An easily patched hole in the First Way

In his First Way, Aquinas argues that as we trace back the sequence of movers from effect to cause, we get to a first unmoved mover, and this is God.

But need the unmoved mover thus reached in the sequence of movers be God? Imagine this scenario. God creates some material beings, as well as an unchanging, timeless and immaterial demiurge that has the power to make the material beings move—and indeed exercises that power. Then if we were to trace back the sequence of movers, the unmoved mover we would get to would be the demiurge, not God. This demiurge would have potentiality, but not a temporal potentiality, so it would not be itself in motion, and hence it would be an unmoved mover.

This doesn’t deeply affect the argument, since Aquinas could do the same thing as he does in the Third Way, where he traces contingent beings to a necessary being, and then considers the possibility of necessary beings that get their necessity from other beings, and traces it back to an absolutely necessary being, namely God. Similarly, God could say that any unmoved mover that has some potentiality or contingency depends on a prior being and so on, and in the end we would get to God anyway.

Indeed, even in this scenario with a demiurge, we might want to say that it is God and not the demiurge who is the first unmoved mover. For God would still be a mover, albeit working through the demiurge who is a secondary cause, and God would be unmoved, and God would be first. So Aquinas would still be correct that the “first mover” is God—it’s just that the scenario suggests that Aquinas does skip a step.