1. The soul and the body are separate.
Summary:
Materialism cannot explain the mind. Therefore, there must be an immortal, non-material soul that gives human beings individuality and sense of consciousness. The existence of the soul supports the existence of god.
Michael Ruse, Canadian philosopher of science, 1940-
“Why should a bunch of atoms have thinking ability? Why should I, even as I write now, be able to reflect on what I am doing and why should you, even as you read now, be able to ponder my points, agreeing or disagreeing, with pleasure or pain, deciding to refute me or deciding that I am just not worth the effort? No one, certainly not the Darwinian as such, seems to have any answer to this... The point is that there is no scientific answer.”
— Michael Ruse, Can a Darwinian Be a Christian? The Relationship Between Science and Religion, Cambridge University Press, 2000 p73
“Why should a bunch of atoms have thinking ability? Why should I, even as I write now, be able to reflect on what I am doing and why should you, even as you read now, be able to ponder my points, agreeing or disagreeing, with pleasure or pain, deciding to refute me or deciding that I am just not worth the effort? No one, certainly not the Darwinian as such, seems to have any answer to this... The point is that there is no scientific answer.”
— Michael Ruse, Can a Darwinian Be a Christian? The Relationship Between Science and Religion, Cambridge University Press, 2000 p73
Marilyn Schlitz, PhD, social anthropologist
“I would take the position of a radical empiricist, in that I am driven by data, not theory. And the data I see tell me that there are ways in which people’s experience refutes the physicalist position that the mind is the brain and nothing more. There are solid, concrete data that suggest that our consciousness, our mind, may surpass the boundaries of the brain.”
— Marilyn Schlitz, “Do Brains Make Minds?” Closer to Truth, Season 2, Episode 4, PBS, 2000 (Quoted by Lee Strobel in A Case for a Creator, Zondervan, 2004 p266)
“I would take the position of a radical empiricist, in that I am driven by data, not theory. And the data I see tell me that there are ways in which people’s experience refutes the physicalist position that the mind is the brain and nothing more. There are solid, concrete data that suggest that our consciousness, our mind, may surpass the boundaries of the brain.”
— Marilyn Schlitz, “Do Brains Make Minds?” Closer to Truth, Season 2, Episode 4, PBS, 2000 (Quoted by Lee Strobel in A Case for a Creator, Zondervan, 2004 p266)
Charles Hodge, American theologian, 1797-1878
“These two principles are in perpetual conflict. In the actual world they are intermingled. Both enter into the constitution of man. He has a spirit (Πνεῦμα) derived from the kingdom of light; and a body with its animal life (σῶμα and ψυχή) derived from the kingdom of darkness. Sin is thus a physical evil; the defilement of the spirit by its union with a material body; and is to be overcome, by physical means, i.e., by means adapted to destroy the influence of the body on the soul. Hence the efficacy of abstinence and austerities.”
— Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, Eerdmans, 1975 p132 (quoted by Elmer L. Towns, Theology for Today, Wadsworth/Thomson Learning, 2002 p511)
“These two principles are in perpetual conflict. In the actual world they are intermingled. Both enter into the constitution of man. He has a spirit (Πνεῦμα) derived from the kingdom of light; and a body with its animal life (σῶμα and ψυχή) derived from the kingdom of darkness. Sin is thus a physical evil; the defilement of the spirit by its union with a material body; and is to be overcome, by physical means, i.e., by means adapted to destroy the influence of the body on the soul. Hence the efficacy of abstinence and austerities.”
— Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, Eerdmans, 1975 p132 (quoted by Elmer L. Towns, Theology for Today, Wadsworth/Thomson Learning, 2002 p511)
Richard P. Feynman, American physicist, 1918-1988
“The problem of existence is a very interesting and difficult one. If you do mathematics, which is simply working out the consequences of assumptions, you’ll discover for instance a curious thing if you add the cubes of integers. One cubed is one, two cubed is two times two times two, that’s eight, and three cubed is three times three times three, that’s twenty-seven. If you add the cubes of these, one plus eight plus twenty-seven – let’s stop here – that would be thirty-six. And that’s the square of another number, six, and that number is the sum of those same integers, one plus two plus three... Now, that fact which I’ve just told you about might not have been known to you before. You might say: ‘What is it, what is it, where is it located, what kind of reality does it have?’ And yet you came upon it. When you discover these things, you get the feeling that they were true before you found them. So you get the idea that somehow they existed somewhere, but there’s nowhere for such things. It’s just a feeling... Well, in the case of physics we have double trouble. We come upon these mathematical interrelationships but they apply to the universe, so the problem of where they are is doubly confusing... Those are philosophical questions that I don’t know how to answer.”
— Richard Feynman (quoted by Paul Davies), The Mind of God, Touchstone, 1992 p145-146)
“The problem of existence is a very interesting and difficult one. If you do mathematics, which is simply working out the consequences of assumptions, you’ll discover for instance a curious thing if you add the cubes of integers. One cubed is one, two cubed is two times two times two, that’s eight, and three cubed is three times three times three, that’s twenty-seven. If you add the cubes of these, one plus eight plus twenty-seven – let’s stop here – that would be thirty-six. And that’s the square of another number, six, and that number is the sum of those same integers, one plus two plus three... Now, that fact which I’ve just told you about might not have been known to you before. You might say: ‘What is it, what is it, where is it located, what kind of reality does it have?’ And yet you came upon it. When you discover these things, you get the feeling that they were true before you found them. So you get the idea that somehow they existed somewhere, but there’s nowhere for such things. It’s just a feeling... Well, in the case of physics we have double trouble. We come upon these mathematical interrelationships but they apply to the universe, so the problem of where they are is doubly confusing... Those are philosophical questions that I don’t know how to answer.”
— Richard Feynman (quoted by Paul Davies), The Mind of God, Touchstone, 1992 p145-146)
J.P. Moreland, American philosopher & theologian, 1948-
“First, if physicalism is true, then consciousness doesn’t really exist, because there would be no such thing as conscious states that must be described from a first-person point of view.
“You see, if everything were matter, then you could capture the entire universe on a graph–you could locate each star, the moon, every mountain, Lee Strobel’s brain, Lee Strobel’s kidneys, and so forth. That’s because if everything is physical, it could be described entirely from a third-person point of view. And yet we know that we have first-person subjective points of view–so physicalism can’t be true.
“The second implication is that there would be no free will. That’s because matter is completely governed by the laws of nature. Take any physical object. For instance, a cloud. It’s just a material object, and its movement is completely governed by the laws of air pressure, wind movement, and the life. So if I’m a material object, all the things I do are fixed by my environment, my genetics, and so forth.
“That would mean I’m not really free to make choices. Whatever’s going to happen is already rigged by my makeup and environment. So how could you hold me responsible for my behavior if I wasn’t free to choose how I would act?”
— J.P. Moreland, PhD (quoted by Lee Strobel), A Case for a Creator, Zondervan, 2004 p270
“We have to be careful with the data and not overstate things, but I do think they provide at least a minimalist case for consciousness surviving death. In fact, as far back as 1965, psychologist John Beloff wrote in The Humanist that the evidence of near-death experiences already indicates ‘a dualistic world where mind or spirit has an existence separate from the world of material things.’ He conceded that this could ‘present a challenge to humanism as profound in its own way as that which Darwinian evolution did to Christianity a century ago.”
— J.P. Moreland, PhD (quoted by Lee Strobel), A Case for a Creator, Zondervan, 2004 p272
“This happens in near-death experiences. People are clinically dead, but sometimes they have a vantage point from above, where they look down at the operating table that their body is on. Sometimes they gain information they couldn’t have known if this were just an illusion happening in their brain. One woman died and she saw a tennis shoe that was on the roof of the hospital. How could she have known this?”
