Nature and Nature's God

Nature and Nature's God
Author: Daniel Shields
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2023
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9780813236681

Aquinas' first proof for God's existence is usually interpreted as a metaphysical argument immune to any objections coming from empirical science. Connections to Aquinas' own historical understanding of physics and cosmology are ignored or downplayed. Nature and Nature's God proposes a natural philosophical interpretation of Aquinas' argument more sensitive to the broader context of Aquinas' work and yielding a more historically accurate account of the argument. Paradoxically, the book also shows that, on such an interpretation, Aquinas' argument is not only consistent with modern science, but actually confirmed by the history of science, from classical mechanics through 19th century thermodynamics to contemporary cosmology.The first part of the book considers Aquinas' argument in its historical context, exploring the key principles that everything in motion is moved by something else and that an infinite regress of causes is impossible. The structure of the First Way is analyzed and the argument is connected both with Aquinas' Third Way--a new interpretation of which is also proposed--and Aquinas' second proof from motion in the Summa contra Gentiles. To complete the account of what natural philosophy--prior to metaphysics--can demonstrate about God, a chapter on Aquinas' teleological argument (the Fifth Way) is also included.The second part of the book tracks the history of modern science from Copernicus to today, showing how Aquinas' argument fared at each major turn. The first chapter shows how Newton's understanding of inertia and conservation of momentum supports the idea that motion cannot continue forever without God's causality, and integrates a modern understanding of inertia and gravity with the principles of Thomistic natural philosophy. The second chapter considers the first and second laws of thermodynamics, showing how they too support Aquinas' contention that motion cannot continue forever without God's causality. This chapter also discusses statistical mechanics and contemporary cosmology, demonstrating that science continues to support Aquinas' unmoved mover argument. The final chapter turns to modern biology as well as cosmological fine-tuning to show that modern science also continues to support Aquinas' teleological argument. The result is not only a satisfying defense of Aquinas' natural philosophical proofs for God's existence, but a primer on the broader project of integrating Thomistic natural philosophy with modern science.

Nature and Nature's God: A Philosophical and Scientific Defense of Aquinas' Unmoved Mover Argument

Nature and Nature's God: A Philosophical and Scientific Defense of Aquinas' Unmoved Mover Argument
Author: Daniel Shields
Publisher: CUA Press
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2023-05-26
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0813236673

Aquinas's first proof for God's existence is usually interpreted as a metaphysical argument immune to any objections coming from empirical science. Connections to Aquinas's own historical understanding of physics and cosmology are ignored or downplayed. Nature and Nature's God proposes a natural philosophical interpretation of Aquinas's argument more sensitive to the broader context of Aquinas's work and yielding a more historically accurate account of the argument. Paradoxically, the book also shows that, on such an interpretation, Aquinas's argument is not only consistent with modern science, but actually confirmed by the history of science, from classical mechanics through 19th century thermodynamics to contemporary cosmology. The first part of the book considers Aquinas's argument in its historical context, exploring the key principles that everything in motion is moved by something else and that an infinite regress of causes is impossible. The structure of the First Way is analyzed and the argument is connected both with Aquinas's Third Way?a new interpretation of which is also proposed?and Aquinas's second proof from motion in the Summa contra Gentiles. To complete the account of what natural philosophy?prior to metaphysics?can demonstrate about God, a chapter on Aquinas's teleological argument (the Fifth Way) is also included. The second part of the book tracks the history of modern science from Copernicus to today, showing how Aquinas's argument fared at each major turn. The first chapter shows how Newton's understanding of inertia and conservation of momentum supports the idea that motion cannot continue forever without God's causality, and integrates a modern understanding of inertia and gravity with the principles of Thomistic natural philosophy. The second chapter considers the first and second laws of thermodynamics, showing how they too support Aquinas's contention that motion cannot continue forever without God's causality. This chapter also discusses statistical mechanics and contemporary cosmology, demonstrating that science continues to support Aquinas's unmoved mover argument. The final chapter turns to modern biology as well as cosmological fine-tuning to show that modern science also continues to support Aquinas's teleological argument. The result is not only a satisfying defense of Aquinas's natural philosophical proofs for God's existence, but a primer on the broader project of integrating Thomistic natural philosophy with modern science.

Five Proofs of the Existence of God

Five Proofs of the Existence of God
Author: Edward Feser
Publisher: Ignatius Press
Total Pages: 338
Release: 2017-08-25
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1681497808

This book provides a detailed, updated exposition and defense of five of the historically most important (but in recent years largely neglected) philosophical proofs of God’s existence: the Aristotelian, the Neo-Platonic, the Augustinian, the Thomistic, and the Rationalist. It also offers a thorough treatment of each of the key divine attributes—unity, simplicity, eternity, omnipotence, omniscience, perfect goodness, and so forth—showing that they must be possessed by the God whose existence is demonstrated by the proofs. Finally, it answers at length all of the objections that have been leveled against these proofs. This work provides as ambitious and complete a defense of traditional natural theology as is currently in print. Its aim is to vindicate the view of the greatest philosophers of the past— thinkers like Aristotle, Plotinus, Augustine, Aquinas, Leibniz, and many others— that the existence of God can be established with certainty by way of purely rational arguments. It thereby serves as a refutation both of atheism and of the fideism that gives aid and comfort to atheism.

The Causation Debate in Modern Philosophy, 1637-1739

The Causation Debate in Modern Philosophy, 1637-1739
Author: Kenneth Clatterbaugh
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 258
Release: 2014-04-23
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1317828100

The Causation Debate in Modern Philosophy examines the debate that began as modern science separated itself from natural philosophy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The book specifically explores the two dominant approaches to causation as a metaphysical problem and as a scientific problem.

