76 Moral Philosophy: Ideas of Good and Evil, Right and Wrongfor human law, signposts that human reason can see are in
harmony with the eternal and natural, therefore in harmony with
God’s will.
Predictably, Aquinas sees religion as the means to achieve the
highest level of human existence. The same way Aristotle sought
to contemplate God to achieve happiness, Aquinas seeks through
religious contemplation to have a “vision of God,” which is the
supreme happiness. Aquinas distinguishes between superior
reason and inferior reason. Through a spiritual, religious life,
one can achieve superior reason, an understanding of good,
truth, beauty, and other non-temporal concepts. Inferior reason
deals with the temporal world: science, materialism, and mun
dane human affairs. Dealing with the material world brings
pleasure, which is not bad; dealing with the spiritual world
brings joy, which is much better.
This union with God comes through God’s grace. We cannot,
in a real sense, earn the vision of God. It is a gift of God’s grace.
With free will, however, we can reject God. Thus, through grace,
with the development of intellectual and moral virtues, through
reason, and with an understanding of eternal, natural, divine, and
human law, we can gain the happiness this world has to offer and
also the ultimate happiness that the next world offers— when the
vision of God becomes actual.
One of Aquinas’ major contentions was that faith and reason
are not contradictory. If, indeed, they were contradictory, he
contended that reason would prove faith false. Thus, if reason
could prove faith false there would be no way to have faith.
When one discusses faith in God’s existence, one must be able
to put forward some reasonable explanation to justify that faith.
Aquinas would also contend that faith comes first, that every
thing begins with an act of faith. This is not to say that one can
prove God’s existence, just as one cannot disprove it. But
rational explanations are required. Aquinas has put forth five
rational proofs for the existence of God:
- The argument from motion: We observe that there is
motion in the world. Everything that moves must be put into
motion by something else. A thing cannot be both mover and
moved, it cannot move itself. If everything is moved by some
thing, one must admit to an infinity of moved and movers, and
there would be no first mover. If this were so there would be no