Exposing the Intellectual Bankruptcy of Atheists Criticizing Religion

[Esquilax]

It may surprise many atheists to know that Thomas Aquinas staunchly defended empiricism. He neither ‘logics’ anything into existence nor does he make assertions without reference to observable experience. To suggest otherwise is to ignore the first ten articles of Question 1 of the Summa that proceed the 5 Ways in Question 2. The evidence of God does not come from some subset of reality; but rather, from the whole of reality. That whole and the features common to everything within that whole serve as the sensible data from which Aquinas reasons about the fundamental causes of it all things. For anyone that wants to criticize Aquinas, at least have the intellectual honesty to criticize the arguments Aquinas actually made rather than the ones you wish he had.

The problem is, mostly, this: Aquinas was a thirteenth century man who made his arguments without the benefit of the scientific method, and without referring to anything that we might consider an objective fact, even for the time. His five ways are little more than intuitive guesswork without any real support backing it up, and they're also kind of lazy, since they end up not pointing to a god, let alone the specific christian god that Aquinas and you yourself, Chad, believe in, before just demanding that the phenomena they do demonstrate, assuming we take the premises one hundred percent seriously, is god. It's argumentation by fiat, from beginning to end, which is problematic on its own, without even getting into the clear issue that an argument is not evidence.

Since you think the five ways are some insurmountable theological edifice, I'll rebut them all, because you think that's impossible and I like doing the impossible. I'll pull directly from the Summa Theologica for this, though I've already gone through all of these before:

The first way is, to put it mildly, dumb. Since I don't take "because I said so!" seriously, I also reject Aquinas' pathetic attempt to cram his god into an argument that has nothing to do with him: "and this everyone understands to be god." It's lazy, and frankly I can't believe you take this seriously at all, Wooters. The absolutely most charitable we can be is to say that the first way demonstrates the existence of a first mover (it doesn't, but I'll get to that) and, as we all know, motion does not necessarily come from intelligent sources, and so saying the originator of motion must be an intelligent being, a "mover" rather than simply an object that moved, is unjustified by the premises of the argument.

Happily, the first way also refutes itself, since "everything in motion needs a mover, therefore my conclusion will posit the existence of a first mover that is itself unmoved" clearly demonstrates that not everything in motion requires a mover. So if the argument is correct, it's also incorrect. I could go on, rejecting the "potential and actual" categories that Aquinas posits as unnecessary additions based on the ignorance of the time rather than any real understanding of how things work, or pointing out that he simply fiat dismisses the concept of an infinite chain of movers solely on the basis that accepting an infinity would prevent a first mover from being the conclusion, or even just showing the obvious fallacy of composition inherent in the "things within the universe behave X way, therefore all things behave X way," formulation, but I think I've said enough there.

Moving on, the second way features many of the problems of the first, mainly because it's basically exactly the same damn argument. There's the same fallacy of composition, the same fiat demand that we call whatever the first efficient cause god for no reason, the same self refuting premises ("all things are caused, therefore my conclusion will posit the existence of an entity which has no efficient cause, breaking the rules to solve the problem I asserted the rules into being to create so I can solve it with the conclusion I'd had in mind all along") only this time there's an extra helping of stupid because Aquinas asserts that nothing can be its own efficient cause, because that would require it to exist before itself, which is impossible: clearly he wasn't thinking of time travel, which is both easier to believe than god, and also not argued against within the premises. Therefore, there's more than one conclusion the argument leads to, and given that the one Aquinas favors is self refuting...  

The third way is... basically exactly the same, both in the basic nature of the argument, and in its refutation. There's still the same fallacy of composition in asserting that because things behave a certain way within this current state of the universe, that is the way it is everywhere. Clearly Aquinas didn't have any special knowledge about the beginnings of our current expansionary universe. There's the same demand that we treat this vague non-contingent thing as both a being, which Aquinas never argues for, and as his specific christian god, which is never mentioned anywhere. Kinda tired of this guy pretending that "first cause" always means "my god," that's literally terrible. Now we also have this weird assumption that everything in the universe is contingent, which is as unjustified as everything else in this dreck. It's just... why the hell do you think this is anything cogent, much less worthy of the big, booming pronouncement you made about it earlier, Chad?

