> Aquinas does not begin with the existence of God.
Excuse my poor knowledge and understanding of all this stuff - but he's absolutely depending on Aristotle, taking existence of telos as a foundation, doesn't he?
And from this, inventing a God isn't a far stretch - if something axiomatically has an intrinsic purpose, it's probably not too hard to state that there should be something with agency to define it all, or something that's has a perfect nature, or however else one wants to define "God".
This said, are any of those books a good read for someone who doesn't think there's any purpose, reason or goal to all of this?
Not the GP, but I suspect the GP meant that Aquinas's Summa and Aquinas's Contra (his major works) starts with discussing first whether there is a god.
> are any of those books a good read for someone
I am not Catholic. I wouldn't recommend Aquinas.
However, I would recommend "reasonable faith" book by William Craig. Or if you want his lectures to listen to, you can start from his lectures on the existence of God[1]
If you are talking about how can one believe in God in an "axiomatic" way, yet still be rational and warranted, I suggest Plantinga's "warranted Christian belief" or his more popular level book "Knowledge and Christian Belief".
My other favorite writer was Cardinal Ratzinger before he became Pope Benedict. The current Catechism was edited by him when he was the head of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. https://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG0015/__P9.HTM
The basic Catholic argument is that God created the world and mankind out of love. We are incapable of understanding why there is suffering and death. But we believe God sent his son to partially reveal his plan. The bulk of his teaching is the “sermon on the Mount.” Matthew chapters 5 to 7. https://bible.usccb.org/bible/matthew/5
Aristotle takes telos to be one of the four causes, yes, and Aquinas agrees with him here. However, telos is a more general concept than what you might call conscious human purpose. The cause-effect relationship is itself teleological. You could not explain why an effect results from a cause without telos. This isn't axiomatic, though, which makes it sound like it is assumed without reason.
And yes, you can indeed argue for the existence of God from telos, but this isn't question begging. The teleological argument Aquinas is famous for (his Fifth Way) is not the Paley-style argument some people think it is. Feser's article "Between Aristotle and William Paley: Aquinas’s Fifth Way" discusses this at some length, beyond what his book "Aquinas" discusses (you can find it in this book [2] along with other material worth reading).
> This said, are any of those books a good read for someone who doesn't think there's any purpose, reason or goal to all of this?
I understand that you lean this way, but perhaps a better stance is to be fair and open minded toward the subject. Apart from the books I already listed (which are indeed good), I might even suggest beginning with this popular polemical tract [0] (polemical because it responds to the snark and ignorant condescension of people like Dawkins), and later, if you are interested in an introduction that focuses specifically on the existence of God from five different philosophical positions, you might find [1] interesting.
Excuse my poor knowledge and understanding of all this stuff - but he's absolutely depending on Aristotle, taking existence of telos as a foundation, doesn't he?
And from this, inventing a God isn't a far stretch - if something axiomatically has an intrinsic purpose, it's probably not too hard to state that there should be something with agency to define it all, or something that's has a perfect nature, or however else one wants to define "God".
This said, are any of those books a good read for someone who doesn't think there's any purpose, reason or goal to all of this?