Morality and Thomas Aquinas' - Five Ways (His proof for the existence of God

Morality:

I have spent most of my recent downtime after work in the late hours of the day and early morning reading books or watching debates and discussions by atheists and theists. I have always found it important to listen to both sides of an argument that I have questions about. You learn much more this way than if you are closed off to half of the questions or solutions.

Along these lines I have found that I can not stand on the side of religion on the topic of morality. I think that the argument is a none issue. Since I have started this journey, I have come to realize that religion has no moral ground to stand on. More then just the obvious problem of genocide, rape, torture, and incest God does or allows, but then tells us its wrong, there are many other morally shameful acts against His chosen creation in the doctrine, but there are other reasons to second guess any religions claim on morality.

No religion can be called a moral code. A simple reason for this idea is that these beliefs were developed thousands of years ago and morality is an ever evolving subject of study. Things that are morally reprehensible today, have often been common practice for the last 3000 years, like marriage at an early age (and with that idea, teenage sex, and condoms).

In the time of Jesus' mother, Mary, women were often married off in their early teenage years (12-14), while men averaged mid-twenties for their first marriage. Imagine a 25 year old marrying a 14 year old today. It is thought that Mary would have been between 12 and 14 when Jesus was born, but Joseph was much older. Today, if someone is married before the age of 20 they are looked at as if they are rushing into it, and told to slow down, take some time and think about it.

More importantly, I would think, morality is a subject of right and wrong. Religion is a subject of “my” right equals reward and “my” wrong equals punishment. Morality, as a guideline, has to be free of reward and punishment, and while evolving, it must also seek to reveal good and bad universally. Once you start to give external and eternal spiritual rewards for certain behaviors, you are no longer talking about morality. Instead you are talking about training people.

I have and love dogs. If I trained one to attack intruders entering my house by feeding them bacon every time they got aggressive at the front door, and another to sit and wait patiently to receive its reward ,which one would be doing a good thing? If you came to my door and my dog seriously hurt you, it would think it was doing a good thing, the same as the dog that sat and watched, because the “good” I “commanded” them to do for their reward was observed by each, respectively

While I would think that this kind of training is morally wrong without justification for the attack dog being needed, the dog still thinks that it is doing good work in my name, so to speak. (I would think that a dog would be a theist, they look at me like I am a perfect being, and I can not do any wrong in their eyes, but my cat is an atheist (maybe a deist) because he looks at me like he knows better, and only needs me for a clean place to poop.)

“...In nature, there are neither rewards nor punishments, there are consequences...”

- Robert G. Ingersoll

It is impossible to say that biblical laws are the same as a moral code; because religion is simply trying to train people to do right, instead of expecting people to know right and wrong (shown in Genesis when God denied man the knowledge of good and evil) and helping them live accordingly. In fact, I would argue that religion, even faith, or belief in any righteous and revealed moral code is the reason that so many evil people find justification for their malicious actions. Good people will do good things whenever they can, and I think it is fair to say that evil begets evil whenever it can. However, religion seems to, in many ways, deem us as sick from the start, giving truly sick people absolution from their moral responsibility to humanity. It is up to religion to cure us of our illnesses, like sin or immorality. I don't like the idea that God created me (personally) abject, inferior, or naturally/morally sick from the start; and then through worship and adoration to Him, I can be cured, but only if it is His will.

How does this play into the thought that we are created in God's image, as almost every religion claims? What does it say about the creative power God has? Did God's creator make Him impure and He found purity? (Given that a creator would have to have a creator as well, same thought as to what was before the big bang?) Or is it just placating our need to create God from our image? I find it hard to have faith in either belief or doctrine. In fact, I would find it wonderful and exciting to discover that God had revealed Themselves, and Their purpose, to us with supporting and irrefutable evidence of His existence or His great plan.

• Side-note: What happens to personal responsibility when someone has come to relieve you of any sins? If I were to rape and murder for the rest of my life but find and believe in Jesus on my death bed I am allowed into heaven, but if I were to be good, just, and charitable to everyone around me but reject God or Jesus then I would go to hell. This seems wholly unrealistic in my eyes.

