Give me Five ... Five Ways of St Thomas vs Atheism

J. L. Mackie, The Miracle of Theism, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1982, from p. 87:

There is a popular line of thought, which we may call the first cause argument, and which runs as follows: things must be caused, and their causes will be other things that must have causes, and so on; but this series cannot go back indefinitely; it must terminate in a first cause and this first cause will be God. This argument envisages a regress of causes in time, but says (as Leibnitz for one did not) that this regress must stop somewhere.

St Bonaventura would agree here, though St Thomas Aquinas (with Leibnitz), granting more to the Atheist, did not. As far as earlier and earlier causes are concerned, it leads back to a beginning.

Why? Because the succession of moments is additive, like the natural numbers, which all have a beginning in one.

In vain does one invoke the number line, because that is a piece of fiction - what is on that line is relations, either proportional or additive or subtractive - and not actually numbers as answering the "how many". Let us put it like this: before you can use any "how many more than" or "how many less than" something else, you need that something else and it needs to be a number, a "how many" as such. Or before you can use any "how much more than" or "how much less than", you need an "how much", as such. If it is not a number, it is not per se additive or subtractive, and thus not a good parallel for the succession of moments in time.

History leads back to a beginning. Change as such cannot be an eternal state. That much we allow the popular mind and the Eleatic school. But let us get on to St Thomas Aquinas. Let us ignore, for the moment the necessity for history to have a beginning. Let us assume we saw no problem with an eternity depicted as Ourobouros biting its own tail. Let us in other words for a moment ignore our sanity as common people. Then we still have, says Aquinas, five ways to fall back on. Now, Mackie is going to criticise the five ways here:

Of Aquinas's 'five ways', the first three are recognizably (sic!) variants of the cosmological proof, and all three involve some kind of terminated regress of causes. But all of them are quite different from our first cause argument...

That is from the "earliest cause" argument of St Bonaventura. St Thomas uses "first" as in "first cause" in another way.

The first way argues to a first mover, using the illustration of something's being moved by a stick only when the stick is moved by a hand; here the various movings are simultaneous, we do not have a regress of causes in time. Similarily the 'efficient causes' in the second way are contemporary agents. Both these arguments, as Kenny has shown ....

... Has he now? ("Kenny" is A. Kenny, who wrote The Five Ways, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1969.) ...

... depend too much on antiquated physical theory to be of much interest now.

Do they? Well, not if Mackie is consistent with what he says in p. 91:

In fact, Aquinas (both here and in the first way) has simply begged the question against an infinite regress in causes. But is this a sheer mistake or is there a coherent thought behind it? Some examples ... may suggest that there is:

Whereupon Mackie goes on to repeat the real point of first and second way without bothering as to whether it is antiquated physics or not:

If we were told that there was a watch without a mainspring, we would hardly be reassured by the further inforation that it had, however, an infinite train of gear-wheels. Nor would we expect a railway train consisting of an infinite number of carriages, the last (sic!) pulled along by the second last, the second last by the third last, and so on, to get along without an engine.

The exact point of first mover (last carriage is of course an oxymoron in an infinite or circular number of such ! - but we see what he means) - except that Aquinas' man moving object with stick through his hand or smith hammering metal through hammer held in hand is replaced by engine and mainspring.

This might indicate that materialistic atheism is not so opposed to the three first ways as they like to pretend, its ahderents, when referring summarily to "Kant has refuted that", or confusing them with the regress of earlier stages that needs a beginning. It is only more into seeing the first cause as impersonal rather than personal. This is confirmed by what he does about the second way:

Again, we see a chain consisting of a series of links, hanging from a hook; we should be surprised to learn that there was a similar but infinite chain, with no hook, but links supprted by links above them for ever.

Indeed, we would. And here even Aquinas, unless memory fails me, is not quite as personal in the description of first cause as he is in description of first mover. Or becomes again in description of wise ordainer of the universe.

There is here an implicit appeal to the following general principle: Where items are ordered by a relation of dependence, the regress must end somewhere: it cannot be infinite or circular.

I would say the appeal is very straightforward and explicit ... but if Mackie wants to be obtuse, I cannot stop him.

As our examples show, this principle is at least highly plausible; the problem will be to decide when we have such a relation of dependence.

A problem? Whenever something changes, the change depends on something. Whenever something stays the same in things that could just as well change, the staying the same depends on something.

Does this apply to will? That would be an argument for determinism, unless will could be in at least a sense a "first cause" even for man's will.

Whether a thing changes or stays the same it exists. If it exists necessarily, it is the first necessary existence. If it does not exist necessarily, it gets its existence from somewhere else. And even necessary existence can get its necessity to exist from somewhere else. There also there is no regress back to infinity.

Now, Mackie tries to answer this:

Why, for example, might there not be a permanent stock of matter whose essence did not involve existence but which did not derive its existence from anything else?

Well, the problem with that answer is that modern materialism actually does identify matter as the primum ens per se necessarium. If there were such a stock of matter neither creatable (since not deriving its existence from anywhere else) nor destructible (since not reducible to anything else), it would thereby fulfill the condition of having existence as part of its essence. And it would therein contrast with configurations of matter that do not have the own existence as part of their essence but only as a result of the particular arrangement of matter.

One clarification, re p. 92:

Though we understand that where something has a temporally antecendent cause, it depends somehow on it, it does not follow that everything (other than God) needs something else to depend on in this way.

Rather: if it does not need it, thereby it qualifies as God in the kind of preciseness or approximation we are dealing with in the five ways. Anything which would not need something to depend on, would qualify as God. It is not as much in Q 2 A 3 as after it that St Thomas excludes from this "x" the solutions involving the manyfold, the composite and so on and so forth.

The modern atheism is very much the three first ways identified with an impersonal first mover, impersonal first cause of permanence also, impersonal first being, by itself necessary.

It does not quite dispense with the fourth and fifth way either. It does not - on the philosophical level we are dealing with here now, never mind they are better in practise, often enough - admit there is a real gradation of better and less good, of nobler and less noble, and therefore no noblest and best. Mind which would on ordinary views seem the best is according to it only an epiphenomenon.

Neither does it admit order depends on someone ordering the universe with wisdom, rather it says the universe arranged itself in the only possible lasting way - and that life arranged itself in many ways that simply failed before the life forms that right now are succeeding. The first part of that statement is either "steady state universe" or "big bang univere" and in either case (therein contrasting with part of the first way, the one that deals with the sun moving "as observed") non-geocentric universe. The second part of that statement is evolutionism.

Which is why, when dealing with modern atheism, it is not enough just to repeat the five ways, but one should also insist on:

• - mind as a primary, since impossible as a side-effect of mindless things;
• - geocentrism as closer to observation and making sense, at least if mind is accepted as a primary;
• - dito for special creation, for non-evolutionary origin of the species we observe or at least the main ones;
• - finally that the five ways were not meant to prove the universe is created at already that stage, Aquinas put them in Q 2 A 3 and it is only in something like Q 45 that we come to Creation, as the only possible emanation of being from the first cause, into non-divine (non-first-cause-like) entities, and there he has used part of it to establish that God is spirit and that the Three Persons of the Christian revelation are not absurd or impossible.

Part of the proof for God being a Spirit is God's simplicity, non-compositeness. Part of the proof for that is again God's upholding the rotation of the whole universe around earth as one unified movement, at least as I recall the parallel text of Contra Gentes. Which is probably exactly where Pope Urban VIII foresaw atheist consequences of allowing heliocentrism. His insistence on the sun moving as observed.

Hans-Georg Lundahl
Bpi, Georges Pompidou
Paris
St Francis of Sales
24-I-2013

Richard Carrier Claimed Critical Thinking was Rare Back Then ...

Series:
	1) somewhere else : History vs Hume 2) Creation vs. Evolution : More on the Hume Rehash by Richard Carrier 3) somewhere else : Richard Carrier Claimed Critical Thinking was Rare Back Then ... 4) Φιλολoγικά/Philologica : Did St Irenaeus Know Who Saint John was and What he Wrote?

Plato finishes his Republic with a fable about Er, coming back to life after being twelve days clinically dead as far as could be verified, and telling his near death experience, which brings on what Plato is really about: Cicero sees this was received with a stupid reaction, so he finishes his Republic with an account of Scipio waking up after a dream. And telling simply the dream.

Now, here are the actual words of Macrobius, when he wants to tell of why Cicero wrote what he wrote in Somnium Scipionis. I quote book I, chapter 1, paragraph 9, but some words are missing:

Hanc fabulam Cicero licet ab indoctis quasi ipse ueri conscius doleat ...am, exemplum tamen stolidae ...is uitans excitari narraturum quam reuiuiscere maluit.

On Richard Carrier's view, what happened must have been that the poor benighted people did not understand that Plato meant the fable as a fable, they took it literally because they had too little critical thinking. And Cicero wanted to avoid stupid credulity (having himself the then rare faculty of critical thinking, no doubt). And that is why he wanted his "teller" of the hidden things to wake up rather than return to life.

Are the missing words "ut reuera factam creditam" and "credulitatis"?

No.

Here I fill in the blanks and then translate:

Hanc fabulam Cicero licet ab indoctis quasi ipse ueri conscius doleat irrisam, exemplum tamen stolidae reprehensionis uitans excitari narraturum quam reuiuiscere maluit.

"Although Cicero is at pain as being himself conscious of the truth that the fable was laughed at by the untaught, even so avoiding the example of stupid criticism he wanted his about-to-tell rather to wake up than to return to life."

