Question

Thomas Aquinas “Christianizes” Aristotle’s theory of causes. How does Aquinas explain the reason why there is something rather than nothing? That is, what are the causes of creation, according to Aquinas?

Answer 1

Thomas Aquinas describes four causes of creation: material, efficient, formal, and final. The material cause explains what something is made of; the efficient cause explains where something came from–who or what produced or moved it; the formal cause explains what something is; and the final cause explains the ultimate purpose toward which something tends.

According to Thomas Aquinas, God is the primary cause of all creation. It is through him and for him. The humankind and all other living creation was the secondary creation fo God, through which we sustain. The idea of "causation" does not necessarily mean the literal term but rather an example of creator followed by what the creator suggests. The famous dilemma about the chiken and egg, is clarified in Genesis, where it clearly says that Chiken came first as God was in the begining. But in the evolutionistic theoris, the egg has to eveolve first. However,  In Summa Theologica (1265-74), St. Thomas Aquinas wrote, “All intermediate causes are inferior in power to the first cause … .” In the sense,   God directly created every human soul and directly made the original body of Adam. He insists: “The rational soul can be made only by creation”. To be clear, he means that each human soul, which is the formal principle of the body, is created directly from nothing: “It cannot be produced, save immediately by God”

He argues that God couldnt use nothing to create something, rather God calls the universe into existence without using pre-existing space, matter, or anything else. So when he creates the universe from nothing, God’s creative act is an act in eternity that does not involve changing one thing into another. Therefore, Thomas argues that God did not create Adam’s body from nothing, but created it directly using, as he puts it, the “slime of the Earth”: “The first formation of the human body could not be by the instrumentality of any created power, but was immediately from God”

For Aquinas, God is the primary cause and is responsible for the means by which all subsequent secondary causes are enabled and sustained. These secondary causes are truly causal, and are variable and arbitrary according to the whims and vagaries of its agents, whether they are humans, or the laws of nature, or the mechanjcs of physics. For Aquinas, humans cause their own actions and God influences the actions of humans, and neither impinges upon the freedom of the other.