Exposing the Intellectual Bankruptcy of Atheists Criticizing Religion

[Esquilax]

And therein lies your problem. You absolutely refuse to see that the veracity of the Five Ways in no way depends on any particular origin theory for the physical universe. The starting point for all the Five Ways is the here and now and the end point where God operates is also in the here and now, across space-time. No one cares about what happened "before" the big-bang except you, HELLO.

Oh.

You're really going to be this obtuse? How boring.

No, the five ways do not work within what we currently know, all that we can currently surmise, about the universe and how it began. The argument from motion requires the existence of a first mover, stating that a sequence of movers cannot go back infinitely, but the concept of "first" as it stands in linear time doesn't necessarily apply beyond the big bang. The chain of movers both does not go back infinitely, and does not require a first mover necessarily, because this trades on an idea of causality that is not present: you don't need a first anything when time does not progress linearly forward and effects do not require causes. There are other problems there that I've mentioned before, but you've ignored them earlier today and I have no hope that you'll suddenly muster up the intellectual fortitude to address them now.

The argument from efficient causes has the same problem, positing the need for a first efficient cause in a framework that does not recognize the necessity of either first anythings, nor causes. For the third way, there's no reason why the universe could not be the end result rather than god, but again, the idea of contingent and noncontingent entities does not work the same way before the big bang. The fourth way is one that this argument doesn't apply to, but since it's an arbitrary and unsupported series of wild assertions, it's invalid also. The fifth way is much the same.

It's really rather sad: you'll bitch about anyone and everyone who doesn't agree with you, whining that they clearly don't understand Aquinas' arguments, but you won't even bother understanding the cosmology you think you see fit to dismiss out of hand. You're a full fledged hypocrite, Wooters.

BTW Your dismissal of uniformitarianism in the first sentence of your post shows that you are willing to throw away basic epistemological assumptions of natural science when they are inconvenient to your arguments.

I didn't dismiss uniformitarianism. I rejected the assertion you made that the things you listed are, in fact, uniform in all corners of reality, at all times, because that is what the science bears out. I didn't throw away anything basic to epistemology, I threw away your unqualified blanket assertion because the evidence contradicts it. Do try to get it right before you scoff.