The 5 Ways!!!

St Thomas Aquinas gave five ways that God could be explained rationally. To me personally, none of these ways make sense because, he assumes that God is the exception to every rule. for instance, he says that every object has to be put into motion by another object, EXCEPT for God. Everyone of these ways always has an "EXCEPT for God" clause. the way that I think makes the most sense (even then it doesn't make much sense) is St Thomas's second way. In the second St Thomas states that no object creates itself, therefore all objects must have come from something else. St Thomas, calls God, the "uncaused first cause", which began the chain of existence for all things. This seems to be the only way that St Thomas could go about explaining existence, while still incorporating rational ideas such as evolution, and the spiritual ideas of intelligent design.

St Augustine & Gothic Architecture

St Augustines ideas about the church and faith can be seen greatly in gothic style churches of this time period. The church's were dark on the outside, and were many shades of gray. On the inside of these churches though,  they were beautiful. There was colored stained glass everywhere which brightened up the whole place and made it seem like a mystical rainbow. The large rose windows allowed light to shine into the churches, and allowed them to be cascaded with beautiful light. This is very much in line with St. Augustine's views of human beings. According to St Augustine, humans are naturally sinful and dirty but, through the church they can find their inner good person. This relates directly to gothic churches because, they are ugly on the outside, beautiful on the inside, and have light shine though them. The light represents the word of god enlightening an individual. 

Hitler and his many fallacies

Now as we all know, hitler was a insane man, well on top of all the horrible things he's done, he can't even make a valid argument. In chapter 11 of his book, hitler says that different races shouldnt breed with each other because, "its just wrong", considering that in the animal kingdom different species of animals don't breed with. Well there are at least two things completely wrong with this statement. First of all, there are no sub species of humans, we are all the same. A race is not a species. It's equivalent to different dog breeds, if a husky and a labrador have puppies then you have husky/lab mix puppies and there is nothing wrong with that. Also, different species do breed with each other on rare occasions (i.e liger, cama) 

Cama!

The great debate of creation

[*note to mr basinger*, I'm not quite sure how we are supposed to go about writing this so I'm just going to give my opinion on what we discussed in class*]

Well for me I find it hard to completely disprove evolution. We have seen that animals evolve through natural selection, and us humans are indeed mammals. If species are evolving now, then they obviously were evolving thousands of years ago. Us humans obviously evolved from something much smaller as did all other living creatures. Now whither, there is a higher being that helped this process along, I'm not sure but, one thing I am certain about is that us humans have evolved over time and natural selection to become the species we are today.

Affirmative Action

In my opinion, regardless of who our president is, affirmative action should not exist. Whither or not an individual gets into a college should be determined by their merit, not their ethnicity. Affirmative action makes it harder for people who are not a minority but, do get good grades etc., to get into the college of their choice. By giving free opportunities to people, we are taking away opportunities from the people who earned them. This will cause even more tension between races because, for one race its easier to get into college and for another its much harder. I don't think the race of our president should determine who receives help in getting into college and who doesn't.  Making, college admissions strictly a decision of merit would make it completely fair.

Reasoning!!

Syllogism - Syllogism is when, from two different statements you infer a new statement. Syllogism is apart of deductive reasoning which is when you start with what you are given and you move towards what you can prove.

Example: Poodles are dogs

Bob has has poodle

Therefore Bob has a dog

Modus Ponens & Modus Tollens

Alright, I am a little bit confused about these two, I understand that Modus Tollens has a "not" in it, and both Modus Ponens and Modus Tollens have to do with cause and effect. Other than that, though I am not sure how to go about making my own examples of these. So I guess you can say I get the main concepts for these but I'm not quite sure about all the logistics. 

All about Mr. Ghiberti

How was he chosen to create the doors?

- There was a competition held in 1401, to see who's design would go on the doors of the Baptistry, and Ghiberti won.

What is the style of the Cathedral in which they reside?

- The Cathedral of Florence is Gothic style

What story is one each panel

-Stories from the New Testament