Thomas Aquinas' five ways of proving Gods' existence are still taken very seriously in the Catholic Church. However, mainstream western academia tends significantly to be dismissive of these proofs, as the Aristotelian physics on which these are based is now considered simplistic. Newtonian physics provides a framework for understanding physical reality that is far more successful and profound but places very large question marks over the validity of Aquinas' proofs.
The Newtonian paradigm has created the perception that 'reality' is essentially composed of 'matter'. There are, of course, many areas of life where materialism is an inappropriate model of reality, but Newtonian physics proved so successful in providing explanations for so many areas of reality, especially technological areas, that the 'non-material' is usually seen as 'anomalous' and needing explanation in materialistic terms.
Now, the reason you do not see the atoms on this page as you read it is not because the atoms are too small for you to see but because you are not looking at the atoms. You are experiencing an image which is created by your mind and the data collected by your senses and you negotiate reality using this image. The image only resembles actual reality to a degree and this is significantly governed by pragmatic considerations. How accurate does the image need to be? And what is feasible?
The materialist fallacy involves believing that our perception of reality is reality itself. If a tree fell in a forest and there was no one there to hear it, it would not make noise. It would make disturbances in the air that have the capacity to be experienced as sound if these air disturbances were to interact with mind-brain sense-data gathering and interpreting mechanisms. In a very real sense, experienced reality is quite different from unexperienced reality. There is an extra layer in the former. This is obviously so in macroscopic 'bodies', to use the physics term for physical, massive objects. But the surface characteristics of a body in no way correspond to the characteristics at deeper, more basic, levels. Newtonian physics deals with the description of the behaviour of entities that have existence at a level where experience of those objects closely resembles the characteristics of the actual objects: macroscopic inanimate objects. But at the level of reality meaningfully described by particle physics the role of the non-material observing consciousness becomes more pronounced. Modern physics describes how reality, at its most basic level, comprises an observing mind and an observed physical reality, dependent on, but not created by this observer. The question ‘can a soul exist without a body?’ should really be ‘can a “body” exist without a soul?’ The answer would be that without interaction with an observing consciousness a 'body' may exist but not in any meaningful sense. A 'body' can only be said to have characteristics when it is appropriately observed, at least at the particle physics level. Otherwise it has only a tendency towards existence. This tendency becomes actualised only on interaction with an observer. And the characteristics in the body that are actualised vary qualitatively according to how they are observed. Frequently this involves one of two physical manifestations, each the diametric opposite of the other. The certainty that death is the end involves the mistake of believing that our perception of reality actually is reality.
Aquinas' proofs of the existence of God are evidential proofs. They point to the likelihood of Gods' existence but will not convince the committed sceptic. Modern physics abounds with such suggestions of the existence of something akin to God. Above I have simply discredited the idea that the soul is a temporary epiphenomenal outcrop of a human 'body'. The soul may indeed be mortal but the idea that this is necessarily so, stems from the fallacy that matter-as-it-actually-is and matter-as-we-experience-it are one and the same. The 'depth reality' and the 'surface appearance' of 'matter' are two different things. The Eastern conception of matter as a creation of the mind is largely true in that what most of us regard as 'matter' is actually a 'photograph' of a sliver of reality that we use to negotiate reality. In actual scientific terms I see no objective certainty that death is the end. That 'mind' is recycled, at the very least, is a reasonable proposition. The vague materialism of a layman's understanding of 19th century science makes the extinction of awareness at death seem certain. However 19th century physics has little if anything to say about the phenomenon of consciousness; awareness seems epiphenomenal only from this materialistic perspective, an inappropriate perspective for such matters.
I am reminded of a conversation I had with an English academic on the so called Darwin/Bible controversy. He seemed baffled by my insistence that the Catholic Church, representing half of all Christians, saw no problem with Darwin's theory. Any apparent conflict was a category mistake: science is not religion. Most other mainstream Christians agree. Only a tiny minority of fundamentalist Christians, vocal in parts of the USA, see 'Darwinism' as a threat to religion. ‘Genesis is a mythological tale,’ I explained, and observed that literalism is not only the preserve of the religiously myopic. To the narrow empiricist any story that is not 'true' is 'fiction', and accordingly a Christian who described the Bible as 'mythology' would, it seemed to my philosophical colleague, be declaring its falsehood.
Another philosophical colleague of mine, again English, but resident in Ireland, and admitting to a vague religiosity, claimed that miracles do exist. If one were to throw a pair of dice 52 times and get two 'sixes' each throw, this would be a miracle. We would go: ‘wow, that's amazing.’ But whether this miracle was due to God's intervention or to luck is unknowable, and fundamentally so. Certainty here would require either dogmatic theism or dogmatic atheism.
John Lennon's death affected me profoundly. He died when he had only just, truly, found genuine success. Hope. Some seven years ago a friend of mine came back from a visit to Prague with a present, a photograph. ‘From the John Lennon wall,’ she said. ‘Thanks,’ I replied, a little puzzled. I put it to one side and found it two years later. I put it on my 'concert ticket' notice board: a snap-shot from the Prague John Lennon wall. And thought no more of it, even though I saw it thousands of times, until…
A Day in the Life. October 9th 2004 was Lennon's 64th birthday. ‘Will you still need me… When I'm sixty-four.’ The Bootleg Beatles, a Beatles tribute band, was, coincidently, playing in the Cork Opera House that night and I was, of course, attending. On that Saturday afternoon I looked at the photograph and, for the very first time… ‘I saw him standing there…’ The photo was of a graffito of Lennon, somewhat obscured by other graffiti, but I only noticed it then. He was ‘standing right in front of me’. Wow!
It is an objective, truthful, fact that John Lennon appeared to me on his sixty-fourth birthday as I was about to see the Bootleg Beatles. In person? Well, that's another matter. It is, of course, possible that the event involved a series of meaningless and undirected coincidences resulting in a curious experience. Some, broadly Freudian, schools of psychology might offer valid enough suggestions that would correlate with atheism. ‘The subject subconsciously blinded himself to what was objectively on the photograph until an appropriate time.’ Possible, even if the existence of such psychology doesn't correlate very strongly with naïve materialism. Or John and I actually met? This would be impossible only if the modern physics analysis of reality were either unnecessary or bogus. So, it is possible. And certainty in such matters is outside the range of possibilities available to observers in this layer of reality. This, or similar, is also the case in other layers of reality.
Do you know that that there are still people who insist that death must be the end. In this day and age too…..

Brendan Burke MA(Phil)
Cork Unitarian Church 16 January 2009.