Was it autism?

I read 10 pages of it

>there must be a first cause therefore Jesus was the son of God and he walked on water, his father was a former Jewish tribal deity and you need Jesus in your life to save you from your sins that became universal after two people ate an apple
Why do Thomists think they're good apologetics for Christianity?

Thomism leads to perennialism and perennialism makes Christianity meaningless.

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Wouldn't that make impossible to Jesus to be God, since it would mean that Jesus couldn't exist as an actual human being, with place and time defined?

There are maybe 5 public intellectuals who fully understand him. The rest are probably in monasteries.

I might have thumbed through the table of contents once.

>Thinking that the argument from motion is supposed to be an apology of Christianity
Wew lad

Can somebody give me a quick rundown on Aquinas' argument from motion? I thought I had understood it, but I think I was getting it confused with the cosmological argument. I heard Bishop Barron say that the argumnet is NOT temporal in nature, so if anyone can expand on that it would be appreciated

Yeah exactly. Fucking Christcucks I swear.

No sane christian will pretend that the first cause argument leads to faith in Christ, and certainly not Aquinas himself. The metaphysical argument leads to the knoweldge of God as the first cause and that's all. It's the philosophical basis for faith but not faith itself. . That's the distinction between surnatural and natural knoweldge that Aquinas made to begin with.

What distinguishes the cosmological argument from the argument from motion is the type of causation being talked about. The cosmological argument is linear or going back in time like a row of dominoes, with one being knocked down by the one preceding it which itself was knocked down by the one preceding it and so one until we get to the "finger" or intelligent force that set the whole thing up to be knocked down.

The argument from motion is concerned with hierarchical causality or levels of causation. Another way to think of it is as dealing causation in the "here and now" as opposed to a historical chain of causation. Aquinas illustrates what he's talking about using the example of a person holding a stick and using it to move a rock on the ground.

Everything that is in motion is moved by something else. Some things, like a rock, do not have the power to move itself. For a rock to move it must be moved by something else, like a stick which is itself being pushed by a hand because the stick doesn't have the power to move itself. The stick is an instrumental cause of the rocks movement because it is deriving its power of movement from the hand, and the hand is deriving its power of movement from the brain, and the brain deriving its movement from something else, a higher source.

The chain of movement must ultimately terminate with something that is itself unmoved by anything else because a series of instrumental causes can't go on indefinitely, and to say otherwise would be to suggest that an infinite series of sticks moving rocks which move more sticks that move more rocks could exist without any hands and brains becoming involved.

Ed Feser's Five Proofs is really good if you want a more contemporary take on Aquinas.

Lovely description, thank you. Yeah, I've been meaning to check Feser out for a while. How accessible is it? I don't mind too much either way, but I'm still quite new to serious theology so maybe it'd be best to start with something gentle

Feser is one of my favorite writers because he's really good at making complex things simple while still being thorough. He has to be thorough because he's constantly defending himself against his contemporaries.

No but I've read pic related

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Unless you're a priest there's no reason to read the Summa Theologia. Seriously there's only 50 or so questions that's relevant to ethics and metaphysics and he covers those topics in much more depth in other places. It was never meant to be read straight though, or even to be read by the layman. It's a reference book.

What work of his would be a good starting point? Should I just pick up a Penguin or Oxford collected writings or is there an obscure something or another I should look into?

the book was written hundreds of years ago who the fuck cares what its intended utility was its a fucking BOOK... youre out here saying you aint supposed to read it because of the way its written.
Also somebody disprove the argument from contingency.

The point is that most people don't have a good reason to ever read the entirety of the Summa. You don't need to read 200 pages on the nature of angels in order to understand his theory of natural law.

The Compendium of Theology. It was written for the regular man.

On the Principles of Nature