anything else for its existence: that it, it must exist necessarily rather than contingenly; and that cause is God.Hume has many criticisms for the Cosmological Argument. He atests there is no a priori reason to believe that everything has a cause or a reason by means of which it is explained or understood. And no set of observations can establish a posteriori the truth of the causal principle (viz., the principle that everything has a cause).Hume also believes the argument commits what is called the fallacy of composition: it assumes that a characteristic of parts of a thing is also a characteristic of the whole thing. The fact that members of a team had biological births does not mean that the team itself had a biological birth. Like wise, the fact that each thing in the universe has a cause does not mean that the universe in its entirety has a cause. Speaking about causes makes sense only in regard to thing in the world, not the world as a totality.Hume puts forth the question, If God is the cause of the universe, then what is the cause of God? If God is his own cause, then why can’t the universe itself be its own cause? Perhaps the universe has itself existed forever and needs no cause other than simply being what it is (as is said supposedly of God).Besides, why does the existence of anything have to have an ultimate reason in terms of which it is intelligible? Why not accept the possibility that things in the universe are caused by other things, and that the sequence of causes has no particular beginning: it simply goes on endlessly, indefinitely, in what is called an "infinite regress"? If thinking this means that things are ultimately unintelligible, so be it. Only the human inclination to think that everything is intelligible requires us to assume an end to the explanation.Finally, even if we were to accept the argument that the universe has a cause, that would not prove that God is infinite, good, caring, etc. Since the...
