/lit/ - Literature

>>15261212

Can you explain why I should read his books and subscribe to Thomism when he was btfo'd so hard by quantum mechanics? This is why Kantianism will always be the chad's ideology.
>Presupposes potentiality and actuality
>We observe objects without a cause
>Potentiality and actuality are btfo'd

>>14926406
”Only this,” said Solomon, ”I found, that God made man right, and he hath entangled himself with an infinity of questions.” (Eccl. vii. 30.)”God created man right” that is, in the state of justice; but, by giving ear to the serpent, man exposed himself to temptations, and was conquered. He rebelled against God, and his passions rebelled against himself.

My favorite pro-abortion theologian :).

St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274)

Prostitution in the towns is like the cesspool in the palace: take away the cesspool and the palace will become an unclean and evil-smelling place.

Wow, it's almost like tolerating necessary evils is conducive to the common good, as is the case in legalizing abortion.

Augustine says (De Ordine ii.4): “If you do away with harlots, the world will be convulsed with lust.” (ST II-II, q. 10, a. 11)

Alright, no memes. Who has actually refuted Thomism? Every conversation I've had with an atheist has ended in them either not understanding the argument or them giving up. Kantianism and Humeianism are clearly long gone and we as a society have collectively agreed that we exist in a material world and are able to empirically learn about it; this fits Thomism perfectly. What legitimate philosopher has refuted him?

Why is there something rather than nothing according to his philosophy?

>Rejects causality
>Thomism collapses
Why did he put so much faith in the dubious assumption that things happen because something caused it to happen? For instance, if you throw a brick at a window, there is no reason to assume that the brick you throw at the window won't magically turn into a squid before it hits.

Has anyone ever refuted the five ways?

Can someone refute him please? I'm beginning to get scared at the possibility of hell and would like to go back to my previous worldview which consisted of masturbation and fun.

Aquinas is right in demonstrating pure actuality, however, he is incorrect in identifying God as separate from us. Aquinas proves a hinduistic, panentheist God rather than a monotheistic one. How could God truly be purely actual if he doesn't realize the potential of being this universe and all that is? Simply put, we are all the divine.

The five 'proofs' asserted by Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century don't prove anything, and are easily - though I hesitate to say so, given his eminence - exposed as vacuous. The first three are just different ways of saying the same thing, and they can be considered together. All involve an infinite regress - the answer to a question raises a prior question, and so on ad infinitum.

All three of these arguments rely upon the idea of a regress and invoke God to terminate it. They make the entirely unwarranted assumption that God himself is immune to the regress. Even if we allow the dubious luxury of arbitrarily conjuring up a terminator to an infinite regress and giving it a name, simply because we need one, there is absolutely no reason to endow that terminator with any of the properties normally ascribed to God: omnipotence, omniscience, goodness, creativity of design, to say nothing of such human attributes as listening to prayers, forgiving sins and reading innermost thoughts.

Incidentally, it has not escaped the notice of logicians that omniscience and omnipotence are mutually incompatible. If God is omniscient, he must already know how he is going to intervene to change the course of history using his omnipotence. But that means he can't change his mind about his intervention, which means he is not omnipotent.

Karen Owens has captured this witty little paradox in
equally engaging verse:
Can omniscient God, who
Knows the future, find
The omnipotence to
Change His future mind?

To return to the infinite regress and the futility of invoking God to terminate it, it is more parsimonious to conjure up, say, a 'big bang singularity', or some other physical concept as yet unknown. Calling it God is at best unhelpful and at worst perniciously misleading. Edward Lear's Nonsense Recipe for Crumboblious Cutlets invites us to 'Procure some strips of beef, and having cut them into the smallest possible pieces, proceed to cut them still smaller, eight or perhaps nine times.' Some regresses do reach a natural terminator. Scientists used to wonder what would happen if you could dissect, say, gold into the smallest possible pieces. Why shouldn't you cut one of those pieces in half and produce an even smaller smidgen of gold? The regress in this case is decisively terminated by the atom. The smallest possible piece of gold is a nucleus consisting of exactly seventy-nine protons and a slightly larger number of neutrons, attended by a swarm of seventy-nine electrons. If you 'cut' gold any further than the level of the single
atom, whatever else you get it is not gold. The atom provides a
natural terminator to the Crumboblious Cutlets type of regress. It
is by no means clear that God provides a natural terminator to the
regresses of Aquinas.

