Faith, Reason and Science: St. Thomas Aquinas and Our World.
... , Augustine, Pseudo-Dionysius and Proclus Aquinas belived that every other had something worthwhile to offer. It was Aquinas’s major work Summa Theologica that sepeatred him from the plethora of Aristolien followers. In Summa Theologica, Aquinas reasons the existence of God. It is the first time that a man of reason combined philosophy and religion. In the text of Summa Theologica the reader is offered five arguments that God exists. Of those five I am focusing on just the first two. As a man of faith, it is my opinion that the first two argumentss in Summa Theologica do provide sufficient evidence to the existence of God. The following is a summary of the first two propositions: (Falcone: p.76) The Argument from Motion: We observe that there is motion in the world. Everything that moves must be put into motion by something else. A thing cannot be both mover and moved, it cannot move by itself. If everything is moved by something, one must admit to an infinity of moved and movers, and there would be no first mover. If this were so there would be no movement, since the second mover depends on the first, the third on the second, etc. There must be then a first mover of the universe. This first cause we call God. The Argument from Efficient Cause: No being can be its own efficient cause. Since the cause is neccesarily anterior to its effect, a being would have to be anterior to itself in oreder to be its own efficient cause. This, of course is impossible. The material world is contingent, it is an intermediate cause in a series of causes, and thus requires a necessary uncreated being, a first efficient cause. This first efficient cause, the cause of being, we call God. Regarding the first proof it can be explained in more pedestrian terms to those not fluent in philosophy studies. It is the difference between potential and actual. In order for something to exist it has to be actual. For example: The interior of a refrigerator is actually cold. The leftovers on the counter are not cold, but are potentially cold, because they will go into the refrigerator. The refrigerator makes the potentially cold leftovers, actually cold. The refrigerator alters the state of the leftovers. Furthermore, the leftovers cannot be both potentially cold and actually cold at the same time, as it is impossible. Aquinas’s first proof states this as well – the moved cannot be the mover. At some point the movement was set into motion by something else. Some claim that this process is infinite, but I support that it cannot be infinite, as there would never be an original mover. This notion violates the laws of physics as well as creationism, a concept that is widely accepted by Christianity. As Aquinas states, there must be an originator of movement and that originator can be understood to be God the unmoved mover. The second argument that is provided by Aquinas is based on efficient causation, which is similar to a widely used notion, cause and effect. It is the production of the effect or result that is important in this argument. It brings the potential into the actual. Man is familiar with means and end as it is evident in our world. Unlike this fact an effect can never cause itself, it is not reasonable either. It is self evident that it is not possible to have infinite series of efficient causes. At some point there must be a primary cause, as each effect is reliant on that original cause. A domino in the middle of a series of dominoes cannot fall if the original domino is not set in motion first (assuming perfect conditions). Summarizing these two arguments, it is clear that Aquinas believes that everything is created by something and that there is a primary source to everything. Movement or efficiency creates all things. The difference between the two is that movement perpetuates movement, while an efficient cause creates the existence of something. Conversely if there was not a primary movement or effect then all life as we know it would fail to exist. Both reasonings are compelling. For someone of faith they are reasonable arguments. As stated earlier, there, of course, are/were opponents of such proofs. Regarding the first argument, a common statement against has been in the form of a simple question. If God is the mover, then what moved God? It is this question that is able to disprove Aquinas by creating circular logic. In order to answer the question there are two possible answers. 1. God has always existed or 2. God just moved. The second answer is too simplistic and therefore lacks value. The first answer could be refuted by suggesting, that if God always existed, then he would never needed to move. In order to prove that God existed forever, Aquinas would need to prove that God exists period. There is an answer to this conundrum that I alluded to earlier, but I opt to defer that until later in this paper. The second argument is very similar to the first in its ability to be refuted. By simply asking: Is there more than one entity controlling the universe? The answer can only be 1. Yes 2. No 3. Unknown. None are very compelling defenses of the question. Again I will defer this until later. Aquinas is not the only man to try and reconcile God’s existence and reason. Norman Geisler outlined reasons for the existence of God in his text Christian Apologetics. Like Aquinas he adopted his method from both teleological and cosmological schools. Among his outline Geisler included the following points: “We can safely assume that we exist, and exist in time. If we do exist, there are only two possible explanations as to how our existence came to be. Either we had a beginning or we did not have a beginning.” “We can observe, using scientific methods, that the universe is expanding.” “We know from laws of physics that matter cannot be created from nothing (ex-nihilo) or destroyed - only converted to energy.” “We can deduce from this evidence that the universe did not always exist. If we project time backwards, "rewinding the tape" of time backwards, imagining an ever-shrinking universe, until we come to a beginning point in time and space. We therefore conclude that the universe had a beginning.” “We can determine the characteristics of a cause necessary to initiate the observable universe through reason (from ontological and cosmological arguments), and correlate them with the description of the God of the Bible: (See Gen. 1:1, Ex. 3:14, 1, Jer 10:12, Tim 1:17).” “We can examine the evidence that exists for design in the universe, and predict the qualities required of a Designer capable enough to conceive such a work in all its beauty and complexity.” “We can disprove other possible (non-theistic) explanations using both observation and logic.” “We can safely conclude that the God of the Bible is the only reasonable cause or explanation for the universe we observe.” His writing are much more detailed than what this list allows, but as you may notice, the thoughts are similar to those of Aquinas. Yet Aquinas was not privy to the science that we have today. May of Giesler’s evidence is reasoned with scientific evidence that bolsters Aquinas’s original claims. The most prominent scientific fact being that we can prove that the universe has a starting point. Yet there is rising evidence that science is no longer a fact-only profession anymore. In 1998 an article titled, Science Finds God was published in Newsweek. In the article they interview Allan Sandage, a 72-year-old astronomer. Before the age of 50 he considered himself an atheist. But at that time he came to believe that there truly is a God. “It was my science that drove me to the conclusion that the world is much more complicated than can be explained by science...it is only th...