Aquinas' 5 Ways To Prove God Exists

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[mjjoe]

My takeaway is that apologetics arguments haven’t changed for centuries. No wonder they argue against evolution.

[serpentinious]

We have prior experience with smoke coming from fire or machines. What he's proposing is more akin to "Where there's smoke, there's a dragon. And it's using the plooms to talk to me."

[BillGarrett]

People have been trying to substitute eloquence for evidence for centuries. I'm happy the rest of us have been able to move on with science and approach a real understanding of reality

[pythondrink]

16:27 "I infer that I have some kind of infection"
I love that he ignores the endless nunber of options that ppl use to believe in and (still do) regarding this: witches, demons, bad air, punishment from god, etc

The only reason why he'd think it's an infection is bcoz we have science now

[duanethompson]

I’m still waiting to hear a serious Christian with a reasonable explanation of why the Christian god exists. Everything I’ve heard so far comes back to “god magic “ or believe because I (the apologist) said so. Thanks for your outstanding work.

[Kevin_Williamson]

Back in the days of Aquinas it was much easier to accept the "look at the trees" view as pointing to God because they had less scientific knowledge about how nature worked. Things were just much more mysterious back then. It's also why higher education tends to lead more (but certainly not all) people to atheism, and why there are churches that frown upon their adherents getting a secular education. The more we understand how things work naturally, the smaller the gap we have to squeeze in a God as the Ultimate Cause. And why most Christians now have to go all the way back to the unknown period of time when the Universe was at its very beginning to try to point to God. "You don't know about that, right? So that was God."

[ajhieb]

12:48 _"I can infer there _*_must_*_ be a fire..."_ No. That's not how inferences work. You can infer that there is _probably_ a fire, not that there _must_ be a fire.

[djfrank]

In his virus example, he ignores the fact that his intelligent, intentional creator also would have created that virus that gives him a sore throat and has caused untold misery and suffering to other living creations throughout history. He chose to do that At some point, his God decided it would be good to create microscopic robots to infect billions of other living things.

[wilhelmschmidt]

I love how his first way to "know" something is essentially to just believe in things without evidence. You are absolutely correct in pointing out this isn't how you can know anything. You might possibly guess correctly with that way of thinking at best, and that isn't very likely.

[PassiveSmoking]

"Wait a minute, how can you be semi-perfect? You're either perfect, or you're not me"

When Vegeta can refute your argument, it's not a great argument.

[flowingafterglow]

And now he accepts Aquinas's claim that animals are not intelligent?

That's just...wrong.

[archapmangcmg]

Aquinas' Degrees of Perfection demands the existence of the Perfect Shit, the Perfect Liar and the Perfect Crime as much as it demands the existence of a Perfect God.

[PassiveSmoking]

And how can you say "Bees do not have intelligence" when you (as in The Thomistic Institute) haven't even defined what intelligence is? Is it the ability to play chess? Because an unthinking machine with no agency can reliably outperform the best human chess player. Is it the ability to create art? Because we now have AI that can do that. If a bee is capable of acting in a manner that ensures that it has a reliable supply of food then I'd say that it's sufficiently intelligent for a bee.

[riluna]

is Thomas Aquinas? The legend himself? The man on every apologist's pedestal? know I shouldn't be surprised. A person from long ago who apologists quote today is a whole lot of red flags all at once, but somehow I actually believed the hype. That we'd get the best arguments from him, and only watered-down versions of same from more modern proponents.

But man....this is just...the absolute bottom of the barrel. There's no logic here, none at all. "Something happened! It must be because someone wanted it to! There's no other POSSIBLE explanation!" That's all of them. All five Ways.

....Now I understand why they like him so much.

[Mr.PeabodyTheSkeptic]

Glassy eyed stares have come from believers when I asked, ' How does your god know it is THE god?'.
Maybe my god created your god to think he was all powerful so my god could take a vacation.
You read my mind when you said 'super god'. Now thats got to be a miracle.

[tremas]

I'm only part way through and some recent conversations ive had keep running through my head. Basically a repeated refrain of something like "oh, all athiests always say the same things!"! And its true to an extent, some being able to put the arguments much better than others (shameless plug for Prof Plink here), I keep coming up with one response to this: Well, if you come up with an argument i couldnt have heard constantly repeated at any point in the last couple thousand years, i would try to come up with a novel response to it.

[danieldelanoche]

"Self-delusion, wishful thinking, and childhood indoctrination" yep that's incredibly accurate

[dwaneanderson]

Wait, we should ask Aristotle about the Catholic church? I don't think he would've had anything to say about that. He died 322 BC.

[jackwhite]

I want to touch on the broken fire analogy.

If we see smoke in the middle of a field and we know it must indicate fire, it is because we have observed fire produce smoke. If a man has never seen a fire or ever heard of fire then why would he assume fire when seeing smoke?

[timothymulholland]

Apologetics are for comforting the faithful and calming their fears.