What do you think of Thomas Aquinas?

i agree entirely with Umberto Eco in this.

What did Umberto Eco have to say?

"Aquinas was a fascist" - Umberto Eco

Eco was a pathetic old commie who had an ax to grind against the Church. He was brilliant, but let's not forget what he really was.

brainlet and a pseud

Right now I'm not interested in post-Schism theology. I'm trying to understand the millennium of shared, consonant theological commonalities between the Orthodox and Catholic churches first, in order to see if there is a way to reconcile them, before I even try to take on those thinkers who came about after those distinctions had already solidified.

don't take this poster seriously

Very interesting posts, thank you.

Much better Christian theologians out there and his ideas are ultimately heretical anyway.

>heretical

Not in the One True Church, they're not.

Biggest maker of shit up of all time

this is not the way to post seriously:
>calls Aquinas heretical
>doesn't explain how
>doesn't explain why Aquinas isn't heretical
>defaults onto dogmatic Catholic chauvinism that cannot convince anyone who isn't already Catholic
please do better, both of you. these conversations are seen by more people than you realize.

>Google "Aquinas was a fascist" (with quotes)
>this thread is one of only two results
>in the other one the complete quote is "This is not to suggest that St. Thomas Aquinas was a fascist, nor Adolf Hitler a scholastic"
Can I get a source on that Eco quote?

Augustine was better

don't take this poster seriously

How is Aquinas heretical?

I know that he was wrong about everything meaningful, and that he isn't even to be feared as some major philosopher. He simpy wrote a lot of doctrine according to a system.

The one single thing that he was most wrong about, is that hatred of god, misotheism, is the greatest sin-translated: "the worst thing possible". On the exact contrary, hatred of god, or of the idea of god as it is understood, is the highest possible good. Because hatred of the idea of god, as expressed historically, is hatred of all that which is deleterious to human beings. Secondarily, he was also wrong in his five ways, but this is a distant second. The single most important and salutary moral principle is to hate god, and to cause every other human being in this world to also hate god. Fuck christ, fuck god, and fuck the holy spirit. We are their moral superiors. We insects.

Not him, but thomistic philosophy(besides being completely nonsensical) subscribes to divine simplicity, which creates lots of problems which renders god unintelligible since his existence is his pure essence. If thats the case then gods essence is something that we can not know and the best thomists can be are agnostics since its impossible to know gods essence and therefore have any real knowledge of god, extending to his existence.

What do you think the issues with his five ways are?

How can God not be simple? If he is composed of something simpler then there is something which precedes him. And how is being unable to know the essence of God a problem when knowledge of God's existence is based on faith?

Do you really doubt that Aquinas had a mystic side to him? Have you ever listened to his hymns? He merely asserts that we can't know God's essence intellectually, since it's beyond our intellect. We can know God through our mystic union with him. Surely the Orthodox would agree with that.

>how can god not be simple

I'm not saying god wouldn't be simple, but thats part of whats heretical about it when you try to map it out onto the christian god. It becomes utterly contradictory.

>we can know God through our mystic union with him
Here's another big chunk of unintelligibility. If we can not know god intellectually, then it is impossible to concretely say anything about him. How does a mystic union confer any information(a domain of your intellect) about god? Oh its a mystery of course. Wow great argument.

If all you can know about god is what some mystic union tells you than there's nothing that the mystic union CAN'T tell you, it could be satan telling you god is X and it would be impossible for you to differentiate anything.

Aquinas is the epitome of that John Locke quote, something along the lines of "All sects, as far as reason will help them, gladly use it; When it fails them, they cry out it is a matter of faith, and above reason."

He frequently "proved" arguments by setting up sneaky strawmen. Really masterful at it really. Pompous too. The five ways are trash. The first two assume that the universe can't be infinite but God can. The third assumes that the universe must by contingent but God isn't. Four is transcendental because-it-is-imagined-it-must-exist mental drool, not even really an argument. Five is that since physical laws exist God had to have set them. This all boils down to "Oh yeah if God isn't real who created the universe? Checkmate!" I guess if you just open up agnostically and name an infinite universe bang/crunch/multiverse thing God I could get along with this guy but you just know he's with the Catholic Church and had this really dogmatic idea of a beardy guy in the sky who talked to people. As if his five points proved anything remotely close to that, or at all.

I liked his book about Aristotle.

Where do you think Aquinas inserts his strawmen?

i believe user was alluding to a thread from the other day about eco's essay on ur-fascism.

It's cute, and it's a great source of info, but you always know at the start of the process what his conclusions will be. Has he ever surprised you?

>Ever since the creation of the world, his invisible attributes of eternal power and divinity have been able to be understood and perceived in what he has made. As a result, they have no excuse;

You can say that but it doesn't make it true.

>*takes hit of weed*
>come on bro, like you can just tell god is like, all around us, like, in this piece of dirt you can see gods like power

Eco's dead?

It's an intuition.

Ah yes, our intuitions, they've never led us astray. Truly this is the brilliance of christian theology, relying on our intuition to tell us the truth of reality.

All facts are built on intuition.

Augustine and Aquinas are quintessential Atheists.

The Orthodox get very retarded when anyone tries to investigate the divine.

Isn't that what idealism is?

You don't think Plato had some idea of the Forms before he tried to justify it?

*fedoras tip*

Great example!
Hahahaha

Fuck off butterfly

Based

Someone has played you, hard.

This should be edifying:

mostholyfamilymonastery.com/catholicchurch/catholicism-vs-eastern-orthodoxy-essence-one-god/

“God as it is understood”
You are assuming I “understand” God to be your definition, which I don’t.
What if you were to talk to a theologian who “understood” God as “that than which nothing greater can be thought” rather than viewing him “historically” as you say, and attributing all human evils and misfortunes to some aspect of his being?

For this to work, you’d need to do a few things.
Firstly, you can’t make an assertion about what God’s nature is without arguing why your supposition is necessarily true, since otherwise the person you are debating with will just sidestep your assertion of God, as anyone could and would. Saying that God represents all human evil would be a massive thesis to defend and prove before you could say anything else.

Beyond that, a refutation rather than a denial to engage with Aquinas’ five ways would be preferable, as I don’t know what you mean by “he was wrong”.

It’s an interesting interpretation, but don’t mix up an interpretation with a definition, as one needs nothing and is subjective, and the other is highly demanding of preliminary substantiation.

Plato’s livelihood didn’t hinge on him coming up with something that justified a belief in forms.

He is among the top 3 philosophers of all time.

Neither did Aquinas. He was a monk dude, he didn't have to do anything.

He did kinda have to not publish findings hostile to Catholicism.

>since the creation of the world
>world
>created
>not eternal and uncreated
heh, gave me a chuckle

Oh well gee that changes everything. So what? He didn't have to publish the things he did. The man came from a rich family that owned castles. He didn't have to do anything for his livelihood but even if he did, what the hell would that prove? Arguments are either good or they aren't regardless of the motivation to make them.

If you think they’re good arguments then I can’t help you lmao.

Monks do a LOT of work in monasteries. Remember: the goal of a monastery was to become an autarchy (i.e. self-sufficient). Monks didn't rely on artistans or craftsmen from outside. They did much of the work themselves. They also had a strict prayer schedule, which you can find out by reading Benedict's rules for monks.

What do you mean ?

I'm responding to a guy asserting that Aquinas was somehow compelled to write the Summa Thealogia and his other philosophical works. Sure, monks had to pray and do their chores, but no monk in the world is forced to do what Aquinas did and that's the point.

I didn't say anything about whether the arguments were good. I'm trying to explain what the genetic fallacy is.

It’s not a fallacy if it’s not used as an argument. Aquinas was wrong about the existence of god and there are numerous real arguments to be had there. Pointing out that Aquinas had preconceived notions he needed to prove (in order for anything positive to come from his publications) is just a nudge for christlarpers to examine him critically.

>Serious philosophers don't hold some preconceived notion

The preconceived notion is all there is. Even for science.

>Serious philosophers don't hold some preconceived notion, and then look for arguments to justify said notion.
You think this is a nudge for Christians to examine Aquinas critically? That looks like flat out dismal of Aquinas, and an urge to not take him seriously because of his motivations and background. If that's the case it is a textbook genetic fallacy.

Every philosopher who ever develops anything has preconceived notions. A concept can't be tested prior to conception.

It’s an abrasive nudge. Religious preconceived notions are unusual in that they’re held closely and typically from childhood, with heavy reinforcement from society all the way. That’s very different from having an original idea and then checking it.

James Joyce thought the same.

What are some good arguments for or against the existence of God?

Are preconceived religious notions any different than the preconceived scientific notions that used to be taught to people all their lives, like the earth being flat or the sun revolving around the earth? What about the notions that modern people are taught as soon as they're able to learn, like the earth being round or the earth revolving around the sun? I don't think your distinction between religious notions and other notions has any substance. None of the preconceived notions stop us from developing our knowledge or rejecting them outright, like Aquinas and Galileo did in their respective fields.

>millennium

700 years at best, more likely 500 years

You’re conflating unfalsifiable faith-based beliefs with things that can be readily tested.

Metaphysical proofs are falsifiable with logic, what hell are you talking about?

CS Lewis writes in a similar way but its more subtle.

They're just having fun, though they might not realize it themselves.

But don't worry te reputation of the Church has been tarnied enough that a conversation on Yea Forums won't change anything.

Some people act like Aquinas just popped into the scene and confirmed everybodies already held beliefs. That's ridiculous because he went against the grain. Most of the church was against Aristotle and Aquinas was the one who really started changing peoples mind.

Your arguments are on point, but can't they be leveled against any kind of theology ? Ultimately what do monotheists have besides conviction that Revelation in Scripture is a guide to God ?

The links advertised below this videos are rather hilarious. Amazing how a uptight religious website can have so much in common with Yea Forums.

As much as I like theology as a pasttime you have to admit this whole Catholic vs Orthodox shitshow only serves to weaken ther faith in the eyes of outside observers.

Only three years ago I would have never believed that going to Yea Forums would make me feel good about being an atheist.

And its entirely possible for "facts" derived on intuition to be wrong. You should be more humble on the limits of your knowledge than just claiming "well its so obvious that god is real because i feel so!"

He probably did, and its a dumb concept so not really a great example of good philosophy.

>t. Brainlet

It wasn't edifying at all. This is just more theology gobbledeygook that asserts wild premises with no justification, if a justification is given its always something along "well this we know to be true!". The video talks about essence as if its something he knows but subscribes to catholic theology which states that it can not be known. Just full on contradictory.

>dumb concept
>still debated over 2400 years later

Scientists can have preconceived notions, yes, but that doesn't mean that science reaffirms those preconcieved notions the way Aquinas does. Take for instance the aether, physicists for hundreds of years took the aether to be true on intuition, but science at least provides a mechanism for determining if these notions are valid in any meaningful sense. Next thing you know modern physicists overturn the common intuition on physics.

>a concept can't be tested prior to conception
Of course thats true, but the problem with aquinas(and a lot of philosophers), is they don't even think to test their concept. Theology is the absolute worst because it makes no claims and is so vacuous of actual content that you can never tell if its wrong or right. They try to sound like they make concrete claims, i.e. god is all loving and created the universe,but then what conclusion should you derive from that claim? That the universe should be full of love. But wait! Umm.. well there could be a creator full of love that created a less than perfect universe for some reason.. we can't know that reason though because its unknowable.

The whole enterprise is so intellectually bankrupt. Each concept introduced is so vaguely defined that it could explain anything, and because of that explains nothing.

>Metaphysical proofs are falsifiable with logic
Based on what premises? On some level they must be induction.

They can be leveled against any kind of theology as far as that theology makes claims that can describe any possible reality we live in. If its the case that the catholic worldview(or whoever) can describe any possible reality, then it doesn't actually describe anything about our reality.

You don't really understand the five ways user.
It is fine though, because Aquinas is probably the most misunderstood of the great philosophers.

Anyway, to give an example of this , you write "The third assumes that the universe must be contingent but God isn't."

