The Cosmological
Argument
What is the cosmological
argument?
Learning Objectives
To know the basics of the cosmological
argument
 To know who Aquinas was
 To understand how Aquinas was
influenced by Aristotle

Starter

Write as many causes of the following as
you can think of (there will be more than
one)
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
A plane to take off
You to be sitting here now
Rain to fall
You to do well in an exam
A film to win an Oscar
A novel to be published
Basic argument
Everything that exists has a cause
 The universe must have a cause
 That cause is God


An explanation of why there is something
rather than nothing
The God of classical
theism

How would you describe God?
Eternal and separate from time and space
 Created and is outside time and space
 Unique
 Omniscient, omnipotent, omni-benevolent,
omnipresent
 Immutable (unchanging)

The classical cosmological
argument

Also known as the ‘First Cause argument’

The existence of God is an a posteriori
premise.
 Why?

The argument is a posteriori
 Based
on what can be seen in the world and
the universe
The starting point

Observation of our world
 Movement,
change, causation
There is always something existing in our
world rather than nothing
 Seeks to prove that the universe (cosmos)
and all that is in it has a cause and that
cause is God.

Thinking about change
The world is constantly changing ...
Things grow and decay ...
But everything is caused by
something else…
A
B
A is caused by B
C
B is caused by C
Forever?
Is this chain of
cause and effect
infinite?
Potentiality and Actuality

There are two states of being:

Potentiality – the possibility of doing
something or becoming something.

Actuality – when potential is achieved.
For example ...
You have the potential to achieve a grade
A in AS Religious Studies.
 It is not yet actualised because you
haven’t achieved it yet.

Just because there is the potential does
not mean it will definitely be actualised.
 You have to work hard to achieve that A!

Potentiality and Actuality
The sperm and the egg have the potential to become ...

But something needs to
cause the sperm and the
egg to change from
potentiality to actuality.

It cannot happen on its
own.

We will return to this ...
Aristotle and the Prime Mover
Aristotle: 384-322 BC
 All movement depends on there being a
mover
 Movement = change

 Growth,

melting, cooling, heating
Argued for a chain of events
A common source ...
... of all substances
 Someone/something responsible for the
beginning of everything
 An eternal substance
 Exists necessarily
 Immune to change, decay, and death
 An ‘unmoved mover’

And that is called ...
Aristotle

Was interested in the movement from
potentiality to actuality…

He thought that everything single thing
that is actualised has four causes.
Material
Formal
Efficient
Final
Material Cause

The things out of which an object is
created.
The Formal Cause

The expression, idea or plan that led to the
creation of an object.
Efficient Cause

The way in which an object is created.
The Final Cause

The aim for which an object is created.
And the Prime Mover?
Not an efficient cause, but a final cause
 Does not start things off but is the purpose
or end of the movement


Teleos – end or goal
Why not an efficient cause?
The Prime Mover would be affected by
giving a push
 But he/it isn’t!
 Movement by attraction

So who IS the Prime Mover?
The Prime Mover is perfect
 All in this universe desire to be perfect
 All are attracted to the Prime Mover
because all want to share in this perfection


For Aristotle the Prime Mover is God.
So is this the God of classical
theism?

Aristotle argues that:
 God
did not create the universe
 God did not sustain the universe
 God did not act in the universe
 God had no interest in the universe
God contemplates himself
 God is supremely perfect and has no
interest in the universe

Aquinas’ argument
St Thomas Aquinas
11th century Italian Dominican friar, priest,
philosopher and theologian
 Wrote Summa Theologica


What do assumptions do you think
Aquinas might have made about God?
The three ways

Aquinas put forward 5 ways to prove the
existence of God
 The
first three make up the cosmological
argument
1.
2.
3.
Motion/change
Cause
Contingency
Infinite regress
Important concept
 Unlimited number of past events
 Aquinas said it was NOT possible

 There
must have been a beginning: a first
event
Aquinas rejected infinite regress
 Most hotly debated part of the argument

st
1
argument:
from change (motion)
Things don’t just start changing out of
nowhere
 Remember, no infinite regression
 Must have been something that started the
changes

 An

unmoved mover
Aristotle called this ...?
 Aquinas
called it God
Wood and fire
The need for an external influence
 If wood could make itself hot then it would
be hot to begin with
 Wood as it stands = actuality
 Fire can make it hot = potentiality
 Do we need anything else in the chain?


