To atheists: some thoughts on responding to the First Way

I find amusement int he grasping as straws and jumping through hoops one has to perform to come up with these kinds of arguments.

The First Way concludes that the First Mover must be pure actuality, which translates into God being radically simple: he is identical to his attributes.

Why he, exactly? Assuming there is a "First Mover" or whatever, how does it logically follow that it's necessary to personify it? It's a huge conclusion to jump to if you ask me.

Lastly, one problem with all these arguments is, if we must stretch our imagination to begin to perceive how a god might exist, that otherwise never seems to intervene in our daily lives, then what's the point in even bothering with it? Another problem is, of course, that you can substitute the deity being argued for with a super intelligent alien or robot.. or maybe just a parking valet from another dimension.

All Aquinas (or any apologist for that matter) has ever shown me is that god has always existed in vivid imaginations and nothing more.

Clearly, you don't understand the Five ways, as any time anyone critiques them it is because they don't understand them.

Most frustrating is the repeated claim that the 1st way is not a dressed up version cosmological argument - though it clearly is.

Everyone keeps forgetting that the First Way isn't an argument for any religion being true or truest, and that in it, God doesn't exist in the same way that a chair exists.

I'm inclined to go further and say that the sort of people who raise the First Way usually aren't the same people who want their religion to be truest, or who believe that God exists in the same way that a chair exists. I don't think anyone who ever held up a placard saying 'God Hates Fags' is very interested in Thomas Aquinas.

There is more to be said about this. Any viable response to the First Way presupposes an accurate understanding of it, including its more unfamiliar presumptions. For the most part, this never happens in atheist responses. And since the First Way is of a respectable age, it is unlikely - and rather presumptuous - to suppose that our own objections are going to provide something genuinely new. So rather than jumping right in and objecting, it seems to me that we should be looking at how other people have responded to the argument over the course of history.

You are suggesting to put the wagon before the horse and start with the analysis for results irrespective of the validity of the input. This approach is pure waste of time. Especially when the input is so obviously convoluted and inductive as in the first way.

For any argument, irrelevant of age, the reasonable action to take when approaching it, is to check whether the presumptions makes sense and are relevant. If they are not, any additional time or effort on the argument can be done, but have ceased to have potential for creative result. How people previously have approached an faulty model may be historically interesting undoubtedly we are wasting our time on a dead end argument.

Input needs to be sensible for any output to make sense. There is an immense amount of potentially good thinking out there, destroyed by bad input. Thinking that that needs to be waded through if we approach questions by putting the wagon before the horse by approaching the result before validating the input. This kind of approach is not defensible unless you have infinite time or do intentionally want to avoid creation of new knowledge.

It seems like the first way may be relevant in a universe where existence is a part of motion and where motion/energy isn't conserved. This is not our universe though.

The logical and arithmetical stringency of physical proofs and arguments don't allow for

a solution from non compatible quantities, treated as compatible (as in motion/existence in actualization) and

1,5. Inductive definitions: motion is the reduction from potential to actuality which is the difference between the potential to exist and existence.

inductive restart at zero without subtracting what is added (repeated actualization (existence))

Representing motion as one single quantity (acceleration/speed?)

Representing energy as something in between actuality and potential when it is something entirely different and non-changeable. Energy/Motion is a "do", not an "are", as actuals and potentials.

These arithmetical defects all seem to be allowed in the first way argument. Metaphysics, not using a language limited to correct arithmetics gives room for hand waving. The hand waving may of course be correct but the first way argument is irrelevant for the physical universe we inhabit since the input is wrong.

Anyone investigating time in the first argument should do it by curiosity of the argument, it can't however, by it's own definitions, give any information about anything than itself.

It seems helplessly irrelevant.

The First Way concludes that the First Mover must be pure actuality, which translates into God being radically simple: he is identical to his attributes. However, if God is identical to his attributes, or properties, then his properties would actually be a single property, and God would himself be that property. And since a property is a mere abstraction which is incapable of causal efficiacy, God could not cause anything.

Fascinating ...

I guess I will never see how this can be anything more than word games ... ಠ_ಠ

I'm not cut out for metaphysical philosophy, it sems

Very nice, but unless someone engages with these four points I don't have anything more to discuss about the First Way.

