In effect, then, if a proof is successful in demonstrating the existence of an omnibenevolent, omniscient, omnipotent being, then the problem goes from a defense (the logical compatibility between God and evil) to a theodicy (an actual explanation or story for why God allows evil, such as the free will suggestion).

I suppose the counterargument is that, if the existence of God can be demonstrated by another means (such as a cosmological or teleological argument), then this makes the evidential argument against God fail. It would be silly to say, I recognize this proof for God's existence is sound, but nevertheless think God does not exist because of the evil in the world.

The evidential argument from evil requires that other proofs haven't worked to demonstrate God's existence. The logical argument from evil is the only thing that could counter a successful demonstration of God's existence by showing that this ends up positing a being that is incompatible with the empirical reality of evil.

The Evidential Argument from Evil is, I think, a serious problem for Theism. — Mitchell

What is the evidential argument, that one that says that because of the amount of suffering in the world, the best explanation is that there is no God? That is, the probability of there being a God is low?

I maintain that there are no good reasons for thnking Theism is true and some plausible reasons for thinking it is false. If I am right, then most forms of Judaism, Chistianity, and Islam are wrong. — Mitchell

What reasons against theism do you find to be particularly strong?

Judging an action to be morally good is simply saying it is consistent with your morality code, which is based off of your subjective values, which expresses preferences (wants, needs, desires, comfortableness). Essentially, ones moral code is just their preferences. — SonJnana

So you assert, but why should I believe this? Why should I believe that what seem to be truth-apt, cognitive statements like "murder is wrong" ultimately derive from non-cognitive, meaningless non-truth-apt, particular preferences?

The problem with subjectivism in moral theory is that it sort of precludes the possibility of genuine dialectic, because it threatens to collapse into relativism. If what is moral is what people like, and people like different things, then there exists the possibility that people will like contradictory things. X and not-X cannot both be true, so it must therefore be the case that neither are true at all (error theory), or it's entirely relative to the person (in which case, real argument is useless).

This is a tough pill to swallow, because we do not approach morality as if we construct it but rather that it "calls" to us, it "commands" us as if it were objective. Judging an action as morally wrong is entirely different than judging an apple pie to be good. This is why, if we are to be moral anti-realists, I think error theory is superior to non-cognitivism (the subjectivism you have presented). Just by phenomenology alone we can know that morality is not just an expression of our subjective tastes or preferences, and that morality at least presents itself as being objective (even if it isn't).

From my perspective, the arrival of subjectivist/relativist interpretations of morality comes alongside a jadedness to humanity as a whole. People act irrationally, are mean, spiteful, hurtful and otherwise bad, always looking out for only themselves, not caring for anyone else, etc. Ironically and paradoxically, the move to a subjectivist/relativist moral view seems to often come from this disillusionment and disappointment with people living up to what we otherwise do see as objective moral laws. It's similar to the skeptical view of religion - there are so many religions and many religious people are actually quite terrible, thus there must not be anything objective about religion.

Can you think of anything else that has intrinsic value? — Mitchell

Knowledge, virtue, justice (the distribution of goods based on merit), beauty. Hedonism is false because it misinterprets these other goods as being derivative from pleasure when in fact they stand independently of pleasure.

It is tempting to adopt hedonism, however, because sensuous experiences, particularly pain, seem to motivate people far more effectively than anything else. Other goods may be independently good, but nevertheless may require that there be a certain threshold of pain that is kept in check. We cannot pursue knowledge, or act virtuously, or distribute justice, or appreciate beauty when we are suffering. It does seem to be the case that, when push comes to shove, suffering and pleasure usually disable these other goods, and not the other way around.

A better way of putting it, in Cabrera-esque terminology, is that Nietzsche was an affirmative pessimist, i.e. someone who recognized the pessimistic point but affirmed life regardless (as opposed to the negative pessimists, who denied life).

But again, we can affirm intra-worldly things while denying the context in which they arise.

