ABSTRACT
Arguments purporting to show that there is a God have been very numerous in the history of philosophy. Two principles are needed to make the argument effective. First, among the events with which are familiar, nothing happens without a cause. Second, a series of caisses and effects reaching back into the infinite past, in which each event in the series is the effect of preceding events and the cause of subsequent events, is not an acceptable explanation of the causation of any event. In St. Thomas Aquinas’ statement of the argument there is an enormous leap from the notion of the First Cause to the notion of God. The cosmological argument is effective enough within the framework of a number of metaphysical assumptions taken for granted by Aquinas and the philosophers of the tradition to which he belongs; but without the assumptions of this particular philosophical tradition it cannot be an effective argument.
