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Contents © 2006
by Jim Holman.
All rights reserved.

CONFESSIONS
July/August 2006

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IN DEFENSE OF SAINT THOMAS AQUINAS

Opening disclaimer: we gripe because we love.

Catholic Answers and its magazine This Rock are in the business of apologetics, and in the magazine's January issue, associate editor James Kidd wrote a piece which basically argued against using Saint Thomas Aquinas' five proofs for the existence of God as apologetic tools.

I think Kidd was right to make this argument -- I will never forget listening to one young man, a believer, try to force-feed the first way (the argument from motion) down the throat of another young man, an atheist, during a bus trip from Rome to Assisi. The poor believer just got more and more flustered at the unbeliever's failure to be convinced about the unmoved mover. "This is rational argument! I've got you wriggling in the crushing grip of reason! Yield, damn you!" Has anyone ever been convinced in this way?

But that's not to say I approved of Kidd's method, which was basically to dismiss the five ways in short order and then argue that Thomas never meant them as proofs to begin with: "Thomas never refers to the five arguments as 'proofs' in the modern sense of the term." (Perhaps understandable, since he wasn't a modern.) "In the preceding article, he asks 'whether it can be demonstrated that God exists' (Utrum Deum esse sit demonstrabile). The word demonstrabile has a precise meaning in Latin as a logical, geometrical proof. Thomas then proceeds to argue that the existence of God can be established by this kind of proof. But in article 3, Thomas suddenly abandons the language of hard proof in favor of a softer term: 'Deum esse quinque viis probari potest,' usually translated 'The existence of God can be proved in five ways.' But, unlike the narrow meaning of demonstrabile, the word probari has a wider meaning that does not necessitate a rigorous, irrefutable proof. A more accurate translation would be 'The existence of God can be argued for in five ways.'"

So Saint Thomas says the existence of God can be demonstrated, but the arguments he gives immediately following that claim aren't demonstrations? Kidd says Thomas is addressing theists, so he doesn't need real proofs. But the first part of the Summa claims to be natural theology -- things we can know about God based on what we sense. If you've got to have faith to accept the proofs, then Thomas is being disingenuous, and this part of the Summa is built on sand.

Later, Saint Thomas does argue from premises that depend on faith (the Trinity). But Kidd says that anything that isn't math depends on faith -- we can't trust the senses anyway. "The five ways ... take as a starting point the validity of our sense perception, which is enough to disqualify them as proofs per se.... There is no way to prove beyond all possible doubt that our senses are true; there's always the logical possibility that Descartes's 'evil deceiver' is making you think you're reading this article right now when in fact you are not. The only true proofs we do have ... are mathematical ones. Thus, it seems that Aquinas did not intend the five ways to be logical, mathematical demonstrations but arguments for something that we already accept."

Nonsense. Whatever the truth of Descartes' claim, it wasn't what Saint Thomas thought. Nowhere does he indicate that a proof must be mathematical. Nowhere does he cast doubt upon universals gained from sense experience. To argue that he doesn't really intend to prove anything by bringing in this modern notion is to do violence to the text.

Then Kidd goes on to attack the arguments themselves, asking a lot of rhetorical questions in an attempt to illustrate various weaknesses. But often, the questions aren't as rhetorical as he suggests. And when he gets to the fourth way, he flat-out misrepresents Saint Thomas by calling him a Platonist and misstating his argument. "Thomas says that a hot thing is hot only insofar as it resembles something that is hot to the maximum degree." No, he says a thing is said to be hotter according as it more nearly resembles that which is hottest. This is a crucial distinction, as Thomas works from our comparisons of things -- that is, the way we know them (as "hot" and "hotter") -- to the existence of a standard which is the maximum, eventually ending up with that which is "most true." Only then does Saint Thomas invoke Artistotle's Metaphysics (hardly Plato) and say that "things that are greatest in truth are greatest in being," taking us out of the realm of the Platonic forms and into "being itself" -- God.

It's dense stuff, sure, much too dense to be dismissed with a couple of sentences. The five ways make poor apologetics for lots of reasons: they need too much unpacking, they require too much background knowledge, the modern ear may not even know how to listen to them. But that doesn't make them invalid. Let's not give away more than necessary when we set out to defend the faith.

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