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Thomas Aquinas Cosmological Argument For The Existence Of God

981 Words4 Pages

3. Thomas Aquinas’ Cosmological Argument argues for the existence of God. Thomas brings up cause and effect as reason the universe had to be created. Everything that is moved is moved by another; basicly saying the whole is not greater than the sum of its parts. Everything in the world is made up of two types of characteristics , accidental and essential. Acidental are characteristics that is not necessary for a being or object to be itself; an example of which is the type of clothes they wear. Essential characteristics are characteristics that are essential to the being or object; an example of which would be that a bicycle needs two wheels to be a bicycle. Thomas use these characteristics to say God is an essential characteristic of the …show more content…

Mackie’s critiques are made up of these two arguments. He says that for these two arguments to be true the fact that there is always a cause and effect need to be true. He believes that it is impossible to prove that cause causes and effect because you do not know why something happened, if it is cause and effect or just correlation. An example is someone is touched and flinches; was the flinch caused by being touched or is it correlated to being touched. The second part of the critique is, is it so crazy to believe that there is a possibility of permanent matter out there instead of God. Cause can only regress so far in an explanation. It is plausible that something existed before is just as implausible as God being uncaused or the origin of the universe being …show more content…

His view of cause and effect makes a lot of sense. How can there be a beginning cause without a beginning effect and vise versa. It just one big circle of logic. Something that correlates to something else makes more sense. Like for example, getting a cold correlates with the winter but the winter season does not and cannot cause a cold. Cold may be more common during the winter but that is because of other factors; the thought that the winter would be directly responsible for the cold would be ridiculous and something more inline with an ancient view of the world. The idea. also; that something is empirical is wrong. Science is always open to for change and debate and Mackie seems to say that with why can’t the idea of permanent matter be possible. Maybe that's is what dark matter(scientist don't know what dark matter is yet, only that it exists) is.
1. Blaise Pascal’s Wager is a wager that God as real and that you want to be a good person. If God is real and you believe then you will go to Heaven, If God is real and you don’t believe you then you go to Hell. If God doesn't exist than you will go to neither Heaven nor Hell. Therefore it is in your best interests to believe and be a good person so you will go to Heaven because if you do you stand to win everything were if you don’t you stand to lose it

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