Does Aquinas successfully prove the existence of God, or do his arguments merely provide a reasonable basis for belief?

>>24504282 (OP)
The Argument from Motion – Everything that moves is moved by something else, and there must be an initial mover (which he identifies as God).

The Argument from Causation – Everything that exists has a cause, and there must be an uncaused first cause (God).

The Argument from Contingency – Things in the universe are contingent (they could either exist or not exist), so there must be a necessary being whose existence is required for everything else to exist (again, God).

>>24504282 (OP)
Check it out everyone another bullshit spam thread from the zoomer jeet spamartist. A stupid OP, and then some chatgpt samefagging to spice it up.

I really don't know how you work around the Unmoved Mover argument. At the very least that one has always felt like sufficient proof to me that the universe has a Cause. You may not want to call that Cause "God," and maybe specifically not the Christian God at that. But SOMETHING set everything in reality into motion. Especially since there seems to be scientific proof that we don't live in an infinite universe, that the universe had a beginning.

>>24504297
If the unmoved mover is merely "something" then you haven't proved the reality of God now have you?
> Especially since there seems to be scientific proof that we don't live in an infinite universe, that the universe had a beginning.
You don't even understand the unmoved mover argument if you think it's talking about a temporal succession. Threads about "does God exist? IS IT PROVE?" are pseud magnets, every single time.

one distinction I only realized recently (after actually reading the summa) was how Aquinas made sure that his demonstrations applied to actually existing things that can be predicated, not simply logical entities. that's why he rejects any a priori demonstrations like ontological arguments because their results are stuck in logical and not actual reality. as for their validity, I think the third way makes the most sense: basically it's a modal argument of "for all x (possibly not exist(x))" if and only if "for all x (not necessarily exist(x))", which is a contradiction if anything exists at all, implying that some x necessarily exists. It's up to you if you call it God or not, but it's a proof of necessary existence in reality of an ontologically prior thing.

>>24504308
You need to study Aristotle to understand the five ways. At the very least read the Summa Contra Gentiles. The argument in ST is extremely abbreviated because he knew his readers would already know the other premises from Aristotle (Physics 8).
>basically it's a modal argument of "for all x (possibly not exist(x))" if and only if "for all x (not necessarily exist(x))", which is a contradiction if anything exists at all, implying that some x necessarily exists. It's up to you if you call it God or not, but it's a proof of necessary existence in reality of an ontologically prior thing.
If it's "up to you" whether to call it God or not, you haven't deduced God, you've proven that something necessarily exists, which could be nature itself.
>Aquinas made sure that his demonstrations applied to actually existing things that can be predicated, not simply logical entities.
And yet you'll find that this is exactly how he proceeds to demonstrate that this "something" is an omnipotent, unchanging, good intellect.

"Something necessary exists.... call it God if you want, this is still proof of something!" You guys need to read the Critique of Pure Reason. Then you will understand why mainstream philosophers do not try to prove that God exists anymore, and the only people you see shilling these arguments are apologists with blogs.

>>24504297
>You may not want to call that Cause "God"
Why not? do you call it banana?

>>24504294
Calm down

>>24504312
you want to unprove God, cringe behaviour

>>24504312
afaik Kant's categories are just the common sense power integrating sense data to create phantasms (the transcendental unity of apperception). so if the sensible species extracted from reality isn't in some way isomorphic (or at least homeomorphic) to the intelligible species in the intellect, then what we end up with is extreme idealism or solipsism, and I don't think Kant is arguing for that at all.

>>24504282 (OP)
do you have thoughts of your own or does chatgpt also jerk you off? books about this?

>>24504282 (OP)
Yes, I'd say so. It's really hard to reject these without rejecting the intelligibility of the world itself or just saying potency spontaneously moves itself to act for no reason at all. Yet if you do the latter, you cease to have any explanation for why things are one way and not any other. It's not surprise that modern thought, to work its way to volanturism and athiesm, has to pretty much deny that reason can know being (a gnostic claim of ignorance).

Granted, most people radically misunderstand them and so aren't forced to grapple with them. Pic related is a pretty accessible introduction.

>>24504312
Kant just assumes representationalism because that's what his era assumed. It's a bad assumption.

