Within Reason - #48 Edward Feser - Aristotle's Argument for God

Episode Date: December 16, 2023

Edward Feser is an American Catholic philosopher, and Associate Professor of Philosophy at Pasadena City College in California. He is the author of "Five Proofs of the Existence of God", and in this episode speaks about one of these: the Aristotelean argument from motion. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to Within Reason. My name is Alex O'Connor. Ed Faser is an associate professor of philosophy at Pasadena City College in California. He's the author of Five Proofs of the Existence of God, and he joins me today to discuss one of them, the argument from motion. This is an argument that was discussed by Ben Shapiro in his video, The Atheism Delusion, something I responded to about a year ago on my YouTube channel. And since Ben's video relied heavily for that portion on Ed Faser's work, I thought it would be interesting to sit down with Dr. Faser to discuss that argument in more detail. With that said, I hope that you enjoy the following conversation with Ed Faser. Ed Faser, thank you for being here. Thank you for having me. Appreciate the invitation. I'm really excited to talk to you in part because about a year ago, I made a video responding to Ben Shapiro who put out a video called The Atheist Delusion, I think, on the Daily Wire. And it was a sort of 10-minute video, going over some of his reasons for belief in God, and one of the most important parts of that video was his presentation of the argument from change, which he attributed to you. Well, I mean, didn't attribute the argument to you, but he referenced the fact that you laid it out in your book, Five Proofs for the Existence of God.

And so although this video that I made in response was a response to Ben Shapiro, in many ways at least that section was a response to you and to your arguments. And so I'm looking forward to sitting down with you. My audience, my listeners will probably have more familiarity than the average person with arguments for the existence of God. But I think that something like the argument from motion isn't discussed quite as much in the sort of apologetics and debate space. And so I wanted if we could take a little bit of time to lay out that argument and see how we do. Yeah, absolutely. So the argument is one that goes back to. to Aristotle really goes back even to Plato and the laws who presents an even earlier version of it,

but the most influential version of it goes back to Aristotle in his book, the physics and in the metaphysics. And then many Aristotelians in later centuries would pick up the basic idea and develop it in their own ways. Most famously Aquinas, it's the first of his five ways. And he presents a much longer version of it in the Summa Contra Gentilis. And you see versions in Maimonides, you see it in Islamic thinkers and so on. and down to the Thomists, say, of the early 20th century. And then it kind of dropped off the radar for a few decades. And it's gotten some renewed attention in recent years,

partly because of the work I've done on it. The basic idea of the argument is, you know, it starts from Aristotle's answer to pre-Socratic thinkers like Parmenides and Zeno who deny the possibility of motion, deny the possibility of change in general. And as you probably know, Aristotle and his followers use the word motion in a broader way than we tend to use it today. They use it to refer to change of any kind. And traditionally, in Aristotelian philosophy, there are three kinds of change, four, depending on how broadly you're using the word change, that we need to distinguish.

There's, first of all, local motion or change with respect to place or location. That's what happens when I move my hand across my face there. So my hand goes from being at one location to another. That's what we usually think of as motion today. But then there's also qualitative change, excuse me, which would be like something changing its temperature or a chameleon changing its color or a banana changing its color as it ripen, say. And Aristotle and his followers count that as a kind of motion in the extended sense of being a kind of change. Then there's quantitative change, which would be change in size, like when, you know, I gain weight

because I eat too many cheeseburgers or what have you. And finally, there is a substantial change, which, if I'm being pedantic here, Aristotelians would say, well, that's not a kind of change because change involves a substance gaining or losing an attribute. And substantial change is a substance going out of existence and being replaced by another. But in an extended sense, we can count it as a kind of change. It's what happens when, say, you swat a fly and what used to be a living thing, an organism now just becomes a pile of chemicals, as it were. okay so those are four kinds of change that aristotle and aristotelians distinguish and what they all have in common for aristotle is they involve the actualization of a potential um to use the technical way of putting it the reduction of potency to act but there's there's no need really to put it in that kind of forbidding scholastic jargon they involve the actualization of a potential so the idea is that whether we're talking about um say the hand before it moves from side of my face to the other, it's actually here and it's potentially over there. And then when I move it, now it actualizes that potential. So the hand's got a potentiality to be in

different locations. Or when the banana ripens, it's initially green and it's got the potentiality to be yellow. And then when it actually ripens, that potentiality is actualized. Or the same thing. When I, you know, I actually weigh whatever it is I weigh. I won't divulge that information. And then I eat several bacon, ultimate cheeseburgers and my potential the way more than I do is actualized. Or in the case of the fly, it's got the potentiality to be a mere pile of goo of chemicals or what have you. And when you swat it, you actualize that potential. So the idea is that substances of their very nature, that the objects that make up the world around us have certain potentialities as well as actualities. There's what they are and then there's what they potentially could be, say.

And for Aristotle, we don't need to go in the whole story unless you want to, but for Aristotle, we have to acknowledge the reality of potentialities in order to understand how change is possible, where Parmenides and Zeno, these ancient Greek thinkers denied that it was possible. Because Parmenity says, well, change involves basically going from non-being to being. If, say, if the banana ripens, then what that means is the yellowness of the banana, which initially did not exist. goes from nothing to something, from non-being to being. But you can't get something from nothing. So Parmeny says change is impossible. And Aristotle's answer to that as well, change would be impossible if that's what change was, but it's not what change is.

Change isn't going from nothingness to something. It's going from potentiality to actuality. And potentiality is a kind of reality. It's not actuality, but it's not nothing either. It's kind of actuality. And so change involves going for potential to actual. So that's the opening move in. the Aristotelian argument for motion is this analysis of change, whatever kind of change we're

talking about as the actualization of potential. That's the first step. I don't know if I want to interrupt there. Go right ahead. Sure. I mean, I imagine it's probably quite unclear to somebody who hasn't heard this argument before why we're presenting this in the context of an argument for God's existence. We're just talking about the fact that things change. But to be clear, this is where we're trying to end up, right? We're constructing here what you believe is a powerful argument for the existence of God, and it begins with a fairly uncontroversial premise that change occurs. And, you know, I refer to it earlier as the argument from change. You can call it the argument from motion, but like you say, motion is being used in a much broader

sense than we would use motion today. And so you mentioned Parmenides and the sort of paradox that he presents, that change seems not to be able to exist. So for those listening, just bear with us for now. We'll just talk about the change stuff and you'll see why this leads to God allegedly, I should say, presently. Parmenides thinks that change can't occur. And I wonder if you could tell us what it is that Parmenides thinks is actually going on. I mean, clearly Parmenides has an experience of the world. He sees that things are sort of moving around and that bananas get ripe, although maybe he didn't see a banana. I'm not sure. What does he thinks going on there? If he thinks that change can't exist. How does he interpret what he is actually observing in front

of him? Well, that's a good question. And there's Permanities himself, and then there are kind of riffs on the basic Permanidaean idea that you see in the history of Western thought recur now and again. In Permanities himself, he not only denies the reality of change, but he denies the reality of multiplicity. He says that not only is it not really the case that the banana ripens or that I move my hand or whatever it might be, he thinks that's an illusion. And what he's doing here, by the way, is pressing a very highly rationalist approach to knowledge,

that knowledge is something we get from pure abstract deductions from first principles, from axioms. And the senses, not in many of these view, it's not the senses supplement that is that they don't give us any knowledge at all. And that the fact that, in his view, it's a fact, that we can deduce the impossibility of motion from first principles, he thinks it gives us a kind of refutation of the reliability of sensory experience altogether. But it's not just that he thinks that changes an illusion.

He also thinks that our common sense supposition that there are multiple objects in the world. You and me, tables, chairs, rocks, trees, dogs, cats, bananas and all that stuff. He thinks that's an illusion. And he's got, he and his student, Zeno, have different arguments for this. And, you know, Parmenides, you know, his argument, I'll just rehearse this briefly just to kind of give you a sense of how he thinks. His argument presupposes a certain conception of space, which he thinks of as a void, as emptiness. So the way there can be more than one object for Permanities, the way there can be a difference between these two hands, for example, is that there's empty space between them, or so we think. But what's empty space?

Parmanyi says, well, that's nothingness. It's the absence of anything. But nothingness is not a kind of stuff. It's not a thing. It's the absence of anything. So nothingness doesn't really exist. If that's the case, then empty space doesn't really exist. If empty space doesn't really exist, then there can't be anything to separate off two objects

from one another within space. Yeah, there's nothing between your hands, is there? Right. There's nothing. If empty space is truly empty. And so if there's nothing between my hands, meaning there's the absence of anything, then there's nothing that could separate them and make them different objects, in which case they're not different objects.