Aquinas

Aquinas
Author: Edward Feser
Publisher: Oneworld
Total Pages: 220
Release: 2009-09
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN:

One of the most influential philosophers and theologians in history, St. Thomas Aquinas was the father of modern philosophy of religion, and is infamous for his "proofs" for God's existence. In this cogent introduction to the great Saint's work, Edward Feser argues that you cannot fully understand Aquinas' philosophy without his theology and vice versa. Covering his thoughts on the soul, natural law, metaphysics, and the interaction of faith and reason, this will prove indispensable for students, experts or the general reader.

Thomistic Existentialism and Cosmological Reasoning

Thomistic Existentialism and Cosmological Reasoning
Author: John F. X. Knasas
Publisher: Catholic University of America Press
Total Pages: 344
Release: 2019
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 081323185X

Cosmological reasoning is an important facet of classical arguments for the existence of God, but these arguments have been subject to many criticisms. The thesis of this book is that Thomas Aquinas can dodge many of the classic objections brought against cosmological reasoning. These objections criticize cosmological reasoning for its use of the Principle of Sufficient Reason; its notion of existence as a predicate; its use of ontological reasoning; its reliance on sense realism; its ignoring of the problem of evil; and its susceptibility to the critique of "ontotheology" as famously put forward by Heidegger. Secondly, the book proposes that the kind of reasoning found in Aquinas's De Ente can be formulated in a more robust version. Prompted by Aquinas’s admissions that philosophical knowledge of God is the prerogative of metaphysics, the second main portion of the book extensively illustrates how the more robust version of the De Ente is the interpretive key for Aquinas’s many arguments for God. Hence, the book should be of interest both to philosophers engaged in cosmological reasoning discussion and to Thomists interested in understanding Aquinas’s viae to God. Finally, the deep purpose of the book is to reawaken interest in Thomistic Existentialism, an interpretation of Aquinas that flourished in the 1950's in the works of Etienne Gilson, Jacques Maritain, and Joseph Owens. In this interpretation, a particular thing’s existence is the actuality of the thing in the sense of a distinctive actus not translatable into something else, for example, the fact of the thing or the thing having form. This book clearly explains how this interpretation looks at Thomas's metaphysics, and why it helps illuminate metaphysical realities.

Passion of the Western Mind

Passion of the Western Mind
Author: Richard Tarnas
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Total Pages: 560
Release: 2011-10-19
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0307804526

"[This] magnificent critical survey, with its inherent respect for both the 'Westt's mainstream high culture' and the 'radically changing world' of the 1990s, offers a new breakthrough for lay and scholarly readers alike....Allows readers to grasp the big picture of Western culture for the first time." SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE Here are the great minds of Western civilization and their pivotal ideas, from Plato to Hegel, from Augustine to Nietzsche, from Copernicus to Freud. Richard Tarnas performs the near-miracle of describing profound philosophical concepts simply but without simplifying them. Ten years in the making and already hailed as a classic, THE PASSION OF THE WESERN MIND is truly a complete liberal education in a single volume.

A History of Natural Philosophy

A History of Natural Philosophy
Author: Edward Grant
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 376
Release: 2007-01-29
Genre: History
ISBN: 0521869315

This book describes how natural philosophy and exact mathematical sciences joined together to make the Scientific Revolution possible.

Mind and Cosmos

Mind and Cosmos
Author: Thomas Nagel
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 141
Release: 2012-11-22
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0199919755

The modern materialist approach to life has conspicuously failed to explain such central mind-related features of our world as consciousness, intentionality, meaning, and value. This failure to account for something so integral to nature as mind, argues philosopher Thomas Nagel, is a major problem, threatening to unravel the entire naturalistic world picture, extending to biology, evolutionary theory, and cosmology. Since minds are features of biological systems that have developed through evolution, the standard materialist version of evolutionary biology is fundamentally incomplete. And the cosmological history that led to the origin of life and the coming into existence of the conditions for evolution cannot be a merely materialist history, either. An adequate conception of nature would have to explain the appearance in the universe of materially irreducible conscious minds, as such. Nagel's skepticism is not based on religious belief or on a belief in any definite alternative. In Mind and Cosmos, he does suggest that if the materialist account is wrong, then principles of a different kind may also be at work in the history of nature, principles of the growth of order that are in their logical form teleological rather than mechanistic. In spite of the great achievements of the physical sciences, reductive materialism is a world view ripe for displacement. Nagel shows that to recognize its limits is the first step in looking for alternatives, or at least in being open to their possibility.

God and Creation in the Theology of Thomas Aquinas and Karl Barth

God and Creation in the Theology of Thomas Aquinas and Karl Barth
Author: Tyler R. Wittman
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 331
Release: 2018-11-15
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1108636535

The legacies of Thomas Aquinas and Karl Barth remain influential for contemporary theologians, who have increasingly put them into conversation on debated questions over analogy and the knowledge of God. However, little explicit dialogue has occurred between their theologies of God. This book offers one of the first extended analyzes of this fundamental issue, asking how each theologian seeks to confess in fact and in thought God's qualitative distinctiveness in relation to creation. Wittman first examines how they understand the correspondence and distinction between God's being and external acts within an overarching concern to avoid idolatry. Second, he analyzes the kind of relation God bears to creation that follows from these respective understandings. Despite many common goals, Aquinas and Barth ultimately differ on the subject matter of theological reason with consequences for their ability to uphold God's distinctiveness consistently. These mutually informative issues offer some important lessons for contemporary theology.