Standard variants of the Cosmological Argument are built on this syllogism:
P1:
Everything that begins to exist has a cause other than itself.
P2: The
universe began to exist.
C:
Therefore, the universe has a cause other than itself.
Christians who understand the essential two category distinctions, God (uncaused, necessary Being) and creation (caused, contingent things - basically, everything that isn’t God), accept the Cosmological Argument is correct in some form, but I think it’s better to have ‘creation’ in the premises not ‘universe’, in case God’s creative dispensations extend beyond this universe. So, an improvement is:
P1:
Everything that begins to exist has a cause other than itself.
P2: Creation
began to exist.
C:
Therefore, creation has a cause other than itself.
A Being powerful enough to bring all of creation into existence is the necessary, uncaused, eternal cause traditionally understood as God, who has made Himself personally knowable in Christ.
Recently, atheist Richard Carrier tried to offer a fundamental issue with the Cosmological Argument, where he says:
“Everything that begins to exist has a cause other than itself” is literally logically impossible. Why? Because “Everything” includes all laws of physics. Causality is a law of physics. Therefore it is logically impossible for any law of causality to apply before that law of causality even exists. The first premise is therefore logically necessarily false. Not just probably false. It is necessarily false. It can never be the case that “everything” that begins to exist has a cause. Nor can “physical reality” be an exception-case to “everything”. Those are part of the contents of what is beginning in “the universe began to exist” and therefore cannot exist before that so as to cause it. Causal laws cannot exist before causal laws exist.”
There are two main things wrong with Carrier’s assertion – one is a philosophical error, and the other is a category definition problem that is already negated if we use ‘creation’ in the premises’ not ‘universe’. The philosophical error is in stating that “causality is a physical law, so it can’t apply before physical laws exist” – because causality is not only a physical law, it is a metaphysical proposition that’s fundamental to reality itself. Carrier’s confusion, which is a popular one, rests on the mistaken assumption that the only things that exist are physical things, which is fundamentally wrong (see my mathematics blogs in the tab here for more on why this is the case). The premise “Everything that begins to exist has a cause” is about ontological dependence, not merely physical cause-effect relationships governed by physics – which are only a subset of all of reality. Moreover, it doesn’t make sense to talk of ‘before’ except in the physical sense (as time is intrinsically linked to space, as per the spacetime of modern physics), so God bringing creation into being is not temporal causality in the sense that a physical human might imagine.
Secondly, my replacing “universe” with “creation” in the premise already addresses Carrier’s objection in a few ways. Creation is metaphysically broader than the physical universe, as “creation” means all contingent reality - not just physical entities or laws. The cause of creation is not limited to physical laws, and the cause that brings creation into existence isn’t subject to physical laws like causality. Replacing ‘universe’ with ‘creation’ grounds causality itself, and no longer remains limited by it. Talking about “creation” rather than “universe,” allows for an atemporal or transcendent cause, which is essential when you realise that time and causality are also created realities.
The claim “Everything that begins to exist has a cause other than itself is literally logically impossible” is false under the above terms, where ‘creation’ replaces ‘universe’ in the syllogism. But if we are just talking about the physical universe – a long-standing matter of discussion in philosophy and cosmology – then applying the standard notion of causality to the origin of the entire physical universe when you think the only things that exist a physical is also problematic. What makes it most problematic is if you make the error in thinking that the only things that exist are physical, which is one of the many limitations of the philosophy of naturalism.
