Stak Contra Sethbag: Sam Harris sucks!

[_DrW]

Those are very poor arguments. I'm not required to respect them nor should I be expected to refrain from sharing my opinion of them. In Aquinas's defense, they were written before we discovered that washing your hands is a good idea to prevent disease. I don't have as compelling a reason to forgive those still infatuated with them. And, again, if this is the depths of theology that needs to be grappled with, then the sensible view is that theology has little to offer.

Thank you.

[_EAllusion]

I share your feelings about the arguments you criticize. But:

(a) Not all premodern arguments are bad just because they are premodern. Many very ancient arguments are still just as good as ever, even though the people who constructed them never flossed their teeth, and may have died of sewage-borne diseases.

I'm not suggesting we should judge the Five Ways bad because they are premodern. Rather I am suggesting we can forgive Aquinas for offering poor arguments due to being limited by premodern knowledge base.

(b) One be trenchant without being abusive. But then as I said I am just a wuss, so don't mind me.

I don't think I'm being abusive. I called the arguments as representation of the best attempts at theistic justification pathetic. I didn't say this of any particular person. If I said they were devastatingly unconvincing, my language would've communicated the same thing.

[_EAllusion]

EAllusion, Your pointing out the gap between first cause and what people understand as God is valid to my understanding. I have heard others point it out. Aquinas, not being a real dumb fellow, knew as well. For him what we know as God is known by revelation. The proofs for him are thoughts reasoning about the being, God, first made known by revelation.

Yeah, my criticism isn't an uncommon one. It has the virtue of being correct. Because Aquinas offers these arguments as a near afterthought in a massive tome of marrying Christian theology with Aristotelian philosophy, some scholars argue what you have: that Aquinas was aware of this inadequacy and only meant to supplement revelatory knowledge with these gimmicky proofs. My reading of him leaves me skeptical of this, but I'm obviously not an Aquinas scholar. The reason I wrote my post is because of the assertion in this thread that if you accept scholastic causal analysis, Aquinas's proof of God follows. No it doesn't. It gets you to Aquinas's prime object of explanadum, but leaves a gap between that and a deity.

[_huckelberry]

EAllusion, Your pointing out the gap between first cause and what people understand as God is valid to my understanding. I have heard others point it out. Aquinas, not being a real dumb fellow, knew as well. For him what we know as God is known by revelation. The proofs for him are thoughts reasoning about the being, God, first made known by revelation.

Yeah, my criticism isn't an uncommon one. It has the virtue of being correct. Because Aquinas offers these arguments as a near afterthought in a massive tome of marrying Christian theology with Aristotelian philosophy, some scholars argue what you have: that Aquinas was aware of this inadequacy and only meant to supplement revelatory knowledge with these gimmicky proofs. My reading of him leaves me skeptical of this, but I'm obviously not an Aquinas scholar. The reason I wrote my post is because of the assertion in this thread that if you accept scholastic causal analysis, Aquinas's proof of God follows. No it doesn't. It gets you to Aquinas's prime object of explanadum, but leaves a gap between that and a deity.

EAllusion, I think I see your point I should not claim expertise on Aquinas. I know enough to admit my comment above was an oversimplification. I went to adult Catholic RCIA classes a few years back taught by a philosophy professor from a good secular college. He was careful to distance the "proofs" from being actually proofs.My quick comment followed that lead.I take a moment now to refresh with the Catechism and read a more subtle interplay between what is potentially understandable with reason and Gods leading our reason, actions which together grow faith and knowledge of God.

I think a couple of people have seen this thread as proposing that understanding the first cause argument well enough shows actual proof that God exists. I did not read Stak or Aristotle Smith as proposing such a thing. They could correct me if needed. I think they may have been thinking something more along the line that theology seeks to put together religious apprehensions to see if harmony or chaos results. To take fragments without regard to their meaning in the whole misses the point and is shallow. The excellent example of this of ridiculing transubstantiation by divorcing it from its meaning has been mentioned several times. I might add that the meaning and context of transubstantiation is not some academic point for a small group of experts but is something understood by millions of believers.Treating it like pancakes is empty.

[_huckelberry]

Adding a small point, the Summa starts first question, Nature and extent of Sacred Doctrine which explores, at least as introducing the subject, the mutual interrelation between reason and science with revelation and sacred doctrine. There are then a couple of pages with those traditional proofs. I read those using reason to try to clarify something about God. That is why next step in the discussion is Gods simplicity perfection and Goodness. These important expansions grow out of the basic idea of first cause and become important clarifications. Even so those ideas do not themselves arrive at personal, caring , purposing anything for individuals, communicating etc which people mean by God. Simplicity is an idea about God the reason proposes which ends up working with the more experiential images of God as personal.

