Who’s on First? The Cosmological Argument for the Existence of God

What is it about?

This is the second chapter of The Devil’s Advocate vs. God’s Honest Truth: A Dialectical Inquiry into the Rationality of Religion. It takes up the cosmological argument for the existence of God. This type of argument infers the existence of God from the existence of phenomena requiring a reason for their own existence. The argument thus proceeds from the observation that everything in our phenomenal experience is affected, caused, created, or explained by something other than itself to the conclusion that the universe as a whole, and indeed reality as we know it, must be affected, caused, created, or explained by something other than itself. It has various different versions, depending on whether the observational premise is about motion, change, causality, contingency, temporality, or some other mode of justification (or sufficient reason). The focus of this chapter is divided roughly evenly between standard versions of the argument, namely those from motion, change, causality, contingency, and so on (sections 2.1–2.5), and the temporal formulation widely known as the kalām approach, which is examined in a separate section by itself (section 2.6). The basic rationale behind the common strategy, though with a distinctly causal execution, can be schematized as follows: (P1) Everything in our experience appears to have a cause. (P2) Nothing at all would now exist had there not been an original cause that was itself uncaused. (C) Therefore, there must be an original cause responsible for everything else.

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Photo by Valdemaras D. on Unsplash

Photo by Valdemaras D. on Unsplash