Human ingenuity is a real power we possess, and as such, it comes with responsibilities towards other humans and the rest of nature.
The enigma of those who betray responsibility flies in the face of nature it seems. A tree that refuses
to grow branches, natural or internal forces not withstanding, is unnatural Therefore, the FREE WILL to reject a beneficial natural outcome seems an aberration that does not belong in nature. It suggests that a secondary sub-prime mover is at work. Mount St Helen's destruction of nature resulted in nature rebuilding its ecosystem, whereas a ruined soul ( sorry for the segue ) is not able to be redeemed (Thomistic view) at all. Our participation in nature is distinct, though we are embedded in its matrix which affects our composite body, unlike nature, we are not beholden to the laws that governs and defines its purpose. The mind has no place in the natural world and is not part thereof.
The 'motor' in question is the ability of any faith based person to tap into a resource that is completely unavailable to one who has no knowledge of how to turn it (motor) on. Think of it this way, solar power has been available since Neanderthal. I don't mean the ability to heat objects or to stay warm.
I'm talking about the modern application to harness power in such a way as to i.e.: run a motor.
In this instance, solar power - which in most cases has to be instilled, taught, conceptualized and demonstrated by proof positive testimony by someone who has experienced its existence. Those would be ardent theists. That same power is available to atheists; however, even though all the above
actions might have been brought to bear, a critical receptor in the mind is blocked or missing which
does not enable the person to engage the 'motor', Faith is a gift I was taught and any lack thereof is
not necessarily the fault of the subject - though id-ego resistance from a multitude of possibilities may
be the culprit that eschews the very idea of 'solar power', thereby negating any reason to pursue it.
This motor in question must work for the theist too or it would be ABANDONED. So the proof of this
solar power lies in the very minds of those who engage and maintain the connection through ritual,
response and acknowledgement, that that POWER is: real, free and limitless. Ask and ye will receive
is the start button on the motor and that requires a ton of humility which cannot be measured by
conventional means. I do sympathize with an old army friend of the Jewish experience who cut to
the chase after hours of subjective rebuttal - "Either you believe (in that motor) or you don't believe"
Interesting post! Your thorough engagement is quite welcome. To pick up the gauntlet on behalf of Schmid and Linford, one of the factors here is that per se chains can possibly terminate in entities that are part of non-essentially ordered chains i.e. an essentially ordered series can get us to a mover who still moves. This movement could occur in the context of an accidentally ordered series or other causes by things within a non-essentially ordered series. It may be the case that the terminus of an essentially ordered series can't further have some causal power that it derives from some other source concerning the relevant per se chain. Still, it does not follow that it, therefore, can't have been caused in the context of a non-essentially ordered series. Here is one way to illustrate this: Let's borrow Aquinas's example of a person holding a stick pushing a stone. In this chain, the person holding the stick is the source of the causal power of the per se instances of chain that imparts motion into the stick and, furthermore, to the stone. While this may seem like an instance of a per se series, the terminus of this specific series (the person) may have a cause of his very existence that ultimately terminates in a per accidens sense (i.e. the person being a product of their parents). This person can also still "change" or "move" within a per accidens series, being a product of their parents, and eventually having children of their own, all of which occurs temporally as opposed to hierarchically. This means the person can still be part of a greater causal network but within the per accidens series. This tells us that various chains that may initially be per se chains can terminate with entities that can be located within broader per accidens chains, which can go back to infinity and can exist as a multiplicity instead of a singular chain.
The issue is that when you go deeper into what a per se chain is, you start running into problems about where exactly a singular unmoved mover comes in. The Thomist wants to say that as I move my hand, say to pick up a cup in the motion itself, there is a series of potencies being actualized by other preceding acts/potencies, but the problem is why should this action, of me moving my hand to pick up a cup, terminate in the unactualized actualizer? I understand my muscles are moving by certain signals from my nerves and can trace the action back to my brain and even my volition, but I see no reason why this chain would extend all the way to God as opposed to some fact about my neural processing (or whatever takes place at the subatomic level. I think these sorts of considerations can support the quantifier shift fallacy that Schmid and Linford bring up.
