Replies

spirited irish: "Natural philosophy is derived from senses?!?!?
Heaven deliver us from such patent foolishness!
This assumption is entirely ignorant.
Senses without spirit (mind) is madness."

Sorry, but you are simply over-reacting to my efforts at being brief.
The simple Thomistic distinction here is between Theology based on the Bible and natural-philosophy (aka "science") which begins with inputs from our senses.
Here is a brief summary:

"Aquinas was a Christian theologian, but he was also an Aristotelian and an Empiricist, and he substantially influenced these two streams of Western thought.
He believed that truth becomes known through both natural revelation (certain truths are available to all people through their human nature and through correct human reasoning) and supernatural revelation (faith-based knowledge revealed through scripture), and he was careful to separate these two elements, which he saw as complementary rather than contradictory in nature."

A quick search did not produce a pithy quote from Aquinas on the subject, but here is one in which the idea is expressed:

"Now every form bestowed on created things by God has power for a determined act[uality], which it can bring about in proportion to its own proper endowment; and beyond which it is powerless, except by a superadded form, as water can only heat when heated by the fire.
And thus the human understanding has a form, viz. intelligible light, which of itself is sufficient for knowing certain intelligible things, viz. those we can come to know through the senses."

spirited irish: "From the post-flood age of Noah and his sons right up to our own, superstitious men have believed they would ‘evolve’ into gods...Gilgamesh boasts that he brought the ‘knowledge of everything’ with him from the highly advanced world that existed before the Flood..."

Nobody on these threads has defended Gilgamesh, nor has anyone suggested "evolving into gods".
Those are phantasms of your own imagination, FRiend.

spirited irish: "He also boasts of being 2 parts god, only one part man.
Of course he believed he was evolving into god.
Here we have the germ of what modern evolutionists call macroevolution, meaning one kind, man, transforming into another kind, god."

Sorry, but that's too much of a stretch in imagination, even for a Disney cartoon.
No scientist has suggested "transforming into another kind, god."
So your accusations are not only false but ludicrous.
Why do you keep making them, FRiend?

spirited irish: "Many antiquarians believe that Gilgamesh and Nimrod (Amraphel in Genesis) were one and the same man."

In fact, Amraphel king of Shinar, is mentioned only twice, in Genesis 14, in connection to two battles, and neither time with enough detail to provide indication of his character, or relationship to other non-biblical figures.
So I would give no weight to speculations such as yours here.

spirited irish: "In a previous post you repeated a vastly popular folk myth when you spoke of our “pre-civilized hunter gatherer” past.
This folk tale is an inversion of reality.
Even pagan historians knew that a “Golden Age” (antediluvian world) preceded the world’s fall into successively degraded ages interspersed here and there by all too brief upticks."

Sorry, but the fact is that even today, there are still a few small groups of "uncivilized" hunter-gatherers living as their ancestors did, in very remote locations.
And, as recently as a few centuries ago, vast areas of the earth were populated only by such people -- Native Americans, for example.

As for an ante-diluvian "Golden Age", there is some evidence of civilization under the Black Sea, but all ancient evidence shows that most of mankind lived as primitive hunter-gatherers for thousands of years before the Age of Agriculture.

Indeed, for whatever my opinion on this might be worth: it is the arrival of agriculture and civilization that the Garden of Eden story reports and explains.

spirited irish: "If you are interested in cleansing your mind of folk tales, belief in evolution and inverted history..."

I do enjoy ancient folk tales and mythology, because of what they tell us about our ancestors, but I don't take them any more seriously than, say, some Disney cartoon.

But evolution is a confirmed scientific theory, while the recorded and discovered history of mankind does in fact show increasingly complex technology and civilizations, separated by periods of downfall and Dark Ages.

“The simple Thomistic distinction here is between Theology based on the Bible and natural-philosophy (aka “science”) which begins with inputs from our senses.”

Spirited: An ideologue is a person who swallows-whole twisted, distorted systems-thinking that is inherently illogical. With respect to your own “swallowed-whole” notions, you must on one hand use your mind (spirit) to posit an entirely insane notion that denies “mind.”

Ideologues always suffer from cognitive dissonance, which means they hold in their minds two distinctly antithetical ideas. In your case, one idea says, “you have a mind,” while the other denies “mind” in service to madness.

It has long been said that the eyes (senses) are the door to the soul/spirit (mind). Any truly great artist will tell you that eyes (senses) and inspiration (mind) work instantaneously together, united in harmony, not one thing followed finally by the other. There is never an instant where eyes (senses) work alone.