The First Cause

One of the most simple and intuitively appealing arguments for God's existence is St. Thomas Aquinas's argument from causality. In the physical world, every material object has a cause. For example, a chair was built by a carpenter; the carpenter caused the chair to come into being. This chain of causality can stretch almost infinitely far back in time, because every action has to have been caused by a previous action. However, nihil fit ex nihilo; from nothing, nothing comes. There must have been a uncaused cause at the beginning of time to set the universe and its chains of causality in motion. Without a first cause, nothing would exist. 

Now we'll cover and refute some objections to the First Cause argument. The first objection replies that if everything in the universe has a cause, then God too, must also have a cause. This objection stems from a misunderstanding of the cosmological argument. The argument posits that everything in the temporal world has a temporal cause. A chair, a computer, and even a human have causes because they exist within a temporal framework. However, God, as the first cause,  definitionally exists independent of time and space, and is therefore not constrained by the limitations of temporal beings. Only temporal objects have causes, and seeing as God is not a temporal being, He has no cause.

The second objection stems from a remark made by famous physicist Stephen Hawking that God cannot exist because time came into existence at the Big Bang. It goes like this :a cause must necessarily temporally precede the object it causes; a carpenter has to exist before he can make a chair. If time didn't exist before the Big Bang, this objection argues,  then neither could a cause for the universe. The problem with this objection is that it assumes temporal causality is the only type of causality. In other words, it assumes that a cause must always precede the object it causes in time. However, the true essence of causality is logical causality. For example, when you place a bowling ball on a cushion, a dent in the cushion appears because the bowling ball is placed on it. Causality only appears temporal because we live in a world constrained by space and time. Again, because God exists independent of the spatio-temporal world, He is a logical cause for the world as opposed to a temporal cause. As a summary, it doesn't matter if time didn't exist before the Big Bang because God's existence and creation is not dependent on time.