Many know that I grew up Catholic, and I’m quite familiar with Aquinas (always one of my favorites, though I wasn’t as big a fan for Aristotle). Great article from the Guardian:

In the five ways Aquinas was not trying to prove the existence of God at all, but was showing that an acceptance of Aristotle is no bar to belief in God. This is why he ends each argument not with "QED God" but "And this is what all men call God". Aquinas does not think God exists. He thinks he is existence.

And countering the common refrain I’ve heard most of my life about “But what came BEFORE the Big Bang”,

Aquinas would have had no problem with Hawking’s contention that the Big Bang didn’t need somebody to light its fuse but can be explained mathematically.

Tags: atheism, atheist, Catholic, Thomas Aquinas.