Tom said: Oh, man. You've been reading too much Catholic apologia.
Perhaps you haven't been reading enough. I see in classical theism a carefully-wrought castle that goes up to the clouds, full of truth, hope, and beauty. In all of the competing philosophies I only see a pile of rubble smoldering on the ground, full of defeat, despair, and ugliness. There is nothing more dehumanizing than determinism, which rejects the most essential aspect of humanity given to us with love: free will.
Tom said: I suppose I should start by saying there's a reason that most academic philosophers consider Catholic apologia in specific to be its own branch of philosophy, much like Rand's utilitarianism: you can't get there from first principles and it doesn't hold up to scrutiny, but its adherents will never admit it. But I'll do my best to address these in a neutral way.
Regarding your first comment about what some modern philosophers think of classical theism, I will just point out that the half-cooked theory you put forward regarding memristor's has a philosophical shelf life of about five minutes and is so deeply uncompelling that you yourself aren't even willing to commit to it. I care absolutely nothing about what modern academia says or thinks; modern academia is full of immoral mid-wits chasing justification for their failings and rejecting the existence of truth.
The other two theories you put forward, determinism and materialism, try to solve the failures in their models by pretending anything which doesn't fit into the model simply doesn't exist, despite the immediate and ever-present evidence to the contrary. Free will? Doesn't exist! (Nevermind that you _really_ seem to experience it). Consciousness? Don't look behind that curtain. Instead, look over here, we have formulas that can describe the motion of billiard balls! If we can do that, trust us, we could predict what you'll have for breakfast in a year. Even though we can't even unify chemistry and physics. We
could predict every detail of your life and every choice you ever might make.
Tom said: First off, before I get into your specific bullet points, here's a big one, and it's challenging something that you seem to be taking as axiomatic: things don't actually need reasons. They need causes (or, at least, everything except a hypothetical Prime Mover(s) require(s) causes), but those causes don't have to satisfy any requirement for rationality....[Electrons] do exist (assuming you believe they do; there are certainly theories out there that say they don't), and they certainly fulfill functions, but do they exist in order to fulfill those functions?
I think there is value and truth in teleology, but the arguments I've made here don't invoke it. I am appealing to the
principle of sufficient reason here and using the word reason in that sense.
Tom said: (Fully Actual) it is not necessary for anything to be fully actualized.
Sure it is. If God were not fully actual, what would act upon him to actualize his potentials?
Tom said: (Fully Actual) This is just the Prime Mover argument all over again, except for individual qualia (which don't actually exist, BTW.)
They sure seem to exist. Why do you say they don't?
Tom said: Heck, Plato actually argued for a metaphysical universe in which all of his Platonic qualia eternally existed in a type of stasis, so that every hot thing shared in the properties of Platonic hotness, without which (he asserted) nothing hot could exist. But of course he did not insist that the Platonically hot thing was also the Platonically intelligent thing, or the Platonically flat thing.
Yes, Plato believed in a realm of forms. I think Plato is wrong about that. I think moderate realism is much more compelling philosophy. Do you think Plato's right? If so, we can talk about it. If not, I don't see much value in invoking a random philosophy from the nearly-infinite pool of philosophies. Tell me what you think and I'll respond to that.
Tom said: Things can be heated, but surely the background radiation of the universe -- which we have reason to believe came into existence already incredibly hot -- can heat things just fine without needing to make them accept the spirit of heat.
There are two problems here. The first is that without actualization of potential, how do things change? Change is the actualization of potential. You can hand wave that away but it's not going anywhere.
The second is that the heat of the early universe does not necessarily exist. Therefore, appealing to it as a fundamental source of heat is not a complete answer. The question remains "Why was the early universe hot?" You're missing the main thrust of my argument with this response.
