[Mr. Moon] Cosmological Argument

Cosmological Argument

Samuel Seung Min Kim (111021, 10b1)

The root of the word “God” comes from the Sanskrit vocabulary “hūta,” which stands for “to invoke, to call.” Indeed, to most Christians, God is the one who “invoked” and “called” the universe into life. And one of the most important tasks that theologists have been holding ever since the creation of Christianity was to logically prove the existence of the “invoker of the universe.” Out of the tens and thousands of theories and arguments proposed for verifying the presence of god, the Cosmological Argument is acknowledged by most philosophers for possessing a firm logic.

According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, the Cosmological Argument, proposed by the genius philosopher Thomas Aquinas, has its base on the logic that every existing thing has its cause for existence and that there is no omission in the cause-effect linkage amongst existing things. So since every single thing on Earth has its cause for “being there,” the universe must have an origin that caused its formation, named God. Such meticulous explanation based on the endless reign of causality bond was indeed more than enough to nod the heads of contemporary skeptics. However, viewing the Cosmological Argument as a citizen of a world nine hundred years after its birth, it is not hard to cast doubts and find the holes inside the logic of the theologists.

The first problem with Aquinas’ logic comes from the fact that not every existing things have their causes for existence. Back in the 1200s when scholasticism philosophers developed the Cosmological Argument, they were unaware of the concept of “time travel.” However, in 1905, as Albert Einstein invented the Relativity Theory, the gates of possibility for moving back and forth in time widely opened. In other words, a person from the future could possibly “rewind” the time and erase the thing that originally caused its existence. In such cases, there is no longer a cause that brought about its existence, and the link between the cause and the effect that was assumed to be solid is now broken.

Furthermore, another question arouses from the absence of the origin of the “origin of the universe.” In short, if the causality link is infinite, who created the God, then? Until now, the philosophers have not been successful in providing an adequate explanation on why the reign of causality has to stop at God’s turn. Plus, there’s a lack of logical evidence to prove that things will work as they do for things around us (that everything has causes and effects) when the causality link gets near the origin of the universe.

The Cosmological Argument is indeed a great work of logic and variations are still being fervently formulated by numerous philosophers. However, a fundamental problem lies in the argument: that it is outdated. The advent of high level technology was not put into consideration by the scholasticism philosophers, consequently making premises that were scientifically wrong from its very first beginning of formation.