Aquinas on the Eternality and Necessity of the World (original) (raw)
Related papers
Reconsidering the Necessary Beings of Aquinas's Third Way
European Journal for Philosophy of Religion, 2012
Surprisingly few articles have focused on Aquinas’s particular conception of necessary beings in the Third Way, and many scholars have espoused inaccurate or incomplete views of that conception. My aim in this paper is both to offer a corrective to some of those views and, more importantly, to provide compelling answers to the following two questions about the necessary beings of the Third Way. First, how exactly does Aquinas conceive of these necessary beings? Second, what does Aquinas seek to accomplish (and what does he accomplish) in the third stage of the Third Way? In answering these questions, I challenge prominent contemporary understandings of the necessary beings of the Third Way.
The Validity of Aquinas' Third Way
This article argues for the formal validity of and the truth of the premises and conclusion of a version of Aquinas' "Third Way" that says: If each of the parts of nature is contingent, the whole of nature is contingent. Each of the parts of nature is contingent. Therefore, the whole of nature is contingent--where "contingent" means having a cause and not existing self-sufficiently.
Seeing God: Thomas Aquinas on Divine Presence in the World
Bogoslovni vestnik/Theological Quarterly 79 (2019) 3, 739—749, 2019
How to recognize the presence of God in the world? Thomas Aquinas' proposition, based on the efficient, exemplary and intentional causality, including both the natural level and grace, avoids several simplifications, the consequence of which is transcendent blindness. On the one hand, it does not allow to fall into a panentheistic reductionism involving God into the game of His variability in relation to the changing world. The sensitivity of Thomas in interpreting a real existing world makes it impossible to close the subject in the ''house without windows'', from where God can only be presumed. On the other hand, the proposal of Aquinas avoids the radical transcendence of God, according to which He has nothing to do with the world.
DIVINE NECESSITY AND CREATED CONTINGENCE IN AQUINAS
Heythrop Journal-a Quarterly Review of Philosophy and Theology, 2009
It is becoming increasingly more common in Christian theism to conclude that the classical predication of a necessary God who interacts with contingent creation is logical inconsistency. This criticism is especially made by Process theists, but joining with them have been proponents of Open theism as well as others who seek to more closely unite God with the contingency in creation. It is feared that a God who is the transcendent cause of all that exists is unable to relate to creation without necessarily determining it. Yet Thomas Aquinas was not unaware of the potential difficulty in maintaining both a necessary God and created contingency and postulated a solution to the dialectic that fits comfortably within the classical synthesis. This paper examines Aquinas' solution against the charge of incoherence and finds that far from being inconsistent, it coherently succeeds in reconciling the dialectic.
Aquinas on God's Relation to the World
New Blackfriars, 2012
Aquinas' denial that God has a real relation with the world results in the difficulty of understanding how God creates, knows, wills, and loves the world without entering into a real relation with the world. Because of this perplexity, the contemporary philosopher William Lane Craig argues that Aquinas' doctrine is 'extraordinarily implausible.' After reviewing Aquinas' teaching in the Summa theologiae, I consider Craig's criticism and then attempt to defend Aquinas' teaching. In this defense, I consider Aquinas' teaching as heir to Aristotle, Lombard, and Augustine. I also look at Aquinas' teaching in relation to his discussions of the divine immutability, knowledge, will, and love.
1998
The Third Way is the most interesting and insightful of Aquinas' five arguments for the existence of God, even though it is invalid and has some false premises. With the help of a somewhat weak modal logic, however, the Third Way can be transformed into a argument which is certainly valid and plausibly sound. Much of what Aquinas asserted in the Third Way is possibly true even if it is not actually true. Instead of assuming, for example, that things which are contingent fail to exist at some time, we need only assume that contingent things possibly fail to exist at some time. Likewise, we can replace the assumption that if all things fail to exist at some time then there is a time when nothing exists, with the corresponding assumption that if all things possibly fail to exist at some time then possibly there is a time when nothing exists. These and other similar replacements suffice to produce a cogent cosmological argument. Aquinas' Third Way is a cosmological argument for ...