So on Macrobius' view - and Cicero's too if Macrobius got him right - the untaught were not stupidly credulous, but stupidly critical. So far from believing a story of one risen from the dead because they lacked critical thinking, they laughed at it because they lacked an attitude of understanding and sympathy (one might venture: an attitude of peace, love and understanding) to what Plato had undertook.

Have we any reason whatsoever to doubt Cicero and Macrobius were right about the reception of Plato's risen Er? None that I can think of.

Critical thinking is not a rare achievement. It is what untaught people start out with. People back then were not willing to believe a miracle like that because a good man told it and good men don't lie. The reaction would have been a guffaw and something like:

"OK, you're a nice guy and all that, and don't take it personally, I'd like to believe in your god and all that, but raising someone from the dead is just plain ridiculous! That's not how the gods act. They may raise a dead to the stars, they may raise a dead to the Olympus, but they don't raise a dead to live again among men and be seen and touched by them. Sorry, better luck with the next guy!"

On top of that the Pagan back then was quite as allergic as AronRa to exclusive claims of any kind of god. So, let's take the Bayesian test for Christ's Resurrection: could it have been believed even if there was not any extremely good evidence for it, could it have been believed even if not true?

Heck no, of course.

If Christ did not rise from the dead, it is a miracle that a religion as exclusive against other gods as Judaism, and clearly related to it (and believe me, Judaism was ridiculed, when Horace was subpoenad as a witness he tried to wringle out of it with the worst excuses ever - one of them being he was now of the "curti Judaei" and had to observe some Sabbath or Newmoon*) could take over the Roman Empire and an even greater it could do so by the claim of someone having risen from the dead.

Hans-Georg Lundahl
BU** Nanterre
Saint Rosaline
17-I-2013

*Ibam forte via Sacra ... I happened to be walking on Sacra Via ... Actually I misremembered, Horace takes the subpoena as the final release from someone even more annoying, a man wanting to be introduced to Maecenas.

For English translation click here, scroll down to IX, IBAM FORTE VIA SACRA
http://ancienthistory.about.com/library/bl/bl_text_horace_sat1.htm

**BU = Bibliothèque Universitaire = University Library (Nanterre is the Paris X site).

History vs Hume

Series:
	1) somewhere else : History vs Hume 2) Creation vs. Evolution : More on the Hume Rehash by Richard Carrier 3) somewhere else : Richard Carrier Claimed Critical Thinking was Rare Back Then ... 4) Φιλολoγικά/Philologica : Did St Irenaeus Know Who Saint John was and What he Wrote?

http://www.youtube.com/all_comments?v=QaENP1R-lbY

A: You don't need to listen beyond the 5:02 mark because he makes and assumption based upon his belief miracles don't exists therefore the rest is based upon that faulty assumption

B: No, he doesn't. He says that the notion of a Christian LEGION is absurd. Maybe you misheard what he said.

C: Assuming miracles do not happen is based on everything but belief. But that's not relevant in this case, because he said no such thing. You need to refrain from commenting until you obtain the necessary clarity of thought to follow a presentation.

Right, right. Only way to tell if Richard Carrier bases his argument on principled rejection of miracles is by hearing whether he said the actual words "I am basing this on the assumption that miracles do not happen".

Like, he could not wait with stating that (which he does later) and let the hearers, already favourable to that position, sip it in without quite noticing what they are doing?

But there is one other possibility of what he is basing his position on: he could mean that even Christians admit absurdity of miracles in any and every case except the Christian ones that are recorded in the Bible. And arguing from there he would not be presuming but arguing by parallel that everyone admits the extreme improbability of miracles. There he is simply wrong about the Christians he has to deal with, at least about me.

I do not reject the factuality of the miracle of the Christian legion. I do reject the total factuality of the Pagan explanation, namely I think it quite likely, given that Marcus Aurelius has surprisingly a Christian legion, that he would try to hide the fact. Also given that Christians were likely to blurt out who prayed to whom, it is likely he would try to push the praise on for instance an Egyptian magician. As well as begin persecuting those who would not buy that. And, yes, Marcus Aurelius intensified the persecution of Christians just after this happened.

D: Why would it be a faulty assumption to believe that miracles don't exist? I'd say that this would follow as the only rational belief given that one has never experienced miracles and that nobody seems to be able to substantiate claims of miracles.

Or are you saying that you can prove that miracles happen?

There's another aspect to denying miracles as well. If it was the case that miracles occur, then this means that both the historical and scientific methods are invalid ways to know things about reality and that for all we know, the universe could have been created miraculously 2 minutes ago with false history. This view is so problematic (and useless in the face of us not having any indication that miracles happen) that we're forced to abandon it and employ methodological naturalism.

That is a pretty idiotic inference, but most likely something like the one Richard Carrier uses without exactly telling us in this video, in order to bias the historic method - which basically he did right apart from this bias - in disfavour of miracles happening. As you see later in the video, he uses a list of most to least likely, and he is either putting likelihood of miracles very arbitrarily (except for atheists and other miracle-rejecters) at very close to zero or using a similarily falwed inference like that.

Now, Piggy made a similar inference against the Monster really being such (and it wasn't such, in the book, but his inference remains idiotic) by saying "if monsters exist, television and elevators wouldn't work". Newton never ever said his Physics only work in the absence of spirits and miracles. Neither did Aristotle, though he was on the same idiotic anti-miraculous line. He was also a necessitist, unless Averroës got him wrong and Thomas attributed Averroës' misunderstanding to him: he believed all on earth is ruled by the stars.

Except for that bias against miracles in the historic method as used by modern historians, very many miracles are proven historically. Like:
- Resurrection of Christ as well as a few other miracles
- Rain miracle of the Legio Fulminatrix
- Temple miracles announcing God left the temple in Jerusalem (and unlike his comment, God actually HAS tried to make the Jews see some sense before this happened, a try that led up to a crucifixion at Calvary).

I also hold that demons are able to do some miraculous seeming things, in so far as God permits it. And that accounts for:
- Delphic statues going out to fight the Persians (see Herodotus), unless that was done by guardian angels, temporarily masquerading as Pagan gods because the time for Paganism to cease was not come yet
- Glykon, the "god" with a human, talking head and the body of a serpent (very clearly demonic).

Also, not mentioned in this video, the demonic accounts for the dragonlike creature summoned by a Ceres priest to frighten the Christians, it ran amuck and St Front had to deal with it. This happened in Perigueux. In France it is known as La Gratusse.

Also, hinted at in the video, Simon Magus' initial success at levitation before the prayers of St Peter stopped him.

Now, if Simon Magus levitated and St Peter stopped him and all the city saw it, why have we no Pagan Historians saying it? Well, it happened when Nero ruled, he was not a man whom it was quite safe to contradict.

The Roman Historians of his time, except the Christian ones, are gone and survive only as quoted by later historians, such as Tacitus or Suetonius. A little the same thing that happened under the somewhat more lenient Marcus Aurelius. He could for a time tolerate a Legion where the Christians were leading - probably recruited as Pagans but converted - and pretend sacrifices to Jupiter Optimus Maximus were made when the legion really prayed to Christ, but he could not tolerate that they became known for having prayed to Christ for a miracle. So, when persecution had done its way to stop non-Christians from commemorating this Christian miracle, all one had to do was to bring in an Egyptian magician who existed at the time but who really had nothing to do with the miracle.

This is enough to answer Richard Carrier's allegation: "Clearly completely false legends of completely ridiculous miracles could arise very quickly and no alternative account survives."

Now, sometimes people do make inferences about what the world would be like if there were a God, but omit his logical step of asking whether the world as the atheist asking the question sees it is actually both accurate (it is inaccurate about miracles, if we are right) and also if the things the atheist sees rightly cannot be explained if there is a God (like existence of evil, by the way exaggerated in extent in one direction at least by the way atheists see miracle allegations as proof of an evil in the human mind). Let's ask the question the other way around: What would the world be like if there was NO god?

The universe would not have been starting with a mind. And in that case there would not have developed any minds later either. And in that case we would not have the minds that discuss these things.

I dealt with this in more detail in this post:

somewhere else : Atheism Very Shortly Stated - and Refuted
http://notontimsblogroundhere.blogspot.com/2012/11/atheism-very-shortly-stated-and-refuted.html

There are some fishy things about Richard Carrier and the Academic process (which I am out of anyway, as a drop out living on the street, but I know some of it) and about the process of debate too:

E: If your book really passed peer-review, why did you publish it at Prometheus and not a scholarly press?

F: Why didn't Richard Carrier bring up the column of Marcus Aurelius in any of his debates with Michael Licona? That seems suspicious.

G: Why won't Richard Carrier tackle the following?
1) The Miracle of Calanda
2) The Miracle of the Sun. [At Fatima in Portugal, 1917]
3) Our Lady of Zeitoun.
4) The Miracle of Lanciano.
5) The NDE of Pam Reynolds.

H: What do you mean "won't"? Has he said he was going to talk about specific miracle claims?

Actually the talk on Skepticon 5 starts out with a debunking of specific miracle claims a lot less easy to check than the better and more recently documented ones commenter G refers to.

I: Makes no sense, why would God help the Romans who supposedly were also killing xians . Shouldnt God be punishing the Romans ?

Not before some sufficiently important Barbarians sufficiently civilised are ready to become Christian.

... miracles are claiming things with extremely low prior probability.

