Cosmological Arguments: Aquinas, Leibniz, Craig.

The Unmoved Mover, the Contingent Universe, and the Kalam: A Whirlwind Tour of Cosmological Arguments 🚀🌌🤯

(Lecture Transcript – Professor Astra Nebula, Department of Cosmic Philosophy, University of Existential Whimsy)

Alright, settle down, class! Today, we’re diving into the deep end of philosophical thought: Cosmological Arguments. These are attempts to prove the existence of God from the existence of the cosmos itself. Think of it as a cosmic detective story: we have the universe, a giant, sprawling crime scene, and we’re trying to figure out who – or what – is responsible.

We’ll be focusing on three heavy hitters: Thomas Aquinas, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, and William Lane Craig. Each offers a slightly different angle on this age-old question. Prepare for your brains to be stretched further than spacetime after a black hole collision! 😵‍💫

I. Introduction: Why Bother with Cosmology?

Why are we even bothering with this stuff? Well, for starters, it’s fun! (Says the philosophy professor. 😜). But seriously, the question of origins is deeply ingrained in human nature. We want to know where we come from, how things began, and what it all means.

Cosmological arguments, if successful, offer a pretty big answer: a powerful, intelligent, and possibly benevolent being (or at least, a powerful and necessary one) is ultimately responsible for everything. That’s a pretty significant discovery, wouldn’t you say? It’s like finding the ultimate instruction manual for the universe! 📜

However, these arguments are notoriously tricky. They’ve been debated for centuries, and there are plenty of objections to consider. Think of it as a philosophical obstacle course. We need to be nimble, logical, and ready to question everything!

II. The Players: Meet Our Cosmological Champions!

Let’s introduce our protagonists:

Philosopher	Time Period	Key Argument	Catchphrase
Thomas Aquinas	13th Century (Medieval)	Five Ways, focusing on motion, causation, contingency, degrees of perfection, and teleological order.	"Quod omnes dicunt Deum" (What everyone calls God)
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz	17th-18th Century (Early Modern)	The Principle of Sufficient Reason: Every fact has an explanation, including the universe’s existence.	"Why is there something rather than nothing?"
William Lane Craig	20th-21st Century (Contemporary)	The Kalam Cosmological Argument: Everything that begins to exist has a cause.	"The universe began to exist; therefore, the universe has a cause."

Think of Aquinas as the seasoned veteran, Leibniz as the meticulous logician, and Craig as the modern debater armed with cutting-edge science. 🤺

III. Aquinas’s Five Ways: The Medieval Masterpiece

Aquinas, a Dominican friar and brilliant theologian, presented five arguments for God’s existence, known as the "Five Ways" ( Quinque Viae). We’ll focus on the first three, as they are the most overtly cosmological:

• The First Way: Argument from Motion 🏃

  • Premise: Things in the world are in motion (change). (Think a bouncing ball, a blooming flower, or even you blinking!)

  • Premise: Everything that is in motion must be put in motion by something else. (The ball doesn’t bounce itself, the flower needs sunlight, and you have muscles controlling your eyelids!)

  • Premise: There cannot be an infinite regress of movers. (Imagine a domino effect that never stops needing another domino to push it. Eventually, you need something to start the whole chain!)

  • Conclusion: Therefore, there must be a first, unmoved mover. This is what everyone understands to be God.

  • The Idea: Everything is being moved by something else. You need a chain of movers to explain why anything is moving. But you can’t have an infinite chain of movers, because there would be no initial mover to get the whole thing started. Therefore, there must be an unmoved mover that is the source of all motion.

• The Second Way: Argument from Efficient Cause 🔨

  • Premise: In the world, we find a series of efficient causes. (Think of a domino falling, causing the next to fall, and so on.)

  • Premise: Nothing can be the efficient cause of itself. (You can’t give birth to yourself, can you? 👶)

  • Premise: There cannot be an infinite regress of efficient causes. (Similar to the first way, an endless chain of causes doesn’t solve the problem of the initial cause.)

