He also says there are a chain of causes and effects leading back to the beginning of the Universe. He did not believe in infinite regress, and so, for him, there had to be a first cause, and that first cause has to be God. Aquinas’ Cosmological argument has many positive points which could be used to prove the existence of God, and his argument is both logical and convincing. However, I believe there are some major flaws within it, and I hope to use these flaws to show that Aquinas’ Cosmological argument does not prove the existence of a God. The first point to Thomas Aquinas’ Cosmological argument is about Motion.
Since the beginning of time, the idea of a God or a supreme being existing has been debated and argued. One argument that supports the existence of God is the Ontological Argument. An Ontological Argument is an argument for God’s existence that begins with the idea of supreme perfection or unsurpassable greatness. The Ontological Argument can also be seen as the idea that God has placed within us a knowledge that God exists and cares for us. Anselm (1033–1109) had opposed an Ontological Argument that one understands God as a being and cannot conceive anything greater because God cannot be understood not to exist.
Although, these three arguments all agree in the way that they use unfound assumptions to prove what has yet to be proven; they do disagree on the studies of how to prove what really is God. The ontological argument believes that God is a “being”. The cosmological argument believes that God is “the universe”. Then there is the design argument which needs evidence to prove that there is a God. The Ontological argument seeks to prove that God does exist by proving, that He cannot not exist.
Copleston put forward a defines with was based on some ideas of the third way of Aquinas’ ways. Russell disagreed with Copleston’s argument and suggested that the universe was not explainable in the way Copleston described. In their debate was the issue of contingency and necessity and a reason to explain why anything exists. Copleston explained Leibniz’s “Principle of Sufficient Reason”, which is the claim that there has to be a full explanation for everything. There are things in the world that do not have the reason or cause of their existence, this mean that some things in the world are contingent - they might have no existed.
The Muslims who initiated the kalam cosmological argument believe that it is obvious that God is the cause for the universe and so they do not look for evidence instead they believe God simply is the answer. Furthermore, why shouldn’t the cause be Gods hands? William Craig would agree with this viewpoint as he says “It is so intuitively obvious that I think scarcely anyone could sincerely believe it to be false” suggesting that any cause other than God is false. The cosmological argument is a posterior argument this means that the argument is based on experience and is based upon the observation that every event has a cause. Everyone who exists sees the existence of the world and simultaneously sees the existence of a cause.
A teleological or design argument[1][2][3] is an a posteriori argument for the existence of God based on apparent design and purpose in the universe. The argument is based on an interpretation of teleology wherein purpose and design appear to exist in nature beyond the scope of any such human activities. The teleological argument suggests that, given this premise, the existence of a designer can be assumed, typically presented as God. Various concepts of teleology originated in ancient philosophy and theology. Some philosophers, such as Plato, proposed a divine Artificer as the designer; others, including Aristotle, rejected that conclusion in favor of a more naturalistic teleology.
Rather we need to ask the question about its origin, nature and purpose. There are many different cosmological arguments but the most famous is that of St Thomas Aquinas (1225 – 1274). Aquinas classically put forward his argument in his famous “Five Ways” of proving the existence of God, which are contained in his book “Summa Theologica”. Aquinas was convinced that there were features of the real world that contained evidence enough to show that God did indeed exist. Putting it another way, if God didn’t exist, the world as we know it simply couldn’t be explained.
This thing starting the motion or change could be equated to God when comparing the domino analogy to Aquinas’ argument. Aquinas’ second way of arguing for the existence of God is causation. He argues that everything must be caused by something as nothing can cause itself (this would mean that it existed before it began, which is impossible). This must therefore mean that there is a first cause, a force that was the initial cause, not depending on anything else to come into existence, to be caused, implying that it caused itself. This means that there must be a
We need to investigate and see why it is valid or invalid. COSMOLOGICAL ARGUMENT On the subject of cosmological proof, God is the first cause. The universe is contingent because everything with in the universe is contingent, thus making the universe in need of a first cause (Foreman, 2012). McCloskey wrote that theists do not study or think far enough ahead to realize that one must be an existing being to be a first cause. “The first, or “no cause,” is a claim that some contingent objects have
All human beings seek to be rational in what they do. Yes, science does provide a method of justifying rationality but God is the other part of the spectrum that science cannot explain. God is also another figure that provides rationality to someone who does not understand science the only path to salvation and to rationality is through religion. If this form of God takes 1000 different shapes across many religions, it does not make God untrue, it is just a manifestation. The biggest contradictory idea against the motion would be that of whether God can be proven empirically.