What Richard Carrier refers to as prior probability or in a case of miracles rather prior improbability, is either a case of inherent improbability (the standard western atheist view of miracles) or of statistic improbability (the standard western atheist view of being present at a great battle or the signing of a peace treaty or the discovery of new technology like penecilline discovered because Fleming left bread to mold close to a bacterium culture, or the Christian view of all of these, but of miracles too).

In RC's view, miracles are very much below all the "usual suspects" (list provided below) and of causality he puts Martians or other Aliens or Matrix as number 4 but God as number 8 and the God of a specific religion as number 9, as least likely. There is very clearly a real prejudice against God and against specifically a God doing miracles if a thing like Matrix can be four or five where God is only eight and nine.

This is all a very great hotchpotch of confusing the two issues. How "the God of a particular religion" could be statistically less likely than "God" is clear, since any probability at all that God exists would give probability to share between more than one religion and each of them have only part of it. But even that is flawed, since the distinction is flawed.

When it comes to "God" the concept usually refers to - especially among Platonists (when explaining one meaning of Zeus=Jupiter=Ra, for instance), Christians, Jews, Mazdeists, Moslems, Mormons - the God of the universe, the Creator, Ruler and Judge of it all. Even a certain school of Hindooism has such a concept.

But each "God of a specific religion" among those (not to be confused with deities like Sea gods or Rain gods or Hermes=Thot=Mercurius) includes the concept of being "God" as such. They are not alternatives to God as such, they are more specific ways of identifying God as such. And if there is such a thing and He does miracles, it is very possible that He made one religion stick out too, both by the kind of miracles it includes and by the atmosphere, as Christianity does, see this earlier post:

ibid. Adam's Sin, Christ's Sacrifice, a Few Glosses
http://notontimsblogroundhere.blogspot.com/2012/11/adams-sin-christs-sacrifice-few-glosses.html

It's enough you have someone believe Jesus rose from the Dead to get Christianity, you do not need Him actually resurrecting.

That is claiming the "usual suspects" cannot be ruled out:

The Usual Suspects:
- Memory Sucks
- People Lie
- Speculation Gets Conflated with Fact
- (Or Fallacious Inferences Do)
- Mythmaking (Allegorising Story Making)

Now, let us rule them out each in order:
- Memory Sucks

What can bad memory do, really? I would be somewhat of an expert.

I recall Mull of Kintyre as being played in radio stations of Malmö either before Grandpa died or just after. But that would have been 76-77. And it seems Mull of Kintyre is from 78. OK, that could be fraudulent to gaslight people who recall it from 76/77 in any way, but assuming the hit is really from 78, this means I heard it later and conflated that with earlier memories. But this does not add any miraculous dimension (except in hindsight: "it would have been a miracle if you heard it in 76") to my memory of the song. Probable reason for bad memory if such: I was not often in that café after early 77, since I only came back on visits up to Easter 1980, in between I lived in Vienna. BUT the song was far better music than I actually heard in that café when I was going there on a less irregular basis, like once a month or once every two months.

Or another example, amusing to historians. I very long conflated the Boulgaroktonos emperor Basil II with the other Emperor who burnt one heretic, because that heretic was called Basil the Physician. But that emperor was not Basil II, and Basil the Physician may have shared tenets with Bulgarian Bogumils but was not clearly Bulgarian himself and his judge who condemned him to the stake was Alexios I Komnenos. And Bulgaroktonos was not so clearly concerned with burning heretics at all. Reason for my conflating these into Bulgaroktonos fighting Bulgars to fight and punish Bogumil heresy: I was seeing a parallel (and seeking a closer parallel than there was) between Byzantium and the Albigensian Crusade.

So, if I approached Gospels as a merely human document, I might not be sure that Jesus really fed thousands of people miraculously twice, it could theoretically (if they had not been guarded by the Holy Spirit) have been one gospeller recalling one number and another one recalling another one. Fourthousand vs fivethousand, twelve baskets vs seven baskets of leftovers ... could just humanly speaking have been one or two mistaking memories of mathematical non-miraculous aspect of the miracle. But will not do at all as an explanation of remembering a miracle if none such happened.

Read the accounts of the Resurrection: what plausible scenario could they be a badly recalled memory of, especially as it seems pretty definite from them that the memory of one helps the other?

- People Lie
And sure, even good people lie, if they think good will come out of it. Usually against, say, someone's sanity, or to put people on guard against someone they think a blackguard even if they cannot prove it. And sure, martyrs are not infallible witnesses to the truth of their religion BUT martyrs are not likely to be martyrs for their own lies. That is the point about the moral impossibility of Apostles being liars.

Nor are martyrs likely to be people who became Christians for mere bread and then pretended to see miracles even if they saw none, as going along with nice people: such adherents fall off pretty quickly in persecution, if they can.

- Speculation Gets Conflated with Fact
Like Richard Carrier's speculation about the inherent improbability of miracles or of God being a cause of specific events?

- (Or Fallacious Inferences Do)
Like Richard Carrier's one commenter's fallacious inference that if miracles could happen neither scientific nor historic method would work?

- Mythmaking (Allegorising Story Making)
Euhemerus thought that certain divine figures were kings of the remote past. Maybe he had specific evidence we have lost or have interpreted otherwise. Maybe he was right about some, like Hercules and Romulus, who certainly had an earthly existence and interacted with persons related to certainly real ones (Romulus was first of only seven kings, Hercules was grandfather of Heraclids leading Doric invasion). It is not all that likely, it is not likely in the least, that a pure allegory gets a life on earth among men for free. Osiris did hardly walk among men, since the Pharaos after him are very probably mere myths too. Woden seems to have tried the same stunt as Simon Magus did, but since no St Peter prayed for him to be stopped, he succeeded in Upsala. Krishna may very well have been charioteer of Arjuna and Pantheistic philosopher on top of that. That makes none of these a real god but some clearly real men. All this is much likelier than three stages: 1) solar allegory, 2) placing it on earth, 3) mistaking it for real history.

All three of last, but without the ad hominem: for speculation or fallacious inference to be conflated with fact or for a story to make all the way through the stages allegory, euhemerised allegory (if there ever was such a thing), mistaking that for real history, we need several stages of transmission.

We do not have them. Textual Critics will serve them on a plate to Atheist or other Non-Christian Historians, but they use their own fallacious inferences from antimiraculous prejudice in order to get there.

And Eyewitness account cannot be fifth after "physical necessity." Richard Carrier said, Caesar had to cross the Rubicon in order to get where he wanted. Fine enough, but it is not a physical necessity, it is from eyewitness accounts, that we have that he got there or existed in the first place.

Now, I saved (at first unconsciously) the reference to the "ridiculous" miracles in the life of St Genevieve to the last. It is her day today and I am in Paris.

Now, I do not find one single of the miracles attributed to God in connexion with her unbelievable.

I do not find it ridiculous that her mother stopped her from getting to Paris to be a nun and went blind and regained her eyesight only as she allowed her fourteen year old daughter to get in and become a nun. Certain ugly modern minds might think "how ridiculous, they are saying God supported the tantrum of an immature teenager" - but we are saying that. We are perhaps not of your mind about what constitutes irrationality in a tantrum or mature enough age to get to become a nun, or for that matter to marry.

In Roman Law, a boy might marry as soon as he was fourteen and a girl as soon as she was twelve - just as legally as GB has it 16/16, and as France had it 18/15 up to 2006. Imperial Austria had 18-21(if I recall correctly)/14-21 with younger ages for each sex depending on parental consent. Spain one hundred years ago had 14/12, just as Roman Civil Law and as longstanding Roman Catholic Canon Law.

No, I do not find it ridiculous that God supported her ideal of becoming a consecrated virgin that soon, or that He punished her mother for delaying it. God created teens and might not like parentla tyranny, even when modern psychology supports it.

I do not find it ridiculous that once or twice she raised a drowned boy from the dead. Or levitated a ship, if she did - though I cannot recall that one from my reading of her lives (two of them) in Acta Sanctorum by the Bollandists.

The antimiraculously prejudiced Richard Carrier finds it worthy of ironic snicker that her biography was written only ten years after her death (if it was, I do not know when it was written) by someone who knew her.

Now, if we go to another saint with very many miracles, like Severin of Noricum, his biography was written by Eugippius. And Eugippius did not write it in Noricum, but in Naples. He also wrote it clearly after Severin died. This has been used to indicate that a man in Naples cannot really have known a man in Noricum, alias mid Austria of our times, and therefore the account is bullshit.

However, we know from same biography that St Severin negotiated with Odoacar the peaceful exile of the Romans of Noricum, and that their goal of exile was precisely Naples. It stands to reason Eugippius was close to Severin in his latter days (but not his early carreer, which would have coincided with Eugippius' childhood) and that he had been in Noricum before the negotiated exile, i e up to when St Severin died. So much for an Eugippius who freely invented what he had no reasonable knowledge about!

Now, as a general rule, biographies are written by people who have known them. Or, earliest biographies are. Belloc wrote about Richelieu and Louis XIV, whom he did not know, but he based his work on much earlier biographies. And sure enough, Agricola's biography was written by his son in law Tacitus, and Chesterton's biography apart from the Autobiography (obviously not updated till his death) was by Maisie Ward, who had connections both by social status and by common implication in Catholic Apologetics, plus access to archives to go by. Humphrey Carpenter has colaborated extensively with Christopher Tolkien. The common procedure is not that some important person lives and dies and then someone else writes nonsense about someone he never knew, the ordinary procedure is that people - except Atheists on Arguing Business - know what they write about before they start writing.

