Since nothing can move of its own accord, and nothing can change itself, there had to be something else which has no cause and had the ability to initiate the Universe. Aquinas said that this entity without a cause and the power to create a Universe had to be an ‘Unmoved Mover/ Prime Mover’. He surmised that this Prime Mover had to be God. This argument has some positive points, in the fact that the natural occurrence of movement plus change have been brought into it, which makes the argument seem valid and plausible. However,
He therefore concludes that a first uncaused cause is necessary and this cause we know as God. Here Aquinas is not simply explaining the start of a chain of actions but explaining the reason why anything exists at all and why any motion or causation has occurred at all. Aquinas’ third way is known as the argument from Contingency. This
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.
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.
Explain key criticisms of the Cosmological Argument Although with each of his ‘ways’ in the Cosmological argument Thomas Aquinas gave what he believed to be evidence to back his points up, the argument was still open to criticism and did receive it. One of the first criticisms of the argument was around the ideology of infinite regress. Aquinas believed that the idea of infinite regress was not possible – the cause and effect chain had to have a beginning, which would have been caused by God (the first cause.) William Lane Craig (1949-) agreed with this idea, stating that infinite regress cannot exist in actuality. For example, if a library was to house an infinite number of books and a book was taken off the shelf, or the library was completely emptied, it would still have to contain an infinite number of books, which therefore shows that infinite regress cannot exist within our living universe.
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.
These other objects, in turn, was put into motion by still another object preceding it, and so forth. This series cannot go on backward to infinity, though, since there would otherwise be no first mover and thus no subsequent movement. Therefore, we must conclude that there is a first unmoved mover, which we understand to be God. Second, we observe that everything has an efficient cause and that nothing is or can be the cause of itself. It is impossible, though, that the series of causes should extend back to infinity because every cause is dependent on a prior cause and the ultimate cause is thus dependent on a previous cause.
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
But because it’s impossible to conceive a greater being that God he must exist in both reality and our minds. In Anselm’s view only a fool can therefore doubt the existence of God, because the ‘fool’ has the idea of God in their mind to doubt him,
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