Thomas Aquinas Proof for God
Now, I've been looking through the forum and been thinking that'll I start a thread on WHY God exists. But, what fun would that be? So, I've put a link to Thomas Aquinas' 5 Proofs for God and I just wanted to hear the arguments against it from those who don't believe in "The Prime Mover"!
So what are the 5 proofs? I haven't read anything by Aquinas.
http://jcu.edu/philosophy/Gensler/RE/r-b2--00.htm
This puts it very simply.
I could argue against them - but I have surpassed my willingness to discuss religion on this forum for the next little while.
That being said, Summa Theologica is a great text - regardless of religious belief (unless the thought of God drives you into an instant rage).
I wrote a poem on a leaf and it blew away...
Points one and two: why is it assumed that the "mover" or "cause" has to have a conciousness?
Likewise, in point four, it states that some "things" are greater than others, which is certainly true, but why is the greatest "thing" assumed to have a conciousness?
__________________
"Personal note: When I was a little kid my mother told me not to stare into the sun. So once when I was six, I did. At first the brightness was overwhelming, but I had seen that before. I kept looking, forcing myself not to blink, and then the brightness began to dissolve. My pupils shrunk to pinholes and everything came into focus and for a moment I understood. The doctors didn't know if my eyes would ever heal."
-Pi
That would be the main argument, yes. But here's the thing about Aquinas - my experience with him at least.
Most people who are introduced to Aquinas are introduced to the 5 points (in similar fashion to which I posted them). And if you are not a staunch theist, you will probably have a similar reaction to Juniper.....this was my reaction. I strongly disliked Aquinas until i was forced (sort of...it was for history class) to read the Summa.
The text is full of holes....but Aquinas pretty much admits that in the text. That somehow for me gave it value.
Besides who can argue with the textual 12th century hug of science and religion....despite the holes.
I wrote a poem on a leaf and it blew away...
#1 to #3 are taken directly from Aristotle, except Aquinas transcribes in the Christian God for no good reason. Bertrand Russel's response to these arguments is that it commits the fallacy of composition. Russel argued there is no reason to think the universe needed a cause, just because aspects of the universe have a cause.
Junniper is echoing Kant's refutation of the cosmological argument, which was that the argument that the greatest of things is God is flawed because it is just a rearranged ontological argument, and ontological arguments are flawed because they can only operate off of the a priori assumption of God's existence.
"If the national mental illness of the United States is megalomania, that of Canada is paranoid schizophrenia."
- Margaret Atwood
Basically it works if you have faith, Aquinas merit is the capacity to build logical arguments to justify faith. It is more how he says, that what he says. It is so well constructed that many people still appeal to first cause until today as granted as a good argument, without considering they may be reducing their god to the fart that started all.
It looks like 1, 2, 3 and 5 are related to the argument that the big bang implies the existence of something like a God.
Even if one does not want a God involved in the creation of the universe 13.73 billion years ago, one needs some other cause or one needs to argue that the big bang did not occur.
Assuming we accept the big bang, a non-God type cause for it would need to have three characteristics. Let's use vacuum fluctuations as an example.
1) The vacuum fluctuations would need some sort of eternal space in which to operate that does not require a cause so there is no infinite regression of causes having all burnt out by now. This seems to be related to Aquinas' first three arguments.
2) Vacuum fluctuations have to be able to create a universe out of nothing. They do seem to be able to create paired particles briefly out of nothing before they annihilate each other, but I don't know how large these particles can be. This would be related to Aquinas' first two arguments.
3) Vacuum fluctuations have to have some controlling mechanism since we do not see randomly created universes all over the place. This would be related to Aquinas' fifth argument. One control mechanism would be some consciousness that made a choice, but that would lead almost directly to a God. I suspect the multiverse is another way of hiding these universes from view while at the same time allowing non-conscious chance to run randomly. The fact that we can't see these other universes becomes a problem with verifying this idea.
Big banging at the void.Originally Posted by JCamilo
YesNo "The fact that we can't see these other universes becomes a problem with verifying this idea."
If the multiverse theory makes sense scientifically, and many cosmologists seem to think it does, then our inability to verify the existence of these other universes ought not push us towards the explanation of it being God's will that began the cosmos. You can't see God either and He makes absolutely no sense scientifically.
I don't know if any cosmologist considers the multiverse more than speculation. It might be possible to conduct an experiment that gave indirect evidence for or against this, but I have not heard of any.
What makes me think that a choice was made in the creation of the universe is the currently existing evidence from near and shared death experiences. This doesn't directly point to any specific God, but it does suggest more is going on than an atheist would like to admit.
And yet those near death experiences have been replicated in the laboratory by stimulating certain regions of the brain. I'll look for a source on that.
I think they have been linked to a region of the brain associated with REM sleep. Vision and hearing is also linked to the brain through the eyes and ears.
This doesn't discredit them. Actually, it raises them from ideas to experiences. Going further, if some other species has a similar brain structure, they may be expected to experience similar things. Again, that doesn't discredit the experience.
I'm not entirely sure what you mean by "discredit," but if those experiences can be demonstrated to have a physical cause then it does disprove the claim that they are evidence of the supernatural.
I don't think these experiences are "supernatural", but that would depend on what one means by "natural". There's more to nature than what popped out of the big bang or that popping would not have occurred.
They are experiences, and not just fanciful ideas, and so they have some cause. Claiming they had no cause would be one way to "discredit" them.
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