I think the first cause argument opens an area where human curiosity may consider the possibility of God. It opens an area some might ask if life and human spirit are images of first cause and creator. Of course that is not a proof of anything. I think the Catholic expectation of reason is more that it is able to perceive God existence not that it can prove that perception.

[_palerobber]

People are the worst.

sure, but they're all we have.

I became a nihilist. I still view nihilism as the only logical option to belief. All else is delusional.

i can't tell if you're saying belief is delusional here or not.

[_palerobber]

It’s a stage modern kids have been going through now for decades, but while doing all this, these kids are groping around in the dark looking for their new “identity” to replace the one they just got rid of.

That is where Sam Harris enters the picture, he doesn’t provide them with squat [...]

and why should he?

that's the thing i don't get about your post.

[Guest]

It's dated philosophy, but you can grant scholastic casual reasoning to accept that a first cause exists without thinking that a case has been made that this first cause is a deity. All of Aquinas's five ways involve a conclusion that says "and this is what we call God." None of those cases effectively establish that what he set out to prove has to be god-like in its attributes.

This is not the case at all. Aquinas makes it pretty clear in Summa Theologiae the purpose of these 5 ways is not to show God exists, he does this because the Summa Theologiae is meant to be a textbook for men studying for the priesthood. Aquinas doesn’t even get to showing that the 5 ways prove just 1 thing exists and not 5 things until much later in the text ( Part 1, third article of Question 11). He has a whole other bevy of arguments that attempt to demonstrate why the thing proved in the 5 ways must be eternal, powerful, immutable, and wholly good. In his Summa Contra Gentiles he mentions that one shouldn’t use arguments to prove the “unique” truths of Christianity because they will always fall short against “The Fool” (Book 1, 9th chapter).

Aquinas has much longer and detailed arguments for traditional theism in his other works outside the Summa Theologiae, the 5 ways are simply not an effort to prove classical theism, nor does is represent his better arguments.

Here's a good reading of what those arguments entail

Those readings don’t show the steps of the argument and why it works or doesn‘t work, which sort of takes away from their force. Here is a deductively valid reconstruction of the 1st way from the actual text:

(P1) Some things are moved.
(P2) If something is moved to being X, then it is potentially but not actually X.
(P3) If something moves a thing to be X, then it (the mover) is in a state of actuality relevant to X.

(C1) If something were to move itself to be X, then it would both potentially but not actually X and also in a state of actuality relevant to X.
(Proof for C1) Conjunction and Modus Ponens of P1, P2, P3

(P4) But it is not possible for something to both potentially but not actually X and also in a state of actuality relevant to X

(C2) It is not possible for something to move itself to be X
(Proof for C2) Modus tollens, C1, P4

(P5) If it is not possible for something to move itself to be X, then if something is moved, it is moved by something else.

(C3) If something is moved, it is moved by something else
(Proof for C3) Modus Ponens, C2, P5.
~Fun fact here, Aquinas actually spend about three times the amount of text for the entire 5 ways on just defending C3 in Summa Contra Gentiles (Part 1, chapter 13)~

(P6) If the series of movers were to go on infinitely, then there would be no first mover.

(P7) If there were no first mover, then there would be no motion.

(C4) There is a first mover
(Proof for C4) Modus tollens, P1, P7

Money Shot: That first mover is the thing that everyone takes to be God

So taking into account the actual fact that this isn’t an argument for classical theism, what makes it so terrible? My biggest objection is to (P6) because it fails to take into a account the distinction between an actual regress (which doesn’t prove there is no “first mover”) and the impossibility of achieving an infinite collection by single addition. ETA- And this wasn't really shown until the Principia Mathematica in the 20th century.

[_MrStakhanovite]

Because Aquinas offers these arguments as a near afterthought in a massive tome of marrying Christian theology with Aristotelian philosophy

What the hell are you talking about? it is near the beginning of the Summa Theologiae, its the 2nd question is Part 1. There is like...2,000 more pages to go.

[_EAllusion]

What the hell are you talking about? it is near the beginning of the Summa Theologiae, its the 2nd question is Part 1. There is like...2,000 more pages to go.

Afterthought as in they are offered after and secondary to a preexisting belief in God's existence, not in terms of the chronological order they appear in his book.

With regard to your other point, it's been a while since I read the relevant portions of Summa, but to my recollection, Aquinas goes from here to infer that the prime mover is simple, infinite, immutable, eternal, and necessarily all-powerful all-knowing and therefore God in classical sense. But he does not particularly make the case that we are dealing with a personal deity in those later arguments as that's already granted. You argue that he wasn't trying to establish classical theism, much less Christianity, with the Five Ways - a point I don't think is under dispute -, but the question is whether he was attempting to establish a god. I know that's a common way to read him in standard phil of religion texts I read, so merely asserting otherwise does not persuade me.