It's only at the fourth way that Aquinas finally gets off of the first cause horse and tries something new, and somehow he manages to mount an even weaker argument than before. The fourth way is just utterly fucking baffling, betraying both a complete lack of understanding about physics, and an over-reliance on the "because I say so!" school of argumentation. Aquinas doesn't even bother to support his assertion that, for all things which exist on a gradated scale, there must exist something at the extremes of that scale, he just makes it and leaves it there. There's no reason why this should be, and the reason that Aquinas gives, that comparisons of intensity are predicated on their resemblance to the thing that is at the perfect end of that particular scale, is flatly false: if I have two rocks, and I see that one is larger than the other, that relies solely on the relative size of both the rocks, it's not sustained by some "ultimate large rock," that literally exists that I'm subconsciously deriving my judgment from. It's just... we know what size is, we can make that judgment.

In fact, Aquinas' example of this is hilariously wrong, stating that fire is the "maximum heat," and is the cause of all other hot things, which is clearly not the case. Not only is it possible to create something hotter than fire- especially the type of fire that Aquinas' era could produce- but it is also possible, and in fact, definitional, that heat does not come from fire. Heat is a molecule thing, not an elemental thing, and so Auinas is even mistaken on his sure fire example, the only point thus far that he's supported his argument with an example, the closest thing to evidence he's gotten at yet. And of course, once again he simply demands that the ultimate goodness is his specific god, because he says so.

Finally, the fifth way is just the argument from design, posed in such a way that it contains all the problems that the other ways had too. One has to try hard to make an argument worse than its usual fallacious self, but Aquinas does it. Simply put, Aquinas' personal intuition that all things work toward goals means very little. Personal opinions are not evidence, especially when we know why even those natural things that do work toward goals do what they do; it's evolution, not magic. There's also the arbitrary demand that god isn't working toward a goal, he's the one doing the goal-making, which isn't apparent in the argument.

So, there. The five ways, so devoid of intellectual content that I kinda can't believe that you take them seriously, and that I took the time to type all this out. Seriously, every one of them just inserts the christian god into their conclusion by fiat demand, what the hell is so compelling about that, that you'd hold it up as the premiere argument for your position? Are you really that pushed into a corner?  

[TheRocketSurgeon]

Well, that's true, that ID is not supported by Aquinas; I only said he developed the philosophical basis (i.e. "groundwork") that would become Paley's infamous argument now used for ID.

[Neo-Scholastic]

…you seem to interpret Aquinas in a way that is, to put it mildly, different from the way almost everyone else seems to read it.

That would be most everyone from Descartes on. The article cited in the OP was by Dr. Ed Fesser. My interpretation aligns with his and similar Thomistic scholars.

Very few people outside of Catholicism take Aquinas' arguments seriously anymore, both Christian and non-Christian scholars alike.

Argument from Popularity

What Aquinas did, though, was lay the philosophical basis for things like Intelligent Design and related "modern" stealth Christians to push theology into science classrooms.

Google is your friend…  (https://biologos.org/uploads/projects/be..._essay.pdf)

[robvalue]

Aquaman's thing is a prime example of how logical arguments are not a substitute for evidence. Sadly, they're not all logically consistent even if you grant the initial assumptions.

Aquaman probably didn't know just how different the rules get as you go back in time, which make his attempts to simplify reality into basic rules even more flawed.

You can't skip around the scientific method.

[TheRocketSurgeon]

…you seem to interpret Aquinas in a way that is, to put it mildly, different from the way almost everyone else seems to read it.

That would be most everyone from Descartes on. The article cited in the OP was by Dr. Ed Fesser. My interpretation aligns with his and similar Thomistic scholars.

Very few people outside of Catholicism take Aquinas' arguments seriously anymore, both Christian and non-Christian scholars alike.

Argument from Popularity

What Aquinas did, though, was lay the philosophical basis for things like Intelligent Design and related "modern" stealth Christians to push theology into science classrooms.

Google is your friend…  (https://biologos.org/uploads/projects/be..._essay.pdf)

Well, not exactly the Argument from Popularity, though I can see how you'd read it that way. What I meant to say is "check your prejudices"... no matter which sort of Christian sub-sect member to whom I find myself talking, they too-easily cite their own (what I call) "incestuous thought-circles" to the exclusion of the mainline thinking on the subject. It is a form of bias that is well-known. It's the main reason I try not to read very many atheist authors on the subject of theology, to be frank; I like to be sure my own views are my own, and the best way to achieve that, I find, is to read primarily people who disagree with me (with whom I disagree) and try to figure out why the disagreement may be legitimately based.

That was a good article on the difference between the main claims of the ID movement and the actual philosophy of Aquinas, especially since he bothered to point out that ID is not one thing but a myriad (I like his term "cluster") of ideas which is all over the map, so (like when discussing atheism) it is necessary to pick a spot in the general center of the cluster to aim at. I have extra respect for him for the way in which he discusses Dawkins in the final third of the article, both praising and criticizing his positions, as appropriate to the argument.

