(November 11, 2016 at 10:46 pm)theologian Wrote: If the Five Ways of St. Thomas Aquinas are special pleading, then everything shall be special pleading.
If you accept his Five Ways, then special pleading is required. The moment you decide that a universal rule that applies to everything does not apply to one thing in particular, then the rule is no longer universal. As soon as you decide that there has to be an "unmoved mover" you have invalidated the premise that everything that moves was acted upon by something else, because you introduced an exception. At that point I can simply decide that the unmoved mover is something else and discard God with the same amount of effort that was required to introduce him.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
