[btilly]

I encourage you to not be flippant about dismissing people who think that your metaphysical arguments don't hold water.

Thomas Aquinas' actual first cause argument is trivially refuted by the possibility of infinite regress.

Your musings about the nature of a thing and its telos, is an attempt to impose a human conceit about how we understand reality, on reality itself. The "human nature" that you're talking about "fully actualizing" is a concept that exists in human minds, not reality. While you might appeal to some sort of Platonic ideal, there is no evidence that any Platonic ideal actually exists.

Any musings about "the nature of God" establishes nothing more than a concept in someone's mind. That concept has no existence, other than that granted by the thinking of people who have that concept. In particular, a concept created relatively recently by humans, did not create those humans. Let alone the world that those humans live in.

These arguments are all sophistry. They do not, and cannot, establish any meaningful existence to the kind of God that is described in your favorite selection of religious texts. And they are only persuasive to people who are easily persuaded due to the conclusion fitting their preexisting religious beliefs.

[lo_zamoyski]

If you're going to criticize a position, the least you can do is understand the basics of what you're attacking. Otherwise, why waste your time jousting with straw men?

> Thomas Aquinas' actual first cause argument is trivially refuted by the possibility of infinite regress.

Except it doesn't. That you claim it does means you are familiar with some caricature of the argument (Dawkins & co. are famous for these, but they are not alone). You even come across such claims in philosophy departments where actual knowledge of Aquinas is conspicuously absent and consequently where misconceptions easily flourish. This is basic stuff about Aquinas, not some rarefied debate about his finer points.

> Your musings about the nature of a thing and its telos, is an attempt to impose a human conceit about how we understand reality

First of all, I was correcting a misunderstanding of Aquinas, not defending telos. However, it is clear you are unfamiliar with the subject yourself. First, what you think of telos appears to be something like conscious human purpose (which is a species of telos, but not telos in the general sense). In fact, you need telos to explain the very regularity of efficient causality that empirical science presupposes. Why is it that striking a match predictably results in fire? Why doesn't it result in an elephant or a million dollars or something else each time, or nothing at all? It consistently results in fire because the match is causally ordered toward the effect of fire that is actualized by striking. The cause-effect relation is itself teleological. Furthermore, what characterizes minds is intentionality, and intentionality is teleological. Without telos, you have no intentionality, and without intentionality, you have no rationality.

Second, given that Aquinas is an Aristotelian when it comes to the problem of universals, the notion of Platonic ideals is simply nonsensical and irrelevant in this context. Human nature is instantiated by human beings, and it is actualized as we develop and grow, to a significant degree by our choices and actions.

> Any musings about "the nature of God" establishes nothing more than a concept in someone's mind. ...etc, etc...

This just sounds like a convoluted way of saying you think God is a fiction. Okay, sure, you think God is a fiction. So what?

(FWIW, according to Aquinas and others — and you see this in Exodus 3:14 as well — God cannot be conceptualized strictly speaking, except by means of analogical devices, as God, according to Aquinas and others, "is" the act of existence. Concepts are abstracted essences; "to be a sunflower" or "to be an alligator" signify the concepts "sunflower" and "alligator", but "to be" does not. There is no concept for "to be", strictly speaking.)

> These arguments are all sophistry.

I would encourage that you attain at least basic proficiency in the subject matter before drawing such hasty conclusions, but you don't seem to respond well to encouragement, so I'll leave it at that.

[btilly]

> I would encourage that you attain at least basic proficiency in the subject matter before drawing such hasty conclusions, but you don't seem to respond well to encouragement, so I'll leave it at that.

I respond just fine to encouragement. It is unwarranted intellectual arrogance that I react poorly to.

The world is full of too many arguments for any person to master. We therefore must find ways to evaluate arguments from first principles, to help us decide which arguments are worth further investigation.

Here is such a principle. Any argument about physical reality which is not rooted in physical evidence can only result in a correct conclusion by coincidence. And any model of physical reality, no matter how accurate in experience, may prove to be wrong upon the discovery of more physical evidence.

As an example, Kant argued that Euclidean geometry was a necessary property of space. This was widely accepted, and was in perfect agreement with experience. And yet his a priori conclusion about physical reality, was later found to be false.

Therefore, only arguments based on physical evidence should be considered for the question of how the universe was created. And there must be room to question even them. Which means that conclusions from the philosophy that you accept, should only be accepted by others if better arguments are presented which come from evidence. And, even then, our acceptance should come with an asterisk.

That's one principle. Here is a second.

Any argument that results in a false conclusion, must either start with a false premise, or include a mistake. We can conclude this entirely without examining the argument.

You have presented an argument that there can be no rationality without intentionality. However even a basic acquaintance with the philosophy of mathematics demonstrates a system which contains rationality without any form of intentionality. Therefore your conclusion about rationality is wrong. And therefore your conceptualization of a teleos, and insistence on its necessity, is likewise wrong.

It may be interesting. It may be entertaining. But it is clearly a poor intellectual foundation from which to try to understand rationality.

By all means, you're free to entertain yourself by continuing to try to understand the world through made-up ideas about how things must be. Just don't expect others to take your claims seriously.

[galaxyLogic]

Great statements. It seems clear to me that people who argue for the truth of religious statements do that not because they want other people to know the truth, but because they want to keep on believing what they already believe in. And they want other people to believe them so they can exert power on other people. If they are right then surely we must do what they say.

It is illustrative that people arguing for religious truths never bona fide accept the possibility that they might be wrong. They might say for argumentative reasons: "I don't assume God exists ..." but then they in effect continue with "But let me proove to you why it must be true that "God" exists". :-).

I put "God" in quotes above because it is not clear what people using that word in fact mean by it. Oh, God is "everything". Oh, God is "perfection". God is Love. God is Pure Goodness. What have you.

The problem with such arguments or "definitions" is that if God is Love, then Love must also be God. If God is everything then everything must also be God.

So they are arguing about properties and attributes of "God", but they are not defining clearly what it is they are arguing about.

[btilly]

The lack of clarity is often the point. They try to get you to accept that God is the uncreated cause, then slip into talking about the God of Abraham. For them this is a natural substitution, because in their belief system the two are one and the same.

But no careful thinker should accept that those two set of ideas are a priori the same thing. It is absolutely true that, if you accept the Bible, then the God of the Bible is the only possible candidate for the uncreated cause. But there are many possible belief systems with an uncreated cause, where the Jews are not the chosen people of that uncreated cause.