ABSTRACT
Thomas Aquinas takes his evidence for God's existence from an analysis of the visible world around us. From the start, then, Aquinas conceives of the universe as including both God and the material realm, of which we are a part. As an eternal being, God must have existed for at least as long as anything else in the universe. As an omniscient being, God has the knowledge to produce whatever God likes. Accordingly, God was under no obligation to create a perfect universe, or even a very good universe. Aquinas treats it as an unassailable Christian truth that the universe had a beginning, a first moment in time. God would have always existed, and the universe would have always existed, and it always would have been the case that God was the cause of the universe. As an analogy, Aquinas imagines someone asking why the universe was located where it is in space.
