Aquinas

Saint Thomas Aquinas is most notably known for his Five Ways of Proving the Existence of God. Aquinas "believed that both faith and reason discover truth, and a conflict between them being impossible since they both originate in God" (Magee, http://www.aquinasonline.com/). Of Aquinas' strongest arguments is that of possibility and necessity. This includes the thought that to exist, means that something before it must have existed and generated it, and because this regress cannot go on forever, it is postulated that the very first being must be God.

Aquinas notes that "in nature things that could either exist or not exist, since they are found to be generated, and then to corrupt; and, consequently, they can exist, and then not exist" (Bowie, 59). For instance, a butterfly could either exist, or not exist, it cannot be in limbo. All things in nature are also found to be generated, or found to be an offspring of a paternal or maternal being that holds the same characteristics.

St. Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225-1274), the eponym of T...

Thomas Aquinas depicted in stained glass

The fifth of Thomas Aquinas' proofs of God's exist...

Aquinas goes on to explain that "for what which can one day cease to exist must at some time have not existed" (Bowie, 59). For all living things that do exist, there must have been some time when they were not in existence, a time when the first butterfly, for example, came into being. He proposes that butterflies weren't always fluttering about, but rather that a first butterfly was generated from which all subsequent butterflies were procreated. Hence, the bigger question turning to be what caused the formation of the first butterfly? He also stated that "if everything could cease to exist, then at one time there could have been nothing in existence" (Bowie, 59). This signifies that since all things in nature can cease to exist, or to...