Fight For A Place in the First Efficient Cause
Who and what is God? Why do some people adamantly conclude that a God exists? St. Aquinas goes from believing that there must be an efficient first cause to the conclusion that God is that cause. Why must Aquinas make such an extraordinary jump from there being a cause, to assuming that this cause must be God? In a scientific point of view, wouldn’t it be just as plausible to make matter the first cause? After all, according to the Law of Conservation of Matter, matter cannot be created nor destroyed. Matter is the substance that any physical object is composed of. Matter is closed and finite, with no beginning nor end. The best explanation to the existence of God through St. Aquinas’s argument is that God does not exist as the first efficient cause.
The argument for God, as presented by St. Aquinas, attempts to show that the existence of the world and everything within it can only be explained if there is a God who is the first efficient cause. The argument states that it is impossible for any being to be the efficient cause of itself because then it would have to bring itself into being, and to bring itself into being, it would have to exist before it existed. If a being exists, it is because some being before it caused it to exist. Therefore, if no first cause exists, neither will any other being exist. Therefore, there must be an efficient first cause -- God.
St. Aquinas’s argument assumes that a first cause is needed to explain the existence of anything. St. Aquinas also assumes this first cause to be God. How can anyone rationally conclude that there is a God from the simple statement that a first cause is necessary for the existence of anything? A first cause does not prove God, it only assumes that there is a God, at best. Could one not put matter in the place of God in St. Aquinas’s argument and still assume there is a first efficient cause? The theory that matter “is”, is just as plausible as the theory that God “is”. Matter is closed and finite in extent, with no beginning nor end.
Putting matter in the place of God in the end of the argument given by St. Aquinas is just as plausible.
To begin with, in order to find Aquinas’ second proof to be a sound argument one must explain the chain of cause and effects that help explain the efficient cause, which is God. There are always things that cause other things. Every effect has a cause, if an effect did not have a cause it would not have been able to exist. Everything could not have come to exist from nothing there has to be a first maker that makes the first being to come to be. God becomes the first efficient cause which starts the chain of cause and effect in which every other thing that is not God depends on Him. Everything that exists from this chain of cause and effect come to be because t...
Aquinas says there are five ways to prove that God exists and one of them is through efficient causation. He starts with the premise that every effect we observe must have been caused by something else. This can be compared to the effect of a particular tree being caused by the planting of a particular seed that grew into that tree. Second, nothing that we observe could have caused itself. A particular tree could not have produced the particular seed that later grew into that tree. The existence of something before itself is contradictory and impossible. He then goes on to explain that if nothing caused itself then it must have been caused by something else that was also caused by something else and so on. If we continue to go up the chain of causes, however, it would seem that the chain of causes goes back to infinity.
Aquinas’ third way argument states that there has to be something that must exist, which is most likely God. He starts his argument by saying not everything must exist, because things are born and die every single day. By stating this we can jump to the conclusion that if everything need not exist then there would have been a time where there was nothing. But, he goes on, if there was a time when there was nothing, then nothing would exist even today, because something cannot come from nothing. However, our observations tell us that something does exist, therefore there is something that must exist, and Aquinas says that something is God.
It is my view that God exists, and I think that Aquinas’ first two ways presents a
In the first part, Aquinas states that the existence of god is not self-evident, meaning that reason alone without appealing to faith can give a good set of reasons to believe. To support this claim, Aquinas refers to “The Argument of Motion”, proposing that:
He came to from well to do family, he had parents and relatives who care for him, but he did not think their love for him were not enough, it did not satisfy his desire to be notice or to get the attention from the popular kids or popular girls. The beginning of Rodger’s manifesto is full of experiences and events from his earliest memory of age one to age 12. In his early year, Rodger’s life seem quite well. He has a loving family, his parents were well off, and he has the chance to travel the world before the age four, that only with who don’t have the money can only dream about. Basically, he was living his life to the fullest with the help of his parents. Thus, he has an easy and relax life. Even when his family moved from England to the United States, Rodger has no problem fitting in with the culture or the American patriotism. If I could have his attitude toward moving to another country that would have been a bit nice. When I was around six, my family and I moved from Vietnam to America. It was one of the toughest and challenges point in my entire life. And, he Elliot Rodger could not have been any
... state. As of May 6, 2014, there has been 142 exonerations nationally. Yet, with so many innocent people who were wrongly accused, the death penalty is still currently being used.
