Overall, Aquinas: for Arm Chair Theologians, by Timothy M. Renick makes several interesting and valid points about evil, free will, and the omnipresence/ omnipotence of God. Renick also provided an interesting analysis of Aquinas’ understanding of God’s existence in time and space. Personally, I agreed with most of what Renick and Aquinas thought about God. I strongly disagree with Calvin and Luther’s idea of predestination. I agree that God gave us all free will, that God is above time, that he chooses what he wants to know and what he doesn’t want to know, and that God does not create catastrophes or evil but that he provides us with the resources and matter to create evil. One of Aquinas’ most profound ideas is that God can make things happen (necessitate them) or allow them to naturally work themselves out and will things to happen in if certain other things happen (contingent). He gives us free will to choose our own fate because he loves us …show more content…
Aquinas made a valid point out demonstrating how God can make things happen or he can just let them play out. God doesn’t always want to know everything and sometimes he just goes with the flow. Another great point is that God gives us free will so that we can make our own decisions. Free will makes it so we can make good or bad choices but the important thing is that we’re the ones making our own decisions. I believe that one of the most important points that the article makes is that God is above time and exists infinitely and will never die. Even though God knows what we are going to do before we do it he chooses to let us live our life accordingly and how we want to. The last point that I agree with is that God does not create evil. He creates the resources that we then can use towards evil. We are the ones who choose to act using evil and how we are going to act while using evil. I enjoyed this article and agreed with most of the points that Aquinas has
However, how does God play into this argument? Because He is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent – how does that reconcile with our free will? One of the ways that free will and God’s omniscience coexist is through our ability to sin. As human beings, we are sinful.
published by Huffington Post, the theological law of free will infers that God cannot interfere with the choices we make, because he created us along with the freedom of choice, and isn 't able to make
In other words, everything is planned before a person is on the Earth and they cannot change God’s
A Dominican, he combined theological principles of faith with the philosophical principles of reason and was the father of the Thomistic school of theology. Thomas Aquinas identified three types of laws: natural, positive and eternal. Natural law prompts man to act in accordance with achieving his goals … eternal law, in the case of rational beings, depends on reason and is put into action through free will, which also works toward the accomplishment of man's spiritual goals. Universities and seminaries use the Summa Theologica as the leading theology textbook.
The Summa Theological tries to describe the relationship between God and human beings and to explain how everything is made possible through Christ; it was constructed of three parts. The first part talked a lot about the existence of god. The second part manly deals with the purpose of man. Then the last part talks about Christ and the events that he went through. Aquinas does well at defining the different sections.
Defenders of the Argument from Evil have challenged the last premises of the presented by the critics of Theological Fatalism and have shown that free will is not possible under an omniscient god. Conclusion In conclusion, an omnipotent, omniscient, and all good God cannot coexist with evil. Therefore, seeing that evil still exists in this world in terms of natural disaster and human suffering, an omnipotent, omniscient, and all good God cannot
In chapter three of Aquinas for Armchair Theologians by Timothy Renick, Aquinas’s philosophy on evil in the world and the free will of humans is heavily discussed. Renick describes a very complex topic and transforms it into something the average person can read and understand. Aquinas answers the questions of whether evil exists, did God create evil, why does evil exist, and if evil exists, who or what removes it. He also answers the questions of whether humans have the free will to make decisions or has God predetermined every decision and its outcome according to his plan. While I found this article somewhat easy to follow, I can understand how some of Aquinas’s arguments can lead to debate or confusion on the nature of God, evil, and free will.
In theory, he thinks that if God exists then evil should not, but it does. So he creates and argues a theodicy to show that God and evil can exist at the same time. He comes up with the “Free Will Theodicy” which states that humans are the cause of evil, not God. The Free Will Theodicy discusses two kinds of evil: moral evil and natural evil.
The first purpose of "Aquinas for Armchair Theologians" seems to be to inculcate the reader that evil exists and is around us in many different forms that we do not recognize. All the reasons for evils existence that Renick discussed are compared to certain people and other living things.
In his first article on war, he expresses that was is entirely justifiable and not sinful. However, while Aquinas claims war is not always sinful, there must be a set of three circumstances that are present for force to be justified. This goes into more depth than Augustine, as Aquinas says the three necessary requirements are “the authority of the sovereign by whose command the war is to be waged… a just cause is required… [and] the belligerents should have a rightful intention”. Both Aquinas and Augustine believe that there must be a good intention for the war, whether it be to reinforce the good, or eliminate the bad. Both Augustine and Aquinas have a very similar viewpoint of peace and how to obtain it.
The paradox of the stone heavily relies on Thomas Aquinas’s understanding of gods omnipotence. Aquinas proposes that Omnipotence is the power to do everything that is possible, not just to do anything. Aquinas breaks it down into two forms of possibilities; Relative possibility and Absolute possibility that will be discussed first in order to understand the paradox of the stone argument. Relative possibility is a power that lies within some beings, but not within others.
In this essay, I will set out to prove that Thomas Aquinas’ First Cause Argument does not show that God exists and the conclusion that God exists does not follow from the premises of the first cause argument. I do think that the conclusion is valid and could be sound/or has the potential to be, but the premises fail to provide the basis upon which to reach such a conclusion. Hence, I will be raising some objections to the premises and will try to disprove any counter-arguments that could be raised in its defense. This would be done by examining Aquinas’ First Cause Argument and trying to disprove it whilst countering arguments in its defense.
This means going through life when faced with decisions, He does interfere or enforce a predisposed plan upon an individual. Reasoning for this stems from personal everyday actions. Upon waking up, there are many decisions that can be made, all of which can slightly alter the future, yet its feels as though there is no divine power at work when making one of these decisions. Individuals go through mental monologues to come to a decision based on the facts and opportunities presented with them. Saint Augustine claims the very same thing in Book V of the text when he says, “that God knows all things before they happen; yet, we act by choice in all those things where we feel and know that we cannot act otherwise than willingly.”
Thomas Aquinas, and Aristotle have somewhat analogous aspects on the concept of virtue, however, while one uses faith, the other uses reason to call for the need of temperance. According to Aquinas virtue is merely the good use of free will (655). This is a common view for those in the practice of Christianity, where many believe that God gives everyone free will and it is up to the individual to put it to good use. Nevertheless, in his work he explains that there are multiple factors that contribute to putting free will to actual good use, and the most prevalent is self-control. Self-control implies discipline, and discipline can ultimately become the deciding factor in the creation of a habit, specifically an operative habit; which Aquinas defines as human virtue (656).
Augustine was the man for the job; confronting philosophical questions and provided a spiritual solution that faced the Empire. He argued in “City of God” that Rome was not the Eternal City that everyone thought, but was the City of Man and was just temporary and the City of God was everlasting because was the commander and not Emperors or Kings. On the other spectrum, Aquinas tells his audience in the “Summa Theologica” there are various kinds of law. He tells that there are three kinds of laws. The divine law is the eternal law that comes directly from the will of God which provides structure and ordains the universe to function in the way that it does, the natural law which is the moral order of human beings, and the human law which is the legal/ political order that is derived from the natural law.