Cosmological argument in the context of "First Cause"

The existence of God is a subject of debate in the philosophy of religion and theology. A wide variety of arguments for and against the existence of God (with the same or similar arguments also generally being used when talking about the existence of multiple deities) can be categorized as logical, empirical, metaphysical, subjective, or scientific. In philosophical terms, the question of the existence of God involves the disciplines of epistemology (the nature and scope of knowledge) and ontology (study of the nature of being or existence) and the theory of value (since some definitions of God include perfection).

The Western tradition of philosophical discussion of the existence of God began with Plato and Aristotle, who made arguments for the existence of a being responsible for fashioning the universe, referred to as the demiurge or the unmoved mover, that today would be categorized as cosmological arguments. Other arguments for the existence of God have been proposed by St. Anselm, who formulated the first ontological argument; Thomas Aquinas, who presented his own version of the cosmological argument (the first way); René Descartes, who said that the existence of a benevolent God is logically necessary for the evidence of the senses to be meaningful. John Calvin argued for a sensus divinitatis, which gives each human a knowledge of God's existence. Islamic philosophers who developed arguments for the existence of God comprise Averroes, who made arguments influenced by Aristotle's concept of the unmoved mover; Al-Ghazali and Al-Kindi, who presented the Kalam cosmological argument; Avicenna, who presented the Proof of the Truthful; and Al-Farabi, who made Neoplatonic arguments.

The Kalam cosmological argument is a modern formulation of the cosmological argument for the existence of God. It is named after the Kalam (medieval Islamic scholasticism) from which many of its key ideas originated. Philosopher and theologian William Lane Craig was principally responsible for revitalising these ideas for modern academic discourse through his book The Kalām Cosmological Argument (1979), as well as other publications.

The argument's central thesis is the metaphysical impossibility of a temporally past-infinite universe and of actual infinities existing in the real world, traced by Craig to 11th-century Persian Muslim scholastic philosopher Al-Ghazali. This feature distinguishes it from other cosmological arguments, such as Aquinas's Second Way, which rests on the impossibility of a causally ordered infinite regress, and those of Leibniz and Samuel Clarke, which refer to the principle of sufficient reason.

The Quinque viæ (Latin for "Five Ways") (sometimes called the "five proofs") are five logical arguments for the existence of God summarized by the 13th-century Catholic philosopher and theologian Thomas Aquinas in his book Summa Theologica. They are:

1. the argument from "first mover";
2. the argument from universal causation;
3. the argument from contingency;
4. the argument from degree;
5. the argument from final cause or ends ("teleological argument").

Aquinas expands the first of these – God as the "unmoved mover" – in his Summa Contra Gentiles.