|
|
        
|
 |
The Five Ways to God's Existence of Thomas Aquinas
by Emanuel L. Paparella
2008-07-14 08:39:36 |
| Print - Comment - Send to a Friend - More from this Author |
   
 |
Thomas Aquinas has become the official favored philosopher/theologian of the Catholic Church. That was not always so. In fact while he was still alive he was suspected of heresy by the archbishop of Paris. His sin was that of basing his philosophy on the materialist Aristotle rather than the more spiritual and esoteric Plato.
Perhaps another one of his sins was that he was too smart for his own good. He was already teaching philosophy at the University of Paris at the age of eighteen in 1243 AD. Those years were followed by thirty years of intense intellectual work (he died in 1274 at the age of 49) wherein he wrote the Summa Theologica (begun in 1266 and finished in 1273 shortly before he died and left unfinished). Basically Aquinas tries to prove that reason not only does not contradict faith but is a sine qua non for a faith that is robust, intellectually defensible and not a mere intellectually shallow fanatical cult. Grace builds on nature and reason is a natural endowment bestowed by God to his creature.
But actually his most important work is not the Summa Theologica but The Summa contra Gentiles which he had written previously between 1259 and 1264. In it Aquinas establishes, mostly by brilliant philosophical argument, the truth of the Christian religion, first proving the existence of God and then discussing the nature of God, creation and its purpose, the soul, ethics, sin, the Trinity, and so on.
As mentioned, rather than using Plato as the underpinning of his theology (as had been the case with Augustine), Aquinas reconciles Aristotelian philosophy with Christian doctrine. He extended and clarified many of Aristotle’s ideas making some original contributions to Aristotelian thought, just as Avicenna had done. Perhaps the most important of those contributions are the five ways to prove the existence of God via logical argument.
In the very first of the five ways Aquinas writes that the existence of God can be proved by considering the concept of change. Most of us can see that some things in the world are in flux or in the process of change and this change must be a result of something else, since a thing cannot change of itself. But the cause of the change itself, since in the process of change, must also be caused to change by something other than itself, and so on again, ad infinitum. Clearly there must be something which is the cause of all change, but which itself does not undergo change - as Aquinas puts it: “if the hand does not move the stick, the stick will not move anything else.” The first mover, Aquinas concludes is God. If this sounds familiar, it is because Aquinas is borrowing from Aristotle the concept of the “Unmovable Mover” as God, also borrowed by Avicenna.
In the second way Aquinas notices that causes always operate in series, but there must be a first cause of the series or there could not be series at all - so both the first and second way proceeds on the assumption that a thing cannot cause itself.
In the third way, Aquinas notices that there are things in the world that come to be and pass away. But clearly not everything can be like this, for then there would have been a time when nothing existed. But if that were true then nothing could ever have come into being, since something cannot come from nothing. Therefore something must always have existed, and this is what people understand by God. The first, second and third way are sometimes called variations of a more general argument which the Stoics called the Cosmological Argument where one reasons from the order found in the universe to a mind or a designer who created it. Interestingly enough, Heidegger’s Being and Time begins with this timeless question which atheists usually ridicule without in any way being able to answer or marvel at: why is there something rather than nothing?
In the fourth way, Aquinas shifts gear and offers a version of Anselm’s Ontological argument. In Aquinas’ version some things are noted as exhibiting varying degrees of quality. A thing may be more or less hot, more or less good, more or less noble. Such varying degrees of quality are caused by something that contains the most or perfect amount of that quality. For just as the sun is the hottest thing, and thus the cause of all other things being hot on earth, so there must be some fully “good” thing which makes all other things good. That which is most good is God.
In the fifth way Aquinas relied heavily on Aristotle’s notion of “telos” or purpose. All things aim toward some ultimate goal or end, But to be guided by a purpose or a goal implies some mind that directs or intends that purpose. That providential director is God.
Various philosophers and theologians have criticized this attempt to prove the existence of God by reason. They argue that the living God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob is not the god of the philosophers devised and utilized by them to underpin their rational schemes; he is not an idol and a creation of the human mind, he transcends reason and logic and especially pure rationalism. We creatures reason exactly because we are imperfect. A perfect being would think and create at the same time; he would intuit but not reason. Aquinas would be the first one to agree with them, for he left the third part of his Summa Theologica unfinished having had one day a mystical vision compared to which he said that what he had written so far appeared to him like so much straw. But he never said that reason was worthless in itself and never burned his theological masterpieces like so much straw. Food for thought!
Thomas+Aquinas Religion Philosophy Culture |
|
| Print - Comment - Send to a Friend - More from this Author |
|
|
|
Newsletter
Subscribe
Contact
Search
