Understanding God: Existence, Evidence, Nature, and Creation
Theology
1. God
Aquinas affirms that the existence of God is evident. The only problem that arises is that of the divine essence. The solution has an existential character. The proof of the existence of God is necessary, and it is possible using the appropriate method of proof. There are two kinds of demonstration: “therefore” (cause to effect, a priori) and “quia” (meaning to search for cause, a posteriori). Aquinas rejects any a priori proof. Subsequent tests are presented with characters that assume the existence of a higher reality, without which it would not be the first explanation, although the effects reveal nothing about its essence.
2. Evidence for the Existence of God: The Five Ways
The Five Ways show a similar pattern: finding an effect, assuming that any effect refers to a different cause, considering that a process to infinity is unthinkable, and asserting the existence of God.
- First Way, the movement: An initial admission of an Unmoved Mover (God).
- Second Way, the efficient cause: The cause precedes the effect, for if there is a first cause, there are no others. The first efficient cause is God.
- Third Way, the possible or contingent: All beings of reality exist, but may not exist because they are contingent. If all beings were contingent, there would be nothing. It is imperative that there is a necessary being, God.
These three ways present the cosmological proof.
- Fourth Way, degrees of perfection: A being that contains within itself all the perfections in the highest degree and causes of partial perceptions of sentient beings, God.
- Fifth Way, the government of the world: Irrational or beings lacking in knowledge tend to an end. If anyone goes, be intelligent, God. Teleological proof.
Reason cannot go any further, cannot penetrate into the reasons for the creation postulates of faith.
3. Nature and Attributes of God (The Divine Essence)
Humans can achieve some imperfect and fragmentary knowledge about God. Philosophy can get to know the nature and attributes of God only imperfectly. Regarding relations between God and creatures, there are three positions:
- Univocal: The being of God and the creatures are identified.
- Equivocal: Nothing to do, there is no ontological relationship between them.
- Analogy: The being of God and of related creatures by virtue of participation.
The creatures are not, because only God is to be, the pure act of existing. Only knowledge can reach a rational analogue of the essence of God, based on the similarity of God’s creatures. Depending on the affirmative route or eminence, when we say we say something about God in an eminent degree, a higher order than used to refer to creatures. God is one, cannot be divided, it is true or good. According to the negative way, God excludes the composition is simple, infinite, omnipresent, immutable, perfect, and very good.
4. Creation
Only God can create and does not by necessity, but freely, to share his goodness. Only God is simple, so that creation is an infinite gulf between God and creatures. First, incorporeal beings (angels), simple and perfect, devoid of matter, composed of essence and existence. Then, the corporeal, rational man or substance composed of body and soul and essence and existence. Then there are sentient beings and vegetation, inorganic beings, raw materials, pure potentiality. The world was created by God to communicate its perfection. He denies that the assumption of eternity is absurd but also asserts that the creation in time is possible. God creates freely and can survive without the world, without entailing any change for him, while creatures cannot exist without God. Evil is not a being, but a privation of being. It is intended by God, but allows, to safeguard human freedom.