The cosmological argument is an old and respected argument in favour of God’s existence.

It’s been employed countless times throughout the ages and, despite its many forms, is actually pretty easy to understand.

It says that everything in nature depends on something else for its existence and so the sum of nature as a whole must also ultimately rely on something independent of nature to explain its existence.

Failure to provide this explanation, proponents argue, would result in an infinite regress where natural things cause natural things in a never-ending series of ultimately unexplainable causes and effects.

In this case, nothing is actually explained. Failure to provide an explanation just infinitely delays the question and infinitely exacerbates the problem. (But I’ll go more into how atheists try to solve this issue below in the section “If You Reject The Cosmological Argument, What Next?”)

But this “something” that is independent of nature must exist “necessarily”. In other words, this something cannot not exist. It must be existence itself, and so therefore does not need an explanation for its own existence. It is the “first cause” of the series that explains why the series exists in the first place.

Proponents of the cosmological argument say this difficult job description of “something that cannot not exist” and “something that is the first cause of everything” can only be fulfilled by an infinite intelligence outside of nature and time.

This concept only finds a parallel in the notion of “God”. A notion that has existed pretty much as long as humanity has existed and transcends cultures and time. And this notion of God, regardless of time or culture, and the logic behind the cosmological argument have always co-existed together.

Of course, not much else is known about this conceptual “God” (hence why there are thousands of different religions), but this argument nonetheless removes the possibility of naturalism or atheism being a valid explanation for existence.

THE Cosmological Argument For God #

The term “The” Cosmological Argument is a bit misleading since, in fact, there are many types of cosmological arguments that have existed throughout history and in a variety of different cultures.

However, all cosmological arguments for God are similar in nature, and the description you just read above fairly sums up all cosmological arguments.

The main differences lie simply in how they are expressed or worded. But they all deal with concepts such as causation, change, contingency, motion, or the sense that the universe is limited and cannot fully explain itself.

Aristotle Cosmological Argument #

Aristotle is considered by many as the first philosopher to articulate the cosmological argument. Writing in 4th century B.C. Greece, he grew up and lived in a largely polytheistic culture, which makes his conclusion that there is one ‘Prime Mover’, all the more intriguing.

Aristotle’s argument begins with his observance that everything in motion is moved by something; there is nothing in nature that can be the cause of its own motion. For example, a ball does not simply move through the air by itself; rather there must be an agent who moves the ball. This agent itself will also depend on something for its own movement, and so on. This creates a chain, or a series of motions. With this observation and reasoning, two conclusions are possible. One option is that there exists an infinite chain of movements, which stretches infinitely into the past. This idea is known as infinite regression. However, Aristotle rejects this idea with his assertion that time itself is finite. It would be incompatible that there could be an infinite chain of movers within the finite capacity of time. The second option concludes that there must be an ‘un-moved mover’ who sets the movement and motion into the universe itself. This un-moved mover must be separate from this chain of motion, meaning the mover itself is not bound by the natural laws of motion, which are prevalent in our universe. Thus, it is not necessary that the un-moved mover should receive its motion from something else.

A popular analogy given to illustrate this idea is as follows. Suppose a chain of dominoes were set up, standing upright, in close proximity to one another. The dominoes cannot come into motion unless an external party pushes over the first domino, thus setting off a chain of motion. If the game of dominoes represents the universe, with its chain of motion, then the party which causes the first domino to fall is the un-moved mover. For the idea of infinite regression to be true, the dominoes would have to infinitely be falling upon each other without a beginning. According to Aristotle, this would be impossible.

Having briefly discussed Aristotle’s cosmological argument, it must be noted that Aristotle himself did not equate this un-moved mover with any particular god or goddess. It is reasonable to assume that this is because monotheism was not particularly common in the 4th century B.C., especially not in Greece. It wasn’t until first the Macedonian Empire, and second the Roman Empire that monotheistic Jewish communities made their way into Europe. Other major monotheistic influences such as Christianity and Islam were not formed until later centuries. Thus, it is highly unlikely that Aristotle sought to ‘match up’ his un-moved mover with any particular god or goddess. However, Aristotle’s argument is clearly one in favour of monotheism. It wasn’t until later centuries when philosophers who had strong associations with monotheistic religion began to employ this argument themselves. As we shall see, they would go on to argue that this un-moved mover or ‘prime mover’ is the same deity they call God.

