Hello, Anyone interested in a debate?

[Esquilax]

The short answer is that the catholic belief in god incorporates many aspects of both the philosophical god as well as the logic of prominent philosophers (the most influential of which is Aristotle).

I have a problem with this: that the catholic conception of god encompasses many of the traits you've listed is not surprising, since you've been describing the most basic deist god imaginable; I can't imagine many gods that wouldn't possess those traits. But the catholic god also has many other traits and claims attached to it, and many of those are directly refuted by the evidence available to us, which is kinda important: if a god matches x, y, and z requirements, but also needs requirement w to be true, and that is literally impossible, then obviously that god can't exist, regardless of all the other bits it matches.

Most of the positions of the catholic church follow from Aristotelian logic (as expressed very well by Saint Thomas Aquinas in the Summa Theologia.  An excellent read I recommend for everyone).

I'm passingly familiar with the Summa Theologica- there's another christian on the boards that just loves it, and so I'll say the same thing to you that I say to him; Aquinas' work, most particularly the Summa Theologica, relies near exclusively on fiat assertions without anything near the level of justification that a claim should require. It may have passed muster as solid thinking during its time, and perhaps it has philosophical significance too, but where it purports to explain objective reality, it's an entirely inappropriate resource, due to its lack of evidence and support for its claims.

  So an educated catholic may follow the logic nearly the entire way to the end point with a little bit of faith required to make the transcendental jump to the the teleological conclusion.

Why would you do that? Why would you use faith for anything? What's the use of that?

While I understand the desire for explicit direct empirical proof in all things.  It is readily apparent that there is little explicit direct empirical proof for things (to my knowledge such does not exist for anything which is not axiomatic or tautological).  I would consider it hypocritical to accept implicit circumstantial empirical proof (in accordance with the scientific method established by Aristotle of metaphysical deduction supported by implicit circumstantial empirical evidence) in any number of fields of philosophical, scientific and legal studies, but not in terms of theology.

You're going to have to define your terms more clearly, I fear; to me, the direct, testable and repeatable evidence that science often brings to bear is explicit, direct empirical proof; without knowing how you differentiate the former category from the latter, it's hard for me to respond, but I will say this: the level of evidence that science provides is far more comprehensive and explicit than anything theology has ever produced, so I fail to see any such hypocrisy in accepting the evidence of science, while dismissing the attempts at it that theology brings to the table. I don't feel that evidentiary support is quite as binary as the two-genre dichotomy you're proposing.