6.3 Cosmology and the Existence of God

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

  • Describe teleological and moral arguments for the existence of God.
  • Outline Hindu cosmology and arguments for and against the divine.
  • Explain Anselm’s ontological argument for the existence of God.
  • Articulate the distinction between the logical and evidential problems of evil.

Another major question in metaphysics relates to cosmology. Cosmology is the study of how reality is ordered. How can we account for the ordering, built upon many different elements such as causation, contingency, motion, and change, that we experience within our reality? The primary focus of cosmological arguments will be on proving a logically necessary first cause to explain the order observed. As discussed in earlier sections, for millennia, peoples have equated the idea of a first mover or cause with the divine that exists in another realm. This section will discuss a variety of arguments for the existence of God as well as how philosophers have reconciled God's existence with the presence of evil in the world.

This lesson has no exercises.

The content of this course has been taken from the free Philosophy textbook by Openstax