The First Cause Argument: The Law Of Cause And Effect

In Chapters 1 and 2 of Genesis, we are told that God creates both the universe and everything that is in it. Thomas Aquinas, a leading scholar of the Middle Ages, argued that “Everything in the universe has a cause. Trace those causes back and there must have been a First Cause that triggered everything else. God is that First Cause.”

     There is, however, a way to fix Aquinas’ theory. If we take his logic into account we can say that there was a time when the universe did not exist. But, the universe exists now therefore it must have had a beginning. By definition a necessary being has no beginning and now end. Due to this definition we can say that the universe is not a necessary being. This leaves us with one of three options: there is a necessary being, the universe has always existed, or something can come into existence out of nothing. Due to the big bang theory we can eliminate the theory of the universe always existing. Therefore, there is a necessary being or something can come into existence out of nothing. Because we know that something cannot come into existence out of nothing we determine that there must be a necessary being. However, the necessary being is either God or the universe. Because the universe had a beginning it can not be necessary, therefore God is the necessary being and he must exist.

One burning and enduring problem in philosophy to which we have given considerable examination is the question of the existence of God--the superlative being that philosophers have defined and dealt with for centuries. After reading the classic arguments of St. Anselm and St. Thomas Aquinas, the contentious assertions of Ernest Nagel, and the compelling eyewitness accounts of Julian of Norwich, I have been introduced to some of the most revered and referenced arguments for and against God's existence that have been put into text. All of them are well-thought and well-articulated arguments, but they have their holes. The question of God's true existence, therefore, is still not definitively answered and put to rest; the intensity of this

That argument contradicts itself, because it uses itself as a cause for existence in its premise, when it is proving the concept of cause being a necessity. Therefore, it begs the question to prove cause and effect by relying on the conclusion to prove the premise. The ideas of cause and effect cannot vary too far from actual impressions of the mind or ideas from the memory. We must first establish the existence of causes before we can infer effects from them. We have only two ways of doing that, either by an immediate perception of our memory or senses, called impressions, or, by an inference from other causes, called thoughts. For example, “A man finding a watch or any other machine in a desert island would conclude that there had once been men in that island” (160). Regardless of the source of the impression, the imagination and perceptions of the senses are the foundation for the reasoning that traces the relation of cause and effect. The inference that we draw from cause to effect does not come from a dependence on the two concepts to each other or from a rational objective look at the two. One object does not imply the existence of any other. All distinct ideas are separable, as are the ideas of cause and effect. The only way that we can infer the existence of one object from another is through experience. Contiguity and succession are not sufficient to make us pronounce any two objects to be cause and effect, unless we

This argument for God’s existence was developed by the twelfth century theologian and philosopher, Anselm. It is based on Anselm’s declaration that God is “that which nothing greater can be conceived.”

Weaknesses of the argument One of the weaknesses of the argument is that if all things need a cause to exist, then God Himself must also, by definition, need a cause to exist. But this only pushes causation back and implies that there must be an infinite number of causes, which cannot be. This is contradictory. Also, by definition, God is uncaused.

The argument discussed is one that has an unending list of contingent beings, all of which need a cause for existence. According to the article, McCloskey assumes that the argument calls for an uncaused cause to start an infinite number of contingent beings. McCloskey believes that each contingent being simply exists with an infinite number of causes that eventually lead back to a case of chance. In “Philosophy of Religion” by Stephen Evans, Evans refers to this way of thinking as a “brute fact.” According to Evans, by claiming this stance would turn the partial argument into a whole argument and concurrently, “this will require the defender of the argument to claim that the contingency of the whole of the universe can validly be inferred from the contingency of all its parts.” Where McCloskey’s ignorance further takes a violent curve against acquiring knowledge about the beginning of the universe connects to his argument is when he said “This means that the first cause must be explained as being a necessarily existing being, one who cannot exist.” What he is alluding to, and is also the focal point of his disapproval of theism, is that humans do not have the right to claim that a being created the universe. If an atheist can claim that there is no such existence of God, then why is it that a theist cannot claim the existence of a God?

As discussed in class, modern scientific research provides alternatives to Aquinas’s presumed necessities. An infinite series of causes no longer seems impossible. This research disproves Aquinas 's third premise (P3), and his argument for God as the first cause is consequently unnecessary. Furthermore, the fourth premise still has a logical gap between the first cause and God. Aquinas offers no explanation as to why the first cause must be God or a supernatural being at all. The first cause may just as easily be a spontaneous event, or a first cause may not exist at all in an infinite universal cycle.

In this paper I discuss both Hume’s and Anscombe’s view on causation. I begin with Hume and his regularity theory; then I move onto Anscombe where I provide a rebuttal of Hume’s regularity theory, and later I explain how Hume would respond to Anscombe’s objection to Hume’s regularity theory.

In order for a universe filled with creation, to be formed by anything other than an all-powerful being, is to say that you or I could construct the same creation. Some theorist believe the Big Bang Theory but this would constitute taking time, space and chance and exploding that into everything while subtracting your law of casualty (Wellman, 2012). Also if the universe had just exploded into the state of “being” then what was it before a “non-being” (Wellman, 2012)? The Big Bang Theory is lacking what the cosmological argument provides something had to exist you cannot just have existence from nothing. Therefore our universe in order to exist supports the existence of the uncaused all-powerful being.

The cosmological argument is an a posteriori argument which intends to prove that there is an intelligent being that exists; the being is distinct from the universe, explains the existence of the universe, and is omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent and omnibenevolent. The basic notion of cosmological arguments is that the world and everything in it is dependent on something other than itself for its existence. It explains that everything has a cause, that there must have been a first cause, and that this first cause was itself uncaused.

But there is a distinction drawn between the universe and God is that the universe has a beginning in time. Everything that has a beginning in time, the kalam cosmological argument claims, has a cause of its existence. The uncaused existence of God, who does not have a beginning in time, is consistent with it ’s claim.

that it is caused to exist by B, why may not B be caused to exist by

Many writers refer to this argument as the uncreated creator proof. All things in nature are transitory and thus may exist or not exist. Because nature is time limited things of the world either exist or they do not. Natural things cannot exist and not exist at the same time. Because of that reality, we can reason that at one time nothing temporal existed. Through this line of thinking we can conclude that not all beings exist as contingent beings but there must be a being that exists because of its own necessity. This being is the uncreated creator that we know as God. This uncreated creator brings all

Assume there is no God. Then nothing could exist right now. Remembering that on the no-God theory, all things require a current cause exterior of themselves in order to be present. So right now, all things, as well as all those things which are causing things to be, need a source. All that exists, consequently, on this theory, stands in need of being caused to exist. But caused by what? Apart from everything that is, there can only be unknown. But that is ridiculous that all of reality dependent, but in need of nothing. The proposition that all being is caused, that there is no uncaused being, is irrational. So there must be something uncaused, something on which all things that need an efficient cause of being are dependent. If there is no