“It is necessary to arrive at a first mover
moved by no other; and this everyone
understands to be God’
In simple terms ...
Nothing can change/move by itself
 If we are going to have change we need a
changer
 Infinite regress is not possible
 So there MUST be an unmoved mover

2nd argument: from cause
Chain of causes
 Must have been a first cause
 This first cause is what we call ‘God’

Why?
You did not cause yourself to come into
being
 Something / someone else caused your
existence
 First cause?
 First human?

 First primate?

 First life form?


An uncaused cause

“Therefore it is necessary to admit a first
efficient cause, to which everyone gives
the name of God’
In simple terms ...
Everything has a cause ... even a cause
has a cause
 Something had to make that first cause
happen. That something is what we know
as ‘God’.

rd
3
argument:
from contingency (necessity)
Let’s get the keywords sorted!
 Contingent

 Something
that is dependent on something
else
 Something that could not be
We are contingent
 Necessary

 Not
generatable or corruptible
 Cannot NOT be in existence
The universe is full of contingent
things
They exist now ...
But they DIDN’T always exist
 And they WON’T always exist


“It is impossible for these always to exist,
for that which can not-be at the same time
is not.”
Nothing comes from nothing
Yet, right now, there IS something
 Therefore there must ALWAYS have been
something

 Rules

out contingent beings – why?
MUST have been something necessary
So what was there?
No infinite regress, remember?
 Must be one ...

 Uncaused
 Necessary
thing
 Has its cause in itself
 Causes all other contingent things

And this we call ‘God’
And WHAT God?

The God of classical theism
 Created
the world
 Sustains the world
 Without whom we would not have motion,
change, cause and effect, or contingent things
 Without whom we would have nothing at all
Baseline assessment

Outline and explain the three ways in
which Aquinas claims to prove the
existence of God. (AO1 – 30)

“Aquinas has proven that God exists”
To what extent do you agree with this
claim? (AO2 – 15)
Homework

Answer the questions on the worksheet
The argument
developed
The argument developed

Learning objectives
 To
know the criticisms of the argument from
Hume, Kant, and Russell
 To be able to explain why they objected to
Aquinas’ arguments
The Principle of Sufficient
Reason

Gottfried Liebniz (1646-1716)

You could have gone to ANY school.
What are the reasons for you being here?
The Principle of Sufficient
Reason

For any contingent substance there must
be a sufficient reason or explanation for it
being the way that it is
Contingent/necessary

We are contingent:
 We
depend on other things for our existence.
 We exist contingently

If we didn’t depend on anything else for
our existence
 We
would exist out of necessity
 We would exist necessarily
Copleston and Russell
BBC Radio debate – January 1948
 Focused on the issue of sufficient reason
and contingent vs necessary existence
 Copleston – Jesuit priest
 Russell – agnostic philosopher

Copleston and Russell

Copleston:
 The
chain of contingent beings must stop
somewhere: with a necessary being
 Each thing must have sufficient reason for its
existence
 A sufficient reason is an adequate
explanation of a thing

“An adequate explanation must ultimately
be a total explanation to which nothing further
could be added”
Copleston and Russell

Russell: (page 5)
 No
point in questioning the existence of the
universe
 It has no meaning

What is the universe? What do we mean?
Copleston and Russell

The ‘brute fact’ argument (Russell)
 The
universe just is
 To ask for an explanation of the existence of
everything is to ask for an answer we cannot
fully understand
 A question and answer that are
meaningless
 The universe exists: it requires no
explanation: it is a brute fact
Copleston and Russell

Is it meaningless?
 Secular


view – the Big Bang
The question is both answerable and intelligible
Is it a brute fact?
A
cop out? Unsatisfactory?
 Perhaps there HAS to be some brute
facts?
Russell
1872-1970
 Philosophical logic

 Study
of the specifically philosophical aspects
of logic
 Key philosophical questions re-worded in
mathematical terms
 Why?

