Brandon, that sounds like a vastly oversimplified definition of God. None of the philosophical arguments for god I've heard forcibly demonstrate that the first cause is something ALIVE.

It's easy. Instead of using non-contingent, use "necessary" term instead. God is the necessary being. There's no more "non" then. :)

"First of all, the mind-body problem comes down to the logical impossibility, in our subject-object relation, for objective knowledge (science) to reach that which makes it possible: the subject, the mind, consciousness. In other words, the spacetimeless experience that we call consciousness cannot be known in the same scientific way we know every spacetime element that causes it (which is simply saying that the objective knowledge of the hardware will never be objective knowledge of the Internet). Objective knowledge of consciousness will always come in the form of the actual experience of consciousness. And science, again, doesn't have access to this experience, even just to confirm objectively that it is happening. To illustrate this matter, we have a neuroscientist in our days claiming that consciousness arises within any sufficiently complex, information-processing system. This panpsychic scientist, by the name of Christof Koch, holds that all animals, from humans on down to earthworms, are conscious, and that even the Internet could be conscious. And the only thing that keeps his claim from being an objective truth is, again, the mind-body problem.

But the idea I'm trying to get across here is about the logical impossibility for religion, philosophy and science to surpass the mere assumption of God, the Being and consciousness, respectively. This shows that the claim of a spacetimeless experience, whether it's God, the Being or consciousness, will be arbitrary (an oxymoronic act of faith, if you will) as long as it is done from spacetime, dualism, plurality or the subject-object perspective. In any case, a scientist would be on better grounds for his arbitrary claim based on both the experience of consciousness and the example of the Internet as results of the interaction of a plurality of neurons and computers; whereas the religious spacetimeless God and the philosophical spacetimeless Being will always be nowhere to be observed or experienced in order to be explained as consequences of the spacetime plurality we're living.

Therefore, the question if science will ever explain the universe as a spacetimeless experience can only have a negative answer, because science can only confirm if the criteria is met for that experience to happen (Koch's theory of consciousness). But the moment science tells us that every element in the universe is interacting with one another, the moment we will have a scientific explanation of the universe as to suppose the spacetimeless experience of consciousness, God, the Being, whatever."

Yes, and my psychological instinct is telling me that I'm not dealing with the brightest bulb.

Armchair psychologist detected!

Hello Loreen, Actually I find your comments very much on topic. I was fascinated by Feser's recounting that his teacher:

"Second, he said that the mind-body problem, which he seemed to think was terribly vexing, really boiled down to the problem of universals. For years I would wonder what he meant by that. (I now think it must have had to do with the way our grasp of abstract concepts features in Aristotelian arguments for the immateriality of the intellect.)"

Cheers

Hi Susan, I would argue that the four causes are still alive and kicking as much in modernity as they were in ancient Greece. It is just that most people aren't aware they are invoking them in their explanations. Take for instance two scientists talking to one another. One asks the other "tell me, what will happen to particle A when it interacts with particle B". The first thing the scientist in question will ask is, "what TYPE of particles are we talking about?". In other words, I need to know if A is, say, an electron otherwise I won't know what its nature or essential properties are. That is the formal cause of the interaction
If the first scientist now responds, "A is an electron, B is a proton" the second scientist will also need to know that electrons always tend to be attracted to protons. That is the final cause of the interaction.
So here we have a very modern scientific example of how formal and final causality are "snuck in" to causal explanations without anyone ever actually naming them as such

Hi Darcy, if the event is without cause absolutely, we would not be able to predict the likelihood of it. It would be completely detached from all causal factors whatsoever, and therefore we would have absolutely nothing to say about how likely it is that we see a virtual particle of energy X at time t.
Now with respect to whether it provides a counter example to the causal arguments of Aquinas, I would dispute that. In the first way, Aquinas says that whatever is moved is moved by another, but this is a short hand way of saying that whenever a potentiality is actualised, it is actualised by an actuality. In other words, what causes the potential of an acorn to form into a tree is actual rain, not the mere potential of it.
So we could say that the potential of the quantum field to fluctuate is caused by the actual evolution of the space-time manifold in which it resides, not a mere potential evolution of it. Alternatively, we could say that the potential of the quantum field to fluctuate is actualised by whatever efficient cause brought the fields into being in the first place. Either way, this is not a counter example to Aquinas' first way

I have not used a separate symbol for xor, since it is of course reducible to more basic symbols.

All the common logical operations are reducible to NANDs or NORs, so that's no excuse.

when the disjuncts in question are "p" and "not p", or is equivalent to xor.

Nope. When P and ¬P are both true or both false (as in intuitionistic logics) or either is neither true nor false (as in many-valued logics), then XOR and OR differ.

You are the one trying to use predicate logic ... Don't use the predicate calculus if you want to avoid needless formalism.

Well there's your basic error. I wasn't trying any such thing. You're the one who brought up predicate logic (which kind?) and said I had to be using it. You never gave a reason why I had to do that. All I did was use common abbreviations to express the principle of bivalence.

That mistake at the root of your posts in this thread nicely explains all the rest of those mistakes, so we can consider this case closed if you like. See elsewhere in this thread for some examples of applying the definition.