"The Five Ways" is his response to two very modern-sounding assertions: a good God cannot exist because there is evil in the world; and, since all things can be reduced either to nature or the reason and will of humans, there is no need of God. [You do not mention this, Benjamin.]
Thomas’ respondeo appeals first to motion, then to cause, thirdly to necessary prior existence of any existent. His fourth way is to the chain of being: “Now the maximum in any genus is the cause of all in that genus; as fire, which is the maximum heat, is the cause of all hot things. Therefore, there must also be something which is to all beings the cause of their being, goodness, and every other perfection…” And finally, Thomas brings in teleology—all things have an end toward which they are oriented—and therefore some intelligence external to them has to gift them with that purpose or end in their creation.
Of course, these Ways are not convincing, even if they continue today to point beyond themselves. Nor did Thomas imagine that they would convince anyone of the reality of the living God of the Scriptures. The Five reproduce “what everyone (in the 13th century) calls God” but what God actually is cannot be divorced from revelation.
But what the Five do is underline the point that every language has a word for “god”, and that the only way humans can approach that is through indirect means without revelation—and even with the Scriptures, it should be clear that in this respect we are no better off. No one can see God and live, not even Moses (Exodus 33:20); from this we understand that no one can know God a se, the divine whatness. We can ask why there is something and not nothing: what set the universe in motion, what caused it, what ordered it… But what is not of the reality we experience we cannot know.
Our knowing is at best a correct abstraction from the concrete, the real as we encounter it. Our attempts to ask whether there is a God can therefore only be a reflection on the power itself to abstract.
(From my book, Choose the Narrow Path: The Way for Churches to Walk Together (Peter Lang, 2023). See my page "Pierre Whalon" on Amazon...)
