannot know, even though for practical purposes we assume that there is. Materialistic philosophy does not deny the existence of “free actions”. It is a frequent misconception that materialism somehow equals determinism. Too bad that there is still a moratorium on discussing materialism / atheism, so these misconceptions must be left unchallenged. Even saying this I risk the threat of banning… even though this is not a “petition” to lift this “temporary” ban.
Deterministic == caused. If an event may have multiple causes, and there is no way to find out “which” possible cause was “responsible” for its occurrence, then you cannot have an uninterrupted causal chain, which could be “traversed” backwards, to reach a “first cause”.
It is not that simple. There could be a different “starting” point (not “F”, rather “G”) for both causal chains. The point is that the “first cause argument” assumes an uninterrupted, single causal chain, which is clearly false.
As you wish. I am simply curious, if there is one (or more) of the proofs of Aquinas, which you find compelling, which should be accepted by all atheists, as long as they are logical and rational.
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polytropos
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If the first cause argument assumed an uninterrupted, single causal chain, then I would agree, it would fail. This blog, linked to in the link I provided earlier, explains why such an objection does not meet the argument (now that I look at it, it also provides a relatively thorough, self-contained exposition of Aquinas’s First Way). To summarize the key points, a per se causal series is a series in which the causes do not have causal power intrinsically.* For instance, if I’m pushing a series of boxes on the floor, the last one is being pushed by the second-to-last one. The second-to-last one is only pushed by the third-to-last one. What the Aristotelian argues is not simply that a causal series cannot be infinite but that, if no cause in a causal series had any intrinsic power to cause other things, then there would not be causal power in the series at all. As such, as Feser notes, even if the causal series were cyclical or branches off in multiple directions, a first mover would be necessary.
*To be contrasted with a per accidens causal series, in which each cause has its own causal power. Aquinas’s paradigmatic example is a lineage of fathers and sons; a father begets a son and then dies, but the son still has causal power to beget another son, regardless of whether the father is still imparting such power to him (contrast with the boxes that I’m pushing on the floor; if you removed one box in the middle, then the remaining boxes cease to move). One might say that then not all changes would lead us to the first mover, but to refer to a per accidens causal series is really just to refer to causes that have their own causal power in a sense. The activity of the father begetting the son and the son growing up would consist of innumerable per se causal series. (This is similar to the fact that I am in a sense the first mover of the boxes, since nothing is, presumably, externally causing me to move the boxes. But in another sense, my body parts are moving each other. Hence we have immanent causation, and the causal series does not actually terminate with the person pushing the boxes.)
I’m not really saying that materialism entails determinism (and since I disagree that determinism must be true for Aquinas’s First Way to work, this does not apply to my point anyway). There is little question that there seems to be free will, but letting it succumb to fully physical mechanisms would prevent it from being any sort of unique objection to Aquinas’s First Way.
I think you are overstating the implications of the ban. One can’t start a thread on atheism or claim explicitly that God does not exist, but that does not mean that one cannot defend materialistic views.
As I’ve pointed out, the argument does not depend on a single uninterrupted causal chain. In any case, the fact that we don’t know which of multiple possible causes an event had would not imply that it is uncaused.
Well, if you are really interested, Feser does defend Aquinas’s proofs more fully in his book Aquinas (he defends parts of them on his blog, but tends not to state the arguments or metaphysical background in full).
I do believe that Aquinas’s Five Ways are sound. Do I think they are rationally binding on all atheists? I would not expect anyone to agree with them by simply reading the text in Summa Theologiae, because they do rely on specific metaphysical claims that most people today could not even articulate, whether they agree with them or not. I think most people a preconditioned to reject them, whether because they read The God Delusion or because they were told in an intro philosophy class that Hume and Kant destroyed them.
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Bagheera
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But argument is that all the causal chains can be traversed “backwards” and reach the same “starting point”. And since we know that there are distinct causal chains, with separate starting points, the “first cause” argument simply fails. Aquinas commits the fallacy of Quantifier Shift, which makes his argument logically incorrect.
Aquinas attempts to start from the observation of the physical reality, and wishes to establish an argument that using simple logic and relying on our observation one can reach the existence of God. This is the proper way to go. No “revelation”, just pure logic and the observance of the physical reality. If it would be successful, then there would be no place for atheism - or more precisely “a-deism”.
There are two problems with it. One is, that even this endeavor would be successful, it would never point to the God of Christianity. It would only point to some faceless “first cause”, “primary mover”, whatever, which does not necessarily exist today. The more serious problem is that Aristotle and Aquinas were totally ignorant of the “physics” of reality. Being ignorant, they speculated and came up with some “metaphysics”. They had no idea that “motion” is a relative term, that there is no difference between stationary existence and linear motion.
The trouble is that one cannot conduct a conversation with a written material. I actually read some of his blogs, and found many problems in them.
Generally speaking, if metaphysics is the same as physics, then the metaphysics is unnecessary. If the metaphysics is contradicted by physics, then metaphysics is incorrect and should be discarded. Those metaphysical assumption that form the basics of the 5 ways have been rendered incorrect by the advancement of physics.
