Ted Turner is a loudmouth bigot but he did not say that he is in favor of American servicemen committing suicide per se.

This is part of the apparent inability of large swathes of people raised in our "sound bite culture" to actually, you know think. It's part of the same motivation that causes mouth-breathing liberals to pretend to think that a Republican senate candidate is in favor of rape, when what he clearly was in favor of was letting living human beings being permitted to remain alive.(For a powerful dissection of this "crime against reason," check out Taranto's "In Defense of Richard Mourdock."

Ted Turner is catching flack for purportedly telling Piers Morgan that the suicide of soldiers is "good." Here's the relevant portion of the interview:

In an interview with CNN host Piers Morgan last week, Media mogul and CNN founder Ted Turner said the fact that there have been more suicides than combat deaths in the Army this year is not “shocking,” but “good.”

Highlighted first by Breitbart.com, the Oct. 19 interview has Turner speculating that “it’s time to put war and conflict behind us and move on,” and the rising rate of self-inflicted troop deaths is good because it brings attention to that view.

Here’s the exchange:

TURNER: It’s time to put war and conflict behind us and move on, and start acting like civilized, educated human beings.

MORGAN: You made the point to me in the break there, more American servicemen have –

TURNER: — are dying now from suicide over there than are dying in combat.

MORGAN: That’s shocking, isn’t it?

TURNER: Well, what — no, I think it’s — I think it’s good, because it’s so clear that we’re programmed and we’re born to love and help each other, not to kill each other, to destroy each other. That’s an aberration. That’s left over from hundreds of years ago. It’s time for to us start acting enlightened.

President Barack Obama has spoken out to condemn Indiana Senate candidate Richard Mourdock’s controversial comments on abortion and rape in recent days. Will he let this remark go unaddressed?

What Turner is saying is that the human capacity for love and charity - which he feels expresses itself in the self-destruction of soldiers who have been forced to act opposite to their true human nature - is good. I take it that he would prefer that no one engage in acts of war or to commit suicide.

Is Turner right about suicide being related to a human aversion to killing other humans? Maybe. Maybe not. Probably there is a human aversion to killing other human beings - and that is a good thing - but this aversion is mediated through the individual's understanding of what the action means. If the individual understands that he is protecting his home, then he may feel better about it than if doesn't have that understanding. There are limits to this, of course. For example, the SS concentration camp guards apparently had high rates of suicide despite the Nazi indoctrination that they were serving the good of Germany. Apparently, there comes a point where the cognitive dissonance becomes so great that self-deception is no longer possible. With the SS, it was blatantly obvious that they were abusing defenseless human beings, not protecting Germany.

And that is a good thing.

You see a similar wilful inability to understand an obvious point when people assert that Thomas Aquinas taught that those in Heaven would be entertained by the punishment of the damned. That is simply BS. Thomas never said any such thing. What he said was (Supplementum, Q.94.3):

I answer that, A thing may be a matter of rejoicing in two ways. First directly, when one rejoices in a thing as such: and thus the saints will not rejoice in the punishment of the wicked. Secondly, indirectly, by reason namely of something annexed to it: and in this way the saints will rejoice in the punishment of the wicked, by considering therein the order of Divine justice and their own deliverance, which will fill them with joy. And thus the Divine justice and their own deliverance will be the direct cause of the joy of the blessed: while the punishment of the damned will cause it indirectly.

In his own maladroit way, Turner is making the same point. He is not rejoicing in the suicide of soldiers; he is rejoicing in what he sees as a natural order that makes people sympathetic to others.

Atheist Converts.

Leah Libresco, Mark Shea's favorite atheist, has a big announcement:

Starting tomorrow, this blog is moving to the the Patheos Catholic channel (the url and RSS will remain unchanged). Meanwhile, I’m in RCIA classes at a DC parish, so you can look forward to more Parsing Catholicism tags (and after the discussion of universalism we had last week, I think it will be prudent to add a “Possibly Heretical” category).

It turns out that it is intellectually confounding to hold to a consistent position on virtue without there being a Person who defines and upholds those virtues, and that for someone who thinks that there is such a thing as "morality," one tradition in particular seems to provide consistent and coherent answers:

For several years, a lot of my friends have been telling me I had an inconsistent and unsustainable philosophy. ”A virtue ethicist atheist whose transhumanism seems to be rooted in dualism? Who won’t shut up about moral lapses as wounds to the soul and keeps trying to convince us it’s better to be sinned against than sinning? Who has started talking about mortifying her pride and keeps pulling out Lewis and Chesterton quotes? C’mon, convert already.”

