Charlemagne, I am not sure if you have read Dr. Feser’s book called Aquinas but if you have not I would recommend picking it up and just reading chapter 2 as a start. This will help you to see what St. Thomas meant when he used the word motion. Unfortunately you are bringing in modern interpretations of the word and also not bringing in the metaphysics behind it.

Stuff only changes in form….

You do agree that there is change and that is a good first step towards what St.Thomas meant.

The remaining artifact to explain is the Big Bang: How did our universe come into existence in the first place? Is it the action of the Demiurge, the action of Abraham's God, or just the spitum of some black hole in another universe? In each case Aquinas' argument fails to answer the question: What caused the DemiUrge, God, or the black hole to exist. If the answer is simply: "but it is turtles all the way down", then what is special about the top turtle compared with all the others beneath?

There are alternative possibilities to the big bang – that the universe is resonant – going through expansion back to the big crunch, which starts it all over again; that the Big Bang theory is incorrect – our universe has no beginning; or there is some eternal guy in robes and a beard twisting the knobs of the universe machine. The point is that St. Thomas' argument has no footing in reality. Thoughts?

It does not really matter if you are able to prove or disprove the Big Bang theory or even what caused it, to what St. Thomas is saying about the uncaused cause. This is not something physics can explain since it is a meta-physical stance and physics does not directly deal with it. St. Thomas famously thought that the universe was eternal (thinking that it would be impossible to prove the beginning of the universe apart from revelation) so his metaphysics also does not stand or fall on that either.

Last edited by Jason (8/11/2016 2:21 pm)

I really don't like doing this, but these are Elementary confusions and nobody here who has read anything about the cosmological argument would assent to anything like what you're objecting to. See:

http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2011/07/so-you-think-you-understand.html

Indeed, not only does your objection only pretend to address one of Aquinas five ways but it is fundamentally confused about the one way it does address, since Aquinas assents to none of the premises you're objecting to in the argument in question. You are suffering from a usual vocabulary problem. We are all well aware that Aquinas does not use words as Einstein does, but this is mainly because he's not talking about many of the same things.