Excerpts lifted from Thomas Aquinas: God and Explanations by Professor Christopher F J Martin
The Five Proofs of God 
 Quinque Viae
  by St Thomas Aquinas
First way A Divine Science
Second way Science in Medieval thought
Third way Signification of a name
Fourth way God doesn't exist?
Fifth way Excerpts will be added later

This presentation of St Thomas Aquinas' famous Quinque Viae is taken directly from Professor Christopher F J Martin's Thomas Aquinas: God and Explanations, Edinburgh University Press, ISBN 0 7486 0901 6.
A thorough reading of the complete work is recommended for students, since here is given only selections; but sufficient nevertheless to provide some idea of the importance of Professor Martin's contribution in this field. Here is a scholar "who knows his time" and a philosopher who illuminates and materially advances his subject as few have done this century; the combination is exceedingly rare. Dr Martin, Oxford University, Glasgow University, and St Thomas' Houston,  is not an historian of philosophy but a pioneering philosopher in his own right who must surely take his place among the very best of his generation.
His detailed but elegantly economic justification of Aquinas's science is already calling into question many contemporary presuppositions and prejudices, not only as regards the validity of the Angelic Doctor's method but, in passing, the scientific virility of the ancients before him. It would seem that, like so many other demanding presences, Aquinas has not been tried and found wanting, but tried and found too disturbing. Scholars this century have already savaged such sanguine Post-Modern beliefs as der Sprung über das Mittelalter; and this study adds its witness to the greater evolutionary probability that man advances most surely when he builds with lapidary patience upon his precursors. The great revolt that discarded as valueless the hard-won fruits of five hundred years (and more) has failed intellectually and now hobbles on as little more than a body of modish opinion. In the encyclical Fides et Ratio, the Catholic Church summoned Aquinas back to the lists and the diffident Dr Martin appears errantly, as from nowhere, his champion ...
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