Cosmological argument
...he universe cannot be the cause of it’s self therefore there had to be a first uncaused cause, which is God He argues that in all things we will find an order of causes. It is also impossible for a thing to be the cause of itself, for then it would have to have existed before itself, which is absurd. He also postulates that in the order of causes there is always a first cause, which causes an intermediate cause which in turn causes the ultimate cause. He further disputes that it is not possible to go on to infinity in this way, never arriving at a first cause. This, he claims, is because if we were to deny a first cause, which is implied in the infinite, then there would never be any intermediate causes and thus no ultimate cause. In this way St. Thomas claims that without a necessary first cause, the universe would never have existed. St. Thomas thus concludes that this first uncaused first cause had to be God. This past demonstration has been one that shows God to be first in time. Another way in which St. Thomas demonstrates the existence of God is to show that, instead of being the first cause in time, He had to be the first Being. It is interesting to note that in this demonstration he allows that the universe has possibly existed for eternity. His argument states that all things in nature can either exist or not exist, or that they come into being and then pass away. He continues that this taken with the assumption that the universe has always existed, leads to the conclusion that nothing would now exist. He arrives at this result by reasoning that since everything can exist or not exist, and in the infinite history of the universe, there had to have been a time when everything must have been in a state of not being. Because nothing can come from nothing, we have to conclude that there exist not merely things that are possible, but that there has to be something that is necessary, something that is an ultimate and self-existent necessary being upon which all other beings depend on for their existence. This being he claims is God. I think that the best criticism of the Cosmological Argument is that if everything must have a cause, then so must God. It seems odd to me that the theist discards this criticism on the basis that God is necessarily a being that transcends space and time. Even if it is granted that God does transcend space and time, I don’t understand how that invalidates the question. Q3 Sketch both Hume’s and Kant’s views of causality. Does either of these seem correct to you? Explain the relevance of their discussions to the evaluation of the cosmological argument. Unlike his predecessors, Hume challenged that causality is a metaphysical principle (that causality is one of the fundamental laws of reality and therefore independent of our perception), but rather proposed that causality is a product derived from our sense experience. According to Hume, causality is not a metaphysical principle, but rather nothing more than ju...