Aaron, do you know a place in the corpus where Aquinas explicitly argues:
1. against backwards causality
2. that the final cause/end must "exist in some way" before the agent begins its operation?

I have seen these positions in commentators on Aquinas, and in your own posts, but so far I have not found Aquinas himself arguing them explicitly.

Tx

Aaron:"For Aquinas, these cannot exist in material nature because then they would have to exist in the future, which is, according to him, absurd (Aquinas is a presentist)."

Aaron, do you know where in the corpus does Aquinas:
1. argue against backwards causality
2. argue that the final cause or end "must exist in some way" before the agent begins its operation?

Many Thomist commentators make this argument, but so far I have not found it explicit in the works of Aquinas himself. It may be implicit, or a later "repair" or expansion of his arguments from governance, but is it explicit in his work?

"The Fourth Way argument goes as far as to prove that there must exist a being whose essence is moral goodness to the maximum degree."

I agree that Christians attach the label "God" to the entities that Aquinas reaches at the end of his Ways. But the Fourth Way does not argue that God's essence is *goodness*. It argues that there is something that is maximally true, maximally good, maximally noble, maximally existing, and from the further premise from Aristotle that the maximally true are maximally existing, we are left to infer that the same X is maximally T, G, N and E. It goes on to conclude that this X is the cause of EG and "of any perfection whatsoever" [cuiuslibet perfectionis] for all entities. Nothing is said about X's essence's being identical with its existence. (That thesis, by the way, is not argued for in the Second Way, as you said above that it is. The Second Way is an argument about first efficient cause.) In your OP, after all, you wrote "And these beings are called perfect because they have goodness of that nature to the maximum degree ..." or there exists a being such.

More argumentation is needed to demonstrate that if X is maximally good, X is Goodness. I should think that the Fourth Way does not argue that X is goodness, but rather, that X is maximally Good and causes other, subordinate beings to be good. X has the property maximally but is not the property itself. The 4th Way concludes with this claim, that X is the cause of goodness for all entities. But if X just is good*ness*, then Aquinas would be concluding that X is the cause of X, i.e. of itself, for all entities. Given that X turns out to be God, I don't know how one could that God is the cause of God for all entities, since God is uncaused. God exists necessarily? But that's not the point of an argument from maximum degrees of properties.

I don't think the Fourth Way is that great. It's not demonstrated that maximal truth, maximal goodness, maximal nobility and maximal existence are distributed over the same x; we only get a citation from the Metaphysics that what are maximally true are also maximally existing. It's not clear whether properties that don't fall into Aquinas' list of transcendentals (nobility is generally not put on that list, BTW) also get distributed over the same X. One might think that they are not so; e.g. in the case of hot, which Aquinas uses twice as an example, the maximally true/good/noble/existing entity is not also the maximally hot entity. I think here of Parmenides' question about hair, mud and dirt, heh heh. So the "cuiuslibet perfectionis" premise would be false. Further, if "the maximally F is cause of F over all x's" thesis does not hold for all values of F, then the 4th Way seems to fail to establish a universal cause.

Finally, there is the old "existence is not a perfection" problem.

I think the argument in the De Ente et Essentia is stronger than the Fourth Way, though it too gets tangled up in making existence a perfection. In the ST, at any rate, it is only in 3.4 that God's essence and existence are argued to be identical. So one is not authorized to use "God's essence is identical to God's existence" as a premise in the Ways back in 2.3.

"The Fourth Way, or argument from degree, is not dependant on the claim that God's essence is identical with His existence. The argument only depends on the definition of 'goodness' as defined in the OP, and the acceptance that moral goodness is objective."

I brought up the Essence = Existence claim because your earlier defense of the Fourth Way appeals to some premise like it. If the "God's essence = God's existence" premise is excluded from those premises in the Fourth Way, then you are not authorized to defend the Fourth Way by saying that God "IS Moral Goodness" and the like, since claims "God is F-ness" depend on His essence's being identical with His existence.

Hello Samuel, what you write in your second paragraph has not been established at the stage of Aquinas' arguing for God's existence. It begs the question to claim that God's essence is identical with His existence and then to use that claim as a premise in an argument for God's existence like the Fourth Way.

Aquinas says in many places that God is not a member of any genus. Let's take a genus in the category of quality, "the just" in the plural. According to the Fourth Way, God would be maximally just, and all just creatures would be just but less so than God.

But if God is not a member of the genus, the just, then "just" does not have the same value when predicated of God as it has when predicated of creatures. It's as though we have grades of J and then argue to that which is Jg. But Jg is not identical to J because it is not in the genus J.

So how does this argument go through? It seems to involve a vicious equivocation.

One might reply, well, 'just' is predicated of God analogously. Analogical predication of names of God is a major piece of Thomist analysis of religious language. But then we get into problems with analogical predication, such as:
Thomistic analogical predication is not either of Aristotle's two kinds of analogy
Aristotle says that terms have to be predicated univocally for a demonstration to go through
We do not have access to the sense of terms that are allegedly predicated analogously, so we can't know what it means to say that God is Jg
In a proof for God's existence, it will beg the question to import the doctrine of analogical predications of names of God, since God's existence and attributes have not been established

I have much to learn, but the above seem to me to be problems with the Fourth Way, in addition to those that some of the others have pointed out already. I'm happy to be shown where I may be wrong.