  • Conclusion: Therefore, there must be a first efficient cause. This is what everyone calls God.

  • The Idea: Similar to motion, everything is caused by something else. The universe is a giant chain of cause and effect. But this chain cannot go back infinitely. There must be a first cause that is itself uncaused, the prime initiator of all existence.

• The Third Way: Argument from Contingency 🍀

  • Premise: We find in nature things that are possible to be and not to be. (Contingent beings – they exist, but they could not have existed. Like you! You exist, but your parents could have decided to stay home that night. 🙈)

  • Premise: If everything is contingent, then at one time there could have been nothing in existence. (If everything could cease to be, then logically, there was a time when nothing did exist.)

  • Premise: If there was never anything in existence, nothing could have ever begun to exist. (You can’t get something from absolutely nothing, right? Magic trick or not! 🎩)

  • Premise: But things do exist.

  • Conclusion: Therefore, not all beings are merely possible. There must exist something the existence of which is necessary. This is what everyone calls God.

  • The Idea: Contingent beings need something to explain their existence. They could have not existed, so there must be something necessary that accounts for their being. This necessary being is the ultimate ground of existence.

Aquinas’s Strengths and Weaknesses:

Strength	Weakness
Appeals to common-sense observations about the world.	Assumes the impossibility of infinite regresses, which some find debatable.
Provides multiple, independent arguments for God’s existence.	Doesn’t necessarily prove the existence of the theistic God of Christianity, Judaism, or Islam. It could be a deistic God.
Rooted in Aristotelian metaphysics, which offers a comprehensive worldview.	Relies on Aristotelian concepts that may not be accepted by everyone.

Objections to Aquinas:

• The Problem of Infinite Regress: Can’t there be an infinite chain of causes? Why must it stop with a first cause?
• The "Who Created God?" Question: If everything needs a cause, what caused God? (Aquinas would argue that God is necessary and therefore doesn’t need a cause.)
• The Leap to Theism: Even if we accept a first cause, why does it have to be the God of traditional religions? Couldn’t it be some impersonal force or cosmic principle?

IV. Leibniz and the Principle of Sufficient Reason: A Logician’s Lament

Leibniz, a brilliant mathematician, philosopher, and polymath, approached the cosmological argument from a slightly different angle. He focused on the Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR).

• The Principle of Sufficient Reason: Every fact has an explanation. There is a reason why everything is the way it is, and not some other way. Nothing is ultimately brute fact.

  • Example: The fact that the sky is blue has an explanation in terms of the scattering of light. The fact that you’re sitting in this lecture has an explanation in terms of your desire to learn about cosmology (and maybe get a good grade!).

• Leibniz’s Cosmological Argument:

  • Premise: Every contingent fact has an explanation.

  • Premise: The existence of the universe is a contingent fact. (The universe could have not existed, just like you could have not existed.)

  • Conclusion: Therefore, the existence of the universe has an explanation.

  • Premise: This explanation must either be found within the universe itself, or outside of it.

  • Premise: If the explanation is found within the universe, it will ultimately lead to a regress of contingent facts, none of which provide a sufficient reason for the universe’s existence as a whole.

  • Conclusion: Therefore, the explanation for the universe’s existence must be found outside of the universe, in a necessary being, which Leibniz identifies as God.

• The Idea: Why is there something rather than nothing? Leibniz argues that the universe’s existence is a contingent fact, and therefore requires an explanation. This explanation cannot be found within the universe itself, as that would only lead to an infinite regress of contingent facts. Therefore, the explanation must lie in a necessary being outside of the universe, which is God.

Leibniz’s Strengths and Weaknesses:

Strength	Weakness
Based on a seemingly intuitive principle (PSR).	PSR itself is controversial. Is it necessarily true that every fact has an explanation?
Avoids the problem of infinite regress by positing a necessary being.	Doesn’t necessarily prove the existence of a personal God. The necessary being could be some impersonal principle.
Offers a powerful argument for the existence of a fundamental ground of reality.	The move from a "sufficient reason" to a "necessary being" can be seen as a leap. Couldn’t the sufficient reason be something else entirely?

