Kirkekegaard And Aquinas Take Home Course Work Sample

1) A. A lot of Thomas Aquinas’s “genius” did not rest in his own thoughts, but in his ability to Christianize the ideas of the ancient Greeks such as Aristotle and Plato’s school of thoughts. In his Summa Theologiae, he presents five arguments that he believes demonstrates logically the need for the existence of God.
1. Aquinas’s first proof for the existence of God was centered on motion. The parallel to the Aristotelian physics is apparent. Under that system, an arrow moved because wind behind it pushed it. Anything moving needed a driving force behind it or initial cause. This initial cause could be traced back to an original cause and orgin. Aquinas writes that “Whatever is in motion is moved by something else: for nothing undergoes motion except in so far as it is in a state of potentiality.” (Aquinas, 350).
2. His second proof relies on efficient cause. In a serious of causes one could go back ad infinitum. For “each ordered series of efficient causes, the first item is the cause of the next.” (Aquinas 350). IN order for the series to begin in motion though, one bust go to a primary moving, a d necessary cause, this is what Aquinas sees as God. This is very similar to the argument for motion, and the current understanding of physics likewise diminishes its compellingness.
3. The third proof goes to a more abstract and metaphysical realm away from physics. It is the “Possibility and necessity” argument. Basically, all things that are were once not and when they were not they obviously had a potential of being since we encounter them in a state of being. He looks at that in a perfect being there would be a potential for it to be, and it is a necessary condition that a perfect being exists. “There must be something in the world which is necessary” is the basic tenet of the argument. This though is a big jump. Aquinas once this to be true as a a priori axiom. This argument is founded on that argument, which seems invalid since the premise is rather dubious.
4. Like the second was like the first, so the fourth is a similar to the third argument for the existence of god. Aquinas looks at the gradations and ranks them by being less good or more good. He says “things which are truest are greatest in being.” Aquinas, 351) He sees things than on a pathway to a mountain and assumes there must be something at the peak of it. This thing he calls God. Once again, I have trouble following with my modern lens this line of reasoning. Things in the universe, I don’t believe can be ranked as better or worse, they simply are.
5. The fifth way has to do with an inner code or law of things. Aquinas observed that things have direction; they are reaching for their ends. He then wonders what directed them towards this and calls that God.
B. I find the fifth proof most compelling. This argument might be his strongest, but in modern terms it is certainly not how science understands things. Again, things just are as they are without necessarily having an internal code of direction written within them. The first argument I find the least compelling. This fits well with the ancient view, but it is less compelling today, since Aristotelian physics was replaced with Newtonian physics, which has made way for quantum physics.
2) A. Kierkegaard does not believe that history can prove that Christ was God because he does not see the writing featuring accounts of Jesus as valid sources to prove that God exists. He sees it as a subjective argument. “Suppose,” he says, “that subjectivity is truth, and that subjectivity is an existing subjectivity, then if I may so express myself, Christianity fits perfection into the picture.”
B. When Kierkegaard says that ”Faith is the objective uncertainty along with the repulsion of the absurd held fast in the passion of inwardness,” (Kierkegaard, 3) what he menas to say is the definition of faith is that one does not have proof of it. One cannot have faith and also consider it knowledge, since the definition of faith is belief in something that cannot be proven.
C. Kierkegaard deeming Christianity is an absurdity stems from this. His previous argument already sufficiently demonstrated that it is not a rational belief, so Christianity as a whole is based on something which cannot be fully demonstrated.
D. Kierkegaard’s statement that “it is easier to be a Christian when I am not a Christian than to become a Christian when I am” seems to point that that Christianity as a code might not be hard to follow, but it is difficult to commit oneself, especially the reflective mind of a philosopher, fully over to something which his logic and sense or reason has already deemed subjective and absurd.