Will anyone ever match his brilliance? Is there anything left to prove?

Will anyone ever match his brilliance? Is there anything left to prove?

C.S Lewis is basically a modern version of him.

hi, your friendly neighborhood user here to remind you C.S. Lewis said Jesus told a false prophecy but still tried to justify him being God

That doesn't change the fact your prophet Darwin/Nietzsche/Freud got BTFO by him.

C.S Lewis believed in Evolution, and where did he even directly address Nietzsche?

Also the idea that he was anywhere near Aquinas in terms of philosophy is pants on head retarded.

Yeah he's much better, he perfected him and actually managed to prove God and destroy nichilism once and for all.

he didnt address nietzsche but his arguments for absolute morality and """slave""" morals being a good thing did wreck nietzsche

what qualifies as justice or moral behavior varies greatly across cultures, which means humans cannot all be applying the same moral code. even in the bible you'll find inconsistencies to what the average christian finds moral, see multiple wives, concubines, genocide, etc, etc. this isn't even Lewis's own original argument, it's just rehashing what has already been done

God's moral code is fluid you utter imbecille, that doesn't mean it doesn't exist

Aquinas always winuias.

It's Tommaso d'Aquino, i wonder why Angloturds call him Aquinas

so his moral code is fluid to the point that I in america can have no problem with my daughter moving in with her boy friend but at the same moment somewhwre in the world a daughter is being stoned for dishonoring her family through adultery?

Anybody who takes Thomas Aquinas seriously is a fucking idiot.

It depends on the context, his code is forgivness and will to sacrifice

except that many cultures don't highly value forgiveness, see the honor killings i just mentioned

>universal applicability
leave cuck.

Those are called Satanic cultures

that's what universal moral code implies. does whether i can kill my daughter for adultery depend on how close i am to a desert? maybe i should move to arizona then

Yeah he's much better,

When the Son of Man came to the earth the rules "changed" (they didn't change but he took sin upon himself)

>that's what universal moral code implies
"universal" moral codes are inhuman. Perhaps some vague and broad tenets can transcend civilizations. They already do in a way.

I hope you realize you just called the OT Law satanic

Satan uses the same laws of the Father but for the wrong reasons, read some Theology

yes yes, so stoning my daughter for adultery was A ok up til 33AD

Are you fucking retarded or just trolling?

Jesus stopped the stoners

yes, and he contradicted the law's specification to stone adulterers. so now one of the two has to be wrong: was the Torah inspired by God incorrect or was Jesus wrong? it can't be both. I don't want to have to look up the specific verse but I will if I have to

>retarded christfag
>brilliance

Areyou fucking kidding me?
The Torah was rigjtof course, but since God understood man is too weak willed for it he became the Son of man and took the sin upon himself despite being the perfect man (and God at the same time) thus nullifying having to follow the old law to the letter

jesus's incident with the adulterous woman was before his crucifixion and therefore before he "nullified" the Law.

Yes but he knew he was going to nullify it, hispresence alone held a lot of nullyfing power (of course with death he would nullify even worse sins)

not in the bible at all, but I'll let that slip for now, because I'd like to return this back to the beginning of this argument: the universal moral code in people's hearts that apparently depends on "context" in the vague. here we have a situation where the "context" changes and yet people's hearts weren't aware and wanted to continue the stoning

...

>not in the bible

Itis, you have a mind, use it to interpret it correctly


>depends on the context

Of course

>avoids entire argument of the post

Thomas "there is a biggest number" Aquinas.

Thomas Aquinas is really really good, even from an atheist perspective. The problem is that like Seinfeld he's been so influential that his philosophy doesn't seem nearly as impressive anymore.

Explain how he's good

>what qualifies as justice or moral behavior varies greatly across cultures,
>which means humans cannot all be applying the same moral code
No falser words were ever spoken. Human cultures all have a conception of morals, just as all humans have descriptions of reality. Why is morality not treated as an empirical field like the material world simply because someone disagrees with a proposition. If someone disagrees we test objective moral reality and see if the proposition is consistent or inconsistent. All men hold sacred things as the basis of morality, sure the most absolute sacred thing is the most absolute basis. When someone disagrees with a proposition in the material world we go to the absolute basis of criteria for the material world, existence.
When my book "The Empirical Morality" comes out, don't you dare steal my ideas.
Veeky Forums will be on the back cover as the reason why I felt compelled to write against relativism. Just to spite the Redditors I wont mention them and i'll also reference /pol/.
There wont be any real name dropping, just subtle references that chan users will understand and Normies will brush off as 'poetic'.
I'm going to make Kant look like a fucking joke.
Bless these great men.

