Mount Toll Productions

Thomas Aquinas

“If anything is found in the words of the philosophers that is contrary to the faith, this is not philosophy but rather an abuse of philosophy, due to a failure of reason” Thomas Aquinas

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If there is anything that is obvious, it is that the existence of God is not obvious. Dan Barker

Many of the contributors of the book “Answering the Music Man” have a PhD in “philosophy of religion” and as a result quote Thomas Aquinas ad nauseum as their proof that renown atheist Dan Barker is in error when he declares his non-belief in their god. While doing research for my last several blogs, I decided to find out for myself what Thomas Aquinas had written. What I learned was very enlightening.

Before we get started with the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas (ca. 1225–1274) let me first say that I understand that as an intellect and philosopher he was formidable. He is still considered the greatest figure of thirteenth-century Europe. His works are still read, studied and written about to this day. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy says this about Aquinas.

Over a mere two decades of literary activity, Aquinas left behind more than eight million words (eight times more than has survived, for instance, from Aristotle). It is a measure of Aquinas’s immediate and lasting influence that—quite unlike the situation with other medieval philosophers—essentially everything he wrote has survived and has been lovingly edited and translated into English and many other modern languages.

Having only read several hundred of his 8 million words it would be foolish of me to attempt to discredit Aquinas’s genius. He was undoubtedly one of the greatest thinkers of all time and is still revered as one of the great philosophers, in the same league as Aristotle and Plato.

My issues with Aquinas have nothing to do with his great intellect. My issue is that modern day theologians use his 900-year-old writings to justify evangelical Christianity. What became clear was that Aquinas was a product of his time, as we all are. The sciences he pondered on were philosophy and theology. In the thirteenth century, he knew nothing about the (as yet) undiscovered sciences that have taught us much about the world we live in.

What Aquinas didn’t know.

He knew nothing about any of the following…

the Gutenberg Bible (1440)
the western hemisphere (1492)
that the planets revolved around the sun (1500s)
the King James Bible (1611)
the speed of light (1676)
the science of gravity (1687)
the existence of dinosaurs (early 1800s)
atoms and molecules (1827)
germs and bacteria (1860)
the elements and the periodic table (1869)
radio and sound waves (1880s)
the possibility of flight (early 1900s)
the uses of microwaves rather than flames to heat our food (1945)

This list could go on and on. I understand that none of this means that Aquinas is automatically wrong in his observations. I’m simply saying that his complete ignorance of science, as we know it today, and the religious culture of his day, might have limited him to some inaccurate conclusions about the existence of God. If Aquinas were alive today, with his great intellect, and knowing what we know now, it seems possible that he might have come to different conclusions about the existence of God, just as atheist Dan Barker did.

Aquinas starts with the proposition that God exists. How could he come to any other conclusion? Questioning the existence of God in the 13^th century would have been a very dangerous undertaking. The existence of God was not something that he set out to prove as is the case with modern sciences. Had he focused on the study of theology (as if it were a real science), he would have started with the hypothesis that God exists and then tested that hypothesis to see if it is indeed true. I haven’t read all 8 million of Aquinas’s words, but it appears to me that rather than starting with a hypothesis of God’s existence, he started with God’s existence as a given and then set out to justify it.

Aquinas says, “Now the object of the theological virtues is God Himself, Who is the last end of all, as surpassing the knowledge of our reason”

So, when we consider how the authors of Answering the Music Man employ Aquinas’ philosophy to help them defend their religion, it’s hard to ignore that there are gaping holes in their reasoning due in part to Aquinas’s ignorance of the knowledge granted us by modern-day science. We can’t blame Aquinas; he didn’t know what he didn’t know.
However, evangelicals can’t use that excuse. They have the same common knowledge we all do, but they choose to ignore it because it might contradict their religious beliefs.

Five Ways to prove God’s Existence

Aquinas is famous for his Five Ways for proving the Existence of God. Since I had never actually read them for myself, I decided it was time. For a novice like me, I found it very enlightening. If you have never read them, I would encourage it.

After reading Aquinas’s five ways for proving Gods existence, I came to the conclusion that they do not actually prove anything of the sort. They are based solely on philosophy, and I find their conclusion less then convincing. However, theists still use these arguments in debates with atheists so let’s take a look and see if they can stand the test of time.