So what Permanetti's argument leads to is a radical monism to use the jargon that there's really only one thing in reality, and it's not changing. And that's really all you can say. So if you say, yeah, but Parmenis, what about tables, chairs, trees, Alex and me, he'd say, that's, none of that's real. That's an illusion, just like change is an illusion. So if you said, well, Parmenis, what do you think happens when the banana ripens? He'd say, what banana? There's no banana there, right? That's an illusion as well. Now, there are later thinkers who are, you might say, Parmenadean in spirit, who would deny the reality of change, but who wouldn't deny multiplicity? And that's where you get into what there's something's called four-dimensionalist theories of the nature of physical objects.

And so they'd say, well, what there really is, is there's the banana as a kind of four-dimensional object that exists not only in the three dimensions of space, but a fourth temporal dimension. And there's the banana at, you know, six a.m. on a Wednesday when it's green. And then there's the same banana exactly two days later when it's yellow or what have you. And those are analogous to spatial relations, you know, the banana at T1 and the banana at T2 are like, they're like spatially separated parts of the banana. So that's not what Permanetti says, but you know, you could take Permanetti's basic insight or his basic position in that sort of direction.

And that's what sort of more modern sympathizers with this kind of view would hold to. Now, I would reject that as well, but sorry, go ahead. Clearly, there's a lot to discuss there and to explore, but to stay on track here. Yeah. Okay, so Parmenides says, and it seems like Aristotle agrees, that if you were to think of change as something coming from nothing, it would be impossible because from nothing, nothing comes. Right. And so Aristotle response and says, well, change is not something coming from nothing, like Parmenides says, but change is the actualization of potential. Certain objects seem to have this thing called potential.

A hot coffee has the potential to become cold, even though it's not actually cold right now. And when the hot coffee becomes a cold coffee, that is a process of that potential coldness becoming actualized. And potential is not nothing. It's not the same as actuality, but it's not the same as nothing either. And so change isn't something coming from nothing. It's something coming from potential. Okay, so this is Aristotle's analysis of what changes. before we start proposing some objections here, what comes next? How do we get from this forward

towards... Yeah, so let's discuss that. And before I, too, just to make one final side comment, you'll notice from everything we've been saying so far, because we haven't even really gotten to God, obviously, that this argument, and this is true of most arguments in the tradition, and certainly the ones that I think are the most interesting arguments for God's existence, is that they're rooted in deeper and more general metaphysical questions about the structure of reality. So when Aristotle, I mean, Aristotle is a pagan. He's writing centuries before Christianity comes into being. So when he puts pen to paper when he's writing the physics, he doesn't say, okay, now I've got to come up with some apologetics. You know, I've got to

defend the existence of God. He's not interested in that. He doesn't have any agenda of that sort. What he's doing is he's trying to understand how the world works. And he thinks, well, these guys like Permanities are, they're getting something wrong. They're interesting mistakes, but there's something wrong here. So I need to figure out where their mistake is. And he arrives at this analysis of change is the actualization potential. What he's doing is he's simply trying to kind of set out what he takes to be the metaphysical structure of reality, the nuts and bolts of how the empirical world works. And it ends up leading him to an argument for God understood as an unmoved mover of the world. But it wasn't initiated by any sort of apologetics interest or even

motivation is not, let's try and prove God's existence. And so let's start looking at the nature of what changes. It's the other way around. Right. And it's, and there's this broader metaphysical picture that's independently motivated, an analysis of what change involves and what causation involves when you unpack it, an analysis of the nature of material objects and so on, totally independently motivated that ends up forming the basis of an argument for God's existence, but the motivation is independent and has to be evaluated independently of it. So that's this kind of a side editorial note. But as you say, we want to get back to the main threat of the argument. Okay. So the argument was okay, so we know from observation that change occurs. And while, you know, Parmenities and Zeno

and people like that try to present skeptical arguments that show that it does not, we can rebut those by appealing to the theory of potentiality and actuality. And there are other things to say as well, but that'll do for the moment. But then the next question is, okay, so that tells us how change is possible, but how does it ever actually happen? What makes it the case that the coffee cools down or the banana ripens or what has you, or what have you? And the next stage of the argument is to argue that a potential can't actualize itself. There's got to be something already actual that makes that happen. So when I move my hand, so my hands initially at this side of the screen, and it's only potentially on the other side. Then when I move it, that potential is

actualized. Okay. So the question is, how does that happen? Can the position of my hand on the other side of the screen actualize itself? And Aristotle and Aquinas argue, well, that's not possible. Something that's merely potential can't do anything. And one of the things that can't do is to actualize itself. There's got to be something already actual that makes that happen. In this case, that would be something like the activity in the motor neurons of my body that actualize the potential of my muscles to flex, which in turn make the hand move across the screen and so on. So the potential position of the hand is actualized by something already actual, namely the activity in the motor neurons. And if we say, yeah, but why do those motor neurons fire? The answer is going to be

because there's other activity in the nervous system that made that happen. So you've got one part of reality actualized by another, which is actualized by another. We've got a kind of regress here. Now, here, we need to introduce yet another complication that has to do with the Aristotelian account of causality, the nature of causality. And the medieval's thinkers like Aquinas and Duns Scotus, but the basic idea goes back to Aristotle once again, drew a distinction between. two kinds of cause and effect series, which, just to make it as non-technical as I can, I'll call hierarchical and linear. That's not actually their jargon that later thinkers use that jargon, but I'll go along with it because it's as clear as it can be. A linear causal

series, and both of these are kinds of cause and effect series, a linear causal series is what we typically think of these days. We think of cause and effect series. It's one that extends forward and backward in time, essentially. And we it trace it back. You know, so there's the fact that I sat down for this interview and that was prompted by an email you sent me saying, Ed, here's the, here's the link to the interview. Oh, yeah, okay. And then that in turn was preceded by my turning my computer on this morning and blah, blah, blah. And we've got this series of events that traces backward into the past indefinitely. We'd say today back to the Big Bang. Aristotle thought there was no beginning. It just went back

forever. But anyway, that's one kind of series. It's linear. And it involves, objects operating in a kind of independent way. That is to say, and here I'll resort to a stock example that Aquinas uses of a linear series, which is a series of fathers begetting sons. So Al begets Bob, begetting is just the flip side of conceiving. So Al begets Bob, and then Bob grows up later on, 25, 30 years later, has a son of his own Chuck. Chuck grows up, has a son of his own later, Dave, and so on.

And here we've got different individual things, different substances, these human beings, with built-in causal powers who are exercising them. Bob's got this built-in causal power to generate a son, Chuck. He needs a woman together with him to do it, but together they can generate Chuck. And they don't need some earlier guy like Al, or Al's father or Al's grandfather around in order for that to continue happening. Yeah, you don't need your own dad to still be around in order for you to have your own child. Right. So the thing that creates you, you're sort of left to your own devices and you have your causal power to bring about another thing. And this is one kind of causal chain that stretches throughout time. It sort of starts with the metaphorical Adam who has a child, who has a child, who has a child. And this is a sort of temporal chain of causation. And once each member does its work in that particular series it's part of, it can go away. It can cease to exist and a series can still go on. Now, some might say, okay, that's great, but as opposed to what? I mean, what would be? be the alternative. So let me say a little bit about the other kind of causal series, hierarchical

causal series, which are best thought of, not on the model of a straight line. That's why the other kind are called linear, but on the model of a hierarchy, like a pyramid or something. We've got one level supported by another, which is supported by another, and where all this occurs simultaneously at the same moment. So Aquinas uses the example, the stock example, of a hand pushing a stick, which is pushing a stone, at every moment where the stone is being pushed by the stick, the stick in turn has to be pushed by the hand. And if the hand weren't using the stick to push the stone, the stone just wouldn't move. And the reason is that, unlike Bob, when he begets Chuck, the stick has no independent

built-in causal power to move a stone or do anything else, which is lighter inert if somebody weren't using it as an instrument or a tool. So the series, stone, stick, hand, and then the hand in turn is moved only because the guy's using his hand to move the stick to move the stone. All of that causal action occurs simultaneously at a particular moment in time. And that kind of, now, now, a crucial difference between these kinds of series that Aristotle and Aquinas argue for is that the first kind of series, the kind that extends forward and backward in time, it can at least in principle go back to infinity. It can at least in principle have no beginning. Yes. As I mentioned, Aristotle himself did not think

the world had a beginning. So when he talks about God as the unmoved mover, he doesn't mean that God knocked down the first domino 13 billion years ago, because he thinks there was no first domino, as it were, that the world's always been here. But he also thinks the unmoved mover has always been here, keeping the whole thing going. Aquinas, because he's operating from a point of view of Christian theology, he thinks the world had a beginning. But he doesn't think you can know that philosophically. He thinks you can know that only through divine revelation. And so he thinks that as far as pure philosophy is concerned, the world may or may not have had a beginning and we can't demonstrate it one way or the other. So when we're arguing for God, Aquinas says, and he explicitly

says this in several places, says don't even get into that issue. It's a time-waster. He thinks you're just not going to be able to demonstrate anything with that. This is actually a dispute in his day between people like himself on the one hand and St. Bonaventure on the other who thought you could demonstrate the world had a beginning. But anyway, Aquinas, excuse me, and Aristotle, they're not doing that when they argue for the unmoved mover. Instead, they appeal to hierarchical causal series. And that kind, they think, must have a first member. But it's important to understand what they mean first. They don't, what they mean by first. They don't mean first as opposed to second, third, fourth, fifth. It's not, you know, it's not a matter of like who got to the head of

the queue first or whether there actually is. That's not really what they're on about. Yeah, it's not related to time, right? It's not like the one who came first in a temporal sense. Yes, it's not really, it's not concerned with time, and it's also not concerned really with the number of members of the series. What they have in mind instead is this. The way Medieval, like Aquinas would put it, is that some causes have only secondary causal power, and they depend on those which have primary causal power. What's that mean? We'll go back to the stick example. Can a stick move a stone? Sure it can, but not by itself, by itself would just lie there. So when it has the power to move the stone, it has it in a secondary way, meaning in a derivative way, gets its power to move the stone from the hand that uses it. And if there were no hand, there would be no motion of the stick and so no motion of the stone. So when, whereas the hand moves, or to be more precise, the person who's moving the hand, if it's me, I have causal power in a built-in way. so the stone can't move the stick, sorry, the stick can't move the stone unless someone moves it.

