What are the strengths and weaknesses of the Cosmological argument for the existence of God?

Question

What points are most and least convincing?

Not homework, I'm just too bored for my own good!

Answer 1

a weakness is the lack of a definition of God. It only states that a 'first instance' must exist, which is logically feasible in a deterministic point of view. Commonly god is conceived as omnibenevolnet, omnipotent, and omniscient. This is not compatible with logical thought as a god who is all loving and the creator of all in existence, and all knowing would not create 'evil' entities, because this violates all loving. It also would be able to do anything including illogical things (1+1=9); including hating something, which violates omnibenevolence. there are many more, but this is slightly off subject.
A further question is raised with the existence of a creator. Who created the creator? This is what is known as infinite regression, but in this argument it doesn't get that far. The creator existed before anything existed, as it supposedly created everything out of nothing. The existence of something (the creator) negates the possibility of creating out of nothing.
I can come up with more weaknesses than strengths because weakness in a theory is what matters. The strongest part of the argument is that it is a failed attempt to explain existence.
For the most part, I challenge the premise that states that a causal chain cannot be infinite in length.

Answer 2

This sounds like a homework assignment....In my opinion, the testing factor would be a strong argument "against " the existence of a god. For example, if you were to take out a coin, and flip it consecutively 25 or so times, while keeping a written record of the # of times it landed heads and tails. Then pray for the next 25 coin tosses to land on heads. Do 25 more coin tosses, again keeping record of the # of times it landed on heads and tails. What is your result? Did god answer your prayer? Did the coin land more or even every time on heads, as you asked in your prayer? The bible says god will answer all prayers. We know better than that though, don't we? On the other hand, a weak argument for the existence of god, would be something like, "just look at the trees, and how perfectly we are designed, we had to have a creator".

Just because we don't have all the answers to life's mysteries, doesn't mean we should automatically "plug-in" the god factor. Besides we aren't that perfect anyway.

This is just my opinion, but what do I know about god, I'm an agnostic.

Answer 3

i've always thought that a weakness to this was to how the first cause was/is equated to God

i buy the argument of there being a first cause but how did this get translated into the religious version of God [Aquinas' version of the argument]? An omnipotent, all-knowing, ever-existing being/God...


also: "Modern quantum physics is sometimes interpreted to deny the validity of the first premise of this argument (that everything has a cause), showing that subatomic particles such as electrons, positrons, and photons, can come into existence, and perish, by virtue of spontaneous energy fluctuations in a vacuum. Though such occurrences do not violate the Law of Conservation of Mass and Energy, Bell's theorem shows that these are impossible to predict."

Answer 4

I find this question intimidating. I am but a squeeking mouse before the all encompassing complexities of it all.

Answer 5

"this is how it happens"= weaknesses
thats only thong i know
in the bible look into moses.
thats were it talks about existince of god