Aquinas Cosmological Argument #

The highly influential medieval Catholic philosopher Thomas Aquinas was one (of many) thinkers who used Aristotle’s argument as proof for the existence of a Prime Mover. However, rather than referring to a Prime Mover, Aquinas referred to God.

In his Summa Theologiae, Aquinas put forward five arguments for God’s existence, commonly referred to as ‘The Five Ways.’ The first three of these arguments constitute his cosmological argument. The fourth is more Platonic than Aristotelian, whilst the fifth is a teleological argument. For the purposes of this article, we will be focussing on the cosmological argument alone. All three of these arguments are very similar in their chain of reasoning.

The first argument is known as The Argument from Metaphysical Motion. This argument is significantly based on Aristotle’s un-moved mover argument. Interestingly, this was Aquinas’ favourite argument, and it can be summarised as follows:

1. Some things in the world are in the process of change. Aquinas defines change as something which moves from its potential to its actuality. For example, wood has the potential to become hot.
2. Anything that is in the process of change is being changed by something else. This is because things that are in the process of change do not currently possess the attribute or characteristic into which they are changing. However, they do possess the potential to possess these characteristics. For example, wood has the potential to become hot.
3. The agent which changes something else already possesses the characteristic which the changing object will acquire. For example, the fire which burns the wood already possesses heat. This will cause the wood to acquire the characteristic of heat.
4. Therefore, anything in the process of change is being changed by something else.
5. If this ‘something else’ is in the process of change, then it itself will need another agent to cause the change, and so on.
6. There must be a first cause of change. Otherwise there could be no subsequent changes.
7. This first cause of change must be itself unchanging, otherwise it would demand another explanation for its change. Thus it would not be the first cause.
8. This first cause of change is what we call ‘God.’

Aquinas’ second argument is known as The Argument from Efficient Causation. This argument is concerned with cause and effect:

1. In nature, we notice that nothing is the efficient cause of itself. In other words, everything we see in nature depends on something else. For example, the ball cannot move without something else moving it.
2. Therefore, everything we see in this world is the effect of some other cause.
3. This chain of cause and effect cannot go on forever. There must be a first causer. If there were no first causer, there would be no effects, which is plainly false.
4. Therefore, there must be a first causer who itself is uncaused.
5. We call this uncaused causer ‘God.’

The third and final of the cosmological arguments put forward by Aquinas is The Argument from Contingency. This argument is focussed on what must exist (necessary) and what does not have to exist (contingent). For example, I do not have to exist – the universe would have existed without me – it does not depend on me for its existence. Rather, I depend on my parents for my existence. Therefore, I am a contingent being.

1. Some of the things we encounter can exist, but they do not have to. We know this because we see them springing up then dying away. They are contingent.
2. Not everything can be contingent. If something is contingent, it means it does not have to exist. Therefore, it means at some point, it did not exist. Rather, it was pulled into existence by something that already existed. If everything were contingent, there would have to have been a time when there was nothing. But if there was nothing then, there would have to be nothing now, yet this is obviously not true.
3. Therefore there has to exist something that must exist. In other words, there has to exist a necessary being on which the cosmos itself depends for its existence.
4. This necessary being we call ‘God.’

Aquinas’ cosmological argument can be concluded with the statement that there exists one necessary being, who itself is an uncaused causer and an unchanging changer. Aquinas refers to this being as God.

