11.

A word now against Kant as a moralist. A virtue must be _our_ invention;
it must spring out of _our_ personal need and defence. In every other
case it is a source of danger. That which does not belong to our life
_menaces_ it; a virtue which has its roots in mere respect for the
concept of "virtue," as Kant would have it, is pernicious. "Virtue,"
"duty," "good for its own sake," goodness grounded upon impersonality or
a notion of universal validity--these are all chimeras, and in them one
finds only an expression of the decay, the last collapse of life, the
Chinese spirit of Koenigsberg. Quite the contrary is demanded by the most
profound laws of self-preservation and of growth: to wit, that every man
find his _own_ virtue, his _own_ categorical imperative. A nation goes
to pieces when it confounds _its_ duty with the general concept of duty.
Nothing works a more complete and penetrating disaster than every
"impersonal" duty, every sacrifice before the Moloch of abstraction.--To
think that no one has thought of Kant's categorical imperative as
_dangerous to life_!... The theological instinct alone took it under
protection!--An action prompted by the life-instinct proves that it is a
_right_ action by the amount of pleasure that goes with it: and yet that
Nihilist, with his bowels of Christian dogmatism, regarded pleasure as
an _objection_.... What destroys a man more quickly than to work, think
and feel without inner necessity, without any deep personal desire,
without pleasure--as a mere automaton of duty? That is the recipe for
_decadence_, and no less for idiocy.... Kant became an idiot.--And such
a man was the contemporary of Goethe! This calamitous spinner of cobwebs
passed for _the_ German philosopher--still passes today!... I forbid
myself to say what I think of the Germans.... Didn't Kant see in the
French Revolution the transformation of the state from the inorganic
form to the _organic_? Didn't he ask himself if there was a single event
that could be explained save on the assumption of a moral faculty in
man, so that on the basis of it, "the tendency of mankind toward the
good" could be _explained_, once and for all time? Kant's answer: "That
is revolution." Instinct at fault in everything and anything, instinct
as a revolt against nature, German _decadence_ as a philosophy--_that is
Kant_!--"

You wanted to know the problems with Aquinas' arguments. I obliged, and let you know what some of them were--not my private, personal opinions, but pretty widespread, common criticisms from modern "secularists". In response you have called me a secularist pretender and suggested I am being an ignorant ingrate. That's not exactly how to be a fisher of men, nor are you coming off as the salt of the Earth.

We're lucky to live when we do now. Isaac Newton may have accomplished as much as any man in history when it comes to breakthroughs in human knowledge about the universe...but at his best he knew only a tiny fraction of what a physics student in an average state university knows, and indeed much less than what a studious high school student knows these days. A regular schmo like me who did not excel in science knows things about how the universe works that Aquinas never dreamed of--which isn't a knock on Aquinas, them's just the breaks.

By the way, I agree that he would rejoice in the positive aspects of modern science, more than you or I, as he had a greater hand in the coming around of modern science.

Aquinas' thought is most certainly an Everest that no atheist I know of has climbed.
You betray modern arrogance and hypocrisy. You pretend you would have somehow known everything we know now and you disregard the fact that we know everything that we do know now precisely because of Christians, especially great Christian thinkers like St. TA.
His thought, along with that of other great Christian thinkers, built modernity. And now secularist pretenders like yourself claim to have moved passed it without comprehending a drop of the ocean that is Christian scholarship.
Christians built modernity and made your fat and easy modern life possible. Don't be an ignorant ingrate.

"I hear a lot of people talk down on St. TA because they hate the fact that he's right and they're embarrassed of their sinful lives. That's why I hated orthodox Christians when I was an atheist."

If atheists thought Aquinas was right, they wouldn't be atheists. See how that works? Statements like yours don't do a lot to suggest that further discussion is going to be fruitful.

But to give you the benefit of the doubt: basically,there are a couple common criticisms of Aquinas' Five Ways: they are based on a medieval understanding of physics and the nature of the world that has no actual basis in reality, and has been completely left behind in modern physics; they are also filled with special pleading, with liberal doses of unevidence and unproven premises.

The Five Ways are not an Everest of thought that atheists are battering themselves against in dismay--they are just the musings of a very smart man who had bad information. I sincerely believe that if Aquinas lived today, he'd reject them out of hand, and delight in the discoveries of modern science.

Quotes please. I want to hear your criticism of one of the greatest theologians in history. (I hear a lot of people talk down on St. TA because they hate the fact that he's right and they're embarrassed of their sinful lives. That's why I hated orthodox Christians when I was an atheist.)

Aquinas may have been a genuis, but he wrote an awful lot of dreck.