This is the script for this video.

On our journey toward classical theism, we’re going to have to make a stop and discuss the New Atheism, which was a resurgence of irreligious sentiment that shortly followed the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. I would date this wave of irreligion as beginning in approximately 2004 with Sam Harris’ book The End of Faith and I would say its major demise occurred in 2012 with the passing of Christopher Hitchens, who died in late 2011. I don’t think the New Atheism has delivered much by way of serious philosophical or theological criticism or a rational defense of atheism. The New Atheism is best understood as a cultural phenomenon in the Anglosphere provoked by 9/11 and a growing sentiment that the complexities of both domestic and international politics could be ameliorated by reducing the influence of religion in both political and personal life. And it represents a further playing out of the contradiction between orthodox religion and certain liberal political views. The New Atheism does emerge from more basic philosophical views, like all positions do, but it is not primarily an intellectual position; no advances in science or philosophy make atheism any more plausible than, say, fifty years ago.

Properly speaking, there’s nothing new about it, with the exception that their books became best-sellers. There have always been flare-ups of irreligion throughout history and the garden variety New Atheist merely spouts off the same talking points used against religion during the Enlightenment and the French Revolution and regurgitates the scientism of the logical positivists of the early 20th century – that the methods of the empirical sciences, in principle, exhaust all decidable questions. Therefore, all questions of theology or metaphysics are either meaningless or, if they are meaningful, are to be subject to the verificationist principle, like any other proposition in the empirical sciences. This is all in spite of the fact that logical positivism received one of the biggest curb-stompings of any philosophical position in history by W.V.O. Quine. Even A.J. Ayer, himself a logical positivist, said that its major defect was that nearly all of it was false. In spite of all this, if you scratch at the surface of many intelligent atheists, you’ll often find that verificationism is still alive (whether it’s well is a separate issue).

The New Atheism is intellectually bankrupt, but you might be asking why I’m devoting a video in this series to it. The reason is that, even though it is bankrupt in its philosophical and theological views, it is influential especially on YouTube, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the vast majority of atheists watching this video have been influenced in one way or another by the atheists in that time period from 2004 to 2012. I wish to make it clear that this wave of atheism doesn’t have that much to say when it comes to the main arguments of classical theism. I’d like to tackle and dismiss some of the weakest New Atheist objections to the arguments of natural theology, which unfortunately occur quite commonly in these debates. The most egregious offenses of the New Atheists are in their treatment of the cosmological arguments, the class of argument that gets the most attention in popular discourse.

These arguments reason not from this-or-that particular fact of the world, but from the most general features of the world, such as the presence of change (which is basically what is meant by the term motion for someone like Aquinas), or the existence of contingent things (that is, dependent on circumstances outside itself), or the existence of composite things, combined with an additional principle, usually of causation, e.g. saying that that which changes is changed by something else, or that which is composite has a cause, to the existence of a qualitatively different absolute source: an unmoved mover, or necessary being, or non-composite/simple thing. Now, atheists often ask where’s your evidence? – for many of the cosmological arguments, this is a rather silly question, what could be more evident than the claim that some things are changing or that some things are made of parts? If you’re looking for more evidence for these two claims, you need to stop watching this video and go outside and go for a walk. Admittedly, we’re going to have to spell out these concepts, especially motion and contingent, and explain those principles of causation we’re invoking and talk about the ordering of causal series, but these aren’t wild claims that I need a special scientific apparatus to verify. If anything, the denial of some of these principles leads to talking nonsense and the undermining of the authority of the empirical sciences, something atheists are quite adamant in preserving.

It is important to point out that the very structure of these arguments involves reasoning from general features of experience and principles of causation to a most fundamental metaphysical source. Therefore, this is not even in principle a god of the gaps explanation. A god of the gaps explanation tends to identify some mysterious unexplained gap between two occurrences, that is to say, a gap, and say that the gap is only explicable by saying God did it. These cosmological arguments, as is evident from their very form, do not seek to fill in a gap or to explain any mysterious natural event. Interestingly, these god of the gaps arguments were first identified by Christians criticizing other Christians for not seeing God in the totality of the cosmos, and as one continuous, sustaining act, instead seeing God only in the gaps. Nowadays, this god of the gaps point is mostly used by atheists to develop the narrative that natural theology bases itself on filling in the gaps in our scientific knowledge, whereas it does no such thing. Additionally, many atheists, almost as a matter of reflex, will criticize any theological argument, such as a cosmological argument, as being a god of the gaps argument without stopping to think whether the argument is even talking about a gap. As I’ve argued above, this is most certainly not the case in these arguments. I have no interest in god of the gaps arguments in this series, but it’s a point that needs to be addressed.

