9. God as Omnipotent Creator (SCG 2,1–29)
God as Omnipotent Creator (SCG 2,1–29)
WHY IS IT worth reflecting on God’s works, on the things that God has made and governs? In SCG 2,2 Aquinas offers four reasons: (1) Doing so helps us to admire and reflect on God’s wisdom, which is partially displayed by creatures; (2) doing so leads us to admire God’s power and inspires reverence for God in us; (3) doing so incites us to love of God’s goodness; (4) doing so endows us with “a certain likeness to God’s perfection.”1 In SCG 2,3 Aquinas goes on to say that knowing about God’s creatures can serve to lead us away from errors concerning truths of faith, errors that are “inconsistent with true knowledge of God.”2 What sort of errors does Aquinas have in mind here? He mentions four: (1) Wrongly taking creatures to be the first cause when, in fact, they derive their being from God; (2) wrongly attributing to creatures what belongs only to God; (3) wrongly conceiving of God’s power through ignorance of the nature of creatures; (4) wrongly evaluating the dignity of people so as to suppose them to be subject to things to which they are not subject. In short, Aquinas declares, it is evident that “the opinion is false of those who asserted that it made no difference to the truth of the faith what anyone holds about creatures, so long as one thinks rightly about God.”3
So, in SCG 2,5, Aquinas explains that he is going to embark on SCG 2 by considering “first, the bringing forth of things into being; second, their distinction; third, the nature of these same things, brought forth and distinct from one another, so far as it is relevant to the truth of faith.”4