by Immanuel Kant

Created on: February 07, 2007   Last Updated: May 08, 2007

The cosmological argument is an argument which seeks to prove the existence of God. It was started in ancient Greece by Plato and Aristotle (Plato's Laws and Aristotle's Physics) and went on to be developed by both Christian philosophers and Muslim philosophers. Some of the main philosophers who took this idea on were Thomas Aquinas, Al-Ghazali, Leibniz and Samuel Clarke.

There are three basic variants of this argument:

The first three of Aquinas' Five Ways
The Kalam Argument
Swinburne's Inductive Argument

Thomas Aquinas' Cosmological Argument

The first three of Aquinas' Five Ways are part of one of the earliest versions of the cosmological argument. His argument goes as follows:

The First Way argues that there must be a first cause for all changes, as nothing changes itself and there cannot be an infinite chain of things, which are changed by another, without end.
The Second Way argues that there must be a first cause of everything that exists, which is not caused by anything.
The Third Way argues that there must be a necessary cause of all contingent things. If there had been no necessary cause, there would have been nothing to bring contingent things into existence and there would have been nothing now, and this is clearly not the case.

In each case the "cause" is what people call a "God".

An evaluation of this argument shows us that it has many weaknesses most of which were pointed out many centuries after this argument was first conceived. The main two philosophers that argued against Aquinas were Bertrand Russell and Immanuel Kant.
Bertrand Russell simply denied that the universe needed explanation and thought it a waste of time trying to explain what our minds could never comprehend. The universe just is. Get over it.
Kant objected to the conclusion of the cosmological argument because in concluding to the existence of a necessary being, it argues for the existence of a being whose existence is absolutely inconceivable. But the only being that meets this condition is a being which is maximally great and perfect. This concept lies at the heart of the ontological argument, which in turn has been considered defective as well by many philosophers. When something is based on something else, which is defective, then that thing is defective as well (in this case the cosmological argument).

The next variant of this argument originated in Islamic philosophy, its main two advocates being Al-Kindi and Al-Ghazali, and is known as the Kalam argument.
Kalam Argument

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