Objections to Leibniz:

• Is the PSR True? Is it really the case that everything has an explanation? Maybe some things are just brute facts, with no explanation at all. (Think of quantum randomness! ⚛️)
• The Problem of Evil: If God is the sufficient reason for everything, does that mean God is responsible for evil? (Leibniz argued that God allows evil for the sake of a greater good.)
• Why This Universe? If God had a choice of which universe to create, why did he choose this one, with all its imperfections? (Leibniz argued that this is the "best of all possible worlds," a claim that was famously satirized by Voltaire in Candide.)

V. William Lane Craig and the Kalam Cosmological Argument: A Modern Twist

William Lane Craig, a contemporary Christian philosopher, champions the Kalam Cosmological Argument, which has its roots in medieval Islamic philosophy. This argument focuses on the beginning of the universe.

• The Kalam Cosmological Argument:

  • Premise 1: Everything that begins to exist has a cause of its existence. (This is a variation of the principle of causality. Think about it: does anything just pop into existence out of nowhere? 🪄)

  • Premise 2: The universe began to exist. (Craig argues for this premise based on both philosophical and scientific grounds.)

    • Philosophical Argument: It is impossible to traverse an actual infinite. An infinite series of past events would require traversing an actual infinite, which is impossible. Therefore, the universe must have a beginning.
    • Scientific Argument: The Big Bang theory suggests that the universe had a beginning.

  • Conclusion: Therefore, the universe has a cause of its existence.

  • Premise 3: This cause must be uncaused, immaterial, timeless, and enormously powerful. (Because it created space, time, and matter itself!)

  • Conclusion: Therefore, a personal Creator of the universe exists. (Craig argues that only a personal being can account for the origin of the universe.)

• The Idea: The universe had a beginning, and everything that begins to exist has a cause. Therefore, the universe has a cause. This cause must be something outside of space, time, and matter, and Craig argues that the best explanation for this cause is a personal God.

Craig’s Strengths and Weaknesses:

Strength	Weakness
Relies on relatively simple and intuitive premises.	The second premise (the universe began to exist) is highly debated, particularly in light of alternative cosmological models.
Draws on contemporary scientific findings (Big Bang cosmology).	Even if the universe had a beginning, the cause might not be a personal God. It could be some unknown physical process or a multiverse scenario.
Addresses the issue of time directly, arguing that time itself began with the universe.	The concept of something existing "before" time is difficult to grasp and may be incoherent.

Objections to Craig:

• The Beginning of the Universe is Uncertain: Some physicists propose models of the universe that don’t involve a beginning (e.g., cyclical universes, multiverse theories).
• Quantum Mechanics and Causality: Quantum mechanics seems to violate the principle of causality at the subatomic level. Why can’t the universe pop into existence without a cause?
• The "God of the Gaps" Fallacy: Using God as an explanation for things we don’t understand can be seen as a "God of the gaps" argument. As science advances, the "gaps" tend to shrink.

VI. Conclusion: The Cosmic Mystery Remains

So, there you have it: a whirlwind tour of three major cosmological arguments. Each argument offers a compelling case for the existence of a first cause, a sufficient reason, or a creator of the universe. However, each argument also faces significant challenges and objections.

Ultimately, whether or not you find these arguments convincing is a matter of personal judgment. They are not mathematical proofs that can be definitively proven or disproven. Instead, they are philosophical arguments that invite us to think deeply about the nature of reality, the origin of the universe, and the possibility of God.

The cosmic mystery remains. But the quest to understand it – through science, philosophy, and perhaps even faith – is one of the most fascinating and important journeys we can undertake.

Bonus Question for Extra Credit:

If the universe had a beginning, what was God doing beforehand? 🤔 (Hint: Consider Augustine’s response: God created time with the universe. There was no "before.")

Class dismissed! Go forth and ponder the cosmos! 🌠