GRAMMAR

 Grammar is indeed more fundamental than our truth claims: before something can be true or false, it must be meaningful. Now even on this more fundamental level of grammar there is a peculiar feature of our language that cannot escape theological implications, namely the futurum exactum or future perfect. Tomorrow it will have been true that I am now writing this text. If tomorrow it turns out not to have been true that I am now writing this text, then I am not now writing this text. The reality of the present depends on what will have been true in the future, and this as a matter of principle. But for whom will this have been true tomorrow? Truth resides in the mind, and whose mind will it be, if humanity has suffered its demise, or after the heat death of the universe? Here, too, we need a mind that exists unconditionally as a foundation for our grammar and its implications. And that is the mind of God.

From Teleology And Transcendence: The Thought Of Robert Spaemann, by Anselm Ramelow.

Arguments for Immateriality

 

 

If truth (ontological truth) is the apprehension of the real…what is reality?
If we cannot agree on that, how could we ever agree on the kind of analysis (logical truth) we make of it.
If our logical truth differs from our behavior( the living the way we think, moral truth) it would be very difficult to derive any common sense.
Realizing full well that one is not convinced by logical argument alone; here is some arguments for the existence of non materiality.

From Benedict M. Ashley's "The Way Toward Wisdom" 2009

page 97

Argument #1

The argument from effects to cause for the existence of a First Cause of the universe and of its non materiality can be formulated as follows.

1. With our natural senses we observe changeable substances A,B, C…in the process of change, and first of all in motion. Thus, by rational analysis, we know A exists, and we can define it with a real and essential definition by finding a certain unity among its observed categorical properties.

2. Since, by the principle of causality (that nothing that is moved moves itself). A’s observed motion must be caused either by some other material or nonmaterial agent B as its efficient cause.

3. The efficient action of B is either essentially identical with B, in which case it is Z, the prime unmoved mover of the motion, or it is only some mover C whose action also depends on the action of Z.

4. The number of movers that, like C, act to move others only when they are themselves moved, cannot be infinite, since in an infinite series of such moved movers there would be no prime mover Z, and hence none of the intermediate agents would be in act but only in potency to act, and hence not actually causing motion.

5. Therefore, Z, a prime mover that requires no other mover to act exists, but it cannot be a material mover, since no material thing either moves itself or is in motion without being moved by another.

In this demonstration no term or principle is used that has not already been directly observed by the senses, or that is not evident directly from an intellectual analysis of the data of the senses, or demonstrated logically from premises formulated on the basis of such data. Thus, this theorem pertains to the foundational generic subject of natural science, not properly to any other science. 

Hence it is pre-supposed to all the more specific conclusions of natural science, that is, to all of modern science that refers to the fundamental forces of gravity, electromagnetism, the weak
and strong nuclear forces, and perhaps a counter gravitational force called “dark energy” that explains cosmic expansion.