Tom Woods
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ABOUT TOM WOODS

Thomas E. Woods, Jr., is the New York Times bestselling author of 12 books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History and Meltdown (on the financial crisis). A senior fellow of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, Woods has appeared on MSNBC, CNBC, FOX News, FOX Business, C-SPAN, Bloomberg Television, and hundreds of radio programs... (Read More)



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St. Thomas Aquinas and the Existence of God

On my program today I said I’d post a couple reading links, and since I don’t have a proper show notes page at TomWoodsRadio.com (a problem that’s being rectified as we speak, as the show is being moved over to this site), I’m posting them on this page. I’ll post more as they occur to me.

The key readings are:

Edward Feser, The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism

and

Edward Feser, Aquinas.

Even though the Aquinas volume is in a “Beginners’ Guide” series, don’t be fooled: this is not easy reading. I suggest starting with the other book first.

  • Gambit Seven

    Thank you for this source. will be keeping up with this!

  • Andy

    Great resource Tom. Trent Horn has a good resource page I’ve used for better defending/arguing that there are good reasons to believe in the existence of God.

    http://trenthorn.com/links/apologetics/

  • Chris

    I’m ashamed to admit that I was one of the obnoxious atheists you referred to in the beginning of the show. I left a snide comment on your blog in the summer of 2013, and you shot me down easily with Aquinas’ arguments which I had never heard of before—the only arguments I had previously heard from theists were something like “because I have faith” or “because the bible says so”, but admittedly I never sought out any real arguments because I am rarely confronted by theism, living in a largely atheist country in Europe. I cringe every time I think of how insulting my comment was, and I would like to offer an apology. I am still an atheist, but a far more humble one, thanks to you.

  • Steffen

    I have one question about a thing, I did not understand. Maybe someone can help me out with this. It is clear, that god can’t be perfectly good and perfectly bad at the same time, just as the egg, tom mentioned, can’ be hot and cold at the same time. But why should we define badness as a lack of goodness (or cold as a lack of warmth) and not the other way around? To understand what I mean, maybe think about Goethe’s attempt to show, that darkness is not a lack of light, but light a lack of darkness.

  • Alexander Paulsen

    I think what he was trying to say was the good an devil are not things per-se, evil is a lack of goodness like blindness is a lack of sight. Cold is a lack of heat energy – hot is just a generous supply of heat. hot and cold are relative to each other and not absolute things.

  • Alexander Paulsen

    I just ordered Feser’s book, thank for the reference

  • Chris

    I could just as easily define goodness as a lack of evil.

  • Steffen

    If you imagine a continuum between the poles goodness (g) and evil (e), the question is: why should g be the final stop? Chris and I already mentioned that you can think of it the other way around. But not only that. You can take every single point between g and e and do the same thing. Let’s say there is a point x somewhere between g and e, why shouldn’t god be
    perfectly x instead of being perfectly g? After all god would have a potentiality to become x, if he where located on g. You can do that with every point on the continuum and get a negative definition of it. Why should we see g as a superior point to any other, if every state lacks something to be be any other state?

  • Vee Voluntary

    This is the first logical explanation I have ever heard of for the existence of God. I went to 8 years of Catholic school as a kid and the experience made me an atheist. I have been an agnostic for a long time, but after listening to this podcast, I might change my mind. Thanks.

  • http://ssrn.com/abstract=1974708 James Redford

    Interestingly, God has been proven to exist based upon the most reserved view of the known laws of physics. For much more on that, see my below article, which details physicist and mathematician Prof. Frank J. Tipler’s Omega Point cosmology and the Feynman-DeWitt-Weinberg quantum gravity/Standard Model Theory of Everything (TOE) correctly describing and unifying all the forces in physics. The Omega Point cosmology demonstrates that the known laws of physics (viz., the Second Law of Thermodynamics, General Relativity, and Quantum Mechanics) require that the universe end in the Omega Point: the final cosmological singularity and state of infinite informational capacity having all the unique properties traditionally claimed for God, and of which is a different aspect of the Big Bang initial singularity, i.e., the first cause. The Omega Point cosmology has been published and extensively peer-reviewed in leading physics journals.

    James Redford, “The Physics of God and the Quantum Gravity Theory of Everything”, Social Science Research Network (SSRN), Sept. 10, 2012 (orig. pub. Dec. 19, 2011), 186 pp., doi:10.2139/ssrn.1974708, https://archive.org/details/ThePhysicsOfGodAndTheQuantumGravityTheoryOfEverything , http://theophysics.host56.com/Redford-Physics-of-God.pdf .

    Additionally, in the below resource are six sections which contain very informative videos of Prof. Tipler explaining the Omega Point cosmology and the Feynman-DeWitt-Weinberg quantum gravity/Standard Model TOE. The seventh section therein contains an audio interview of Tipler. I also provide some helpful notes and commentary for some of these videos.

    James Redford, “Video of Profs. Frank Tipler and Lawrence Krauss’s Debate at Caltech: Can Physics Prove God and Christianity?”, alt.sci.astro, Message-ID: jghev8tcbv02b6vn3uiq8jmelp7jijluqk[at sign]4ax[period]com , July 30, 2013, https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/alt.sci.astro/KQWt4KcpMVo , http://archive.today/a04w9 .



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