Word: aquinases
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Together and separately they lobby U.S. Presidents and Congressmen and city councilors to adopt laws that would promote jobs for deprived minorities and investment for capital-starved companies. They often recruit each other for public interest projects, major and modest. When Manhattan College, a Catholic institution, needed money recently, its...
The classic cosmological inquirer was Thomas Aquinas (1224-74), and the classic modern innovator is Canadian Jesuit Bernard J.F. Lonergan, whose "transcendental Thomism" in Insight (Philosophical Library; $10) justifies Aquinas to the modern world through a complex philosophy of human understanding. Chicago's Mortimer Adler has long been interested...
Aquinas reasoned that each effect must have a cause and that an endless chain must proceed back to a primordial First Cause or Prime Mover. In How to, Adler rejects that starting point because a universe with a beginning presupposes the Creator that it seeks to prove. Therefore Adler assumes...
That leaves the most esoteric of Aquinas' "five ways" of proving God, from "contingency." Things can be divided into two categories: "contingent" ones that could either exist or not exist, and "necessary" ones that cannot not exist. The latter is a category of one, namely God. The reason that...
At one time Adler embraced Aquinas' proof, then for decades he thought it did not work because although everything in the universe is contingent, nothing ceases to exist absolutely (e.g. burning wood only changes form), so no God is needed to explain the existence of contingent things. Last May...