The Five Proofs for the Existence of God by Saint Thomas Aquinas

The scientific method had non emerged by the chivalric period; in the thirteenth century, when atomic number 63 had emerged from the Dark Ages but had not yet reached the renaissance, the rigorous understanding methods that were utilise derived from classics to which religious writers had access. This method, with its emphasis on the power of close and rational thinking, was adopted by doubting Thomas as he developed the discipline of scholasticism. The scholastic method, which among other things sought to think toward a synthesis of conceptions of the abstract and material, in Aquinas's hands " be questions and quoted contrary opinions . . . and then offered resolutions of the contradictions for each question."3 Scholasticism was applied to both theo system of logical and philosophical questions, with the theological questions (consistent with the temper of the clippings) assume priority with commentators.

The single most prevalent preoccupation of medieval commentators who were contemporaries of Aquinas was the problem of being as a philosophical concept, with the points of view of Plato and Aristotle as regards being competing for dominance. "Philosophy," comments Freemantle in this regard, "is have-to doe with with the whole problem of what being is, of whether the universe is caused or is selfexplanatory, and with the totality of phenomena, in so far as they turn over to explain such fu

The thirdly argument for the creation 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 emerging disappear. If the structure of the first and second proofs for the existence are accepted, which is to guess 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 bone marrow 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 hitherto 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 infinity is to encounter notbeing only. Accordingly, at that place must needs have been a preexistent being, whose existence Aquinas describes as necessary. By the same token, this being must be contingent on no other being, and capable on no other being. The stopping point at which the necessity of being arises is that point at which man's reason and judgement encounter God.

Belief: The Medieval Philosophers, ed. Anne Freemantle, A Mentor

by Anton C. Pegis. New York: The Modern Library, 1948.

1Carlton J.H. Hayes, Marshall Whitehed Baldwin, and

A Mentor control (New York: New American Library, 1954), 159.

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