Cosmological Argument

Cosmological Argument

1. Basics

   • Everything that exists has a cause if its existence
     • The Universe exists
       • The Universe has a cause of its existence
         • If the universe has a cause of its existence, then that cause is God
           • God exists

2. Aquinas

   • 1. The Argument from Motion
     • Nothing can move itself
       • If every object in motion had a mover, then the first object in motion needed a mover
         • Movement cannot go on for infinity
           • The first mover is the unmoved mover (God)
   • 2. Causation of Existence
     • There exists things that are caused (created) by other things
       • Nothing can be the cause of itself
         • There cannot be an endless string of objects causing other objects to exist
           • There must be an uncaused cause (God)
   • 3. Contingent and necessary objects
     • Contingent beings are caused
       • Not every being can be contingent
         • There must exist a being which is necessary to cause contingent beings
           • This Being is God
   • 4. The Argument from Degrees and Perfection
     • Things can have more of a quality than other things (comparisons of beauty etc...)
       • There must be a standard that all things are compared by
         • This standard is God
   • 5. The Argument from Intelligent Design
     • The world is complex, too complex to be random
       • There must be a designer
         • This designer is God

3. Kalam

   • Everything that has a beginning of its existence has a cause of its existence
     • The Universe has a begining
       • The Universe has a cause
         • That cause is God
           • God exists

4. Swinburne

   • Uses Oakham (Occum)'s Razor
   • God is the simplest explanation for the existence of the Universe
     • God is the best explanation for the existence of the Universe

5. Strengths

   • a Posteriori
   • Logical

6. Weaknesses

   • a Posteriori
   • Hume maintained that we have no experience of universes being made and it is simply not possible to argue from causes within the universe to causes of the universe as a whole. There is a logical jump which the argument fails to recognise. It is one thing to talk about causes that operate within the system of the universe, but it is an entirely different matter to speculate about whether the system as a whole is caused
     • Hume argued that it was illegitimate to move from saying that every event in the universe has a cause to the claim that the universe has a cause. Bertrand Russell made a similar point by remarking that this was like moving saying that every human being has a mother. One cannot move from individual causes to the claim that the totality has a cause
   • Immanuel Kant rejected the argument outright not only because he maintained that the idea of a ‘Necessary Being’ was incoherent but also because our knowledge is limited to the phenomenal world of space and time and it is not possible to speculate about what may or may not exist independently of space and time

7. Alternative Explanations

   • The creation of the Universe was caused by the death of the previous Universe (lung theory)

8. Why is there something rather than nothing?