>>24504282 (OP)
>Does Aquinas successfully prove the existence of God
No.
>do his arguments merely provide a reasonable basis for belief?
No.

>>24504378
Kant is not a representationalist. The thing in itself is simply a noumenon, objectivity follows from transcendental apperception itself, etc. I’m not explaining Kant to tradcath pseuds like you and >>24504360. The categories are prior to any “abstractive” activity, they’re transcendental. You think they’re psychological. But you will never understand Kant because that would mean thinking for yourself rather than brainwashing yourself into arguments which you don’t even understand which confirm your worldview.

>>24504282 (OP)
>Does Aquinas successfully prove the existence of God, or do his arguments merely provide a reasonable basis for belief?
I would say yes. They are simple arguments that are easily approachable and at the very least prove a need for a God to make sense of reality. You should keep in mind the 5 arguments are from part 1 of the Summa Theologica. Which itself was a work for beginner theology students.

>>24504363
Why are u so mad? lol

>>24504282 (OP)
>Does Aquinas successfully prove the existence of God
Yeah.
He doesn't prove that God is specifically the Christian God, since this is a matter of revelation.
But he did prove there is a God and any argument against it is either by people who don't understand scholasticism (most philosophers after the Renaissance) or it is atheist cope by atheists who will want to prove there is no god.

>>24504388
The noumenon/phenomenon is itself an incoherent distinction. Today, hardly anyone considers themselves a Kantian but neoscholasticism is still very much a thing. Kant himself was a pseud, dismissing past metaphysics as twaddle while never having studied it at any depth. He absolutizes Aquinas' "everything is received in the manner of the receiver," but forgets that act follows on being and ends up with solipsistic skepticism that he fixes with ass pulls. That his immediate successors all feel they have to radically reread him (Fichte, Hegel, etc.) just shows what a failure the project is. I mean, it gave us modernity. Congrats, I couldn't think of a worse indictment.

>>24504400
Is it just me or the Enlightenment philosophers didn't really understand Scholasticism and were poorly educated on it?

>>24504388
>Everyone who disagrees with me is a tradcath
Nah, my big influences are C.S. Peirce, Hegel, and Solovyov, but I can admit that Aquinas' arguments are right and that Kant lived at a time when scholastic realism and the via antiqua was poorly understood, so people tilted at strawmen.

>>24504388
I am not a tradcath my man, I'm just some dude reading philosophy for the first time and want an answer to the mind-world problem.

>>24504282 (OP)

>>24504405
No, there was a huge democratization and deprofessionalization that occured. Rather than having to have your work arduously and expensively copied by other lifelong contemplatives with a decade plus of higher education you to make an impact you just had to sell the most pamphlets. There is a lot of creativity that comes out of the lowering of the bar and break up of standards but also a much lower quality.

The Reformation also led to people just throwing out stuff without understanding, or just trying to invest it. Populism became huge and so the simplistic reigned, while careful distinctions were bowled over and forgotten. The successes in science that came later (notably, not with the new philosophy of science, but centuries later) paper over the fact that it was a cultural apocalypse on par with the fall of the Roman Empire in many respects, and left ethics in particular totally incoherent.

Even those who had a kinder eye towards scholasticism tended to morph it into an absurd fun house mirror version of itself to make it appeal to the high tempers of the less subtle populace to win Reformation popularity contests.

>>24504414
you are retarded monkey

>>24504388

>>24504427
kant is wrong

>>24504320
>>24504421
>>24504430
Learn enough English to participate in the convo, or fuck off to Twitter, jeet

>>24504284
Aren't these all just special pleading?

>>24505892
Yes, but you can't expect people who believe in god to be smart.

>>24505892
they follow a similar structure to existence and uniqueness proofs for fixed point theorems, I don't know how you could call that 'special pleading'.

>>24505892
A worse damnation is that none of these actually prove the existence of God. Even if you accept them at face value then at best they tell you that everything had an initial cause, (which doesn't necessate intellect). And there was something at the beginning which was not moved by anything else.

This sounds like petty language games instead of anything concrete.

>>24504282 (OP)
Belief in God isn't about reason. Most people convert to religion because of personal experiences. Atheists don't usually get those experiences because their brains are wired differently which cuts them off transdimensional inferences.

