Throughout this blog there has been a good deal of discussion prompted about Aquinas’s Five Ways. Whther this is simply because Oohlah takes a personal interest int he subject I am not sure, but we can be sure that Aquinas has fascinated many phiilosophers with his teleological argument for God, so much so that many feel compelled to give him a response. While most qill claim that he falls easily with logical thought, I am here to contend for the scholar, as I feel that spme perhaps do not give him his due.
Specifically, an objection was raised in an earlier blog in regard to the Fourth way: the gradation of all things. To lay the argument out:
1. All things seem to come in gradation or degrees (degrees of goodness, degrees of temperature)
2. TO come in degrees they must have a maximum in that genus to which to compare them.
3. That maximum is the cause of their gradation.
4. Goodness, therefore, must have a maximum, and that maximum is God.
I hope I have adequately presented the argument. Two objections I’m going to dismiss right off because I feel they have been adequately answered within the blogosphere (and I want to save SOMETHING for my final paper). Namely, the objection that God cannot be the maximum off all gradations since he would need to be the maximum evil. Luckily for us, this is not Aquinas’s claim in the first place. He readily admits that fire is in fact the maximum heat, but |God is the maximum love, etc. A second objection is whether a maximum is necessary at all for gradation– a concept that I covered in a comment to Oohlah’s earlier blog.
TOday what I am dealing with is the objection that Aquinas gives us no reason to believe that the maximum of any genus is the cause of that genus, as Aquinas claims it is…
“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 we call this God.”– Summa Theologica
What is interesting to me is
1. This argument basically pushes the fourth way into the same category as the first three– with God being a necessary cause in the universe.
2. This claim is not even necessary for his argument. Whether or not God causes things to be good does not seem relevant when we can prove that he must exist as the ultimate good, since good comes in gradations and they need a maximum, and therefore he exists. As long as we can prove that, we prove his existence. He is, therefore he is.
I think the confusion comes, perhaps, from a misunderstanding of what Aquinas meant when he said that he is the cause of their being, goodness, and every perfection. I think that he does not necessarily make things that are good, but rather, he makes good things. Or perhaps, he makes things “”good”. To explain, without God as the maximum good, we would have no concept as to what good was. Just like we can’t tell if an artist’s rendering is close or far from the original subject unless we have the original subject. Once we have an original, we can see the gradation of artists’s attempts. With God, we have the original “good” and therefore can judge the meager attempts of his proteges.
So, without God being the supreme good, nothing could be closer or further from it, and therefore there could be no gradation– therefore, there would be no good. So God, it would seem, must exist as the perfect good for all other beings to be considered good in comparison. Therefore, he is the cause of all good things.
You thoughts…