I don't deny that "good life" has problems. Life just is problematic, even if it is good. There are bad people in this good life. There are difficult diseases in good life. It isn't perfection of niceness that makes life good, it's existence-at-all that makes life good. — Bitter Crank

I don't know what to think about this, the claim that the sheer existence of life makes it good. I mean, I'm familiar with Scholastic attempts to show the existence just is good, since it's the actualization of a potential and this entail more perfection, but that doesn't seem like what you're going for here, and I don't like Scholastic stuff that much either.

What about life makes it good? Why is it life that is good? I've already given my reasons why I think life is not good (not that life has no good within it) - the inevitable suffering, decay, disease, and most importantly death. Life is suffering, life is death. Every cradle is a grave.

So when I hear these claims that "life is good", it always strikes me as more appropriate to say "certain forms of unsustainable ways of living are good". As has said, we have to strive towards and create the good within life, it doesn't come ready-made. And if we don't go for them, we suffer (and probably die eventually).

It's a shabby game, because even if you win, you lose. That's what I see to be the core of the pessimistic point.

Why? — Bitter Crank

Because I think making this distinction between the empirical, contingent aspects of life and the structural necessary aspects of life gives a more accurate picture of human life than the more common view that life is a "see-saw" or "mixed bag", some good, some bad. On my account, the good that happens within life takes place within the context of a broader negative landscape. In my opinion there is hardly anything more absurd than the notion that life is meant to be enjoyed. It's just what it is.

It also helps me and I think some other people to approach life in this way. As Schopenhauer said, life makes sense if we see it as a penitentiary. If we approach life as something we have to struggle against, we can help prepare ourselves against the inevitable and live a more heroic life.

And finally it frees pessimists from the charge that they can't enjoy anything in life, or can't see anything as good at all, and actually thus makes it more digestible to non-pessimists. I don't deny there can be good things in life. I just deny that life viewed outside of the present, subjective moment, can be seen as anything other than bad. And that's probably fairly easy for many people to accept, since they already oftentimes do - see how they affirm things within life in order to "make up for" the structurally negative things in life, like death and disease.

So in the end all I'm saying is, keep living your life if you want to, but don't be fooled into thinking these enjoyable aspects of life constitute life itself, or qualify life as good. And certainly do not procreate or encourage procreation, as abstaining from procreation is far easier than suicide (and the vast majority of the rest of life, at that).

Nietzsche was a pessimist, nerds. A Dionysian pessimist, but a pessimist nonetheless.

As much as I'm getting tired of the repetitive pessimistic rants here (despite being a pessimist myself), I cannot agree to what you are saying here (because I am a pessimist).

Life is Good in Itself. — Bitter Crank

What does this mean? What is "Life" with a capital L? What does it mean that it is Good?

Too often is "life" associated with a sunny, cheery afternoon, the greenery of the landscape, the cutesy Hobbit village. But that's not "life". That's only a way of life.

The same can be said of most conceptions of life - they are ways of living, not life itself.

The way I see things is that, after you have met all your basic needs, have worked and strove to maintain a tolerable equilibrium, and aren't horribly suffering...then you might start enjoying some things. The negative is structural, and the positive contingent. This is exactly what the Buddha meant when he said that "life is suffering". Life is suffering, even if there's some good parts to it as well.

But the upsides outweigh the downsides. There are pleasures and joys, loves and sorrows, great music, drama, art, and science, dreams, the fascinating details of life on earth, the vastness of the universe, and all such things. — Bitter Crank

Do you mean instead that the stuff that happens within life can be good? If so, then I agree - there are many things in life that are good, great even, and are worth celebrating. But LIFE itself? No, that is not good. We absolutely must make a distinction between the empirical, ontic phenomena within life (love, music, drama, art, science, dreams, etc) and the metaphysical, ontological structure of life itself (suffering, desire, decay, disease, death).

True enough, there is pain and suffering; disappointment and aggravation; hard labor and little reward, injustice and inequality, tyranny and worse. — Bitter Crank

There will be liars, thieves, knaves and scoundrels who will prey upon the kind, loving, innocent, and defenseless (as well as each other), and that has always been the case. — Bitter Crank

...and will continue to be the case. The problem with affirming life is that you implicitly affirm all of these bad things as well.

