Aquinas and Philosophy
Philosophy Essay
Question: Explain how Thomas Aquinas tries to prove Gods Existence (30)
St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) was a Catholic Italian Monk who was regarded to be one of the most important philosophers of the medieval period. Aquinas had adopted the works of Aristotle's analysis of physical objects, his view of place, time and motion, his proof of the prime mover and his cosmology. He tried to connect the Christian faith together with the Philosophy of Aristotle’s work in his 'Summa Theologica'. Aquinas used 5 arguments to do this, with the first 3 being regarded as the Cosmological Argument, as the arguments were coherent and summed up to the same conclusion that; there must be a cause of the cosmos, and that cause being God. His main achievement was to bring together faith and reason and Aquinas had used the theory of A Posteriori in order to address this. This term basically just means that things have not been learnt/accepted on the base of experience, and Aquinas used this to claim that we have no direct understanding of God's nature as perfection, as the starting point to his argument.
Aquinas's first way to prove Gods existence was known as the argument from Motion. As Aquinas had stated in his Summa Theologica, on the third Article 'Whether God exists' ''It is certain and evident to our senses, that in the world some things are in motion''. Through our senses, such as feeling, observing, tasting, we are able to perceive that a real world exists, and this is how Aquinas would prove that a real cosmos also would exist. Nothing can theoretically move by itself, every object in motion would have a mover, and this mover would also have a mover. However you cannot have an infinite chain of movers? Therefore Aquinas thought that there was an unmoved mover and this was known as 'God'. Something must have put the object moving into its state and it maybe could have been an external supernatural power. As Philosopher Peter Kreeft mentioned that if
Question: Explain how Thomas Aquinas tries to prove Gods Existence (30)
St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) was a Catholic Italian Monk who was regarded to be one of the most important philosophers of the medieval period. Aquinas had adopted the works of Aristotle's analysis of physical objects, his view of place, time and motion, his proof of the prime mover and his cosmology. He tried to connect the Christian faith together with the Philosophy of Aristotle’s work in his 'Summa Theologica'. Aquinas used 5 arguments to do this, with the first 3 being regarded as the Cosmological Argument, as the arguments were coherent and summed up to the same conclusion that; there must be a cause of the cosmos, and that cause being God. His main achievement was to bring together faith and reason and Aquinas had used the theory of A Posteriori in order to address this. This term basically just means that things have not been learnt/accepted on the base of experience, and Aquinas used this to claim that we have no direct understanding of God's nature as perfection, as the starting point to his argument.
Aquinas's first way to prove Gods existence was known as the argument from Motion. As Aquinas had stated in his Summa Theologica, on the third Article 'Whether God exists' ''It is certain and evident to our senses, that in the world some things are in motion''. Through our senses, such as feeling, observing, tasting, we are able to perceive that a real world exists, and this is how Aquinas would prove that a real cosmos also would exist. Nothing can theoretically move by itself, every object in motion would have a mover, and this mover would also have a mover. However you cannot have an infinite chain of movers? Therefore Aquinas thought that there was an unmoved mover and this was known as 'God'. Something must have put the object moving into its state and it maybe could have been an external supernatural power. As Philosopher Peter Kreeft mentioned that if