Anselm: Cosmological-Type Arguments

Before Anselm, Saint Augustine offered a proof for God. After him Anselm (1022-1119). He is best know for his ontological argument in the Proslogion, but an earlier work, the Monologion, offered three a posteriori proofs for God's existence (Anselm 1-3). A description of his arguments is given in the article on Anselm.
Anselm's first argument is from the existence of things:

1) Good things exist.
2) The cause of this goodness is either one or many.
3) If it were many, there would be no way to compare their goodness. But some things are better than others.
4) So there is one Supreme Good who causes all goodness in all good things.

The second argument is similar but works from perfection:

1) Some beings are more nearly perfect than others.
2) But things cannot be more or less perfect unless there is one wholly perfect standard for comparison.
3) The standard is a Most Perfect Being.

The third argument, from being, is most obviously cosmological:

1) Something exists and
2) owes its existence either to nothing or to something.
3) Nothing cannot cause something.
4) There is, then, a something, which is either one or many.
5) If many, the beings would be mutually dependent for their own existence or dependent on another.
6) They cannot be mutually dependent for their existence. Something cannot exist through a being on which it confers existence.
7) Therefore, there must be one being through which all other being exist.
8) The being must exist through itself.
9) Whatever exists through itself, exists in the highest degree of all.
10) Therefore, a supremely perfect Being exists in the highest degree.

These arguments, unlike Plato's but like the reasoning of Plotinus, identify the Creator with the supreme Good. Unlike Aristotle's, the arguments view God as the efficient, not the final, Cause of the world. Unlike Plato or Aristotle, Anselm holds that his efficient Cause does not merely operate on eternally existing matter. Rather this Cause causes everything, including mater.
These Christian theistic arguments combined at least three elements: (1) Efficient causality from Plato's Timaeus argument; (2) identification of this God with the Good of Plato's Republic, the supremely perfect Being; (3) identification of this God with the Hebrew-Christian God. This God causes the very being, not merely the forms of being, of everything that exists.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PvdLhQ3Mz04