Before St. Thomas Aquinas gave an answer to the question whether God exists in things, he, in I.7, answered that God is limitless. The characteristic of limitless things is to exist with an unending amount everywhere in everything . Then he asks about God’s existence in things, I.8.1-4. He is trying to answer the questions: Is God in all things, Is God everywhere, Is God everywhere by essence, power, and presence, and Does it belong to God alone to be everywhere? These questions and their answers are a significant component of Aquinas’s understanding of the natural world. Aquinas is building of his understanding that God is self-subsistent existence and supplying being to all of His created things.
Aquinas begins his argument by explaining that God is in everything, but not as a segment of their essence or even as an accident. He refers back to when he explains the existence of God and says God as an “efficient cause” of the being of the thing . To understand this, we should remember the five ways from ST I.2.3 that prove God’s existence, but specifically the second …show more content…
The objections suggest other things that might be considered omnipresent. For example, numbers, universals and prime matter can be considered to exist everywhere. If we think about the whole world as a sort of unity then we might claim that it is everywhere present in itself. Aquinas replies that there are senses in which one could rightly claim that other types of thing than God have a presence everywhere. However, God is unique in being everywhere primarily and essentially. The former term means that all of God exists everywhere, not just different parts of him in different places; the latter term means that He exists everywhere in all circumstances. So, the examples given in the objections can be thought of as existing everywhere but they do not exist everywhere primarily and essentially; it is these that give uniqueness to God’s
Aquinas begins his argument by explaining that God is in everything, but not as a segment of their essence or even as an accident. He refers back to when he explains the existence of God and says God as an “efficient cause” of the being of the thing . To understand this, we should remember the five ways from ST I.2.3 that prove God’s existence, but specifically the second …show more content…
The objections suggest other things that might be considered omnipresent. For example, numbers, universals and prime matter can be considered to exist everywhere. If we think about the whole world as a sort of unity then we might claim that it is everywhere present in itself. Aquinas replies that there are senses in which one could rightly claim that other types of thing than God have a presence everywhere. However, God is unique in being everywhere primarily and essentially. The former term means that all of God exists everywhere, not just different parts of him in different places; the latter term means that He exists everywhere in all circumstances. So, the examples given in the objections can be thought of as existing everywhere but they do not exist everywhere primarily and essentially; it is these that give uniqueness to God’s