Thomas Aquinas' Best/Worst Arguments

Today was a fun day in class, spending time arguing against Thomas Aquinas' Five Ways of proving the existence of God. And we all love debunking people's arguments miserably into pieces, despite the fact that I would have to agree with Aquinas' stance on this whole issue. Well, with no further due, as much as I agree with his principles, there are clearly many fallacious reasoning in Aquinas' arguments.

Personally, I think all of Aquinas' "scientific" evidence all virtually revolve around one overarching theme, which is the notion that things just don't appear by themselves and they all need a creator who makes the thing come out into reality. However, if I were to choose the worst argument, it would be Argument #4: The Argument form Degrees and Perfection. As established in class that all of the arguments violate "begging the question" fallacy, the fourth argument, on top of this fallacy, just doesn't make proper coherence with the previous premises. (not to say that the other arguments made much coherence, but this one is just out of the window) Although I certainly believe that God is the result of perfection, his reasoning is wrong. Taking the sculptures example, we can clearly argue that just because one sculpture is better does not authorize us with the right to assume that the better sculpture of the two is worse when compared to another, which is worse when compared to another one, and so on until you compare it with perfection. First of all, if and all, we can't ever view perfection. If God does epitomized perfection, and we can't see him, then we would never know what "perfect" means, so we can safely sit down and argue that one thing can ever be compared to perfection, but just so far as being close to perfeciton. This brings up another point. Who says that the one statue that looks better on one person is going to be better in the eyes of another person? Different people have their different tastes and their focal emphasis when it comes to judging things like sculptures, so we can't presume that just because one statue looks better for one person, or even the majority, that the sculpture does represent a sculpture of higher value.

With this said, Aquinas also has a very good point in his Five Ways in Argument #2: Causation of Existence. This is basically the reason why I believe in creationism, although I am a little bit skeptic about the Earth being 60,000 years old only. Basically, here, Aquinas argues that nothing could have existed by itself and there had to be a thing or an object that was created without being needed the dependence of another object to be created. Going back to the watch theory, if there is a watch on a desk, then we would subcontiously know that someone must have made the watch, for it could not have popped out of nowhere. However, God, the good old God our savior, he is an exception to the rule. The reason why we call him God in the first place is because he is of supernatural origin that has powers beyond our imagination, or at least we believe so. If this premise holds true, then we can't count God into the circular argument about "Oh, who created God?" because the fact of the matter is, nobody or nothing created God. He was always there. This is something we have to accept if we want to get anywhere, or else we would always be arguing about the origin of God forever. As said before, God is above us. Even atheists, who don't believe in God, would at least acknolwedge the fact that divinities, whether they exist or not, have powers beyond humans. Therefore, to argue against the existence of God with human logic is incoherent, because God does not apply to our imagination.

I have a great little story with this. When I was little, I always loved looking at ants for some reason. (everyone has their unique side) Now, imagine, if I were to blow using my mouth gently towards the colony of ants, would the ants, with their limited knowledge, be able to figure out that there is a being that is clearly above their own level that is making the wind or would they just simply believe that there was a gentle wind that blew? With ant's limited knowledge, they probably cannot know of the fact that there exists the humans, who are "higher" in level compared to the ants that caused the wind to happen. This is the same thing with God. We just don't know that God is there becuase we have such a limited knowledge on things and with our limited knowledge it is very hard to fathom God's exitence at all.