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When Reasons Run Out: The Cosmological Argument for God
Making sense of the “First Cause”
The universe is full of systems and cycles that can’t go on forever, as far as our intuition can tell. These natural regularities are causal, meaning that some events are probably produced by others. Natural events are contingent since they don’t come from nowhere or from absolutely nothing; if they did, they’d be inexplicable rather than natural. Some states of a system give rise to later states, and the whole system evolves.
For example, the planet’s rotations around the sun produce our changing seasons. The planet orbits the sun because of how the solar system formed long ago. The solar system formed from the collapse of part of a giant molecular cloud. That cloud was produced by differences in density of the nearly-uniform soup of baryonic matter that congealed soon after the Big Bang.
What, then, is the ultimate source of all of this causality and evolution? Things in nature can produce other natural things, but what of nature as a whole or what of the first natural (contingent and scientifically-explainable) events? According to theistic proponents of the cosmological approach to proving that God exists, there are only three possibilities.
