Do Atheists Misrepresent Aquinas' Five Ways?

The point is that if a rock begins moving across the ground, we know that rocks are not capable of doing this so we look elsewhere for the source of the effect.

I don't see how that is apropos of anything. Swap the rock for a person and swap "moving across the ground" with "coming into existence" and it comes out the same. The reason I think determinism is important here is that the rock's behavior is the result of deterministic forces acting in and on it, and a person's behavior is also the result of deterministic forces acting in and on it. The line between essential ordering and accidental ordering, when viewed through a deterministic lens, certainly seems to get very blurry.

Perhaps, but regardless, a body in motion through space is not in "motion" in the Aristotelian sense, since it is in one state.

But Aristotle is simply wrong about that. There's no great mystery here, Aristotle's sense of motion doesn't describe anything.

Perhaps, perhaps not. But no one is denying that there is two-way interaction.

No "perhaps not" about it. That simply is the state of affairs. The plant cannot help but cause minute distortions by virtue of being a mass.

And it certainly seems as if Feser is denying two-way interactions, at least insofar as he is labeling one object as the "cause" and one the "effect" in any such interaction, rather than the interaction itself as the cause, and how it affects the objects as the effect.

It is a version of it, yes. And I think it's also controversial just how controversial it is. And this version is certainly not the rationalist PSR that most analytic philosophers deal with, as the Spinoza and Leibniz chapters of the SEP article show.

This is one thing I actually remember very well from my philosophy class, because the PSR is such a big deal in philosophy. As common-sense as the PSR is, it absolutely can't be accepted without limitation.

I'm going to go into a bit of a tangent here, and I apologize, but this is what I recall from my class, and I think it's appropriate to go into it here to show why the PSR, strictly applied, is controversial.

Consider how the PSR is usually used in cosmological arguments. The universe (or the Big Bang, at least) needs a sufficient reason for its existence. Since the universe is all of space and all of time, the reason must be timeless, eternal, spaceless, and so on. God, in other words.

But the universe has specific features that also must be accounted for, most notably its age - around 14 billion years, give or take. Apply the PSR again, and ask why the universe is 14 billion years old. God is timeless, so what is the sufficient reason for a specific age for the universe? Any age is unexplained and arbitrary, thus violating the PSR that got us to God in the first place.

Anyway, end of tangent.

That's fine, and nobody is denying that. To think otherwise is to misunderstand the principle.

Doesn't this cast difficulty over identifying the causal member in an essentially ordered series? Or is the whole point of this to say that the entire universe amounts to an essentially ordered series, and there's really no such thing as accidental ordering?

It doesn't make any difference. If a tuba is playing music, I know that tubas can't play themselves and that there must be someone or something in addition to the tuba blowing air into it. Even full knowing that the musician on the other end cannot play tuba sounds without the tuba, either, and that it is only the combination of the two that produces the sound.

So which is the causal member, here? The tuba or the tuba player?

/r/DebateReligion Thread