Bronze-level article

Argument from first cause

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The divine comedy
Icon creationism.svg
Running gags
Jokes aside
Blooper reel
—Dan Barker
Again, where could gods find

A model for creating things-what planted in their mind

The notion of mankind, so they knew what they undertook

To make, and they could picture in their hearts how it should

Lucretius, almost a hundred years before Christianity even existed.[1]

The argument from first cause (or the cosmological argument) states that the universe must have a cause, and that this cause is (the arguer's) God.

Argument structure[edit]

The argument from first cause proceeds as follows.

Everything that comes into being must have a cause[edit]


An infinite regress of causes is impossible.[edit]

Disallowing an infinite regress of causes is, technically speaking, an assertion required for the argument to work.

We must therefore arrive at a first cause.[edit]

Following from disallowing an infinite regress of causes, there must be a point where the first cause appears. This is the concept first developed by Aristotle and expanded upon by Aquinas as the "unmoved mover" or the "uncaused causer".

This first cause is God.[edit]

Having established the existence of the first cause, it is asserted that this cause is none other than the God of choice of the person making the argument.


Kalām version[edit]

  1. Everything that exists/begins to exist has a cause of its existence.[note 1]
  2. The universe exists/began to exist.
  3. Therefore, the universe has a cause of its existence.[note 2]

Platonic / Aristotelian version[edit]

  1. Every finite and contingent being has a cause.
  2. A causal loop cannot exist.
  3. A causal chain cannot be of infinite length.

Thomistic version[edit]

In this context, "Thomistic" means "by Thomas Aquinas".[2]

  1. A contingent being exists.
  2. This contingent being has a cause of its existence.
  7. Therefore, a necessary being exists.

The assumptions[edit]

Self-causation is impossible[edit]

Related to the infinite regress of causes is the idea that something may cause itself to come into being. Aquinas argues that this is impossible on account of it never having been empirically observed, but also because of the impossibility and absurdity of an object causing itself. Specifically, for an object to cause itself to come into being, it must be prior to itself. This expressly forbids the universe from causing itself, which would otherwise scupper the conclusion.

The reasoning does not seem to apply to the laws of physics, since the notion of "being prior", e.g. preceding something in time, requires time to already exist to have any meaning.

Prohibition of infinite regress[edit]

The argument assumes that an infinite causal chain cannot occur. While at the time the argument was first proposed this assumption was entirely unsupported, since an eternal universe might contain causal chains of infinite length, today we know that the universe did have a beginning. Therefore this assumption may be regarded as sound when referring to our universe. Nevertheless, in the standard cosmological model, inflation makes it debatableWikipedia's W.svg[note 3] whether the multiverse had a beginning or not. Theoretical physicists continue to propose models of eternal Universes,[3] such as Conformal Cyclic CosmologyWikipedia's W.svg.

Uniqueness and identity of the first cause[edit]

As Aquinas said at the end of his first cause argument:


There are two rather big assumptions in this sentence: first, that by following a causal chain back in time, one will eventually always arrive at the same starting point; and second, that this causal starting point is in fact a very specific God – precisely the one the arguer has in mind. The first assumption is wrong if, for example, each of the four fundamental forces of nature (strong nuclear force, weak nuclear force, electromagnetism and gravity) have separate unrelated origins. The second has no basis at all, and constitutes a bit of sleight of hand.


Special Pleading[edit]

A commonly-raised[4][5] objection to this argument is that it suffers from special pleading. While everything in the universe is assumed to have a cause, God is free from this requirement. However, while some phrasings of the argument may state that "everything has a cause" as one of the premises (thus contradicting the conclusion of the existence of an uncaused cause), there are also many versions that explicitly or implicitly allow for non-beginning or necessary entities not to have a cause. In the end, the point of the premises is to suggest that reality is a causally-connected whole and that all causal chains originate from a single point, posited to be God. That many people using this argument would consider God exempt from various requirements is a foregone conclusion, but citing "special pleading" because finite causal chains are said to have an uncaused beginning is hardly a convincing objection.