Affirming the things within life can be and often is innocent. Affirming life itself is most definitely not, since it entails the affirmation of that which should not be affirmed.

But the upsides outweigh the downsides. — Bitter Crank

Do they, though? If the upsides outweighed the downsides, why are there pessimists? It puts a dent in the proposition that life is good (TM) when there are many people who cannot seem to recognize this, and in fact when most people live as though it were not good (but rather a burden, a chore, sometimes even a nightmare).

I like you BC, you seem like a nice enough person. Don't waste your time on us pessimists, cause we're not gonna start loving life any time soon. Optimists have a hell of a lot more to lose than we do, which is why I always feel a bit of guilt when I argue my pessimistic point.

Holy shit this is a book. >:O

If you want a solid alternate realist position it's Husserl's. I'm with Feser on this, universals exist (though I'm not sure what sort of realist I am exactly, maybe Husserlian?).

That's not to say I would like it if nominalism were true. It would make things less oppressive, I think. For instance, Feser's argument "words are universals too" strikes me as imperialistic. YOU CANNOT ESCAPE UNIVERSALS, EVEN WORDS ARE UNIVERSALS TOO. At least some nominalists must have wanted to escape this metaphysical regime: see early Buddhist philosophers who argued for extreme nominalism in order to overturn the Hindu caste system. As do I, but unfortunately I don't know if it's coherent to deny that universals exist.

Implicit in Feser's (et al) approach to metaphysics seems to be the dominion of the Same over the Other, the desire to "fit" everything within a totality, the imperialistic urge to know everything. To which I typically say: no thanks.

The "value" or "sanctity" of life does not come from it being intrinsically good, but from it being completely devoid of any positive value at all. Every person's life is equally worthless, which helps explain why murder is wrong (because we do not have the right to interrupt the being of someone else, because we do not have any positive value for this right to be appropriate).

It's ambiguous, what "life" actually means. Do we mean the current present spectacle? Do we mean the temporally-unified structure of a life (as I do)? Or something else? A key part of the ambiguity, I think, surrounds the "ontological" distinction, or the whole beings vs Being schtick (though it's probably not exactly as Heidegger thought it was). Humans are beings which can invent all sorts of axiological and ethical paraphernalia to suit their ontic agendas, which typically involve some kind of aggression, manipulation or neglect of the Other. Thus it is said that people "deserve" things like equality, liberty, freedom, etc (even if it comes at the cost of other people's equality, liberty, equality, etc). But to go beyond the ontic and into the ontological leads us to the structural aspects of life: banal suffering, decay, death and moral impediment, all inevitable and guaranteed within the temporal structure of life. Once we arrive in this dimension it is much harder to see how any of these values could ever seriously be appropriate for beings with this Being. It's hard to see how a being-towards-death can seriously be given a positive value without the typical sleight-of-hand, the "obscurement" or "forgetfulness of Being" that leads to the exclusive valuation of intra-wordly, ontic beings and not Being.

The point I'm trying to make, then, is that within life, there can be positively valuable things, but life itself cannot seriously be seen as positive in value. That is to say, when the moral paraphernalia of the intra-worldly is applied to the ontological it falls apart.

Pseudoscience is a bad concept because it's lazy. Anything someone disagrees with can be labeled as pseudoscience. If you think there is something wrong with it, don't just slap on a label and declare your dogmatism to be true. Spend the time to explain what is wrong with it and let people come to their own conclusions. There absolutely must be a separation of science and state, as there is religion and state, in order to avoid these totalizing and oppressive schemes where anything not-science is bad, wrong, misguided, corrupt, outdated, and worthless.

In fact I think we ought to scrap the whole label "science" and just refer to things as their individual disciplines. Fuck the idea of a unifying theory and fuck the idea of a unified methodology.

Other have mentioned this, but part of the difficulty of pinning down the present is that we never just "exist" in the present. Experience irreducibly involves temporality. Phenomenologically, we experience not only the "present" but also a retention of the past and a protention of the future that anchor us to the world. It is not incorrect to say that we live in the present only by living a little in the past and future as well.