I just don't think you understand the argument. Now,this is not to say that I am totally convinced that it is valid, but it is certainly stronger than how it is commonly caricatured.
In any case, I'll try my best to set it out adequately, but I will ask you to please forgive any errors I make. I am no expert.

The third way begins with the claim that 1) Contingent things exist.

Now, contingent things are commonly conceptualized as simply things that exist, but might not have existed; they might also be characterized as things which come into existence and pass out of existence. (Aquinas actually has a different and far more technical definition of what a contingent thing is based on his metaphysics, but I am not studied it enough to give his conception justice, so I will stick with the common-sense conception) In any case, it would would seem that this first claim is pretty commonsensical, so we shall not doubt it at this time.

The next step in the argument is to consider the hypothesis that 2) All things are contingent things. Is this possible?

It would seem that this is not possible, although I must say that the argumentation as to why this is not possible is actually very often mischaracterized and misunderstood.

(cont)

The common (and incorrect) conception of why Aquinas thought it was impossible for all things to be contingent goes something like this:

"Given infinite time, all things which can pass out of existence will pass out of existence: now, since nothing can come from nothing, it would seem that not all things can be contingent things"

But this argument is clearly obviously fallacious! There is nothing logically impossible about an infinite chain of contingent things: one contingent thing might cause another to come into being, then pass away, and that other might cause something else, then pass away, and so on ad infinatum. SO this line of reasoning fails.

HOWEVER, this is not the claim that Aquinas is making!

(cont.)

He's wrong about Divine Simplicity, Orthodox is the right position, Catholics eternally btfo

To formulate a proof argument is to test it, because by it's nature a proof is something that if logically valid and the premises are true, a rational person must accept it. If you would read further than the first page of the Summa you would see how logic dictates to Aquinas that if God exists he would also have to be X, Y, and Z. A failure on your part to understand the arguments or to even make any effort to comprehend the reasoning is not an indictment on theology, but on you.

Aquinas actually wrote a sort of summary of the Summa intended for Layman and with just a quick look you can see how he gets from 'God exists' to 'God is good' or 'God is eternal' and so on. These aren't just things that he asserts for no reason.

dhspriory.org/thomas/Compendium.htm

Your question doesn't make any sense to me.

A complete retard, a one-eyed man amongst the blind.

The claim that Aquinas is making, that it is impossible for all things to be contingent things, is a far more interesting claim than the characture commonly attacked.

One can certainly accept that there exists an infinite chain of contingent things causing other contingent things: indeed, Aquinas considers this possibility to be philosophically quite sound, as he believed that there were no valid philosophical arguments against a world that had always existed (although he rejects such a world out of deference to revelation)

But the deep point that Aquinas is making is that, if one accepts the claim that "all things are contingent things" then IT WOULD FOLLOW that nothing exists (an absurdity). The reason that such would follow is this: even if the world consists of a infinite series of contingent things causing other contingent things to come into existence, the series [or infinite set] itself, if it was merely contingent in its existence would at some point not exist. But if at any point this series [or set of all things] did not exist, then it could never exist again: for it is impossible for anything to come from nothing on its own accord. So nothing would exist.

But there is something, rather than nothing, so it seems that assuming that all things are contingent things results in an absurdity.

So not all things are contingent things.

>One can certainly accept that there exists an infinite chain of contingent things causing other contingent things: indeed, Aquinas considers this possibility to be philosophically quite sound,
Are you sure you have that right? I thought to be contingent is to be an instrument. A hammer is an instrument and it doesn't hammer nails by itself. It has to be moved by a hand which itself is being moved by something else and that something else is being moved by something else and so on until we get to the unmoved mover. To say an infinite contingent series can exist is to say that instruments can move by themselves, which is to say the hammer can pick itself up and hit a nail.

So so far, my presentation of the argument runs something like.

1. There exist contingent things.
2. If all things are contingent things, then nothing would exist (an absurdity).

From this, it may be argued that, 3) it is not the case that all things are contingent things.

There must exist, therefore, something which is not merely contingent in its existence, but rather exists NECESSARILY, something which does not come into being and pass out of being, but rather exists unchangingly, a being whose (to use Thomistic metaphysics) existence and essence are one.

At this point, I have to stop: I'll leave the argument unfinished. As I have some work I need to do, and I hate sitting at the computer this long. But I hope you can see why the argument is a little different than has commonly been portrayed.

Nevertheless, I am somewhat sceptical as to whether it establishes it's conclusion soundly ( I am distrustful of metaphysics in general) but I thought I would try my best to paraphase the argument in a way Tommy portrays it.

I do know that my presentation is not a perfect one, so I hope someone who has a better understanding of the argument will assist me by setting it out clearer than I have.

I am certainly NOT sure I have that right. I am just trying my best.

Me too man. These things are confusing.

I suppose for his staunch conviction to prove logically the existence of God. Traditional platonist-inspired eastern churches hate that and claims that is impossibile to rationalize the mystery of God. Thus Thomas in the end was doomed to fail his quest to rationalize god, and his rational approach started to grow separated from the belief of God - apparently not necessary on a strictly logical view of the Universe - and thus accidentaly opening the way to modern agnosticism and atheism

He would love this book.

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>haha stupid philosophers how dare they think

>>Thomism btfo with facts and logic¡¡¡
>HIT LAIK AN SUSCRIBE TO MY NEW YT CHANEL, WERE I DISMANTLE RELIYION WITH REASON AND FATS¡¡¡
>xDDDDDD

Yikes

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Kant debunked him.

Everything he ever wrote or maybe just a part of it?

Critque of pure reason for metaphysics.
Critque of practical reason for ethics.

That sounds like a good thing though

That's a little vague. Aquinas and Kant didn't agree on anything then?

If my only experience with Kantians were from this board I would think they were the dumbest motherfuckers in the world.

Well reading Kant jumbles up your brain in a bad way.

If my only experience with thomists were from this board I would think they were the dumbest motherfuckers in the world. Luckily I have outside experience with thomists so I KNOW they're the dumbest motherfuckers in the world.

Kant never read Aquinas and never accurately engaged with his proofs, just his proofs as they were transmitted to him by others.

I got laid after reading the summa, I thank Aquinas and God everyday for that gift. His ways are truly mysterious.

Repeating somebodies insult while changing a few words never works out.

God helps you find love, not sex

:3

Ahh thank god we finally have someone who truly understands Aquinas. Would you mind explaining to me how the two highlighted parts are not flat out contradictory?

And then when you explain that can you explain how his justification for why there can not be an infinite regress being "because then there would be no first mover" is not one of the biggest examples of hiding(not so subtly) your conclusion in your premises?

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That means the insult wasn't very good to begin with.

The first statement is a law of this universe, God is outside of this universe, therefore he is not bounds by the laws of this universe

>His deal was pure undiluted autism.
So you're saying he's /ourguy/

Oh okay, special pleading. Got ya.

What I'm saying that when you merely repeat somebody, it makes me think you couldn't come with anything original. I can't see an intelligent person doing it. I don't why it would mean the original insult wasn't good. Any idiot can repeat everything he sees, does that mean nothing that gets repeated could be good?

That’s cool that you say that here, so close to our guy. It makes you seem more powerful, a more divine member of something than any other board.

...:3

>Does that mean nothing that gets repeated could be good

Thats literally how memes work. If something is good it will be repeated. If you're now claiming that it isnt good enough to get repeated than it didn't have much memetic value in the first place.

See

How does it make sense that God would be bound by any of the laws of this universe, which he created?

God is found through faith not fiddling about with math.
Burgers know better for this.

Explain

Aquinas is NOT a philosopher, he's a theologian. Its basically handicapped philosophy performed under a number of arbitrary constraints.

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Okay you dumbass,

"Whatever is in motion must be put in motion by another"

IS IN NO WAY CONTRADICTORY WITH A FIRST MOVER. DID YOU NEVER TAKE A LOGIC CLASS? WHY THE FUCK DO YOU THINK ARISTOTLE ARGUED FOR AN "UNMOVED MOVER"? IT WOULD BE A CONTRADICTION IF AQUINAS ARGUED THAT THE MOVER WAS IN MOTION, BUT HE DOES NOT. HIS WHOLE ARGUMENT IS MEANT TO SHOW THAT THERE IS SOMETHING WHICH CAUSES MOTION WHICH IS NOT ITSELF "IN MOTION". IF SOMETHING IS NOT IN MOTION, THEN IT DOES NOT NEED TO BE "PUT IN MOTION" BY THE TERMS OF THE ARGUMENT.

JESUS CHRIST, I GUESS BASIC READING COMPREHENSION IS NOT YOUR STRONG SUIT HUH?

If God is beyond the universe, how would you know even a single fact regarding their nature, and the manner by which they operate? You only have the universe for your reference, everything you reference will be of the universe.

Imagine unironically not believing in God

Imagine unironically falling for the God meme.

I believe in the Divine, it's name just isn't Yahweh.

He reminds me of a brainlet version of Whitehead, or proto Deleuze

I responded a little uncharitably to your post before, but upon thinking it over, I think a more measure response would be better. We are all, after all trying to figure this out, and you should not be criticized for asking questions.

First, you should keep in mind that Aquinas is not talking about Newtonian motion, or the motion of physical bodies per se, but rather is talking of Aristotelian motion, which is an abstract term which roughly indicates any sort of change (i.e. a change in temperature is "motion" in this sence). More precisely, motion for Aquinas is the what Aristotle calls the "actualization of a potency." I don't want to get bogged down in Aquinas' metaphysics, but I thought it would be wise to point this out, just so you don't fall into the common misreading of thinking him to be talking of "motion" as the type of thing which Newton tried to describe.

To your first point: the two highlighted parts are clearly not contradictory: The principle that "whatever is in motion must be put into motion by another" does NOT say that this "another" must itself be in motion. Indeed, Aquinas is arguing precisely that there exists one thing which causes motion which is not itself in motion. But the general principle allows for this, as I am sure you now see.

I am sure you also see why this is not therefore special pleading: God is not an arbitrary exception to the general principle "whatever is in motion must be put in motion by another" because God is not in motion.

As to your second point: Good Point! The argument that a regress is untenable actually does require some explanation of Aristotelian/Scholastic metaphysics to get into: and I don't really want to write it all out in case you are not still around to read it. However, if you are still around, I do want to help you resolve your difficulties: so I am going to link to the contemporary Thomist Ed Feser's account of the argument from motion, which does a good job of explaining why the regress is untenable. I am sorry that I cannot do it myself, but I really don't want to write out pages of argumentation right now. But please do read it! It should help you to see what the actual argument says, so that you can be sure that your criticism's are against what Thomas actually thought.

ia800106.us.archive.org/33/items/FiveProofsOfTheExistenceOfGod/Five-Proofs-of-the-Existence-of-God.pdf

(The relevent chapter is "Chapter One, the Aristotelian proof.)

Hope this helps!

The link died, so I am going to see if I can find another.

I found another link. Here is the google books version of Feser's book. Again the relevent chapter is "The Aristotelian Proof" which deals with the first way of Thomas' five ways.

Sorry for the bad link. Hope this helps!

books.google.com/books?id=il8yDwAAQBAJ&pg=PT12&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=3#v=onepage&q&f=false

>eastern churches
>platonist-inspired
have you ever read any greek church fathers?

actually if you read scg book ii he talks about how you can't prove that the universe isn't infinite

you don't understand cause and effect. read the organon. can't believe i had to reply to you twice. read a book you fucking retard this is Yea Forums you don't like to back to /pol/ or reddit or wherever the fuck you came from

I don't have so much of a problem with Aquinas' reasoning as I do with him tying it to Christianity. If there is such a thing is a first mover, a being or concept of pure action that has no potential for change, how is it possible that this concept has an individual consciousness and personality the same way Yahweh does? My immediate first thought would be that any info about this concept would be unknowable, but if I had to guess it would be an infinitely simple concept similar to platos idea of The One, and isn't really a conscious being in the way we think of one. Isn't tying this concept to Yahweh the very definition of special pleading?