>>24506150
I was thinking something like this earlier. Jung's synchronicities, like, genuinely fortuitous coincidences that aren't just the mind seeing things, like listening to a podcast and hearing a word at the exact same time you see the same word on a billboard. such experiences would be noumenal for some and phenomenal for others.

>>24504282 (OP)
You can't prove God. God is faith.

>>24505892
No, and there's some truth to >>24504312 and >>24506137 in that the five ways don't demonstrate the existence of the God of Christianity per se, but only some cause or being that philosophical pagans could concede exists and would identify as a god. The anon at >>24504312 rightly points to that ambiguity, each argument ends with "and this everyone understands to be God," "to which everyone gives the name God," "this all men speak of as God," "and this we call God," "and this being we call God." He's aware that these arguments don't settle whether such a being or cause is to be identified with the Biblical God.

>>24504282 (OP)

>>24506194
>>24506137
These critiques don't demonstrate a basic familiarity with the conclusion. The First Cause, First Moved, First Principle, and Necessary Subsistent Being is also Goodness and Truth itself (4th way). The Fifth Way is more obviously related to the fact that God is intellect but the idea of being outside intellect is alien to all of classical metaphysics and requires the materialist elevation of potency over act to even be dreamed up (and even then it is arguably incoherent). "The same is for thinking as for being."

>>24506168
I love Jung so much. He was very insightful. I think a lot of people waste time trying to rationalize faith when its more subconscious than that.

>>24506194
This

It's like saying
>"who stole my car?"
>"Mark stole it"
>"Prove it"
>"For the car to have been stolen, somebody must have stolen it, therefore Mark stole it"

It completely jumps from "there is a first cause" to "It is the Christian God"

This silly argument perfectly applies to all religions and not just Christianity.
I can make up a God right now, lets call him "Deus HomoFaggot", I claim that he is the first cause. Since there is a first cause, it must be Deus HomoFaggot

>>24506201
The "God" you describe, this first cause, necessary being, is a theory, an idea. From it you have drawn conclusions such that this first cause is also goodness and truth and so on.

And all these logical conclusions may well be valid... but your starting point, this "God" has absolutely nothing todo with, nor proves at all the existence of the Christian God, rendering it at best completely meaningless, and at worst complete heresy.

God's existence cannot be proved with logic starting with the first cause, because we have not yet established that the Christian God is the first cause. People may claim it, they may even define him as such, but there is no proof of it. And as such, any further conclusions drawn from this claim are as weak as the initial claim itself.

I could assert that God is a red sports car, and then draw further conclusions from that like "well God being a red sports car must have four wheels, and having four wheels he must travel on roads and have mass and etc etc" but it would all be meaningless since I have no proved that God is a red sports car, it is a baseless claim.

>>24504282 (OP)
Yes his arguments are solid. There being an intelligence at the origin point who is the cause and source of everything is by far the most reasonable, most logical and most intuitive viewpoint

>>24506208
I mean, I think Aquinas is busy throughout the Summa making the case for how a god understood through natural theology ought to be identified with the God of the Bible, I'm just saying the five ways don't do that by themselves. Stoics, Peripatetics, Neoplatonists could agree with these arguments.

>>24506201
I wasn't "critiquing" anything. I think it's a perfectly fair point to make that the five ways don't simply establish the existence of the Biblical God per se, they establish that there's some being or first cause or prime mover that would often enough be agreed upon as being a god, that's all and that's plain.

>>24504282 (OP)

>>24506229
This is a Dawkins-tier facile response.

>>24506229
Wrong Argument

>>24504284
Motion and cause are the same thing, everything is caused by motion.

>>24506397
>>24506400
>no counter argument
I accept your concession

>>24506408
you are abomination

>>24506229
>The "God" you describe, this first cause, necessary being, is a theory, an idea. From it you have drawn conclusions such that this first cause is also goodness and truth and so on.

What is that retard?

>>24504282 (OP)

>>24504282 (OP)

>>24504427
This really isn’t what Kant was saying. His work is anti-representationalist insofar as the thing in itself is a noumenon. That is to say, there’s an immediate relation between you and the object, but you necessarily think of something prior to the representation as its cause. He still retains language of “thing in itself as cause” as a sort of shorthand for the givenness of representation, and as a rhetorical concession to empirical realism. I can’t be too buttblasted at this meme reading of Kant though. He’s an awful writer and he puts way too much weight on these dualistic metaphors, which mean different things in different contexts. (The “noumenality” of the thing in itself is not the same as the “noumenality” of freedom, for instance).

