Is God THE Necessary Being?
Part I · Part II · Part III
We can compare ...
We can compare the whole endeavour to the easier exercise of proving what is indeed in some sense true, that there is a unique thing, immutable, timeless, simple, immune to evil and necessarily existing, between zero and two.
TLS : Enlightened thinking?
SIMON BLACKBURN | September 5, 2018
https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/enlightened-thinking-atheism-god/
This is probably what Feser meant here:
Blackburn’s playful comparison of a divine first cause to a number ignores the rather crucial difference that numbers are (notoriously) causally inert. This is a little like saying that a living man is like a dead man, except for being living.
This misses a point about FIRST mover, FIRST cause, FIRST necessary being.
It seems, Blackburn has even (at least verbally) admitted their existence.* He has just refused to identify them with the Christian God:
Light a candle and kneel in silent contemplation by all means – it is after all good, in the sense that there is nothing deficient about it (you cannot imagine a better number one). But then adding that this number is something you might one day see face to face, or something that sends messengers to earth occasionally, or has a chosen people, or something that prefers humanity to the ebola virus, or that underwrites the kinds of edicts that Feser’s Church typically makes, commanding that we ban assisted suicide and birth control, and avoid gay sex, strongly suggests exactly the confusions besetting Hobbes’s rustic.
Now, perhaps it is not only in causation, but also in explanation or proof or definition that Feser misses a point about "first".
Certainly there is no coherent way to draw it, as many atheists attempt to do, at the fundamental laws of nature. Higher-level laws are explained by lower-level laws in something like the way the book on the top of a stack is held up by the ones below it. Take away the floor, and there is nothing that gives the bottom book any power to hold up the top book. Similarly, make the fundamental laws into unintelligible brute facts, and they have no intelligibility to pass upward to higher-level laws – which in turn will have no intelligibility to pass along to the phenomena they are supposed to be explaining. The world’s being just a little bit unintelligible is like its being just a little bit pregnant. Or it is like having a cancer that metastasizes unto the remotest extremity.
False. All explanation involves some level of precisely brute fact, intelligible as to what, but not as to why, which confers an added intelligibility on what is explained, so that it is intelligible both as to what and also as to at least one why.
If you pretend that even the first fundamental law needs to in its turn be explained by an even more fundamental one - you have given up the Thomistic sense of "first".
Indeed, many Neo-Thomists have come to do so. I claim, as a Geocentric, God is moving the aether, which is moving the Sun, the Moon and the Planets and Stars Westward at an angular speed of 360 ° every stellar day, every 23h 56m 4.098 903 691s and that an Angel is moving Eastward any heavenly body that takes longer than that time, notably the Sun which takes a full 24h for 360° AND that this is what the Prima Via, First Mover, is most basically about. Answers a Neo-Thomist "no, God moves through secondary causes".
Well, the aether moving westward at 360° every 23h 56m 4.098 903 691s IS a secondary cause and one directly moved by the First cause. But the Neo-Thomist would require that secondary cause to also be moved by a secondary cause, not directly by God, and then, from physics giving famously the rules for secondary causes, he would scrap Geocentrism, as there is probably no secondary cause able to move the aether of all the universe around earth 360° westward every 23h 56m 4.098 903 691s. When Sungenis suggests that inertia and conservation of momentum would apply as such a secondary cause, he is in fact scrapping the Thomistic sense of First mover (in contemporary causation) and reducing God to a Newtonian style earliest mover (in temporal succession of causes).
The problem with this is, if EVERY secondary cause according to the dictum "God moves through secondary causes" needed to be caused by another precisely secondary cause, then that would constitute a glaring denial of St Thomas' need for secondary causes to depend on a first cause.
Now, Carrier has a better grasp on this, at least in the domain of explanation:
- Carrier
- But it’s possible for things to exist that no language can describe, so merely being meaningless is not a sufficient conclusion.
[on why contradictum in adiecto cannot exist]
- Simon
- Has the idea [entities can exist that are linguistically indescribable] been logically demonstrated?
- Carrier
- Describe the color green.
(Not what things are green. Or what causes us to experience the color green. But what being green consists of. Describe the thing itself, without referencing any green thing or any causes of it.)
