Criticisms of the Cosmological argument Hume, Mackie and Anscombe

Hume and responses  Fallacy of Composition – however, it is not a formal fallacy and does not always hold (eg. it doesn’t hold for the coloured tiles but does for the shapes – so the question is ‘is contingency more like colour or shape’?)  Problems with PSR – it’s not a logical necessity, but a ‘presupposition of all rationality’

Mackie – Necessary Being  1. Criticism of the notion of a necessary being:  1.1 We have no good reason to believe that there can be such a thing: For any object, one can conceive of it failing to exist.  1.2 Conceivability is evidence of possibility  1.3 So, for every object, it's possible for it to fail to exist  1.4 But if so, then we have evidence against the possibility of necessary beings  1.5 And if so, then this severely weakens our basis for thinking that contingent beings need an explanation in terms of necessary beings. For then it is dubious that there could possibly be a necessary being.

Mackie - PSR  2. Criticisms of PSR:  2.1 PSR isn’t a necessary truth (or at least this isn't self-evident, or otherwise derivable from what's self-evident)  2.2 Even if we have an innate tendency to always look for an explanation, it doesn’t follow that the universe has to cooperate with this tendency and satisfy this desire  2.3 Rejecting PSR doesn’t have the implausible consequence that we can no longer do science.  It is enough if we explain the existence of each object or fact in terms of one or more contingent fact, and so on forever.  We don’t have to give a further explanation of the series of objects or facts taken as a whole.

Mackie in summary  Building off the previous points: Since we have reason to think that there can be no necessary being (as we saw in the previous criticism), then we have excellent reason to believe that the existence of at least some objects or facts (e.g., the existence of the set of contingent objects and events in the universe as a whole) is just a brute fact, with no further explanation.

Anscombe’s response to Hume  Responding to the Fallacy of Composition  (a) G.E.M. Anscombe has responded to Hume’s argument by pointing out that you could conclude that ‘existence must have a cause’ without believing or knowing that ‘such particular effects must have such particular causes’. (G.E.M. Anscombe, 1974)  (b) Anscombe gives the example of a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat, pointing out that you can imagine a rabbit ‘coming into being without a cause’ but this tells us nothing about ‘what is possible to suppose ‘without contradiction or absurdity’ as holding in reality’

Anscombe in summary  Hume's fallacy of composition says that it is possible to conceive of an event without a cause because there is nothing about an event that requires a cause. This is Hume's zero tolerance policy for rational conclusions. He required all conclusions to come from observation.  Anscombe says that even if Hume is right about no rational conclusions, Hume is jumping from conceiving of something happening to the possibility of it happening and this is a mistake. The concept or idea of a rabbit coming from nothing exists. That concept does nothing to prove that it is possible for the rabbit to come from nothing.  That is Anscombe's point. Hume did nothing to prove that events don't need causes. At best he proved that if you don't observe that every event has a cause, then you can imagine that events don't require causes.