Notice that there is one clear yet subtle difference between the argument put forward by Aristotle and that of Aquinas. Beyond expanding Aristotle’s cosmological argument, Aquinas equates the Prime Mover with God – ‘And this being we call God.’ Critics throughout the centuries have consistently argued that this is an unreasonable jump to make. ‘Whilst I can accept the logical steps which conclude in the existence of a Prime Mover,’ one might argue, ‘I see no reason why I should accept that this is the same Being which different religious groups claim to worship.’ Whilst this objection may sound plausible, the critic who raises it is guilty of a jump of his own. In this one argument alone, Aquinas is not seeking to prove that his belief in the Triune God revealed in Christianity exists. Rather, he is seeking to prove that something exists rather than nothing. As mentioned above, he does of course give attributes to this being; necessary, uncaused and unchanging. Thus, it is an argument against atheistic naturalism. To assume that Aquinas is trying to fully justify his belief in the Christian God within this argument alone would be to misunderstand his intention. Aquinas simply says that ‘we call this being God’, not that ‘this Being therefore must be the Christian God.’

In order for one to progress from the understanding that there exists one uncaused causer, to the acceptance of Christian theology, Aquinas makes a separate argument that investigates the idea of ‘Divine Revelation.’ But that is another subject. Nonetheless, if the critic rejects the idea that this Being is what others call God, yet still adheres to the logical steps of the argument, the critic must reject atheistic naturalism.

Kalam Cosmological Argument #

The Kalam Cosmological Argument is yet another development from Aristotle’s original argument, and also that of Thomas Aquinas. However, it also has roots in medieval Islamic philosophy. It was formulated and named by twentieth and twenty-first century philosopher Dr William Lane Craig. The term ‘Kalam’ is the Arabic word for ‘speech’ and it is used to imply that God spoke or willed the universe into existence. This idea, according to Craig, can be traced back to medieval Islamic philosophers such as Al-Ghazali. Craig, who was seeking to argue against the possibility of the existence of actual infinities, believes this is an important point. As we shall see, it marks a point of distinction between this version of the cosmological argument, and that of the others that have been briefly discussed in this article.

So what does the argument state?

Well, its starting point is the same as Aristotle and Aquinas. Namely, whatever begins to exist must have a cause. As has been mentioned above, this is consistent with our experience and observations. The second point is that the universe began to exist. Not only is this philosophically the case (as we have seen), but also modern advances in science confirm this idea. Physicist Alexander Vilenkin stated that cosmologists ‘can no longer hide behind the possibility of a past-eternal universe. There is no escape, they have to face the problem of a cosmic beginning.’ If the universe had a beginning, then the universe itself must have a cause. What can we know about this cause? It must be uncaused, because there cannot be an infinite regress. It must be timeless (and therefore changeless) because it created time. It must be immaterial, because it created space and material.

At this stage in the argument, Craig has arrived at very similar conclusions to Aristotle and Aquinas. However, distinct from other cosmological arguments, Craig argues that through cosmology, we can conclude that this cause is also personal. This point is deduced from conclusions already made by this point in the argument. Firstly, this cause is timeless, and secondly that space and time are finite. ‘If this cause is not personal, [endowed with freedom of the will],’ asks Craig, ‘how else could a timeless cause give rise to a temporal effect with a beginning, such as the universe?’ He goes on to argue that a cause which is impersonal yet still meets all the necessary conditions of a first cause (for example it must be timeless, changeless, uncaused etc) could not exist without its effect. He uses an example to explain this. ‘The cause of water’s freezing is that the temperature is below zero degrees centigrade. If the temperature were below zero from eternity past, then any water that was around would be frozen from eternity. It would be impossible for the water to begin to freeze just a finite time ago. Therefore, if the cause is permanently present, its effect must be permanently present as well.’ However, as we have argued, the permanent cause (timeless causer) caused a temporal effect (the universe) which has a beginning. Thus, it is reasonable to argue that this causer is a personal agent, who has freedom of the will. In other words, it can spontaneously create a new effect without any exterior determining conditions or influences.

Simply put, this argument can be arranged like this:

1. What begins to exist must have a cause.
2. The universe had a beginning.
3. Therefore the universe must have a cause.
4. This cause must be:
   • Uncaused because there cannot be an infinite regress.
   • Timeless and therefore changeless because it created time.
   • Immaterial because it created material.
   • Personal because:
     1. The Timeless Cause has caused a temporal effect. This is philosophically impossible unless this Timeless Cause has freedom to create a new effect without other determining influences or conditions.
   • This cause we call God.

