cosmological argument

Any line of reasoning for the existence of God that proceeds from the inexplicable existence of the universe to an allegedly self-explanatory being, God. The cosmological argument originates in ancient Greece with Aristotle, but takes various forms. One version is that everything requires a cause, so God must exist as the first or sustaining cause of the universe.

In the Middle Ages, Thomas Aquinas argued that the universe could have not existed, so there must be a being that could not but exist – that is, exists necessarily – on which it depends. Gottfried Leibniz in the early 18th century also used the cosmological argument. Like the ontological argument, most versions of the cosmological argument rely on existence being a property or predicate, which Immanuel Kant claimed was impossible. Another weakness is that the argument attempts a causal inference from the universe to God, when it only makes sense to speak of causal relations as holding between observable states of affairs. The other two traditional arguments for the existence of God are the argument from design and the moral argument.