The Existence of God I: The Cosmological Argument

I'll start this weighty topic with a quote from David Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, in response to Demea's presentation of the Cosmological Argument:

But dropping all these abstractions, continued Philo, and confining ourselves to
more familiar topics, I shall venture to add an observation, that the argument a
priori has seldom been found very convincing, except to people of a metaphysical
head, who have accustomed themselves to abstract reasoning, and who, finding
from mathematics, that the understanding frequently leads to truth through
obscurity, and, contrary to first appearances, have transferred the same habit
of thinking to subjects where it ought not to have place. Other people, even of
good sense and the best inclined to religion, feel always some deficiency in
such arguments, though they are not perhaps able to explain distinctly where it
lies; a certain proof that men ever did, and ever will derive their religion
from other sources than from this species of reasoning.

The question, before we proceed, is this: do we need any independent proof of God's existence to demonstrate the truth of religion? After all, even if we do accomplish this, what difference does it make? Do we instantly know what religion entails? No; we must rely on revelation for this. If so, then what difference does this proof make at all? We must rely on an adequately-proved revelation in any case, thus obviating the need for a proof of the existence of God.

This challenge is very interesting and important to bear in mind. However, I think I can come up with a response to it. In the process of proving the existence of a god, one may come to simultaneously find that this god, through the manifestation of the proof, must be interested in humankind. Thus, we would expect to see some divine involvement in human affairs, such as commanding man how to act. Therefore, any extant revelations would be granted additional weight in determining their validity.

Now, whether a proof of God's interest in humankind is possible, I will not deal with here. For now, I will content myself to discussing the Cosmological Argument.

Growing up, the reason that I believed in God, was, essentially, the Cosmological Argument: every effect must have a cause, and we can trace the causes back to God. The criticism, "Who created God?" didn't bother me - God was the "Prime Mover," and thus didn't need a cause. One could not say the same, though, for the Universe, as it clearly had a beginning - the Big Bang. Since the appearance of the Universe in such a fashion seems to violate the laws of physics, I assumed that there must be something that can break these laws to create the Universe - namely, God.

However, as I got older, I realized that there are many problems with this argument. Firstly, I had not demonstrated that God must be the first cause - there could be something else before him that caused him, and something that caused that, extending back to an infinite amount of time. However, I was able to respond to this in two ways: first, that it does not matter whether God is the Prime Mover or not (after all, the pagan gods were all born in some manner of theogony or another); and second, that the chain of causes and effects could not go back to infinity - an infinite amount of time can never go to completion, so the Universe can not be infinitely old.

However, there is a more devastating criticism of the Cosmological Argument: so what? All we have proven is that there is a first cause; we have not proven that this is intelligent, continues to act within the Universe, cares about mankind, or anything else. This is exactly the criticism Hume had for the argument, and it stands.

We are, nevertheless, left with a problem: how did the Universe start, if it broke the laws of physics? Now, while this is not a science blog, I will offer the following suggestion (though it is probably better to talk to a professional physicist about this instead). We assumed that it broke the laws of physics. However, we assumed that the laws of physics were in place when the Universe appeared. This, however, we can deny. The Universe, along with everything that governs it, such as gravity, electromagnetism, and even space and time did not exist prior to the universe. Thus the universe could "spontaneously" (obviously not actually spontaneously, since time did not exist without the universe) appear, without any violations of the laws of physics.