That said, it still does nothing to shake me from my view that Aquinas' entire position is built around "If we assume ______ then ______ is also true" arguments. I will grant that accepting such philosophy and its assumptions as valid does allow one to be an evolutionary biologist/physicist and Catholic at the same time (I know several such persons, since the university I went to is in one of the most heavily-Catholic areas in the USA; my own favorite professor was one, and spent a LOT of time in our after-hours/office-hour discussions trying to convince me to go back to being a Christian, in between discussions about the latest in dimensional physics), but I simply do not think Aquinas' Deism with regard to the First Mover argument (which, you may have seen, I have no issues with; I simply don't find it necessary) equates to a proof of theism, or that his arguments about the underlying purpose he sees in natural things is something that actually exists.

[abaris]

Hmmm...Intelligent Design is in no way supported by Aquinas. ID advocates follow Paley's line of reasoning. Kant does pose the best challenge to Aquinas. The challenge is complex and technical but it is a vast overstatement to call it a 'slam dunk'.

Honestly, is there a reason why you don't adress Aquinas being a man of the 13th century? Which makes his arguments purely philosophical, since our knowledge doesn't draw from there.

[Longhorn]

The whole article is spot on. Only after I was Halfway in did I realize Fesser wrote it. And in my experience on AF atheist objections to Aquinas are consistently wrong about what Aquinas actually claimed. They beclown themselves. Its so easy to say the 5w have been or are trivially easy to refute but its another thing altogether to do so. To date no AF  atheist has seriously tackled the Thomist claims.

but when I ask you to clarify the five ways in a sincere attempt to understand them, you get pissy and stop responding. When I ask you to tell me why my objections to them are wrong, you don't. So what's the problem here?

[Minimalist]

Hmmm...Intelligent Design is in no way supported by Aquinas. ID advocates follow Paley's line of reasoning. Kant does pose the best challenge to Aquinas. The challenge is complex and technical but it is a vast overstatement to call it a 'slam dunk'.

Honestly, is there a reason why you don't adress Aquinas being a man of the 13th century? Which makes his arguments purely philosophical, since our knowledge doesn't draw from there.

He's a man of the 13th century relying on the observations of a man of the 4th century BC.  Perhaps Chad is as well?

[Neo-Scholastic]

Here is a point by point demonstration of how you have misinterpreted Aquinas and thereby failed to present valid objections to his Five Ways (5W)

The problem is, mostly, this: Aquinas was a thirteenth century man [1] who made his arguments without the benefit of the scientific method [2], and without referring to anything that we might consider an objective fact, even for the time. His five ways are little more than intuitive guesswork without any real support backing it up, and they're also kind of lazy, since they end up not pointing to a god, let alone the specific Christian god [3] that Aquinas and you yourself, Chad, believe in, before just demanding that the phenomena they do demonstrate, assuming we take the premises one hundred percent seriously, is god. It's argumentation by fiat, from beginning to end, which is problematic on its own, without even getting into the clear issue that an argument is not evidence [4].

[1] Aquinas was a 13th century clergyman. No matter.  Status, class, and titles do not affect the veracity of anyone’s ideas. Ideas stand or fall on their own merits regardless of who has the idea.

[2] Aquinas made his arguments without the benefit of the scientific method, not only because that had not yet been defined, but because the tools of inquiry into the natural world are useless when applied to philosophical problems. The efficacy of scientific methods presupposes many philosophical ideas, like objects of knowledge, parsimony, and compliance with the principles of logic.

[3] Believers often refer to God, not by name, but in terms of His Divine capacities as Creator, Sustainer, All-knowing, etc. Aquinas is fully justified in using the repeated refrain, “…and this everyone understands to be God” because he later makes good on his promise to demonstrate that the Christian God is identical with the First Cause/Unmoved Mover/Maximally Great Being. He does this in Questions 3 through 26. These further text deal with the nature of God. The objection you raise is not a fatal flaw of the 5W themselves since demonstrating that the God of the Philosophers is identical to the Christian God is beyond the scope of the 5W.

[4] Evidences are facts that point to the veracity of a belief. The demonstrations of the 5W rely on factual information about reality observable in everyday experience. It is a fact that sensible objects retain their identity while undergoing change. It is a fact that things that do not yet exist cannot affect things that already do exist. It is a fact that not all things that could be actually come to be.

