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Arguments For God’s Existence: Aquinas’ Five Ways

Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) developed five arguments for God’s existence, simplified in this way:

1. The unmoved mover argument: from our experience of motion in the universe, we can see that there must have been an initial mover. Things do not begin moving on their own.

2. Argument from first cause: it is impossible for a being to cause itself. Therefore there must be a first cause, itself uncaused.

3. Argument from necessary being: if everything can possibly not exist, there must have been a time when nothing existed.

4. Argument from degree: things that are called good are measured against something that has a maximum goodness.

5. Teleological argument: unintelligent objects cannot be ordered toward a purpose unless they are done so by an intelligent being.

Some of these statements are difficult to understand and require further reading to grasp them fully. At the heart of them, however, is a recognition that God, by definition, was not created-He always existed-and the rest of the universe could not have come into existence on its own.

It’s hard to conceptualize anything or anyone existing without having been created by something or someone else. Almost everything in our personal reality has a beginning and an end. We naturally assume that physical things do not spontaneously come into existence. Yet evolutionary theory has no answer for where the first hot gasses came from that the scientific community asserts were the source of our universe.