Richard Dawkins’ Failed Critique of Thomas Aquinas (Part 8)

“Proving” the existence of God in any rationalistic, scientific sense is going to be a futile endeavor. The reason why is, not because God doesn’t exist, but rather because He is ultimately beyond our limited rational capabilities, and is ultimately beyond nature. “Evidences” for God’s existence taken from the natural world, therefore, are always going to be inferred. If anything, arguments for the existence of God can best be understood as arguments for the possibility of the existence of God.

That being said, in Dawkins’ next chapter, “Arguments for God’s Existence,” he critiques the traditional arguments past philosophers and theologians have put forth for the existence of God. As we will see, Dawkins’ take on all these arguments is rather dismissive. He does a very poor job at even understanding what the arguments are saying. All he does is first set up materialistic science as the only valid method of ascertaining truth, and then discount out of hand all other methods of theology and philosophy on the basis that they’re not materialistic science. By doing this, all Dawkins has really proved is that he hasn’t really addressed the philosophical arguments on their own merits.

Dawkins Disses on Thomas Aquinas—Arguments 1-3
Dawkins’ first target is Thomas Aquinas and his five “proofs” for God. Now, Thomas Aquinas is considered to be one of the most brilliant medieval philosophers of all time. His Summa Theologica is still considered possibly the most robust and insightful work of theology ever written. Richard Dawkins the scientist, though, makes it quite clear how little he thinks of Aquinas. The problem with Dawkins’ analysis of Aquinas is that Dawkins clearly knows nothing of the philosophy Aquinas is using in order to make his arguments. Therefore, Dawkins’ “take down” of Aquinas is only convincing if one knows nothing of Aquinas, and just takes Dawkins’ word for it.

For example, Dawkins dismisses out of hand Aquinas’ first three “proofs” for the existence of God (The Unmoved Mover, The Uncaused Cause, and The Cosmological Argument) as “vacuous,” and says, “All three of these arguments rely upon the idea of a regress and invoke God to terminate it. They make the entirely unwarranted assumption that God himself is immune to the regress” (101). Do you understand that? Probably not. Why? Because not only does Dawkins not explain what Aquinas was actually arguing, but he, in fact, misrepresents what Aquinas was actually arguing.

Basically, what Dawkins is saying is this: “Aquinas says, ‘Everything in nature has a cause  and comes from somewhere’ (i.e. a baby comes from its parents, who come from their parents, etc.); therefore his entire argument is, ‘Everything has to come from some ultimate cause—God!’ Therefore, Aquinas’ ‘proof’ is vacuous, because who caused God?”

And Dawkins the scientist thinks he has made mincemeat out of the greatest Catholic theologian in history—how easy. That just shows how unintelligent Christianity is.

There’s only one problem: that’s not Aquinas’ argument. Dawkins doesn’t even understand it correctly in the first place. So, what do you say? Are you up for a brief lesson in Aquinas?

Thomas Aquinas 101
What Thomas Aquinas is most famous for is incorporating Aristotelian philosophy as a means to explain Christian theology. If you will, he “Christianized” Aristotle. Now, one of the things that Aquinas did was show just how far human reason could take one in one’s search for God. Aristotle had argued that one could learn about universals in the world of forms by studying the particulars in the natural world. In his “Christianizing” of Aristotle, Aquinas showed just how much the natural world could, in fact, tell us about God.

By doing so, many people like Schaeffer have accused Aquinas of splitting reality into two spheres: the “upper level” of the spiritual world, with its concepts of God, heaven, the unseen, and grace, that can only be arrived at by faith, and the “lower level” of the natural world, with the visible, created, physical order that can be analyzed and measured. Of course, such accusations are misleading—there had been philosophical debates between Plato and Aristotle for 1,500 years. In the Nicene Creed, one of the first statements of faith is “I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible.” Clearly there was an understanding of the two aspects of reality.

Aquinas argued that logic and reason where unique aspects of human beings who were made in God’s image. Therefore, even though human beings are sinful and fallen, their capacity for reason and logic are still gifts from God and can still aid human beings in their search for God. A sinful person, therefore, because he is made in God’s image, can still use his God-given reason to look at the God-created natural world and thus come to a better understanding of God. Human reason is never autonomous—it is a gift of God, and can therefore help lead human beings back to God. And inversely, if one rejects God, that person is without excuse, just as Paul says in Romans 1:20: ““Ever since the creation of the world his eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things he has made. So they are without excuse.”