The first way is, to put it mildly, dumb. Since I don't take "because I said so!" seriously, I also reject Aquinas' pathetic attempt to cram his god into an argument that has nothing to do with him: "and this everyone understands to be god." [1] It's lazy, and frankly I can't believe you take this seriously at all, Wooters. The absolutely most charitable we can be is to say that the first way demonstrates the existence of a first mover (it doesn't, but I'll get to that) and, as we all know, motion does not necessarily come from intelligent sources, and so saying the originator of motion must be an intelligent being, a "mover" rather than simply an object that moved, is unjustified by the premises of the argument.[2] Happily, the first way also refutes itself, since "everything in motion needs a mover, therefore my conclusion will posit the existence of a first mover that is itself unmoved" clearly demonstrates that not everything in motion requires a mover [3]. So if the argument is correct, it's also incorrect.  

[1] Repeating the objection that the First Cause need on be the Christian God does not make the objection any more valid than the first time you made it. See above.

[2] Nothing in the 1W relates the First Cause with an intelligent agent. The intentional relationship between causes and effects is demonstrated in 5W. Your task was to refute the arguments Aquinas actually made not those you wish he had.

[3] In Scholasticism ‘motion’ means ‘change’. The 1W talks about two distinct properties something could have: the ability to change and the ability to cause change. You, not Aquinas, are the one asserting that everything with the ability to change must itself be subject to change. The First Mover is not in motion so it doesn’t need a prior mover.

I could go on, rejecting the "potential and actual" categories that Aquinas posits [1] as unnecessary additions based on the ignorance of the time rather than any real understanding of how things work [2], or pointing out that he simply fiat dismisses the concept of an infinite chain of movers solely on the basis that accepting an infinity would prevent a first mover from being the conclusion, [3] or even just showing the obvious fallacy of composition [4]inherent in the "[some] things within the universe behave X way, therefore all things behave X way," formulation, but I think I've said enough there

[1] Not everything that could be will be. Some things actually exist while others do not. Many things that exist now have the potential to turn into something else. To reject these ideas is to reject common sense.

[2] No one disputes that many of the examples provided by Aquinas no longer survive modern scientific scrutiny, but the veracity of the demonstrations do not depend on the examples given; he just needed better examples. The conclusions follow from the premises and stand on their own merits.

[3] Later Neo-Scholastics have clarified that the infinite series which Aquinas rejects is an essentially ordered sequence without a first member. Nothing can give what it doesn’t have. Adam cannot borrow a dollar from Bill, if Bill borrowed it from Calvin, and so on without end. Every actual pocket has the potential to hold a dollar, but that potential cannot ever be actualized unless there is at some point in the series a pocket holding with a dollar in it, i.e. a first member to the series. It doesn’t take advanced degrees in mathematics or physics to understand how this type of infinite series is absurd.

[4] No you have not said enough to support your point because you haven’t meaningfully related it to any particular one of the 5 Ways. If I had to guess, you’re actually arguing against the 5W, not the 1W, but reading further you want to use the ‘fallacy of composition’ against Ways 1 thru 3.

Moving on, the second way features many of the problems of the first, mainly because it's basically exactly the same damn argument. [1]There's the same fallacy of composition, the same fiat demand that we call whatever the first efficient cause god for no reason [2], the same self refuting premises ("all things are caused, therefore my conclusion will posit the existence of an entity which has no efficient cause, breaking the rules [3] to solve the problem I asserted the rules into being to create so I can solve it with the conclusion I'd had in mind all along") only this time there's an extra helping of stupid because Aquinas asserts that nothing can be its own efficient cause, because that would require it to exist before itself, which is impossible: clearly he wasn't thinking of time travel [4], which is both easier to believe than god, and also not argued against within the premises. Therefore, there's more than one conclusion the argument leads to, and given that the one Aquinas favors is self refuting...

[1] The 1W is about how things go from potentially existing to actually existing. The 2W is about how effects are ontologically dependent on logically prior causes. The 3W is about the difference between what must be out of necessity and possibility. While they share a similar structure, anyone can see that they are not exactly the same argument and your hyperbole doesn’t make them so.

[2] Yawn.

[3] Aquinas never breaks the rules he establishes at the onset. He just identifies distinctions that apply equally to everything, from the smallest quark to God Himself. In the 1W that distinction is between potential and actuality. Nothing in that distinction prevents any particular thing from having actuality only, both actuality and potential, or potential only. In the 2W he distinguishes between causes and effects. In any essentially ordered series, nothing prevents something to be a cause only, both a cause and an effect, or just an effect. If you’re going to imply special pleading then show me where specifically in 1W Aquinas says that everything that causes a change must itself be subject to change? Likewise, where in the text of the 2W does Aquinas say that every cause must have a prior cause? He doesn’t. Your favorite trump card is worthless.

