AQA A Level Philosophy - Cosmological Argument

What is infinite regress? (3)

It is chain of cause and effect that continues back and back forever (into infinity).

It has no beginning point.

Therefore, there is no need for a first cause.

1.) What is a contingent being (3)

Contingent existence= something that relies on something else to exist. Does exist but may not have done.

What is a necessary being (3)

Necessary existence = something that does not rely on anything else to exist. It has to exist.

What is the principle of sufficient reason (3)

No fact can ever be true or existent unless there is a sufficient reason why things are as they are and not otherwise.

What are causal arguments? (3)

1) It can be argued that a chain of cause and effect cannot go back in time forever - a sequence or chain of causes must have a beginning.

2) This can be understood through an analogy involving a train with carriages. The movement of a train cannot be explained by the existence purely of carriages or by an infinite number of carriages (infinite regress).

3) The movement of a train can only be explained by the existence of an engine - something which is clearly different from the carriages and able to create and sustain the movement of the whole train. There needs to be a first cause that is able to provide an explanation for the whole universe.

What are contingency arguments (3)

1) The world (and everything within it) is considered to have contingent existence, whereas only God has necessary existence.

2) For the world to have contingent existence means it must have been brought into existence at a certain point in time by something else (interpreted to be God), unless it is to be considered a brute fact.

3) (Brute fact = something that cannot be explained)

Outline Aquinas' first way (argument from motion) (5)

1.) There are some things in motion or a state of change, for example wood burning into fire.

2.) Nothing can move or change itself.

3.) Imagine if everything moved something else. There would be an infinite regress of movers.

4.) Reductio ad absurdum: if 3 were true then there would be no first mover and hence there would be no subsequent movers.

5.) But this is false

6.) Therefore, there must be an unmoved mover, which is the source of all motion and change.

7.) This is whom we call God

Outline Aquinas' second way (argument from atemporal causation) (5)

1.) There is an order of efficient causes (every event has a cause).

2.) Nothing can be the efficient cause of itself.

3.) Imagine this order of efficient causes going back infinitely - there would be no first cause.

4.) Reductio ad absurdum: if 3 were true then there would be no first cause and hence no subsequent efficient causes.

5.) But this is false.

6.) Therefore, there must be a first cause, the cause of all efficient causes.

7.) This is whom we call God.

What is a temporal cause? (3)

A temporal cause brings about its effect after it - the effect follows the cause in time - and

the effect can continue after the cause ceases. For instance, the cause of my existence is

my parents, and I can continue to exist after they die.

What is an atemporal cause? (3)

An atemporal cause (AKA 'sustaining cause') brings about its effect continuously, and the effect depends on the continued existence and operation of the cause. It operates continuously rather than at a time. That I am sitting on a chair is a continuing state of affairs that has causes, namely the rigidity of the chair.

Outline Aquinas' Third Way (argument from contingency) (5)

1.) Everything in the world is contingent.

Contingency = dependency or 'shelf life'. Eg a forest is contingent on water. Contingent states can be different - if the climate is hotter then there would not be a forest.

2.) Imagine that if everything was contingent there was once a time when everything had not existed.

3.) Reductio ad absurdum: if 2 were true then there would be nothing now as nothing can come from nothing.

4.) Therefore, not everything can be contingent; there must be at least one thing which is necessary.

5.) Everything that is necessary either has the cause of necessity inside itself or outside of itself.

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Imagine every necessary thing has the cause of necessity outside of itself.

6.) Reductio ad absurdum: if 5 were true there would be no ultimate cause of necessity.

7.) Therefore, there must exist a necessary being which causes and sustains all contingent.

8.) This is whom we call God.

Outline the Kalam Cosmological Argument (temporal causation) (5)

A temporal cause brings about its effect after it - the effect follows the cause in time - and

the effect can continue after the cause ceases. For instance, Stonehenge was caused (built) by ancient people but it continues to exist even after they have died.

1) Everything that begins to exist has a cause.

2) The universe has a beginning.

3.) The universe has a cause.

All of the above is a formal deductive a priori syllogism. However, in the next stage of the argument he goes beyond this to make a further claim which provides more detail on the nature of the cause of the universe

4.) The cause of the universe must be God.

Outline the Kalam Cosmological Argument (temporal causation) (12)

The Kalam causal argument states that everything that begins has a cause (rather than everything has a cause). It therefore avoids the criticism, 'What caused God?'

