Thomas Aquinas was the greatest of the Scholastic philosophers. He produced a comprehensive synthesis of Christian theology and Aristotelian philosophy that influenced Roman Catholic doctrine for centuries and was adopted as the official philosophy of the church in 1917.

In Aquinas’s system, God is that paramount perfection. Aquinas’s fifth and final way to demonstrate God’s existence is an argument from final causes, or ends, in nature (see teleology). Again, he drew upon Aristotle, who held that each thing has its own natural purpose or end.

Saint Thomas Aquinas believed that the existence of God could be proven in five ways, mainly by: 1) observing movement in the world as proof of God, the “Immovable Mover”; 2) observing cause and effect and identifying God as the cause of everything; 3) concluding that the impermanent nature of beings proves the …

His best-known works are the Disputed Questions on Truth (1256–1259), the Summa contra Gentiles (1259–1265), and the unfinished but massively influential Summa Theologica, or Summa Theologiae (1265–1274). His commentaries on Scripture and on Aristotle also form an important part of his body of work.

Thomas Aquinas. The principal work of St. The Summa Theologica focuses on religious matters pertinent to the organization and doctrine of the Catholic faith, discussions of virtues and the Sacraments, and the nature of the Christian triune God and His creation. …

Aquinas maintains that the soul is capable of existing apart from the living body after the death of the body, because the soul is incorruptible. The soul is indeed capable of existence apart from the body at death.

2,669 Articles

Aquinas offers several definitions of virtue. According to one very general account, a virtue is a habit that “disposes an agent to perform its proper operation or movement” (DVC 1; ST IaIIae 49.1). These virtues are prudence, justice, temperance, and courage (ST IaIIae 61.2).

Aquinas assigned to synderesis principally a cognitive role. He argued that human beings have a fundamental grasp of right and wrong, which is infallible. Aquinas conceived of synderesis as habitual knowledge. According to Aquinas, conscience is the consideration of a specific case in light of one’s moral knowledge.

There are three theological virtues: faith, hope, and charity.

God’s Word says that we are saved by grace through faith in Christ Jesus and not by our own efforts or works (Ephesians 2:8-9). Our best efforts can never be good enough to earn salvation, but God declares us righteous for Christ’s sake. We receive that grace through faith alone.

Hope is always accompanied by faith. Faith is almost always accompanied by hope- but not always. It is a matter of primacy-not temporal but axiological. People need to have faith because they need hope.

Hope (lat. spes) is one of the three theological virtues in Christian tradition. Hope being a combination of the desire for something and expectation of receiving it, the virtue is hoping for Divine union and so eternal happiness. While faith is a function of the intellect, hope is an act of the will.

“Hope” is commonly used to mean a wish : its strength is the strength of the person’s desire. But in the Bible hope is the confident expectation of what God has promised and its strength is in His faithfulness.

Characteristics of the Hopeful Research indicates that the protypical high-hope person appears to exhibiy optimism, perceptions of control over one’s life, perceived problem-solving ability, a preference for competition (but not winning itself), high self-esteem, and positive affectivity.

Anchors

Most current theories of emotion do not include hope as an emotion (at least not a prototypic emotion). Averill bases his conclusion that hope is an emotion on the findings of a study that compared hope to two other emotions (love and anger).

This chapter provides a conceptual introduction to and overview of Snyder’s hope theory. Hope is defined as “a positive motivational state that is based on an interactively derived sense of successful (a) agency (goal-directed energy) and (b) pathways (planning to meet goals)”.

As an “a priori” argument, the Ontological Argument tries to “prove” the existence of God by establishing the necessity of God’s existence through an explanation of the concept of existence or necessary being . Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury first set forth the Ontological Argument in the eleventh century.

Moral arguments for God’s existence form a diverse family of arguments that reason from some feature of morality or the moral life to the existence of God, usually understood as a morally good creator of the universe.

Ontological arguments are arguments, for the conclusion that God exists, from premises which are supposed to derive from some source other than observation of the world—e.g., from reason alone.

Argument from morality Immanuel Kant (1724 – 1804) asked what it is that makes people behave morally, apart from achieving some happiness for themselves by doing so. Kant thought that there are certain objective laws which people are ‘duty bound’ to follow when faced with a moral decision.

Four broad categories of ethical theory include deontology, utilitarianism, rights, and virtues.

Kant has an insightful objection to moral evaluations of this sort. The essence of the objection is that utilitarian theories actually devalue the individuals it is supposed to benefit. To act in pursuit of happiness is arbitrary and subjective, and is no more moral than acting on the basis of greed, or selfishness.

Utilitarians believe that the purpose of morality is to make life better by increasing the amount of good things (such as pleasure and happiness) in the world and decreasing the amount of bad things (such as pain and unhappiness).

Definition. The greatest happiness principle is a moral tenet, which holds that the best thing to do is what contributes to the greatest happiness of the greatest number of people.