Lesson 1 – What Would It Mean to ‘Prove’ God Exists?

For St. Thomas, if you’re really going to prove something, then you can’t leave any room for error.

That matters for how we read and think about the five ways. Because these five arguments aren’t just intended to persuade us that there’s a god. They’re not just supposed to convince us of that truth. They’re actually supposed to prove it. 

And that means that the five ways will only work as Aquinas intended them to work if they don’t leave any room for error. 

Course Reading

Commentary on the Posterior Analytics II.8 | St. Thomas Aquinas

Commentary of Boethius's De Trinitate, Q.6, a.3, corp. | St. Thomas Aquinas

Excerpt from Commentary of Boethius’s De Trinitate, Q.6, a.3, corp.:

We conclude that in the case of immaterial forms we know that they exist; and instead of knowing what they are we have knowledge of them by way of negation, by way of causality, and by way of transcendence. These are the same ways Dionysius proposes in his Divine Names; and this is how Boethius understands that we can know the divine form by removing all images, and not that we know that it is. The solution of the opposing arguments is clear from what has been said: for the first arguments are based on perfect knowledge of what a thing is, the others on imperfect knowledge of the sort described.

Course Listening

The Divine Attributes: God as Perfectly Simple and Perfectly Good | Prof. Edward Feser

Why Should We Believe God Exists? | Prof. Gregory Doolan