Thursday, March 08, 2007

Rebuttal of Aquinas's "Five Proofs" (part 1)

I was reading a blog on the computer where Thomistic, the owner of the blog Roman Catholic Blog was presenting St. Thomas Aquinas’s five proofs that God existed by the use of reason alone. I thought he had seemed to prove it. So, I asked gramps his idea of it. Gramps never looked up from the paper he was reading as he said;

"Boy, if man could prove by reason alone that God existed there would be no need of Faith. Faith is a necessity for a belief in God. It is the fact that reason alone is not capable of it that there is a saying that faith begins where reason ends. But at the same time faith alone cannot be enough for a belief in God. It requires the use of reason too. The two are inseparable. And both are finite also.

The first two proofs use the cause and effect method to show proof. The idea was to show that God is not only is an Existence but also is a Being. St. Thomas tries to use a regression to prove this by declaring we can know that God exist by the Effect. Where there is a known effect there must be a prior Cause. The problem here is that in using a regressive argument we can then see it as a progressive argument for any rebuttal.

The third tries to declare God is a necessity from the basis of all things possible. And that He is the first necessity. The fourth that God is a perfection. The fifth that God is an intelligent being.
Thus, we have a progressive argument from the idea that God is an existence to one that God is a necessary and perfect intelligent existence of being. And that He is the cause of all things inclusive of Existance except for Himself.

The only thing that was not considered was the fact of his infinity and man’s finiteness of being.

Man lives in a finite state of existence.

The best way to define this is in the fact that we live in state of existence of a beginning and end. All that is finite has a beginning and end. And that includes all things of existence or being. And all that can be conceived is finite even our thoughts. Every thought has a beginning and end. One more thing, wherever we know of an end we know there must be a beginning. All that we know that has a beginning must have an end.

God, though, always was; God always is; and God always will be. And what can be said of the God that always was can be said of God that always is. And what can be said of God that always will be can be said of God that always is too. Thus if anything that effects one it would effect the others also. That is one basis which we can use to view Him as a Triunity. Therefore, not only would God be the first Cause He would also have to be the first Effect by the nature of His being and existance.

Now, boy, can you think of anything that would make God the first Effect?"

That really got me to thinking and I could not think of anything. Can you?

4 comments:

opal said...

You are quite a Man, Mr. Griper. Quite an intelligent, wonderful, Man. Whom I must admit, I admire,respect and honor. ~Opal~

nin238 said...

I happen to stumble upon this blog randomly and have to say that this is a bit confusing. While I might agree that Aquinas has the basic idea of existence outside of this existence right, how does he come to justify his religion's dogma. He makes the merit less claim that God (in the Christian sense) is the sole culprit. Because of the lack of evidence I could switch this around to Allah, Bob Cobb, or even the Spaghetti monster. Dogma is solely human created and because just about all religions require some adherence to dogma, it seems that religion is a human creation. I would like to get your response if I could...

nin238 said...

I happen to stumble upon this blog randomly and have to say that this is a bit confusing. While I might agree that Aquinas has the basic idea of existence outside of this existence right, how does he come to justify his religion's dogma. He makes the merit less claim that God (in the Christian sense) is the sole culprit. Because of the lack of evidence I could switch this around to Allah, Bob Cobb, or even the Spaghetti monster. Dogma is solely human created and because just about all religions require some adherence to dogma, it seems that religion is a human creation. I would like to get your response if I could...

The Griper said...

that was the point of his proofs. to show that it went beyond man made dogma.

he wasn't trying to prove a particular dogma here, only trying to prove the existence of a God through the use of logic.

and welcome to my site. hope you stay or come back for more.

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