cosmological argument

Leibniz explaining sufficient reason

“The sufficient reason… is found in a substance which is a necessary being, bearing the reason for its existence within itself.”

Leibniz central question

“why is there something, rather than nothing”

Aquinas justifying a necessary being

"Because not everything can be dependent, there must be a being that exists necessarily and that necessary being is God."

Leibniz necessity for the PSR

“No fact can be real or existing and no statement true without a sufficient reason why it is so and not otherwise.”

Russel and brute fact

“I shall say the universe is there and that’s all”

hume against special pleading

“Why may not the material universe be the necessary existent being?”

russell against special pleading

I see no reason why the world could not have come into being without a cause.

Hume on the regress of cause and effect

But this does not prove, that every being must be preceded by a cause; no more than it follows, because every husband must have a wife, that therefore every man must be married”

Hume against a necessary being

"Whatever we conceive as existent, we can also conceive as non-existent. There is no being, therefore, whose non-existence implies a contradiction. Consequently there is no being who contradiction is demonstrable"​

hume’s anything causes anything critique

"Creation, annihilation, motion, volition; all these may arise from one another, or from any other object we can imagine."​

Al-Ghazali on kalam

“every being which begins has a cause for its beginning ; now the world is a being which begins, therefore it possesses a cause for its beginning”

Hume against something coming out of nothing

"Why can't a bicycle of Beethoven appear out of nothing?"