Chapter 6 Of Aristotle's View Of God

1188 Words3 Pages

Kert Woods
Prof. LaBarge
Philosophy 51
7 November 2014

Explain the place of God in Aristotle’s view of the world. How does Aristotle think that we can know that God exists? What role does God play in explaining why things in the world exist and behave the way they do? How persuasive do you find Aristotle’s account of these matters?
Aristotle the Contemplator
To open Chapter 6 of Lambda in Metaphysics, Aristotle states, “Since there were three kinds of substance, two of them natural and one unmovable, regarding the latter we must assert that it is necessary that there should be an eternal unmovable substance. For substances are the first of existing things, and if they are all destructible, all things are destructible. But it is impossible …show more content…

There cannot have been a first change, because something would have to have happened just before that change which set it off, and this itself would have been a change, and so on and so forth. Aristotle believed that if the universe ever completely ceased movement there would never be a force that possessed the ability to begin the moving again without the presence of the Prime Mover. In chapter 6 of Metaphysics Lambda, Aristotle concluded that the world and time are not perishable. He vouched for the idea that there must be at least one eternal and imperishable substance; otherwise all substances, therefore everything in the world, would be perishable. Aristotle calls this source of all movement the Prime Mover. The Prime Mover to Aristotle is the first of all substances, the necessary first source of movement, which is itself unmoved. It is a being with everlasting life, and in Metaphysics Aristotle also calls this being …show more content…

Here Aristotle is attempting to explain the way in which the world is created by god. He does not want his god to act in time because he does not want god actively changing things in the world because that active change would lead to potentiality. Aristotle’s god is not an activist, the God of the Bible is much more of an activist who gets involved with human lives in a direct fashion. He believes that the final end of the universe is to attempt to be like god. I find Aristotle’s arguments to lack the evidence necessary to actually persuade me into seeing the world through his lens. Aristotle, criticizes Plato for having no concrete evidence to back up his theories yet he has no concrete evidence that the material world is the source of knowledge. Isn’t it possible that things don’t exist for a reason, some things happen by chance? If the Prime Mover cannot interact with the world, then it is very different from the Judeao-Christian understanding of God that I have grown up being taught to understand. Therefore I am quite biased in the sense that my morals lean toward the Christian view more so than that of Aristotle, his ideas are second nature right now and therefore not as appealing to my mind. I would want Aristotle to believe that God has the ability to know that evil is

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