On Tortoises and First Causes
at Friday, August 14, 2009
The First Cause Argument says that, since everything has a cause, if we go back far enough we must come upon the first cause, which must be God. Someone must have got the ball rolling.
In modern times we have followed the expansion of the observable universe to a singularity, a point of infinite density and infinitesimal size, but because we as yet have no theory to unify gravity and quantum mechanics (the holy grail of physics), beyond this point we are unable to travel. In other words, we have followed the trail to 10-43 seconds after the Big Bang, but we cannot (yet) penetrate further.
So when physicists are asked, what happened before the Big Bang, they say, "We don't know." When Christians are asked this same question, they say, "God created the universe." God being the First Cause.
However, if everything requires a cause, as these religionists claim, then God must also have a cause. They will attempt to sidestep this problem by claiming that God has no cause. He is the end of the line. But if God does not require a cause, then not everything can be said to require a cause, and the universe can just as easily be without a cause as God.
This is where the tortoise comes in. In the Hindu tradition, the Earth is said to be resting on the back of an elephant, which is in turn standing on the shell of a tortoise. But what does the tortoise stand on? At this point the Hindu must ask to change the subject.
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August 16, 2009 at 2:29 PM
To be fair, the Christian answer is a coherent one (and unlike the tortoises) even if it isn't a proof of anything like a theistic God. To avoid an infinite regress of causes, we posit something that requires no cause that we call God. The question "What caused the thing that you defined as not having a cause?" is nonsensical, and not a substantive criticism.
In effect, the Christian is really saying that the claim "everything requires a cause" implies an infinite regress, and and an infinite regress is absurd, therefore there must be some first cause that requires no other cause. You can say it isn't convincing, you can say that an impersonal Big Bang is just as good a candidate for the first cause as God, but you can't say it's incoherent, and you can't reasonably compare it to "turtles all the way down."
The atheist/agnostic (which, by the way, not all physicists are: when you ask some of them, they'll say "God" just like the rest of us Christians, Muslims, and Jews) is also within reason to say "I don't know", but that doesn't do away with the apparent problem.