Aquinas’ Philosophy
One part of Aristotle that Aquinas builds from is Aristotle’s concepts of actuality and potentiality. Using these concepts, Aquinas argues that there is no potentiality in God, and that God, therefore, is full actuality, meaning Another part of Aristotle that Aquinas builds from is Aristotle’s claim that everything in nature is a composite of both form and matter—a concept known as hylemorphism. Aquinas argued that although this is true for material substances, that it was possible to have immaterial substances of pure form, without matter—for example, God and other spiritual realities (again, consider the Nicene Creed that states that God, the Father Almighty, is the creator of all things visible and invisible).

Yet when it comes to the natural world, everything is a composite of form and matter. The perfection of this combination of form and matter is what Aquinas calls the essence of a particular thing in nature: what a thing is meant to be is its essence. Of course, taking human beings for example, no human being is perfectly what he/she should be—in our current state (our present existence) we are not yet what we are meant to be (essence). Aquinas said that the reason for this is that because of sin the material world has not yet been fully redeemed. We know this because there is still potentiality in nature—things are still in a state of becoming; and thus this means that all of creation has not yet been fully actualized (i.e. redeemed).

By contrast, there is no potentiality in God, because He is fully actualized and fully real. He is pure Spirit, and thus is not material, for to be material is to have potential and be susceptible to change. But human beings…that is another matter. We are in process of becoming; we are not yet fully actualized; our matter is “in potency” and it is our form actualizes our matter.

Therefore, Aquinas argued that goodness is conformity to the essence of a thing—in other words, you are doing what is “good” when you are doing something that conforms to your essence, who God created you to be. By contrast, evil is the absence of the good. This leads to another observation of Aquinas: if goodness actually is what conforms to one’s essence, and one’s essence is that which is fully real, then goodness conforms to what is really real; but evil, being the absence of the good, is ultimately unreality. It cannot have being in and of itself, because existence, being created by God, is ultimately good—existence is what is real.

Like Plato and Aristotle before him, and indeed like virtually most philosophers up to that point in time, Aquinas viewed the purpose for wisdom and knowledge as the search for the ultimate causes and meaning of things. Both the study of the natural world and the intellectual inquiry of philosophy were only worthwhile if they pointed toward God and helped human beings better themselves as they searched for God.

If all that has gotten your head spinning, hold on. We’ll now look at the first couple of Aquinas’ “proofs” for the existence of God. They all stem from the Aristotelian idea that one can look at the reality of nature and existence and derive a logical argument for the existence of a God.

Proof from Motion (Or the “Unmoved Mover”)
Contrary to what Dawkins would have you believe, this argument does have anything to do with literally moving from point A to B, like a car travelling from Chicago to New York. Rather, “motion” needs to be understood in terms of change. Aquinas argued that the very fact that things in the natural world undergo change points to the existence of God. As stated earlier, this has to do with the concepts of potentiality and actuality. Simply put, Aquinas argued that nothing can undergo change unless it is “put in motion” by another. For example, a car engine has the potential to run so that the car can leave Chicago and go to New York, but it can’t turn on itself. It’s potential must be “turned on” by someone or something else. This is true with everything: change doesn’t happen by itself; it must be initiated by something other than itself. Or as Aquinas said, “Whatever is in motion must be put in motion by another” (ST 1.2.3).

Yet if that is the case, how did change ever begin in the first place? Enter God. Aquinas argued, “…it is necessary to arrive at a first mover, put in motion by no other; and this everyone understands to be God” (ST 1.2.3). By arguing for a “first mover,” Aquinas was not talking in terms of the order of time, as if God, way back when, created the universe, wound it up like a clock, and then set it in motion with all the change inherent in nature. Aquinas was talking, not in terms of time, but in terms of being. God was not “first in time,” for God was, in fact, outside of time. Rather, God is first in terms of being and existence. He is “pure actuality,” without any potentiality, and is thus the basis for all existence and change in nature.

