• Question: What's your view on St. Thomas Aquinas' Cosmological Argument?

    Asked by mukherjeeman101 to Jack, Jon, Tom, Yalda on 14 Mar 2013.
    • Photo: Tom Branson

      Tom Branson answered on 14 Mar 2013:

      I have to be honest. I did not have any idea who this guy was or what his argument was, but I have just looked it up! And it is a very interesting idea.

      So basically it is, where did everything come from in the first place? it must have been a god…

      I think that it is a very difficult thing to think about. Current scientific knowledge can not explain what there was before the creation of the universe or the big bang. So it is an easy step to say that it must have been God that created everything. But there is also no evidence of this (apart from some religious books) so is this really what happened? We do not know the truth. So I think for some people find it is nice to think that there must have been a creator god that made everything, this solves the problem. But for me, I think we need to keep looking at the universe and see if there is any other evidence that we have not found yet and maybe we will come up with a new theory.

    • Photo: Yalda Javadi

      Yalda Javadi answered on 14 Mar 2013:

      Ah good old wikipedia came to the rescue, as I too didn’t know who St. Thomas Aquinas was and what he argued!

      My view on this is that for his time (1224-1274) this was amazing and profound and definitely offered one explanation for why we exist. However, since then we have come along way and unlocked many mysteries of the universe. And it is my belief that in order to develop we have to grow, which involves change! While science cannot explain what happened before the big bang, my view is that we should for sure keep on searching!

    • Photo: anon

      anon answered on 14 Mar 2013:

      It was a fairly good argument back in the 1200s, but people back then also thought that the world was flat and that women with moles or pimples were witches.

      Nowadays, we have a broader understanding of physics & cosmology so we can draw up different theories. No-one can say which one is right though and until we find a good answer, there’s every reason to keep looking.

    • Photo: Jack Heal

      Jack Heal answered on 16 Mar 2013:

      It’s interesting but I agree that it doesn’t prove anything. The argument boils down to “We don’t know how we got here, therefore we must have been created by God”.
      Just because we don’t know what the answer is doesn’t mean that the answer is “God”.
      I agree with Tom, Claire and Yalda: we must keep searching for an answer rather than taking the easy step and answering the problem with “God”.

    • Photo: Jon Marles-Wright

      Jon Marles-Wright answered on 17 Mar 2013:

      It seems like a bit of a place-holder argument to me. It might have been a reasonable argument in the 13th Century, but saying something is the way it is ‘because God did it’ seems to go a bit against modern science. Saying that, there are lots of questions we don’t know the answer to, especially when it comes to cosmology, and any answer you would give to some big questions is just as (in)valid as another.

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