dimanche 5 octobre 2014

Two points on St Thomas Aquinas and Creationism


Jonathan Sarfati has a feedback article on the matter. Basically, questioner feels Thomism is as good as Creationism in giving intellectual cohesion to Christian belief. And basically Sarfati answers that ironically enough St Thomas himself was a Young Earth Creationist - with pertinent examples. Here:

CMI : Feedback archive → Feedback 2014
Abandon YEC and reconcile the Bible to evolution?
Thomas Aquinas taught a young earth and 24–hour creation days
http://creation.com/thomas-aquinas-young-earth-creationist


Two little corrections, as a Thomist:

It’s notable how he approached this—he listed objections, then he would often cite Scripture as authoritative, then reply to the objections

Sarfati forgot one step: the explanation between authority of Sed Contra and reply to objections. As to authority, the Sed Contra is always an authority, usually from Scripture, less often from Canon Law, Fathers, or Aristotle. But after it comes the corpus of the article.

To St Thomas, proving your own point is as essential as disproving your opponents' points. The latter he does in the reply to objections section, the former in the part of each article called corpus, or in corpore articuli.

So, on Part I, Q2, A3, "Does God in fact exist?" the Sed Contra is quoting, famously, Exodus 3:14, and the corpus of the article is where St Thomas lists the five ways of proving God. Of the two objections the Epicurus type is then countered by a very brief theodicy and the Occam type by a reference basically to what was said in the corpus of the article.

So much to correct Sarfati's understanding of St Thomas. Now to the questioner.

The problem is that it is not at all Thomism which is at once so called and used as sham argument from Thomistic authority against Creationism, Geocentrism or anything else too clearly affirming that Creatures always have some direct dependance on God, even though this does not take away the indeirect ones through created intermediates.

I have written a few articles and series against this pseudo-thomism which is closer to being Aquikantian (there was a time when this was a cuss word among Thomists, meaning "you have the skin of Aquinas but the voice is that of Kant") or Averroist.

New blog on the kid : Proximate causes are not always secondary
http://nov9blogg9.blogspot.com/2013/12/proximate-causes-are-not-always.html


New blog on the kid : Responding to Miller, Staying with Father Murphy's God, part 1
http://nov9blogg9.blogspot.com/2014/02/responding-to-miller-staying-with.html


This one is linking to part 1 out of 4, links to remaining parts in the article under the heading. Now, this is the most recent one:

New blog on the kid : God's Regular Action in Creation
http://nov9blogg9.blogspot.com/2014/09/gods-regular-action-in-creation.html


As to the blog, "New blog on the kid" is my general blog*, but not the first of them. I named it while thinking of "New Kids on the Block", though I am no dedicated fan. It replaced my second general blog on this profile, which slowly first parallelled and then replaced the first one. In each case I abandoned a blog so as to keep its number of posts low enough for readers to find their way.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Bpi, Georges Pompidou
17th Sunday after Pentecost
5-X-2014

* While this Creationist blog is obviously a specialised one.

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