arguments do not induce but instead deduce from the fact reporting some occurrence of
natural design that there is a supernatural designer-creator of this occurrence, it
supposedly being an analytic truth that something displaying design or purpose must have
a designer or purposer. This does not make for an effective argument, as its opponents
will be within their rights to charge its existential fact component with begging the
question. There are Thomistic-type design arguments that also attempt to deduce the
theistic conclusion from the initial existential fact but do not appeal to this trivializing
analytic truth but instead some high-level metaphysical principle requiring that there be
as much reality in the cause as in the effect.
Cosmological Arguments
With these preliminaries out of the way, we can begin our survey of the different types of
cosmological arguments. In the thirteenth century, Saint Thomas Aquinas presented Five
Ways of proving the existence of God, the first three of which are versions of the
cosmological argument (Aquinas 1969, part 1, question 2, article 2). The First Way
begins with the contingent fact that one object is moved by another, the Second that one
thing depends for its existence on the causal efficacy of a contemporaneous being, and
the Third that there exists a contingent being. These are commonplace observational facts
that only a complete skeptic about our senses would want to challenge. The explanatory
arguments in the First and Second Ways are based on the impossibility of there being,
respectively, an infinite regress of objects simultaneously being moved by other objects
or objects depending for their existence on the simultaneous causal efficacy of another
being. These regresses, therefore, must terminate with a being who is capable
respectively of moving another object without itself being moved by another or causing
the existence of something without itself being caused to exist. Thomas then identifies
this first mover or cause with God on the basis of our common ways of speaking about
God—“and this is what everyone understands by God”—thereby papering over a serious
gap problem, since the Five Ways do not establish that this being
end p.118
has all of the essential divine attributes. Thomas does give arguments to close the gap
(questions 3–11), but limitations of space preclude our discussing them here.
The intuition underlying Thomas's rejection of the possibility of an actual infinity of
simultaneous movers or causers is far from obvious, especially because, according to
most commentators, he did not think it impossible to have an actual past infinite regress
of nonsimultaneous causes, as, for example, an actual infinite regress of past begetters.
We will make an attempt to draw out his intuition in a way that gives some plausibility to
it. The causal relation in a series of simultaneous causes or movers involves transitivity in
that if X simultaneously moves (causes) Y and Y simultaneously moves (causes) Z, then X
moves (causes) Z. Nonsimultaneous causation is not transitive, since, even though you
were begot by your parents and they in turn were begot by their parents, you were not
begot by the latter.