Thomas Aquinas - Criticism

Criticism

Bertrand Russell criticized Aquinas' philosophy on the ground that

He does not, like the Platonic Socrates, set out to follow wherever the argument may lead. He is not engaged in an inquiry, the result of which it is impossible to know in advance. Before he begins to philosophize, he already knows the truth; it is declared in the Catholic faith. If he can find apparently rational arguments for some parts of the faith, so much the better; if he cannot, he need only fall back on revelation. The finding of arguments for a conclusion given in advance is not philosophy, but special pleading. I cannot, therefore, feel that he deserves to be put on a level with the best philosophers either of Greece or of modern times.

This critique is illustrated on the following examples: According to Russell, Aquinas advocates the indissolubility of marriage "on the ground that the father is useful in the education of the children, (a) because he is more rational than the mother, (b) because, being stronger, he is better able to inflict physical punishment." Even though modern approaches to education do not support these views, "no follower of Saint Thomas would, on that account, cease to believe in lifelong monogamy, because the real grounds of belief are not those which are alleged." It may be countered that the treatment of matrimony in the Summa Theologica is in the Supplements volume, which was not written by Aquinas. Moreover, as noted above, Aquinas's introduction of arguments and concepts from the pagan Aristotle and Muslim Averroes was not uncontroversial within the Catholic church.

Aquinas' views of God as first cause, cf. quinque viae, "depend upon the supposed impossibility of a series having no first term. Every mathematician knows that there is no such impossibility; the series of negative integers ending with minus one is an instance to the contrary." Moreover, according to Russell, statements regarding God's essence and existence that are reached within the Aristotelian logic are based on "some kind of syntactical confusion, without which much of the argumentation about God would lose its plausibility."