Lots of SSRIs.

Go ahead and make one, if you want to discuss it.

I think you’ve fallen for some romantic notion about space travel - that it somehow represents humanity’s best side. But exploration is just the precursor to exploitation. It isn’t noble even if it makes sense to big up those willing to take a risk on behalf of the masses. — apokrisis

(Y) The interest in space travel is fueled primarily by a naive, adolescent, starry-eyed anticipation for some future metamorphosis in human civilization.

It doesn't make sense, from a practical perspective, to colonize Mars, or the moon, or whatever. It's not going to solve the overpopulation problem, especially since it's stupidly easier to just put down procreative limitation laws instead of sending people vast distances across space. It's not going to solve any energy problems, because it takes at least as much energy to get to Mars and back as we would get from mining there. It would be a logistical nightmare to try to "govern" an interplanetary society. And it wouldn't be a very comfortable, easy or fulfilling life on another planet, either. Like you said, it's fun to go to Antarctica for a few months or so but it gets old after a while. Try arriving on Mars, being amazed for maybe a week and then realizing you're stuck there for the rest of your life, or at least for many years.

If space holds answers for energy problems, it might only be with bringing things to us, not going there ourselves. We might be able to lasso an asteroid into Earth's orbit and, assuming rocketry becomes more efficient, be able to mine that. Or set up entertainment depots or whatever makes the capitalists froth at the mouth.

Not to say that I don't harbor curiosity about other worlds. If there's a "good" reason for going into space, it's for sheer scientific, philosophical and spiritual reasons. I used to fantasize (and still do, on occasion) being a deep-space explorer, who leaves Earth (probably permanently) in order to travel FTL to all sorts of worlds, not for colonization or exploitation but to simply bear witness to their existence. There's something deeply, intensely breathtaking to think there are worlds that, given certain metaphysical assumptions, have never been perceived, and that I conceivably could be the very first to witness them.

That's what drew me to astronomy as a child and what continues to pique my interest in it. To realize that stuff still happens even if there isn't anyone around to witness it disorienting. Makes you feel like an alien, like you've been exiled from everything else.

What's the real existential issue of instrumentality? — Πετροκότσυφας

Presumably that we suffer only for us to continue to suffer. We don't go anywhere, nothing changes. It's a whole lot of effort for nothing.

I think if you're going to do philosophy, you need to be aware of what you are doing. What is philosophy?, what am I doing, exactly?, what purpose does this serve?, etc. If you read the big thinkers of the past, one of the patterns you'll see is an overarching self-consciousness about philosophy. Meta-philosophy just is part of the normal philosophizing. The very best philosophies are those that can capture and take account of themselves within their systems.

I'm skeptical of the modern "institutionalizing" of philosophy. Philosophy is not "just another discipline" to be put aside biology, psychology and statistics. Nor do I think philosophy should be aiming for its own dissolution (re: Russellian analytic philosophy) or reduced to a "handmaiden" to the sciences (re: "naturalism").

At its core, philosophy is the rational manifestation of humanity's religious nature. We want to know why we're here and where we're going, how we know what we know and the limits of this knowledge, whether there is a God and what happens after we die. Most crucially, we want and need to know how to live, because life is an eternal ambiguity with no simple algorithm. It is this latter observation that leads me to believe that philosophy is born from a certain helplessness, an anxiety in the face of moral ambiguity and spiritual discouragement. Hence why when we approach deep philosophical questions we usually do so in silence or with trepidation. And this is exactly what you see inside temples and churches, cathedrals and mosques, a deafening, breath-taking silence.

I just don't see it. Work for what? Sustaining oneself, to work, to sustain, to work, to sustain. We are tragically too self-aware for this scheme- anarchic, communist, mixed economy, capitalist, what have you. — schopenhauer1

At the most basic level it would seem as though most if not all pleasure (hell, even pain for that matter) is in some way dependent on certain structural illusions, one of which is the apparent requirement that life, or at least our lives, continue for as long as possible.

