The Worst Cosmological Argument Is An Argument For Atheism

Here is an argument that, as defenders of the cosmological argument emphasize at great length, has never been made:

1. Everything has a cause.

2. That cause of everything must be God.

3. So God exists.

The theist will, of course, not be able to accept premise 1, for they deny that God has a cause. As Wikipedia informs us “none of the major cosmological arguments rests on the premise that everything has a cause.” So this premise that everything needs a cause is a massive red herring. People only think it is relevant to cosmological arguments because when they hear cosmological arguments they get distracted (checking their phone perhaps?), don’t listen carefully to the argument,and then trot out quips from 2002 Christopher Hitchens.

So let me emphasize: when people make cosmological arguments, they are not making this argument. Perhaps caps would help. WHEN PEOPLE MAKE COSMOLOGICAL ARGUMENTS, THEY ARE NOT MAKING THIS ARGUMENT.

But it occurs to me that one could make a cosmological argument from this premise for atheism. I don’t think that this is a very good argument, but it’s something—the premises aren’t obviously completely crazy—and given that it proceeds in a similar way to the world’s worst cosmological argument, I thought it would be worth highlighting.

Okay, here’s the argument:

1. Every concrete thing that exists has a cause.

2. God doesn’t have a cause.

3. So God is not a concrete thing that exists.

Note that I use concrete to refer to things that can cause other things. My chair is concrete, your mom is concrete, the number 2 is not. Your mom needs a cause, chairs need a cause, the number 2 does not. If you’re a nominalist and don’t think that abstract objects exist, you can replace 1 with the much more elegant “everything that exists has a cause.”

1 isn’t that implausible. When we observe a thing, we ordinarily suppose it has a cause. It seems reasonable to ask, for anything, why it exists, and this will usually be given a causal explanation. The plausibility of this premise explains why it would be unreasonable to, for instance, think that there is an eternally existing Kangaroo without a cause.

2 is something theists would grant. God isn’t the sort of entity that would be caused, being the ultimate, supreme foundation of all reality. But then the conclusion follows that God either isn’t existent or can’t cause anything.

Now, you might think this argument is absurd. If the first premise is right, what caused the first thing? The answer: there wasn’t a first thing. There is an infinite succession of causes. Thus, nothing is uncaused—there just is an infinite regress of causes, going infinitely far back into the past! Arguably, this is what cosmological reasoning supports; the best sort of cosmological argument will have the broadest cosmological principle, according to which everything needs a cause—but then that implies atheism.

Okay, so now that I’ve laid out the argument, what’s wrong with it? The answer is premise 1—we don’t have strong reason to accept it, but we do have strong reason to reject it.

First of all, positing an infinite succession of causes is no better than positing a single first cause. Positing an infinite succession of causes doesn’t explain anything, because there’s no explanation of the chain itself. If a dragon appeared in my room, even if it was birthed by an earlier dragon, itself birthed by an earlier dragon going infinitely far back, there would still be something unexplained—it would be surprising that there’s this infinite succession of dragons. That would need a cause.

In fact, the argument requires denying that the chain of causes is a concrete thing. But it sure seems to be. The chain of infinite events is concrete—causally efficacious—and so it would seem to need a cause by the principle (maybe you can deny that it’s a thing, but that doesn’t seem promising, and if you restrict your conception of thing, then the theist can deny that God is a thing).

Second, there’d have to be a law that governs how the things cause other thing. Perhaps, for instance, there are laws of nature that go infinitely far back, each governing how things play out at later stages. But the laws of nature seem to be concrete things, so they’d also need a cause. Even if you deny that laws are a thing and think they’re just a description of what stuff does, it seems like the grounds for accepting 1 would also give you reason to think that physical stuff doing stuff would need a cause. It sure seems like causal powers are the kinds of things that need a cause if existence does (it would be mysterious if a thing randomly took on a new causal power for no reason).

Third, I think that infinite causal chains are probably impossible. Alexander Pruss masterfully defends this thesis in Infinity, Causation, and Paradox. Infinite causal chains produce all sorts of horrifying paradoxes rendering them probably impossible.

Fourth, this argument isn’t effective at convincing a theist. For an argument to be convincing, it must appeal to premises that a reasonable person on the other side would find reasonable. But a theist already has a cosmological premise that they accept—perhaps everything needs an explanation or everything that begins to exist has a cause. Given that this provides a nice explanation of why things don’t pop into being randomly and has a similar intuitive plausibility, there’s no reason to prefer the atheists’s cosmological premise.

This isn’t, therefore, a very convincing argument. But we can at least make something out of a cosmological argument that proceeds from the premise that everything needs a cause. An interesting result!