Every Catholic priest is required to take four years of philosophy prior to his theology. Likewise, many Catholic philosophers who are also priests (though not necessarily pastors of churches) exist; I know many. We believe faith and reason to be fundamentally compatible because they are two aspects of the same truth.

Yours In Christ, Eternal Wisdom,

StMichael

What kind of Philosophy are priests taught?  If it's anything like the Christian Colleges around here, it consists of alot of philosophy of religion...from a Christian perspective.  And alot of philosophy by the St. Thomas, and St. Augustine.  Its all philosophy that has been basterdized into a religious context.  I doubt priests are taught serious Philosophy.  They are taught "philosophy" which is almost equivolent to theology. 

If one studies Philosophy, and after that time, still believes in God, one of two things has happened:  You didn't learn anything, or your dishonest.  Philosophy, like science, has at its very essence, rationality.  if all the arguments for God's existence are fallacious, then your belief is irrational. 

Please, show me some respect.  I don't sign off saying "yours in atheism" or "yours in reason" or "yours in science."  Please, show me the same respect. 

Yeah, pretty much.  I cannot see any other option at this point in time.  There is not one good epistemologically justified reason to believe in God.  If you study enough philosophy...and you do not see that not some...not most...but ALL the arguments for God's existence are fallacious, yet you still believe, you are wallowing in self-delusion, or you have turned into a deceptive charleton, like William Lane Craig.

Hey, if you think you have a good argument for God's existence, lets here it.  Realize, that all the usual ones are fallacious, like the ontological and cosmological argument...as well as the teleological arguments.  Moreover, I am familiar with Plantinga's Evolutionary argument against naturalism.  You need to give me an original argument for God's existence.  If you do this, and the argument is cogent...I will become a theist.

Really?  What are the other options?

Go on...

And you got this information from the bible, right?  How do we know the bible is reliable?  Well, because the bible says so.  To quote Sam Harris, epistemological black holes of this sort are fast draining the world of its light.

Its a statement that not only makes no sense, but is a statement no Philosopher would make.

right, as if I couldn't tell you were a Christian by your defense of Christianity.  Your sig is condesending and pretentious.

Yours in atheism,

Chaoslord2004 

[MOD EDIT - Removed duplicate post]

well, this is false given modern physics.  I suggest you go put down the theology books, and go study something important...like, i donno, physics.  Anyone who has studied physics, knows this is demonstrably false.  Take entropy.  Put a motionless atom in a vacuum...and it will become chaotic.  According to quantom theory, things pop in and out of existence uncaused.

Moreover, the above argument is invalid.  "therefore, God" does not follow from the premises...if by God, you mean the God of the bible.  All the above argument implies is that SOMETHING must have started motion.  In fact, this was Aristotles conclusion when he first came up with the argument.  he ment to demonstrate with this argument that SOMETHING must have started motion.  Nowhere in Aristotles conception did he envision God.  It was St. Thomas who basterdized Aristotles argument, and turned it into a piece of crap.  Aristotles argument was reasonable during his time.  However, good ole St. Thomas turned the argument into a non-sequitor.

For a more indepth refutation of the cosmological argument, read David Humes "Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion."

I find that hard to believe, since its pretty hard not to refute your argument.  You have been deluded by the metaphysics of your religion.

many of those philosophers, like all philosophers, are a mixed bag:  Some good insights, a whole lot of nonsense.  Even my favorate philosopher, Spinoza had a fair number of nonsensical beliefs.

Obviously you havn't, since your argument rests upon a fundemental misunderstanding of basic physics.  In fact, the whole Cosmological argument rests upon ancient conceptions of physics.  

Actually, it has everything to do with the Cosmological argument.  The cosmological argument rests upon a faulty understanding of physics.  Anyone who understood physics, would never put forth the Cosmological argument; or, they would become a charlaton like William Lane Craig.

No, actually it proves my point.  Im suprised you think it proves your point.  Take an atom, put it in a vacuum...and guess what?  It will move chaotically as time passes.  Is any agent acting on it? no.

Like I said, you obviously don't understand physics.  If you did, you would know that energy can never be created or destroyed...this is a very basic law of theormodynamics.

no, actually it is entirely true.  Show me, how from your premises, you can deduce that the unmoved mover has the properties you described.  You can't, because the argument...in and of itself, does not revel this.

This is what is claimed, but the argument does not prove this.  The argument doesn't necessarily prove the God of the bible.  If you claim it does, you have to demonstrate how it does this.  Show me how you can get that the unmoved mover is "omnipotent" from your premises.

