First argument: why is there anything at all?

Imagine you are walking in the desert, and suddenly you find a glass ball on the sand. You will immediately ask yourself: who made it? How did it get here? And if someone tells you “it is just there, for no reason,” you will think he is making fun of you. It is clear to you that everything has a cause.

Now think of the whole universe as that glass ball. Why should it, of all things, have no cause?

Here immediately comes the question every child asks: if everything has a cause, then the cause of the universe also has a cause, and that one another, and so on without end. And if we say that God is the cause, who created God? That is an excellent question, and it is precisely the one that leads to the answer.

About a thousand years ago lived a Muslim philosopher named Avicenna (Ibn Sina), who also influenced Maimonides. He distinguished between two kinds of things. There are “possible” things: they can exist, and they can also not exist. A table, a person, a star. Such things need a cause. And there is a “necessary” thing: a thing that cannot fail to exist. It needs no cause, because it did not “happen.” It simply is.

Now the argument builds itself. Everything we know is of the “possible” kind, and therefore has a cause. If the cause too is of this kind, it has a cause, and so on. But a chain without end is not an explanation. There is a well-known story about a man who claimed that the world rests on the back of a giant turtle. He was asked: “And what does the turtle stand on?” — “On another turtle.” “And that one?” — “It’s turtles all the way down!” Everyone understands that this is not an explanation, but an evasion of explanation. Reuven slaps Shimon. “Why?” — “My hand moved.” “And why did it move?” — “The muscle activated it.” “And what activated the muscle?” — “An electric current”… Whoever retreats like this without end explains nothing. An explanation exists only when we reach the end of the chain. Therefore the chain must begin with something “necessary,” which has no cause. That is what we call God.

And what about the question “who created God?” Now it is no longer hard. The argument never said that everything has a cause. It said that everything of the kind we know has a cause. God is not of that kind. This is not an evasion. It is exactly the conclusion. The question “who created God?” is really part of the proof: precisely because one cannot go on like this without end, there must be something that is not of the familiar kind.

Some say: “But God is infinite and eternal, so you have brought infinity in through the back door.” Not necessarily. The argument proves only that there is a first cause. It does not say of it that it is infinite. That is already a matter for the religious traditions. And the main point: the problem with the infinite chain is the evasion. A chain that has a beginning is a complete explanation, even if the beginning is something we do not fully understand. As Sherlock Holmes said: when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains is the truth, however strange it may be.

One can of course try to challenge the assumption itself: perhaps not everything has a cause? After all, no one has seen this rule with his eyes. The philosopher David Hume showed 250 years ago that we did not learn the principle of causality from experience. It is an assumption of reason. But try living without it. And as we saw in the introduction, it is an intuition that all of us rely on at every moment. Whoever gives it up only in order not to reach God gives up more than he thinks.

Some bring science itself here: in the physics of the very small, quantum theory, we see particles that suddenly appear in empty space, from nothing. But they do not appear “just like that.” They always appear in balanced pairs, a particle and an “antiparticle,” so that the total charge and energy do not change. It is a coordinated process, according to precise laws. And that “empty space” is not really empty: it contains laws and energy. An ancient Greek philosopher named Anaximander described this nicely: in the beginning there was “matter without form,” which split into opposites, hot and cold, positive and negative, that balance each other. The vacuum of modern physics is like that too. The question merely returns, in another place: where did the laws come from?

There is also a shorter and sharper answer, from Bertrand Russell: “The universe just is, and that’s all.” That is, the universe is a fact without an explanation, and there is no point asking why. But “a fact without an explanation” is not an explanation. It is an admission that there is no explanation. And to someone who says “God too is a fact without an explanation,” the answer has already been given: the difference is that the universe is made of things that can fail to exist, and therefore demands an explanation, whereas the first cause is a thing that cannot fail to exist. To say that the universe “just is” is to attribute to the universe exactly the property that the argument attributes to God, without any justification.

And perhaps the universe itself is the “necessary” thing, which always existed? First of all, science itself does not think so. According to the Big Bang theory, which has strong evidence behind it, the universe came into being about 14 billion years ago. But even without science, the proposal is hard to accept. The universe is made entirely of “possible” things, each of which needs a cause. A heap of things each of which needs a cause needs a cause too. And if someone claims that the universe is “more” than the sum of its parts, that there is something in it that connects and sustains everything, like a soul in a body, then that something is exactly what we call God. The philosopher Baruch Spinoza said “God is nature.” If the meaning is that God is just another name for matter, that is atheism in disguise. And if the meaning is that there is a “soul” in the universe that unifies it, that is exactly what we are saying.

And even if the universe had existed forever, we would still need to explain why it exists and why it is as it is. There is a difference between a “cause” and a “reason.” The cause of there being a table in the room is that a carpenter built it. The reason it is in the room is that we need something to eat on. Even a thing that has always existed may have no “cause,” and yet it must have a “reason”: why it exists, and why precisely like this. In that case God is not the one who created the universe at a certain moment, but the one who sustains it at every moment, like a soul that keeps the body alive all the time.

One more answer remains, one that atheists like: “God is not an explanation. You know nothing about him.” But the argument does not come to explain how the world came into being. It only shows that there is a cause. When you see footprints in the sand, you conclude that someone passed here, even without knowing anything about him. An argument is judged by whether the conclusion follows from the premises, and not by how much it explains.

It must be said honestly what this argument proves and what it does not. It proves that there is a “first cause.” It does not say that it is wise, good or infinite. It also leaves open the possibility that the first cause is some kind of blind “machine.” The following arguments will close that. But this too is no small beginning: the world does not rest on turtles.