GOD All created causes, while having their own proper eVects that distinguish them one from another, also share in a single common eVect which is being Heat causes things to be hot, and a builder causes there to be a house They have in common therefore that they cause being, and diVer in that Wre causes Wre and a builder causes a house There must, therefore, be some superior cause whose proper eVect is being and in virtue of which everything else causes being And this cause is God (DP 2c) Better known are the Five Ways which are placed near the beginning of the Summa Theologiae: (1) motion in the world is only explicable if there is a Wrst motionless mover; (2) the series of eYcient causes in the world must lead to an uncaused cause; (3) contingent and corruptible beings must depend on an independent and incorruptible being; (4) the varying degrees of reality and goodness in the world must be approximations to a subsistent maximum of reality and goodness; (5) the ordinary teleology of nonconscious agents in the universe entails the existence of an intelligent universal orderer.10 None of the Five Ways is successful as a proof of God’s existence: each one contains either a fallacy, or a premiss that is false or disputable The Wrst way depends on the premiss that whatever is in motion is moved by something else: a principle universally rejected since Newton The series mentioned in the second way is not a series of causes through time (which Aquinas himself admitted could reach backwards for ever), but a series of simultaneous causes, like a man moving a stone by moving a crowbar; there is no reason why the Wrst cause in such a series should be God rather than an ordinary human being The third way contains a fallacious inference from ‘Every thing has some time at which it does not exist’ to ‘There is some time at which nothing exists’ The fourth way depends on a Platonic, and ultimately incoherent, notion of Being The Wfth way is much the most persuasive of the arguments, but its key premiss, ‘Things that lack awareness not tend towards a goal unless directed by something with awareness and intelligence, like an arrow by an archer’, needs, since Darwin, more supporting argument than we are given Many attempts have been made, and no doubt will be made, to restate the Five Ways in a manner that eliminates false premisses and fallacious reasoning But one of the most promising recent attempts to reinstate 10 For a detailed treatment of the Five Ways, see my book The Five Ways (London: Routledge, 1969) 303