So yesterday's talk, of course, was about arguments for God's existence, and we focused specifically

on what I call the Aristotelian proof of God's existence, of which Aquinas' first way is a variation.

And we left off with the idea that such an argument gets us to the idea of God as a first cause of the existence of things, whose pure actuality

with no potentiality, in particular no passive potentiality, to allude to a distinction that came

up during the Q&A yesterday.

Now, I mentioned that you can take Aquinas five ways or really any of the other classic

arguments for God's existence,

the ones you see in thinkers like Plotinus or in Leibniz, in St. Augustine, in St. Anselm,

any of the classic arguments of natural theology, including the ones that I defend in my book

Five Proofs of the Existence of God, as basically having two stages.

And in the first stage, you argue for the existence of God

understood in terms of some key description,

such as being an uncaused cause,

or as being an unmoved mover of the world,

or as being an absolutely necessary being, or as being a supreme

intellect as an Aquinas' fifth way or what have you.

Then the second stage is to argue that anything fitting that key description would have to

have to have all of the traditional divine attributes, would have to be omnipotent, would have to be

omniscient, would have to be eternal, would have to be necessary, would have to be omnipotent, would have to be omniscient, would have to be eternal, would have to be necessary, would have to be unique, and so on and so forth.

Okay.

And so we only had time last time yesterday to say a little bit about that second stage of an argument like the one that I gave yesterday.

I sort of gestured in a very general way

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