Explain the Cosmological Argument from Aquinas and Copleston There are many arguments that can he presented to prove the existence of God. In defending the faith

Thomas Aquinas developed five lines of arguments for God's existence, which are known as the "Five Ways." These five arguments are all a "posteriori" and the first three ways are different versions of the Cosmological Argument.

The First Way is also known as the "Unmoved Mover" (or "Unchanged Changer/"Prime Mover.") These are different kinds of changes: various size, place and state. Aquinas focused primarily on the last one, the change from potentiality to actuality. "What is potentially x is not actually x, yet the actually x can only be produced by something that is actually x." In other words, whatever is changed must be changed by another, which itself was changed. If we keep going back like this, we will eventually arrive at a first mover, which was moved by nothing/no one else. This is what Aquinas defined as God.

Also related to Aquinas' First Way is the dependency argument, which argued that God sustains the universe. If God discontinued to exist, then the universe itself would stop existing; therefore, there must be an initiator of the change whose continued existence is depended upon, hence the dependency argument.

This leads to Aquinas' Second Way (The Uncaused Causer) in which he gives the following premises: "Every effect has a cause", "Infinite regress is impossible" which he uses to arrive to this conclusion: "There must be a first cause."

Everything that happens has a cause and even the cause itself has a cause but since it would be illogical to assume that the first cause has a

cause, Aquinas decided that the first cause would be known as the Uncaused Causer, according to him, this was God. The first cause sees God as a factual necessity for the explanation of how the universe was brought about. This also means that God doesn't have to rely on anything for His existence, he is a contingent being that is causeless.

The Third Way (Possibility and Necessity) suggests that if all beings were contingent, then nothing would have ever previously existed. Thus, all beings cannot be contingent, Aquinas decided that there must exist a necessary being which he believed to be God.

In opposition to Aquinas' argument, Copleston believed that the existence of God can be philosophically proved by a metaphysical argument; secondly, that it is only the existence of God that will make sense of man's moral experience and of religious experience. He also reasoned that what we call the world consists simply of contingent beings. That is, of beings no one of which can account for its own existence.

This is taken from the 1948 radio debate between Copleston and Russell: " I say that that if there were no necessary being, no being which must exist and cannot not-exist, nothing would exist. The infinity of the series of contingent beings, even if proved, would be irrelevant. Something does exist; therefore, there must be something which accounts for this fact, a being which is outside the series of contingent beings."

Bertrand Russell believed that the universe is just there, and that's all there was to it. He assumes that the universe is intelligible and ultimately depends on an eternal self-existent reality.

Copleston associates Russell's approach of refuting the problem to saying "If one refused to even sit down at the chess board and make a move, one cannot of course, be checkmated."

Michele Dominique 13B 22.02.06