Lastly, you say that the picture of reality that Schmid and Linford bring up is erratic. I would disagree. The atheist picture of reality doesn't go beyond natural science and involves causal chains as par as they terminate in processes that don't go beyond our natural world. The Thomist, in contrast, wants to go beyond this picture and add a level and type of causation. Not only do we have very little understanding of what this type of causation is, but there are also good reasons to think that such per se causation also imperils libertarian free will (as discussed in Schmid's video), so unless we have really good reasons to accept such a chain, simplicity, and explanatory power dictate the Naturalistic picture of reality is the far superior one in this context.
I think this First Way of Aquinas is a fuller articulation of Leibniz's fundamental question of metaphysics, namely, "why is there something rather than nothing?"
Most great modern philosophers (Bertrand Russel, Ludwig Wittgenstein) reply some variation of "because it just is."
That's a lovely statement. What do we mean by "it just is?" Well, Aquinas would say it is an approximation to the notion of pure actuality, and this notion of pure actuality, pure being is something we understand as God.
I think the ancients were a little ahead of us all when they saw the significance of God asserting himself as "I AM." It's a strong philosophical assertion and it certainly gets my attention.
Thanks for reading our book and for the engagement!
I’ll begin with a meta-point about the narrative: it seems irresponsible to link Feser’s responses without linking my two blog posts responding to his responses. In there I systematically address every point of his and illustrate the panoply of ways in which he misrepresented my work, misunderstood the dialectical context, and demonstrated other confusions. Not only do I address all of his responses in those posts, but we also address his responses in the Springer book; you can find the posts cited and criticized in multiple chapters.
Having made that meta-point, I will now proceed to your criticisms of 1 out of ~9 of our criticisms of McNabb and DeVito’s formulation of the first way, which you claim is a ‘significant confusion’ on our part.
Let’s start with how you state our criticism.
“Schmid and Linford imagine per se causal chains not as parts of a unified whole but as isolated, finite pathways each having its own first mover.”
We do not imagine or conceive of them this way. Our point is simply that the first way does not show that this is *not* the case, and yet in order for the argument to succeed, it would have to show that it is not the case. That doesn’t require conceiving of per se chains in isolated terms; it only requires pointing out that the first way itself gives us no reason *not* to conceive of them in isolated terms. So you have misstated our criticism from the outset.
“They envision that if along the way, a per se chain is knocked onto a different course by a per accidens chain, that per se chain would no longer terminate in the same first member.”
We say nothing of this sort in the chapter. We don’t say anything about per se chains being ‘knocked onto different courses by per accidens chains’. We give an example of what we’re talking about: the noodles are ultimately heated by something with the intrinsic capacity to heat of its nature: fire. The fire serves as a first member of the per se chain wherein the causal power of the chain is the power to heat, and wherein all non-first members derive this power from the first member, the fire, which has the power in a non-derivative fashion, of its very nature. This, in turn, allows it to be the first member of the chain in question. We then highlighted that even though the fire is the first member of this chain, it is nevertheless a secondary member in lots of other chains — e.g., the chain leading to the fire’s movement across the room. As we point out in the chapter, even prominent Thomist defenders of (versions of) the first way, such as Kerr, grant that there can be members that are first in some chains but non-first in other chains. This was our point, and it’s entirely cogent.
You then link to a portion of my video on the first way. There are several clear issues with this. First, I was not even covering the quantifier shift objection in the portion of the video you cite and discuss. The problem discussed at that juncture in the video is the problem that the first way fails to rule out that a first member of some per se chain may be changed in some respect by something in a per accidens chain. This is totally different from the formally invalid shift from ‘each per se chain has a first cause’ to ‘there is a first cause for all per se chains’.
Second, the graphical illustration was simply not an illustration of the quantifier shift worry. The graphical illustration’s sole purpose was to show that, just because per accidens chains presuppose more fundamental per se chains, the above criticism still goes through, since the above criticism is perfectly compatible with every per accidens chain presupposing a more fundamental per se chain. That’s what the graph illustrates: every per accidens chain is undergirded by a more fundamental per se chain, but nevertheless, the first members of the relevant per se chains are changed in some way by members in per accidens chains. All of this was very explicit in the video.
You continue to describe my point here as follows:
“Where the series of chains interact is where a per accidens series could interact with a per se series and change the series itself, thereby changing which first mover the per se chain terminates with (down at the bottom). He shows that (start at the top) there is no per se (essentially ordered chain) that will terminate (at the bottom) in just one first mover if the per accidens (non-essentially ordered) chains change the terminus of the per se chains.”
