- Anything that begins to exist has a cause.
- The universe began to exist.
- Therefore, the universe has a cause.
So everyone is on the same page, I want to define what I mean by "argument." I do not mean what everyone usually means. I don't mean "fight," "debate," "verbal dispute," or anything like "heated discussion." When I use "argument," I mean:
Argument =df. At least one statement, the premise(s), that serve as a reason(s) to think that another statement, the conclusion, is true.
Think of an argument like this. Let's say I claim that abortion ought to be outlawed. This is a rather controversial claim, so it's likely that someone will ask me why I think my claim is true. They will ask why I think abortion ought to be outlawed. Then I would say, "I think abortion should be outlawed because it is wrong to murder, murder is taking the life of an innocent human being, abortion takes the life of an innocent human being, so abortion is murder, so abortion is wrong. Further, murder is outlawed, abortion is murder, so it ought to be outlawed."
Notice that I gave several reasons why abortion ought to be outlawed. All of those reasons are my premises, and the statement I'm trying to defen as true is my conclusion.
According to this definition of "argument," the three numbered statements above constitute a argument. (1) and (2) are the premises, and (3) is the conclusion. I am trying to prove that (3) is true by citing (1) and (2).
There is a standard strategy one uses to prove this kind of conclusion. The first part of the strategy is to show that the argument is "valid." A valid argument is valid if, if the premises are true, then the conclusion must be true. A valid argument gives you a guarantee that your conclusion will always be true if your premises turn out to be true. The second part of the strategy is to show that the argument is "sound." A sound argument is valid and it has actually true premises. This means that the conclusion must be true (the argument's being valid guarantees a true conclusion only when the premises are true, and a sound argument is a valid argument with true premises, so the conclusion must be true).
If I can show that the above argument is sound, the it must be the case that the universe has a cause. Of course, there is more work to do to get to the existence of God, but that is a bit down the road. What I want to do now is to defend each premise over two posts, beginning with this one. As for validity, the argument is clearly valid. I just need to defend the premises, so that's what I'm going to do.
I'll start with (1).
II. Defending (1) Anything that begins to exist has a cause.
Now (1) may seem so self-evident that it's hardly worth defending. True enough, but I want to be clear about what (1) does NOT claim. First, (1) does not claim that everything that exists has a cause. It claims only that if something has a begining then it has a cause. This is important because a common criticism of Christianity is that we require that everything has a cause. If that is so, then God must have a cause. Then they nail us with the uppercut, "So what caused God?" If we make the weaker claim that things with beginings are things with causes, then we can deny that God has a cause because he has no beginning.
Second, (1) does not make the extremely strong claim that every true statement requires an explanation or reason. Again, this may seem reasonable. Nevertheless, it is false. If we took all the true statements in the universe and put them together in one long conjunction (e.g., if we let lower-case letters a-z stand in for statements, then we could take statement a, statement b, ..., and statement z and make one long statement a and b and ... and z), then we would have one long super-statement that was true and in need of an explanation. But the explanation would be a true statement in the universe. That statement would already be in the conjunction itself, so it can't explain the entire conjunction. In fact, there would be no true statement that was not already in the conjunction so there could be no explanation or reason for that long conjunction. so the strong prinicple that every true statement must have a reason or explanation of its truthfulness is false.
(1), on the other hand, does not have any of the immediate problems of its two false cousins. So that is at least some evidence in its favor. However, some claim that quantum physics says that there are uncaused entities that begin to exist. If this were true, (1) would have to be false. It's a good thing that these people misunderstand the issue. Quantum physics says that there are indeterminite events, such as the unpredictable generation of a fundamental particle. However, it does not follow from an entitie's beginning being indeterminite that it must also be uncaused. We need some further reason to suppose that there is no cause; the burden of proof is on the objector to show this.
Thus, since there are no logical problems with (1) like there are with "every true statement must have a reason or explanation," and there are no theoretical problems with (1) like there are with "everything has a cause," and since (1) is unaffected by the putative objection from quantum physics, I think there is very good reason to think that (1) is indeed true.
Next time: The universe had a beginning.
