ABSTRACT
Thomas Aquinas was an enormously accomplished theologian and philosopher. Aquinas’s arguments always include additional premises. Aquinas’s first argument for the existence of God is the argument from motion. Aquinas’s second argument generalizes the ideas found in the first. Aquinas thinks that if an object is in motion, it must be caused to move by something outside itself. The idea is that cause/effect chains (or mover/move chains) leading from the present back into the past have a finite number of links. One idea that has been put forward in atomistic theories is that atoms (fundamental particles) can’t be created or destroyed. Large objects made of atoms can be created and destroyed by assembling and disassembling collections of atoms. Current physics doesn’t support the view that atoms are indestructible. The conclusion that there is a God doesn’t follow from the assertion that not everything is contingent.
