Cosmological Argument for the Existence of God
The cosmological argument is actually a family of arguments that seek to demonstrate the existence of a sufficient reason or first cause of the existence of the cosmos. Among the proponents of the cosmological argu-ment stand many of the most prominent figures in the history of western philosophy: Plato, Aristotle, Ibn Sīnā, al-Ghazālī, Maimonides, Anselm, Aquinas, Scotus, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, and Locke, to name but some. The arguments offered by these thinkers can be grouped into three basic types: (1) what may be called the kalam cosmological argument for a first cause of the beginning of the universe; (2) the Thomist cosmological argument for a sustaining ground of being of the world; and (3) the Leibnizian cosmological argument for a sufficient reason why anything at all exists.
The kalam cosmological argument derives its name from the Arabic word designating medieval Islamic scholasticism, the intellectual movement largely respon-sible for developing this version of the cosmological argument. It originated in the efforts of Christian philosophers such as John Philoponus who, out of their commitment to the biblical teaching of creatio ex nihilo, sought to rebut the Aristotelian doctrine of the eternity of the universe. The argument aims to show that the universe had a beginning at some moment in the finite past and, because something cannot come out of nothing, must therefore have a transcendent cause that brought the universe into being.
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