CHALLENGING COSMOLOGICAL ARGUMENTS
For I am the LORD and I change not - Malachi 3: 6
All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being - John 1: 3
The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth - Isaiah 40: 28
A more interesting response to this is to ask, Why couldn't the universe itself be necessary? This was a question asked by David Hume who accused the Cosmological Argument of committing the Fallacy of Composition.Just because everything inside the universe is contingent, it doesn't mean the universe-as-a-whole is contingent.
An example provided by Bertrand Russell is that just because a wall is made of small bricks, it doesn't mean it is a small wall. |
Just because a wall is made of small bricks doesn't mean it has to be a small wall.
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I am who I am - Exodus 3: 14
"Who caused God?" is a very widespread challenge to the Cosmological Arguments, but it's a rather misinformed one. Most of the arguments don't discuss 'causes'. This challenge seems to treat the Argument from Causation (the "First Cause Argument") as the real or typical version of the Cosmological Argument, then points out a flaw in an over-simplified version of it.
This sort of debating is called the "Straw Man Fallacy". This particular Straw Man seems to date back to Bertrand Russell's essay "Why I Am Not A Christian". |
A straw man?
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