Aquinas' First Proof – the First Cause or Unmoved Mover – is not a proof of the Christian God, but an argument in principle, and I have seen the First Cause dismissed as 'special pleading', and defended on the basis that it has to be disproved, and special pleading itself is insufficient, it has to be shown how or why.
There's a discussion here.
I have also heard people dismiss the Cosmological Argument as a form of special pleading but I don't think it is in its classical form. It does tend to be botched by some amateur apologists, though, in ways that do become forms of special pleading.
My issue with the Cosmological Argument is a lot simpler. I don't think there's enough evidence for its premises. I don't think, for example, that we can say that there was a single first mover, for instance.
While I do think a first mover is more likely than time extending infinitely into the past given the Big Bang (although some physicists have speculated that time in our universe is a sort of infinite loop with a Big Crunch at the end, I don't think there's enough evidence for this) it's hard for me to see why there would be only one mover or why this mover is necessarily God.
It could be the case, for instance, that out of empty spacetime probability waves generated virtual particles en masse shortly after T=0 which caused the Big Bang. I'm not sure why you would call those waves a singular force or why you would identify that force with God.
Well quite. Again, to paraphrase Aquinas, 'logic' proceeds according to its principles, so we have to determine whether 'special pleading' is a cop-out, or whether actually that 'special case' is nevertheless logically coherent.
It becomes a circular argument.
As a Trinitarian Christian, I would say the world is 'Trinity-shaped', that the various triunes in human speculation are intuitions that allude to it. The Platonic triune stasis-kinesis-genesis :: rest-movement-becoming was right, but the wrong way round, Plato's notion of the fall as the eternal soul, in the contemplation of God, turns away and falls into the material world (created to arrest the soul's decline) was 'baptised' by Maximus the Confessor to read genesis-kinesis-stasis, becoming-movement-rest (in God).
But yes, logically arguing the Trinity is a whole different ballgame!
I did read this part. I haven't much to respond to but I found it informative and thought-provoking. I do think that the forms of the Trinity that are most comprehensible to me tend to have a basis in Platonism. Origen is a great source for Neoplatonic thought overlapping with Christian theology and he'd probably be my first pick when talking about it in this context, too.
The concept of stasis-kinesis-genesis plays a huge role in Agrippa's Occult Philosophy, although I don't think he uses those terms. It always seemed more similar to Modalism than Trinitarianism to me, though.
Outside of that, I guess my issue is more that there isn't a
computational description of Trinitarianism. It can make sense in paraconsistent logic and, indeed, I have read academic papers on that subject published in scholarly journals. I just think it's a misapplication of paraconsistent logic, since it was invented to deal with uncertainty rather than mystery, and I think using paraconsistent logic in an epistemic sense can bring with it a lot of issues. I'm more of a supporter of Bayesian epistemology, personally, for a few technical reasons.