All writers have shit grammar btw, its why we proofread and then get others to proofread, and then proofread again. But you know, who cares.

and the appeal to God being the appeal to the most real the most true of all sacred understandings, just as existence is the most real and the most true of all material understandings.
I am not a theologian, but I hope they do their jobs.

>what qualifies as justice or moral behavior varies greatly across cultures, which means humans cannot all be applying the same moral code
How does that refute in any way the existence of a single objective moral code?

It doesn't, that's the great embarrassment of moral relativists and epistemic denialists about morality.
They are left with shouting "Well, no one REAALLY knows." Saying "You can't prove anything." As if they were a criminal facing death row. They aren't wrong about their situation, morality is quite serious, and the idea that everything matters, every single act, matters on a level of significance which is incomprehensible is terrifying.

bwcause according to Lewis moral reasoning comes from appealing to a universal moral code. if people were appealing to a universal moral code they have to at least agree to the same basic principles, which people do often disagree about.

Because without Aquinas western Europe would have been on the same trajectory as the Eastern Orthodox world into mystic naval-gazing rather than the Catholic academic tradition that made much of our modern society possible.

I'm sorry but that's a really bad objection.
Imagine I were to say "well there isn't really a fact about the origin of mountains because people have held really different beliefs about it. If there was really an objective fact about it, why do they disagree so much?"
That objection looks patently absurd, right?

first we'd need a way to determine what the correct morality is. even supposing you have a method that no one has apparently discovered before this would still contradict Lewis's idea that this universal moral code is in everyone hearts and everyone already knows it

also I should add that this analogy is absurd. we all agree that there are morals. we all agree that the morals have an origin in something. you even agree that some morals don't have an objective basis.

The analogy isn't in the origin bit, it's just in the idea that because there is disagreement about something, it means that something is unlikely to be objective.
It's a piss poor argument.

the disagreement disproves Lewis's specific argument. it wasn't intended to disprove all conceptions of how objective morality could exist

>Will anyone ever match his brilliance?

He was not only matched but overtaken within his own lifetime and within his own field.

>If someone disagrees we test objective moral reality and see if the proposition is consistent or inconsistent.
What is "objective moral reality" and how can we test it?

Aquinas, Duns and Ockham are the three most important philosopher-theologians of the late middle ages. Which one is more important is completely arbitrary. Aquinas is the most famous out of the three though.

Aren't all three of them Doctors of the Church, too?

Too bad only librarians study Scotism, and only from an historical perspective. Also, they seem to get super salty when someone equates Scholasticism with Thomism.
Ockham isnt, he bordered on heresy on his final years, but apparently recanted.

>Duns and Ockham
I've never heard of them but are intrigued.

Ockham's razor?

That's named after a Catholic theologian? Interesting.

>Catholics using greek pagan philosopher to prove god exists

Why am I not surprised

Good explanation desu.

The semites were never good at that shit

>Just as the footprint in the sand is evidence of a camel, the creation of the universe is evidence of god

Im pretty sure the flying spaghetti monster created the universe, the evidence is everywhere

Lmaooooo, nice meme fellow redditor

And yet dune cross-bedding is only evidence of sand and wind, but we could just as easily invoke djinn as an explanation for them if we discount natural processes out of hand.

This. It was a really nice reference.

Not at all. Thomas Aquinas is simply an old historical meme who is held up as an intellectual beacon for no other reason than that his closer proximity to today allows his "rigorous discourses" to be taken more seriously, because they seem to have a significant logos to them (they don't). It's also an intellectual way for catholics to feel good about themselves, to bask in Muh Culture. Except there's really no rigor at all, it's an acceptable play.

Look at this shit. Yes, it's an oversimplified wiki, but /look at it/. /Scan it a moment and actually think about the substance of the ideas as represented here/. "Oh derp a chain so Muh God of course". Every time. THESE are the five ways that are supposed to be so sublime? No, of course not. Before, I actually thought that they were supposed to be halfway-compelling arguments. The more one learns about Thomas, the easier it becomes for a clear-headed person to dismiss him, and to vanish the mystique about him, especially as it promulgates on the globally pro-catholic quasi-alt-right (above all contrarian, which now means traditionalism) Veeky Forums, on its more polite boards anyway.

All that Thomas was really ever doing was to play an acceptable language game in his own historical period, and to be very good at playing that language game. That's all. At no point does Thomas approach the logos that moderns would like to put on him, or which is actually necessary. He's just an old meme-man who wrote such a very lot of stuff that people think that he has value, like Aristotle. And in both cases, that is exactly the problem.

