KIDDNAPPED, part 4

There. The worst is done. We have reviewed all the silliest moments in Ray’s ridiculous satire on Thomas Aquinas, and have exposed them to—well, not to the brilliant light of truth exactly, but to the 40-watt bulb of common knowledge. The unpleasant work is over.

In this post, I want to highlight what is actually a legitimate question from Ray Moose:

But the problem is with Thomas’s next statement: "We call this being God." As we will see with the rest of the five ways, this is an enormous logical leap. While it is correct that the A-B-C string of movers proves that there must be a First Mover, how do we know that it is identical to the First Mover of X-Y-Z? Couldn’t there be as many First Movers as there are lines of movers? How do we know that there is only one Unmoved Mover? And even if there is only one, how do we know that it still exists or that it is to be identified as God? The answers to these questions are not found in the first way itself.

I remember this question coming up the first time I read Aquinas. The solution depends on having some experience with the way Aquinas proceeds. He states his question in very precise terms, and then answers only the question he has stated, leaving any further points one might want to know about for a later article. So the question to ask is, What question does St. Thomas actually answer in the Summa Theologica, Question 1, Article 3?

A clue can be found in his little summa for real beginners, the Compendium of Theology. In the third chapter of that little book, he gives the same argument from motion that we know as the “first way”. It is not until chapter fifteen that he shows that “God” is not a species predicated of many individuals.

In other words, the “first way”—or any of the five ways—shows that “God” exists in the same way that archeological digs can show that “man” existed long ago. The archeological dig does not show us which man exists, or that only one man existed, but that “man”—the species “man”—existed. Similarly, the five ways demonstrate that “God” exists, but for all we know “God” could be the name of a species: there could be any number of individual “Gods” within the species “God”.

One of my professors at the ITI used to emphasize this point by refusing to capitalize “god” in his translation of the five ways. The question St. Thomas asks in the Summa, Question 1, Article 3 is “Does god exist?”; only later do we find out that God alone is god, and there can be no other.

In point of fact, this is true of every argument for God’s existence. Whether it be the ontological argument or the cosmological argument, the appeal to reason or the appeal to beauty, the argument from morality or the argument from history—all of them conclude initially to the existence of the divine. But atheism is never just the rejection of the God of Jacob, but the rejection of any divine element in the cosmos. If there is even a small deity, even a god of the meadow, atheism fails.

Perhaps for cultural reasons, people who lose their faith in the God of Jacob rarely lapse into polytheism: they “convert” to atheism. Conversely, people who forsake atheism rarely take to worshipping a local deity: most leap over the logical hurdles to embrace the God of Christianity.

So for apologetical purposes, the fact that arguments for God’s existence conclude only to the existence of “god” is not a problem. It is not a problem with Descartes’ argument (which has problems of its own), and it is not a problem with Aquinas’s arguments.

OK, credit where credit is due: good question Ray—even though I know you didn’t mean to provoke an inquiry into truth!