Aquinas Regarding Almighty...Again

Aquinas Regarding Almighty was posted in the early days of this blog, but I thought I’d bring it up again because…

1. It’s Aquinas’s feast day.

2. We have more followers now.

3. It’s just cool stuff! Joe and I never get tired of this sort of thing. What sort of thing? Thinking things and connecting things…because thinking means connecting things.

 

The post relates to the premise that God creates out of nothing. Now, some ridiculous discussions can be had about what really is “nothing”. Some say there is no such thing as “nothing”, which is true if there is always God (being itself), but to avoid sidetracks to nowhere and to bring some additional clarity, it might be better to start by saying that God requires no other condition, or set of conditions to exist in order to create. He is the one reality that requires no other reality.

 

 

Aquinas Regarding Almighty

St Thomas Aquinas falls into that category of people I like to call “scary-smart”. Reading his work can result in a peculiar experience, at least for me. I may read something translated to English well using perfect grammar, and understand the meaning of each individual word, yet somehow not understand what was said. Does Aquinas write nonsense or am I not the sharpest knife in the theological drawer? The latter is more reasonable.  Here is a case in point from the Compendium to Summa Theologica chp 70:

 

“The more remote a potency is from act, the greater must be the power that reduces it to act.”

 

With help from other Catholic thinkers that explain Aquinas and my blog buddy Joe, I can make sense of such a sentence. Rephrasing in more common language, I think it may read something like this:

 

The less one has to make something potentially happen, the more power one needs to make it actually happen. But what does this mean when contemplating ultimate things?

 

Analogies are most helpful………

Suppose you have a new car you wish to start. All that is needed is the key and the ability to turn the ignition; not very difficult. Now take away the gasoline. You now need the ability to get some gasoline, put in it the car and then start it. More resources are needed. In a sense you might say you need more “power”. Now take away the battery as well. You now need to get a battery, install it, get gasoline in the car, and then start it. You’ll need even more “power”.

 

The more that is taken away from the car, the more power needed to make it actually work. Taking away things to infinity becomes nothingness. Adding power to infinity becomes “all powerful”. If left with nothing to work with (no-thing), no matter, no energy, no force, no time, no space (no outside condition), the only way you could make a car first exist and then start it is if you had infinite power. To create from nothing then, requires infinite power.

St. Thomas Aquinas

1225 - 1274

All of this to truly understand one word in our Creed. The word “Almighty” is not used simply because it sounds lofty and majestic. It describes, from logical necessity, the kind of power needed to bridge an infinite gap between potency and act.

Thank you St. Thomas Aquinas; thou art scary-smart!
 

The Immaculate Deception?

Here is some Catholic trivia for the feast of the Immaculate Conception. What saint wrote that the Mary was conceived WITH original sin? The answer is St. Thomas Aquinas. I did a double-take myself when I first stumbled upon it in the Compendium to Suma Theologica, chapter 224:

 “Likewise, if Mary had been conceived without original sin, she would not have had to be redeemed by Christ, and so Christ would not be the universal redeemer of men, which detracts from His dignity. Accordingly we must hold that she was conceived with original sin, but was cleansed from it in some special way.”

Could this be the beginning of a new scandal in the Church that has its roots way back in the 13th century? Is the Immaculate Conception really the Immaculate Deception? Should Catholics be mortified, crushed and shaken to their very core of their faith? No, not at all; why not? Because when someone is declared a saint, it does not mean everything he or she did, said or wrote is infallible.

How then, can we know true Christian dogma? What is the foundation for truth? Where do we turn? What do we do? We can start with the Bible, but the Bible will direct us elsewhere; it directs us to “…God's household, which is the church of the living God, the pillar and foundation of the truth.” (1Timothy 3:15 is a verse every Catholic should memorize)

The Immaculate Conception was dogmatically defined by “God’s Household” in 1854 and is one of those “thorny” teachings that non-Catholic Christians object to, and I’ll bet some Catholics object to it too. This is the teaching that Mary was spared from original sin by God. An analogy is that we all fell in a mud puddle, and God cleaned us up afterward through baptism. In Mary’s case, God saved her by not letting her enter the mud puddle to begin with. Some may say this teaching is not only unbiblical, but actually contradicts the Word of God. After all, the Bible is clear, “all have sinned and are deprived of the glory of God;” (Romans 3:23), but what is clarity without perspective, and what is perspective without context.

