For even if, per impossibile, their atheism turned out to be correct, they would not have arrived at it by rational means, shamelessly caricaturing as they do the best arguments for the other side, when they are not ignoring them altogether. That alone suffices to show that the arguments of Dawkins and his gang are worthless. Whatever one’s ultimate appraisal of these arguments, the New Atheist’s pretense that a religious view of the world can only ever be the result of wishful thinking rather than objective rational argumentation is thereby exposed as a falsehood, the product, if not of willful deception, at least of inexcusable ignorance of the views of the most significant religious thinkers. There is no appeal to “faith,” or to parapsychology, ghost stories, near-death experiences, or any other evidence of the sort materialists routinely dismiss as scientifically dubious. In the first passage from The Last Superstition quoted in this post, we saw Feser giving expression to a belief that the relationship between the universal and the particular is one of the seemingly abstruse questions of metaphysics which in fact have dramatic repercussions for religion, morality and even politics.

(Buddhists object to being called monists, but all their objects can be made by every other monist, all of whom are still monists.“Notice in any event that at every point in Aquinas’s account of the soul, as at every point in his arguments for God’s existence, the appeal is to what follows rationally from such Aristotelian metaphysical notions as the formal and final causes of a thing. The Mahayana sects just realize that that's an infinite regress, and so fall back on extreme apophasis, advaita-which is a type of monism. The Buddhist conception of causation (the interdependent origination) is extremely complicated, but they're more materialist than not-being atomist nominalists whose metaphysics is called 'inanimate' ( anatman, same Indo-European roots) for a reason. Hence the 'ice cream koan': 'If you have 'no ice cream,' I will take it if I have 'no ice cream', I will give it to you.' One of the most basic things koans are for is to get you to stop reifying privations.

Indeed, in Buddhism, the very idea of negation (which would include 'nothing') is considered unreal, since 'not-A' is only a thought-in-relation-to-'A'.

The thing in Buddhism that you're thinking of isn't nothingness.

The last superstition by edward feser