Text: In his book, The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins spends a chapter objecting to his interpretation of famous arguments for the existence of God. It is the proper place of Atheists to do this since it is the only way to validate atheism. He begins with the first three Ways of Thomas Aquinas. His summary of them is somewhat reductive, especially where the terms are concerned. We will focus on Aquinas’s First Way in this video.

It is worth noting that Aquinas, being well-trained in the art of philosophy, incorporates quite a bit of realism into his thought. As such, he consistently uses very well-defined terms. This is to say, if one hopes to understand or summarize what he means, one had better take those terms seriously. Some key terms Thomas uses in this argument are motion, potency/potentiality, act/actuality, and first mover. Let us look in depth at these:

• Potency/potentiality, in the passive sense, denotes the ability of a thing to receive an effect/be changed, and in the active sense, denotes a thing's ability to act as a cause (Clarke, The One and the Many, 318 [linked above]).

• Actuality/act refers to a thing's current state or configuration in all aspects, substance, accident, essence, and existence (Clarke, The One and the Many, 315 [linked above]).

• Motion is finally meant in this argument as change, which as shown above is what act and potency describe thoroughly, which includes Newtonian physical movement, qualitative change, quantitative change, essential change/transformation/transubstantiation, and accidental change.

• Based on the above terms, the first mover is the initiating changer or mover that begins change in act and was that from which all potency came i.e. a being that is pure act which gave rise to the contingencies/changing of things without Himself being subject to the philosophical equivalent of the third Newtonian law that change would not be effected without oneself also being changed. As a result, this first causal action would have to defy the third Newtonian law in favor of the first, requiring an external unbalanced force or input of energy.

Thomas Aquinas, in the heart of his First Way, makes clear that all of material existence is subject to change and interdependency, which can be seen quite clearly in the Newtonian laws as they apply in any field of study. What Aquinas points out is that there has not been, and by the nature of things seemingly could not have been, found an unexplained motion in things unless there was at least one input from outside the system. Aquinas claims this is what we understand the first mover to have done. This does not necessarily mean that we would find the particular first source if we simulated the big bang. This would be to read something into Aquinas more specifically and correlate it to contemporary ideas or concepts that Aquinas did not have/use. Neither does the argument depend on an exhaustive knowledge of all that exists. The First Way was not meant to serve as a comprehensive treatment on the matter of God or his existence, find a terminator to place at the beginning of a theoretical infinite regress, nor comment on modern science. Nevertheless, it does seem to withstand Newtonian physics, acquit itself of the accusations it is charged with i.e. arbitrarity and assumption, and manages to be sufficiently conformed to the truth of material existence. Aquinas’s argument, contrary to Dawkins, would be better summarized in the following claims (Aquinas, Thomas. Summa Theologiae, based on the translation of Fathers of the English Dominican Province as found at newadvent.org):

1. Beings, most clearly inanimate beings, are not changed by themselves but only by something external to them. (In the case of animate beings, it is worth noting digestion is an involuntary process and so even though a being might seem to be able to change of their own accord there is no less input from outside the creature to make it possible.) The change occurs by means of an efficient cause i.e. something that already has actuality that brings a potency into potentiality, a catalyst of change, as it were.

2. To strengthen premise 1, Aquinas points out to be in potentiality and actuality in the same respect, at the same time, and concerning the same principle contradicts the law of noncontradiction and the principle of sufficient reason thereby. This is important because as Aquinas points out that would mean that a thing would be able to precede itself in existence and also be the efficient cause that would actualize its potential. The implication would be that things would spontaneously come in and out of existence and/or change while in existence without cause. This would violate the basis for many scientific laws; Newtonian motion, the law of conservation of mass, and the energy to mass conversions among them. If a counter-argument was attempted from the subatomic level, the truth is we do not yet have the tools or methods to understand the causes of change on that level, and this does not mean there is no cause.

3. There could not have been an actually infinite causal series of material beings, otherwise the series itself would violate the above principles i.e. it is without cause.

4. Since the first efficient cause of change would have to be excluded from that which is changed, it would make sense and be simplest to say (lacking another clear alternative), that the God we all believe in (it would have been difficult to find an atheist in the audience at that time) is said first cause. It is, after all, our belief that He is the creator.

However, to put the point Aquinas is getting at in our contemporary terms let us consider Einstein’s energy and mass equation. If there was in fact no matter at one point, there would have to have been energy and something to convert it to matter (a catalyst) to account for the matter and motion we have today. The problem is what would be the catalyst, even if the Big Bang were the moment of creation? Very often scientists will try to answer this with some complex imagined response, but this attempt is hypothetical and ultimately is the same thing all religions have done, use myth to explain how things came to be the way that they are, without having all the facts.

In his summary and rebuttal of this argument, Dawkins accuses Aquinas (in each of the First, Second, and Third Ways) of needing to reconcile an infinite regress and conveniently placing God in that space. This is to say as “god of the gaps”. However, placing anything at all conveniently in the space whether intuited from a scientific imagination or a religious one, does not resolve the problem. To suggest that we would only need a name to bring closure and an end to the investigation of the issue fails to address the real problem of a never-ending series of material objects giving rise to the next without something to explain it. The fact remains that there is in fact a space where God, as He has always been understood at least as far as the most enduring religions are concerned, would be. The Christian understanding of God, which predates science, is that He is the creator of all things and if He exists, would be close enough to suppose and distant enough to be unsure of. Claiming the First Way is a “God of the gaps” argument does not prove that if God existed, we would be wrong about Him, nor does it take seriously the philosophical validity and truth of the argument, it only shows that it seems to a scientist and atheist to be a non-scientific approach. Does the levied accusation of “arbitrarily conjuring up a terminator to an infinite regress and giving it a name simply because we need one, [and ascribing that to be] God” stand (Dawkins, The God Delusion, 77)? Not if one takes seriously the philosophical terms and the reality that they describe. Another objector, Hank Green accuses the arguments of not getting to the Christian God, however, that is not Aquinas’s intent here, which is found in succeeding pages of the Summa following epistemologically (Matt Fradd, Responding to Hank Green's objections to Aquinas' 5 ways). Moreover, Green does not really describe the God of Christianity either. The problem of infinite regress is one thing in theory (when things become circular in reasoning for example) and another when discussing material objects which Aquinas is. If we see billiard balls, however many there may be, perhaps billions, rolling, we know that there was something that bestowed its momentum/energy to them. Another objection is that God does not answer the infinite regress problem. On the contrary, if God is as He would have to be in order that we may call Him the first mover, He would, in fact, be the eternal noncontingent, non-changing entity that answers our material object infinite regress problem and not only the theoretical problem. Moreover, Aquinas never said that everything that exists needs a cause (Matt Fradd, Responding to Hank Green's objections to Aquinas' 5 ways, 17:14 [found above]).