Tuesday, May 18, 2021

Julian Baggini on the Cosmological Argument

 

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)