Normal (‘everyday’) language can be
misleading
Russell

Fallacy of composition
 Falsely
ascribing the properties of the parts of
a whole to the whole
Objects within the universe were created.
Therefore the universe was created
 Just because you had a mother
doesn’t mean the universe had a
mother

Russell

Necessary being
 God
would have to be in a special category of
his own
 Where does this category come from?
 A ‘necessary being’ has no meaning
 Copleston: you understand the meaning
because you are talking about it!
Russell – key points
Supported infinite regress
 No need for an explanation: brute fact
 Attributing the properties of the parts to the
whole: fallacy of composition
 Rejected idea of contingency and a
necessary being

Hume
Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion
(1779)
 Why go back to a creator? Why not stop
at the material world?
 Simpler to argue for a universe without an
outside creator

Hume
1711-1776
 Empiricist

 All

knowledge comes from the senses
Imagination makes a connection between
cause and effect
 We
think we know more about the world
than we really do
Hume

Aquinas is wrong to make a connection
between cause and effect
 Aquinas
observed the world around him and
considered the existence of the universe
 Hume argued these are two separate events

The mind has made the connection
 Aquinas
made an inductive leap
Hume – key points
Empiricist – everything from the senses
 Imagined connection between cause and
effect
 Inductive leap

Kant
1724-1804
 Empiricist
 A cause for everything only applies to the
world of sense experience
 Cannot apply to something we haven’t
experienced

 God

is outside of time and space
No justification for the conclusion that
God created the universe
Hume vs Russell vs Kant

Hume refers to simplicity
 Simpler

not to posit a creator God
Russell refers to meaninglessness
 Meaningless
to talk about how the universe came to
exist

Kant refers to the world of sense experience
 Cannot

apply it to the idea of God
ALL agree the cosmological
argument FAILS!
Understandings of
the role of God
Understandings of the role of
God
1.
2.
3.
God as the temporal first cause
God as the sustainer of motion,
causation, and existence
God as the explanation of why there is
something rather than nothing
God as the temporal first cause
Temporal – ‘in time’
 God at the beginning of time and starting
everything off
 The universe as a series of events with
God positioned right at the beginning
 Supported by William Lane Craig

Two types of causes

Cause in fieri
 Cause
brings things into being but is no longer
involved


Boat builder
Cause in esse
 Cause
brings a thing into being but
needs to remain involved for that thing
to continue

electricity
In Aquinas’ argument

Traditionally the argument is seen as a
cause in fieri
A
cause stretching back in to past
 Having a temporal first cause
 God began the process and can then stop
being involved
Copleston disagreed with this
 He says that Aquinas was referring to a cause in
esse – a sustainer

God as the sustainer of motion,
causation and existence
Cause in esse
 God’s existence is necessary to sustain
the existence of everything else
 Everything continues to depend on God
for its existence

God as the explanation of why there
is something rather than nothing
The fact that there is something needs an
explanation
 Infinite regress provides no explanation

 The
fact that something exists does not
explain its existence
Principle of sufficient reason suggests the
need for an explanation
 Explanation HAS to be something that
stands outside the entire sequence

Test yourself

What is the third way?
Test yourself

Why is the cosmological argument an a
posteriori one?
Test yourself

What is the first way?
Test yourself

What is infinite regress?
Test yourself

What is a contingent being?
Test yourself

Give an example of potentiality and
actuality
Test yourself

What is needed for movement to occur?
Test yourself

What is the second way?
Test yourself

What is a necessary being?
Test yourself

What is the term that Russell uses to
describe the universe?
Test yourself

What is the fallacy of composition?
Test yourself

Why did Russell say that it is meaningless
to ask how the universe came to be here?
Test yourself

What is a cause in fieri?
Test yourself

What is a cause in esse?
Test yourself

Who came up with the principle of
sufficient reason?
Scientific theories
Quiz time!

