The Five Ways of Aquinas: God’s Existence Through Reason – A brief essay

In this brief essay, author Jayson Brunelle takes his readers on a “guided-tour” of the famed “five-ways” of St. Thomas Aquinas, as these are originally presented in Book Ia, Question 2, Article 3 of St. Thomas’ master-work, the Summa Theologiae. Brunelle begins by anticipating and responding to the two most common objections to the veracity of the conclusions and/or the soundness of the arguments presented by Aquinas, which are (1) the challenge of logical positivism, which is the philosophical conviction that one ought only to accept or acknowledge as “true” that which can be empirically verified. The second challenge is that of radical epistemological skepticism, which goes a step further by asserting that it is impossible to “know” anything, whatever, with any degree of certainty. Clearly, these two challenges seem, from the outset, to undo any possibility of arguing for, let alone “proving,” God’s existence, yet these issues, as the reader shall see, are dealt with quite simply and, in truth, pose no threat at all to the integrity of the “five-ways.” Finally, having addressed the above preliminary issues, the author explains what Aquinas means when he argues in favor of the existence of (1) a First-Mover, Itself unmoved; (2) a First-cause, Itself un-caused; (3) a non-contingent, Necessary Being; (4) an ultimate standard of Perfection, Itself perfect in every respect; and (5) a universal, supremely intelligent and all-powerful Designer, responsible for the countless instances of complex design exhibited all throughout the cosmos – not least of which is the organic, carbon-based gray-matter of the human brain, by which we, as intelligent beings, are capable of awareness and/or consciousness of said design.