Debunking St. Aquinas, Part 1 of 5

This will be a five part series on the Classical Arguments for god as presented by St. Aquinas. The first one that we will cover tonight is the First-cause Argument, since it is the most commonly used fall back.

The argument goes, quite simply, that everything that we see in this world has a cause. If you should follow the chain of causality further and further back, we should arrive at a first cause. To that, some ascribe the name of god.

Truly, I have never heard a more eloquent yet simplistic retort to this than that of Bertrand Russell.

If everything must have a cause, then god must have a cause. If there can be anything without a cause, it may just as well be the world as god, so that there cannot be any validity to that argument. It is exactly of the same nature as the Hindu’s view, that the world rested upon an elephant and the elephant rested upon a tortoise; and when they said, “How about the tortoise?” the Indian said, “Suppose we change the subject.” The argument is really no better than that.

The idea that things must have a beginning is really due to the poverty of our imagination.

Furthermore, as the field of astrophysics continues to gather huge amounts of information regarding the various galaxies within our universe, the idea of “first-cause” has changed quite dramatically. Once one realizes the finality of our universe, it becomes increasingly difficult to believe in any god. Realize this; once the last star is born and all of the hydrogen in our universe is depleted, that is the beginning of the end. (Of course, this is getting off topic, so I will move on.)

In essence, this argument of “first-cause” carries little weight these days. If everything must have a cause, then god must have a cause also. If god can be without cause, then it is plausible that other things can be without cause.