Thereby the first role of God established by Aquinas in his first way is that God is the ‘prime mover’. He was the being that caused everything after it to move. Deists see their role as ‘cause in fieri’ that God caused the first movement but then left it to continue by itself. Aquinas’s second way is the uncaused cause. His cosmological argument states that every affect has a cause, which itself has a cause.
It is also deductive, so the conclusion is the only possible one that could be deduced give the premises. Therefore, it is theoretically strong. Anselm proposed in the Proslogian that the existence of God was true for him by the virtue of faith and logical necessity. He proposed a reductio ad absurdum argument that aimed to demonstrate he impossibility of denying God’s existence. His first form of the argument runs as follows: (P1) God is that than which nothing greater can be conceived (P2) If God exists in the mind alone (in intellect) then a greater being can be conceived (in re) (P3) God to be the greatest being, has to existing the mind and in reality, otherwise another being would be greater than God.
Elbert D. Thomas Aquinas Five Ways Elbert Thomas Jr. Research Paper Philosophy of Religion Question 1 of part 1 of the Summa considers the nature and extent of “sacred doctrine,” or theology. Aquinas concludes that, although theology does not require philosophy to promote knowledge of God, philosophy nevertheless can be of service to the aims of theology. Question 2 of part 1 concerns the existence of God and is subdivided into three Articles. In the First Article, Aquinas maintains that the proposition “God exists” is self-evident in itself, but not to us, and thus requires demonstration. The Second Article concludes that such a demonstration is indeed possible, despite objections to the contrary.
He then trounces the argument, saying, “If we use the causal argument at all, all we are entitled to infer is the existence of a cause commensurate with the effect to be explained, the universe, and this does not entitle us to postulate an all-powerful, all-perfect uncaused cause. The most it would entitle one to conclude is that the cause is powerful enough and imperfect enough to have created the sort of world we know.”1 He then states that because the world is imperfect, and because we see a great deal of unnecessary evil, if we reason that there is a creator at all, he must be either “a malevolent powerful being or . . . a well-intentioned muddler.”2 It would seem that Mr. McCloskey assumes that the universe as we know it (with its current defects) must be the world as it was created, without considering the theist’s appeal to special revelation as to why this may be so.
Second view is more difficult because compatibilist talk about reasonable futures. To fully understand Inwagen views, I fist like to define terms that need further explanation to fully understand his explanation. He defines free will as being able to take more then one fork in the road, meaning choices. Determinism is the way things are at any particular moment determines a unique physically possible future. Indeterminism is the concept that events (certain events, or events of certain types) are not caused, or not caused deterministically (by causality) by prior events.
The cosmological argument has several different forms and seeks to prove the existence of an external necessary being which caused the universe to come into existence. This external agent according to the cosmological argument is God. It is an a posterior argument meaning it is based on our experience of the universe around us. Plato and Aristotle were the first to postulate views on the idea that the universe could not exist without a mover. They both argued that the fact of motion needs a prior agency to motivate it and this mover itself would not need a further mover itself as it would be a prime mover, a necessary being.
The first premise states that “whatever begins to exist has a cause for its existence.” Based on experience things that come to existence has a cause. A couple examples are paintings have painters and sculptures have sculptors. In the case of the cause of our existence God is the cause. He is the beginning of what exists today. An argument against this however is the cause of God.
THEOLOGY ESSAY A)EXPLAIN THE KEY IDEAS OF THE DESIGN ARGUMENT AND GIVE REASONS WHY SOME PHILOSOPHERS REJECTED THIS ARGUMENT FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD. The Design argument looks at the order and purpose, or telos, in the world and states that it implies that there must be a designer who made the world ‘just right’ for human existence. Religious believers go on to state that this designer is God. The argument states that if one uses one’s senses to look at order, such as gravity and the motion of the planets, which exists in the world, it is likely that one will accept that there is a designer God who created the world and gave it this order. Thus, the argument is a posteriori, based on experience, and inductive, containing a conclusion that
J. Ayer claimed that to speak of a designed universe is meaningless. Unless we could say what the world would have been like without a designer, we cannot reach the conclusion that this world is designed. Who establishes that there is beneficial order in the universe? How do we argue from that to the conclusion that god has designed it? Swinburne counted this by claiming that the order in the universe does require an explanation.
The design argument outlines that the world has been designed, and therefore requires a designer. This designer, has to have been God because he is the only being that has the power and will to do so. This argument is a posteriori because it bases it’s argument on observations within the Universe. It is also an inductive proof because it has more than one possible conclusion. There are a few ideas that support the idea of the world being designed, one of them being Aquinas’s Fifth Way.