Aquinas's Second Way

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Aquinas’s second way is one of the most commonly defended and contested of the five ways. In his book Arguing for Atheism, Robin Le Poidevin contests the second way, or as he calls it, the cosmological argument. Le Poidevin reconstructs the argument, in its most basic form, as such:
“Anything that exists has a cause of its existence
Nothing can be the cause of its own existence
The universe exists
Therefore: The universe has a cause of its existence which lies outside the universe.” From this reconstruction, Le Poidevin argues that the first two premises demonstrate that there cannot be a first cause because if there was, it would have to have a cause (1) and but it could not be caused by itself (2), so it would have to be caused by something …show more content…
At this point, Aquinas’s argument is fairly well re-created, and Le Poidevin makes his real objection to the “temporal cosmological argument” as he calls it. Le Poidevin latches on to the temporal aspect of the argument, because if the universe is caused, it must have had a beginning point. The universe must have started to exist for the temporal cosmological argument to hold. Le Poidevin supplies two ways of getting around a temporal beginning. First, he offers an infinite regression of time, in which everything is preceded by a previous cause, and there is no need to speak of a first temporal cause because any individual cause X can be explained by cause …show more content…
Le Poidevin makes a compelling case, but he has errors of his own to deal with. First, some Aquinas scholars might argue that Le Poidevin’s entire shift to a temporal sense of causality is not fair to Aquinas, and that when Aquinas says prior, he does not necessarily mean it in a directly temporal sense, but in some more vague sense that could simply mean contingence rather than temporal progression. However, I think that Le Poidevin has the upper hand here. Aquinas clearly means something temporal when he describes efficient causes, and it is indeed difficult to imagine an efficient cause that does not involve some progression of time in which the cause
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