Lesson 15 - What is God’s Role in Ordering the Physical World?
Universal patterns or “Laws” of nature have become so familiar to us that we often treat them as obvious and self-evident, which makes Aquinas’ claim that the regularity of natural activity demands some intelligent being – expressed in his “Fifth way” and elsewhere – sound antiquated and strange.
Ultimately though, this intuition of Aquinas does not reveal some naivete of his about the order of nature. More properly, it reveals our own blindness to how much we take the natural scientific order for granted.
Excerpt from the Summa Theologiae I, q. 2, a. 3:
The fifth way is taken from the governance of the world. We see that things which lack intelligence, such as natural bodies, act for an end, and this is evident from their acting always, or nearly always, in the same way, so as to obtain the best result. Hence it is plain that not fortuitously, but designedly, do they achieve their end. Now whatever lacks intelligence cannot move towards an end, unless it be directed by some being endowed with knowledge and intelligence; as the arrow is shot to its mark by the archer. Therefore some intelligent being exists by whom all natural things are directed to their end; and this being we call God.
Course Listening
More Videos
The Fifth Way | Fr. Stephen Brock
Does God Exist? | Prof. Alexander Pruss
Related videos from earlier in the series
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