| 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. |
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.