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Aquinas Arguments For God's Existence Of God

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Group 2 (Problem 3) Anselm’s, and Aquinas’s arguments concerning God’s existence
Comparing the two medieval thinkers, Anselm and Aquinas will examine their stances on the argument concerning the existence of god. Both of Saint Anselm in his Ontological argument and Saint Thomas Aquinas in his argument “The Existence of God” confirmed that god does exist.
Saint Anselm (1033-1109), was one of the most important Christian thinkers of the eleventh century, present one of the most famous arguments for God 's Existence. Saint Anselm started his argument with defining the God as " that, the greater than which cannot be conceived.”(Anselm 40R) Anselm briefly explained the existence of god by using several topics and examples such as the painter when …show more content…

The one weakness of Anslem argument is that he didn 't give enough evidences for God existence in reality. Another weakness posed by St Aquinas, as Anselm states God is "that which nothing greater can be conceived" then to understand God in this way is to be equal to him, which Anselm is human and cannot be equal to God. The one strength of Aquinas argument: Aquinas was influential philosopher concerning the different people who have different concepts of God, and how they could understand and accept his argument. Aquinas also presented five ways as evidences to argue the existence of God. One of the weaknesses of the Aquinas argument is that Aquinas contradicts himself when he rejects the possibility that the universe is unlimited. Then he argues that God has no end. It also states that everything is conditional, but God is unconditional. (Aquinas

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Overall, Aquinas: for Arm Chair Theologians, by Timothy M. Renick makes several interesting and valid points about evil, free will, and the omnipresence/ omnipotence of God. Renick also provided an interesting analysis of Aquinas’ understanding of God’s existence in time and space. Personally, I agreed with most of what Renick and Aquinas thought about God. I strongly disagree with Calvin and Luther’s idea of predestination. I agree that God gave us all free will, that God is above time, that he chooses what he wants to know and what he doesn’t want to know, and that God does not create catastrophes or evil but that he provides us with the resources and matter to create evil.

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Anselm’s argument is based on this known definition of the concept of God alone. Descartes’ argument for the existence of God is based on his foundation of knowledge, logic. Humans have the idea in their minds of infinite perfection. Humans also have the idea of themselves as inferior to this idea as imperfect. For humans to have the idea of infinite perfection, there must be truth in the reason for them having this idea.

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The paradox of the stone heavily relies on Thomas Aquinas’s understanding of gods omnipotence. Aquinas proposes that Omnipotence is the power to do everything that is possible, not just to do anything. Aquinas breaks it down into two forms of possibilities; Relative possibility and Absolute possibility that will be discussed first in order to understand the paradox of the stone argument. Relative possibility is a power that lies within some beings, but not within others.

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The objection addressed the validity of the argument which had the premise 1, nothing is the efficient cause of itself except God and premise 2, a chain of causes cannot be infinite. The argument thus concludes there must be a first cause. This conclusion agrees with my thesis that Saint Thomas Aquinas’s argument formulated in the second way leads to a valid argument, which concludes that there must be a first cause and that God

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Aquinas’ First Cause argument is one of a number of Cosmological arguments that aim to prove the existence of God. A Cosmological argument is based on observation and entails the insistence of Gods necessary existence in order to explain the existence of the Universe. The Fist Cause Argument uses the cause and effect of material objects going back into the past in order to find the first cause. It comes to the conclusion of the first cause being an uncaused cause which is said to be the traditional Christian, all-knowing, all-loving and all-powerful, God. There are a number of arguments and objections to the First Cause but I will argue the success of the objection ‘God is More’ objection which objects to the conclusion of the argument that states that the Christian version of God ,with its attached attributes, exists.

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The argument for God’s existence is that God is a perfect being, he is infinite, independent, supremely intelligent, and supremely powerful. Descartes goes on to talk about how God exists because he can conceive of him as better than himself (AD 40). God is perfect and perfect at everything, and was the first thing that sent everything into motion (AD 45). God is the ultimate cause.

