Aquinas' Proofs for Existence of God The purpose of this research is to examine

The purpose of this research is to examine the five proofs for the existence of God by Saint Thomas Aquinas. The plan of the research will be to set forth the context in which these proofs are advanced by Aquinas, and then to discuss each of the five proofs in turn, including an analysis and opinion of, together with a reaction to, each proof.

Aquinas flourished in the middle of the thirteenth century in Europe, as a Dominican teacher and philosophical/theological commentator, at a time when, as Hayes, et al., comment about this period, "Men were absorbed by the attempt to understand the nature of the world and of man and to explain the existence of God and the meaning of creation. . . . To the average medieval thinker, philosophy was not an end in itself. It should lead him to truth, and in particular to theological truth, which he deemed the highest of all."1 In the medieval period, intellectual and religious rivalries and the threat of accusations of heresy confronted and plagued serious philosophical and theological thinkers. It was during this period, indeed, that the Catholic Church was institutionalized as the chief arbiter of society, morals, and politics. Inevitably, then, the nature of God would be considered as a primary philosophical question, and from such questions proceeded considerations of the nature of man and the whole of the universe. Freemantle notes that in his own era Aquinas came under an intellectual cloud as a result of efforts by reli

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hypothesis, in the form of a preexisting and preeminent hypothesis. Aquinas seems to dub this preexisting phenomenon and the reason's ability to abstract from it evidence of the existence of God. The null hypothesis is not an absolute; God, for Aquinas, is. The third argument for the existence of God arises from "possibility and necessity,"15 or in other words from the possibility of being and not being. What one sees or thinks, in this view, at one time was not seen or thought and may in future disappear. If the structure of the first and second proofs for the existence are accepted, which is to say that Aquinas's concept of the origin of motion and of cause go to a primary source of all motion and creation, then the logic of third argument can easily be seen. This is the core of the argument: "[I]f at one time nothing was in existence, it would have been impossible for anything to have begun to exist; and thus even now nothing would be in existencewhich is absurd."16 That things exist is manifest, and that something must have caused their existence has already been shown; indeed, Aquinas cites what "has been already proved in regard to efficient causes."17 But again, to reason backward between being and notbeing to i

Category: Philosophy - A