Cosmological argument

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The cosmological argument is an argument for the existence of God. It is also known as the first cause argument for the existence of God. There are three versions of this argument: the argument from causation in esse, the argument from causation in fieri, and the argument from contingency.

St. Thomas Aquinas, the most famous philosopher of the Middle Ages, adapted an argument he found in his reading of Aristotle to form one of the earliest and the most influential versions of the cosmological argument.

The cosmological argument does not attempt to prove anything about God besides existence. Scholastic philosophers believed, however, that further arguments can be used to prove to anyone via logic some attributes of God, such as his omniscience, simpleness (i.e. total lack of composition), and more. However, they believed other things can not be known about God by deduction and can only be known by divine revelation, such as the Christian belief of God being a trinity.

Contents

1 The argument

2 A more detailed version of the argument

3 Critique of the cosmological argument

4 See also

The argument

Framed as a formal proof, the first cause argument can be stated as follows:

Some things are caused.
Nothing can cause itself.
Therefore, everything that is caused is caused by something other than itself.
A causal chain cannot stretch infinitely backward in time.
If the causal chain cannot stretch infinitely backward in time, there must be a first cause.
The word God means uncaused first cause.
Therefore, God exists.

The cosmological argument infers the existence of God from claims about the entire universe. Fundamentally, the argument is based on the claim that God must exist due to the fact that the universe needs a cause. In other words, the existence of the universe requires an explanation, and an active creation of the universe by a being outside of the universe—generally assumed to be God—is that explanation. To quote the Epistle to the Hebrews 3:4, "Every house is built by someone, but the builder of all things is God."

The cosmological argument rests on the assumption that there need be a first cause. This assumption is made because of the conceptual difficulty of imagining an infinite regress. St. Thomas' version does not assume that the first cause is an omnipotent, omniscient, and all-benevolent God, but later attempts to prove also that this is true.

In light of the Big Bang theory, which asserts that the universe came into existence less than fifteen billion years ago, a stylized version of the basic cosmological argument (sometimes called the Kalam cosmological argument, most recently defended by William Lane Craig) for the existence of God has emerged:

Whatever begins to exist has a cause.
The universe began to exist.
Therefore, the universe had a cause, i.e. God.

Modern quantum physics is sometimes taken to deny the validity of the first premise of this stylized argument, asserting that subatomic particles such as electrons, positrons, and photons, can come into existence, and perish, by virtue of spontaneous energy fluctuations in a vacuum. However, such occurrences do not violate the Law of Conservation of Mass and Energy, and they are not essentially different from other natural stochastic processes which are not presently fully understood (with some saying that it is impossible to predict them, and others saying, with Albert Einstein, that "God does not play dice with the universe"). Thus, it is not presently known whether such processes have any bearing on the assertion that all effects have causes.

A more detailed version of the argument

A more detailed explanation might go something like this:

Consider some event in the universe. Whatever event you choose, it will be the result of some cause, or more likely a very complex set of causes. Of course each of those causes would be events, which were the result of some other set of causes. Thus, there is an enormous chain of events in the universe, with the earlier events causing the later events. Now, either this chain of events has a beginning, or it does not.

Currently, the theory of the cosmological history of the universe most widely accepted by astronomers does, indeed, include an apparent first event—the Big Bang—the immense explosion of all known matter and energy from a superdense point. If accepted as the first event in the universe, this explosion could not be the result of any prior event. According to the cosmological argument, the cause of the first event would necessarily be a being which is capable of causing other events, but which is not itself caused. Aristotle called this the Uncaused Cause, and left it at that, but Aquinas went on to argue that this Uncaused Cause is just another name for God.

Though contemporary versions of the cosmological argument assume that there was a beginning to this chain of causes, Aquinas' formulation did not make such an assumption, due to his view that it was impossible to prove that the universe did have a beginning.

According to Aquinas, it is logically possible that the universe has already existed for an infinite amount of time, and will continue to exist for an infinite amount of time. Even if the universe has always existed, (a notion which Aquinas rejected on other grounds) there is still a question as to why this infinite chain of causes exists.

Aquinas follows Aristotle in claiming that there must be something which explains why the universe exists. Since the universe could exist or not exist, that is to say it is contingent, its existence must have a cause. And that cause cannot simply be another contingent thing, it must be something which exists by necessity, that is, it must be something which must exist. In other words, even if the universe has always existed, it still owes that existence to Aristotle's Uncaused Cause.

So Aquinas comes to the same conclusion, that God exists, whether there was a first event in the universe or not. Since either the universe has always existed, or it had a first event, Aquinas says that this argument definitively proves the existence of God.

The German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz made the same point with his Principle of Sufficient Reason in 1714. He wrote: "There can be found no fact that is true or existent, or any true proposition, without there being a sufficient reason for its being so and not otherwise, although we cannot know these reasons in most cases." He formulated the cosmological argument succinctly: "Why is there something rather than nothing? The sufficient reason...is found in a substance which...is a necessary Being bearing the reason for its existence within itself."

Critique of the cosmological argument

The cosmological argument depends on several assumptions. Most objections center on two of them:

All events are causal.
The First Cause is [usually the Christian] God.

The cosmological argument attempts to prove that a First Cause exists, but does not even attempt to ascribe this First Cause with attributes necessary to call it "God," not even with extremely basic prerequisites such as self-awareness and will. It simply names the First Cause as "God" without proving that it has the characteristics that that name implies.

A third assumption is that our universe has not "always" existed. This is still an open question, although the standard Big Bang cosmology is consistent with it. Eternal existence, the "always there" assumption, does not eliminate the problem of origin anyway.

Leibniz stated the problem in his conclusion, although his terminology included some assumptions. If his Principle of Sufficient Reason is indeed universally applicable, then the First Thing must bear the reason for its existence within itself. Leibniz was well versed in the mathematics of his day, but he may not have known that his condition can hold only if the First Thing is the resolution of a paradox. Furthermore, there must be sufficient reason to select that one form of resolution. Either there must be only one possible resolution or the paradox must be resolved by all possible forms of resolution, for any selection among them would be random. No one has demonstrated a paradox that can be resolved only by the existence of the Abrahamic God.

It can be shown that Nothing is a paradox, but also that almost anything could resolve it. The conclusion is essentially that all possible worlds must exist if the Principle of Sufficient Reason always holds. If we accept the theory that our world is possible, then the only question is whether it requires a God to maintain it. We do not know if a God actually belongs to any possible world, so the God hypothesis requires strong evidence. That is outside the domain of the cosmological argument.

If the Principle of Sufficient Reason does not hold, then the selection among potential alternatives must be random. Most of us believe our world is possible because we seem to live in it, but God is an unlikely result of random generation.