would be nothing, since what does not exist can only begin to exist through something else that exists. Therefor not all being are capable of existing and not existing. There must be some necessary being.Before Aquinas, Avicenna operated with a concept of necessity similar to that. The concept stated that God is a necessary being, since only in God does essence entails existence, and all creatures are contingent.But in his third way St. Thomas does not stop there. The establishing of necessary being does not proof God’s existence to Aquinas. He isolates ‘necessary beings who have the cause of their necessity outside themselves’ a description which could not apply to God.The third way, then, is not simply an argument from contingent being to necessary being. It does indeed start from contingent beings (things Which ‘have the possibility of being and of not being’), but it works through the existence of caused necessary being, to the existence of a being whose necessity is uncaused, which alone, among necessary beings, can be called God.In order to show that the necessary being can be uncaused, Aquinas refers to his earlier regress argument. In order to show that the uncaused necessary being is God, he offers no proof, and we may ask why might it not be perpetual, indestructible matter, and how can it be everlasting?The fourth way is based on the varying degrees of perfection we discover among the being we experience. Some are more or less good, more or less true, more or less noble, etc., then others. But the more and less are said of different things insofar as they approach in varying degrees something that is such to a maximum degree. Therefore there is something that is truest and best and noblest and hence that is also being to the maximum degree. To support this Thomas comments that those things that are true to the maximum degree also enjoy being to the maximum degree’ in other words ...