We can't really be clear about something until it is understood in its proper context. Suppose someone said they have beheld the most beautiful eyes on a woman and then proceeded to show you her eyes in a box, would you be entranced by their beauty or be horrified? Her eyes are beautiful in the proper context of her face, not in a box.

Another way to better understand a thing is to compare it to other similar things in a similar context. Consider temperature in degrees kelvin. If I told you it is 250°K outside, what would you wear to go out? You may have no clue unless you had a relevant basis of comparison. 250°K is about -23°C, or about -10°F; not exactly flip-flop weather.

250°K

To what can we compare Romans 3:23 to get a better understanding?

• How about this verse? “In Adam all have died…” (1 Cor. 15:22). In the Old Testament Enoch and Elijah did not die; they were taken up to heaven. Does this mean Paul contradicts scripture? No, this shows how “all” does not mean “every single one.” Also, if Christ never sinned, once again “all” does not really mean all. It reminds me of other generalizations like, “Everybody loves pizza”. I bet you can find at least one human on earth that does not like pizza.

• Paul also says that “death came to all men, inasmuch as all sinned” in Romans 5:12. Again, this proves that “all” does not mean “every single one” because death did not spread to all men as we have already seen with Enoch and Elijah.

• Here’s a doozy; “as it is written: ‘None is righteous, no, not one;’” (Romans 3:10). Some may use this verse to show how all human beings are sinful including Mary, but the basis for the verse comes from Psalm 14:3 or Psalm 53:4. These psalms are not talking about all people being sinful. They note that among the wicked, all are sinful.

• What about the words of Jesus himself? In Luke 18:19 Jesus says, “No one is good but God alone.” But then in Matthew 12:35, Jesus also says “A good person brings forth good…” So Jesus says no one is good but God, and then calls another person good. Is Jesus also contracting himself? I think not.

How do we know what’s true? The saints, as they lived on earth, were fallible humans just like you and I. The Bible alone leads to confusion alone (30,000 different Christian denominations & counting). Conscience alone leads to relativism alone. It is the spirit of truth that guides us to all truth (see John 16:13), but we cannot know the stages of guidance. Whatever the case or whatever the stage, remember to stick with God’s Household, which is the Church of the living God, and have a happy feast day!

You're kinda lost without it...

God as Father

Monday is the feast day of St. Thomas Aquinas. This reminds me to share something from his compendium of Summa Theologica that helps to explain God as Father.

God is pure spirit and the Catechism of the Catholic Church is clear that He has no gender in paragraph 239, “We ought therefore to recall that God transcends the human distinction between the sexes. He is neither man nor woman: he is God.” One might conclude that there is no particular reason to call God Father other than our own sexist bias. Why not say “Mother”, “Divine Parent”, “Great Spirit” or “The Big Man Upstairs”?



INTERESTING SIDE NOTE:

Whenever I hear some refer to God as “The Big Man Upstairs” there seems to be a strong correlation between that title and a deficient (or non-existent) relationship with God.

I’ve heard it said that the reason we should call God Father is simply because Jesus called Him Father and we should follow suit. I suppose this is a reason, but it leaves me uninspired. Inspiration (for me) comes from reading St. Thomas Aquinas, and of course, other theologians who help explain Aquinas.

Before getting to Aquinas we can first step into some High Christology from John’s Gospel where we read, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1). We also read, “And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us…” (John 1:14). From here we can make some distinction between a word and an idea or a thought. Physical words are meant to express some other “thing”, idea or thought. The Word of God as described in John’s gospel is not a physical vibration from vocal cords formed by the mouth, tongue and lips; a thing of the air. We might say the Word of God is more like the “thought” of God.

We also should make a distinction between the thought and the thinker. If you were to think of yourself, you would have some imperfect image of yourself in your mind. If God were to contemplate Himself, there would be no deficiency in it; this would be a perfect thought or perfect image, or God himself. Going back to the beginning of John’s gospel, it can be helpful to use “thought” in place of “word”, so we would have, “In the beginning was the Thought, and the Thought was with God, and the Thought was God.”, “And the Thought became flesh (God incarnate), and dwelt among us,…”

What do these seemingly useless mental gymnastics have to do with St. Thomas? Chapter thirty-nine of his compendium of theology is entitled Relation of the Word to the Father. Aquinas relates a thought in the mind as a kind of offspring of the intellect when he says, “What is conceived in the intellect is a likeness of the thing understood and represents its species; and so it seems to be a sort of offspring of the intellect”. The intellect itself can resemble a mother, whose function is such that conception takes place in her. The thing thought about resembles a father since it acts on the intellect to make an offspring, which is the idea or thought.