I therefore argue it is supremely improbable that St Genevieve's biography was not written soon, that Eugippius did not know St Severin of Noricum, and that Gospels (except the fourth) are from fifty years later rather than by Matthew (eyewitness), Mark (having access to at least eyewitness St Peter plus to Gospel of St Matthew), Luke (having access to several eywitnesses, including the Blessed Virgin) and John (eywitness, as he states himself), though he wrote some sixty years after the facts.

The only thing Richard Carrier has to show against this is antimiraculous bias, and Textual Criticism based on such bias, the socalled Higher Criticism, which Popes such as Leo XIII so rightly, not just for the faith, but even for reason, condemned as a sham.

Hans-Georg Lundahl
Bpi, Georges Pompidou
in Paris (Lutetiae Parisiorum
uel Parisius)
St Genevieve's Day
3-I-2013

Challenged Again on Testimonium Flavianum (linking to other blog)

Φιλολόγικα/Philologica : Challenged Again on Testimonium Flavianum
http://filolohika.blogspot.com/2012/12/challenged-again-on-testimonium.html

Adam's Sin, Christ's Sacrifice, a few glosses

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPlOI_TNtDk

Christ, who sacrificed his life for Adam's sin, is the Eternal Son, in whose image He Himself made Adam. He was not giving His sacred life for "a remote hypothetical ancestor He never knew anything about" but He knew from Paradise what Adam's sin was like. And, of course, how Adam's sons could be made to detest it properly without detesting themselves or their ancestor. But Dawkins is time after time interrupting, as an impatient schoolboy who cannot see why Latin has to have those bothersome six cases, and who therefore sets out to interpret a Latin text on the presumption that SVO or possibly SOV will get him right every time.

Adam's sin is inherited by all humans (except the Blessed Virgin Mary and Her Son, Jesus). What kind of doctrine it is? The most easily observable of any Christian docrine. Even evolutionists see such traces of Adam's sin that they are quite willing to put it down to the primitive herd mentality of Apes./HGL

Continued, Sunday:

It is not usually for me to preach the Gospel about the Resurrection. The witnesses were most often the twelve minus Judas the Traitor, thus the eleven. Matthias was added to them and on Pentecost they preached, most specially St Peter, who went on when the others were silent. Their successors are the bishops and the bishops delegate the task to priests and deacons, and I am neither bishop, priest, nor deacon. I usually limit myself to this: when you and people like you calumniate either Creation or Resurrection accounts as untrue, I answer that by reasons for believing these accounts. Here we are dealing with something else, not "untrue" but "immoral and horrible if true". I am provoked to say my mind about it.

And in order to make that point, Dawkins takes part of the story and leaves out the rest. It is not as if he were taking the story and leaving out the theology, which as an atheist he thinks erroneous, which is how I as a Christian think we may (if at all) reasonably read Iliad and Odyssey. It is not as if he were taking only one part of the story as such, what he can believe possible, while leaving out what he calls impossible, though he obviously may be doing so on other occasions, and that being done in a way as to treat the story told with a real double standard about the evidence. No, he is not only doing that, but dealing with part of the theology of that part of the story, while leaving out other parts of the theology.

Now, as I wrote yesterday, dying for the sin of Adam and Eve was to Christ not like dying for a stranger. He was the God who both created them and forbade them to eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge. He died to free people he loved.

In every story that is about freeing captives that is really great, the deliverer walks himself into the trap to break it. In the Franco and Moscardó story, it is actually Moscardó we admire most, even if Franco did him a due homage by freeing him. But now to stories where the deliverer is great: Ulysses to free his wife Penelope walks in among her unwelcome suitors who are dealing with his and her home as with their own robber's den. He walks in and gets treated like a beggar by people who do not treat beggars very well. Conan walks to the castle of Thulsa Doom to free king Orlik's daughter. Mankind admires even Schwarzenegger for just acting out Conan, even Homer for making fine verses about Ulysses. And you think it is "bad news" that God is behaving like a brave man, like the men to whom Schwarzenegger and Homer did homage? Orpheus gets down to Hades and fails to free Eurydike, and you complain about God loving men as Orpheus loved his wife, you complain about God being the true Orpheus who succeeded in freeing his Eurydike?

Oh, if you wonder about Christ as "helpless victim" of such a decision, it is precisely because he is in His Divine Nature equal to the Father that He is rather a free volunteer.

Which is perhaps the most urgent reason, apart from the truth itself, why Nicea affirmed Trinity, affirmed full divinity of CHrist, and condemned Arius.

God could have - as you said - just said to Adam and Eve: "I forgive you, nothing changes, as far as I am concerned you did not eat the fruit I forbade you". And spontaneous human death and spontaenous animal death would have been non-occurrences. He preferred to say: "You shall truly die" - and then to get down to Hades to free them himself. What sense of story do you have if you think that is a "horrible story if true"?

It is a bit like reading the story of King Solomon's Judgement and stop at the order of parting the baby in two with a sword. "What a horrible story, King Solomon killed a baby" and that is it. And then to cling to that idiotic misunderstanding even when learning about the rest of the story. I presume you know it, otherwise it is in III:d Kings.

Now, Christ dying for us is in two different ways like the Solomonic Judgement.

First of all, the fall of Adam was a kind of paternity test. "Whom does the baby obey?" Disobeying God and obeying the suggestion of the old snake gave a very bad outcome to the paternity test. God makes a second paternity test, quite in line with Solomon's maternity test. "Who wants the baby to live?"

Satan who did not directly control all about the region of Hades where Adam and Eve were waiting four thousand years for their child and saviour, but who was still ruler of Hades and at least had the power to shut these souls out from Paradise and from Heaven above, had such power because of Adam's sin and on top of that because of personal sins. In Christ he found neither. He was quite willing to kill a man - and his virgin mother, St Mary's heart would have broke on Calvary but for a miracle - who was innocent. After all it was a man, and he as angelic being was superior to men. He forgot about the guilt part. He lost the paternity test quite as clearly as the "mother" who said "go ahead, part the child in two and we each will have half".

God died so as to give us back life - now who won that paternity test?

You know the answer. It is as clear to you as to St Irenaeus and to C. S. Lewis (when he wrote about the White Witch and her deal with Aslan), as to Shakespear whose Shylock plotted for more than the due pound of flesh, as to me and to everyone else.

If the story as we receive it is true, God did. He won mankind back for a very dear price, his flesh and blood on Calvary.

Are you still calling it a horrid story? God should maybe have - on your view - done better to "just forgive and forget about retributive justice"?

There can be said to have been in Heaven another Solomonic Judgement about exactly that proposition. Mercy and Truth, Peace and Justice come before the King of Heaven. Now, in this case none of them is a deceiver. None of them can just be pushed off. Each of them is a true daughter of the eternal father, a true aspect of the eternal son, of the wisdom of the father. St Bernhard tells the story of how Incarnation, Calvary and Resurrection were planned in Heaven.

Oh yes, this is interpretation, it is not in the Bible itself. But it is obviously well founded in it.

I will start with a story. It was told by the twelfth century preacher, Bernard of Clairvaux. The sermon has this intriguing title: The Four Daughters of God. They are Truth, Justice, Mercy and Peace. In the sermon the Four Daughters come before God after our first parents fell, that is, after Adam and Eve sinned in the Garden of Eden. The held a kind of trial:

Truth spoke first. She pointed out the obvious: Adam and Eve had every advantage, but they turned their back on God. Next came Justice. She said that the man and woman did not deserve a second chance. They knew the rules and they deliberately broke them. But Mercy said, "Yes, I agree they do not merit a second chance, but, still, I plead for them." Finally Peace said that if God did not do something for Adam and Eve, there would only be enmity between heaven and earth.

God faced a dilemma. He loves all of his daughters - but how can he affirm one without losing another? Strict justice seems to exclude mercy. Keeping the peace seems to require hiding a bit of the truth. Here on earth we sometimes fudge the truth in order to keep the peace. But it cannot be that way in heaven. How does God keep his daughters together: Justice with Mercy and Peace with Truth?

God came up with a this solution: He would himself become man.

Cited after another sermon, The Four Daughters of God which beyond St Bernhard adds that the Beatitudes - which Christ himself lived to the full - show him as bringing precisely these four. By the way - as I recall the story, which I read elsewhere, part of the reason is His saying in essence: "it is my fault, I have to fix it" (He being, as Council of Nicea said, obviously God the Creator, not just subordinate to Him). The story gives a Bible reference to the words before He produced the Flood and shortened human life span.

I am not sure that believing the moral of this story comes easy to you. To me it is actually the "god" you prefer who seems a horrid distorted shape of the old betrayer Satan.

The fall was a corruption of free will. Not a total corruption, as Calvin pretended, but a corruption. Now, let a cancer patient live a thousand years with a cancer, and after a thousand years you bet he is miserable because there is more cancer than healthy body in him. As to Adam and Eve, yes, they could live nearly a thousand years and still not corrupt all that much, because they were sorry for their deed and because they were waiting for the promised saviour. Nearly thousand years on earth and then in its entrails more than four thousand years - as a French Christmas carol makes clear - for the saviour. People like Cain or his latter descendants in Nod took such a lifespan in a worse fashion. Imagine what they would have done if granted an immortality continued despite the fall! But now we are talking free will rather than tissue. If cancer is bad, what about the unchecked ongoing corruption of free-will?

