... and don't give a shit about the Christianity and the Church?
Pascal said that the God of philosophers is not the same as the God of Abraham. What if I agree with him and just think that the God of Abraham is shit and the God of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas is better?
Can one separate metaphysics from religion? In particular can one purify the system of Thomas Aquinas from Christian theological excretions?
Inb4 Catholics saying that the God of the Bible and Thomas Aquinas are the same. Sure thing buddy...
Inb4 Marcionism, Gnosticism.
Then you've clearly never heard of the problem of induction
>>728438
about Christianity and the Church*
Please explain what you mean.
>>728453
Aquinas asserts causality as an obvious truism. You can't do this based on what's ultimately a limited number of observations.
Everything about God presupposes absolute certainty, something the human intellect has no access to
Read Plotinus
>>728464
Y-you can't kno nuffn
>>728464
>Everything about God presupposes absolute certainty
Is that a fancy way of saying you need faith to do metaphysics? That causality is the unprovable premise that would require a kid of faith in order to build the whole system? And how is that exclusive to Christianity? Please be more clear.
>>728493
You indeed can't, not absolutely. Every serious thinker is aware of this.
Basically, Aquinas' ideas were invalidated as soon as he asserted that they were absolute. Since thinking is a human activity, and humans are known for being fallible, you can't do this
Kind*
>>728503
If all assertions are fallible, why the fuck should I listen to you?
>>728500
I can give you a run down of the Five Ways
>the unmoved mover
>Some things are in motion.
True, as far as we know
>A thing cannot, in the same respect and in the same way, move itself: it requires a mover.
Absolute statement, asserts knowledge of everything, something we don't have access to
>An infinite regress of movers is impossible.
Absolute statement, we don't have access to infinities and their properties
>Therefore, there is an unmoved mover from whom all motion proceeds.
>This mover, everyone calls God.
Conclusions based on absolute statements, unfounded since don't have access to the premises they're based on
>the argument from first cause
>Some things are caused.
True as far as we know
>Everything that is caused is caused by something else.
This assumes access to everything. We don't have this access
>An infinite regress of efficient (simultaneous) causation is impossible.
Again, a statement about infinities
>Therefore, there must be an uncaused cause of all that is caused.
>This cause, everyone calls God.
Again, conclusions based on incomplete knowledge
>the argument from contingency
>Many things in the universe may either exist or not exist and are all finite. Such things are called contingent beings.
"May either exist or not exist" is an absolute statement, and so is "are all finite". This assumes you have access to everything, and that you know every property of it
>It is impossible for everything in the universe to be contingent, for then there would be a time when nothing existed, and so nothing would exist now, since there would be nothing to bring anything into existence, which is clearly false.
Again, an absolute statement
>Therefore, there must be a necessary being whose existence is not contingent on any other being or beings.
>We call this being God.
And again, a conclusion based on absolute statements
(1/2)
>>728544
>the argument from degree
>Varying perfections of varying degrees may be found throughout the universe.
Again, a statement containing an absolute. "Perfection" is a predicate of absolute flawlessness. We have no access to perfections
>These degrees assume the existence of an ultimate standard of perfection.
See above
>Therefore, perfection must have a pinnacle.
>This pinnacle is what we call God
Another conclusion based on absolutes
>the teleological argument
>All natural bodies in the world act towards ends.
Again, assumes that we know everything about "all natural bodies", which again, is knowledge we don't have access to
>These objects are in themselves unintelligent.
Again, we don't know this
>Acting towards an end is a characteristic of intelligence.
Based on something we don't fully understand, we again don't know what an 'end' is
>Therefore, there exists an intelligent being that guides all natural bodies towards their ends.
>We call this being God.
Finally another conclusion based on the assumption of complete and absolute knowledge, something we can't assume
>>728523
>this meme
>>728482
Finally a smart guy.
>>728523
You don't have to
>>728577
Based Plotinus is /thread: the philosopher
>>728570
Dude all absolutist statements are based on that which we cannot exhaustively verify lmao
Dude except this one lmap
>>728580
W-what do you m-mean ?
