Indeed, these recent articles of mine were just on Foster's formulations, and there are better ones by other Christian writers. Only a few of Foster's arguments were taken from Aquinas, mind you.
As I understand it, the Five Ways in Aquinas's text are just relatively simple summaries that are indeed backed up by the whole Summa. Alas, Aquinas's philosophy is woefully medieval, which is why only Thomists resort to it. Most Christians prefer to leave all of that behind, and just use the Five Ways in which the conclusions are indeed infamous for being, in effect, tacked on.
I've indirectly criticized Aquinas by responding to classical theism and to Edward Feser (links below).
I agree that ultimately the standard of rational respectability comes from secularists and modernists, and that this was imposed on Christians. That's to say that the Scientific Revolution helped define our zeitgeist, our default assumptions of what it means to be a civilized person. That's largely why Aquinas's writing seems so anachronistic and irrelevant to late-modern Christians. Things have a habit of moving on, you know.
Indeed, the Christian's problem is that the modern intellectual standards make ancient Christianity as a whole obsolete. That's why what the late-modern Christian actually resorts to are sophistry and casuistry to conceal the implications of that progress. Sophistry and casuistry are all you find in Foster's ten arguments or in William Lane Craig's apologetics.
If you think Aquinas's philosophy preserves the faith, you must also have a time machine handy to roll back the clock and pretend the Scientific Revolution never made all of that complacent, anthropocentric metaphysics irrelevant.
You ask what I hope to accomplish with these exchanges. My goal is mainly to express a viewpoint that isn't often directly heard from these days, namely that of the "old" atheist, as opposed to the scientistic new one (Sam Harris, Jerry Coyne, Richard Dawkins) or of the facile, happy-talking, neoliberal secular humanist (Steven Pinker, Neil deGrasse Tyson).
I don't expect to change the minds of committed Christians. That's not how public forums work. But the competition between ideas lets more neutral parties decide for themselves what to believe.
You seem to imply that Christians can fall back on faith, trusting in the intellectual defenses made by Christian philosophers like Aquinas. But that would make faith superfluous and moot, wouldn't it?
That's not how the author of Hebrews 11 explains the nature of faith, and it's not what Jesus meant when he said that those who couldn't touch his wounds would be even more blessed for their blind, childlike faith (Matt. 19:14) than would be those who could touch the wounds and who thus had no need for faith (John 20:29).
Thus, it's as I put it in the articles: the Christian wants to have it both ways. Christianity as it's found today is quite incoherent and two-faced. I think that becomes clear from my exchange with Backyard Church, so that's one thing that's been accomplished here.
http://rantswithintheundeadgod.blogspot.ca/2015/02/new-atheism-and-edward-fesers-thomistic.html
