An idea · Medieval · first attested 1265
The Five Ways
Five compact arguments for the existence of God.
Aquinas's five paths to God's existence (Summa Theologiae I, q.2): from motion, from causation, from contingency, from degrees of perfection, from the order of nature. Each argues, from a feature of the observable world, to a first cause that the believer calls God. Critics from Hume to Russell have hammered them; Thomists keep refining them.