Ancient
Greece & You
Joe Greenwald, Champlain Valley
Union High School, VT
Cosmological Argument
"'The Cosmological Argument' is the name given to a group
of interrelated arguments that claim to prove the existence of
God from premises asserting some highly general fact about the
world, such as that it exists contingently." -- Ronald W.
Hepburn
Plato
Plato argues that all motion in the world
is untimately due to the activity of soul.
He divides the motion up into two categories:
motion that is passed from one object to another, and motion
that is self-originated. He believes that only beings with souls
can originate movement.
Aristotle
Aristotle believes that there is something
that moves things without being moved; this will be "something
eternal." This "Unmoved Mover" will be an actual
being who did not move the heavens physically, but instead through
desire.
Thomas Aquinas
Thomas Aquinas broke his argument down
into three main points.
- For something to be in motion, it must
have been set in motion by something else.
- Unless there was an original mover, then
no other motion could have taken place.
- "Among phenomena we discover an order
of efficient causes." Everything is caused by something
else, but the list must have started somewhere. Therefor, there
must an original cause so that everything else can take place.
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- Everything that has happened during our
existence was not necessary. The initial cause was made by a
divine being who had its own necessity, namely God.
Descartes
"From whom could I ... derive my existence?"
This was Descartes' main question. He knew that he was not responsible
for his own existence. "I know that I am dependant upon
some being different from myself." Descartes believes this
is a "thinking being."
Locke
Locke believed that everything that has had a beginning was created
from something else. Therefor no real being could have
been produced by a nonentity. So, there must have been
something that could have created a real being in the very beginning.
Critisisms of Cosmological Arguments
Plato
Many people argue the idea that "motion
and rest are not equally natural or original." Plato
assumes that motion requires an explanation but that rest does
not; and modern philosophers have critisized this assumption.
Aristotle
Compared with the theories of current science,
Aristotle's arguments for existence of God seems groundless.
The God tat Aristotle explains in his argument does not
"make or sustain the world's being; he only elicits motion
in it." Unfortunately, the only credit that Aristotle
has been given over the course of history is his contribution
to the arguments of Thomas Aquinas.
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Complementary
Resources
CTCWeb Resources
Roots
of English: an Etymological Dictionary
The
Heart of the Matter: Gods, Grief, and Freedom in Aeschylus' Orestia
The
Classical Symposium in Greek Art
Maecenas:
Images of Ancient Greece and Rome
Women
in the Oikos: The Stranger Within
Knowledge Builders
Dress & Costume, Zeus,
Colonization, Homer's Iliad &
Odyssey,
and more.
Teachers' Companions
Dress & Costume, Zeus,
Colonization, Homer's Iliad &
Odyssey,
and more.
Other Resources
The
Perseus Project
History of Ancient Philosophy
Exploring Ancient World Cultures
Global Glossary Terms
- Homer
- Plato
- Ptolemy
- Galen
- Socrates
- Sophists
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