So what?  Christians have also defended the Spanish Inquisition.  I care because...

I don't care.  I could careless what your faith dictates.  What I care about is what you can prove.  

Fallacy of Equivocation.  Your using "God" to mean two different things.  If the argument was valid and sound, all it would prove was that there was an unmoved mover.  If you want to call this being "God" fine, but then don't turn around and change the meaning to mean "the God of the bible."  The argument doesn't prove the God of the bible.

Fallacy of Equivocation.  He thought it was "God" as in a material mover.  Not, I repeat, not the God of the bible.

No, actually its a pretty basic observation.

An unmoved mover must be purely acting upon other things without having anything acting upon it. It must be purely in act, otherwise it would not be the Prime Mover. But, in so far as it is unmoved by another, it possesses the fulness of actuality without limit. Potentialiy indicates a potential for change to something else - a potential for actuality. But the Prime Mover is pure act, and has no ability to "progress" in actuality. Hence, it is pure act and cannot have any potency.

Yes, God does not possess knowledge in the same sense we do. God is His knowledge; this is the same with His other attributes: God is His intellect, power, will, existence. He is utterly "simple" or without division or parts.

The will indicates a desire of the intellect - its tending toward a good that is known. But God's intellect exists as proven, so His will must likewise exist as His tending toward Himself (which is likewise simple - His will is His own substance).

God is an immaterial substance - a spirit.

Yours In Christ, Eternal Wisdom,

StMichael

When God was "in act" in moving, what role did his will play? was he tending toward himself? Sorry if this question is naive, but could there have been another case where God decided not to be in pure act? 

Also, I still don't understand what you are saying about God's will. To me, will is only meaningful if something else could have occured. I asked this before but I'll ask again because I still don't get it: does will necessitate potentiality (Could God have chosen to be or do something else, or are all possibilities actualities?)?

Also what does it mean to say God's will exists as proven? I don't understand that.

Finally, can you more thoroughly explain what it means for God to tend toward himself?  

Thanks for taking me through this. I find it difficult to understand.

Keep clicking your heals together because some fairy told you you'd get home by doing that. Me I'd prefure to fly on a real plane or ride on a real bus.

StMichael wrote:

In a different note, it also indicates, according to modern theories of the second law, that the universe moves according to maximize entropy production in an orderly manner, guided to the end at which entropy can be maximized. This likewise proves that a rational orderer of the universe exists, because the universe acts in such a way as unintelligently to achieve the best result. In entropy, this is what results as a logical consequence of the law of entropy, where order arises in the nature of entropy production. But to achieve ends is specifically the characteristic of an intelligent agent. Hence, the universe is guided to achieve ends by a higher intellect - God.

Now lets examine the REAL picture...

The Universe most definitely does NOT "move[s] according to maximize entropy production in an orderly manner, guided to the end at which entropy can be maximized."

It moves in a not particularly ordered manner, subject only to the constraint that total entropy cannot decrease, and due to ordinary irreversible processes, must inevitably continue to increase, at least slightly.

Ultimately, entropy encapsulates in a quantitive form the basic facts that heat always flows from a hotter body to a cooler body, unless there is an input of some other form of energy to move heat the other way, as in a refrigerator.

There is the idea of an ideal 'reversible' process, in which there are no 'losses' due to friction or turbulence. If all thermal and mechanical energy interactions took place 'reversibly', so all loss of heat from a hot body was accompanied by generation of the maximum amount of mechanical energy, and all refrigeration processes are perfectly efficient, then there would be no change of entropy.

What happens as entropy increases is that the amount of energy availbale for conversion to other forms of energy decreases by that amount. The total amount of energy in the system does not change (thinking in classic terms for the moment, ie not worrying about matter-energy conversion, it just is in less useful form, like spread out over a lot of cool matter instead of concentrated in a smaller amount of hot matter.

Useful energy is essentially just motion in some consistent direction, like a moving body, a rotating shaft, or a flow of electricity. The same particles making up those things, with the same total energy of motion, but moving randomly, is identified as thermal energy. This insight lead to the extension of the idea of entropy as a measure of disorder. There is actually a subtly different usage of the term 'entropy' as a measure of information, which understandably the layman can easily get confused by, especially as there are some associations between the concepts of order and information.

The availability of free energy allows local decreases of entropy accomanying things like the emergence and evolution of life.

