In Islamic thought, scriptural references to the skies, the stars, the heavens, and other creatures inspires reflection on the universe as part of worship itself. The possibility of other planetary life is not seen as a threat to human existence or the moral framework of human life on earth, but intrinsic to the rhythm and purpose of the cosmic order.

Two creation traditions in the Hebrew Bible yield particular resonances with the astrobiological notion of life as a planetary phenomenon: Genesis 1, with its “living landscapes,” and Job 38–41, featuring alien creatures and eco-centric wisdom.

Chapter 8 contrasts ancient, more personal forms of domination (through kings, shepherds, masters) with more impersonal, digitally enabled forms of modern domination that organize work, life, and death on a planetary scale. Confronting the mass loss of wildlife and the industrial confinement of animals – and the possibility that humans may soon share that fate – this conclusion calls for collective action to cultivate more genuinely social forms of relation, knowledge, and spirituality that affirm the intrinsic worth of all beings rather than reducing life to utility.

This chapter examines Aquinas’s account of will in God, showing how it builds on his teaching about knowledge. For Aquinas, will follows from intellect: as truth is the object of understanding, so good is the object of desire. Since God knows himself as perfect goodness, he necessarily delights in himself and thus has will essentially. God also wills creatures, yet not by necessity: creation is free, not compelled by divine nature or by anything external. Aquinas contrasts divine willing with human volition, stressing that while human will involves deliberation and change, God’s will is identical with his essence. Love, as the first movement of will, is also properly ascribed to God: God loves creatures insofar as he wills their existence and goodness, though unequally. The chapter also considers modern critiques – such as Kretzmann’s appeal to Dionysius and Swinburne’s theistic personalism – arguing that Aquinas avoids anthropomorphism by rooting will in divine simplicity.

This chapter focusses on Aquinas’s philosophical arguments for the existence of God. It begins by noting where he offers such arguments. Then it notes his general strategy in presenting them. Unlike many philosophers, Aquinas argues that the claim that we can only know that God exists by means of demonstrative arguments from certain facts about the universe to the conclusion that God must exist as cause of these facts. This chapter explains what that view amounts to for Aquinas and compares and contrasts it with other philosophical approaches to the question ‘How can we know that God exists’. The chapter then turns in detail to Aquinas’s arguments for God’s existence in his De Ente et Essentia (4) and his Summa Theologiae, 1a, 2, 3. The chapter explains how these arguments run and comments on what can be said for and against them.

This chapter explores Aquinas’s account of God’s perfection, goodness, and the problem of evil. Aquinas argues that God is perfect because he lacks all potentiality and is wholly actual, with every creaturely perfection pre-existing eminently in him. God is good, not as a member of a genus, but as the Creator whose nature grounds and causes the goodness of creatures. Goodness, Aquinas maintains, is convertible with being, while evil is privation of good – either as suffering (malum poenae) or wrongdoing (malum culpae). He denies that God directly causes evil, holding instead that evils suffered arise incidentally from the flourishing of other beings, while evils done derive from human free will. The chapter contrasts Aquinas’s approach with modern debates – such as Mackie’s logical argument from evil, Rowe’s evidential argument, and Plantinga’s free will defence—showing how Aquinas resists theodicy by emphasising God’s transcendence and the derivative character of creaturely goodness and freedom.

This chapter examines Aquinas’s doctrine of divine simplicity, situating it within the broader landscape of classical theism in contrast to theistic personalism. After outlining Aquinas’s conviction that while God’s existence can be demonstrated, God’s essence remains incomprehensible, the discussion turns to Summa Theologiae, 1a, 3, where Aquinas denies that God is composite in any respect. He argues that God is not a body, nor composed of form and matter, essence and existence, substance and accidents, or genus and difference. Instead, God is pure actuality, identical with his essence and existence, and thus utterly simple. The chapter compares these claims with parallel treatments in the Sentences, Summa Contra Gentiles, and Compendium Theologiae. Finally, it surveys modern objections – particularly from Alvin Plantinga, Richard Swinburne, and others – that divine simplicity undermines God’s personhood, freedom, or responsiveness. The chapter concludes that many such criticisms misrepresent Aquinas, who presents simplicity chiefly as a way of ruling out what God cannot be.

This chapter explores Aquinas’s account of knowledge, first in creatures and then in God. Aquinas distinguishes between scientia (understanding) and cognitio (awareness), situating knowledge within the broader framework of living beings, sensation, and intellect. For him, knowledge entails the immaterial reception of form: animals possess cognition through sensation, while humans attain scientia by grasping natures universally and immaterially. Aquinas links knowledge with immateriality, arguing that intellect expands in proportion to freedom from matter. Turning to God, Aquinas contends that divine knowledge is identical with God’s essence, wholly immaterial, and thus unlimited. Unlike human discursive reasoning, God’s knowledge is simple, immediate, and comprehensive: God knows himself perfectly, and in knowing himself as Creator, knows all things, including non-existent and future contingent beings. The chapter concludes by examining Aquinas’s treatment of truth, omniscience, and divine causality, showing how God’s knowledge differs fundamentally from creaturely.

This chapter provides an account of Aquinas’s life and works. It then explains his intellectual perspectives as an author while noting how he distinguishes between faith and reason. It notes what he means by ‘divine revelation’ and why he thinks that to be important. It also explains what he has to say about ‘sacra doctrina, ‘articles of faith’, and ‘preambles of faith. The chapter then explains why Aquinas can be thought to be an advocate of ‘natural theology’ and why he takes it to be important. Finally, it provides an introduction to some key terms which recur in his philosophy of God, including ‘ens’, ‘ens per se’, ‘ens per accidens ‘form’, ‘substantial form’, ‘accidental form’, ‘matter’, ‘substance’, ‘accident’, ‘cause’, ‘efficient cause’, ‘final cause’, ‘formal cause’, ‘material cause’, ‘effect’, ‘essence’, ‘nature’, ‘substantial change’, ‘accidental change’, ‘sensation’, ‘individuation’, and ‘being’ (esse).

