An Essay about Atheism in Latin

[FlatAssembler]

Why? Do you also have trouble with the ISPs? 

No, it's because I find your arguments weak and uninteresting, and your reasoning to be pretty poor. Sorry, somebody else can deal with this, but I don't currently have the energy. 

Karl Popper pointed out that if you want to overthrow your opponent's position, you have to attack it in its strongest version. If you attack the weak version and defeat that, then you still have all the hard work left to do, and the strong version is still standing. 

Like so many Internet atheists, you are attacking Ken Ham and other simpletons, and various straw men. Since you don't know what theology really says and you don't want to learn it, that's where it will stay for the time being. 

Again, I apologize, but I'm not inclined to teach theology 101 at this point.

I didn't quote any creationists in the video. And I agree with you that apologetics has devolved a lot over the centuries: a thousand years ago, Aquinas was trying to convince people that a God exists using logic alone or using what he considered obvious statements and what, according to him, follows from them. These days, apologetics is mostly composed of conspiracy theories, which is what Young-Earth-Creationism is (the statements such as that the measurements of the parallaxes of the stars have been faked to make stars seem further away than they really are). Sure, today there are attempts to translate the ontological argument into modern logic. But that argument is rarely used by popular apologetics and, even then, I think it's somewhat dishonest to argue that way: the usual objection to the ontological argument is not that it doesn't logically follow (though Kant claimed that), but that the first premise (that a perfect being exists in some possible worlds) is dubious.

You didn't answer the basic question I asked: Why do you think theology holds any more merit than, for instance, astrology?

No, he has also critiqued Aquinas, and you didn't really address his critique regardless of the reason you have stated for not addressing it and regardless of whether his critique was weak or not.

And what he said about Aquinas was strange. 

Again, I don't find the 5 ways persuasive as they stand either. But we have a duty to describe them accurately. 

As far as I can tell, Flat is referring to the 4th way when he mentions fire being hot. It's not an ontological argument really, but about degrees of quality. 

Since what Flat says about Aquinas is unclear and part of a long post full of different problems, I don't have the energy to deal with it.

Look, sometimes, famous philosophers and scientists in history do get things wildly wrong. Aquinas did express some very interesting thoughts, like empiricism, the correspondence theory of the truth, that time and causality are not logical principles but simply the properties of the universe we inhabit (though it's a bit hard to conceive how could somebody realize that and still think the Cosmological Argument is valid)... But the argument that a perfect being has to exist just because we can talk about perfection, and that we can talk about hotness just because fire exists, is obviously wildly wrong. Do you think Richard Feynman was wrong for criticizing Spinoza's obviously incoherent text about the concept of substances?