The Philosophy of God in St. Thomas Aquinas’s Works. A Characterization of the Main Issues
Studia Gilsoniana, 2024
The topic of God in the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas will be treated in three aspects: the question of the existence of God, the essence of God, and the topic of the relations between man and God. In this article, we would like to show the key issues of Thomas’s philosophy of God in order to show how they serve as a starting point for the theology of Aquinas. With regard to the first matter, it was claimed that the only argument of Thomas for the existence of God is the reasoning conducted in De ente et essential, where Aquinas points at the existence of God (the subsistent act of existence – ipsum esse subsistens) as the external efficient cause of the existence of beings composed of two elements, the act of existence and the essence as potentiality. In this perspective, the famous ways of St. Thomas were accepted in numerous philosophical systems (Aristotelianism, Neo-Platonism, and their compilations) to be an illustration of the possibilities of arriving at the stance that the first cause exists. When it comes to the latter issue, we present a concise approach to God’s attributes in Thomas’s Compendium theologiae and show a strictly existential approach to these attributes in the Thomism of Mieczysław Gogacz. Regarding the relation of man to God, we turned our attention —following St. Thomas — to two orders of these relations: natural, related to justice, and supernatural, which is love (friendship) between man and God. As an example of the application of philosophical solutions in theology, we point to a Thomistic interpretation of the development of the religious life of man. In sum, we observe that the philosophy of God, in its version developed by Aquinas, is characterized by strict intellectualism and a naturalistic starting point for philosophical analyses.
Research Statement Aquinas's way of philosophizing the doctrine of God as Ipsum Esse Subsistens
Aquinas's philosophical way of proceeding in his metaphysical analysis by means of which reached his doctrine of Ipsum Esse Subsistens was typically Aristotelian while at the same time assuming the substance of Plato's intuitions and some elements of Plato's philosophical way of proceeding. The aim of this research is to demonstrate which of these views most faithfully reveals Aquinas's genuine thinking on Ipsum Esse Subsistens. Research Plan The research project is postdoctoral or similar; its objective is to conclude the writing of a journal article or a book chapter or both, and it will be deployed in the following phases. 1) First Phase: The Contemporary Debate About Aquinas's Ipsum Esse Doctrine I will contrast the two interpretations of Aquinas's Ipsum Esse doctrine that clash in the contemporary philosophical arena. Scholars of the two currents of interpretation mentioned seem to agree that Aquinas assumes substantially most of Plato's doctrines. For example, in Summa Theologiae 1 q. 6 a. 4 Aquinas maintains that Plato's opinion is "absolutely true" when he affirms the existence of a supreme being "which is essentially good, which we call God." Aquinas thinks that not only is Plato's doctrine correct, but also that "Aristotle agrees with this." And he concludes: "Hence from the first being, which is essentially good, everything can be called good and a being, inasmuch as it
Aquinas’s Real Distinction and Its Role in a Causal Proof of God’s Existence
Roczniki Filozoficzne
This paper is not going to offer any criticism of the way Gaven Kerr treats Aquinas’ argument. Instead, it offers an alternative way of reconstructing Aquinas’ argument, intending to strengthen especially those controversial aspects of it that Kerr’s reconstruction left untreated or in relative obscurity. Accordingly, although the paper’s treatment will have to have some overlaps with Kerr’s (such as the critique of Kenny’s critique of Aquinas), it will deal with issues essential to adequate replies to certain competent criticisms of his argument untreated by Kerr (such as Buridan’s critique). For the sake of the “formally inclined” reader, the paper’s treatment will also include an Appendix offering a formal reconstruction of both the main argument and its sub-arguments to demonstrate the formal rigor of Aquinas’ original.