Chapter 2. Approaching the Question of God’s Existence (SCG 1,10–12)
CHAPTER 2. APPROACHING THE QUESTION OF GOD’S EXISTENCE (SCG 1,10–12)
1. Aquinas also discusses these questions in Summa Theologiaē 1a,2. But the treatment of them in the SCG is considerably longer than the treatment in the Summa Theologiae.
2. I shall return to Aquinas’s notion of substantial form. For now, I am trying to get some major points across as quickly as I can.
3. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Occasions 1912–1951, edited by James Klagge and Alfred Norman (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993), 373.
4. I quote from Thomas Aquinas: Selected Philosophical Writings, translated by Timothy McDermott (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 71–72.
5. ND, 1, 79. Like the translator of ND 1, I am taking “self-evident” to be an accurate rendering of Aquinas’s phrase per se notum (literally, “known through itself,” understood to contrast with “known by means of something else”).
6. ND, 1, 79 [1].
7. Aquinas must have been thinking of particular writers when noting, in the SCG, arguments for the claim that “God exists” is self-evident. But he does not refer to any authors by name. However, the first and second arguments look very like what St. Anselm of Canterbury (1033–1109) offers in chapters 2 and 3 of his Proslogion, a text with which Aquinas was familiar. For Anselm’s arguments see Anselm of Canterbury: The Major Works, edited by Brian Davies and G. R. Evans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 87–88. In the Summa Theologiae, Aquinas cites St. John Damascene (c. 675–749) as someone who, rightly or wrongly, might be quoted in defense of what looks like the fourth argument for “God exists” being “self-evident.” The Summa Theologiae reference to Damascene in this connection appears to be to his On the Orthodox Faith, 1,1.
8. ND, 1, 81 [1].
9. ND, 1, 82 [5].
10. From this text alone, though also from others in the SCG, I infer that Aquinas is presupposing that readers of the SCG would be, to say the least, students with a fair grounding in theology and philosophy as he understood it. This inference squares with what Patfoort argues in Saint Thomas d’Aquin: Les Clefs d’une Théologie (Paris: FAC éditions, 1983).
11. Aquinas himself accepts that God’s essence is to be and that, in God, essence and existence are identical, and he goes on to argue for this conclusion later in the SCG. In SCG 1,12, however, he presumes that his readers are familiar with the conclusion and that the people he is talking about accept it. So, I shall refrain from an attempt to explicate it in detail until later in this book.
12. See Aristotle, Posterior Analytics II,9 (93b–28).
13. See Aristotle, Metaphysics IV,7 (1012a 23–25).
14. See Aristotle, Posterior Analytics I,18 (81a 38–39).
15. ND, 1, 85 [8]. By “middle term” Aquinas has in mind a term that allows us to proceed to a conclusion from at least two premises. He would, for example, have thought of “carnivore” as the middle term in the argument “All cats are carnivores; all carnivores eat meat; therefore all cats eat meat.”
16. We might translate demonstratio propter quid by “demonstration why” and demonstratio quia as “demonstration that.”
17. Aquinas does not think that we can never offer a demonstration quia that relies on some knowledge of what a certain cause is. His point is that a distinction can be made between demonstration propter quid and demonstration quia so as to register the fact that we can reason causally while not understanding what a certain cause really is. For another example of quia reasoning as Aquinas understands it, consider the case of a door that normally opens as we push on it but gets stuck on some occasion since it is obviously meeting resistance of some kind from the other side. One would try to account for the door failing to open, but one might have little idea as to what exactly is resisting one’s pushing against it. I mention this example since it fits in with the fact that Aquinas thinks that demonstration quia when it comes to God actually leaves us in a serious state of ignorance concerning God even though it can successfully be employed when arguing for the truth of “God exists.”
18. Aquinas is contrasting knowledge and belief here since he thinks that knowledge involves understanding in a way that belief, or mere belief, does not. A scientist might know what gravity is while a nonscientist might just believe, on the say-so of the scientist, that gravity is real. By the same token, Aquinas thinks that someone might know that God exists while others might believe that this is so because they have been told that it is so.
19. The reference here is to De Fide Orthodoxa (On the Orthodox Faith), bk. 1, chapter 4. In this chapter John emphasizes the incomprehensibility of God. He writes: “It is clear that God exists, but what He is in essence and nature is beyond all understanding. … As regards what God is, it is impossible to say what He is in His essence, so it is better to discuss Him by abstraction from all things whatsoever. For He does not belong to the number of beings, not because He does not exist, but because He transcends all beings and being itself.” My quotations from Damascene come from the translation of De Fide Orthodoxa provided in Saint John of Damascus, Writings, translated by Frederic H. Chase, Jr., The Fathers of the Church (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1958), 37:170–172.
20. I quote from Aquinas: “Summa Theologiae,” Questions on God, edited by Brian Davies and Brian Leftow (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 23.
