RE: Atheists, tell me, a Roman Catholic: why should I become an atheist?
December 19, 2016 at 7:58 pm
(December 18, 2016 at 7:13 pm)Ignorant Wrote: 1st way: An unmoved, prime mover of everything else that moves. "and this everyone understands to be God"
2nd way: A first/un-caused efficient cause of every other cause. "to which everyone gives the name of God"
3rd way: Necessary being which causes all other being. "This all men speak of as god"
4th way: Perfect being/goodness/truth/beauty which causes the incomplete being/goodness/truth/beauty of everything else. "and this we call god"
5th way: Intelligent and teleological being which directs natural things to their end. "and this we call god"
Ways 1 to 3 are disproven by the fact that the "necessary" being actually contradicts the original premise, the unmoved mover means that not everything needs to be moved by something else, the uncaused cause means that not everything has to be caused by something else, and so on. Thus a universe where the universe itself fulfills these roles is more plausible and probable than a universe with an outside agent which also needs to be explained.
The fourth argument is an argument from "my farts are the smelliest". It is a subjective value judgement and the there is no way to figure out whether even the opening premise has any value in reality (because it is a judgement made through the prejudice of a fallible human)
The fifth way is the teleological argument, which is the argument from design, which has long been refuted (Darwin refuted it, as stated by Paley, in his preface to On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, so that he wouldn't have to deal with the flood of creationist nonsense he knew he'd receive using the argument).
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