This is the most complex of the cosmological arguments we have looked at. It includes the arguments of Aquinas and Aristotle yet develops them further, to add an additional attribute to this first cause: the attribute of freedom – meaning this is a personal being. It argues that it is the ‘Kalam’ of God, or the speech or will of God that created the universe. This addition is an important contribution, as it argues distinctly for monotheism, although admittedly a deist could still adhere to this argumentation.

I would confidently state, however, that if the premises for these arguments are true, and the steps are philosophically coherent, there leaves no room for atheism or polytheism.

To discern between deism and monotheism, one must explore the concept of divine revelation, unless a further development in the cosmological argument emerges.

What Does The Cosmological Argument Prove? #

While no philosophical argument can “prove” God in the same way that science has proven that, for example, water boils at 100°C (212°F), nonetheless the underlying logic of these arguments can be convincing in a different way.

But as alluded to above, the cosmological argument does not “prove” any particular god’s existence. Once someone reaches the end of the cosmological argument and accepts its logic, they are still pretty unclear about the name, personality, or nature of this deity.

These descriptors such as “name”, “personality”, or “nature” can be deduced from further arguments or authorities such as the Moral Argument or through Divine Revelation (e.g. the Bible), to give just two examples.

Bertrand Russell And The Cosmological Argument #

No account of the cosmological argument is complete without its most famous twentieth century critic. Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) was a British philosopher, mathematician and aristocrat, best known for co-authoring the Principia Mathematica and for receiving the 1950 Nobel Prize in Literature. He was also, for most of his long life, the English-speaking world’s most prominent unbeliever, and his objections to the cosmological argument have largely set the template for how sceptics have responded to it ever since.

Russell’s fullest written treatment appears in his 1927 lecture Why I Am Not a Christian, delivered to the National Secular Society at Battersea Town Hall in London. There he admits that as a young man he had actually accepted the first cause argument, until, at the age of eighteen, he read John Stuart Mill’s Autobiography and stumbled on a single sentence. Mill’s father had taught him that the question ‘Who made me?’ cannot be answered, since it immediately suggests the further question ‘Who made God?’ Russell concludes: ‘That very simple sentence showed me, as I still think, the fallacy in the argument of the First Cause. If everything must have a cause, then God must have a cause. If there can be anything without a cause, it may just as well be the world as God.’

He then produced the image which has haunted first cause arguments ever since: ‘It is exactly of the same nature as the Hindu’s view, that the world rested upon an elephant, and the elephant rested upon a tortoise; and when they said, “How about the tortoise?” the Indian said, “Suppose we change the subject.” The argument is really no better than that.’ And he finished with the assertion that ‘there is no reason to suppose that the world had a beginning at all. The idea that things must have a beginning is really due to the poverty of our imagination.’

In his popular History of Western Philosophy (1945), Russell attacked not only the argument but the arguer. Aquinas, he wrote, showed ‘little of the true philosophic spirit’, since ‘before he begins to philosophise, he already knows the truth; it is declared in the Catholic faith… The finding of arguments for a conclusion given in advance is not philosophy, but special pleading.’ Even philosophers unsympathetic to Aquinas have found this verdict excessive; the philosopher Mark Nelson has called it ‘breathtakingly supercilious and unfair’, observing that arguing towards a conclusion you already hold is no crime in itself. Scientists routinely go looking for what they expect to find.

Russell’s most memorable encounter with the argument, however, came in 1948, when he debated the Jesuit philosopher Father Frederick Copleston live on the BBC’s Third Programme. The exchange, later published as ‘A Debate on the Existence of God’, is still cited as the model of how civilised this sort of disagreement can be, and it ended, as we shall see, in an honest impasse rather than a knockout.

