It would actually be very difficult to overstate the contemporary importance of Thomas's having taken ten articles to arrive at the question of God's existence, and then taking two steps before broaching directly that question itself. One of the luminaries in the Communio circle, albeit not wholly uncontroversial, has actually published (and, after criticism, republished in a revised second edition) a book which I found terribly helpful in the middle of my crisis of faith and literary theory: Dieu sans l'etre: hors-texte (God Without Being by Jean-Luc Marion).
Now, I'm not even 100% sure I still track with some of the philosophical premises that I seemed to share with Marion's approach when I read him back in 2008, but I keep meaning to re-read him to find out. What I am sure of is that since Modernism has identified "realist" knowledge with a totalitarian vision of reality comprehended and controlled by technical means in service of an unknowable unity between the most extremely individual, inarticulate "gooey center" of each person and the most unknowably sublime "outer limits" of collective aspiration, it has become increasingly difficult to articulate what a thinker like Aquinas means by seeing revelation as God's having given us in part what He has in whole: an identity (not a mere resemblance) between truth and reality.
Marion confronts that question, and though far more subtle games are afoot than I can here (or, without careful re-reading, ever) restate, he offers us an "even if" scenario. Even if we cannot bring our understanding of Being back into line with the God who reveals Himself, we can surrender our understanding to God, suffering the sacrifice of our concepts and the (false?) hope they bring us of a totalizing understanding. And, of course, to the extent that this is what Marion achieves, I think it is of a piece with the spiritual project of St. Thomas Aquinas, too. (But I hope we can also try other things.)
Anyway, what is important about all of that is that Marion can make this sort of intervention (and, by the way, I think Q2A1 is susceptible of considerable refinement) because Thomas has prudently recognized that not merely "Does God exist?" but also "Can this question be asked?" and "Can this question be answered?" are really live issues, here. The reason these questions are live is indicated by the complexity of Q1. If our knowledge of God is a partial set of God's knowledge that God has shared with us, nonetheless our contingent mode of knowing is quite unlike God's absolute mode of knowing. For God, there is no final difference between "to know a thing" and "to decree a thing" and "to sustain a thing in being" and "to bring a thing into being." Mind you, I do think there is meaning in distinguishing God's knowledge, especially once we begin to talk about Trinity and Incarnation, but these differences have to do with God's interactions with contingent beings, not with God's final being. Can a contingent being, then, know what "to exist" means for God? Can this question be asked without presupposing its answer? Can this question be answered without invalidating the question? If we cannot answer "Yes" to these questions, then we will find that our whole science of theology craters immediately, as its unifying subject matter is not a fit subject for the practice of speaking and reading and writing and teaching.
I admit to being a bit tangled up on this question, actually. In the terms most moderns think of, where "prove" and "demonstrate" mean to give an unattainable, cognitively sublime degree of certitude to a proposition by merely rational discursive moves, I would answer "No" to Q2A2. In similar terms, where most moderns tend to think one either presupposes "God is" or remains skeptical about the meaning of these terms, I would likely answer "Yes" to Q2A1. But I think Thomas is right, nonetheless, to take precisely the opposite view: and the reason is that Thomas is unencumbered by Modern Western Philosophy and its Through The Looking Glass redefinitions of key terms.
Treatise on The One God (QQ[2-26])
Question. 2 - The Existence of God (Three Articles)
Article. 1 - Whether the existence of God is self-evident?"Self-evident" is a term much abused since the days of the Declaration of Independence. One might do better to say "mere intuition" rather than "self-evident truth" when looking through these things. We are not even, I think, talking about what Polanyi or Plantiga might call "properly basic" truths, because "properly basic" truths require (as Aquinas would agree) demonstration to be realized. Such "self-evident truths" or "mere intuitions" were what Descartes sought under the rubric of "clear and certain" truths which haunted the mind practicing enlightened skepticism; they were what Locke attempted to locate in the operations of the brain in response to stimuli; and they are the "ghost in the machine" that continue to haunt the desires of sociologists, neuroscience researchers, and sophomoric Calvinist "presuppositionalists" to this day.
The question, then, is not whether God's existence is evident to all (which is what folks most commonly confuse with "self-evident"). It is whether God's existence is in the category "a thing we can know, or not," such that our words about God have their own definitions and are either true or false; or whether "God exists" is in the category Kant would give it, a "regulative concept" which occurs in our thought because without it thought would be impossible. See, if we go the latter direction, we end up in the land of liberalism, or at best in Barth's neo-orthodoxy and the "God is dead" fringe of Dialectical Theology, with a "God" whose name has no particular and effective content, because "G-d's" role as a cipher in our conceptual system is too important to be risked on any falsifiable particulars. We spend our effort rescuing our concept from "superstitious" and "anthropomorphic" claims that God has said thus, done thus, appeared there, worked here.
But "they are without excuse."
"Ever since the creation of the world his invisible nature, namely, his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made."
Article. 2 - Whether it can be demonstrated that God exists?This item is entangled with the prior one, and our answer to each really determines our answer to the other (in fact, it is this entanglement that convinces me Q2A1 is susceptible of refinement). But, yes, it is possible to arrive at the conclusion "God exists" from rational premises. Whether this suffices for spiritual conversion is not at issue; what matters is whether "God exists" is similar in kind to, or totally different from, other speakable, writeable, readable, teachable truths.
Article. 3 - Whether God exists?Yes.
Oh, yes, the Quinque Viae. Ah. Well, anyone want to discuss those, more? Your turn.
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