(1) You can have causes preceding all effects, without all effects needing to succeed a cause. The proposiitons “All effects are preceded by causes” and “Not all causes are succeeded by effects” are contradictory, but not contrary. That is, they cannot both be false, but they can both be true.

(2) Whatever other “natural options” exist, one must distinguish properly between agents and processes. Evolution as a process and Evolution as an agent are two different concepts. Because they are in separate categories, the existence of both do not necessarily need to contradict. And the agent needs to be outside the process, so a natural process that is the core process of natural systems, that is, evolution, would require a supernatural agent to conduct it.

Personally, I think that atheists dismiss the “dead matter” argument too quickly.

(3) Actually, Ockham would disagree with you. As he applied it, God is favoured over the Greek Gods, because God is a simple concept as opposed to the complex concepts which are each of thee Greek Gods. Even a Trinitarian concept is far simpler – in Level-of-detail terms – than Athena popping out of Zeus’ head and Hermes popping out of Zeus’ hip, not to mention the politics and family politics on Mount Olympus.

(4) The “Five Ways” are demonstrations of God’s existence given life experience; Aquinas didn’t intend to use them as proofs of God’s existence; for that he deferred to Anselm, that is Anselm’s proper argument, not the weak strawman version that is paraded around in popular – and academic – philosophy nowadays.

(7) The Catholic Church believes in the evolution of bodies, but not the evolution of souls or minds. So your aside on the Catholic Church and evolution is irrelevant.

The “evidence” question can be redirected at atheists too: what sort of evidence do you count as “extraordinary evidence” that is “extraordinary” enough to prove “extraordinary” events like miracles etc, and won’t be dismissed as somatic effects or hallucinations (or mass hallucinations) or imagination or whatever else?

That having been said, I don’t think the word “supernatural” has any usefulness anymore, since the definition of “natural” has been fluid for the last century. I would prefer the term “trans-natural”, the idea that God is “around nature” as opposed to “outside nature”.

(8) You have committed a category error. That it is harder to be moral in the sense of “doing the right thing” is one thing. What the Catholic is asking you is something
else entirely. It is the question of “how can one know whether anything at all is right or wrong without God or the theoretical possible alternative?” The question of co-ercion is on a lower conceptual level than this one.

In this case, treating evolution as an agent creates a form of fatalism (nothing to do with “could kill you”) which denies the possibility of self-evaluation, since if our morality is purely evolved, then we can’t really change to a “better” or “worse” morality. There is no basis for progress in either direction.

(10d) Nope, the Catholic is referring to the step before that. What is your criteria for whether something classifies as a meaning. For instance, taking your answer to (10a), what if the person’s chosen purpose of life was to “beat Hitler in number of Jews exterminated”? It is perfectly possible to imagine a moral system that was totally consistent with this life-purpose, that might contain paradoxes, but no true contradictions. (The existence of paradoxes does not indicate that a system is unsound.)

Under your definition in (10a), this would be a logically-valid moral system, albeit one that none of the three of us (you, me, the Catholic) would condone. On what grounds would you say that this purpose of life was invalid or valid?

Also, “purpose of life” is different from “activities of life”, the latter of which includes “feed the poor” and “be happy”.

(10e) And your ultimate grounding for that is … ?

(11) And the Catholic and I see no reason why it should not. :D On a more serious note, I think that this is a stupid point to make by the Catholic, because lists will have both points of intersection, and points of difference. A point of intersection is not necessarily more correct or wrong than a path from a point of divergence. The “lists are contradictory” argument is misstated here. What is the proper form of that argument is that when there are two points which are contradictory and contrary to each other, then there must be a basis on which one chooses between the two, if one wishes to avoid a sentimental decision. (I am using Aristotle’s definition of “sentiment”.)

(14) They are predicate objects, which means they are not physical objects, if I am right to assume that you are a naturalist-materialist, as most atheists seem to be. They are a physical presence; they do not “possess” a physical presence. And a “vacuum” is an elliptical object (“elliptical” in the sense of “ellipsis”, not “ellipse”), so it isn’t a true object to begin with.

(15a) Dimensions are mathematical abstact objects, not physical objects. “Space-time” is called “space-time” because there is still some acknowledged difference between space and time.

(15b) And “motion” itself is a true object, as opposed to a predicate object?

(15c) Do you consider Pythagoras’ Theorem a physical object?

(15d) Execution of a computer program is a physical process, although not a physical object. The program itself is a set of information that can be expressed – i physical terms – as grooves on removable media and hard-disks or as text on paper, nothing to do with electrical pulses.

(16) A better answer would be that there can be different orders of nature, and things can be part of different orders without being outside nature. Although, for you to be consistent in using that argument, you would need to accept that there could be an order of nature for God.

Your Aunt Frida example contains a logical fallacy. “Doesn’t exist” is a stronger assertion than “is dead”. The afterworld aside, her body – or ashes – still exist somewhere in this world.

(17) And the question would be, “how much more evidence needs to come to light?”

(!8) That was a careless comment by the Catholic, but on strict logical grounds, if only real things exist, then by that definition, all things that exist are real, and nothing that exists can be false. Unless of course, you accept the doctrine of Orders of Existence…

(21) If the supernatural needs to be proved, then atheism needs to be proved too, since both are negatives of the same order.

In any case, the evidence you provide is not of the correct type. It can be disproved by a simple analogy. Assume you see a printer out along a corridor which is printing something. By your reasoning on brains and neuroscience, it would be logical to say that the printer was producing what was being printed. Of course, though, we know that a printer can only print what is being sent to it; it does not send data to itself. Similarly, a brain is activated to store or transmit data, it does not activate itself.

(23) Again, not necessarily contradictory. A story involving a supernatural being and an explanation/description of a natural process is not necessarily contradictory, given the agent/process distinction.

(25) Well, simply because “where the universe came from” isn’t considered as important by the Bible as “why is the universe here?” So you won’t find that rigorous explanation because that is not the Bible’s purpose.

(26) It’s hard for an adequate comment on this one, but I will try. Basically, being a skeptic is good, but it is not good being a skeptic if you don’t know what you are being skeptical about, and also not good if you are skeptical of everything but yourself.

(27) And I have the converse, to a bit less extravagant degree. :D I also get the impression of “I know you have objections, but all your objections are naturally trash because you believe in the supernatural, so you should just follow me and the rest of the Enlightened folk!”

(30) I would be skeptical, but not dismiss it out of hand. As for the Trojan War, well that there was some kind of war has been proven by archaeology; the Gods bit was dubious, even to Plato/Socrates.

(31) Bias does not imply fabrication. You can have all truth from one angle only. So, the Gospels can be totally reliable as factual sources, even if they aren’t “complete” in your sense.

I am, however, interested in what is a “bad translation” in Matthew 21:15, bearing in mind of course that translations always occur in a neighbourhood.