ARISTOTLE
Empiricist someone who thinks that the primary source of knowledge is experience gained through the five senses.
Aristotle's Four Causes
1) The material cause: This explains what something is made from.
2) The formal cause:
This explains what shape something takes or what its identifying features are.
3) The efficient cause:
This explains the activity that makes something happen. It brings about change and 'actualises potential', turning something from what it could be to what it is.
4) The final cause: This is something's purpose, or reason for existing at all. Aristotle used the term 'telos' or 'end'. he thought something was good if it achieved or fulfilled its telos.
Aristotle and the Prime Mover
Aristotle thought that there must be some kind of Prime Mover (or Unmoved Mover) to account for the fact that everything in the world is changing.
He did not think that an endless chain of cause and effect was possible.
The Prime Mover is the first of all substances and depends on nothing else for its existence - it exists necessarily.
If the Prime Mover exists necessarily, it must also be eternal.
The Prime Mover causes change or motion in everything else by attraction - everything in the universe is drawn to its perfection.
The Prime Mover must have no potential for change, but must be pure actuality.
The Prime Mover must be immaterial, because it is not capable of being acted upon.
The Prime Mover is transcendent.
The Prime Mover is transcendent and the ultimate reason (telos) for everything: the Prime Mover is the final cause for everything.
CRITICISMS OF ARISTOTLE
Aristotle's writing often lacks clarity, partly perhaps we only have fragments of it.
Aristotle could be criticised for dismissing Plato's belief in another world beyond this one, and for depending too heavily on sense experiences.
Many thinkers such as Bertrand Russell and Dawkins, reject the view that the universe has a telos. They argue that it just exists, without any explanation or purpose.
Perhaps the universe came about by chance and is not the result of a Prime Mover.
Aristotle only succeeds in suggesting a possible explanation for the universe, but it is not the only possibility so he does not arrive at a certain conclusion.
The fallacy of composition is an error in reasoning. It is the assumption that what is true of the part is true of the whole. Even if it were true that every part of the human body and had a purpose, it would not follow that the person as a whole has a purpose. Modern anatomy suggests that not all parts of the body do have a purpose. The appendix may have had a purpose in the past, but it does not seem to have a purpose now.
Existentialists deny that the universe has any purpose. Only humans have purpose, the universe just exists. Bertrand Russell said '...I should say the universe is just there, and that's all.'
Aristotle uses the idea of a Prime Mover to explain motion and change in the world, but this assumes that there is one, single reason for motion and change. If we argue that there are many reasons and causes for change, then it is difficult to see how one Prime Mover can be assumed to be the cause of all. If there are many possible causes of change, there seems to be no reason to jump from that to a single explanation.
The Big Bang Theory and much of modern cosmology would cast serious doubt on a God who brings the world into motion by attracting it to himself. Instead, we are presented with a violent beginning of an ever-expanding universe which some cosmologists would argue has no need to any kind of God.
Religiously, it is also possible to criticise the idea of the Prime Mover. Aristotle's God is not the God of the Abrahamic religions. For Muslims, Christians and Jews, God cares supremely about the universe He created and with which he interacts.