Huh? Pierce says the world is mind right there

To be clear to the readers, subjective idealism says the universe has no reality except in our minds. Objective idealism says we create the world and it's real. George Berkeley believed in the former, while Hegel, Royce, Peirce, and Giovanni Gentilies probably can be said to be objective idealists

Aquinas said heretics should be burned at the stake. He was hard core into torture. My middle name is named after him. I know all about that freak.

As for forms, your comments are all over the place. For Aquinas God has infinite form, angels are form, and humans are form and matter. When a human understands something, it's form enters the intellect. That's it. There is not much else to his philosophy on this. I have no idea where you are going with your posts on here

Your suggestion that people can't have wonder if they don't believe in an all-powerful guy out there is wrong wrong wrong. You just think everyone is like you. You don't have to believe in anything higher than humans and other mammals.

Einstein and Hawking, the two greatest thinkers of the last century, didn't think the universe required a God separate from it.

If objects are infinitely divisible, then an actual infinity is real. I don't see how finite geometry can be defended. Euclid and Archimedes understood this

BTW, by 99 are you referring to your birth year? I get the impression you are very young. I'm 34

I said time did have a start. William Craig used that theorem all the time but his atheist opponents contacted the authors and they said Craig misrepresented it. There much confusion about its details. I think you should read the first book of Contra Gentiles. You will be impressed by his extended argument for God's existence and get to see why Aquinas thought God was all knowing and all powerful. You're going down that rabbit hole anyway. You have selected a couple articles in the Summa Theologica without even reading the ones about God's knowledge and power. Don't be afraid of God knowing you fully, if you insist on believing in him. Fair enough Devans?

God creates the division. Augustine and Aquinas explicitly say the forms are in God. The doctrine of Plato that the forms are separate from God are held by few Christians.

Augustine supported the forcing of the Donatists into the Catholic Church. Aquinas supported the Inquisition. Both very creepy people

And Devans99, why don't you read Aquinas's first book of the Contra Gentiles. He tries to "prove" God is all-knowing. Why not go all the way? Why not start praying all the time?

Saying God started the first motion or gravity matters notta. There is no reason to believe there is a person out their, unless you believe in absolute time. Time as understood by Hawking, Sean Carroll ,and all those guys does not require a God. If you guys want to believe in medieval physics, go for it. I'm not wasting my time anymore. Devans99's intelligence is too high for the low he is stooping to in these discussions. It's BS

I've explained already on this thread how the universe works mechanically. TIme starts from the first motion of gravity. There i no before in any sense whatsoever, even one for a dude out their to exist in. I am not saying anything Spinoza didn't, or Einstein or Hawking..

You switch from the first 2 Ways to the 5th. You're position really is the Third Way.

You think the world is not God, so there must be a God out there somewhere for you. As Spinoza pointed out, Aquinas was wrong to say the world can't be God just because it can be divided and change within the whole.

Still, whatever you apply to the deist God as the reason why HE doesn't need a cause can be applied to the universe (with organic beings alone in all reality having consciousness). Prove me wrong.

That's true when considered from materialism alone. But I am a materialist who thinks the world is God minus the consciousness. We are the higher form God takes. The world is self-caused, like you say of the dude out there. You have to admit this is a valid alternative to theism or deism

First there is void, then there is existence, then there is goodness, then there is truth, then there is beauty. That's the hierarchy of the transcendentals. The sum of to being, or rather, a being. Whether things share something common between them, or are more individual, is the nominalist debate. Nominalism is fun to think about

The world could have all the reality it needs to exist, everything you attribute to God, except consciousness and it's faculties of will and reason. Then the world explains itself because we are called to be moral. The struggle between good and evil in each of us is the reason for the world. Maybe animals struggle with these in a rudimentary fashion. There is no need to posit some extra dude out there somewhere

Again, hair-slitting. You either believe that Platonic Forms are real entities separate from God or not. Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas all thought not. Neo-Platonic Christianity and Christian Aristotelianism are not different. They just have a little different emphasis

Scotus did think that prime matter and form could exist somehow separately. Aquinas believed contra that there was only a formal distinction. Nonetheless, I've never seen such splitting hairs as in this thread

You think you can peer into the nature of time. You think that proving to yourself that God exists means you have to convince us. Why don't you spend your day trying to communicate with "Him" through prayer and good works instead of starting threads on here? I don't get it

I totally don't get your position on nominalism.

