Currently, the most-watched video on YouTube that mentions Aquinas in its title is “Aquinas & the Cosmological Arguments”. So far, it has received 2.1 million views. With its charismatic presenter, Hank Green, and its endearing animations of St Thomas Aquinas, it’s easy to see why the video is so popular. And judging by the thousands of comments, this video has certainly stirred up a lot of interest in St Thomas’s cosmological arguments.
Cosmological arguments themselves are arguments that aim to prove that God exists by taking some obvious fact about the cosmos as their starting point. One of the challenges in understanding St Thomas’s cosmological arguments is understanding his Aristotelian terminology. Without this understanding, the presentation of St Thomas’s arguments may be far from convincing. Take the aforementioned video, for example. The presenter attempts to explain St Thomas’s cosmological argument from motion by considering a row of dominoes, each one being pushed by the one behind it. But the dominoes can’t go back forever, so there must be something that pushes the first one over, the first mover. Therefore, if we think of the universe as analogous to the row of dominos, this must also have a first mover, and this we call God.
