cosmological argument Flashcards
INTRO
a posteriori, inductive and synthetic -the universe requires a cause and an explanation: God.
Aquinas’ First Way: Motion - Summa Theologica)
P: The world is in motion
P: Infinite regress is impossible
P: The world therefore requires a prior cause to put it into motion
P: This prior cause must transcend the world
C: This cause is God who is the ‘unmoved mover’
Aquinas’ Second Way: Uncaused Causer
P: Things in the world exist, each requiring a prior cause
P: This chain of cause and effect cannot go on to infinity (rejection of infinite regress)
P: The world must have had a first cause which itself was uncaused
P: This cause must lie outside of the universe
C: This cause is God who is the ‘uncaused causer’
Aquinas’ Third Way: Contingency and Necessity
P: Everything within nature which now exists has
not always existed
P: Every object/being is dependent upon a prior, contingent, finite being
P: This cannot go on to infinity
P: There must be one being who is not contingent but which has always existed and is not dependent upon any other for its existence
P: This being must lie beyond the universe
C: This being is God who is labelled a ‘necessary being’: one who is eternal, uncaused and unique.
Criticisms - rejection of infinite regress
Hume wonders if those qualities that make God’s non-existence impossible – couldn’t they belong to the universe itself? In other words why posit a necessary being rather than a necessary universe?
the term‘necessary being’ makes no sense a posteriori – any being claimed to exist may or may not exist. In Hume’s own words “All existential propositions are synthetic.”
the possibility of an infinite regress – Aquinas rejects this but with little justification
Aquinas argues that, for example, everything that is in motion must possess a prior cause – and then contradicts this by arguing for the uniqueness of God – on what basis?
defenders would argue that god is the exception as his existence is necessary
Mackie provides the analogy of the
infinite number of train carriages. An infinite number of these still requires an engine to inject energy
Kant - experience is limited, weak as applies human concepts to something we have no knowledge of
categories might be completely irrelevant to the beginning of the universe, they might only work inside the universe and make no sense at all outside of it.
how can we say that the universe was caused when we are not sure that causes and effect make any sense outside the universe??
Hume - So we have had experience of houses coming from architects but no experience of the origins of universes, so we are in no position to talk about them. to talk about the origin of the universe is to go beyond the scope of human understanding and observation,
HUME AND RUSSELL - it is equally possible that the world has a beginning and that it is eternal
Bertrand Russell – the earth is a ‘brute fact’ with no need of explanation in terms of a cause. To attempt to provide an answer is to provide unnecessary meaning and purpose to the world.
As Russell explains, the universe might just “be
there”, and that’s it. There might be no need to look for an explanation.
Leibniz philosophy
P: For everything that exists there must be a sufficient reason to
account for its existence
P: The world exists, but contains no sufficient explanation within it
for this existence
P: The explanation for the world must lie outside of it
C: The sufficient explanation must be God
criticism of Leibniz
Hume - ‘Dialogues on Natural Religion’
(fallacy of composition)
one can account for single instances of cause and effect, but to ascribe an overall cause to the universe is to go beyond the available evidence
just because each of the elements of the ‘chain’ has a cause, it doesn’t follow that the chain itself needs a cause. He gives the example of a collection of twenty particles – if an explanation is found for each particle individually he says it would be wrong to then seek an explanation for the whole collection, because you have already explained it by explaining each particle.
Russell - because every man has a mother, it doesn’t mean that there is a
mother of the human race.
we cant logically move from idea that everything in the world has reason, to say that the universe as a whole must have a reason
Hume - people say the ‘whole’ needs a cause, but that the uniting of the parts into a whole is performed by an ‘arbitrary act of the mind’, in other words, what we call a ‘whole’ is only our own name for something that doesn’t actually exist ‘out there’. Eg. when we unite several counties into one kingdom, this has no influence on the nature of things, it is simply a human perception. So to look for a cause of this whole (arbitrarily defined by us) would seem to be mistaken.
Leibniz’s argument falls prey to its own logic: if God is the sufficient explanation to the universe, what is the sufficient explanation for God?
The inductive leap – Aquinas moves from inferring that there must be a first cause to the idea that this is the God of classical theism – on what basis or justification?