Besides the god of the gaps point, there’s another point I need to address concerning these main cosmological arguments, and this comes up again and again in both popular atheist literature and philosophical arguments. The point is that not one of the cosmological arguments begins with the premise: everything has a cause. As I said before, the arguments always begin with a premise such as that which is X has a cause, the X being many different things, e.g. that which is composite has a cause, or that which goes from potential to actual has a cause, or that which is distinguished between essence and existence has a cause. This is simply not the same as saying that everything, full stop, no matter what, has a cause. This misunderstanding of the form of the premises within the cosmological arguments leads to the following strawman of what theists are saying: first, everything has a cause, so that means the universe must have a cause, and that cause must have been God, and therefore God exists. But wait! You said that everything had a cause, so what caused God? If you say nothing then you’ve contradicted that statement that everything has a cause. But, if you say God is self-caused (whatever that means) then why can’t the universe be self-caused? Why does it have to be God that causes the universe?

Now, this silly cartoon of the cosmological arguments takes up an inordinate amount of time in philosophical argument. We’re all agreed here that it’s a dumb argument. Here’s the thing – none of the major philosophers or theologians has ever made this stupid argument. I encourage you to take me up on this challenge, go back to the writings of the major philosophers and theologians, for example, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Scotus, or any others, and look to see if any of them argued for God’s existence starting from the premise everything has a cause. Unfortunately the New Atheists have convinced many people that natural theology rests upon such nonsense like everything has a cause and a stupid, self-contradictory argument.

This misrepresentation of the cosmological arguments is by no means an isolated occurrence among popular atheism; it appears to be the norm in atheist literature. I’m going to start with Daniel Dennett in his 2006 book: Breaking the Spell. Dennett, unlike me, is a trained philosopher and does this stuff for a living. In this book, which is one of the representative books of the New Atheism, Dennett devotes all of one paragraph to the cosmological arguments, a class of argument with a 2300 year history. Before he discusses the cosmological argument, in Ch.8, part 7, he says:

That leaves us with the traditional arguments discussed at great length by the philosophers and theologians over the centuries, some empirical—such as the Argument from Design—and some purely a priori or logical—such as the Ontological Argument and the Cosmological Argument for the necessity of a First Cause.

Now, saying the cosmological argument is one argument as is implied by saying the cosmological argument is strike one; it’s a class of argument, not one argument. Strike two is saying that it’s an a priori argument – but, it is a logical argument, he got that part right. Let’s examine his singular paragraph and see what he has to say about the cosmological argument:

The Cosmological Argument, which in its simplest form states that since everything must have a cause the universe must have a cause—namely, God—doesn’t stay simple for long. Some deny the premise, since quantum physics teaches us (doesn’t it?) that not everything that happens needs to have a cause. Others prefer to accept

the premise and then ask: What caused God? The reply that God is self-caused (somehow) then raises the rebuttal: If something can be self-caused, why can’t the universe as a whole be the thing that is self-caused? This leads in various arcane directions, into the strange precincts of string theory and probability fluctuations and the like, at one extreme, and into ingenious nitpicking about the meaning of “cause” at the other. Unless you have a taste for mathematics and theoretical physics on the one hand, or the niceties of scholastic logic on the other, you are not apt to find any of this compelling, or even fathomable.

Now, what I like about this is that Dennett says he’s giving us the simplified version of the argument, as though he could give us the more complex one if he had the time, and you can see he starts off with that stupid premise everything must have a cause. And, of course, he asks because everything has a cause what caused God? And if God can be self-caused, why can’t the universe? I’m trying to be charitable here and Dennett does say in that second sentence, everything that happens – but what does that even mean? Happened to what? Notice too that Dennett doesn’t tell us where he found this argument. He mentions the scholastics at the end but whom does he have in mind? Abelard, Lombard, Aquinas, Scotus, Ockham? Who among the scholastics made this stupid argument? You might say, well you’re just being pedantic here. But suppose I tried to make the case against evolution by saying that it can’t be right because if it were, that means that, in its simplest form, a chimpanzee gave birth to a modern human 6 million years ago. People like Dennett and Dawkins would be foaming at the mouth with outrage if someone presented this strawman as a case against evolution. Perhaps I am being too harsh here and Dennett has produced an extended critique of the cosmological arguments elsewhere but wouldn’t one expect to find such a critique in a book taking on the entirety of religion? Even so, why can’t he at least state one of the cosmological arguments correctly? You might say, okay, Dennett was an unfortunate case, but I bet you won’t find that elsewhere in the big atheist books.