I could see where they were coming from, but I stayed put. I was ready to admit that there were parts of Christianity and Catholicism that seemed like a pretty good match for the bits of my moral system that I was most sure of, while meanwhile my own philosophy was pretty kludged together and not particularly satisfactory. But I couldn’t pick consistency over my construction project as long as I didn’t believe it was true.

While I kept working, I tried to keep my eyes open for ways I could test which world I was in, but a lot of the evidence for Christianity was only compelling to me if I at least presupposed Deism. Meanwhile, on the other side, I kept running into moral philosophers who seemed really helpful, until I discovered that their study of virtue ethics has led them to take a tumble into the Tiber. (I’m looking at you, MacIntyre!).

Aquinas will do that to you.

"Give me Thomas Aquinas."

Paul Ryan disavows Ayn Rand in favor of the Angelic Doctor:

In an interview with National Review Online’s Robert Costa, Rep. Paul Ryan denies that he is, as Paul Krugman claimed in the New York Times, “an Ayn Rand devotee,” calling such descriptions of his political philosophy “an urban legend”:

“I, like millions of young people in America, read Rand’s novels when I was young. I enjoyed them,” Ryan says. “They spurred an interest in economics, in the Chicago School and Milton Friedman,” a subject he eventually studied as an undergraduate at Miami University in Ohio. “But it’s a big stretch to suggest that a person is therefore an Objectivist.”

“I reject her philosophy,” Ryan says firmly. “It’s an atheist philosophy. It reduces human interactions down to mere contracts and it is antithetical to my worldview. If somebody is going to try to paste a person’s view on epistemology to me, then give me Thomas Aquinas,” who believed that man needs divine help in the pursuit of knowledge. “Don’t give me Ayn Rand,” he says.

Practical Thomas.

Stacy Trasancos finds the scholastic approach useful in dealing with a question that plagues all parents:

“Whether it is fitting that I should be called the mother of these children?”

Objection 1: It would seem not, for mothers are wise, kind, and loving, but when I am reduced to screeching like a deranged heathen, it does not seem fitting that I should be called anyone’s mother.

Objection 2: Further, the essence of a motherhood is gentleness, guiding children in the precepts of moral life, and I often chase quarreling kids out of the kitchen with a wet towel, which is not gentle guidance, so the title of mother is not fitting.

Objection 3: It is written, “Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right.” (Ephesians 6:1) Obey? They don’t even listen, unless they are asking for food, money or transportation.

On the contrary: It is written (CCC 1657) that, “the father of the family, the mother, children, and all members…exercise the priesthood of the baptized in a privileged way.” Yes, this is my family, so they are my children, therefore, it is fitting that I should be called their mother.

I answer that: I know, I know. The home is where children learn first about Christian life, and by committing to “the reception of the sacraments, prayer and thanksgiving” then we will grow in virtue and charity in spite of our sinful natures. The home is the “first school of Christian life.” We have a responsibility to create a home where tenderness, forgiveness, respect, fidelity, and service are the rule. (CCC 2223)

Reply to objection 1: I am their mother in two senses. First I am their physical mother because they depend on me to nurture them. Second, I am their spiritual mother because the family is the domestic church.

Reply to objection 2: “By knowing how to acknowledge their own failings to their children, parents will be better able to guide and correct them.” Alright, there are plenty of learning opportunities.

Reply to objection 3: “Whoever obeys the Lord will refresh his mother.” (Sirach 3:6) Yes, even on the worst days I have but to hear their refreshing little prayers, and realize that truly it is only by God’s grace that is it fitting that I should be called their mother.

Analogy, not metaphor - laying the smack-down on nominalism.

The USCCB declares that Sister Elizabeth Johnson’s Quest for the Living God distorts Catholic concept of God.


Here's the USCCB opinion.

Several things are interesting about the opinion.  For those of us who think that nominalism was the worst thing since the bubonic plague, the USCCB takes Sister Johnson to task for her assertion that human language can say nothing about God.  Human language can say something about God, that thing will certainly be limited by human conceptions, but it is not nothing. Words like "goodness" and "love" can be thought of by way of analogy from how such words apply to us to how they would apply to an infinite, spiritual, eternal being. 