Kant does have intelligent things to say about this question. He shows that the leap from first cause/unmoved mover -> God is not theoretically defensible but it is practically necessary. Many itt think “first cause must be supernatural”, and the fedoras think “look at these morons”. Kant shows how both sides are right and both sides are wrong. CPR is not enough you have to read the other critiques too.

>>24506523
Wrong, also kant is retard

>>24504427
G.W.F. Hegel famously argued that the Categorical Imperative, particularly the Formula of Universal Law ("Act only on that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law"), is too formal and lacks concrete content. It can tell you what not to do (e.g., don't make lying promises because if everyone did, promises would lose meaning), but it struggles to positively guide action or resolve conflicts of duty.

>>24506201
>assumes that act=intellect even though he is surrounded by non-intellectual actualities
>assumes that the effect is in the cause even though the scholastics themselves knew it might be only virtually present
>assumes intelligible structure is prior to being even though this is extremely controversial even within the “classical tradition”
>gay Parmenides reference

Another faux premodernist pseud. He memorizes and repeats arguments he likes without thinking about them at all or reading much. The most blistering criticisms of your half baked philosophy came from Franciscans btw.

>>24506539
Many, many people argued that before Hegel.

>>24506106
>everything needs a first mover EXCEPT my God
>everything needs a cause EXCEPT my God
>everything relies on something else existing EXCEPT my God
Logic would dictate that if God does not need a cause, then the statement that everything requires a cause is false. If there can be a "prime mover" that was not set in motion, then not all things needed to be set in motion.

>>24504282 (OP)
>First cause
No such thing exists. Only misguided people "reason" themselves into such nonsense borne out of their own childhood faiths. No one with an ounce of critical thought would be convinced that an all powerful creator deity with manlike intellect brought about this world based on some single statement regarding causes. No one in the history of religion and mankind based their faith on this play of words. If this is your criteria of evidence and "proof" especially over a claim with such massive implications on existence and reality, then you my friend played yourself successfully.

People who fall for this stuff are sometimes smart enough to apply a bit more skepticism than this to other areas of life, but forget to do so here since the conclusions fit nicely with whatever faith they profess. Which usually involves a God of Abraham who asks people to cut off their foreskins.

>But Aristotle
The good thing about application of philosophy is that you can take away relevant wisdom from ideas without having to deal in parts which were clearly product of their time. My interest in Kant's justification for the subhumanity of African people is as dry as my patience for why Aristotle thought Zeus is real.

>>24506587
The fact God is the first mover and the uncaused cause is what makes God, God. There's no predication on things 'needing' a first cause. Might as well says cars are fake because cars don't 'need' a hydrocarbon combustion engine.

>>24506591
Careful everyone, we got ourselves a real badass here

>>24506605
Yeah whatever. As far as I am concerned people who spout this nonsense as the definite proof that God must exist are no different from pearl clutching bible thumping grannies. Because the level of critical contemplation applied might as well be the same. One could only hope, for their sake, that they are not this credulous in regards to other things they don't have a cognitive bias for , and base their worldview on better grounding than muh single line word trick from medeival era book.

>>24506547
Oh look, we have reached the "I will just make shit up" part of the Kantfags memory. Sorry not everyone falls for sophistry you pseud.

>>24506874
If you can’t see how what I said is relevant to what you said you REALLY don’t know what you’re talking about. It’s a level of pseud that I have trouble comprehending. Again, you’ve picked up some bits of “philosophy” here and there but have no idea what any of it means or how the arguments for your position actually work. Congrats, you’ve managed to make yourself look even worse.

>>24506898
Stop, you're embarrassing yourself. First, you made it clear you didn't understand Aquinas. Fine. Then you spam a bunch of ad homs when people point out you're a pseud. We can all see it. Deep down you know it to. Get off 4chan and read if you're that butthurt about it, it might help you move out of pseudom.

>>24506941
I recognize him because he calls everyone who disagrees with his pseud takes a "tradcath." Dude isn't worth talking to, he just spergs out into insults like: >>24504421 on repeat.