But I can move the stick without somebody having to pick me up and move me so that I can move the stick so that I can move the stone. So I've got causal power in a built-in way or in a primary way, a non-derived way or a built-in way. And so what Aquinas means when he says that you need a first cause is that you couldn't have secondary causality without primary causality. You couldn't have something that has causal power in a merely due. derivative way, unless there's something that has it in a built-in or undarived way. Well, it has to derive it from something, doesn't it?

Right, right. To say it has derivative power to do something means it derives it from something else. From something else. And ultimately, they think that's got to be something that has it in a built-in way in an unqualified sense so that it can give causal power to other things without having to get it from anything else. If you don't have that, that we don't have an ultimate explanation. of whatever it was we started out with, like the motion of the hand or the ripening of the banana or what have you.

Yeah. So we're starting to get a little bit, we're starting to get almost a little bit theological here. We're talking about first causes, first movers, this kind of thing. And people might be able to see how we're getting close now. But I think it's really worth emphasizing this distinction that you've just laid out. Because we've been sort of on this particular point for a while. So people should bear in mind how we got here. It's very common to hear in discussions. about arguments, the existence of God, when somebody's talking about a causal chain, and we started by talking about change. We said that, you know, in order for a coffee to become cold, there needs to be something actual, like an actually cold room, to actualize that potential.

But the cold room itself was only once potentially there. There was a time when the room didn't exist, only potentially existed. And so something actual had to actualize that. And so you've got something that has to actualize the coffee and has to actualize the room, and whatever actualizes the room, has to be actualized and we get this chain. And it's common to hear somebody say, well, why

can't this just go on infinitely? Why can't we just say that every single event or every single phenomena has an explanation that comes before it and this just stretches back infinitely and there's no beginning to the universe? And if I understand this point correctly, it's that in the case of a linear causal chain, that's perfectly possible. Yes, I can I can say I was caused by my dad and he was caused by his dad and he was caused by his dad and that just goes back on for infinity and there's nothing strictly speaking illogical about that however with a hierarchical series of causation it would be more like if i was hanging if i was holding onto my father's hand and i was like hanging above a huge drop and i said well what is what is keeping me from falling

down what's keeping me in the air what's causing me to to be hanging there and i say well it's it's my father because my father's holding me up he's he's grabbing my hand and then i say well what's holding up my father. Well, his father's sat above him, and he's holding his hand, and he's pulling him up. I say, okay, well, what's holding him up? And this is a hierarchical causation. But we couldn't, in this case, say, well, it just goes on infinitely. Because my father above me doesn't have the power to hold me in midair unless he himself is simultaneously being held in midair by something else. In other words, in this kind of causation, if my father were to disappear, I don't have the causal power to hold something up below me because I would fall down. If my

grandfather were to disappear, my father doesn't have the causal power to hold me up. So if my grandfather disappears, my father still has the causal power to bring me into existence. That's linear. But if we're hanging in this chain, then if my grandfather disappears, my father doesn't just have of his own accord, as you say, built in the ability to hold me up. So this is something that cannot go back infinitely or down or up infinitely. This is something that has to be terminated. And indeed, because the power that something has, like to hold something in midair, only exists in so far as it's getting it from the thing, you know, above it on the chain.

There has to be something at the basis to give the entire chain causal power. Because without that, they wouldn't have anywhere to derive the power from the first place. And they wouldn't have the power to hold me up at all. Yeah. So if we change examples a bit to tie it into the example that I use that I borrowed from Aquinas, the hand moving the stick, moving the stone, we could put it this way that if we're talking about something as mundane as that, a guy's using a stick to move a stone. We ask, well, how is that exactly is that happening? How do we account for that? Part of the story, obviously, is, well, this guy's here in the first place because his dad begot him and then his grandfather begot his dad and so on. And again, that series goes back linear. in time, perhaps without a beginning, and Aquinas is happy to allow for the sake of argument. Yeah, maybe there's no beginning there. Fine. It's not relevant to my argument. But he would say there's other things going on here and now that require an explanation in terms of yet further things going on here and now. So again, when I use my hand to move the stick, that's possible

only because of the activity in my nervous system here and now, which actualizes the potential motion of the hand. Excuse me. And that potential activity in my nervous system is actualized by yet other activity in my nervous system. But all of that can occur, in turn, ultimately, only because my nervous system and the rest of my body stays in existence at any particular moment. And so here, the way I present the argument, this is not quite the way Aquinas or Aristotle presents, but it's the way other Thomists have are followers of Thomas Aquinas, and it's the way I think is the most useful way to develop the argument.

We shift from the motion or change of things, like the changing position of the stone or the stick or what have you, to the fact that things exist at all any particular moment. So again, in order for all this stuff to be going on, my body and my nervous system have to exist here and now in order to cause the motion of the stone and the stick here and now. Now, that's possible only because my body, say, is made up of particles. It's made up of molecules, for example, that comprise the cells of the nervous system and the cells of the muscles and so on. And those molecules could in principle have made up other things. There's nothing in the nature of the molecules that entails they must make up the tissue of a muscle or of a nervous system or what have you.

And yet they do. So you might say, well, there's something that's actualizing that potential here and now for them to constitute a body rather than some other thing. What would that be? Well, one possible answer would be, well, it's the micro level structure of the molecules themselves, the atoms, the subatomic particles that comprise. the molecules, they could make up those molecules or some other kind, but they make up the particular kind that make up cells, that make up a body and so on. So you might say we've got one level of reality actualized by a lower level of physical reality, which is actualized by yet a lower level and so on. All of this going on here and now simultaneously, so that we're talking

about a hierarchical causal series rather than a linear one. And the argument continues by arguing that unless we reach some kind of bottom, then we just keep passing the explanatory buck. We haven't reached an ultimate explanation. And what that bottom is going to have to look like is this. It's going to have to be some level of reality that can actualize everything else without itself having to be actualized in any way. Because if it had to be actualized in order to actualize the other things, then we would just have yet some further thing that requires explanation. Yeah, it's just another link on the chain at that point. Exactly. Yeah. Just yet another link, which presupposes a further one. So the bottom level explanation, an ultimate explanation of

what we started out with, the motion of the stone or whatever it might be, is going to have to be something, again, that can actualize without having to be actualized. And that, as Aquinas and Aristotle put it, would have to be something that is pure actuality with no potentiality. It's something that of its very nature, it just is, it's just fully actualized without standing in need of any potentiality awaiting actualization. And it's in that sense that it would have to be an unmoved mover or uncaused cause. What they mean by that is something

that can cause without having to be caused, not because it's an exception to some, an arbitrary exception to some general rule that everything requires a cause. That, you know, as you probably know, I mean, it's one of my pet peeves is the idea that these sorts of arguments

rest on the principle that everything has a cause. They do not. In fact, Aristotle and Aquinas and other thinkers in this tradition would deny that. they don't say everything as a cause. What they say is that what goes from potential to actual requires a cause. So when we get to something that is purely actual and it's got no potential, because it's got no potential, it does not and indeed cannot in any respect go from potential to actual. And so it does not and indeed could not have a cause of its own. That's why it's an uncaused cause because of its very nature, you know, given what's required for it to be an ultimate

explanation, it lacks any of the potentiality that opens the door to needing a cause in the first place. Yeah. And so the idea is that in order to understand how anything exists here and now, including I, you know, me as I move the stick, which moves the stone, there must be something that actualizes every level of reality and keeps it going here and now. or I wouldn't exist to be doing all that stuff here and now. And that's just what it is to be a purely actual actualizer or unmoved mover.

And Aquinas, you know, at the end of his little exposition, and it's just kind of a brief summary. At the end of the first way, Aquinas again makes this remark, and this we call God. And you might wonder, well, why would he say that? Because they're all sorts of aspects of the divine nature that he hasn't said anything about, God being all powerful, all good, and so on. And he's well aware of that, and he addresses that those questions later on in the Summa Theologi in elsewhere. But the reason that he ends the argument that's that way by saying in this we call God is that he means that whatever else God is supposed to be, God has taken to be the ultimate explanation of why things exist at all.