Copleston presented not Aquinas’ version but the Leibnizian argument from contingency, a close relative of the Third Way: the world is simply the totality of contingent beings, none of which explains its own existence, so the totality must have a reason outside itself; and unless that reason is a being which ‘cannot not exist’, the explanation regresses forever. Russell’s replies are worth quoting, because they are essentially the three replies still in circulation today.

First, he denied the meaning of the central terms: ‘I don’t admit the idea of a necessary being and I don’t admit that there is any particular meaning in calling other beings “contingent”… The word “necessary”, it seems to me, is a useless word, except as applied to analytic propositions, not to things.’ In other words, only statements can be necessary; things simply are.

Second, he denied that the causal question can even be asked of the whole: ‘The whole concept of cause is one we derive from our observation of particular things; I see no reason whatsoever to suppose that the total has any cause whatsoever.’ To ask for a cause of everything, on his view, commits the same blunder as arguing that because every man has a mother, the human race itself must have one: ‘Obviously the human race hasn’t a mother; that’s a different logical sphere.’

And third, when Copleston asked whether he agreed with Sartre that the universe is ‘gratuitous’, Russell gave the answer for which the debate is remembered: ‘I should say that the universe is just there, and that’s all.’

What is often overlooked is that Russell did not claim victory. When Copleston asked at the outset whether he was an atheist or an agnostic, Russell replied at once: ‘My position is agnostic.’ Later he insisted, ‘I’m not contending in a dogmatic way that there is not a God. What I’m contending is that we don’t know that there is.’ His objection was never that the cosmological argument proves the opposite of what it claims, but that the demand for an ultimate explanation is a question without meaning rather than a question with a bad answer. A scientist hunting for causes, he suggested, is like ‘a man [who] may look for gold without assuming that there is gold everywhere; if he finds gold, well and good; if he doesn’t, he’s had bad luck.’

Copleston’s rejoinder survives as the neatest summary of where the disagreement truly lies: ‘To say that there isn’t any cause is not the same thing as saying that we shouldn’t look for a cause. The statement that there isn’t any cause should come, if it comes at all, at the end of the inquiry, not the beginning.’ Russell had concluded the search was illegitimate before it started; Copleston simply refused to stop digging.

There is a fitting coda to Russell’s story. On his ninetieth birthday, so the story is told, a dinner companion asked him what he would say if it turned out he had been wrong and he found himself face to face with his Maker. The old philosopher, we are told, pointed a finger upward and cried, ‘God, you gave us insufficient evidence!’ It is a charming answer, but it sits awkwardly beside his own philosophy: you cannot complain of insufficient evidence for a question you have already ruled meaningless. The cosmological argument is exactly the kind of evidence he said did not exist.

Arguments Against The Cosmological Argument #

Having spent time with its most famous critic, it is worth collecting the main objections to the cosmological argument together and giving each one its day in court. Most are Russell’s in embryo; all deserve an honest answer.

The ‘Who Made God?’ Objection

Following Mill and Russell, Richard Dawkins revived this objection in The God Delusion (2006): if everything needs a cause, then God needs one too; and if God is allowed without a cause, why is the universe not allowed the same privilege? The trouble is that this objection only touches a version of the argument nobody actually holds. None of the arguments above begin with ‘everything has a cause’. They begin with ‘whatever begins to exist has a cause’ (the Kalam), ‘everything in motion is moved by another’ (Aristotle and Aquinas), or ‘every contingent thing requires an explanation’ (Leibniz and Copleston). The being these arguments conclude to is proposed precisely as the thing which cannot not exist, the uncaused causer that stops the regress. To ask what produced it is not a difficult question but a confused one; it is like asking which wife a bachelor is married to. The objection assumes from the start that nothing can exist necessarily, which is the very point under dispute.