Given that suicide is not usually a viable option for whatever reason, it shouldn't be controversial to see the practical importance of making an intolerable situation less intolerable. Your form of pessimism, while it certainly does point out real existential issues (such as this instrumentality you keep bringing up), is actually somewhat dangerous in my opinion, because it seems to lead to a sort of defeatist complaining. Capitalism is a bad thing, and making the alternative (socialist-anarchism) seem like an incoherent pipe dream threatens to sustain the very thing that needs to go, the thing that makes life so much worse.

You might as well just say "socialism doesn't work". Well, clearly nothing is going to "cure" us of life but capitalism is making things abhorrent. A person who gets sick in a socialistic system worries about their health and their relationships and projects. A person who gets sick in a capitalistic system, in comparison, ends up also worrying about their debt. It's grotesque how people fear disease, for instance, not simply because it's a disease but because it will induce an economic crisis. And when it comes down to it, when a person gets seriously sick, they care far more about these things than anything like "instrumentality", because their life is on the line and they don't want to die. Nobody really wants to die. They just want to stop suffering.

Creating work for people is much different than making people work. In an ideal socialistic => anarchistic society, work is not "negative", at least not any more negative than anything else. It's not something you're "enslaved" to. You work and enjoy the work, instead of being completely exhausted by it.

A symptom, I think, of the increasing shittiness of capitalistic society is the alarming degradation of aesthetics to something that is merely consumed, "force fed" into us. People don't go to movies, or listen to music, to appreciate the aesthetic qualities of it, they go the theaters or buy the next album as a means of escaping or distracting themselves. Watching movies with a deep or ambiguous messages, and unique cinematography, or spending an hour listening to a classical piece, is too hard for the working class.

Life isn't great but it's made intolerable through capitalism.

What is the most common sexually-transmitted disease?

Birth. — Michael Ossipoff

More like life.

Saying that we were "designed" like a car or an alarm clock sounds strange. Yet, apparently it is a joy for some people to say that about themselves. — WISDOMfromPO-MO

It's a joy only because it offers an alternative to the depressing notion that we exist by accident. It's comfy to think our bodies were made "with us in mind", as if it's all a great gift. It's kind of sad how people will froth at the mouth when they marvel at the cherry-picked beauty of a biological system. :-|

What the hell is going on here, seriously?!

If we value liberty and freedom, and see them as good, is it reasonable to assume that God, if he exists, also values liberty and freedom, and therefore can be expected to remain hidden and allow his creatures to believe what they want to believe and live as they wish to live?

I guess I just don't see the big issue with people believing in things, even if it's ultimately unjustified, if it doesn't hurt anyone. I usually don't really care too much about science (I think most of it is extraordinarily dull) so whether black holes exist or not is not a big concern of mine.

That being said, there is no one single definition of science, and the only method that can be applied to all sciences is "whatever works". Anything goes. And if this includes pie in the sky speculation then so be it. Why do people care so much about being wrong?

There's been rather a lot of what passes for science these days doing the job of just that -- passing as science. — AngleWyrm

Like what?

Isn't what you call awareness of the "there is" really a lack of awareness of anything? — T Clark

Isn't the lack of awareness of anything just unconsciousness?

Interesting. Probably what any human is aware of at the most basic level is the "there is". For Heidegger's Dasein, this would likely be "Being" (Sein), though I personally am a fan of Levinasian phenomenology so I like to reference the il y a (French: "there is"). This is most clearly experienced during the night when there is no light and the objects of experience are hidden. The "night" or the "darkness" is not a thing, it is the presence of absence. Here we have the essence of horror: not the fear of death but the fear of being, the invasion of private subjectivity by an anonymous vigilance or field of forces. It's a silent murmuring, and the dread we feel when looking at corpses (as if they'll come back into being at any second). The il y a is what is left over when we negate everything else; it's the density of the void. I think this is something everyone is aware of at all times, but it is especially evident during the nocturnal hours and exacerbated through insomnia.

Now, I spend much of my attention on what is going on inside me. I often find myself stopping what I’m doing or thinking to figure out what I feel about something. Given where I’ve come from, it’s an incredibly freeing experience. It’s so much fun. — T Clark

Yes, I agree. At times it is an exhilarating experience to read phenomenology and come across a perfect description of an experience that was previously clouded and ambiguous.

