A New Look at the Cosmological Argument

Introduction

The cosmological argument for God’s existence has a long history, but perhaps the most influential version of it has been the argument from contingency. This is the version that Frederick Copleston pressed upon Bertrand Russell in their famous debate about God’s existence in 1948 (printed in Russell’s 1957 Why I am not a Christian). Russell’s lodges three objections to the Thomistic argument:

• There is no intelligible form of necessity other than logical truth.
• There is no reason to suppose that any such thing as the “universe” exists.
• Even if there were such a thing as the “universe”, our empirical knowledge gives us no good reason to assume that it has a cause