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The Cosmological Argument is Self-contradictory Essay

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The Cosmological Argument, also known as the First Cause Argument, is one of the most important arguments for the existence of God, not only because it is one of the more convincing, but also because it is one of the most used. The thought that everything that happens must have a cause and that the first cause of everything must have been God, is widespread. The cosmological argument is the argument from the existence of the world or universe to the existence of a being that brought it into and keeps it in existence. The idea that the universe has an infinite past, stretching back in time into infinity is both philosophically and scientifically problematic. All indications are that there is a …show more content…

But it is not that simple. I would not be here without billions of causes, from the Big Bang through the cooling of the galaxies and the evolution of the protein molecule to the marriages of my ancestors. The universe is a vast and complex chain of causes. But does the universe as a whole have a cause? Is there a first cause, an uncaused cause, and a transcendent cause of the whole chain of causes? If so, then there is an eternal, necessary, independent, self-explanatory being with nothing above it, before it, or supporting it. It would have to explain itself as well as everything else, for if it needed something else as its explanation, its reason, its cause, then it would not be the first and uncaused cause. Such a being would have to be God, of course. If we can prove there is such a first cause, we will have proved there is a God. If, on the one hand, God were thought to have a cause of his existence, then positing the existence of God in order to explain the existence of the universe wouldn't get us anywhere. Without God there would be one entity the existence of which we could not explain, namely the universe; with God there would be one entity the existence of which we could not explain, namely God. Positing the existence of God, then, would introduce as many problems as it solved, and so the cosmological argument would leave us in no

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