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According to Dawkins, "[t]he five 'proofs' asserted by Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century don't prove anything, and are easily [...] exposed as vacuous." [46] In Why There Almost Certainly Is a God: Doubting Dawkins, philosopher Keith Ward claims that Dawkins mis-stated the five ways, and thus responds with a straw man.
The argument from degrees, also known as the degrees of perfection argument or the henological argument, [1] is an argument for the existence of God first proposed by mediaeval Roman Catholic theologian Thomas Aquinas as one of the five ways to philosophically argue in favour of God's existence in his Summa Theologica.
Although St. Thomas felt that human reason alone could prove that God created the universe, reason alone could not determine whether the universe was eternal or actually began at some point in time. Rather, only divine revelation from the Book of Genesis proves that.
Thomas Aquinas holds that the existence of God can be demonstrated by reason, [38] a view that is taught by the Catholic Church. [39] The quinque viae (Latin: five ways) found in the Summa Theologica (I, Q.2, art.3) are five possible ways of demonstrating the existence of God, [40] which today are categorized as: 1.
Therefore it is necessary to admit a first efficient cause, to which everyone gives the name of God. Importantly, Aquinas's Five Ways, given the second question of his Summa Theologica, are not the entirety of Aquinas's demonstration that the Christian God exists. The Five Ways form only the beginning of Aquinas's Treatise on the Divine Nature.
Aquinas presents an Augustinian view of teaching being divided into "interior" and "exterior" processes; that is modified by Aristotelian ideas. [22] The former process is inventio, a means of teaching that is reserved to God, the principal teacher, a process of "natural reason [arriving] by itself at the knowledge of things previously unknown ...
Thomas Aquinas OP (/ ə ˈ k w aɪ n ə s / ⓘ ə-KWY-nəs; Italian: Tommaso d'Aquino, lit. 'Thomas of Aquino'; c. 1225 – 7 March 1274) was an Italian [6] Dominican friar and priest, the foremost Scholastic thinker, [7] as well as one of the most influential philosophers and theologians in the Western tradition. [8]
In the mid-1650s Ciantes wrote a "monumental bilingual edition of the first three Parts of Thomas Aquinas’ Summa contra Gentiles, which includes the original Latin text and a Hebrew translation prepared by Ciantes, assisted by Jewish converts, the Summa divi Thomae Aquinatis ordinis praedicatorum Contra Gentiles quam Hebraicè eloquitur ...