St. Thomas Aquinas Confirms
Through out the Middle Ages, Theology was considered the most important science and because of this greatly scrutinized. Although people accepted their beliefs, they wanted something to both explain and augment their faith. At this time, many of Aristotle's writings were translated from Greek and Arabic into Latin, making them a great deal more accessible to people. This broadened knowledge profoundly influenced the people, who began to ask the question of what relationship existed between Christian revelation and Greek philosophy. St. Thomas Aquinas, the greatest and most significant philosopher of this time period, tried to make Aristotle's philosophy compatible with Christianity by interpreting and explaining it in a way that they were no longer viewed as a threat to Christian beliefs (Garrder 180). St. Thomas Aquinas was a Dominican monk and lived an active life of listening to the people and teaching. When asked by the people, "Whether God exists?" he felt responsible to answer. The outcome of this attempt is known as Article 3. of the Suma Theologica, "Whether God Exists?," in which he provided two objections to God's existence, his Five Ways that prove the existence of God, and finally his replies to the fore mentioned obje
The Fourth Way concerns " the gradations found in things". Some beings are found to be more good, more true, more noble, and so on, while other things are found to be less (Fogelin 307). Such relative terms show the proximity of how close or far away something is to an absolute, suggesting that that there is an elite member of each component (the absolute). Therefore something best, something truest, and something most noble must exist. This existence is to all beings the cause of their being, goodness, truth, nobility, and every other perfection. The existence is known to man as God. Aquinas progresses from the above stated objections and moves on to his Five Ways, which he claims prove the existence of God. The First way concerns motion in the very broad sense in which the Aristotelian tradition uses the concept of motion (Fogelin 311). It states that anything in motion is put into motion by another, because nothing can be in motion unless it is in potency towards that which it is in motion. Aquinas uses the example of how fire, which is actually hot, causes wood, which is potentially hot, to actually become hot, and therefore moves and changes it. Nothing is able to move itself, without the influence of a previous mover, just as wood could not become hot without fire influencing it do so. Therefore there must be a first mover in order to have resulting movers, and this initial mover who is moved by no other is understood as God. (Aquinas 2) Aquinas finishes the article with two replies that address the earlier stated objections. The reply to the first objection states that because God is the highest good, he only allows evil to exist because his infinite goodness is so great that it even brings good out of evil. The reply to the second objection states that because nature works for a predetermined end under the guide of an ultimate being, whatever is caused by nature must be traced back to God, the initial mover. Aquinas claims that because human reason and will can
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Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page double spaced)
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