Refutation to richard dawkins.

Richard Dawkins is probably the best known exponent of atheism today, which is a shame, since despite the fact that there are true geniuses who defend this philosophical position, a mediocre thinker like Dawkins is praised in this branch.

This time we are going to talk about Dawkins' mistakes in criticizing the ways of the medieval philosopher Thomas Aquinas.

richard dawkins said (and I quote): "The first 3 ways are different ways of saying the same thing." From here we already started badly, movement, efficient causality or contingent being and necessary being are not the same.

then dawkins says: "1. the immobile motor, nothing moves without a previous motor, this leads us to an infinite regression, from which the only way out is god, something had to make the first movement and we call that god." 2. the uncaused cause, nothing is caused by itself, every effect has a previous cause and again we are pushed into a regression, this has to end in a first cause that we call god. "3. the cosmological argument, there has to be a moment without anything physical, but since there are now physical things, there had to be something non-physical that brought them into existence." The problem is that Dawkins confuses the ways of Aquinas with variants of the cosmological argument, but the truth is that Aquinas does not speak of causality in temporal terms, but in hierarchical terms, Thomas accepts that there could be an eternal universe with infinite causes, which Thomas denies that there are infinite causes in the here and now for the universe, according to Aquinas there must be currently only one thing that supports all the others, just as the earth supports everything that is inside it regardless of whether there are things prior to it.

dawkins continues: "4: we see that things vary in the world, there are degrees, let's say perfection or goodness, human beings can be both good and bad, but we judge these degrees by comparison with a maximum, human beings can be both good and bad, so they cannot be our maximum comparative, there must be another maximum to this maximum we call it god. Is this an argument? In the same way, we could say that things vary in stench, and that we can only make a comparison by a maximum possible stench, therefore there must be a preeminently stinking being, we call that being god, and so we can draw an equally foolish conclusion with any characteristic " Aquinas does not refer to any characteristic, but to the characteristics that he calls pure, the mixed characteristics (such as being red) are imperfect on some level according to Aquinas, the pure characteristics (such as goodness or wisdom) however do not have no imperfection implied in its nature, the stench is not a pure characteristic but a mixed characteristic, therefore, it does not apply.

"5. teleological argument or design argument, things in the world especially living beings have the appearance of having been designed, if they seem designed they were designed, therefore there must be a designer, we call that designer god, he has never there has been such a devastating defeat of popular belief at the hands of intelligent reasoning that Darwin's destruction of design theory " Aquino, however, does not speak explicitly of living beings, nor of the appearance of design, but of the fact that there is a direct pattern in the way things act, if there is a regularity in the way of acting of the universe, Aquino It tells us that this regularity must be directed intelligently, Aquinas would not have denied evolution, would have denied that it is formed by pure chance, without intelligence behind it.