— J.P. Moreland, PhD (quoted by Lee Strobel), A Case for a Creator, Zondervan, 2004 p271
“We have experimental data, for one thing. For example, neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield electrically stimulated the brains of epilepsy patients and found he could cause them to move their arms or legs, turn their heads or eyes, talk, or swallow. Invariably the patient would respond by saying, ‘I didn’t do that. You did.’ According to Penfield, ‘the patient thinks of himself as having an existence separate from his body.’
“No matter how much Penfield probed the cerebral cortex, he said, ‘There is no place...where electrical stimulation will cause a patient to believe or to decide.’ That’s because those functions originate in the conscious self, not the brain.
“A lot of subsequent research has validated this. When Roger Sperry and his team studied the differences between the brain’s right and left hemispheres, they discovered the mind has a causal power independent of the brain’s activities. This led Sperry to conclude materialism was false.
“Another study showed a delay between the time an electric shock was applied to the skin, its reaching the cerebral cortex, and the self-conscious perception of it by the person. This suggests the self is more than just a machine that reacts to stimuli as it receives them. In fact, the data from various research projects are so remarkable that Laurence C. Wood said, ‘many brain scientists have been compelled to postulate the existence of an immaterial mind, even though they may not embrace a belief in an after-life.’”
— J.P. Moreland, PhD (quoted by Lee Strobel), A Case for a Creator, Zondervan, 2004 p272-273
“My point is this, Lee: I am a soul, and I have a body. We don’t learn about people by studying their bodies. We learn about people by finding out how they feel, what they think, what they’re passionate about, what their worldview is, and so forth. Staring at their body might tell us whether they like exercise, but that’s not very helpful. That’s why we want to get ‘inside’ people to learn about them.
“So my conclusion is that there’s more to me than my conscious life and my body. In fact, I am a ‘self,’ or an ‘I,’ that cannot be seen or touched unless I manifest myself through my behavior or my talk. I have free will because I’m a ‘self,’ or a soul, and I’m not just a brain.”
— J.P. Moreland, PhD (quoted by Lee Strobel), A Case for a Creator, Zondervan, 2004 p276
“I do think, however, that a proper reading of the New Testament implies that dualism is true, not Platonic dualism, but at least the view that there is a substantial soul and it’s distinct from the body. It infuses the body, but it is different–it has different properties from those characterizing matter, it is capable of disembodied existence, and it will be reunited with the body of the future.
“So the real debate does not center on personal immortality versus resurrection; it is really a debate between those who hold to personal disembodied survival followed by resurrection and those who merely hold to a bodily resurrection. I happen to hold to disembodied survival with a resurrection of the body in the future. Apart from exegetical arguments and general arguments for dualism, I would cite after-death experiences as evidence for my view. I’m not certain what to make of these, but I’m not going to reject them a priori. A physicalist explanation of them is to claim that they are near-death, not after-death experiences. But this response doesn’t explain the following: Allegedly there are cases where people have died, and in the period when they’ve been ‘gone,’ they have obtained knowledge of things that have happened two blocks away. it would have been very difficult for them to have known this type of information.
“Now that sort of thing makes me stop. What I want to know is, Did those things really happen? And I would say that if they really did, it would be pretty tough to explain these cases on any kind of physicalist interpretation. Now I’m not saying these stories are clearly true, but if these kinds of cases can be established, then we have got something interesting to discuss.”
— J.P. Moreland, Does God Exist?, Prometheus Books, 1988 p88-89
“First, if physicalism is true, then consciousness doesn’t really exist, because there would be no such thing as conscious states that must be described from a first-person point of view.
“You see, if everything were matter, then you could capture the entire universe on a graph–you could locate each star, the moon, every mountain, Lee Strobel’s brain, Lee Strobel’s kidneys, and so forth. That’s because if everything is physical, it could be described entirely from a third-person point of view. And yet we know that we have first-person subjective points of view–so physicalism can’t be true.
“The second implication is that there would be no free will. That’s because matter is completely governed by the laws of nature. Take any physical object. For instance, a cloud. It’s just a material object, and its movement is completely governed by the laws of air pressure, wind movement, and the life. So if I’m a material object, all the things I do are fixed by my environment, my genetics, and so forth.
