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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.
Both works sometimes parallel each other in organization and topics, [4] and the possibility of the Compendium being a reduced version of the former has been proposed by scholars. [ 5 ] Against the historical consensus, it has been recently proposed that Aquinas might have voluntarily abandoned the book due to a change in his teaching strategy.
In both texts, Aquinas views human life as a "journey" which starts with the conversion from sin to grace and ends in the beatific vision, a process marked by the good actions which make the soul closer to God and hold the divine approval. Acknowledging the difficulties of affirming the possibility of human merit before a divine entity, Thomism ...
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. [xiii] [xiv]
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]
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:
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 ...
When demonstrating a Truth about God which can be known through reason, St. Thomas gives multiple arguments, each proving the same Truth in a different way. Book II is dedicated to the Creation (viz. the physical universe , everything which exists).