This is extremely important to understand, for this is the very point Dawkins is wrong. Aquinas is not claiming that God is the first cause of everything in some sort of space-time sense, for to claim that would be, in fact, reducing God to a mere something else in the universe. Aquinas is not even arguing for “how the universe began.” For Aquinas, even if the universe itself is eternal, the fact is that things within the universe cannot cause themselves or undergo change themselves. Therefore, whoever or whatever is initiating those “causes,” whoever or whatever is “causing” things to change must be what we call God. But to fully grasp this would mean to understand what Aquinas means by “actuality” and “potentiality.” Here’s that in a nutshell:

Here’s An Example: Be Prepared to Have Your Mind Blown
Everything in the universe is some combination of “actuality” (i.e. what we are) and “potentiality” (i.e. what we can become, change into). For example, back in 1981, 12 year old Joel Anderson was 12 year old Joel Anderson, but with the potential to eventually become 46 year old Joel Anderson. And lo and behold, here in 2016, due to time, societal and cultural factors, and basic growth and maturity—here I am, the 46 year old Joel Anderson! But then here’s the thing that will really bend your mind: both the 12 year old and the 46 year old is still the same Joel Anderson! And I’m not yet the 80 year old Joel Anderson that I have the potential to be, but given various factors, I will one day be that 80 year old Joel Anderson while still being the same Joel Anderson!

And so, everything in the universe undergoes change because everything in the universe is a combination of “actuality” and “potentiality”—that change, therefore, is the process in which we are becoming who we are. But since we cannot cause our own change, our becoming must be caused by someone or something else—but that someone or something else must be pure actuality, without any potentiality. That someone or something else is the “First Cause,” the Ultimate Reality, a being who is pure actuality, in whom no change can occur because He is already fully who He is. Biblically speaking, that “someone” is God—the Great I AM. All reality, and all potentiality within creation, is rooted in that Being, that First Cause, who brings everything into being.

Proof from Causality (Or “The Uncaused Cause”)
With that, let’s look at Aquinas’ second “proof.” The proof from causality will sound very similar to the proof from motion. In many ways, they actually overlap. Yet whereas the proof from motion addressed the question as to why things change, the proof from causality addressed the question as to why things exist at all. The philosophical term Aquinas used was “cause,” and he distinguished between ultimate causes, intermediate causes, and first causes. He argued that without a first cause, there would not be an intermediate cause, and there would not be an ultimate cause. But we need an example to flesh this out.

Let’s say Bob and Betty get married and have a son, Bill—that will be considered the “first cause” that produced Bill. Bill then grows up and goes to college and gets a degree—this will be considered the “intermediate cause” that gave Bill the knowledge to launch a career. Eventually, Bill, being the genius that he is, creates a new supercomputer that puts all other computers to shame—this is the “ultimate cause.” Aquinas would say that Bill’s supercomputer would have never come into existence in the first place if he had not gone to college, and he would have never gone to college if it had not ultimately been for his parents who got frisky one night and conceived Bill.

Hence, everything and everyone gets its existence from another. Just like there is always a cause that invokes change in something that exists, there is also always a cause that invokes existence in the first place. Without a first cause, there wouldn’t be any intermediate or ultimate causes. And so, since such a thing could not regress to infinity, “…it is necessary to admit a first efficient cause, to which every give the name of God” (ST 1.2.3).

Again, as with the proof from motion, Aquinas is not talking about a first cause in terms of time. He was no deist who viewed God as a cosmic watchmaker who caused existence, wound it up with natural laws, and then left it to its own devices. Simply put, existence is not a one-time thing; existence is a continuous reality. Therefore, Aquinas’ argument for God here is that just as God is the basis for all change, He is also the basis for all existence—here and now, on a continual basis, not back then and there. Aquinas’ argument basically is that God is the sustainer of all existence throughout time.

Edward Fesser, the writer from whom I got most of this information on Aquinas,  provides a good illustration on this point: “…for Aquinas, the claim that God made the world ‘is more like the minstrel made music than the blacksmith made a shoe;’ that is to say, creation is an ongoing activity rather than a once-and-for-all event” (88).

Conclusion
I could go on about Aquinas’ third proof, but I think the brief explanation of the first two will suffice in my argument about Richard Dawkins. Dawkins dismisses out of hand Aquinas’ first three proofs, but he gives no indication that he even knows what Aquinas was talking about. In fact, Dawkins’ assumption that Aquinas was talking about God being the first in regards to time, within the space-time continuum of the natural world, shows that he has positively has misrepresented Aquinas’ arguments.

Simply put, Dawkins’ dismissiveness stems from a willful ignorance of the very thing he is dismissing. Tomorrow, we will continue in our analysis of the shortcomings of Dawkins’ analysis of Aquinas’ next two proofs for the existence of God.