David Hume’s Objections

The deepest objections are still among the oldest. In his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779), David Hume had his character Cleanthes raise three challenges that remain in heavy use. First, why can the material universe not be the necessarily existent being? ‘We dare not affirm that we know all the qualities of matter,’ Cleanthes says; for all we know, its non-existence may be as impossible as twice two being five. Second, conceivability: anything we can conceive as existing we can also conceive as not existing, God included, and so ‘necessary existence’ can never be more than a word. Third, the composition point later made famous by Russell: explain every part of a chain and you have explained the chain, since uniting parts into a whole is ‘performed merely by an arbitrary act of the mind’; demanding a further cause of the whole is like being told the cause of each of twenty particles and then asking, unreasonably, for the cause of all twenty.

Each deserves a serious reply. Matter’s arrangement is precisely what is contingent: every particle, force and law of our universe could apparently have been otherwise, which is exactly what necessary existence is not. Conceivability is a poor guide to possibility: we can conceive a Euclidean world with ease, yet ours is not one. And the composition objection misidentifies what is being claimed. The argument does not say that the universe needs a particular cause the way its members do; it says that a pile of unexplained things remains unexplained when you have counted the last one. Copleston put it with characteristic plainness: ‘If you add up chocolates you get chocolates after all, and not a sheep. If you add up chocolates to infinity, you presumably get an infinite number of chocolates. So if you add up contingent beings to infinity, you still get contingent beings, not a necessary being.’

Immanuel Kant’s Objections

Kant offered a subtler criticism in his Critique of Pure Reason (1781). He argued that ‘the so-called cosmological proof really owes any cogency which it may have to the ontological proof from mere concepts’: having arrived at a necessary being, the argument must import a purely conceptual picture of God to say what that being is, and so it secretly relies on the very ontological argument it claims to bypass. He also held that the principle of causality is a rule our minds apply within experience, and cannot be extended beyond the world to whatever may lie behind it.

Both moves have force only if the argument pretends to define God by its conclusion, which it does not. The cosmological argument reaches a necessary being as a conclusion, not as a definition; what attributes that being possesses is left, as we have seen, to further arguments. And Kant’s famous split of reality into things as they appear to us and things as they are in themselves is itself a much heavier metaphysical commitment than anything Aquinas asks us to take on.

Quantum Mechanics And Uncaused Events

Russell anticipated this objection in 1948: ‘The physicists assure us that individual quantum transitions in atoms have no cause.’ If nature already contains genuinely uncaused events, the causal premise collapses. The reply distinguishes two ideas that are often confused. Quantum events are indeterministic, meaning their precise outcomes are not fixed in advance; but they are not uncaused, since they occur only within pre-existing fields, laws and probabilities which are emphatically something. An electron does not spring into being from sheer nothingness. The quantum vacuum, as the philosopher of physics David Albert pointed out in his demolition of Lawrence Krauss’ A Universe from Nothing, is ‘the particular, eternally persisting, elementary physical stuff of the world’, which is about as far from nothing as it is possible to be.

An Eternal Universe

If the universe never began, the second premise of the Kalam argument evaporates, and several models have tried to secure this: oscillating universes that expand and contract forever, Stephen Hawking’s ‘no-boundary’ proposal in which the universe ‘would not be created, not be destroyed; it would simply be’, prompting Hawking’s famous question ‘what place, then, for a creator?’, and Roger Penrose’s conformal cyclic cosmology of endless aeons. These are serious ideas, but several difficulties press back. The Borde-Guth-Vilenkin theorem (2003) shows that any universe which has on average been expanding cannot be past-infinite, which catches most inflationary and bouncing models; cyclic universes must still explain why the cycle itself exists rather than nothing, since an eternal series of contingent things is still contingent; and a no-boundary universe, even if real, would be every bit as contingent as a bounded one. Something can be finite and edgeless, like the surface of a sphere, and still cry out for an explanation of why it is there at all.

It is also worth remembering that a cosmic beginning is only essential to the Kalam family of the argument. Aquinas himself held that an eternal universe was philosophically possible, since his series of causes is not a row of dominoes stretching backwards in time but a stack of dependencies pressing downward here and now. Leibniz’s contingency argument, likewise, would work perfectly well in a beginningless universe. Eternal models threaten one strand of the cosmological tradition, not the whole rope.