You may deny there is free-will. In that case you are, as Chesterton noted about Shaw, a Calvinist minus the remains of Christianity that there are in the usual Calvinist. And in that case you are no longer dealing with "what if the story is true, is it a good or a bad story", you are simply denying part of the story. And a very relevant part for all that.

If we were automata and God an administrator whose task was to make us happy automata, yes, you could argue that God was pushing the wrong buttons. Or that he was pushing exactly the right ones. One part of being happy is being conscious of not being an automaton.

But we are not automata, on the terms of Christianity. We are endowed with free will, with the duty of using it to love God - really love and not just appreciate as a decent administrator - and to love our neighbour as ourselves, and whatever rights we are endowed with (indirectly enumerated in the Decalogue, if you want the correct enumeration) are founded in that endowment fo our nature.

The kind of "god" you seem to prefer, who forgives without any measure of justice, because he is omnipotent, reminds me of certain modern trends in administration (perhaps because many of it agree with you about how you would like a god you could find it decent to believe in). Offenses traditionally punishable by death - well, pardon from death penalty is an many modern administrations automatic, because the state is "almighty" (or thinks itself so) and because "mercy rather than justice" is a kind of "duty" for any "almighty" according to that philosophy: so these offenses are just not punished by death. Does that mean that the offender is happy about being parodned death penalty and now he can go and do something else, and let's hope he has learnt a lesson? Ah no. Such mercy to him would have (in more than one case, especially with relapsed offenders of heinous crimes) been cruel to other citizens. So he is usually locked up. Now, that is merciful to other citizens, because they are spared a dangerous man, but also to him because he has not been killed.

Is it all that merciful to him? Look at the lives of people who are spending life time in prison. Look at the lives of people who have come out after twenty years in prison. And especially, at locking up way beyond the usual prison sentence fora certain crime!

So, why is a "merciful rather than just" administration doing it to him? Out of mercy (and not exactly justice: some would perhaps deserve to be in danger) to everyone else.

But if it is not a question of justice, purely of mercy, why stop at keeping dangerous criminals in prison? Why not do the same with people who might be dangerous in the future, even if they have so far not committed any crimes?

Well, the society you get with that is pretty much described in the SciFi story recently a film with Tom Cruise: Minority Report. That is a film with an unusually happy ending for such a scenario. Take A Clockwork Orange, see the end from where he is caught up to the point where he is crying because he can no longer enjoy Beethoven. THEN assume that he is considered cured and let free. THEN turn on the film from the beginning anbd assume that is how the story continues after the end. Now, that is a very realistic view of what happens if people are by pure mercy going to be cured of potentially dangerous to society tendencies, against their will, even before they do any ill. People submitted against their will to therapies get angry and feel anguish, and there is no medicating away the possibility that some crimes are committed by the objects of such "mercy" who would otherwise have lived perhaps if not totally straight at least more or less decent lives.

That is what comes from preferring the kind of "god" you pretend to be ideally a better guy than the one we Christians believe in. As lukewarm Christians agree with it and atheists and certain other non-Christians push it, society is getting worse and worse by the day.

I was in prison. I had not beaten up any fellow citizen. I had not resisted arrest for suspicion of any crime. I had resisted - only on the third occasion - getting locked up with "merciful" shrinks and with their other objects of "mercy" by taking the gun of the policeman who helped doctors bring me there. In first trial I was freed. Putative self defence. In second trial I was condemned, the assessment of first judge being overturned since I admitted being fully aware that the police officer was a police officer. He got a flesh wound that ought to be healed by now (10 cm in the hip). I got, nominally, three and a half years. People who think that what he police officer was doing for me was merciful are still trying "mercifully" to subject me underhand to treatments of the type "behavioural therapy". My so called offense was 5th of February 1998, Anno Domini. I was out for three weeks after first trial. I got back to liberty last of June 2000, after serving 2/3. The other third would have brought us 14 months later, 2001, last of August. I have been condemned for no offense after that. And there are still today people who "mercifully" are giving me lessons, and which lessons are doing to my life about as much happiness as being with fellow inmates does to a prisoners life. Except being out of prison I am not around those all of the time. Justice does not demand it. The ordinary acceptation of mercy does not demand it. It is only in the logic of a system where "mercy" is seen as ultimately far above justice. Where mercy is no more itself, because it is a label tacked conveniently on to punishments that reach a level of uncontrolled revenge because they are not checked by retributive justice. Again: retributive justice would have set me free at the latest last of August 2001. We are dealing with 14 years of my life rather than 3 and a half.

And it was also "mercy" uncontrolled by justice which put me in position to defend myself in the first place. Defending myself I got nominally 3 years and 6 months. Not defending myself I would have gotten life time in and out of that unhappy kind of institutions, at least it is what I thought I had valid reasons to fear.

If you see flying saucers and are taken to hospital and they ask you after a week whether you are still seeing flying saucers, and you say no, then if you are not a Roswell believer, nor think such views are the devil's work even before sane eyes (but in that case you might not have been telling your experience carelessly enough to get shut up), but you think they were patological as much as your shrinks do, you can feel a hope of not getting back in such "merciful" places again. They will tell you to hope to see no more flying saucers and you will believe them.

If you are being put there, as was my case, for either doing nothing in particular or for doing what you thought and still think right, then you are not agreeing that psychiatry locked you up for what was really your own good. If you think you are not ill, and are locked up "until better" by people who thereby indicate that they disagree with you, you may legitimately feel concern about psychiatry as a kind of mafia.

In my case, either psychiatry itself has been, or some other network has been acting underhand, "mercifully" of course, since for "my own good", which apparently I am "not well enough to understand". If mercy without justice provokes what it terms a crime and then replaces the 3 and a half years of justice with 14 years of "mercy", then you bet I prefer a God who gives justice its due.

Hans-Georg Lundahl
BpI, Georges Pompidou, Paris
Sunday, St Catherine of Alexandria
25-XI-2012

The Kalam argument against God, courtesy of TheoreticalBullshit

• P1: Nothing which exists can cause something which does not exist to begin existing.
• P2: Given (1), Anything which begins to exist was not caused to do so by something which exists.
• P3: The universe began to exist.
• P4: Given (2) and (3), the universe was not caused to exist by anything which exists.
• P5: God caused the universe to begin to exist.
• C1: Given (4) and (5), God does not exist*

P2 is given as a restatement or immediate conclusion of P1.

Sorry if that degree of absurdity is what he finds the Five Ways of Aquinas to be.

Because, if P1 is true in any sense, it is in the sense that only already existing things can be caused to exist somewhat otherwise.

Whereas P2 is only obverse of it if P1 is taken to mean what it clearly does not mean (and what TBS has denied it means) that it is the non-existent alone which can cause anything to exist.

It boils down to:

• Nothing begins to exist.
• The Universe began to exist.
• The Universe is nothing.

Well, if nothing begins to exist, maybe the universe which is not nothing did not begin to exist but always did.

Or, if the universe began to exist, then something at least began to exist.

But the underlying principle for P1, which TheoreticalBullshit has defended, is that no real existence ever begins, whatever begins is only a modification of things existing far before and maybe very far otherwise than itself.

Like - as is very popular today - of atoms, having gravitation, electro-magnetic force, nuclear force, explaining thereby everything else as by-products.

I have dealt with that in two ways:

a) mind cannot be a by-product of atoms with those forces,
b) gravitation does not explain a steady state universe very well.

a) somewhere else : Atheism Very Shortly Stated - and Refuted
http://notontimsblogroundhere.blogspot.com/2012/11/atheism-very-shortly-stated-and-refuted.html

b) Triviū, Quadriviū, 7 cætera : Considering Newton … Gravely
http://triv7quadriv.blogspot.com/2012/09/considering-newton-gravely.html

If I would like to add something to the former, it is basically this:

Since mind and matter exist:
either mind is a by-product of matter
or matter the by-product of at least some mind
or matter and mind just coexist.

But if they just coexisted, they would not be influencing each other. And besides the fact that mind obviously is no by-product of matter, the way in which they influence each other even in our experience suggests that mind is more primary.

Therefore material objects in the universe had universally a beginning, not just a beginning for such and such a configuration, and that universal beginning is a mind. OR, if it existed always, that mind has always kept it in existence.

Now, if you would say that I am relying too much on intuition, as some atheists clearly would, so are you on the intuition that beginnings only take place of configurations of pre-existing materials.

Hans-Georg Lundahl
Bpi, Georges Pompidou, Paris
St Cecily's Day
22-XI-2012

*http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmeZ_BAWAhQ

Is Peter Kreeft proving God as St Thomas Aquinas did?

A quote:

Look at the steady state theory. The Universe is there, it always was there, it always will be there, it is the sum total of all things, there is nothing else.

In that case there is no beginning. There has already been an infinite amount of time in the universe. So, what?

Well, from that beginning point some philosophers argue that you couldn't have reached today if there is an infinite time, because you couldn't go through infinite amount of moments of time and actually reach today if there is an infinite time, because you can't go through an infinite amount of moments of time, and actually reach today if you have to go through an infinite amount of days or hours or whatever in the past.

I don't think that works, it is the fallacy of Achilles and the Tortoise, by Zeno, the ancient Greek philosopher.

But Aquinas doesn't use that version, he uses another version. He says:

If there has already been an infinite amount of time, then there is enough time for every possibility to have become actualised.

