Matter and Energy (or Energy sometimes in form of Matter) is their answer to ways 1 to 3.

Most evolved is their answer to "highest value".

Chance plus elimination of any unfit solution by its failure is their answer to wisdom of the Creator.

Which means one has two fronts to work on. One is reading St Thomas. Was atheism as understood by these modern really denied in I Q 2 A 3? Or is the fact that God is simple and therefore a person perhaps a subsequent part of the argument (read on past Q 2)?

The other front is seeing what part of the sciences have been used in making matter and energy and failure of whatever is unfit seem a plausible explanation. And refuting it. Evolution, Big Bang Cosmology, Heliocentric cosmology even without Big Bang, denial of Genesis stoary as "myth", Old Earth Geology ... you name it.

"The Thomistic theory of existence is unintelligible apart from its theory of essence."

This should be a huge worry for you. It should bother you that time and again, Thomists open a conversation with an assertion so simple-sounding they think even a child who denies it must be daft or dishonest, but within only a few rounds the Thomist is telling people they're wrong to deny it because they couldn't possibly understand it without several semesters of graduate-level philosophy reading.

And there should be an even huger worry on top of this: to the skeptical eye, you've all but conceded Thomists can present no independent motivation to believe any of their claims are true. In fact, one has to buy in to Thomistic vocabulary whole hog, across multiple topics, just to make the claims intelligible.

I contrast this to things I believe that require some modest technical background -- say, Quasi-realist Expressivism in metaethics, or the principles of digital circuit design -- and it's never like this. In those cases, I can start with someone who is a blank slate and systematically build their understanding up from simple, shared observations that they can recognize and appreciate indepently of their having already bought in to the system whole-hog.

"Some forms are more essential to a thing than others."

I would think instead that some specifications are more essential to our descriptions of things than to things, since things don't have specifications, descriptions do. This is classic Map/Territory stuff. A thing just is what it is, and no one of its properties is more essential in and of itself, independently of our subjective interest in modeling it. They are only more or less essential to what it is we are trying to accomplish when we model a thing as that sort of thing. Hence: "the form of humanity is obviously more essential to me as a human being than of being caucasian." (emphasis added)

Relativism seems to be the rule here.

"When they [abstract forms] do [instantiate], they're thought to be conjoined with something that makes them to be, called their act of existence."

Thought by whom? This seems confused, a textbook example of the Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness. Just because 'lego brick' is a noun that refers to a thing that can be conjoined to other legos doesn't mean you can say that since 'form' is a noun you can unproblematically talk about forms "conjoining" with the things other nouns refer to.

I hypothesize that the Thomist has no clear picture of what this "conjoining" looks like when it's occuring or about to occur, like some metaphysical gamete just about to merge with the ovum. The doctrine seems like a list of rules for manipulating words in a certain order given certain prompts, without any notion of checking to see whether these manipulations line up with anything in reality in any meaningful or useful way.

"This 'act of existence' is what we mean by their 'being'. They 'have' being in so far as it is a part of them."

So x is a substance S when a form y is conjoined with an act z (Ax)(xS) (Ey,z)[yF^zA^(yCz)]. So, all eyes on the predicate here.

"Instead, his essential form would be identical with his act of existence."

So we tack on the conjunct for God (Ax)(xS) (Ey,z)[yF^zA^(yCz)^(z=y)]

...and we've preserved at least the syntactic meaningfulness of the "Has Being/Is Being" distinction. But it looks like we're still quantifying over x in a first-order predicate calculus in both cases. So it looks like God exists in a univocal sense as candy bars exist, at least according to this interpretation of what the Thomist is trying to say. And this is all granting for the sake of argument that a) talk of "acts of existence" and "conjoining" is meaningful at all, and b) asserting an identity relation even given this framework is meaningful.

"Does this mean that God and creatures belong to a common genus of 'existence'? Thomists would prefer to word things differently, since this implies there is something over and above God (namely a genus that he belongs to)."

