I am a christian but not catholic.

Oh I forgot to mention: the universe is expanding, as if from a central point. This trend in movement indicates if that we were to reverse time, everything would be in one spot, perhaps a singularity where the Big Bang occurred.

Final point (I Swear): Why create reproductive organs if God could simply make more of us?

Riddle me this: Why would Satan torture those who did not impress God as well? Hell should be an eternal celebration.

Also, why does God not fight all other religions? If there is one true "leader", then he should of eliminated the rest and confirmed his existence as the one and only.

As for your intelligence statement, I don't see "lesser beings" following suit. We are a bit more intelligent with speech and such and so we have religions. Animals have one core goal: to survive and continue breeding. No one told them that this was necessary; they act on instinct, so it's not far fetched that humans can develop morals just with human interaction and instinct of our own as well.

Finally your first clause is a bit flawed. You say all things have a beginning, but what about God's? The parents having parents cycle would easily apply to him as well. Then there's the needing a purpose bit. Why does God do what he does? He didn't have to care for humans, let alone make a universe to govern. Sounds a little power hungry if you ask me.

All in all, good blog. You're not the ignorant biased type. It's good to be ambiguous, especially in this topic. +1

I don't know how this blog has be published... The religion is a fragile theme...

Anyway im Italian (Really italian, from Europe/not italo-american) and im grow up like a catholic (Cattolico Apostolico Romano) but i believe in God like Albert Einstein believe him; God is everything, is energy (= materia) is have created the universe in a cientif but is don't decide good or bads things for us. I hope to is can't make goods (or bads) things, becose if is can but is don't does anything, im really said with him.

And the holy bible is not the "true word" of God (or Jesus, etc...) becose this book has be altered so much times with a lot of lies (principally from the Vatican in others olds times) and like that, each century from his creation has been changed every time more and more to the version to we found now in the library's, churches, bookstores, homes and hotels...

Also I do beleive there was Jesus but I do not beleive he did all the things the Bible said he did

I didn't laugh while reading this nor do I disrespect your beleifs and religion. But I do not beleif there's a God. It's all up to the person to beleive or not. Another thing is I do not beleif any of the stuff St. Thomas Aquinas said.

P.S don't try to make me beleive. Please

I guess I entertained everyone enough. I am done. It's not because I have nothing left to say but it's not worth it. I still believe in the one true God and you wasted the whole day arguing with me. No winners or losers.

I must point out a flaw in your examples to the Aquinas dialogs. You state that scientists believe in multiple Big Bangs, as a rebirthing universe. More recent scientific evidence actually points to a single Big Bang and an eventual cooling universe. Charles' Law is used in chemistry to describe the relationship between temperature and volume. Combine that with the Law of Thermodynamics, and one can conclude that the constant expansion of the universe, accelerated by dark matter, will lead to an average cooling per unit volume of the universe, alone an asymptote toward infinite volume and infinitesimal temperature.

Additionally, the time dimension (or multiple time dimensions) will dilate with the universal expansion. Initially, time flowed at a standstill and logarithmically accelerated. Due to this, the start of the universe must have come from outside our time continuum. (That fits with the original mover argument.) The universe itself will exist for infinite time forward, but it had a discrete starting point somewhere between 12.7 and 15 billion years ago.

The scientific theories concerning the formation of the universe, as known for just a few decades, fit very nicely into the Biblical explanation of God creating the world in 6 ages, commonly translated as "days" from the King James era onward (since "days" had different additional context in older English). Keep in mind that the Bible was written to be understood by mankind some 3500 years ago, so explanations are kept simple and from the perspective of someone standing on Earth. For example, as the planet cooled, the atmosphere cleared, revealing the stars to the observer. The stars were created with the "heavens", just obscured by a thick cloud cover for millions of years.

St. Thomas Aquinas is a great basis on which to establish a dialog to assert the existence of a single Supreme Being. From a Christian perspective, one must follow it with extra-Biblical historical evidence. Great starting points are Josephus and Tacitus, but there are something like 20,000 other surviving historical documents that put Jesus and his divinity into historicity and a provable context. Two key arguments that historians use to establish historicity are adversarial statements and embarrassing situations. For instance, let's say that you and I are bitter enemies. At one point, my scribe notates that I said "I hate so-and-so with a passion, but I admit that so-and-so is a skilled military strategist." What historians can gather is that you must be a skilled military strategist, since even you enemy believed it. Many such statements exist in reference to Jesus and his disciples. When the Bible states that a woman was the first to see Jesus at the tomb, that would have been an embarrassing admission nearly 2000 years ago, when much of society was male-dominated. There were 11 apostles, many of whom fled Jerusalem like cowards, so the woman Mary was one of the few who stayed in town. Historians place such embarrassments as believable, since there would be no benefit to fabricating them. Finally, when one does for a belief, that is seen as establishing valid historicity.

Many of these arguements you make seem very valid, but I also think Epic is great at pointing out your flaws. May you explain the parodoxes in your arguments, like how God is good by human standards. Personaly I think "good" is based on perspective, and therefor, has an indefinate meaning. A criminal cam think greed is good but maybe you think sharing is caring and therfor donatings good. How can God be good, assuming God exists.

Aliens.

Sorry Enigma, I deleted your comment because it was stretching the whole comment stack.

