The biggest - and most valid - objection to the Cosmological Argument is the issue of the inevitable Infinite Regress it engenders. If everything had a cause, then what was the first cause? Christians or theists say “God”. Atheists then ask from whence came God? And where did the thing that created God come from? And so on, ad infinitum: ‘there are turtles all the way down’ so to speak (for those who get the reference).
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Aseity is the concept that something can exist uncaused by anything else. The term itself was coined by Christian theologians in the Middle Ages but the concept exists in Judaism and Islam and predates Christ, first appearing in written history with the ancient Greeks. Pythagoras and Plato believed certain abstract, non-physical concepts or ideals existed outside of and independently of our physical world and are ‘uncaused’. These include things like numbers & mathematics (Pythagoras’ ‘forms’) and essences of things like ‘redness’ (Plato’s Forms). Parmenides simply argued that everything had a cause and ‘nothing could come from nothing’ and therefore existence itself had to be eternal and uncreated.
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Aristotle observed that the world around him was in a state of constant flux – that everything was in motion all the time. He developed what has come to be known as the Cosmological Argument in Book 8 of Physics although elements that contribute to its understanding can be found throughout his writings especially Book 12 of Metaphysics.
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Thomas Aquinas was a Catholic Priest, a Dominican Friar, that lived in Italy in the 13th Century. He was the best and most well-known philosopher in the Western Canon for 1,500 since the Ancient Greeks such as Aristotle and Plato in 300 B.C.
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2,500 years ago, around 525 B.C., Paremenides was one of the earliest great Greek philosophers. Pre-dating Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle by 200 years, his only known work is a poem entitled “On Nature” of which only fragrments survive.
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