Cosmological arguments

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Cosmological arguments. A family of arguments for the existence of God, which start from the existence of the world or some very general feature of it, e.g. causality, change, or contingency, and argue thence to the existence of a First Cause or Necessary Being, which is identified with God. Such arguments were attacked by Hume and Kant in the 18th cent. and by subsequent thinkers; but they are still defended by many neo-Thomists and some analytic philosophers. Their modern proponents see the arguments as an expression of the human mind's search for total intelligibility in the world, and contend that we should not set a priori limits to the search for ultimate explanations.

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