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.

Sigh, he mentions Aquinas's argument without ever even giving it, and makes the mistake of treating it as a design argument.

Just for the record, I wrote a paper on Aquinas's fifth way once, and I went back and checked the original Latin; in many translations of it, Aquinas is presented as arguing that since everything is acts towards a definite end, this cannot by chance, but must be designedly. The Latin however reads "ex intentione" where designedly appears in the English, and "ex intentione" translates to something more like from/out of the aim/intention, which is a much weaker claim. If Aquinas had wanted to say designedly here, he would have, since design is itself a Latin-derived word, and there was a plethora of other words in Latin for design as well.

Hence, Aquinas's teleological argument is not a design argument; it's a cosmological argument given from the perspective of final causality.

But of course y'all already knew that; now you've got some more evidence for why it's not.

Also, isn't it a little funny that the video jumps to Paley as the great formulator of the design argument, and then jumps back about 50+ years to Hume as its greatest objector? Was Paley answered so adequately that he couldn't even formulate a somewhat convincing response to Hume before he even gave his original watchmaker argument? Could none of Paley's contemporaries give a rebuttal that could outdo a sceptic whose famous objections Paley would have carefully formulated his argument in an attempt to avoid? That would be quite damning if they couldn't; so please, let's stop this Hume hero-worship, and actually get into the meat and potatoes of the argument.

Finally, the video makes the classic mistake of shifting all purpose talk from proximate purposes to remote purposes, which inevitably lends to a reductio of non-speculative purpose talk. Thus, that the eyes are for seeing is a very different purpose claim than that the eyes are for the glory of God, but BOTH claims are legitimate uses of the idea on a Classical Theist view. One is talking about what casual powers we see that things have, which is an undeniably empirically verifiable phenomenon, and the other talking about how things fit into God's providential care for creation, which we might know little about comparatively.

The video also simply assumes that the design arguer is committed to the claim that all things must have one and only one purpose, which, while this is true about a thing's final end, since God is the final end of all things, this need not be true about instrumental ends, since there are many roads to God, and many things an object might be for.

Greg wrote:

Timotheos wrote:

The Latin however reads "ex intentione" where designedly appears in the English, and "ex intentione" translates to something more like from/out of the aim/intention, which is a much weaker claim. If Aquinas had wanted to say designedly here, he would have, since design is itself a Latin-derived word, and there was a plethora of other words in Latin for design as well.

And even "from intention" is apt to be misread. Aquinas's intentione has no psychological presuppositions.

Quite right; my dictionary for example has the first translation as stretching, and it is only after it gives about a dozen other translations that you get aim and intention thrown in. The fact that Aquinas uses an archer shooting his bow as an illustration in the fifth way has a close imaginative association here, because the Latin form of "to intend", intendodere, is the word one would use to describe the bending of a bow, and also to describe the aiming of a shot.

That's really, really bad.

The suggestion that theists are just scrambling to avoid the inconsistency of "God is omnipotent" with "God can't create a rock he cannot lift" is quite specious.

Omniscience and human free will do pose a problem that requires an answer. But the way this problem is approached in the video really shows that the series is really an introduction to what philosophers have talked about rather than what philosophy is. "God is omniscient" and "humans have free will" are not contradictory, as what's-his-face rather breezily claims. They are in apparent tension, but the philosopher's response to such an apparent tension is not to stop thinking but rather to add more propositions until one has an actually inconsistent set. Then one can survey what would have to be true if the apparent tension were a real tension. The suggestion that the apparent tension between "God is omniscience" and "humans have free will" can only be resolved by giving one of those propositions up or qualifying one of them to death is a philosophical farce. That isn't how logic works.

I am so done with Theism being strawmanned. If I see it one more time, I'm gonna turn into the Hulk. But seriously do people think we're that stupid or dumb? I'm insulted.

Last edited by AKG (5/03/2016 12:18 pm)