Aquinas's Philosophy of Religion

261 Pages·2014·2.66 MB·English

by  Paul O'Grady

Aquinas’s Philosophy of Religion
Also by Paul O’Grady
RELATIVISM
THE CONSOLATIONS OF PHILOSOPHY: Reflections in an economic downturn
( editor )
Aquinas’s Philosophy of
Religion
Paul O’Grady
Trinity College Dublin, Ireland
© Paul O’Grady 2014
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First published 2014 by
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To the memory of my father,
James O’Grady (1927–2014)

Contents
Preface and Acknowledgements ix
List of Abbreviations xii
Conventions in Referring to Aquinas’s Work xiii
1 Philosophy and Theology 1
1.1 Introduction 1
1.2 Characterizing philosophy of religion 3
1.3 Aquinas as a philosopher of religion 8
1.4 Objections to Aquinas’s philosophy of religion 13
2 Aquinas’s contexts 30
2.1 Intellectual context 3 0
2.2 Biographical context 3 6
2.3 Works 3 8
2.4 The conceptual scheme 4 2
3 Reason and Faith 54
3.1 A spectrum of views 5 4
3.2 Reason in Aquinas 6 1
3.3 Faith in Aquinas 6 9
3.4 Assessing Aquinas’s position 7 9
4 Arguments for God’s Existence 87
4.1 Preliminaries 8 7
4 .2 The first way 9 3
4.3 The third way 1 02
4.4 The fifth way 110
5 Objections to God’s Existence 120
5.1 The problem of evil 1 20
5.2 Naturalism 1 39
6 God’s Nature: The Way of Negation 151
6.1 Disputes about God’s nature 1 51
6.2 Divine simplicity 1 61
6.3 Divine eternity 1 74
vii
viii Contents
7 God’s Nature: The Way of Eminence 185
7.1 Divine goodness 1 85
7.2 Divine knowledge 1 95
7.3 Divine power 2 05
Notes 2 16
Bibliography 2 25
Index 239
Preface and Acknowledgements
Aquinas wrote in a world far removed from the twenty-first century and
held many assumptions that few now share. He also wrote a great deal –
over 8,500,000 words on a recent estimate [McDermott (1993) p. xv].
He wrote in a distinctive academic style, which can seem remarkably
limpid once accustomed to it, but is often rebarbative to new readers.
Aquinas, therefore, is a difficult figure to write about. Yet despite these
difficulties, I have come to appreciate his manner of thinking and his
way of arguing more deeply the longer I engage with his work. There
is a robust critical intelligence coupled with a deep religious sensibility
evident throughout his writings. And even if one comes to disagree with
his views, it becomes clear what the issues are and what the philosoph-
ical commitments are which underpin the debate.
Aquinas excites strong responses, being sometimes rejected out of
hand, sometimes idolized. His own approach is always to seek to under-
stand his interlocutor, to give them the strongest case they have, but to
assess critically and without prejudice the strength of the view under
scrutiny. Aquinas didn’t write in a vacuum, but rather participated in
different communities, took part in current debates of the thirteenth
century and on occasion wrote at the request of friends and colleagues.
Neither did my own writing of this book take place in a vacuum and
its immediate spur was teaching philosophy of religion at Trinity College
Dublin, wishing there was a book like this available. My predecessor
teaching philosophy of religion there, J.C.A. Gaskin, is well known for
his book H ume’s Philosophy of Religion. It is a model of clarity and solid
information on one of the great figures in the history of the discipline
and indispensable for anyone teaching it. It served as an ideal for me
as I began to write on one of the other great figures in the history of
philosophy of religion.
There are different philosophical and intellectual currents behind
my writing. In my initial graduate work at University College Dublin
I found myself engaging with contemporary analytical philosophy and
this led me to Trinity College Dublin to work on Wittgenstein, Carnap
and Quine and issues of cognitive relativism – a world far removed from
Aquinas in one way, but not in another, as I shall argue in the book. At
Trinity I also found a philosophical community distinctive (in Ireland,
at the time) for its vigorous atheism. I found myself teaching philosophy
ix