>>24506941
Think whatever you want, if you don’t understand how something’s being more intellectual insofar as it is more actual is relevant here, I doubt you’ve read any Aquinas besides the five ways. I gave arguments, you’re the one who has nothing but ad homs. The absolute state of this board. What I said is completely legitimate but to you it’s gibberish.
>>24506946
You guys are tradcath pseuds. Or pseuds in general at any rate. You’re too ignorant to see what I’m saying or referencing in >>24506547 and how it relates to the first anon. You don’t know the premises of your own arguments. (No, you retard, they’re not in the first five pages of ST)

>>24506969
The fact that you think >>24506547 doesn't expose you is pretty funny. Let me ask, does "true" not apply to all things that have being? Does "truth" relate necessarily to the intellect?

Scotus and Ockham are corruptions of the tradition and after the fact so irrelevant.

Genuinely surprised by how many retards exist by evidence of this thread "Yes actually his arguments are totally reasonable because it own atheists!!" is essentially every reply agreeing.

The first mover argument is a perfect example of why Aristotle is so fucking dumb to me as a philosopher. I dont havr the vocabulary to explain this, but he aims to be "right" more than true.

His type of philosophy can unironically be reduced to the fallacy that embodys this sentence "Does your mother know youre gay or not?" That is literally his entire philosophy. Something that cant be argued against, because it appeals to a certain familar order of language and "logic" that "makes sense" because it skips the part of actually having to prove it makes sense.

In ordinary language, the presumption that something is treated as is the case, can sometimes actually override the truth of whether it is the case. (I think Wittgenstein would call this "grammar"?)

The first mover argument "makes sense" because it appeals to a particular way in which were already naturally predisposed to understand the world: That cause and effect is real independent of us, that things have to come before other things in a sequential order, and that things have a definite beginning.

For example. What is the beginning of your life? Is it the point you came out of your mothers womb? Or the point the sperm reached the egg? Or the point your parents intercoursed that produced the sperm that reached the egg? Or was it the day they decided to actually TRY for a baby? Or was it the day they decided to settle and marry, or was it the moment, where the electrical synapses in their brain triggered their attraction to one another? The point is that identifying a "first" point to anything is not only borderline impossible, but fundamentally dependent on a perspective that seeks a purpose. For somebody who is pro choice, the beginning of your life was actually as soon as you displayed some capacity for consciousness, for somebody pro life it is any number of points that embody the potential for life at all, so usually when the sperm meets the egg i think (idk im not super pro life or pro choice so i dont remember the specifics) Its possible and likely that the only reason we think there is a first mover, is because we want to. Even scientists cant escape it.

As an atheist, ive settled on the disbelief of God, but Ive done the argument enough times to basically know that its impossible to prove or disprove either way. I think thay suggests that were arguing about the wrong thing in the first place. There is an unchecked presumption to the fact that its argued at all.

>>24506990
>Scotus and Ockham are corruptions of the tradition and after the fact so irrelevant.
1) This is nothing but an ad hom.
2.) Ockham is the more genuine interpreter of Aristotle, certainly closer to Aristotle than the demiplatonist Aquinas. But you haven't really studied Aristotle so this is a dead end conversation. You may have read a few tractates in isolation, I wouldn't even bet on that.
>Let me ask, does "true" not apply to all things that have being? Does "truth" relate necessarily to the intellect?
Indeed it does. But if "x is" = "it is true to say that x", it does not follow that a universal, standing in potency to x, is prior to x. This is something Aristotle for example argues against at length in the Metaphysics. So again you don't actually know the tradition you claim allegiance to, you've just read some dialogues and other rubbish. If you think "if something is, it's true, therefore univesals like horseness are prior to actual horses" is a valid argument - man I give you ad homs because you deserve ad homs. The relevance here re: God is that if particulars are prior to universals, you do not actually need an intellect in the sky to account for the "planning" of reality, the intelligibility of the world can actually be in the world. You have no fucking idea what you're talking about and you clearly do not think independently, you grab hold of arguments that sound good. You, like almost everyone else here, on youtube, and so on, do not actually study philosophy, it's just dicking around. I really am so angry that people like you think they know what they're talking about, it's outrageous. You guys can gang up on me because I'm poking holes in your simplistic, quasi-Thomist bubble. But you really are completely out of your element and that's all there is to it.

for the anons that are saying "sure this proves a necessary being, first cause, unmoved mover, etc, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's God, not is it necessarily the God of the Bible", you're glossing over how Aquinas uses Aristotelian metaphysics to show that the unmoved mover has an essence equal to existence, ie. God as existence itself, and directly points to the tetragrammaton, ie. "I Am (essence) Who Am (existence)" as the demonstration that it's the biblical God. not saying the proof is correct, but just showing that if it is correct, the God of classical theism is the God of the Bible.

