Aquinas' First Way succeeds

I appreciate Con's clear response and that we can agree on BOP, the re-articulation of the argument, premise 1 of my articulation of the First Way, and the issue of infinite series per se. So I am going to focus on Con's objections to Premise 2 of the First Way. Conception Con argues that it is possible to conceive of something self-actualizing. I agree with what he said about conception in general, but it is important to draw a distinction between conceive and imagine (Feser pointed this out in his book Aquinas). For instance we can imagine something being changed without a cause, but that may be because we are just refusing to imagine the cause of the change. So, imagining may not qualify as conceiving. Though, it might be still be possible to conceive of an object being changed without a cause (as some purport happens at the quantum level). Let's put this problem on hold though until the bottom of the response where I will address it there. Inertia Con further objects that inertia places premise 2 in doubt because the law of inertia says that objects can move through space with no cause. Except, I think that these objects do have a cause, their cause is the laws of physics. So, I don't think that inertia places premise 2 in doubt. Free will Con objects that premise 2 is incompatible with free will. I think that we do have free will (and so did Aquinas), so if premise 2 is in fact incompatible with free will then something has to give. It is important to understand how actualization applies in order to reconcile it with free will. Actualization is not a theory of occasionalism, where God is the direct cause of everything, as in God controls a person to walk down street and controls rain drops to fall from the sky. Rather, actualization is the act of bringing something from one state to another, in accordance with the nature of that thing. So, going back to the ice cube, it is an ice cube's nature to be frozen until it melts. God does not necessarily directly cause the ice cube to melt, rather God brings the state of heat to a new state and brings the state of the ice cube to a new state, which results in the ice cube melting. So, if the ultimate cause but not the direct cause. So, in regards to humans' wills, God brings the state of the person's will to a new state, but what that person chooses to will in that new state is up to that person, because the nature of the person is to will freely. So, the person can't bring themselves to the new state (self-actualize), but they still decide what they do in the state that they are in. So, I don't think that premise 2 poses a problem for free will. False dichotomy Con thinks that a false dichotomy or apparently a sort of equivocation is at play between "caused by nothing" and "having no cause". This may be true, but I think that the two are actually the same thing. For something to change uncaused is to say that some sort of being is generated for that thing not from something else or from itself, so where does it come from? I think one would have to conclude that it comes from nothing. More on this below. Conclusion I will now return to the part about premise 2 and the possibility of something changing without a cause. I don't think it is possible for something to change without a cause for reasons that I gave above, but one may still want to maintain that an individual object can change uncaused (eg. quantum particles). So, I want to re-cast premise 2, slightly, to perhaps bring out the absuridty that I think ensues when this option of 'no-cause' is applied to the universe as a whole. So here is premise 2 written slightly differently. 2. The universe cannot actualize itself. Now, this may seem like a bigger assumption than premise 2 already was, but I will now defend it. Again, to actualize means to be brought to a new state of being. In order for the universe to be brought to a new state of being: it would have to bring itself to the new state of being, be brought to the new state by nothing, or be brought to the new state by something else. Now, obviously I think that only the third option is reasonable. Con may again object though that perhaps the universe is brought to the new state without a cause, so not by nothing but just not by something. But agan, I think this is absurd. The only logical option left if the universe is not brought by itself or something else is to say that it is brought by nothing. Conclusion further Con objects that even if the First Way succeeds in presenting an actualizer that the actualizer may have potentials that are just not actualized and so the actualizer of the universe may not be fully actual. Con says that I have "argued that actualized potentials require a cause, but not that something with potentials requires an external cause." This is true, except I now argue that if the actualizer of the universe has potentials then those potentials would be actualized when it actualizes the universe. In other words, God would change when He changes the universe, but if premise 2 is true and an infinite regress is impossible, then God cannot change. Now Con may object that God may not need to change in order to change the universe and yet still have the 'possibility' of changing. Except, I think this is absurd. Something with potential must be actualized in order to actualize something else because I think that to have potential precisely means to be in waiting for a new state of actuality. But if God must be actualized in order to actualize something else, then this leads to an infinite regress which we agreed is impossible.