“That would mean I’m not really free to make choices. Whatever’s going to happen is already rigged by my makeup and environment. So how could you hold me responsible for my behavior if I wasn’t free to choose how I would act?”
— J.P. Moreland, PhD (quoted by Lee Strobel), A Case for a Creator, Zondervan, 2004 p270
“We have to be careful with the data and not overstate things, but I do think they provide at least a minimalist case for consciousness surviving death. In fact, as far back as 1965, psychologist John Beloff wrote in The Humanist that the evidence of near-death experiences already indicates ‘a dualistic world where mind or spirit has an existence separate from the world of material things.’ He conceded that this could ‘present a challenge to humanism as profound in its own way as that which Darwinian evolution did to Christianity a century ago.”
— J.P. Moreland, PhD (quoted by Lee Strobel), A Case for a Creator, Zondervan, 2004 p272
“This happens in near-death experiences. People are clinically dead, but sometimes they have a vantage point from above, where they look down at the operating table that their body is on. Sometimes they gain information they couldn’t have known if this were just an illusion happening in their brain. One woman died and she saw a tennis shoe that was on the roof of the hospital. How could she have known this?”
— J.P. Moreland, PhD (quoted by Lee Strobel), A Case for a Creator, Zondervan, 2004 p271
“We have experimental data, for one thing. For example, neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield electrically stimulated the brains of epilepsy patients and found he could cause them to move their arms or legs, turn their heads or eyes, talk, or swallow. Invariably the patient would respond by saying, ‘I didn’t do that. You did.’ According to Penfield, ‘the patient thinks of himself as having an existence separate from his body.’
“No matter how much Penfield probed the cerebral cortex, he said, ‘There is no place...where electrical stimulation will cause a patient to believe or to decide.’ That’s because those functions originate in the conscious self, not the brain.
“A lot of subsequent research has validated this. When Roger Sperry and his team studied the differences between the brain’s right and left hemispheres, they discovered the mind has a causal power independent of the brain’s activities. This led Sperry to conclude materialism was false.
“Another study showed a delay between the time an electric shock was applied to the skin, its reaching the cerebral cortex, and the self-conscious perception of it by the person. This suggests the self is more than just a machine that reacts to stimuli as it receives them. In fact, the data from various research projects are so remarkable that Laurence C. Wood said, ‘many brain scientists have been compelled to postulate the existence of an immaterial mind, even though they may not embrace a belief in an after-life.’”
— J.P. Moreland, PhD (quoted by Lee Strobel), A Case for a Creator, Zondervan, 2004 p272-273
“My point is this, Lee: I am a soul, and I have a body. We don’t learn about people by studying their bodies. We learn about people by finding out how they feel, what they think, what they’re passionate about, what their worldview is, and so forth. Staring at their body might tell us whether they like exercise, but that’s not very helpful. That’s why we want to get ‘inside’ people to learn about them.
“So my conclusion is that there’s more to me than my conscious life and my body. In fact, I am a ‘self,’ or an ‘I,’ that cannot be seen or touched unless I manifest myself through my behavior or my talk. I have free will because I’m a ‘self,’ or a soul, and I’m not just a brain.”
— J.P. Moreland, PhD (quoted by Lee Strobel), A Case for a Creator, Zondervan, 2004 p276
“I do think, however, that a proper reading of the New Testament implies that dualism is true, not Platonic dualism, but at least the view that there is a substantial soul and it’s distinct from the body. It infuses the body, but it is different–it has different properties from those characterizing matter, it is capable of disembodied existence, and it will be reunited with the body of the future.
“So the real debate does not center on personal immortality versus resurrection; it is really a debate between those who hold to personal disembodied survival followed by resurrection and those who merely hold to a bodily resurrection. I happen to hold to disembodied survival with a resurrection of the body in the future. Apart from exegetical arguments and general arguments for dualism, I would cite after-death experiences as evidence for my view. I’m not certain what to make of these, but I’m not going to reject them a priori. A physicalist explanation of them is to claim that they are near-death, not after-death experiences. But this response doesn’t explain the following: Allegedly there are cases where people have died, and in the period when they’ve been ‘gone,’ they have obtained knowledge of things that have happened two blocks away. it would have been very difficult for them to have known this type of information.
