Obviously in the sense that God doesn't have Being if he's radically Other. It also doesn't offer us a teleological explanation, explain the problem of evil, or makes God explainable in terms of essence, existence, or any properties whatsoever which would delimit God.

He's a part of that tradition, I think. Although, I personally haven't read much on Jean Luc Marion.

As in the God depicted as Otherwise Than Being. A part of the philosophy of Levinas that attempts to get away from intentionality in the early phenomenological tradition.

Well, I actually normally wouldn't defend a Thomistic God, as that's a God that's both, in my opinion, transcendent and immanent. The God that I would generally defend is a radically transcendent one, a God that's radically Other - with philosophers like Kierkegaard and Levinas. I also don't think the cosmological argument works because of the explanation Kant gave, but it's hard to say because the there's an on-going feud I'm sure. I just think people in general don't go really far into what the Thomistic tradition has to say. In which case, I don't really think anyone has really addressed people like Feser and Oderberg that I know of.

But anyway, I think saying that the universe - if that's what you mean by world - is the totality of everything then this would simply be question-begging for a Thomistic philosopher. That the world, (as both God and the universe he created as a whole is taken to account) then it follows the universe does have a purpose that follows the original and divine plan of God that set it into motion.

Reasons are just explanations for things, which can be merely casual. It follows the PSR, and if that's true, then all things need a reason for their being. Such as a red ball that's in the middle of a forest needs an explanation, or as something as vast as the sun needing a reason for being there casually and contingently. Even if we don't know the epistemological reason for why things are why they are, and how they got there, the fact remains that they must have a reason - the opposite would mean it's reasonless. Which to the Thomistic is absurd. For if everything in the world was reasonless, this would also include the mind, but if the mind is reasonless, then it follows everything you posit as a reason would be self-defeating.

These are theological questions, though, not philosophical. This argument is to simply argue for God simpliciter.

Though, again, having a divine intellect and being good would mean that he does have some attributes that we can appeal to. So there is homogeneity between us and God - as there would have to be in classic theism - but it doesn't get us further into anthropomorphizing God into a material, bodily, or finite entity because Aquinas works negatively to show how these properties are all contingent.

I'm not sure if a physical explanation is a postulation of necessity? The very claim made by classic theism is that it's not so. I've always thought, though I may be wrong, that physicalism always leads to a type of naturalism.

For the most part it seems that most theists want an anthropomorphic God. He should think and love, just as we think and love, but do it better. I can understand that metaphysically inclined thinkers may focus on God as a solution to an intellectual problem. When I was religious many years, I looked toward God for both reasons. I could talk to an infinite, benevolent intelligence directly, and I has a kosmos that made sense in human terms (God's love, which could only mean something to me in terms of human love). — Hoo

I'm honestly inclined to think this isn't true within my experience, and always offered some level of charity. So time to time I asked people how they viewed God - mostly because I go to a catholic church sometimes - and one-hundred percent of the time I generally get a God of three O's. (Or at least one.) Nobody's anthropomorphizing God unless by that we mean that he has a divine intellect. But then, it seems like the only way to have a teleological world is for the world to have purpose and reason, but that can't be done without an intellectual agent. So, God can't be extended or Earthly, but he can certainly be given a disembodied intellect.

Most of the attributes of God in the scholastic traditions seemed to be defined negatively - by what God is not.

I mean, that's fair. I agree with Pascal that the matter is one of disposition and not proposition, but then it becomes a matter of motivation and surrounding oneself in a environment which can't really be addressed philosophically. And I'm not sure if a person with the disposition to cast a blind eye to God will be convinced in any way. I'm not sure if I blame them, though, but the misunderstandings of the cosmological argument are so prominent.

I always took God on a leap of faith.