And in arriving at the existence of this purely actual actualizer of the world, this purely actual cause or mover of the world, he's arrived at least that much of the idea of God. The core idea of God is the ultimate explanation. Now, of course, that raises questions about, okay, well, what else can we say about this purely actual actualizer, this unmoved mover? And he goes on to say, well, when we analyze the notion of an unmoved mover and what it would have to be like in order to produce a world of precisely the kind that we find ourselves in, we're going to find that it must be infinite in power. It must be unique. There can only be one of them even in theory, he thinks. It must be all knowing. It must be all good, et cetera. So he has a battery of subsidiary

arguments that aim to establish each of the divine attributes. But they constitute a second stage of reasoning after the initial stage, which argues for an ultimate cause, which is purely actual in nature and therefore uncaused. Sure. Okay. And those reasons are, of course, discussed in detail in the book, which I have here, five proves to the existence of God. I'm going to make sure that it's linked in the description and show notes. It's a wonderful overview of five really quite interesting arguments for God's existence. This one being the first in the book. We've spent quite a lot of time now laying out the argument, and I think we've got the bulk of it down. And so I think it's time that perhaps I put some of these objections to you and I'll put forward some of the objections that I had in this, this Ben Shapiro response video and we'll see what you make of them. So we need to sort of, like I said earlier, we'll sort of come back to it. So we need to go back to the beginning here where we begin with this conception of what change is. And change is the actualization of potential. And the reason

for this, or one one important aspect of this is that this helps us to escape Permanides' paradox that change is something coming from nothing. Some people might want to begin by asking, look okay so you say something can't come from nothing and so if that's what change was then change couldn't exist but actually it's something coming from potential but i mean potential doesn't exist right if i have a hot coffee the cold coffee that it potentially could become it still doesn't exist aren't we just sort of renaming nothing well we're not renaming nothing i mean certainly that would be aristotle and aquinas would regard that as a as a question-begging way of framing the objection because what Aristotle's key point is, and Aquinas and his followers

insist on this as well, is that we have to think of being a reality as comprised of more than one kind of thing. So some reality involves actuality, a kind of fullness of reality, but some reality is merely potential, whereas potential is not the same thing as nothingness. So again, the idea is that, to use an example, I think I use in the book, and I've certainly I've used it a lot in these discussions. If I've got a plastic ball, the kind that you use to, you know, to play ping pong or something, right? There are a number of things we can say about the ball. We can say it's white in color. If we're talking about a standard ping pong ball, it's smooth to the touch, it's spherical in shape. There are a number of, those are,

so those are all things that are true of it, and they're true of it in an absolute unqualified way. There are ways we might say to use Aristotle and Aquinas' jargon in which the ball is actual. Now, there are also things that are in an unqualified way, not true of it. The ping pong ball is not a frog. It doesn't have legs. It does not weigh a ton and so on and so forth. And we might say that these things are false of it, in a kind of absolute unquestion. qualified way because there's nothing in the matter that makes up a ping pong ball that would give it, say, the capacity to grow legs or to have the digestive system and activities of a frog and so on and so forth. But now let's note that the ping pong ball also, even if it's just sitting there on

the table motionless because you haven't started playing yet, it does have the capacity to bounce along the ping pong table when you knock into it. If you apply a lighter to it, it's going to melt, that plastic's going to melt. So those things are capacities of it that are really in it in a way that, say, the capacity to digest food the way of frogwood or to grow legs are not in it. And so we need some concept to capture that middle ground kind of reality that's not actuality, but it's not nothingness either. You might say that the ball is spherical in an unqualified way, it is a non-frog in an unqualified way, but it is, let's say it's moving across the table, not in an unqualified way, because it's sitting there. But on the other hand,

it's motion across the table is not like it's being a frog, which is simply ruled out absolutely by its nature. It's a kind of middle ground fact about it. And that's what Aristotle Aquinas mean by a potency or a potentiality. There is a potentiality in the ball to bounce or to be melted in a way there is no potentiality to grow legs or to function as a frog. So because that's the case, we are describing something real in the ball. It's not nothing, even if it's not actuality. And so what they want to say is that being a reality is a more expansive concept than

actuality, includes potentialities as well as actualities. And if we don't acknowledge that, then first of all, we're going to miss certain features of reality. And there are philosophers who've arrived at the idea of potency or sometimes they're called powers or causal powers or dispositions. Philosophers have different jargon for this concept. But they arrive at it from very different roots, sometimes because they're trying to account for the nature of what science tells us about, the facts of chemistry or physics or biology. So sometimes philosophers of science arrive at this concept. Sometimes it's general metaphysics. But there are independent reasons to think. We've got to recognize something like

potentiality as a real feature of the world that's distinct from actuality. And not only we miss these features, but we'll also miss what the mistake is that Permanides and Zeno are making. Yeah. So, I mean, a hot coffee is not a cold coffee. It's all. also not a frog, but there seems to be a way in which we want to say that the coffee has the potential to become the cold coffee, but it doesn't have the potential to become a frog, and therefore this non-existent cold coffee seems to somehow have more of an existence than the non-existent frog in relation to the hot mug that we have in front of us. Okay, so this means that potential is a real quality that you can ascribe to an object.

Here's one issue, and this is an issue that I raised in the video, is that a lot of philosophers, and I don't know if you would count yourself among their number, think that actual infinites can't exist. That is, you can't have an actually infinite number of things, because it leads to a whole host of paradoxes. This is sometimes used as a basis for arguments for the existence of God, such as William Lane Craig's Calam cosmological argument. It relies on the idea that you can't have an actually infinite pass set of events, for example. If we want to say that potential qualities of an object are real things, then I think we open the door to allowing the existence of actual infinites. The reason for that is because, you know, my coffee is, I don't know how hot a cup of coffee is, but, you know, let's say our coffees, let's say it's 100 degrees Celsius, you know, and it has the potential to be 90 degrees Celsius if it cools down. It also has the capacity to be 50 degrees Celsius, or 51 degrees Celsius, or 51.5 degrees Celsius, or 51.55 degrees Celsius, or 51.55 degrees Celsius, so on seemingly ad infinitin. Now, if you think a potential as a thing that isn't real, doesn't exist, but comes into being, this isn't a problem. There's a sort of seemingly potentially infinite number of things that the coffee can do. But if the coffee really has, an infinite number of potential states, then if those potential states are real things,

the potential is a real quality of the cup, then it seems like we have an actually existing actual infinite. Now, you might want to say in the example of a coffee cup that, you know, heat being caused by vibrations of atoms, there's actually a point at which you can't keep dividing up infinitely and it will actually end up being discreet. And this is something I heard people say in response to my video. they said, well, maybe there aren't actually an infinite number of temperatures that the coffee can be, because at some point it's impossible to actually half it anymore.

That's fine, but you can imagine another example. For example, you were talking about local change earlier, which is something actually moving across space. If we envision, even if we don't think our universe is like this, there's nothing logically inconceivable of thinking of an infinite universe. You can imagine there's a universe that has no, and I don't mean temporally, I mean it's spatially. just as a completely open, open sphere, or even, to be honest, now that I'm thinking about it, think of our current universe, believe to be finite, but expanding. It's getting bigger and the expansion is increasing. Take an object like, you know, this book, which again is linked down in the description, or my body, or this microphone or something like that. I have a spatial location.

Here I am, but I have the potential to be five meters in that direction. I have the potential to be meters in that direction, or three meters in that direction. If the universe is constantly expanding, then as time goes on, there will be an infinite number of places that I could potentially take up. Because, you know, if you think the universe is finite, then as it expands, you know, there's going to be more space tomorrow that I can go into. Or you can just imagine a possible world in which there is an infinite universe, an infinite spatial universe, I mean, spatially infinite. And you could say, look, I have the potential to be here and to be here and to be here and to be here. And there's an infinite number of places that I could be.

Again, if potential is a real quality of me or of this book, it seems like I've described an actually infinite number of things, of real things, I should say, to this book or to me. Right. So I want to say a couple of things about that. The first of them is that it's important to keep in mind that words like actual, real being, et cetera, existence, they're ambiguous. and so we want to make sure we're disambiguating them and using them consistently in the same context. So why is that relevant here? Well, the way Aristotle and Aquinas and their followers use these terms, they want to say, okay, well, being a reality, we'll use those as synonyms.

That's what there is. Okay. But actuality and potentiality we're using for two different kinds of being a reality. So actual is not being used here as a synonym for real. It's being used to mark a certain kind of reality. So we've got actuality, potentiality. There's nothingness. Obviously nothingness is not part of reality, but actuality and potentiality are different kinds of reality. So you note that there might in different ways be an infinite number of potentialities.

