Biomolecular shifts occur in our 40s and 60s (med.stanford.edu)
54 points by fzliu 1h ago 7 comments
The time is right for a DOM templating API (justinfagnani.com)
117 points by mdhb 9h ago 67 comments
Some thoughts on my first YC Demo Day (billchambers.me)
28 points by kaycebasques 1h ago 20 comments
Thomas Aquinas – The world is divine
30 pedroth 25 6/26/2025, 11:00:11 PM ralphammer.com ↗
The article starts with that but then provides no evidence for that claim as far as I can see. How does our civilization in large part rest on his ideas? What about other civilizations?
The claim about the validity of Aquinas' ideas seem to only make sense if we accept his initial assumption which is the existence of God. But, making claims like this seems almost as if designed to HIDE the existence of such initial assumptions. Call them axioms if you will. They are not "proven".
> Something is good if it fulfills its function
The confusion here is that there is no such thing as "universal good". It is always "good for something" and "good for somebody". Bad for something else, and bad for somebody else. So the claim seems to be that because something is good for somebody and bad for somebody else, there is perfection?
Yes there is often an "equilibrium". It is better to be in equilibrium than to be on the losing side of it. But that is not "perfection" (whatever that means). Maybe Aquinas was not aware that some species go extinct. How is that "perfect"?
I can't resist but quote from one of the great philosophers of our time, Mel Brooks: It's good to be King! :-)
I’d argue the Catholic Jesuits probably had a more profound impact on science than any counter-catholic Christian denomination - purely from their intellectual output
They were formed around the same time as the reformation, but obviously had vastly more money and power (not that this should discount their contributions)
Examples:
- Christopher Clavius (created our modern Gregorian calendar)
- Anathasius Kircher (somewhat helped pull geology and medicine from vague Natural Philosophy into actual disciplines)
- Rodger Boscovich (atomic theory and a lot of basic everyday lab work was first used by him)
- A lot of contributions to astronomy and mathematics by many priests
- Probably their biggest contribution was the communication to the west and preservation of Chinese and Indian cultural artefacts/traditions. Without their work later anthropologists would have lost entire fields of study
Protestants had, what? Max Weber? That’s more cultural than intellectual or scientific
I agree with you though the later scientific revolution and age of enlightenment were in spite of the Catholic church, but I’d also probably broaden that as in spite of Christian belief altogether
And how about Kepler, Boyle, Hooke, Leibniz, Linnaeus, Euler, Maxwell, Lord Kelvin. That's off the top of my head, and this isn't even a subject I've really thought about.
Can you find any protestant priests with major scientific contributions during the reformation?
I only mentioned Weber as there are no other major contributions I can think of that actually influenced protestantism/wasn’t primarily from the scientific revolution
You people are sure allergic to anything religious.
The author's main point isn't that so he or she didn't support it. I don't think it's true, though he is an important figure in philosophy and theology still.
Should the author also first attempt to prove the existence of Aquinas? And that he was a monk? Before writing about him? Does he need to prove that Aquinas wrote the work the work usually attribute to him? Does he need to prove there is a god? Just to talk about Aquinas' view? But I agree his intro is a bit overestimating.
For such a grandiose claim, I was honestly thinking of another churchman, though not a medieval monk: Augustine of Hippo
Free will as a mental phenomenon (rather than political freedom), Christian original sin, Western prudence and chastity are some notions that I think were extremely heavily influenced by him, or originated from him.
> The claim about the validity of Aquinas' ideas seem to only make sense if we accept his initial assumption which is the existence of God.
Not at all. Aquinas does not begin with the existence of God. Rather, he shows how the existence of God can be inferred from basic metaphysical principles. So you have things exactly backwards.
It is a common misconception that the existence of God must be assumed or that it is a matter of faith.
> The confusion here is that there is no such thing as "universal good". It is always "good for something" and "good for somebody". Bad for something else, and bad for somebody else. So the claim seems to be that because something is good for somebody and bad for somebody else, there is perfection?
No. What determines the good is the nature of a thing and its telos. To be a good human being is to more fully actualize human nature and its end. What it means to be a good turkey is to more fully actualize turkey nature and its end. Perfection is the case when a thing fully actualizes all its potential as the kind of thing it is; there is nothing left to actualize. (Accidentally, turkeys can exist for the sake of the good of others animals, but this is secondary to what is intrinsically good w.r.t. a kind of thing.)