>>24507072
>2.) Ockham is the more genuine interpreter of Aristotle, certainly closer to Aristotle than the demiplatonist Aquinas. But you haven't really studied Aristotle so this is a dead end conversation. You may have read a few tractates in isolation, I wouldn't even bet on that.
>Aquinas is wrong because he is further from Aristotle than Ockham.

This is irrelevant and doesn't follow.

>The relevance here re: God is that if particulars are prior to universals, you do not actually need an intellect in the sky to account for the "planning" of reality, the intelligibility of the world can actually be in the world.

No one suggested this. This is a common symptom of pseduds, they hallucinate entire arguments out of thin air.

It is the case though that pure actuality must be prior to any horses (act/potency composites) and pure actuality is not, in Aristotle or Thomas (or Avicenna), without intellect.

Finally, seething about "Platonism" as set against "the real Aristotle" is funny given the Greeks who spoke Aristotle's dialect natively and had access to more of his texts took him as one.

>>24506941
You are retard

>>24507227
We've made it to the point where you collapse into grammatically incorrect slurs, got it. The true mark of a great intellect.

>>24504360
can anyone else more familiar with Kant answer this?

>>24507474
Retard

>>24504282 (OP)

He fails a physique check, having been famously obese. Thus, by Christian standards, all his writings are invalidated.

Why do Christians listen to ANY other mundane, mortal "authority" on Christianity other than Jesus Christ alone?

>>24507782
He was also famously strong. Builtfat. And had remarkable endurance, considering how far he walked.

>>24507827

Too bad, per Christian rules, he was fat and therefore wrong. Bald, too.

>>24507782

>>24507834
>>24507801
Why would i listen to a faggot like you

>>24507839

I'm just quoting your own rule. Any time someone challenges Christian beliefs, step 1 is they must prove they're not black or Jewish. step 2, prove they aren't a woman, gay or trans. Step 3, physique check. You have to be straight male aryan, tall lean and muscular, before you can validly disagree.

>>24507844
maybe a chrisitan fucked you in the ass so hard bitch

>>24507844
Female-brained male detected.

>>24507853
>>24507856

I didn't write the rules, you did

>>24507860
worthless worm

>>24507865

NOOOOOO I really care so much what you think of me, how will I live now? I'm melting, melting, oh what I world, truly I am undone

>>>UMMMMM..... your pecker is LITERALLY shorter than 12" soft and not twice the width of my arm circumference at its widest point so why would I ever listen to anything YOU have to say!?!

Female-brained.

>>24504282 (OP)
>>24504284
I'm confused by what these sorts of arguments are attempting to do. Proving the existence of A God is very different than proving the existence of THE God. How do you make the leap from
>Logically, a God must exist
to
>The God that exists must be the God of Abraham

>>24507888
That's what the rest of the Summa is, dumbass. The book is like seven thousand pages long, it's not going to be summarized in a few bullet points.

>>24507888
If I want to prove that grass is green against a purplegrassisist, first I need to explain what the color green is.

I seriously, genuinely want to know why. I want to know why Christians use ANY other "moral authority" other than Christ himself.

Aquinas isn't God.

>>24508606
This is my problem, too. Why does anybody give a shit about Paul? I don't trust any human enough to have authentically recorded Jesus, let alone hear what someone who never met him has to say.

>>24507932
Nta, but the thread is on *the five ways*. Given a tendency among some in apologetics to appeal to the five ways, it's fair to point out, as several have above, that by themselves they don't prove the existence of the Biblical God.

