Outline the Cosmological Argument for the existence of God.

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The Cosmological Argument

Q:        Outline the Cosmological Argument for the existence of God.

The Cosmological argument is an argument that starts from the existence of the universe, and from this attempts to prove the existence of God.  The argument is a posteriori, i.e. it draws on experience from the material world.  It is important to state that the most this argument can hope to prove is that there exists a necessary being who caused everything in the universe; it cannot arrive at the Judaic-Christian conception of God (i.e. an omnipotent, omniscient and all loving being).

The Cosmological Argument is mainly attributed to St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), although may well have originated from Platonic or Aristotelian ideas.  The argument is also known as ‘Aquinas third way’; the argument from contingency and necessity.  Aquinas was already a firm believer, and so it is not entirely clear what the purpose of the arguments were; i.e. whether they were designed as a basis for faith, or as a reinforcement of faith.

Aquinas starts his argument with what he considers to be a universal truth; that all things in the world come into and go out of existence, that they are contingent or depend upon other factors for their existence.

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He then moves on to state that if everything cannot exist (if everything is contingent), then given infinite time, there will be a time when everything does not exist (a time when there will be nothing).  Aquinas has taken ‘can’ from the first statement, added infinite time, and arrived at ‘must’ in the second premise.

His next premise states that if there was once nothing, nothing could come out of it, which leads to the first conclusion of the argument; that something (not necessarily God) must necessarily exist.

This can be considered as the first half of the argument. ...

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