And I don't have a problem with that. So you mentioned temperature, for example, if the coffee could be 51 degrees, it could be 52, it could be 53. there might be some limits posed by physics to how hot it can get, but what's metaphysically possible might outstrip that, and I'm happy to allow that for the sake of argument. It wouldn't affect the point. So let's imagine that the sky's the limit. There's no limit to how hot the coffee could get, or there's no limit to take another one of your examples to how large the universe might get as it expands and so on. I'm happy to allow for the sake of argument that there might be an infinite number of potentialities in that. sense. But notice that that doesn't conflict with the idea that there couldn't be an actual infinite, because we're using potentiality here to mark a different kind of reality than actuality. So it means that there might be an infinite number of potentialities and potentialize are kind of reality, but it doesn't mean there could be an actual infinite because we're not talking

about actualities here. We're talking about potentialities. So at any particular moment, the universe is only going to be finitely large. It could always be larger still. and yet larger again, a day, a century, a million years hence. But in a particular moment, it's got a certain specific finite size. Same thing with the temperature of the coffee. It might have an infinite number of potential temperatures, but at the moment, it's only one particular temperature. And so we don't have an actual infinite in the relevant sense.

Okay, that's one thing I would say. Another thing I would say, though, before you move on, I just wanted to clarify, because I've just realized this might confuse people that the word, actual and potential might be equivocated on here in that in the context of infinity an actual and a potential infinite those two words mean very different things to when talking about actual and potential in an aristotelian sense in the sense of infinities when I say an actual infinite I mean a sort of complete set of infinite things that exists all at once whereas a potential infinite is something that tends towards infinity I'm not using the words in other words when I say potential

infinite, actual infinite, in the same way as we've been using potential and actual to discuss the rest of the topics that we've sort of covered so far. I just thought that was worth clarifying. Okay, yeah, so fair enough. So I would say that given the way Aristotle and Aquinas use these concepts, there's no difficulty in acknowledging that the thing might have an infinite number of potentialities. And in a sense, it has the matrix of moment. So that would mean having a real infinite set of properties. That is, in the way that like, you know, you talked about potentially being cold as a property of the mug in the way that sort of potentially having no legs might be a property of me. It's like an actual property that I have, this potential to have no legs or to grow an extra finger or something.

Yeah. If that's the case, I think saying that the coffee actually has the potential. to be any of an infinite number of, of temperatures, it would be like me saying or hypothesizing a thing that has an infinite number of other kinds of properties, like an infinite number of fingers or an infinite number of legs or something. You'd probably say, well, you can't have a thing that actually has an infinite number of legs because that would be an actually infinite number of things. Again, actually infinite used in a different sense there in the mathematical sense. If I said, well, I've imagined a being that's got an infinite number of legs,

you might say, well, that's impossible. You can't have an infinite number of properties. But if potentiality and potential states are real properties of real objects, then to say that the coffee can potentially be any temperature, including up to any decimal place, seems to me that that's a bit like saying, because you're saying that's a real property of the coffee right now, it's like saying that, you know, the coffee has an infinite number of handles, which would be impossible. Yeah. Well, again, now, this brings us to the other point I wanted to make, which it seems to me now more clearly is the more fundamental point. So I'll move on to that. But before doing so, I don't have a problem with saying, again, that the safe, suppose we take

the universe that exists right now is one big substance, whether that's the right way to think about it is another question. I don't think it is. But for the sake of argument, I'll just grant that to say that there are, there are an infinite, number of sizes that it could potentially be. And that that's a fact about it here and now. I don't have a problem with that myself. And I don't think it conflicts with anything I've been saying. And the same thing, if we granted for the sake of argument, the coffee could potentially be any one of an infinite number of temperatures. I don't have any problem with that either. But that brings us, I think, maybe what is the most fundamental point, which is that I don't

actually think myself that actual infinites and whether they're a problem. And whether they're possible or not really plays an essential role in this kind of argument. It's well known that it plays a crucial role in the Kalam argument for God's existence, the sort of argument that does try to trace the history of the universe back to a beginning and to argue for God as the cause of that beginning. It's central to such arguments to say that, well, you know, if the universe were infinitely old, we'd have an infinite number of moments having elapsed and there can't be an actual infant, all that. But that's not the kind of argument I'm giving. But it's the difference between the kind of argument we've been discussing and that argument is not

just that that argument appeals to a temporal regress and Aquinas and Aristotle's argument does not, but also as I say that whether the series is infinitely long or not, I don't think is actually doing any essential work in the argument. So let me explain what I mean by that by using another example I sometimes appeal to. If you take, so I, you know, I used Aquinas as example of the hand moving the stick, moving the stone. Suppose you're looking at a window and you see a stick moving and all you see is like there's the stone moving and you see the stick and the stick extends beyond the part of the, you know, the part of the window you can see. So you think, gee, what's going on? Is there some guy out there like, you know, a few yards away holding a long stick? So you go out

to investigate and you see, no, this stick just keeps going up into the sky, say. And you might think there must be somebody in a tree who's holding that stick and moving it. And, and, and you And so you investigate further and you say, no, it goes well beyond any tree I can see. In fact, it goes way up into the clouds and you get a telescope out and you see it goes well beyond anything you can see with a telescope. I suppose in theory we could allow that the stick goes on to infinity. There are going to be reasons of physics why you couldn't have a stick that operates this way. I understand that. But putting that aside, you know, we could allow for the sake of argument that maybe the stick goes on to infinity with no beginning to it.

But even if that's where the, even if that were the case, there would still have to be something outside the stick that's making it move in such a way that it can push that stone along. And the reason is that sticks, whether they're a foot long or a yard long or a mile long or infinitely long, doesn't matter how long they are, sticks don't have any power to move themselves. So there's got to be something outside them that imparts that power to them. And the length of the stick is not really to the point. Even if it were infinitely long, that would remain the case. it has to be something outside of that imparts causal power to it.

So in that way, I don't think infinity and how long this series of causes is, whether it's infinitely long and is really doing the essential work here. What's really doing the essential work in Aristotle Aquinas' argument is the distinction between secondary causality or derivative causality on the one hand and primary or built-in causality on the other. It's the idea that you can't have a secondary cause without a primary cause rather than any point about the length of the series and whether it's infinite or not? I think that makes perfect sense.

I mean, another example I've heard is essentially the same thing but in the context of a paint brush. That is, if you see an image being painted, if you see the Mona Lisa being painted on a canvas by a brush, and you say, well, what's moving the hairs on the end of the brush? And we say, oh, well, this bit of stick that's attached to it, that bit of the paintbrush. And we say, well, what's moving that bit of the paintbrush? Well, there's another bit of the paintbrush further up. a bit of wood, you know, just longer along.

And that's, that's moving it, and that's causing it to move. And that's being caused by the thing further up and further up. And you should just say, if somebody would to just say, well, I just think that the paintbrush goes on infinitely. You could say, even if that were the case, still doesn't explain why it's painting the Mona Lisa. It still doesn't seem to have any, any power to do that, you know, even if you allow it to go on for infinity. So I agree with you that infinity is not relevant in that context, but the specific objection I'm making is, like you say, you know, it doesn't really matter whether this causal chain goes on forever or whether it doesn't. That's kind of irrelevant, quite right, I think.

However, it does rely upon the idea that change is the actualization of potential and that potential is a real quality of objects. And so the specific objection that I'm making with relation to infinity is that I think this requires the belief that there really exists an infinite number of properties of objects And not like in a potential sense of like, I mean, for me, if I were to say, well, I don't think that potential properties are real in the way that you say they are, then it's not a problem that there's an infinite number of them because they're not real. I don't have to posit the existence of an infinite set of properties. But if you want to say no, these properties, these potential properties are real properties of an object, there has to be an infinite number of them. And so regardless of whether the chain of actualization and potential, we're talking about goes on for an infinite length or not, like totally irrelevant, just in the singular instance of one case of the actualization of potential, or even before the actualization, you just have the coffee sat there on the table. And you look at that coffee and you say,

what are its properties? Well, the coffee cup is white. It's got one handle. It's, you know, this many centimeters tool. It also has an infinite number of potential temperatures. And that's a real property just like its handle is, you're positing the existence of a real infinite, surely. I mean, would you think that I should, before I ask whether you think that's a problem, do you think that that's what somebody is doing or does have to do if they think that potential properties are real properties of an object? They have to say that there are an infinite number, even if you just think in terms of its spatial location, you know, you could move at an inch to the side, you can move it half an

inch or a quarter of an inch or a third of an inch, you know, and you could sort of keep halving it forever. And this would be a potential infinite if it weren't for the case that you think these potential locations are like real properties. They really exist of this mug all at once, all at the same time. Is that what a person is committed to doing? Well, I think, first of all, so let me say a couple things here. First of all, in the case of the coffee cup, the case of coffee in the cup. Like I said before, I'm happy to allow for the sake of argument that it potentially has an infinite number of temperatures. And since potentialities are real, I don't have a problem with saying that in that sense, there are an infinite number of

