Exposing the Intellectual Bankruptcy of Atheists Criticizing Religion

[Esquilax]

Here is a point by point demonstration of how you have misinterpreted Aquinas and thereby failed to present valid objections to his Five Ways (5W)

Took me a bit to get to this, but let's see...

[1] Aquinas was a 13th century clergyman. No matter.  Status, class, and titles do not affect the veracity of anyone’s ideas. Ideas stand or fall on their own merits regardless of who has the idea.

[2] Aquinas made his arguments without the benefit of the scientific method, not only because that had not yet been defined, but because the tools of inquiry into the natural world are useless when applied to philosophical problems. The efficacy of scientific methods presupposes many philosophical ideas, like objects of knowledge, parsimony, and compliance with the principles of logic.

Certainly, but the point I was making is that Aquinas was largely ignorant of the scientific and epistemic developments of the present day, and it shows. The fact that he's a 13th century clergyman doesn't make him wrong by default, but it does make him a product of his time, obviously.

I also object to the idea that Aquinas was dealing with an exclusively philosophical problem, because god is not that, no claim about objective reality is a purely philosophical claim, and Aquinas makes many of them on his way to a conclusion that is, itself, a claim about reality. We need to remember that Aquinas was a clergyman, the god he had in mind was a specific one that does specific things and has specific attributes; Aquinas' god can easily be tested by science in many ways.

[4] Evidences are facts that point to the veracity of a belief. The demonstrations of the 5W rely on factual information about reality observable in everyday experience. It is a fact that sensible objects retain their identity while undergoing change. It is a fact that things that do not yet exist cannot affect things that already do exist. It is a fact that not all things that could be actually come to be.

They really don't, though? The five ways rely on a series of intuitive, presupposed philosophical demands, that both you and Aquinas assert by fiat to be facts, that maybe, in passing, slightly resemble certain facts about the subjects in question.

[1] Repeating the objection that the First Cause need on be the Christian God does not make the objection any more valid than the first time you made it. See above.

Well, okay, I mean, I can only write the things I knew at the time, I can't actually cast my mind forward to see your rebuttal before you made it. Arguing for deism isn't particularly impressive, anyway.

[2] Nothing in the 1W relates the First Cause with an intelligent agent. The intentional relationship between causes and effects is demonstrated in 5W. Your task was to refute the arguments Aquinas actually made not those you wish he had.

So on the one hand you say that Aquinas wasn't attempting to make the case for an intelligent agent in this argument, but on the other you state that his repeated "and this everyone understands to be god," which you specify yourself to have "all knowing" as a quality, is justified. So Aquinas isn't talking about an intelligent agent, but his conclusion contains the premise that everybody knows that what he's talking about is an intelligent agent. Cool.

[3] In Scholasticism ‘motion’ means ‘change’. The 1W talks about two distinct properties something could have: the ability to change and the ability to cause change. You, not Aquinas, are the one asserting that everything with the ability to change must itself be subject to change. The First Mover is not in motion so it doesn’t need a prior mover.

Taking one lazy argument and substituting it for another doesn't really help. The simple assertion that the first mover doesn't move doesn't actually prove anything, and the formulation "here's the thing that solves the problem I've defined into existence with rules that the thing doesn't have to follow," is simply self serving tripe. If you've accepted the existence of a category of things that move others without being in motion, but don't then justify only god being in that category, then you have a problem because the most parsimonious explanation for this argument would not then be a god. In fact, given what we currently know about physics and cosmology, it's far more likely that whatever lies beyond the Planck time, in that region of spacetime that doesn't function like anything we understand currently, fits the bill far better than god does; at least the big bang and its implications for pre-Planck time reality are readily demonstrable. How did Aquinas determine that the universe itself wasn't a mover that is not in motion?

Oh, he didn't? He just assumed it couldn't be because that's good for the conclusion he'd already come to? Oh noooooo.....

I mean, there's also the enormous fallacy of composition at the heart of the first way that renders it moot from the beginning, but even on its own premises, the argument fails. It all comes back to what I said about Aquinas being from the 13th century: there was additional facts about the universe, its possible origins, and position within the larger scope of reality, that was simply unavailable at the time, rendering his arguments rather outdated.

