I like that idea, especially since the Bible seems to represent God in several different ways - it's interesting to think of different ideas of God, appearing different from our perspective but really perfectly unified.

(would it be in God's interest to appear manifold? or would that just be our failings?)

Good to keep in mind - names are all in our head

Doesn't look like Aquinas has ever been camping

Oof that really doesn't sound like very much then

I mean isn't that the point, that God is so mindblowing, it's impossible to mean more?

Meaning, I think, something coinciding with something else, not necessarily attached to it

sounds like the greek four humours idea?

Does anybody else ever wonder whether some animal species are actually smarter than we are, but we don't know that because we're not as smart?

well isn't that subjective? A scientist would say that nature's determinate end is survival and it is self propagating.

Compared to arguments like "God is a stupid idea", saying "God doesn't need to exist" seems pretty clever actually

Here is the full verse, Aquinas paraphrased it

" For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse. "

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Romans%201:20

I'm sorry WHAT EFFECTS ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT

Does he ever specify in this passage ?

I mean I could put a dozen different possibilities here of what God's effects on the world could be and what Aquinas (and Paul) could possibly mean, but unless I'm missing something, he never specifies and this makes it impossible to really critique his argument. Like if he said "oh God's effect on the world is its natural harmony" or whatever you could of course pick this apart and assess to what degree it points towards God, how Aquinas' perspective on the environment contrasts with our modern one, etc etc, but no

WHICH things that have been made? Humans? The beauty of nature? Human morality specifically? EVERYTHING???

If I could time travel I would go back and pay Paul a billion shekels to be more specific, every word you write is going to be scrutinized for centuries by millions of people for crying out loud

Paul the author of Romans

how do we know? because time is finite?

I also wonder whether the concept of infinity was used in Aquinas' day the same way it is used today, with a mathematical sense to it, or if 'infinite' for Aquinas meant the same as 'eternal' Like had people really worked out this concept yet, or was it just a way of describing something that lasted forever?

recalls negation

(,when it really consists in God) I guess

There are other interesting ways you could use this argument, like saying humanity desires companionship, or survival, and that true companionship/survival consists in God

faith is ok in the argument, bc you're allowed to use it as a starting point to argue from

I think he's still presupposing god's existence though

Ok, this feels as if it implies that humans can get divine revelation (the source of sacred science) wrong because of our weak intelligence

I wonder if this is Aquinas permitting doubt as an allowable action for a Christian, or just admitting that it is possible for a Christian to doubt.

not to mention that ecclesiastes is probably not the best book to quote lol

Is this elitist coming from Aquinas, if he's saying that among every human, only a few can fully use their reasoning abilities?

Or is this an acknowledgement of the (sad?) fact that some people are just smarter than others? Is that even a fact? Can anyone learn anything, or are some people forever held back, doomed to ignorance by inefficient genes (I'm thinking Forrest Gump here)? Of course in such a scenario, assuming God's mercy, divine revelation seems a certainty, but I feel like this leads to another question (at least for someone believing in divine revelation) regarding the possibility/method of divine revelation for mentally handicapped persons. Not at all something that would hold Aquinas' ideas back, but likely something that would necessitate further explanation nonetheless.

Full verse, different translation

"So I saw that there is nothing better for a person than to enjoy their work, because that is their lot. For who can bring them to see what will happen after them?"

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Ecclesiastes+3:22&version=NIV

isn't this identical to ~affirming~ that God is alive?

and the negation begins

very humbling

the gap that negation fills in, or at least tries to

reference to biblical legend to support his idea

It looks like rainbows connote divinity to the Israelites?

So they have to be actual wheels

This whole wheel passage is so trippy! Who knows if the wheels can't rotate like normal wheels or if the wheels can't change direction while moving

similar language to Avicenna - did Maimonides read his stuff?