To be more specific, wouldn't have a consciousness or thinking thoughts be indicative of changing, or having potential? How is it possible that God ever thinks things or says things at certain times if he's forever unchanging. God made the choice to cast Adam and Eve out from Eden, to flood the Earth, to make the 10 commandments, etc. Are these things not reactions to external stimuli?

Not that user but Yahweh is only one of the persons of God, same as Christ or the Holy Spirit. Consider that you were introduced to these metaphysics not by Aristotle but by the divine word itself. Christ is the logos made flesh. He wakes the dead as easily as you wake someone sleeping. He is one person of the unmoved mover.

Aristotle and Plotinus prepared the way for Aquinas, but Aquinas still also depends on Scripture. This is the beauty of the divine revealing itself to man. It does not come only by one stream, but in a flood. Just as all causes can be chained back to a first cause, so do all roads lead to God.

>consciousness
>exclusive thoughts
>reactions to stimuli
You are placing human limitations on a being who defies explanation. You're also caught in the paradox of God's omniscience. How can God "react to external stimuli" if he already knew what would happen? Think on this a while and you'll start to see. God is a greater being than you can imagine. Words do not apply, God cannot be adequately bound by our vocabulary - there are such things as mysteries.

This is one of the possibilities I considered, but I still have problems with it. If all aspects of the trinity are just avatars of some greater being, what makes them worthy of worship? If the true God is an unmoving mover, an infinitely simple concept that all things are derivative of, how are all things in the universe not on the same level of the trinity in that case? As an example, God is incapable of taking actions or thinking things because It is forever unchanging, so to do things he has Yahweh and Jesus, entities that aren't first movers and do have potential, entities that can be influenced by outside stimuli. But in that case why would you consider Jesus or Yahweh on a higher level than a rock, or the dirt in the ground? Everything in reality would be derivative things with potential moved by the original first mover, they're all just reflections of a force that enables and encompasses everything. Jesus and Yahweh are both flawed and imperfect the same as the rest of reality because they have potential, or am I wrong?

Additionally, how would the first mover ever decide to have a trinity represent it in the first place? To make that decision would be a change, would it not? And if the trinity is simply something that exists like the rest of reality, not something that was actively chosen to exist by the first mover, why is it lumped in with god? I'm pretty sure when people talk about god in christian terms theyre usually talking about yahweh, not some platonic abstraction that can't actually make choices lest it be victim to the ability to change.

I agree with your interpretation, but what is the reasoning in linking him to Yahweh?

This is what is so frustrating about Aquinas. Eventually it does turn to mysticism. Because that IS what we're talking about here. The entire premise of metaphysics depends on the assumption of a cause that exists outside of the observable. Don't get me wrong, there's nothing wrong with mysticism: once you have heard the call to holiness, it is the personal journey to God. But it is too easily misunderstood or rejected out of hand by people ignorant of theology.

>If all aspects of the trinity are just avatars of some greater being
Inaccurate assessment. The persons of God are not avatars. Each of them IS God, expressly. But they are not each other.

>I agree with your interpretation, but what is the reasoning in linking him to Yahweh?
Why should man have been made in the divine image? Why was Jesus a man, and not an elephant? That's why. Because the divine is revealing itself to us. Not anything else.

God doesn't change or react in response to stimuli, but that doesn't mean he doesn't think about things. God knows his creation by knowing himself as their cause- if knowledge is union to the object understood, God as divinely simple and the origin of all things thus has a mode of knowledge of creatures infinitely superior to our own.

God creates things not by corresponding changes in himself, but by creating things other than himself out of nothing. This is not special pleading, but follows easily if his act is absolutely prior to all other being.

His will is free and changing in the sense of the range of its possible effects: from the same unchanging nature, myriad effects can emerge which are different from time to time, each of which reflects some small part or approximation of the divine nature. But none of this requires God to change 'in himself.'

>not some platonic abstraction that can't actually make choices lest it be victim to the ability to change.
This is exactly what I was criticizing before. You can't put God in an arm-bar and make him contradict himself. You're only playing with words, not accurately expressing the divine. And thank heaven for that. The word of God creates and destroys in the speaking.

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I have more to say but I don’t have the time, so instead I’m just going to concede. Thanks for your input, I appreciate the opportunity to learn more about this.

Same, gonna hit the sack. I'm *40 and *53 (and *867). Thanks for being interested and asking questions. Stick around, we need fewer shitposters.

I just want to say that I am glad this thread exists.

I love people that seem so confident in telling others what god is and does, especially when it's all dreamy babble

Not being rude to them but yes, I really don't understand where the confidence comes from. You have never witnessed anything you're speaking of, nor by your own admission can you as a finite being have comprehension of the infinite one you're speaking for. It would be fitting to speak in a speculative tone, since you are only speculating by nature, but we never see that. It's always confident convictions, while speaking speculatively. I don't understand why.

Lol I love when christfags think they're the smartest shit in the world.

When you actually read it, it doesn't say that this first cause isn't in motion, it says "put in motion by no other". It could be in motion but just not put into motion by another. But if you really think that the first cause is not in motion then how could it possibly actualize anything else? Its just a complete nonstarter.

Faith in God is an unquestioning belief in His existence, it's not something you unconfidently say and require evidence to believe, if you do then you don't have faith. That's just the nature of religious belief, it's not like a scientific theory which can be changed when new evidence contradicts it

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For all the hubbub about Aquinas, particularly his "proofs" for god, see Bertrand Russel's fallacy of composition.

Sure, but every one of you (I'm referring to Christians and your innumerable sects) has a different conception of God, and every one of you also speaks with conviction over the nature of the God that your believing neighbour does not believe in. Speaking less definitively might be better for all of you, and your collective cause.

God is not knowable as he is in himself, but may be known somewhat through his effects. And his effects are ubiquitous, since he is after all the First Cause. The trick is not seeing the signs of his being and attributes, but learning how to see him through the signs.

If you do know how to look (i.e., have mastered the arguments), you see God everywhere, since he underlies all contingency, all teleology, all goodness and all beauty. Not all of us are or need to be haltingly speculating about entry-level truths about God.

Aquinas commits no such fallacy, though. The Five Ways lead to at least one thing which is underivative in its being. Later in the Summa Aquinas shows why there can only be one such being, entailing that all there is or could be other than God comes from God.

There's no applying what is true of a member of a set and arbitrarily applying it to the whole set.

>If I define "God" as "every bad thing that has happened" then the highest moral imperative is to hate God.

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>Entry-level truths about God
Are they truths, or beliefs? You speak of Goodness and Beauty, terminology popularized by a man named Plato, who himself hadn't even the slightest conception of God as you're today sharing. The "first cause" argument posits the universe to have began existing, and this so by a cause. Is this true? Could the universe not be eternal, and therefore uncaused?

The form of the good was basically Plato's God

He realized Christian metaphysics were retarded but wasn't intelligent enough to mental gymnastic Aristotle and Plato into working with his religion. He is a hero to pseuds who dont even understand anything about the subject.

First off as a disclaimer I just want to voice my very strong opinion that if god could be proved through logical proofs than it would, sort of, cheapen, the whole faith thing, and religion and all aspects of it in general. I could end this post here and I would be content with that.

But the fallacy of composition, by its very nature doesn't have any exclusions. As I'm sure you know it simply states that you cannot assume something is true of the whole just because it is true of some part of the whole. Easily applicable to the old as dirt cosmological argument. Is it a profound argument? Not really but it essentially nullifies the third way.

You can play the metaphysical card and say that god exists outside of space and time or whatever. But that isn't a fair argument to bring to the table, especially when any infinite amount of gods could be applied to it, it's just a theory with no evidence to support it.

>first you should keep in mind, Aquinas is not talking about Newtonian motion.. but Aristotelian motion
Let me stop you right there. Why should we start this conversation from an Aristotelian framework of physics? Have you ever considered why nobody does Aristotelian physics anymore? Already the framework for the argument is really bad.

>does NOT say that this "another" must be in motion
But if god is not in motion then how could he possibly actualize the first thing to be in motion. Think about that for a second. It makes sense to think about your hand being in motion because it is put in motion by your arm which is put in motion by your muscles etc. But what does it look like for the 'first' thing to be actualized? If theres nothing else in motion to actualize it will merely pop into motion. There would be no way of determining what put it into motion.

Either way its still special pleading because you want to claim a general rule for all things but then this one thing doesn't follow the rules because(and here's the loading the premises with your conclusion) then you couldn't arrive at what you're trying to prove.

>does require some explanation of Aristotelian metaphysics
You can explain Aristotelian metaphysics all you want, that doesn't make it a valid framework. Why should anybody subscribe to Aristotelian metaphysics?

>im going to link to Ed Fesers account
Why do apologists always do this shit? This is the tactic of flat earthers, you show somethings wrong in their argument and then they link you to a 5 hour youtube documentary that will "educate" you. Why don't you just grapple with the issue I raised. Aquinas loads his premise with the conclusion he is trying to prove. This is supposed to be the greatest mind of the catholic faith and in his most famous argument he begs the question. How do you defend that?

And theres a ton of problem with Feser's account as well, for starters theres tons of implications he doesn't even grapple with. For instance, change is potential->actual, and he gives his example of his hand being potentially to the left, then he moves it and then now it is actually to the left. But that also involved the potentialization of an actual. His hand was actually in the middle but now its potentially in the middle. Reconstruct his argument swapping this interchangeable terms and you'll arrive at a being who is pure potentiality. Obviously nonsense.

>This is supposed to be the greatest mind of the catholic faith
That's what makes it so hilarious and sad.

Yes, which has no relation to the YHWH Christians believe in. Plato did not worship/pray to the Good, nor was it attached to any sentient, anthropomorphic being. I'm not saying you were saying this - I'm just clarifying it for both of us.

No one (except that one user, who should be reading his Aquinas) is saying anything about spacetime or whatever. All the third way shows is that there is something (i.e., at least one thing) not susceptible of generation and corruption.

Since whatever is susceptible of generation and corruption does not exist in its own right, there must be at least one thing which does exist in its own right, if anything else exists.

Now Aquinas would be making a fallacy of composition if he said something like, everything which comes to be and passes away has a cause in that which does not come to be and pass away, therefore the universe as a whole is caused to be by some cause which does not come to be and pass away. But that’s not Aquinas’s argument for why everything other than God has one cause.

That argument stems from the simplicity of that which has underivative existence: whatever has underivative existence is non-composite, since composites derive from their parts. But whatever is potentially multiplicable in any respect, must be composite, since it would be composed of what is potentially multiplicable, and what remains unique to itself. Hence there can only be one underivative thing. But if there is only one underivative thing, and everything else derives from it, then we have the conclusion that everything there is apart from the one underivative thing, is caused to be by it.

Can someone explain to me how you go from the essentially deistic ontological argument Aquinas uses to Christianity?

Plato regarded the vision of the One as the highest end, thought that the One was what all thought approximates, and thought of the One as the source and summit of all perfections.

This language is enough to fix Plato’s referent as the metaphysical ultimate, and hence, for the monotheist (who himself worships God precisely as the metaphysical ultimate) to recognise that he is pointing to the same reality. Anyone who wants to say something about the One, whether one agrees or disagrees, has to reckon with Plato, precisely because his doctrine has the same referent as that of the monotheist.

You're going to have to define generation and corruption for me. The more we get sidetracked in abstract terms the more the argument becomes white noise.

It seems the fallacy still holds, Aquinas theory, in my understanding of it seems to imply on its most base principle that if everything in the universe has a cause, the universe must have a cause - which the fallacy dismisses.

Your explanations on underivative existence etc cater to that base principle.

The One, however desperately one attempts to equate it, is not even remotely similar to the Christian God, which has a name (Hebrew), an intellect, an (anthropomorphic) form, and yes, even a temper. Everything you mentioned of Plato's views on the Absolute are correct, but they do not connect to anything of the Christian ones. The fact that they are both the "metaphysical ultimate" is as meaningless as saying that all religions are the same, since all of them concern themselves with the metaphysical ultimate. The details of said reality are what differ them, and thereby distinguish each religion from the other.

