So I've been charged with talking about arguments for God's existence, and I've decided to pick a representative argument, what I take to be a representative argument from the tradition, which is what I call an Aristotelian argument.

And you've got a handout, I believe, a little packet of handouts actually, where I set this argument out in a step-by-step form.

Please do not throw that handout,

or packet of handouts app out after today's talk, by the way,

since most of that material actually will be relevant to what I'll be talking about tomorrow,

so you'll need that.

You can throw out tomorrow afternoon, just don't throw it out this afternoon.

All right. So what I'm, what I

describe here on the handout, and we're not going to get through all that whole argument in case

you're curious, how is it possible it's not. And so I'm not even to try. We'll get, I'm hoping,

through just page one of the argument, which is what I think of is stage one of the argument for reasons

I'll address later on. What we've got here is an outline of a style of argument for God's

existence that goes all the way back to Aristotle. Really, it goes back even earlier to Plato's

law as at least the basic idea of this kind of argument for God's existence, a kind of argument

for motion or change.

But it's really in Aristotle's physics and then in Aristotle's metaphysics as well,

that this style of argument is first spelled out in detail.

And then later Aristotelians in the tradition, of course, Maimonides, Thomas Aquinas, and many

others pick this up later on in the Middle Ages and down to the present day.

So this is an Aristotle's argument, full stop, but it's an Aristotelian argument.

It's Aristotelian in spirit.

I like to think it's the kind of way that Aristotle might state the argument if he were around today.

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