Example:

Ø  An object, let’s say a bird, acts on the human intellect through sensory input from the sight, sound, smell, (taste?), and touch of a bird.

Ø  The bird flies away, but the idea of the bird conceived in the intellect remains as an imperfect image of the bird.

Ø  The image of the bird is a product (offspring if you will) of both the intellect and the bird itself.

Therefore, if the thing being thought of is God, it is God acting on the intellect resembling a father, so to speak. Now if God’s intellect were to contemplate and understand Himself, the thought conceived would be a perfect image of God better known to us as the second person of the trinity (the Word was God). Therefore, the thought, or the Word, or Jesus relates to God as a Son relates to a Father.

Although God has no gender, Father is the most reasonable term for us to use considering the logic above along with the kind of close family relationship God wants with us. The nature of God, the wisdom of the Church and St. Thomas Aquinas all come together to give us a whole new perspective on that modern-day phrase…“Who’s Your Daddy?”

Getting to Know Evil...Again

Thought I’d republish this from last July given what happened in CT yesterday in case it might help someone. I have a daughter in kindergarten myself. Seems like she was born yesterday and I could not imaging making funeral arrangements now. Another thing I find troubling is the fact that many who mourn the loss of these children today would have gladly supported their killing six years ago…when they were in their mother’s womb.

 

Epicurus
341 - 270 BCE

Many are familiar with what the Greek philosopher Epicurus said centuries ago:

“Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?”




We wonder how a God that is all knowing, all powerful and all loving can permit evil. We conclude that there must be at least some error, weakness or indifference about God. A flawed assumption with this kind of thinking is that finite humans can fully understand perfect knowledge, perfect power and perfect love. Think of a child receiving a flu shot. Should the child conclude that the parents either do not know shots are painful, they do not have the power to stop it or they just don’t care? This is NOT meant to compare a shooting to a flu shot. It is meant to compare the perspective of a child to our prospective to God.

St. Augustine of Hippo
354 - 430

Like us, St. Augustine had similar questions about evil before his conversion to Catholicism. He practiced Manichaeism in his younger days, which taught that there were two forces in the universe of equal power, one good and one evil. This would mean that God cannot be all powerful since there was a matching power of evil to counteract Him. Being the intellectual that he was, Augustine knew about Catholicism. He knew that Catholics taught God was all good and all things came from God. He had a question for Catholics, which we can read about in his Confessions, Book 7. The question was “From whence came evil?” If God is all good and all things come from God, where did evil come from? How could evil come into being at all?


It’s simple logic, but once again we have a bad assumption. The assumption is that evil has “being”.Catholics taught and still teach (because Truth does not change) that evil has no substance or “being”. Think of physical darkness; it has no “being”.Darkness is merely the absence of light. It doesn’t come from anywhere or find its source in anything; it is merely the lack of something. By the way, the Devil is NOT the source of evil, just like night time is NOT the source of darkness.

I'm finding this post disturbing.

After his conversion, Augustine equated evil to “disharmony”. I play some guitar and I’ve owned my current guitar for over twenty years. I can hear when it is even slightly out-of-tune, even if one string has the slightest disharmony with the other five. It may sound perfectly fine to you, but I know it can sound better. In a sense, I know my guitar’s perfection within the context of its nature. When all six strings are way out-of-tune, the guitar is gravely out of harmony with how it should be, and playing any chord would make an “evil” sound to anyone’s ears. It’s been said that without evil there would be no such thing as good. That is akin to saying without an out-of-tune guitar there would be no such thing as an in-tune guitar.

Thomas Aquinas tells us that good signifies “perfect being” and evil signifies “the privation of perfect being”, so when a thing lacks a perfection it ought to have, we perceive the deficiency as an evil. Blindness is evil for a human because a human ought to have sight. Blindness is not evil for a stone because a stone should not have sight. Also, think of a tree seedling trying to grow into as perfect of a tree as it can within its nature. Things preventing this like insects, disease, bad weather, animals or a man with an axe are evil to the tree, in the sense that they bring deficiency to it.

