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.
Paley believed that no one else would have been intelligent enough to create the order and complexity of the universe. Aquinas also argues the point that the order and purpose of the world proves that there must be a designer behind it. He believed that God was the answer to the unexplainable and that all natural bodies act for an end. An example for
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
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.
Examine the strengths of the cosmological argument for the existence of God (21) The cosmological argument is an argument in which its main point is that there must have been a first cause for the world to exist, God. The classic version of the cosmological argument originates from Thomas Aquinas’ summa theologica in which he proposed five ways to argue for the existence of God, the first three of these help form the cosmological argument. Aquinas’ first way is an argument taken from Aristotle that argues that everything that is moving or changing is moved or changed by something outside of itself. The instigator of the motion or change in a thing is also changing or in motion, this process cannot be of infinite length. Therefore, there must have existed a first mover independent of anything else, this being God – the prime mover.
It was originally called fides quaerens intellectum (faith seeking understanding). ‘For I do not seek to understand that I believe, but I believe in order to understand’ – Proslogion 1. Anselm defined god as ‘that than which no greater can be conceived’. This is a priori accepted (no evidence). He then goes on to say that it is always greater to exist in reality (in re) than just in the mind (in intellectu).
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.
Compare the concept of a Prime Mover with the idea of God as a Craftsman The concept of a Prime Mover was thought of by Aristotle who suggested there was a God because of the way things exist in the universe. Aristotle said that the chain of cause and effect cannot go on forever so there must have been something that started off this chain, he argued that there must have been an uncaused first cause that started off this chain of events, he said that this was the Prime Mover. The idea of God as a Craftsman suggests that God designed the universe in this specific way and it was not random at all. Genesis 1 and 2 portray God as a craftsman with a clear plan as to how he was going to create the world in six days. The repetition of the words ‘And God said’, ‘And it was so’, ‘And God saw it was good’ show that God is a craftsman who was very much aware of what he was creating; it is said that this God is omnipotent.
Explain Paley’s version of the teleological argument (25) The teleological argument, or the design argument, is an argument to prove the existence of God, it is an A Posteriori argument which attempts to show that the design, order, complexity and purpose of the universe imply the existence of a God who gives the world such characteristics. The design argument follows the logical pattern that when we see things that are manmade, which are in an ordered pattern, or are particularly beautiful, complex or which work well then we must infer that they have been created that way by an intelligent designer. We must see that these things do not arise by chance, therefore when we look at the natural world and see that there is order, beauty, complexity and purpose we can see that the natural world closely resembles human inventions and therefore must also have and intelligent designer. The only thing that is powerful enough to design something as complex as the universe must be God. Therefore, God exists.
As Paley explains, just as the function and complexity of a watch implies a watchmaker, so likewise the function and complexity of the universe implies the existence of a universe-maker. I will examine the argument presented by William Paley, in which he offers an argument from design that claims to show a clear reason why one should believe in God, due to the natural features of the world. I disagree with Paley in that there are many flaws to his argument. In my opinion Paley's argument is a deductive argument, in the sense that he first establishes a belief and uses it in order to reach his final conclusion, hence a deductive argument in which Paley’s premises might be somewhat true but his conclusion is false. .