The Kalam argument also understands cause as temporal. This means the cause exists before the effect. It does not exist at the same time as the effect to sustain it. A temporal cause brings about its effect after it - the effect follows the cause in time - and

the effect can continue after the cause ceases. For instance, Stonehenge was caused (built) by ancient people but it continues to exist even after they have died.

It also rejects the claim of Aristotle that the universe always existed. The Islamic philosophers sought to show that the universe could not be infinite using mathematics. Al-Ghazali presented various mathematical paradoxes to try and show that an 'infinite regress' was not coherent.

Craig claims that the universe began with a singular event - the big bang. He goes even further arguing that this cause cannot have a scientific explanation.

Scientific explanations stop at the big bang, but the big bang itself also needs explaining.

The only alternative, according to Craig, is a personal explanation: God.

Outline Descartes causal argument (5)

1.) If I cause my own existence, I would give myself all perfections (omnipotence, omniscience, etc.).

2.) I do not have all perfections.

3.) Therefore, I am not the cause of my existence.

4.) Either what caused me is the cause of its own existence or its existence is caused by another cause.

5.) If its existence is caused by another cause, then its cause is in turn either the cause of its own existence or its existence is caused by another cause.

6.) There cannot be an infinite sequence of causes.

7.) Therefore, some cause must be the cause of its own existence.

8.) What is the cause of its own existence is God.

Outline Leibniz's argument from the principle of sufficient reason (contingency) (5)

1.) No fact can ever be true or existent unless there is a sufficient reason why things are as they are and not otherwise (Principle of Sufficient Reason).

2.) Contingent facts exist.

3.) Contingent facts can only be explained in terms of other contingent facts.

4.) 1-3 cannot be sufficiently explained by any contingent fact within that series.

5.) the sufficient reason for all contingent facts must lie outside this series of contingent facts.

6.) therefore the ultimate reason for facts/things must be a necessary being.

7.) This is whom we call God

Outline the issue of the possibility of an infinite series (5)

1) Aquinas and the Kalam argument claim that there cannot be an infinite series of causes. Also, science shows that an infinite series of causes is impossible, because the universe started with the Big Bang, about 14 billion years ago.

2) However, this can be argued against and it can be claimed that the series of causes and effects goes back and back into infinity. If this universe has a cause, perhaps it was caused by a previous universe, and so on, infinitely. If this can be demonstrated and made convincing then there is no need for God to be proposed as the uncaused cause.

3) One approach attacks Aquinas and says he misunderstands infinity and therefore his rejection of it is wrong.

4) Aquinas argues, in both his First and Second Ways, that if we remove the 'first' cause, no other causes follow.But an infinite chain of causes isn't like a finite chain of causes with the first cause removed. It is simply a chain of causes in which every cause is itself caused.

5) An infinite series of causes doesn't mean that there isn't a 'first cause' in the sense that some effect occurs without a cause. It sounds like Aquinas defends the impossibility of an infinite series of causes on a mistaken idea of infinity.

Explain Hilbert's hotel paradox (5)

1) Suppose there is a hotel with infinite rooms. Even when the hotel

is completely full, it can still take more people!

2) You cannot add any number to infinity and get

a bigger number: ∞ + 1 = ∞.

3) Suppose, when the hotel is full, infinitely more people show up.

4) They can all be accommodated! ∞ + ∞ = ∞.

5) But it is impossible for the hotel to be full and

still have room for more guests. So there cannot be an 'actual' infinity.

Outline Hume's Objection to the 'Causal Principle' (every effect has a cause) (5)

1) One of Hume's challenges to the cosmological argument question the validity of the assumption that existent things need causes or reasons for their existence. The causal principle is the claim that everything has a cause.

2) David Hume argues that it is not analytically true that every effect has a cause.

(Analytic truth = true by definition. 'Bachelors are (analytically) unmarried males'. It is a tautology.

'Every event has a cause' is not analytic as it is not a tautology. Cause and effect are different concepts.)

3) It is possible that something could not have a cause and therefore be created out of nothing.

It is not logically contradictory. This makes it possible. Although we have never experienced this, we equally did not experience the start of the universe and so cannot make assumptions about what might have happened. Cause is not true by experience

4) Hume says that it is not inconceivable that the world had no cause, or just always existed - he says "it is neither intuitively or demonstratively certain" that every object that begins to exist owes its existence to a cause.

5) Hume's reasoning for rejecting that causation exists is as follows: CAUSE is simply the name we give for the habit of seeing one regular event being followed by another.

