I think you're misunderstanding "changing" here. It is being applied to the object of change, not the subject that is effecting the change.
Whatever is changing is being changed by another. God is not changing, therefore does not need to be changed by another. Immutability is one of the Divine Attributes (Aquinas talks about this as well).
> Whatever is changing is being changed by another
It started off good :)
Makes me wonder about the technical details of what hardware God runs on and how that was created?
I got interested in Sethianism, since Seth is my given name, and it has a fun creation mythos. You get a little backstory leading up to the garden of eden.
> Makes me wonder about the technical details of what hardware God runs on and how that was created?
If it is created, then it cannot be God by definition. If we are talking about creation and existence (and not change), then we are getting into the Second Way:
> 1. Everything which has come to exist has been caused to come to exist.
> 2. Nothing which has come to exist can be the cause of its own existence.
> 3. Everything which has come to exist is caused to exist by something other than itself. (follows from 1,2)
> 4. It is impossible for a chain of causes of this kind to go on to infinity.
> C. There must be a first cause, which causes other things to come into existence but did not itself come into existence. (follows from 3,4)
I'm not really sure about any of these premises. Maybe there is some reflexivity in there. Maybe there are causes as far back as anyone cares to look and we'll never know for sure if there are loops or starting point(s).
How is anything caused, what does it mean for a cause to not exist, what hardware does God run on and so on?
Let us examine premise 2: Something does not exist. How can it then cause itself to exist?
I would love to hear how you think this is not logical.
> How is anything caused, what does it mean for a cause to not exist, what hardware does God run on and so on?
You were caused by your parents, they were caused by your grandparents. Before you existed your parents needed to exist. When your parents did not exist, neither did you.
That's one way (though not the only way) "for a cause to not exist". (Called per accidens sequences by Aquinas/Aristotle.)
The thing that we call "God" runs on no hardware, but is the hardware that everything else is built on. Strictly speaking, in the (Catholic) Christian thinking, God is not a thing or a being (not even the Supreme Being), but rather Being Itself: God is the act of to be itself.
I can imagine inquisitive minds today might want to know more about how the God "hardware" works.
We have amazing computers today that can simulate worlds. We use them to simulate and learn about this one. It's almost inconceivable in the past, but now someone might say that this world is a simulation and that our creator may have created along with the hardware our world runs on. Perhaps it seems unlikely, but we have new ideas to explore and I like to leave a little room for them.
I suppose that's why I'm not so sure about the premises. The world has turned out to be really amazing and strange.
To answer your question, I imagine something may exist at one time, then not exist, but have put in motion the events to cause it to exist again. So things that get into a causal loop like a mushrooms and fungal spores, a cutting or someday perhaps digital copy of a physical person, or some speculate even the whole universe gets recycled.
> I can imagine inquisitive minds today might want to know more about how the God "hardware" works.
Again, this is a category error. God (in the Catholic/Christian theological tradition) is not, strictly speaking, an individual or a being. Not even the Supreme Being. God is the act of to be. What you mean when you refer to "God" and what theologians mean when they refer to "God" are two different things:
> The world has turned out to be really amazing and strange.
Stranger than you thing. Expanding:
> Of every created entity, we may ask two questions: what is its nature, and does it actually exist? Answering the first question does not give us an answer to the second. Consider the question “What is ____?” [...] If, for example, we ask, “What is a human being?” we might reasonably reply, “A rational animal.” We need not add the phrase “that exists.” It does not improve or clarify our response to the request for a definition. We can grasp the “what-it-is” of an entity, in other words, without having to determine whether it exists.
[...]
> This distinction between essence and existence also applies to imaginary entities. If you ask me, “What are elves?” I will explain that they are rational children of Ilúvatar, but unlike human beings, they are immortal and exist as long as the world lasts. [Per Tolkien.]
[...]
> Commenting on the above passage from the Summa Theologiae, Bauerschmidt writes: “Existence is not a part of the definition of any created thing; even more, it cannot be derived from that definition, as the ability to laugh can be derived from the definition of human beings as rational animals, for the existence of a particular thing’s essence presupposes that the thing exist”
> But not so with the eternal Creator, who is perfect simplicity. If God is God—that is to say, the ultimate and final answer to the question “Why does anything exist rather than nothing?” (the burden of the Five Ways)—then he cannot suffer from essence/existence composition. God does not potentially exist; he necessarily exists. Deity is the mystery where the ontological buck finally stops. Here is perhaps Thomas’s most important contribution to Christian reflection upon divinity. The eternal Creator and first mover must exist in and of himself. He cannot derive existence from some other source; otherwise the question of “why” would continue ad infinitum. But not only must God exist, he is his existence: the whatness of God is identical to his act of existing (ipsum essendi).
> To answer your question, I imagine something may exist at one time, then not exist, but have put in motion the events to cause it to exist again.
