God's existence by observation - Cosmological

Question 1

What is a Cosmological argument?

Answer 1

Refers to the presence of the cosmos as evidence for God instead of the nature of the cosmos.
Why is there something instead of nothing?

Question 2

What are the first three of the five ways?

Answer 2

1) motion
2) causation
3) contingency

Question 3

Explain Aquinas’ first way (motion)

Answer 3

Things can not move themselves from a state of potential to actual and requires something else to move it. Something must have began this chain of motion which itself is unmoved (The first mover - God).

Question 4

Explain Aquinas’ second way (causation)

Answer 4

All things are caused by other things and nothing is the cause of itself. There must be an uncaused causer that began the causes (The first cause - God).

Question 5

Expplain Aquinas’ third way (contingency)

Answer 5

All things can possibly not exist (are contingent). If time is infinite there must have been a time with nothing, so there would be nothing now. There must be something necessary (impossible not to exist) to cause the contingent things (uncaused necessary being - God).

Question 6

What do the first three ways of Aquinas require us to accept?

Answer 6

The rejection of infinite regress (the idea that there is an infinite past)

Question 7

Hume’s arguments against Cosmological: Against sufficient reason

Answer 7

Attacks the principle of sufficient reason upon which the third way is founded (that there should be an explaintation for the whole, not just the parts)

Question 8

Hume’s arguments against Cosmological: fallacy of composition

Answer 8

You can not move from saying individual elements of the universe require an explainattion to the entire universe requiring one. Like saying a floor is square because all the tiles are square

Question 9

Hume’s arguments against Cosmological: Reality of the ‘whole’

Answer 9

Questions the reality of
whole things, saying it is “arbitrary acts of the mind”, E.g uniting several lans into a country does not change the nature of things, simply our perception of them.

Question 10

Hume’s arguments against Cosmological: convenience

Answer 10

The word ‘universe’ could just be a convenient term for our perceptions rather than reality (modern physics support with ‘pocket universes’ inside larger ones)

Question 11

Hume’s arguments against Cosmological: always existed

Answer 11

“it is neither intuitively or demonstratively certain” that every object that begins to exist owes its existence to a cause

Question 12

Hume’s arguments against Cosmological: Like causes produce like effects

Answer 12

for example, parent rabbits produce baby rabbits. Many things seem to be the offspring of two things so why assume the universe has one male creator

Question 13

Hume’s arguments against Cosmological: Psychological effect

Answer 13

we can never be sure causation is anything beyond a psychological effect, it is more foolish in the case of a universe as we lack other experience.

Question 14

Hume’s arguments against Cosmological: Existential propositions

Answer 14

any being that exists could also not exist and it is not contradictory to concieve its non-existence (woul be the case if beings were necessary). In hume’s own words “all existential propositions are synthetic”