Now, if there is no God, every other being than God can not be. There is no being that has to be necessarily. Everything can cease to be, everything can die.

If there is enough time for everything to die, why is anything still alive?

If in infinite time every potentiality is actualised, then at some time everything in the universe will cease to be. And once nothing exists, nothing can start up again, so how come we are [still] here?

Source: The Thomist Cosmological Argument (Peter Kreeft)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wefohtJBnN8

Modern Atheism has actually dealt with it in a way. Not by saying that there is no necessary being, but by calling atoms or smaller particles or energy that necessary being.

It is a shame for them that atheists don't say that when confronted with the argument. But refuting that is not saying atheists don't deal with it. It is stating how atheism cannot deal with it properly. That is the difference between logical dialectics and rhetoric.

Atheism as believed by Science Believers is actually not denying any argument of the five totally.

• It is identifying "first unmoved mover" (1) with energy (kinetic and other).
• It is identifying "necessary existant" (3) with (older) particles or (newer) with quanta of energy,
• Preservation (2 minus what 1 already states) of movement neither changing speed nor direction is regarded as quite as much a preservation as preservation in unchanged stillness. Attributed to matter and to energy.
• Wisdom of rule (4) is attributed to every failed state of system already having failed. Those are the various atheistic theories of evolution.
• Best thing (5) is considered an illusion or as by-product of biological evolution, and therefore as relative.

To give us Thomistic Theist Philosophy, it is no longer enough to quote the five ways. One must also show how conclusion of five ways cannot be for instance, anything composed.

And a probably-so theoretical fault underlying this belief system is Newton's first or second law meaning that preservation in movement needs no cause beyond preservation of moving object and absense of forces changing the movement.

That is also not something observed directly on earth. One can thus hardly say it is based on experience. We throw a stone, and it continues flying through the air a while, then it falls to the ground. Newtonians say that is due to gravitation of earth. Of course things do tend to fall to the ground. But is the downward bend of the stone's orbit entirely due to gravitation or is it due to a weakening of the initial momentum of the throw?

That could be tested, actually. Measure impact of two projectiles thrown same force on same weight (can be arranged by machinery), one on a target set high up at beginning of orbit, one on a target further away and lower. Will the low and far target have to measure less of an impact than the high and close one - or more?

I think it has been done. I think you have greater chances of surviving a bullet or arrow hit if it comes from afar. Of course a Newtonian may answer: "yes, agreed that not only is the projectile lower due to gravitation, it is also less forcefull, BUT that is accounted for by friction."

His explanation of the case agrees with the data, but is obviously not the only one that does so.

Of course, he could say his explanation can be tested by the fact that bullets loose their force easier in water than in air and easier in solid objects (like that Bible in a breast pocket that saved a man's life: afterwards he started reading it and became a Christian). And the Aristotelian or semi-Aristotelian might agree that higher friction makes projectiles loose force earlier, but say that this is not the only cause, the prime one being that motion is an imposed thing which cannot remain for very long on its own in an object.

And that is why St Thomas Aquinas - unlike Peter Kreeft earlier in this video - makes locomotion, i e change in place, the most obvious example of change, the most obvious thing requiring a first mover.

Newtonianism essentially makes "inertia plus forces" the first mover.

Materialism goes one further and makes all other change an epiphenomenon of locomotion. Even chemical change is essentially locomotion of electrons to it.

Now, that is not the usual answer of an atheist when confronted with St Thomas Aquinas. His reaction is: "Aquinas is philosophy, not science. In philosophy he has been answered by Hume and Kant. Therefore I answer this Christian appealing to philosophy by an appeal to Hume and Kant. Obviously Hume and Kant are as much later than Aquinas as Tycho Brahe is later than Ptolemy. Ergo as much trustworthier." And if the Christian does not agree that later means trustworthier within each discipline, then he thinks the Christian an oddball.

Now, he could have done what my analysis does for him, say: "I agree there must be a first mover. We no longer call it God, we call it energy. Prove it is not impersonal as we believe, will you?"

If Peter Kreeft had taken the road of using all the five ways, he could have answered: "we see things obeying a wise overall design. Therefore there is a designer wiser than us who has also the power to impose his design - by fiat on inanimate objects or by obedience of angels - on the whole universe."

And the Newtonian and Materialist atheist happens also to be a Heliocentric-Acentric Einsteinian as well as an Evolutionist. He thinks that the designs that do not work have all and sundry been eliminated not by choice of a designer, but by failure of every design other than the one we now enjoy.

And of course he would not agree that the Universe is only the sum of everything that can exist and cannot exist as well: he will call everything that can not exist, such as solid objects and life and conscience, an epiphenomenon of what he considers ultimately necessary existence. If what Mendeleian Chemists use the word atom for is composable, no doubt the Demokritean atoms are even smaller than that. Particles. Quanta. Whatever. Or he resorts to Heraklitean panta rhei materialism: it is all an epiphenomenon to the flow of energy. So his answer is: while everything we see can as well not exist, it consists of smaller things which can only exist. When the things we see cease to exist, that only means the smaller things rearrange.

NOW Peter Kreeft might agree that proving theism indeed goes by the five ways, but has to include a refutation of the atheist's way of dealing with the five ways. Their real way, when doing their science or science based speculation, not the phony way of appealing to Kant or Hume, which is actually just a way of telling Kreeft and company: "get out of the way, I want to discuss with people who have something to say."

These do include Christian Creationists. Kent Hovind is currently in prison. You might contribute to his defense fund, if you like. When he was out, I do not find atheist refutations of him from that period. But now he is in, a certain thunderf00t is making so much fun of him, and refuting so short clips from him, that I think he was on spot.

Creation vs. Evolution : thunderf00t ... did you actually say that? (part 1)
http://creavsevolu.blogspot.fr/2012/11/thunderf00t-did-you-actually-say-that.html

Creation vs. Evolution : thunderf00t, did you really say that? (part 2)
http://creavsevolu.blogspot.fr/2012/11/thunderf00t-did-you-really-say-that.html

Now, when St Thomas aquinas proves God to be personal, he first of all proves that God is not composed. Something which creationists will make a case of.

"Who created God?"

"Since God is not composed of anything at all, but is his own being, he needs no creator."

Quoted from memory from a creationist site.

Now, how does St Thomas Aquinas set about proving that God is simple?

First he deals with God not being - as such - a body. And here he uses at the very first an argument where Materialist Newtonism would disagree:

First, because no body is in motion unless it be put in motion, as is evident from induction. Now it has been already proved (2, 3), that God is the First Mover, and is Himself unmoved. Therefore it is clear that God is not a body.

"Protest, your honour! A body in order to move does not need to be continually set in motion."

Sungenis gives an explanation where the turning of the universe around a central no-mass location or same location occupied by earth can go on and on and on for billions of years.

On its own. Without having, for each moment of its movement, a first mover.

You may perhaps now see, why a thoroughgoing Thomist should not try to accept everything presented as modern science, even if it has centuries of unanimous acceptation in the scientific community.

You may also see why now more than ever it is necessary to insist that cognitive events - thinking or realising - cannot be epiphenomena to locomotive ones in bodies.

Now, there are some reasons why St Thomas Aquinas did not take the C. S. Lewis proof.

First of all, it is a composite proof, where first part leads to a junction where Averroism is a clear option. He knew very well how to refute Averroism, but he may not have wanted to bring it up first.

Second of all, the thing is so obvious he might not have considered it needed saying.

Third, he was not dealing with people who actually seriously said that events such as knowing or loving can have sunbjects such as purely bodily objects. The closest you came to Atheism among serious options back then was Averroism, which admitted there was a mind with known truth of eternal validity, only denying that these other lesser minds that we have exist also.

Now, proving God is neither impossible nor even very difficult. The problem is some people make it more difficult than it need be by accepting too much of the modern scientific options. Some of them are refutable as purported facts. Others are at least refutable as purportedly known facts.

Hans-Georg Lundahl
La Clairière, Paris
St Cecilia, Virgin and Martyr
22-XI-2012

PS: St Bonaventura's version which Kreeft said was Achilles and the Turtle fallacy, is not so. Reaching a part that equals zero by smaller and smaller divisions is mathematically impossible. Reducing serial things like time or numbers to a start like 1 is not so. You cannot have whole numbers lesser than one. Zero is not a number. "Minus one" is not a number. You can say that "plus/minus zero" and "minus one" are valid as relative numbers - I prefer to call them numeric relations - but these repose on numbers. "How many more or less than ..." requires a related object of "how many". Which is where you do not come lower than one.

Atheism Very Shortly Stated - and Refuted

I do not believe we can expact an answer to the question of why anything happens, nor do I see how the answer to this question has any relevance for our understanding of things. A question of purpose should be properly phrased in the context of consciousness, which itself is an emergent feature of the evermore complex nature of the brain. By all accounts advanced brains are a relativeley small scale phenomenon of the cosmos. But even a grand design of purpose, would not, I propose, give us a satisfying answer to the question. Consider a univers that just exists, and one brought into the existence of a creator who just exists. Both seem equally meaningless to me.

source, youtube > AndromedasWake > Atheist
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XAizi4zwM6g

There are more than one meaning of the word "why". One is final cause, i e for what purpose. But there is also efficient cause, i e by what driving force, material cause, i e from what matter, and formal cause, i e of what not just shape but actually nature.

