by Dean F. Wilson

Created on: June 13, 2008

"The existence of God can be proved in five ways. The first and most obvious proof is the argument from change (ex parte motus). It is clearly the case that some things in this world are in the process of changing. Now everything that is in the process of being changed is changed by something else, since nothing is changed unless it is potentially that towards which it being changed, whereas that which changes is actual. To change something is nothing else than to bring it from potentiality to actuality, and a thing can be brought from potentiality to actuality only by something which is actual. Thus a fire, which is actually hot, makes wood, which is potentially hot, to be actually hot, thus changing and altering it. Now it is impossible for the same thing to be both actual and potential in the same respect, although it may be so in different respects. What is actually hot cannot at the same time be potentially hot, although it is potentially cold. It is therefore impossible that, in the same manner and in the same way, anything should be both the one which effects change and the one that is changed, so that it should change itself. Whatever is changed must therefore be changed by something else. If, then, whatever is changing it is itself changed, this also must be changed by something else, and this in turn by something else again. But this cannot go on forever, since there would then be no first cause to this process of change, and consequently no other agent of change, because secondary things which change cannot change unless they are changed by the first cause, in the same way as a stick cannot move unless it is moved by the hand. We are therefore bound to arrive at a first cause of change which is not changed by anything and everyone understands that this is God."

- The Five Ways, by Thomas Aquinas

The above is a cosmological argument for the existence of God, from roughly a millennium ago, and one that still holds some weight today, even if its specifics are argued. This is based on the principle of Cause & Effect (which is both a scientific concept and one that has been espoused by various schools of philosophy for millennia), and the argument goes somewhat like the following, with my own (half-formed) musings added in for good measure:

Something is caused (and must be caused) by something else. We know this from observation alone, as an effect cannot exist without a prior cause for that effect, such as a ripple in a pond requiring some cause, perhaps

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