According to the First Vatican Council, it is an article of Faith that the existence of God can be proven using reason alone. This declaration shows just how much faith the Church has in reason and philosophy. It is an endorsement for the metaphysical endowment that God has given to man in the form of his own intellect. The timing of the Vatican Council’s declaration is not accidental; reading the signs of the times almost 150 years ago, the Council Fathers saw that faith in reason was in decline and so the Holy Spirit thought it necessary to remind us of our metaphysical prowess. Their message remains a clarion call for us today.
Among the many proofs for the existence of God, the Church has given a special pride of place to the Five Ways of St. Thomas. These proofs ably combine metaphysical thinking with common experience to lead us to back to God under five different attributes: the Unmoved Mover, the Uncaused Cause, the Necessary Being, the Most Perfect Being and the Orderly Governor of Creation. This does not, mind you, replace what God has revealed, but instead acts like a preamble to faith or a preliminary motive of credibility that paves the way for the invasion of grace and true Faith. These proofs have proven to be irrefutable. Those who have tried have only shown themselves unable to understand them. It is therefore vital that we be able to present these proofs in an intelligible manner. In the past we have explained the First Way so that in this essay we will present what is the most metaphysical of the Five Ways, the Fourth Way, often called the Argument from Degrees of Being.
Before getting to the actual proof, it will be helpful to review the metaphysical principles that St. Thomas employs because the modern mind habitually assumes that all value judgments are subjective. But objective reality is otherwise. But in order to grasp this, we need to introduce the medieval concept of the Chain of Being.
The Chain of Being
In an egalitarian age that is unable to decipher between the value of man and beast, the Chain of Being might strike us as odd. It posits that the world is not just a blob of different stuff or a random collection of atoms, but instead an ordered hierarchy of beings. The ordering is not based upon subjective preferences, but upon objective standards. A man’s best friend really does have more value than Man’s Best Friend; John is objectively more valuable than Fido.
Merely saying so does not make it so however. Instead we must look at why John is more valuable than Fido. We say that one creature is greater than another when it has more perfections, that is more being. A geranium has life and can grow and thus has more perfections than a Plymouth Rock. Fido has life and the capacity to grow, but also the power of locomotion and sense knowledge. John too has vegetative powers and sensitive powers of Fido, but also the power to reason. John is more valuable than Fido because he has more perfections. And because he has more perfections, he has more being and occupies a higher place in the Chain of Being. We can say that John is objectively more valuable than Fido accusations of speciesism not withstanding.
It is better to be than not to be. Put another way, a thing must exist before it can be good so that whatever has goodness must have being. The reverse is also true: everything that has being also has some goodness. This is the case because being and goodness are convertible meaning that we can examine being under the aspect of goodness. To be is good and to be more is to better. Good is related to the perfection of being.
Being is not within a category, but instead transcends all categories because it contains all categories. The same applies to goodness in that it transcends all categories because it applies to all of them. This is why we refer to goodness, along with truth and beauty as transcendentals. Truth is a transcendental because all being is in a sense knowable. The more being a thing has, the more knowable it is (and the hard it is to truly know). In that sense we can also say that a plant is more true than a rock. Likewise with beauty which, in a certain sense, combines goodness and truth so that the objectively beautiful exhibits integrity, harmony and clarity. To avoid repeating what has been said before, I point the reader to this link on beauty.
Aquinas’ Fourth Way
With our feet planted on this metaphysical foundation, we can now evaluate St. Thomas’ argument.
The fourth way is taken from the gradation to be found in things. Among beings there are some more and some less good, true, noble and the like. But “more” and “less” are predicated of different things, according as they resemble in their different ways something which is the maximum, as a thing is said to be hotter according as it more nearly resembles that which is hottest; so that there is something which is truest, something best, something noblest and, consequently, something which is uttermost being; for those things that are greatest in truth are greatest in being, as it is written in Metaph. ii. Now the maximum in any genus is the cause of all in that genus; as fire, which is the maximum heat, is the cause of all hot things. Therefore there must also be something which is to all beings the cause of their being, goodness, and every other perfection; and this we call God.
ST I, q.2, art. 3
St. Thomas begins by referring to the aforementioned Chain of Being. What he then goes on to do is say that if we predicate a transcendental property to any being, then there must be “something which is truest, something best, something noblest and, consequently, something which is uttermost being.” This might not be intuitive based on our foundation so we will spell it out more explicitly.
Although creatures have various degrees of being, none of them are the cause of their own being. Each creature is limited in their being by their nature or their essence and thus they must receive their existence from another (this is the First Way). This cause of being cannot itself require a cause but instead must have maximal being, that is, it must be of their essence to exist. This Being, we call God Who calls Himself “I AM”.
Meeting an Objection
It is worth looking at an objection because it helps to clarify the argument and illuminate St. Thomas’s genius. It would be a misreading of the argument to assume that St. Thomas is saying that all things that exist in degrees must have a maximum. He is partly to blame for this because of the example he used with respect to fire and heat. Heat need not have an absolute maximum. Treating it as simply an example of a closed system in which a fire is the source of all heat, makes the example more intelligible. Many people, including theists, make this mistake. But none make it with as much flair as Richard Dawkins did in his book The God Delusion when he said that “You might as well say, people vary in smelliness but we can make the comparison only by reference to a perfect maximum of conceivable smelliness. Therefore, there must exist a pre-eminently peerless stinker.”
Dawkins’ cleverness stops at his example. Unable to see anything without his scientistic glasses, he can only see the flaw in St. Thomas’ example and is unable to grasp the underlying logic. A bad example does not invalidate the principle. Dawkins and his kind do not grasp that the argument is not about beings in particular, but being itself. St. Thomas is focused only on the transcendentals—” so that there is something which is truest, something best, something noblest and, consequently, something which is uttermost being; for those things that are greatest in truth are greatest in being”—and not on particular created things. Those things that share or participate in a limited way of being, goodness, truth and beauty must be caused by a Being that is essentially and maximally good, true and beautiful.