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In his book The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins objects to Thomas Aquinas that even if we admit a terminator of the regress in causation or explanation:

there is absolutely no reason to endow that terminator with any of the properties normally ascribed to God: omnipotence, omniscience, goodness, creativity in design, to say nothing of such human attributes as listening to prayers, forgiving sins, and reading innermost thoughts. (Delusion, 101)

In other words, even if there is a first cause, this cause need not be God as understood in the traditional sense with all the attributes ascribed to the Divinity.

On this score, Thomas would agree with Dawkins insofar as the five ways were never intended to be a full description of all that can be claimed about God through rational argumentation. True, most people would call the origin of the universe, the first cause, “God,” but Thomas would agree that the five ways do not, simply of themselves, show that God enjoys perfection, omnipotence, omniscience, goodness, and creativity. Dawkins’ critique amounts to the fact that in a single article (the smallest complete subsection of the Summa), Thomas’s work does not show all that can be shown rationally about God. This is rather like critiquing a biology textbook because it does not lay out all that can be known about biology in the first two pages.
The Rest of the Story

For this reason, in both the Summa Theologiae and the Summa contra Gentiles (whose complex argument for God’s existence Dawkins completely ignores), Thomas goes on to argue that the first cause must be a Being without composition, without beginning or end, without change, and without evil (intellectual or moral) of any kind. These divine attributes are corollaries that can be deduced from the notion of an uncaused cause.

For each of these corollaries, Thomas offers a number of different arguments. For example, to argue that the first cause must be perfect, Thomas indicates that, a “thing is perfect in so far as it is in actuality: Therefore it will be imperfect inasmuch as it is failing in actuality” (ST I:4:1). The first cause is in actuality, for if it were not in actuality, it could not cause anything else to exist, so the first cause must be perfect. Likewise for the other traditional characteristics of God, Thomas argues from the basis of the first mover, the first cause, and the necessary being, etc. to the conclusion that God must have certain other attributes—including perfect intelligence, freedom, and love—which make up the traditional attributes of God.
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