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Thomas Aquinas Arguments For The Existence Of God

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Aquinas and Existence Thomas Aquinas made several arguments for the existence of God, one of them relying on existence itself as proof of Him. Aquinas claimed that it is possible for all natural things to either exist or not exist, and that only something that is already in existence can bring something nonexistent into existence. From these premises, he deduced that something must have existed before anything else did, and this thing is God. Aquinas was wrong because it is not true that all natural things did not exist at some point in the past, nor is it true that anything can either exist or not exist. Aquinas claimed that God exists because of the causal nature of possibility and necessity. He thought that a thing in nature either exists or does not exist. If it is possible for something to not exist, he said, then it did not exist at some point in the past. Aquinas then claimed that it is impossible to follow an infinite chain of creation of existence, as the origin must eventually be reached. Therefore, at some time there was only one existing thing – the cause of existence for all other existing things. Without an original first existence, he argued, nothing could ever …show more content…

He claimed that if a natural thing can either exist or not exist, then at some time no natural things existed. This conclusion does not follow from the antecedent necessarily. He seems to assume that anything that can happen has already happened. Not only that, he also assumes that all of those random happenings came at the same time! This is clearly an invalid argument that relies on the assumption that anything that can happen has already happened. A natural thing could very well have always existed, but reach non-existence at some future time. The non-existence did not have to occur in the past. Rather, if a thing exists now, we can infer that it has always existed in some form, and will likewise always

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