Scientific Study

TH 291

10/5/04

Introduction

St. Thomas Aquinas

• high middle ages, second to Origen
• countering the works of Aristotole
• reason and revelation are in basic harmony
• grace (revelation) is not the denial of nature (reason)
• “I am who I am” God is being, the ultimate reality of which everything else derives its being

Acquinas – 5 points can be read as a spiritual exercise

Inquiring After God

Introduction

• skepticism – denial that knowledge can be known
• atheism – denial that God exists

St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae (Part I, Q.2)

• 60 volumes – not completed
• reflects style of medieval university – disputation
• teacher in the graduate school
• undergraduates steeped in philosophy of Aristotle (new truth, modern way of knowledge)
• Aristotle – world was eternal (not created), no immortality of the soul
• Aristotle – modern science
• Aquinas – all truth is harmonious since God is truth and created all things
• Summa (summary) Theologiae
• written in Latin, unfinished at 60 volumes in three sections

1. God, Trinity, Creation, Angels, Cosmology and Humanity
2. Ethics
3. Christ and the Sacraments

• question-driven, sub-questions called articles
• each question is like a chapter in a book
• example – Part I, Q.2, Article 3. “Is there a God?”
• sources for theology – a source is a place where the truth about God is found
• #1 - revelation (scripture) – Charry -> larger than scripture
• #2 – reason / natural world (because God created it) – all natural theology infers God’s role until William Palley
• philosophy
• Aristotle
• Kant
• #3 – tradition
• Augustine
• Church Fathers
• Church Councils
• Peter Lombard (lumberg?) – 80% - 90% from Augustine
• #4 – experience
• Thomas puts it in the reason category because a person uses reason to interpret experience

• natural theology – use of natural world and reason, inferential process to go from a tree to God (philosophy)
• everyone drew on philosophers of his day until Karl Barth
• Calvin – Stoicism
• Luther – “reason is a whore”
• “personal” is a word pre-pended to experience in the last 20 minutes, or 20 years

Articles in Summa Theologiae

• question posed in an article
• starts with 3-5 reasons against the point
• dialectical method – “on the other hand”, contradictory sets of reliable evidence
• countervailing piece of evidence from another source (tradition or scripture)
• finishes with final answer
• answers each objection – absolute parity
• reply – his analysis

Challenges

1

2

3

4

5

Sed contra

Reply

Hence…

Five ways to prove there is a God

· taken as rational proof of God

· more like 3

· or all variations of 1

Charry Advice – be well aware of your opponent’s stance, respond to the best of your opponent’s stances.

Philosophy is a spiritual exercise

• enlist and pull out our ability to know and love God

Thomas was an empiricist

• Thomas begins with empirical evidence
• Thomas was influenced by Aristotle

Order

• Thomas looks to remove disorder
• there must be something outside of the order
• multiplicity – looking at all the phenomenon of the world, state of becoming
• 5 ways – analysis to explain becoming and multiplicity
• his world was more comfortable with things that did not change instead of things that change – currently, change for its own sake is good / radical change of preference, for them, change = death

Charry

• repetition of change – too much for us to handle
• why don’t people want stability?
• intense skill of keeping up gives us no rest
• why?
• change always occurred – Heraclides “you cannot step into a river twice and touch the same thing”
• God is constant – way to transcend flux

Progress

• invented by Darwin
• change is good / more recent is better