First Cause

"It has even been said that the highest praise of God is to be found in the denial of Him by the atheist, who considers creation perfect enough to dispense with a Creator."  -Marcel Proust

So let us discuss another argument for the existence of a god, in this case specifically a creator. It's known by various names, but is most commonly referred to as the First Cause Argument or Cosmological Argument. It's originally credited to Aquinas, but more recently it's been touted widely by William Lane Craig under the name the Kalam Argument. All of them state basically the same thing, though Aquinas goes into a bit more detail. To quote directly from the second link above-

(1) Everything that has a beginning of its existence has a cause of its existence.

(2) The universe has a beginning of its existence.

Therefore:

(3) The universe has a cause of its existence.

(4) If the universe has a cause of its existence then that cause is God.

Therefore:

(5) God exists.

There are rather a lot of theories surrounding the Big Bang. Many of the rebuttals you can find to the First Cause argument start out by saying that the laws of conservation of mass/energy actually prove that the universe did not, in fact, have a true "beginning." The Big Bang may have been the beginning of time, but the mass/energy that comprises the known universe has always existed in some form. Something was not created from nothing. Therefore the assumption that the universe had a beginning, the foundation of this argument, is faulty.

But let us move on, and allow the assumption that the universe did have a beginning. I don't think it naturally follows that it had to have had a cause, and that cause is God. Because, of course, it begs the question of who or what created God to begin with? All the variations of the First Cause Argument make some sort of stipulation for finite beings or "everything that has a beginning" require a cause, obviously to allow God to be the exception. Supposedly he isn't finite or doesn't have a beginning or what have you. This seems like a hell of an assumption with very little proof, but then, "if we can suppose that God always existed- and thus requires no causal explanation- then we can suppose instead that the mass-energy comprising our universe always existed and thus requires no causal explanation." (David Mills, Atheist Universe)

Then there's the point that, supposing there was a beginning, and it was caused, how do we get from there to allowing him "any of the properties normally ascribed to God: omnipotence, onniscience, goodness, creativity of design, to say nothing of such human attributes as listening to prayers, forgiving sins, and reading innermost thoughts?" (Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion) At best this proves the existence of a Deist God. How can the average believer even claim to "know" it was their god that's responsible? "Zeus or Allah has just as much claim to being the 'First Cause' as does Jehovah or Jesus." (David Mills, AU)

There is one final point I wish to make, and it is the one I consider the most important. There is some debate, and I'm not sure how seriously to take it since it seems pretty controversial but goes way too far over my head for me to understand, as to whether fluctuation of the quantum vacuum (I wouldn't bother with the link, it makes very little sense to a non-physicist) actually proves that it is possible for something to be created from nothing. Like I said, I don't entirely understand it, but I just want to make it clear that even if it were proven that something did in fact appear out of nothing, that does not mean that one can immediately assume that God must have done it. God and conservation of mass/energy are not our only options. There were atheists before the Big Bang was discovered/thought of. Just because science has not caught up yet doesn't mean we can automatically fill the gap with God. This is an issue that we run into with creationism as well. When science is unsure of something, "we are encouraged to leap to the default theory without even looking to see whether it fails in the very same particular as the theory it is alleged to have replaced." (Richard Dawkins, TGD) If you expect me to prove the Big Bang (or any explanation for how our universe came to exist in its present state) is true, then I expect you to do the same for your theory that God did it. The very fact that vacuum fluctuations seem to create particles all the time would suggest that something from nothing may be possible, but does it logically follow that God is doing it constantly? If it happens a lot, it actually seems more likely that it can be a result of natural physical laws that we simply don't understand yet. This may not, after all, turn out to have been a one-time event that we need to conjure up a god to explain, any more than we feel the need to say "God did it" every time we jump and actually come back down instead of flying off into space. The fact that there are issues that science can't explain at this time doesn't mean it will never be able to.

So there's my opinion of the First Cause Argument. This is a serious argument in favor of belief that I had presented to me as a young Christian, and much like Pascal's Wager, at the time it seemed like a very convincing one. Hopefully I have made a good case here for why it is not.