Thomas Aquinas – The world is divine

Aristotle takes telos to be one of the four causes, yes, and Aquinas agrees with him here. However, telos is a more general concept than what you might call conscious human purpose. The cause-effect relationship is itself teleological. You could not explain why an effect results from a cause without telos. This isn't axiomatic, though, which makes it sound like it is assumed without reason.

And yes, you can indeed argue for the existence of God from telos, but this isn't question begging. The teleological argument Aquinas is famous for (his Fifth Way) is not the Paley-style argument some people think it is. Feser's article "Between Aristotle and William Paley: Aquinas’s Fifth Way" discusses this at some length, beyond what his book "Aquinas" discusses (you can find it in this book [2] along with other material worth reading).

> This said, are any of those books a good read for someone who doesn't think there's any purpose, reason or goal to all of this?

I understand that you lean this way, but perhaps a better stance is to be fair and open minded toward the subject. Apart from the books I already listed (which are indeed good), I might even suggest beginning with this popular polemical tract [0] (polemical because it responds to the snark and ignorant condescension of people like Dawkins), and later, if you are interested in an introduction that focuses specifically on the existence of God from five different philosophical positions, you might find [1] interesting.

[0] https://a.co/d/7tSlbxk

[1] https://a.co/d/arJWT56

[2] https://a.co/d/jaG30ac

We tend to be suckers for the 'big men' way of writing history. As we are hard wired to appreciate causality:

X triggers y which revolutionized how we do z and changed the world to our 'current understanding'.

In this case the writer is trying to push a theological, conservative narrative, and Aquinas fits perfectly! Wow!

Otoh one could argue that Aquinas biggest achievement is showing the natural world cannot be explained solely from the bible, thus necessitating less convoluted explanations (Occam's razor) this paving the way for science through falsification.

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

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

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

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

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

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

That's one principle. Here is a second.

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

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

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

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

This is no knee jerk reaction my friend, the author is capitalizing "he" when referring to the Christian god.

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

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

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

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

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