John Lockes Cosmological Argument From Causality For The Existence Of God
Submitted by johnqlaw on 06/30/2008 05:21 PM
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John Lockes Cosmological Argument From Causality For The Existence Of God
Locke's argument for the existence of a necessary eternal being is a version of the cosmological argument from causality. His argument in general is as follows: 1) Men actually exist and are not eternal beings. 2) Existing non-eternal beings must have begun to exist at some point. 3) Things that begin to exist cannot cause their own existence. 4) Things that begin to exist cannot come from nothing. 5) Therefore from eternity there has been something.
Although the first premise may be controversial, I don't think anyone would seriously challenge that non-eternal beings exist. Premise two is trivial; a non-eternal being must have begun to exist otherwise it would be an eternal being. But of course if we understand "non-eternal being" as something which just at some point in time does not exist, then perhaps a non-eternal being can have no beginning but just an end, and we can dismiss premise two. Nevertheless we can assume that by "non-eternal" Locke just means that it had a beginning. Premise three simply says a thing cannot cause itself since it cannot exist before it exists. And premise four says that non-entity or nothingness cannot have the power to create something actual. Locke's four premises seem to be true.
But suppose the conclusion is false and at some point in time nothing existed at all, then certainly premise 1 would be false since there would be no explanation as to how non-eternal beings could begin to exist. Therefore the argument is valid. But since it seems that the premises are true, the argument seems to me to be sound as well.
However, the problem is that it doesn't establish what Locke had hoped it would. Just because something has existed from eternity doesn't mean that an eternal being has existed. It is possible that what has existed from eternity is an infinite regress of non-eternal beings, each of which is the effect of the preceeding member. Additionally Locke's conclusion does not...
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