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the point of the fifth way

It's starting point is NOT the ID claim that things around us in nature are evidently engineered/designed/programmed things in the past, but Thomas's claim that beings that operate right now are truly acting for an objective purpose (including what is per se good for them).

If the way beings operate right now shows true teleology, then talk of "the good" as a kind of transcendental is legitimate.  And our reasoning about goodness points to The Good.

Objection: if the way beings operate right now is considered teleological by us through a kind of anthropomorphism, then perhaps the only teleology we might rightly affirm is that associated with human action.  The rest is illusory.

My reply is to point to a dilemma: (1.) if human beings themselves have a genuinely objective purpose, our reasoning about human goals may still lead us to affirm The Good.  (2.) if humans don't, then moral reasoning is illusory as well.  Relativism kicks in.  Arguments against God in the name of humanism become ironic.

Tertium quid time.  Perhaps teleology is known principally through the reflection on human action combined with a kind of anthropomorphic interpretation of the non-human.  But if the human person is a kind of microcosmos then the cosmos itself participates in the human good through our labor, through our ordering of nature as we do in our human actions.  In other words, the cosmos is for us ("us" here being rational beings.... making room for ET).
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Leo White said…
Must revise "starting point is that things..." to "starting point is NOT that things..."
7:20 AM
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