Introduction
Thomas Aquinas was an outstanding scholastic scholar, theologian, and jurist who was an Italian Dominican monk and priest. According to Aquinas, God is the ultimate perfection; an appeal to final causes, or ends, in nature, is Aquinas’s fifth and last route to prove God’s existence (Aquinas, 2018). He once more cited Aristotle, who believed that everything has an inherent goal or purpose. The cosmological argument for the presence of God is one of the sorts of arguments presented in Aquinas’s first three arguments, which are motion, cause, and contingency. Each starts with a general fact about natural events before moving on to the idea that the universe has a supreme creative source, whom Aquinas names as God.
The second causation explanation expands on Aristotle’s concept of an efficient cause, the object or event that caused a change in a specific thing. Aristotle uses the decision-making process of an individual, the birth of a child by a parent, and the creation of a statue as instances. There must be an unchanging initial cause of all changes occurring in the world, and this first cause is God. This is because each material cause must have an efficient cause, and there cannot be an endless chain of efficient causes. This paper discusses Thomas Aquinas’s thinking about the existence of God based on the first two factors, namely motion and efficient cause.
Motion
Since change or motion is a fundamental aspect of nature, it is impossible to understand nature without also understanding motion. It is challenging to explain motion without including motion in the explanation. St. Thomas adopts Aristotle’s formulation, which assumes that it is understood that existence is divided into prospective and actual as well as essence and feature or occurrences of substance (Aquinas, 2018). Due to the relationship between the move and the mover, the connection category is particularly significant.
An object can be entirely prospective, wholly actual, or something in between these excess and deficiency. What is really actual has already changed, and anything in potency alone is not moving. The batter who is currently at the center field has a chance to be at first. He has fully revealed that potentiality, although initially safely. The batter is halfway between the states of pure great potential and pure reality. The intermediate state, which is a poor embodiment of power, is motion. Motion is an inadequate or incomplete manifestation of the potential when looking back toward home. However, if the sprinter slipped and fell while running first, that might be enough to protect him. If people emphasize the untapped potential while looking first, this covers the player who has been imprisoned and who has lost their position. Insofar as it is in potency, motion is the act of being in potency.
Motion is a correlating act or reality to power; the term the transition is the full embodiment of the potential, then motion is an incomplete act of the potential. Therefore, it is neither the potency of something already existing in potency nor is it the act of something already existent in potency (Aquinas, 2018). The act designates the command to the prior potency, and “being in potency” designates the command to act further.
Thus, the description avoids using motion or an equivalent to define motion, instead using the contrast between someone being capable of being something and being something, which is one that everyone is familiar with and can use without reservation as an explanation. When individuals first understand history, it appears to be something incredibly complex and challenging to grasp. The capacity he once had at home plate is no longer just an opportunity, though, if they say that motion is the expression of a player who can be on first insofar as he can be on the first, as Thomas says (Aquinas, 2018). In addition, he can say that the person whose behavior motion has motion insofar as he still has the possibility to be on first.
Even if someone were to argue that they are entirely aware of what motion is, this explanation seems very muddled. Everyone is aware that change happens and is familiar with motion, although it is not always clear what motion exactly is. Since they can immediately distinguish between potential and reality, people can utilize them to describe what motion is. The complexity of the account or definition of motion surprises people because change and motion are so visibly present that they are unlikely to be questioned as to their occurrence (Aquinas, 2018). The fundamental challenge comes from the fact that motion is an unreliable reality and an imperfect being. Since the mind tends to focus more readily on the real world, it makes sense that trying to capture motion can be difficult.
In terms of common knowledge, the definition is commendable; there is no reference to a particular “philosophical” experience. It is incorrect to think of the phrases “actual” and “potential” as technical Aristotelian terminology. They are no more sophisticated than the capacity to distinguish between “is” and “might be.” Motion can occur in a variety of ways: in quantity when something changes in size or weight, in place when something moves, and in quality when something improves in quality. A substance changing into or disappearing as such is not a motion. Thomas presents this claim as follows: Motion is always found in something existent in potency; an act is properly the act of that in which it is constantly found (Aquinas, 2018). The second premise, which he believes requires discussion, is that motion is the act of that which is present in potency. These kinds of topics influence one another and change in opposing directions. What is cold and turning hot has the potential to be hot, and what is hot and turning cold has the potential to be hot.
