God as Nothing

Thomas Aquinas’ Proofs of God’s Existence

I’ve finally got to that stage in my life when I find myself, after fifty years of working in and around universities, with a collection of books which I don’t know what to do with any more. Now that I’m a ‘charming old gentleman’ – i.e. a pensioner – I find myself able to let go of a lot of these books, and local charity shops are reaping the benefit. At least I hope they are.

Every now and then during this process I return to a long-unopened book and think about it again. And this week the book I returned to was Anthony Kenny’s The Five Ways: St Thomas Aquinas’ Proofs of God’s Existence. I bought it when I was in Oxford in 1984, and having read it I had a happy afternoon talking to Brian Davies about it.

Back then, in the 1980s, people would often mention Thomas’ ‘five ways’ to me, if we were talking about faith, about God, about ‘the existence of God’, and so on. They were always treated as if Thomas was trying to prove the existence of God. People assumed that Thomas was faced with an atheist who denied the existence of God, and was thinking up reasons which might persuade the atheist that God existed.  This is certainly what Anthony Kenny thought Thomas was doing. He says on the first page:

‘I shall not discuss how seriously St Thomas meant the Five Ways as proofs. … I myself think that [he] meant them as seriously as he meant any other philosophical proof.’

In what follows I am going to suggest that this is not what Thomas is actually doing with his ‘five ways’.  I’m going to explore this from three different angles.

First: a question of translation

At first sight it does seem that Thomas seeks to demonstrate by proof, by evidence and logic perhaps, that God exists. He writes, Deum esse quinque viis probari potest.[1]  The traditional way of translating this would be something like: ‘God can be proved to be (or exist) in five ways’.  Not that he exists in five ways, but the fact that he exists can be proved in five ways.

But what about this word probari – that’s the passive infinitive: ‘to be proved’?   What does it mean?  What does Thomas mean by ‘proved’ here?  Latin probare can have a range of rather different meanings. It can mean ‘to prove’ in the sense that a mathematician proves a theorem, or in the way that the prosecution in a court of law might prove a defendant’s guilt ‘beyond all reasonable doubt’.  But it can mean other things too.  It can mean ‘to test, to try, to inspect’. Think of the phrase ‘The proof of the pudding is in the eating’.  That is to say, you find out what it’s like by trying it.  Think of the English verb ‘probe’, which comes from that same Latin word probare.  To probe is to make enquiry, to explore and examine.  You might end up wanting to assert something at the end of your enquiry, but the probing is in the enquiry, not the conclusion. Think of the word ‘proof’ in relation to whisky, where it is used to refer to how much alcohol it contains. It comes from the test that tax inspectors used to perform on strong drink, mixing it with gunpowder.  If you could light the mixture it meant that the whisky was above a certain strength and so you paid a higher tax. But the ‘proof’ was the test.

So we should not simply assume that when Thomas uses the word probare he is offering a logical proof that something is the case. Perhaps he is ‘testing’ or ‘probing’ what it means to say that God exists.

Second: what is it that exists?

Normally if I said, “I know that X exists”, my friends would say, “What is this X that you speak of? What is it like?”  If I didn’t know what it was, they would look at me – quite rightly – as if I were mad.  How can you know that something exists if you don’t know what it is?

But St Thomas says, ‘This is what it is to know God: that we know that we don’t know what God is.’ (Hoc est Deum cognoscere, quod scimus nos ignorare de Deo quid sit).[2] Thomas does not know, and asserts that he does not know, what God is.  And he says no one knows, ‘neither Catholic nor pagan’.  If we don’t know what God is, the question of ‘Does God exist?’ becomes more or less meaningless.  This is implied by what he says elsewhere: ‘Because we cannnot know what God is, but only what he is not, we cannot contemplate how God is, but only how he is not.’  (Sed quia de Deo scire non possumus quid sit, sed quid non sit, non possumus considerare de Deo quomodo sit, sed potius quomodo non sit.)[3]  We cannot consider how God is, then, or what it means for God to exist.  ‘As the substance of God is unknown, so also is his being’ (Sicut ejus substantia ignota, ita et esse).[4]

This points to the idea that Thomas is not arguing for the existence of God at all in his five ways.  Instead we should see him as looking at everything that does exist, the whole world of existing beings, and pointing to the mystery that underlies them all. It remains a mystery, utterly unknown.  But as it is the mystery that underlies all existing beings, it cannot itself be an existing being.

