St. Thomas Aquinas's Five Ways as a Path Back to Catholicism

About this sermon

DONATE: https://give.catholic.com/castudios SUBSCRIBE: https://www.youtube.com/user/catholiccom WEBSITE: https://www.catholic.com/ Tim Staples discusses St. Thomas Aquinas's Five Proofs for the existence of God with an atheist caller who is seeking clarification, focusing particularly on the third way, the idea of a necessary being, its attributes, how we can know that this necessary being is the God of the Bible, and finally how we can reconcile God's ultimate perfection and love with the apparent harshness He shows in the Old Testament. Tim Staples is Director of Apologetics and Evangelization here at Catholic Answers, but he was not always Catholic. Tim was raised a Southern Baptist. Although he fell away from the faith of his childhood, Tim came back to faith in Christ during his late teen years through the witness of Christian televangelists. Soon after, Tim joined the Marine Corps. During his four-year tour, he became involved in ministry with various Assemblies of God communities. Immediately after his tour of duty, Tim enrolled in Jimmy Swaggart Bible College and became a youth minister in an Assembly of God community. During his final year in the Marines, however, Tim met a Marine who really knew his faith and challenged Tim to study Catholicism from Catholic and historical sources. That encounter sparked a two-year search for the truth. Tim was determined to prove Catholicism wrong, but he ended up studying his way to the last place he thought he would ever end up: the Catholic Church! He converted to Catholicism in 1988 and spent the following six years in formation for the priesthood, earning a degree in philosophy from St. Charles Borromeo Seminary in Overbrook, Pennsylvania. He then studied theology on a graduate level at Mount St. Mary’s Seminary in Emmitsburg, Maryland, for two years. Realizing that his calling was not to the priesthood, Tim left the seminary in 1994 and has been working in Catholic apologetics and evangelization ever since. If you are interested in booking Tim Staples for an upcoming event, please contact Catholic Answers at (619) 387-7200 or seminars@catholic.com.