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In this essay, I will set out to prove that Thomas Aquinas’ First Cause Argument does not show that God exists and the conclusion that God exists does not follow from the premises of the first cause argument. I do think that the conclusion is valid and could be sound/or has the potential to be, but the premises fail to provide the basis upon which to reach such a conclusion. Hence, I will be raising some objections to the premises and will try to disprove any counter-arguments that could be raised in its defense. This would be done by examining Aquinas’ First Cause Argument and trying to disprove it whilst countering arguments in its defense.

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The existence of God has been presented by a multitude of philosophers. However, this has led to profound criticism and arguments of God’s inexistence. The strongest argument in contradiction to God’s existence is the Problem of Evil, presented by J.L Mackie. In this paper, I aim to describe the problem of evil, analyse the objection of the Paradox of Omnipotence and provide rebuttals to this objection. Thus, highlighting my support for Mackie’s Problem of evil.

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Evil is a hardship, meaning it is the lack of fullness in something that already has existence, and this we call God. Not a single thing is pure evil for an evil thing is starts as a first thing. This means that it has some existence, and some good, of which God is the cause. Since evil is the lack of existence, God is not the direct, i.e. per se, cause of it; He is the cause of evil only indirectly, i.e. per accidens, insofar as He causes things to exist in which there is found some evil. So, Aquinas believes that the existence of God can be proved from the fact that things exist and do not cause their own existence.

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Then we look at the second argument of Aquinas, The Argument of Causation- everything that is caused has to be caused by something else, there cannot be an infinite number of causes, and same as argument number one that must mean there is a God since all effects have causes. The Argument from Contingency asks if everything already exists contingently has a reason to do so, does the universe exists for a reason and if the universe has a reason for its existence that that reason must be God. The Aquinas fourth argument the Argument from Degrees Aquinas says in order to compare two things in the terms of good or bad, we must have something to compare it to, this would have to be an absolutely perfect thing aka God. Aquinas’ fifth and final argument is The Teleological Argument-

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I think Aquinas did prove God existence. Aquinas argued that there must be a designer who had the intelligence and power to create the universe itself and everything in it, which was God. Using his five proofs of god 's existence some can be supplied for his existence. The creations being put into motion, we observe motion around us but there was a mover that caused the motion which was God. The creations of elements, how things came about of course nothing was self made which is why God is the maker or creator.

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Among the many points raised in these readings I was particularly interested in the five proofs of the existence of God that Aquinas puts forward in the Summa Theologiae. I was particularly interested in the first proof that Aquinas makes. In his first proof of God he suggests that our senses show us that things are in motion and the only way something moves is if a potential motion changes to actual motion. Since only actual motion can convert potential motion then things cannot be potential and actual at the same time and thus each thing placed in actual motion is done so by something else in actual motion. This sequence of transferring potential to actual motion cannot continue on forever and thus something or someone must have been the

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This is its biggest weakness, in order for it to succeed someone has to presuppose that God exists. Another weakness is based on whether or not existence is an actual property of something like its size, weight, or color. If existence isn’t considered a property then it fails, but if it is then it succeeds. Then there is the cosmological argument.

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Detail both the strengths and weaknesses of the cosmological arguments for the existence of the god of tradition, and make an argument for whether or not they effectively establish the certainty or probability of the existence of a Judeo-Christian-Muslim sort of god. The cosmological arguments formed by Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century in order to validate the existence of God are subject to both strengths and weaknesses. The cosmological arguments are composed of the first four out of Aquinas’ Five Ways to Prove the Existence of God. The first four ways are Motion, Causation, Contingency, and Degrees, all of which take part in concluding the presence of a god as definite, and possesses the roles of the unmoved mover, uncaused causer, the

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In other words, Anselm stipulates that God must exist since we can’t think of something greater than God but Descartes says the main reason why God exists is because he is a perfect being. St. Anselm and Descartes arguments are without doubt the most important arguments to the existence of God. They formed the basis for further discussion both by those that agree to these schools of thought as well as those that saw the arguments as weak and decided to show why. Both philosophers agreed that the comprehension of the concept of God was sufficient for anyone to believe in the existence of God even though Anselm argument was skewed towards our inability to conceive a more powerful being while Descartes mainly concentrates on the perfect nature in

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