How does any of this help anyone? Does it take away the pain and confusion when a loved one is suddenly and senselessly taken from us? So what if evil has no “being”? So what if we understand evil better? We can still ask, “Why does God allow the privation of goodness to happen?”

One thing I’ve learned from years of dealing with complex problems in my professional and personal life is this….The more you understand a problem, the better you can deal with it, EVEN IF you can’t necessarily solve it. And so it is with the problem of evil.

Sacrifice and the Greater Good

Today on relevant Radio, I listened for a short time and heard Fr Rocky answer a question regarding the difference between the heart, spirit and soul in relation to the body and mind.

He deftly gave the clear Thomist answers but then took it a step further.  He said that the soul (or spirit) is the differentiator that gives humans reason and free will.  Two of the faculties of the soul are the intellect (mind) and the will (often synonymous with the heart).


(Here is the archive link.)

Here's where he develops it further.  Religions usually contain some form of sacrifice.  As we look at religion with all its varied acts of sacrifice, the highest sacrifice is the Sacrifice of the Mass.

As Catholics we employ sacrifice all the time.  Fasting is the sacrifice of the body desire to eat.  Celibacy is the sacrifice of the sexual urge.  These sacrifices exercise our self-control.






How does this relate to the Will and the Intellect?

The sacrifice of the Intellect is Faith.  The Intellect is the striving to know.  To discover and to contain all it can find.  It is a temptation of the Intellect to believe ONLY what it can apprehend (through the senses).  Conversely, the logical fallacy is that if it is not sensible, then it does not exist.   Faith then, is letting go of knowing only what I can perceive.  It is the accepting of knowledge GIVEN to me rather than acquired by me.  It is other-centered and trust-based.

The sacrifice of the Will is Obedience.  The Will is the choice maker, the part of me that decides whether to do this or that.  The temptation of the Will is to be the captain of my own destiny.  To decide that MY wishes are the ends towards which the whole world ought to work.   Obedience then, is the letting go of my wants and desires.  To act as if another's wishes are actually mine.  To make their goals, my goals and their tasks, mine.  Again, it is other-centered and trust-based.

The sacrifice of the Heart is Love.  Since Love is a decision, you love from the Will.  You decide whether to love someone or not.  The temptation is to treat love as an emotion and love when you feel like it and refrain from loving when you do not.  Love then, is the letting go of whether the person is lovable, and loving them anyway.  Deciding to act loving when it's not merited, deserved or even wanted is to truly Love.


What I see from this wonderful insight is that the act of sacrificing something is an indicator of the intrinsic value of the thing sacrificed.  Food, sex, knowledge and choice, are all powerful and GOOD.  Practicing the sacrifice of them makes us better, and orients us toward the ultimate Good, God.

The Evil of Two Lessers

You're the Diet Coke of evil.
Just one calorie, not evil enough.

Some speak of voting for “the lesser of two evils” in the upcoming presidential election and that voting this way only brings more evil.  A more accurate phrase may be “the evil of two lessers” IF we understand the reality of evil.

Thomas Aquinas tells us that good signifies “perfect being” and evil signifies “the privation of perfect being”, so when a thing lacks a perfection it ought to have, we perceive the deficiency as evil (see his Compendium of Theology). 



Another important point is that evil has no substance, nature or being. We may say for example, Satan is evil, but the word "evil" is an adjective. Satan is not evil itself in the way that God is Goodness itself. Think of darkness; it is merely the absence of light. Darkness doesn’t come from anywhere or find its source in anything; it is merely the lack of something. No one can bring more darkness or take away darkness; one can only take away light, bring light or stop light from dimming. Once we understand all this, we can see that any candidate is a “lesser” in the sense that everyone is imperfect and the imperfection can be called evil. So we are really talking about the imperfection of two candidates or “the evil of two lessers”.

Really?
Whatever....

Think of monetary debt as an election issue. Candidate “A” has a plan that will grow the debt by 20% per year. Candidate “B” has a plan that will grow the debt by 10% per year. Let’s say debt or negative dollars = evil and positive dollars = good. No one really brings negative dollars. I can’t hand you a negative dollar bill. Both plans result in more debt, but "B" is better. Going back to our light metaphor, Candidate “B” will slow the dimming of light better, or bring more light to help compensate or some combination of both. The result is more light (more dollars) than "A".

