George Hayward Joyce gives a version of it in his book Principles of Natural Theology; it was Scott's favorite book on natural theology, so it's a good starting place.

Here's the link: https://www3.nd.edu/~maritain/jmc/etext/pnt05.htm

As part of the set of corrections we send to them, I vote that we should reference Lewis Carrol's classic article "What the Tortoise Said to Achilles", or something like it, as a way to illustrate to them and to their audience what Aquinas is up to in rejecting infinite regresses of causation; it's intuitive, imaginative, and something that would fit well into their format of a quirky half-animated short show.

So there's this YouTube series called crash course, which is a fairly popular series of videos, and they have recently started a series on arguments for God's existence.

They started with "the" Ontological argument, and have moved on to "the" Cosmological argument, which I linked to below.

The video was very brief, but it basically summarized the first four ways, and made some objections, without trying to develop how Aquinas might respond to them.

As was expected, they trotted out the old "then who caused God" cliche, and made the classic mistake of thinking that Aquinas rejected infinite regresses because he thought there just must be a beginning of time.

I mention this video though because I think the author was making honest mistakes, and that means we might be able to contact him and get some corrections made; his videos average around 100k views, and the channel has about 4M subscribers, so providing corrections to these common mistakes could potentially reach a wide popular audience.

It could also be a PR boost for our site (although I don't know if we want quite that strong of such a boost...)

http://youtu.be/TgisehuGOyY

So I was recently reading Part I of Spinoza's Ethics for the first time, and I was actually surprised to find that I found it to be an enjoyable read, despite his obvious agenda.

What particularly struck me about it was how much scholasticism was lurking in the background; I thought most of his axioms were actually perfectably reasonable, and since he is stipulating his own definitions, one cannot argue too with him too much on that front.

My biggest beef with him was that he slyly grafted in his definition of substance, which he defined as that which exists in itself AND is conceived through itself, an expansion from the generally Aristotean definition of substance as that which exists in itself. It's a sly move, because in a number of places, he, in my view, incorrectly equates his definition of substance with merely meaning that it is that which exists in itself, which allows him to shift Axiom 1 from stating, basically, that everything is either a substance or an accident to stating that everything is either a Spinoza-defined substance or an accident. This later allows him to basically use a proof that there is only one God to show that there is only one substance, and of course that is Spinoza's biggest thesis he wants proved.

Hence, I actually can agree with Spinoza that there exists only one "substance" (i.e. God), as long as we bear in mind that it is in Spinoza's quacky sense that the word is here being defined; as soon as those two meanings get equated however, one should jump ship. Thus, the classical theist, I think, could pretty much agree with Spinoza right up to Prop 14***, just taking the whole thing to be an eccentrically worded proof for God's existence; right afterwards though, we should get off the bus and never look back.

What do you guys think?

*** I don't think his proof actually does work though; for the life of me, I cannot understand how he is supposed to be deriving Prop 2, or even why anyone would believe that it is true for that mat

Iwpoe: "Protestants clearly wanted to divorce the Church from the state because they were losing in that arena (and must since they can't confine themselves to one sect)."

Be careful here, the original Protestants, the one's that deserve that title at least in my mind, went in quite the opposite of that direction; one of the first things that Luther did to his churches was to remove them from the auspices of the bishops and into the hands of the German princes. And of course, Calvin himself set up a theocracy in Geneva, and his Puritan followers in Britian and the Netherlands tried to follow his example.

It was only after trying that for a few hundred years that the piestic, Quakers, and the broad church members of those churches moved onto the old separation of church and state idea