An Essay about Atheism in Latin

[Belacqua]

Apologetics obviously has.

Maybe so. I don't know what apologetics -- separate from theology -- was like centuries ago, so I can't judge.

So might an astrologist say that the premises of bad astrology have been refuted, but that the premises of good astrology haven't been. Having made more stuff up to evade falsification doesn't make you more credible, in fact, it makes you even less credible.

If an astrologist made that claim, we'd have to ask him to make arguments, as see if we could refute them. 

Philosophers generally aren't the biggest experts in logic or physics these days, which is necessary to evaluate those statements.

Why should philosophers be experts in physics? Those are separate fields. I don't expect physicists to be expert in philosophy -- though if they say things about philosophy they should try to know what they're talking about.

As for logic, that's a field in philosophy. The experts on what logic is or does are philosophers. 

How is that different from saying that the Bible has perhaps just been mistranslated? Look, maybe there is some language barrier going on here, but 

It's entirely different. 

When Kant uses the word "intuition," he doesn't mean what we do in conversation. When Merleau-Ponty says "intentional," he doesn't mean what we do in conversation. In order to deal with difficult subjects philosophers have often had to use special vocabulary, and to understand them we have to learn what they mean. 

It's the same in science, right? When scientists talk about "theory," they don't mean "my best guess." 

To work out Feynman's critique of Spinoza and whether it was fair or not, we'd have to know what Spinoza meant be "attributes" and "substances," etc. These may or may not be the same as what Feynman was imagining when he read the words. If you know more specifically about Spinoza and why Einstein was wrong about him, I'd be glad to read your explanation. 

it's hard to deny that Lucretius got many more things right than Christian philosophers have.

Christian philosophers like Locke and Kant? Christian physicists like Newton? I imagine that Lucretius got some things right. If you'd like to specify one or two I might be able to talk about them. 

Look, Belacqua, your responses here read like this:

Yes, the Earth is probably round. But the ships appearing to sink as they disappear over the horizon isn't a valid argument. But don't ask me why, I am not going to teach you the basics of plateogeology here. You need to study plateogeology to be able to refute it. Otherwise, you are just making yourself look arrogant and ill-informed.

No doubt it sounds that way to you. 

So far you've taken a kind of scatter-shot approach, addressing so many different ideas in a single post that it's just wearisome. Frankly it comes across as a kind of Gish Gallop, in which you try to make half a dozen weak arguments add up to a strong one. I know that isn't intentional, but it makes it hard to respond. There are so many claims that it's hard to know where to begin. I try not to type out personal insults, but for the record you seem very arrogant and ill-informed to me too. 

Which specific theological claim would you like to focus on?