>trying to rationalize god

>>3334537
>rationalize

>>3334553
?

This is what adherents of creeds do.

>>3334575
He was an empiricist is what he's getting at. The two pre-Kantian schools of Philosophy are the Empirical, basically Aristotelian, and Rational, essentially Platonic.

>>3334587
>religion
>empiricism

Divine Plato and Aristotle al ready debunked Abrahamic religion.

Convert to paganism ASAP

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100KB, 418x352px

>>3334603
Wow, it's almost like words have different meanings in different contexts.
Also, the Catholic Clergy and lay community was very active in what you'd call proper Empiricism as well.
But thank you anyway for you input, Sargonfan97.

>>3334609
You can certainly be empirical while being religious. But I don't understand how you could be empirical about religion.

>>3334622
Because Empiricism refers to his philosophical school, that of Aristotle, not the fact that he was a scientist.
Basically, he's an empiricist, because he revived Aristotle in the Christian world, and used Aristotelian arguments of the Unmoved Mover to justify the philosophical/metaphysical existence of God.

>>3334638
So if I understand correctly, Aquinas didn't have to rationalize god because he could feel or sense him. But aren't some of the conclusions he makes outside the bounds of sense alone?

>>3334662
The reason the other anon greentexted you was because he was making a cheeky jab at your use of words.
Rationalize is a word we use today in a general sense, but has other implications in Philosophy. We you rationalize, you turn your answers over to inward deduction.

Aquinas is an Empiricist, because he used sense reasoning to justify his position for assuming God's existence. His reasoning is that since there must be an unmovedmover, due to the problem of infinite regression, that mover must be God, since he's the one who made the scriptures, which Aquinas took for granted as divine.
>inb4 a bunch of Aquinasfags bust my balls

>>3334689
I understand that now. Though your last sentence gives the impression that Aquinas was using deduction to prove the existence of god, doesn't it?

>>3334703
There's deduction based on sense data, and there's deduction based on "rational" data or data that is supposedly held in your brain since the day you're born.

A rational argument for God would be Anselm's Ontological argument, which is, broadly, the idea that God must exist, or else a Human would not be able to conceptualize such a concept as the almighty, as all our sense data is based on finite matter, not infinity

>>3334711
So his reasoning isn't wholly empirical.

>>3334722
It is by philosophical standards. Empiricism wasn't not about deduction, but about from where you drew your deductions from.

>>3334728
What was his sense experience that he derived his arguments from?

>>3334604
t. hasn't read St. Justin Martyr