If one believes that every material object is made of a single ordinary or prime matter, then this reciprocal connection could be as universal as the cosmos. Any substance that is genuinely what it is has the capacity to be any of the other positive attributes or acts of the matter when it comes to the ultimate topic. Change thus looks reciprocal; what changes is changed by what it changes. The warming agent is cooled, and the cooling agent is warmed. That this cannot be universally true, that there must be some mover that is not itself moved, is one of the crucial claims of Aristotle’s Physics; this is his proof of the Prime Mover.
Recognizing reciprocal change shows how this topic and the discussion of causes are related. Motion is the act of moving, of anything that has power in and of itself, but we also need to consider the mover. Whatever was once simply a possibility and is now actually has changed. An object, however, occasionally moves just hypothetically before moving. A mover like this becomes the object of change or motion.
The opposites of motion and rest allow anything that can be at rest to also be in motion. On the other hand, anything is considered to be at rest when it ceases moving. The movers must, therefore, be in motion. However, because it moves through contact with the move, movement or alteration does not pertain to the mover as the mover. The mover is only moved to the extent that it is also moveable, not to the extent that it is a mover. Simply by coincidence, the mover is also moved. The moved is the object of motion in the sense that the mover is not itself moved. Both the mover and the moved are in motion. These explanations prove to be of utmost significance for Thomas Aquinas’ intellectual worldview, which he borrows from Aristotle (Aquinas, 2018). If the motion is the act of moving, a mover is needed. Whatever is moved, another moves it. The unmoved mover will be devoid of the matter if one is necessary, and the moving movers are so because they share a matter with their consequences.
Efficient Cause
The concept of causation is generally challenging to comprehend; contemporary and modern philosophical scholarship on the subject has sought chiefly to restrict causation to a specific logical relationship between people among events. For instance, according to a well-known theory, for action A to lead to event B, A, and B must serve as examples of a periodicity such that when event A occurs, event B follows.
According to a different explanation, the concept of causality can be explained in terms of counterfactual dependence, where event A causes event B and vice versa if it were true that event B would not have occurred if event A had not occurred. According to these ideas, the connection between a cause and an effect is just a typical conjunction or correlation. Reasons do not actually act or have a tangible impact on the world’s objects; hence, they do not cause their consequences. The fact that some events frequently correspond with other events is just a matter of simple truth. For example, it is a simple truth that the likelihood of coming into touch with fire corresponds with the probability of burning, yet fire itself does not cause burning to occur.
The traditional explanation of causation is inadequate in a number of ways. In addition to offering no justification for why specific regularities exist in nature, the prevailing opinion appears to be in conflict with current scientific thinking. People frequently believe that they are discovering active forces capable of causing predetermined results rather than patterns that apply to passive, inactive events. Given these flaws in the dominant perspective, an increasing number of modern philosophers have called for a return to a pre-modern theory of causality that sees causation as simply the application of proactive causal power.
According to Aquinas, a cause and its consequence cannot be separated by a logical consistency or counterfactual. In contrast, according to Aquinas, causality is an ontological reliance of a consequence on its cause that is sui generis and irreducible in nature (Aquinas, 2018). Effects occur because of their reasons, and causes are necessary for consequences to emerge. The kind of causes that start to influence the natural world is called efficient causes. According to Aquinas, effective causes are physical objects that act by active causal forces (Aquinas, 2018). The existence of specific rational linkages between particular sorts of events in the natural environment is not just a matter of fact.
However, certain commonalities and probabilistic reasoning are actual because of material objects and their causal capabilities. For instance, burning frequently occurs after a touch with fire, which is due to the fundamental causal power of fire. Aquinas provides an intriguing explanation of what causal forces are and how they are implicated in causation by drawing on ideas from both the Aristotelian and neo-Platonic philosophical systems (Aquinas, 2018). Aquinas had well-developed opinions on these subjects, but he never produced a standalone work on causality or causal powers.
Conclusion
To summarize, Thomas Aquinas looked to the natural world for evidence of God’s existence. He sought to demonstrate the existence of God through the laws of nature. Each of his five reasons together, referred to as the cosmological argument, stems from a cosmic concept that demands an explanation. Aquinas offered five examples that used indisputable truths about the universe to prove God’s existence. Aquinas demonstrates how we might embrace a conclusion while disagreeing with its logic or partially accept the premise or logic while rejecting the conclusion. For instance, while adherents of diverse religions concur that God exists, they disagree on how this affects the decisions they make in life. People can know something is true for various reasons, much as Thomas Aquinas had five different arguments.
Reference
Aquinas, T. (2018). Summa Theologica Complete in a Single Volume. Coyote Canyon Press.