No, you simply re-arrange existing material.

Simply an assertion of your original claim, and still complete gibberish.

I am really surprised you are having so much trouble with this.  Conservation of mass/energy is literally middle school physics material.  Even when I was a little kid I knew mass/energy cannot be created or destroyed, only transformed.

But thats a straw man, Thats not what I Said, and indeed if thats what you think think then as I've showed You are yourself have to accept the claim you want to deny on pain of incoherence, And finally I've addressed this topic elsewhere on this thread already. 

Organization is not an existent thing, it is an arrangement of existent things.  Don't you understand the difference?

Do you understand what I tried to demonstrate in the post in the first place? 

If you have 100 bricks you can stack them up, or you can lay them in a line, or you can stack them to make a fire pit, or you can throw them in the trash bin and they will be dumped in a land fill site.  Whatever you do to re-arrange them the number of bricks stays the same.  The amount of bricks does not change.

But this is total non-stater as a rebuttal to anything said above, You're again talking of things changing and going in and out of existence , namely fire pit here. And you've done nothing to rebut they way I've showed that its false that "everything" is simply Sum of its parts and that composite wholes do not exist. 

This is nothing more than crackpot science.  Find any physics book to support this bizarre "reasoning".  Cite it.  There is no such reference.

Asserting something crackpot science, bizarre etc does not refute it , So it still stands and your claim still stands refuted by it. And whose resorting to mere name calling now ,Sp ?

Organization, or arrangement of material changes over time, not hierarchically.

Organization, or arrangement of material changes over time, not hierarchically.

The aspect of existence that stays the same does not necessitate a changer at all.
The aspect of existence that changes does so temporally, not hierarchically, and thus does not necessitate a hierarchical changer.

This is what I've dealt with else where, above post was refutation of other claim of yours ,But still they can't change at all unless they are actual at any particular moment.  

Thus I have proven, again and again, that the Ways of Aquinas fail as arguments for the *necessity* of a *hierarchical* first *changer* acting in the present moment to account for observed motion, change, and existence.

Unfortunately for you, merely asserting you claims again and again, completely failing to engage with particular points coupled with most ridiculous straw-man and Ad hominems  does not constitute a "proof" , So we have good reasons to reject your claims.

@bmiller

Well that is what he always does, He either does not respond or responds with complete straw men. Most of his responses simply boil down "Ha, You stupid AT folks are idiots, therefore I am right" 
 

@Stardusty Psyche:

"I take your lack of rational counter argument as acquiescence to my arguments."

And I suggest you take it with a potent laxative.

Calhoun wrote:

Here is a further problem, If one holds that Form,arrangement,organization,structures etc or whatever one want to call some composition principle is only thing that changes but they do not really exist, then they are committed to saying that change do not really exist, So logically, If you deny composition you deny change which is again untenable. 

 
I find it easier to just point out how if a thing's essence (what it is) is distinct from its existence (that it is), then logically the essence has no inherent tendency to exist and remain in existence. You know, in the actual metaphysical question, which has nothing to do with conservation of mass. If a thing's essence is distinct from its existence and the thing simply exists all by itself, then we're dealing with something unintelligible.

I don't see the point in discussing natural science for 30+ pages when the argument in question is metaphysical. SP's problem isn't just his particular misunderstanding of the five ways and natural science, but his unsupported scientistic assumptions. His arguments are confused precisely because his prior assumptions are inconsistent; he fails to recognize metaphysical truths while simultaneously affirming metaphysical truths necessary to his contradictory epistemological stances (which he considers postulates). You have to remember that he is an eliminativist, technically speaking. He takes scientism as a dogma akin to Special Revelation (albeit technically it's his religious "postulate", a postulate held with dogmatic conviction sufficiently strong to reject consciousness, for example). He doesn't accept PNC as a necessary truth, merely as a postulate. His epistemology is all fucked up from start to finish and he doesn't have a clue about all the contradictions and incoherences of his views. His talk of probabilities and postulates is a mere façon de parler, because since he accepts PNC only provisionally, he has no way to justify any distinction between "truth" and "falsity" without begging the question; no way to accept probability without begging the question or turning it into something unintelligible either ("probable" with respect to what? On what basis?). He doesn't fully recognize necessary metaphysical truths (for instance: that there is something, instead of non-being), and as a result he has an extremely hard time comprehending basic metaphysical facts such as motion or essence-existence distinction; he cannot understand it, and as a result, in his human and impulsive attempt to find any intelligibility in these ideas, he tries to interpret them in the language of natural science, which obviously fails. He refuses to reason logically, he forces himself to think in some bizarre and invalid scientistic and empiricist pattern that consciously avoids logical definitions and inferences.

@Miguel #326

His epistemology is all fucked up from start to finish... He refuses to reason logically

LOL

This isn't complicated folks:
Conservation of mass/energy
The amount of material in existence does not change
No new material is ever observed to come into existence
No existent material is ever observed to blink out of existence
The amount of material is constant
Material does not change in its existential respect
Existential inertia is manifest and evident to the senses.

These are all ways of saying the same thing.  When an idea is so common, so obvious, so universally confirmed, human beings tend to implement many various ways to express the same fundamental concept and observation.

Since the amount of material in existence does not change no changer is *necessary* to account for the observed constancy of the amount of material in existence.
Therefore, the Second Way fails as an argument for the *necessity* of a changer to account for observed existential inertial.

What part of this middle school physics and reasoning don't you lot get?

ficino wrote:

I had said something like this a while ago, or a step beyond it, i.e. why not just drop the Ways and seek to argue from the De Esse et Essentia? A Catholic colleague told me he does that with his philosophy classes, though of course they study the Ways, too. I'm not crazy about the DEE either, but my colleague is convinced it provides the strongest of the proofs in Aquinas.

 

​But why you drop the first way? The first way shows how God can be reached through the concepts of act and potency, which is a distinct route from the second way.The first way is a good argument, even if the second way is better. I hope your not implying that anything SP has said or brought up touches the first way in the least. Frankly, anyone who has perused this thread sufficiently and gives any credence to SP is either lacks reading comprehension or the most elementary scientific and/or philosophical knowledge, or they are intellectually dishonest. Any unbiased person, for example, who read his post immediately following yours, and had a basic grasp of the first way and the concepts involved in it, and high school physics, could only roll their eyes. The guy is a cretin of the highest order. He's also dishonest, as witnessed in his latest attack on grod, where he implies this is the sum total of all grod has ever contributed on this topic. 

And, SP, don't even think of spreading this trolling crap to the rest of the forum. It will just be deleted.