>>24508606
To be more appealing

>>24508656
>They by themselves they don't prove the existence of the Biblical God.
They do

>>24508669
You don't understand English enough to argue about this, jeet

>>24508672
We wanted decent atheists to argue with instead of you scumbag

>>24508656
>some dishonest bad faith actors try to elide a huge and complicated body of work into a strawman they can actually tackle so we have to talk about the strawman
So what, you want to argue about the wikipedia summary? The OP is about Aquinas and his arguments (ie his entire body of work), not "the five ways", that's blatantly dishonest.

>>24509327
he is just wasting our time

>>24509327
I'm going to be charitable because you don't know what's up, but >>24504282 (OP) and >>24504284 are both by the same poster, a poster who's spammed AI threads of the same variety (OP basic bitch overly general question followed by a post using ChatGPT to answer it) for the last month. I'm not being disingenuous by treating the five ways over Thomas' corpus, because OP just wants an excuse to copypaste the five ways.

>>24508693
>>24509352
Jump into the Ganges and swallow your sacred trash water.

>>24509411
>I'm not being disingenuous, I'm just playing into an AIjeet spammer's spam
That's retarded, what the fuck are you doing?

>>24504284
1st one is just a special case of the 2nd
2nd one refuted by Hume(pbuh)
3rd one refuted by Parmenides
Still aquinas was pretty kino.

>>24509411
kids shouldn't be allowed to type on the internet

>>24507046

I've always considered the first cause argument to be a trick of language and nothing more. It does presume things about how we think of "causes" and "beginnings".

>>24507046
Idioto

>>24509522
>I've always considered the first cause argument to be a trick of language and nothing more.

WittGODstein has really opened my eyes to this, although i fundamentally reject his philosophy despite it largely seeming correct, but thats another argument entirely that i havent been able to get off here since people only engage with reinforcing ideas here it seems.

i haven't read the entire summa so i don't know

>>24506865
amen

>>24509488
I'm talking with the other anons who took the jeetbait and ended up having an actual conversation, are you retarded?

>>24507072
First, learn to notice the details. For example, the similarities between Jesus and Superman end only with a) doing extraordinary things, b) sympathy of followers. Superman is an alien who operates a closed catalog of powers that are useful in specific situations. Superman can even be treated as a god, but he is a Greek type god, closed within the framework of his individuality and quite limited. To a large extent, his divinity ends with strength and the ability to use it. Meanwhile, Jesus has no "power", Jesus is a soteriological figure who, instead of individual abilities, continues the actions of God himself, i.e. the process of Creation. One who follows Christ continues Creation. Jesus does not even have to perform miracles to have such a function (which is why he so often gives them up).

>>24504282 (OP)
>>24504282 (OP)
Most logical philosophy falls into wordplay, including his. And no, arguments on first cause, prime mover and so on don't prove god in any meaningful way.

>>24507171
>No one suggested this. This is a common symptom of pseduds, they hallucinate entire arguments out of thin air.
Nta but you must be somewhat retarded if you don't understand how his whole post pertained to yours. Aristotle didn't imply a god for his universals (from what I remember), from which you don't need a god to have a universals-compatible universe (although universals are stupid to begin with)

>Finally, seething about "Platonism" as set against "the real Aristotle" is funny given the Greeks who spoke Aristotle's dialect natively and had access to more of his texts took him as one.
Platonism as in disciple of plato, not as a follower of his ideas (in particular how his universals played out)

>>24509658
You have rocks for brains, you can't even follow a conversation let alone an argument.

The first mover argument is more about that Amo nigga's designs

>>24504282 (OP)

>>24504282 (OP)

>>24504284
Right

>>24510010
by what explains everything else, fukken politics?

>>24510012

>>24510018
the contingency arguments sounds like a proof against god for the strict purpose that we wouldn't know we're looking at a contingency

>>24510026
The very purpose of the contingency argument is to resolve the problem of an infinite regress of dependencies. If we truly couldn't identify contingency, then the problem it aims to solve (the lack of an ultimate explanation for existence) would simply disappear or be unrecognized, making the argument itself moot rather than a proof against anything.

>>24510030
Well then the causation argument is arbitrarily defined by the fact that something happened, I don't know the behind the meme on that one though

the argument that schelling makes for deriving nature or something natura naturans or something like that reminds me of something st denis the pseudo aeriopagite said about names occasionally

the copernican ellipse has not been thought through ellipsely or something in my humble opinion as it were harumph harumph harumph rubarb rubarb badger badger nar shaddaa