The Cosmological Argument Summary

Within William Rowe’s Chapter two of “The Cosmological Argument”, Rowe reconstructs Samuel Clark's Cosmological Argument by making explicit the way in which the Principle of Sufficient Reason, or PSR, operates in the argument as well as providing contradictions of two important criticisms from Rowe’s argument.

Rowe explains that the PSR has two premises. The first premise of the PSR requires that there must be an explanation of the existence of any being whatever. Meaning that for any being that exists, or ever did exist, it is either a dependent being or a self-existent being. In his argument Rowe defines a dependent being as “a being whose existence is accounted for by the causal activity of other things”(Rowe 18). While Rowe’s definition of a self-existent being is “a being whose existence is accounted for by its own nature” (Rowe 18). Rowe then explains that the second premise of the PSR requires that there be an explanation for any positive fact whatever. Rowe’s formulation of the Cosmological argument is presented that: Every being, that exists or ever did exist, is either a dependent or self-existent being. Not every being is dependent. So there exists a

One of the objections states that the argument makes the mistake of inferring that because each member of a series must have a cause, the series itself must have a cause. According to Bertrand Russell this objection follows the case of the Fallacy of Composition in which Russell claims it makes sense to ask who any human being’s mother is, yet it is senseless to ask who the mother of the human race is. However, Rowe counters Russell’s objection by stating that finding the reason for any series may be difficult, but not meaningless. Rowe argues that asking why a set has the members it has rather than none at all may turn out to hold no answer, but it doesn't mean that the question is