Analysis Of Saint Thomas Aquinas's Unmoved Mover Argument

Over a millennium after Aristotle wrote his unmoved mover argument. The Catholic philosopher Saint Thomas Aquinas reintroduced the idea as part of his five proofs for the existence of God. Aquinas’s first way is derived from motion. Following the same premise as Aristotle, Aquinas argues that a first mover, existing in a state of perfect actuality, must exist to move things from potential to actual states. Absence of this first mover would result in an infinite regress; therefore, the observable presence of motion in the material necessitates the existence of a first mover. The second way is founded upon the principle of efficient cause. Examination of the material world shows that every action will have an equally proportionate reaction. Therefore, every effect must have a cause. Thus it logically follows that all effects must trace their causes back to an …show more content…
It wasn’t so much the distinctions made about the types of mystical experience or what he thinks a person should do after having a mystical experience. What stood out to me were the almost universal constants reported by people having had mystical experiences. Supposedly, these include feelings of “love” and a sense of “unity between all things”. Although, it would be rash to alter my convictions based upon this, my biggest criticism of faith is that it has been used to create a profuse number of unique faiths possessing incompatible beliefs. However, if mystics in these faiths had some unifying overlap in their transcendent experiences, it would not only allow me to justify the use of faith, but it might reveal some degree of underlying truth in world religion. Beyond an underlying religious truth, I have found myself intrigued by the concept of pantheism this semester, and have oriented the majority of my personal inquiry the writings of Spinoza, Deleuze, and Watts. For the most part