A Hasty Word

“Hill. Yes, that was it. But it is a hasty word for a thing that has stood here ever since this part of the world was shaped.” -- Treebeard

It's interesting that when Thomas Aquinas starts the Summa by talking about God, his preamble is about Sacred Doctrine (holy teaching) meaning how we as humans came to know about God.  His argument is that we could reason to the existence of God but that without revelation (God telling us about himself), even our natural knowledge would be difficult to acquire and limited in extent.

Then in the section about the existence of God (I'm using Msgr Glen's Tour of the Summa which is available online, fortunately, since our copy fell to pieces a long time ago) he says that (1) God's existence is self-evident in itself, but not to us.   An example of a self-evident truth is "a circle is round".   Everyone who understands the words and has had experience with a circle knows this is true.   But the words "God" and "existence" aren't so evidently clear to humans.  

(2) He says that to reason to the existence of God we use a posteriori reasoning.   That is, rather than knowing God as a cause and reasoning to the effects, which would be a priori reasoning, we see effects and reason back to the cause.

(3) The ways Aquinas gives are in relation to:   motion, cause/effect, contingency, scale of perfection, and design/order/government.    These are all features, notes, of effects.    Basically, we see everything around us coming and going, changing its form, working as part of a bigger picture, a kind of interlocking series of chains, like a net.  This includes ourselves.   These seem like some of the things that people observe intuitively without philosophical expertise.   It is so much part of our existence that the word existence itself seems contingent and partial.  

Everyone sees existent things, and also sees how they change, grow, explode, compress, come to life and decay, and do all kinds of things in a large, but still impermanent and shifting framework.    And we're right in the middle of it, just as contingent as any of it and maybe more so.   I will outlast the food I ate for dinner (hopefully) but the house I'm in, the furniture around me, the giant trees outside,  mostly preceded me by years or centuries at least in their materials and will outlast me, short of some acute disaster like a bomb dropping or more likely, a giant forest fire like the one that barely passed us by 4 years ago.  

However, by the terms used -- contingency, chains of effects, scales of perfection, ordering, movement etc -- we are talking about interrelatedness and interdependence.  We have never seen anything resolve back to its ultimate origin, but neither have we seen everything going on in infinite particulate -- "turtles all the way down" as they say.    If we choose to think past these things, we have to either posit a Cause that isn't all these things, or else deny it and stay with some stack-of-turtles type concept, or just avoid thinking about the whole thing.  

I know there is a lot of discussion as to whether Aquinas's ways actually prove or demonstrate that God exists.   This isn't really the part of it that interests me right now.   For that question I would recommend Michael Augros or Edward Feser, both philosophers who have written very good books. I am not a philosopher.   Nor am I trying to speak for Aquinas, who says it far better.  

What I'm trying to bring out is that these things are things that are there to be thought of, and people do think about them, and this has very little to do with superstition or wishful thinking or any of that.  It is straight up logic (in my case, admittedly at a rudimentary level, but for all that, not illogic).