>>728583
I'm not making an absolute statement. I'm more than happy to admit that my assumption of fallibility is just that, an assumption.
However, I think it's a fairly safe assumption. To use a staple of Christian thinking, if I assume that I'm usually wrong and turn out to be wrong about that, I lose nothing and I could gain a lot. However, if I assume that I'm right, and it turns out that that's wrong, I gain nothing and I could lose a lot
>>728593
Dude owns
>>728544
>>728564
I finally see what you mean. Indeed I wasn't familiar with this problem, and the challenge it posed for the arguments of Thomas Aquinas. I will screen cap this post to think about it later.
But so far it seems to imply the impossibility of not only metaphysical but any kind of knowledge, unless you have a perfect, God's eye view of the whole universe, past, present and future. That sounds way too far-fetched to me.
I know there's an Aristotelian response to this, but I'm not that proficient in Aristotle yet, and you would probably say that it is an unproven absolute statement. But to anyone curious I think it would involve the so-called active intellect.
>>728438
Assume I could prove to you that there are angels, would you listen to my advice regarding what to believe?
>>728438
>Can one separate metaphysics from religion?
I'm going to reccommend you Plotinus as >>728482 did.
He's the man who, directly or indirectly through his successor neoplatonists, taught the greatest theologians of the three Abrahamic faiths how to God, reinterpreting revealed religion into more complete metaphysics.
And he's a pagan.
>>728666
>666
Sure satan. But how do you prove there are angels?
>>728809
Ah, by showing you the most insane case of mental illness of course.
This is the first pic, if you examine it, you will deduce that this is a person answering to a claim, a person has declared himself to be the angel gabriel, yet this person doesn't believe him, because, obv. she knows of a power that angels obviously have.
The power to feel other angels and demons over a forum post.
Disregard that this is absolutely fucking crazy and not imaginable to humans, since a human would deduce that angels simply recognize each other by seeing things that are invisible to other humans and by using their memories from since the rebellion, being supernatural beings of high intellect and not fucking strange and completely alien creatures that do recognize each other by having feelings over forum posts that would identify them by a description created by feelings, as it may obviously sound reasonable.
Do you understand this yet?
So basically, that nigga has a crazy and non biblical idea of how angels function.
>>728897
You people might observe there's a (you) there, I am, obv. insane, as you will discover now.
As a nutcase, I am aware of the powers that my mental illness has given me, but I have not revealed them, so I ask the person how come she knows about my secret power that the bible doesn't mention because of how fucking insane it is.
>>728482
>>728577
>>728580
>>728593
>>728613
>>728720
I mean how can you stand Christian presumptuousness? "Oh those ignorant heathens sure knew some half-truths hohoho, but Christianity is the whoooole super-doodly-diddly truth". Oh shut up! Never mind that your entire theology is a rip-off from pagan philosophy. Never mind that when pagan philosophers were alive (Celsus and Porphyry) and allowed to actually say anything, Christianity was considered a religion for plebs and old widows. Never mind that even your "revealed" scripture is indebted to Greek philosophy (in the beginning was the Logos? I mean come on!).
How could you be anything but a heretic, Gnostic, Freemason, Rosicrucian, Illuminati, occultist, hermeticist, you name it, back in the day? Every time I hear a Christian lecturing on Greek philosophy it makes me want to vomit.
>>728903
But sadly, she only knows of this power because she doesn't want to really confess that she's insane like me, it's merely a deduction, she says, which isn't rational for a human, because humans think like this:
> angels simply recognize each other by seeing things that are invisible to other humans and by using their memories from since the rebellion
So obv. this person does play dumb when I ask her about my secret power, that I, as an angel, do have and have used, but she shouldn't know about, because she's fucking human, and humans, are rather basic when it comes to recognizing each other, so such an alien concept, would be real insane to them.
Whereas what I mentioned, would be logic.
Now... I'll explain how my mental illness goes.
I believe I'm an angel myself, even tough I'm in trouble temporarily.
And I believed she was a demon, and caller her so.
