Rationalists argued confidently that human reason can derive knowledge about realities beyond experience simply by moving from one idea to another as one does in mathematics.
As Stephan Meier, an academic at Columbia Business School, argues persuasively in " The Employee Advantage" , a new book, people are motivated by many more things than moolah.
Much of this has to do with academic economists, mostly in the U.S. and Europe who have argued with great success that governmental regulation diminishes prosperity by limiting growth.
The cosmological argument cannot, therefore, securely lead us to a first cause of all things, for the most we can infer from our experience of things is a regulative idea of God.