This is another text where the concept of God's unity plays a huge role

You mean what we're doing? psych

Does seem pretty weird though given that people elaborated on Plato, Aristotle all the time in the middle ages

Maybe kind of protective I guess? "It's my philosophy, don't write in it and mess it up, I paid money for that thing"

Thinking about only the literal interpretation is very self-constraining

I think this is pretty smart because people do this all the time actually

Like in God creating the world in 7 days, the point isn't that land existed for a literal day before plants did or whatever, the point is that he worked for 6 days and rested on the 7th one, illustrating the holiness of the sabbath. But people "turn aside" from that and obsess over the literal days (I think)

So Maimonides is preemptively warning against that kind of thing

Hey it's funny reading this from a Jewish author since I've seen the phrase before in a Muslim context https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_be_upon_him

Cultural similarities I guess

recurring theme this semester of "we're just not smart enough"

The "parable" translation is interesting since I'd normally use/hear the word with stories from Jesus, but Maimonides isn't using it that way

kind of like Pseudo-Dionysius - God is a total mystery and we can only see/express parts of the truth at a time

I like this word

I'm not dumb, I'm PERPLEXED

Professor Miller, I didn't finish the reading because it was so PERPLEXING

ie, the torah, jewish law?

So if Good = Existence by definition a totally evil thing can't exist

Man I wish the supposed most good thing in the universe existed more obviously

Seems a bit arbitrary to claim disease or any evil "subsists at the lowest order" in the world, but at the same time since we can't prove anything it's an interesting idea. Like Leibniz saying that this is the best of all possible worlds, like from what we see we'll tend to doubt that sort of thinking, but hey, why not.

pretty smooth transition from concepts of lust to evil

hang on - so scripture isn't the only authority? anyone with a legit-looking vision has inside info?

I wonder what PD means here? I guess that since humans, at least long for God in a certain way, it follows that everything else does the same (because such longing is a natural instinct?)

It's an interesting idea because you could interpret this longing in a lot of different ways - the drive for survival, for knowledge (PD's claim), for love, for happiness - that each could be construed as yearning for divinity, so there's some ambiguity.

Do animals have any proven conception of happiness beyond physical pleasure - ie, can they demonstrate mental, not just physical satisfaction, like humans? I think if yes, that would be an interesting (to me at least) fact supporting PD's idea. (asking as someone who's never had a pet lol)

Maybe this is similar to Boethius' idea of God existing in an eternal present - he can see all of time because his perspective is fundamentally different from ours, and the relation to the universe is similar, being eternally present in all space as well as time.

Alternatively, if God created the universe perhaps that would mean he created the rules of existence (or the concept of existence itself) and therefore transcends existence in that sense (this is an argument I've seen Christian apologists use with regards to time to address the 'who created the creator' question), so maybe that's what PD has in mind?

I feel like this perspective doesn't allow for much free will, which would seem to go against PD's ideology. Praise doesn't really qualify as praise at all when it's forced or provoked, unless the words "commanded," "shaped," and "raised" somehow refer to internally directed actions.

I guess they didn't have an arabic word for "planet" yet

Ok back to a serious note here it's lowkey intriguing how similar the language used here is to Boethius and Pseudo-Dionysius, lots of 'God=Unity=Truth' despite Avi coming from a totally different place and a different religion

It's like he's got everything except the inclusion of the trinity, which is obviously a given with him being a muslim and them being christians

paging the math major, what say you caitlyn?

When Avicenna says numbers arent noble :`(

Wait, so he calls it metaphysics cause it looks to him like it's after/posterior to nature, but actually it's before/prior to nature?

It sounds like the medieval Arabs thought you could learn about angels from looking at the stars? No joke that sounds pretty cool

But Avicenna you just said that metaphysics validates lower sciences

Instead of lower sciences validating metaphysics

If this is the highest one and leads into the others

Why put it last

I'm confused I feel like the lower ones should prove metaphysics right not the other way around

I'm assuming Avicenna's talking about theoretical sciences here, in contrast to practical sciences? Presumably one would learn science to solve practical problems so he's probably referring to sciences without practical use as a primary concern, like metaphysics (although I'd naturally assume mathematical sciences would be practical not theoretical despite his classification at the beginning)

I'm going to guess that Avicenna means that non-sensible substances are the forms he refers to in section 2