1/2

>pic related to this post.

You think that Thomas approached his subject matter /dispassionately/, /objectively/, scientifically? Of course not-he was raised in a Christianity Is Mandatory milleu. Apologists will immediately protest of course not, and yet this logos and apologia is exactly what is supposed to put an intellectual veneer on unintellectual ideas, ideas worth dismissing. You can't and won't have it both ways. Aquinas had an "I'm right because I'm-right" agenda, and exege-sized about it. That's all. He didn't prove anything. Exactly because the world keeps on turning as it does.

It is incumbent upon every religious person and it is especially incumbent upon the believers in the false catholic church to renounce their false christ. Thomas achieves nothing. You are an idiot if you believe in the false christ, and the way forward is to destroy the idea of god in the heart of man, starting with your children (it's generally too late to convince you, so we'll go for your children). This can, should, must and will be achieved, so that in a future state of affairs, not a single human being will believe in god. And then the world will be worth living in. And it will then be exactly as it always should have been in the first place.

Now, try something, faggots. Try and actually not post your fat-manfunnyhat pix. Try and actually think. You would like to say that I am wrong (I'm not). Attempt to articulate why that is so (it isn't). Get creative, faggots.

The dismissal of Thomist nonsense should never be extended into a dismissal of the legitimate work Aristotle did for his time. The first step to being right is to be wrong in a consistent, testable manner, and despite his numerous blunders Aristotle represents a good first step into the sorts of investigation we now know as science.

Even this defense of Aristotle is too much. Oh all right, taxonomy, list down categories, fine. But when you get so much, so wrong, so hard as he did (and he did), it is salutary to dismiss Aristotle in toto and only later go back as an academic curiosity to see what bits he might have got right, and not the other way round.

These people need to be relegated to the otherwise-irrelevant historical curiosities that they really are.

Nietzsche won in the end though

>Too bad only librarians study Scotism, and only from an historical perspective.

Unless Aristotle becomes big again (outside of the weird Ayn Rand way) its probably going to stay that way. Same with all the Scholastics outside of Aquinas due to his relative simplicity and memeworthyness.

>Also, they seem to get super salty when someone equates Scholasticism with Thomism.

It would be kind of like if someone thought that all of German idealism was just Hegel.

Fortunately thought scholastics are so very rare and are tied up on simply defending Aquinas from new atheist understandings that they dont have to often argue about their own existence as a school of thought.

>tries to mock Thomas
>using Wikipedia
you're only making a fool out of yourself.

>inb4 this is pasta

>Unless Aristotle becomes big again (outside of the weird Ayn Rand way) its probably going to stay that way. Same with all the Scholastics outside of Aquinas due to his relative simplicity and memeworthyness.
Aristotelianism is making a big comeback. Many philosophers are following a broadly Aristotelian metaphysics, while taking some insights from Thomas, Scotus, Ockham, etc.

Can you expand upon this? and the implied miss use of Aristotle in ?

From what ive seen in pics like this he seems to be on the level however Im unsure if its just my ignorance when it comes to causation and simmilar concepts

>Aristotelianism is making a big comeback.

I'm not involved in the field enough to be able to see and evaluate on the ground changes. It will be real interesting to see if this is a flash in the plan or a serious change.

Do you think it will be able to past the political biases and anti religious sentiment in non religious universities?

I hope not, Aristotelian metaphysics are elegant solutions to non-existent problems.

> Aristotelian metaphysics are elegant solutions to non-existent problems.

How are objective ethics and the nature of causation and God not real problems?

*demolishes scholasticism*
*turns it into synonymous with gibberish*
Nothing personnel Monsieur.

>Muh essence
>Muh substance
>Muh angels
Wow so intellectual! There are people living today that take this seriously.

This assumes that 'potential' is anything more than a human invention for the sake of convinience. As far as I can tell there is no potential, just actual.
And the whole thing involving time somehow functioning according to inertia or whatever is purely speculative and has no basis in reality, unless somesuch force has been demonstrated, and to my knowledge, is not the case.

>This assumes that 'potential' is anything more than a human invention for the sake of convinience. As far as I can tell there is no potential, just actual.

I think that issue is answered in that third collum on the pic

Okay, from what I'm gathering the distinction comes from the very real ability for matter to change states and assigning every attribute to the object depending on what may happen. This pretty much defeats the whole purpose of distinguishing pot/act. I could just be not getting it, but this is my take.
Moreover, the third column brought a problem I missed the first time, which is the whole metaphysics thing. Outside of this argument being purely speculative, it's also pretty much just god of the gaps. There's also the whole multiverse hypothesis, which is at the very least testible; and more or less turns this universe into a numbers game.