Third: God is not in any list

One of the key insights of Thomas’ theology, implicit in his notion of creation, is that God is not a member of any category that we can dream up.  Of course we use language in all kinds of ways that seem to suggest that he is.  We say that God ‘knows’ things. And therefore it seems that God can be listed among the category of ‘knowers’.  We say that God is ‘beautiful’, and therefore it seems that God can be listed among the category of ‘beautiful things’.  We call God a judge, so he must be listed in the category of ‘judges’.

But for Thomas this is simply not true.  He says that ‘God is not in any category’ – Deus non est in genere.  If we make a list of all things which are ‘X’, we cannot include God on that list, even if we might have just said that ‘God is X’. We sometimes use language that suggests that he is one member of a list of certain kinds of thing, but that is just a trick of our language. It just looks that way because we use words about God which seem to help us, but they are not accurate representations of what God is, or what God is actually like.  We speak of him by metaphor, or analogy, or (most accurately of all) by negation – God is not this, and not that. 

So, in the first of Thomas’ Five Ways he observes that everyone knows that some things cause other things to happen. Things have a potential for ‘change’ or ‘movement’ and sometimes that potential is actualised, and they change. I have a potential to become hot, and sometimes I might actually become hot. That’s a change. Thomas says that potential can only be actualised by something else, an active agent like fire, or sun, or a hot bath. ‘Everything which is changed must be changed by something else’.  Everything which moves must be moved by something else which is prior to that movement – a ‘mover’. And as there is movement all over creation, with one thing moving another, there must have been a first mover which is the origin of all subsequent movement but which is not moved by anything else.[5]

But let us think about this picture for a moment. First of all, the process of one thing causing or moving another thing depends on both occupying time and space. They must be related to each other and exist in the same dimension. That is part of what we mean by ‘causing’.  Causation is a process within creation, within the order of existing things. But Thomas tells us that God is ‘completely outside the order of existing things’ (omnino extra ordinem entium).  If God is not within that order where movement, change and causality take place, then how can he be the first mover, or the first cause?

And here is another way of making roughly the same point: if God is not a member of any list (Deus non est in genere), then he can’t be in the list of ‘movers’ or ‘causes’.  He can’t even be the first one on the list, for he would then still be a member of that list. Whatever Thomas is pointing to when he speaks of the unmoved mover, he cannot be identifying God as simply the first one in such a series.  We may speak of God as a ‘cause’ or as a ‘mover’, but this cannot be because he is one of the causes or movers that exist – not even the first one –  because God cannot be ‘one of’ any category, including the category of causes. Thomas must be using the term primum movens ‘first mover’ in a strange way.  And of course he is, because for Thomas all language about God is language being used ‘in a strange way’.

What has been ‘proved’?

Given the foregoing, I think we must abandon the simplistic notion that Thomas thinks he has demonstrated that there is something that exists which corresponds to a description of God. What he has done is to look at what we know – the world of change and movement – and to point to an answer to the question ‘Why do things move or change at all, rather than remaining exactly as they are?’  It is an echo of another question which he asks, which can be summed up as: ‘Why does anything exist rather than nothing at all?’  And just as the answer to the question ‘Why does anything exist? cannot be something which exists, so the answer to the question ‘Why are there movers and moved things in the world?’ cannot be simply just another mover. The answer to both questions is, of course, ‘We don’t know.’  It is a mystery beyond imagination or utterance. But it is the mystery – not an existing being, nor a ‘mover’ – which we call ‘God’.

This blog was created to encourage discussion and engagement
with the recently published book God as Nothing, by Gilbert Márkus.
You can order a discounted copy from Writing Scotland here.

For North American readers, it is cheaper to buy the New York edition,
which has a different title:
Presence and Absence: God as ‘Nothing’ in Christian tradition here:

---

[1][1]  Summa Theologiae 1a, q. 1, art. 3,

[2] In Librum De divinis nominibus, Cap. vii, lectio iv.

[3] Summa Theologiae 1a, 3, I Prologus.

[4]  De Potentia 7, 2 ad 1um.

[5] This argument is the origin of the modern English phrase, used to refer to God, ‘the unmoved mover’. It’s a phrase that often has an implicits sneer attached to it, in my experience, as if such an abstract philosophical concept was unworthy of any kind of devotion.