The Cosmological Argument

Question 1

Argument from experience or reason???

Answer 1

Argument from experience

Question 2

An inductive argument or deductive

Answer 2

Inductive
Premises are taken from experience
Leads to a probable conclusion

Question 3

The First Way
(Movement)

• Do not refer to cause

Answer 3

• All moving things have a source of motion
• There must have been some original source of motion unmoved by anything else
• This we call God, ‘unmoved mover’
• Does not believe in infinite regression

Question 4

Examples for the first way

Answer 4

Fire and wood
- wood has the potential to be hot. Fire makes wood actually hot

Staff and hand
- the staff is moved by the hand

Question 5

The second way

Causality

Answer 5

• Everything which exists must have a cause of it’s existence
• There cannot be an infinite chain of causes stretching back into the past
• There must have been some first cause uncaused by anything else
• This we call God, the ‘uncaused cause’

Question 6

What is the difference between movement and cause

Answer 6

Movement= change, grow, decay (physical)

Cause= Brings something into existence

Question 7

The third way

Contingency

Answer 7

• Everything which exists is dependant on something else for its existence and might at some stage not exist
• At one stage, everything did not exist
• There must be something dependant on nothing else for its existence, the source of all contingent things
• This we call God, who must exist

Question 8

Strengths

Answer 8

• Inductive = uses empirical evidence
• Premises lead to a logical conclusion
• Premises lead to probable conclusion so if you find fault with a premise the conclusion remains the same
• testable = a posteriori
• Infinite time can’t exist as it’s being added to continously

Question 9

Weaknesses

Answer 9

• inductive = probable not definite

Question 10

Ockham’s razor

Answer 10

“Entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily”
Simplest answer is the right one

• The most basic level means that the simplest conclusion is the most viable/ likely
• God and not God are both complicated
• God = a lot of assumptions made

Question 11

David Hume criticisms

Science

Answer 11

• God was an arbitrary act of the mind

- What we perceive as causation, could be just statistical conjunction (we assume cause and effect)

Question 12

The Big Bang supports the Cosmological argument

Answer 12

• There needs to be a cause of the singularity = something eternal, outside of time and space can create the singularity

Question 13

The Big Bang refutes the Cosmological argument

Answer 13

• For a ‘God’ to have been ‘outside’ the universe there must have been an ‘outside’ which can’t have happened until The Big Bang
• There was nothing before the Big Bang so there can’t have been a God