God Exists

I’d like to thank Magic8000 for challenging me to this debate on the existence of God. I'll define God as a being which has the general Judeo-Christian attributes of omnipotence, omniscience, and perfect goodness, which all major monotheistic religions ascribe to the being they understand as God. I'm not referring to a specific deity, for that would require more than 8000 characters, just a classical theistic conception of God. Introduction St. Thomas Aquinas, the Angelic Doctor of the Church, is one of the greatest Western philosophers of religion to ever live. In his magnum opus, the Summa Theologiae, Aquinas writes, “there are five ways of proving there is a God. ” (ST, 1.2.3) These arguments rely on Aristotelian metaphysics which I will explain as the argument progresses. Out of the Five Ways, I’ll use the first – a simple cosmological argument based on the Aristotelian idea of motion. I’ll then analyze the implications of this argument and show how it affirms the existence of God. The First Way, or the Thomistic Cosmological Argument For Aristotle and Aquinas, motion did not mean spatial movement, it meant change. So in order to understand the First Way, let’s analyze the concept of change. However, for the ancient Greek philosopher Parmenides, change is nonexistent; for this entails that a state of affairs, such as my microwave oven blaring obnoxiously, must come from another state of affairs, my microwave oven’s silence. To Parmenides, this is impossible – the being of my microwave’s blaring comes from the non-being of my microwave’s silence, but ex nihilo, nihil fit, Parmenides says: out of non-being, no being can come. Aristotle responded to this argument with the distinction between potentiality and actuality – that is, the new state of affairs exists as a potential within the previous state of affairs, until it is actualized by that previous state. Now, we know that a potential cannot actualize itself, because it does not exist as a state of affairs yet. So only something actual can raise a potential to actuality. In the case of my microwave oven, the microwave oven must exist before it can raise its potential to trumpet cacophony. So what is actualized is actualized by an actual. However, we must stop somewhere – for only can we observe change if something is changing it; thus, an infinite regress of actuals is meaningless and would not be able to produce change. Note, however, that here Aquinas is referring to ahierarchical system of motion, not a linear system of motion. A hierarchical system is one in which potentials are simultaneously dependent on actuals; for instance, a microwave’s potential to be raised three feet in the air is actualized by a three-foot-tall refrigerator, which is in turn actualized by the Earth, and so forth. So Aquinas means there must be a “First Mover” in this sense. Further note that the “First Mover” exists as actus purus, pure actuality, without any potentials, for these potentials would only move the system of motion further back – or, in Aquinas’s words, “we arrive then at a first cause of change not itself being changed by anything, and this is what everybody understands by God. ” (ST, 1.2.3) Analysis We know by definition that this unmoved mover is devoid of any potentiality. A being of pure act cannot be material, as that which is material inherently has potentials – for instance, to grow warmer, to move, etc. Incapable of any change, by definition, this immaterial being must be immutable and atemporal. We also know that this being is singular, for if there were more, then to distinguish between them there must be some unactualized potentiality – but we know thatactus purus presents no potentialities. Aquinas distinguishes between two forms of power: active power, the ability to act, and passive potentiality, the ability to be acted upon. Thus, as Pure Act, this being has all possible active power; that is, he has all possible ability to act, but no ability to be acted upon. Thus we can derive omnipotence. Knowledge, in the Aristotelian tradition, consists of three sequential states: the ability to grasp concepts, the ability to form complete statements on those concepts, and the ability to form conclusions based on those statements. We know that a cause can only give what it has itself – for instance, a microwave oven cannot turn our leftovers into chickens, because it simply does not have that ability, while it can heat. As the mover of all forms (in Aristotelian hylemorphism, the form is the pattern of related things; for instance, the form of man is rational animality) this being must have all forms in this immaterial, noetic way. Thus we can derive omniscience. An objective standard of goodness exists as the extent to which a being actualizes its essence. For instance, a good treeis one which realizes its form of growing out with a great number of branches. Because this being is purely actual, it exists as absolute perfection, having no possible potentiality to be greater. Hence, there exists an immaterial, atemporal, immutable, omnipotent, omniscient, perfectly good being which sustains all in the Universe. Conclusion In the First Way, I (or rather St. Thomas, to not take credit) demonstrated that the Aristotelian concept of motionrequires there be a First Mover of pure actuality to actualize the potential for change. I then analyzed the properties this First Mover must have as Pure Act, deriving omnipotence, omniscience, and perfect goodness. And, after this long journey, we arrive at the affirmation of the existence of a God in the Judeo-Christian sense.