Who Designed the Designer?: A Rediscovered Path to God's Existence

by Michael Augros

Overview

The “New Atheists” are pulling no punches. If the world of nature needs a designer, they ask, then why wouldn't the designer itself need a designer, too? Or if it can exist without any designer behind it, then why can't we just say the same for the universe and wash our hands of a designer altogether?

Interweaving its pursuit of the First Cause with personal stories and humor, this ground-breaking book takes a fresh approach to ultimate questions. While attentive to empirical science, it builds its case not on authoritative pronouncements of experts that readers must take on faith, but instead on a nuanced understanding of universal principles implicit in everyone's experience.

Here is essential reading for all people who care about contemplating God, not exclusively as a best-explanation for the findings of science, but also as the surprising-yet-inevitable implication of our commonsense contact with reality. Augros harnesses such intellects as Plato, Aristotle, and Aquinas, ushering into the light a wealth of powerful inferences that have hitherto received little or no public exposure. The result is an easygoing yet extraordinary journey, beginning from the world as we all encounter it and ending in the divine mind.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781586179694
Publisher:	Ignatius Press
Publication date:	04/22/2015
Pages:	244
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Michael Augros holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from Boston College and teaches at Thomas Aquinas College in Santa Paula, California. He is the author of Who Designed the Designer? A Rediscovered Path to God's Existence and of numerous scholarly articles that have appeared in such journals as the Thomist, Angelicum, and the National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly.

Table of Contents

How to Take This Book 9

1 Common Ground; or, There Is a First Cause 27

2 The Tree of Being 41

3 The Philosophy of the Axle 56

4 Beyond Imagining 68

5 The Most Intensely Existing Thing 81

6 The Ear of Whittaker's Daughter 100

7 Who Designed the Designer? 118

8 Intractable Minds 134

9 What a Lovely Tiling a Rose Is 160

10 Hecklers 180

Epilogue: The Shoulders of Giants 205

Acknowledgments 213

Appendices 215

1 Naked Proofs 217

2 Hume Causing Trouble 224

3 Mad Philosophers and the Natures of Things 230

4 Musings on Newton's First Law 238

Index 245

Editorial Reviews

 "Finally! A book that tackles the ‘big questions’ in ways everyday readers can understand and appreciate. Using personal stories, engaging examples, humor, and common experiences, Augros builds an argument for God that opens readers' minds and finds common ground among atheists, agnostics, Jews, Muslims, and Christians.”
- Danielle Bean, Editor, The Catholic Digest

From the Publisher