A (very brief) Dismissal of the Cosmological Argument

I remember, with some vagueness, the first day I was exposed to the cosmological argument. I was reading St. Thomas Aquinas' Summa Theologica in high school on a personal whim and a most difficult journey into the perilous mount of Medieval Latin. Giving up fairly quickly on the latter endeavor, I delved deep into the English translation of the theology of one of the most influential intellectuals on Christian thought from the medieval era into modernity. Needless to say, Aquinas' Five Ways left the most peculiar aftertaste in my mouth. It was akin to drinking orange juice processed in such a fashion to remove all of the fructose and sucrose from the juice and artificially sweetening the juice blend with aspartame.

One particular argument which bothered me the most during my early adolescence was the cosmological argument. Essentially, the conclusion of the argument is the proclamation of the existence of an uncaused first cause which by necessity is God to prevent a logical regress. Of course, with age and development I have come to see that Aquinas' argument is simply a Christian version of Aristotle's Prime Mover, the assignment of God being necessarily uncaused is from an assertion more so than anything empirically derived. With these observations, studious minds hence Aquinas have attempted to adapt and build upon these basic premises, but still failing to admit the lack of knowledge concerning the nature of God, whether his essence being caused or uncaused. Though some do assert such knowledge from the historical record or a mystical experience, their abilities to demonstrate the veracity of such revelations is seriously dependent upon the integrity of the original authorship and document itself and of a personal or mystic experience.

I mean to keep this entry very brief, and so I will. There are numerous objections and counter-arguments to the cosmological argument ranging from the minds of mathematicians, such as Rene Descartes, to the minds of physicists, such as Michio Kaku. One argument against the cosmological argument I have found which leaves the fructose in my orange juice alone is the one offered by modern ethologist Richard Dawkins (although admittedly, he was not the original to coin this assessment of the argument). Essentially, the argument makes "the unwarranted assumption that God himself is immune to the regress" (The God Delusion, 77). Try and try as defenders of the cosmological argument attempt, they cannot escape the ultimate observation of God being equivocally able to be affected by the argument against an infinite regress, and hence we get no viable, attainable information from the cosmological argument.

To conclude, I will pervert the words of William Lane Craig. All things in the universe have a logical cause. Hence, the universe could not have been created by an illogical notion. Since God can be reduced to an illogical notion based on the qualities assigned to him via revelation, natural theology, or fiat, God could not have been the logical cause of the universe. Consider this to be my very brief dismissal of the cosmological argument.