(Note in passing that this preference has all the hallmarks of motivated reasoning: "this implies our desired conclusion is wrong, so let's find a way to avoid it".)

Even though I think I've clearly shown you haven't escaped the conclusion, I would be remiss not to underline how deeply weird and unshared I find this intuition that describing something as a kind of thing means there's something "over and above" it, as though ontological ranks in a mental model were the same thing as ranks of moral value. It's a weird vestige of Great Chain of Being thinking that has deities on top and demigods underneath them and priests and the nobility under them and farmers and the Irish under them etc.

Whereas it would simply never occur to me that, say, Obama is not the Chief Executive, because he belongs to the genus "male", and so "maleness" has greater legal authority over our armed forces. I'm not just gently suggesting the Thomist is wasting his time tilting at windmills. I'm also trying to explain that I see no windmill there.

'God's knowledge' and 'God's goodness' (etc.) refer to the same thing but in different senses

That seems pretty obvious Steven, because otherwise it would not be possible for a good God to wipe out all of humanity except for one family, unless it could also be good for Vicq Ruiz to do the same.

I'll take it from the "what the church has said on the topic" and "according to Aquinas" verbiage that this is an attempt to explicate, not necessarily defend. Which is perfectly fine, although it's never bad advice to remember that appeal to authority is no substitute for evidence. So in the spirit of understanding:

"[O]f all other terms that may be predicated of God, only terms that we know by what they are not (e.g. simple = not composite, eternal = not temporal) may be univocally predicated of God."

First, it seems just obviously false that these examples are concepts we "only know by what they are not". You could just as easily say you "only know" that composite means not simple, or temporal means not eternal. Do we only know what the smaller numbers towards the left of the number line are in terms of their being "not those bigger numbers to the right?"

And second, fatally: as I pointed out in my very first comment, all Catholics predicate things of God, all the time, a nonexhaustive list of which can be found by cracking the Bible open to any random page. Only one reply to my first comment even pretended to address this, and it was... creative... but clearly unorthodox.

"All other terms are predicated anologically, in the sense of the one being the cause of the other, e.g. if 'medicine is the cause of health in the animal body' then both are called 'healthy'."

You have to see that in English, this makes no sense. We would say they are both "health-related", but when was the last time you heard you heard your doctor call an antiseptic wipe or a neck brace "healthy"?

"So to return to your example, taking the above as given, the statements 'God knows my password' or "God knows the capital of Belgium' do indeed refer to the same thing, but only under the analogical sense of God being the cause of all knowledge."

Does this ring true to you? Does it ring true that people who believe in an omniscient god never really mean to say that he knows e.g. what's in my heart, the exact date the sun will expand, they only ever mean he's "the cause of knowledge"? That it is literally false that god knows my password? Come to think about it, that would explain a lot of things, like why he couldn't find Adam & Eve when they were hiding in the bushes, or why he doesn't answer prayers (he doesn't know we're crying out for him!)

"If by 'identical' you mean that the one is always substitutable for the other, then I believe Jesus could not be considered identical to the 'ground of all being'."

Well, I don't know much about you, but according to this, you are definitely not Catholic, or even any variety of Trinitarian. The doctrine is, Jesus is God, full stop. Just read any number of passages from the link you gave me, e.g. "[O]ne and the same Person, Jesus Christ, was God and man. We speak here of no moral union, no union in a figurative sense of the word; but a union that is physical, a union of two substances or natures so as to make One Person, a union which means that God is Man and Man is God in the Person of Jesus Christ." There are plenty of other obscurities and inconsistencies in the doctrine that I refuse to get sucked into right now, but this one point is something they go to great lengths to make crystal clear.

Thank you for the reply Steven.

Some thoughts.

It is no so much that I think natural theology fails to give us rational rational Theistic beliefs, rather I think it fails to give us any 'robust' Theistic beliefs about God's perfectly loving and authoritative nature (see The Elusive God by Paul Moser which has been very influential for me personally, for further description). Furthermore, Western Catholic (cf: Eastern Catholic) and Protestant Theology has kind of insisted on this abstract reasoning about God to the point where it seems that knowledge of God *can only be* acquired via discursive, argumentative reasoning.

