The Shape of Theological Humanism
48
“one in the many” (the being of all entities, which is truth or goodness) to a more determinate sense of the “one above all else” (the highest and supreme being).adopts Ar (^27) In his “five ways” of proving the existence of God, Thomas istotle to argue for God as “uncaused cause” or “first mover” of the
created world.of its ultimate cause or ground. Thomas argues backwards from the effect to its ultimate cause in demonstrating that God exists. The “first” way begins with the self-evident experience of our senses that things are moving or^28 He understands the world, and everything in it, as an effect
changing.from potentiality to act. Since something cannot arise from nothing, the change from potency to act can only come about through something that already possesses that actuality as a mode of being. “Thus a fire, which is^29 He defines motion with Aristotle as the reduction of something
actually hot, makes wood, which is potentially hot, to be actually hot, thus changing and altering it.” An infinite regress of movers is inconceivable, else nothing could have started anything moving and there would consequently be no motion. We must think the necessity of a prime or first mover that is
not itself moved by anything and is the source of all movement, to avoid denying the evidence of our senses that things are in fact moving. The final step of the argument is to identify the first mover with God: “everyone understands that this is God.”
the ultimate principle entails a critique of Platonism. With the infusion of Aristotle, thinking moves toward the autonomous investigation of the natural world. Philosophy and science will follow this path toward inde-This kind of formal, metaphysical reasoning from empirical experience to
pendence from theology. So, the metaphysics of Thomas appears to have a tenuous connection to religious consciousness. This is not true. Just as the created world points to God as the effect of an uncaused cause, so does the rational mind of human beings and its functions. The mind (as principle of
the act of volition which unites mind and knowing) are structural vestiges The cof the Trinity: God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, respectively.all mental activity), apacity to do metaphysics is given by God as a sacred trust and a sign knowing (involving speaking and thinking), and love (as (^30)
of God’s being.to a new level in his measurement of the scope and limits of reason by reason itself. This Immanuel Kant brought critical thinking in the eighteenth century Critique of Pure Reason (1781), which is a rigorous critique
delivered the death blow to metaphysical theology. It gave a major push to move from a world whose structure and laws were preexisting and immutable givens for members of society, to a world wherein one could discover its nature and define its norms. The key fault in metaphysical