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human
What is Aristotle’s unmoved mover?

I have seen Aristotle’s god described as an unmoving mover and this mover is thought thinking of itself.

I’m very confused on how Aristotle came to the conclusion that thought thinking of itself would be a kind of god?

I’m sure I’m misunderstanding some key elements here, any corrections are much appreciated.
gpt
> I’m very confused on how Aristotle came to the conclusion that thought thinking of itself would be a kind of god?

Note: not "a kind of god" but "God". Aristotle's thought on this has been one of the formative influences on our understanding of what the term 'God' means, so the relation here is to some extent the other way around: to some extent, it's not that we had a concept of God and then there's a question of whether Aristotle's thought matches this concept, but rather that we had Aristotle's thought and this taught as the concept we refer to with the term 'God'. Given this historical priority, there is some prima facie oddity in being very confused as to how Aristotle could be speaking of God, so it may help if you spelled out your thinking here a bit more and clarified what exactly is causing the confusion.

For instance, Aristotle's God is immaterial, self-sufficient, contemplates itself, is pure rational activity or something higher which is the condition of pure rational activity, eternal, unchanging, self-caused or uncaused, perfect or complete, the first cause of the cosmos, engages in the greatest activity and does so in the greatest way, by virtue of this activity is happiest or in a state elevated beyond what we can conceive of happiness... These are all notions, or iterations of notions, that we think of as central to divinity.

That said, there are some features of Aristotle's theology which would strike us as idiosyncratic. First, while it is a cause of the cosmos, it is only the *final* cause of the cosmos - Aristotle distinguishes between final, formal, material, and efficient causes, and when we imagine God being a cause of the cosmos we're probably imagining more than just final causality. The reason why final causality would be particularly important is buried in the specifics of Aristotle's broader philosophy, but the result is that we get a kind of primordial dualism in Aristotle: to explain the cosmos we need both God and matter. (In Aristotelian terms, perhaps even a trialism, insofar as we need matter organized into forms.) This dualism often struck subsequent thinkers as untenable, so attempts to reduce the cosmos to a single underlying causes tended to involved making God a cause of the cosmos in a broader sense than it is for Aristotle.

Perhaps what you find jarring about Aristotle's theology is that, for him, God doesn't seem to particularly care for human beings. Now, Aristotle's God is certainly *perfect* and *good*, but these terms have less of a moralizing context in ancient thought than they often do for us. In ancient thought, something is *perfect* principally when it is a well-formed instance of its kind, that is complete, lacking in nothing, and undamaged, and -- by extension -- principally when it is self-sufficient, i.e. requires nothing else to support it but rather is complete in and through itself. And something is *good* when it is a result that attains something like perfection. So to say that God is perfect and good, in this sense, is not to say that it -- say -- would never allow anyone to drink room-temperature pop (or would never allow some other, more dire state of affairs), but rather is to say that God is complete and self-sufficient, and our own natural activity aims at the completion and self-sufficiency of which God is the exemplar.

In this context, to say that God is *good* is, to a certain degree, to say something more about *us* than about *God*. We *aspire* to that which God *is* -- God is, in a certain sense, our aim. This sense of 'good' is like the sense when we speak of "goods" like lumber and porcelain, i.e. things that have value to us, or when we say "It would be good if you did well on your test", i.e. this is something aimed at. (Though, saying that God is good, and the highest good, still *does* say something about God, viz. that he is such as is the highest good -- that he is perfect, etc.)

But this ancient sense of *perfect* and *good* largely endures throughout the medieval period, and to some extent in theological sources since, and consequently a theologically-informed conception of God as understood in the Abrahamic faiths -- nevermind earlier, pagan sources -- is often closer to Aristotle's notion of God (on these points) than common sensical or "folk" theology would suggest. Though, the two are not to be equated, as -- as noted above -- the developments of theology after Aristotle tended to move in a direction of broadening the senses in which God is engaged in the world (and this is true in pagan sources as well as Abrahamic sources).