Now, in the East Christian Churches (e.g., Eastern Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and Oriental Orthodox) there is a distinction between 'nous' and 'dianoia' where the latter is similar to a Western conception of 'intellect'.** 'Nous' is a separate faculty of the mind that is necessary for knowledge of God; it isn't necessarily a sensory faculty, but it certainly is not a faculty we utilize for abstract reasoning (that faculty is 'dianoia'). So my point in explaining all this is that if this distinction is understood, then the kind of arguments found in natural theology can be understood in the appropriate context, i.e., it is specialized theoretical exercises for certain individuals, and not for individuals like my Grandmother. And furthermore, it does not supercede the kind of direct acquisitional knowledge we have of God.

To be fair, I know there are Wester Catholics and Protestants who definitely seem to be aware of the points highlighted above, and I don't think this is one of the major issues keeping the Churches in schism, but I do readily recognize the difference in emphasis that each Christian tradition teaches.

I'd highly recommend a book called "Aristotle: East and West" by David Bradshaw to get a far better description of what I am trying to lay out. I think the book will make you reconsider your statement that Aristotle, Plato, and Plotinus are the founders of Classical Theism :) and a better understanding of the 'essence-energies distinction' vs. God as Actus purus that you seem to sympathize with.

**the Eastern notion of Theosis is the best resource for a good understanding of 'Nous'

I think you would need evidence of intent to get you to bad faith. I have through my own ignorance argued against Catholic straw men in the past.

I think you also haven't commented on the question of ordering of forms and your claim that there is a most essential form. I'm not even clear that there is a well-defined ordering. But even if I suspend disbelief and agree there is an ordering why does it have a unique maximum ?

Forms are just principles of specificity, so to deny forms is to say nothing has specificity. But, the claim "nothing has specificity" has specificity.

I'm not denying them. I'm denying they have any reality beyond a useful construct of the human mind.

Moreover, if forms are just collections of things, and collections of things exist outside of our minds, how can they be 'subjective'?

Because which collection of things depends on the person. My collection of great rap songs of 2014 will be different to yours.

For now, I'll just say it's the commonsensical view:

The last 100 odd years of science suggests this is a mistake. The real precise description of reality is often a long way from our common sense view. The common sense view is limited by the

Forms are just principles of specificity, so to deny forms is to say nothing has specificity. But, the claim "nothing has specificity" has specificity.

Perhaps we don't mean that something has redness to it by saying it is red. But, that would only be a fact about our language, not about whether there really are forms.

Moreover, if forms are just collections of things, and collections of things exist outside of our minds, how can they be 'subjective'? If things have specificity independent of our minds, forms are objective. Keep in mind that we're dealing with the ontology of forms, not our epistemology of them.

My summary could be greatly expanded on, especially with respect to why substances have substantial forms, or what I call essential forms. For now, I'll just say it's the commonsensical view: we ordinarily think about things as 'substances' like dogs, people, flowers, trees, buffalo, etc. not collections of stuff in dog-configuration, people-configuration, and so forth.

That is to say dogs, people and other substances are thought of as 'wholes', unities of all there many, many parts.

I guess I'm not a Thomist because I see no reason to believe in forms as anything other than labels attached to collections of things. Saying something is red does not have to mean there is a thing called redness it "has". Just as saying a set has two elements doesn't mean it possesses a thing called twoness it just means it can be put in bijective correspondence with the set {1, 2}.

I also see no reason to believe that the notion of an essential form is anything other than subjective. For Hitler the essential form of humanity was Caucasian or Aryan. In any case how do you get from "one form is more essential than another" to "there is a unique essential form" for something. Even if I admit there is an ordering on forms, which is hard because of the subjectivity, why are there unique maximal elements?

I also don't see any reason to think that instantiation and conjoining happen anywhere than in my mind. Take away humans from the real world and all these ideas just evaporate because they are just ideas.