Eli’s Mind

Thomas Aquinas, drawing heavily from Aristotle’s philosophy, presents a reasoned argument for the existence of God through the concepts of potency and act. Aquinas posits that in the natural world, things exhibit potentiality (potency) and actuality (act) – the potential to change and the state of actualized existence, respectively. He observes that these changes and actualizations are contingent and require an external cause. Reasoning further, if everything were merely potential, it would lead to an infinite regress of causes, necessitating a prime mover or an unmoved mover—the ultimate actuality that initiates all change without needing to be changed itself. Aquinas identifies this unmoved mover as God, the necessary being whose existence is grounded in self-sufficiency and actuality, serving as the foundation for all contingent beings and the ultimate explanation for their existence.