Exposing the Intellectual Bankruptcy of Atheists Criticizing Religion

[Esquilax]

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)

Serious question: do you honestly think that just repeating this point, after you've been shown multiple times that it's both a fallacious argument (do you know what the fallacy of composition is yet?) and that your observations demonstrably do not apply at all times and in all cases, is at all convincing? At this point you're just ignoring what I'm saying and reaching for arguments I've already debunked: are you just being intellectually dishonest in the hopes that people won't realize I've already addressed this nonsense, or are you truly so bereft of ideas that all you have left is the repetition of debunked talking points?

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.

The five ways make claims about objective reality, genius, they aren't solely philosophical arguments, and in the sense that they can be tested and verified by observation, they have failed those tests. If you want to push it back and focus solely on the philosophy then that's fine, but don't ever forget that when held up against the reality they attempt to reflect, the five ways failed. As I said before, philosophy that clearly and evidently does not match up with the real world is just making things up, and frankly, I'd rather talk about something applicable and substantial, not the untrue ideas that you believe anyway under the mistaken beliefs that philosophy doesn't have to be objectively true in order to prove its points.

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.

Borde-Guth-Vilenkin theorem: beyond the region of spacetime known as the big bang, whole new physics are needed to accurately describe what goes on there. The laws of nature are not consistent and identical to their current state beyond that point, which is the "chief conclusion," of that paper, and I mentioned it before, so this is just another thing you've ignored.

Besides which, "highly robust and consistent," is not the same thing as "consistent with the five ways." Physics can be internally consistent while still not matching up with Aquinas' claims: in fact, it very much is in many circumstances.

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.

And again I say: if you're using "first cause" in any other sense than the way it applies to the actual history of the universe then I don't give a shit, because it doesn't align with things that actually happened. If you are using it that way, then the first cause of Aquinas is demonstrably not necessary.

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).

Yes, congratulations Chad: if a thing is real, then it's real. Stunning discovery, that.

However, the point is that the premises of the five ways attempt to demonstrate the necessity of that first cause, and within what can objectively be known about reality, they are factually wrong and a first cause, whether it exists or not, is not necessary on the basis of Aquinas' argument. What that means is that you'd need evidence, and you can't just point back to Aquinas, since his arguments don't accomplish the thing they set out to.

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.

Which is sort of my point from the beginning: scientifically, we're at present unable to observe what things are like beyond the Planck time. The only honest answer that we can give, at this point, is "I don't know," with the option to change that once our capabilities develop to the point that we can obtain a clearer picture. But you're asserting that Aquinas' five ways are true, which is the same as asserting that you know what things were like beyond the Planck time, based on observations you're making in the here and now, which we've already established don't necessarily apply there. It's like flipping a coin and without seeing what side it lands on, you assert that it has to be heads because you've observed a coin landing on heads before. Nobody is doubting your observations, I'm just saying that, as with the five ways, they don't necessarily apply to the case under discussion, because there is another option: the coin can land on tails too, and the observations that inform the five ways don't have to exist beyond the Planck time.

If you had evidence that things operate the same way pre-big bang as they do within the quotes you made at the top of your post then that would be another thing entirely, but you don't, which means that true or false are both on the table for the claims made in the five ways. You are drastically overstating your case when you say they're proven, and nobody needs to prove you wrong before you should let go of unevidenced claims. The time to believe a claim is when it has evidence behind it, and as yet, the five ways simply don't. There is no rational justification for accepting the five ways based on what you've presented.