Knight's POTD 1-10-2008

[Nathon Detroit]

ApologeticJedi bursts Traditio's Aristotle-bubble

This is just silly. Let's name some arbitrary emotion...say....anger. Either God possesses anger or he does not. If he already possesses anger, then how can you say that He is moved by becoming angry? He is already angry. If he does not possess anger, from from what does He gain it?

I agree … your circular reasoning is silly. If we only start with the question settled (that God is outside of time) then we reach the conclusion that God is outside of time. That’s why its called begging the question.

But what if we don’t start with the conclusion as our premise, but rather try to arrive there? :noway: How novel of us!

We could look and see that if God is outside of time, the He could become angry at something He witnessed. This would imply movement in God. And what if there were truly a Triunity within God? Then they could converse and move each other.

Ergo we cannot determine naturally that anything that moved God would be God.

1. Everything moved moves from potency to act.
2. Everything in potency is moved by something in act.
3. Take some arbitrary property for which something can have a potency, or of which something is in act. Let's call it...hotness.
4. Assume everything were made hot by something else.
5. Therefore, nothing is in act actually to make everything hot.
6. Nothing is hot (And this is a contradiction to obvious given knowns).
7. Therefore, nothing everything is made hot by something else. Something is hot of itself.
8. Since we chose the quality arbitrarily, it must be true of all such properties, and indeed for all movement.

If there is movement, there must be something to cause that movement, which is of itself unmoved, from which all things receive movement.

God is Final Cause of all motion.

You were supposed to prove that God is unmoved … not that He is the first cause of all movement. Those are two different things. God could be moving, an still be the first cause of movement in the scenario above.

If there are hundreds of domino blocks lined up, one movement had to start them, but we cannot say that the first was moving or unmoving. You can't draw conclusions backwards like that. Aristotle should have known that. Sadly it was out of his reach.

1. We know that other things do not become hot unless something makes it so … ergo there must be a universal source …. God.
2. God causes other things to become hot.

This does not mean God himself cannot be hot. If anything, it implies that God IS hot, just as it would imply that the first domino was moved by a moving thing (but in truth, it is not settled one way or the other as either could be true).

Hot is interesting as we have no emotional stake in a "hot" attribute, but what about attribute like "righteousness". I we follow Aristotle's lack of logic (and your butchery of it), we would get :

Everything that is righteous comes from a God that isn't! :jawdrop:

Sadly that would be the conclusion we arrive so long as we missed the same very obvious counter principle that you and Aristotle missed. A lack of use of logic was Aristotle's undoing at times; don't follow him into it.

:first:

 

[cattyfan]

to what thread does this pertain?

 

[Nathon Detroit]

Click the arrow next to ApologeticJedi's name in the post. :up:

 

[cattyfan]

Thanks

 

[FellowServant]

Awesome!! :up:

 

[death2impiety]

Good read.