As a Christian I believe all of these, not just the question of purpose require God to be correctly answered. God being efficient and final cause of all things (i e His purpose with creation is Himself, to realise His capacity of sharing His Glory but also that anything that produces any effect whatsoever ultimately does so because God is producing all effectivity). God is not identical with material or directly with formal cause of created things as the Pantheists think, however.

Now, there is a very important difference in explanation between a universe that just is there and a universe created by a creator that just is there, at least if the universe that just is there is the one you describe, in which mind is a byproduct of brain matter.

(source: wikimedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Boulier1.JPG)

No science even begins to explain how mind can be a byproduct of the material "information processing" roughly parallel to that done by computers. It is basically, and I have said it before, as if beads on an abacus were to gain, as an emergent feature of abacus counting, an understanding of mathematics. They do not, they only illustrate our understanding of mathematics. Same is true for computers. Same would be true if brains were only matter and mind no primary.

In other words: if mind is no primary, mind cannot exist, because mind cannot be an emergent feature.

That is exactly where a universe created by a "mind that just is" explains more than a mind emerging from "matter that just is".

Now, if we are to correctly refute not just atheism, but pantheism as well, we may add that if God were identical to the material cause of universe and to the forms inherent in material objects, there would not be any other mind than God's. And then the supreme mind would be in error each time anyone thought something erroneous, or the erroneous thought would not be a thought, both explanations being absurd.

Since there are other mind's than God's, the universe is not identic to God, but created by Him.

You said yourself in the continuation of those words, that a universe created by divine purpose is one where we can never fully understand the purposes of so many arbitrary choises God made.

However, if you recall that starry night, you can be sure that beauty was one of them, supposing my explanation to be correct. Supposing it not to be correct, I would like to see a refutation of this essay.

Hans-Georg Lundahl
Public Information Library (BpI)
of Georges Pompidou, Paris
St Martinsmass
11-XI-2012

Update 29-IX-2015 : the video I quoted and linked to is now private.

So, Dionysus was a Copy of Moses, may One Presume?

somewhere else : So, Dionysus was a Copy of Moses, may One Presume? · Assorted retorts from yahoo boards and elsewhere : Historicity of Moses Revisited

Acharya S (a k a D. M. Murdock) does it again. And so presumable she will be doing for some time, I do not want her to stand uncontradicted though.

Here she quotes Voltaire, so the following is my quote of Voltaire via Acharya:*

The ancient poets have placed the birth of Bacchus in Egypt; he is exposed on the Nile and it is from that event that he is named Mises by the first Orpheus, which, in Egyptian, signifies "saved from the waters"… He is brought up near a mountain of Arabia called Nisa [Nysa], which is believed to be Mount Sinai. It is pretended that a goddess ordered him to go and destroy a barbarous nation and that he passed through the Red Sea on foot, with a multitude of men, women, and children. Another time the river Orontes suspended its waters right and left to let him pass, and the Hydaspes did the same. He commanded the sun to stand still; two luminous rays proceeded from his head. He made a fountain of wine spout up by striking the ground with his thyrsus, and engraved his laws on two tables of marble. He wanted only to have afflicted Egypt with ten plagues, to be the perfect copy of Moses.

OK. Possible. Let us take chronology. Dionysus is a Greek divinity so recent that Homer (c. 800 BC he wrote Iliad and Odyssey) does not know him. That is well after Moses. Time enough for the old Hebrews to remember him correctly and for Pagans to remember him wrong.

I have previously reasoned or guessed that Deukalion and Pyrrha (the Flood surviving childless old couple in Greek Mythology) are based on:
1) Noah and Family (Flood survivors)
2) Abraham and Sarah (a so far childless old couple when visited by three angels who announced also the coming destruction of Sodom)
3) Lot and two daughters (hospitable survivors of a disaster similar to the Flood, though geographically limited, and faced after being saved with some conundrum about how to repeople the world (in Genesis it is only an imagined conundrum, imagined by the two daughters who thought the world had been destroyed but for them: when they soaked their father drunk he made them pregnant with Moab and Ammon).

If Orpheus (supposing Orpheus the husband of Eurydice to be the one to whom Voltaire referred as to "the first Orpheus") said such things about Dionysus, he might have similarily been getting the story of Moses in a distorted fashion.

I think Pagans had a reason to distort the stories. Step one, they leave out things they do not want to believe. Step two, they put in things, preferrably from stories already known and which may well be true ones too, to fill the gaps in the story.

What is left out in the Deukalion and Pyrrha story? The Miracle of Sarah's pregnancy and the fact that Sodomy was the third and final of the Sins leading God to decide the destruction.

The first of these woud to a Pagan, used to judging hopes and fears after how things usually go, as a foolhardy miracle to hope for and a stupidity to believe in.

As to the second, since the time of Hercules (reputed a lover of Iolaus), Greeks had more and more been lenient on sodomy, if not in legislation at least in talking about peopple outside their own jurisdiction.

Now, Voltaire analysed himself that the one thing left out from the story of Dionysus, if a copy from that of Moses, are the ten plagues. Not quite left out though. Pentheus would in such a case echo the Pharao. But in the main yes.

Reason? Well, Moses had argued that the Pharao insulted the law of the one God whose chosen people the Israelites were (as the Catholics are today, by the way, though with other duties to those outside, since that is indeed for all nations).

Would that not have struck a false note with people who believed in many gods and in equal or nicely graduated degrees of favour by the gods?

And furthermore, the Israelites were described as being held as slaves: those being the chosen people might very well have struck a Pagan who believed slaves were such by nature or divine decision as very awkward to believe or accept.

Hans-Georg Lundahl
Georges Pompidou Library
St Carina and martyrdom of
Bishop Jón Arason (in 1541)
7 - XI - 2012

*Stellar House Publishing : The Moses-Dionysus Connection
http://stellarhousepublishing.com/moses-dionysus.html

---

Appendix : Egyptian evidence for Moses

If above is correct, the Dionysus cult is, from Orpheus on a Thracian and from after Homer but before Hesiod a Greek independent testimony for the existance of Moses.

But would not Egyptian evidence be even better?

We might have exactly that. But first a piece of Chronology. Here I state that I believe Protestants to be wrong and Martyrologium Romanum to be right in Chronology. Now, Protestants would place the Exodus from Egypt in B.C. 1446, the Martyrology places it 1510 years before the birth of Christ. This means Moses striking the Egyptian Overseer to death was 1550 years before Christ.

Keep that in mind as we read following extract from the article I link to on that one.**

One of the last kings of the 12th dynasty was Sesostris III. His statues depict him as a cruel tyrant quite capable of inflicting harsh slavery on his subjects. His son was Amenemhet III, who seems to have been an equally disagreeable character. He probably ruled for 46 years, and Moses would have been born near the beginning of his reign.

Amenemhet III may have had one son, known as Amenemhet IV, who was an enigmatic character who may have followed his father or may have been a co-regent with him. If the latter, Amenemhet IV could well have been Moses. Amenemhet IV mysteriously disappeared off the scene before the death of Amenemhet III.

Amenemhet III had a daughter whose name was Sobekneferu. It is known that she had no children.6 If she was the daughter of Pharaoh who came down to the river to bathe, it is easy to understand why she was there. It was not because she had no bathroom in her palace. She would have been down there taking a ceremonial ablution and praying to the river god Hapi, who was also the god of fertility. Having no children she would have needed such a god, and when she found the beautiful baby Moses there she would have considered it an answer to her prayers (Exodus 2:5–6).

But when Moses came of age he identified himself with the people of Israel and was obliged to flee from Egypt. This left a vacuum on the throne, and when Amenemhet III died there was no male successor. Sobekneferu ascended the throne and ruled for 8 years as a Pharaoh, but when she died the dynasty died and was succeeded by the 13th dynasty.

And a little further on David Down identifies the last pharao to have a scarab in Kahun, Neferhotep I, with the Pharao of whom Moses demanded the release of Israelites.

According to Manetho, he was the last king to rule before the Hyksos occupied Egypt ‘without a battle’. Without a battle? Where was the Egyptian army? It was at the bottom of the Red Sea (Exodus 14:28). Khasekemre-Neferhotep I was probably the pharaoh of the Exodus. His mummy has never been found.

HGL
*HGL's F.B. writings : Disagreeing about age of flood. (et c)
http://hglsfbwritings.blogspot.fr/2012/10/disagreeing-about-age-of-flood-et-c.html

**I link to:
CMI : Searching for Moses by David Down
http://creation.com/searching-for-moses

---

Appendix B : what about Kontiki Viracocha? Another Pagan calque of Christian figures?

If missionaries came to anywhere in Northern South America or Southern North America or Central America before Columbus, say in Roman times, and were not in the end followed by a population surviving to our times, the legend of Kontiki Viracocha alias Quetzalcoatl (which seems to be Aztek for Geek/Scholar or something) may be a distorted memory thereof.

As distorted as Dionysus from Moses or as Deukalion and Pyrrha from Noah et c.

The man is white and haas a beard. That would mean some kind of European or Mediterranean.

He orders human sacrifice to cease. That is one thing a Christian missionary would do.

His orders were not obeyed. This is what would have happened if a mission failed. And a failed mission would explain a persistent Paganism quite able to distort the story so as to leave out more specifically Christian parts, or so as to attribute what a missionary attributed to Christ to the memory of the missionary rather than that of the God-Man he came for./HGL

Did the Gospellers plagiarise Mexican Myth, Acharya?

"Our Lord and Savior Quetzalcoatl" / Freethoughtnation
http://freethoughtnation.com/contributing-writers/63-acharya-s/596-our-lord-and-savior-quetzalcoatl.html

I think that geographically and chronologically impossible.