And what caused the thing to come into existence in the first place? It did not exist, at all, at one point it time. It then did. Then it went away, but came back. I'm talking about the first nothing-to-something instantiation.
Further, when it does exist, why does it continue to exist?
When theologians say "God creates the world", they don't just mean in the past. Yes, you could say "God created the world" via the Big Bang, but they also mean in the here-and-now. Just as Yo-Yo Ma created recordings of Bach's Cello Suites (that will continue to exist after he dies), he also creates the sound of the Cello Suites during a concert: and the music stops when he stops moving the bow.
The first ("created") sense is what is called accidentally ordered creation, while the latter ("creates") is called essentially ordered creation:
Eh, if there are problems with the proof, it isnt because of that. All proofs by contradiction eventually claim the negation of their premise must be true. That's the point.
The weaknesses in these proofs are in the premises.
For example:
> Whatever is changing is being changed by another
Asian philosophers would have pointed out that self causation seems to be true. Most things that appear persistent cause themselves to change state. They even had the concepts of two things changing or creating each other at the same time "dependent co-arising". "conditioned existence". Thing might exist conditionally. When condition arises thing starts to exist, when it goes away it ceases to to exist.
Note that Aquinas has not (just|necessarily) talking about 'horizontal' causes (going back in time), but 'vertical' causes.
Up until the Big Bang Theory was formulated (by a Belgian priest no less)†, the accepted cosmology was that the universe had always existed eternally with no beginning. So Aquinas talking about what caused things (to continue) to exist in the here and now.
> A sequence is ordered essentially if each changer in the sequence possesses the power to change another only if a preceding changer is acting concurrently upon it. For example, a clarinet does not have the power to play Mozart's Clarinet Concerto in A in and of itself. It will only play if Sharon Kam is playing upon it concurrently.
For a fuller treatment on the subject, I highly recommend the book Aquinas by Edward Feser.
† The fact that it was initially put forward by a priest supposedly stunted its spread a bit, because folks thought that he just wanted to give "scientific" grounding to the Biblical account of creation in the book of Genesis.
I have seen Aquinas's proof written somewhere. It is like what you wrote: Something that is moved is moved by someone else, but there cannot be a infinite regress, therefore God is the unmoved mover. But that is illogical: The conclusion contradicts the premise. Rather, if something that is moved is moved by someone else that is before it (rather than a loop), then it necessarily is a infinite regress (and this infinite regress is like what is God, I suppose).
> Rather, if something that is moved is moved by someone else that is before it (rather than a loop), then it necessarily is a infinite regress (and this infinite regress is like what is God, I suppose).
Read the series posts. The use of the word "motion" in the day-to-day colloquial sense is not the way "motion" is being used in the technical/philosophical sense in these arguments:
> What's in a name? If "motion" is more than the thin concept used in modern physics, that raises the question³ of whether we ought to call it "motion" anymore. Because motion is defined as "the reduction potency to act," we might call it "actualization," but this would earn blank stares [see left]. So would kinesis, although that sounds agreeably scientificalistic. The word change captures the greater scope of kinesis, but comes off as rather bland. It's kinetic change, after all.
[...]
> 3. "Motion" begins when the many potencies a thing possesses collapse onto a single potency (the "actual" potency). The act of building commences.
> 4. "Motion" ceases when the potency has been fully actualized (or the actualizing force has been removed!) The building has been completed (or abandoned).
> 5. "Motion" means that a thing is both what it is now and what it is going to be, as of now.
> 6. "Motion" is a change to something a thing already possesses. If the thing already possesses motion, then it would be a change in that motion (i.e., an acceleration)
[...]
> 8. "Inertia" (lit. "laziness") is a principle of resistance to change, not a principle of motion. "Motion" ["Change"] must overcome this resistance. A body does not continue to move because of inertia, but because of momentum. If friction changes the motion, it must overcome resistance to change.
> 9. "Motion" that is continuous and unchanging is actually "rest" (equilibrium). This includes orbiting planets, Belousov–Zhabotinsky reactions, etc.
OK, what you write makes sense, although my argument is not about motion, but rather about Aquinas's argument, so the meaning of "motion" is not relevant to my argument (whether that premise is true or false is also not relevant); rather, I am commenting on the form of the argument being illogical.
* http://tofspot.blogspot.com/2014/07/first-way-some-backgroun...
* http://tofspot.blogspot.com/2014/08/first-way-moving-tale.ht...
* http://tofspot.blogspot.com/2014/09/first-way-part-ii-two-le...
> Some things in the world are changing. (Observation)
> Whatever is changing is being changed by another. (Lemma 1) See Part I.
> There cannot be an infinite regress of instrumental changers. (Lemma 2) See Part II.
> Therefore, there must be a changer that is not itself being changed by another.
* http://tofspot.blogspot.com/2014/10/first-way-part-iii-big-k...