An Essay about Atheism in Latin

[FlatAssembler]

But there is little reason to think Aquinas was even partly right about God, so why bother trying to deeply understand it?

You've made it clear that before understanding Thomas you've decided he's worthless, so I agree that it's a waste of time for you.

Some ideas are just objectively less worth studying than other ideas are.

[Divinity]

Writing something in Latin doesn't make you sound smarter. It just makes people ignore you.

[FlatAssembler]

Writing something in Latin doesn't make you sound smarter. It just makes people ignore you.

It depends on the education of that person. Somebody who happens to know Latin (theologians, historians, historical linguists, or simply people interested in that kind of stuff) will be much more interested in what you have to say if you say it in Latin.

[Belacqua]

You've made it clear that before understanding Thomas you've decided he's worthless, so I agree that it's a waste of time for you.

Some ideas are just objectively less worth studying than other ideas are.

But your assessment isn't objective, because you don't know what he really said.

[FlatAssembler]

Some ideas are just objectively less worth studying than other ideas are.

But your assessment isn't objective, because you don't know what he really said.

Statements about God, and supernatural in general, have a terrible track record of being either unfalsifiable or demonstrably false.

[Belacqua]

But your assessment isn't objective, because you don't know what he really said.

Statements about God, and supernatural in general, have a terrible track record of being either unfalsifiable or demonstrably false.

Is there some objective standard of judgment which tells us that reading about unfalsifiable things is a waste of time?

[FlatAssembler]

Statements about God, and supernatural in general, have a terrible track record of being either unfalsifiable or demonstrably false.

Is there some objective standard of judgment which tells us that reading about unfalsifiable things is a waste of time?

Sure. It's called scientific method.

[Belacqua]

Is there some objective standard of judgment which tells us that reading about unfalsifiable things is a waste of time?

Sure. It's called scientific method.

You've proposed that reading unfalsifiable books is waste of time. 

According to the scientific method, we'd need a repeatable empirical way of falsifying the proposition that reading unfalsifiable things is waste of time. If we can't falsify your proposition, then it's not something the scientific method can approach. 

So I'm curious what you'd propose. How could we do a repeatable empirical test to show, for example, that reading Proust is not a waste of time? The value of Proust, like so many things in the Liberal Arts, is not obviously falsifiable. 

What scientific test can we do to show that Proust is or is not a waste of time?

[FlatAssembler]

Sure. It's called scientific method.

You've proposed that reading unfalsifiable books is waste of time. 

According to the scientific method, we'd need a repeatable empirical way of falsifying the proposition that reading unfalsifiable things is waste of time. If we can't falsify your proposition, then it's not something the scientific method can approach. 

So I'm curious what you'd propose. How could we do a repeatable empirical test to show, for example, that reading Proust is not a waste of time? The value of Proust, like so many things in the Liberal Arts, is not obviously falsifiable. 

What scientific test can we do to show that Proust is or is not a waste of time?

1. In science, unfalsifiable claims are (and should be) rejected a-priori.
2. Proust is read for fun. You are proposing to read Aquinas to find out what the truth about God is. So, this is a completely wrong analogy.

[Belacqua]

1. In science, unfalsifiable claims are (and should be) rejected a-priori.

Yes, good. I think we're making progress.

In science, unfalsifiable claims are rejected. (Science can't say whether they're true or false, only that they are not something the scientific method can deal with.)

In other fields, unfalsifiable claims may be valuable. 

Now, why do you think that Thomas was writing science? Most people would say that he was writing metaphysics, and metaphysics, by definition, is not science. So why should we expect it to be falsifiable? 

It looks as though you are making a category error, applying something about science to writing which isn't science.

2. Proust is read for fun. You are proposing to read Aquinas to find out what the truth about God is. So, this is a completely wrong analogy.

All right, you acknowledge that some books (e.g. Proust) are not books which we demand to be falsifiable. So some books need to be falsifiable and some don't. 

And I agree that Thomas wants to say true things about what God is. 

Why do you think that Thomas was intending to write a book of the type that should be falsifiable? What makes you think that it was supposed to be a science book? 

If you had read and understood Thomas, you would know that repeatable empirical tests are not something he proposes for God. He is clear that science-type evidence is not what he's talking about. So I don't see why you are holding him to criteria that he never claims to follow. 

Since at least the time of Plato, everyone knows that God is not the sort of thing that repeatable empirical tests can demonstrate. If that's what you're demanding, then sure, no book will meet your criteria. Because they never meant to.