“Now that sort of thing makes me stop. What I want to know is, Did those things really happen? And I would say that if they really did, it would be pretty tough to explain these cases on any kind of physicalist interpretation. Now I’m not saying these stories are clearly true, but if these kinds of cases can be established, then we have got something interesting to discuss.”
— J.P. Moreland, Does God Exist?, Prometheus Books, 1988 p88-89
Paul Davies, PhD, English physicist & professor, 1946-
“‘Is mathematics an invention or discovery?’ asks [Oxford mathematician Roger] Penrose. Do mathematicians get so carried away with their inventions that they imbue them with a spurious reality? ‘Or are mathematicians really uncovering truths which are, in fact, already “there” – truths whose existence is quite independent of the mathematicians’ activities?’ In proclaiming his adherence to the latter point of view, Penrose points out that in cases such as the Mandelbrot set ‘much more comes out of the structure than is put in in the first place. One may take the view that in such cases the mathematicians have stumbled upon “works of God.”’ Indeed, he sees an analogy in this respect between mathematics and inspired works of art. ‘It is a feeling not uncommon amongst artists, that in their greatest works they are revealing eternal truths which have some kind of prior etherial existence... I cannot help feeling that, with mathematics, the case for believing in some kind of etherial, eternal existence...is a good deal stronger...
“...The mathematician Rudy Rucker thinks of mathematical objects as occupying a sort of mental space – which he calls the ‘Mindscape’ – just as physical objects occupy a physical space. ‘A person who does mathematical research,’ he writes, ‘is an explorer of the Mindscape in much the same way that Armstrong, Livingstone, or Cousteau are explorers of the physical features of our Universe.’ Occasionally different explorers will pass over the same terrain and report independently on their findings. ‘Just as we all share the same Universe, we all share the same Mindscape,’ believes Rucker. John Barrow also cites the phenomenon of independent discovery in mathematics as evidence for ‘some objective element’ that is independent of the psyche of the investigator.
“Penrose conjectures that the way mathematicians make discoveries and communicate mathematical results to each other offers evidence of a Platonic realm, or Mindscape:
“‘I imagine that whenever the mind perceives a mathematical idea it makes contact with Plato’s world of mathematical concepts... When one ‘sees’ a mathematical truth, one’s consciousness breaks through into this world of ideas, and makes direct contact with it... When mathematicians communicate, this is made possible by each one having a direct route to truth, the consciousness of each being in a position to perceive mathematical truths directly, through this process of ‘seeing.’ Since each can make contact with Plato’s world directly, they can more readily communicate with each other than one might have expected. The mental images that each one has, when making this Platonic contact, might be rather different in each case, but communication is possible because each is directly in contact with the same eternally existing Platonic world!’...
“Many physicists share this Platonic vision of mathematics. For example, Heinrich Hertz, the first to produce and detect radio waves in the laboratory, once said, ‘One cannot escape the feeling that these mathematical formulas have an independent existence of their own, and they are wiser than even their discoverers, that we get more out of them than was originally put into them.’”
— Paul Davies, The Mind of God, Touchstone, 1992 p143-145
“‘Is mathematics an invention or discovery?’ asks [Oxford mathematician Roger] Penrose. Do mathematicians get so carried away with their inventions that they imbue them with a spurious reality? ‘Or are mathematicians really uncovering truths which are, in fact, already “there” – truths whose existence is quite independent of the mathematicians’ activities?’ In proclaiming his adherence to the latter point of view, Penrose points out that in cases such as the Mandelbrot set ‘much more comes out of the structure than is put in in the first place. One may take the view that in such cases the mathematicians have stumbled upon “works of God.”’ Indeed, he sees an analogy in this respect between mathematics and inspired works of art. ‘It is a feeling not uncommon amongst artists, that in their greatest works they are revealing eternal truths which have some kind of prior etherial existence... I cannot help feeling that, with mathematics, the case for believing in some kind of etherial, eternal existence...is a good deal stronger...
