Skip to contentWillowOne's PositionsTagsWhat’s newMediaStatisticsSearch
WillowOne's Positions

First Cause Argument

Form

  1. Every effect has a cause.
  2. There cannot be an infinite regress of causes.
  3. Therefore there must be a first, uncaused cause.
  4. (Usually added) That first cause is God.

This is the second of Thomas Aquinas's Five Ways (Summa Theologica, I, q.2, a.3), the argument from efficient causation.

My Positions

  1. Ambiguity in "cause" and "effect".
  1. The terms cause and effect are vague across metaphysical, physical, and temporal contexts. Physics does not use "cause" as a primitive at all; it uses equations that are, for the most part, time-symmetric.
  2. Causation may not apply outside time or space, that is, at the supposed origin of the universe.
  3. Quantum events (vacuum fluctuations, radioactive decay) challenge the universality of causation as the argument understands it.
    2. Rejection of premise 1, as it is contradicted by the conclusion. If everything needs a cause, the first cause needs a cause. If the first cause is exempt, then not everything needs a cause, and the universe itself is as good a candidate for exemption as God. This is special pleading.
    3. Rejection of premise 2. An infinite regress may be coherent. There is no logical contradiction in an infinite past, any more than in the infinite sequence of negative integers. The intuition that it is impossible is an intuition, not an argument. See Owens Tryptic of Ignorance.
    4. The first cause need not be God-like. Even granting the argument, it establishes only that something uncaused exists. It does not establish that this something is conscious, personal, good, singular, or still around. A brute physical fact would satisfy the argument as well as a deity, and more parsimoniously (Occam's Razor - Principle of Parsimony).
    5. Temporal causation may not apply "before" time. If time began with the universe, "before the universe" is incoherent. Causation, as we understand it, requires temporal succession: the cause precedes the effect. A "first cause" outside time is a cause that does not precede anything, which is to say, not a cause in any sense we understand.
    6. The argument, like its relatives, trades on the Appeal to Ignorance: we do not know why there is something rather than nothing, therefore God. The honest answer is that we do not know. "God" is a label for the gap, not an explanation of it.

Also see