All that is required in the initial Big Bang singularity is that the energy was ordered, which would be the case if, for example, expanding space was filled with a relatively evenly distribution of particles, which attracted each other gravitationally. This leads to clumps of matter forming, heating up as graviational energy is converted to kinetic and thermal energy of spinning proto-stars and proto-galaxies. This is a somewhat over-simplified scenario, but is a general idea of the sort of thing that we speculate happened.

Those particules of matter probably condensed out of the raw energy of the initial fireball.

The law of entropy, at least in thermodynamics, says nothing about any absolute value of entropy, it is only only about changes of entropy, and maximums and minimums, measured as heat flows at particular temperatures.

About the energy of the 'fireball', where did it come from? There is an idea that if you take into account the gravitational energy of the universe, the nett energy of our known Universe iz zero, since gravitational energy is treated as negative, on the basis that the gravitational energy of an extremely spread out sea of particles separated by such large distances that they don't significantly attract each other, is assumed to approach zero.

As objects separated at very large distance move towards each other under the influence of gravity, the increase in energy of motion is balanced out by an equal amount of negative gravitational energy.

So all we are left with is what 'triggered' the initial singularity to start expanding, and this would appear to have occurred at the quantum level, where things like quantum fluctuations seem to be as purely random as any process known, and therefore essentially 'causeless'.

Somehow I don't think Aquinas was quite up to speed with all this, so I think at the very least his argument would need to be entirely re-thought before we can take any account of it.

OK, now where is the logical requirement for a conscious entity in all this????

EDIT: Could you actually give a link to an article relating to one of these "modern theories of the second law" you referred to? I do read a lot of science, and that doesn't ring a bell with me, but you may well be expressing the idea in a way I don't recognise.

The philosophy involved in these arguments, and much of the science for that matter, seems like stuff from the early history of those subjects, rather than actually current understanding. I think someone has mistaken a course on the history of philosophy for the actual discipline itself...

It boggles my mind that this fellow expects his argument to be compelling, even though it rests upon Medieval conceptions of matter and motion.  Medieval conceptions of matter and motion have not been accepted since Newton wrote his Principia Physica (I think thats what it was called) in the 1500's.

Motion, in the Aristotelian sense, is merely the movement of a thing from potency to act or vice-versa. Local and material motion is one sense of motion which likewise requires a mover. But the same is true of any change.

Further, I believe the proof likewise stands on its own assuming modern theories of motion. In reference to other things, an object is in motion. But this does not negate the fact that a thing cannot be in motion without a mover. Nor does it negate the fact that things are in motion (even if relative to us, they are in motion). These last two are all that is needed to deduce an unmoved mover. 

This last phrase indicates entropy is a one-way street which required an original phase of order. It likewise indicates a mover of the universe, otherwise the "movement" of entropy "forward" would not exist; it requires a mover to set the universe in motion for entropy to exist.

Maximum entropy production was a modern discovery that the movement of heat always flows in the way that best accomplishes the heating of the object in question. In other words, a rational order.

Which indicates that the universe must have had a mover. Otherwise, the Big Bang singularity would not have been ordered at all.

Precisely my point. It only dictates a decrease in order in a given system. Which begs the question that, if there is order now and order inevitably decreases with life of the system, there must have been a first mover to cause order in the system.

I don't know what you mean by "fireball" but I assume the Big Bang is here indicated.

Which begs the question of why the things existed in that way in the first place.  

Not there yet. Hold your pants on.

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v436/n7053/full/436905a.html

This is an article about MEP.

In a manner. They choose an apparent good.

God never created hell. I don't see how God's goodness factors into the possibility of hell in the first place. Further, His creatures do will their own good in the world; there is no question that they do (assuming they are rational and have wills).

No, you are misreading what it means to will ones own good. Everyone wills some good to themselves. One could will that one drinks a cup of water because one is thirsty. The water is a good because it satisfies the thirst. The people in hell still will their own good, and this is fundamentally what causes them pain because they have forever lost the Good itself.

Yes, in the sense that, for example, he wills to be like God in such a way that he is prideful. It is a good to be like God in general, but his will is evil in willing this thing in a wicked way. For he willed to be like God in obtaining beatitude not through God's grace but by his own power, or by desiring some good which he could obtain by his own natural powers rather than the supernatural beatitude offered by God. In either case, he turned his will from God and thence sinned.  

I would suppose that He hates it.

