Bertrand Russell and Saint Thomas Aquinas’s Arguments on God's Existence

In this paper I will be exploring two arguments on the topic of the existence of God. In particular, I will focus on Saint Thomas Aquinas’s efficient causation argument for God’s existence and an objection to it from Bertrand Russell. After an analysis of Aquinas’s argument and a presentation of Russell’s objection, I will show how Russell’s objection fails.

Aquinas says there are five ways to prove that God exists and one of them is through efficient causation. He starts with the premise that every effect we observe must have been caused by something else. This can be compared to the effect of a particular tree being caused by the planting of a particular seed that grew into that tree. Second, nothing that we observe could have caused itself. A particular tree could not have produced the particular seed that later grew into that tree. The existence of something before itself is contradictory and impossible. He then goes on to explain that if nothing caused itself then it must have been caused by something else that was also caused by something else and so on. If we continue to go up the chain of causes, however, it would seem that the chain of causes goes back to infinity.

“But the series of efficient causes cannot possibly go back to infinity” (Aquinas, 45). If it was possible to theoretically “get rid of” a cause, then all of its effects would be gone as well. If the particular seed I talked about earlier was destroyed, then the particular tree would not exist. To say there was no first cause would mean that there were no effects at all. This is contradictory to what we can clearly observe, so there must have been a first cause. Aquinas concludes that just as it can be observed that no object exists without a cause, which ca...

... middle of paper ...

...t causation argument reasoned out in the first place. There had to be a beginning because “If there were no first efficient cause, there would be no last or intermediary efficient causes” (Aquinas, 45).

In the above essay, I analyzed Aquinas’s efficient cause argument and presented Russell’s objections to some of the claims that Aquinas made. I then showed how Russell’s objection failed based mainly on the fact that the first cause is something that is unchanging. This, in turn, supported Aquinas’s argument for the existence of God.

Works Cited

Aquinas, St. Thomas. “The Existence of God,” in Introduction to Philosophy. 6th edition. Perry, Bratman, and Fischer. Oxford University Press. 2013, pp. 44-46.

Russell, Bertrand. “Why I Am Not a Christian,” in Introduction to Philosophy. 6th edition. Perry, Bratman, and Fischer. Oxford University Press. 2013, pp. 56-59.