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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   27234 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 11, 2023

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Oh not Aquinas again.

Since to change is to be reduced from potency to act, that which is Pure Act, devoid of all potency, must be immutable or incapable of change

What's the "must" coming from? Not obvious at all to me.

Since material things are of their nature compounds of act and potency, that which is Pure Act must be immaterial and thus incorporeal or without any sort of body (ST I.3.1–2).

This is all frankly confused. Just because you can out the words "Pure" and "Act" together and the poor English language doesn't throw a segfault doesn't mean it means anything.

Since such a being is immutable and time (as Aquinas argues) cannot exist apart from change, that which is Pure Act must also be eternal, outside time altogether, without beginning or end (ST I.10.1–2).

Without beginning? Sure. Without end? Why?

He's correct in the sense that modern physics considers time to be meaningless in the absence of anything that can serve as a clock.

Hence immaterial beings can possess the forms of other things precisely because they are immaterial;** and the further a thing is from materiality, the more powerful its intellect is bound to be.**

Bruh

I admire the sheer audacity of that statement, if literally nothing else.

Now the reason non-intelligent things lack this ability to have the form of another thing is that they are wholly material, and material things can only possess one form at a time,as it were

Quantum superposition says hi.

But other sorts of thing have final causes too. In sentient beings, namely animals, this inclination towards the perfection of their forms is what we call appetite

???

Since therefore God is in the highest degree of immateriality … it follows that He occupies the highest place in knowledge

Ah, I knew Anselm would get a shout out somewhere. Tell him that his ontological argument proves the existence of the perfect pizza, which alongside the other necessary qualities for perfection, such as existing in my hand (clearly better than not existing isn't it?), also comes with more laudable/necessary properties such as banishing his spirit to the aether.

These are words of art that require precise definitions and examples to understand what is even being said here. For example your rebuttal of "quantum superposition" doesn't work on what is meant by the word "form." Without writing a hundred pages on what is meant by the terms Act, Potency, Perfection, etc I cannot defend this argument, and so I will not be defending these arguments in a forum post (or at all, dozens of better people have written these books already.) But please desist from claiming that theists do not give arguments that go from First Cause to the Divine Attributes.

But please desist from claiming that theists do not give arguments that go from First Cause to the Divine Attributes.

Sure. I'll water my claim down to "theists do not give arguments that go from First Cause to the Divine Attributes that happen to be remotely sane or comprehensible".

How many explanations, books, and tutors did it take for you to go from a child's understanding of zoology to a doctor's understanding of biochemistry? That this topic is difficult to understand without gaining a background in metaphysics is not a serious argument against it.

There's a reason the job market for doctors is pretty solid and that for theologists looks threadbare. You'd think such convincing arguments that could save priceless souls might fetch better market rates.

I don't care to delve into this further because I strongly expect it's a waste of my time, the expected value of further information is negative. I don't need to confound my otherwise perfectly clear thinking by looking into whatever a few millenia of theological sophism has achieved, given that the fruits of it are so paltry. You don't need to be a doctor to understand homeopathy doesn't work, for all that its devout practitioners have built up their own parallel corpus of literature and jargon.

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