The (Somewhat Simplified) Philosophical Approach to God
Cosmological reasoning in plain language.
I have a new article at Ignitum Today presenting, and somewhat simplifying, Aquinas’s philosophical approach to God.
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I have a few short comments about this article.
It is pretty complicated when the title says "simplified."
The article is about three separate things. First, it is about the concept of contingency, which is unclear. For example, some obviously contingent things are listed but what is not contingent? By listing some, it implies some are not. Is the universe contingent? Is anything in our universe not contingent?
It could quickly get into the fine-tuning argument and which characteristics of the physical universe are contingent and what is not.
Then, the arguments go into the possible cause of the contingency. So, are we talking about the universe here and its cause? We know that the universe is not infinite, so what could have caused our universe, another contingent event?
And these causes of our universe are not the result of an infinity of time and space. Why? That leads to "reductio ad absurdum." So, we are limited in what the cause could have been.
The article's third part is related to the first two but not essential. It assumes that the source of our contingency is a non-contingent entity. This makes sense. But then, the article goes into the characteristics of this entity.
So we have three ideas: 1) what is contingent? 2) what could be a source of the contingent phenomenon? Finally, what is the nature of the cause of these contingent phenomena? All related but all separate discussions.