Let’s turn our attention to Sam Harris, to his 2006 book Letter to a Christian Nation, and look at page 72. The context here is that he’s talking about intelligent design (ID), another topic I don’t particularly care about in this series. Harris says:

The argument for ID has proceeded on many fronts at once. Like countless theists before them, fanciers of ID regularly argue that the very fact that the universe exists proves the existence of God. The argument runs more or less like this: everything that exists has a cause; space and time exist; space and time must, therefore, have been caused by something that stands outside of space and time; and the only thing that transcends space and time, and yet retains the power to create, is God.

Harris has no problems identifying the problems that arise from this dumb argument, again, starting off with everything that exists has a cause. And Harris, in proper fashion, proceeds to ask who made God on the very next page. As far as I can tell these two pages (and they’re extremely short pages, if you’ve ever read this book) contain the only discussion of the cosmological argument in this book. I’ll be gentle with Harris here because I understand he’s not giving a serious theological critique here; the point is that these guys can’t even represent the argument correctly.

The misconception that the cosmological arguments rest on the premise that everything has a cause and that they are god of the gaps arguments are, in my experience, two major misconceptions of natural theology. I’d like to point out a third misconception, one that we saw above with Dennett and Harris, that apparently one of the most devastating objections to theological arguments is asking who made God? or who moved God? or who caused God? These aren’t, properly speaking, objections to any argument, unless the argument was made poorly; rather, they are silly questions which rest upon a misunderstanding of what theists are talking about when they talk about God. As I said above, the cosmological arguments reason to the existence of something which is the unmoved mover, or Prime Mover, or First Cause, or necessary being. Of course, one would like additional arguments for the divine attributes, such as unity, omnipotence, omniscience, and transcendence, and we’ll go over these later in the series. But if the atheist is truly understanding what the theist is saying when he says that God is First Cause or unmoved mover, he would not even bother asking questions like what caused God? for all that amounts to asking is what caused that which is uncaused? which is obviously a silly question, just like asking which cause comes before the first cause. Likewise, the atheist would not ask who moved God? because that amounts to asking who moved that which is unmoved? All of these are, in my opinion, asking a variant of what’s more fundamental than the most fundamental? The answer to all of these questions is simply – nothing – the question betrays a misunderstanding of what the theist is talking about when he talks about God. What the atheist should really do is cut to the chase and ask the good question, which is: okay, can you show that this thing called God with all these features, like unmoved mover, Pure Act, First Cause, necessary being, plus those other divine attributes must exist, as opposed to being imaginary or some abstraction? That’s the good question.

This third sort of bad objection of asking who made God is also astonishingly common in atheist literature and philosophical argumentation. Let’s turn to Christopher Hitchens, in his 2007 book God is not Great which, like the others, devotes somewhere in the range of a paragraph to a few pages to discussing the most important theological arguments, such as the cosmological arguments. Hitchens devotes all of one page in chapter 5, most of which is spent praising William of Ockham, to addressing serious theological arguments:

However, if one intends to identify a first cause of the existence of the world, one may choose to call that “god” even if one does not know the precise nature of the first cause. And even the first cause has its difficulties, since a cause will itself need another cause. “It is difficult or impossible,” [Ockham] wrote, “to prove against the philosophers that there cannot be an infinite regress in causes of the same kind, of which one can exist without the other.” Thus the postulate of a designer or creator only raises the unanswerable question of who designed the designer or created the creator. Religion and theology and theodicy (this is now me talking and not Ockham) have consistently failed to overcome this objection. Ockham himself simply had to fall back on the hopeless position that the existence of god can only be “demonstrated” by faith.

What I find odd about what Hitchens writes here is that he talks about the first cause and then proceeds to ask what caused that cause which is the first one. Hitchens is also a bit confused here because he then raises the issue of infinite regress – but if he thinks such infinite regresses are possible in whatever cosmological argument he has in mind, why bother talking about a real first cause? He should have said there is no first cause; the chain of causation has no most fundamental, or first, member. What’s most interesting is that in his citation to Ockham (which he does not give explicitly) in context, what Ockham is actually saying is that he thinks a certain kind of causal series, those which people now call accidently ordered cannot be proven against the philosophers to be impossible. However, he does affirm there is a type of causal series which can be proven to be impossible, which are called essentially ordered which have more to do with causes in the here and now and have the important feature that each member in the causal chain only possesses its causal power derivatively. That is, it only has causal power insofar as it depends on a more basal member in the hierarchy of that essentially ordered causal chain. Such causal chains ordered essentially, not accidently, do not extend backward in time to the Big Bang singularity in a linear fashion, which is what I think most people are thinking of when such causal chains are being discussed.