How well do you know those keywords?
Science

Since Aquinas’ time science has
discovered more about the nature of the
universe and how it came to be.

Do you think science supports or
supposes the argument?
Anthony Kenny
1931 How did Aquinas say that things move?

 Everything
is moved by something else
 Nothing moves itself

Goes against the fact that people and
animals move themselves.
Newton’s Law of Motion

1st law
A
body’s velocity will remain unchanged
unless some other force – such as friction –
acted upon it.
Kenny says this proves Aquinas wrong
 Inertia – amount of resistance to changes
in velocity

 An
object not subject to an external force will
move at its current velocity
Newton’s Law of Motion

1st law
A
body’s velocity will remain unchanged
unless some other force – such as friction –
acted upon it.
Hang on. Isn’t this what Aquinas is
saying? That there has to be a mover?
 Not really

 Friction,
air resistance, and gravity
Newton’s Law of Motion

Basically …
 Motion
can be explained by the principle of
inertia
 The body’s own previous motion
 No external agent involved

No ‘mover’
The steady-state theory
Refutes the third way
 Suggests the universe is eternal
 Denies a beginning to the universe
 Developed in the 1940s by Sir Fred Hoyle

The steady-state theory
Says that energy cannot be created and
therefore the universe will always weigh
the same
 Energy within the universe will be
distributed
 The universe is uniform

 Should
always look the same from
the same place and time
The steady-state theory

http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/space/univer
se/questions_and_ideas/steady_state_the
ory#p00bq8xv
The steady-state theory
The opposite of creationism
 No beginning or end to the universe
 Has always been there and its appearance
does not change over time
 Yes it is expanding

 New
galaxies form to fill gaps
The steady-state theory

What problems does this pose for the
cosmological argument?
 First
cause
 Contingency/necessity

HOWEVER – generally rejected in favour
of the Big Bang theory
The Big Bang theory
Can be used to support or oppose the
cosmological argument
 Scientific observation confirms that there
WAS a beginning to the universe

The Big Bang theory

A challenge
A
spontaneous event that is random without
reason or cause


Aquinas says God is mover and cause of the
universe
In support
 There
must be a reason why it happened
 The universe needs to be sustained

Supports the God of classical theism
What do you think?

Make a snowflake

Explain the key criticisms of the
cosmological argument.
(30 marks)

“The weaknesses of the cosmological
argument far outweigh its strengths”
To what extent do you agree with this
view?
(15 marks)
The Kalam
Cosmological Argument
Actual infinite
A set theory
 Refers to sets or collections of things with
an infinite number of members.
 Not growing towards infinity because
already infinite
 A part is equal to the whole because it is
infinite

Actual infinite

Infinite set of books in a library
A
count of even numbered books is equal to
the count of all the books
Actual infinite
Some philosophers argue that actual
infinite numbers can’t exist
 Add or subtract – still the same number

 Infinity

+ infinity = infinity
An actual infinite is ‘complete’ at all times
 Some
regard this as illogical
Potential infinite
Exists if it is always possible to add one
more
 The future is a possible infinite

 Why?
 More
events are always being added to
history
The kalam cosmological
argument

Originally a Muslim argument
 ‘kalam’
= ‘argue’ or ‘discuss’
Muslim scholars al-Kindi (9th century) and
Ghazali (1058-1111)
 It is cosmological

 Seeks
to prove that God was the first cause of
the universe
An argument of two halves
The universe had a beginning because it
is not infinite and so must have had a
creator
 That creator is God

William Lane Craig
American philosopher: 1949 Focuses on the question of whether nor
not the universe had a beginning
 In Aquinas’ argument this is taken for
granted

criticism – assumes that everything
except God had a cause
 Why can’t the universe not have a cause?
 One
William Lane Craig
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
An actual infinite cannot exist in
reality.
Therefore, an infinite number of events
cannot have occurred before the present.
Therefore, the universe began to exist.
Whatever begins to exist has a cause.
Therefore, the universe has a cause.
Why did it have to have a
beginning?
If not then it must consist of a series
of events that is actually infinite and not
potentially infinite
 Why not?