The Multiverse

Why not many universes? The suggestion relocates the question rather than answers it. An ensemble of contingent universes is still contingent; the machinery that generates it, whether eternal inflation or something else, still demands an explanation; and the Borde-Guth-Vilenkin result applies to inflating spacetimes however many bubbles they produce. Vilenkin himself has noted that the multiverse cannot evade a cosmic beginning. Postulating an infinity of unexplained things to avoid explaining one is the largest possible way of multiplying the problem in the hope that it will look like a solution.

A Universe From Nothing

Finally there is the claim that physics has abolished the question altogether: Hawking’s declaration in The Grand Design (2010) that ‘the universe can and will create itself from nothing’ because of the law of gravity, and Krauss’ book of the same title (2012). The flaw in both is identical, and it is that their nothing is always a something. A quantum vacuum equipped with fields, laws and probabilities is a particular, highly ordered physical state, and gravity is a law, not a void. Nor can anything literally produce itself, since to cause yourself you would already have to exist before you existed. When the ‘nothing’ keeps arriving pregnant with laws of physics, the word has stopped meaning nothing.

The Gap Objection

The last objection grants the argument and then shrugs: even if there is a first cause or necessary being, why should it be God rather than the universe itself, or deism’s clockmaker, or Spinoza’s nature? This is a genuine limit, and the honest answer is that it is true but misdirected. The cosmological argument was never designed to prove the Incarnation, and it is unfair to mark it down for failing at a task it never attempted. What it leaves standing, if it succeeds, is not nothing: it is a necessary, uncaused, timeless, immaterial cause of everything contingent. Whether that cause has further revealed itself is, as Aquinas would say, another question requiring another investigation.

If You Reject The Cosmological Argument, What Next? #

Rejecting an argument is easy; paying for the rejection is harder. If the cosmological argument fails, some alternative account of why anything exists has to take its place, and each of the exits usually tried carries a price tag.

The Universe Simply Exists, Unexplained. This is the brute fact option, Russell’s ‘the universe is just there, and that’s all’. It still has defenders today. The cost is that it applies the rules selectively: we demand explanations for every particle and event we meet, then exempt the whole show at the exact point where the answer would matter most. And it cannot allow itself what it denies the theist. If brute facts are permitted at the end of the story, then ‘God simply is’ is no worse a brute fact than ‘the universe simply is’; indeed it is arguably a better one, since a necessary being at least claims to contain the reason for its own existence, while contingent matter makes no such claim.

The Universe Is Necessary. Hume floated this option, and the philosopher Bede Rundle gave it book-length treatment in Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing (2004), concluding that some material reality must exist necessarily while declining to call it God. The difficulty is that everything about our particular universe looks contingent: its particles, forces, laws and arrangement could all apparently have been otherwise. A necessary universe must explain why this universe is the one which cannot not exist, and saying ‘it just is’ smuggles the brute fact back in wearing a smarter outfit.

The Universe Created Itself From Nothing. This we have already examined. Krauss’ nothing is a quantum vacuum, Hawking’s nothing contains the law of gravity, and self-causation is strictly absurd, since a thing would have to exist before it existed. The emperor’s new nothing is, on inspection, very well dressed indeed.

Go Round In Circles. Oscillating universes, Penrose’s cyclic cosmology and the multiverse all postpone the problem rather than remove it: an endless succession of contingent aeons is no more self-explanatory than a single one. Copleston’s chocolates again; an infinite pile of them is still just chocolates.

Admit It Is A Mystery. The most honest exit is the one Russell himself took: agnosticism. The question is real, the argument inconclusive, the jury out. Nobody should pretend this position is comfortable, however. It is a verdict on the reach of our knowledge rather than on the question itself, and the question keeps sitting there all the same. As Wittgenstein wrote in the Tractatus, ‘it is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists.’

Which brings us to the real choice. The cosmological argument does not offer a plain answer over against atheism’s no answer; it offers one mystery over against a rival set of mysteries, each with its own price. Its defenders simply point out that a necessary, uncaused, self-explaining being is the only candidate on the table that even claims to be the sort of thing that can stop the questions. Every other exit ends with ‘suppose we change the subject’.

