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A Note on Cosmological Arguments
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 April 2024
Extract
I am very grateful indeed to Fr Brian Davies for treating my work with such sympathy and thoroughness. He has put forward objections to some of my arguments and conclusions which richly deserve some attempt on my part at an answer.
Fr Davies approves of a recent suggestion by Anthony Flew, derived from Kant, that one should distinguish sharply between those types of argument for God’s existence which try to establish it from the mere fact of the world, and those which do so on the basis of some particular characteristic of the world. They propose that the term ‘cosmological argument’ should be kept for arguments of the former class. With great respect and suitable trepidation, I would wish to dissent from this formidable team of authorities, preferring as I do a threefold division. For I believe it is very important in this context to distinguish between two sorts of properties which things or the world may have; one sort, by virtue of the fact that they can be objects of our knowledge at all; the other which they just happen to have as a matter of fact, independently of their knowability by us. Let us distinguish these as respectively A properties and B properties. Now the effect of the proposal of Kant, Flew and Davies is to reduce theistic arguments which are not versions of the ontological arguments to two types — those from the mere existence of things or the world, and those from the B properties of things and the world.
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- Copyright © 1983 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers
References
1 Brian Davies O P, ‘The Intelligible Universe’ (New Blackfriars Sept 1982, pp 381‐389).
2 The Presumption of Atheism, London 1976, p 53; Critique of Pure Reason, section 3 of chapter III of the Transcendental Dialectic.
3 I would not count Kant's so‐called ‘moral’ argument as establishing a case for a rational theism in this sense, even granted that it is sound as far as it goes.
4 I concede this to fideists, atheists and agnostics for the purpose of the present argument. But of course it does leave out of account the recent and rather sensational claims of Professors Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinge, that the postulated mechanisms fail to account for life as we know it.
5 Fr Davies cites with approval Fr Herbert McCabe's putting of the traditional question, why is there anything at all? But I am afraid that I agree with those sceptics who deny that this is a proper question, at least in that form. As T Penelhum neatly puts it, ‘There can be nothing not mentioned in the question to bring in to explain what is mentioned in the question’ (‘Divine Necessity’, in Burrill, D (ed), The Cosmological Arguments (New York, 1967, pp 154 5Google Scholar).
6 In conversation.
7 One disadvantage is that Kant takes it to be particularly characteristic of cosmological arguments that they combine a priori and a posteriori elements; and this is certainly true of the ‘epistemological’ argument. Kant regards this feature as a defect, but I think he is wrong. Cf The Intelligible Universe (London 1982, pp 10‐12; 105)Google Scholar.
8 Summa Theologica, I, questions 2 and 3.