Feser on the cosmological argument and the beginning of the universe

The cosmological argument: dominoes in a series of simultaneous causation, not causation extended in time.

From Ed Feser's great post on the pitiful lack of insight by atheists on the cosmological argument for God's existence. Feser points out that the most common atheist 'retorts' to the cosmological argument are nonsense, and serve merely to point out the philosophical illiteracy or mere intellectual laziness of atheists.


As a primer, my earlier post on Aquinas' First Way, which is one version of the cosmological argument, is here.

Feser:

3. “Why assume that the universe had a beginning?” is not a serious objection to the argument.

The reason this is not a serious objection is that no version of the cosmological argument assumes this at all. Of course, the kalām cosmological argument does claim that the universe had a beginning, but it doesn’t merely assume it. Rather, the whole point of that version of the cosmological argument is to establish through detailed argument that the universe must have had a beginning. You can try to rebut those arguments, but to pretend that one can dismiss the argument merely by raising the possibility of an infinite series of universes (say) is to miss the whole point.

The main reason this is a bad objection, though, is that most versions of the cosmological argument do not even claim that the universe had a beginning. Aristotelian, Neo-Platonic, Thomistic, and Leibnizian cosmological arguments are all concerned to show that there must be an uncaused cause even if the universe has always existed. Of course, Aquinas did believe that the world had a beginning, but (as all Aquinas scholars know) that is not a claim that plays any role in his versions of the cosmological argument. When he argues there that there must be a First Cause, he doesn’t mean “first” in the order of events extending backwards into the past. What he means is that there must be a most fundamental cause of things which keeps them in existence at every moment, whether or not the series of moments extends backwards into the past without a beginning.

In fact, Aquinas rather famously rejected what is now known as thekalām argument. He did not think that the claim that the universe had a beginning could be established through philosophical arguments. He thought it could be known only via divine revelation, and thus was not suitable for use in trying to establish God’s existence. (Here, by the way, is another basic test of competence to speak on this subject. Any critic of the Five Ways who claims that Aquinas was trying to show that the universe had a beginning and that God caused that beginning – as Richard Dawkins does in his comments on the Third Way in The God Delusion – infallibly demonstrates thereby that he simply doesn’t know what he is talking about.)

Feser observes that the 'cause' invoked in the cosmological argument is not the cause of a temporal beginning of the universe, but the cause for the existence of the universe at every moment, including now. The dominoes of the cosmological argument are a arrayed in a string of simultaneous causation, not causation extended in time. It addresses 'cause' as the reason for existence of each thing at every moment, not 'cause' of the first thing in a temporal sequence. Aquinas and nearly all others who formulated important versions of the cosmological argument assumed a universe eternal in the past.

The cosmological argument has nothing-- nothing-- to do with the Big Bang.

Nearly all atheist 'retorts' to the cosmological argument get this rudimentary part of the argument wrong. They understand nothing of the actual argument, and nothing even of its premises.