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Life's Ultimate Questions: "Aquinas"
Life's Ultimate Questions: "Aquinas"
Questions “Aquinas”
Christopher Ullman, Instructor
Christian Life College
1
Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274)
• Known as the greatest • He stands at the top of the
Christian medieval group of thinkers known as
theologian-philosopher, he Scholastics
single-handedly stemmed • At age 48 he suddenly
the tide of Islamic stopped writing
Aristotelianism into Europe
• Maybe he suffered a brain
• His friends playfully called hemorrhage
him “the dumb ox”
• Maybe he had a vision that
• He produced over ninety academic learning was not the
works in a little over two most important thing
decades • “All that I have written seems
• Summa Theologica like straw to me,” he told a
• Summa Contra Gentiles friend
• The Ways of God: For • A year later, he died on the
Meditation and Prayer road to a church council
2
Followers and Critics of Aquinas
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Knowing or Believing (the
separation of reason and faith)
• Knowing applies to the domain of reason
• Any truth humans gain apart from divine revelation is
acquired by the unaided light of the intellect
• Philosophy, natural science, mathematics, psychology are
examples
• Believing applies to the domain of revelation
• Truths of the faith are acquired by believing the
authoritative word of God
• Theology is the example
• Knowledge of God is the one exception
12
The Five Ways (how philosophy
can support the belief that God
exists)
1. The Argument from Change to a Prime Mover
2. The Argument from Cause and Effect to a First
Cause
3. The Argument from Contingent Beings to a
Necessary Being
4. The Argument from Degrees of Perfection to a
Perfect Being
5. The Argument from Design in the Cosmos to a
Designer of the Cosmos 13
The Five Ways Summed Up
• Logic is employed in each to show that the
cosmos as we know it depends in different ways
upon the existence of God
• God is the sufficient answer to the “why”
questions
• God is the one necessary being upon which all
the existences of all other beings depends
logically
• Only the existence of God can make sense of
the facts of existence
14
Aquinas the Empiricist
• Denial of innate ideas means that sensed
experience is the trigger or catalyst of all
knowledge
Only then can my
A Sensed
particular passive intellect
thing Experience become aware of it
20
Virtues: Guidance from the Inside
Cardinal virtues are part of the created nature of all
humans and are knowable through reason
• Aquinas affirms
• Plato’s doctrine of four virtues (prudence, courage, temperance
and justice) and
• Aristotle’s doctrine of the golden mean (virtue is somewhere
between the deficiency and the excess)
Theological virtues are attainable only by grace
through faith
• Faith: leads our minds to see truth and our wills to assent to truth
• Hope: makes us willing to seek God’s help in attaining happiness
• Love: is the divine gift that inclines us to seek God’s friendship
21
Law: Guidance from the Outside
Four different kinds of law
• Eternal law: both moral and physical
principles governing all of God’s creation
• Natural law: the part of eternal law that
applies to humans, knowable through reason
• Human (positive) law: humans trying to
make practical laws based on natural law
• Divine law: God’s law knowable through the
Bible
(Refer to Figure 7.2 on p. 185)
22
Natural Law
• Aquinas takes insights present in Plato, Aristotle
and the Stoics (such as Epictetus and Cicero)
• He then sifts them through a Christian filter
• The result is a powerful tool for coaxing non-
Christians to an awareness of objective moral
standards
• Natural law shows up in our Declaration of
Independence, the Civil Rights Movement, and
the ethical positions of the Catholic Church
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Some Tenets of Natural Law