St. Thomas Aquinas

St. Thomas Aquinas (1224/5–1274), called the Angelic Doctor, was the foremost Christian philosopher in history.

The following are excerpts from the book The Wonder of the World: A Journey from Modern Science to the Mind of God by Roy Abraham Varghese. Used with permission.

"...Varghese's Wonder bears favorable comparison with Stanley Jaki's Gifford Lectures, The Road of Science and the Ways to God. ...Varghese's Wonder contains more detail on the current situation in science, and it has the added advantage of being much better informed about Eastern thought. It would be difficult to find a comparable investigation accessible to a general audience. Setting out the pros and cons in dialogue form, Varghese manages to keep the argument moving briskly along in language any educated, attentive reader can follow. It would be hard to find anything in contemporary literature quite like this lucid, wide-ranging exploration of the central issues." — Professor Thomas Sullivan: Philosopher, University of St. Thomas St. Paul, Minnesota
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From page 70:
Every thousand years or so, there comes a thinker whose life is as striking as his or her intellectual output is stunning. Viewed from this perspective, it is remarkable indeed that within a period of 300+ years, the world was to witness the convergent odysseys of four titans of thought who set the agenda for the study of reality at every level. This is the period I like to call the Golden Age of human thought. Between them, Avicenna of Persia (980–1037), Moses Maimonides of Egypt(1135–1204), Thomas Aquinas of Italy (c. 1225–1274) and Madhvacharya of India (c. 1238–1317) created a magnificent monument of thought that underpins the very possibility of the scientific enterprise. It was the mother of all Theories of Everything, one that was validated both by its inherent logic and the success of modern science.

From page 12:
My thesis is that the foundational framework of modern science, with the key idea of laws of nature, was born and bred in the theistic world-vision. What is more, prior to this and within a time window of 300 years, the four finest thinkers of Hinduism, Judaism, Christianity and Islam framed a meta-scientific Theory of Everything that underpins the scientific enterprise. This intellectual superstructure, which we shall call the Matrix, provided a systematic rationale for the foundations of science. Its starting-point and core principle was an “equation of God.” Interestingly the great scientists who founded modern science, Copernicus, Newton, Maxwell, Einstein, Planck, Heisenberg, Dirac and numerous others, were Prophets of the Matrix in the sense that they passionately proclaimed the root-and-fruit embeddedness of science and religion. The Matrix is the common platform that supports both science and religion.

From page 116 to 118:
St. Thomas Aquinas (1224/5–1274), called the Angelic Doctor, was the foremost Christian philosopher in history. Thomism, the school of thought built around his work, has attracted disciples from both different religions and no religion. Born to noble parents, he became a monk in the Dominican Order in 1243. He studied under Albert Magnus and taught at the University of Paris. Before he died at the age of fifty, he authored numerous works of philosophy and theology that came to some 8 million words. The Summa Theologica and the Summa Contra Gentiles are his two most celebrated books.

Aquinas made distinctive contributions in multiple areas, but our concern here is with his writings on God, the soul and human reason.

God
Aquinas embraced Avicenna’s formulation of God as the Being that exists by its very nature/essence, and refined the formulation further by introducing the idea of act and potency. An act is any activity or operation while potency is a potentiality or capability. A car has the passive potency of running on the road and its driver has the active potency of being able to run it. The actual running of the car is the actualization of both potencies. These ideas are transferred to the question of existence. The existence of a being is the act of existing of its essence, of what it is. All beings other than God are dependent for their existence, for the actualization of their essence, on external, previously existing beings. Ultimately, they are dependent on God because His essence is identical to His act of existing. “Everything, then, which is such that its act of existing is other than its nature,” writes Aquinas, “must needs have its act of existing from something else. And since every being which exists through another is reduced, as to its first cause, to one existing in virtue of itself, there must be some being which is the cause of the existing of all things because it itself is the act of existing alone...There is a being, God, whose essence is His very act of existing.”

God is Pure Act. He cannot exist more fully than he does and has no passive potentiality yet to be actualized. “The act of existing which is God is such that no addition can be made to it,” said Aquinas. “God possesses all perfections in His very act of existing.”

Aquinas believed that human reason could discover the existence of God from reflection on the world. From effects we find the cause. This is the basis of his famous Five Ways for demonstrating the existence of God, which are five versions of one fundamental insight: the affirmation that all existent beings must be the ground of their own existence or have this ground in something else.

Although Aquinas believed that our knowledge of God proceeds from negation, from determining what God is not, what limitations he lacks, he also believed that we can know something about God by way of analogy:

“God prepossesses in Himself all the perfections of creatures, being Himself absolutely and universally perfect. Hence every creature represents Him, and is like Him, so far as it possesses some perfection: yet not so far as to represent Him as something of the same species or genus, but as the excelling source of whose form the effects fall short, although they derive some kind of likeness thereto. ...When we say God is good, the meaning is not, God is the cause of goodness, or, God is not evil; but the meaning is, Whatever good we attribute to creatures pre-exists in God, and in a higher way...He causes goodness in things because He is good.”

Laws of Nature

“There is a certain Eternal Law, to wit, Reason, existing in the mind of God and governing the entire universe.”

The Soul

“The nature of anything is manifested from its operation. Now, the proper operation of man, as man, is to understand; indeed he rises above all else by this operation...The intellectual principle is the proper form of man.” “We have to say that the principle of intellectual operation which we call the soul of man, is some sort of incorporeal and subsistent principle...This intellectual principle called mind or intellect has an operation by itself which it does not share with the body.”

Truth

“The nature of the true consists in a conformity of thing and intellect.” “Our knowledge, taking its start from things, proceeds in this order. First, it begins in sense; second it is completed in the intellect.” “First principles are immediately known when we know their terms. … The intellect is not deceived in any way with respect to first principles. It is plain, then, that if intellect is taken in the first sense – according to that action from which it receives the name ‘intellect’ – falsity is not in the intellect. Intellect can also be taken in a second sense – in general, that is, as extending to all its operations, including opinion and reasoning. In that case, there is falsity in the intellect. But it never occurs if a reduction to first principles is made correctly.”

To find out more about Thomas Aquinas and the "Theory of Everything" he shares in common with Avicenna, Maimonides and Mahdvacharya, read the book The Wonder of the World: A Journey from Modern Science to the Mind of God by Roy Abraham Varghese.

Further resources on Saint Thomas Aquinas: