Exposing the Intellectual Bankruptcy of Atheists Criticizing Religion

[TheRocketSurgeon]

…you seem to interpret Aquinas in a way that is, to put it mildly, different from the way almost everyone else seems to read it.

That would be most everyone from Descartes on. The article cited in the OP was by Dr. Ed Fesser. My interpretation aligns with his and similar Thomistic scholars.

Very few people outside of Catholicism take Aquinas' arguments seriously anymore, both Christian and non-Christian scholars alike.

Argument from Popularity

What Aquinas did, though, was lay the philosophical basis for things like Intelligent Design and related "modern" stealth Christians to push theology into science classrooms.

Google is your friend…  (https://biologos.org/uploads/projects/be..._essay.pdf)

Well, not exactly the Argument from Popularity, though I can see how you'd read it that way. What I meant to say is "check your prejudices"... no matter which sort of Christian sub-sect member to whom I find myself talking, they too-easily cite their own (what I call) "incestuous thought-circles" to the exclusion of the mainline thinking on the subject. It is a form of bias that is well-known. It's the main reason I try not to read very many atheist authors on the subject of theology, to be frank; I like to be sure my own views are my own, and the best way to achieve that, I find, is to read primarily people who disagree with me (with whom I disagree) and try to figure out why the disagreement may be legitimately based.

That was a good article on the difference between the main claims of the ID movement and the actual philosophy of Aquinas, especially since he bothered to point out that ID is not one thing but a myriad (I like his term "cluster") of ideas which is all over the map, so (like when discussing atheism) it is necessary to pick a spot in the general center of the cluster to aim at. I have extra respect for him for the way in which he discusses Dawkins in the final third of the article, both praising and criticizing his positions, as appropriate to the argument.

That said, it still does nothing to shake me from my view that Aquinas' entire position is built around "If we assume ______ then ______ is also true" arguments. I will grant that accepting such philosophy and its assumptions as valid does allow one to be an evolutionary biologist/physicist and Catholic at the same time (I know several such persons, since the university I went to is in one of the most heavily-Catholic areas in the USA; my own favorite professor was one, and spent a LOT of time in our after-hours/office-hour discussions trying to convince me to go back to being a Christian, in between discussions about the latest in dimensional physics), but I simply do not think Aquinas' Deism with regard to the First Mover argument (which, you may have seen, I have no issues with; I simply don't find it necessary) equates to a proof of theism, or that his arguments about the underlying purpose he sees in natural things is something that actually exists.