Many commentators have accused Aquinas of committing either a formal or an informal fallacy in his Third Way argument. I believe it is possible to revise the Third Way argument so as to avoid such errors. I here present a revision of the first part of the Third Way that is (a) immune to the objections most commonly raised against it, (b) consonant with the basic tenets of Thomism, and (c) plausible from a contemporary point of view.

In 1963, in the first edition of his book Metaphysics, Richard Taylor presented two interesting defenses of the cosmological and design arguments for the existence of God. Surprisingly, even after the third edition has appeared, his defense of the cosmological argument has passed relatively unnoticed, and while his novel account of the argument from design has provoked a fair amount of critical discussion, little attention is given to Taylor's reply contained in the same text. In this paper, we attempt to (...) show that Taylor's defenses contain some new and interesting moves. However, we conclude that they ultimately fail to provide rational grounds for belief in the existence of God. (shrink)