In other words, in the domain of explanation, Carrier knows that there is a FIRST, sth which can explain or enter into explanations, but which itself cannot be explained or defined.
While green can in given instances be causally explained, it cannot be explained further in the direction of definition, at least according to Carrier.
A painter might counter "it's a colour, it's a cold colour and it's a passive colour".
Warm : Red and Yellow, Cold : Green and Blue.
Active : Red and Blue, Passive : Yellow and Green.
And here you must admit, there is a level on which we see that this is fitting as a description of these colours, but we cannot explain this to a colour blind person. And we cannot either even by this description make someone imagine correctly "green", it only works as identifying its relation to other colours.
So, yes, in description there is a first. There is a fact which is brute fact with which other things are described.
Therefore, there is also (contra Feser) a fact which is brute fact, with which other things are explained causally.
Now, the thing is, with only the first three ways and with no Geocentrism allowed "any more" in the first way, we cannot prove that the "ultimate first" is personal. First mover? Could be energy. First necessary existent? Could be matter. First cause? Could be the couple matter/energy.
Other version, since according to Einstein matter is a form of energy, energy in the physical sense could be all that were needed. Especially if we skip all the questiones after Q 2 A 3.
Now, look at Fourth and Fifth ways.
The fourth way is taken from the gradation to be found in things. Among beings there are some more and some less good, true, noble and the like. But "more" and "less" are predicated of different things, according as they resemble in their different ways something which is the maximum, as a thing is said to be hotter according as it more nearly resembles that which is hottest; so that there is something which is truest, something best, something noblest and, consequently, something which is uttermost being; for those things that are greatest in truth are greatest in being, as it is written in Metaph. ii. Now the maximum in any genus is the cause of all in that genus; as fire, which is the maximum heat, is the cause of all hot things. Therefore there must also be something which is to all beings the cause of their being, goodness, and every other perfection; and this we call God.
The fifth way is taken from the governance of the world. We see that things which lack intelligence, such as natural bodies, act for an end, and this is evident from their acting always, or nearly always, in the same way, so as to obtain the best result. Hence it is plain that not fortuitously, but designedly, do they achieve their end. Now whatever lacks intelligence cannot move towards an end, unless it be directed by some being endowed with knowledge and intelligence; as the arrow is shot to its mark by the archer. Therefore some intelligent being exists by whom all natural things are directed to their end; and this being we call God.
Persons are nobler than stones and more existent than stones, therefore the noblest thing in this gradation also needs to be personal.
The extra criterium of that ultra thing which confers the quality on things having it in lesser degree could even be brushed off as Platonic pseudo-science.
Except for ... presuppositional, see previous part.
And governance, fifth way. With no centre of the Universe and no extraordinary complexity of movements around it (like in denying Geocentrism), and with all local centres being so by simple gravity and with Eco-Systems actually being by-products of Evolution, no Fifth way either. Not for a personal God.
Therefore, the need for Geocentrism and Creationism. These are however available.
Now, the fact is, Heliocentrism is built on a kind of radical scepticism which St Thomas Aquinas was NOT counting.
I'll have to deal with it, so I reformulate.
You can accept Empirical evidence as it is, and you can from there conclude God exists.
Or, you can accept Atheism as a postulate for explanations, and you can from there build an anti-Empiric science, like Heliocentrism.
So, if we accept Empirical evidence, Sun and Moon and Venus and Jupiter are each day turning around Earth and if we abstract from that, Venus and Jupiter are doing such marvellous dances that they need a choreographer, apart from the question how a biggy like Sol would dance around our small Earth without one ... and that argues the choreographer is also first mover - His moving things is the prime law of any movement - and the necessary being - how could He be First mover all over the cosmos without also being that?
Either, the necessary being is God, or, empiry is wildly misleading. Which, in a way parallel to presuppositional apologetics, argues that you can know nothing much if there is no God.
Hans Georg Lundahl
ut in priori et secunda parte
* Probably the wording "between zero and two" means he is accepting the "number line" ideology of arithmetic. That would mean, "one" is to him not the first principle of number. This would then constitute a disagreement with St Thomas even on the Five Ways.