Aquinas didn't invent concepts of the first cause or unmoved mover, that was the far superior Aristotle. Aquinas' argument that the impersonal forces which Aristotle discussed somehow applied to his imaginary wizard friend in the sky. Personal Gods like Christianity and impersonal forces like the Form of the Good are polar opposite distinctions from one another. They are not mutually compatible.

Aquinas doesn’t infer that the whole universe has a cause from the fact that everything has a cause. He gets to the conclusion by a different route:

1) Everything which is derivative derives from something underivative (note: they do not at this point all derive from the same thing, hence it cannot be said that the universe as a whole has some unified or unifying cause).

2) there can only be one underivative thing

C. Everything derivative derives from one underivative thing.

At no point is there a direct inference from the properties of the parts to the whole. Hence it is quite obvious that the fallacy if composition cannot apply.

I know that, but why reply to me.

Of course the differences are important. There’s a lot more to be done to understand God than just fixing the referent. But the fixing of the common referent is the start of a fruitful conversation about the same thing, and that’s all that Christians have historically done with the insights of the Pagans about the One God.

>all that Christians have historically done with the insights of the Pagans about the One God.
You mean beside completely distorting what the Pagans were talking about, banning it, burning it, or killing anyone who practiced those beliefs?

Christianity tended to cherish the pagan insights about the One wherever they were found, from Plato to Aristotle to Heraclitus and the Stoics. The rest of paganism, being polytheistic trash, was rightly suppressed.

>Christianity tended to cherish the pagan insights about the One
Plato quite literally ceased to exist in the Latin speaking West until the Renaissance, when Pletho, a Pagan critic from the East brought it back. The Catholic church would then put Plato and Aristotle on an expurgatio list, attempting to ban and destroy this literature altogether.

>cherish the insights
Yes, by bastardizing them and completely removing them from any sensible context, instead attaching them onto their own God whose ever-expanding attributes and achievements have not ceased to grow till the present day. He "caused" the big bang, and "guided" evolution! Yes, Yahweh! Your powers are so innumerable, even the Bible couldn't list them all!

>rightly suppressed
Who are Christians to do such a thing to another culture? Also, you're calling Greek Polytheism, which has vastly more cultural value and aesthetic depth than anything similar in Christianity "polytheistic trash"? The same deities which Plato's work eulogizes heavily, even if only in a purely artistic sense? The same mythology which the post-Renaissance English Poets (Shakespeare, Marlowe, Keats, Wordsworth, and many more) wrote a deluge of references to in their work, while leaving very scant ones to anything Christian in comparison, even while living under heavily Christian nations?

This is where Christians reveal themselves in their true nature: they desire to align themselves as heavily to Plato and Ancient Greece as they can, while simultaneously hating in their hearts the very cultures which those same figures and civilizations loved and revolved around. They are completely Semitic in their soul, yet they pretend to be Westerners, because they know aligning with the greatness of the latter culture boosts the credibility of the former's. The other direction wouldn't work to that end, as an user in a parallel thread on the Old Testament recently said: Platonism has absolutely nothing to borrow from Christianity.

Here you go again, ignoring the comments I left earlier regarding "desperate attempts" to reconcile contradictory realities. The One is not YHWH, and has never been, and can never be made such. You can believe in one, you can believe in the other, you can even believe in both. But you can't believe they are themselves one, because they are not. You called them the "One God" at the end of your comment, as if the fact that one is a Monad-Principle and the other an Anthropomorphic-Being's enraged claims to being the sole creator of the cosmos makes them equal. Christians desire the framework of Plato with the template of Abraham, and unfortunately you can't have such a theological combination. If you conflate them again, I won't attempt to correct you. Just ensure to yourself that you're being respectful to the philosophies you're discussing, rather than trying to honor all of them and only dishonoring both of them by doing so.

I'm not by the way.

Amazes me how easily you equate YHWH to the One, as if no contradiction was ever to be found in such a motion. Then again, I see this with Christians all the time, where they seemingly can't bother to even follow their own faith with any faithfulness, believing in the big bang, evolution, pantheism, monism, and other kinds of conceptions while simultaneously believing in the Biblical God, which permits none of the above realities. I don't even reason with Christians anymore, since they don't seem to show reason enough to even follow their own beliefs coherently. Not being rude to you personally, just speaking generally. Just do you, I guess.

This is painfully intellectually dishonest, friend.

No.

What makes YHWH God is that he is the one first principle of all things- everything else he is, all his power and his claim to authority and exclusivity, follows from that, and without it, none of the rest which is predicated of YHWH can be understood with any religious sincerity.

Of course, if you start with the assumption of an opposition between God's dynamic personhood in revelation and his metaphysical ultimacy (an ultimacy the Platonic tradition helped articulate, if imperfectly), you're going to get an opposition at the end. Big surprise.

If, on the other hand, you look for what is true and good and useful in both, you find wellsprings of edifying synthesis. Plato's One is indeed an intellect- it is what the intellect as intellect approximates when it sees or is infused with the Forms, since it is the overarching reality which contains and gives rise to all others. The One even for Plato is not a monad opposed to intellect, but transcendental mind itself. Certainly, Plato's One has no relation to man 'on its end'- its contemplation can only be self-directed, as far as the philosopher knows. Such are the natural tendencies of the mind unilluminated by revelation.

The Christian emphasis on personhood, however, inspires an emphasis on the One's internal and external relationality: God's internal relation of self-knowledge, when we consider the asymmetric relations of knower and known and the love that flows between them, is the philosophical side of the Trinitarian discourse, giving rise to the Persons who are the one divine substance considered as an object of relation.

The One's love for creation is again derived from its self-knowledge: for the One to know himself, is for the One to know himself as the creator of all other things- but to know all things and have their being as the object of his intellect, is for the One to love them, too.

The One's absolute priority is intensified in the Christian synthesis in the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo: so absolutely prior is the One, that creation can have no claim of necessity or inevitability and hence, no eternity. Rather, it is by a free act of love that the One creates.

The crowning Christian doctrine of the Incarnation, at the heart of this relational turn, articulates a union and reconciliation between God and man the Platonists could not imagine- that of the Person with two natures, divine and human. The improvements which Christian theology inspires, far from doing violence to the Platonic project, both extend and perfect it in myriad ways, even while making it more accessible and readily participatory for the great mass of men who are neither philosophers nor mystics.

On the other hand, God's metaphysical ultimacy invites deeper reflection on his revelation than a shallow reading of Scripture allows. Love and wrath and faithfulness acquire a metaphysical dimension they would not otherwise have had.

Sophistry

Greek polytheism, like all polytheism, is destructive because it leads the soul away from its true ultimate end, the knowledge of the one God. Once suitably chastened and deprived of all true spiritual power, the polytheistic gods may be allowed to serve as poetic devices with no harm. Plato, if anything, was harsher on his own gods, declining to allow them even a poetic role.

Platonism borrows true universality and universalisability from Christianity. Christianity provides the tools and impetus to develop what is true in the Platonic metaphysic into a reality that can nourish the great mass of men. It does this by improving that metaphysic in innumerable respects, following a revelation Plato did not himself anticipate. Christianity is the living thing to whose bones Platonism speaks.

The sequence of potential > actual as a description of change doesn't work in reverse.

A potential is an 'orderedness-toward' some end or range of ends, and act, the being and fulfilment of those ends. Potential is part of the Aristotelian account of change because it articulates the respect in which a changing thing is the subject of change, as distinct from the object of change. The hand, considered as the subject of change, has a potential to move left, which is fulfilled by the hand's actually being on the left.

On the other hand, the reversal of the priority in change doesn't make sense.

Potential is not the fulfilment of actuality, since actuality as actuality is not ordered toward anything. Hence, it doesn't make sense to treat something as the subject of change insofar as it is in act. So act and potency do not have equivalent roles in the description of change, and are not interchangeable. While potency may be actualised (in that its object, initially lacking, may be achieved), actuality cannot be 'potentialised,' since actuality qua actuality does not aim at anything ('aiming at' things it lacks is what potency does).

What's the best book to read his thoughts on Aristotle?

This is a good one. Feser is about to release a new book on Aristotle and I expect it to be good.

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Thanks.

>Why should we start this conversation from an Aristotelian framework of physics? Have you ever considered why nobody does Aristotelian physics anymore? Already the framework for the argument is really bad.

No, you misunderstand. Although Aristotle's physics is indeed outdated, his philosophy of change is properly considered part of his Metaphysics. If you were to dispute it, you should not look to Newton (who is perfectly compatible with Aristotelian metaphysics of substance and change) but rather to Hume or to Kant, both of whom put forward good rival metaphysical schemes . But it is by no means a settled question that Humean metaphysics (more properly his anti-metaphysical stance) is superior to Aristotelian metaphysics. For example, many contemporary analytic metaphysicians have abandoned the humean conception of what a cause (basically constant conjunction of cause and effect) is, and also what a "Law of Nature is" in favor of a more generally Aristotelian approach.

You did not respond to my actual claim, but rather another straw man. Aquinas' argument is not attempting to show how a unmoved mover causes movement in other bodies. All it is attempting to show is, since it is impossible for an infinite regress of Aristotelian motion, then there MUST be some way out ot he regress. The only solution (to Aristotle, but also to Aquinas) would be something which does not have any potential to actualize.

>Why should anybody subscribe to Aristotelian metaphysics?
There are a few reasons why someone should. But perhaps the best reason could be made by a disjunctive argument: Either a broadly Humean Metaphysics, or a generally Kanitian Metaphysics, or an Aristotelian Metaphysics is correct (you need a metaphysics of some sort, even if it is as bare-bones as Hume's, because the claims of the natural sciences presuppose various metaphysical claims. For example, when talking of the composition of molecules, the natural sciences bracket the questions posed by mereology: when science makes reference to "natural laws" they bracket the question of "what a natural law is (is it just a regularity found in nature or is it something else?). The Humean Metaphysics and the Kantian Metaphysics both fail, and so the Aristotlean metaphysics would seem to be the best candidate.

>Why do apologists always do this shit?
I thought you are interested in the truth, not just your own preconceived notion of what Aquinas said, so I thought I would give you a resource written by a contemporary philosophy PHD on the subject. I am sorry if that is not what you wanted.

>This is supposed to be the greatest mind of the catholic faith and in his most famous argument he begs the question. How do you defend that?

He clearly does not beg the question. I am starting to think that you don't know what it means to "beg the question" or what "special pleading" means.

(cont')

>obviously nonsense.

I don't understand your objection. Could you rephrase it in order to show why Feser's account fails? If you do have a really good objection, I would reccommend you publish it in "The Journal of Philosophy" or "The Philosophy Quarterly," because these arguments are still topics of contemporary debate.

>Yes, which has no relation to the YHWH Christians believe in
Wrong.

Plato's form of the Good is that form which illuminates all others. Sounds very much like a Creator, donnit? Compare to Plotinus' essay On Beauty. Or Aquinas' examination of beauty. Or the Vatican's recent Via Pulchritudinis.

You brainlets really don't understand the immensity of God's influence. It passes, effortlessly, between science and mysticism and metaphysics and empiricism. The logos inspired not only the ancient Greek philosophers but also revealed itself by way of the creation myths and chronicles of the Israelites and the life of Jesus Christ, which is historical and of as-yet unrecognized importance. These traditions are not at odds. They are of a single telling.

>Can someone explain to me how you go from the essentially deistic ontological argument Aquinas uses to Christianity?
define "Christianity"

Do you mean Joel Osteen? Or the changes since the time of Jesus?

For that, Augustine is mostly to blame. He advocated the causes of just war, persecutors and non-Christians being pawns of the devil. Read City of God.

>Plato's form of the Good is that form which illuminates all others. Sounds very much like a Creator, donnit?
in fact I'll go further and say it sounds very much like the first cause, or first principle. That unmoved mover which effects causes without being itself diminished. Seriously, read Plotinus.

>Greek polytheism, like all polytheism, is destructive because it leads the soul away from its true ultimate end, the knowledge of the one God
No. All roads lead to God. The so-called 'wrong' roads especially, the sinner's roads. They are the path of the prodigal son. These are long and difficult ways, but make no mistake God is calling everyone back.