We’ll come back to this point very shortly when I talk about what Richard Dawkins has to say about the cosmological arguments in The God Delusion but I find it quite remarkable that the Scholastics knew about this fundamental distinction between different sorts of causal series – those ordered accidently and those ordered essentially. This isn’t some ad hoc fabrication to escape an objection from an unbeliever; this was always part of scholastic thought, and therefore a part of the main theological tradition. It’s a shame that such a distinction isn’t discussed more frequently and I only learned about such a distinction relatively recently, but it makes a big difference in these philosophical debates – what this distinction does is it makes talk of what happened in the distant past, those most primordial events of the universe, totally irrelevant to the discussion at hand. It doesn’t matter at all which cosmological theory is correct, whether there are multiverses, or quantum tunneling, or whatever fancy cosmological theory or speculation you’d like to propose. This is because the sorts of causal series under discussion, the essentially ordered ones, are concerned with the here and now, not with the distant past like the Big Bang, or whatever events took place in the formation of our universe.

We turn now to Richard Dawkins’ 2006 book, The God Delusion, which is perhaps the defining book of the New Atheism. Dawkins, like the other prominent New Atheists, only devotes a short segment of his book tearing down all religion to the major arguments for classical theism. What Dawkins tries to do is debunk the entire corpus of St. Thomas Aquinas in three pages and he focuses his attention on Aquinas’ Five Ways which are to be found in Part 1 of the Summa Theologica, specifically, question 2, article 3. It should be pointed out that, according to people who study theology for a living, that Aquinas’ Five Ways are not intended to be standalone arguments which could be given to persuade an atheist. They are just summaries, with the details contained in other parts of Aquinas’ work. But, I happen to think they are quite powerful in getting us off the ground to the existence of an unmoved mover/Pure Act, such as in Aquinas’ First Way, or First Cause, such as in Aquinas’ Second Way, or necessary being, such as in Aquinas’ Third Way. Of course, tying this all together and showing that unmoved mover/Pure Act has those divine attributes, such as unity, immateriality, immutability, omnipotence, omniscience, etc., those features we understand God to have, is something we’re going to gradually spell out. And I say gradually because these arguments need some background metaphysical concepts explained, just to even understand what they are getting at. So let’s actually turn to Dawkins and I’m going to try to outline why Dawkins doesn’t even understand what any of the Five Ways are getting at, especially the first three, which are cosmological arguments, in addition to misrepresenting what classical theology has to say on the attributes of God. Right in the beginning of chapter 3, Dawkins says:

The five ‘proofs’ asserted by Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century don’t prove anything, and are easily – though I hesitate to say so, given his eminence – exposed as vacuous. The first three are just different ways of saying the same thing, and they can be considered together. All involve an infinite regress – the answer to a question raises a prior question, and so on ad infinitum.

1 The Unmoved Mover. Nothing moves without a prior mover.

This leads us to a regress, from which the only escape is God.

Something had to make the first move, and that something we

call God.

2 The Uncaused Cause. Nothing is caused by itself. Every effect

has a prior cause, and again we are pushed back into regress.

This has to be terminated by a first cause, which we call

God.

3 The Cosmological Argument. There must have been a time

when no physical things existed. But, since physical things exist

now, there must have been something non-physical to bring

them into existence, and that something we call God.

All three of these arguments rely upon the idea of a regress and invoke God to terminate it. They make the entirely unwarranted assumption that God himself is immune to the regress. Even if we allow the dubious luxury of arbitrarily conjuring up a terminator to an infinite regress and giving it a name, simply because we need

one, there is absolutely no reason to endow that terminator with any of the properties normally ascribed to God: omnipotence, omniscience, goodness, creativity of design, to say nothing of such human attributes as listening to prayers, forgiving sins and reading innermost thoughts.

