Thomas Aquinas and the Great Pumpkin

 

Thomas Aquinas and the Great Pumpkin

Thomas Aquinas is famous for his “Five Ways” that present five logical arguments supposedly proving the existence of God (and, specifically, the God of Christianity). One notable feature of these arguments (aside from the fact that they are all unsound due to having premises that are merely asserted instead of actually being shown as necessarily true) is that each one ends with the assertion, “and this everybody understands to be God.” It doesn’t matter what Aquinas claims to have logically proven, whether it’s a “first cause” or a “necessary being” or “the greatest good” — in the end he just waves his magic wand and declares that this is necessarily the Christian God we are talking about here.

For example, his “Argument from Contingency” can be summarized as follows:

In the world we see things that are possible to be and possible not to be. In other words, perishable things. But if everything were contingent and thus capable of going out of existence, then, given infinite time, this possibility would be realized and nothing would exist now. But things clearly do exist now. Therefore, there must be something that is imperishable: a necessary being. This everyone understands to be God.

— Five Ways (Aquinas) - Wikipedia

Now, a lot of people attack Aquinas’s arguments on the basis that they are unsound, as I mentioned earlier, and that’s all well and good for the most part. Unfortunately, people who defend the arguments like to play games with definitions and terminology and this can make it hard to pin down exactly what Aquinas was saying. So, rather than going down that path, I thought I would just point out how utterly ridiculous it is to assert that whatever Aquinas thinks he has logically proved is understood by everybody to be the God of Christianity.

First of all, it’s simply not true. Even if it were true that there was some sort of “first cause” or “prime mover” or “greatest good” or what have you, faithful Muslims are likely to understand it to be Allah. And faithful Hindus will likely understand it to be Brahma or some other avatar of Vishnu. And, of course, atheists are likely to simply understand it to be “whatever caused the universe to begin” without ascribing any other characteristics to it such as omnipotence or omniscience or omnibenevolence (and certainly without accepting that it has interacted with humanity, inspired scriptures, made various promises, told us what to do and not do with our lives, promised us eternal salvation for a price, etc.)

Second of all, regardless of what some or even most people “understand” to be the case, there is simply no logical connection made between the “first cause,” “prime mover,” “greatest good,” etc., and the God of Christianity. The God of Christianity is defined with numerous attributes and is described as having said, done and promised to do numerous things, and nothing in any of Aquinas’s arguments even makes an attempt at linking what he claims to have proved to the actual God he claims to worship.

As an analogy, here is a little argument of my own using the same sort of logic that Aquinas uses in his arguments:

  1. There are pumpkins in the world.
  2. For every pumpkin that we observe, there exists the possibility that there is another pumpkin bigger than it.
  3. This cannot be true of every pumpkin, however, since that would lead to an infinite regression of pumpkins.
  4. Therefore, there must be one pumpkin that is bigger than any other pumpkin could ever possibly be.
  5. Everybody understands this to be the Great Pumpkin[1].

If you’re looking for me next Halloween, I’ll be out in the pumpkin patch waiting for my presents.

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