Q&A: The Cosmological Argument
The Cosmological Argument
Question
Hello Rabbi,
In the discussion of the cosmological argument in the book The First Existent, you say that the argument is valid. I think it is not valid, for the following reason: the claim "everything has a cause" (the qualification based on our experience is not relevant here) is ambiguous, and you do not distinguish between its two meanings. It could mean that every event that occurs has some cause or other, or it could mean that there is something that is the cause of everything. The logical form of these two claims is different: the first says that for every X there is a Y such that X is caused by Y, and the second says that there is some Y such that for every X, X is caused by Y. These two are not equivalent. The second entails the first, but not vice versa (if everyone has a mother, it does not follow that there is one woman who is everyone's mother). It seems to me that your argument contains a logical fallacy, because in the first premise you use the first meaning, while in the conclusion you use the second meaning (which the premises do not establish at all). Therefore the argument is not valid (the premises may be true while the conclusion is false).
I would be happy to hear your response.
Thank you,
Yaron
Answer
This distinction is obvious, and I do not see any connection between it and the argument I presented, certainly not any kind of fallacy in it.
At no point did I assume that there must be one single cause for everything. On the contrary, what I wrote is that in principle there could be several gods, and only Occam's razor leads to the conclusion of one God. This argument does not necessarily lead to monotheism, and I wrote that explicitly.
Discussion on Answer
I don't understand what the discussion here is about. The cosmological argument assumes that the things around us must have causes, and at the end of each chain there is supposed to be a cause that itself does not require a cause. From here you arrive at several starting points for several chains. From the razor principle you can infer that all the starting points are the same cause, or not.
What's unclear here?
I did not claim that this was your premise, but rather the conclusion of the argument. If not, then what do you mean by "there must be a cause for the existence of these things"? And in any case, the question whether this is a self-caused cause or not does not seem relevant to me here.