>there are laws of physics, there was the big bang
>we call it God
>Yeah right man Aquinas is the proof Christianity is right! Also this God he proved was born on Earth as a wizard and hates fags and you'll burn in hell
>how did I arrive here? oh, that part wasn't philosophy or logic, just, you know, le faith
*posts lewis*

Except he was wrong? There is zero reason to think that the existence of the universe proves the existence of a deity.

Basically what this guy said.

Well done.

>instantaneous causation
Not a thing, sorry. The whole argument falls without it, so, good riddance.

Inb4 he will use an example in line of one of these:
>Fire causes heat and is simultaneous with its effect
>My sound health causes my heart to be alive, which in turn keeps my health
>The reason of a mathematical truth is simultaneous with said truth
The first case only holds if we understand causation vaguely. What is really happening is that energy from the fire is, putting it simply, getting out of it, so there is a movement from the fire in a moment A to the environment in a moment B, posterior to A. So no simultaneous causation here.
The second case only holds in a loose way of defining causation. A more adequate way of stating it is "The oxygen from my blood going to my heart keeps it alive, and my heart in turn makes my blood circulate to the rest of my body, which in its turn keeps my lungs alive, which purify my blood so it can give oxygen to my heart and the rest of my body, and so on until I die". We don't have simultaneous causation here, but processes happening one after another in time, the thing is that an A-kind process is going to be the result of a B-kind process, but before said A-kind process there is still another A-kind process happening, which gives us the illusion that both A-kind processes are the same process happening simultaneously with a B-process that is actually a sucession of B-kind processes.
As for the third case, there is really no causation, no "going from potency to act", it just says that a given representation is inseparable from another given representation. That would not argue for the existence of God, only for the existence of an all-encompassing representation, and that is space and time.

The problem isnt that potency act diviison doesnt make sense, though you could argue it does not in light of quantum mechanics.

Its that its a word game that adds nothing to our understanding. I could easliy argue that Buddhist metaphysics explain the underlying rules of our world using a systematic argument, but that would in no way prove Buddhist metaphysics or Buddhism.

I can't read the pic...

>the creation of the universe is evidence of god
The creation of the universe is eveidence of something. Whether your a sciencetist type who thinks its a computer simulation or whether the universe itself is God, ect is another thing entirely.

Your post was a good read
But you're a retard if you believe
>This can, should, must and will be achieved, so that in a future state of affairs, not a single human being will believe in god. And then the world will be worth living in.
All our minds are pretty restrictet and we like to fill the huge voids that leaves some way or an other. Therefore people believe. They believe in whatever and that's not a bad thing in iteself

I agree that it adds nothing to our understanding, but I just wanted to demonstrated how it is so. Otherwise a Thomist could say "You just don't understand!"
The only meaning it can have is one analogous to the real/possible distinction, but in this case it only tell us about our understanding of the situation, it does not add anything to it.

In talking about "creation" you are already presupposing a creator, that's fallacious thinking.

That doesn't make his philosophy good.

What is the difference between being, essence, substance and substantial form? Nobody knows, they just parrot these words, often interchangeably.

"Substance" means the substratum of modifications called accidents, but what is this, if not matter?
Besides this meaning, the Scholastics talk about substance as something considered in and by itself alone; but then it would be just an idea, like the idea of circle: I don't need to think about other things (besides space) to think about a circle.
Moreover there is the meaning of "something being real in and by itself", and then we have Kant's thing-in-itself.
So, if we analyze Scholasticism, substance basically means three different things: matter, idea and thing-in-itself.
The major problem with Scholastic notion of substance is that it falls in vacuous abstractions. But it is probably intentional: if it were not so it would not be possible to defend transubstantiation.

*tips*

>but what is this, if not matter?
Maybe it's the actual definition of substance that scholastics use, instead of trying to find paralels in other writers and assume what theyre talking about. In fact, there is a whole dictionary with the definitions of these terms, along with the books make by Thomas, Scotus, Suarez and the hundreds of Scholastics that have ever written.

I based what I wrote in the Catholic Encyclopedia definition of substance:
>Substance, the first of Aristotle's categories, signifies being as existing in and by itself, and serving as a subject or basis for accidents and accidental changes
I just divided the definition in two parts and, along with it, I put the Cartesian idea of substance as something conceived through itself.

try using he zoom function on your computer by pressing ctrl then moving the mouse wheel forward