The problem with such arguments are that they are founded on something that is inherently unstable and subject to change - namely the current scientific model of the Universe. I don't understand why anyone bothers. Science will change. What's the point of trying to make up arguments which are based on such fickle considerations? After all ... — Agustino

The Kalam maybe is since it has to state the universe has a beginning. But any cosmological argument is merely going to state that all we need is a contingent world. All the theist needs to argue for the existence of God is to have Being somewhere in our philosophy.

I've been meaning to make a post on Ross's argument. I'm not sure if it is as persuasive as others make it out to be. — darthbarracuda

It doesn't seem very persuasive to me either, but I haven't seen anyone actually answer it and it's a pretty simple argument:

(P1) No physical process is determinate.
(P2) All formal thinking is determinate.
(C) Therefore no formal thinking is a physical process.

...I honestly think the best argument I've seen against the cosmological argument is Kant's.

But isn't this just simply anthropomorphizing God? That in order for there to be a mind at all, it must relate to something bodily. It just simply could be that God exists as a pure act, and has an intellect. There are other justifications from the theistic camp to basically show how you can have an aspect of the mind is that is non-physical. Namely, James Ross's argument for the immateriality of the mind.

As for the conclusion in the argument, I think Aquinas basically does give the reason why it's not just simply smuggled in, and has to be a God.

Isn't La voix et le phénomène on Library Genesis?

Although, I'm not finding the English equivalent. At least not the Leonard Lawlor version on there.

even if sound, the argument does not suggest anything "divine", sentient, conscious, thinking, caring, loving, warranting worship or prayer, so this amounts to unwarranted or ad hocpersonification/anthropomorphization; rather, Craig's conclusion shadows Aquinas' definition inSumma Theologiae, which hence smuggled his God in the backdoor with the baggage

No, it's not smuggled - it's basically argued for. The reason why it's a God instead of any other being is i) the being must be simple. Which means it cannot be material as that would be composed of an aggregate of parts that would be conditioned by those parts. As generally parts are contingent entities. ii) The being must be immutable, or else it's conditioned by change. iii) It's unextended, immaterial, and eternal, then since it cannot be conditioned by space and time. It would also have to be omnipotent otherwise it would be conditioned by its limitations. iv) It then follows if it's omnipotent, it's also v) omniscient and vi) omnibenevolent.

if there was a definite earliest time (or "time zero"), then anything that existed at that time, began to exist at that time, and that includes any first causes, gods/God, or whatever else

The first cause doesn't have to be temporal. It's an instantaneous cause.

an "atemporal", "eternal" cause of a universe that has a definite age (like 14 billion years) is incompatible with the principle of sufficient reason, since such a cause leads us to expect an infinite age of the universe - there's no sufficient reason the universe is 14 billion years old and not some other age (yet item 1 is supposedly related to sufficient reason)

God isn't in time as a duration, or an extension of the universe. He's a pure act. The universe being any age is completely compatible with this, and it holds with the PSR since the PSR states all things have to be given a reason for.

spacetime is an aspect of the universe, but "before time" is incoherent; causality is temporal, but "a cause of causation" is incoherent

Nobody in classic theism denies this, though. That's why the first cause isn't temporal.

Also, I'm not sure of it's very absurdity. Even the transcendentalist would argue for a condition of possibility for causality to exist at all - though as a concept of pure understanding.

To put a demand on myself for a responsibility for the Other. Ethics as first philosophy. However, I'm not sure if this has to do with accumulating virute or anything. Generally a forgetting of one's self as the arbitrator of the just is something I attempt to keep in mind.

“And this is one of the most crucial definitions for the whole of Christianity; that the opposite of sin is not virtue but faith.” — Søren Kierkegaard

The rest - striving for authenticity or pleasure - comes afterward.