For Sister Johnson, however, descriptions of God are arbitrary and metaphorical.  They do not describe God, but only, perhaps, our experience of God. Once she makes that leap, then she can describe God any way she wants because no description of God is rooted in God.  Then, she can go the whole nine yards and say that anyone's description of God is as equally valid as anyone else's description.

The USCCB also seems interested in heading off the last two hundred years of liberal Protestantism by noting that Sister Johnson gets into the same trouble that Kant got into by positing a God who was completely beyond human understanding.  Once that proposition is accepted, they note, then there is no objective way for understanding God, and the next step - which Johnson takes - is that talk about God becomes nothing but a subjective discussion of how the notion of God functions in human society.  So, if you want to define God as the "feeling of transcendence," as did the Nineteenth Century founder of liberal Protestantism, Freidrich Schleiermacher, well and good, but if you want to define God in terms of "blood and race," perhaps not so good.

Fred Sanders on First Things' Evangel blog draws an analogy to the Rob Bell kerfuffle:

As an evangelical Protestant, it’s interesting to watch the dynamics of this controversy playing out inside the Roman Catholic theological scene. The similarities and differences between it and the Rob Bell kerfluffle are equally instructive. On the Roman Catholic side, the provocateur is an accomplished theologian, re-stating for the third or fourth time in book form her basic teaching, through an academic publisher without sensational publicity or a reach that aspires far beyond the textbook market. The critics are recognized teaching authorities (bishops) in the theologian’s own church, they didn’t act until four years after publication, and they scarcely seem aware that there is an internet (releasing pdfs of statements on letterhead). The differences from the Bell case are striking. But the similarity is also striking: unstoppable polarization, as if there are two churches struggling with each other inside the institutional unity of the Roman Catholic church, as much as within the movement known as evangelicalism.


Theological conservatives like me think that both Bell and Johnson have crossed some lines and published books that do not state the Christian message accurately. Bell’s critics were shunted aside with the rhetorical question, “Who made you the judge of what’s orthodox?” But in the case of Johnson’s critics, it’s not a rhetorical question: the Roman Catholic magisterium is who made the council of bishops the judge of what’s orthodox. An evangelical onlooker might understandably think that that will make all the difference between the two cases. But it won’t. Two kinds of Roman Catholic theologians disagree about this book, and the gulf between them is as big as the gulf between Rob Bell and Al Mohler.

Maybe not to some, but to the average person in the pew, the simple statement that Sister Johnson's book has been defined as not being Catholic carries weight, and carries more weight, I suspect than a statement that Bell's book is not "orthodox" made by a long list of pastors.

Should Protestants Read Aquinas?

Yes.

1. Synthesis instead of mere critique. While we moderns specialize in breaking down ideas into their component parts, the masters of the high middle ages had the opposite strength: They excelled at putting ideas together and building up larger masses of interconnected ideas. Again, where we are strong at critically testing, refuting, and falsifying anything that doesn’t meet the standards of rationality, the medievals were strong at finding the bits of truth in every proposition and harmonizing them with their own thought. My point is not to scold modern thought for being itself and having particular strengths and weaknesses, but to point out what we need to import from other ages: the power of synthesis.


The scholastic theologians of the high middle ages, and Thomas chief among them, also liked to win intellectual fights. But they did so by out-synthesizing each other. They didn’t win by dismantling their opponents’ arguments so much as by outflanking them. If you built a house of thought, Thomas Aquinas would not tear it down: He would build a Gothic cathedral around it and assign your cute little house to its proper place as a side chapel somewhere along the back part of the north transept. He would put you in your place by out-synthesizing you. It’s a good model for intellectual engagement, and one that doesn’t come naturally to moderns or postmoderns.

2. All Roads Lead to Thomas Aquinas. Because of his intellectual style of out-flanking and out-synthesizing everybody, the theology of Thomas Aquinas ended up taking in all the best ideas that had gone before. There is certainly such a thing as a recognizably Thomist school of thought (and particular sub-types within it), but Thomas metabolized so many influences that his thought is a kind of epitome of the “perennial philosophy” of the entire Western intellectual tradition. Plato and Augustine are in there, with Aristotle and John of Damascus in the mix. Thomas was a philosophical omnivore. As a result, if you come to understand him, you have come to understand a comprehensive overview of western thought down to 1274.

