The Cosmological Argument for God's Existence

Response to the claim:  "Creation science begins with God, and thus invalidates itself by making a priori assumptions which it fails to substantiate."

We don't start with the assumption that God did it and then work forward from there, we start with the assumption that something, anything, now exists and ask where it came from.


So this rock (R1), for instance.  This rock exists.  Science loves rocks.  Where did this rock come from?  It had a cause(Cr)... whatever that cause may have been... but where did that cause (Cr) come from?  From whatever caused it (C1).  And where did C1 come from?  from C-1, of course.  And C-1 comes from C-2, and so forth.

But this cannot go on forever.  You cannot postulate an infinite regression of causes because it is logically impossible to traverse an actual infinite.  That is, if each iteration of C requires only a single second in the history of time to both become and to cause the next iteration, but there are an infinite number of causes, then there are an infinite number of seconds prior to this one.

We could never arrive at this second right now, then, because there would always be an infinite amount of seconds prior to it.

Thus, an initial cause is philosophically necessary.

This cause CANNOT be the Big Bang.  Why?  Because matter, space, and time all came into existence at the same moment.  Since the Big Bang is a physical event, it cannot cause itself.

Therefore, whatever caused time, space, and matter to come into existence must itself be timeless, spaceless, and immaterial.  It must also be immensely powerful to cause time, space, and matter to come into being, and further, it must be personal, because it makes the choice to begin the act of causing these things to come into being.

That is, it is philosophically necessary for there to BE an initial cause, which itself needed not to be caused.

Now, why can't that initial cause be the universe itself?  Because of the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, which states that everything is winding down, like a clock.  If the universe itself were infinitely old, we would already have experienced the eventual heat death that science predicts, on top of the logical impossibility of an infinite regression of causes.

So if the uncaused initial cause is timeless, spaceless, immaterial, powerful, and personal, what would we call that?

We'd call it God.


NOTE:  Many thanks to Drs. Gerald Schroeder, Frank Turek, Ravi Zacharias, and William Lane Craig, among others, for their work on the Cosmological Argument.