Drovot wrote:

ArmandoAlvarez wrote:

Perhaps this may help Drovot (although I'm just a beginner, so maybe I'm misstating this or being unhelpful).  A materialist may say, "This chemical only has the property it has because of the arrangement of the atoms that make up its molecule, and the atoms only have the properties they have because of the arrangement of the subatomic particles," but in that case, "arrangement" is only another word for "form."

I'm not sure it is. It depends on how you use the term "arrangement." An arrangement can be nothing more than independently existing parts. A pile of bricks is twenty bricks, a stack of blocks is six blocks. If we can reduce these to their constituent parts by virtue of them being consisted of individually existing things, then why not side with scientific analysis and conclude that the pig is a swarm of atoms?

I don't think it's "siding against science" to say that something arranged certain ways has qualities that something arranged another way doesn't.  Two hydrogen atoms arranged in a covalent bond with one oxygen atom really do have qualities that two hydrogen atoms alone do not.  As far as I know, and I may be misstating Aristotle, he would include the use of the words "form" and "matter" even to something as simple as shaping iron into a sphere.  So I think it is acceptable to use the word "form" for any arrangement at all.

@ficino & romanjoe
As you know, when Feser brings in his cups sitting on tables (or chandeliers hanging in buildings) he does so in the context of a statement like "Change is just a subset of actualization of potential."  And I would think if I understand actuality and potentiality, which admittedly I don't have the best grasp of, the cup sitting on the table would be an actualization of the cup's potential for various locations.  Do you think this is an inappropriate digression from the First Way?  Or is it a modern refinement of the First Way? 

Why wouldn't the reverse be just as validly the case?  Drop a rock, obviously it accelerates to Earth, and I am sure you realize Earth calculably accelerates toward the rock.

Of course.  But if I have a table that is one meter tall and a place a cup one meter off the ground with the table between the ground and the cup, the cup will not accelerate to the ground, right?  But if there is no table and I place a cup one meter off the ground, the cup will accelerate to the ground.  If a cup is placed on a table, the cup's position is dependent on the table, but other than the imperceptible compression of the table, the table's position is not dependent on the cup.

The cup, saucer, table, and Earth are all equally the causes and effects of each other.  Imagine 4 equal size rock lined up in space, weakly held to each other by mutual gravitation.  Which is the cause and which is the effect?

That a cause and effect are the same event from viewed different perspectives is a tenet of A-T philosophy.
 

I suppose if we balanced things very carefully we could put the cup on the floor and put the table on top the cup.  I don't see how the particular arrangements of such systems argues for a per se causal series at all.

If Books 1, 2, and three are stacked on top of each other with 1 on the bottom and 3 on top, then the position of book 3 is dependent on books 1 & 2 in a way that the position of book 1 is not dependent on the positions of the other two.  If we reverse it, so that Book 3 is on the bottom, then Book 3 is the one whose position is not dependent on the other two.  I am having trouble seeing why you are even disputing this.

I am more sympathetic to your viewpoint than most here, and I think you may be right that inertia is fatal to the first way, but I don't think your argument against the existence of causes per se is as strong as you seem to think.

Hello, SP.
If you had a cup sitting on a coaster, sitting on a table, couldn't you consider the table to be the "cause" of the position of both the coaster and the cup, and wouldn't that be a per se causal series?

Timocrates wrote:

I don't think physics or even the basics of Newtonian mechanics is or are wrong, certainly not in ordinary day-to-day application of their basic principles and assumptions. What I do think is that the astrophysical or cosmological component of it is problematic and not consistent with its actual, more practical virtues.

The thing is, all your objections absolutely depend on assumptions that would render all of classical mechanics, including Newton's laws, as irredemiably flawed, in ways that would be noticed daily by tens of thousands of engineers.  You also demonstrate a lack of understanding of fundamentals.  For example,

Timocrates wrote:

The centrifugal force generated by a spinning object isn't typically measured by how much weightlessness an object on the edge of the rotating object will experience. It will simply exert a determinate force that will cause some things to be flung off of it or for the object itself to fly or break apart or some things to remain on/fixed if the object is itself sufficiently strong and any objects on it are firmly fixed enough.

That a feather no less than a man only becomes 0.3% lighter owing to this force is, to me, just plain suspect. In my experience centrifugal forces just don't work like that. Given this logic, it's not even clear how any centrifugal force could even succeed in throwing an object away from itself: worse, it would if this logic were true only throw off a 1kg object at the same time it had sufficient force to throw off a 100kg object.

That is, again, just wrong in my mind.

Here you show a lack of understanding of Newton's laws, vector addition, and the normal force (and therefore apparent weight).  All of this is dealt with in an introductory physics course, but it will take many months, and a lot of work practicing with problems before you can begin to trust your instincts on these matters.  I can't explain it in a comment box.