Objections (1 of 3 notes)

Part Three
Theology Proper: 16 PHILOSOPHICAL ARGUMENTS FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD
A DISPENSATIONAL THEOLOGY
By Charles F Baker

The Scottish philosopher, David Hume, and the German philosopher, Immanuel Kant, were two of the outstanding critics of the Cosmological argument. Hume voiced his objections in his work, Dialogues on Natural Religion, in which he argued like this: Nothing is demonstrable unless the contrary implies a contradiction. Nothing conceivable implies a contradiction. Whatever we conceive as existent we can also conceive as non-existent. There is no being therefore whose non-existence implies a contradiction. It follows then that there is no being whose existence is demonstrable. Hume further argued that we cannot prove that every event must have a cause, claiming that the observable succession of events can be conceived as continuing indefinitely. Finally, he claimed that if there was a first cause it could just as well have been the material world as to have been God. In answer to Hume it would seem to imply a contradiction to conceive of a universe which had no cause, and to say that the universe is the cause of its own existence is in itself contradictory.

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