Rather, Aristotelian causation is more easily referred to as hierarchical. While Aristotle’s take on the nature of temporality and creation may be a bit skewed, what this meant for his metaphysics was that his argumentation from cause did not rely on temporality to be sensible.

Interestingly, Aristotle did not really concern himself with the beginnings of the universe or the origin of time the world according to his view was eternal, having no beginning or end. The “cosmological” part of the cosmological argument refers to the creation and development of the universe-its origin and its cause. Since most of what I’ll be discussing here only uses Feser’s book as a jumping-off point, I decided to split it off and make it a post of its own. Feser doesn’t spend much time on the Kalam argument save to mention it briefly in the last chapter of his book, and even then, he spends no time focusing on it. For even if, per impossibile, their atheism turned out to be correct, they would not have arrived at it by rational means, shamelessly caricaturing as they do the best arguments for the other side, when they are not ignoring them altogether.While writing the review for Ed Feser’s Five Proofs of the Existence of God, I decided to cut out a large segment I had written concerning the Kalam cosmological argument and its relationship with Aristotle’s First Cause argument. That alone suffices to show that the arguments of Dawkins and his gang are worthless. Whatever one’s ultimate appraisal of these arguments, the New Atheist’s pretense that a religious view of the world can only ever be the result of wishful thinking rather than objective rational argumentation is thereby exposed as a falsehood, the product, if not of willful deception, at least of inexcusable ignorance of the views of the most significant religious thinkers.

There is no appeal to “faith,” or to parapsychology, ghost stories, near-death experiences, or any other evidence of the sort materialists routinely dismiss as scientifically dubious. “Notice in any event that at every point in Aquinas’s account of the soul, as at every point in his arguments for God’s existence, the appeal is to what follows rationally from such Aristotelian metaphysical notions as the formal and final causes of a thing.

Ed feser five proofs