St Thomas Aquinas developed the most popular version of the Cosmological Argument. He developed his ‘Five Ways’ and the first three ways were used to prove the existence of God, they were Motion, Causation and Contingency. The first way is based on motion. Whatever is moved must be moved by another, which itself was moved. If we trace back we must arrive at a first mover, moved by no other. According to Aquinas ‘this is what everyone understand to be God’ as the chain of movement cannot go back to infinity. Therefore there must have been a first or prime mover, which itself was unmoved. The second way, he identified a series of causes and effects in the universe. Aquinas observed that nothing can be the cause of itself, as this would mean that it would have had to exist before it existed. This would be a logical impossibility. Aquinas rejected an infinite series of causes and believed that there must have been a first, uncaused, cause, to which ‘everyone gives the name God’. The third way identified the contingency of matter in the universe. The world consists of contingent items. That is, items that could have existed differently. Therefore there was a time when the items did not exist. Since what does not exist cannot begin to be, except through something that already exists, there must be an ultimate source of all necessity. Something permanent cannot be. ‘This’, said Aquinas, ‘all men speak of as God’.
The heart of all three parts of the Cosmological Argument depends on the supposed impossibility of a series having no first term, i.e. the rejection of infinite regression. Many argued that such a rejection has not been justified. Leibniz accepted the Cosmological Argument because he believed that there had to ‘sufficient reason’ for the universe to exist. He did not accept that it was uncaused. Leibniz is credited with having formulated one of the most fundamental of all metaphysical questions, which is: ‘why is there something rather than nothing?’ Leibniz went on to formulate his own version of the Cosmological Argument; he avoided the problem of infinite regression by reinterpreting the endless series, not of event but of explanations. Even if the universe had always existed, there is nothing to show why it exists. According to Leibniz everything has a sufficient reason, therefore the universe as a whole must have one and it must be outside the universe. This sufficient reason we call God. The Cosmological Argument has been reformulated and put into a more modern form by Professor F. Copleston. His argument is shorter than that constructed by Aquinas in the third of he ‘Five Ways’ of providing the existence of God, although the reasoning is very similar to that of Aquinas whilst avoiding some unnecessary steps. Copleston’s version has the three points that Aquinas had; the first states that there are some things in the world, which are not contingent or not self-explanatory. They are ‘might-not-have-beens’ because, they might not have existed, and for example if our parents had not met we would not exist, meaning that some things are dependent. In the second part he says that all things are dependent, as all things within the universe can only be explained by some external cause or reason. The third part says that if we accept Leibniz’s Principle of Sufficient Reason, it follows that outside the universe there must be a cause for everything in the universe.
The Kalam argument has its origins in Islamic philosophy. The Muslim scholars al-Kindi and al Ghazali developed the Kalam argument, it is cosmological because it seeks to prove that God was the first cause of the universe. A recent follower of the Kalam argument is William Lane Craig, and he developed his own version. The first part of his argument states that the present can only exist because of a chronological series of past events. Craig argued that if the universe did not have a beginning, then the past must consist of a series of events that is actually – and note merely potentially infinite. Craig cannot accept this idea because it would mean that past events form a collection of events; in which, for example, there would be just as many wars as there would be all other events together. The universe had to have a beginning in time and in the second part of his argument, he states that the cause of the universe must be a personal creator. If the universe had a beginning, then this beginning was either caused or uncaused. Either it was a natural occurrence or a choice was made to bring the universe into existence. Supporters of the Kalam argument argue that since rules of nature did not exist before the beginning of the universe, the universe cannot be the result of natural causes. Craig concluded that ‘if the universe began to exist, and if the universe is caused, then the cause of the universe must be a personal being who freely chooses to create the world’.
B)
A number of objections have been raised against the Cosmological Argument, which those who support it have to counter. One of the main criticisms of the argument is the suggestion that infinity is impossible and that the universe had a beginning. Many philosophers point out that Aquinas and Craig contradict themselves when they reject the possibility of the infinite. Supporters of the argument point out that God is unique and that the laws of nature do not apply to God.
If one is willing to accept that the universe is just brute fact, then the question does not get posed and the answer, ‘God’, will not be required. David Hume argued that it was illegitimate to move from saying that every event in the universe has a cause to the claim that therefore the universe has a cause. Bertrand Russell made a parallel point by remarking that this was rather like moving from saying that every human being has a mother to the claim that the human race as a whole has a mother. One cannot move from individual causes to a claim that the totality of all has a cause. If we were to say to Russell, ‘but everything requires an explanation, and so the universe must be therefore require an explanation’, and Russell accepted this, then it may be possible to believe that God is the explanation for the universe’s existence. However, Russell would probably reply by saying, ‘if everything requires an explanation, what is the explanation for God?’
