Why Aquinas' Five Ways Fail: Two Ex-Catholics Debunk JesusAndWhatnot's "How The Communist Manifesto Proves God's Existence"

In this episode of Apostate’s Imprimatur, Colin and I react to Jesusandwhatnot’s video titled "How the Communist Manifesto Proves God's Existence," explanation of Aquinas’s famous Five Ways: the arguments from motion, efficient causality, contingency, degrees of perfection, and final causality. We dig into act and potency, infinite regress, first causes, divine simplicity, Aristotle, physics vs. metaphysics, and the assumptions hiding underneath these arguments. Even if we grant some version of a “first cause” or “unmoved mover,” how do we get from there to an all-knowing, all-powerful, all-loving personal God, much less the God of Christianity? Along the way, we ask whether Aquinas’s arguments describe reality, whether confusing someone with technical philosophical language actually proves anything, and why arguments that have been debated for centuries are still sometimes presented as obvious and uncontested proofs of God. Noah's original video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUOZcbNeKIE 00:00 Who Is Jesusandwhatnot 09:33 Aquinas Five Ways Intro 10:26 Motion Proof Explained 13:47 Potency and Ontology Debate 26:10 Causation Chain and Regress 31:50 Physics Pushback and Forces 34:03 Nothing Truly Begins 36:32 From Prime Mover to God 39:46 Special Pleading and Language 41:02 Perfection Smuggled In 52:29 Efficient Cause Argument 54:23 Physics vs Metaphysics Definitions 01:01:59 Infinite Regress and Cosmology 01:06:18 Contingency and Nothingness 01:08:09 Third Way Rehash 01:12:58 Logic Above God 01:16:07 Blendered Proofs Critique 01:17:22 Degrees of Perfection Setup 01:20:49 Fire Causes Heat Debunked 01:23:13 Nominalism and Genus Problems 01:25:26 Goodness Category Errors 01:34:00 Begging the Maximum Cause 01:35:44 Fifth Way Explained 01:36:59 Teleology Meets Evolution 01:39:10 Ends Are Human Uses 01:45:38 Special Pleading Intelligence 01:49:36 Modern Physics Pushback 01:54:33 Summa Ethics Detour 01:57:52 Thomism As Party Trick To join our discord community for $1 or to support my work/get early access to content, check out my patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/gayextrad To be a guest on the episode, visit my YT channel and send me an email.