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Portofino
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Aquinas also tries to show that the first cause is necessarily good, omnipotent, omniscent, omni-benevolent – all the good stuff
Not many of us outside the circle of Christianity may be convinced by these arguments – I among them – but, from there, one could go on to say “gee, all of these qualities sound awfully familiar to the God posited by Christianity” (which can work both ways, as there is a reasonable suspicion – especially for those who find problems with the arguments themselves – to posit that Aquinas may have been predisposed or biased to…find what he was looking to find, in the first place).What even Aquinas never claimed to do is try to prove the Trinity or the divity of Jesus, nor hell or the existence of the devil – not without Scripture, at least.
My own reservations do not have to do with science, per se, but witht the logic of the argument itself. I see a few possibilities, here. One is that there is an uncaused cause. Another is that perhaps we should question our understanding of causality; is it possible that we are not understanding causality in the correct way? Certainly, it is possible. In making an argument, one is assuming one’s understanding of causality is correct – whether the causuality of Aristotle or causality as posited by modern science. Both could be wrong. Another question would be, in terms of any temporal aspect to the uncaused cause argument, “is it perhaps our understanding of time that is limited and incomplete?” This question has been posed by scientists and philosophers as regards the question “what existed before the Big Bang?” The very question may not be sensical and may point to our own conceptual limitations.
In very general terms, it’s unclear to me whether the uncaused cause argument is logically sound – therefore, true – or whether it is more of a Zeno’s paradox kind of formulation, more along the lines of, “yes, it would certainly seem as if there would have to be a first cause.” Of course, a not unnatural question to ask, in that case, is, what caused the first cause? And if something that exists can exist without an antecendent cause (namely, the uncaused cause) then why not the universe itself? Thus the possibilities, as I understand them, are:
- There may be an uncaused cause to the universe
- The universe may not have a cause, in any sense in which we understand causality
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tonyrey
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Do you have an alternative explanation of the origin of truth, goodness, freedom, justice, beauty and love?Aquinas also tries to show that the first cause is necessarily good, omnipotent, omniscent, omni-benevolent – all the good stuff
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Portofino
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All of these questions lead, I think, to the ultimate question, “why does something exist, rather than nothing? Why are certain things ‘the case’? And how can there be order in the universe, if that order was not authored by some person or higher intelligence? Didn’t something have to make the universe?”
These are all compelling questions, and I do not claim to have the answers to them. I think the uncaused cause, or unmoved mover, is a hypothesis based on our understanding of what would be logically necessary, given our current understanding of causality. It posits the necessary existence of a form of being that must exist outside the universe itself, exerting itself on the universe. It’s something whose existence is posited – inferred – based on our current understanding of causality (and, probably, time, as well). I see two general caveats to this inference, however – 1. I’m not confident that our understanding of causality for all of the constituent parts of the universe applies, in turns, to the origin of the universe itself, taken as a whole (nor am I sure our understanding of causality for all the constituent parts of the universe is completely free of distortion and not subject to change); 2. since I cannot get outside the universe, to observe what’s going on, there would be no way for me to demonstrate to those who contest my allegedly sure and certain knowledge of the truth of my premises, that my hypothesis of the unmoved mover (of what I claim would have to exist, must exist) is actually the case. It’s certainly a possibly that it does exist, outside the universe, and exerts itself on the universe. What I don’t know is whether positing it would tell me more about limitations in my own understanding of the universe, however, as opposed to the nature of the universe itself; and, again, I can’t get outside the universe to see what’s going on (it is possible to leave the earth’s atmosphere and to leave this earth while still alive, though seemingly not possible to leave the universe itself, while still alive, and to experience first-hand what is going on behind the scenes, assuming there is any such thing as “behind the scenes” vis a vis the the universe itself – that is, anything beyond space, beyond time, and potentially beyond causality itself).
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tonyrey
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They are more useful, in my opinion, because they are more precise and highlight the value of existence.
There is no evidence that the universe must exist, still less that it must be orderly.
Scientific progress is based on the belief that our current understanding of causality is valid. There is no reason to suppose it can be easily discarded.
You need to justify the implication that it is the sole universe.
It seems the most adequate explanation in the absence of any proposed alternative.
We can’t get inside our minds to see what’s going on but we still draw reasonable conclusions about their value and significance - and even their origin. Can mindless objects produce minds? If so how?
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Portofino
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Bagheera
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Obviously you do.
He commits the fallacy of “quantifier shift”, something along the lines: “for every human there exists another human who is his mother” and from that he concludes that “there is a woman who is the mother of all humans” - which is clearly false. (It would be a proper corollary to say:" for every human there exists a woman, who is his mother").And so do I. The most glaring possibility is “on what grounds does one assume that the universe requires a creator?”. Before one can meaningfully ask “who created the universe?”, the prior question of “does the universe need a creator?” needs to be answered in the affirmative. And that is simply assumed, and not proven. Mind you this is a question for physics itself, not some nebulous metaphysics. The answer is - of course - given by the conservation laws, namely “matter / energy / momentum / etc cannot be created nor destroyed”.
So the answer is: “the existence of the universe is a brute fact, without a need for explanation”. The universe forms the platform for all the explanations.
There are lots of dumb dichotomies offered in the form: “how could the universe create itself?” as if anyone of sound mind would assert that. The universe did not “create” itself, the “universe simply exists”.
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