I don't see how persistence makes any sense outside of any relationship to time. Maybe the Will is a transcendental space-time worm or something, where it exists at all places and at all times. But if it's outside of time and space, then action cannot occur, and intelligibility doesn't seem to be able to exist, let alone be seen as a metaphysical specificity. — "darthbarracuda

I'm not sure if Schopenhauer's will is any different from the TS, but the transcendental subject doesn't exist outside of space-and-time, or as a thing at all. This was the point of Kantian philosophy: to rid ourselves of such substantial philosophy when it came to regarding the subject; otherwise he wouldn't have made an argument against an immaterial soul that existed outside of space-and-time in philosophers such as Aquinas. The transcendental subject can never be said to be any of the conditions which he sets out to provide as the "conditions of possibilities." It's not that he's non-temporal, non-physical, etc; it's that that these are simply the conditions of possibility themselves provided by the TS. The conditions of possibility are definitely not casually instantiated.

I'd read Derrida's Speech and Phenomena. I've been meaning to get into Derrida more recently, and it's a great text that usually serves as a introduction to him. Although, I doubt I have much stake in the matter.

Some aspect of transcendental philosophy makes enough sense to me to think we are both immanent within our factical life, and transcend ourselves within our projected possibilities to be something we are not. I think in this transcendence we are free. Not sure if faith really plays into this.

No, you feel hunger. Nothing about suffering a muscle contraction will let you know that you have muscles. Feelings are not information about the objects felt, nor the objects feeling. — The Great Whatever

Well, it's not a detached object. It's your body. There's obviously a difference between feeling your arm, and feeling your broken arm, right? Or say an extended metal piece that might be fulfilling that role. The prior is vital, and part of an embodied consciousness, and the latter sort of a lifeless thing - so there's a clear lack of "just raw sensations". Pain seems to indicate a vital part of you if it's in a particular area. Also, these don't seem like raw feelings to me, they seem to be a type of understanding. What do you think is particularly convincing in Henry's work that makes you think it has no directed intentionality? I don't buy into the intentionality project altogether - there's some work in Levinas that attempts to diverge from that type of philosophy. Anxiety, for example, seems to be one of the few types of moods that're unintentional. It has a general "intentionality" towards nothingness.

It is exactly the opposite. A hungry child has no understanding whatsoever of its hunger or how to satiate it. All it has are instinctual compulsions that act in response to the hunger. It's only once these satiations take on regular patterns that 'objects' begin to come to the fore as capable of satiating that hunger. Food is itself an objectification of hunger, just as physical objects generally are a kind of objectification of felt spatial possibilities. — The Great Whatever

I'm not sure how you can have no understanding of hunger if it's affecting you. Surely, it's not that type of know-how of hunger that correlates it to specific neurons in the brain, but it seems it's in a sense at least vulgar. Otherwise, I'm not sure what we're later rationalizing it into an object.

Can you sort of elaborate the reversal you have in mind more?

Do you, when you feel hunger, not feel the contractions of your muscles near your stomach? Do you not feel pain in certain areas they're bodily? Then will not further deterioration of your body cause a specific attunement which in advanced understands the world as "something-which-can-satisfy-my hunger/a-hunger-for-something?" This is no more than Heideggerian comportment. So it does change the ontological meaning of beings - it is that which is desireable for one to eat. Of course, we cannot in advance know everything that is edible, but then I wasn't arguing for a theoretical knowledge of what can actually fulfill my hunger, merely that consciousness is looking for something outside itself to fulfill that purpose, and interact with it.

How does an adult understand that hunger requires an outside source to satiate it, without feeling hungry? He can't in advance search for something that he has no understanding of. The understanding would have to come first, and then once he understands his hunger, he begins to go outside to search for what can stop it. This is all that's really required for intentionality.

Hunger still affects the body, and is produced via the body which is outwardly connected with the world. All suffering seems to be bodily, which means it's an experience of being-in-the-world, an intentional consciousness.

And the experience of hunger would still be a hunger-for, wouldn't it? Even if one is hungry and it does not offer any theoretical information about how one procures a meal for themselves, consciousness is intentionally related to something that it's attempting to secure to stop it's suffering. So once it manages to find something that it holds onto, it develops a sort of theoretical frame of mind.