First way: The Argument of the Unmoved Mover

Summary: In the world, we can see that at least some things are changing. Whatever is changing is being changed by something else. If that by which it is changing is itself changed, then it too is being changed by something else. But this chain cannot be infinitely long, so there must be something that causes change without itself changing. This everyone understands to be God.

So, if A changes B, and B changes C, and C changes D, and D changes E and so on and so forth, the question for philosophers is, what, if anything, changed A? If A starts the change and is unchanged itself then A=God. Therefore, in the words of Aquinas, “this everyone understands to be God.”

I may not have a Ph.D. in Philosophy and I’m certainly not an intellectual elite, (like the authors of Answering the Music Man), but I’m not buying this theory. And that is exactly what it is… a theory… passed off as a presumptive truth.

The next two ways are similar in construction and postulate the concept of “a first cause”. I don’t buy those two either.

Fourth way: The Argument from Degree

Summary: But judging something as being “more” or “less” implies some standard against which it is being judged. For example, in a room full of people of varying heights, at least one must be tallest. Therefore, there is something which is best and most true, and most a being, etc. Aquinas then adds the premise: what is most in a genus is the cause of all else in that genus. From this he deduces that there exists some most-good being which causes goodness in all else, and this everyone understands to be God.

This is proof of the existence of God? Let me see if I understand this reasoning correctly. If we’re considering the intelligence of humans, there has to be someone who is the most intelligent person in the world, such as Einstein in his time, or Oppenheimer in his or Aristotle and Aquinas in theirs. If this is true, then an even more intelligent being has to exist which is at the top of the hierarchy and therefore “this everyone understands to be God.” Like I said before, I don’t have a PhD in philosophy but I’m not buying this!

Fifth way: Argument from Final Cause or Ends

Summary: We see various objects that lack intelligence in the world behaving in regular ways. This cannot be due to chance since then they would not behave with predictable results. So, their behavior must be set. But it cannot be set by themselves since they are non-intelligent and have no notion of how to set behavior. Therefore, their behavior must be set by something else, and by implication something that must be intelligent. This everyone understands to be God.

By objects that lack intelligence, I assume he is talking about animals and possibly plants. If this is true then it seems that Aquinas is trying to explain the concept of what we now call instinct. How does a bird know how to make a nest? How do wasps know how to use either mud other materials to make a wasps’ nest? Some other examples of this phenomenon are,

Beavers building a dam.
Bees creating a beehive and producing honey.
Mother bears nurturing and protecting their young.
Wolves hunting in packs.

The Stanford philosopher who was attempting to explain this concept to a novice like me explains it like this,

The concept of final causes involves the concept of dispositions or “ends”: a specific goal or aim towards which something strives. For example, acorns regularly develop into oak trees but never into sea lions. The oak tree is the “end” towards which the acorn “points,” its disposition, even if it fails to achieve maturity. The aims and goals of intelligent beings is easily explained by the fact that they consciously set those goals for themselves. The implication is that if something has a goal or end towards which it strives, it is either because it is intelligent or because something intelligent is guiding it.

I have five oak trees outside my bedroom window. Maybe I haven’t been paying much attention, but I have yet to see any evidence of arboreal “striving” to propagate. What I have observed, though, is that in autumn, the squirrels in my neighborhood climb the trees, pick the acorns and bury them in the ground for winter. Is the acorn “striving” to be planted in the ground or are the squirrels striving to survive the winter? I fail to see how the conclusion to this is “everyone understands this to be God”.

Maybe everyone in the 13th century, but we know better now, don’t we? At least we should.

If there is anything that is obvious, it is that the existence of God is not obvious. There would be no “Does God Exist?” debates if the question were one of evidence rather than philosophy.

Coming next:

Dan Barker and other renown atheists have come to the conclusion that the God of the bible is a nefarious character. Barker writes, “If you claim to be a good person, then this book (the bible) should embarrass you and disgust you.”

Are theists actually embarrassed by the atrocities found in the Old Testament? And if not, why not? We’ll see, but I will tell you this, I was disgusted by their stance.