Cosmological Argument’s Strengths And Weaknesses #

So where does all of this leave the argument? It is worth ending with an honest audit, because the strongest case for the cosmological argument is also the least boastful one.

Its Weaknesses

The argument does not prove the Christian God, and it never promised to. A Jew, a Muslim, a Hindu philosopher or a deist can accept every premise and arrive at the same necessary being, which is why versions of it appear in nearly every philosophical theology. What it produces is, in Pascal’s famous distinction, ‘the God of philosophers and scholars’, and not yet ‘the God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob’. It also leans on machinery its opponents are free to decline: the principle of sufficient reason, the distinction between contingent and necessary things, the impossibility of certain infinities. A determined sceptic can always exit through one of those doors, which is why the great debates so often end, as Russell and Copleston’s did, in an impasse between rival starting points. And it is not, and cannot be, a laboratory proof. It will never weigh God on a scale.

Its Strengths

What is remarkable is how well the argument has worn. It was discovered independently by minds with almost nothing else in common: Plato’s self-moving soul in the Laws, Aristotle’s Prime Mover, Avicenna’s ‘proof of the truthful’ for a necessary existent, the kalam of medieval Islam, Aquinas’ Five Ways, Leibniz’s question ‘why is there something rather than nothing? For nothing is simpler and easier than something’, and Samuel Clarke’s demonstration before the Boyle lectures. Arguments that keep being rediscovered by cultures with no shared scripture are usually tracking something real.

The behaviour of its enemies is also revealing. Einstein found the idea of a cosmic beginning so distasteful that he confessed it ‘irritates’ him; Robert Jastrow, the NASA astronomer who recorded the remark, called it ‘curiously emotional language for a discussion of some mathematical formulas’, and suspected the irritation was theological rather than scientific. Fred Hoyle gave the game away entirely when he complained that ‘the passionate frenzy with which the Big Bang cosmology is clutched to the corporate scientific bosom evidently arises from a deep-rooted attachment to the first page of Genesis, religious fundamentalism at its strongest.’ He was right about which way the evidence was blowing, even if he was wrong about the evidence itself: his own steady-state universe was killed by observation, not by theologians. Nor should we forget that the Big Bang was proposed by a Catholic priest, Georges Lemaître, who nonetheless despised having it used as a sermon; when Pope Pius XII tried in 1951 to baptise his primeval atom as proof of creation, Lemaître was horrified, and quietly persuaded the Vatican to keep the science and the pulpit apart. The theist can afford that restraint. The argument never needed astronomy’s permission.

The argument also has the odd distinction of converting its most celebrated opponents. In 2004 the philosopher Antony Flew, for fifty years the world’s most quoted philosophical atheist, announced that he had become a deist, moved in large part by the very considerations raised in this article: why nature is intelligible, why it is governed by law, and why there is anything at all. ‘I had to go where the evidence leads’, he explained. Even Jastrow’s famous concession stands as a verdict on the whole twentieth century of physics: ‘For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.’

Nor is the argument a museum piece. The last decade has seen a genuine revival in the journals: Edward Feser’s Five Proofs of the Existence of God (2017), Alexander Pruss and Joshua Rasmussen’s Necessary Existence (2018), Rasmussen’s How Reason Can Lead to God (2019), and sustained exchanges with Graham Oppy, the ablest living critic of these arguments, alongside fresh challenges from philosophers such as Joseph Schmid. Whatever one makes of the verdicts, the cosmological argument is doing something no dead argument does: it is still being fought over.

The honest conclusion is the one this article has been circling since the beginning. The cosmological argument is not a proof that compels consent, but it is a question that refuses to die. Why is there something rather than nothing? If the universe had a beginning, and the best cosmology of our century says it probably did, then the alternatives are no longer between explanation and no explanation. They are between a necessary being and a series of mysteries that each cost more than they admit. For an argument approaching two and a half thousand years of age, that is not a bad position to be in.