Short response to a stupid rebuttal (made by an ostensibly intelligent guy)

Some guy objected to the argument for God’s existence from first cause principles –otherwise known as the cosmological argument– with a video of Physicist Lawrence Krauss explaining a philosophically bankrupt version of  a creation ex nihilo event, while bolstering it with the statement “If everything has a cause, then what caused God? [huh? huh? I got you now!]“

The amusing thing is that people who make this objection, and who are sufficiently well-versed in philosophy of religion –as indeed they must be if anyone’s obliged take them seriously on such issues– seem to think that this most obvious retort was somehow overlooked by philosophical giants like Leibniz, Aquinas and Craig –to name a few of its more notable defenders.

To disabuse his mind of the folly of his thinking, I responded tersely with:

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The problem with that version of creation ex nihilo is that it shows Krauss’s complete ignorance of philosophy. Krauss’s “nothing” is a sea of quantum energy still governed by physical laws. That’s hardly a “nothing” in a strict metaphysical sense. Krauss even admitted this much during his debate with Craig.

And to object with a “who made God?” is to seriously miss the point because it assumes the premiss the argument rests on is ‘everything has a cause’.

Not quite.

The premiss the whole argument actually rests on is the one for which we have at least prima facie evidence for, which is: everything that *begins to exist* has a cause, or, everything that’s contingent has a cause.

God isn’t arbitrarily defined as an uncaused entity, actually. The aim of the whole argument, in it’s complete form, and not the form it takes on infidel websites, is to show that there must be a cause of everything which could not in principle be caused because it’s not the sort of thing that in principle can be said to have had a cause.

Ofcourse, the reasons for the above, in all their complexity, won’t be easy to show here (at the comment box) –if I even attempted to do so, I’d be doing an injustice to philosophers like al-Ghazali, Aquinas, Leibniz, or Craig– but It nevertheless shows why an objection like the one made above is not a serious objection to the cosmological argument.

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