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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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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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