The third way is... basically exactly the same, both in the basic nature of the argument, and in its refutation. There's still the same fallacy of composition in asserting that because things behave a certain way within this current state of the universe, that is the way it is everywhere.[1] Clearly Aquinas didn't have any special knowledge about the beginnings of our current expansionary universe.[2] There's the same demand that we treat this vague non-contingent thing as both a being, which Aquinas never argues for, and as his specific christian god, which is never mentioned anywhere. Kinda tired of this guy pretending that "first cause" always means "my god," that's literally terrible. [3]Now we also have this weird assumption that everything in the universe is contingent,[4] which is as unjustified as everything else in this dreck. It's just... why the hell do you think this is anything cogent, much less worthy of the big, booming pronouncement you made about it earlier, Chad?

[1] It’s called parsimony when we say that similar initial conditions product similar results. It’s called the Principle of Identity when we say that if things are alike in all ways then they are the same thing. Those are basic principles, not fallacies.

[2] Show me where in the 5W Aquinas posits a specific cosmological model to support any of his arguments. He doesn’t. The 5W work regardless of whether the existence of the universe extends into the infinite past or came into being last Tuesday.

[3] Same objection, same response as above.

[4] The ambiguity of your objection makes it impossible to respond. I will however concede that later commentators fleshed out the 3W based on other things Aquinas expressed elsewhere. I suspect you’re trying to accuse Aquinas of begging the question since he does not include in his demonstration something educated people already knew: if everything that exists does so by necessity then there could not be any change.

It's only at the fourth way that Aquinas finally gets off of the first cause horse and tries something new, and somehow he manages to mount an even weaker argument than before. The fourth way is just utterly fucking baffling,[1] betraying both a complete lack of understanding about physics, and an over-reliance on the "because I say so!" school of argumentation. Aquinas doesn't even bother to support his assertion that, for all things which exist on a gradated scale, there must exist something at the extremes of that scale, he just makes it and leaves it there.[2] There's no reason why this should be, and the reason that Aquinas gives, that comparisons of intensity are predicated on their resemblance to the thing that is at the perfect end of that particular scale, is flatly false: if I have two rocks, and I see that one is larger than the other, that relies solely on the relative size of both the rocks, it's not sustained by some "ultimate large rock,"[3] that literally exists that I'm subconsciously deriving my judgment from. It's just... we know what size is, we can make that judgment.
In fact, Aquinas' example of this is hilariously wrong, stating that fire is the "maximum heat," and is the cause of all other hot things, which is clearly not the case. Not only is it possible to create something hotter than fire- especially the type of fire that Aquinas' era could produce- but it is also possible, and in fact, definitional, that heat does not come from fire. Heat is a molecule thing, not an elemental thing, and so Aquinas is even mistaken on his sure fire example, the only point thus far that he's supported his argument with an example, the closest thing to evidence he's gotten at yet. And of course, once again he simply demands that the ultimate goodness is his specific god, because he says so.

[1] If it baffles you how can you object to it?

[2] Aquinas ‘doesn’t bother’ to support degrees of perfection because an educated reader would already know that he’s building on the moderate realist solution to the problem of universals. Things that have a common nature manifest that common nature to greater or lesser degrees.

[3] Your example fails to distinguish between essential and accidental properties. Let’s say the rock in question is a diamond. The size of a diamond is an accidental property because it remains a diamond regardless of its size. In contrast to that, all diamonds share a common atomic structure. That common atomic structure is an essential property of all diamonds. However, anyone can see that some diamonds are better than others. Any particular diamond may be contaminated by other elements or otherwise flawed.

Finally, the fifth way is just the argument from design [1], posed in such a way that it contains all the problems that the other ways had too. One has to try hard to make an argument worse than its usual fallacious self, but Aquinas does it. Simply put, Aquinas' personal intuition that all things work toward goals means very little [2]. Personal opinions are not evidence, especially when we know why even those natural things that do work toward goals do what they do; it's evolution[1], not magic. There's also the arbitrary demand that god isn't working toward a goal, he's the one doing the goal-making, which isn't apparent in the argument.

[1] The 5W has nothing to do with evolution or fine-tuning; but rather, that the laws of nature operate with unerring regularity.

[2] Unless the tendencies of a cause are directed towards a determinate range of effects anything, or nothing in particular, could happen during a specific event or process. This is evidence of intentionality and intentionality is a property of Mind.

[Nay_Sayer]

I have read the bible, It is trash suitable only for craft projects or lining animals cages.

Now I read the real bible 'The Pontifications Of The Pasta".

RAmen