Aristotle's Prime Mover

 

Aristotle, marble portrait bust, Roman copy of a Greek original (c. 325 BC) in the Museo Nazionale Romano, Rome, Italy.

This is for all who love to explore Aristotle's cosmology and his understanding of the Divine. The Prime Mover is above all other movers. The notion of an immaterial High Deity was not uncommon among populations of the Ancient World. 

Excerpt:

In On The Heavens, Aristotle describes ether as the nearest element to the divine due to its perfect and eternal natural motion. Unlike the rectilinear motion of the sublunar elements, the natural motion of ether is circular.

Circular motion is continuous and eternal because a circle, unlike a line, has neither a beginning nor an end. Hence, everything in the supralunary region is eternal, changeless, ungenerated, and imperishable. For all these reasons, Aristotle considered the supralunary region more perfect than the sublunar domain.

The question yet to be answered is what causes the motion of the supralunary region? Given that every movement needs a mover and the Aristotelian cosmos is spatially finite, the series of movers-moved cannot indefinitely extend. As a result, all the series of motion must start with a first mover that is itself unmoved. The Prime Mover is the divine, metaphysical, and immaterial unmoved mover that is the original source of motion in the entire cosmos.

Aristotle argues, however, that the intricate motion of the celestial spheres cannot all be explained by the movement of the sphere of the fixed stars. Hence, in Metaphysics, he proposes that, in addition to the Prime Mover, there are multiple unmoved movers that cause each motion in the supralunary region that the motion of the fixed stars doesn’t account for. As Botteri and Casazza explain in The Astronomical System of Aristotle, these unmoved movers are finite in number, each associated with a celestial sphere. Like the Prime Mover, the unmoved movers are divine, metaphysical, and immaterial. However, they are subordinate to the Prime Mover because they are not responsible for the motion of the entire cosmos, but only partially responsible for the motion of the celestial spheres.

 

Read more here: What Is Aristotle’s Divine Blueprint for the Cosmos? | TheCollector

George Ellis on testing what existed before the universe

George Ellis

George Francis Rayner Ellis is the Emeritus Distinguished Professor of Complex Systems in the Department of Mathematics and Applied Mathematics at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. He is known for his work in physical cosmology. Physical cosmology is the study of the largest-scale structures and dynamics of the Universe and is concerned with fundamental questions about its origin, structure, evolution, and ultimate fate.

John Horgan interviewed George Ellis in 2014. He found that Ellis has a great deal to say about fields other than physics. What follows is an excerpt from the interview published in Scientific American:

Horgan: Lawrence Krauss, in A Universe from Nothing, claims that physics has basically solved the mystery of why there is something rather than nothing. Do you agree?

Ellis: Certainly not. He is presenting untested speculative theories of how things came into existence out of a pre-existing complex of entities, including variational principles, quantum field theory, specific symmetry groups, a bubbling vacuum, all the components of the standard model of particle physics, and so on. He does not explain in what way these entities could have pre-existed the coming into being of the universe, why they should have existed at all, or why they should have had the form they did. And he gives no experimental or observational process whereby we could test these vivid speculations of the supposed universe-generation mechanism. How indeed can you test what existed before the universe existed? You can’t.

Read the whole interview here.

Related reading: Does the Multiverse Really Exist? by George Ellis; Cosmologist George Ellis on the Multiverse