Thomas Aquinas – The world is divine • Hacker News Board

Re: Thomas Aquinas – The world is divine

#41

Post by galaxyLogic » Mon, Jun 30, 2025, 6:46 PM UTC

hackingonempty wrote: post #37

lo_zamoyski wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't recommend using this article as a serious source of knowledge about Aquinas. Some of the wording is a little iffy as well. For beginners, I would recommend "Aquinas: A Beginner's Guide" [0]. After that, if you want to dig deeper into Scholastic metaphysics in general, consider [1]. There are also books devoted to Aquinas's metaphysics exclusively, such as [2] and [3]. > The claim about the validity of Aquinas…

> Therefore it is necessary to arrive at a first mover, put in motion by no other; and this everyone understands to be God. > Therefore it is necessary to admit a first efficient cause, to which everyone gives the name of God. > Therefore we cannot but postulate the existence of some being having of itself its own necessity, and not receiving it from another, but rather causing in others their necessity. This all men…

Right that's one thing I never understood about these theological arguments, if there is a cause of everything, why can't there be more than one cause?

And if we assume or believe that there is a single cause for everyting, how does the rest of the stuff like " must also be something which is to all beings the cause of their being, goodness, and every other perfection; and this we call God" follow from that?

They BELIEVE there is a single cause for everything but why do they believe that? I assume because they WANT to believe it. But even so what makes them believe that "single cause" is "the cause of their being, goodness, and every other perfection"? What about all the imperfections? Oh, it must be the Devil. Then why did God create Devil? (Or is Devil perhaps a 2nd God?)

It seems we just created "Devil" because we could not otherwise explain "God". And all the while we were quite confident that, we simply cannot be wrong. :-)

Re: Thomas Aquinas – The world is divine

#42

Post by galaxyLogic » Mon, Jun 30, 2025, 7:03 PM UTC

tasty_freeze wrote: post #13

lo_zamoyski wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not at all. People can have bad and harmful desires. The good is determined objectively by the nature of the thing; desire should be aligned with that objective good, but may not be because of some defect.

How is what I said different than "good for somebody". A Russian bridge gets blown up. It is good for Ukrainians; it is bad for Russians. There is no intrinsic goodness to the event in this case. Let's take another case that has people arguing on both sides in the US: universal health care. Some think not having it is an atrocity, and others see it is a threat to civilization. Who is to judge its objective goodness?…

I agree with you. People who talk about "good" most ofen conveniently omit the qualification "... for this group of people". Their purpose of course is to make every listener believe it is good for them.

If God is "good", who is he good to? For everybody, in equal amounts? Most intruding armies believe in, and preach the goodness of God, who helps them kill their enemies.

Re: Thomas Aquinas – The world is divine

#43

Post by btilly » Tue, Jul 01, 2025, 1:57 AM UTC

galaxyLogic wrote: post #40

btilly wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 argument…

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 rel…

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

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