Did Aquinas ever speculate as to why God exists? As in, not talking about why it's evident he exists, rather, about His existence. I know that he believes God is pure actuality, but why is he here?

The problem with all of his proofs for God's existence in his work the Summa is that he failed to demonstrate why the universe requires a first cause.

Literally the entirety of the Summa collapses with one question. "Then who created God?" Guarantee no one is going to earnestly answer that question and all the replies are gonna be Christcucks seething.

How do Thomists respond to the objections made by Kant and Schopenhauer?
>Immanuel Kant objected to the use of “necessary being” throughout the cosmological argument, and hence to the conclusion that a necessary being exists. Kant held that the cosmological argument, in concluding to the existence of an absolutely necessary being, attempts to prove the existence of a being whose nonexistence “is impossible”, is “absolutely inconceivable” (Critique B621). Kant indicates that what he has in mind by an “absolutely necessary being” is a being whose existence is logically necessary, where to deny its existence is contradictory. The only being that meets this condition is the most real or maximally excellent being—a being with all perfections, including existence. This concept lies at the heart of the ontological argument (see entry on ontological arguments). Although in the ontological argument the perfect being is determined to exist through its own concept, in fact nothing can be determined to exist in this manner; one has to begin with existence. In short, the cosmological argument presupposes the cogency of the ontological argument. But since the ontological argument is defective for the above (and other) reason, the cosmological argument that depends on or invokes it likewise must be defective

>Schopenhauer also objected in >Objected in "On the Fourfold Root, and On the Will, page 42"

>Refuted by Kant
>Refuted by Hume
>Refuted by Schopenhauer

Keep it civil. I only want to see intellectual conversation here with the goal of reaching truth in this thread. Every post MUST be an argument against Kant, Hume, and Schopenhauer's objections. Catholics, how do you respond to Kantianism?

Aquinas
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9ioyEvdggk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJ9rUzIMcZQ

So all of the arguments for God's existence are from Aristotelian or Thomist (Aristotelian) Philosophers. There have literally been 1000 years of Philosophy and refutations since Aristotelian-Thomism came around. Have any Aristotelian-Thomists refuted all the refutations in those 1000 years or have they just been living under a rock? Serious question.

>>14142182
>For three thousand years in the West, ten thousand years in the East, philosophers have been struggling to find the truth, and not a single philosopher has been able to find it.
Excuse me?

Has Aristotelian-Thomism ever been refuted?

Has Aristotelian-Thomism ever been refuted? And if so, who?

Preface for jannies: In this post I talk about natural law. Natural law is a philosophy created by Thomas Aquinas in his book. Do not delete, as this thread is on topic.

P1. Any act that doesn't fulfill its primary and secondary purpose is immoral
P2. Sex is unitive and procreational. Any sexual activity that doesn't fulfill these purposes is illicit.
P3. The prostate has two purposes. The first is to provide nutrition to sperm and to carefully orchestrate the release of semen. The second is to feel good when simulated.
P4 Ejaculation requires the prostate.
P5 If you ejaculate without fulfilling the second purpose of the prostate, you are illegally ejacullating
P6 You must get fucked in the ass while procreating with your wife or else it's illicit.

I'd like someone to rationally argue against this. Pro tip: You can't.

>>14062606
The idea you can't revere something you possess is absurd.

>it contrasts the civil laws of man (most of which have a divine pedigree) with the lawlessness of the natural world and asserts that when the two mix the former is degraded by the presence of the latter and begins to break down.

You need to brush up on your theology, natural law has primacy over "the civil laws of man", civil law can't invalidate or override natural law, the concept of lawlessness doesn't even exist in Christianity.

The five 'proofs' asserted by Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth
century don't prove anything, and are easily - though I hesitate to
say so, given his eminence - exposed as vacuous.
All three arguments rely upon the idea of a regress and
invoke God to terminate it. They make the entirely unwarranted
assumption that God himself is immune to the regress. Even if we
allow the dubious luxury of arbitrarily conjuring up a terminator to
an infinite regress and giving it a name, simply because we need
one, there is absolutely no reason to endow that terminator with
any of the properties normally ascribed to God: omnipotence,
omniscience, goodness, creativity of design, to say nothing of such
human attributes as listening to prayers, forgiving sins and reading
innermost thoughts. Incidentally, it has not escaped the notice of logicians that omniscience and omnipotence are mutually incompatible. If
God is omniscient, he must already know how he is going to intervene
to change the course of history using his omnipotence. But that means
he can't change his mind about his intervention, which means he is not
omnipotent.