The Prime Mover Flashcards
What is the Prime Mover and what does it do?
The Prime Mover is the Final Cause of movement + change (Motus) as it draws things towards itself. Everything is attracted towards it’s perfection and through this attraction undergoes change in order to reach it.
What are the characteristics of the Prime Mover?
The Prime Mover is pure thought, immutable, and a Deistic God that is impassive. It has no knowledge of our mutable existence and only thinks about it’s perfect self because it cannot engage with anything mutable.
How does the Prime Mover avoid the Problem of Evil and Suffering?
Its immutability, deistic nature, and impassivity make it incapable of being responsible for the problem of evil, as it does not know us.
The problem of evil is a probl…
How is the view of the Prime Mover shared and similar to other perspectives?
The Prime Mover shares many characteristics with the God of modern religions like Christianity, such as its eternal and perfect nature. Thomas Aquinas, influenced by Aristotle, developed the Teleological Argument.
What is the problem with the Prime Mover being found a priori?
Aristotle’s theory, mainly uses empirical methods, yet is unable to explain the Prime Mover empirically. Instead, Aristotle had to rely on deductive arguments to explain the Prime Mover, demonstrating the limitations of empirical knowledge.
How would Religious people argue against the Prime Mover?
For theists a God who is not involved in us is unsatisfactory. Abrahamic religions would point out that God is loving and caring.
Just because it seems that all things have a purpose and change does not mean that it is the work of a deistic God, it could be another God that could in fact be the efficient cause of the world, like Aquinas argued.
The Problem of Interaction
How is it that the Prime Mover, an immaterial and unchanging entity, can interact with or even influence the material and changing world.
What is Aquinas’ Five Ways argument and how does it challenge Aristotle’s views?
Aquinas’s “Five Ways” argument is a modification of Aristotle’s Prime Mover. Aquinas posits the Christian God as the prime mover, offering a more comprehensive and theological perspective on the existence of a prime mover, incorporating elements of Christian theology and the concept of the universe’s design.