[1] Not everything that could be will be. Some things actually exist while others do not. Many things that exist now have the potential to turn into something else. To reject these ideas is to reject common sense.

I just don't think that these philosophical concepts are appropriate notation for questions of objective reality, which is what god certainly is. It is, perhaps, a good mental shortcut to consider things in terms of potential and actuality, but it's essentially irrelevant in the real world calculus involved with demonstrating real phenomena. "Potential," is not some quantifiable thing that dwells within objects, it is an extrapolation we can make based on prior evidence and experience. It's conceptual, nothing more, and hence pointless.

[2] No one disputes that many of the examples provided by Aquinas no longer survive modern scientific scrutiny, but the veracity of the demonstrations do not depend on the examples given; he just needed better examples. The conclusions follow from the premises and stand on their own merits.

Not necessarily: in the case of the first way the premises don't stand at all because of Aquinas' lack of understanding regarding the nature of the universe and what might lay beyond it. It makes sense from a thirteenth century point of view, but in a modern one where we know that our traditional notions of causation aren't at all prevalent everywhere, the things that he's saying suffer from a basic mistake of language: discussions of the cause of motion necessarily stop being relevant at the point of the beginning of our universe. At the point that Aquinas' argument would actually apply to something in the real world, it stops making sense. The science is all about how we'd need new, as yet undiscovered physics at the Planck time, and Aquinas' argument relies upon not only our current physics, but an intuitive, uncomplicated version of that, that was never reliant on evidence or research anyway.

[3] Later Neo-Scholastics have clarified that the infinite series which Aquinas rejects is an essentially ordered sequence without a first member. Nothing can give what it doesn’t have. Adam cannot borrow a dollar from Bill, if Bill borrowed it from Calvin, and so on without end. Every actual pocket has the potential to hold a dollar, but that potential cannot ever be actualized unless there is at some point in the series a pocket holding with a dollar in it, i.e. a first member to the series. It doesn’t take advanced degrees in mathematics or physics to understand how this type of infinite series is absurd.

You keep falling victim to the fallacy of composition: of course physical, Earthbound examples cannot be infinite, since we know from the start that we're dealing with a finite amount of space and materials and persons. But we're talking about the origin of the universe here, a point in history where our current understanding of causation breaks down, and beyond that we're talking about the spaces beyond our own expansionary universe, and we don't know what is going on out there. Despite this, you sit there insisting that what we know now will absolutely apply there, based on nothing but the intuitions of a man who lived and died before we ever discovered the conditions we're talking about. It's essentially taking directions from a man who's never even heard of the place you're going, over the word of a collection of trained individuals who at least know where it is.

[4] No you have not said enough to support your point because you haven’t meaningfully related it to any particular one of the 5 Ways. If I had to guess, you’re actually arguing against the 5W, not the 1W, but reading further you want to use the ‘fallacy of composition’ against Ways 1 thru 3.

"Things within the small pocket of the universe that Aquinas knew about behave in a certain way, therefore things outside of the universe behave the same way," is a fallacy of composition. Something being true of a part (an extremely small part, I must remind you) does not make it true of the whole, nor things on the outside of the whole.

[1] The 1W is about how things go from potentially existing to actually existing. The 2W is about how effects are ontologically dependent on logically prior causes. The 3W is about the difference between what must be out of necessity and possibility. While they share a similar structure, anyone can see that they are not exactly the same argument and your hyperbole doesn’t make them so.]

Meh. You can pretend that each of these is some brilliant piece of argumentation, but that doesn't change that the argument is essentially the same in formulation, and that the refutation is the same each time. The flaw is one in Aquinas' conception of reality, and so it extends to all of the ways equally.

[3] Aquinas never breaks the rules he establishes at the onset. He just identifies distinctions that apply equally to everything, from the smallest quark to God Himself.

The distinction between "this is a thing that breaks the rules I've established," and "this is a thing which doesn't have this quality by fiat assertion alone," is not only so small as to be irrelevant, but also sort of insulting. Again, you might be prone to mistaking assertion for evidence, but a rational person will not fall into the same trap, no matter how glittering the language you use to describe it.

