His cosmological argument states that every affect has a cause, which itself has a cause. You cannot have an infinite chain of causation so there must be a first cause. This first cause must be God. The second role that was established by Aquinas for God is Causa Sine - the first cause. God being transcendent does not need a cause but he is the first cause for everything within the universe.
For Anselm, God cannot not exist. Descartes supported Anselm in his book ‘meditations’ and developed Anselm’s argument particularly in terms of necessary being. He based his argument for God’s existence on the idea that God is a ‘supremely perfect being’. Descartes believed that we can conclude that God exists, because existence is a predicate of a perfect being; therefore God must exist to avoid being self contradictory.
Human wisdom is limited, because its bases off of prior knowledge and instinct, the wisdom of the world from philosophers, scholars, Greeks, Jews, and Gentiles is foolish to God. The only way to have true wisdom is by the Spirit which is the Holy Ghost through Jesus Christ. “No one can know a person’s thoughts except that person’s own spirit, and no one can know God’s thoughts except God’s own Spirit. And we have received God’s Spirit (not the world’s spirit), so we can know the wonderful things God has freely giving us. (1 Corinthians 2:11-12 NLT).
Outline two key objections to the Ontological Argument and explain the responses made to them. The ontological argument was first introduced by Anselm in the ‘Prosologian’. It is an a priori argument as it is not based on empirical evidence but id deductive and analytic in that it allows one to use logical reasoning to reach a logically necessary conclusion which, in theory, cannot be disputed. Anselm defines God as ‘that than which nothing greater can be conceived’ (TTWNGCBC) and states that everyone, theist or not, can accept this definition. He argues that ‘the fool’ in Psalm 53 can conceive of God but fails to believe he exists.
A prime mover such as this could not fit in an ordinary chain of material causes. In Christianity this prime mover is deemed as God. The most famous Christian application of this argument comes from St Thomas Aquinas who in his book ‘Summa Theologica’ (published in 1917). Aquinas came up with Five Ways, three of which apply to the cosmological argument: The Unmoved Mover, The Uncaused Causer and Necessity and Contingency. The first way is The Unmoved Mover, Aquinas considered the way in which objects move or grow or change in state.
But that series cannot go back in time forever. Thus there must be some first cause which was not itself caused by anything else this prime mover being God. The
Taking Aristotle’s prime mover that exists outside of space and time and therefore cannot have any matter and so can’t run does this mean that we are better than God by being able to do something he cannot. Therefore God isn’t omnipotent. Even in the presence of such difficulties Rene Descartes holds the view that God can do everything; following the definition that omnipotence is a kind of
Obviously, our reason cannot of itself provide us with complete knowledge of God, if it could we would ourselves would be God. Nevertheless, through our reason we are able to gain some certain knowledge of God. Thomas Aquinas theorized five different logical arguments to prove the existence of God utilizing scientific hypotheses and basic assumptions of nature called "The Five Ways". The First Way is Motion. Our senses prove that some things are in motion.
St. Thomas Aquinas is probably one of the most well-known philosophers of the cosmological argument as he came up with five steps that explained why there must be a “creator” and did not just state that there was one. The first three of his five steps related to the cosmological argument, they were motion, cause and contingency. His first argument, motion, stated that nothing can move itself and therefore, there must have been something that set everything else in motion, an original mover that set everything in a long chain of reactions, like a line of dominoes. He argued that there can’t have been an infinite chain of movers as it would have no beginning and so could not have been started and there would be no motion. However, some people would argue that although some things do need a cause to move, such as someone turning the pages of a book, people and animals move themselves with no cause at all, they do not need to be moved by something else, therefore there does not need to be a chain of causes for everything.
Secondly, Aquinas concludes that common sense observation tells us that no object can create itself. In other words, some previous object creates it, but there cannot be an endless string of objects causing other objects to exist. Aquinas believes that ultimately there must have been an uncaused first cause that begins the chain of existence for all things. I quite assent to the idea that there must have a first unmoved mover to put the universe into motion. As we all know, everything has a beginning and an end, so as to the universe.