Thomas Aquinas Cosmological Argument

Everything that begins to exist has a cause of its existence 2. The universe began to exist 3. Therefore, the universe has a cause of existence His defense of the Kalam Cosmological Argument revolves mostly around the second premise. This is mostly due to him finding the first premise as intuitively obvious, where he claims that “no one, seriously denies it”. From experience, we find that physical objects do not come into existence without causes.

I have to admit that Zimmerman’s talk was hard at times for me to comprehend. I would love feedback if I understood his divine argument wrong, because I have had a few discussions about it with my peers and many took away different views from his final argument for a divine being, and in this paper I will explain how I understood his final argument. To come upon the divine being of God, he had to eliminate all the other contingent and necessary options believed by other philosophers and scientists through reasoning. He explained how it wasn’t possible for their to be no answer for the cosmos, nor were any of the contingent explanations of science, philosophy, or an infinite past made any sense.

I think William Lane Craig made a strong argument when it came to a cosmological argument. He does have a point that there is an explanation of how the world came to be but there is more to it, such as dates and things like that. He says that the ultimate question in philosophy would be “why does anything exists”? He brings up that atheist think that the universe is eternal but he says there is reasons why the universe began. He says its obscured to think that its number of past events is infinite, which he says leads to self-contradictions.

The Teleological argument is also a cosmological argument it also begins with the existence of the cosmos. McCloskey rejects this argument along with the argument of design by rejecting the premise. However, “Tennant and Swinburne developed a version of this argument not as strict deductive proof but to show probability of theism” (Evans & Manis) The theory of evolution was offered as an explanation for the creation of design which was rejected because there many things before the theory of evolution. McCloskey believe there must be indisputable proof of actual evidence to prove evolution.

The objection addressed the validity of the argument which had the premise 1, nothing is the efficient cause of itself except God and premise 2, a chain of causes cannot be infinite. The argument thus concludes there must be a first cause. This conclusion agrees with my thesis that Saint Thomas Aquinas’s argument formulated in the second way leads to a valid argument, which concludes that there must be a first cause and that God

The cosmological argument consists of several arguments that start with the fact that the universe exists and, using inductive reasoning, works down to a conclusion as to how and why the universe exists. The cosmological argument is a posteriori so it uses empirical evidence from the known world to support its conclusion. The kalam cosmological argument, which has its roots in Islam and was revived by contemporary philosopher William Lane Craig, and the first three of St Thomas Aquinas’ five ways are arguments that attempt to prove the existence of God by inferring ‘facts’ concerning causation, motion, contingency and Aquinas’ first way is known as the ‘unmoved mover’, Aquinas observed that everything in the universe is in motion (in the state

J.L. Schellenberg’s Divine Hiddenness and Human Reason discusses the argument that God does not, in fact, exist. Schellenberg summarizes his beliefs in God’s nonexistence in five key ideas. The main ideas summarized are “If there is a God, he is perfectly loving, If a perfectly loving God exists, reasonable nonbelief does not occur but reasonable nonbelief does occur. Therefore, no perfectly loving God exists. Therefore, there is no God” (Lacy 121).

To begin, the Cosmological arguments is an a Posteriori argument. The argument goes as follows, there exists things

The cosmological argument looks to the world to prove God’s existence rather than pure definitions. The proponent of the cosmological argument was St. Thomas Aquinas, a theologian in the eleventh century CE (Solomon). He proposed that everything that exists must have a cause, and that the cause was God (Aquinas). Aquinas’ first point was based off of motion, that nothing can be both the mover and moved. An item sitting in place has the potential to be moving, but cannot move unless something that is already moving imparts motion to it

In Newton’s first law, he explains the law of inertia by stating that an object at rest stays at rest unless acted upon by an outside force. This law can be applied on a wider scale to the creation of the universe because put simply, in a chain of events, there must be a beginning that acts as the catalyst to the entire sequences of occurrences. The cosmological argument rests on the first event in the history of the universe because that initial beginning dictates whether there exists a self-existent being. The universe is filled with dependent beings but for those beings to be capable of existing, they are contingent on the existence of an uncaused cause.

PAPER #2 History of philosophy: Philosophy 20B Thomas Aquinas reasons that “God is one” in the Summa theologiae, part one, question eleven, article three. Using three proofs, one on “Gods simplicity,” the second on “the infinity of Gods perfection” and the last based on “the unity of the world.” The following will be Dissecting and providing explanations along with criticism. As well, what it is meant by “God is one”.

Each part of his system goes on to support some further argument, as in the case above wherein his argument regarding knowing God’s existence by natural knowledge is a support for his premise 2. This interconnectedness and cohesion is present throughout Aquinas’ works and is, itself, a defense against objections since it makes any objection seem unlikely to penetrate Aquinas’ defenses. Resultingly, it seems reasonable to doubt that my objections to Aquinas’ argument are unmet. It may be that they are met and overcome in other section of the Summa Theologica or even in other works of Aquinas’, but it seems likely that they are addressed by Aquinas

So the first cause argument proves that God does not exist assuming the first cause argument is sound then there must be some other cause because it is not God. In summary the notion of omnipotent is a miss-name because it implies the potency, power, causality when in fact all that it does is imply logical entailment, it implies that if it wills something you can deduce from the statement that something exists, you do not need a causal step, it is a logical deduction and therefore the first cause argument argues from causes in the world

In this argument we already assumed that there may be possibility that God exist and finally we reached where we started. So this argument does not give us the exact information about existence of God. There are many objections on this argument but still it is a powerful argument. In my opinion, this argument is not much satisfactory. It describes that existence is greater than imagination.

St. Anselm and Descartes are known for presenting the first ontological arguments on the existence of God. The word ontological is a compound word derived from ‘ont’ which means exists or being and ‘–ology’ which means the study of. Even though Anselm and Descartes’ arguments differ slightly, they both stem from the same reasoning. Unlike the other two arguments on God’s existence (teleological and cosmological), the ontological argument does not seek to use any empirical evidence but rather concentrates on pure reason. The rationale behind this school of thought