Classical Theism

Not sure if anyone still chats here, but if you're reading this, good to "see" you. I'm having a hard time working through Aquinas' (and Feser's) demonstration of God's omniscience.

Feser appeals to the PPC in order to prove God's omniscience (since God is the cause of all things, all things must exist in God in some way); however, I don't see why we need to ground things in God by way of knowledge. Meaning, can't we just say that all things exist in God because of his omnipotence, his capacity to do all things? That seems just as good to me. For example, when a robot creates something, that thing must exist in some way in the robot, but we don't say it has knowledge. Rather, the robot just possesses the ability to create that thing. This line of argument, as far as I can tell, can be applied to God as well.

As for Aquinas, he states that immateriality is the knowledge-making-property of beings. He then continues, since God is the highest degree of immateriality, he must also be omniscient. But this doesn't seem right to me. I think that knowledge entails immateriality, but I don't know if this necessarily works the other way around.

Hopefully someone has some answers. Thanks!

The objection: it is in principle possible that physical things or at least things other than something pure act can lack potentiality. Therefore, you cannot deduce God's existence from the existence of motion.

To illustrate what this means, take any physical object whatsoever. You can imagine a possible world in which a physical object lacks the potentiality for things like local motion or change. This would exhuast the possibility of it having potentiality, all the while not qualifying it as something which is pure act: it may still be susceptible to time, it is composite, it isn't all powerful, etc. Therefore, the argument from change is false (well, at least it isn't deductive).

I would like at the outset, to make some clarifying statements about why the argument from motion proceeds as it does. In many, if not all variations of the argument from motion, it starts with the premise "change occurs", or something synonymous. The reason for this move is soley to establish the reality of the metaphysical categories act and potency. It is not, and I repeat, it is not the premise by which the existence of God is directly derived. To put it in a crude syllogistic form:

P1 Change occurs
P2 So, actuality and potentiality exist
P3 If actuality and potentiality exist, then God exists
C Therefore, God exists.

After the establishment of change, we get act and potency. From this, the argument (I have Edward Feser's argument in mind) then applies and seeks to understand the conclusion when these metaphysical categories are applied to actualization which is of a vertical sort, rather than a horizontal one. Meaning, it is concerned with the continued actualization of a potential, rather then the actualization of a potential throughout points in time. The argument deduces God's existence from the fact that there are objects that exist which are being continually actualizaed, not the actualization of potentialities happens in a temporal manner.

To make even more preliminary statements, however, I would like to make a distinction between the ways in which a thing can lack potentiality. These two I have labeled underivative existence and derivative existence. The first we would call God, and the second would be some sort of being which lacks the capacity to change. Understanding now what the argument's objective is, take any physical object. By virtue of being a physical object, regardless of whether or not "it lacks the capacity for change", it is always physically composite. Cups, spoons, houses, and boeing 747s are the way they are because of the various arrangement of atoms involved. Atoms can be broken down into protons, neutrons, and electrons, and further those things can be logically divided by space (if it is .0000000000000000001cm long, then we can say it is composed of two parts which are .0000000000000000001/2cm in length). Strictly speaking, anything in space is divisible (composite), and everything physical is in space. Knowing this, we can then say that call physical things are dependent on their subsidiary parts for their existence. Meaning, the arrangement of parts actualize the potentiality for there to be a whole. Therefore, in order to appease the causal principle, we must then posit some being which is causally prior to this. You can run this game ad infinitum, but ultimately to satisfy the chain of causality, you must at some point come to the existnece of an "unmoved mover" or "pure actuality". Physical things may very well lack the capacity to change, but it is in the very nature of the things which deems it something of derivative existence. You must therefore appeal to that which is of underived existence.

I'm just wondering. How much weight do performative contradictions have, if any?

I see no good arguments in either direction. It seems to me that you either accept the definition of whats good or you don't, and I see no reason to accept it. I also see no reason that I ought to follow the conclusions either, because there really is no oughtness about it as far as I can tell.

As I understand it, the thomist doesn't believe that laws of nature exist in the sense of its contemporary understanding; rather, the thomist would say that how a thing behaves is built into the thing itself. For example, water freezes at 32 degrees not because the "laws of nature" dictate such, but because it is inherent in water to do so. My question is then, how exactly would a fine-tuning argument be presented on this analysis of laws, if at all?

How could the universe be truly contingent if God could have never decided to create some other universe, because that would involve changing his mind, which is impossible. My thought is that we might be nearing the conclusion of a modal collapse, but I think at best this alone leaves us with a universe which has some sort of "weak necessity". As in, its conception may have been necessary but the events that play out could be contingent, unless you're a determinist, which I'm not.