Assessing the Cosmological Argument

Explaining The Cosmological Argument

Throughout the centuries, there have been many different versions of the cosmological argument. Aristotle's proof was an early version proposing that there must be one purely actual cause of the existence of things.¹ Thomas Aquinas's argument was similar and proposed that the only way to account for our existence is that we are being caused to exist by something whose very essence is existence itself - God.² Though there are subtle differences, in general they all share the same core argument: that God (or something like God) must have caused the existence of the universe. The argument can be structured around questions like:

• Why is there anything at all?
• Why do things continue to exist?
• If the universe has a beginning, what is the cause of that beginning?

The Kalam Cosmological Argument, a more modern version of the classic argument, provides a succinct statement of the argument:

• The universe began to exist
• Whatever begins to exist has a cause
• Therefore, the universe has a cause³

Common conclusions of this argument state that because this cause must be outside of space and time, it must be immutable, eternal, immaterial, perfect, omnipotent, and omniscient. These are typical descriptions of God.⁴

There are relationships to other arguments for the existence of God, like the Anthropic Principle (fine tuning argument), but here we will keep our scope focused on the Cosmological Argument as much as possible.

Exploring Previous Thought

Most ancient cultures thought of the world as experiencing repeating cycles rather than having a fixed beginning. There is evidence for this in ancient Chinese, Indian, Middle-Eastern, Mayan and Greek cultures. It was the arrival of the Judeo-Christian beliefs that challenged this and contributed to the dominant world view in modern European cultures that holds fundamentally that "God created the universe at a specific moment in the past, and that subsequent events form an unfolding unidirectional sequence."⁵ Because of this, there is a deep sense in Western culture that something must have started or created the universe and that the cause must be outside the scope of scientific inquiry - that it must be supernatural.⁶

For much of the modern scientific era, scientists generally believed in an eternal cosmos, however the impact of gravity and the fact that physical systems undergo irreversible change at a finite rate complicate this. The second law of thermodynamics imprints upon the universe an arrow of time, showing the universe is moving towards uniformity or heat death. This discovery, that the universe is expanding, forms the basis of the big-bang theory. A conclusion of the logic and implications of this theory is that "at some finite instant in the past the universe of space, time, and matter is bounded by a space-time singularity". In other words, space, time and matter all began with the Big-Bang.⁷

Physicists James Hartle and Stephen Hawking argued that the dimension of time becomes more like another dimension of space the further back in time we go toward the Big Bang. They conclude that this implies there is no origin of the universe, not that it is infinitely old, but that time has no past boundary. This opens the possibility that the universe's existence does not require anything outside of it.⁸ Additionally, like many others, Astronomer Carl Sagan had also asked the question "that if God created the universe, then who created God?" It is not immediately obvious that the universe needs a cause but that God doesn't.⁹ This argument implies that if everything needs a cause, including the universe, then we should expect there to be an infinite string of causes. This infinite regress is illustrated by the famous "Turtles all the way down" expression. Here the world is thought to rest on the back of a turtle, and when asked about what that turtle is resting on, the answer is given that it rests on another turtle, which rests on another, ad infinitum. It's turtles all the way down.

Philosopher and theologian David Bentley Hart advocates for the need for an infinite, unconditional being that sustains the existence of all other things: In short, all finite things are always, in the present, being sustained in existence by conditions that they cannot have supplied for themselves, and that together compose a universe that, as a physical reality, lacks the obviously supernatural power necessary to exist on its own... There must then be some truly unconditioned reality (which, by definition, cannot be temporal or spatial or in any sense finite) upon which all else depends; otherwise nothing could exist at all. And it is this unconditioned and eternally sustaining source of being that classical metaphysics, East and West, identifies as God... And God, therefore, is the creator of all things not as the first temporal agent in cosmic history (which would make him not the prime cause of creation but only the initial secondary cause within it), but as the eternal reality in which “all things live, and move, and have their being”¹⁰

If God is invoked as an explanation for the physical universe, then this explanation cannot be in terms of familiar cause and effect. Some suggest it should be more analogous to an author of a book being both the creator and sustainer of the story.¹¹ As C. S. Lewis put it "God is not hurried along in the Time-stream of this universe any more than an author is hurried along in the imaginary time of his own novel."¹²

Employing Method

Assessing the Cosmological Argument from the empirical point of view is challenging, if not impossible. This is because empirical data is, by definition, within time and space. We literally cannot observe what is outside our own experience in the three dimensions of space and one dimension of time. However, science can take us pretty far in estimating the age of the universe since the Big Bang and what the universe was probably like near the beginning.