The doctrine, in fact, is the biggest problem. The doctrine can not be changed without excruciating pain to the faith. For example, the catholic doctrine on condoms. This is a belief that is killing hundreds of thousands of people every year in undeveloped, AIDS infested countries worldwide. It is a death sentence for these people All in the name of an outdated religious idea that has no real presents in scripture. It all comes out of the Catholic Church, and the Papacy, not the Bible. Not to restrain myself to Christianity, Islam has an offensive history when it comes to vaccination in similar countries. Polio could have been eradication worldwide if religious doctrine hadn't gotten in the way. The spread of containable diseases should be condemned by all humanity regardless of religious conviction.

• Rufus: Mankind got it all wrong. Taking a good idea and building a belief structure around it.

Bethany: Are you saying having beliefs is a bad thing?

Rufus: I just think it’s better to have ideas. I mean you can change an idea. Changing a belief is trickier.
- Dogma (1999), Kevin Smith

Moving on...

I feel a need to assert that if there is an all powerful creator, then He would stop evil acts done in His name. How can any all powerful, all seeing, ever present being let any evil act happen in His name, unless – (1) it was part of his greater plan, or (2) the creator isn't concerned with the day to day activities of His creation. If you are willing to say that God has a plan, then you must be willing to accept the “evil” allowed because of the plan, as well as the good done. Especially when God can circumvent natural laws to enact His will through miracles.

Also, it is always confusing to hear a person of faith claim that God is only love and compassion, and in the next breath forward all the worlds evil to the devil or mans inferior nature. How do you reconcile that God would have to have created the devil and mans nature, so must have created evil, or at least the ability for evil acts, on purpose and for a specific reason.

How is God of the Old Testament all loving and compassionate to any people living at the time, even selling His chosen people to the Philistines (Judges 13:1). This would mean that the Philistines were not an evil people, even though being called a Philistine became a derogatory term. They were just doing Gods will, right? Same with the Egyptians in the Exodus, and Judas in the New Testament.

You have to believe that Judas was necessary to the story. He wasn't doing an evil act, but helping fulfill destiny. He was sacrificing himself. Someone had to do it, and I didn't read anything about Jesus turning himself in. Judas took the step that he thought was needed to fulfill Jesus' teachings. But instead of looking at this man with some sort of acceptance or empathy for his situation, he is called evil.

What does this say about the morality of the Bible or Christianity? I see a book that tells you what to think. I see people in this book doing what God makes them do, and it being called evil. What is the difference between the Israelites doing what God tells them to do, and the same God forcing the Egyptians to do His will. How is it moral to call them or their actions evil? When you use force, you remove choice, and you move the burden of guilt to the one using force to enact their will.

Don't get me wrong, there are good things to learn in this book. There are great philosophical ideas. The problem comes with the idea of forced obedience, or the thought of reward and punishment as a moral code. And I'm not so ignorant of human nature to know that some people need rules to live by or at the very least guidelines for a community, but laws are different then morality.

So call it Gods law, or rules of the Bible, but don't tell me it is a moral code to live by.

On Thomas Aquinas “Five ways”

The first proof says, roughly, that God exists because things change. It implies that, in the beginning, the universe was still and unchanging until God set things in motion. I don't see in his argument a need for the first mover in the way he describes it. He says that everything is moving from a potentiality to an actuality, and to do so there has to be a being of only actuality. Fire is actually hot and makes wood, which is potentially hot, actually hot; but the fire had to be put in motion by some other motion, is his example.

The reason that I don't need God to explain the first movement has to do with modern astrophysics and cosmology. Now science has not yet been able to discover experimentally what happened at the origin of the universe, but they have theories that describe the universe back to a point that is less then a split second after this bang. I think William of Ockham would agree that placing a supernatural event before this moment and saying that everything came from this supernatural event is going to far.

Why confuse the facts with unprovable wishing? There is no need to add to the complexity of the beginning of the universe by saying that everything was created by God and set into motion when he decided to let it go. Now, I bring up these ideas of cosmology because one thing that Aquinas didn't know about in his time was gravity. After the bang that created mass and matter, the weakest of the four fundamental forces began the construction of the beautiful galaxies we see in the night sky. I think this is more astounding then any miracle described in the bible. I think that looking at images of the Hubble telescope, like the Carina Nebula, are simply breath taking, but if someone came up to me tomorrow and said that his father was God and his mother gave birth to him while still a virgin, I would think that they were crazy not amazing.

