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I took a few ethics & epistemology courses getting my ba

Aquainus has sound reasoning based on the observable world; his reasoning and logic are very good. I think that my largest issue with his thinking is his formation of the omnipotent singularity, God. The arguments in the Five Ways are incredible. I do agree; I can't believe how many people don't at least give this thought consideration. Maybe they are too distracted by "life" and are unable to maintain a level of security (i.e. Maslow's hierarchy) to have the luxury of self-reflection upon what is and why. I think that's why organized religion works. It can distill down heavy concepts into themes. I see your credentials, and please forgive my ignorance in the subject of religion; I hope I am speaking kindly.

I was initially drawn to philosophy for answers. I self-described growing up as staunchly atheist. Plato was a beautiful read, but I found Aristotle harder. Through Aquinas and Descartes, I realized that I could not know for sure the presence or lack of the omnibeing, and that agnostic is a better term for myself. I think my main hesitation with the omnipresent is that it removes free will or brings it into question. If an outside entity knows what I will do or how it will turn out, how do I have the ability to choose? It's the reason I liked elements of Utilitarianism; it gave me as a simple individual a way to quantify moral choices. It can be a very dangerous ideology, as majority "positivities" can create strange outcomes that I think on a singular level are very worrisome. I think I need to go back and reread Russell with a lens that violence is not necessary.

Neal 9mo ago

All good, religion is just a word to describe whenever metaphysics and anthropology meet.

Everyone is a philosopher, credentials are not needed to talk and engage in discourse. I guess i list my credentials just because i know some people use them as an initial guage. I’ve had one on one conversations with PhDs that revealed how little depth they actually have. I just listen to what people are saying.

The existence of God isn’t even a “religious” argument. It’s just logic.

There is no other coherent explaination why somwthing actually exists, as opposed to nothing exists, without some being that is complete act.

Call that Zeus, God, a flying sphegetti monster, makes no difference, you need a god like being else you have no way around the impasse of the origin. you either say something came from nothing or something always was, both logical absurdities.

Aquinas argues, and i find his case completely compelling, that logic/philosophy gets you to “a god exists” but that it takes revelation to get to “God is a loving person, and we are made im His image”

Just my experience, but i haven’t encountered any atheist, anti god person who ever engages with the arguments directly. It’s always some strawman gross distortion of the philosophical issues.

And that is basically what makes Dr. Feser’s story so compelling. He was an huge atheist, teaching philosophy of religion, just bashing people who believed in a god to his class. Then he got bored and started digging into Aquinas instead of just regurgitating things others said about him. He found all the critiques he taught in class skipped by the issues, never dealt with aquinas’s arguments, yet claimed victory.

If u care about truth, u follow it where it goes.

Just like all things in this world, it’s proof of work. I don’t preach or tell someone they have to think something. but i care enough about people to tell them the truth.

To answer how can a god know what you are going to do and you still have choice. we could go into the entailments of what eternal, outside of time means, unpack rationality, freewill, love, and morality: building the dialectic argument, but this ramble is going on for too long, so i’ll answer with analogy.

if you have a child, or a wife, someone you know inside and out, you know how they will respond to a situation.

my wife knows if we are threatened, i will respond with force even if it means laying down my life. Her knowledge of that, does not affect my nature, doesn’t change my being. and takes nothing away from my deliberate decision in the moment to fight or flee.

simply put, it does not follow that knowledge of a decision changes the nature of the decision itself.

thx for the msg, i’ve just been consumed with trying to get my

book over the finish line, it was a welcome distraction to engage with another about some

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