This chapter examines Aquinas’s account of God as omnipotent and eternal. Aquinas distinguishes active from passive power, attributing only active power to God, who as pure actuality is wholly the source of effects. Divine omnipotence, he argues, does not mean God can do just anything, but that God can bring about all that is absolutely possible – that is, all that does not involve contradiction. Hence God cannot undo the past or contradict his own immutability, though he can work miracles, which Aquinas understands not as interventions but as events beyond the natural capacities of creatures. The chapter considers modern critiques, such as Geach’s challenges to defining omnipotence and Plantinga’s free-will defence, and contrasts them with Aquinas’s view that divine causality grounds rather than negates human freedom. Turning to eternity, the chapter explains Aquinas’s claim that God is utterly unchangeable and ‘altogether at once’ (tota simul) thereby transcending time without negating his causal presence in history.

This chapter investigates Aquinas’s account of how human beings can meaningfully speak about God despite the limits he takes human understanding to have. Focusing on Summa Theologiae, 1a, 3, the chapter explains how Aquinas argues that while our language originates in creaturely experience, it can nonetheless be applied to God in ways that are not merely metaphorical. The chapter also notes how Aquinas distinguishes between nominal and real definitions, between what a word signifies (res significata) and its mode of signification (modus significandi), and defends the view that terms such as ‘good’ or ‘wise’ can be predicated of God properly, though always imperfectly. Central to the chapter is Aquinas’s thinking on analogy, which mediates between univocal and purely equivocal predication, allowing words applied to creatures and God to enable us to speak truly about God without rejecting belief in divine simplicity. The chapter also explores later philosophical debates while highlighting how Aquinas’s nuanced account of analogy continues to illuminate the possibility of meaningful God-talk.

This chapter explores Aquinas’s account of God as Creator, both philosophically and theologically. Aquinas argues that everything other than God depends on divine causality not only for its origin but for its continued existence. Central here is the distinction between essence and existence: creatures have esse only by receiving it directly from God, whereas God is ipsum esse subsistens. Creation, therefore, is not the modification of pre-existing matter but the bringing into being from nothing (ex nihilo). The chapter examines how Aquinas differentiates divine causality from creaturely causality, allowing for genuine secondary causes while insisting that only God creates. It also considers Aquinas’s nuanced position on the eternity of the world, maintaining that reason cannot prove whether creation had a temporal beginning, though revelation affirms it. Finally, the chapter engages modern objections – such as existential inertia and the coherence of ‘creation from nothing’ – and shows how Aquinas’s metaphysics continues to challenge such critiques.

This chapter addresses two distinct, if often conflated, claims. The first is that the theology of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan undermined Christian orthodoxy and perhaps even theism itself. The second is that this was an intention of the text, which required Hobbes to engage in rhetorical techniques that amounted to a form of esoteric writing. The chapter argues that certainty on these assertions is unattainable, but that the balance of evidence favors affirmation of both. Both the allegation that Hobbes was a self-aware heretic or atheist, and the allegation that he wrote duplicitously, were contemporary charges that have never disappeared. The former allegation (heresy or atheism) predated Leviathan in fact, while the latter (esoteric writing) only seriously attached itself to Hobbes’s masterwork and his subsequent defenses of it. Focusing on Leviathan, the chapter contextualizes these allegations as they moved through generations of commentary and then into modern scholarship. It constitutes a report on the state of the debate from the perspective of a committed participant.

God of absolute goodness and compassion wants to be known via the commandments and prayer as the only God for the human hand heart. In creedal faith, Christ’s presence is realized by the Spirit.

As a basic phenomenological constraint, God is hidden to creation in virtue of being the creator. The conclusion identifies implications for the typical atheistic and the theistic responses to the problem of divine hiddenness. Against the atheist who holds than an all-loving God would always want to be in a relation with us, the conclusion argues that if God is in fact the hidden creator, our ultimate source, he would be uniquely the sort of thing we were implicitly always in relation to even if we were unaware of it. Against the theist who wants to explain divine hiddenness in terms of a moral defect of the one seeking, the conclusion argues that such resistance would only be detectable after the fact, in light of faith, and so would be an issue for theological, not philosophical explication.

Supposing someone earnestly seeks God but to no avail. Does this mean God does not exist? Or might it be instead that the seeker seeks God without awareness of the peculiar method that must be employed in order for the seeking to be productive?

Within the aletheistic tradition, Aquinas thinks creation, as a linguistic act, involves the theme of interpersonal manifestation. He is therefore able to overcome the apparent artificiality of Anselm’s linguistic ostension by setting the deferred ostension back into both the structure of created being and the natural longing for happiness.

Using phenomenology to develop Plantinga’s analogy of God and other minds, and in dialogue with Feuerbach’s critique of the God–world difference, this chapter articulates how the order inherent in a work makes manifest the cause of that work even when it remains unknown just how the cause brought about the order. To see the world as created amounts to seeing the world as an ordered work indicating its author amounts to seeing it as created; the world can serve as a kind of protreptic but one that is only understood by those who read it carefully. “That hidden other, whose agency causes the world and me to be, is ‘God’.”