Religion and science are more connected than people in general actually think they are. In the Middle Eve Galileo Galilei was accused to be a heretic because of his assertion that the earth is not the center of the universe, as it moves around the orbit of the sun (Eppur, si mueve) (Galilei in Gibbons 109), later on his heresy was proved scientifically correct. The eternal being that Clarke’s Cosmological Argument is founded on has also been explained scientifically as the Big Bang theory, the beginning of everything. From that primordial explosion star dust spread and it continues to spread, giving life to cosmos particles. Humans and the Earth on which are living, with all the creatures and the surrounding flora, etc., are all the product of the star dust that the initial atoms produced while colliding.
Therefore, at the beginning there was something that produced everything, as Clarke also argued. But instead of calling that something God, scientists chose to call it Big Bang, a physical phenomenon and not a spiritual one. In fact, one of the main weaknesses of Clarke’s Cosmological Argument is that he makes the creation of the cosmos sound as a biblical event, something miraculous, when in fact it had a more precise nature: science. Or, as Cleanthes argues, the existence of things, the existence of matter in all its shapes, forms, structures and substances, can be explained from within, as something that must exist, without being created by somebody, but self-produced (Williford 103).
Another feebleness in Clarke’s argument is that he states that there has been an unchangeable and independent being since eternity (Rowe 225). He bases his argument on a undemonstrated idea as it is impossible to demonstrate that something remained unchangeable throughout time from the beginning of the cosmological existence. Looking at physical laws, there can be stated that nothing is changing: everything is transforming or expanding, as the universe (“Big Bang Theory”). By this “everything is transforming” there is deducted that even that mighty being that Clarke considers that has not changed from the beginning of times (God) transforms. For everything to transform it is not required the intervention of a mystic supreme spiritual force that Clarke believes to be God. For the “series of dependent beings” that Clarke attributes to God’s creation, the explanation lies in the initial spark produced in the 0 moment of the Big Bang explosion. As the source of life has been created through the ramification of the elementary particles everywhere, life has appeared and evolved differently, depending on the various conditions in which it was created. The fact that people in the desert or in the sunny regions have a darker skin than the ones in the countries that benefit of temperate continental climate is not the hand of God, but the result of life interaction with the sources of life: sun, water, wind, etc.
If God existed since ever, as Clarke indicates, and in control of everything that exists and does not exist, on what criteria did he choose what to exist and what not to exist? Why did the dinosaurs get extinct and why have people appeared on the Earth? It is rather the natural forces’ evolution, the interaction of atoms, better known as the atmospheric conditions which dictated the existence and the ending of existence of species and the development of the world as known today. Clarke’s argument is not finite, not complete and not tested. By supporting the idea of the existence of a necessary being that it is independent by all the other beings and all the other beings are dependent by it (God), Clarke implies that God is the reason for why everything in the world exists and develops as it does. While his argument that every effect is produced by a cause is relevant, but cannot be applied to the case that he exemplifies. In other words, Clarke implies that God is the cause and everything else that exists in the cosmos represents the effect. However, to name God the cause of everything that produces in cosmos is un-sustained and contradictory, in the context of also considering its nature eternal and independent. Being independent implies being not influenced by anything that surrounds one, hence not changed and not transformed. But since the laws of physics demonstrated that everything is transforming in the world (cosmos), expanding and evolving every day, these transformations can only occur because the source that is producing them it is also changing. Therefore, because Clarke sustains that God is independent, his argument according to which he is necessary for the other things to exist it is contradictory with the first. For other things to exist as they are, evolving and transforming, God would need to keep up with the transformations that he, supposedly produces. Otherwise the distinct evolution of the known part of the cosmos, the planet Earth, would represent God’s random and inconsistent display of a moody personality. The big freeze that changed the way the world looks today, the separation of land into six different continents surrounded by oceans and now the global warming would simply be the effects of a capricious God, acting like a cause for producing a large variety of effects from time to time.
As Clarke describes God through his cosmological argument and looking at the actual known facts about planet Earth and the surrounding space, one could say that God is playing, testing various variables to see their effects, feeling amused by the products of its work.
Is this the being that created the cosmos? A curious baby that endeavors in new games and multiple combinations of whose effect he does not know? An irresponsible creature playing the extension – survival game just for having fun? According to his description, this is how he sounds, because he draws God as independent and necessary for the things to exist as they are. This means that God is the only constant and controls everything else, deciding their destiny on no other premises than his imagination.
Looking at relevant evidence, time and space had a finite start date and the universe expands (“Big Bang Theory”), making everything within it to transform and experience new phenomena, generating various shifts know today as the big frost or the current global warming. All these changes that produce in the immediate world are the effects of precise and explicable natural phenomena, and not the product of the independent and necessary being (Clarke in Rowe 171).
In developing his argument for the existence of God, Clarke erroneously uses the cause – effect argument, situating God as the cause of the existence of all the cosmos and of the changes and transformation that occur. Clarke’s cosmological argument is un-sustained by relevant proves and are founded on the premises of the existence of an independent and necessary creature that has the power to transform everything, while he remains unchanged.
Works Cited
Big Bang Theory – The Premise. Accessed 9 December 2014, available at http://www.big-bang-theory.com/. N.d. Web.
Rowe, William L. The Cosmological Argument. Princeton: Princeton University. 1998. Print.
Williford, Kenneth. “Demea’s a priori Theistic Proof” Hume Studies. Volume XXVIX, no 1, pp. 99 – 123.