If people don't have Aquinas, they will follow any idiot who comes along.

Science Fiction author and Thomist Mike Flynn does a great job of dismantling yet another bullshit claim that humans are just machines.  The proximate cause of Flynn's essay is a Telegraph article entitled "Neuroscience, free will and determinism: 'I'm just a machine' - Our bodies can be controlled by outside forces in the universe, discovers Tom Chivers. So where does that leave free will?"

Actually, the subtitle gives away the show.  Our bodies can be controlled by outside forces in the universe?  Has Tom Chivers never fallen down, been wrestled to the ground or drunk?

In this case, though, the gosh-wow thrust of the story is a magnetic wand that can cause a subject's hand to flinch, which is no different in principle than causing the hand to flinch by holding a lit match under it, and, yet, no one starts describing the brain as a machine without free will when that happens.

Flynn writes:

 We might start with a few things free will [volition] does not mean.


It does not mean a random choice.

It does not mean a successful choice.

It does not mean an unpredictable choice.

It does not mean an unforeseeable choice.

It does not mean a surprising choice.

It does not mean an unreasoned choice.

It does not mean an unmotivated choice.

It does not mean indifference to the ends chosen.

It does not mean a deliberated choice.

It need not mean a conscious choice.

And it does not mean that the will is unencumbered by habit, error, mental or physical illness, or other impairment -- including magnetic wands. It only means that it is not determined by external forces. Someone could seize hold of Prof. Haggard's finger and twitch it mechanically, but the fact that an external force can also move his finger does not demonstrate that in the common course of nature Prof. Haggard cannot normally choose to do so.

The last bullet needs a comment: If the human subconscious is real, it is as much a part of the mind as any other; so subconscious choices are also encompassed by free will.

Part of the problem is the blindness of modern science to formal and final causation. These two causes are making a quiet re-appearance under new names like "emergent property"/"self-organizing system" and "attractor basins," but they have been banished from our thinking of causation for several hundred years. Therefore, Haggard and others misunderstand both "will" and "free."

The electrochemical reactions in the brain are simply the material cause of the choice. They are not the formal or final causes.

Read the whole thing to get an understanding of how lost so much of science is without Aristotelianism.

Hawking discovers the Logos.

Science Fiction author Mike Flynn explains:

Let's assume that he wasn't serious when he said, "from nothing," but that he meant only "from no matter." (This is "nothing" only in the sense of "absence.") So Hawking says that once upon a time the universe [space-time manifold] did not exist. There is a "beginning" or "finiteness" to time," and therefore an "outside" to time. And the laws of physics somehow exist outside of time. He is flirting with Platonism here. I wonder if he knows it.


So he equates the "creation of the universe" with the "becoming of matter." And logically prior to this "becoming" stands a principle, a set of laws described by quantum theory. (This is logically prior, not prior in time. Time commences with the becoming of matter.)

IOW: Law precedes Matter and is the cause of it.

This makes the Law the formal cause - i.e., "the form-specifying principle" - of that which would otherwise be formless. This is also Kool, since the Scientific Revolution deliberately rejected formal causes.


But since every thing that exists exists in some form, formless matter must be (in some way) non-existent. By bringing form to "formless matter" the Law brings matter as we know it into being. And we're back to Aristotle, again! There's no escaping that old Stagerite. Like American Express, he's everywhere you want to be.

Πρώτη ὕλη. If we abstract [in thought] all characters and determinations from body, we arrive at a concept of characterless, undetermined matter, aka "prime matter." Formless matter, the πρώτη ὕλη (prote hyle), is pure potency and not actually anything. In particular, while it potentially exists, it does not actually exist. (It "lacks the act of existence.") Thus it is incorporeal because it is no actual body -- though it is the necessary underlying condition for bodies. So the prime matter is formless or chaotic and because it has no physical existence we can call it a "void."

So according to Hawking, there was a beginning; and in the beginning was the Law and the Law was all there was; and without the Law nothing came to be. And the Law was an immaterial being that was pure λογοϛ. And this Law gave form to the void of pure potency, prime matter.

Wait a minute.....

Something about that sounds awfully familiar. Didn't someone say all that and say it more poetically a long time ago?