First of all, as I said above, the Five Ways are summaries, not standalone proofs, and Dawkins is simply wrong on the fact when he says there’s absolutely no reason to endow the terminator with any of the properties normally ascribed to God – presumably he got the Five Ways from the Summa Theologica and if he had only turned a couple pages or glanced at the table of contents, he would have seen that Aquinas does, in fact, give arguments for each one of those in a systemic fashion. The Five Ways comes from question 2 in the first part and in fact question 3 argues that God is simple (which is a bit inconvenient for his Ultimate Boeing 747 Gambit), in question 6 he argues for God’s goodness, in question 14 he discusses God’s knowledge, etc. Now you may disagree on whether Aquinas argues successfully or not, but Dawkins is just wrong on the facts here. Aquinas gives an argument for each one of those attributes. Dawkins then gives a stock objection against omnipotence and omniscience, but the objection is based upon a misunderstanding of what God is, like almost all stock objections, and we’ll save such objections for later on in the series. Dawkins then says:

To return to the infinite regress and the futility of invoking God to terminate it, it is more parsimonious to conjure up, say, a ‘big bang singularity’, or some other physical concept as yet unknown. Calling it God is at best unhelpful and at worst perniciously misleading.

He then goes on to talk about cutting a piece of gold in half, but it has little to do with the argument. We see here that Dawkins thinks that, yes, the regress terminates with a first member but insists on calling it the big bang singularity rather than God. But this goes back to what I was saying in the distinction between causal series ordered accidently and ordered essentially. Dawkins thinks Aquinas is talking about a causal series ordered accidently extending backward in time to a singularity, whereas when we take a look at the argument, he’s actually talking about causal series ordered essentially. And by the way, Aquinas didn’t even think it was possible to prove philosophically that the universe as a whole had a beginning in time. Let’s go back to how he represents Aquinas’ First Way:

1 The Unmoved Mover. Nothing moves without a prior mover. This leads us to a regress, from which the only escape is God. Something had to make the first move, and that something we call God.

The representation of the argument itself isn’t horrendous but the issue is that the term motion in this argument is an important one that needs to be explicated for this argument to make any sense and that’s because motion here does not refer to merely change in spatial location, or local motion. As I hinted at earlier, for these guys, motion should really be interpreted as change in the broadest sense. So, you might also think of the First Way, the argument from motion, as an argument from change. We’ll leave many of the details for later on in the series but because I don’t want to leave you hanging, let’s try to formulate what the argument from motion/change is really saying, as least as a quick sketch:

First, we ask what Aquinas means by motion here. Aquinas borrows his metaphysical understanding of change from Aristotle, which uses the act-potency distinction. This says that being is divided into potency and act – things may exist actually (in act) in one way but may also exist potentially (in potency) in other ways. Consider a red ball. The ball is now actually red, but it is potentially blue or green or any other color. The ball is red in act and is blue merely in potency. However, the ball could become blue in act if it were dropped into a bucket of blue paint. Clearly, the ball has changed in its color from red to blue. In the language of the act-potency distinction, the potential for the ball being blue was actualized. This is how change is understood in this metaphysics, it is the actualization of a potential, or, as I may sometimes say, the reduction of potential to actual. In our example with the ball, the ball’s potential for being blue was actualized. But we now ask what actualized that potential – after all, the ball doesn’t spontaneously actualize its own potential in becoming blue, and that’s because the ball is only blue in potency but not in act. Now, we should ask what caused this actualization of the ball’s potential for being blue. The answer is, of course, the paint. But that blue paint itself could only actualize this potential if it exists in act, and that’s because if it existed merely in potency, it couldn’t cause anything, such as actualizing a potential for that ball being blue. So, we see that the thing put into motion, the color of the ball, was put into motion by something else, namely the paint.

With regards to the First Way, Aquinas says that it’s, “evident to experience that some things are in motion,” that is, some potentials are actualized. And he’s right, isn’t he? Just look around you and you can find many examples – perhaps the potential for a cup of coffee to be a lower temperature is being actualized or perhaps liquid water’s potential to be vapor is being actualized. So motion, as Aquinas understands it, is indeed obvious to experience. Furthermore, we saw in the example that the thing going from potential to actual, that red ball, was put into motion by something else which was in a state of actuality, namely the paint. Or as Aquinas says in the First Way “nothing can be reduced from potentiality to actuality except by something in a state of actuality” and we also see that “whatever is in motion must be put into motion by another.” In our example, the red ball was put into motion with respect to its color by the blue paint. I’m skipping over many details which I want to develop later but hopefully, it’s becoming clearer that once we understand the terms used in the argument, in this case motion/change, it’s clearer what Aquinas is driving at here and that the argument isn’t just silly nonsense. The next step is to ask whether that thing which put the first thing into motion is itself in motion. If it isn’t, we arrive at the conclusion of an unmoved mover. If it is in motion, it must be put into motion by something else.

