2.

10 The Cosmological Argument: Descartes

Descartes put forward an ontological argument for the existence of God, but he also tried his
hand at the cosmological argument. His argument runs like this:

1. I am a thinking thing and have the idea of God.

2. There cannot be an infinite series of causes.
3. There must be an initial cause that is also the cause of itself.
4. Whatever caused me to exist must have these same features.
5. That cause is God.

Look back at the numbered points on the previous slide. The best way to evaluate an
argument is to look for the assumptions and find a way of challenging these. So what
assumptions do you think Descartes has made and how would you challenge them?

Let’s start with Descartes’ second point. Descartes has the intriguing idea that whenever
something creates something else it must contain at least as much as the thing it creates. You
probably find that this idea clashes with your intuitions. It makes a sort of sense, for example,
if we think about cutting out a pattern from fabric to make a dress: the roll of fabric has to be
at least as big as the dress we are aiming to make. However, it’s probably not a principle we
would apply to the rest of life. We know new things can develop from things that were quite
different: chemical interactions transform constituent parts into new substances, and gene
mutations mean offspring can be very different from their parents. Particularly counter to
modern notions is Descartes’ view that even the ideas we have must have come from
somewhere, and that he has been given the idea of God. A response to this is to suggest
instead that the human imagination is endlessly inventive.

The second assumption Descartes makes is that an infinite series of causes is impossible. As
covered earlier in the section, it is unclear that an infinite series is any more likely or unlikely
than an uncaused first cause, or unmoved mover (to use Aquinas’ terminology).

Thirdly, it’s quite a leap to say that there must be a first cause and then declare that cause to
be God. Why not something else? Or even if it was God, how would we know what
characteristics God had?