Mexican myth may have plagiarised Gospel story:
1) by human means if missionaries reached new world before Spaniards, or if 1492 - 1520's were sufficient space of time for Mexican pagans to develop a new myth OR:
2) by diabolical means, the devil plagiarising the Gospel story as already known.

Detail:

The Aztec godman descends into the underworld, where he "gathers the bones of the human beings of the previous epochs," while, in the apocryphal text [The Gospel of Nicodemus], Christ resurrects several kings and prophets of previous epochs out of the underworld. Quetzalcoatl's blood is used to convey life to the humans whose bones he saved, while Christ's blood delivers eternal life and saves humans from death.

As to Christ resurrecting several kings and prophets of previous epochs, it seems to have better authority than Gospel of Nicodemus.

[Matthew 27:52] And the graves were opened: and many bodies of the saints that had slept arose, [53] And coming out of the tombs after his resurrection, came into the holy city, and appeared to many.

Haydock Commentary:

The rocks were rent, and the graves were opened: and many bodies of the saints ... arose. St. Jerome takes notice, that these saints did not rise with their bodies till after Christ was risen; and so it follows, that going out of the graves, after the resurrection, they came into the holy city, (i.e. into Jerusalem) and appeared to many. (Witham) --- This event was a prophecy of the fatal destruction that was shortly to fall upon the temple; and also, that it should henceforth give place to things more noble and sublime. It likewise shews that greatness of Christ's power. (St. Chrysostom, hom. lxxxix.)

Hans-Georg Lundahl
Le Havre
St Raphaël
24/X/2012

Lewis and Nagel Against Materialist Monism

I will copy one wiki about Thomas Nagel's book Mind and Cosmos:

Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False is a 2012 book by Thomas Nagel, Professor of Philosophy at New York University.

Overview

In the book, Nagel argues that the materialist version of evolutionary biology is unable to account for the existence of mind and consciousness, and is therefore at best incomplete. He writes that mind is a basic aspect of nature, and that any philosophy of nature that cannot account for it is fundamentally misguided.[1] He argues that the standard physico-chemical reductionist account of the emergence of life - that it emerged out of a series of accidents, acted upon by the mechanism of natural selection - flies in the face of common sense.[2]

Nagel's position is that principles of an entirely different kind may account for the emergence of life, and in particular conscious life, and that those principles may be teleological, rather than materialist or mechanistic. He stresses that his argument is not a religious one, and that it is not based on intelligent design (ID), though he writes that ID proponents such as Michael Behe, Stephen Meyer, and David Berlinski do not deserve the scorn with which their ideas have been met by parts of the scientific establishment.[3]

Notes
^ see p. 16ff.
^ pp. 5-6
^ p. 10

I will now ask readers of C. S. Lewis which book they are reminded of. It is not exactly one of the Narnias. Nor is it the Perelandra Trilogy, though parts of That Hideous Strength spring to mind. It is a book which he debated with a contemporary philosopher. Miracles. 1947.

C. S. Lewis' argument for Theism as of Christian / Jewish / Moslem / Platonist form begins with an identical argument or nearly so which is indistinct as to Theism, Pantheism, Dualism, Averroism, but which rules out Materialism. He then goes about to rule out Averroism and Pantheism: if God is doing all the thinking, why would he impose on himself to think wrongly through human reasoners who are mistaken? After that he rules out Dualism too: imagining the good and evil principles, or for that matter simply mind and matter as side-by-side, both ignores part of our common sense experience of them (mind ruling matter is for good of both, matter ruling mind is of ill of both, good is selfcontained, ill and evil is parasitic) and smuggles in the idea of "a common space" in which both could exist side by side.

The contemporary philosopher, I think she was called Anscombe, did not radically challenge the ruling out of Averroism or Dualism as much as attack CSL's attack on Naturalism - or what Thomas Nagel calls Materialism.

I would ask two things of Thomas Nagel:

• if his "Materialism" is any different from the "Naturalism" in CSL's Miracles
• if not, and in case he answers either that or CSL's outruling of Averroism (non-Theist Jews tend to late Averroist Spinoza) in the book, then notify me about that please. Right now I have no access to it.

From the rest I ask that readers of Thomas Nagel's Mind and Cosmos also check out C. S. L's Miracles.

Hans-Georg Lundahl
Bibl. Audoux, Paris
St Eustace
20th September 2012

PS: I do not think Creation Science deserves the scorn given it by scientific establishment either. But that is not in either Nagel or Lewis (at least not that book, though he later wrote an essay called Funeral of a Great Myth), so you may check out my stance on my Creationist blog.

And if you do not know how to find the books, I will give links to Amazon: Mind and Cosmos, and Miracles. I might be back on topic after looking at preview pages in either of the two books.

Answering Architectus777 and First a Bit of Dawkins

Richard Dawkins says that* due to phantastic evolution we have brains that bring into the universe, maybe for the first time things like love and value and purpose.

He could have added, of course, thought. And everything else that comes to mind when we think of mind. And of mind itself.

Problem is: his explanation is about some supposed reality way before grandpa was a child when there was no purpose, no love, no life and of course no mind either.

Problem is: he thinks adding phantastic complexities to brains somehow make them capable of adding to the things that really are there. If atoms and so on is all there really is, if life is one kind of interplay of atoms and dead matter very similar to it in any essential way, then Dawkins' explanation is no explanation. Just because you can in the English language string together a proposition and prefix it with "because" does not mean it is a valid explanation.

But I was actually going to write another response to another video.

Architectus777 writes beneath his youtube:**

I have so many questions about the God idea that I can't answer, but maybe there is someone out there so brilliant that they can. Where are you? Please leave a video response if you care to answer any of the questions. Only a video response please.

I admit I was so eager to answer that I forgot the part of only a video response. Did you click the link and see the video?

Good, for here are my comments in chronological order:

0:23 Thoughts of Humans take time to work and must be processed. It is called reasoning. All thought or mind is called intellect, because it understands, but human mind processes, angelic and above all divine mind does not.

Once a thought made sense in one instant, and I filled in afterwards.

01:33 God does not gain new memories. Memory is the mode of an insight related to the past God is above that, and therefore improperly said of God. However forgetfulness is quiet properly denied of God.

03:33 God from all of His Eternity to all of His Eternity is Aware of every moment he has created (including the beginning of the Universe) in addition to being aware of His own eternal being in Three Persons, each of them aware of and adoring and loving the two others.

04:23 You cannot add to infinity. God is not gaining "new memories" and he is not loosing "older" ones. And new and old are not about how God is getting things, either Each Other (Father, Son and Holy Ghost) or His Creation. Or any moment of history of creatures, or any combination, such as Man-God, Jesus Christ. However, in his Human nature Christ could very well gain new experiences and did all through his life (He's the second person, by the way, the Son, in case you forgot).

05:16 Time is not eternal, and God unchangingly had decided from all eternity when time was to be created.

If you think of what you draw, think of God as drawing one line called "beginning of time" and another called "judgement day" and between them A Cross and an Empty Grave. All other is filled in between or around these.

06:36 The point called "beginning of time" and the point called "judgement day" and the point of Calvary are all sovereignly decided by God. From his view he could have chosen any other point if he had wanted to. But he also decided how much time elapses between them. You cannot arbitrarily say, nor I, that the universe could be so much older or younger than it is. We are here with what God actually did. The decision is not ours.

07:08 If you have a purpose of beauty when you start a drawing, is it not still arbitrary for you where you set your pencil or pen?

At least in the sense that no one else than you can give the exact reason you felt for chosing that point rather than the other one.

And we are other than God, we are just his creatures.

08:09 If you are right about protons, in the main, there are not just gluon, upquarks and downquark, there is also a positive charge involved in the proton.

As for God, he is identical to the attributes which we are told about as forming different attributes. God is not dependent.

Neither God nor existence nor life nor intelligence can be dependent on anything lacking itself.

There is God who exists, lives and is wise. There are existent things created by Him who exist, [et c.]

14:09 Existence does not emerge from non-existant attributes. Life does not emerge from non-living attributes. Mind does not emerge from mindless attributes.

God does not emerge, He is eternal.

Created existence or life or mind are created rather than emerging and from God rather than from inferior attributes.

I tried to add another comment but could not. So I sent it to him, here is our correspondence, beginning with my missive:

mind adding this above my coments, youtube keeps saying error, try again?

It's not a question of having a greater mind than you, just of having heard the answers.

Look them up in Summa Theologiae by St Thomas Aquinas (available in original Latin, but also in English, French, German translations: English one is available on newadvent dot org slash summa and you are basically asking for part I).

(It is for the youtube I have already commented so much on, questions about God)

Really? Aquinas doesn't answer my questions. He is an outdated philosopher with weak philosophy.

He answered everyone of them.

In philosophy there is no such thing as outdated.*** There is such a thing as refuted, and he refuted your positions in advance.

Glad you think so, but I think I destroyed his God.

Look up my comments.

You missed the possibility of divine thought NOT being processual, unlike human thought.

You reasoned on from that misunderstanding about what God means.

(so far I got neither another response from him, nor any answers in comment section of his youtube for the video).

Hans-Georg Lundahl
Georges Pompidou Library
St Radegundis' day
13-VIII-2012

*http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dRmKA5zUYBI

**http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8yaw4q2xu58

***Thank you Owen Barfield (senior), thank you C S Lewis!