Exposing the Intellectual Bankruptcy of Atheists Criticizing Religion

[Neo-Scholastic]

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First things first.
You are under the impression that “first” cause means the starting point of a temporal axis. In Latin term Aquinas used was ‘primus’.  Just as in English, first can mean a temporal beginning but it can also refer to what is primary and fundamental. The first Three Ways are based on a rejection of an infinite essentially ordered series. Events in time can be accidentally ordered and that is why the argument has nothing to do with time. Aquinas only mentions ‘time’ in the Third Way and even there it doesn’t refer to a specific starting point for creation. In the Third Way he is talking about any given point in time not a temporal beginning.

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Oh, I'm sorry! Fool that I am, I thought you were finally discussing something real! You certainly were enamored with the importance of observations back when you thought that observations confirmed the five ways.  

And I still am interested in real, common, everyday experiences. I don’t know about you, but I see and experience on a daily basis the same observations Thomas Aquinas uses in the Five Ways, and I quote:

From the 1st Way - “It is certain, and evident to our senses, that in the world some things are in motion.”
From the 2nd Way - “In the world of sense we find there is an order of efficient causes.”
From the 3rd Way - “We find in nature things that are possible to be and not to be, since they are found to be generated, and to corrupt, and consequently, they are possible to be and not to be.”
From the 4th Way – “Among beings there are some more and some less good, true, noble and the like.” (translation for the perplexed – some examples of triangles in the physical world are more represented of what it means to be a triangle than others, etc.)
From the 5th Way – “We see that things which lack intelligence, such as natural bodies, act for an end, and this is evident from their acting always, or nearly always, in the same way,…” (translation for the perplexed – the laws of nature are consistent)

But it turns out instead that you just wanted to waffle on about abstract philosophical bullshit instead!

How come some people happily engage in a philosophical discussion only until the arguments turn against them and suddenly they say that it’s all bullshit? Loser.

I should have known, it's kind of your thing. You just wanted it both ways: before you were asserting that empirical observations bear out your claims, but the moment it's demonstrated that no, that's not true, you shuck observations completely in favor of vague "primary and fundamental" abstractions that have not only never been observed, but are contraindicated by the available evidence.

Still waiting for your examples of evidence that contradicts the observations on which the Five Ways are based, perhaps one showing that the laws of nature are not consistent. From what I gather the laws of QM are highly robust and consistent.

Essentially, you were shown why a first cause isn't needed in an objective sense, and your response was to walk back the entirety of your last argument to say "yeah, but there's a first cause anyway because it has nothing to do with objectively real things like linear causality, the only framework we can observe through which causes occur, it's all about a... first cause." Do you know what we call philosophical ideas that have no basis in objective reality and are contraindicated by all the available data, Chad? "Making shit up."

My position has been consistent and I keep pointing you back to it when you start working off a complete misunderstanding of what a “first cause” is and voicing objections to an argument Aquinas never made.

I also noticed that you used the word ‘objectively’ twice. I take that word to mean things that exist independent of our knowledge of them. If there is a first cause, then it would be something objective. We would know about it, the same way we know about other things that cannot be directly observed, from its real effects. Those real effects are the first premise of each of the Five Ways (listed above).

Below, more belaboring the same points you’ve already presented, but kept to avoid the accusation of malicious editing.

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Aquinas lived before the time when his ideas could be properly refuted by the evidence, before there was a scientific method and a recognition of how important evidence was in an epistemological sense, before the fallacies that inundate his work were formulated. What the hell is your excuse?

If you don’t believe my interpretation of Aquinas is correct then you should at least know it is not unique to me. I refer you to the following paper: “There Must be a First: Why Thomas Aquinas Rejects, Infinite, Essentially Ordered, Causal Series” by Gavin Kerr. I can give you other references as well.

The trouble is that "infinite" or "finite, with a first cause," are not the only two options. They certainly are within a linear causal framework, but as we've established, such a thing isn't uniform across the entirety of reality.

It’s not whining if you really don’t understand Aquinas which is clearly the case. As shown above, you continue in your ignorance of what ‘first’ means, even when it is central to the argument, and even when the correct denotation was given to you more than once. Why would I would undertake to address all your other stubborn misconceptions?

Yes, I was mistaken. I was also giving you the benefit of the doubt and presuming that you were talking about something objective and empirically proven, when you were talking about how empirical observations demonstrate the claim. How was I supposed to know that all that talk of observation was a smokescreen and that, in reality, you were talking about something that has never been observed? And for that matter, why should I be chastised for my charity in assuming you were talking about something real, rather than just asserting your claim in some vague, ill defined conceptual terms that must exist objectively only because you say so?

Sorry, I'll try not to give you any credit in advance in future.  

For a person that always cries about others making assumptions about him, you presume to know the extent of my education in the natural sciences. I do not need to prove to you that I have a reasonable layman’s understanding of modern cosmology. In your post you made no statements about cosmology with which I disagreed. They simply do not matter.

They matter if you're talking about something real. Since you're not, I guess the entire conversation is moot, since you were trying to prove that the five ways were objectively truthful, and your final resort is just to fall back on nothing.

Gee, that sure sounds like you did. The only wiggle room you have is the last part when you talk about something that is “not this universe” but that’s trading on an ambiguity that doesn’t distinguish between the physical universe and all of reality.

What I'm saying is that our observations are perfectly valid as uniform on Earth, within the timeframe that they were made in. There's nothing wrong with uniformitarianism within the scope that we are capable of observing. The problem is that you're taking those observations and seeking to extrapolate them out into areas that we've never observed, and thus can't necessarily make those assumptions about,…

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…and then going further and attempting to push them out beyond the boundaries of the physical universe as a whole, into a region of spacetime that we already know operates completely differently to anything we've ever observed.

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That's the problem: you're not aware of the limitations of uniformitarianism as an axiom in your rush to make simplistic blanket statements to confirm your presuppositions. Again, if we were to find physical evidence in new observations that contradicted uniformitarianism, then uniformitarianism would either need to expand to fit, or be rejected.

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The big bang and the state of the universe prior to it represent exactly such evidence. You can't have uniform physical principles within a space that we've established does not behave like the universe that informs those principles in any way. This isn't... it's not exactly a controversial statement.

Like I hinted at earlier, you’re trading on an ambiguity between the physical universe and reality as a whole. The known physical laws do appear to break-down near time zero. I don’t know I wasn’t there, but from what I hear extensions in time and space don’t exist in any meaningful way there. That doesn’t mean that all the laws of reality, metaphysical laws like the PNC or the Indiscernibility of Identicals, no longer apply. I suppose you can argue that every law governing reality is up for grabs, like possible worlds where numerability works differently, but that would undermine the very possibility of a rationally ordered and intelligible reality, i.e. nihilistic absurdity. And I know how you feel about that.