Welcome to Pints with Aquinas. I'm Matt Fradd. What is up with you today?

Hey, Yohan, this is Pints with Aquinas. Are you new to Pints with Aquinas? If you are, it's really good to have you. What's going on?

Hey, here's the premise of the show. Okay? If you could sit down over a pint of beer with the Big Band. That's Thomas Aquinas and asking any one question. What would it be?

In today's episode, we're going to ask Thomas, why does every single atheist misunderstand your arguments for the existence of God?

Here we go.

I get a good head. You're with us. Sorry about that dramatic intro. Today we're going to be discussing, as I say, Aquinas is five ways, five proofs of the existence of God and why it is that apparently every atheist ever seems to misunderstand them.

Okay, that might be a bit of a stretch. But what we're going to do is basically go through what Dawkins has to say about Aquinas' five ways. You'll see why he's wrong in trying to refute them because he doesn't understand Aquinas at all.

And if you listen to this episode quite honestly, attentively, and you come back to it from time to time, almost every atheist I've seen on YouTube, parrots at Dawkins, maybe because they've read him and they're regurgitating his stuff, or maybe because they just make the same mistake he does, probably the latter, I think.

But this will really help you, I think, understand why most atheists, okay, totally misunderstand Aquinas' five proofs of the existence of God. Now, as you know, I've just come out with a new book on Aquinas' five ways. It's called Does God Exist, a Socratic Dialogue on the Five Ways of Thomas Aquinas. You should go get it. Seriously, you should go get it.

Or you should support Pines of the Aquinas on Patreon and I will send you a signed copy of the book for free. How about that? You should do that, I think.

Because you know, you want to support this and I'll give you a book and it'll be signed, which means at your next garage, say a little go for more money than if it wasn't signed. That's a joke, it's a bad joke. Okay, so here's what I want to do in this episode.

I want to read a paper that I wrote back when I was doing my master's in philosophy on why Richard Dawkins is a temp to a few Thomas Aquinas' five proofs of the existence of God fail.

Now, you might be thinking to yourself, isn't Dawkins a rather out of date character? And I think yes he is. I don't think many atheists worth their salt today rely heavily upon Dawkins as, you know, rants, dire tribes against the existence of God.

He's not a very sophisticated atheist because he's a poor philosophers. We'll see in today's episode that said, I think he illustrates just how people misunderstand Aquinas' five ways.

So usually when people read papers, it's rather boring, but because you're an interesting person, you'll no doubt find my paper interesting. And also pause throughout to make gearing remarks at Dawkins, which should make this somewhat more interesting.

Okay, so Dawkins in his 2006 bestselling book, The God Delusion, have you read it? I tweeted at him a while back. I saw his book in the philosophy section and I took a photo of it and I said the humorous moment when you find Dawkins' book in the philosophy section.

And he tweeted back, oh go on, be honest, have you read it? No, of course you haven't. Well, I haven't. And you'll, that'll be evident in this paper.

But anyway, so he wrote the book, The God Delusion, and it responds to Thomas Aquinas' five proofs of existence of God in the superthiologia.

Now, Kudos to him because he's one of the only atheists, one of the four horsemen they refer to themselves as, or someone referred to the mass.

He really takes on the five ways, even if it is in three pages, but well, at least he does it.

But anyway, he makes this bold claim, right? He says that these proofs are, and his equitation from him, easily exposed as vacuous. Wow.

Okay, that's a pretty bold claim. Well, before I show you why he doesn't refute Thomas' arguments, I need to point out two problems with Dawkins' general approach.

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