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prophet69 said:
Yes.St. Thomas Aquinas, the Angelic Doctor of the Church, is one of the greatest Western philosophers of religion toever live. In his magnum opus , the Summa Theologiae , Aquinas writes, “there are five ways of proving there is a God.” ( ST , 1.2.3) These arguments rely on Aristotelian metaphysics which I will explain as the argument progresses. Out of the Five Ways, I’ll use the first – a simple cosmological argument based on the Aristotelian idea of motion . I’ll then analyze the implications ofthis argument and show how it affirms the existence of God.
The First Way, or the Thomistic Cosmological Argument
For Aristotle and Aquinas, motion did not mean spatial movement, it meant change. So in order to understand the First Way, let’s analyze the concept of change . However, for the ancient Greek philosopher Parmenides, change is nonexistent; for this entails that a state of affairs, such as my microwave oven blaring obnoxiously, must come from another state of affairs, my microwave oven’s silence. To Parmenides, this is impossible – the being of my microwave’s blaring comes from the non-being of my microwave’s silence,but ex nihilo , nihil fit , Parmenides says: out of non-being, no being can come. Aristotle responded to this argument with the distinction between potentiality and actuality – that is, the new state of affairs exists as a potentialwithin the previous state of affairs, until it is actualized by that previous state.Now, we know that a potential cannot actualize itself, because it does not exist as a state of affairs yet. So only something actual can raise a potentialto actuality. In the case of my microwave oven, the microwave oven must exist before it can raise its potential to trumpet cacophony. So what is actualized is actualized by an actual. However, we must stop somewhere – for only can we observe change if something is changing it; thus, an infinite regress of actuals is meaningless and would not be able to produce change. Note, however, that here Aquinas is referring to a hierarchical system of motion, not a linear system of motion. A hierarchical system is one in which potentials are simultaneously dependenton actuals; for instance, a microwave’s potential to be raised three feet in the air is actualized by a three-foot-tall refrigerator,which is in turn actualized by the Earth, and so forth. So Aquinas means there must be a “First Mover” in this sense. Further note that the “First Mover” exists as actus purus , pure actuality, without any potentials, for these potentials would only move the system of motion further back – or, in Aquinas’s words, “we arrive then at a first cause of change not itself being changed by anything, and this is what everybody understands by God .” ( ST , 1.2.3)
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