 Past
events would form a collection of events
where each type was numbered the same as
others

Eg – just as many wars as other events
So what is it then?

The history of the universe was
formed by one event following on from
another event
 Successive
addition
A collection formed by successive addition
cannot be actually infinite
 Therefore the universe must have had a
beginning

Argument part 2
If the universe had a beginning then
the beginning was either caused or
uncaused
 Two options

1.
Natural causes

2.
Laws of nature didn’t exist
Personal being who freely chooses to create
the world

God
Ex nihilo
Crucial for the argument to work
 The universe was created ex nihilo

 ‘out
of nothing’
If so then the beginning of the universe
was the beginning of time
 Must have been a personal agent existing
outside time to start the process

 An
agent who willed the universe into
existence
Craig explains it

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VeKavD
dRVIg
Recapping
Plan for today

To re-watch the videos, making notes on
key points as you go.

To write a collaborative essay
The videos
Video 1 – an introduction to the argument
 Video 2 – the three ways explained
 Video 3 – the criticisms
 Video 4 – the kalam argument

Collaborative essay

Explain how Aquinas’ cosmological
argument attempts to prove that God
exists
Does the argument
prove God?
Two things to consider …
1.
The strengths of the argument
2.
The value of the argument for religious
faith
 Would
it convert an atheist or agnostic?
Strengths

A posteriori – based on experience
 We
all experience cause and effect
 Can understand the concept of the universe
having a beginning
Strengths

Science supports a beginning to the
universe
 Big
Bang theory suggests that the universe is
not infinite and there was a beginning
Strengths

Scientists who accept the Big Bang theory
cannot explain what caused the big bang
Strengths

As we are able to measure time, this
would suggest a beginning to the universe.
In an actual infinite universe we would not
be able to
Strengths

We can see that the universe exists
 Supports
the argument that things that exist
are caused to exist and that cause is God
Strengths

Simplest explanation of why there is
something rather than nothing
 Richard
Swinburne
Strengths

Satisfies the need to find a cause of the
universe and the origins of everything
within the universe
Strengths

Criticisms fail
 Criticisms
are persuasive
 Depends on your view
Strengths

Consistent with God as the explanation
 Fits
in with the concept of the God of classical
theism
 God as a necessary being
Strengths

Part of the cumulative argument for God
 arguments
for the existence of God do not
consist of a single decisive argument. All of
the arguments together (the cumulative case)
is alleged to prove the existence of God
Value for religious faith
Would it convert an atheist or agnostic?
 Would it just add weight to an existing
belief in God?

Natural theology
The use of reasoned argument to provide
a basis in reason for believing in God
 Cosmological argument could provide that
reason
 Add to other arguments and reasons for
belief in God are strengthened

Russell on natural theology
Russell – can never prove the existence of
God no matter whatever the evidence is
 Arguments have no value
 Religious believers would not agree

Fideism
The idea that religious beliefs cannot be
justified through rational means, only
through faith
 What is faith?

 Believing
in something without necessarily
having physical evidence
Fideism
Fideism

A believer sees God as the cause of the
universe

An atheist sees ..?
 The
universe as a result of random chance
Of value
Gives intellectual support for belief in God
 Only God provides an explanation that
requires no further explanation
 Reveals aspects of the nature of God

 Unmoved
being
mover, uncaused cause, necessary
Of limited or no value
The argument is flawed
 Draws conclusions that go beyond the
evidence
 Inductive and therefore not proof
 Religious faith is not based on intellectual
arguments (fideism)
 Proof would leave no room for faith

 Would
change nature of relationship between
God and humans
Activities

‘Science supports a beginning to the
universe’. Justify this claim and then
challenge this claim

Decide whether or not:
The argument strengthens religious faith
b) The argument undermines religious faith
c) Faith is independent of evidence and the
use of reason has no impact
a)