“...The mathematician Rudy Rucker thinks of mathematical objects as occupying a sort of mental space – which he calls the ‘Mindscape’ – just as physical objects occupy a physical space. ‘A person who does mathematical research,’ he writes, ‘is an explorer of the Mindscape in much the same way that Armstrong, Livingstone, or Cousteau are explorers of the physical features of our Universe.’ Occasionally different explorers will pass over the same terrain and report independently on their findings. ‘Just as we all share the same Universe, we all share the same Mindscape,’ believes Rucker. John Barrow also cites the phenomenon of independent discovery in mathematics as evidence for ‘some objective element’ that is independent of the psyche of the investigator.
“Penrose conjectures that the way mathematicians make discoveries and communicate mathematical results to each other offers evidence of a Platonic realm, or Mindscape:
“‘I imagine that whenever the mind perceives a mathematical idea it makes contact with Plato’s world of mathematical concepts... When one ‘sees’ a mathematical truth, one’s consciousness breaks through into this world of ideas, and makes direct contact with it... When mathematicians communicate, this is made possible by each one having a direct route to truth, the consciousness of each being in a position to perceive mathematical truths directly, through this process of ‘seeing.’ Since each can make contact with Plato’s world directly, they can more readily communicate with each other than one might have expected. The mental images that each one has, when making this Platonic contact, might be rather different in each case, but communication is possible because each is directly in contact with the same eternally existing Platonic world!’...
“Many physicists share this Platonic vision of mathematics. For example, Heinrich Hertz, the first to produce and detect radio waves in the laboratory, once said, ‘One cannot escape the feeling that these mathematical formulas have an independent existence of their own, and they are wiser than even their discoverers, that we get more out of them than was originally put into them.’”
— Paul Davies, The Mind of God, Touchstone, 1992 p143-145
2. Argument from Change
Summary:
A. Things change.
B. In order to change, a thing must be acted upon by something outside itself.
C. Even living beings have desire, which is more than the sum of its parts and therefore must come from outside the being. (A dead body has all the parts of a living one, but cannot desire to enact change itself.)
D. The universe contains all changing things.
E. The universe changes.
F. Therefore, something outside the universe must act to change the universe.
G. God exists outside the universe and is unchanging.
H. Therefore, God necessarily exists.
B. In order to change, a thing must be acted upon by something outside itself.
C. Even living beings have desire, which is more than the sum of its parts and therefore must come from outside the being. (A dead body has all the parts of a living one, but cannot desire to enact change itself.)
D. The universe contains all changing things.
E. The universe changes.
F. Therefore, something outside the universe must act to change the universe.
G. God exists outside the universe and is unchanging.
H. Therefore, God necessarily exists.
St. Thomas Aquinas, Italian friar, priest, philosopher, & theologian, 1225-1274
“The first and more manifest way is the argument from motion. It is certain, and evident to our senses, that in the world some things are in motion. Now whatever is in motion is put in motion by another, for nothing can be in motion except it is in potentiality to that towards which it is in motion; whereas a thing moves inasmuch as it is in act. For motion is nothing else than the reduction of something from potentiality to actuality. But nothing can be reduced from potentiality to actuality, except by something in a state of actuality. Thus that which is actually hot, as fire, makes wood, which is potentially hot, to be actually hot, and thereby moves and changes it. Now it is not possible that the same thing should be at once in actuality and potentiality in the same respect, but only in different respects. For what is actually hot cannot simultaneously be potentially hot; but it is simultaneously potentially cold. It is therefore impossible that in the same respect and in the same way a thing should be both mover and moved, i.e. that it should move itself. Therefore, whatever is in motion must be put in motion by another. If that by which it is put in motion be itself put in motion, then this also must needs be put in motion by another, and that by another again. But this cannot go on to infinity, because then there would be no first mover, and, consequently, no other mover; seeing that subsequent movers move only inasmuch as they are put in motion by the first mover; as the staff moves only because it is put in motion by the hand. Therefore it is necessary to arrive at a first mover, put in motion by no other; and this everyone understands to be God.”
