Saint Thomas Aquinas & the Five Ways

In this lecture, Dr. Schenk mentions Saint Thomas Aquinas’s “Five Ways” Argument as a background for the Cosmological Argument. If you are interested, an outline of Aquinas’s “Five Ways” is available here in the public domain from Minnesota State University.

Aquinas’s “Five Ways” is a collection of five arguments for the existence of God, including:

1. Argument from Motion
2. Argument from Efficient Causes
3. Argument from Possibility and Necessity (Reductio Argument)
4. Argument from Gradation of Being
5. Argument from Design

Saint Thomas Aquinas was born in the Kingdom of Sicily in 1225 and died in 1274. Aquinas was a Dominican friar and a Catholic priest. His work in philosophy and theology has had immense influence on Western philosophical thought, with the Summa Theologica (a collection of the teachings of the Catholic Church) as his most famous work. His interests ranged from the study of reason, ethics, and natural law to metaphysics and theology. As Dr. Schenk shares, Aquinas embraced Aristotelian philosophy, merging it with his Christian beliefs. Aquinas was both a philosopher and a great theologian, and from his work came the philosophical school of Thomism. He was canonized as a Saint in 1323.