Can something come from nothing

[Neo-Scholastic]

Anyhow. I wonder if you've ever approached a logic expert/professor/teacher and discussed the 5 ways?

I majored in Architecture but minored in philosophy. While I didn’t specifically have the opportunity to have an academic discussion on the 5W, my coursework did include analysis of the underlying and/or related issues like the Problem of Universals and Classical Logic, and ancient philosophy in general. I personally know a couple of professional philosophers. They are usually more interested in obscure specialties and when we do chat it’s usually about craft beer. Amazingly, I have actually had some of the more prominent Thomists, like Edward Fesser, write back to me to clarify points that I did not fully understand. It helps to send things by snail mail because it gets people’s attention.

The thing is, I don't need the argument to fail. I don't care whether it works or not. It makes no difference to me…If this thing wants to come communicate with me in a sensible way, I'm all for that. It doesn't have to be worship and mystery.

You call yourself an epistemological naturalist, which is a fair position with respect inquiries about natural science. At the same time, you seem to have a tacit ontology. You will not grant ontological status to anything unless it can be established by a naturalist methodology. To my mind that is like the guy who only looks to find his lost watch under the streetlamp because the lighting is better.

I'm afraid that it appears that you need these arguments to work, because your world would fall apart without them… you seem to spend huge amounts of efforts confirming that which you already believe by guarding these arguments, and looking for more ways to justify it.

Back in the day, I was quite comfortable being an Existentialist Atheist. I found that position difficult to maintain. When I think about myself as a conscious being in a phenomenal world, I am confronted by an ineffable Otherness. Besides being a completely incoherent ontology, materialism ignores the question of Being-as-Such, which to my mind it the most important question of all.

For me, the 5Ws serve mostly as an aid for contemplation about the nature of Being-as-Such, which incidentally happens to be the God that Christians worship. The 5W were never meant to convert anyone. That is the job of the Holy Spirit – the sudden realization that one’s relationship to the ineffable is a personal one. My strident defense of the 5Ws are not for my sake but to dispel the falsities that get in the way of people who are genuinely seeking something more than impoverished and absurd ontologies, like naturalism, that fail to address the central mystery of human existence. YMMV.