21. ND, 1, 85 [9].
22. In the Latin translation of Romans 1:20 that Aquinas used, the word rendered as “understood” by the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible is not one that would, for Aquinas, have meant “fully understood.” Aquinas takes Romans 1:20 to be speaking of some knowledge of God derived from what God has made, not of a knowledge that he would regard as a matter of scientia concerning the divine nature. For Aquinas on different senses of “know,” see Scott MacDonald, “Theory of Knowledge,” which is chapter 6 of The Cambridge Companion to Aquinas, edited by Norman Kretzmann and Eleonore Stump (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). Aquinas thinks that we can know something about God without grasping what God is essentially.
23. ND, 1, 84 [6].
24. The classic text here is A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic, 2nd ed. (London: Victor Gollancz, 1946), specifically 114–120.
25. David Hume, An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, edited by Tom L. Beauchamp (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), 123.
26. I take it that the death knell for logical positivism was sounded by Alonzo Church in his review of the second edition of Language, Truth and Logic, Journal of Symbolic Logic 14 (1949).
27. Davies and Leftow, Aquinas: “Summa Theologiae,” 24.
28. Davies and Leftow, Aquinas: “Summa Theologiae,” 26.
29. D. Z. Phillips, The Concept of Prayer (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965), 10.
30. The Concept of Prayer, 81.
31. D. Z. Phillips, Religion without Explanation (Oxford: Blackwell, 1976), 174 and 181.
32. In his highly influential Meditations on First Philosophy, René Descartes (1596–1650) argues that he is essentially a nonmaterial thinking thing. Many natural theologians have worked on the assumption that God is what Descartes takes himself to be, albeit more knowing, more powerful, and much better behaved. Hence, for example, Richard Swinburne begins The Coherence of Theism, rev. ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), by saying that God is “a person without a body” (1).
33. I defend this conclusion in some detail in my “D. Z. Phillips on Belief in God,” Philosophical Investigations 30, no. 3 (2007).
34. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993.
35. Barr’s point is endorsed and in some ways developed in Christopher Rowland, “Natural Theology and the Christian Bible,” which is chapter 2 of The Oxford Handbook of Natural Theology, edited by Russell Re Manning (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
36. Acts 17:24.
37. Acts 17:28.
38. James Barr, Biblical Faith and Natural Theology (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 26.
39. Vatican I, Dogmatic Constitution on the Catholic Faith (Dei Filius), chapter 2. The text I cite reads: “Eadem sancta mater Ecclesia tenet et docet, Deum, rerum omnium principium et finem, naturali humanae rationis lumine e rebus creatis certo cognosci posse: ‘invisibilia enim ipsius a creatura mundi, per ea quae facta sunt, intellecta, conspiciuntur’ (Rom 1,20).”
40. Barr, Biblical Faith and Natural Theology, 43 and following.
41. Psalm 19:1.
42. For the notion of a universal knowledge of God derived from the world, see especially Wisdom 13:5. Also see Barr, Biblical Faith and Natural Theology, 67: “Both Paul and Wisdom begin from creation and provide an account of the way in which people, failing to recognize the reality of the creator God, entered into idolatry and then into the vilest immorality. Both say that God, the true God, was known to people, which is why their idolatry was disgraceful and inexcusable. Both hold it clear that God is knowable through the things that he has made (Wisd. 13:5; Rom. 1:20). The similarities are very great.”
43. Barr, Biblical Faith and Natural Theology, 104.
44. For a review and criticism of a lot of them, see Graham Oppy, Ontological Arguments and Belief in God (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
45. The exception here is Alvin Plantinga, who offers a defense of an ontological argument, though not one that Aquinas considers, in The Nature of Necessity (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), and God, Freedom and Evil (London: Allen and Unwin, 1974).
46. I try to explain them in chapter 7 of The Cambridge Companion to Anselm, edited by Brian Davies and Brian Leftow (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
47. For a more technical statement of this point, see Oppy, Ontological Arguments, 114–116.
48. William P. Alston, “Why Should There Not Be Experience of God?,” in Philosophy of Religion: A Guide and Anthology, edited by Brian Davies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 384. Alston extensively develops what I have quoted him as saying in William P. Alston, Perceiving God: The Epistemology of Religious Belief (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991).
49. Alston does not target Aquinas for criticism in what he says about perceiving God. However, his comments on the notion of perceiving God are obviously relevant to what Aquinas says about “God exists” not being “self-evident.” For another contemporary philosopher arguing along lines similar to those of Alston, see Richard Swinburne, The Existence of God, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004), chapter 13.
50. See Summa Theologiae 1a,12,1. As I will show, Aquinas has things to say relevant to the beatific vision in SCG 2.
51. “Why Should There Not Be Experience of God?,” 385.