What is the cosmological argument?

Question 60099.

The cosmological argument begins with a question that turns out to be remarkably resistant to any answer that does not involve God: why is there something rather than nothing? The universe exists. Matter, energy, space and time exist. Where did they come from, and why is there anything at all to ask the question about?

This is not a piece of theological trickery invented to smuggle God into a conversation. It is a question that has occupied Plato, Aristotle, the medieval Islamic philosophers, Aquinas, Leibniz and a good many contemporary physicists who have no religious commitments whatever.

The Basic Shape of the Cosmological Argument

In its simplest form the cosmological argument runs like this. Everything that begins to exist has a cause. The universe began to exist. Therefore the universe has a cause. If the argument is sound, the conclusion follows whether we like it or not.

Notice the care in the first premise. It is not that everything has a cause, which would immediately invite the question of what caused God. It is that everything which begins to exist has a cause, and an eternal being does not begin to exist. Whether that is special pleading depends on whether there are independent reasons for thinking a necessary being possible, and there are.

Behind the cosmological argument lies a more basic intuition that we all rely on constantly, and which Psalm 33:6-9 assumes throughout. Things do not pop into existence out of nothing for no reason. If a horse appeared in your kitchen this evening you would look for an explanation, and you would not be satisfied with the answer that it simply came from nothing.

The Kalam Version

The kalam cosmological argument, developed by medieval Islamic thinkers and revived in modern philosophy, focuses on the impossibility of an actual infinite regress. If the past were infinite, we would have had to traverse an infinite number of moments to arrive at today, and an infinite series cannot be completed by successive addition.

Modern cosmology has been unexpectedly friendly to this argument. The evidence for an expanding universe with a finite past, the Borde-Guth-Vilenkin theorem, and the thermodynamic argument that a universe of infinite age would already have reached heat death all point the same way. The universe appears to have had a beginning.

That was not the expected result. The steady state model was preferred by several twentieth century physicists partly because a universe with a beginning looked uncomfortably like a universe with a Creator, and one of them said so in print.

What the Cause Would Have to Be Like

This is the step people usually miss, and it is the interesting one. The argument does not stop at a bare cause; it tells you something about the character of that cause. Whatever brought space, time and matter into existence cannot itself be spatial, temporal or material.

So the cause must be immaterial, outside time, and of enormous power. It must also, on a further step, be personal. An impersonal set of eternal conditions would produce its effect eternally, since nothing would ever change to start the process. Only an agent with will can bring about a new effect without a prior change in the conditions.

Immaterial, timeless, immensely powerful, personal and the cause of everything else. That is not proof of the God of the Bible, and I would not claim it is. But it is a considerable distance from nothing, and it is remarkably close to the opening line of Genesis. See how creation reveals God.

Common Objections

The first and most popular is what caused God. As noted above, the premise concerns things that begin to exist. A being who exists necessarily, without beginning, is not a candidate for a cause. You can dispute whether such a being is possible, and that is a real philosophical discussion, but the objection as usually stated misses the argument.

The second is that quantum mechanics gives us uncaused events, since virtual particles appear in a vacuum. The difficulty is that a quantum vacuum is not nothing. It is a physical field with structure, energy and laws, and something arising from a structured physical field is not something arising from nothing at all.

The third is the multiverse. Perhaps ours is one of countless universes, and no explanation is needed. Set aside that the evidence is currently absent; the proposal does not solve the problem. A multiverse generating mechanism is itself something rather than nothing, and the original question simply moves one floor up.

What the Argument Does Not Do

I want to be careful here, because overclaiming does more harm than underclaiming. The cosmological argument does not give you the Trinity, the incarnation, or the forgiveness of sins. Nobody has ever been converted by a syllogism, and I would not want them to be.

What it does is clear away the assumption that belief in God is intellectually disreputable. It shows that the question of why anything exists has no comfortable naturalistic answer, and that the theistic answer is at least as rational as its competitors and arguably more so.

Scripture itself does not argue for God’s existence; it assumes it and holds people responsible for suppressing what they already know. Romans 1:20 says His invisible attributes have been clearly perceived in the things that have been made. The cosmological argument is best understood as putting into philosophical form something Paul says everyone already senses.

Using It Well in Conversation

I would rarely lead with this argument, and never in a form that sounds like a courtroom cross examination. It works best as a question asked with genuine curiosity: what do you think is the explanation for there being anything at all?

Most people have never been asked, and the honest ones will say they do not know. That is a much better place to be standing together than at opposite ends of a debate, and it opens the way to talk about the character of whatever the answer is.

From there the conversation can move to where it needs to go, which is a person rather than a proposition. The God who is the cause of the universe is the God who walked into it, and that is a claim you can investigate historically. See the teleological argument and the moral argument for the companion cases.

A Word About Certainty

No argument of this kind delivers mathematical proof, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. What the cosmological argument delivers is a strong inference to the best explanation, which is the same kind of reasoning we use in history, medicine and law every day.

That should not disappoint us. We do not demand deductive certainty before boarding an aeroplane or trusting a spouse, and a demand for it in this one area is usually a way of avoiding the question rather than answering it.

What Scripture offers is not certainty in advance but a Person who can be tested. Taste and see that the LORD is good, says the psalmist, and that is an experimental invitation. See are faith and reason opposed.

Leibniz and the Question of Sufficient Reason

There is a second family within the cosmological argument that does not depend on the universe having a beginning at all, and it is worth knowing because it survives if the physics changes. Gottfried Leibniz asked why there is something rather than nothing, and answered with the principle of sufficient reason: everything that exists has an explanation, either in the necessity of its own nature or in an external cause.

Apply that to the universe. Either the universe exists necessarily, or it has an external explanation. Almost nobody thinks the universe exists necessarily, since we can easily conceive of it being different or not existing at all. So it has an external explanation, and that explanation cannot itself be part of the universe.

The strength of this version is that it works even for an eternal universe. You can have a chain of causes running back for ever and still have no explanation for why there is a chain rather than nothing. An infinite row of books does not explain why there are books. See Hebrews 11:3.

What the Cosmological Argument Has Achieved

It is worth noting how the intellectual situation has shifted in the past century, because the story is usually told the other way round. In 1900 the confident position was that the universe had always existed and needed no explanation. Bertrand Russell said in his debate with Copleston that the universe is just there, and that is all.

That position is now much harder to hold. The evidence for a cosmic beginning came from observation rather than from theology, and it came as a surprise to those who found it. Fred Hoyle coined the phrase big bang as a term of derision precisely because a universe with a birthday sounded suspiciously religious.

So the cosmological argument stands on firmer ground now than it did when Russell dismissed it, and it did so without any help from believers. That is not proof of anything, but it is a reminder that confident scientific opinion has moved in this area before and may do so again.

So, now what?

Learn the argument well enough to state it in three sentences without notes. Everything that begins to exist has a cause. The universe began to exist. Therefore the universe has a cause, and that cause must be immaterial, timeless, powerful and personal. That is enough to hold a conversation with almost anyone.

Then remember what it is for. The cosmological argument removes an obstacle; it does not save anybody. When it has done its work, the question to ask is not whether a first cause exists but whether that first cause has spoken. And if He has, what are you going to do about it?

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.

Genesis 1:1 (ESV)