Another instant classic in Mopologist misfires, from Sic et Non:
From Sic et Non
Gemli: When people proclaim that they know the unknowable, and know it in extraordinary detail, they're either clueless or lying. I was being generous
DCP: When people proclaim that something is unknowable because they don't know it, they're being presumptuous.
Gemli: If God made us, it seems presumptuous to claim that anyone could know the mind of God, just as ants can't know the mind of the kid with a magnifying glass who's torching them ... This is what's wrong with ordinary mortals claiming to know what God wants and what must be done to obey His wishes.
DCP: Unless God tells them.
Gemli: It's said that a creating a perfect circle is nearly impossible. But your answer comes pretty close.
DCP: Actually, it doesn't at all. You simply don't understand what we're talking about. Aquinas would have been helpful to you here, as well. But you aren't interested.
Wait...what? Nothing any Mopologists has ever said that I can recall would lead me to think about Aquinas. Certainly, nothing that Mormonism teaches would urge a person to think about Aquinas, unless it is to insult traditional theology and exalt Joseph Smith as the restorer of simple truths.
Ironically, Aqunias's position is much closer to Gemli's than DCPs. Perhaps Gemli's formative years as a Catholic instilled him with a better sense of what the world outside of Utah County thinks of God than what the apologists can teach.
According to Aquinas,the will does not incline necessarily to these goods, either. For in this life we cannot see God in all his goodness, and thus the connection between God, virtue, final happiness will always appear opaque
It's far more complex for Aquinas than God simply appearing in a grove of trees and "telling us" this or that in plain English, given the great gulf of understanding that separates people from God like ants from people.
Here's some more to think about regarding Aquinas:
https://cct.biola.edu/thomas-aquinas-hu ... afterlife/
And Aquinas thought the idea of bodily entity like a human being ceasing to exist, and then coming back into existence at a future point in time involved some sort of logical contradiction along these lines. Here’s why.
Recall my comparing human souls to a blueprint explaining how to structure a bunch of physical stuff human-wise. In a sense, each of us has the same blueprint. We are each structured human-wise, and not tree-wise or squirrel-wise. But each of us is also a unique individual. What makes me the unique individual I am, on Aquinas’s view, is the particular physical stuff that gets structured human-wise in each of our cases when we are born. It’s starting out with the particular physical bits that I did that makes me me.
Consider first the view that Grampa “lives on” after his death as a disembodied soul in heaven. There are notorious philosophical difficulties involved with the claim that human persons are actually non-physical souls. For example, how are such non-physical souls supposed to interact with physical bodies? Even supposing such difficulties could be resolved, though (and readers interested in learning how to do so should read Alexander Pruss’s blog post on the subject! Available here, there remains this question: why is the Christian tradition so insistent on the importance of a bodily resurrection? If human persons aren’t really bodies at all, but rather non-physical souls capable of existing perfectly well in heaven without bodies, then why would getting our bodies back be such a big deal? Having a body, after all, is often pretty inconvenient. Why would disembodied human persons, enjoying beatitude in God’s presence, need to return to embodied life? Aquinas has an obvious answer to this question. Disembodied souls aren’t human persons. They’re merely former parts of human persons who used to be alive, and who by God’s power will return to life on the last day.
Now add to all of that, intelligence, which is either the material the spirit is composed of or a "you within a you within a you", and the common-sense notions of people having NDE's and going to heaven that the Mopologists are obsessed with look rather silly. To understand Mopologist wisdom is to first understand Aquinas. Please!