Rescuing the Argument from First Cause – HARDER!

OK, you don’t really need this for GCSE but it’s worth mentioning that the argument from First Cause is not dead in the water. People still use it today because they think it does work and that the arguments from science are missing the point. Here’s why:

The arguments from science are missing the point! The point is not that is we track back and back in time in models of chronological causation (cause and effect over time) that we get to God. The point is a purely logical one that the universe must depend on something in order to have come into existence.

The simple fact is we cannot (with current technology and understanding) track back to the Big Bang (mostly because at something like 1/10^-22 of a second after the Big Bang all our models of how the universe works break down (even time doesn’t really exist anymore!)).

For this reason we can’t really know about the cause (if there is one) of the Big Bang. What we do know is that we can currently only account for less then 30% of the mass of our universe (most of it is missing – called DARK MATTER (not as cool at it sounds)) and if some quantum physicists are right there are many dimensions of our universe that we can’t experience anyway. In a nutshell the only things we can prove are:

• We don’t know exaclty how the universe began.
• We don’t really know how our universe works or what makes it up.
• We DO know that our knowledge of it is incomplete.

So, the only sensible thing to do is admit we don’t know. Is there a God? I don’t know, but of course, for a religous person, it’s not a question of knowledge it’s a question of faith or belief. The logic suggests there COULD be a first cause and faith suggests there is, so in the absence of any evidence to prove otherwise I’m going to go on believing that there is.