12 Facts About Cosmological argument

Cosmological argument, in natural theology, is an argument which claims that the existence of God can be inferred from facts concerning causation, explanation, change, motion, contingency, dependency, or finitude with respect to the universe or some totality of objects.

The history of this Cosmological argument goes back to Aristotle or earlier, was developed in Neoplatonism and early Christianity and later in medieval Islamic theology during the 9th to 12th centuries, and was re-introduced to medieval Christian theology in the 13th century by Thomas Aquinas.

The cosmological argument is closely related to the principle of sufficient reason as addressed by Gottfried Leibniz and Samuel Clarke, itself a modern exposition of the claim that "nothing comes from nothing" attributed to Parmenides.

Cosmological argument argued that the fact of existence could not be inferred from or accounted for by the essence of existing things, and that form and matter by themselves could not originate and interact with the movement of the Universe or the progressive actualization of existing things.

Cosmological argument says that to deny causation is to deny all empirical ideas – for example, if we know our own hand, we know it because of the chain of causes including light being reflected upon one's eyes, stimulating the retina and sending a message through the optic nerve into your brain.

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An infinite regress Cosmological argument is an Cosmological argument against a theory based on the fact that this theory leads to an infinite regress.

The regress relevant for the cosmological argument is the regress of causes: an event occurred because it was caused by another event that occurred before it, which was itself caused by a previous event, and so on.

Once the viciousness of the regress of causes is established, the cosmological argument can proceed to its positive conclusion by holding that it is necessary to posit a first cause in order to avoid it.

One objection to the Cosmological argument is that it leaves open the question of why the first cause is unique in that it does not require any causes.

Opponents of the Cosmological argument tend to argue that it is unwise to draw conclusions from an extrapolation of causality beyond experience.

The Kalam and the Thomistic cosmological argument posit that there cannot be an actual infinite regress of causes, therefore there must be an uncaused first cause that is beginningless and does not require a cause.

Some cosmologists and physicists argue that a challenge to the cosmological argument is the nature of time: "One finds that time just disappears from the Wheeler–DeWitt equation".