Alright, I am poor. I am poor in spirit. I see the good in all people. And that's why I been more than nice to your harsh comments.

In my first paragraph, I stated that my target audience was Catholics. That's who the blog was for. Catholics would be able to understand. The Five Proofs are better explained by St. Thomas Aquinas.

I don't like the word 'proof' in this context. There can't be a correct idea because we'll never know what happened. Philosophy is about thinking for yourself.

Oh god, there's so much gross and terrible stuff here, and you just keep adding onto it, and everything you add has about 50 more gross and terrible things to it. I actually feel physically ill just reading this. And you keep saying things to try to prove your argument, but they're all based on their own assertions and don't adress what the problems with them are. The sky is blue because we live in the eye of a giant blue eyed chinchilla. If we didn't, then why isn't the sky brown instead?

Remember also the time the Euthyphro dilemma was created. It was the Ancient Greece. Plato wrote about Socrates, "Is the pious loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is loved by the gods?". In Greek Mythology, the gods had human qualities and desires. This makes their standard not the absolute best. This is a valid question towards Greek Mythology. When it's applied to the Catholic faith, only agnostics and atheists believe it is a valid idea. True Christians wouldn't concern themselves about it because we believe in a God who actually loves us. Not a group gods who dominated their power. An ancient Greek myth about how the earth received fire shows the Greek gods did not love the people.

As for the Euthyphro dilemma,(I googled it) God is good and his will is good. God's standard of good is the best standard of good which none greater can be thought of. As for the diactor example, if God told me to do something, I could say no. I am not punished unless I completely reject Him or do some immoral thing. God doesn't punish us for every little thing we do. Man's free will and rejecting God causes the miseries of the world. You're acting like God is a person and not the true concept of God. It's not God who sends us to Hell. It's a combination of our sins, fear of God, and our shame that leads us to Hell. Jesus said there is a room for everyone in Heaven. Why would He make a room for a person if he was going to reject him. St. Peter is a said to have the key of Heaven and he chooses to let anyone in. Peter was the one of the best disciplines of Christ. Christ welcomed everyone into his presence that is why Heaven is open to anyone. The reason we have to believe in Jesus in order to get to Heaven is because Jesus is the only one that could help you overcome all fear and sin at the same time give us the courage to enter God's presence. As for the last Judgement, it will be our sins that place us in our final resting place. All we have to do is believe in Christ and be sorry for our sins to achieve the Kingdom of God.

Ghosts.

Does the first cause have to be a God?
And does the designer have to be a God?
Those are the main criticisms.

The primary mover unmoved seems to make sense, but we have to take into account that not everything necessarily acts causally. Bear in mind that, on a quantum level, science gets crazy weird. Many sub-atomic particles appear to interact and move randomly, with no cause. Since the big-bang is theorised to have come from a singularity, an infinitely small point, who knows what kind of random stuff could have been going on to trigger the universe?
We don't know entirely how conditions were at that point, and we probably will never know for certain, but there's still plenty of possibility that there was no original cause in the deterministic sense. As such, saying that there must have been a primary mover unmoved is a large logical leap. The same applies to your second 'first cause' argument.

As for the contingency argument, you haven't got the definition of 'congingent' quite right.
Contingent truths are truths that aren't necessarily true. For example, a necessary truth would be that 'all triangles have three sides,' since triangles are, by definition, three sided shapes.
Contingent truths, on the other hand, are truths which could either be true or false and there would not be a logical conflict. For example, I could either have had breakfast today, or I could not, and that would not have made me any less who I am.

Except I actually think that's false. But that's the official definition anyway. I'll get into that another time.

The ice analogy for the greatness of god is not accurate, however. Coldness has a limit, since it is just a lack of heat. You can't have any less heat than no heat. As such, once you have no heat, you have reached your limit.
Greatness, however, has no limit. Limitless things cannot exist. Goodness and power cannot be unlimited, or they are incoherent.

If God is the infinitely powerful being, wouldn't he have the power to make himself more powerful? If so, then he was not infinitely powerful to begin with. If not, then his power is flawed. This applies to perfection, and all his other attributes.

Also, there is a particular argument that comes to mind regarding his perfection. I cannot for the life of me remember its name, but it goes as such:
Is what god says good because it is good, or is it good because it is God saying it?

If God can order us to to something, and it is good simply because he is saying it, then doesn't that strike you as unfair? After all, if a tyrannical dictator tells you Everything I tell you to do is good, because I am perfectly good," would you believe him? No, because he is only good by his own standards.

On the other hand, if it is good because it just is good, and he is telling us to do it, then why have God? If there is an objective, set scale of goodness that transcends even God, to which he adheres, doesn't that limit his transcendence?

As for Thomas Aquinas, his assumptions that living beings are a means to and end, with specific goals, and that beings cannot develop without guidance from intelligent beings, are both very tenuous logical leaps, which require more backing up.
It's very close to a petitio principii argument, wherein the conclusion is assumed within the premise. It assumes that there is an intelligent being that created life in order to prove that there is an intelligent being that created life.

It is clear that many things which at first appear designed can easily be explained by such theories as natural selection. As such, it is evident that the illusion of design can easily be present without necessarily being proof of a designer.

Hmm. Cows.

OHMOOGOSH, GERD

I'll accept this since it seems to have some thought put into it, but the comments better stay in check.