Fenring: Before I respond to you point-by-point, can I ask you why you are taking up the other side of this argument?
Hm, hm. To me there is only one side to any argument: seeing to its logical fortitude and pointing out flaws. There is no conclusion so good that I'll overlook a bad argument, and no conclusion so bad that I'll ignore its good arguments. To me the great debilitator is the lack of real communication, so establishing that is primary for me over and above hoping someone will agree with my conclusions.
I know you to be Catholic, which means you must believe the things I am saying to be true. What is your point and motivation?
That's a tricky point, isn't it? I can agree with a conclusion and disagree with a chain of reasoning, correct? And what's even trickier, is if a conclusion is
framed within its chain of reasoning then I actually have to disagree with both if one is problematic. That's the issue with language: you could just say God is responsible for everything as an axiom, and I'd say sure. But if you frame it as being
because all things need causes then it follows that God is responsible for everthing that's a totally different proposition, and I wouldn't accept it unless it was ironclad, which I don't believe it is. There's a difference between a good argument, and a necessary argument, as I mentioned earlier. It's not dumb to suppose that God (or a god) could have done all this; but it's also not dumb to suppose it could be something else. As long as we're sticking to paper arguments one must not be stuck struggling to prove a conclusion we already believe is true. It is
not true that because something is right that we can prove it, and certainly not trivially. Incompleteness theorem already shows that in principle not all true propositions can be proven. Having a belief as a starting point, and trying to work it backward to reach all the necessary premises to reach it, is going to have problems, not the least of which is we are mixing up types of proposition. If I were to say "I believe in God" that
is not a proposition in the form of a paper argument, but rather a combination of life experience, moments of revelation, identification of patterns, knowing what stirs people's souls and what does not, and indeed, also science knowledge and pure logic. All of this combined is what I would call "reason", and any derivation of how a belief is reached would have to include all of these types of experience. Paper logic alone is not a lived experience, and is not God, so in terms of, shall we say, fealty, I think we are only required to be on the side of truth insofar as it accords with life itself. A paper argument can be flawed in so many ways, the greatest of which is failure to accord with actual reality and with life. How can we know that the words employed in such an argument really match something in reality, or accord with some real thing and aren't just wordplay? That's what I was getting at earlier, and why resting on such arguments
as important proofs is risky. They are interesting, yes; worth takling about, for sure; can teach us how to think, definitely. But imagine how bad it would be to be shackled to a line of reasoning: imagine if one day you realize it's bad reasoning - does that mean your faith is shaken? So the reasoning must work on its own grounds, not because you need it to be true. As it happens I think many of Aquinas' arguments (similar to your OP) are deeply problematic, but that fact is not deeply problematic to me. He was just one thinker. That said I'm not an Aquinas expert, and I only based this off reading around 200 pgs of the Summa, so this is not some final expert conclusion on my part. But I could easily go over any major section and point out serious problems, many of which have to do with the types of analogies the Ancients used to prove conclusions. Just as a tiny example, the Greeks loved to employ
opposites in arguments; e.g. light is the opposite of dark, heat is the opposite of cold. But these are physically incorrect ways to understand light and heat, and so the analogies are useless. Heat
is not the opposite of cold. In fact it would be hard to find opposites of any kind in nature. Maybe spin direction, maybe electric charge. Even those may not really be opposites if we understood them more deeply. You get the idea.
The trouble Tom has, I think, with Catholic theology and logic, is that it unfortunately ends up being trouble to try to take a broad position and argue against it. For instance if he takes issue with Aquinas, which in fact I do as well, that doesn't really speak to 'Church theology' since that would be like disagreeing with Descartes and saying that 'Western philosophy' is flawed. He's just one guy, who does exist within a context and tradition, but nevertheless he's one guy. The difficulty is that most philosophy in the last 2,000 years in the Western world exists within the Church, and that just means it's a ton of work to sift through all the thinkers involved to see who makes great arguments and who doesn't. I like that you decided to try to make the argument in the OP your own since it's better to understand the moving pieces and construct your own argument, rather than resting on the authority of one thinker.
Sorry to have taken so long to answer a simple question, but you see how weak words are? I can work with people in an arts setting and identify when their eyes light up, when something deep and important is touched through our work; I can see when weight is lifted from people's minds, when meaning fills up something they previously was just an abstraction to them. I can see "whoa!" moments and moments where pieces of life get put together and fit somehow. And it is true as well that for some few people paper arguments can do this do: mathematicians can find revelation in pure reason for sure. So that is also part of it. But even they know that what they've discovered is only a little piece of the puzzle, carving out a tiny corner of the wondrous total. For a paper argument to employ terms like "good" and "intelligent", and indeed, even "fully actual", requires that we really can see what those might be in reality. That's no small task!