 

We can easily relate this to the topic of abortion or the killing of human beings. Suppose Adolf Hitler died before the fall of Nazi Germany and there was an election for a successor. Candidate “A” wants to keep the killing of all Jews legal. Candidate “B” wants only the killing of Jews who are a product of rape/incest or any Jew unintentionally threatening the life of a German. Both are imperfect because both will allow killing, but Candidate “B” brings more good , moving closer to perfection like lighting one candle brings more light in the darkness.  Is choosing NOT to vote at all in this scenario a sin of omission, because “B” could possibly save many lives? Just a question.

Of course, there is always a third party or a write-in candidate. This option reminds me of the contemplative side of Catholicism. A big part of contemplation is to be in the present moment because that is where we find God. The past is gone and the future does not exist; there is ONLY now. In the present moment there is no time to build-up a more perfect (or less evil) third candidate that can win. In our moment in the voting booth, we can only try to bring more good (more light) based on the candidates we have.

It is better to light one candle than to curse the darkness.

 

Getting to Know Evil

I’ve been meaning to do an evil post, meaning a post about evil, not a post that is objectively evil. Regrettably, it took the horrific shootings in Colorado last week to spur me on. Studying Augustine and Aquinas helped me to understand evil better, so I thought I’d pass along some concepts that are rarely talked about, even in Catholic circles.

Epicurus
341 - 270 BCE

Many are familiar with what the Greek philosopher Epicurus said centuries ago:

“Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?”



We wonder how a God that is all knowing, all powerful and all loving can permit evil, like what happened in CO. We conclude that there must be at least some error, weakness or indifference about God. A flawed assumption with this kind of thinking is that finite humans can fully understand perfect knowledge, perfect power and perfect love. Think of a child receiving a flu shot. Should the child conclude that the parents either do not know shots are painful, they do not have the power to stop it or they just don’t care?

St. Augustine of Hippo
354 - 430

Like us, St. Augustine had similar questions about evil before his conversion to Catholicism. He practiced Manichaeism in his younger days, which taught that there were two forces in the universe of equal power, one good and one evil. This would mean that God cannot be all powerful since there was a matching power of evil to counteract Him. Being the intellectual that he was, Augustine knew about Catholicism. He knew that Catholics taught God was all good and all things came from God. He had a question for Catholics, which we can read about in his Confessions, Book 7. The question was “From whence came evil?” If God is all good and all things come from God, where did evil come from? How could evil come into being at all?


It’s simple logic, but once again we have a bad assumption. The assumption is that evil has “being”. Catholics taught and still teach (because Truth does not change) that evil has no substance or “being”. Think of physical darkness; it has no “being”. Darkness is merely the absence of light. It doesn’t come from anywhere or find its source in anything; it is merely the lack of something. By the way, the Devil is NOT the source of evil, just like night time is NOT the source of darkness.

I'm finding this post disturbing.

After his conversion, Augustine equated evil to “disharmony”. I play some guitar and I’ve owned my current guitar for over twenty years. I can hear when it is even slightly out-of-tune, even if one string has the slightest disharmony with the other five. It may sound perfectly fine to you, but I know it can sound better. In a sense, I know my guitar’s perfection within the context of its nature. When all six strings are way out-of-tune, the guitar is gravely out of harmony with how it should be, and playing any chord would make an “evil” sound to anyone’s ears. It’s been said that without evil there would be no such thing as good. That is akin to saying without an out-of-tune guitar there would be no such thing as an in-tune guitar.

Thomas Aquinas tells us that good signifies “perfect being” and evil signifies “the privation of perfect being”, so when a thing lacks a perfection it ought to have, we perceive the deficiency as an evil. Blindness is evil for a human because a human ought to have sight. Blindness is not evil for a stone because a stone should not have sight. Also, think of a tree seedling trying to grow into as perfect of a tree as it can within its nature. Things preventing this like insects, disease, bad weather, animals or a man with an axe are evil to the tree, in the sense that they bring deficiency to it.

How does any of this help anyone? Does it take away the pain and confusion when a loved one is suddenly and senselessly taken from us? So what if evil has no “being”? So what if we understand evil better?  We can still ask, “Why does God allow the privation of goodness to happen?”