4) "It cannot be infinitely long." Is there a way to demonstrate this, other than by Occam's Razor? — Samuel Lacrampe

If you want to put a cup on a table, the table has to be stable and relatively motionless, which requires that it be on the floor, which requires it to be on the ground, etc. Each element in this series has derivative power, but derivative power is just simply power that is derived from something with ultimate power.

"Things can only exist, however, if it has the potential to exist which is actualized." I don't think this is possible. It seems to me that before a thing exists, then neither does its properties, including the property of potential existence. — Samuel Lacrampe

Things come into existence, as we usually see them, from other things that are already existing. And furthermore, it seems to me that, if material things are contingent, then this means they do not have to exist, which means that they have the potential to not exist. If this potential is not "part" of the material thing (since it does not exist), then it still exists as a possibility (perhaps in a mind).

This is interesting. Could you expand on this? I have trouble imagining that a lamb, having the un-actualized potential of being a sheep, must have evil. — Samuel Lacrampe

I'm not very confident about this notion either, I'm more sympathetic to the undefinability of goodness a la Moore and the British moral philosophers. But if we're going to Aristotelian route, it's that goodness has a lot of similarities to that of functioning "as it should". A lamb might not be bad if it's functioning as it should, i.e. to develop into a sheep. But it may be a bad lamb if it fails to develop. I don't really like this way of putting goodness, it doesn't seem very moral in nature.

Even a practising scientist is not in a position to make such a statement, unless they have worked in every scientific field. If you have not studied science at least to tertiary level, and preferably engaged in at least some research, this opinion is simply uninformed.

Science looks for patterns and makes models to describe them. One does not need to postulate a telos to do that, any more than one needs a telos when one looks for interesting shapes in clouds or star constellations. One may overlay a telos on it, if one's philosophical disposition encourages that - and some do. But such an overlay is strictly optional, and plenty don't. — andrewk

To a certain extent I would argue that one of the things allowing "scientism" to run rampant in many scientific circles is the loosening of importance of philosophical reflection in scientific reasoning. As science is taught (at least from my experiences), philosophy is not taken seriously, sometimes to the point of hostility. Many scientists, it would seem, fail to understand the metaphysical assumptions underlying their research, which leads them to assume something is the case (because of their general intellectual environment, probably most often) without actually arguing for it.

It used to be the case that great scientists were also great philosophers, or at least respected the importance of philosophy. They understood that science has limitations and works within a pre-established metaphysical framework. These metaphysical views were not assumed to be true, but they were approached in a more open-ended way. Many 20th century scientists took the views of Hume, Kant or Husserl seriously. Aristotle and Peirce are good examples of scientist-philosophers. etc.

Anyway, most scientists, like most people, believe there exists a real external world, that causality is real, that universals are real (re: natural kinds), that humans stand in a Cartesian relationship to the world, and, yes, that some form of teleology is real (even if most do not realize that teleology extends beyond intelligent-design babble). When you go into a specific field you see much more diversity of opinion in many metaphysical issues; neuroscience, psychology and the cognitive sciences have the representationalist theory of mind, and reductive materialism as paradigm ideas (yet there is a lot of disagreement, and I for one think they are wrong). QM leads us into theories of reality, realism and idealism or panpsychism or whatever. And biology is rife with teleological descriptions that, in most cases, are "reduced away" to mere mechanical laws with varying degrees of success.

So the point here is that science absolutely cannot operate without the use of metaphysical assumptions, whether scientists like it or not. Back in the day this was not controversial, but nowadays anything that threatens the monopoly, or hegemony, of science in our intellectual inquiry is immediately cast into doubt. We can't do science without metaphysical assumptions, but we can do science without metaphysics. But it just ends up cheap and uninteresting.

