St Thomas Aquinas Argument For God's Existence

There have been many arguments made over the years that are designed to show proof for God’s existence or a lack thereof. Thirteenth century philosopher St Thomas Aquinas is one of those people who formed their own argument supporting God’s existence. The Five Ways, as he called them, were designed to in five different ways prove beyond a reasonable doubt that there is in fact a God who subsists all around the world. The “Argument from Possibility and Necessity”, the third of Aquinas’ ways is one such reasoning that using what he considered to be sound logic, can be used in order to prove the existence of a higher being. Even though it can be demonstrated to be invalid and contains within it some pretenses that are not necessarily accurate, the Third Way as explained by St Thomas …show more content…
The logic behind the Third Way as described by Aquinas is that all things have dependence on outside factors, which has to be contingent on a being that came before it. Every essential thing has its necessary requirement caused by another thing or not caused at all, thus deciding whether a certain thing exists in the world or not. This means that if everything is conditional on outside factors in order for the desired action or reaction to occur, there must then be an outside force acting in order to ensure that this does happen and this outside force must not need to be acted on itself in order for there to be the existence of all other things. This reasoning requires a being that is independent of all other things and therefore does not rely on anything beside itself to function normally. Everything else in the world could hypothetically exist or not exist, but this independent being considered to be God by this argument is crucial because without it the world would not be able to