Five Proofs preview

By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed will be out from Ignatius Press next month.  Later in the year, and also from Ignatius, comes my book Five Proofs of the Existence of God.  Having told you, dear reader, a bit about the former, let me say something about the latter.

It is not a book about Aquinas’s Five Ways.  I have already treated that topic at some length in my book Aquinas and in several of the essays collected in Neo-Scholastic Essays.  Rather, it is a book about what I personally take to be the five most compelling arguments for God’s existence.  Naturally, there is some overlap with the Five Ways, but the book largely stakes out new ground. 

The arguments in question are what I call the Aristotelian proof, the Neo-Platonic proof, the Augustinian proof, the Thomistic proof, and the Rationalist proof.  As those labels indicate, each of the arguments has a long history in the tradition.  They can be found in some form or other in thinkers like Aristotle, Plotinus, Augustine, Aquinas, and Leibniz.  However, the specific formulations are my own.  I am not presenting the arguments exactly as any of these thinkers presented them, and I am not doing exegesis of any of their works.

That is deliberate.  In Aquinas and in The Last Superstition, I treat the question of God’s existence by way of expounding and defending Aquinas’s own arguments.  That was appropriate given the specific aims of those books, but it has a downside.  As readers of those books know, properly to understand Aquinas’s Five Ways, you first have to understand all the background philosophical theses he presupposes in the arguments but actually develops and defends elsewhere.  For example, you need to understand his account of what change is, of how efficient causation works and the different kinds of causal series that there are, of the structure of a material substance, and so on.  You also need to disentangle these background philosophical theses from the dated and mistaken scientific claims Aquinas sometimes used to illustrate them, but which are not in fact essential to them.  That is why, in both books, the reader has to work through seventy pages or so of fairly abstract general metaphysics before getting to the specific topic of what Aquinas had to say about God’s existence.

In the years since writing Aquinas, I became convinced that there was a need for a book that approaches things differently.  In particular, there was a need for a book that just gets straight to the main thrust of each of the best arguments for God’s existence, introducing the relevant background metaphysical notions along the way rather than in a separate prolegomenon, and without getting bogged down in exegetical questions or being limited to discussing what some particular writer of the past had to say.  That’s what Five Proofs does.  I defend an Aristotelian proof, but not Aristotle’s own formulation exactly; a Neo-Platonic proof, but without doing any exegesis of Plotinus’s Enneads; and so on.

The Aristotelian proof, as you might expect, is an argument from the distinction between actuality and potentiality to the existence of a purely actual actualizer of the existence of things.  The Neo-Platonic proof is an argument from the existence of things that are composite to a first cause that is absolutely simple or non-composite.  The Augustinian proof is an argument from realism about universals, propositions, possible worlds, and purported abstract objects in general to the existence of an infinite divine intellect in which these entities must reside. The Thomistic proof is an argument from the existence of things whose essence is distinct from their existence to a first cause which is subsistent existence itself.  The Rationalist proof is an argument to the existence of an absolutely necessary being from the principle of sufficient reason, where the latter is interpreted in Scholastic rather than Leibnizian terms.  Each of these arguments is developed and defended at much greater length than I have treated any of them elsewhere.

Each of the first five chapters of the book is devoted to one of these arguments, and the structure of each of these chapters is as follows.  First, I argue in a discursive or informal way for the existence of something fitting a certain key description – being a purely actual actualizer, or an absolutely simple or non-composite cause, or what have you.  Second, I argue in a discursive or informal way that anything fitting this key description must also possess the key divine attributes – unity, immutability, immateriality, omnipotence, omniscience, and so forth.  Third, I then recapitulate the argumentation of the first two sections in a more formal way, showing how the reasoning can be set out carefully in a long step-by-step demonstration that lays bare its basic logical structure.  Fourth, I address all the main objections that have been or might be raised against the argument.  Again, I follow this procedure for each of the arguments in these first five chapters.

In the sixth chapter of the book, which is quite long – almost a short book by itself – I treat in much more detail all of the key divine attributes, as well as God’s relationship to the world.  In particular, I argue at length for God’s unity, simplicity, immutability, immateriality, incorporeality, eternity, necessity, omnipotence, omniscience, perfect goodness, will, love, and incomprehensibility.  I also defend the doctrines of divine conservation and concurrence.  These issues will all have been dealt with to some extent in the earlier chapters, but the sixth chapter is intended to probe them at greater depth, to address all the main objections, and so on.

The seventh and final chapter of the book is an “omnibus” treatment of all the main objections to arguments for God’s existence of the sort defended in the book.  Once again, these matters will have been dealt with to some extent in the earlier chapters, but the aim of the seventh chapter is to probe them at much greater depth, and also to deal with objections that aren’t treated in the earlier chapters.

The book is, then, a general work of natural theology, as concerned with the divine nature as it is with God’s existence.  Naturally, it is written from the point of view of a Thomist, but it also interacts critically and in some detail with the literature in contemporary analytic philosophy of religion, both theist and atheist.  Essentially it does for natural theology what my book Scholastic Metaphysics did for that subject.

More information to come…