6) This regular occurrence creates in us a feeling of anticipation the next time we see a similar event. It is this feeling of anticipation which is responsible for concept of causation, not any senses experience.

There is no object called 'cause' that we see, hear, etc.

7) Therefore, causation is a fake or illusory concept as it cannot be traced back to sense experience.

Therefore., we cannot say sense experience shows us that 'every effect has a cause.'

What is a fallacy of composition? (3)

The logical error of arguing that, because every member of a group

has a property in common, the group taken as a whole also possesses that same property.

Outline the issue that the Argument Commits the Fallacy of Composition (Hume) (5)

1) The logical error of arguing that, because every member of a group

has a property in common, the group taken as a whole also possesses that same property.

2) Hume argues that it is sufficient to know the cause of parts of the universe. We do not need to know the cause of the entire world because the explanation is contained with the parts:

3) He gives the example of a collection of twenty particles. If an explanation is found for each particle individually he says it would be wrong to then seek an explanation for the whole collection, because you have already explained it by explaining each particle.

4) 'The cause of the whole is sufficiently explained by explaining the cause of parts'.

5) If we know what causes parts of the universe (eg why a river exists) we have a full explanation of the universe. It is a mistake to think the whole of the universe needs a cause on top of this. The whole of the universe is simply a collection of the parts, not something different

Outline the issue that the Argument Commits the Fallacy of Composition (Russell) (5)

1) Russell argues that a whole explanation is not necessary to explain the cause of the world and a partial explanation is satisfactory.

2) To look for a whole explanation, he says, is 'something which can't be got and which one ought not to expect to get'. He says the world is simply 'without explanation... the universe is just there, and that's all'.

3) To explain this position he uses an example of the fallacy of composition: Every man who exists has a mother, and it seems to me your argument is that therefore the human race must have a mother, but obviously the human race hasn't a mother.

4) P1. Every individual human who exists has a mother.

P2. The human species is composed of these individual humans.

C. Therefore the whole species must have a mother.

5) In this example, 'having a mother' is the property common to all individual humans, and from this we can infer that 'having a mother' is a property of the human species as a whole. This conclusion is clearly false.

6) For Russell, cosmological arguments have the same form as the 'mother argument' and are guilty of the same fallacy.

7) P1. Every event that happened has a cause.

P2. The universe is composed of all these individual events.

C1. Therefore the universe as a whole must have a cause.

8) Just because individual events require an explanation/cause, we cannot conclude that the universe itself also has this same property (requiring an explanation/cause).

Outline the issue of The Impossibility of a Necessary Being (Hume) (5)

(Analytic - known by simply analysing the meaning of words in the proposition

(opposite of synthetic - anything else)

Necessary - something which has to be the case / has to be true

(opposite of contingent - dependent on something else to be the case / to be true))

1) Hume: Only analytic statements are statements are necessary.

'A bachelor (subject) is an unmarried man (predicate)'. Change the predicate to its opposite: A bachelor is a married man. Since this proposition is self-contradictory (it is asserting an unmarried man is a married man), then the original was a necessary proposition (because it was analytic)

2) Hume: No existential statement (a statement about something's existence) is necessary.

3) This is because existential statements are not analytic.

4) It is always possible to conceive the opposite of an existential statement

5) Therefore, 'God exists' is not necessary.

(Contingency Cosmological Arguments therefore fail as they assume a necessary being exists.)

6) Therefore, Hume rejects the notion of necessary existence as having 'no meaning' because; 'it will always be possible for us at any time to conceive the non-existence of something we formerly conceived to exist'.

Outline the issue of The Impossibility of a Necessary Being (Russell) (5)

1) Russell argues that there is no such thing as a necessary being. He says it is 'meaningless' and 'impossible' because the only necessary things are those for which it would be 'self-contradictory to deny', as is the case with analytic statements.

2) The existence of God is not analytic. Therefore, it is not self-contradictory to say He does not exist.

3) Russell rejects the cosmological argument because he believes the claim that God is a necessary being is false.

4) If we want to avoid infinite regress we do not need to look beyond the universe. We do not need a supernatural cause. To say only God can be necessary is a 'theological insistence'. The believer might say 'but what caused the universe?' Russell says the same could be asked of God.

5) 'If there can be anything without a cause, it may just as well be the world as God, so that there cannot be any validity in that argument... The idea that things must have a beginning is really due to the poverty of our imagination.'