Exposing the Intellectual Bankruptcy of Atheists Criticizing Religion

[Esquilax]

All the conclusions of the Five Ways follow from observations of reality and none of them have been contradicted by an observed phenomena. If you think otherwise I challenge you to name a single phenomenon that definitively rules out the possibility of any of the following: Unmoved Mover, First Cause, Necessary Being, or Guiding Intelligence.

To begin with, your first sentence is, again, a fallacy of composition: all observations of reality, by necessity, are made within a (very small, I must remind you) band of time and space, which is itself within our singular expansionary model of the universe. To take them as some overall relief map to the workings of everything is to argue that, because we have observations of an infinitesimally small quantity of the overall universe, within an equally small period of time, therefore everything works that way all the time, including something that is not that universe.

You do realize that, don't you? Pre-Planck time, all of our notions of how things operate break down, something that all of the current physics and cosmology bears out. Even apologist favorite, the Borde-Guth-Vilenkin theorem, when read completely and not misused, states that any attempt to describe the pre-big bang universe (the point at which all of Aquinas' arguments attempt to insert a god) will necessarily require an entirely new suite of physics, that does not rely upon our common understanding of cause, effect, or anything else. That is the current scholarly consensus: time and space are linked, one informs the other, and what we're talking about is a point at which space and time did not behave as they do now. Pointing to the universe as it is today as a means of determining how it behaved during a time when literally everything about it was different from anything we've ever known is ridiculous, for reasons that should be obvious. Aside from just being a fallacy of composition- and I implore you to actually read up on what that is, rather than just ignoring it because it's inconvenient- it's rather like asserting that because we know how liquid water behaves, solid water must behave in exactly the same way. Intuitively it might make a little sense, assuming you know absolutely nothing about ice, but the moment you actually examine that claim, rather than loftily asserting that it's some perfect divine mandate, you see that it's not actually true.

Leaving that aside, you're rather pathetically shifting the burden of proof: it's not up to me to prove you wrong, it's up to you to demonstrate Aquinas' accuracy, and to do that all you've done is reach for a set of observations that don't even apply to the situation under discussion and appeal to some other way of knowing. Nobody needs to "definitively rule out," the five ways if that's the best you've got; you haven't provided a shred of justification that would give the claims sufficient weight to merit rebuttal. Just demanding that nobody has proven you wrong yet, when it's rather trivial to make the case that all your support for your position is either insubstantial or irrelevant, is just petulant childishness, little more than "I'm right! I'm right! I know I'm right! You can't show me I'm wrong!"

Well, actually I can, and I have. I challenged you before to actually do some research into the science and, rather than doing that, you seem to have just decided that it sides with you sight unseen. Which is a bit surprising because the absolute best you can say about your position is that determining how reality behaved before the big bang is currently beyond the reach of science, but that the hypothetical models all favor something very different from how it currently behaves. You, for some reason, are simply demanding by fiat that, though all the actually trained minds in the field don't know, you do know, because you said so, and that what you know is that the universe behaved exactly the same way it does now, and you know this in direct contradiction to all of modern science, and you also don't have to demonstrate how you know it, because nobody has proven you wrong yet.

It's sad, really, and until you're able to provide some non-fallacious reasoning, I'm going to stick with the science from the 21st century still, rather than the uneducated man who really really likes unsupported intuitions from the 13th. I simply can't see why anyone would do anything else.