So stars, rocks, water, etc. aren't natural? This seems to be the same thing Apo said. I don't think that minds are a necessary requirement for some thing to be natural. — Harry Hindu

Well, no, I just said that inanimate objects that haven't been made by humans are usually the most obviously "natural" thing. But these objects don't exist by themselves, they exist within a broader teleological system, which I imagine this is what apo was saying.

To say that the supernatural can do the impossible is to say that it can be random, which you attributed earlier to being natural. — Harry Hindu

Well, supernatural agency would probably be seen as random, but impossibility =/= randomness. But we could see that God's intervention, if he exists, in the natural world is "natural" but that probably isn't what we want to see here, since it threatens to break down the very distinction we were trying to make. Again, remember I said natural-ness makes the most sense when constraining our thought to a certain region. Like how agency is natural when we're talking about human civilization, but is not natural, at least when compared to the bigger cosmos at large.

Did the natural world stem from the supernatural world? Which existed prior? If the supernatural world existed prior to the natural world, then you could say that is existed for a long time and is historic, which then makes it fall under your definition of "natural". You seem to be inconsistent in your descriptions. — Harry Hindu

If a supernatural being exists outside of time, it is eternal and has no "history".

There seems to be a greater magnitude of difference between natural and supernatural, than natural and artificial. But in both cases the difference arises by how we define "natural", and I think a general characteristic of natural-ness is that of being in accord with the way-things-have-been (for a long time). The natural is the historic.

Now we may say that it is natural that there be random events, but this is itself a historical claim: if randomness is natural, then randomness has been the way-things-have-been.

There also seems to be the important element of agency that differentiates the natural from the non-natural (the supernatural or the artificial). By this I mean intentional action, or more generally, teleological systems, which are contentious as they may be only a feature of mental states, or legitimate states of non-mental systems (or perhaps a mix, or an elimination of one, or whatever).

But perhaps "natural", since it is a historical claim, can never be a concrete and unchanging form. If intentional agency is around for a long enough time, it becomes part of the natural. And in fact we see this when we narrow our focus to human civilization. What is natural, anthropologically speaking, is intentional action, the use of tools, language, etc. Compared with the rest of the world, this may be "unnatural", but when we are dealing with human civilization itself, agency becomes the norm.

In a theological sense, the "supernatural" would be something that has qualities or powers that could never be that of the "natural" world around us, which is the collection of "material objects". It can do the impossible - or at least, do what we normally, usually see as impossible. We can then, presumably, specify (if we are inclined) by reference to a metaphysical system, perhaps Aristotle's, in which natural, material objects have potency and actuality, whereas a supernatural entity is pure actuality. But this also might just be a bunch of mumbo jumbo. Someone get Carnap in here. Or maybe Wittgenstein.

What notably distinguishes the first actualizer from other substances is that it necessarily exists. But there is no reason why it can't be material and mutable and have potentials just as other substances do. — Andrew M

This is going in the the neo-Platonic demonstration, but if this material being had both actuality and potentiality, then it would be a complex composite with parts, and a composite necessitates the existence of a simpler entity. This is again meant in the stronger hierarchical sense. It seems that by the nature of composites, they cannot be necessary. The fact that there are contingent composites leads the way to the existence of a non-composite, simple entity.

Though I do agree with you to some extent, I think Feser did not explain this well enough/failed to consider this particular objection.

I'm confused by what you mean. A purely actual being cannot change and thus cannot exist in time, which means it cannot be material. Are you implying it has not been shown that God must be immaterial?

Sure, but that's because your body is a material substance. God is not a material substance.

But it may nonetheless have unactualized potential for, say, causing substance S to exist.

If A subsequently does cause S to exist, then it has actualized a potential and thus has changed per premise 2:

2. But change is the actualization of a potential. — Andrew M

I don't think this is true. Just because change requires the actualization of a potential doesn't mean causing the actualization of a potential requires change. Indeed it would lead to an infinite regress if we tried to explain change by reference to something that, itself, changes.

Feser has a response to exactly this criticism (why does the actualizer have to be purely actual and not simply have unrealized potentials?) on page 66:

Effectively, Feser argues that if the actualizer had parts of itself that were unactualized potentials, then the actualized parts are what are really the purely actualized actualizer.