Man’s natural desire to know follows from his possession of an intellectual soul. The intellect was made for knowledge and seeks it. Indeed, man’s final end is knowledge.
In this next set of articles in our wider series vindicating the claims of the Catholic Church, we will trace the rise of scholastic philosophy, its devastating decline, its revival under the direction of the Holy See, and, finally, its status in the Church today.
In this article, we take a temporary pause from discussing proofs for the existence of God and consider how the Catholic Church has responded to claims that the human intellect lacks the capacity to reach certain knowledge of God’s existence.
In his third way, St. Thomas Aquinas argues that because a contingent being is not a sufficient reason for its own existence, it cannot ultimately be a sufficient reason for the existence of other things.
In this article we will explore a second path by which we can attain certainty about the existence of God: St. Thomas Aquinas's argument from 'efficient causality.'
Some philosophers have considered that the existence of God is so 'clearly seen' that it is, in fact, self-evident. If the existence of God is self-evident, there is no purpose in attempting to demonstrate it by argument. Therefore, we must begin by asking whether the existence of God is in fact self-evident.