The cosmological argument in a nutshell is
that since everything must have a cause, the universe must have a cause. And
the only cause of the universe that could be up to the job is God, or at least
that the best hypothesis for the cause of the universe is God. The cosmological
argument is there whenever someone turns around and says to the naturalist,
'Ah, well the universe may have begun with the big bang, but what caused the
big bang?'
The argument is to my mind utterly awful, a
disgrace to the good name of philosophy and the only reason for discussion it
is to expose sloppy thinking. One fatal flaw among many is that the argument is
based on principles it then flouts. The intuitive principles that lie behind
the argument are that nothing exists uncaused and that the cause of something
great and complex must itself be even greater and more complex. But it ends by
hypothesizing God's existence as simple and uncaused. If it is possible for God
to exist without a cause greater than God to exist without a cause greater than
God, why can't the universe exist without a cause greater than itself? Either
the principles that inform the argument stand or they don't. If they stand,
then God requires a cause and the causal chain goes back ad infinitum. If they don't, then there is no need to hypothesize
God.
The second fatal flaw is that even if the
logic of the argument works, we do not arrive at God. What we arrive at is a
cause which is greater and more complex than the universe itself and which is
itself uncaused. Whether or not this resembles the traditional God, who is much
more like an individual personality than a super-universe, is surely open to
question. So the argument cannot really establish that the cause is anything
like God at all.
Viewed as an example of an apologetic,
however, we can see the true merits of the argument. It shows how it is
possible for the religious to reconcile their beliefs with what we know about
the universe. It is compatible with reason and what we know to suppose that the
big bang was caused by God, and it is possible that all things within the
universe must have a cause but that the causal chain, since it must stop
somewhere, stops with God. So just as long as the believer does not mistake the
argument as evidence for God's existence, they can maintain the argument as a
demonstration of the rational possibility
of their belief in God. This leaves open the question of what really justifies belief in God, which we will
come to shortly.
One further caution is that this kind of
argument is precarious as it essentially hypothesizes a 'God of the gaps'. God
is invoked to explain what we cannot currently explain. This is a risky
strategy. After all, people previously invoked God to explain all sorts of
natural phenomena we later explained, and each time God had to retreat further
back into the unknown. In this case God has retreated to behind the blue
touch-paper that started the universe going. Such a God is fast running out of
places for believers to hide him. (Julian Baggini, Atheism: A Very Short Introduction [New York: Oxford University
Press, 2003], 94-95)