She seemed to know of this insane and impossible to imagine -for a human- power.
And this is amusing, because I've used this power in the past, surely because of my mental illness.
I could feel things from a forum post of a person in the philippines that felt like he was a fighter, it's an impression you get, some kind of... emotion? hard to describe but "feeling it" nails it, later on I discovered he was indeed a filipino pro fighter. But this was long ago. You see, I myself am demonized and in a human body.
>>728897
>>728903
>>728922
So in short, I am a person with a mental illness, which consists on believing I'm an angel, and I have this special power, which is not even rational to imagine for humans.
And you know what? People that are also insane and believe to be demons, but that pretend not to be (obv. it's the same illness) also happen to be informed of this totally, absolutely unlikely power that, yes, a normal human wouldn't fucking have imagined because humans aren't this fucking alien in behaviour and perception.
TL;DR
Surely we are crazy here. Totally mental.
>>728922
And obv, the philippines thing, wasn't the only time I saw this power.
I experimented it during catholic church service, and it was pretty clearly giving me an emotion/feel of the whole priest and doctrine thing: And the emotion/feel whas "shit".
Also other people have been "danger". Also "lie". Etc. Or even "enemy".
That's fucking particular.
What a strange illness, and it's like clockwork.
>>728975
If you can feel other people then what other posts in this thread are written by me, if any?
>In particular can one purify the system of Thomas Aquinas from Christian theological excretions?
Yes. Even if we grant every single one of his logical arguments, we are zero steps closer to proving the Christian god exists. There is an infinite amount of concepts of god, just as before. And zero evidence for any particular one, just as before.
Aaand why would you like someone who bought into christfaggotry, made absolute claims based on limited knowledge, and thought people who didn't share his delusion should be tortured and put to death?
Pic related. More appropriate depiction of this dunce.
>>729031
I suspected as much, what a stirring realization to see someone post this so directly.
I guess this always bothered me and I never could put my finger on it.
God is god, no matter what humans try to project on to him or call him
>>728988
Not always, I'm after all in a human body and have a demon inside it.
Still, you're bitching as if I needed to prove anything: knowing about strange supernatural indeductible abilities makes you very suspicious of having these after all.
Normal humans aren't feely-happy like that
Precisely because of this, it is a problem communicating jokes and such over the internet.
Strangely enough, even tough this idea seems absurd and impossible for a human: you deduce that angels would have it... you don't say.
I am amused that you think you can bullshit your way by requesting evidence of what needs no additional proof.
Surely tha person was informed about such an alien concept because fuck you, surrealism.
I find Aquinas interesting but I am wary of people using metaphysics to 'prove' anything. I also hate how Thomists on 4chan redefine their arguments post hoc but that's a different story.
>>728611
Why is that Christfags seem to struggle with 18th centuary philosophy?
Ideas about the uncertainty of reality are a cornerstone in virtually every philosopher since Descartes, and if you travel back to ancient Greece it existed even back than. This is entry level stuff and is going to be found in every discipline from analytic to post-modernism to epistemology 101.
The entire point of the scientific method was a response to problem of how to best gather information given limited certainty (ie the solution is to test something many times under many conditions). If human perception were capable of absolute certainity we would just be able to define all the knowledge of the universe into existence. Why stop at just proving God?
>>729045
You can apply this tautology to any other God or indeed any fictional imaginary concept. So it's useless to justify any particular proposed religion.
>>729277
If I have a box and you can't see what's in it the statement
"You do not know what is in the box" is not an absolute statement, you could very well take a guess and be right. However it is a very useful statement.
>>729273
Aquinas says we can't even grasp the essence of a grain of sand.
Human limitation is a fact, and as I exposed here >>729277, this limitation can only be perceived when you confront your intuitions with reality.
The atheist scepticism grounds itself in an insane ideal absolut, and from this absolut he starts to deduce its own world accepting only the quantitative and simplest aspects of reality, so it ends up being tautological reasoning, because our reasoning was not made to ideally reason about itself , but as a "reality reader" that provides us intuitions about real things.