Because the question of infinite regress is approaching, we must talk about those two sorts of causal series that I spoke of earlier, those ordered accidently (per accidens) and those ordered essentially (per se). Those causal series ordered accidently extend backwards in time and contain members which do not essentially derive their causal power, in this case their motive power, from the previous member of the series – the previous members in the series could be suppressed and later members would not lose their motive power.

An example of this is the following: imagine I’m making spaghetti and I need to boil some water. I fill a metal pot with water and get the flame going. That flame actualizes the potential for the metal pot to be hot, which in turn actualizes the water’s potential to be hot, which in turn actualizes the spaghetti’s potential to be hot once I drop that into the hot water. Since each one of these steps involves the actualization of a potential, it is an example of motion. And notice that each one of the steps occurred in a linear fashion extending backward in time, beginning with the flame actualizing the pot’s potential to be hot. However, once the pot is hot, it can go on to actualize the water’s potential to be hot, and what that means is that once the pot is actually hot, it possess motive power to move the water on its own, even though the flame is no longer there, so the actually hot pot does not essentially derive its motive power from the flame, in that it continues to put the water into motion even in the absence of the flame. And once the water is hot, it may also put the spaghetti into motion even in the absence of the flame. Such a series of movers ordered accidently in this linear fashion might in principle extend into the past to infinity, (I happen to think not for other reasons); but this is not the sort of situation Aquinas is talking about here. And this is why talk of cosmological theories about the distant past has little to do with these sorts of arguments.

Consider a different example of motion, one closer to what Aquinas is actually talking about. Imagine there’s a stone on the ground and you move the stone to your left using a stick in your right hand. The stone moves because the stick puts it into motion. But the stick is only able to put the rock in motion because the stick is being put into motion by the hand. And your hand only puts the stick into motion because your forearm puts the hand into motion. But here, if your forearm stopped actualizing the hand, the stick would fail to put the stone into motion, so the stick derives its motive power ultimately from the forearm. So, you might actually say that ultimately, the stick isn’t the thing moving the stone, it’s your forearm that ultimately moves the stone. We can see that a series of this sort absolutely requires actualization from fundamental members of the series, and getting rid of more fundamental members would halt the actualization of the more distal members – that is, if the forearm stops putting the hand into motion, the stone stops moving because the stick derives its motive power from the forearm. Because each member in the series derives its motive power from a more fundamental member and does not possess motive power in their absence, such an example is a series of movers ordered essentially. This important feature, that more distal members of the series derive their motive power from more fundamental members, is what makes infinite regress impossible in such a series. To say that such a series regresses infinitely is to say that the stick ultimately doesn’t derive its motive power from anything. But if the stick doesn’t derive its motive power from anything, there’s no way it could do things like move stones, which plainly contradicts experience. Even if such a series could regress infinitely, something outside the series would have to supply the series it with motive power so that the stick derives its motive power from something that does contains motive power and also doesn’t need to derive it from something else. The actual physics in this example doesn’t matter at all here, and I’m aware you can analyze the situation in terms of Newtonian mechanics incorporating friction – if you don’t like this example, simply substitute a different one. The key idea we’re extracting from the example is that the motive power of each member in the series, that ability to actualize a potential, is essentially derived from a more fundamental member, and if more fundamental members fail, the rest of the series necessarily fails.

Of course the example I gave isn’t really the full story. The forearm only contains its motive power because the biceps muscle contracts. So, we might say the stone is being moved by the contraction of the bicep muscle. The story doesn’t end there either. The contraction of the biceps muscle, which is an actualization of a potential, only occurs because of the firing of motor neurons innervating the muscle. In this series of movers, if the neuron stops firing, the stick loses its motive power. And even the actualization of the potential for these motor neurons firing only occurs because of the shape/conformation of specialized ion channel proteins within the nerve. We could go further and further and descend into finer and finer levels of reality but the point is that each member in this series derives its ability to actualize a potential from a more fundamental member in the series. Also remember that in this example, we’re talking about the actualization of certain potentials in the here and now, not the distant past, as one might speak of in causal series ordered accidently.

