What I'm going to read you today, what I'm going to discuss today is some material from a

forthcoming book of mine coming out this fall from Ignatius Press, and the title is five

proofs of the existence of God. Despite the word five in the title, it's not a book on the five ways,

on St. Thomas's Five Ways. I've talked about St. Thomas's Five Ways Elsewhere, particularly

in my book on Thomas Aquinas, though there is overlap.

It's on five arguments that I take to be, I don't want to say that they're the best, meaning that there are no other arguments of equal strength for the existence of God.

But they're the ones that I take to be personally of the most interest and the ones that I think

are the most useful for apologetic purposes in a contemporary context. And some of them do correspond to

some of Aquinas' arguments and some of them don't. Some of you might be familiar with Father

Robert Spitzer's book New Proofs of the Existence of God. And I was tempted to title my own book, Old Proofs of the Existence of God. And I was tempted to title my own book,

Old Proofs of the Existence of God, because there's nothing terribly original about them.

There is something, I think, original about the presentation, the way I formulate the

arguments and defend them against contemporary objections. But the arguments themselves are

actually quite old. They go back to some of them to the ancient Greeks. Very briefly,

the five proofs in question referred to in the title of this forthcoming book, are first

what I call the Aristotelian proof for the existence of God, which in different versions

goes back to Aristotle himself, something like it even goes back earlier to Plato, but

it's certainly most famously associated with Aristotle and presented in Aristotle's book, The Physics, and in his book Metaphysics.

That's the argument from the existence of motion or change in the world to the existence of an unmoved mover.

The second proof that I discussed in the book is what I call the Neoplatonic proof, which is an argument you see in Platinus and other ancient Neoplatonic philosophers.

And it's basically an argument from the existence of things that are composite or made up of parts

to the existence of a first cause of the existence of things which is absolutely simple or non-composite.

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