The path of repentance is the quickest and most salutary, but it's not the only way.

>creation myths
Mostly stolen and "adapted" from Mesopotamian creation myths.
A good chunk of the OT is non-historical (same for the NT).

>Mostly stolen and "adapted" from Mesopotamian creation myths.
wow I guess God is really btfo then, huh. Good thing you were here to show him. Read my posts again, slowly.

The first cause argument does NOT assume the universe began to exist, which you would know if you had even only read the wiki on it:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Ways_(Aquinas)#Secunda_Via:_The_Argument_of_the_First_Cause

>Could the universe not be eternal, and therefore uncaused?
>restated: "could there have not been a Big Bang?"
Ask a scientist. They'll tell you this is very much a minority view. Way too much evidence points to an expansion from an origin.

I don't understand why critics think that similar creation myths showing up in other culture is evidence against Christianity. If anything it's a reason to believe the accounts are true.

I have read the summary, don't worry. "Everything which exists must have a cause for its existence". If the universe was caused, then it could not have existed before that cause, and therefore had to "begin to exist". He might not have understood that speaking of causality speaks temporally, but that's how reality and these concepts within them actually work. If the universe always existed, it cannot be said to have any cause for its existence. It's one or the other.

They're brainlets.

>I have read the summary, don't worry.
>"Hold my beer, watch this."
Now let your mind be troubled by the idea of quantum particles, objects which can scarcely be called objects at all: they settle into an intelligible state only after being "observed."

Who are you to say that contradictions are impossible? Or that language is inadequate? Quantum physics is at work in our own brains at this very moment, affecting every instant of our consciousness from birth to today.

Scientists change their views every decade, let alone century. I really don't place much faith in them at this point, I don't agree with their primary narratives or consider them competent enough to discover them in the first place. I also find it dissatisfying when Christians pick and choose the scientific narratives they believe in, based solely on which ones support their own theologies.

Boy you really are confused aren't you. What the hell DO you believe? And at what age did Nietzsche change your life?

I'm a Platonist, silly. Nietzsche isn't for me. Today's world makes it seem like one has to choose between theism (and not any general theism, but specifically the Abrahamic variant) or athiesm, but that's a very recent dichotomy, and it only exists in the Western hemisphere of the world. There are other conceptions of reality and theology, and I personally align with them.

>"Platonist" with yellow fever who is secretly a wannabe Buddhist but can't let go of his ecchi fetish
I see. You're a pseud.

Platonism has far more in common with Eastern philosophies than it does Semitic ones (save for that which absorbed Platonism into it, of course), like Advaita. Plato had "the One", Advaita has Brahman, which is literally "the one without a second", both held the unmanifest reality to be infinitely more real than the manifest one, both promote an impersonal Divinity, both support individual enlightenment unmediated by external institutions or rituals, both advocate for the transmigration of the soul between bodies i.e reincarnation, both are nondualist, and so on. There really is no yellow fever, no fetishizing of any kind - the correspondence between Platonic theology and specific Eastern ones far outweigh anything between Platonism and Judeo-Christianity, when the Platonism is taken out from the latter.

>ecchi fetish
user pls. i haven't watched anime in years. if you have any recs for recent ones i'm open to them though. i won't lie, i just a few days ago saw clips on youtube of a "caretaker" anime (can't remember the full title) where this really beautiful girl took care of a boy and it made me sad bc i have no caring gf of my own...

You say that Plato had "the One" but isn't that more Plotinus? Plato believed in a multiplicity of forms, at least I think. Not saying you're wrong but I didn't study Plato as a monist.

Plato seemingly conceived the concept of "the One", but it's not in his own dialogues. Aristotle wrote about it, and so did someone named Alexander of Aphrodisias, but Plato never did. He apparently spoke of it in person though, and that's where the others heard of it. It's believed that Plotinus later inherited the concept through oral transmission, but it's uncertain what exactly it looked like then and how Plotinus himself altered it.

he doesn't tie it to christianity. if you read him he starts off by saying he's going to prove the existence of god before proving the christian god. he really doesn't present the five ways as his own arguments, more like passing on a tradition from aristotle

he was unbelievably obese, but his debating mind was the best yet seen
quick as light
sharp as a razor
Yea Forums would love him as our professor

I'm impressed with this response

It's evidence against the specific contribution of Revelation to the Hebrew (and later Christian) cosmogony.

If there have been similar creation myths before, it could be that both scripture and heathen mythology account for the same events, or more damningly than scripture relied critically on compiling earlier mythology.

In both cases it points towards the Scripture not being entirely god-given or even god-inspired and to their writings being subject to a historical process of compilation and editing just like any other ancient text.

In summary it weakens the claim of essential distinction between scripture and heretical mythology, the former being then suspected of being merely a very successful case of the latter.

There are ways to argue around this of course, as there always are when you are committed to upholding a certain set of beliefs above anything else.

But this is not what is at stake here.
Nobody thinks that alluding to ancients myths is going to converts atheists or make Christians lose faith. Rather the fundamental dynamic is the following: atheistic or generally skeptical critics of religion but forth an argument for dismissal of the most daring claims of Christianity. If that argument is really weak or ill-conceived it won't gain much weight outside of r/atheism-like echo chambers. If, however, it does have weight as a motivation for doubt, Christians (and more generally abrahamic) believers will reshape their apologetics in order to steel them against that argument. This can often be achieved by digging up an old counterargument made by a famous christian scholar or writer (for this kind of games have been played in the West for the better part of the past two millenia). The only limit is one's dialectical ingenuity and willingness to commit (or cling, depending to your perspective) on one's faith.

And ironically said argument might have been ignored by most Christians before (not all religious people are very knowledgeable about their own religions after all), so the direct result of atheistic campaigning might be a strengthening of theological common knowledge among believers.

Nonetheless the the impetus lies (or used to lie, maybe things are changing right now) on the side of the atheist, and Christians are merely adapting themselves to the evolving mores and general gnoseolegy in order to stay relevant and keep justifying their faith to themselves. Said mores and gnoseology being mostly secular and science-inspired (if not properly scientific) in the contemporary world, this means that Christians are doomed to stay forever on the defensive and keep treading, so to speak, on an increasingly secularized intellectual ground.

A religion that used to provide a comprehensive framework for humanity's collective existence within the whole universe finds itself increasingly pressed to restrict its claim to an ever-narrower ethical territory, the epistemological and gnoseological battle already being lost.

This is the most autistic shit I've seen in a long time

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You would have that picture saved.

>In both cases it points towards the Scripture not being entirely god-given or even god-inspired
Prove it.

Prove God did not inspire the Sumerians, or the Chaldeans, or Egyptians, in preparation for the Israelites, in preparation for Aristotle/Plotinus, in preparation for Aquinas, in preparation for you, today, saying God did not do these things.

All of these cultures have similar explanations, true, but this doesn't necessitate the truth of their claims. Given the similar level of resources available to early groups (barebones being the natural world as observed with little methodology) their explanations couldn't have been too different. So scripture isn't necessarily God given in any divine sense, unless we allow what we observe to be divine in a derivitive way (as Aquinas argues). This being said, and in relation to this comment, , we shouldn't dismiss theological beliefs based off of current trends. Atheists, among others, have done a very decent job sifting out contradictory details in religious texts. But this does not negate the existence of God, only certain aspects that belong to certain ancient definitions. The existence of God is an endgame question, one that we can postulate over and attempt to derive things from, but one that very well may not be answered. While we may attribute current trends to the dismissal of the Christian God's existence (in relation to scripture) to the world becoming more atheist, this isn't necessarily true, as many have an interpretation that is deist or more difficult to define.
I personally do not want to give too much credit to a Abrahamic ideology, though I also think that parts of the arguments of Aquinas, Augustine, ect. still hold their ground, though their metaphysical systems have lost quite a bit of efficacy in explaining things.

No, it's on you to prove God's inspiration.

I am not fond of the way he formulates his arguments
>Answer
>Questions opposing his idea
>Question for his idea
>Question of his idea
>Counterquestions to the opposing questions
It's very dirty, though he makes certain assumptions, though this is just because he is a postmodernist.

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>implying is not on god to prove his existance

The primary sense of causation for Aquinas is not temporal. It is dependence, where the dependent thing is such that in and of itself, it has no existence, and hence exists at all, at any moment, in relation to something else, that 'something else' being its cause. A whole, for instance, is dependent upon its parts: considered in abstraction from them, it has no existence, and hence at any moment at which it exists, is caused to be by them.

Aquinas' arguments are all different ways of illustrating various dependences of this kind, and inferring an independent being which does have existence in and of itself, which is capable of imparting being to everything else.

Perhaps he cannot *disprove* it, but can you yourself *prove* it? You're the one taking the positive claim here (if you subscribe to Christianity), while simultaneously acting like you are yourself in the clear. You are not. Prove to me that every chain in the sequence you listed are inspired by the same God, which is only directly traceable to one of those cultures. If you cannot do so, but continue to claim so, then I have the exact same right to claim that the Vedas and Hinduism are inspired by the same God, that the deity Ganesha (see attached) is exactly the same as YHWH and Christ, and that all of Vedic and later Hindu culture was born from the same source as the latter figures.

If people like can so recklessly and disingenuously fuse completely different conceptions of Divinity as if there were no contradictions at all, I have every right to do the same. If Plato/Plotinus's "One" is allowed to be attached onto YHWH and Christ's figures, despite being conceived of by a completely different culture and time period, despite being a nondualist conception as compared to a dualistic one, despite literally not being remotely similar to the latter in any regard, then I have every right to equate whatever I want to these same figures, and to equally call it "Christian Theology". You have no basis to prove me wrong, either, by your own assertions.

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As for you two, let's begin.

To the first user, I'll just tell you that for all your flowery writing, which you should feel proud of because you genuinely have linguistic talent, your assertions are empty. You have absolutely no right to equate Plato's "One" to anything of the Trinity. These are separate theologies, conceived of by different minds, cultures, and eras. There is hardly a thing in common between Grecian culture and Judaic culture, but historical circumstances wound up intersecting the two together, and therefore Christianity, which was produced by this intersection, was naturally the child of two parental cultures. Yet the cultures themselves had no relation to one another, not then and not now. I am genuinely incredulous at how effortlessly you've crafted your own, individual theology here, wherein all of Plato's doctrine has somehow become one with all the elements in the Old and New Testaments (which were not inspired by Platonic concepts), which a Christian minister themselves would not agree with you on. Reading your comment tells me that you've never read the philosophies you're writing about, or that you simply don't care whether your words have any doctrinal accuracy to them.
To the second user, you opened by asking whether Plato's Good "sounds like a Creator", to which I answer: no, it does not. It is extremely different, and if you'd read into the philosophy properly, and weren't so recklessly attempting to fuse every other system of thought with the Judeo-Christian worldview, you'd understand this. Here is a simple page that can get you started, and highlight the fundamental differences for you:
newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Emanationism

I say this with no malice nor condescension to you, I'm genuinely showing you resources which are among those I myself use when studying philosophy. (1/2)

Nondualism and dualism are not, in fact, the same doctrine. You are not able to believe both at once. You claim to follow Aristotle, in which case you should be familiar with his "principle of the excluded middle". This law of logic applies to the above theologies which you have been claiming to be in unison. I should also mention that Beauty is universal and independent of any theological convictions, something an athiest could believe in as easily as a believer could, and it's your task to somehow prove a relation between this universal and your specific brand of religion. Well, this is true of any reality, really, but we're discussing something like Beauty here, so that's why I mentioned it.

At the end of the day, all of you Christians who have gathered in this thread, and are presenting views like those addressed here, are doing one and only one thing: being incredibly intellectually dishonest, and disrespecting every philosophy you associate with by virtue of this. It's no different than when Christians believe in the big bang, evolutionism, species-creationism at once, thinking that by casting their net of belief over as many doctrines as possible, they will defend themselves against ideological assaults from all sides, when in reality it results in them having no coherent position to even begin with. The difference is that you have added nondualism, emanationism, pantheism, and thrown them into the pool with dualism, creationism, theism and other contradictory doctrines. Have some dignity and commit yourself to doctrines that do not conflict with other ones you desire to align it with, thinking it better buttresses your faith from later assaults on it, and increases its level of profundity too.