Tom said: Secondly, how you define the qualia that can be actualized here is pretty important. You'll notice that whatever apologist you're working from here has added the caveat, not present in Anselm's original, that contradictory qualia cannot be actualized. This exists because one of the more potent arguments against Anselm back in the old days was that if God had to somehow embody every quality, He also had to embody the most evil of things as well. The convenient response was, "but He already is the most good, so therefore He can't be the most evil!" Obviously this falls down if you're trying to deal with physical attributes: if God is fully-actualized hot, does that mean that cold is simply the absence of hot? That's fair, sure -- but is "healthy" the absence of "poisoned?" If God is fully-actualized Italian, does that mean that Norwegian is simply the absence of Italian? But once you start thinking that way, and realizing how critical it is to identify what qualia you care about, you realize that "actualization" is actually a completely unnecessary mental exercise. (I'll get to that in #4).
I agree, God is not actually hot or actually cold. God doesn't possess hotness formally, he possesses it eminently. God doesn't have to "embody" every quality that might be actualized. As I mentioned above, God is immaterial and yet he created the material universe. He clearly can't be immaterial and "embody" material.
An effect must be in a cause in one of three ways: formally, virtually, or eminently. Fire possesses heat formally. But when a cobbler makes a shoe, he doesn't himself formally possess "shoeness" -- he isn't a shoe -- but instead he possess the form of a shoe eminently; he holds the form in his mind and is able to actualize it in matter. A thing cannot be a shoe and a person at the same time, but still a person can have the power to actualize a shoe from the potential in matter. Analogically, God cannot be hot and cold at the same time, but God has the power to actualize heat or actualize coldness.
Tom said: Thirdly, being the Prime Actualizer does not actually mean you have to be Fully Actualized. There is nothing stopping a hypothetical Prime Actualizer from actualizing everything else but not having any properties of its own to actualize.
God is not fully actual in the sense that he is actually every quality something might have. He is fully actual in the sense that he has no potential to be changed.
I agree with your second point: God is perfectly simple, so he doesn't have unique properties. He doesn't have any properties. He is. All of the properties I listed individually are the same one thing in God, not separate things.
Tom said: Once you realize this, it becomes extremely easy to recognize how Anselm is lazily arguing from his own conclusion. The classic "God must exist because I am defining God as the entity embodying the best of all possible attributes, and the best form of existence is existing"
I don't find the ontological argument for God's existence compelling (whether Anselm's, Descartes, or any other modern rendition) and I have not invoked it here.
Tom said: (Immutable) Leaving aside my complete rejection of this assertion, let's examine what that means. We see several times in the Bible descriptions of God becoming angry. Assuming that these descriptions are true, moods cannot be actualizable qualia; otherwise, God could never be any angrier or happier or more tired than He is at all times. But let's assume that the Bible's descriptions of God are tainted by the flaws of the humans doing the writing, or that God is perhaps just roleplaying emotions at times to make some point.
God possesses no passive potentiality but he does possess active potentiality. Said another way, God cannot be changed but God can act. So God does become angry, but in a way that is only analogical to the way humans become angry. Anger changes us; it does not change God. God is simple; his anger is his love.
Tom said: Surely being material is better than being immaterial?
No. Better means moving closer to perfect. Perfection is the actualization of all of the potentials proper to a thing. So it is better for birds to have beaks but it is not better for humans to have beaks. Similarly, it is better for animals to be material, because that is their nature, but it's not better for God to be material. Actuality is better than potentiality, and matter is the principle of potentiality, so immateriality is better than materiality. Not to mention, a material God is a contradiction for the reasons articulated above (just like a triangle with four sides is a contradiction).
Tom said: (Immaterial) Leaving aside the question of whether there's Biblical support for people successfully changing the Judeo-Christian God's behavior, let's question whether something that has a material form necessarily must be acted upon by outside forces. If our Prime Mover is actually, say, a brane from some versions of string theory, the only influence on that brane is going to be other branes "bumping" into it outside space-time. It has a material existence, but literally nothing in our material universe can change it. Does that suffice?