This totally misunderstands my criticism. Nowhere do I say anything to the effect that the per accidens chains interact with the per se chains to change which first mover the per se chains terminate with, thereby making it the case that “there is no per se (essentially ordered chain) that will terminate (at the bottom) in just one first mover“. You will not find a single place in the video where I say anything remotely like this. In fact, I say things that contradict this. At 41:10, for instance, I note that each per se chain is finite, and then proceed to point to the different per se chains on the screen. And if you look at those per se chains, it is evident that each of them terminates in just one first mover. Just look at the single per se chain at the top right consisting of two nodes. Given my explicit claim in the video that this is a different per se chain from the rest and that this per se chain is finite (and, given the drawing, terminates in a single node), it simply follows that this per se chain terminates in one first mover of the chain. So nowhere do I say or suggest that “there is no per se (essentially ordered chain) that will terminate (at the bottom) in just one first mover”; as just explained, I say things that literally contradict this. And nowhere in the video do I say that the terminus of any given per se chain somehow ‘changes’ to no longer become the terminus. Instead, the point is that each per accidens chains results in the relevant terminus of the relevant per se chain changing in some respect. Nowhere do I say that they change *to no longer be first members of their per se chains*. This is a straightforward mischaracterization.
In full honesty, I’m not going to continue pointing out the many flaws in the rest of the post. Our criticisms were badly misstated and misunderstood from the outset, rendering that task otiose.
Why think that the first thing had to be purely actual? I know it couldn’t have been actualised by anything else prior to actualising other things. But from that it doesn’t follow that it has no potentials--that nothing could possible change it--and certainly not that it has no deficiencies even in qualities like goodness.
Human ingenuity is a real power we possess, and as such, it comes with responsibilities towards other humans and the rest of nature.
The enigma of those who betray responsibility flies in the face of nature it seems. A tree that refuses
to grow branches, natural or internal forces not withstanding, is unnatural Therefore, the FREE WILL to reject a beneficial natural outcome seems an aberration that does not belong in nature. It suggests that a secondary sub-prime mover is at work. Mount St Helen's destruction of nature resulted in nature rebuilding its ecosystem, whereas a ruined soul ( sorry for the segue ) is not able to be redeemed (Thomistic view) at all. Our participation in nature is distinct, though we are embedded in its matrix which affects our composite body, unlike nature, we are not beholden to the laws that governs and defines its purpose. The mind has no place in the natural world and is not part thereof.
The 'motor' in question is the ability of any faith based person to tap into a resource that is completely unavailable to one who has no knowledge of how to turn it (motor) on. Think of it this way, solar power has been available since Neanderthal. I don't mean the ability to heat objects or to stay warm.
I'm talking about the modern application to harness power in such a way as to i.e.: run a motor.
In this instance, solar power - which in most cases has to be instilled, taught, conceptualized and demonstrated by proof positive testimony by someone who has experienced its existence. Those would be ardent theists. That same power is available to atheists; however, even though all the above
actions might have been brought to bear, a critical receptor in the mind is blocked or missing which
does not enable the person to engage the 'motor', Faith is a gift I was taught and any lack thereof is
not necessarily the fault of the subject - though id-ego resistance from a multitude of possibilities may
be the culprit that eschews the very idea of 'solar power', thereby negating any reason to pursue it.
