Daniel Dennett on The cosmological argument
Dennett regarded the cosmological argument as a relic of prescientific thinking that explains nothing.
Dennett's treatment of the cosmological argument was characteristically deflationary. He argued that the argument rests on intuitions about causation that evolved to handle middle-sized objects in everyday life — and that these intuitions simply do not apply to questions about the origin of the universe as a whole.
He compared the cosmological argument to asking 'Who designed the designer?' — not as a refutation but as an illustration that the argument generates an infinite regress unless one arbitrarily declares God to be self-explaining. And if we are willing to accept something as self-explaining, Dennett asked, why not the universe itself?
In Breaking the Spell, Dennett treated the appeal of cosmological arguments as itself a phenomenon requiring explanation — an instance of humans' tendency to seek agent-based explanations for natural phenomena. We are, he argued, cognitively predisposed to find the cosmological argument compelling, but that predisposition is a feature of our evolved psychology, not evidence for God.
“The idea that God is an intelligent being who designed and created everything is itself a theory that needs explaining.”