Topics Religion

Question How can the universe always be said to have existed, when there is nothing in the universe that always existed? People, plants, planets - all these things come into existence and then decay and disappear. In other words, every thing in the universe needs a cause for its existence. God, on the other hand, needs no such cause. This is not because he is "causa sui" or "self-caused"(an absurd notion, for how can something that has no being produce it own being?), but rather, he is "sine causa" or "WITHOUT a cause". Something, after all, always had to have existed. This is the Uncaused (call it God), not the Caused (Universe), which is inherently unstable and subject to flux. Scott from Ireland.

Accepted:
November 5, 2005

Comments

Cosmological Jeopardy: I'll answer your answers with questions...

Why is it that something--or even just a multitude of strings of overlapping different things--needs always to have existed? Is it that it makes no sense to speak of existence if there are not particular things that do so?

And even if we accept this claim, and that the existence of something(s)without a cause is the way to honor it, why does this thing (or things) need to be God and not the universe itself? Is the universe not particular enough?

Shades of St. Thomas! Is this your thought (in your first twosentences): if everything failed to exist at some time, then at sometime everything failed to exist? (And, the argument might continue,that's impossible, because if at some time there was nothing, there'dbe nothing now, since nothing comes from nothing. Therefore, ourassumption must be mistaken: it must be that not everything fails toexist at some time. That is, there must be at least one thing thatalways exists.) But that's incorrect. Everyone at the United Nationsspeaks some language, but it's not true that there's some language that everyone at the U.N.speaks.

Just to echo Joe and Alex, it's not at all clear to me why the following isn't a coherent possibility. Suppose that, for convenience, we divide time into equal intervals, says, seconds, and let's suppose that time is infinte in both directions. (That may be false, as a matter of physical fact, but it's not an incoherent supposition, so far as I can see.) Let's suppose that at each time tn there exists exactly one object, n, which has but one purpose in life: to bring into existence the object n+1 which will exist for the next second. That's definitely a boring universe, but, as I said, it doesn't seem incoherent, and in it each thing has a cause. If our universe is temporally infinite in both directions, then maybe things are similar in it.

If I remember correctly, Aquinas, who (as Alex implied) gave a version of this argument as one of his "Five Ways", considers this kind of reply. His answer is that the whose series of things needs a cause for its existence, but it's hard to see why. It seems like this reply is just changing the rules of the game.

Modern cosmology makes Aquinas's argument easier, though, in a way: The universe, or so there is good reason to believe, began with the Big Bang. So the Big Bang was the first event in the history of the universe, and everything else that has happened is (perhaps very indirectly) causally dependent upon it. So one can ask: What caused the Big Bang? God! But why assume that something had to cause the Big Bang? Why can't it simply not have had a cause at all? You can't say, "That's incoherent, because everything has to have a cause", because, on your view, God has no cause. And it won't help to say, "God, by definition, is the only thing that doesn't have a cause", because then it simply turns out that, on your view, we can't rule out the possibility that God was the Big Bang.

This last remark echoes something Hume argues in Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion: Even if one can show that there has to be something Uncaused, that does very little good from a religious perspective, for we can't conclude anything about this Uncaused Thing. Maybe it no longer exists. Maybe it created the universe with evil intentions. Maybe just about anything you like.