I wish to defend a version of the Cosmological Argument. But the phrase ‘the Cosmological Argument’ has been used to refer to various arguments, some of them very different from each other. Let me, then, say at the outset that with some of these I am either out of sympathy, or I am just plain unsure.

Take, for example, the argument for God’s existence offered by Locke in Book IV, Chapter X of the Essay Concerning Human Understanding. ‘Man knows’, says Locke, ‘by an intuitive certainty that bare nothing can no more produce any real being than it can be equal to two right angles’. So for Locke, if anything exists it is caused to exist by something else. And Locke thinks that what belongs to anything that exists, its nature, must be derived from something else, and that God therefore exists. For if something exists, says Locke, it must have been caused to exist. This means that ‘from eternity there has been something, since what was not from eternity had a beginning, and what had a beginning must be produced by something else’. But this argument is invalid. According to Locke, if something has existed from eternity, there is an eternal being. ‘If, therefore’, says Locke, ‘we know there is some real being, and that nonentity cannot produce any real being, it is an evident demonstration, that from eternity there has been something’. But all Locke’s argument shows is that there has always been something, which is quite compatible with there having been a whole host of different things. In other words, Locke thinks he has proved the equivalent of: