While rhetorically powerful, this objection misses the point of the Cosmological argument. The claim is not that everything has a cause. Rather, everything that begins to exist has a cause. The universe clearly began to exist, and so it needs a cause. On the other hand, God is the uncaused, self-existent, eternal cause of the universe.
• If matter began to exist at the moment of creation, then the matter’s cause must be nonphysical, or spiritual.
• Since space itself came into existence at the big bang, space’s cause must be spaceless.
• Since time began at the moment of the big bang, time’s cause must be timeless.
• Since change is a product of time, time’s cause must also be changeless.
• Given the immensity of energy and matter that comprises the universe, energy and matter’s cause must be unimaginably powerful.
It’s impossible to avoid positing an uncaused cause of the universe. Think about it. If God was caused by something else, then that thing would also need a cause, and we would have an infinite regress without a beginning. Yet if there was no beginning, then nothing could exist. The regression only stops with something that is self-existing. This thing cannot be physical because physical matter itself began to exist. A supernatural being is the best explanation of the first cause.
A cosmic beginning is a problem from the atheistic perspective, but it is right at home in the Judeo-Christian worldview. After all, the first line in the Bible, written thousands of years before the advent of modern cosmology, says, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
Learn more about the evidence for God and how to respond to the toughest objections in my book – Is God Just a Human Invention? And Seventeen Other Questions Raised By The New Atheists
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