Aquinas's Shortest Way to God’s Existence, and How Darwinism Fits Within It | Fr. Stephen Brock

The Thomistic Institute

Christianity, Society & Culture, Catholic Intellectual Tradition, Catholic, Philosophy, Religion & Spirituality, Thomism, Catholicism

4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 5 February 2025

⏱️ 51 minutes

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Summary

Fr. Stephen Brock explains Aquinas's Fifth Way, focusing on the governance of things and how natural bodies without cognition display goal-oriented activity, ultimately placing the Fifth Way into dialogue with Darwinism.

This lecture was given on September 5th, 2024, at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

For more information on upcoming events, visit us at thomisticinstitute.org/upcoming-events.

About the Speaker:

Stephen L. Brock is a priest of the Prelature of Opus Dei (ordained 1992). He is Ordinary Professor of Medieval Philosophy at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross in Rome, where he began teaching in 1990. Since 2008 he has been an Ordinary Member of the Pontifical Academy of St. Thomas Aquinas. Since 2017 he has been a visiting professor in the Department of Philosophy of the University of Chicago. He is the author of Action & Conduct: Thomas Aquinas and the Theory of Action (T&T Clark, 1998); The Philosophy of Saint Thomas Aquinas: A Sketch (Wipf & Stock, 2015); The Light that Binds: a Study in Thomas Aquinas's Metaphysics of Natural Law (Wipf & Stock, 2020); and numerous articles on various aspects of Aquinas’s thought.

Keywords: Aquinas' Fifth Way, Darwinism, Divine Governance, Natural Bodies, Natural Inclinations, Purposeful Activity, Regularity in Nature, St. Thomas Aquinas, Teleology

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Tomistic Institute podcast.
0:06.0	Our mission is to promote the Catholic intellectual tradition in the university, the church, and the wider public square.
0:12.0	The lectures on this podcast are organized by university students at Tomistic Institute chapters around the world.
0:19.0	To learn more and to attend these events, visit us at
0:21.9	Thomistic Institute.org. So we're looking at the fifth way, Thomas's fifth way, of, as he puts,
0:30.1	it proving the existence of a God. It's the shortest of his ways. They're all very short. I'm sure
0:36.4	most of you've looked at them, right?
0:37.9	They're very short.
0:38.7	They're kind of very compressed.
0:40.3	I think they're really more like sketches of proofs than full-fledged proofs.
0:45.4	You sort of have to fill them in.
0:46.9	But let's just jump in.
0:48.5	Is everybody got the handout?
0:50.8	This is the fifth way here.
0:52.6	And I'm just going to kind of walk through it and make some
0:55.4	comments about it and then in the last section I'll talk a little bit about the relationship
1:01.1	between the fifth way and Darwinism. Okay. So let's just begin. He says a fifth way
1:08.8	by which it can be proved that a God exists.
1:12.4	He's gathered from the government of things. That's the word he uses,
1:16.5	gubernator, the government of things. Elsewhere, he explains that to govern means to direct
1:24.1	something's activity toward a goal or toward a purpose.
1:28.9	That's what it is to govern.
	...

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