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So I'm here to speak on God, creation and the act of existence.

I didn't choose this title. I won't say the title chose me. I was basically told,

could you speak about this? And I thought, well, yeah, sure, I've published two books on the

issue and I'm engaged with that sort of stuff, so yeah, why not? So what I'm going to talk about,

I'm going to talk about Aquinas' metaphysical thought

and how he comes up with this distinction between essence and existence

and that whole issue of essence and existence.

And then I'm going to point out about how existence, or the active existence is the unifying

theme in Aquinas' metaphysics.

See if you're trying to understand in Thomas' metaphysics,

understand the active existence. Understand what he means by the active existence. See,

once you understand that, that's it. You're golden. It's like understanding Plato's theory of forms.

Once you've understood the forms, you've got Plato. You can open any platonic dialogue, and you can situate yourself once you've got the theory of forms. So it's a quietness on the active existence.

You will have broken the back of the mystic metaphysics once you have that.

So I'm going to talk about that, how that's a unifying theme, how that leads him to the affirmation of God's existence,

and how that has implications for the metaphysics of creation.

Is that okay?

...