realities in the coffee. Okay. However, I would add, first of all, that I don't think that that follows from the analysis of change as the actualization of potential, that would just follow from the nature of properties like temperature and maybe the nature of coffee. So in that way, if I understood you correctly, you were saying that if you start with this whole analysis that I've been setting out, you're committed ultimately to saying there are an infinite number of realities. And I would say, no, it's not real things. Real things. And I would say, no, it's not, it's not the analysis of potentiality and actuality that leads to that, it would be instead the nature of specific things like liquids and so on and temperature that might, when you supplement the theory

of actuality and potentiality might lead you to say there are an infinite number of realities in the case of, you know, an infinite number of potentials that the coffee might be. So that's one point. The second point, though, is that I don't see how this poses any sort of problem. It would pose a problem only if somehow was committed to the idea that there could not in any sense be an infinite number of realities. But I'm not saying I'm not committed to that idea. So since I'm not, if the analysis of temperature or the analysis of size, I were talking about the different sizes the universe, the expanding universe could be, if the analyses of

those things led us to posit an infinite number of potentialities, I don't think that poses any problem because I'm not saying there can't be infinites of any kind. And like I said, I don't even think infinity per se plays an essential role in the argument yeah it's worth bearing in mind that somebody can if my objection is correct here somebody can just say well you know you can have an actually infinite number of things or maybe it's just the case that you can't have an actually infinite number of actual things but you can have an actually infinite number of potential things like maybe that's just a truth and and that would be fine um but i think it's essentially if we provide an argument that actual infinites can't exist, then this becomes a powerful

objection, but it can also be sort of an ad hominem in the sense of talking to somebody who in other contexts might say actual infinites can't exist. Like if I was having this conversation with William Lane Craig and he was putting forward your argument, I might say, but you know, you've said elsewhere that actual infinites can't exist. But here you seem to be suggesting that we have an actually infinite number of real properties of a coffee cup. So it could be sort of formulated as an ad hominem, but it's worth, and that's, I just mean, like, to the person, not in the fallacious sense. It's just like an argument. It's just like putting out a, it's an appeal to consistency. Yeah, quite right. Yeah, right. But, but I mean, like, yeah, you could just say, I have no problem with,

you know, an infinite, an infinite number of realities, but it does seem to me that that's what you have to believe. And you said that, well, this isn't, this doesn't come from an analysis of change. It comes from just the nature of temperature and the nature of coffee. I'm not sure if that's true. I think in my view, I mean, I'm suspicious of the idea that potential properties are real. And so because I don't have that analysis of potentiality and of what change is, I can look at a coffee cup and think, yeah, I mean, it's sort of, it's potentially the case that this could become an infinite number of, infinite number of temperatures. But that's not a problem for me because I don't think those potential states of the coffee exist of the coffee right now. I think it, once you have an analysis of change that says, no, potential is a real thing, a real property of an object that gets actualized, then you look again at the coffee and you say, oh, well, now I've got this problem because the infinite number of temperatures that it could be are real. So I think it does follow from the analysis of change, not that there's going to be an infinite number of temperatures that the coffee can be, but that this leads to a problem because it's that analysis of change that requires us to say that those infinite number of

potential temperatures actually, not actually, but really exist of that coffee cup right now. And so you have the existence of an infinite number of things that really exist. And I think that only, that problem only comes about with this analysis of change. Well, whether it does or not, and I'm not convinced, I'm still not convinced that it does, but more fundamentally, I don't see how it poses a problem for the argument. So if we're talking about the coffee, we say, okay, we've got this cup of coffee in front of me. this has got tea in it right now, but supposedly it had coffee in it. And it's actually at room temperature, but it could potentially be 90 degrees, 95 degrees, 100 degrees, 100 degrees, 300,

and so on. And there's no limit there. So there's potentially an infinite number of temperatures it could be. So far, so good. I don't have any problem with that. But the next step of the argument that I'm giving for God's existence, the Aristotelian-Tumistic argument, it doesn't doesn't make any reference to how many potentialities that there are, but rather to how any of them gets actualized. That's what you're really doing the work. So if it's, if it ends up being actually 90 degrees rather than 91 or 88 or something, we need an account of why that's the case, what made it the case. And so the argument then proceeds by saying, well, there must be something already actual that actualized that potential. So it's not a matter of how many potentials there are and whether in some sense potentials are real. It's how the potentials ever become actualized. And can, Can we account for that without arriving ultimately at something that is purely actual, that can actualize anything else? And I think you can spell out. Sorry, I don't mean to interrupt, but I think I can tell you why I think it is, why it is a problem, which is that if we were to say, for example, that we don't think there can be real infinite, that an infinite number of things can't really exist, then if I were to say, that your analysis of change.

I don't say that though, but go, but go ahead, go ahead. You don't say that it requires the existence of an infinite number of real things. I'm saying, I'm not denying that there can be an infinite number of real things. Oh, sorry, yeah, sorry, yeah. So, yeah, like I said, a moment ago, if you think that there can be an infinite number of things, then fine. But I think the reason it would be a potential objection is because if you thought that that were a problem, then it would essentially invalidate the, it would by reduct. to invalidate the analysis of change because we'd say this analysis of change leads to

having to assert the real existence of an infinite number of things but a real infinite number of things can't exist and therefore the analysis must be wrong and so the very beginning of the argument this analysis of change is the actualization of potential and potential being a real property of an object would be uh would be undermined um you seem to be suggesting if i'm hearing you correctly that well there there just can be there's no problem with saying that there is a real number of infinite things in the universe. There's a real number of infinite properties of a coffee cup. Is that, like, am I hearing you correctly there? That's right. I think, I think, I'm not saying there can be that every sort of infinite collection is

possible. I will allow, at least for the sake of argument, that there might be some that are not, but I would definitely not say that all infinite collections of any kind are impossible. I don't appeal any such premise. And I think that I think it probably gets too much attention in this context, both from defenders and critics of arguments for God's existence. That's my personally. I tend to think it's a bit of a red herring. And so I emphasize both defenders. So I'm not criticizing you for doing it. Both defenders and critics of the argument, I think, they devote too much attention to whether this or that sort of infinite collection is possible. And I don't. Would you go as far as to say at least that

this analysis of, even if you don't think it's a problem, this analysis of change does require its adopter to look at a coffee cup and say there are a real number, a real infinite number of properties that actually exist of that coffee cup. Or maybe, because again, the temperature example, you were sort of just stipulating that we could allow it to go infinitely up. Even if we don't allow that, think about like halving it, right? Think about sort of 40 degrees, 20 degrees, 10 degrees, 5 degrees, 2 and a half degrees, you know, just sort of halving it or turning up the temperature so it's 25.5.5 degrees and then it's 25.555 degrees and then 25.55 degrees and so on, you know, these are all the potential properties, which it seems plausibly there are actually

an infinite number of ways the coffee can be. So even if you don't think it's a problem, do you think you are committed to looking at that coffee and saying that because the potential states of that coffee are real things and they really exist at the coffee cup, you have to think that there exists a real number of infinite properties? Well, first of all, just to, and I don't blame you because the jargon here can get complicated and that the ambiguities can be confusing. But what we're talking about here, again, are an infinite number of real temperatures, but real because they're potential, not because they're actual.

So we're not talking about an actual infinite here. Okay, but if you mean, okay, yeah, but it's a real infinite. It's kind of an, isn't it like an actually infinite number? of real potential properties. Because again, the word actual and potential are used different in the context of infinity. I kind of wish we had a different word to use to describe this. But do you know what I mean? Like the phrase actual and potential infinite means something different to actual and potential existence in this context. Right. Well, I guess I would say, you could put it this way. There really are, meaning it's something about the reality of the liquid, not just about

the way we think about it or something. There really are in the liquid. an infinite number of potential temperatures say. Yes. Okay, I think I'm okay with that. But in answer to your question, I would say, if that's the case, then it's not because of the analysis of change as the actualization of potential. That's not what leads us to say it. It's because of the nature of temperature. When we think about what temperature is, we find, well, I mean, there's in principle no reason why there should be some uppermost temperature.

There might be reasons from physics and chemistry, but if we're talking about the metaphysics of temperature, you know, perhaps for the sake of argument, there's no upper limit. Well, I'm happy to allow that for the sake of argument, but I don't think it's the analysis of change as the actualization of potential that leads me there. I think it's the analysis of temperature. So it's tangential to the, it's tangential to the analysis that underlays the argument for the unmoved mover. Well, I think the operational word there, or the operative word there would be real. We said a moment ago when we were sort of trying to iron out the jargon, we said, okay, well, maybe I'd say there's a real number of potentially, a real number of infinite potential objects. And you said, but that doesn't come from the analysis of change. I think the real part does, because if I don't think that potential properties are real, they're not, they're not a thing that actually exist. Then it wouldn't be the case. that I look at the coffee and say, no, there's a real number of infinite potential properties. I would just say that there are an infinite number of potential properties, but they're not real. They're just potential, and that's not a real thing, whereas this analysis of change does bring out this real, and only the analysis of change brings out that real.