Anyway, I'll be off now. I'm starting a new sect of Christianity and of Hinduism, Hindu Christianity, which claims the Vedas and Upanishads and everything else in Hinduism to be inspired by YHWH and Christ, and creates a wholly original culture based around this irrefutable assertion. There will be statues of Jesus next to ones of Krishna, Gita's beside Bible's, and prayers will be in both Sanskrit and Latin. Wish me luck, hopefully it succeeds and 2000 years later everyone has continued equating the two cultures to eachother.

Okay, not trying to mock you guys or the user above. But just showing you what your own claims could be turned into, and why they're flawed. (2/2)

>t. ignorant of the Greek-Semitic syncretism that is Christian theology
You are not worth replying to. Read some Church history. Go find out who organized the New Testament. Hint: they were Jewish converts, were acquainted with the works of Aristotle and Plato, and wrote the NT (in Greek) and formed its theology at the height of Plotinus' Neoplatonic influence.

>straw manning me with emanationism
Get fucked brainlet. You aren't half as smart as you believe yourself to be. Read my reply to other user, and do the same. Learn the subject before giving your sophomoric diagnosis.

Yes, and what does that have to do with Jesus Christ, and YHWH of the Old Testament? You think that because a bunch of human men, over stretches of time, crudely combining mythologies and philosophies from completely different cultures together now makes it a single philosophy...? Such that you can dare claim YHWH and the One to be the same entity, without any contradiction? Well fortunately Ganeshaji, attached, is part of the Trinity too. Why? Because I say so. A thousand years from now, it'll be gospel truth, with legions of followers supporting it.

>get fucked brainlet
Why do you guys even slightly pretend to be spiritual? You aren't. You aren't kind, you have no empathy for anyone, you aren't pure in heart, you are none of these things. You are just self-righteous, and in need of a platform allowing for its expression, which religion provides to you.

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Like I said: you are ignorant. Read the texts in question before saying I am wrong. John 1 specifically identified Jesus Christ as not only Yahweh but also as the LOGOS, for goodness sake. I'd ask you to read the fucking material before talking about it, but you've proven incapable. Here, see if your mentally deficient ass can follow along with a wikipedia article:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoplatonism_and_Christianity

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logos_(Christianity)

Do your fucking homework you FUCKING illiterate troglodyte.

philosophyatcurley.blogspot.com/2012/11/plotinuschristianity.html

You do your argument zero favor if it's full of insults.

My argument doesn't need favors. It needs someone who is capable of thinking. Ganeshanon deserves to be castigated for his hubris and willful ignorance.

And I'm asking you how a non-dualist doctrine can be so casually equated to a dualist one, a pantheist conception to a theistic one, a creationist model to an emanationist one, as if they were the same...they are not the same.

Do you think that a writer combining Platonic doctrines from literally three centuries prior to Jesus, along with figures from the mythology of a complete different culture (Yahweh), makes it true, or coherent? You realize that human hands wrote these Gospels, and put them together? Do you think these words wrote themselves? You realize that without Plato putting together his ideas, Jesus could have come along the same, the Old Testament would have been the same, and the Platonic features would not be there? If I wrote a book today, claiming some concept of Christianity to be equal to some random and completely different concept from Hinduism, does that equality make them equal?

Did Plato know anything about Semitic culture? Did he have any clue what his ideas would later become attached to?

I'm asking you such simple questions, I don't understand why it's so difficult to grasp. Philosophies are not equal to each other because they are placed in the same book together...they are equal because their actual ideas are non-contradictory and in union with the other. And this is not, and will never be true of, Plato's doctrine and Semitic mythology.

Again, why do you even pretend to be spiritual, user? I'm asking you so politely. The Bible says things like "blessed are the pure in heart", "love thy neighbour as yourself". Do you embody any of this? Do you think the manner by which you speak to me here is acceptable for someone claiming (pretending, maybe) to follow God?

Here, one final Ganesha for good luck. Please try to actually respond to my questions this time, and no more insults if you can manage it.

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>Not in the One True Church, they're not.
In the One True Church, they are heretical.
In your worldwide cult, they are accepted.

>they are equal because their actual ideas are non-contradictory and in union with the other. And this is not, and will never be true of, Plato's doctrine and Semitic mythology.
You have not proven this. I've given you summaries to read, since you evidently can't be bothered to read the material itself. I'll reply to your other questions because you really annoy me but you need to have your hubris beaten out of you. Learn something.

>Did Plato know anything about Semitic culture? Did he have any clue what his ideas would later become attached to?
Do you not understand that effects come AFTER causes? The NT was written long after Plato. I don't know if he knew anything about the Israelites, but that does not matter as his corpus does not depend on them.

>Do you think that a writer combining Platonic doctrines from literally three centuries prior to Jesus, along with figures from the mythology of a complete different culture (Yahweh), makes it true, or coherent?
Do you not know the definition of syncretism? Platonic thought influenced the authors of the NT. This is indisputable fact. It did NOT modify the Old Testament, the Jews were very happy with their sacred text thank you very much. The NT authors built a Church from approved Scripture and the lives of the apostolic fathers who told the life of Jesus. The theology for this Church adopted the metaphysics of the day. That this occurred is not coincidental, or a mistake. It is the divine presenting itself to man in revealed knowledge, mystical experience, and philosophical inquiry.

>Again, why do you even pretend to be spiritual, user?
Why do you pretend to know what you are talking about? And why do you suppose yourself to be an authority on what constitutes spiritual qualities, when you are contriving to add Ganesh to the trinity? Please, admit that you are a brainlet.

>And I'm asking you how a non-dualist doctrine can be so casually equated to a dualist one, a pantheist conception to a theistic one, a creationist model to an emanationist one, as if they were the same...they are not the same.
Pantheism vs monotheism is a question of religious practice. The answer should be obvious if you weren't a wannabe Buddhist: Scripture. Your question about creationist vs emanationist would be answered if you read Plotinus. Your question about non-dualist vs dualist is a false dichotomy: God made Creation, and it was good. Period, end of. That is: the temporal life is not separate from the eternal life, and the eternal life is not separate from the temporal life.

Again, learn what syncretism means. Why do you always shit up Christian theology threads with your Advaita stupidity?

>You have not proven this
And what, exactly, have you proven? I can't find your summaries, please send me them again or summarize them here for me. I asked you questions, I did not ask you for links. It would be better if you could provide answers in your own words.

I do understand syncretism. And I've been giving you examples of how easily I could "syncretize" Hinduism and Judeo-Christianity, if I want to. What I've been trying to explain to you is that philosophically, these doctrines contradict, and "syncretizing" them doesn't change that. Is this really so difficult to understand, that I have to repeat it maybe 6 times now? Yes, I'm aware it didn't influence the Old Testament. Yet you presently and proudly tell me that Neoplatonism and Semitic mythology are one, and what's your argument for saying so? Well the book says so, silly! Our theologians put these conceptions together, and that reconciles their contradictions, and makes them true! What allowed the writers of the NT to combine Platonic theology with Old Testament conceptions? And what allows them to do so, that prevents me from adding Ganesha to the Trinity?

>that this occurred is not coincidental, or a mistake
Proof? This sounds like you're just running off your own opinions here. Why is Platonic theology part of the Christian theology, and not Greek polytheism? Plato wrote much about the latter. Did Christians just pick and choose what they wanted, and yourself today now claims that everything taken was "divinely orchestrated"? What about all the homoeroticism of his works, which Christianity is vehemently against? Why is that not "part of the revelation"? You guys just take what works for you, and then act as if the rest didn't even exist.

Perhaps take a break from all the religious stuff for a bit and just read Plato on his own, and read into concepts like pantheism vs theism, nondualism vs dualism, creationism vs emanationism, without any other considerations attached. Blindly believing these to all be the same thing, because your manmade scriptures have told you so, does not make you look very learned in the face of someone who reads purely into philosophy for it's own sake, without religious belief accompanying it. Ideas are all that philosophy is, and the only thing that matter.

>Do your fucking homework you FUCKING illiterate troglodyte.
>Get fucked brainlet. You aren't half as smart as you believe yourself to be
Are these spiritual qualities? Am I wrong to judge them as not being so? A Christian, asking others "why they suppose themselves to be an authority", is a bit funny since you guys consider yourselves authorities on everything spiritual, and your scriptures the canon everyone is expected to follow.

Regardless of your insults towards me, and your immaturity relative to your pretension to being a "person of God", this is nothing more than a casual discussion and I hope you have a good night, and a good day tomorrow too.

Pantheism versus monotheism is not a question of "religious practise". If you stepped away from religion, and actually read into these as philosophies, you would understand that.

I have read Plotinus, and I don't think you realize that Plotinus and Genesis are NOT compatible. Do you understand this, user? I'm practically spelling it out for you, at this point. Non-dualist and dualist is a false dichotomy? It is, if you once again don't have any real understanding of what these doctrines even mean...

Oh, brother. You really enjoy insulting me, don't you? Whatever, Christians from my encounter have never been any holy sort, though you consider yourselves such. I don't take back a word I said regarding not having ill-will to you, but I doubt I'd like to continue our conversation further. You seem to have no philosophical foundation at all, like, no familiarity with what any of the terms we've even been using actually mean. Nor do you show any desire to actually go and familiarize yourself with them, or to even understand what the meaning of "ideological contradiction" is. You seem to think that incoherent answers (that literally don't even show an understanding of the definition of our terminology), alongside personal insults, results in a refutation.

If you can actually refute me, please do so. If you're going to insult me further, I'd prefer you save both our time and just don't respond. Acquire a stronger philosophical background, I assure you it'll allow you to justify your own faith to other people better.

>Yet you presently and proudly tell me that Neoplatonism and Semitic mythology are one
No. I never said that. In fact I've said repeatedly that Christianity is a syncretism of Greek and Hebrew thought. If you are simply going to purposely misrepresent what I tell you, what is the point of speaking to you?

Look, it's clear to me you have not read the material. You might have read Plato. You might even have read Plotinus. But you definitely have not read Scripture, and consequently have failed to see what it has in common with Neoplatonism or how Aquinas adopted the ideas of Aristotle. Again, I tell you: if you are so ignorant of Christian theology, why do you post your ignorance in these threads? Just make a thread about Buddhism and be done instead of trolling here.

>Acquire a stronger philosophical background, I assure you it'll allow you to justify your own faith to other people better.
Yeah fuck off brainlet. Go read more metaphysics "for its own sake." You're missing the point there, too. If you actually understood metaphysics, you'd know that actionable faith, acting by your beliefs, is a vital component. You have none, and this is why you remain a dilettante. Just an ignorant casual who can only hurl rudimentary criticisms instead of understanding the mystical component. Hear me now believe me later.

Fucking wannabe Buddhist trying to into the mysteries of the Orient because he's too stupid to do a little normie reading. The Bible isn't special enough for this fuckhead. He's got to sample the "REAL" mysticism. Woof I am seriously pissed at this idiot shitting up this thread with his Advaita nonsense and paper tiger questions. Start your own thread where nobody replies to you, dummy. Don't shit up what you don't understand. FUCK.

brb having a stroke

Good post

>There must exist, therefore, something which is not merely contingent in its existence, but rather exists NECESSARILY, something which does not come into being and pass out of being, but rather exists unchangingly, a being whose (to use Thomistic metaphysics) existence and essence are one.
But why it has to be an anthropormphized being(which i think the scriptures are very clear about his desires, mandates, plans, and all that regarding our existance, and not abstractions of his thinking like many like to say) this is, and I think I speak for many, the cross(heh) of the issue. There is a lot of other concepts that can cover that (it come to my mind karma, unknown scientific laws, any form of determinism, you know not beings but kind of aspects of reality), is there something of Aquinas oeuvre that talk about this?

