Philo

Volume 16, Issue 1, Spring/Summer 2013

Emanuel Rutten
Pages 77-94

On Herman Philipse’s Attempt to Write Off Cosmological Arguments

In his 2012 book God in the Age of Science? A Critique of Religious Reason, Herman Philipse argues that all known deductive versions of the cosmological argument are untenable. His strategy is to propose a few objections to two classical deductive cosmological arguments. The first argument is from the impossibility of there being contingent entities that are the sufficient cause for the existence of a contingent entity: the second argument is from the impossibility of there being an infinite causal regress. In this article I argue that Philipse’s attempt to write off all deductive cosmological arguments fails.