An Essay about Atheism in Latin

[GrandizerII]

When the Christian philosophers of the Renaissance began to look at Lucretius' book again, they took from it a number of ideas, but wisely chose not to make ataraxia their goal.

Wisely? You make it sound like these Christian philosophers were equally impelled by their Christianity to accept the idea of ataraxia as they were impelled to reject it, and that after a significant period of deliberation struggles, they eventually arrived at the decision to reject it. I don't think it was much of an option.

That doesn't mean we should say false things about them, though.

What false things did I say about the arguments? I expressed a view of the arguments in general which is confirmed by the observations I've made and the collective knowledge of today's world, with parts of that knowledge adequately accessible to me. As for the arguments specifically, I was careful enough to read and understand the best I can what they're stating, so if I misrepresented any of the arguments, it was not intentional and I am open to correction. But just implying that I said false things about these arguments without elaboration isn't helpful.

One thing that I think has been exaggerated is the extent to which they are meant to persuade. I don't think they were written as stand-alone succinct proofs, as if they were syllogisms. They were more like bullet points for theology students, and several of the ideas -- like what constitutes the "greatest" and why there would have to be such a thing -- need filling in with about a semester's worth of lectures.

But we have the Internet to help us fill in the gap in knowledge pertaining to all sorts of topics and subjects, including Aristotelian/Thomistic metaphysics. It's not like one needs to necessarily enrol in some prestigious university to have access to whatever extra information I may be missing regarding Aquinas' Five Ways. And it's not like one has to be a top expert of a subject before they can understand the basics and fundamentals of the topic or before they can be qualified to critique the various topics debated within the subject. I personally have made use of various Internet resources to eventually have a good idea of what evolution entails, adequately understand what quantum mechanics is about and the popular interpretations of quantum mechanics, and finally learn how to do calculus. Most of this I never studied back in school.

So it comes off as rather "lawyerly-speak" when you word things the way you have here, and in so doing, have placed theology at such a high epistemic level that laypeople aren't able to attain easily and thereby are very likely not to be qualified to discuss/debate theology.

Furthermore, you could have said a similar thing about arguments for God which you do not take so seriously, such as the Kalam Cosmological Argument. But it doesn't mean that because understanding how to properly defend and support every component of the argument may require semesters (or even years) of studying apologetics along with access to highly technical papers hidden behind paywalls, one needs to go through the same series of milestones to understand what the argument is saying and what objections can be reasonably made against it.

Ultimately, it's all about really understanding what these arguments are saying, and often times this can be achieved by reading the right free-to-access articles on the Internet (which doesn't take semesters to accomplish).