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Religious Philosophy Essay Christian theology has its roots in Judaism. Christian theology has evolved from the philosophy of the Old Testament from which the Christians take their most basic of tenets: there is only one God, that God is present everywhere, and that God is all-knowing. However, the God of the Old Testament was a more personal and a more vengeful God. This wrathful nature led to a philosophy that God was an awesome, fearsome God. Later Western philosophers also accepted that God was in everything and was the Creator of everything. However, those who followed the cosmological argument of St. Thomas Aquinas seemed to also include the goodness of God. Not only was God fearsome, as the Creator of all things He was also the source of all good. Much of the religious philosophy in today’s Western culture is based on this goodness. St. Thomas Aquinas did more than just theorize on the goodness of God. Through the cosmological argument he offered a proof for the existence of God. But he was not a cloistered scholar. Aquinas wrote profusely, he preached to and taught congregations, and he lectured at public gatherings. His many writings influenced two avenues of Western thought: empiricism and Aristotelianism. According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Thomass theological writings became regulative of the Catholic Church and his close textual commentaries on Aristotle represent a cultural resource which is now receiving increased recognition. The following account concentrates on Thomas the philosopher and presents him as fundamentally an Aristotelian (McInerny, 2005, par. 1). Few philosophers of Western religion had so much impact on religious thought as St. Thomas Aquinas. One testament to his continued importance is that Pope John Paul II issued an encyclical that used Thomist reasoning in 1998 (McInerny, 2005). For this reason, I think that St. Thomas Aquinas most advanced Western religious thought.