The Five Ways. St. Thomas Aquinas’ Proofs of God’s Existence by Anthony Kenny, and: The Cosmological Argument. A Reassessment by Bruce R. Reichenbach (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 721 The Five Ways. St. Thoma8 Aquina8' Proofs of God's Existence. By ANTHONY KENNY. Studies in Ethics and the Philosophy of Religion. General Editor, D. E. Phillips. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969. Pp. 139. The Cosmological Argument. A Rea8sessment. By BRUCE R. REICHENBACH . Springfield, Illinois: Charles C. Thomas, 197~. Pp. 164. $8.75. With the renewal of interest in natural theology prompted by the publication of Flew and Mcintyre's Neu> Essays in Philosophical Theology (1955), attention has been directed once again to rational arguments for God's existence. The ontological argument was the first to benefit from this resurgence of interest, but in the two books under review cosmological argumentation and its various formulations come in for their share of attention. Kenny's work, which shows more the negative influence of Flew, stresses the difficulty involved in separating Aquinas's five ways from the medieval cosmology in which he sees them as imbedded. Reichenbach's work is more positive in spirit, the author's major concern being to reformulate St. Thomas's first three ways so as to meet the objections of Hume and Kant and contemporary critics in the analytical tradition. Both works merit a brief exposition and critique, if only because they consider much the same subject matter and yet come to contrary conclusions. After a brief introduction wherein he allows that " the criticisms of Kant are certainly still the most effective obstacle any rational theism has to meet" (p. 3), Kenny devotes a chapter each to the five proofs for God's existence offered by Aquinas in Summa Theologiae, I, q. ~.a. 3. In the case of each via he attempts a rather complete exegesis of the text, supplementing this with St. Thomas's arguments in parallel places and with elucidations supplied by commentators, mainly recent, including Roberto Masi, Joseph Owens, and Peter Geach. In each instance Kenny raises objections drawn from modern science and from Humean, Kantian, and more recent philosophies to show not only that the ipsa verba of St. Thomas are unacceptable to the modern mind but also that " scholastic modernizations " must share the same fate (cf. p. 4). With regards to the prima via Kenny experiences special difficulty with the principle "omne quod movetur ab alio movetur," and so sides with Suarez's evaluation of the proof that it is impotent " to prove that there is anything immaterial in reality, let alone that there is a first and uncreated substance " (p. 33) . The chapter has some interesting material on the chains of movers involved in inertial and gravitational motion, particularly when the author attempts to explain these in terms of Newtonian and Einsteinian mechanics, but unfortunately his discussion here comes to no conclusive results. Kenny's examination of the secunda via focuses on the principle of efficient causation, which he formulates in mathematical logic BOOK REVIEWS following Salamucha and others. His difficulty here is with essentially subordinated series of causes, which he sees as intelligible in terms of medieval astrology, as thus based on an "archaic fiction" (p. 44), and hence unacceptable in the light of modern science. The discussion of the tertia via, admittedly one of the most difficult proofs to make sense of, permits Kenny to range through contemporary discussions of possiblity, necessity, and contingency. His evaluation is that the proof concludes as well to the "everlasting existence of matter with a natural indestructibility" (p. 69) as it does to God's eternal existence. In analyzing the quarta via the author dwells at some length on Platonic Forms, predicates, and existence, using Geach as a foil for much of the discussion; his own conclusion, predictably, is that " the notion of lpsum Esse Subsistens, ... so far from being a profound metaphysical analysis of the divine nature, turns out to be the Platonic Idea of a predicate which is at best uninformative and at worst unintelligible" (p. 95). His critique of the quinta via, finally, allows Kenny to discourse on contemporary problems relating to teleological explanation and the philosophy of mind, again coming to the negative result that the argument from design has no more claim to validity than the other theistic arguments. Kenny's book is clear and well...