12.28.05
Buchanan Resurrects Aristotle
Worldnet Daily, dubbed Wingnut Daily by the Howler Monkeys, gives us Aristotle via Buchanan.
As for the unmoved Prime Mover I suggest Buchanan consider the antinomies discussed by Kant in the Dialectic of his Critique of Reason.
But if intelligent design is creationism or fundamentalism in drag, how does Judge Jones explain how that greatest of ancient thinkers, Aristotle, who died 300 years before Christ, concluded that the physical universe points directly to an unmoved First Mover?
As Aristotle wrote in his “Physics”: “Since everything that is in motion must be moved by something, let us suppose there is a thing in motion which was moved by something else in motion, and that by something else, and so on. But this series cannot go on to infinity, so there must be some First Mover.”
A man of science and reason, Aristotle used his observations of the physical universe to reach conclusions about how it came about. Where is the evidence he channeled the Torah and creation story of Genesis before positing his theory about a prime mover?
I was a bit surprised, full doubletake, to read, “Where is the evidence he channeled the Torah and creation story of Genesis before positing his theory about a prime mover?” I have no idea, where is it? Actually the question of diffusion between ancient ‘Israel’ and Greece remains a good question, and the influence of the Iliad on the Old Testament remains a subliminal hypothesis.
In any case, to resurrect Aristotle seems like a good idea, but…wasn’t there something called the Scientific Revolution that declared against Aristotle? We can go back to that very deep thinker, dispensing then with modern science, but we can’t graft him onto modern science.
The attempt to consider teleological issues in the light of modern physics has its most classic moment in the works of Kant. Why not start from there, then? Answer: Kant is theist, unique in his self-discipline in the face of metaphyics, who produced a famous critique of the design argument. The IDM and its fellow travellers apparently are afraid anyone will find out that such a major modern philosopher doesn’t support their ‘designed ambiguities’, so useful in swaying public opinion.