I challenge you to look upon modern people that say they speak to God with the same reverence that you would give Abraham, Noah, Moses, or Jesus. I'm not talking about your priest, or traditional people of faith, but the people outside your normal existence. Those four people I mentioned stood outside their norm and tried to change things, against the odds, and told those of the local traditional faith, that they were wrong. So too you must stand with those that say God speaks to them today, like He did thousands of years ago; and if you can “know” who is actually speaking to God and “know” who is just talking to themselves, then you have an obligation to tell the world who is right.

Also, I want to speak on the idea of the potential and the actual. To say that God is only actuality and not potentiality implies that God only exists in the now, and does not have a presents in the past nor knowledge of the future because he would have to have a linear existence to only be actuality. If God doesn't have potentiality, as Aquinas says, then God doesn't know the potential existence to come. Without knowledge or ability of potentiality, then God can not be omniscient. God and His creation would have to be both actual and potential.

In the second proof I can not find any reason for dispute, except to again speak of Ockham's Razor. If you want to imply a supernatural necessity for the first cause, then your adding complexity where none is needed. The origin of all existence is confusing enough for the average person, but attaching the existence of a supreme being only adds to the turmoil. I am looking for clarity in this origin, not imposed complexity. There is nothing wrong with saying “I don't know” and I would want more people to embrace this idea.

The third proof is basically a rehash of the first. He has exchanged the terms first mover with the idea of a necessary being. A first mover is the same as a necessary being so any argument in this proof should be similar to the argument in the first proof. Also, in this proof, is the idea that given enough time, everything in existence would cease to be. This is exactly what modern science says will happen; but Aquinas wants to make the argument that an infinite possibility of existences would lead to non-existence. While it is true that non-existence is a possibility, it doesn't have to come before or during existence to be true. We could exist within one of many possible lives before non-existence happens. On a side-note, the way Aquinas wrote his third proof is exactly the way science says the universe will end. We are in a period of existence and life, but, given enough time the universe will move into a dead zone.

The fourth proof states that because there are differences between beings, that there must be a supreme being at one end of the spectrum. There must be a perfect being because of the very idea of its existence. But this does not imply that this perfect being created us. If you want to argue that our existence implies the actuality of another superior being, fine, but you must also find a reason that this being would create humans. Which would include a need for this superior being to create us. Also, this idea implies that God sees us as better then the rest of His creation. I would like to think that if God loved all of what He created, and saw that it was good, even the AIDS virus, then all of existence would be equal in His eyes. In the end, the existence of a supreme being does not give raise to our creation. Also, the existence of one being does not limit the amount of other similar beings in existence. So, one end of the spectrum, limited to a perfect being does not confine that existence to one perfect being. It could be many.

What about the other end of this idea? If you are to reason that because there are differences, there must be a perfect being, then there must also be some wholly imperfect being. I would think that it is more reasonable to say that just because something is possible doesn't mean it has to be. Just because this line of thought leads to a possible perfect being doesn't mean a perfect being has to exist.

The fifth proof describes a reality that would preclude freewill, as it is written by Aquinas. He argues that things that lack intelligence, such as natural bodies, act as if they have intelligence, so intelligence must have been given to us by some other being. Now, it is obvious that intelligence varies in all existence, and this variability would mean that I have only been given enough intellect to do/understand as much as God wants me to. So I wouldn't have the ability or choice to understand anything God doesn't want me to.

But his argument also implies that the motion of the natural body, you growing from a child to an adult, is also directed by God. This idea is what we would recognize today as intelligent design. This proof has been completely ruined by the amazing work of evolutionary biologists, like Kenneth Miller, who is a Christian that is not afraid to say that intelligent design is not good science. He has a perfect lecture on how evolution can explain reducible complexity of advanced organism.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JVRsWAjvQSg

(This video was suppose to be a debate on intelligent design/evolution, but the ID side didn't show up)

Now, a lecture that I listened to on the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas, has an idea that needs to be examined. Since God is perfect, did God create the best of all possible worlds? The professor in the lecture says that the very idea of a best possible world is self contradictory. It is to say that you can always add some new attribute to this world to make it better, but can't the same be said about the best possible being? If the idea of a perfect world is self contradictory, then so is the idea of a perfect being.

I think that most people use the wrong definition of perfect. Is perfect an absolute, or pure, or complete, or correct in every detail? I think that most people want it to be these things, but in the end, it is “the exactly fitting the need in a certain situation or for a certain purpose” that people really mean. People will change and adapt their view of God to be whatever they want or need for the situation. As much as philosophers have tried over the centuries, there is not a universal definition of what God is.