Beginnings and the Cosmological Argument

Of the stuff that's purely conceptual, beginnings and endings might be more on the conceptual side, and perpetually up for debate.

Events sort of morph into other Events, and Eckart Tolle says there is only circumstantial evidence for time.

There are sparks and there are the straws that break the camels back, but the events that led up to those happenings are indeed hard to place.


The position that the world must have a starter of causes, the chain of cause and effect, is called the Cosmological Argument. Aristotle originally thought of this idea as The Unmoved Mover from this basic thought experiment that

the Unmoved Mover Argument

Premise 1)If stuff causes other stuff
Premise 2) the Chain had to start somewhere
Conclusion 3) Therefore, there must have been an original cause that was not itself caused (the Unmoved Mover)


One of the medievals, Saint Augustine and Saint Aquinas, and it was probably Aquinas, used Aristotle for, you guessed it, a proof of God's existence. Note that above the Unmoved M0ver does not have to necessarily be God per se, we Judeo-Christian-Islamic religions just so happen to be looking for such a thing.

3 Takes on the Cosmo-Argument:

1) John Locke Uses this in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding
2) Spinoza kind of alludes to this using the principles of Sufficient Reason, but his proofs for God are ontological (Existence necessitates Essence, argument from definition); and of course because Leibniz subscribes to the principle of Sufficient Reason, so does he
3) Rabbi Herman two years brought this up. I was furious.

Kant, as per usual, beats them all by saying the Cosmological Argument is an Antinomy.

Here's the gist of the antninomy: we can't know of a first cause because there might be a cause before that. Consider the big bang argument: people say that the universe came from sands slapping against each other. But where did the sand come from in order to slap together.

If there is a Creator God, it might have been created by something else; and there's no fine print here against saying that something might have many causes. The cosmological argument is staked on the fact that we might see causality as only a linear chain, whereas you might see it as a funnel or a 3 dimensional design in your head.