Thomas Aquinas Argument

St Thomas Aquinas was born around 1225 in the city of Naples. In his growing up, Aquinas was dubbed the “Dumb Ox” because he was quiet and rather large in size. However his Teacher at the time told his fellow classmates that his “Bellows” would one day be heard around the world. His teacher, Albert the Great, was right and today Aquinas is renowned as one of the best philosophers of his time because of his ideas on the existence of God including the five proofs that God exists. Thomas Aquinas made some of the first arguments for the existence of God and to this day many of them still hold up quite nicely. His contributions to the beliefs of Christianity have done a great job of allowing Christians to explain the problems in the ideology of …show more content…
Another argument by Aquinas specifically is that if a human is considered an eternal being, which is a common belief in the Christian ideology, then an exile for eternity is permissible. Also if heaven is an eternal place and the existence of free will is what allows evil to exist as well as an omniscient omnipotent God, then there must also be arrangements made for those who choose not. That arrangement is what is considered hell. The separation of those who choose to turn their backs on God and God himself is what is called hell. Aquinas made this clear and showed that an eternal hell could be justified in this way as well. This argument has some obvious weaknesses in it. For example there is no specification in the requirement that people who reject God that they be punished. There is no reason that the separation be made a horrible separation unless the actual existence of God is what keeps us from being eternally tortured. If there is still a punishment after a person separates from God and God is still good then a discrepancy exists. God could have just as well made it a pleasant place for people who reject Christ even if it isn’t the paradise that is referred to in …show more content…
At first it seems unfair to have an eternal punishment for a finite being who commits finite crimes. This idea has turned many people away from the Christian tradition because they do not want to follow a God that they think is unjust and cruel. However, in this ideology God is neither evil nor cruel nor unjust. He is simply acting in perfect justification that is required by his nature. God, in this manner can regain his qualities of completely good and able to send people to an eternal punishment of they choose. He allows the people to not choose that and instead choose his way, which is grace and justification from the crimes that they committed against him. It joins with thee free will argument saying that it is the choice of the sinner to choose repentance or death. If God is goodness then the opposite has to be death. A crime committed against goodness is the absence of goodness. Therefore it makes sense that a perfect God has to allow some way of justification in order to preserve free will and allow his creation to choose for