Returning to the First Way, we left off with the idea that “whatever is in motion must be put into motion by another” and we left off with the question of whether this additional thing is itself put into motion, that is, some potential is being actualized. If it isn’t, we conclude there exists an unmoved mover. If it is itself put into motion, it must be put into motion be yet another thing. Remember we’re talking about essentially ordered causal series in this argument, those which cannot in principle extend infinitely. And that means that such a series of movers must terminate with a most fundamental member, which I’ll call the first mover – but remember this isn’t first in the sense of time; time isn’t the important feature here, it’s the idea of receiving motive power derivatively. This first mover, being that most fundamental mover, contains its motive power in itself and does not need to derive it from something else, for if it did, it wouldn’t truly be the first mover. And obviously, because this is a first mover, it must be unmoved, for if it were moved, it wouldn’t be first. Therefore, we conclude there exists an unmoved mover, or a Prime Mover. But remember, the Prime Mover isn’t prime/first in the temporal sense, but in the sense of being most fundamental, not having to receive its motive power derivatively – the Prime Mover already contains motive power, not having to derive it from something else. I’d like to emphasize, yet again, that we’ve reached this conclusion simply by consideration of change in the here and now, not from speculating about cosmology or the Big Bang, as many other formulations of the cosmological arguments often do. Theories about how the universe began or its finitude simply have no relevance to this argument. And hopefully you can see that given we have demonstrated there exists an unmoved mover, the question of who moved the unmoved mover is a rather fatuous question to ask here, since it’s asking what moved that thing which is not moved?

And the argument doesn’t end there, as many atheists think. Aquinas ends this argument by saying, “and this everyone understands to be God.” Again, the Five Ways are summaries, not standalone arguments, and we can in fact reason further about why one might think this Prime Mover possess those features we understand God to have. Although I wish to return to all this and cover it in more detail in the future, but let me go one step to conclude something else about the Prime Mover. Let’s go back to that act-potency distinction. Now, either something is purely potential, some mixture of potentiality and actuality, or it is purely actual. Something that’s purely potential cannot do much of anything, being only potential, so we eliminate that possibility. So, either the unmoved mover is an admixture of act and potency, like most things are, or it is purely actual. However, things only go from potential to actual insofar as they are actualized, so act is logically prior to potency in this relation. Because the Prime Mover is the most fundamental, it cannot have any unactualized potentials and of those two possibilities, it must therefore be purely actual, or as the scholastics said: Pure Act. And obviously, because the Pure Act is in no way potential, it is immutable and because those things that exist within time or are made of matter are subject to change, the Pure Act is additionally eternal and incorporeal. And there can only be one Pure Act because for there to be multiple would imply that there is some material or temporal feature or perhaps an unactualized potential that one has but the others do not. Since none of these are possibilities, because the Pure Act is immaterial and eternal, there can in principle be only one Pure Act, not many. And because there is only one Pure Act, it is the ultimate source for all motion. Now, this is just a sketch of the First Way and what we can conclude from the existence Prime Mover which additionally includes it being Pure Act, there being one, not many, immutable, eternal, and incorporeal. But whatever God is understood to be, he includes all of the above attributes.

So we see that all this is missing from the writings of Dawkins and the other New Atheists. Whatever you think of the argumentation above, it’s not going to be debunked by asking who put the Prime Mover into motion, or saying it’s a god of the gaps argument, or saying there’s no evidence (unless you want to go full-Parmenides and deny that things are in motion), or anything silly like that. You’re going to have to make a serious attempt to find where the inference is going wrong and explain why. Perhaps my sophisticated viewers are saying to themselves, well, aren’t there some very odd quantum phenomena which undermine the premises to this argument? Such objections using quantum mechanics are generally confused because they are not thinking of motion in the broadest sense, the reduction of potency to act, and they try to translate the idea of causation used in metaphysics to a particular concept they might be familiar with in quantum physics. And once these translations are performed, you’re no longer engaging the argument on its own terms. Furthermore, excessive talk about quantum physics here simply obfuscates the fact that this is an argument about general principles of metaphysics, not individual physical theories. I’ll come back to this later in the series, where we’ll talk about this argument in more detail, but with the quantum objections I’ve seen, the objector isn’t being observant enough in noticing that even within his own objection, certain potentials are indeed being actualized, even though they may not be as obvious as for macroscopic phenomena.

Let’s turn to Dawkins’ treatment of the Second Way:

2 The Uncaused Cause. Nothing is caused by itself. Every effect

has a prior cause, and again we are pushed back into regress.

This has to be terminated by a first cause, which we call

God.

Now, the Second Way deals with the nature of efficient causality which is that type of causation which deals with things coming into being. Dawkins misrepresents this as though we’re tracing the chain of cause and effect back through time to the Big Bang singularity, lining them up, cause and effect, cause and effect, which is not what Aquinas is doing in the Second Way. What Aquinas is talking about is a logical ordering of efficient causes, again ordered essentially, in which we must conclude there is a most fundamental, or first efficient cause. Again, suppression of the first cause removes the causal power from the intermediates and therefore removing the cause also removes the ultimate effect, contradicting experience. And to this first, or most fundamental efficient cause, everyone gives the name of God. Such a chain of efficient causes may have to do with why the things of our daily experience exist at in the here and now, and therefore, that most fundamental uncaused cause sustains the existence of the things of our daily experience. Again, I wish to come back to this in detail, but the show must go on.

