Aquinas

A detailed Summary of Aquinas

Saint Thomas Aquinas is most notably known for his Five Ways of Proving the Existence of God. Aquinas "believed that both faith and reason discover truth, and a conflict between them being impossible since they both originate in God" (Magee, http://www.aquinasonline.com/). Of Aquinas' strongest arguments is that of possibility and necessity. This includes the thought that to exist, means that something before it must have existed and generated it, and because this regress cannot go on forever, it is postulated that the very first being must be God.

Aquinas notes that "in nature things that could either exist or not exist, since they are found to be generated, and then to corrupt; and, consequently, they can exist, and then not exist" (Bowie, 59). For instance, a butterfly could either exist, or not exist, it cannot be in limbo. All things in nature are also found to be generated, or found to be an offspring of a paternal or maternal being that holds the same characteristics. Aquinas goes on to explain that "for what which can one day cease to exist must at some time have not existed" (Bowie, 59). For all living things that do exist, there must have been some time when they were not in existence, a time when the first

This is a strong argument on the premise that all living beings are created from other living beings, and that something, which is claimed to be God by Aquinas, is the cause of the first being coming into existence. Because it is impossible for a being to be in both potentiality and actuality at the same time, self-causation is impossible and this shows that only those caused by another is possible. This theory of possibility and necessity also incorporates the theory of efficient causation. In the same respect, "there is no case known (neither is it, indeed, possible) in which a thing is found to be the efficient cause of itself" (Bowie, 58).

Aquinas' essay further investigates many of the conditions in which there could be a case in proving the existence of God. His third way, possibility and necessity, though written in the 1200's, is still relatable in this new millennium. Though many still argue the fact that evolution alone began the divergence of new species, could it be that Aquinas was begging for us to question, what caused the world to evolve the way it did? This possibly isn't an argument over whether God exists or not, but rather of whether we have a disposition to want to believe for personal reasons alone.

butterfly, for example, came into being. He proposes that butterflies weren't always fluttering about, but rather that a first butterfly was generated from which all subsequent butterflies were procreated. Hence, the bigger question turning to be what caused the formation of the first butterfly? He also stated that "if everything could cease to exist, then at one time there could have been nothing in existence" (Bowie, 59). This signifies that since all things in nature can cease to

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Approximate Word count = 1168
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page double spaced)

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