An Outline of an Argument for God’s Existence
I hope this doesn’t make anyone’s head spin. Please let me know if it does. I’m open to suggestions on how to tidy things up.
Here’s my objective: I’m trying to update St. Thomas Aquinas’ arguments one by one to make them easier to understand for the casual reader not steeped in scholastic philosophy, and this involves redefining his terminology and streamlining it somewhat, which is extremely difficult to do. And it doesn’t help at all that I’m a mathematician by profession. I make spagetti-bowl piles of logic for a living!
Anyway’s, here goes my best shot at the famous unmoved-mover proof.
Argument from Change
By looking at the world around us, we can see some things are changing. Now whatever is changed is changed by another, not by itself. This is because change is nothing but the acquisition of something not had or the loss of something had, and since nothing can acquire something not had unless it is indeed not had and nothing can lose something had unless it is indeed had, it is therefore impossible for a thing to change itself, or in other words, to acquire something from itself it does not have or to lose something to itself it does have. Thus, if that which changes something is itself changed, then it is changed by another.
But this cannot go on forever because then everything would be acquiring something it did not originally have without anything originally having it, which is absurd. So there must be a source of change which cannot be changed, and since time is the measure of change, any such source must exist beyond time.
Moreover, there can only be one such source; otherwise, if there were more, then there would be some distinction between them and thus one would have something the others lack, which would mean the others could be changed by acquiring it—a contradiction of the source’s unchangeableness.
Now in addition to being one, this source has everything which is acquired by anything through change. Furthermore, everything this source has it has infinitely, or else it would be changed whenever anything acquires something from it.
It follows that this source has all truth, all good, all beauty, all power, all presence, all intellect, all will, all personality, and indeed, all things infinitely, for all of these are acquired through change.
Therefore, God exists and is one and the same with this source of change that cannot be changed, which is also self-evidently synonymous with being itself or existence itself.
