> Thomas never quite calls them proofs (and rejects as unsound the
> so-called
> ontological argument) -- in part because he doesn't think God "exists"
> as
> things do (i.e., if you made a complete list of everything in the
> universe, the list would not properly include "God.")
Sorry but I don't have a copy of the Summa Theol. handy, and anyway aren't we getting rather far afield from LBO's usual area (whatever that is)? So I can't tell for sure whether you are right about what Thomas calls them. All I can tell from what I have on hand is that Antony Flew, in his _A Dictionary of Philosophy_ (s.v. "Five Ways"), quotes the following from the Summa: "We must say that it is possible to prove the existence of God in five ways" (IQ2A3); I can't vouch for the accuracy of that translation, not having the original text here to check.
But anyway, looking at the references I do have, Frederick Copleston, the ever-reasonable-minded Jesuit, calls them "proofs" in Vol. II of his _History of Philosophy_ (Chapter XXXIV: St. Thomas Aquinas-IV: Proofs of God's Existence), and of course considers them sound , or at least defensible, arguments.
The fact (at least Thomists consider it such) that God doesn't exist the way things do doesn't mean the existence of God can't be proven from the existence of the world of things. In fact, the Thomist view is that that is the only way to prove it -- a careful consideration of the nature of the world of our experience shows, they think, that it can only be explained by the existence of a unique being, the First Cause, or God. As Copleston explains, the human intellect has *all* being as its primary object, but being an intellect embedded in a body, it depends on the senses for its operation, and therefore has to start with what it knows about perceptible beings. But, knowing this, Thomas thinks it must conclude that the First Cause is needed to explain their existence. The "embeddedness" of the intellect explains, for Thomas, why humans don't have a clear enough understanding of God's nature to use an a priori argument like the ontological, or Anselmian, argument.
I also see that John F. Wippel's article on Thomas' metaphysics in _The Cambridge Companion to Aquinas_ (Cambridge U. P., 1993) treats them as arguments.
> In context (Summa
> theologiae 1.2.3), he suggests five ways ("viae") that the universe by
> its
> existence poses a problem (roughly, "How come?"). The answer -- which
> he
> insists is literally unknowable -- "this, we call God" (et hoc dicimus
> deum).
He doesn't say that God's existence is *completely* unknowable, just that it's not "per se notum quoad nos" (knowable "it itself" -- a priori -- with respect to the human intellect), but it is "per se notum secundum se" (knowable a priori in itself, not with respect to the human intellect). In other words, he thinks that we have *enough* knowledge to make the "five ways" work, at least.
That's probably enough scholasticism for now. We now return you to your regularly scheduled political list. :-)
Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org __________________________________ A gentleman haranguing on the perfection of our law, and that it was equally open to the poor and the rich, was answered by another, 'So is the London Tavern.' -- "Tom Paine's Jests..." (1794); also attr. to John Horne Tooke (1736-1812) by Hazlitt