The First-cause Argument
Perhaps the simplest and easiest to understand is the
argument of the First Cause. (It is maintained that everything we see in this
world has a cause, and as you go back in the chain of causes further and
further you must come to a First Cause, and to that First Cause you give the
name of God.) That argument, I suppose, does not carry very much weight
nowadays, because, in the first place, cause is not quite what it used to be.
The philosophers and the men of science have got going on cause, and it has not
anything like the vitality it used to have; but, apart from that, you can see
that the argument that there must be a First Cause is one that cannot have any
validity. I may say that when I was a young man and was debating these
questions very seriously in my mind, I for a long time accepted the argument of
the First Cause, until one day, at the age of eighteen, I read John Stuart Mill's Autobiography, and I
there found this sentence: "My father taught me that the question 'Who
made me?' cannot be answered, since it immediately suggests the further
question `Who made god?'" That very simple sentence showed me, as I still think,
the fallacy in the argument of the First Cause. 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 in 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. There is no reason why the
world could not have come into being without a cause; nor, on the other hand,
is there any reason why it should not have always existed. There is no reason
to suppose that the world had a beginning at all. The idea that things must
have a beginning is really due to the poverty of our imagination.
Therefore, perhaps, I need not waste any more time upon the argument about the
First Cause.
I don't recall a time that I actually believed in this
argument, though I should mention that this doesn't mean that I always denied
it.
"If every thing has to has a cause
then what is the cause of god? And if not why is god the first cause?"
This was the first question that I came up with(at the age of 16), it also was
the start of my disbelief . Unlike Bertrand Russell I did not read/heard about it
anywhere, until some years later.
LOL!