— St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I, Q2, A3, Second and Revised Edition, translated by Fathers of the English Dominican, 1920
“The first and more manifest way is the argument from motion. It is certain, and evident to our senses, that in the world some things are in motion. Now whatever is in motion is put in motion by another, for nothing can be in motion except it is in potentiality to that towards which it is in motion; whereas a thing moves inasmuch as it is in act. For motion is nothing else than the reduction of something from potentiality to actuality. But nothing can be reduced from potentiality to actuality, except by something in a state of actuality. Thus that which is actually hot, as fire, makes wood, which is potentially hot, to be actually hot, and thereby moves and changes it. Now it is not possible that the same thing should be at once in actuality and potentiality in the same respect, but only in different respects. For what is actually hot cannot simultaneously be potentially hot; but it is simultaneously potentially cold. It is therefore impossible that in the same respect and in the same way a thing should be both mover and moved, i.e. that it should move itself. Therefore, whatever is in motion must be put in motion by another. If that by which it is put in motion be itself put in motion, then this also must needs be put in motion by another, and that by another again. But this cannot go on to infinity, because then there would be no first mover, and, consequently, no other mover; seeing that subsequent movers move only inasmuch as they are put in motion by the first mover; as the staff moves only because it is put in motion by the hand. Therefore it is necessary to arrive at a first mover, put in motion by no other; and this everyone understands to be God.”
— St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I, Q2, A3, Second and Revised Edition, translated by Fathers of the English Dominican, 1920
Peter John Kreeft, American professor of philosophy, 1937-
“Now a question: To explain the change, can we consider the changing thing alone, or must other things also be involved? Obviously, other things must be involved. Nothing can give itself what it does not have, and the changing thing cannot have now, already, what it will come to have then. The result of change cannot actually exist before the change. The changing thing begins with only the potential to change, but it needs to be acted on by other things outside if that potential is to be made actual. Otherwise it cannot change.
“Nothing changes itself. Apparently self-moving things, like animal bodies, are moved by desire or will—something other than mere molecules. And when the animal or human dies, the molecules remain, but the body no longer moves because the desire or will is no longer present to move it.“Now a further question: Are the other things outside the changing thing also changing? Are its movers also moving? If so, all of them stand in need right now of being acted on by other things, or else they cannot change. No matter how many things there are in the series, each one needs something outside itself to actualize its potentiality for change.“The universe is the sum total of all these moving things, however many there are. The whole universe is in the process of change. But we have already seen that change in any being requires an outside force to actualize it. Therefore, there is some force outside (in addition to) the universe, some real being transcendent to the universe. This is one of the things meant by ‘God.’”
— Peter Kreeft, “The Argument from Change,” 20 Arguments for God’s Existence (website)
“Now a question: To explain the change, can we consider the changing thing alone, or must other things also be involved? Obviously, other things must be involved. Nothing can give itself what it does not have, and the changing thing cannot have now, already, what it will come to have then. The result of change cannot actually exist before the change. The changing thing begins with only the potential to change, but it needs to be acted on by other things outside if that potential is to be made actual. Otherwise it cannot change.
“Nothing changes itself. Apparently self-moving things, like animal bodies, are moved by desire or will—something other than mere molecules. And when the animal or human dies, the molecules remain, but the body no longer moves because the desire or will is no longer present to move it.“Now a further question: Are the other things outside the changing thing also changing? Are its movers also moving? If so, all of them stand in need right now of being acted on by other things, or else they cannot change. No matter how many things there are in the series, each one needs something outside itself to actualize its potentiality for change.“The universe is the sum total of all these moving things, however many there are. The whole universe is in the process of change. But we have already seen that change in any being requires an outside force to actualize it. Therefore, there is some force outside (in addition to) the universe, some real being transcendent to the universe. This is one of the things meant by ‘God.’”
— Peter Kreeft, “The Argument from Change,” 20 Arguments for God’s Existence (website)