No, of course not. As above, this is missing the point entirely. I'm not talking about the relative prime cause in only our local universe in some larger multiverse. I'm talking about the absolute prime cause of all of it, no matter how big and strange all of it might be.
If your theory of higher-dimensional branes colliding in higher dimensional spaces creating many many big bangs all isolated from one another is true, that would be no more interesting to what I am articulating than the existence of atoms. The chain of causation described in my first post (and in the long post above) may be very long and very strange; it may pass through all sorts of dimensions and all sorts of strange modulations; it doesn't change the fundamental feature of a contingent chain of existence or a contingent chain of actualization: there must be a most fundamental thing which necessarily exists and is fully actual.
Tom said: (Eternal) Even our multi-universal brane might get swallowed by another brane, at which point our entire universe would either collapse into (ironically) a timelessly eternal stasis, or simply end entirely. So "as eternal as the universe, barring its replacement by something else performing the same function" is probably the best we can do.
Again, if you can imagine it being swallowed by some other thing, then you are not imagining the God I am pointing at. He is more fundamental than that. He is most fundamental. He is the cause of all things swallowing all other things. He is the most fundamental explanation for it all. If you hold up some thing, label it God, and say "Well this could have been caused by some higher-dimensional thing", then you are not using the word God in the same sense that I am. Or if you leave the label off and point at some thing which has some more fundamental cause, you are not pointing at the thing I am pointing at when I say God.
Tom said: (Omnipotent) This one is frankly ludicrous, because it's transparently being used as a rhetorical trap. "Omnipotent" here is meant as "the only entity we've logically proven is able to produce any change in anything, because we've declared that this is the nature of actualization and posited it as the only thing capable of initially actualizing something." And if we were to grant "Fully Actual," sure, that might follow. But of course when people talk about an "omnipotent god," they're not actually talking about a god who, by existing, makes it possible for me to both create and solve a jigsaw puzzle; they're talking about a god who can knock sparrows out of the sky with a thought and summon zombies to lift rocks that he/she may or may not have already created to be too large to lift. The entire reason this section exists is so that apologists can play rhetorical tricks down the line, and it's honestly a bit rude of them.
God cannot do the impossible. As I mentioned above, God necessarily exists. That means he can't cease to exist. He similarly cannot make one and one equal two or make a triangle with four sides or make a rock so heavy he cannot lift. These things are impossible and God cannot do them, because they're impossible. They're just nonsense; they're phrases devoid of any real meaning. There is no meaning in saying "a four sided triangle" or "a rock so heavy God can't lift it".
God, who created everything from nothing and sustains all of reality in being from moment to moment, can certainly cause the dead to come back to life or cause a sparrow to fall from the sky. God draws that sparrow every moment; he decides to allow it to fly but he could also decide to make it fall. Just because God often chooses to act in a a predictable (albeit fantastic) way doesn't mean that he always must.
GK Chesterton outlines the distinction between necessary truths and simple repetitions well in Orthodoxy. I will quote a few paragraphs of that in the following post.
Tom said: There are two branes, the vibration between each of which sustains the existence of our universe. Fourteenth-dimensional observers call one of them "Ultra-A", and the other one "Ultra-B". They don't know which is which, not least because there definitionally can be no distinguishing features or positioning or anything that would let someone reliably make a distinction, but they sometimes like to write stories in which the two branes are in love but cannot be together because they don't want to accidentally destroy the universe they didn't really intend to make in the first place. In these stories, the authors impute to "Ultra-A" a slightly supercilious British accent, but of course that's fictional.
1. If there is nothing to distinguish the two branes at all -- if they aren't made of matter and if they are identical in every way -- then there aren't two branes. Simply insisting that there are two despite this principle is the same as saying "Fourth dimensional observers hold a four-sided triangle in their hands". It's a nonsense sentence.
2. Putting that aside, if our local universe is created by the vibration between these two things, then the question of "Why are there two things? Where did they come from?"
3.