"In the beginning was the Word
and the Word was *with God,
and the Word *was God.
He was in the beginning with God.
All things came to be through him,
And without him nothing came to be."

But I don't think Hawking realized he was paraphrasing that.

Deconstructing Victor Stenger.

A Thomistic response to the argument that the absence of evidence is evidence of absence.

Just about the dumbest and most painful thing you are likely to read about Aquinas this Century.

How Aquinas turned (orthodox)Catholicism into Romanism.

So these Trent men canonized his teachings (and later he was made an angel doctor) and essentially dismissed all the other great Saints and Theologians who had gone before because of ... well, that's not the subject of this post. Suffice it to say that this was the culmination of the transformation from Catholicism to Romanism.

Which shows that the author has not really read anything that Aquinas wrote because Aquinas quoted from Augustine, Boethius, Jerome, Ambrose and every other Christian theologian who had put anything to paper.

Sheesh.

Secular Atheist on Aquinas

According to Jurgen Habermas:

Habermas, who defines himself as "a methodical atheist", is a member of the Frankfurt School of philosophy. His most recent essay - A Time of Transition - was published in Italy this month.

Sandro Magister, the Vatican affairs writer for the Italian news magazine l'Espresso quotes Habermas' confession that he is is "enchanted by the seriousness and consistency" of the theology of St. Thomas Aquinas, "the opposite of the feeble thinking that pervades current theology".

Habermas says: "Thomas represents a spiritual figure who was able to prove his authenticity with his own resources. That contemporary religious leadership lacks an equally solid terrain seems to me an incontrovertible truth. In the general level;ing of society by the media everything seems to lose seriousness, even institutionalised Christianity. But theology would lose its identity if it sought to uncouple itself from the dogmatic nucleus of religion, and thus from the religious language in which the community's practices of prayer, confession, and faith are made concrete."

On Aquinas.

"Why I am not a Thomist"

The Thomist professor of philosophy at Marquette - Mark Johnson - confesses that he is not a Thomist:

I told them that I didn’t feel that I could really consider myself a full student of Thomas’s teaching until I had a reasonable mastery of some basic texts and skills. And so, until I acquire them, I can’t be a Thomist.

So here is a list of ten things I haven’t done yet, that I need to do. What do you think?

I am not a Thomist because:

I have not yet read all of the writings of Augustine, cover-to-cover.
I have not yet read all of the Bible (in the vulgata), cover-to-cover.
I have not yet read the Metaphysics, cover-to-cover.
I have not yet read Gratian’s Decretum, cover-to-cover (but I have read Raymond of Peñafort; does that count?).
Yeesh! I haven’t read Lombard, cover-to-cover (big feelings of inadequacy!).
I don’t know the medieval or Dominican liturgy very well at all.
I don’t really know the doctrine of St. Albert.
I haven’t memorized Isidore’s Etymologies.
I remember reading through Damascene’s De fide orthodoxa, but I’ve forgotten what it says!
I haven’t read through the whole Corpus Dionysiacum, or Maimonides’s Guide for the Perplexed, or…..ugh.

St. Thomas read and memorized all that without the benefit of the internet, copying machines, word processing software, etc., etc., but people like Richard Dawkins think they can waive their hand and dismiss him as "ignorant" and "superstitious." Compared to Aquinas, Dawkins doesn't have the intellectual firepower to carry St. Thomas' jockstrap.

"Learning Ethics from Les Miserables."

Everyday Thomist provides a wonderful reflection on the ethical dimensions on display in the musical Les Miserables. For myself, I have always been captivated by the disparity between Javert - incarnating the rule-oriented deontological ethic - and Jean Valjean - who instantiates, as Everyday Thomist points out, a "virtue ethics" based on love. Exposed to grace, Valjean reforms; exposed to grace, Javert dissolves.

Everyday Thomist observes:

While Valjean occasionally uses utilitarian reasoning in his approach to ethics, he is more representative of a third approach to ethics, a virtue-based approach. If a deontological approach to ethics first asks “what does the law say?” and a utilitarian approach first asks “how can I do the most good?” a virtue-based approach asks “what does this action say about the kind of person I am, and what are the implications of this action for becoming the person I want to become?”

Alasdair MacIntyre, a famous philosophical advocate of virtue ethics, says that virtue ethics can be summed up in three questions:

Who am I?
Who do I want to become?
How do I get there?