This motor in question must work for the theist too or it would be ABANDONED. So the proof of this
solar power lies in the very minds of those who engage and maintain the connection through ritual,
response and acknowledgement, that that POWER is: real, free and limitless. Ask and ye will receive
is the start button on the motor and that requires a ton of humility which cannot be measured by
conventional means. I do sympathize with an old army friend of the Jewish experience who cut to
the chase after hours of subjective rebuttal - "Either you believe (in that motor) or you don't believe"
,
Interesting post! Your thorough engagement is quite welcome. To pick up the gauntlet on behalf of Schmid and Linford, one of the factors here is that per se chains can possibly terminate in entities that are part of non-essentially ordered chains i.e. an essentially ordered series can get us to a mover who still moves. This movement could occur in the context of an accidentally ordered series or other causes by things within a non-essentially ordered series. It may be the case that the terminus of an essentially ordered series can't further have some causal power that it derives from some other source concerning the relevant per se chain. Still, it does not follow that it, therefore, can't have been caused in the context of a non-essentially ordered series. Here is one way to illustrate this: Let's borrow Aquinas's example of a person holding a stick pushing a stone. In this chain, the person holding the stick is the source of the causal power of the per se instances of chain that imparts motion into the stick and, furthermore, to the stone. While this may seem like an instance of a per se series, the terminus of this specific series (the person) may have a cause of his very existence that ultimately terminates in a per accidens sense (i.e. the person being a product of their parents). This person can also still "change" or "move" within a per accidens series, being a product of their parents, and eventually having children of their own, all of which occurs temporally as opposed to hierarchically. This means the person can still be part of a greater causal network but within the per accidens series. This tells us that various chains that may initially be per se chains can terminate with entities that can be located within broader per accidens chains, which can go back to infinity and can exist as a multiplicity instead of a singular chain.
The issue is that when you go deeper into what a per se chain is, you start running into problems about where exactly a singular unmoved mover comes in. The Thomist wants to say that as I move my hand, say to pick up a cup in the motion itself, there is a series of potencies being actualized by other preceding acts/potencies, but the problem is why should this action, of me moving my hand to pick up a cup, terminate in the unactualized actualizer? I understand my muscles are moving by certain signals from my nerves and can trace the action back to my brain and even my volition, but I see no reason why this chain would extend all the way to God as opposed to some fact about my neural processing (or whatever takes place at the subatomic level. I think these sorts of considerations can support the quantifier shift fallacy that Schmid and Linford bring up.
Lastly, you say that the picture of reality that Schmid and Linford bring up is erratic. I would disagree. The atheist picture of reality doesn't go beyond natural science and involves causal chains as par as they terminate in processes that don't go beyond our natural world. The Thomist, in contrast, wants to go beyond this picture and add a level and type of causation. Not only do we have very little understanding of what this type of causation is, but there are also good reasons to think that such per se causation also imperils libertarian free will (as discussed in Schmid's video), so unless we have really good reasons to accept such a chain, simplicity, and explanatory power dictate the Naturalistic picture of reality is the far superior one in this context.
I think this First Way of Aquinas is a fuller articulation of Leibniz's fundamental question of metaphysics, namely, "why is there something rather than nothing?"
Most great modern philosophers (Bertrand Russel, Ludwig Wittgenstein) reply some variation of "because it just is."
That's a lovely statement. What do we mean by "it just is?" Well, Aquinas would say it is an approximation to the notion of pure actuality, and this notion of pure actuality, pure being is something we understand as God.
I think the ancients were a little ahead of us all when they saw the significance of God asserting himself as "I AM." It's a strong philosophical assertion and it certainly gets my attention.
Exactly.
Many years ago in CS I countered a posit you made, saying: if one doesn't believe in gravity but obeys
its laws then one will never die by falling. You responded by saying that was a mighty fine line to be
walking. That's what atheists do I believe. Deep inside their soul they are not prone to burn bridges.
Thanks for reading our book and for the engagement!
I’ll begin with a meta-point about the narrative: it seems irresponsible to link Feser’s responses without linking my two blog posts responding to his responses. In there I systematically address every point of his and illustrate the panoply of ways in which he misrepresented my work, misunderstood the dialectical context, and demonstrated other confusions. Not only do I address all of his responses in those posts, but we also address his responses in the Springer book; you can find the posts cited and criticized in multiple chapters.
Having made that meta-point, I will now proceed to your criticisms of 1 out of ~9 of our criticisms of McNabb and DeVito’s formulation of the first way, which you claim is a ‘significant confusion’ on our part.
Let’s start with how you state our criticism.
“Schmid and Linford imagine per se causal chains not as parts of a unified whole but as isolated, finite pathways each having its own first mover.”
We do not imagine or conceive of them this way. Our point is simply that the first way does not show that this is *not* the case, and yet in order for the argument to succeed, it would have to show that it is not the case. That doesn’t require conceiving of per se chains in isolated terms; it only requires pointing out that the first way itself gives us no reason *not* to conceive of them in isolated terms. So you have misstated our criticism from the outset.
“They envision that if along the way, a per se chain is knocked onto a different course by a per accidens chain, that per se chain would no longer terminate in the same first member.”
