The Cosmological Argument (Thomas Aquinas)

[Heartless Angel]

I kind of am, I suppose.

What I am saying is that there isn't much of anything to be called a "fact" that isn't an experienced thing. I said in a bunch of ways in that last post, this was just one of them. A stomach ache is an experienced thing.

Then this is the fallacy of wishful thinking. The fact that an idea makes you uneasy as a premise has absolutely no effect on the conclusion of a factual argument, and is therefore irellevant to the argument. To use another analogy, think of a courtroom. If you are testifying as a witness, and you say you saw the suspect commit the crime, this is treated as evidence. If you got up oin the stand and said that he made you uneasy, or that when you listened to his defense, you developed a stomahce ache, no reasonable jury would give a crap, because it isn't relevant to the conclusion the man is guilty. Just because we can percieve something, doesn't nescessarily make it relevant.

... which is what Aquinas was doing, no?

Sort of, but not really. His argument was more trying to define existence, causality, and the universe in terms of God, not the other way around. Though he poses a relatively good argument, ultimately he relies on the existence of God existing to prove god exists. That's like trying to use a word in its own definition. Again, most metaphysical arguments do this to some extent, which is why we say most of them fail to PROVE anything.

In fact, if we go by what we assume we should know, then Aquinas would have a more convincing argument than Kant's challenges to him. I have not experienced in my existence a single thing without a cause. So mebbe I should know something about causality and how everything needs it and mebbe I should trust Aquinas.

Except for the fact that right after saying everything needed a cause, he created an exception to the rule of logic he was attempting to establish by saying God did not. A major part of his premises were that God did not have to follow any form of logic, but that everything else did. This is not fact, this is not provable in itself, and can't prove another conclusion until it is proven itself.

But here's the thing (and this is where we catch Aquinas too). Deduction doesn't prove the existence of the deer. Deduction proved it would be valid to believe in the deer if those premises were true. In the end, the sense experiences you talked about didn't come from deduction but came from experience. Like my stomach ache, like Teresa de Avila's experience of god.

It proves it in terms of what we consider to be existence. Aquinas' argument created a seperate dimension outside of existence, that need not follow the rules of existence, but then tries to say things that fall into this category INSTEAD of our definition of existence, still exist.

This is where Kant flies in: Science needs to be based on interactions between sensory experience and reason. You cannot deductively carry out science. You can deductively work science, but science needs data.


It seems like you know that though from the way you stated your two proofs.


Something CAN be, not if it is.

So this materialist premise (as you framed it) defines existence as ocurring prior to anybody encountering it. Some creator entity, as long as it's material, is as valid as your deer.

Yes, according to my proof, IF and only if it can be seen (I certainly can't see it, nor do I know anyone who can), heard (I spent years of my younger life asking God to tell me he existed while I was struggling with my beliefs, never heard a word), smelled (I couldn't even hazard a guess as to what God smells like. Even the bible never mentions being able to percieve him through this sense), tasted (same argument for smell), and felt. Feeling could be a bit arbitrary, we could be talking about feeling his presence, literally reaching out and touching him, feeling something he definitely caused... any number of things, but i haven't experienced any of the above. Yes, if he fit these definitions, I would have to say he exists, however he does not.

To quote Teresa de Avila:

"I saw in his hand a long spear of gold, and at the iron's point there seemed to be a little fire. He appeared to me to be thrusting it at times into my heart, and to pierce my very entrails; when he drew it out, he seemed to draw them out also, and to leave me all on fire with a great love of God. The pain was so great, that it made me moan; and yet so surpassing was the sweetness of this excessive pain, that I could not wish to be rid of it."

That's more sensory data involved than most people's sexual encounters.

However, it was experienced by one and only one person. If I reach out and touchh a deer, and you reach out and touch the same deer, you and I would both be able to say we felt the deer. This argument however is also not perfect, because it fails to explain existence in terms of blindness or deafness, or other sensory impairment. If I can say it exists even though a blind man can't see it, I'd have to be open to the possibiility that the majority of humanity was in some way impaired in the sense that some apparently use to detect God. This is where we have to make a distinction that may or may not be correct and say that the senses an average person has are teh only ones that matter in terms of defining reality. This may or may not be correct. Once more I have to agree with Jin, logic and metaphyics don't mix well.