Effect without cause[edit]

Most philosophers believe that every effect has a cause, but David Hume critiqued this. Hume came from a tradition that viewed all knowledge as either a priori (from reason) or a posteriori (from experience). From reason alone, it is possible to conceive of an effect without a cause, Hume argued, although others have questioned this and also argued whether conceiving something means it is possible. Based on experience alone, our notion of cause and effect is just based on habitually observing one thing following another, and there's certainly no element of necessity when we observe cause and effect in the world; Hume's criticism of inductive reasoning implied that even if we observe cause and effect repeatedly, we cannot infer that throughout the universe every effect must necessarily have a cause.[6]

Multiple causes[edit]

Finally, there is nothing in the argument to rule out the existence of multiple first causes. This can be seen by realizing that for any directed acyclic graphWikipedia's W.svg which represents causation in a set of events or entities, the first cause is any vertex that has zero incoming edges. This means that the argument can just as well be used to argue for polytheism.

Radioactive decay[edit]

Through modern science, specifically physics, natural phenomena have been discovered whose causes have not yet been discerned or are non-existent. The best known example is radioactive decay. Although decay follows statistical laws and it's possible to predict the amount of a radioactive substance that will decay over a period of time, it is impossible — according to our current understanding of physics — to predict when a specific atom will disintegrate. The spontaneous disintegration of radioactive nuclei is stochastic and might be uncaused, providing an arguable counterexample to the assumption that everything must have a cause. An objection to this counterexample is that knowledge regarding such phenomena is limited and there may be an underlying but presently unknown cause. However, if the causal status of radioactive decay is unknown then the truth of the premise that 'everything has a cause' is indeterminate rather than false. In either case, the first cause argument is rendered ineffective. Another objection is that only the timing of decay events do not appear to have a cause, whereas a spontaneous decay is the release of energy previously stored, so that the storage event was the cause.

Virtual particles[edit]

Another counterexample is the spontaneous generation of virtual particles, which randomly appear even in complete vacuum. These particles are responsible for the Casimir effectWikipedia's W.svg and Hawking radiation.Wikipedia's W.svg The release of such radiation comes in the form of gamma rays, which we now know from experiment are simply a very energetic form of light at the extreme end of the electromagnetic spectrum. Consequently, as long as there has been vacuum, there has been light, even if it's not the light that our eyes are equipped to see. What this means is that long before God is ever purported to have said "Let there be light!", the universe was already filled with light, and God is rendered quite the Johnny-come-lately. Furthermore, this phenomenon is subject to the same objection as radioactive decay.

Fallacy of composition[edit]

The argument also suffers from the fallacy of composition: what is true of a member of a group is not necessarily true for the group as a whole. Just because most things within the universe require a cause/causes, does not mean that the universe itself requires a cause. For instance, while it is absolutely true that within a flock of sheep that every member ("an individual sheep") has a mother, it does not therefore follow that the flock has a mother.

Equivocation error[edit]

There is an equivocation error lurking in the two premises of the Kalām version of the argument. They both mention something "coming into existence". The syllogism is only valid if both occurrences of that clause refer to the exact same notion.

In the first premise, all the things ("everything") that we observe coming into existence forms by some sort of transformation of matter or energy, or a change of some state or process. So this is the notion of "coming into existence" in the first premise.

In the second premise there is no matter or energy to be transformed or reshaped into the universe. (We are probably speaking of something coming from nothing.)

The two notions of "coming into existence" are thus not identical and therefore the syllogism is invalid.

See also[edit]

External links[edit]


  1. The change in phrasing from "everything that exists" to "everything that begins to exist" is an attempt to avoid infinite regress and the question of "So what was the cause for (your) god's existence?" in a slightly more clever way than claiming that the deity is self- or uncaused. By referring to "everything that begins to exist", the apologist is pre-emptively excluding any eternal (or "timeless" in William Lane Craig's even more clunky terminology) phenomena or beings (e.g the Abrahamic God).
  2. Then add some (more) dubious logic to get from "a cause" to "(my) god". This approach is probably best known from William Lane Craig who has used a version of the Kalām as the cornerstone of his apologetics since at least his 1979 Ph.D. thesis on Philosophy of Religion.
  3. Assuming the "eternal inflation" model is the correct one, since others have a beginning and an end


  1. De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things), Book V, Lines 182-186, translated by A.E. Stallings, ISBN978-0-140-44796-5
  3. Eternal Universe
  4. Bertrand Russell, Why I Am Not A Christian
  5. W. Norris Clarke, The Creative Retrieval of Saint Thomas Aquinas
  6. Cosmological Argument, Reichenbach, Bruce, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2017 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), section 4.4