No 'science' can provide you axiological statements (ethical, aesthetical, not even logical in the actual sense of the world [dialectics]), and the world has intrinsic values you can't ignore, because this values are the instrument of your reasoning. Even the purpose of sciences can't be explained by science itself.
>>729306
>is not an absolute statement
Yes, it is. How do you know there is a box?
>>729306
If you guess correctly you still don't "know" it.
>>729336
>aquinas says we can't even grasp the essence of a grain of sand
Aquinas must be retarded, then.
>>729336
>Yes, it is. How do you know there is a box?
Whether the box 'is' or 'isnt' any statement you make about what is inside is still respondign to it.
The box could be something that I am lying about or an illusion made by aliens and you would still be capable of making a claim about the nature of it (which would of course be an uncertain claim).
Think of Wittgenstein's concept of the beetle box. Everyone has a box and they all agree whatever is inside their box is called a beetle, even if everyone has a different item in the box, if the item changes, or if the box is empty people can still communicate.
In other words even when all variables are uncertain we are still able to function. This is because our statements are always relative to their context.
The idea of uncertainity is always going to present because there are known unknowns which you are aware of but there will also be unknown unknowns which you cannot prepare for.
>>729761
that's obviously a plastic imitation of a grain of sand.
>inb4 lol chemical composition SiO2
>>729795
This is what philosophy has come down to in this day and age, a play on words! Oh love of wisdom! Oh lushness of youth! But love surely gets old, doesn't it? And so do we. Now wisdom is an old wrinkled woman, and we, a cynical, sad old man. Remember the days of our youth, when we used to talk in bed and say dirty words like "truth"? Ha! What of it? Now bring me my medicine, you old hag! And that nurse is stealing from me again...
>>728503
But what about the truths of geometry?
A euclidian square's diagonal is always root-2 times it's length. We can know this with absolute certainty.
>>728503
>Absolutely, no truths are absolute.
Listen to yourself, brah. If there were no absolute truths, then 'there are no absolute truths' would be an absolute truth.
Your view is a logical falsehood, since it implies its negation.
>>728544
You're being uncharitable to Aquinas. He doesn't aim to justify his premises empirically, he gives a priori argument to justify each. For example, his premise about the impossiblity of infinite causal chains is based on something like the following argument:
If there were an infinite chain of causes, stretching infinitely backwards in time, then there was can be no first cause of the chain. But if there is no first cause, then there can be no subsequent causes, and so no chain at all, since there is nothing which causes everything else in the chain. Therefore, all causal chains must be finite, each beginning from some first link in the causal chain.
Whether or not this argument works is another matter, but it would be unfair to say that Aquinas did not try to justify his premises.
>>730064
B-but you haven't seen all the triangles! You can't say that!!
The biggest problen with the Medievals is causality. The world is probalistic, not deterministic
>>728503
Have you heard of Logic?
Its literally analysis of the truth and validity of arguments or propositions.
>>728438
>>730690
Following the common Christian critique of atheists having no reason to be good people for lack of an afterlife, why would Calvinists care about being good people if their fate's already been decided?
>>730703
Do they have a choice??
>>730172
Medievals had no problem with probability vs determinism, since they didn't think causality relied upon the latter. It's primitive mechanistic theories of nature, which arose in the wake of the loss of the Thomistic synthesis, which have a problem with probability.
>>730106
Aquinas never talked about infinite series going backwards in time. He famously thought that you couldn't prove that the universe had a beginning.
Aquinas is rather saying that motion, existence, teleology, etc., depend upon sustaining causes. There must be a first, bedrock sustaining cause, because otherwise all one has is an infinite series of derivative causes, with no causal power in and of themselves, hence no effects.
>>730064
Unfortunately for Aquinas, he wasn't talking about mathematics, which is basically just axioms and derivations of them.
>>730703
I once heard that if you are an elect you will inevitably be a good person.
>>731568
he was talking about metaphysics, which is kinda the same thing for aquinas
>>729031
Nice sun.
>>731636
In which case he remains a dunce. We define mathematics, we don't define reality.
>>730852
>>730106
