Thomas Aquinas was an Italian priest, philosopher, and theologian during the early to mid thirteenth century. Aquinas is up there with some of the great philosophers, such as Aristotle and Plato, although both came long before Aquinas’ time.
Many philosophers after the birth of Christianity have tried to tackle the question of theodicy, the question of how evil resides in the world if God is both all-powerful, and good. Thomas Aquinas focuses on proving that God is all-powerful as, for many, the simple solution to the question is that he must not be all-powerful.
Aquinas uses an analogy centered around a rock and a stick. A stick can move a rock, but no matter how many sticks are near the rock, no matter how long the stick is near the rock, a person has to use the stick to move the rock. Furthermore, the brain has to tell a hand to use the stick to move the rock. This is a way to explain that everything has unactualized potential. The stick had the potential to move the rock, but that was unactualized until a person came along and decided to actualize their potential to use a stick to move a rock.
Your potential to sit on a couch is not actualized until you go sit down, when you sit down your potential to be standing up is now not being actualized. However, God has no unactualized potential. Someone might counter this argument by saying that if that were true, God would have to have the potential to be bad actualized, which again defeats the theodicy concept. Although, God is light, God is good, because dark is simply an area that has unactualized its potential to be in the light, dark is not anything, because dark is the absence of light the same way black is the absence of color. Bad is simply an adjective to describe the absence of goodness, goodness is on a scale and we describe being lesser on the scale as bad, and not to have any good as being evil, when in a sense, evil doesn’t exist at all.
This is how God actualizes all potential. How does this mean God is all-powerful? If God was not all-powerful, that would mean some other being is a peer to him, or above him, but if another being was his peer, that being would deny God some actualized potential. All distinct things have unactualized potential, but God is indistinct, therefore He is all-powerful.
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