Cosmological argument

Xenophanes A watch doesn’t exist out of nothing. Someone had to create the pieces than mend them together. There must have been a creator the one that makes the watch just as the universe has a creator. The universe didn’t just come from existence there had to be something that made the universe. Xenophanes a wondering poet and philosopher born in Colophon, around the year 570 B.C. believed in one and only one divine God that created the universe. He claimed to neglect the Olympian gods because…

Samuel Clark provides a convincing demonstration in Section (IV) where establishes the existence of an independent and unchangeable being that has always existed. He believes that there are two options when it comes to the explanation of how things have come to be. The first, is his acceptable premise that a “being has always existed in some one unchangeable, and independent” form. (p. 10) The other premise is that “there has been an infinite succession of unchangeable and dependent beings,…

way “Efficient Cause.” In this proof, Aquinas states that everything is caused or created by other things. He states that every effect has a cause and that cause is an effect of another cause, and so on and so forth. An example to help explain his argument is a coffee table. The creator of a coffee table is the builder or the carpenter. (The cause is the carpenter and the effect was the coffee table). The parents had created the carpenter (The cause is the parents and the effect is the…

Aquinas formed The Third Argument on Contingency, he believed that since the universe could have once not existed, there had to be a causable explanation for its existence. if everything in the world proceeds to be contingent than how could anything exist in the first place? Portraying that there had to be a necessity or nessasary being that was the cause of all these contingent things. Could it be god? I very much agree with aquinas, the world we live in is in a very cause and effect manner.…

Freedom vs Causality In the argument of freedom vs. causality, causality follows the laws of nature, which implies that nothing happens without cause, in other words meaning, life as we know it is just one big cycle of cause and effect. Freedom, on the other hand, allows for spontaneity, meaning not every effect has a prior cause, thus allowing for new events to occur. So, the argument, or rather question, is: which one of these is true…freedom, or causality? With freedom comes free will, a…

The Ontological argument, written by philosopher St. Anselm of Canterbury in his book the Proslogion in the eleventh century, is a metaphysical argument for the existence of God in reality. In this essay I will discuss the validity of this argument. In this text Anselm states that the concept of God has the necessary and sufficient condition of being maximally perfect- ‘that than which a greater cannot be thought’- and that, since existing in reality is greater than existing only conceptually,…

Edwards, by not denying the existence of God (even if God is not the first cause), one does not reduce the argument to the non existence of everything. Furthermore, according to Edwards, if an infinite regress is impossible, then it doesn’t mean there were not many different first causes or that the first cause is still in existence. Edwards distinguishes, on behalf of defenders of Aquinas’ argument, between “causes in fieri” and “causes in esse”. A “cause in fieri” is a direct cause of an…

Descartes’ argument regarding the claims of the existence of God. There are philosophers who claim Descartes commits to a belief that has no foundation and because his argument is circular it holds no weight. There are also philosophers who defend Descartes and claim that he does not commit himself to a foundationless belief and that what seems circular isn’t actually circular. I will be supporting the latter argument and I will show that Descartes doesn’t consign to a circular argument but…

that everything has a chain of cause and effect. That these cause point to a “first efficient cause, which all call God”(72). The third proof for the existence of God is “the natures of the merely possible and necessary”(72). Aquinas’ uses this argument to argue that “not all things are mere accidents, but there must be one necessarily existing being”(73).With this Aquinas seems to be stating that there is a cause and purpose for all things, and that nothing just randomly happened, like some…

proof for the existence of God he approaches it with the concept of motion. But looking deeper it really is about the issue of actuality and potentiality which Aristotle also used to analyze motion. This proof reminds us that things are in motion and move when potential motion or ‘possibility’ becomes actual motion. This is very similar to Aristotle’s explanation of motion defined as “actuality of a potentiality.” Next Aquinas tell us that only an actual motion can turn potential motion into…