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My son asked: if everything needs a cause, what caused God? What do philosophers actually say?

Thamarai Raman Fellow
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God & the argumentsIndianAnalyticBertrand RussellDavid Hume#beginner#cosmological-argument#first-cause#who-made-god
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Its coordinates: 1.8 Natural Theology

My son is nine. He came home from school after a lesson on the Big Bang and asked who made the universe. I said some people believe God did. He asked who made God. I said nobody did. He thought about it and said: "Then some things don't need a cause. So maybe the universe doesn't either."

I had no answer, and he went off to play, very pleased.

I looked it up afterwards. Bertrand Russell, in Why I Am Not a Christian, says he accepted the first-cause argument until he read in John Stuart Mill's autobiography that Mill's father had taught him that the question "Who made me?" cannot be answered, since it immediately suggests the further question, "Who made God?"

But I also have a feeling that the people who defend these arguments are not so easily beaten by a nine-year-old. And in my own tradition, Śaiva Siddhānta, God (pati) is not the maker of everything: souls and the bonds that tie them are also without beginning.

So, simple answers please, for me and for him:

  1. Do the first-cause arguments really say "everything needs a cause"?
  2. If not, what do they say, and why would God be an exception?
  3. Was my son's reply a good objection or a mistake?
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4 answers

  1. Ikechukwu Anyanwu

    Fellow

    To your first question: no, and that is the most common misunderstanding. Aquinas's Second Way says that a chain of causes acting here and now, each depending on the one above it, cannot go on forever, or nothing would be acting at all. So there must be a first cause that is not itself caused by anything.

    His Third Way is clearer still. Things that can fail to exist need something to explain why they exist. A being that exists necessarily, of its own nature, does not. God, on the argument, is not an exception to the rule. He is what the rule leads to.

  2. Omar Ragab

    Fellow

    The kalām version, which comes from Muslim theologians, is narrower still: whatever begins to exist has a cause. God, on this view, never began to exist, so the question "who made God?" doesn't arise. The argument's real work is in showing that the universe did begin.

    So your son's question is a good one for the simple version you gave him, and the defenders would say it misses theirs.

  3. Arvind Poojary

    Fellow

    But your son's reply is still a good objection, Thamarai, and a famous one. In Hume's Dialogues, Cleanthes asks why the material universe itself might not be the necessarily existent being. If something can exist without a cause, why must it be something other than the world?

    Defenders have answers: they say the universe is made of parts that could fail to exist, or that it began. But those are new arguments, not the first one. Tell him a philosopher took his side in 1779.

  4. Olivier Mbarga

    Fellow

    Thamarai, a priest's answer for a nine-year-old, since I am asked this in catechism more than any other question.

    Ikechukwu and Omar have given the right correction: the classical arguments do not say that everything needs a cause. They say that things which begin to exist, or which depend on something else at this moment, need one. God, in these arguments, is not a very large thing that happens to have no cause. He is the name for whatever does not depend on anything.

    But your son's reply is still clever, and Arvind is right to say so. If something can exist without depending on anything, why not the universe? The theist then has to show that the universe is the kind of thing that depends, and that is where the real argument starts.

    So I would tell him: you have just done philosophy. You found the exact place where the argument has to work hardest.