has a concept of “God”, by this argument, then that person has also admitted God’s existence (in the same way that admitting you have the concept of a triangle is, is to admit that a triangle has three angles).Like most of Kant’s topics of discussion, it is difficult to fully grasp the entirety of what is being said. However, unlike most other cases, this time I don’t think it’s entirely his fault. In fact, his refutation to this deceivingly simple argument is (perhaps deceivingly) actually quite simple. Existence cannot be a predicate. In the sentence “Thomas is the teacher”, the word “is” is not the predicate, but it is the word that implies existence. Therefore, the sentence “God is” does not contain a predicate. A predicate is a word that ads a quality to the concept of the thing it is applied to – existence is not a quality. The cosmological argument, according to Kant, “is too well known for it to be necessary to expound it in detail here” (P570), so if you don’t know it, you can join me in feeling like an idiot… However, he then goes on to quickly explain the argument. I also took the liberty of finding out where this argument came from and it seems to have started with Aristotle and also used by Aquinas. Aristotle said that the fact that there is movement could prove the existence of an “unmoved mover” (God). In other words the only way that something can have movement is if something moves it. The only way the thing that moves it can have motion is if something, in turn, moves that as well (and so on). Aristotle believed that there must be a final end to this chain – a thing that can cause movement without inheriting that movement from anything else – this thing must be God. As per usual, Kant uses as many words as he can find, saying that this argument “appeals to the agreement of t...
