The cosmological argument in Judaism

Medieval Jewish philosophy's engagement with the cosmological argument is most directly owed to Moses Maimonides (1138–1204). In the Guide for the Perplexed, Maimonides presented three arguments — from motion, from the impossibility of an uncaused universe of contingents, and from the distinction between potentiality and actuality — all drawn from Aristotelian foundations and all aimed at a necessary being that is the ultimate source of movement and existence in the world.

Maimonides's move was distinctive in that he accepted (unlike al-Ghazali and Aquinas) that Aristotelian proofs could work even on the assumption of an eternal universe. This created a philosophical position that stood with the Greek philosophers on eternity while maintaining, on religious grounds, the Torah's teaching of creation. This characteristically double-minded approach — Aristotelian in philosophy, Jewish in religion — shaped the Latin reception of Jewish thought and influenced Aquinas directly through the thirteenth-century translations of the Guide.

Jewish philosophy since the Haskalah has largely moved away from cosmological arguments toward experiential and ethical frameworks. Hermann Cohen's ethical interpretation of Judaism, Franz Rosenzweig's Star of Redemption, Abraham Joshua Heschel's God in Search of Man — all treat the primary evidence for God as coming from encounter rather than from cosmological inference. Orthodox Jewish thought, particularly in the Lithuanian yeshiva tradition and the writings of Joseph B. Soloveitchik, has retained a place for classical proofs, but without the central role they played in medieval Jewish thought.