In the 1W that distinction is between potential and actuality. Nothing in that distinction prevents any particular thing from having actuality only, both actuality and potential, or potential only. In the 2W he distinguishes between causes and effects. In any essentially ordered series, nothing prevents something to be a cause only, both a cause and an effect, or just an effect.

The lack of evidence certainly prevents me from taking the argument seriously.

If you’re going to imply special pleading then show me where specifically in 1W Aquinas says that everything that causes a change must itself be subject to change? Likewise, where in the text of the 2W does Aquinas say that every cause must have a prior cause? He doesn’t. Your favorite trump card is worthless.

And you don't see how the admission that not everything requires a prior cause robs the argument of any force? If causes aren't required for everything, then there's no need to posit a god at all, because there's no problem to solve. There can, in fact, just be a point in routine physical reality where things don't need a cause- in fact, that's what the science seems to suggest- without needing to imbue that point with any form of divine significance. Same with the first way, really.

[1] It’s called parsimony when we say that similar initial conditions product similar results. It’s called the Principle of Identity when we say that if things are alike in all ways then they are the same thing. Those are basic principles, not fallacies.

... And then we come to the big bang, a point in spacetime where the initial conditions were fundamentally unlike anything we have ever experienced in the history of the universe, and also largely unquantifiable to our current physics as a result. Moreover, we have no idea what the region beyond our universe looks like now, or whether it behaves along recognizable lines of causation. You can't say the initial conditions are uniformly the same because at a certain point we cannot currently make sense of those conditions in the slightest, and that is where the fallacy comes in, in that you and Aquinas are assuming similarity in places that do not necessarily hold it.

[2] Show me where in the 5W Aquinas posits a specific cosmological model to support any of his arguments. He doesn’t. The 5W work regardless of whether the existence of the universe extends into the infinite past or came into being last Tuesday.

The problem is that Aquinas' argument doesn't fit within the currently understood model. Whether he posits a specific model is irrelevant in the face of that.

[4] The ambiguity of your objection makes it impossible to respond. I will however concede that later commentators fleshed out the 3W based on other things Aquinas expressed elsewhere. I suspect you’re trying to accuse Aquinas of begging the question since he does not include in his demonstration something educated people already knew: if everything that exists does so by necessity then there could not be any change.

Sorry, but "everybody knows," is not sufficient justification for your bald ass assertion right there.

[1] If it baffles you how can you object to it?

What's baffling is that it was actually seriously offered as an argument.

[2] Aquinas ‘doesn’t bother’ to support degrees of perfection because an educated reader would already know that he’s building on the moderate realist solution to the problem of universals. Things that have a common nature manifest that common nature to greater or lesser degrees.

Sure, but that doesn't entail that extremes of that nature objectively exist, which is not only the thing he's arguing for, but the thing that he thinks is demonstrated by the argument he made.

[3] Your example fails to distinguish between essential and accidental properties. Let’s say the rock in question is a diamond. The size of a diamond is an accidental property because it remains a diamond regardless of its size. In contrast to that, all diamonds share a common atomic structure. That common atomic structure is an essential property of all diamonds. However, anyone can see that some diamonds are better than others. Any particular diamond may be contaminated by other elements or otherwise flawed.

But "better than," in the diamond example is a subjective, human qualification based upon the things we opine as valuable in diamonds. It's not some objective function of diamond-ness, nor does it suggest that there actually exists some perfect, flawless diamond that somehow plays a role in the degree to which other diamonds are flawed or otherwise. All it means is that we can imagine a diamond in which the rare, subjectively valuable elements are uniform, and the more common, less valuable imperfections are not present. Degree is a conceptual matter informed by objective attributes, not an objective attribute in its own right.

[1] The 5W has nothing to do with evolution or fine-tuning; but rather, that the laws of nature operate with unerring regularity.

Which implies that Aquinas believes that, without design, such regularity would be impossible, something that I've never once heard a cogent argument for.

[2] Unless the tendencies of a cause are directed towards a determinate range of effects anything, or nothing in particular, could happen during a specific event or process. This is evidence of intentionality and intentionality is a property of Mind.

How did you determine any of this?