There is essentially a unanimous understanding amongst scientists that the universe has been expanding since the Big Bang roughly 14 billion years ago.¹³ This is based on several scientific observations including:

• Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation - leftover heat from the early universe glowing in all directions
• Redshift - light from distant galaxies is stretched to redder wavelengths because of the expansion of space
• Abundance of light elements matches what we'd expect from the universe's theoretical early state
• Hubble's Law - galaxies are moving away from each other

Additionally, while we may never have scientific evidence of what happened before the Big Bang, there is a lot of speculation including the following ideas:

• That time makes a U-turn at the beginning of the Big Bang or that time has no past boundary
• That our universe was spawned from a different universe, potentially even with different physical laws
• That the universe follows a cycle of expansion and collapse, and the potential that it has always been

However, a key point is that even with these possibilities of what happened before the Big Bang, there is still the question of what caused the universe and all possible previous forms to exist in the first place. The scientific explanations of the Big Bang simply push the metaphysical question a layer further out. In his book, The Mind of God, physicist Paul Davies reasons "If one perseveres with the principle of sufficient reason and demands a rational explanation for nature, then we have no choice but to seek that explanation in something beyond or outside the physical world - in something metaphysical - because, as we have seen, a contingent physical universe cannot contain within itself an explanation for itself."¹⁴ Empirical data will only get us so far, so we must use reason and logic to better assess the strength of the argument.

Some may argue either that the universe just is or that it doesn't require an explanation or cause. This would imply that there is a fallacy of composition in the first statement of the Cosmological Argument and that the logic that everything must have a cause may not necessarily apply to the universe itself the way that it applies to everything within the universe. This is a fair objection to the Cosmological Argument, however, Hart eloquently argues "Reason seems to dictate that there cannot be an endless regress of purely contingent causes of existence. If this regress were infinite it would never be reducible back to an actual beginning. Such an infinite regress would therefore be equivalent to nonexistence. At some point, then, at the source of all sources and origin of all origins, the contingent must rest upon the absolute."¹⁵ He explains that most cosmological arguments made by classical philosophers utilize the principle of causality, which states that all things that do not possess the cause of their existence in themselves must be brought into existence by something outside themselves. The Philosopher Edward Feser states a similar argument based on Aristotelian inspiration: that everything that changes has a cause, but this hierarchical series of causes cannot be infinite but must terminate in one initial "purely actual" cause. This cause cannot itself be capable of change which has the following consequences:

• It would be immutable
• It cannot exist inside of time, so it is eternal
• It cannot be material, so it is immaterial

Additionally, as the initial cause, it is the source of all power, so it is omnipotent and because nothing can be outside of its thoughts or knowledge, it is omniscient. ¹⁶ Only with these qualities could this cause be the reality upon which material, temporal, changing, composite, and conditional things can exist. This addresses the question of "who made God?" or the infinite stack of turtles because it explains that the concept of a infinite being that not only initiates but also sustains the universe would be sufficiently different from just another link in an infinite chain of causes. The idea of God in this description is the infinite thing upon and within which finite things can exist.

Though there are various versions of the argument, the core point that something beyond the universe created the universe and sustains it is logical and extremely compelling. Additionally, the argument appeals most strongly to our intuition. It is such a foundational concept that it's likely most of us have asked the question ourselves "how did the universe begin?" or "why is there something rather than nothing?" I find the idea that something or someone had to create the universe very compelling. It is actually very difficult for me to imagine nothing, much less something emerging out of nothing. However I recognize that just because it is hard for me to imagine, does not mean that something could not be.

As I see it, there are two possibilities:

1. The universe had no cause or beginning in the way we would think of it. In this view, it may be eternal, having always existed, or it has been apart of an infinite cycle of universes, or something similar, but the key in this possibility is that it had no other cause. I will group into this view the idea that what caused the universe was also caused by something else, creating an infinite series of causes. The implications are essentially the same. For this to be true, our intuition that everything must have a cause must be incorrect. Additionally, this would imply that an infinite being like God is not necessary.
2. God, or something with the attributes we think of God having, including omniscience, omnipotence, and immateriality, created and sustains the universe.

This argument deals with concepts that are likely outside the limit of human knowledge. It also goes without saying that I could be wrong and there is tremendous uncertainty as we have so few tools to assess truth in this area as we can't make observations about it directly. Even so, I find it very likely (>90%) that there is a God who created and sustains the universe and, to me, it follows logically that this cause or being is immutable, eternal, immaterial, omnipotent and omniscient.

Though this is one of the stronger arguments for God's existence and integral to the conversation, it doesn't indicate whether God set everything in motion and let it go (Deism) or if he is actively involved in the world he created (Theism). Additionally, this doesn't indicate the God of any given religion, including Christianity. This is just one component in a larger study of God's existence which I will explore more in other sections.

¹Edward Feser, Five Proofs of the Existence of God (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 2017), 37.

²Richard G. Howe, "What Are the Classical Proofs for God's Existence?" in The Comprehensive Guide to Apologetics, ed. Joseph M. Holden (Eugene, OR: Harvest House Publishers, 2018), 84-85.

³Howe, 83-84.

⁴Feser, 37.

⁵Paul Davies, The Mind of God: The Scientific Basis for a Rational World (New York, NY: Touchstone, 1992), 40-41.

⁶Davies, 39.

⁷Davies, 45-50.

⁸Davies, 61-68.

⁹Carl Sagan, The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God (New York, NY: Penguin Books, 2007), 155.

¹⁰David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,2013), 105-106. ¹¹Davies, 58.

¹²C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York, NY: HarperCollins, 2001), 168.

¹³Francis S. Collins, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief (New York, NY: Free Press, 2006), 64.

¹⁴Davies, 171.

¹⁵Hart, 101.

¹⁶Feser 34-37.