In the case of God, the nature of God is to exist, and God is goodness itself (a transcendental).
--
I encourage you not to be flippant about metaphysics. It deserves and requires no less attention and seriousness than any other science, and indeed more, as metaphysical principles by definition underpin all of reality. Get them wrong, and things go wrong.
[0] https://a.co/d/cTumDmM
[1] https://a.co/d/24ssFeX
[2] https://a.co/d/8F93mme
[3] https://a.co/d/25v7XMf
Thomas Aquinas' actual first cause argument is trivially refuted by the possibility of infinite regress.
Your musings about the nature of a thing and its telos, is an attempt to impose a human conceit about how we understand reality, on reality itself. The "human nature" that you're talking about "fully actualizing" is a concept that exists in human minds, not reality. While you might appeal to some sort of Platonic ideal, there is no evidence that any Platonic ideal actually exists.
Any musings about "the nature of God" establishes nothing more than a concept in someone's mind. That concept has no existence, other than that granted by the thinking of people who have that concept. In particular, a concept created relatively recently by humans, did not create those humans. Let alone the world that those humans live in.
These arguments are all sophistry. They do not, and cannot, establish any meaningful existence to the kind of God that is described in your favorite selection of religious texts. And they are only persuasive to people who are easily persuaded due to the conclusion fitting their preexisting religious beliefs.
Excuse my poor knowledge and understanding of all this stuff - but he's absolutely depending on Aristotle, taking existence of telos as a foundation, doesn't he?
And from this, inventing a God isn't a far stretch - if something axiomatically has an intrinsic purpose, it's probably not too hard to state that there should be something with agency to define it all, or something that's has a perfect nature, or however else one wants to define "God".
This said, are any of those books a good read for someone who doesn't think there's any purpose, reason or goal to all of this?
Not the GP, but I suspect the GP meant that Aquinas's Summa and Aquinas's Contra (his major works) starts with discussing first whether there is a god.
> are any of those books a good read for someone
I am not Catholic. I wouldn't recommend Aquinas.
However, I would recommend "reasonable faith" book by William Craig. Or if you want his lectures to listen to, you can start from his lectures on the existence of God[1]
If you are talking about how can one believe in God in an "axiomatic" way, yet still be rational and warranted, I suggest Plantinga's "warranted Christian belief" or his more popular level book "Knowledge and Christian Belief".
[1] https://www.reasonablefaith.org/podcasts/defenders-podcast-s...
Value is objective, as good is a matter of being the kind of thing a thing is. That a subject is making the determination doesn't mean it has no objective reality. The subjective is not a cause of value anymore than a telescope is the cause of the image of the moon. The telescope can distort the image, but it would be nonsensical to call it the cause.
To consign value to mere subjectivity only makes value more mysterious, not less, as all this does is assert it as a brute fact with no relation to reality. On the other hand, an objective basis grounds it in human nature.
Let's take another case that has people arguing on both sides in the US: universal health care. Some think not having it is an atrocity, and others see it is a threat to civilization. Who is to judge its objective goodness?
You make the call, and then will you just say the people who disagree with you have bad and harmful desires and that is why they don't see the truth as you can?
A person with pika desires to eat things with no nutritional value, like glass or polystyrene. A drug addict desires drugs. A pedophile desires sexual relations with children. These are disordered desires that do not advance the good of the subject: eating glass is not good for you; taking drugs is not good for you; having sexual relations with children is not good for you (both the sexual act in itself, but also that harming children like that is gravely opposed to justice and our social nature).
In the case of an armed conflict, our social nature entails justice, and so we can determine the moral features of a war according to justice. We can objectively say that the Russian invasion, broadly, is gravely immoral and that the Ukrainian defense of their country, broadly, is moral (it is still possible for Ukrainians to engage in immoral acts as part of their defense, of course).
W.r.t. universal health care, this is not something that is intrinsically evil, and so whether it would be good to institute universal health care will depend on particular circumstances. That there is debate over such things does not imply that there is no objective fact of the matter. Indeed, if that were the case, then genuine debate would be impossible, as genuine debate presupposes an objective truth. It would be nothing more than a battle of arbitrary wills willing things for no reason.