Exposing the Intellectual Bankruptcy of Atheists Criticizing Religion

[Esquilax]

Reply to 1) – I believe that with respect to the proposition “God exists”, atheists such as yourself do not earnestly seek to know the truth. I think that not because simply because they disagree with me per se but because the 5W are sound and well supported arguments.

An argument cannot be sound, nor well supported, if basic premises within it are either contradicted by, or at the very least not in evidence with, what we currently know about the universe. An argument with, at best, no evidence behind it is not supported at all.

Go and read the cosmology. Go and learn what we've actually discovered about the universe in the eight hundred years between Aquinas' time and our own. It's not my problem that your understanding of the things the five ways discuss is stuck in a time when people could not possibly have been in a position to know, nor is it my fault that I'm not willing to ignore whole centuries worth of advancement just because you happen to think that an argument that aligns with what you already believed is the bees knees. All this is is you projecting your own ignorance onto us: you won't learn the things that demonstrate the weakness in Aquinas' position, the verifiable, objective science that has been done that shows that the very terms Aquinas is using are inappropriate for the subject, and then when people who are willing to learn those things come along, you accuse them of not honestly seeking the truth because they won't wallow in the same self-inflicted blindness that you are.

I think therefore that the failure to accept them must be something other than rational evaluation.

No, my failure to accept them came from the fact that I didn't just stop at an evaluation of Aquinas' work. I realized that Aquinas was making claims about the real world, claims that fall within science's ability to investigate, and so what I did was, I didn't stop at the one damn book. I moved on and checked to see if Aquinas' claims actually align with what we've discovered about the universe using technologies that would have been unthinkable during Aquinas' days, and do you know what I found? Why, Aquinas' claims are so misinformed that they aren't even using the correct frame of reference to be considered wrong!

The problem is that you want to evaluate Aquinas' claims without bothering to understand anything more about the topics Aquinas discusses. You want to just evaluate them based on your intuition and embrace the fallacy of composition at the heart of the claims, you don't want to actually know anything that secular science has demonstrated about the topic. Again, not my problem: your exact same reasoning would lead you to conclude the earth was flat if Aquinas said so, because that makes an intuitive degree of sense and you refuse to look further into the science on the matter before forming your conclusion.

Despite having been shown how to understand the 5W consistent with the informed opinions of Aquinas scholars*, many atheists continue to reiterate objections to arguments Aquinas never made.

... And then when I point out that Aquinas isn't even working within the correct frames of reference, making his entire theology reliant on a non-applicable model of reality, you just ignore this and focus on other things. So hey.

If things cannot move by themselves then God also requires a mover. (No premise of the First Way says that everything is in motion.)

If the first way allows for there to be things that are not in motion, but are capable of conferring motion, then there is no need at all to install a god into the picture, because there is no longer a problem for the first way to resolve.

The universe can exist from eternity with no need for a first cause. (The Second Way refers to an essentially ordered sequence and not an accidentally ordered one.)

Then why assume the former over the latter with regard to the universe?

The physical universe satisfies as the necessary being. (No compound of merely possible parts could exist necessarily.)

Arbitrary philosophical labels are irrelevant to objectively real things: you can demand by fiat that the universe is "merely possible parts," all you want, that doesn't make it so.

If God is perfect in all ways then He is also perfectly evil. (Not understanding that imperfection is privation and evil is the lack of the good that ought to be there.)

Given that I've never made that argument, it's irrelevant. My actual objection to the fourth way is that it's entirely unjustified and arbitrary.

Evolutionary theory refutes the Fifth Way. (The Fifth Way is not a modern intelligent design argument.)

Modern or not, the fifth way does posit design without ever demonstrating it, which is problem enough on its own.

There is no observable phenomena support the Five Ways. (The demonstrations of the Five Ways are based on everyday observable effects common to all sensible things.)

Two objections here: if the five ways are demonstrable via evidence, why all that bluster about how evidence isn't necessary and the five ways can be known a priori in your last response?

And also, fallacy of composition: the five ways may be demonstrable within everyday causality within the universe, but as I've pointed out maybe five times now, the very basis of that causality does not apply beyond the boundaries of the universe, including before it. Your argument here is no more sound than "things within the universe are tin, therefore there is tin outside the universe." The conclusion is absolutely not justified based on the premises.

Even if the proofs were valid they would not reveal a specifically Christian god. (The link is revealed in Exodus 3:14 which succinctly describes the perfect union of His Divine Existence and Essense as “I AM WHO I AM” and Jesus used that reference to Himself in John 8:56-59)

Are you serious, right now? For all your pretenses to intellectual superiority, your whole position really is very anemic.

Reply to 2) – First, experience should have taught you otherwise. In some threads I admitted to being wrong. Second, were I so certain of my infallibility, I would never have challenged my previous atheism and would have remained one.

If your only response to people not accepting the five ways is that they "just don't want to know the truth," then you have presupposed the five ways to be absolutely truthful, with no possible means of disagreement other than malevolent personal motivations.

Reply to 3 & 4) – I try to keep the debates lively and playful; taunts and jabs are par for the course on AF and I am willing to go along with forum culture. However, I have not done so here without an accompanying argument or pointing back to one.

There's an appreciable difference between a jab, and imputing motivations to those who disagree with you in order to reduce their credibility.

I said what I believe to be true. That is the definition of honest. I said not everyone wants to be convinced. That is true. You apparently also believe that because you accuse me of presupposing that I can never be wrong.

The difference is that when I talk of your presuppositions, I'm doing so on the basis that the only possible reason you can produce that someone might disagree with you is that they personally are biased against your position. When you tell me that I only say what I do because I have a darkened intellect, you are doing so on the basis that I don't agree with you, not on anything that might actually lead you to the conclusion you'd come to. The former is a conclusion based on observation, the latter is a conclusion made without any such observations, to preserve the integrity of a prior conclusion.

Only the former is rationally justifiable in any sense.

My second statement is also true. On another thread I asked if finding the words “Made by Jesus” engraved on every living cell would be sufficient evidence? Someone replied No, because it could have been put there by an advanced race of mischievous aliens.

Are you saying that aliens aren't an equally valid explanation? Or that it isn't a far more parsimonious one than the god explanation, in that it requires far less additional claims be accepted than the christian god? What actually is your objection here, in an epistemological sense?

The following is simply too good to hide any portion:

... And if we found something tomorrow that both was and not-was at once, you know what'd happen to the PNC? It'd be rendered untrue.

That is the most illogical thing you have ever said. Anything you can find obviously ‘exists’ and it cannot be said to ‘not exist.’ [/quote]

I didn't assert that it was possible that something could both exist and not exist simultaneously. I asserted that, were we to find such an object, it would render the idea of non-contradiction untrue. The point I was making was that empirical evidence overrides our intuitions, not that I literally believe the principle of non-contradiction to be untrue.