You can't give what you don't have, lesser being cannot beget higher being, it's simply impossible
I have yet to hear a convincing rebuttal of Evolution by natural selection. Life exists as anti-gravity anti-entropy miracle of an emergent order. If god did create life, she seeded it and let the laws of her creation do the rest. There is no evidence of hand-created life. We don't know how proteins formed without RNA, and we don't know how proteins created RNA, but we know that RNA created DNA.
I'm not an atheist, I just don't believe in a Christian god. Atheism is indeed a fool's errand. It implies there is no metaphysics, yet worships at the altar of mathematics. It's irrational.
I accept Spinoza's god maybe, perhaps the Dao, perhaps a magenta ball of string.
None of Aristotle nor Aquinas implies a god who intervenes in human life. God does not answer prayers. Two teams have never won the Super Bowl in the same year, yet both QBs pray. How does god arbitrate contradicting prayers. Does god have a nose? Why does he love the smell of beef? Maybe it's a metaphor to describe the nutrient density to meat which is preferable to grains. Perhaps the whole book is a primitive metaphor to describe difficult to explain concepts like liberty, hygiene, and justice. Our legal system is fundamentally a religious system based on fictions like free will and authority. It's not just Theists who are irrational, nobody understands what they're doing.
The Epicureans were right, if there is a god it is irrelevant. I know for a fact Abraham's god doesn't exist. Goodbye Catholicism, Protestantism, Orthodoxy, Mormonism, Islam, and Judaism.
Why is there something rather than nothing?
I don't know. We accept existence a priori. Can you prove we exist? Perhaps we're an illusion. Reality is a hallucination we assume corresponds to a shared external world.
What is being?
Being is existence, comprised of shape and location over time (motion)
What is essence?
Essence is a concept, a pattern of being or existence of an object or set of objects
What is substance?
Atomic matter connected by an intangible substrate which unites the universe as a single object
What is good?
Existence is good. Growth is good. Cooperation is good.
What is truth?
Linguistic Correspondence with essence of shared experience Map=Territory.
This isn't a useful proof to convince you because I don't see you changing your mind, but there are other ways to think that aren't trapped in dogma and not nihilism.
I disagree entirely with your definitions, they're all based on materialism.
I would exhort you to keep an open mind and read St. Thomas on Being and Essence: https://isidore.co/aquinas/ De Ente et Essentia and other works there.
The universe could be made of intangible puppet strings for all we know, but for it to exist, it must have a shape and location.
My mind is open. I'm here, aren't I? It isn't that I haven't read Aquinas, it's that Aquinas birthed a revolution in thought that even God is subservient to reason.
That's not St. Thomas's position, Thomas would just say that God can be known, to a degree by natural reason alone, but not necessarily the Christian God, such as the trinitarian nature of the Godhead.
I agree the universe is material, obviously. But I also think Metaphysics is incredibly important and the most ignored aspect of Philosophy today, especially in academia and by modern "scientists" because it means they'd have to change their positions. Without the metaphysical, we couldn't have the physical. When St. Thomas discusses metaphysics, he comes to it by observing reality from the senses.
You might enjoy that book The Last Superstition by Edward Feser, he explains it pretty well in there.
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