We can create a bench from wood, and this term we use "to create" is likewise applied to God in a supereminent way when we speak of His creation of the universe. I don't know if this is what you mean, so ask differently if you mean something different.

I am not sure what this means, but I think the answer is "No."

God only necessarily wills certain things, such as His own goodness (as we likewise will our own goodness). Outside of those, however, He is free to create or not create. Possibility still exists. It would have been possible for God to do something differently.

I don't know.

When will what happen? God is constantly perfectly united with His own will.

I couldn't say. Only God, who knows hearts, could.

To know the good requires a properly formed conscience, which is accomplished by investigating the right and evalutating morality rationally. I would point out, however, that God made this considerably easier by Revelation, where He reveals a good deal about what we could naturally know about moral action and a good deal more that we could not know about how to attain salvation through Christ. By original sin, human knowing has been impaired and becomes filled with error. This is one reason why God revealed these truths: to make them certainly known by all men so that they can easily attain salvation.

I personally have no idea who gets to heaven. Christians and Jews have a naturally higher chance because they both possess the moral law revealed by God and hence are surer here. Christians further possess greater aids through the teaching of the Church, Scripture, and the grace of the Sacraments, all of which makes their chance of going to heaven much more probable. But it does not guarantee it, as is evident from apostasy and sin among Christians.

It is, however, a truth that God offers to all men at all time sufficent grace to come to salvation. This might mean an opportunity to accept baptism in the Catholic Church, or to hear the Gospel preached, or merely to discover the moral law naturally (without knowledge of the Gospel). And so, all men can be saved even naturally if they obey the voice of conscience. But all of this is oriented toward the Church and draws one into it, because God established it as the sure, certain, and ordinary means of salvation. It likewise becomes harder to follow the moral law and to know God outside of the Church, without the help of the Church's teaching and grace in the Sacraments. We cannot say for sure, but we firmly believe that God wills all men to be saved and that no one is saved outside of the Catholic Church. Thus, we preach the Gospel and evangelize to bring all men to salvation.   

Well, I suppose this is a rather complex question on two levels. First, it is definitely not in our power to know whether a person is going to heaven or hell, as God decides this according to His judgement about their soul (which only He knows). Second, there is, however, of course a probable knowledge we could have based on such things as whether the person is an orthodox Catholic and performs works of charity, prayer, ect. recieving the sacraments, and the like. But I don't think it wise or helpful to speculate on whether some particular person is going to heaven or hell. If you want to know how you can avoid hell, there are clearly two commands from God: to love God above all things and your neighbor as yourself. If you fulfill the first, this entails such things as: prayer, fasting, recieving the sacraments, orthodox belief in union with the whole Catholic Church, ect. If you fulfill the second, this entails such things as: almsgiving, prayer for the dead, works of corporeal mercy, ect.   

If you have further questions about these things, I suggest you ask a Catholic priest in your area, as he could help you better "face-to-face" than I can over the computer. 

May almighty God keep you in His care, and may His Blessed Mother pray for you. 

Yours In Christ, Eternal Wisdom,

StMichael 

Occasionalism is not involved here. Nor do I espouse such a theory.

As an atheist who is very interested in philosophy, I will readily admit that I have learned a great deal from theist philosophers, teachers, and authors.  Thinkers like Kierkegaard and Levinas have contributed a great deal to philosophy, and one of the greatest philosophical attacks on the proofs for god's existence came from a theist: David Hume's "Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion." 

My undergraduate philosophy professor, who made a major impact on my thinking and introduced me to many great books and thinkers, was a christian.  As a great teacher, of course, he encouraged me to explore my own interests and thoughts. 

I disagree Plantinga and Swinburne make good arguments, perhaps not sound arguments, but they are valid arguments. There are a few questions that come to mind, what constitutes a good argument? Further what constitutes a good philosopher? I don't think the two walk hand in hand, I disagree with most of what Descartes argues but I still think he is a good philosopher. Plantinga is still even recognized, widely, as a good philosopher; take a philosophy of logic course and you are bound to discuss him on modalities, and necessity; take an epistemology course and you are most likely going to talk about proper function theory; Even now he has just published an article for the Stanford encyclopaedia of philosophy on Religion and Science, so it is not the case that his ideas are not being recognized as in the range of "good".

Swinburne is a well known public intellectual, and I think he is a good philosopher, I don't agree with him, but he is still a good thinker and makes valid points, and writes good books. In addition there are several other thinkers I have listed there, several of them have won awards for their work in philosophy... I still maintain you can be a good philosopher and a theist.

