Research Task:
Find out about the relevance of your philosopher/physicist to the Cosmological Argument. Do you think they would support or oppose it and why?
There is a Niels Bohr example below.
RMPS revision
A site for Scottish students of Religious, Moral and Philosophical Studies (Philosophy too).
Niels Bohr won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1922. In his obituary The Times called him the ‘leading spirit’ in the study of Quantum Physics which has shaken physics to its very foundations. Quantum Physics is the academic study that considers sub-atomic particles and tries to account for how they behave. The relevance of this to the cosmological argument is that he discovered that these particles often seem to come in and out of existence. This of course would undermine one of the premise of the argument. Whether Quantum Physics can answer ‘why is there something rather than nothing?’ is still being debated.
The Big Bang was an explosion that happened 13.7 million years ago that created all of space and time, when the explosion happened the universe was extremely hot and very dense, and it expanded rapidly. After the initial explosion the universe cooled alot and energy was converted into particles, then converted into protons neutrons electrons. It kept expanding (even today) and is also cooling (even today).
David Hume Objection to Cosmological Argument
He thinks that it is okay to explain the whole by explaining each of the parts. So by explaining where each of the parts of the universe came from, you can explain where the whole universe came from. Hume thinks it is unreasonable to have to try to explain where the whole universe came from.
Kant Objection to Cosmological Argument
He thinks that the conclusion is contradictory because for it to be true, it means God must be a necessary being. However for that to be true, it depends on the ontological argument. Kant thinks the ontological argument is not correct, therefore the cosmological argument is false too.
Immanuel Kant rejected the argument outright not only because he maintained that the idea of a ‘Necessary Being’ was incoherent but also because our knowledge is limited to the phenomenal world of space and time and it is not possible to speculate about what may or may not exist independently of space and time.
– Stephen hawking though that everything must have a cause and the universe is not infinite.
– He wrote that God was this cause but now thinks this may not be the case.
– Stephen hawking refers to meta physics (which is when sub atomic particles come into existence through nothingness, and now believes that there is no need for knowing the cause if the universe.
Bertrand Russell was an atheist who thought that we should just take the existence of the universe as “brute fact”. He also suggested that even though things that we know must have a cause, but the universe might not, as nobody has ever witnessed one starting so nobody knows how it happens. He says that the first cause argument is not valid, as if everything has a cause, God must have a cause. If God is the one thing without a cause, why can’t the world be uncaused and God non-existent?
David Hume: He believed that people who made the theory of the Big Bang can’t be definite, because if nobody was there to witness it, then we cannot come to an accurate conclusion. David Hume believes that everything has a cause and something can’t come from nothing.
Immanuel Kant maintained the argument of a ‘Necessary Being.’ He basically said that we have no experience of a being who is so great and powerful. We simply can’t comprehend it and therefore have no way of knowing if God exists. He also argues that humans are a contingent being, which basically means that humans rely on other beings to live e.g our parents and ancestors.
G.W Leibniz
1.)Every existing thing has an explanation of its existence, either in the necessity of its own nature or in an external cause.
2.)If the universe has an explanation of its existence, that explanation is God.
3.)The universe is an existing thing.
4.)Therefore the explanation of the universe is God.
Leibniz appealed to a strengthened principle of sufficient reason, according to which “no fact can be real or existing and no statement true without a sufficient reason for its being so and not otherwise”. Leibniz uses the principle to argue that the sufficient reason for the “series of things comprehended in the universe of creatures” must exist outside this series of contingencies and is found in a necessary being that we call God.
Immanuel Kant rejected the argument outright not only because he maintained that the idea of a ‘Necessary Being’ was incoherent but also because our knowledge is limited to the phenomenal world of space and time and it is not possible to speculate about what may or may not exist independently of space and time.
Stephen Hawking
definitely thinks that the universe is finite and had a beginning. He has recently began to thing that there is a small possibility that the universe caused itself. He has also recently argued that there is ‘no place for a creator’, that God doesn’t exist.
David Hume
‘Until we know the necessary cause, then all human knowledge is uncertain.’
Knowledge allows us to know the truth about matters and its interactions. To move from ‘everything we observe has a cause’ to ‘the universe has a cause’ is too big a leap in logic. This is the same as saying that because all humans have a mother, the entire human race has a mother.
Remember David Hume was well before the Big Bang was thought of… 🙂
The Big Bang Theory says that at one point the universe was infinitely small and infinitely dense and from that point it exploded into the universe by going through different stages of cooling that formed planets and stars. The universe is still expanding today which is proof that there was an explosion.
Niels Bohr
He was a scientist that believed that the universe could have come from nothing. He used the evidence that sub-atomic particles are able to appear from nothing. If these particles can appear without a cause then so could the big bang. It’s the exact same but on a larger scale. This would make premise 1 of the Cosmological Argument invalid, proving that not everything needs a cause to come into existence.
Bertrand Russell
Says “The universe is just there, that’s all.”
The universe does not need an explanation, we should not try to explain things we do not fully understand. Also, no one was there, so we can’t thinnk we know how it was caused.
Gottfried Leibniz
Principle of Sufficient Reason (Attributed to Gottfried Leibniz):
Everything that happens does so for a reason.
Leibniz asked “Why is there something, rather than nothing?” His argument runs like this:
Every existing thing has an explanation of its existence, either in the necessity of its own nature or in an external cause.
If the universe has an explanation of its existence, that explanation is God.
The universe is an existing thing.
Therefore the explanation of the universe is God.
David Hume
David Hume believed that because nobody witnessed the start of the universe, nobody could know how the world began. He also aid that it was impossible to guess anything about God because we have no idea and that it would be illogical and arrogant to try.
Niles Bohr
Bohr studied quantum physics, saying that subatomic particles that seem to appear from nowhere, therefore he says that it is possible that the universe appeared from nothing as there is evidence from quantum physics. This would disprove he need for God to have created the universe.
David Hume
David Hume believed that if no one was there to experience the Big Bang, then there’s no proof of it. He said “Universe has a cause” and he said that, that was too big a jump to “everything we observe has a cause”. God, is also beyond our comprehension so it’s arrogant and illogical to make conclusions about his character and link this to evidence for the existence of the universe.
William of Ockham
His theory was that he compared it to a razor which cut through all the bad explanations. He said to always go for the simplest answer, as it is most of the time correct. He also believed that Premise 1 contradicts 4 (well who made God).
David Hume says..
Anything and everything is existence must have a cause, or a reason for being in existence. It is impossible for something to just create itself out of nothing. Therefore you could either trace things back through an infinite amount of causes with no ultimate cause at all, or there must be a necessary being that caused everything. This cause is God.
David Hume (1711-1776) said that we can’t compare arguments from within the universe to arguments about the universe as a whole about the cosmological argument. He also said we have no experience of the universe being made so we can’t assume anything. He said that we cant assume that just because everything inside the universe has a cause. Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) opposed the cosmological argument because he said we can’t understand anything about ‘necessary beings’. He said we can only understand things in our universe, not anything that can exist out of space and time.