Well I guess the next question becomes, what have been some of your inventive insights?

While I think you might very well be correct with everything you've said. I'm wondering if you're leading up to something with everything you've said. You've given us a history yes, but I guess what I want to know is why I should read your book rather than any other historical account. After all, what is the purpose of a discussion on something all of us agree on?

I think the correct term to use here would not be logical, but rather that it is a priori known that I exist. It's a level of certainty that I can't escape because my conscious experience is fundamental to my existence.To me at least.

If these thoughts are occurring, I can identify these thoughts, remember them later, then certainly I am the one who's doing it.

Even if there is some aspect of this process that is beyond my control, my awareness of this process implies the existence of a mind that can be made aware of thoughts or how they are processed. Even a process presumes that there is a certain type of organization of elements that exists to carry out a process. If I am not an actor, then at least I am subjected to these thoughts with acute awareness of them. All of these statements presume the fact that a mind or some awareness is present. If it was not, then I'm don't know how I would even refer to an "I", talk about thoughts that occur in "my" mind.

The subjectivity of my personal/internal experience all of it presumes the existence of an "I" or "my mind" or at the very least "a mind" that is experiencing these things.

If I talk about it in the third person, I can only do so as an observe. So for a statement like thoughts occur without a thinker presumes a certain observation from mind that can make said observation.

Notice in all of these statements, I can't escape existence of some type of being. The nature of such a being is possibly questionable and we might not know that for certain. However, escaping the fact of existence itself is quite difficult I think

I can't comment on you, but I certainly am. That I can be sure of

Is that a fact thought? Didn't Nietzsche say that Descartes' skeptical method and the resulting cogito, ergo, sum was not as radical a doubt as is presumed because even Descartes (without realizing it) was presupposing the existence of certain things like thinking, what it means to exist. From what I understand people say that Descartes couldn't overcome his socialization and brought some of it with him when he constructed his argument for the existence of the mind.

I would imagine that it still doesn't change the fundamental outcomes of his thought. That if thoughts exist, then a thinker must exist. Or at least thought as an act, must have at the very least an actor and an object? If you agree, then I think something can be said to certainly exist, no?

Hahaha, love the pun

So, I may have to disagree with you here. Descartes goes beyond just that thoughts exist right, he implied that no thought can exist without there being a thinker. I'll also add an excerpt from the meditations where he says this:

"I am therefore a true thing, and one that truly exists; but what kind of thing? I have said it
already: one that thinks."

But even in your case, if he did prove that thoughts exist- it still implies that there is a thing that can perceive or have these thoughts. This at the very least proved to Descartes that he was not fundamentally a physical being, rather he was something that thinks.

Now for the second problem. See, while certitude is a problem that philosophers across the ages have tried to address but have failed. There is no shame in admitting that; as a discursive practice, certainty in philosophy has been long sought out but not achieved. Yes we do take things to be certain, but it's important to come to terms with the fact that we are the ones taking it to be certain.

But before I continue, I was wondering if you agree with I've said so far. I want to stop here because I don't want to go into a long-winded comment. I'd love it if other people would also comment here.

Zero chill lol

In any case, I think this question is quite a deep one under the guise of an innocent enough assertion. OP, have you considered Descartes exercise to establish the existence of his own mind? Let's make this an exercise, maybe we'll both arrive at interesting ideas.

Off the top of my head, there might be some merit to this suggestion. It's not like philosophers and thinkers who've engaged with question of knowledge haven't spoken about the hegemony of Western Rationalism and Scientism that these methods ostracize certain kinds of knowledge (or information) simply because they do not fall within the epistemic paradigms that are accepted by the scientific tradition or Rationalism. It's just that we don't have distilled methods and languages to talk about these concepts.

Omnipotence need not mean all-loving right? OP seems to be looking at a case for a loving God, while presenting Omnipotence as the driving force for the argument. It's not a question of can or cannot God carry out certain kinds of actions, but rather did not carry them out.
There's a lot going on in the argument that OP presents, and I'm not entirely sure that I follow. However, let's consider his premises for the argument, I can think of some problems with them. The shift from premise 1 and 2, seems to rely on a logical jump from a logical jump. There are possibly (on the face of it anyway) other alternatives in which such a situation may arise. Ones that could be explained within the context of the existence of God and even one in the context of a multiverse theory where our universe is just not well-designed in the way that classical theism speaks of it.

I do not understand why this assumption was taken for granted this is basically the equivalent of saying that this is how God created the world as is. Classical Theism even provides explanations for the injustice in the world, describing to some extent what God's final intent for humans was. I don't understand why we would disregard those reasons and step over them to accept premise 2. Any Classical Theism theorist, like Aquinas or Augustine all worked within the context of Scripture while theorizing and much of their explanations fall well within the confines of scripture; because that's the metaphysical background they working with. The argument here relies on an assumed falsification of scripture that was the fundamental basis for classical theism. While I may not necessarily disagree with the conclusions, I would really wonder from a purely argumentative perspective if this argument is valid in the sense of justifying discarding classical theism altogether.

So when you say that there is no reason to assume a world such as this on Classical Theism; I think all theorists at that time had plenty of reasons to give for why the world was imperfect and that people should work for their salvation. It never admitted the world was perfect; otherwise there would be no need for salvation. The entire premise of classical theism and religion is that we should be good people so that we go to heaven; in the absence of such a heaven there would be no practical case for religion and any argument made based on the imperfection of the world can't directly invalidate classical theism because classical theism was okay with it and in harmony with the idea. If you consider this, then I don't think that Naturalism has any greater value than classical theism.

On the second objection whether God needs competition to improve people's lives, that's a trivial point. The fact that God can do anything but chooses not to can't be used to invalidated classical theism because it's not certainly known what God would really ever do or should really ever do. This entire section of objections depends on an assumption that we've figured out some objective moral truth that even God would follow. But fact of the matter is, can you really justify such a moral obligation? Do you have objective knowledge that such a moral obligation should apply to even the most supreme being?

There are a lot of grey areas here which make me question the integrity of this argument. Would love to hear y'alls thoughts on this.

I would wonder if anyone could say that empiricism is "dead" in the sense that it's no longer a viable epistemic position. Since Locke (as one of the first people who spoke of empiricism in the way we recognize it now at least) it seems quite unlikely that I'm not having sense experiences. Unless I take the Cartesian route and say that there is no external world. It's a logically viable position I suppose, but is it a probable one? I'd be hard put to answer that question. So I guess, if you're wondering if the empiricist position that sense experience is the fount of all knowledge is wrong or unjust -- I mean how do I deny that I'm typing these words out on my laptop sitting in my room? I am certainly. What I'm typing it out on, or whether these words have any reality in the sense of corresponding to some objectively real state of affairs, those are questions that you can pose. But do these questions (about the nature of the things I'm using to type out these words or the words themselves) really bring into question that I AM interacting with something outside of myself? I do understand to some degree that there is an interaction taking place, the specifics of such a state of affairs might be beyond me-- but I can't really call into question that there is an interaction taking place right? That is at least a piece of knowledge that I can't seem to wrap my head around unless, of course, I take up a position like Descartes.