Everything that we observe in nature has been created, and nothing can create itself. Everything that exists around us has a cause, nothing causes itself to come into existence. There cannot be an infinite regress of causes though, so the universe must have had a first cause, and there must be a creator that made it happen. This type of reasoning is often called the "First Cause" argument (in philosophy it is known as the cosmological argument), and it is one of the several arguments for the existence of God, which are tremendously popular in simple forms among Christians, pastors, apologists, and other theists.

I. Inexplicable Exemptions

If you believe God exists, and that all things which exist were created, then God must have been created. Yet this falls into the spiral of infinite regresses (who created whatever created God?). The Christian might respond that "God was not created, the bible tells us he is eternal", but such a statement completely misses the point. If God was not created, then you believe something can exist without having been created, and that means that your initial premise ("everything that exists has been created") is not true. Why should the first cause be exempt from needing a cause? Why should the creator be exempt from needing a creator?

II. Aquinas' Uncaused Cause

To answer these challenges, the 13th century philosopher and theologian Thomas Aquinas revised the concepts into his own argument from contingency [1]. A contingent being is something which can either exist or not exist. You can be dead or alive and it will not significantly change the state of the universe, in other words. Aquinas says that contingent beings have a cause for their existence, and that cause cannot be itself or other contingent beings. Basically, you did not cause yourself to exist, and while your parents might be the biological reason for why you are here, they are faced with the same dilemma of what caused their existence, and it goes back and back into infinite regression... unless there is a necessary, non-contingent being in all of this. This being, according to Aquinas, is necessary because nothing would exist without it, and it is uncaused because contingent beings cannot be their own cause.

There are multiple problems and assumptions made in the argument from contingency, the first being that it is not necessarily self-evident or true that if most of the universe's inhabitants are contingent, the universe itself must be too. This is known as the fallacy of composition: assuming that if the parts of something have a certain quality, the whole of it must have the same quality as well. A stone wall might be made up of short stones, but that does not mean the wall itself is short. We do not know for a fact if the universe had a beginning or will have an end in the traditional sense of the words. The law of conservation of mass states that "matter cannot be created or destroyed". What might that seem to suggest about Aquinas' assertion that our universe is contingent?

Following from that last thought, would a necessary or uncaused cause only be attributable to a god, or might there be other possibilities that could occupy the role? Aquinas' imagination of this "ultimate" being is also rather questionable. He denies that there should be an infinite regress of contingent beings, yet he argues for an infinite god. He claims that contingent beings cannot be their own cause, but then states that God is his own cause. What makes him so sure that a god would be a necessary, uncaused cause?

Aquinas' argument seeks to answer the question of why something exists rather than nothing, but by presenting God as an answer, it only begs the question of why there should be a god rather than nothing. Why pretend like a possibly non-existent god is the reason for a universe that we already know exists? What if it is, as Bertrand Russell suggested [2], just a brute fact that the universe exists, and no explanation is necessary? With so many alternative possibilities, Aquinas' argument is no more persuasive than Pascal's Wager.

III. Time and Causality

A couple other problems also arise for the cosmological argument, having to do with its statements regarding time. According to modern science, the Big Bang was the expansion of both space and time, at which all dimensions came into existence. Because causality only makes sense in the context of time, it seems fruitless to postulate a first cause that occured before the creation or before the Big Bang, as it implies that the event took place outside of time. But what is even the basis for believing that everything (except God) has a cause? Quantum mechanics has revealed that some particles do not actually have a cause in the way that we generally think of causation [3].

IV. Kalaam Calamity

In recent history, the cosmological argument has been rephrased by Islamic philosophers as the "Kalaam argument". This revised version is not much different from other ones proposed in the past, with the exception that it specifically includes a second premise which denies the existence of an actual infinite. The reason for this is primarily that proponents of the Kalaam argument wish to eliminate the possible objections of an infinite universe or an infinite regress of causes. Many times it is asserted that since we cannot fully conceive of infinity, there must not be such a thing.

However, a lack of imagination is not a valid argument for the non-existence of something, and mathematicians seem to be perfectly comfortable with the concept of infinity these days. Aside from these obvious problems, the Kalaam argument also suffers from virtually all the other faults I have indicated in the other formulations of the cosmological argument. Despite the fact that these arguments all rest on at least one or two unfounded assumptions about the nature of existence or the universe, they continue to be used by many theists today.

1. Aquinas. (1274) Summa Theologica. I: 2,3.
2. Russell, B. & Copleston. (1964) The Existence of God. "Debate on the Existence of God".
3. Vuletic, M. (1997) Creation ex nihilo - Without God. Retrieved Oct. 11, 2008.