Is there a summary anywhere of the definitions of various terms used in these arguments, like "actuality", "potential", etc.? There's always extensive discussion on these arguments but I've never been able to figure out just what the words are supposed to mean.

There has recently been a series of posts here explicating Thomas Aquinas' First Way argument. Responses to this argument tend to have been overwhelmingly reactionary rather than reasoned, mostly because of the argument's Aristotelian and teleological presumptions. This isn't surprising given that these are precisely the two things that modern mechanistic naturalism explicitly set out to reject, which is why the reactionary responses given here have tended to attack the argument for its alleged scientific irrelevancy. It seems that people feel adequately justified in presuming that the First Way is automatically false simply because it was formulated before the advent of modern science.

If a description of the workings of the universe is scientifically false, then it is false, no matter what your opinion of the argument. And if the argument, no matter how valid and reasoned you think it is, makes basic mistakes in its understanding of the universe and the nature of the universe, it cannot be used to support its own conclusion. The very fact that the conclusions of the ways assert nonsense makes the whole endeavor nonsense.

There is more to be said about this. Any viable response to the First Way presupposes an accurate understanding of it, including its more unfamiliar presumptions.

Turn that around. Any viable response to the First Way presupposes the respondent be knowledgeable enough to know when gibberish is being presented. As it happens, the First Way is gibberish first to last.

For the most part, this never happens in atheist responses.

Cut out the arrogance.

And since the First Way is of a respectable age, it is unlikely - and rather presumptuous - to suppose that our own objections are going to provide something genuinely new.

Wrong. You can always find a new way to look at something.

So rather than jumping right in and objecting, it seems to me that we should be looking at how other people have responded to the argument over the course of history.

We can all do both.

As has been mentioned, Hume and Kant both provide objections, not to the First Way per se but to cosmological arguments in general, and not only to these, but to all inductive and metaphysical arguments whatsoever. We can certainly use these objections to dismiss the First Way, but their broader applicability, coupled with the demands of consistency, will require us to reject the foundational beliefs of the scientific method as well.

That's a problem for philosophy, not science.

And, as previously mentioned, these objections are not really to the First Way itself, but only to arguments of its kind.

And so those objections irrelevant to the First Way, but you just wanted to let everyone know that to reject cosmological arguments is to reject the foundations of science. That is philosophy's problem, not science's problem. I definitely think you should make a new post demonstrating that rejecting God is rejecting science. That would be pretty entertaining.

There is a more direct objection that can be advanced. The First Way concludes that the First Mover must be pure actuality, which translates into God being radically simple: he is identical to his attributes.

That is not simple, that is nonsense.

This objection has been advanced most recently by Alvin Plantinga, although the alleged incoherence of divine simplicity is almost as much a feature of modern thought as the exclusion of final causes (a fact which should give rise to suspicion). Note also that this objection should not be considered final. Responses to it can, and have, been made. I mention it here because I think it serves as a useful illustration of an appropriate response to the First Way. Of course, since this response is theological in nature, most contemporary atheists will not be interested in it anyway.

An appropriate response is any response that deals directly with the argument. If an objection is a sound scientific objection, that objection is the best objection to have. Any argument that gets the science wrong, whether or not they claim to be making a scientific argument or statement, will be wrong and can be thrown out.

It is a natural psychological reaction to reject things that threaten our preexisting explanatory frameworks.

The First Way is in No Way a threat to any preexisting framework due to its blatant wrongness. Science works, however, by challenging your preexisting frameworks and if your Moft Ancient Wifdom of Pedigree cannot withstand modern critique, then that is no fault of modern critique. The Moft Ancient Wifdom is not so full of wisdom and truth as you would like to make it out to be.

This tendency must be resisted if we value reason, however.

Agreed. If scientific advancements and understanding challenge your preexisting frameworks, then do not resist. Try to understand the world a little better rather than continuing to accept Aristotelian and Thomisian errors as fact.

It should especially be resisted when we encounter ideas of ancient pedigree, whose true nature tends to be obscured by layers of misconceptions and received wisdom.

Actually, that is the very definition of holding on to preexisting frameworks rather than challenging them.

When we strip these away, we will usually find not something alien and irrelevant, but rather the history of our own way of thinking.

That's called a preexisting framework. Challenge it!

