Doubting Thomas? Here's Proof of God - Reason #1

There is a lot of doubt out there right now about the existence of God. In a culture that highly praises the material, people want physical proof that God exists in order to believe in Him. They claim to believe only in the physical, but not the spiritual, because they believe in science. "Unless science proves it, I won't believe it," is a common refrain among those who doubt God's existence. In some ways, it is hard to blame people for the resistance when so much of our Western culture teaches that something cannot be true unless it can be proved. I think a little known fact about the Catholic church is that it is actually compatible with science. Faith and science aren't opposites; they actually complement each other.  In a way, this even makes sense because if God created the world and everything in it, then of course science - the study of the natural world and how things work - will lead us to God. We do not need to physically see God to know of His existence.

After the Resurrection, Jesus came to the disciples who were closed in a room. He showed them the nail marks and the wound in his side. Thomas was not with the disciples at this time, and when he heard the news, he could not believe that the other disciples had seen Jesus. Nothing could make him believe that Jesus had risen. When Jesus appears to Thomas in John 20:29, he says, "Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed." We do not need proof to know and believe in Jesus. However, the evidence does exist for those who look.

For me personally, I have always believed in God despite never seeing Him. I was convicted because of the witness of faith I had seen in others. My mind works on reason though, so when I discovered that St. Thomas Aquinas wrote about five ways of proving that God exists, I was enthralled. Learning about the proofs of existence in Summa Theologica confirmed my beliefs in Him. Today I want to present the first proof that Aquinas gives for God's existence.

St. Thomas Aquinas' first argument for the existence of God deals with motion. If we think about what we know about the solar system, we know that the planets orbit around the sun, and the Earth spins on its axis. There is motion all around in the universe. Newton's first law of motion states that, "An object in motion, stays in motion while an object at rest, stays at rest." We also know that for anything to move, potential motion must turn into actual motion. This basically means that for something to move, something has to cause it to move. Nothing can move itself.

Simple observation shows us that there is motion all around us. So we must ask ourselves, "what caused this motion?" Some people will say that the Big Bang set everything in motion, but this still leaves us with an unanswered question. What caused the Big Bang to be set into motion? No matter how far back a person can make a reason for how everything was set in motion, there will always be the unanswered question of 'what set that in motion?' It is impossible for this sequence of motion to go on forever. As stated before things cannot just move themselves, they have to be first moved. 

Thus, we come to the conclusion that there must be a First Mover - someone or something that is above the laws of science. A being or thing that set everything into motion. We called this being God.

The argument of motion is just one of five different ways in which St. Thomas Aquinas logically derives the existence of God. Throughout the next few days, I will be talking through the other four proofs of God in hopes of showing to some skeptics that there is evidence that God exists and anyone can understand it.

Your Sister in Christ,

Emily