One thing I’ve learned from years of dealing with complex problems in my professional and personal life is this….The more you understand a problem, the better you can deal with it, EVEN IF you can’t necessarily solve it. And so it is with the problem of evil.

Aquinas Regarding Contingency

Today is the feast day of St. Thomas Aquinas, someone I like to refer to as “scary-smart”. Anyone remotely interested in the topic of existence should give him a serious look.

Theologically, God is existence itself; not some being contained within existence like a ghost, a fairy in the sky or a flying spaghetti monster. This is the elementary blunder of most atheists. When asked His name, God answers, “I am that I am” (Ex 3:14), hinting that He is “being” itself. I think of the ocean as a metaphor. We generally don’t say there is water in the ocean. We are more apt to say the ocean IS water.

I especially like Aquinas’s theory of contingency as a proof for the existence of God. With help from other theologians that explain Aquinas, I describe contingency like this: Every effect must have a cause. We cannot logically trace back causes to infinity. We can logically trace back to a first cause, sometimes called an uncaused cause. A first cause, by necessity, would need to be simultaneously whole and non-composite, meaning totally self-sufficient and having no parts. Nothing is needed for its own existence, not even time or space and nothing can be added or taken away, not even knowledge or power (or else it cannot be the first cause). From this premise flows that there can only be one first cause which must encompass all knowledge, all power, etc, etc.

I struggled with the idea that we cannot logically trace back causes to infinity. I thought to myself, “why not?” Then I read a good analogy for it in a book entitled, How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization by Thomas E. Woods Jr.

Suppose you are at a deli counter to buy meat and you are told to first take a number. You are then told that you must take a number in order to take a number and this process of taking numbers to take the next will continue to infinity. You will realize that you will never reach the deli counter. You then notice that others have meat in their cart from the counter. You conclude that the processes of taking numbers must have ended at some point, at least for those with meat. It logically could not have continued to infinity as evident by the meat existing in the cart.

Here’s another way to think about contingency. Everything receives its existence from something else. You are here because your parents met. A valley exists because a river flowed there at some point. Try to imagine a universe where everything is a receiver of existence and nothing is a sender. If you showed someone from the far past a television set and explained that it receives signals and turns them into pictures and sound, the time traveler can logically conclude that there must be, somehow, a “sender” of the signal.

Modern physics now teaches that space & time do not go back to infinity, but have a certain beginning point. It’s not well advertised that the Big Bang Theory was first proposed by a Roman Catholic Priest and scientist, Monsignor Georges Lemaître.

Monsignor Georges Lemaître meets with Albert Einstein

Both science and religion lead to the truth. Seems after all these centuries science is finally starting to catch-up to Catholicism…took’em long enough.

Aquinas Regarding Almighty

St. Thomas Aquinas falls into that category of people I like to call “scary-smart”. Reading his work can result in a peculiar experience. I may read something translated to English well, using perfect grammar, and understand the meaning of each individual word, yet somehow, not understand what was said. Does Aquinas write nonsense or am I not the sharpest knife in the theological drawer? The later is much more reasonable.  Here is a case in point from the compendium to Summa Theologica:

“The more remote a potency is from act, the greater must be the power that reduces it to act.”

With help from other Catholic theologians that explain Aquinas and my blog buddy Joe, I can make sense of such a sentence. Rephrasing in more common language, it may read something like this: The less one has to make something potentially happen, the more power needed to make it actually happen. But what does this mean when contemplating ultimate things?

Analogies are most helpful………

Suppose you have a new car you wish to start. All that is needed is the key and the ability to turn the ignition; not very difficult. Now take away the gasoline. You now need the ability to get some gasoline, put in the car and then start it. More resources are needed. In a sense you might say that you need more “power”. Now take away the battery as well. You’ll need even more “power”.

The more that is taken away from the car, the more power needed to make it actually work. Taking away things to infinity becomes nothingness. Adding power to infinity becomes all powerful. If left with not a single molecule to work with (nothing), the only way you could make a car first exist and then start it, is if you had infinite power. To create from nothing, then, requires infinite power.

All of this to get one word in our Creed. The word “Almighty” is not used simply because it sounds lofty and majestic. It describes, from logical necessity, the kind of power needed to bridge an infinite gap between potency and act.

St. Thomas Aquinas

1225 - 1274

"scary-smart"