You really do need to catch up on the Christian synthesis. I am neither saying that Platonic and Christian doctrine are the same doctrine, nor am I saying that they agree on all points. I am saying that they are striking at the same root phenomenon in reality from different but often-complementary angles. If we approach each tradition seriously (i.e., as trying to say something about reality), rather than just as cultural products frozen in their original circumstances, it can hardly be otherwise. I think Christianity penetrates deepest, but Platonism has complementary things to say, even if Platonism needs to be corrected on some points.

For example, emanationism and creation ex nihilo are different accounts of the One's relation to the world. But they nonetheless have things in common: they do not multiply the One, they are methods of articulating the dependence of the many upon the one, and are different accounts, one more erroneous than the other, of the same phenomenon. Hence, one can compare them and pick the better doctrine, while respecting and honouring the contribution and motivation of each.

This applies even to very inferior views like Advaita Vedanta. It too approaches ultimate reality, but is inferior to Platonism and Christianity in that it has no doctrine able to affirm the middle world of contingent and changeable things, such that the latter is dismissed entirely as non-existent. They, too, it must be admitted, are talking about God, in a very inferior and more limited kind of way. Why should it not, since the sun shines on the wicked and the good alike? This is not an attempt to affirm all doctrines in all their details, but to recognise the true for what it is, and repudiate error.

Certainly, nondualism and dualism (between ultimate and proximate being) are not the same doctrine, but their differences must be qualified- they are not entirely without similarities. Both, for example, talk about the metaphysical ultimate. They disagree about whether there is really anything besides the ultimate. To point this out, and recognise the points of convergence and reasons for the divergence, is not remotely syncretism.

Your attitude toward these bodies of thought seems very clumsy and ossified. You treat 'God' and the 'One' merely as a sort of term within the various accounts, so obviously the terms must be frozen within the limits of their cultural origins. But God, on Platonism and Christianity both, and arguably even more so for the mysticisms of the East, is not an item within any account, but at best the referent which words only attempt to approximate. As the common reality from which all beings come, it is no surprise that diverse societies will have diverse doctrines inspired by him, and some better than others.

Yes user, and I've told you that syncretism, meaning, the combination of different ideologies into a single one, does not automatically result in any sort of coherent product. I repeatedly tried to get you to understand this using the Ganesha concept and the Trinity, but it seems I failed. You still seem to think that telling me that because your forefathers chose to combine Neoplatonism with Jewish mythology, that this creates a sound doctrine. It does not.

>If you actually understood metaphysics
Yeah, as I said above, Christians think that their religion is the only spiritual authority, which everyone should follow. I don't believe in "faith", like you tell me to here. And guess what? Neither did Plato, Aristotle, Pythagoras, or anyone else your "Neoplatonic" doctrines were copied from. Nobody the NT writers stole from believed in anything else they believed in.

I know what your faith "has in common" with earlier Greek thought, and I know what it does not. I have spent all of these posts trying desperately to make you understand what the latter part, namely the contradictions, consist of, but have not yet availed to do so. I told you earlier that Plotinus and Genesis are not reconciliable, but you ignored it along with the rest of my arguments, repeating the "syncretism" remark as usual, which I explained doesn't "work" how you think it does.

I gave you so many specific arguments above. You instead greentext a single line, continue to insult me, and think you've won.

I don't care about Aquinas, who comes onto the scene 1200 years later, but is still treated by Christians like yourself as some kind of "scriptural continuation", believing the "revelation never ends", continuing to claim anything asserted by any random individual is "divinely revealed". The fact that he stole from Aristotle, and the Church later canonized his theft, does not now continue to showcase how "synchronous" Christianity is with earlier Greek conceptions.

I can't help you further, user. I tried. You still haven't addressed any of my arguments, or even understood what I've been talking to you for. Your theology is a flexible one; it grows and grows and grows, facing new challenges every millenia, and massively alters itself to stay afloat. And you'll believe in all of it, with certainty, because your Church approves it.

And yes, someone as immature and insultatory as yourself certainly seems to know about "mysticism". God, after observing your nobility of character, must have revealed His secret wisdom to you!

Why are so angry, user? I know that I've spoken to you on here before because you seem to spit vitriol like it were the only thing capable for you. Are you okay? Is religion really what you need, perhaps other issues in your life need sorting out first? I'm not patronizing, I'm being honest. If you're the same one I've seen before, you seem to have some kind of deep-seated enmity in you. Take care of that before it hurts you. Goodbye.

It's late where I am, I'll try and give you a response in the morning. I appreciate your civility and clarity, and your lack of personal insults towards me, unlike the other representative of your faith.

>this smarmy of a post
Your self-control is a mask. Your posts are more concerned with their own composed righteousness than engaging in a meaningful dialectic. This is your hubris, and your downfall. Believe what you want about your superiority, or your misconceptions about my beliefs or Christian doctrine and its Aristotelian and Platonic inheritance.

But please do NOT fucking pretend to know better. You have willfully chosen to feed your ego and representa particular (obscured) viewpoint rather than entering in an informed conversation about the origins of Christian philosophy.

>Why are so angry, user?
I am angry because you an insufferable cunt who would rather have a winning look than engage with your interlocutor and his sources in honest conversation. Your questions are the questions of a child, or an misinformed adult with a prejudice against Christianity. You are a dilettante. A pretender. A pseud. And you will recognize it someday.

>Yes user, and I've told you that syncretism, meaning, the combination of different ideologies into a single one, does not automatically result in any sort of coherent product

>explaining to me the definition of syncretism as if I haven't repeated it to him half a dozen times
Lordy lordy lord when the fuck will this nitwit come down from his high horse. Ideologies do not have to be perfectly compatible in all aspects, you dope. YES, people in the past (and -- shock -- the present!) have picked and chosen those bits which they found backed their theory. But in the case of the New Testament, THIS DOES NOT MATTER. The historical person of Jesus is well known. The political and philosophical influence of his ministry is demonstrated across millennia and billions of humans. If you understood the purpose of metaphysics, the supposition of not only a supernatural subtle quality of reality but also a Creator, then you would know that a mystical component is absolutely necessary. People don't go to Church "for its own sake" as you blandly claim to study philosophy. They go because it is part of their cultural indoctrination, then part of their individual journey, and finally part of their informed seeking after the divine. You can cry all day long for proof but the proof I have presented (Aristotle, Plotinus, Aquinas) you have dismissed with a wave of your dumbass hand. You are not worth replying to because you are more interested in speaking than listening. Please, please, please educate yourself on the very basics of Christian philosophy so that you can ask some informed questions from the perspective of the seeker rather than the high horse of the shameless contrarian.

Alright, user. I will do exactly as you say, and steep myself in the Judeo-Christian tradition for some time. I will attempt to understand it as thoroughly as possible. And after doing so, having a better reading of it, will compare it to my current viewpoints and see if they have changed. If I'm on here in a few months, and see a relevant thread, I'll enter it and present my honest views, whatever they be. Until then, I'll refrain from posting about Christianity further. I won't even respond to here, because I would similarly disrespect another Christian if I'm uneducated on his faith while speaking to him about it. I will properly educate myself before I return here. Perhaps we'll speak again, perhaps we won't. But my word here is sincere, and I'll see where my learning takes me. That's all then, I'll be on my way out now.

I will pray for you user, that God's grace will illuminate to you what my impatient words cannot.

Aquinas fucking sucks, just read Plato and Aristotle and drop the dumb Jewish faggot who desperately wished he could apply their work to his Jewish religion

...

>ideologies do not have to be perfectly compatible in all aspects
yeah but when these "ideologies" claim to be from an immutable, objective, perfect and transcendent source, they do. humans can make errors - God can't. and if you're claiming that your ideologies are from the latter source, then whatever is included in that clause can't have any errors, contradictions, incompatibilities, or anything else of the kind.

not the user you spoke to btw

I'll refer you to You can't force God into conforming to man's imperfect understanding. You don't have the privilege. No one does.

That is to say: mysteries are not only allowed, our nature makes them necessary.

aquinas blatantly states his own metaphysical intuitions. For most ppl this is an issue because it means relying on an epistemological indubitability that he himself has set up and approaches it systematically, rather than adhering to a heuristic of critical thinking and deductive reasoning. On the one hand this is because empiricism was still far off and nominalism hadnt been formulated yet either. On the other hand theres an underlying proposition in medieval logic that doesnt rlly depend on empirical verification which is this: medieval logic takes a naturalistic approach to the 'other'... whereas modern philosophy subsumes an other e.g in its focus on language... Aquinas was spot on in his cosmology especially when formulating the argument from contingency, which proves god without a doubt, with its only detractors being those who, simply distrust the metaphysical instinct... and so to obvious assertions like how there must be a single god and not two, theyll be like "but how do u know" and the point here of course is that its self evident from the bylaws of existence itself but well analytic thinkers dont really have any concept of cosmology n so continue to say dumb shit like what if the universe existed forever...

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Stop using words you don't understand

The same "unchanging" being who inhabits space and time, speaks with a voice, gives orders to the Israelites, reacts and responds to Moses, lives in tents, has a violent temper, and embodies every other anthropomorphic and changing attribute under the sun? This is the "unchanging nature" you speak of? Do you even understand what these words mean? I myself am an "unchanging being" then, since I have all the same attributes as the above.

Plato didn't believe in any sort of anthropomorphic being who brings scriptural revelations to select individuals and cultures as part of some grand unknowable plan. You either haven't read him or you don't care enough to represent him properly. Abraham's God isn't Plato's, and connecting them like you've done here demonstrates a high level of either ignorance or dishonesty on your part.

>Plato didn't believe in any sort of anthropomorphic being who brings scriptural revelations to select individuals and cultures as part of some grand unknowable plan.
*pic related scowls at you for being a brainlet*

And that's not even what that user was claiming, guy. Read his post again:
>Plato regarded the vision of the One as the highest end, thought that the One was what all thought approximates, and thought of the One as the source and summit of all perfections.
This is accurate. Please learn to read and desist your misrepresenting others.

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I am more interested in the implications that Aquinas' argument has for philosophical theism than Christianity per-se (note, Aquinas was quite the fan of both Aristotle and the Muslim commentators of Aristotle, even if he disagreed about their conception of God.)

Aquinas does bite the bullet and argue that the trinitarian, personal god of Christianity and Catholicism is not proved by this argument; for him those conceptions of God can only be proved by revelation: we cannot reason to the truth of Christianity as opposed to Islam as opposed to Judaism as opposed to Monotheistic interpretations of Hinduism, although he obviously believes that the Christians got it right.

In his strictly philosophical argumentation, Aquinas is setting out only to prove that there exists a being which has various divine attributes: through what is called natural theology, Aquinas believes that he can prove, and he advances strong arguments for, the thesis that there exists a being with such divine attributes as necessary existence, simplicity, omnipotence, eternity, omnibenevolence, pure actuality and omniscience. For example, following Plotinus (Aquinas was heavily influenced by the Neoplatonists) Aquinas derives God's simplicity from God's pure actuality. These and other divine attributes would seem to rule out many possible things which might seem candidates for what a necessary being might be (things like Karma, or undiscovered scientific laws) although Aquinas is always quick to point out that most of the divine attributes are essentially negative in character: that God is simple is another way of saying "Although we cannot know what God is, we can know that he is not composite." Saying God is eternal is another way of saying "Although we cannot know what God is, we can know that He is not subject to time"

Aquinas argues that this conception of the divine is available to all human beings if only they use their reason, in a similar way that the natural law is available to all human beings if they use their reason. Atheism, for him is quite clearly false. But as for the specifically Christian conception of God, he believes that this can only be known through God's revelation of Himself, and is not available to reason alone, although Aquinas advances several philosophical arguments that the Christian conception is not contradicted by the divine attributes arrived at through reason.

>This language is enough to fix Plato’s referent as the metaphysical ultimate, and hence, for the monotheist (who himself worships God precisely as the metaphysical ultimate) to recognise that he is pointing to the same reality. Anyone who wants to say something about the One, whether one agrees or disagrees, has to reckon with Plato, precisely because his doctrine has the same referent as that of the monotheist.

Plato's conception of reality has no relation to Abrahamic Monotheism, like the user there claimed. Try again.