Let’s turn to the Third Way, which is Aquinas’ argument from contingency but this is looking pretty bad already because Dawkins calls this the cosmological argument, perhaps suggesting the two above arguments weren’t also cosmological arguments, which they are:

3 The Cosmological Argument. There must have been a time

when no physical things existed. But, since physical things exist

now, there must have been something non-physical to bring

them into existence, and that something we call God.

This is just a horrendous botching of this argument and too garbled to address, which is unfortunate because the contingency argument is actually a very fascinating argument and quite difficult to refute unless you want to discard the same principles of reason that we use when we do empirical science.

We’ve been discussing the major New Atheists primarily, and one thing I’d like to conclude from this rather unhinged critique of the New Atheists is that for serious theology, we’re going to have to look beyond the New Atheists, as they have very little to say on this matter. But I should point out there are, in fact, other half-way decent objections from writers such as AC Grayling, such as David Hume’s skepticism concerning causality and Kant’s declaration that existence isn’t a predicate. Now, I happen to think both objections are quite poor, especially the Humean objection, but we’ll come back to those later. However, this tendency to select random objections from mutually incompatible philosophical systems, like that of Hume and of Kant, is more of an indication of the intense fragmentation in modern thought than something which undermines natural theology. These sporadic objections are never made because the person has any intention of being a serious, systematic Humean or Kantian, but merely because they are useful and serve to rhetorically defuse individual arguments; all the while the objector glibly ignores the consequences of applying such objections consistently.

I understand I’ve been quite harsh with the New Atheists, and perhaps a bit salty, but I would like to end on a positive note, and try to find some common ground. You’ll remember from part 0, that I believed and likely said all of the above things at one point, so I’m not exempting myself from any of my harsh criticism. There are at least two sorts of common ground I can share with the New Atheists.

The first has to do with the direct experience of that which is intrinsically beautiful and noble, and certainly the religious and non-religious draw upon common sources, such as the beauty of nature, whether it be here on Earth or a distant galaxy, or perhaps the sublimity of a piece of music, such as Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, which is a piece of music I know Dawkins likes. What I mean here is that surely all of us can recognize that that which we perceive in the beautiful is not merely a fleeting sensation but the perception of lasting meaning coming from the work itself. We might say that it speaks to the soul, except when I say that, I mean it beyond a figure of speech, in that the beautiful is intimately related to our soul, and even that which speaks to the soul isn’t restricted to the particular beautiful thing we happen to perceive. On the other hand, the non-religious is restricted to a figure of speech.

The second sort of common ground is the mysticism I often see from people like Sam Harris – and I mean mysticism in the positive sense, not in the pejorative. This often takes the form of interest in meditation, or an interest in Buddhism, or some other intense reflection on conscious experience. I too share in their astonishment of the features of consciousness, from the most mundane experiences to the most rarefied, in the way we experience a simultaneous unity and diversity in our immediate experience – unity in the sense that we extract universal features from particulars but also diversity in the sense that we can tell objects apart from one another and our experience isn’t that of a singular, amorphous blob. I’m also astonished by its unity in another respect, in the way all the different sensory modalities are brought together as a singular, continuous, coherent stream. And finally, I’m astonished by the seamless connection between the part of conscious experience which arises from sense and that which arises from the intellect, and the fact the sensory part presents itself as a continuous stream in space and time whereas the intellect presents itself with the ability to immediately make connections which are not just strung together as one event in time after another, but logical connections, for instance between abstract objects, which are not at all connected in the temporal sense; this is all in spite of the fact that within the brain, the only sorts of connections made between its parts are organic and physical, certainly not logical connections. And all of the above is to be found in the most hum-drum conscious experience. The thing is, when it comes to Sam Harris, he has to be on guard when thinking about all this because this very easily leads to other dangerous ideas, especially of the metaphysical or theological sort – so, to prevent that, someone like Harris has to artificially fracture and suppress his thought, lest it deviate from naturalism. The same goes for Dawkins who has to keep his experiences of the transcendentals in check, lest that question his underlying metaphysical views.

Nonetheless, I think the New Atheists and I share the admiration of the transcendentals, such as the Beautiful, and consciousness; that’s all I wanted to point out, although obviously we take this common ground in two wildly different directions. I thank you for watching and I hope you’ll join me for part 2 in this series.