Exposing the Intellectual Bankruptcy of Atheists Criticizing Religion

[Esquilax]

It may surprise many atheists to know that Thomas Aquinas staunchly defended empiricism. He neither ‘logics’ anything into existence nor does he make assertions without reference to observable experience. To suggest otherwise is to ignore the first ten articles of Question 1 of the Summa that proceed the 5 Ways in Question 2. The evidence of God does not come from some subset of reality; but rather, from the whole of reality. That whole and the features common to everything within that whole serve as the sensible data from which Aquinas reasons about the fundamental causes of it all things. For anyone that wants to criticize Aquinas, at least have the intellectual honesty to criticize the arguments Aquinas actually made rather than the ones you wish he had.

The problem is, mostly, this: Aquinas was a thirteenth century man who made his arguments without the benefit of the scientific method, and without referring to anything that we might consider an objective fact, even for the time. His five ways are little more than intuitive guesswork without any real support backing it up, and they're also kind of lazy, since they end up not pointing to a god, let alone the specific christian god that Aquinas and you yourself, Chad, believe in, before just demanding that the phenomena they do demonstrate, assuming we take the premises one hundred percent seriously, is god. It's argumentation by fiat, from beginning to end, which is problematic on its own, without even getting into the clear issue that an argument is not evidence.

Since you think the five ways are some insurmountable theological edifice, I'll rebut them all, because you think that's impossible and I like doing the impossible. I'll pull directly from the Summa Theologica for this, though I've already gone through all of these before:

The first way is, to put it mildly, dumb. Since I don't take "because I said so!" seriously, I also reject Aquinas' pathetic attempt to cram his god into an argument that has nothing to do with him: "and this everyone understands to be god." It's lazy, and frankly I can't believe you take this seriously at all, Wooters. The absolutely most charitable we can be is to say that the first way demonstrates the existence of a first mover (it doesn't, but I'll get to that) and, as we all know, motion does not necessarily come from intelligent sources, and so saying the originator of motion must be an intelligent being, a "mover" rather than simply an object that moved, is unjustified by the premises of the argument.

Happily, the first way also refutes itself, since "everything in motion needs a mover, therefore my conclusion will posit the existence of a first mover that is itself unmoved" clearly demonstrates that not everything in motion requires a mover. So if the argument is correct, it's also incorrect. I could go on, rejecting the "potential and actual" categories that Aquinas posits as unnecessary additions based on the ignorance of the time rather than any real understanding of how things work, or pointing out that he simply fiat dismisses the concept of an infinite chain of movers solely on the basis that accepting an infinity would prevent a first mover from being the conclusion, or even just showing the obvious fallacy of composition inherent in the "things within the universe behave X way, therefore all things behave X way," formulation, but I think I've said enough there.

Moving on, the second way features many of the problems of the first, mainly because it's basically exactly the same damn argument. There's the same fallacy of composition, the same fiat demand that we call whatever the first efficient cause god for no reason, the same self refuting premises ("all things are caused, therefore my conclusion will posit the existence of an entity which has no efficient cause, breaking the rules to solve the problem I asserted the rules into being to create so I can solve it with the conclusion I'd had in mind all along") only this time there's an extra helping of stupid because Aquinas asserts that nothing can be its own efficient cause, because that would require it to exist before itself, which is impossible: clearly he wasn't thinking of time travel, which is both easier to believe than god, and also not argued against within the premises. Therefore, there's more than one conclusion the argument leads to, and given that the one Aquinas favors is self refuting...  

The third way is... basically exactly the same, both in the basic nature of the argument, and in its refutation. There's still the same fallacy of composition in asserting that because things behave a certain way within this current state of the universe, that is the way it is everywhere. Clearly Aquinas didn't have any special knowledge about the beginnings of our current expansionary universe. There's the same demand that we treat this vague non-contingent thing as both a being, which Aquinas never argues for, and as his specific christian god, which is never mentioned anywhere. Kinda tired of this guy pretending that "first cause" always means "my god," that's literally terrible. Now we also have this weird assumption that everything in the universe is contingent, which is as unjustified as everything else in this dreck. It's just... why the hell do you think this is anything cogent, much less worthy of the big, booming pronouncement you made about it earlier, Chad?

It's only at the fourth way that Aquinas finally gets off of the first cause horse and tries something new, and somehow he manages to mount an even weaker argument than before. The fourth way is just utterly fucking baffling, betraying both a complete lack of understanding about physics, and an over-reliance on the "because I say so!" school of argumentation. Aquinas doesn't even bother to support his assertion that, for all things which exist on a gradated scale, there must exist something at the extremes of that scale, he just makes it and leaves it there. There's no reason why this should be, and the reason that Aquinas gives, that comparisons of intensity are predicated on their resemblance to the thing that is at the perfect end of that particular scale, is flatly false: if I have two rocks, and I see that one is larger than the other, that relies solely on the relative size of both the rocks, it's not sustained by some "ultimate large rock," that literally exists that I'm subconsciously deriving my judgment from. It's just... we know what size is, we can make that judgment.

In fact, Aquinas' example of this is hilariously wrong, stating that fire is the "maximum heat," and is the cause of all other hot things, which is clearly not the case. Not only is it possible to create something hotter than fire- especially the type of fire that Aquinas' era could produce- but it is also possible, and in fact, definitional, that heat does not come from fire. Heat is a molecule thing, not an elemental thing, and so Auinas is even mistaken on his sure fire example, the only point thus far that he's supported his argument with an example, the closest thing to evidence he's gotten at yet. And of course, once again he simply demands that the ultimate goodness is his specific god, because he says so.

Finally, the fifth way is just the argument from design, posed in such a way that it contains all the problems that the other ways had too. One has to try hard to make an argument worse than its usual fallacious self, but Aquinas does it. Simply put, Aquinas' personal intuition that all things work toward goals means very little. Personal opinions are not evidence, especially when we know why even those natural things that do work toward goals do what they do; it's evolution, not magic. There's also the arbitrary demand that god isn't working toward a goal, he's the one doing the goal-making, which isn't apparent in the argument.

So, there. The five ways, so devoid of intellectual content that I kinda can't believe that you take them seriously, and that I took the time to type all this out. Seriously, every one of them just inserts the christian god into their conclusion by fiat demand, what the hell is so compelling about that, that you'd hold it up as the premiere argument for your position? Are you really that pushed into a corner?