A Cosmological Argument?

While this is not directly associated with philosophy I have been cruising the net reading while taking a break from writing the Essay. With that said one of the greatest aspects of this class which I feel I will retain for a life time is the notion of philosophical ideals vs. religious ideal. Lets face it philosophy has been around for centuries as with religion. Christianity bears the greatest comparisons to the philosophy of Aristotle, examples can be found in Aristotle's view of Virtue and the adoption of the 7 Cardinal Virtues and Sins. Aside from this comparison one area that is extremely intriguing in retrospect would be that of the origin of the world, the cosmological argument. This class has presented us with many origins and my religious and scientific background as well has presented several origins to our existence as well. But one thing that many various arguments that aim to prove or disprove is the likelihood of there being a God of theistic nature. In my head the true instance of the Cosmological Argument was found in the words of two ancient philosophers, Aristotle and Plato. Though these two were very well known, major strides in the argument were not made until the thirteenth and eighteenth centuries. I take great emphasis in the cosmological argument as one of my favorite theologians presents the most rationalized beliefs to the argument.

Thomas Aquinas developed the “argument from contingency”, siding with Aristotle in claiming that there has to be something that serves as an explanation for the earth's existence. He queried that the earth's existence couldn't be explained by another “contingent” being; thus there had to be something that created the earth that didn't have some sort of “proceeding” agent before it. By “contingent” beings, Aquinas was referring to beings that depend on someone or something else in order to exist.

It would then be logical for there to have been some sort of beginning to the chain of contingent beings, someone that doesn't depend on another in order to exist. This is Aquinas's first part of the Cosmological Argument.

One interesting part of this argument is that it is made upon an “empirical premise” (evidence that is based upon observational data). In this sense, since the argument was made on an observation about the world, it can be referred to as an “a posteriori” argument. This argument differs from a similar argument; “a priori”, which is begun with a concept. In Aquinas's second part of the argument, he states that many things in the world were obviously created by other things; therefore there must be some being out there that wasn't created by something else, by logic.

Finally, Aquinas's third part entailed that throughout the world, there are things that seem to have no purpose, and could easily not exist at all. Aquinas reasons that because of this, there has to be something that doesn't fail to exist and has always been. Many claim that even if these points made hold true, they do not serve to prove the existence of the “theistic God” of Christian theology. This can be defended by the fact that there two parts of the Cosmological Argument; one, that there exists a being that does not depend on anything to exist, and two, that this being has the features that the theistic God exhibits.