The word transcendental with regard to Abelard is misleading. That has to do with form. Abelard didn't believe in form. He believed in Cartesian extension. That is what nominalism is. You say Scotus "denies whatever is 'one' is an individual"? One and individual are the same thing! He doesn't deny that tautology. Scotus was not a nominalist so of course he believe in unity that was more than the numerical sum of the parts. Thisness! Yes Scotus also denied Platonic forms. But he did NOT agree with Islamic ideas that we all share a cosmic soul together. And I fail to see where Scotus "disagrees with Aquinas' views on common natures/species".

You never heard of Greek fire? As for miracles, strange things happen in ALL religions. Catholics just pay attention to the ones they want to..

He won't even consider Hawking's no boundary hypothesis

I don't see an infinity of quality in light personally. Maybe if I finally tried LSD

I haven't been paying a ton of attention, but has mapping the medium oscilated between Aquinas and scotus on here? And if she thinks we are all God, why read them instead of Hegel

My ears tell me sound is infinite, when I study music. There is an infinity within the limit of the highest and lowest frequency.

Violins can create an infinity of sounds with infinitesimal changes. Aristotle's finite universe is a myth

Devans99 is just impossible :(

Scotus supported "ontological individualism" against certain Islamic thought that said we had a world soul. Scotus sided with Aquinas on this. Aquinas and Scotus believed in free will. But all sin for Aquinas is infinite, but for Scotus even mortal sin is finite (but deserving of eternal punishment still). I learned this from the Old Catholic Encyclopedia (new advent dot com)

Every video and article I read about one-to-one-correspondence is garbage. They arbitrarily move infinity, place the first units together, send them off into infinity (without proving anything yet about uncountable vs countable) and exclaim "they are the same!". Nevermind ALL infinities are composed of units and you can do this trick with ALL infinities

Free will requires reason, but reason is prior to free will. Likewise, gravity causes time, upon which it is dependent to work. There is no contradiction there. We have a self-contained universe. There are just a number of discrete motions going infinitely into the future

Going to LA, talk to you latter. Think about what I said here

He is obsessed with proving God, so he ain't in my Heaven :)

You need to give up the the Newtonian idea of time

They would have to see the infinities side by side in their infinity to know they are the same size. Cantor says he can find numbers that aren't in the countable group by his diagonal "proof". But 2 is not on the odd numbers, yet the odd numbers are the same as all the whole numbers? They haven't worked this out properly

The one-to-one correspondence thing is a hoax I think. They just line up a few terms and say "it goes on forever so they are the same size". You can do that with ANY infinity whatsoever.

The materialist option says that time started with the first motion. The first cause was gravity in the first motion. There is absolute space but not absolute time. If there was absolute time there would be something spiritual behind it. But again not necessarily an intelligence. The world could have flowed from an eternal Tao without the Tao changing or knowing anything

Epigenetics has not proved we can evolve into whatever we want. It's is not Sartre

So your argument on this thread is that there is not a contradiction in math, but that it's incomplete?

Levi-Srauss, who's "mythic discourse" is very Jungian, said "since the purpose of myth is to provide a logical model capable of overcoming a contradiction... a theoretical infinite number of slates will be generated, each one slightly different from the others." Hence i, tongue in cheek , said above that God created the world as a poet, not a mathematician

I've been told that if I truly understood calculus, I would see how there is no contradiction in something spatially being finite and infinite at the same time. I suck at math so I could be the stupid one in the conversation :(

Exactly mr. undercover. The world is an Esher painting