Immortal soul or resurrection?
On the axis: After death · the resurrected person
Does survival rest on the soul's nature, or on an act of God restoring the whole person, body included? Athens and Jerusalem part ways here, and the re-created body poses a riddle: would it be the same one, or a perfect copy?
Justification
Thomas rejects both fideism, which would treat God's existence as a mere matter of faith, and 's ontological argument, which claimed to deduce it from the concept alone: for a finite mind, God's existence is not self-evident, it is demonstrated from effects. Hence the , which all start from a fact of experience (motion, causation, contingency, degrees of perfection, the ordering of ends) and rise, to avoid an infinite regress, to a first term: an unmoved mover, an uncaused cause, a necessary being. Theism is thus held to be rationally established, and not merely believed.
Whatever is moved is moved by another; we must therefore arrive at a first mover moved by nothing, and this everyone understands to be God.Summa Theologiae, Ia, q. 2, a. 3 (the first way)
Summa Theologiae, Ia, q. 2, a. 3 (the Five Ways) · Summa contra Gentiles, I, 13
Anchors: Thomas Aquinas · van Inwagen
leads to: Existence of God