We say nothing of this sort in the chapter. We don’t say anything about per se chains being ‘knocked onto different courses by per accidens chains’. We give an example of what we’re talking about: the noodles are ultimately heated by something with the intrinsic capacity to heat of its nature: fire. The fire serves as a first member of the per se chain wherein the causal power of the chain is the power to heat, and wherein all non-first members derive this power from the first member, the fire, which has the power in a non-derivative fashion, of its very nature. This, in turn, allows it to be the first member of the chain in question. We then highlighted that even though the fire is the first member of this chain, it is nevertheless a secondary member in lots of other chains — e.g., the chain leading to the fire’s movement across the room. As we point out in the chapter, even prominent Thomist defenders of (versions of) the first way, such as Kerr, grant that there can be members that are first in some chains but non-first in other chains. This was our point, and it’s entirely cogent.
You then link to a portion of my video on the first way. There are several clear issues with this. First, I was not even covering the quantifier shift objection in the portion of the video you cite and discuss. The problem discussed at that juncture in the video is the problem that the first way fails to rule out that a first member of some per se chain may be changed in some respect by something in a per accidens chain. This is totally different from the formally invalid shift from ‘each per se chain has a first cause’ to ‘there is a first cause for all per se chains’.
Second, the graphical illustration was simply not an illustration of the quantifier shift worry. The graphical illustration’s sole purpose was to show that, just because per accidens chains presuppose more fundamental per se chains, the above criticism still goes through, since the above criticism is perfectly compatible with every per accidens chain presupposing a more fundamental per se chain. That’s what the graph illustrates: every per accidens chain is undergirded by a more fundamental per se chain, but nevertheless, the first members of the relevant per se chains are changed in some way by members in per accidens chains. All of this was very explicit in the video.
You continue to describe my point here as follows:
“Where the series of chains interact is where a per accidens series could interact with a per se series and change the series itself, thereby changing which first mover the per se chain terminates with (down at the bottom). He shows that (start at the top) there is no per se (essentially ordered chain) that will terminate (at the bottom) in just one first mover if the per accidens (non-essentially ordered) chains change the terminus of the per se chains.”
This totally misunderstands my criticism. Nowhere do I say anything to the effect that the per accidens chains interact with the per se chains to change which first mover the per se chains terminate with, thereby making it the case that “there is no per se (essentially ordered chain) that will terminate (at the bottom) in just one first mover“. You will not find a single place in the video where I say anything remotely like this. In fact, I say things that contradict this. At 41:10, for instance, I note that each per se chain is finite, and then proceed to point to the different per se chains on the screen. And if you look at those per se chains, it is evident that each of them terminates in just one first mover. Just look at the single per se chain at the top right consisting of two nodes. Given my explicit claim in the video that this is a different per se chain from the rest and that this per se chain is finite (and, given the drawing, terminates in a single node), it simply follows that this per se chain terminates in one first mover of the chain. So nowhere do I say or suggest that “there is no per se (essentially ordered chain) that will terminate (at the bottom) in just one first mover”; as just explained, I say things that literally contradict this. And nowhere in the video do I say that the terminus of any given per se chain somehow ‘changes’ to no longer become the terminus. Instead, the point is that each per accidens chains results in the relevant terminus of the relevant per se chain changing in some respect. Nowhere do I say that they change *to no longer be first members of their per se chains*. This is a straightforward mischaracterization.
In full honesty, I’m not going to continue pointing out the many flaws in the rest of the post. Our criticisms were badly misstated and misunderstood from the outset, rendering that task otiose.
Why think that the first thing had to be purely actual? I know it couldn’t have been actualised by anything else prior to actualising other things. But from that it doesn’t follow that it has no potentials--that nothing could possible change it--and certainly not that it has no deficiencies even in qualities like goodness.
Feser says Schmid’s attempt is “riddled with confusions, begged questions, and missed points”
If you were building a motor, the atheist's would not work - as their case in point is skewered,
per observation by Aquinas and yourself. If they can not see through their own word play that
the First Mover concept is right, and believe that your 'motor' doesn't work too, then it comes
down to a point I made: Atheism is the sincerest form of Pride.
.
Great article! I've been wanting to read their book on Existential Inertia, although I know I don't have the knowledge to evaluate it.