Cosmological Argument Essay Example

The Cosmological argument is one of many arguments that try to explain the existence of the universe coming from God. Unlike the teleological and ontological arguments, the cosmological argument is more of a type of structure than an argument in itself. Within the framework of the cosmological argument, there are three major arguments, the argument from contingency, Thomas Aquinas’ Five Ways, and the Kalam Cosmological argument. Even though their reasoning for God’s existence is different, they all argue their case under the assumption of cause and effect and observations from the universe.

All three cosmological arguments are created through a series of hypotheses that, if true, logically culminate into a conclusion. The Kalam argument begins with a rather unremarkable statement: whatever begins to exist has a cause. In the natural world, objects do not come into being spontaneously - otherwise, cats and dogs, chairs, and buildings would pop into and out of existence all around us at random moments. The idea of nothing is immensely important to understand with this first claim. Nothing does not mean just empty space. It is the absence of anything whatsoever, even space itself - nothing has no properties within it. The second claim is more contentious: The universe began to exist. If the universe has always existed, then it would not need an explanation, it just is. However, an actual, rather than a potential, infinity cannot exist; Hilbert’s Hotel is a great analogy as to why actual infinities are absurd. The event of today could not have happened if an infinite amount of events have happened because that would take an infinite amount of time to traverse to the present. Therefore, it logically concludes that the universe had a beginning and that it has a cause. 

Unlike the Five Ways by Aquinas, The Argument from Contingency is more similar to the Kalam argument by continuing the idea of cause and effect by adding a philosophical tool along with its first hypothesis called the Principle of Sufficient Reason, or PSR: Every existing thing has an explanation of its existence, either of necessity or contingency. Popularized by Gottfried Leibniz, the PSR creates a dichotomy between necessary and contingent beings; contingent being things that need to have a cause and effect, while necessary being not contingent, like metaphysical constants of the universe. Using this tool, the Argument from Contingency proposes that the universe’s cause cannot be of the universe, that is, the universe must be contingent. Samuel Clarke puts this conundrum succinctly: 

Either there is one being, unchangeable and independent, from which all other things are created, or a series of infinite succession of changeable and dependant beings produced from one another in an endless progression…then it has no cause from without of its existence because everything is included…no object is claimed to be self-existent or necessary…therefore, an unchangeable and independent being which has existed from eternity, without any external cause of its existence, must be self-existent, that is, necessarily existing. (Clarke, 1998)

Even though the argument’s connection with the universe’s cause is God, it concludes, similar to the Kalam, that the universe’s cause could not have been of itself nor have existed from eternity, two common counterpoints thrown at these arguments.

The final argument for God’s existence comes from Thomas Aquinas, an Italian philosopher. He asserts in his Five Ways from observations found in the natural world. The first way is described as motion, for a thing that is changed has become what it was not to begin with. Therefore, there must be a first cause of things being changed. The second way is described as cause and effect. Causes are arranged in series must have a first member. If you eliminate a cause, you eliminate its effects: you can not have a last or intermediate cause unless you have a first. Therefore, there must be a thing causing the first cause. The third way is the Principle of Sufficient Reason explained above. The fourth reason is described as gradation. In order for there to be degrees of perfection, there must be something perfect against which everything else is measured. The final way is described as design or the Teleological argument.

Disregarding perhaps the most important question arising from reading these statements of whether or not it is cogent to believe in these cause and effect arguments, the second question that might arise is what links these three arguments together? If each argument for God’s existence has a different name, why are they under the umbrella of Cosmological Argument? Is this generalization even helpful? Well, in philosophy, there are usually two types of arguments, one stemming from knowledge deduced from first principles called a priori, and the other stemming from the knowledge that results from experience or empirical evidence called a posteriori. In the simplest categorization, the Cosmological Argument is an a posterior argument, gathering its information from the observable universe, then logically deducing from that information, a conclusion. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy puts it this way: “The cosmological argument is less a particular argument than an argument type. It uses a general pattern of argumentation (logos) that makes an inference from particular alleged facts about the universe (cosmos) to the existence of a unique being, generally identified with or referred to as God.” However, the distinction between these three arguments disjointed from the category of Cosmological allows criticisms of the Causal Principle by David Hume and the questioning of necessary beings by Immanuel Kant to not be thrown at Aquinas’ Five Ways, and vice versa. So in some cases, all three arguments are most definitely separate from each other. A more honest reason why some would separate these arguments is the relevance of time in the argument. Again, referencing Stanford’s Encyclopedia of Philosophy: “In Aquinas’s version, consideration of the essential ordering of the causes or reasons proceeds independently of temporal concerns. The relationship between cause and effect is treated as real but not temporal so that the first cause is not the first cause in time but a sustaining cause (Siniscalchi 2018: 691). In the kalām version, however, the temporal ordering of the causal sequence is central, introducing issues of the nature of time into the discussion.”1

It is at the very heart of philosophy to question the world around us. How did all of this come about? What is our purpose, if there even is one? Why were we created? Over centuries of thought has combined into what we know generally as the Classical Arguments for Theism, specifically the Cosmological Argument. At the center of the argument, the question of why there is something rather than nothing or than something else necessarily leads to an ultimate explanation as to what exists contingently. The creation of the world could not have come from the world itself, and since the things that we see today are the cause of events prior, there had to have been a beginning, or else you have an infinitely existing universe where the events of today are impossible to approach. Does it necessarily mean that the being that created the universe is God? Perhaps not, but deducing from the Cosmological Arguments, this being must be apart from the thing which it created, have existed forever, and must be a personal being, because of the order seen within the universe.