Show Notes

Quick Tip

• Focus on improving your Catholic case-making skills one area at a time. As John Lee Dumas says, FOCUS means “follow one course until success.”
• Download this PDF guide to assess your Catholic case-making proficiency and decide what you want to improve.

Show Outline

• In this episode, we answer 5 “big” objections to the First Way of St. Thomas, which shows the argument still has teeth. The objections are “big” because they are common, not necessarily because they are good. They range from unsophisticated to more sophisticated, but the important thing is that all of them have been adequately answered by Thomistic philosophers.
• Many of the answers I provide come from Dr. Feser’s Five Proofs of the Existence of God. 

The 5 Objections Answered in this Episode

#1 – If everything has a cause, then what caused God?

• Atheists allege that theists make an arbitrary exception to a general rule when attempting to argue for God’s existence.

#2 – The principle of inertia disproves the principle of causality.

• This argument runs as follows:
  • Premise 1: If the principle of inertia is true, then an object’s potential to be in a different spatial location is actualized with no corresponding actualizer.
  • Premise 2: The principle of inertia is true.
  • Conclusion: Therefore, not all actualization requires an actualizer to reduce potency to act.
• I provide several possible responses:
  • #1 – Premise 2 is false or unwarranted.
    • No empirical evidence and limiting case inferences are not always valid.
  • #2 – Premise 1 is false or incomplete.
    • A. Newton’s law “mathematicizes” reality and doesn’t capture all features of the situation. So, if we knew all the features of the situation, then the actualization of potential would be explained.
    • B. Inertial motion constitute’s a state and is not a case of a genuine change in the Aristotelian sense so the principle of causality does not apply.

#3 – If something is purely actual and unchanging, then it must also be inert and cannot cause anything because all of the things we experience as causes also change in the process of causing.

• This commits the fallacy of accident.

#4 – Nothing really changes in an Einsteinian 4-dimensional block universe.

• In this episode, I explain two main answers to this.
  • Real change still occurs in human consciousness.
  • The proposal does not derail Feser’s rendition of the Aristotelian Proof.
• NOTE: I accidentally use a made-up word “Block-time” a few times in this section, when what I meant to say was the “4D Block universe.”

#5 – There’s no good reason to think that the purely actual reality is God.

• This is just not true and shows the skeptic hasn’t done his homework.

Resources Mentioned

• I defend the Aristotelian Proof of God in this podcast episode.
• Five Proofs of the Existence of God by Dr. Edward Feser
• Whatever is Being Changed is Being Changed by Something Else by David Oderberg (Free article)
• Dr. Feser Debunks Hume’s Fork in this Blog Post.
• Scholastic Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction by Dr. Edward Feser
• Dr. Alexander Pruss’s Blog has several posts on the block universe.
• Aquinas by Dr. Edward Feser
• The Argument from Motion Revisited by Paulo Juarez