It's not from the analysis of coffee or temperature, but from the analysis of change that you're providing that gets us to this analysis, that gets us to this conclusion. I agree with that, right, that the real qualifier there is part of my analysis, because if it's not, then you're not treating potentialities as, as, if they're not part of reality, distinct from actuality, they're not going to do the work that the argument needs them to do. So with that much, I agree. Yeah, and so that's why I say that if somebody's listening and they think, well, actually, no, I don't think there can be intuitively an infinite number of real things, then given that, as you say, this is required to get the argument off the ground, this might serve as an

objection, but it seems like your response is to say that, well, there can be an infinite number of real things, and there's no problem with that. And I guess that's... I would just say, if that's a problematic notion, it's because of the nature of temperature. That's what needs the attention. It's not the nature. It's not the theory of actuality and potentiality. It's kind of like if somebody said, well, I don't think there can be an infinite collection of any kind. And I said, well, what about the series of numbers, right? And we start arguing about that. Well, now we've got to be nominalists and say that numbers aren't real, their inventions and so on.

But the problem there would derive from the nature of numbers, not from, you know, not from infinity itself. So, or if somebody wanted to deny that, you know, wanted to argue for a nominalist theory of numbers

and was unable to do it, again, it would be because, it would be because of the nature of numbers and the difficulty of denying their reality, rather than the notion of infinity itself. You know, it's amazing.

This has been, this is like the sort of the first objection that I raised to this argument in the video that I did responding to Ben Shapiro and I think that our discussion of the singular objection is longer than the entire video that I produced in the first instance so it's it's it's been it's been fascinating I wonder if I might be able to run there were two more specific objections that I had and you know I don't want to sort of take up too much of your time here but if if it would be good to sort of get them out because I'd like to be able to say that I've given you the opportunity to respond to the objections that I put to your right.

I can make this video. The other two, the first, and one of them you actually have already mentioned and preempted, but before we get to that, there was a, I remember when you had a discussion with Graham Opie on capturing Christianity on Cameron Batuzzi's channel, and he raised a point that I think has an implication that I don't think got discussed. He spoke about the fact that if change is the actualization of potential, that's fine, but the actualization of potential doesn't always involve change. So, for example, the example that he gives, there's a yellow chair that I'm sat on right now.

If people are watching, we'll be able to see it. And the chair seems to have the potential, Opi says, to become green if I were to re-apulster it. So it has this potential to become green. But it also seemingly has a potential to remain yellow. If it doesn't have the potential to remain yellow, then that means it can't. remain yellow and so it would stop being yellow. It seems to me intelligible to say that this yellow chair has the potential to stay yellow. And if that's the case, and this is the implication I don't think was drawn out in this discussion you have with Graham Opie, if that is the

case, if that's a correct analysis and it may be wrong, but it would seem to me to suggest that in the existence of any actual thing, it must have at least one potential property and that is the potential to remain as it is. So in this argument that you present the argument from motion, we're led to an unmoved mover of pure actuality, that is a purely actual being or actuality itself. But if things have the potential to remain as they are, then you couldn't have a purely actual being because the purely actual being would need to have this potential to remain as it is.

If it doesn't have the potential to remain as it is, then it can't remain as it is. it pops out of existence? Well, I would say in the case of Graham Opie's example there, and it's been a while since I had that exchange with Graham, and since then, you know, we've had an exchange about this in print, which people might want to check out if they're interested in pursuing this more carefully, because it gets, carving up all these different kinds of potentialities gets complicated and hard to hold before your mind. But it seems to me, not having gone back and re-read what he said, that there's a kind of ambiguity here in the term potentialities that's used in this context.

We say that the yellow chair that you're sitting and has a potential to remain yellow. Is there a sense in which that's true? Yeah, there's a sense in which it's true. But it's not the same kind of potentiality that we're talking about. We're talking about the chair being potentially red, say, right? because the basic idea is this, that the yellowness is there in the chair already. It's not potentially yellow. It is yellow.

Whereas the redness is not in the chair already. It's there only potentially. So you might say there's a, the yellowness of the chair is already actual. And so if it potentially remains yellow, well, that's true only in the trivial sense that it already is yellow anyway, and there's nothing in the nature of things that require that anybody stop, you know, making it yellow by painting it red or something. That's a different sense from the sense in which the redness is in the chair potentially. So that, so there's a potential ambiguity there that I think poses a problem for the analysis. But you also, you open up the

question here by saying, suggesting that there can be, if I remember how you put it, correctly, that there can be the actuality of potentialities that don't involve change. And I'm happy to allow that, that there's a sense in which that's true. Because after all, you know, Aquinas, unlike Aristotle, Aquinas, when he gets into this particular discussion, has to make a place for things like angels, which are disembodied intellects. And people hearing this, you don't know what Aquinas says about angels might think. angels, what are you talking about? And they think of the wings and all that kind of stuff.

But for Aquinas, an angel is just a disembodied mind. So you can think of like a Cartesian res cogitans, a mind without matter. And whether somebody believes in these things or not is not relevant to the present point. The present point is just this. Suppose there are angels or that there even could be angels. Because they are not material things, they're not made up of form and matter. They don't change in the sense in which physical objects do. For Aquinas, they don't exist in time. They don't gain and lose properties over time and so on. And so in that sense, they don't change, but they still have to be created because they're

merely contingent things. And that means they have to go from potentiality to actuality. So going from potential to actual is a broader notion than change. All change involves the actualization potential, but not every actualization potential is a change. And so if that's what's at issue, I'd say, well, I agree with that much. The kind of argument I've been giving starts with a particular kind of actualization potential that we see as change in the world around us. But ultimately when you follow out the implications of the argument completely, it transcends that to any kind of actualization of potential. Yeah, it's not an objection in itself just to say that there is actualization of potential that isn't change.

It's just to to provide a space for an example of that which in this instance is the potent is the sort of actualization of the potential to remain as you are. Now, you took issue with this idea of the yellow chair having the potential to remain yellow because it is currently actually yellow.

I think the thought would have to be worded something like something like saying, yes, the chair. share is currently yellow, but its future yellowness is not actual. Its future yellowness is still potential because, you know, it's in sort of five minutes time, it's going to be yellow, but like that future yellowness doesn't exist. And so if it, if it's going to be actualized, it seems to need to come out of something, which would be potential. Do you just sort of reject this analysis this altogether, or do you think there's some truth to it, some accuracy?

Well, I mean, the bare statement that the chair could in future be either yellow or not yellow and that there will have to be something that makes it the case, that it's one or the other. I don't any problem with that, but I don't think it poses any problem for my argument. So if you said, yeah, but okay, but wouldn't you have to say the same thing about God, that God, who's purely actual, even though he's purely actual, there's a sense in which he has the potential to exist in the future, I would say, well, it depends on what you mean. I mean, that can't be true in the strictest sense because we didn't get into this, but one of the implications of being purely actual is being atemporal or outside of time altogether.

So for Aquinas and the tradition that I'm describing here, God is eternal, not in the sense that he exist at every moment in time, but that he transcends time altogether. So there's no past, present, and the future for God. And if that's the case, then there's no literal sense to be made of the idea that he might potentially exist in the future. I mean, for one thing, at least semantically, someone might think, well, if he can potentially exist, he could also potentially not exist, and that would be ruled out by his being purely actual. But furthermore, again, if we say potentially exist in the future, that makes it sound like he's in time, passing through time, and he hasn't got to his existence on Saturday or something. But Aquinas would say, and I would agree that

that's not intelligible with respect to God, since he's not in time whatsoever. If what we mean instead is, well, from our perspective, you know, God will still exist on Saturday just as he does now, because we pass through time and we entertain the notion of God at different points in time. So in that sense, could we say he potentially exists? Well, yeah, but we're speaking really loosely now. We're not really talking about him. We're talking about our thoughts about him. So when we disambiguate the key phrases here, I don't think we have any problem. Yeah. And so even if we do accept the analysis of the chair potentially remaining yellow, that seems to require time. That seems to require me saying, well, its future yellowness is potential. Its current yellowness is actually. but it's future yellowness as potential but that kind of analysis can't apply to God who sits outside of time

I think there might be a way thinking about it to come up with a notion of potentials that must exist of an object even atemporally but yeah I certainly can't think of one off the top

of the top of the head and that would be I think required to make this objection stand so perhaps I'll give it some some more thought but I think that that's a That's a perfectly reasonable rebuttal to the objection that I've given. And I want to make sure that we've got time to discuss the third briefly, which you've already mentioned, is adopting a B theory of time. That is adopting the idea that objects have a temporal dimension, just like they have spatial ones. You talked about this earlier.

Temporal meaning to do with time. So if we have like a book and the book has three dimensions, it has a width, has a height, has a depth. Some people believe that the way we should interpret time is such that we sort of exist on this time block and this book has a real temporal dimension that stretches sort of through time. But it all exists all at once and it sort of has its past and its future as as parts of it in the same way that its left hand side and its right hand side are parts of it.

