The Cosmological Argument from Plato to Leibniz:

317 Pages·2001·22.88 MB·English

by  William Lane Craig

COSMOLOGICAL ARGUMENT
PLATO TO LEIBNIZ
LIBRARY OF PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION
General Editor: John H. G. Wood
Professor of Theology, University of HtrmnJ.gn.am
This new series of books will explore contemporary religious understandings of
man and the universe. The books will be contributions to various aspects of the
continuing dialogues between religion and philosophy, between scepticism and
faith, and between the different religions and ideologies. The authors will
represent a correspondingly wide of viewpoints. Some of the books in the
series will be written for the educated and others for a more
spe:cm.hsc::d philosophical or meoiO,~lc.ai n~aaersJtup.
Already published
William H. Austin THE RELEVANCE OF NATURAL
SCIENCE TO THEOLOGY
Paul Badham CHRISTIAN BELIEFS ABOUT LIFE
AFTER DEATH
Patrick Burke THE FRAGILE UNIVERSE
William Lane Craig THE KALAM COSMOLOGICAL
ARGUMENT
THE COSMOLOGICAL ARGUMENT
FROM PLATO TO LEIBNIZ
Lynn A. de Silva THE PROBLEM OF THE SELF IN
BUDDHISM AND CHRISTIANITY
Padmasiri de Silva AN INTRODUCTION TO BUDDHIST
PSYCHOLOGY
Ramchandra Gandhi THE AVAILABILITY OF RELIGIOUS IDEAS
J. C. A. Gaskin HUME'S PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
H. A. Hodges GOD BEYOND KNOWLEDGE
Hywel D. Lewis PERSONS AND LIFE AFTER DEATH
Hugo A. Meynell AN INTRODUCTION TO THE
PHILOSOPHY OF BERNARD LONERGAN
F. C. T. Moore THE PSYCHOLOGICAL BASIS OF
MORALITY .
Dennis Nineham THE USE AND ABUSE OF THE BIBLE
Bernard M.G. Reardon HEGEL'S PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
John J. Shepherd EXPERIENCE, INFERENCE AND GOD
Patrick Sherry RELIGION, TRUTH. AND LANGUAGE
GAMES
Robert Young FREEDOM, RESPONSIBILITY AND GOD
Further titles in preparation
M
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© William Lane Craig 1980
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First edition 1980
Reprinted 1986
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Craig, William Lane
The cosmological argument from Plato to Leibniz
- (Library of philosophy and religion).
l. God - Proof, Cosmological
I. Title H. Series
211 BT102
ISBN 0-333-27467-9
MY PARENTS
who taught me as a boy
the adventure of learning and
spared me nothing that

Preface ix
1. PLATO 1
2. ARISTOTLE 20
3. ARABIC THEOLOGIANS AND PHILOSOPHERS 48
Al-Kindi 61
Al-Farabi 76
Ibn Sina 86
Al-Ghazalr 98
Ibn Rushd 105
4. JEWISH PHILOSOPHERS OF RELIGION 127
Saadia 128
Maimonides 131
5. THOMAS AQUINAS 158
6. JOHN DUNS SCOTUS 205
7. BENEDICT DE SPINOZA 236
8. G. W. F. LEIBNIZ 257
9. A TYPOLOGY OF COSMOLOGICAL ARGUMENTS 282
Index 296
vii

I
It was my reading and outlining of Frederick Copleston's masterful A
History of Philosophy during my student days that first sparked off my
interest in doing a comprehensive study of the cosmological argument
for the existence of God. Copleston's History provides the broadest
historical survey to date of the cosmological argument, but his
expositions of the various versions of the proof are necessarily brief and
must be extracted from the wide range of other material presented in his
work. Perhaps the finest overall study on the cosmological argument up
to this point is R. L. Sturch's unpublished Oxford doctoral thesis 'The
Cosmological Argument'. Unfortunately, Sturch's survey of the argu
ment, because it is broader than mine, is much less detailed and
sometimes contains positive misunderstandings. What I have sacrificed
in breadth, I have attempted to make up in analysis and accuracy. A
comprehensive, scholarly history of the cosmological argument still
remains to be written. Such a history would include the cosmological
arguments of Fakhr al-Dfn al-Razi, Bonaventure, Suarez, Descartes,
Locke, Clarke and Wolff, thinkers whom I have not included in this
study. But my present work is a step in that direction. In this book I have
chosen to analyse in detail the cosmological arguments of thirteen of the
proof's greatest proponents; these constitute the peaks in the long
history of the argument and are exemplary models of the various forms
which the cosmological argument assumes. In the final chapter of this
work, I attempt to formulate a typology of the various versions
surveyed and to distil what I perceive to be the major critical issues
involved in each form of the argument.
II
I hope that this study will help to meet a serious need in the
contemporary debate over the argument. For the past thirty years or so,
ix
X
in writers have
by all indications a woeful ignorance of the historical versions of the
am amazed at the shallow and often grossly inaccurate
expositions of the forms of the by con-
ten1PC)raJrV authors. As a result of these many of the
co:smoH)I:!lCal ar~~unl1ern are aimed at straw
as a result I would venture to say that if one
up at random an article on the 1t lS
inaccurate and focuses on the wrong issues. This
....... '"'"'~HJI'''"' to and analyse the
most versions. of the cosmological and I approach
the task with For I am sure that if most of the expositions
and I have read are filled with errors evident to me, then the
in
chances are that my own is also error in places. But the
frustration is that I do not know where those are; so I must beg
the reader's when he discerns instances in which I have
unKnoW'lnllllV erred.
III
What constitutes a cosmological Probably the best
definition is that the cosmological is an a posteriori argument
for a cause or reason for the cosmos. Three items in this definition
deserve First, the cosmological is an a posterwn
ar~:un1entt. Unlike the ontological argument, the cosmological argument
always contains an existential premiss, that is, it asserts that something
exists. The fact that the may also employ a priori principles,
such as the of contradiction or the principle of causality, does
not negate the fact that the argument as a whole is a posteriori, since its
truth is on the fact that something exists. 1 Second, the
cosmological seeks a cause or reason. Some versions of the
argument conclude to a being which is the first cause of the universe,
either in a temporal sense or in rank. Other versions posit a being which
is the sufficient reason for the world. The distinction between cause and
reason is an one that is rarely appreciated but one that must
be maintained if we are correctly to understand the different forms of