How To Be An Agnostic
into two groups: the fi rst four are called cosmological; the fi fth
is teleological.
The cosmological ways arise from looking at the cosmos and
asking what lies behind it. Aquinas saw that the cosmos exists,
that it is full of movement, and that it is full of causes of move-
ment. So he concluded that this way of talking about God is to
infer that there must be a necessary being, an unmoved mover
and an uncaused cause behind it all, and that this being must
have the attributes of a deity, whatever else that God might be.
In a modern idiom, Aquinas’s questions are a bit like asking
what caused the Big Bang, and concluding that we don’t know
because there was nothing before it to cause it. So, whatever was
before the Big Bang, if that’s even a reasonable question, must
have been something divine-like because before the fi rst event
there could not have been normal being. That said, we don’t
know what it means to be divine-like, only that it is not thing-
like.
The teleological argument also arises from looking at the
cosmos but, rather than looking at its origins, it looks at its
purpose. It argues that the universe appears to be designed with
an end in mind – whether that end be taken as the ‘pinnacle of
creation’, namely human beings, or simply the intricacy of the
universe itself (the version put most famously by William Paley
in the analogy of fi nding a fi ne watch and concluding that there
must, therefore, be a watchmaker.)
As positive proofs, the cosmological arguments are highly
vulnerable to critique. For example, one might ask what this
God looks like, for clearly the unmoved mover and uncaused
cause does not look at all like the personal God people claim
to believe in. Someone else might think that if God can exist
without a cause, then perhaps the universe can come into being
without a cause too – though whatever the universe might be, it
is a thing existing as time and space; and whatever God might
be, God is not that.
The teleological argument can be made to look fl imsy too.
Most obviously, Darwinian theory articulates a mechanism by