all things were created at the beginning, being primordially woven into the texture
knowledge, of self-awareness and self-reflection, of moral conscience, freedom,
question of why the living body is just such a body. In the Summa contra
Robert Pasnaus learned and yet highly accessible study of Aquinass philosophy of human nature is a welcome departure from the deplorable tendency to ghettoize the master philosopher of the high middle ages. Thes. This, however, is invariably the case with any argument which makes any genuine advance, since in all progressive arguments the distinction between datum and conclusion is artificial. A contingent universe can
I, Q. Q: Descartes' Philosophy and . While the Five Ways are commonly mentioned in discussions of history and philosophy, they are easily misunderstood. regular course of nature. But he insists that the unseen things of faith are entirely beyond the reach of reason, 32and that faith is only of things unseen. the co-principles of all physical reality.(52). where Aquinas would locate it. This is the view that the natural order itself and the changes
That is all we do if we reply that a mere existence does not imply God as its cause, which is no answer to one who seeks to open our eyes to see that it does. God created all that is from nothing [de nihil condidit] and that this
An account
2. On
metaphysics; whether human souls are among the things that exist is a question
"(8)
claim of ancient science that something cannot come from nothing and the affirmation
But the mystical elements of his thought encroached on the province of revelation, and had indeed been the source of heresies. The very limitations of Aristotle, on the other hand, served to emphasize that the truths of revelation were unknown to the Greeks because they were not discoverable by natural reason, but above reason. to other agents and causes in the world. If the terminology is found puzzling, it should be borne in mind that it is intended as the way out of complexity, not as the way into it. This question should be compared directly with 22ae, Q. I, Art. to govern creatures from within and from the summit of the whole causal
8). to depend directly on changes in individual molecules which are in turn governed
In emphasizing the contribution
That only should we call God, than which nothing is better. The distinction drawn in Proslogion IV between the two uses of the term God, namely, cum vox significans eam cogitatur, and cum res ipsa cogitatur, seem to make it plain that the argument is fundamentally a short restatement of the claim of the Monologion in terms which fit the Realist-Nominalist controversy. The basis of these arguments depends upon one's understanding of the nature of God. There is indeed no reason why God should be, other than that he is (De Veritate, 10; cf. "If there
10), but can never do more than provide a preamble to faith itself, though it may discover reasons for what is already believed through faith. day, namely, the works of Aristotle and his Muslim commentators, which had recently