St. Thomas Aquinas' Five Ways

St. Thomas Aquinas was a Dominican priest, theologian, and philosopher, and was considered one of the greatest Christian philosophers in history. He believed that reason should be embraced by Christianity. According to Aquinas, God had created us with this capacity and when used correctly, we can see the world more fully as an emanation of God. To prove that reason wasn't an enemy to faith, Aquinas developed rational arguments for the existence of God. Since God was such an abstract being to understand, it was necessary to use logic in order to understand Him and bring one close to Him. This grasp of reason was influenced by a very Muslim concept. Instead of seeing reason as an opposition to faith, as it was during the Middle Ages, Aquinas brings reason back into focus and teaches how to embrace it in order to prove Christian faith.


Out of Aquinas' Five Ways, the one I believe is most reasonable and makes the most sense is the Fourth Way: The Argument from Degrees and Perfection. Basically:

St. Thomas formulated this Way from a very interesting observation about the qualities of things. For example, one may say that of two marble sculptures one is more beautiful than the other. So for these two objects, on has a greater degree of beauty than the next. This is referred to as degrees or gradation of a quality. From this fact Aquinas concluded that for any given quality (e.g. goodness, beauty, knowledge) there must be a perfect standard by which all such qualities are measured. These perfections are contained in God.



Generally, I am not in favor of the fact that God is regarded as the necessary being that needs to exist in order for things to move or exist, etc. However, I agree with the fact that everything is generally compared to an ideal that we have in our minds. Of course, we cannot say what beauty exactly is, but there are standards that we have for what is considered "beautiful" in our minds. Thus, we tend to compare and contrast things according to those standards. From experience, we know what is more beautiful and what is less beautiful. This "perfect standard" is one we set ourselves, and we set standards such as these in areas other than just this one.



The Way I believe is most unreasonable would probably be the Second Way: Causation of Existence. Basically:

This Way deals with the issue of existence. Aquinas concluded that common sense observation ttells us that no object creates itself. In other words, some previous object had to create it. Aquinas believed that ultimately there must have been an uncaused first cause (God) who began the chain of existence for all things.

1) There exist things that are cause (created) by other things.

2) Nothing can be the cause of itself (nothing can create itself)

3) There can not be an endless string of objects causing other objects to exist.

4) Therefore, there must be an uncaused first cause called God.

All in all, I do not believe that we can conclude that God began the chain of existence for all things. We cannot necessarily say that God created the world and all things in it. There are still theories such as the Big Bang Theory and other scientific reasons which support a scientific development of the universe. It's almost impossible to say the world was created this one way. If nothing can be the cause of itself, then the question is, how did God even come to be? As mentioned in class, God is probably just a personification of this supernatural force that initiated what we have today. There might not even have been a force. The universe may have just come into existence in the blink of an eye. There are endless possibilities for creation, especially since it is such a mystery.