评托马斯•阿奎那对上帝存在的五路证明

Evaluation of Thomas Aquinas’ Five Ways to Prove the Existence of God

摘要: 托马斯•阿奎那是欧洲中世纪著名哲学家和神学家，由他提出的上帝存在的五路证明在世界范围内至今颇有影响。本文逐一考察了他的五路证明，认为他的每一个证明的前提中都至少包含一个假命题，因此至少都不是有说服力的论证；同时认为，从寻求最佳解释的推理的角度来说，上帝存在也未必是对托马斯所断言的诸现象的最佳解释。

Abstract: Thomas Aquinas is regarded as the greatest philosopher and theologian of scholasticism, who has put up the Five Ways to defend for the existence of God. The Five Ways are influential in philosophy of religion to this day. A detailed examination of these arguments is carried out in this paper. Its result shows that every argument of the Five Ways contains at least one false proposition as their premise, therefore none of them is cogent. It also argues that the existence of God is not a good explanation for observed phenomenon mentioned by Thomas’ argumentation.