I don't know, Cartesian foundationalism has seen better days. And logical positivism seems to have run it's course.

Again I will have to disagree, and it's questionable what constitutes "moving others". I think Alan Wood is a pretty good epistemologist and is paving the way for some good ideas in virtue epistemology. In addition Philip Clayton has recently won the Templeton prize, and George Ellis has received the same prize (this prize is noted for being larger than the noble prize, so that suggests that his ideas are moving people).

 There's also Keith De'Rose, a leading contextualist philosopher at Yale. And the list goes on and on.

Well, that depends what you take supernatural claim to be. If by supernatural you mean theistic claims, or strong emergence claims then I disagree. Certainly Dawkins and Dennett don't take them seriously, two people are not every person. Philip Clayton and Paul Davies recently explored the emergence hypothesises, Clayton and Davies both took each others claims seriously and had a dialogue about Science, Emergence and Religion; Clayton is a theist, Davies is not. So I don't think that theists and scientists are out of the realm of having a dialogue with each other and take each other's claims seriously, provided they can agree that each other is rational. If they didn't think each other were rational thinkers then I don't think dialogue can even happen.

I disagree, holding a religious belief is not necessarily irrational, some hold their religious beliefs based on reason. Now the reasoning may not be sound but a reasoned case can still be made for a theistic belief. If you define rationality to simply not include holding a religious belief, then that is an ad hoc theory of rationality, philosophical theorizing goes wrong when you cling to ad hoc principles like that.

In response to your position on "supernatural" and causality, it depends what you take to be supernatural. There are philosophers who find natural, reductionism methodology extremely lacking (I am one of them), for example you cannot say as a scientist, what I ought to do in Iraq today. That is to say you can't ask a scientist as a scientist "what do scientists say what we ought to do in Iraq?", it is completely out of the domain of scientists. There are also metaphysical issues that seem to lie outside the domain of natural science; so there seems to be some basis for arguing for transcendence, if that's supernatural then so be it.

It depends what you mean by "realm" of causality and logic. If what you mean is a particular domain then you seem to be arguing along similar lines as a logical positivist. What about a domain for ethics, or aesthetics? Even metaphysics seems to a lost cause according to such a hypothesis.

This seems to be ad hominem, if it is an argument at all. My thesis is that Philosophers who are theists can be good philosophers and rational. You define rationality as not including faith, I take this to be holding a religious belief, thus anyone who holds a religious belief is guilty by association.

I take your point, however I did not argue that axioms were unjustified, just that a definition of rationality needs to be modified, I think you agreed with me there and that was the basis of my point.

If irrationality is accepting into one's ontology anything that is not proven using logical argument, then by definition logicians who accept axioms into their ontology and modest foundationalist who accept something along the lines of prima facie justification of basic beliefs are irrational. It is not the case that logicians who accept axioms into their ontology and modest foundationalist who accept something along the lines of prima facie justification of basic beliefs are irrational (there are practical reasons as you've listed above to accept axioms into one's ontology), Thus irrationality is not defined as accepting into ones ontology anything that is not proven by logical argument (via modus tollens).

A latter concern is that you think basic beliefs are unjustified in the epistemological sense, I disagree, I think basic beliefs are justified non-doxastically (this is just nit picking though), I tend to think that basic beliefs are also fallible but that's just my opinion.

Although I have yet to argue for a non-materialist view, yet, my point was to argue that you can be a theist and good philosopher, and rational. We however have different opinions on what constitutes rationality, which is fine, but I'm not sure that anyone has really laid out a really good definition for rationality except positing what it is not. I'm more interested in hearing what rationality IS, and arguments for what rationality is.

Now you somewhat argue that naturalist rationality is "dropping anything that is falsified", but even Karl Popper argues that religious belief cannot be falsified (scientifically), so it's not clear why you would drop God in your ontology. You might argue that since God cannot be falsified it should be dropped from your ontology, but if it is the case that anything that cannot be falsified should be dropped then we should also drop “I ought to keep my promises” , or perhaps any ethical principle from one’s ethical ontology, since they cannot be falsified either.

Let me be clear I am not positing God as a scientific hypothesis, I think this is a wrong approach, I am discussing philosophical opinions on rationality and the belief in God, and this is in the domain of philosophy.

Anyways, I may post an argument or two on non-materialism in the future, but not right now, I have a few papers to write; I just thought I'd post a slight rebuttle.