The death penalty is a good way to punish someone who has committed murder. The reason is because if they are willing to take a life then they should have their own taken from them as well. On the fox news website there is an article called “Death Penalty Discourages Crime.” In this article, it says “ between three and 18 lives that would be saved by the execution of each convicted killer.” This statistic alone shows we should want to punish all the convicted murderers. We could save a lot of other people’s lives. The only thing that we have to do in order to save all these lives is to just follow through with capital punishment when that person is convicted of first degree murder. The death penalty can do a lot for our society and for families of the victims. We can prevent
Aquinas argues that “Perhaps not everyone who hears this word "God" understands it to signify something than which nothing greater can be thought”, thus Descartes’ argument is only plausible for those who view God in the same light that he does. Nevertheless, this criticism is easy to solve. If we replace the word “God” with “a being than which none greater can be conceived”, then we instead establish that a being of which none greater can be conceived exists, and we naturally assume that this being is God. Nonetheless, Aquinas continues with a second flaw in Descartes argument, the lack of establishment between physical and mental existence. In light of Aquinas’ criticism, it becomes apparent that Descartes’ argument does nothing to show the physical existence of God. In Axiom X ,Descartes claims “Existence is contained in the idea or concept of every single thing, since we cannot conceive of anything except as existing”. However, this does not prove that God exists, for example, if I imagine a unicorn, this proves the mental existence of unicorns, however it does no such thing for the physical existence. Therefore, Descartes premise may be true, but it fails to be specific enough to make a convincing
One in twenty-five or 4.1% of people sentenced to death are innocent(One in 25). A man named Cameron Todd Willingham was wrongfully sentenced to death. In Texas, during the year 2004 Cameron was accused of killing his three daughters in a fire. Cameron claimed that he was innocent from the very beginning, yet no one believed him. He was found guilty for the act of killing his three daughters in the fire. Later on after his execution, they found more information that helped them come to the conclusion that Cameron was indeed not guilty. As he said from the very beginning(Cameron Todd). This case is particularly weird because the court does not usually look back into a case after one is executed. Cameron is not the only one who was ever wrongfully executed. Cameron is one of many. “I’m actually really opposed to the death penalty”(Bill Paxton). Bill Paxton is one of many who agree that the death penalty is wrong. There are many reasons why one can oppose the death penalty, but the major reason one opposes the death penalty is because it puts the lives of innocent people at risk.
One of Aquinas’s proofs is based on the idea of a first mover and another is based on the idea that intelligence is necessary to direct non-intelligent objects. St. Thomas Aquinas' first argument tries to prove that there must be a first mover. He calls this first mover God. He proves this by saying that whatever is in motion must have been put in motion by something else. He then defines one type of motion as the reduction of something from potentiality to actuality, and says that nothing can make this movement except by something that is already in actuality in the same respect as the first object is in potentiality. He goes on to say that no thing can be both actual and potential in respect to the same aspect and, thus, that nothing can be both moved and mover. In this, he means that nothing can move itself. Therefore, if something is in motion, it must have been put in motion by something else, which must have been put in motion by yet another thing, and so on. However, this cannot go on to infinity, as St. Thomas Aquinas explains, because there would never have been a fist mover and, thus, no subsequent movers. This leads to the conclusion that there is a first mover, and this first mover is what is called God.
The conclusion of Aquinas’s argument is that there must exist a necessary being that is the reason for the existence of contingent beings. Aquinas argues for this conclusion by saying that all contingent beings can be traced back to other contingent beings. He says that because the progenitors are also contingent, they do not give a complete explanation. The existence of contingent beings can only be properly explained by tracing them back to a necessary being.
The last argument is considered the teleological argument or what some modern theorist call argument of design. Which means that the thought of evolution can come into play in regards to how humans came about and how the universe could have been formed. This last argument was not necessarily Aquinas best nor strongest part of his main idea as to why God is existing and may have always been since many theorist have taken the challenge to prove his first four arguments to be false and lacking knowledge and understanding as of how the world was formed.
Aquinas’ first proof says anything currently in motion was put in motion by another thing. This “mover,” as he calls it, cannot also be the “moved.” The mover transfers its own actuality of motion into the moved, which until then only has the potentiality of motion. Since nothing can have both actuality and potentiality at the same time, the mover and moved cannot be the same thing. Since the universe is motion, it could not have been something from the universe which put it into motion. Therefore, there is a God who first put the universe into motion.
debates in the present day. Since God is a notion about an entity that was never seen or heard from by anyone, it has been a strenuous struggle to substantiate his existence. Yet, great philosophers have always found a way to validate the idea of God through their own way of reasoning. The philosophical discussions about God’s existence began with pre-modern philosophers such as Plato, Saint Augustine, and it was further examined by modern philosophers such as Descartes etc. In this essay I will present St. Augustine and Descartes’ arguments for the existence of God and offer my criticism based upon my own set of reasoning.