And it is understanding this history that enables us to have the possibility of choosing a different way.

It is understanding that ancient peoples could have possibly been wrong about a lot of stuff that allows you to choose a different way.

the alleged incoherence of divine simplicity is almost as much a feature of modern thought as the exclusion of final causes

The exclusion of final causes, as characterized by your summary, is a feature of science. The incoherence of divine simplicity is a consequence of computability, which--as a branch of mathematics--is (hammiesinkishly) apriori truth.

The first way is wrong because it's premises are false.

It is not necessarily true that all things in motion have a mover. My understanding of physics leads me to believe that all things are in motion and all things have always been in motion. In fact, in some models, motion and existence are the same thing.

Thomas's ways (all of them, not just the first) are incoherent in the face of modern physics. They rely on assumptions that are utterly false by the standards of our day.

(By the way, I am aware that what we think we know today may be wrong. But this is no support of Thomas. We've never once found out that a model of the universe was wrong because an older model was right. If modern physics is proved wrong, we will not return to actuality and potentiality. It will be something far stranger and beautiful that will turn out to be correct. Such is how it has always been, every time.)

In spite of the pretensions of the Enlightenment, it becomes clear that people generally do not want to reason, and become agitated when they feel their personal faiths are being challenged. Perhaps one ought to conclude that society should leave to the multitude their personal faiths, and release them from the expectation to reason, which they find so burdensome. As to how society can be governed on such a basis, Spinoza's Theological-Political Treatise may be a good reference.

I know they're not your main topic here, but I remain committed to the sorts of responses to the cosmological argument in general offered by Spinoza, Hume, and Kant. There are certainly some more specific issues that belong to specific formulations of the cosmological argument, such as particular problems (e.g.) Aristotle faces due to the particular premises of his metaphysics. In line with the issue you raise, there are sustained discussions of the divine simplicity that arise out of neoplatonism and medieval philosophy. But I think such matters must ultimately concern issues about what specific sort of divinity reason leads us to, which is a rather more limited concern than the one which is of interest to atheists and related groups.

The generality of the sorts of responses offered by Spinoza, Hume, and Kant allow us to get around these limited sets of concerns about the nature of God to the broader issue of atheism. Moreover, I think these general responses have a broader significance for the history of ideas. They are not merely debating points on a particular argument of apologetics, but rather are descriptive of the Enlightenment development in general, and this has significance for science, ethics, politics, art, etc.

I think that, in the context of the whole history of ideas, it is quite understandable that the most significant responses to the cosmological argument (and ontotheology in general) would be found in Enlightenment thought. Enlightenment thought provides something of a backdrop to the debates of the 19th century and beyond, so that in these later periods, the direct confrontation with ontotheology moves into the background, and the arguments that occupy the foreground no longer give us a clear picture of how to conduct such a confrontation. The medieval period contains the most extended analysis of the logic of ontotheology, but at least in its most characteristic forms remains largely within the scope of the ontotheological project, whereas what we really want here are ways to be critical of this project wholesale (we could identify medieval trends that get toward this wholesale critique in those trends which are usually thought of as leading toward the Enlightenment, e.g. Ockham). Since it's really in the Enlightenment that this direct confrontation with ontotheology is an explicit debate, it is natural that Enlightenment thought gives us the clearest tools for understanding and arguing that confrontation.

It's true in a sense that Kant and especially Hume create some problems for science in the same breath that they create problems for ontotheology. But I'm not sure that's the best way to put the difficulty. The problem with Hume especially is that thought in general takes on an expressly conservative, even parochial, and fideistic foundation. It is no coincidence that theology in this period (i.e. particularly Protestantism) itself becomes critical of ontotheology and becomes fideistic. While appeals to faith by our contemporaries as a basis of knowledge is often misconstrued as being a regressive return to pre-Enlightenment values, a study of the relevant history shows these appeals to belong quite properly to the Enlightenment project. For the same reason, it's no accident that when we look to pre-Enlightenment periods, we tend to find things like the cosmological argument rather than appeals to the brute mystery of God or simple trust in revealed scriptures.