If this were the case, and I know you discussed this. in your book. It seems like some scientific theories imply this kind of theory of time. For example, there's an argument to be made that Einstein's relativity implies a B theory of time, that this is actually the way the universe works,

or the universe is. If that's the case, then to say something like, you know, the coffee now is hot, but it's potentially cold in the future, would be, given that like, the future cold coffee, it's just different part of the same hot coffee that existed five minutes ago, it would be like saying,

you know, the book here is actual because I can see it, it's in front of me, but if I put it in the other room and if I hide it, then it's potential because I'm in a sort of place where I can't see it anymore. It would be something like doing that. It would be really weird and arbitrary to say that there's this property of the book that it's it's it's sort of potentially exists just because I can't see it right now it's it's over there it's in the other room but if I bring it over here now it's actual seems like nothing's actually changed there if the B3 of time is true I think it's something like that because the the hot coffee and the cold coffee are just like two parts of the coffee you know what I mean I mean you

you'll be familiar with this objection I don't think I've put it particularly well there. But you'll know what I'm talking about. Sure, absolutely. I know exactly what you're talking about. So obviously the dispute between A and B theories of time is a huge issue. It's one that I get into in another book, Aristotle's Revenge, for anybody who's interested. And I am a kind of a theorist of time. I think that temporal flow is real. And I don't buy the idea that the past and future stages of any particular object are as real as the present and so on. So, I would reject all that on grounds that are independent of anything that we talk about here in natural theology.

However, having said that, I think ultimately you can bracket all that off because, excuse me, what's really doing the crucial work in the argument from motion is the idea of the actualization of potential. And as long as there's anything like that in reality, we have the ingredients for an argument for a purely actual actualizer or unmoved mover of the world. So I mentioned a few moments ago that Aquinas thinks of an angel as a mind without matter, but he still thinks angels need to be created. Now, why is that?

This brings us to something we haven't talked about, which is Aquinas' distinction between essence and existence, the essence of a thing and the existence of a thing. And so he introduces this with examples like the following. He says, well, and this is actually my riff on Aquinas, I'll just use my way of putting this. Suppose we're talking about different kinds of living thing, different kinds of creatures, some of which exist now, some of which never existed, some of which have gone extinct. And imagine you're talking to somebody who's not familiar with any of these creatures,

maybe a young, precocious, but a child who's not aware of these creatures. For example, suppose you tell one of these children, you say, look, let me describe for you what a lion is, and you give him a complete description of the nature of a lion, the essence of a line, what it is to be a line. You give him a complete description of the essence or nature of what it is to be a Tyrannosaurus Rex, and a complete description of the essence or nature of what it is to be a unicorn. And the kid isn't familiar with any of these things. So then you ask, okay, now that you have understood what I've told you, and again, imagine it's a precocious kid who remembers everything, and he's also really good at reasoning, so he can deduce all the relevant facts

from what you've told him. If you ask him, now, of these three creatures, one of them really exists. One of them, what it really exists here and now. I've got the answering machine in the background here. I'm sorry, it's kind of distracting me. One of them really exists here and now. One of them used to exist, but has gone extinct. And one of them never existed, but is purely legendary, purely fictional. Now, tell me which is which. The kid would not be able to do it. There's nothing in knowing the essences of any of those things that would tell him one way or the other, which of those exists here and now, which you stupid, has gone extinct and which never did. So from this kind of argument, and he gives others, Aquinas concludes that the existence of a thing,

its reality, is distinct from its essence or nature. Okay, that's one point. Essence and existence are different aspects of a thing. But because they are, Aquinas thinks that the essence of a thing considered just by itself is a kind of potentiality, and existence is what actualizes it. So a T-Rex, say, is just considering the nature of a T-Rex, is by itself just a potential kind of thing. And at one time, that potential was actualized millions of years ago, now it no longer is. A unicorn is a potential kind of thing. It's never been actualized.

You might say, existence has never been added to the essence or nature of what it is to be a unicorn. Now, this would be as true of angels as it would be of, of animals, but angels are not material objects. They don't exist in time. They don't pass through time. They're outside of time and space for Aquinas, but they still need to be created because they're still in them a distinction between their essence and their existence. So something has to add existence to them in order for them to be real. Now, suppose we accepted a B theory of time, and suppose we therefore concluded that the universe is a four-dimensional block where every event that takes place, the conversation we're having here and now, 9-11, World War II, you know, the extinction

of the dinosaurs, and then the other direction of time, the foundation of the first lunar colony, the first Starbucks on the surface of Mars, you know, that takes place 500 years from or whatever, right? All those events are equally real and all those entities are equally real in a kind of timeless way on this eternalist or B theory account of time. Even if that were correct, the four-dimensional object that is the universe would be something that in which we can distinguish its essence or nature what it is from its existence. It would be a contingent thing that could have failed to exist and yet it doesn't fail to exist. So why does it exist? Well, we need to appeal to something outside it that imparts existence to that, the nature of the universe. And then we're back,

we're back on the road to a purely actual actualizer. Yeah, and in fact, we're kind of opening up the conversation to talk about an entirely different argument, which is the argument from contingency, which you also discuss in your book. So that would be a whole other discussion to have. But yeah, sorry, do you continue. So, yeah, so I would say, now, in fact, I don't accept that whole account of time, but for reasons that are independent of philosophy of religion in which I get into and

Aristotle's revenge, which is really a book about the philosophy of science and the philosophy of nature. My point here, though, is that even if we conceded all that for the sake of argument, it wouldn't really affect the heart of the argument for an unmoved mover. Now, it would in effect transform the argument into what in the book Five Proofs, I call the Thomistic argument from the distinction between essence and existence to an ultimate cause of existence. But that argument, too, ultimately makes use of the idea of the actualization of potential. So the arguments are closely related anyway, even if they're distinct arguments. Yeah, I mean, it's going to be difficult always to precisely distinguish between different arguments. I mean, like the paintbrush

example that I gave earlier, I've most commonly heard it in the context of talking about contingency, I think, contingency arguments. But I also, I think it more naturally lends itself perhaps the argument from motion. These do interact and they cross over quite a bit. I see what you're saying. B theory of time sees the universe as all one sort of big block in the way that it's got right now it just has these spatial dimensions. It also has this temporal dimension.

It just exists as one big time block. And we still have to explain why does the time block exist in the first place? I do think that's perhaps a slightly different question. I'm not sure that it involves change. I think it might involve something more like the existence of a contingent object rather than the actualization of potential. And so I think that there are sort of things to say about that, but I think it would sort of veer us off this particular argument.

And in fact, that sort of works as a good segue to maybe put a pin in things and perhaps return at some point in the future to discuss contingency and the existence of a contingent universe and how that itself might point to the existence of a god. I think what we've discussed so far, I hope that listeners will be familiar with the argument now if they went before because we spent a good sort of 30, 40 minutes or so, really laying out the argument and detail and getting to grips with it, presented some of the rebuttals, or the three rebuttals that I put in the Ben Shapiro video, which for what it's worth, I think that

the sort of infinite number of qualities or properties of an object, I still think that might be a problem. I'm interested to hear what viewers, listeners have to say about that. On the second point, I think your response to what I said works quite well, provided I can't think of an example of another kind of potential that doesn't require time but must exist of actual objects of actual things. I think that that second objection was was quite briskly done away with. The third that we're talking about here, the B theory of time, we've only scratched the surface, but I think it might require talking about contingency. But I think that's my interpretation of the conversation we've had so far and the successes and failures, I think,

of the various arguments. But I think it's perhaps a good place to put a pin in things. All right. Again, I appreciate the invitation and I enjoyed our discussion here and your willingness to pursue it in such depth. Yeah, I sort of, I hope that people, it's interesting. I have spoken about these arguments in the past in the context of debates. I remember the first time I read your book was in preparation to debate, Trent Horn, who I knew was going to be using, if not your arguments, the same kind of arguments, or some of them that appear in the book. So it was the first time I came across, came across the book. And in that context, it's a lot more presentation and rebuttal and rebuttal and rebuttal. These podcasts try

to be a bit more conversational. I hope people aren't disappointed that I haven't sort of pressed my case like I were doing in the debate. But if they're interested in hearing it presented in that context, then that original Ben Shapiro video that I made might be of interest as well as that debate with Trent Horn that I just mentioned. Because we talk about a lot of these themes, but with a bit more of a sort of argumentative style. It's really nice to be able to sit down and have a friendly conversation about these arguments, which I think genuinely are some of the most fascinating and interesting areas of philosophy or points of philosophy that exist. And the book in particular, I really do recommend that people pick it up because it's a, it's a wonderful

overview of these great arguments. So Dr. Faser, genuinely, it's been a real pleasure to sit down with you and I do appreciate you taking the time. Thanks for coming on the podcast. It's been a pleasure for me as well. Thank you very much.