Virtue ethics is unique because it sees ethics as concerned not so much about discrete actions (should I do X or not), but how every action fits into a total life narrative. Virtue ethics acknowledges that people change over time—they become better or worse people depending on what they do.

And:

Virtues are certain aspects of a person’s character that lead them to do good things. A person develops virtues through actions. One develops justice, for example, by trying to be just and giving to others and oneself what they deserve. One develops courage by facing fear, and by not avoiding good actions even when they are difficult or frightening.

There are lots of different virtues that people develop like temperance (moderation), prudence (right judgment about things to be done), generosity, etc. The dominant virtue for Valjean is love. In each ethical dilemma he faces, Valjean asks “what is the loving thing to do?” Javert asks “what is the right or the legal thing to do?” and as a result, ethical dilemmas are much simpler for him. But for Valjean, things are more complicated. It is not always easy to be loving, and he sometimes has to break the rules to do so, which is how he ended up in prison and an enemy of Javert in the first place.

And this brings us to what I see is the entire point of the story. Ethics is messy. Ethics is complicated. There are so many particular dimensions of each ethical dilemma that we face that we cannot possibly account for them all. And so if we look at ethics as primarily concerned about discrete actions, about what is the right or wrong thing to do in any given situation, we miss the point. Ethics is about becoming a good person. Ethics is primarily about the story of one’s life with all the successes and mistakes taken as a whole. It is about being able to die and say “I lived the best I could, and I am proud of the person that I am.” Rules are important, as is attention to consequences, but both rules and consequence are meant to facilitate the ultimate goal which is living well.

The college professors reading group I participate in is finishing off Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics this Saturday. This post is an excellent hook to start that that discussion.

Aquinas Watch

Aquinas by way of the Marxist literary critic Terry Eagleton on his book rubbishing Dawkins and Hitchens.

Some quotes:

"Imagine," fired Eagleton, "someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology."

And :

Eagleton is particularly exercised by the New Atheists' tendency to conflate reason and rationality. "We hold many beliefs that have no unimpeachably rational justification, but are nevertheless reasonable to entertain.")

And:

As an ex-Catholic myself, I said, I couldn't help but wonder why you were quite so generous about your Catholic schooling in your autobiography The Gatekeeper.

"I valued the way it taught me to think analytically, to not be afraid of analytic thought, however nonsensical some of the content surely was. There was an opportunity to argue."

And:

Eagleton can, of course, fight back against this kind of rebuttal if he can only show that there is something in theology which undermines the arguments against religion made by the new atheists. And this indeed is what he is up to in Reason, Faith and Revolution when he seeks to show, with the use of the theologian Thomas Aquinas, that the God so readily dismissed by Dawkins and Hitchens is not a god that many theologians, or indeed believers, would recognise. While God for Dawkins and his ilk is "some kind of mega-manufacturer or cosmic chief executive officer" who set the world in motion and now directs it from his home in the clouds, Aquinas was quite ready to entertain the possibility "that the world had no origin at all". Dawkins and Hitchens are equally theologically illiterate in their view of religion as a failed attempt to explain the world. "Christianity was never meant to be an explanation of anything in the first place." God is not a mega-manufacturer. "He is rather what sustains all things in being by his love and would still be this even if the world had no beginning."

I quoted this passage back to Eagleton and asked for some elaboration. Did Aquinas really reject the Biblical story of the creation of the world? "Oh yes. He paid a great deal of attention to scripture but he was a mainstream Catholic and not a fundamentalist so he didn't take it literally. For Aquinas, God the Creator is not a hypothesis about how the world originated."

And:

But is the emperor really as well dressed as such critics allow? I decided to press him further about his theology. "You say that God made the world simply for the love and delight of it. But you don't mean 'made' in the usual sense of the word as you've already insisted that God did not create the world."

"That's right. Aquinas is saying that the relationship between God and the world is about the fact that the world is in some ways His. Not in the sense that my shoes are mine because I manufactured them but because at the centre of the world lies his love and freedom. God didn't create the world. He loved it into being. Now what that means, God knows, but that's exactly what Aquinas was saying. The concept of God is what will not let you go. He will not let you slip through his fingers. It's that kind of unconditional love. If you like, that's impossible. We can only know conditional love, but if you are to have some kind of authentic idea of God that's the place from which you have to start, not seeing God as some kind of manufacturer.