McNabb and DeVito have recently argued that Graham Oppy’s objections to the First Way are found wanting. In response, McNabb and DeVito restructured the First Way on behalf of St Thomas. More recently, Joseph Schmid and Daniel Linford argue that the restructured argument given by McNabb and DeVito is problematic, claiming that it is either valid but unmotivated or it is plainly invalid. In this paper, I argue that McNabb and DeVito’s schematic glossing of the First Way is both valid and motivated.

A common argument put forth by naturalists (including the prominent philosopher Graham Oppy) in support of naturalism as a worldview over theism, is to claim that naturalism is a simpler hypothesis. Theism posits the existence of everything that naturalism does, plus the existence of a theistic realm. Thus, all things being equal, via Ockham's Razor, naturalism should be preferred to theism. In this essay, we argue that the Classical Theist need not worry about the naturalist's Simplicity argument. Specifically, we argue that, the one holding to a scholastic metaphysics (i.e., potency-act distinction, participatory metaphysics, and existence-in-degree), in the end, will be the one with the simpler worldview.