The Cosmological Argument is defeated by the fallacy of composition. Discuss. v.2021–06
William Lane Craig, who was responsible for re-popularizing this argument in Western philosophy, presents it in the following general form:
Whatever begins to exist has a cause for its existence.
The universe began to exist.
Therefore, the universe has a cause for its existence.
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A fallacy is a failure in reasoning which makes an argument invalid. The
‘fallacy of composition’ is the fallacy of inferring that something is true
of the whole from the fact that it is true of part of the whole, or of every
part of the whole.
A simple example of the fallacy of composition is:
1 Hydrogen is not wet; oxygen is not wet.
2 Therefore water (H2O) is not wet.
This is clearly a fallacious argument! It assumes that what is true of the
parts of water (hydrogen and oxygen) is true of water as a whole.
Russell’s best known example of the fallacy of composition comes in his
1948 radio debate referred to above, where he says to Copleston:
‘I can illustrate what seems to me your fallacy. Every man who exists
has a mother, and it seems to me your argument is that therefore the
human race must have a mother, but obviously the human race hasn’t
a mother — that’s a different logical sphere.’
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Resources
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