Here we find some of the broader significance of these general responses to the cosmological argument. The various sorts of vulgar faiths which dominate our own cultural context, faiths both atheistic and theistic, often present themselves as antitheses of one another, and are happy to collude in a fictional history of western civilization which supports the notion of such an antithesis. We see this for example in the bizarre enthusiasm atheists show for the fiction of fundamentalists that they represent the original worldview of Christianity. But working through the Enlightenment foundations to this way of thinking can help us to understand how these diverse cultural trends of ours actually share a common root. Hume's appeal to faith, and its parochial consequences, is simultaneously an interpretation of science which can lead to various vulgar positivisms, and an interpretation of religion which can lead to various vulgar fideisms. These two interpretations are the result of a single underlying attitude to our place in the world.

And the way to understand what this attitude is, what its consequences are, and what alternatives there might be is found in studying the cultural development which produced it, i.e. the Enlightenment development, of which the aforementioned responses to the cosmological argument are a fine case study and even an exemplar.

"This objection has been advanced most recently by Alvin Plantinga, although the alleged incoherence of divine simplicity is almost as much a feature of modern thought as the exclusion of final causes (a fact which should give rise to suspicion)."

"It is a natural psychological reaction to reject things that threaten our preexisting explanatory frameworks. "

You are providing an argument that is part of an accepted preexisting explanatory framework. Not to mention not acknowledging arguments that are outside of it - except to say that they do not 'understand' the argument. This seems slightly ironic, and also says to me just to be that you are not hearing the rebuttal you were expecting.

Because you prefer this argument does not mean that it is the only or even the best argument necessarily.

Further, you cannot complain that someone is not going to do research to respond to what someone posited as an 'explanatory thread' in the first place (re. the other threads on this debate). If the OP cannot explain it in such a way that does not result in every other response being 'you don't understand it', he should not post 'explanatory threads'. Ditto Feser. It lends to the argument that divine simplicity is either incoherent, or that feser and the original poster don't understand it well enough to explain it.

Aquinas didn't believe his arguments himself. Otherwise he wouldn't have commended the torture and murder of those accused of heresy.

if God is identical to his attributes, or properties, then his properties would actually be a single property

How does this follow?

a property is a mere abstraction which is incapable of causal efficiacy, God could not cause anything

How is this not also a problem for God with many attributes/properties? Why is it the case that a single property is a mere abstraction that is causally inert, but a collection of properties is not causally inert?

Ok, so this is what I have accumulated as per an explanation (given the debate threads we are referring to). help me understand (quotes from hammiesink)

"You have to understand the transcendentals, the scale of potency/act, form/matter, essence/existence, and so on and so forth."

So: Essence = potential

Actual = things that exist/matter

"In philosophy, essence is the attribute or set of attributes that make an object or substance what it fundamentally is, and which it has by necessity, and without which it loses its identity."

Essence is the 'identity' of the thing, or form?

"A "good" triangle is one drawn carefully with a ruler, because it gets closer to that ideal form of triangle. A sloppy one drawn by hand is "evil" because it is farther from that ideal triangle. "

a 'good' triangle is one that gets closer to it's essence, it's ideal form then?

"Something" exists. Something is "good" when it is fuller in existence. And so on. They transcend every other category, like the earlier H20 and water example, because they refer to the highest category that presides over everything: existence."

Something is 'good' when it is 'closer' to existence. Fuller in existence?

"If it's a mixture of potency/act, then it can't be the first mover, per the second premise."

"And this can only lead to something whose essence is existence. In other words, something that is existence itself. "

What?

So lets dig in to the definitions, perhaps I can find understanding there:

"Only actual things can do anything, as the argument lays out. Only an actual rose can attract bees to its petals. A potential rose cannot do so. So only actual things can cause anything. So what is fullest in actuality can cause everything. "

an actual rose exists, it is physical, it is the rose... ok, that is consistent with the definitions above...

"It doesn't matter. Pure actuality is non-physical. It isn't composed of energy and matter, or physical laws. "

Ok, so pure actuality is non-existent it is NOT an actual rose (it is without parts)... It does NOT exist in a material way, unlike the previous definition...so, Pure actuality is not physical, it has no parts, and actuality is the material thing?

These definitions are not clear, the concepts are not clear, and I believe it not at all shocking the popular response to this throws the problems onto the reader rather than trying to resolve this mess.

Also, there are no essences or forms. Just saying.