Aquinas Arguments Against The Existence Of God

Aquinas and Descartes both have arguments for the existence of God, with some similarities and a multitude of differences. Descartes presents two major premises in his argument with his degrees of reality principle and his casual adequacy principle. It is possible for Descartes to be influenced by Aquinas, but the arguments for the same thing differ greatly that even if any inspiration Descartes could have pulled from Aquinas' work is minimal, to say the least.

Anselm. St. Anselm argued that a perfect being is necessary for existence. His argument is even prior to nature. St. Anselm thought it was impossible for anyone to reason about God or God’s existence without already believing in him. St. Anselm started the Ontological Argument based upon the nature of being. The Ontological Argument states that God is “the greatest being conceivable”. Anselm also said that if we imagine two objects both identical, but one exists and the other does not, then the one that exist is more perfect. Perfection cannot be perfect.

One thing that Saint Thomas Aquinas is most known for is his Five Arguments for the Existence of God. The first argument of God's existence that Saint Thomas Aquinas talks about is The Unmoved Mover Argument. The unmoved mover argument can also

In an attempt to justify the existence of God, Christian Philosopher, St Thomas Aquinas, has developed an argument which derived from his observation of the physical world. He evidently observed that everything in the universe is moving and that which is moving is certain that it must have been moved by something else which has also been moved by something else. However, he realizes that by tracing back who has caused the very first movement, he believes that there must

Aquinas argued the existence of God with five main points. Aquinas began by saying that nothing can be a cause of itself; rather every event was caused by some prior event. Therefore event A causes event B that leads to event C and so forth. He believed in this cause and effect relationship but believed that there must be a first cause as a starting point. When contemplating this starting point Aquinas rejected the possibility of an infinite series of events. This means that the universe has not existed forever and there must have been something from which every single event stems. There must be an uncaused first cause, which Aquinas concluded to be God. The first cause is called the unmoved mover. The unmoved mover is what set all other events and beings in motion.

Than there has to be something that already existed to make everything exist and for that to happen that had to be someone, so that is God. Aquinas also pointed one in one of his earlier proofs of the First Mover. Aquinas says that anything moved is moved by another, so there must be a first mover (a mover that is not itself moved by another) and that first mover is God. Both of the philosophers used great methods to come to their conclusion about how god came into existence. They both used different thinking methods to get to their well respected arguments but did come to the conclusion that God does “exist”. I believe the key difference about the two philosophers was the time difference between the philosophers, Thomas Aquinas wrote his proofs in the medieval ages around the 1200’s while ( with no disrespect) Rene Descartes wrote his meditation in the 1600’s. There is a big 400 year gap between ideas are compared but that came down to the same conclusion

Thomas Aquinas believed that the existence of God is self-evident, but rejected the idea that it can be deduced from claims about the concept of God. He critiques Anselm’s ontological argument, stating, “not everyone who hears this word ‘God’ understands it to signify that some have believed God to be a body” . This critique is plausible because most people have different ideas of who God is and what He does. Anselm’s argument works only to convince all people to define the notion of God in the same way. However, Anselm may rebut this critique, arguing that his ontological argument could be restated.

The analogy between God and creation is a metaphysical debate that Theologians and Philosophers are stilling struggling with today. It is only when Philosophy is thought of as a tool for Theology to discover meaning in the concepts used to describe the metaphysical that individuals are able to better understand divinity in either a equivocal or univocal sense. When language is used to describe the similarities and dissimilarities between the creator and creature in a metaphysical sense, disputes on whether or not connections can be made through conceptualizing still rage on today. “Thus, at the critical heart of the entire question, there stand, on the one side, the Joachimism of the West and East and, on the other, the Fourth Lateran Council and Thomas Aquinas: in the former case, gnostic or mystic, exemplary or rhythmic identity as the fundamental principle of theopanism or pantheism, in the latter, analogy as the utterly fundamental principle obtaining between God and creature” (Przywara, p.362). One of the main lessons

Many words are exchanged in the arguments of Aquinas’s existence of God. Aquinas has five different arguments for why God exists, which leads one to believe just as much as he does in our Father. Argument from Possibility and Necessity leads anyone being to agree with every statement of the argument he presents. Aquinas’s third argument will allow one to question his own view on God’s existence. Due to Aquinas’s third argument for God’s existence, this argument gives one the best understanding of God’s existence.

It cannot be refuted that philosophers have struggled with and tried the existence of God, not for years- but centuries. However the idea of God is yet to be exhausted. Aquinas makes the claim that God exists and specifies that the existence of God can be proven in five ways based on features of the world. The argument he makes is cosmological meaning it deduces God is real from facts or processes within the universe.

According to Aquinas, the existence of God can be proven in 5 ways, namely through the arguments of motion, efficient cause, possibility and necessity, gradation, and governance of the world. Motion is regarded by Aquinas as a thing observable. Man can prove that with his senses that things are in motion. It is necessary to believe that movers are put in motion by another mover. Because that is, nothing can be both potential motion and actual motion at the same time in the same respects for either case.

order. The divine order and harmony of the universe further support Aquinas’s argument. The intelligent designer is the final cause of all things. Psalm 19:3-4 makes a valid point as well. It states, “There is no speech nor language, where their voice is not heard. Their line is gone out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world. In them hath he set a tabernacle for the sun.”[18] These two verses also discredits Hume’s argument by saying the universe has no creative attributes of an intelligent designer. Though, the universe cannot speak with a voice, they speak without using words. God’s power is revealed and proclaimed through heavens presentence. Not only is God’s attributes revealed through the universe, the heavens

singularity there is no time and all of the laws of physics as we know

Does God exist? That question has been asked by people for centuries. Christians, Jews, and Muslims would all say that God exists. They would claim that He is the creator of all things and is of a higher being than man is. Others would claim either that God does not exist or that God is not what the Christians, Jews, and Muslims say He is. Both Anselm and Aquinas address this question: Anselm in his "Proslogion" and Aquinas in his "Summa Theologica." The opinions of Anselm and Aquinas as to the nature of God are the same, although Anselm lacks the proof to back up his claims.

Thomas Aquinas theorized five different logical arguments to prove the existence of God utilizing scientific hypotheses and basic assumptions of nature. In the fifth of his famous “Five Ways”, Aquinas sets forth the assumption that all natural bodies move toward an end. Since bodies are constantly moving in the best way possible to achieve that end, the path must be designed. God, of course, is the ultimate designer of the universe.