>Plato's conception of reality has no relation to Abrahamic Monotheism
Read Aquinas. user just above you stated it very well. Aquinas used Plato's ideas about the One (and Plotinus, and Pseudo-Dionysius, and Aristotle) to help him analyze the theology presented in Scripture and to organize his thoughts about the nature of the Trinity, the existence of God, etc. That's all. Plato's work does not need to have even had an inkling of Abrahamic traditions. He came before, but was useful after. Why is this so difficult to understand?

Like... this is how the accretion of knowledge works. This is how any kind of knowledge is increased, by building on what came before. Can you imagine if the physical sciences had the same posturing, hubris, and ignorance speaking from authority as has been demonstrated in this thread? We'd still be in deer skins.

This post relies on a protestant understanding of how scripture is to be interpreted. It assumes that Luther is correct about the perspicacity of scripture: that the meaning of scripture is available to every reader. However, for an early medievalist such as Augustine, or a scholastic such as Thomas, this assumption is completely off the mark: for them, any interpretation of scripture must be backed up by references to how that scripture has previously been interpreted by the church community, because these thinkers actually believed that the church was itself divinely guided; although there are infinitely many interpretations of scripture, medieval christian theologians believed that a great many of these interpretations were "heretical," and thus should not be accepted, even if they are not explicitly contradicted by the bible.

For example, the Gnostic reading of the Old Testament YHWH as an evil Demiurge, who Christ freed us from was a somewhat common interpretation early on in the history of the church, and even was backed up by learned interpretation and more than a few bishops, but this account was rejected by the tradition as "Heretical," and thus was not considered a valid interpretation, even though can read the text that way. In any case, the consensus of the early christian community was that the "anthropomorphic" reading of the Old Testament God was also off the mark. So they would not accept your critique: they would say you simply were not reading the scripture in the right way, because you aren't operating within their interpretative tradition.

Now, I am not saying that you should agree with this idea: it certainly seems to offend our democratic sensibilities (why the fuck would we accept how the church interprets the bible?).

But it does hit on a very difficult problem, namely how to interpret the Bible, as there seems to be an infinite number of valid ways to do so. Note also that the bible itself is the product of one such interpretation: for many early Christians, it was not self-evident that the Old-Testament was divinely inspired (some argued that is was totally unnessacary, because Christ superseded it.): it was only through various back and forth arguments that they came to the conclusion that you could not understand Christ without the Old Testament, and that the Old Testament was itself divinely inspired. But if you do not accept the traditional interpretation as at least a little valid, it does not seem that there is any good reason to accept the traditional interpretation that the Old Testament is necessary to understand Christ, or even the traditional interpretation that the authoritative Gospels are Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, or that Paul is a legitimate authority on the meaning of Chist. So there seems to be at least a little reason that Aquinas and Augustine rely on canonical interpretation, rather than their own interpretation. Not saying that your interpretation is wrong though.

God is not real.

>God is not real.

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That handsome man can sneer at me all day long and it won't make God a real thing.

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Imagine needing a sky daddy to cope with reality.

>baptist gang
never gonna make it

This is a good thread.

stop being a vague faggot lol explain what you mean

>He thinks God is a bearded man in the sky
>He thinks God is just a cope

Scientifically prove the metaphysical
Oh that’s right, you can’t, ah hah hah hah

>prove up is down lol btfo
Divine metaphysics is by definition beyond the scope of empirical observation. Mystics and philosophers are okay with this. Kant rejected it as worthless, even as a thought experiment. Brainlets like you don't even know the definition of the word.

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disprove the argument from contingency right fucking NOW

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Kant is a smart guy though

Allegedly. And even smart people can be mistaken.

Good post

Prove that Kant was smart

Do you think Kant's argument for the existence of God and for immortality being real based on them both being necessary presuppositions of the practical reason works?

>and Catholics claims their beliefs aren't gibberish.

Do tell me senpai what the difference is between intellect and mystical union is. I guarantee you, in your explanation, intellect will be able to be substituted for mystical union.

Through faith, you can find Cthulu. This Jesus figure is more myth than person. I'm sorry, YAHWEH is a false idol. You'll be my sex slave in the afterlfie for worshiping the wrong deity.

What is the holy book of Cthulhu which reveals him to us?

>7777
>more myth than person
>yahweh is a false idol
you forgot to praise yaldaboth, user

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You're reading scripture crudely, and I'm not sure what sort of Pope or Protestant principle is supposed to make a crude reading normative.

We know from scripture (Malachi 3:6) and metaphysics that God is unchanging, but of course he can have changing effects in space and time. The whole of the changing world, after all, comes about through his eternal agency. One word may comes at one moment and another the next, which reflects some small part of his eternal and everlasting being, and more so when we pick out the synthesis of these words. The eternal can, because he creates changing effects, which we can take sequentially in our timebound way, thus converse on 'our level.' By understanding man's relation to God and God's relation to himself and to creation through himself, we understand why he would want to.

Let's take another illustrations of this: even while God is more 'present' in the Temple and the Tabernacle, he says to the prophet, "Heaven is my throne, and the earth is my footstool. Where is the house you will build for me? Where will my resting place be?"

You can read this as a contradiction and as an excuse to dismiss the scriptures, or you can read it as revealing different and important aspects of the eternal God's relation to men- he wills and is capable of personal relation and presence with man, even if he is cosmic in ontological status and can't literally live in tents. Intelligent synthesis both reveals truth and encourages the use of the texts. Why should a reader of scripture take the less charitable, more limited and more useless reading, when another is more faithful, more intellectually fruitful, does not involve dispensing with anything in the text, and is more edifying?

What you are doing is starting out with the assumption of opposition rather than the desire for synthesis, then deriving your conclusion that the texts are in fundamental opposition. If you were a believer, you would be shooting yourself in the foot reading scripture this way, and if you were an unbeliever, you're prematurely closing off an opportunity to learn from one of the great texts of human civilisation.

daaamn fambly he said u crude af

Philosphy is the art of constraint and explaining why you apply them, retard.

God is a cope who is typically characterized by the people who use the God-belief to cope as a patriarchal figure yes.

I'm still working through the Old Testament, and not in order, so I don't have as comprehensive a background on your scriptures as you do. From what I've read thus far, YHWH is most-definitely a space-and-time agent, and one who is gendered and anthropomorphic in his explicit nature. You cannot now transform this into "he has a changing part but also an unchanging part" as you might to something impersonal in nature, and must say that from what we find in these scriptures, God is a being, who behaves virtually identical to ourselves. You cannot point to these dimensions and claim them somehow different from our own embodiment of them, since they are identical. YHWH literally lives in tents, literally speaks to Moses, literally gives directives, and embodies many other modes of operation which are no different to our own. If you want to claim YHWH to be unchanging and immutable, you can't use a single article of information from those anthropomorphic sectors above to support that claim, else I myself could say the same of myself, or any other person around me, which the scriptural accounts of YHWH have no qualitative difference to. This is the difference between worship of a Principle versus a Deity: namely that the latter, for whatever part of it is only the latter and not the former, cannot be given any status which we ourselves, the same in make, would not be given either. Unlike a Principle on the other hand, which can escape this trapping. Your argument would be far easier to make were it a different Deity, which were far-less entangled in the ongoing affairs of a specific human society, but YHWH cannot be granted such a status. This is a person, not a principle.

The connection of the human-character YHWH from the Old Testament to that of Plato's entirely impersonal conceptions of Divinity are again something requiring a heavy justification for, and to my mind, there is nothing intrinsically in common between these worldviews either in culture, aesthetic, or ideology - and certainly nothing which connects them more closely than to Eastern conceptions of reality, which affirm tenets like vegetarianism and narratives like metempsychosis, that Judaic doctrine, and subsequently that of Christianity, does not adhere to. What I mean to say is that while individuals here assert the commonality of the Old Testament and Plato, and there may be some, greater internal synthesis is found between Plato and philosophies elsewhere in the world, who have equal right to align their own worldview with those of Plato's. Not that I personally follow them, but I'm merely responding to the concept of syncretism here, and of its nature, and that one could more easily adjoin Platonic doctrine with other cultural philosophies. Now, I'm still working my way through the OT, so my perspective is necessarily unfinished thus far. As I read more, I have more to think on, but the above remarks will remain for now, until you or another can overturn them.

This. Self-righteousness is the real onus of most Christians. They are generally quite empty of empathy for other human beings, and only gain some for them once their metaphysical positions align to their own. One need only spend a week in their world to see how truly intolerant they are of all other religious backgrounds, and especially of their severe and sincere hatred of athiests more than anyone else. These people are in no ways saints, though they do spend their days posturing as such.

Nice generalizing. I feel sad for atheists, but I don't go out of my way to tell them they are wrong. When they start telling me I am wrong, however, the gloves come off.

I'm not sure why you're so confident that the crude reading of the anthropomorphic features of YHWH is the correct and normative one for a reader of the Scriptures.

The Christian affirms both that YHWH is unchanging and immutable, and that he is an intelligence with personhood and care for his creations. I did not say that God has a changing and an unchanging part: I said that he is changeless, but can through changing effects communicate with us. This does not in the least compromise his changelessness.

In any case, the Christian synthesis helps show and motivate the notion that the personhood of God isn't contradictory with his unchangingness and eternity. Christianity shares with Platonism the idea that ultimate reality is intellectual. Christianity goes further than Platonism in that God's personhood is derived from his intellectual nature, and the relations that entails: he knows himself and through himself as the cause of things, he knows his effects, namely, his creations. His effects as they are caused by the divine nature are therefore not merely impersonally caused, but willed. And if he wills the being of his effects (among them, humans), he wills their good, and therefore loves them.

If God knows and loves us and can create effects by which he communicates with us, then it is quite consistent with what reason reveals about the changeless ultimate reality, that that reality should choose (not by changing in itself, but by being the origin of a contingent effect) to do so. Christianity even gives us a good universal reason why he should do so: he is interested in the true human good, which involves the reconciliation of man to himself, and man is not merely universal, but particular as well.

Naturally, there will be differences in the mode in which God is personal (i.e., an intellect capable of relating to others as such), compared to us. Our persons are limited by space, matter and time. We interact with other similar finite beings in a finite way. But there is still an analogy between our intellects and God's- while we understand finite numbers of things by finite generalities or universals, God understands things perfectly, as the most general thing which contains the reality of everything else. Human understanding is therefore reframed as the shadow or approximation of something higher, which is more understanding, and therefore more perfectly personal, not less. There is no reason therefore to confine our understanding of YHWH's personhood to our own mode: what we see of his person in the scriptures is perfectly compatible with being the finite manifestation of a higher mode.

>This is the difference between worship of a Principle versus a Deity: namely that the latter, for whatever part of it is only the latter and not the former, cannot be given any status which we ourselves, the same in make, would not be given either.

If you could rephrase, that would better help me understand where you are coming from.

>the gloves come off
Oh shit man, I was just about to start arguing with you but imma just back off. Dont want the gloves to come off.

>Although aristoltes physics is indeed outdated, his philosphy of change is propery considered part of his Metaphysics
If you dont realize that aristotles metaphysics is informed by his understanding of physics I dont know what to tell you. Just the notion of cause and effect is so outdated.

>you did not respond to my actual claim
You didn't even start with mine, which was how do you defend Aquinas including his conclusion in one of his premises? You've yet to even discuss it.

>I thought you were interested in the truth
We're in a Aquinas thread and I brought up an objection and you link me a different guy who gives a different argument. Whats wrong with Aquinas? Is he not good enough for you? When we're in an Ed Feser thread then we'll deal with his argument.

>I am starting to think that you don't know what it means to "beg the question"
Aristotle thought begging the question was when an arguments premise assumes the truth of the conclusion. If you want to disagree with that view that i'm using let me know.
One of Aquinas' premises is that there can not be an infinite regress because then there would be first no mover. His conclusion is that there is a first mover. Please explain how this is not begging the question.

>I would recommend you publish it in..
Sure! As soon as Feser publishes his view of physics and why he thinks following an Aristotelian physics is a good idea in the Physics Review.

It's usual cult behavior.