First order logic, set theory and God

[Pat Mustard]

from a transtemporal perspective

Although First Cause arguments come up on forums like this every few months, I despair of ever having people address the real argument.

For example, it's clear from earlier responses that everyone here is thinking of a temporal series of events leading back to a beginning in time. It doesn't seem to matter that this is not what the First Cause argument addresses. As far as I know the only temporal argument is the so-called Kalaam argument, and that is rejected by both Aristotelians and Thomists. 

It's hard to point out that the causal chain in question is essential, logical, and simultaneous. So the question is better posed as something like "what exists in order that people may exist?" or "what is it that holds people in existence?" The answer is then something like "the earth and its atmosphere." And again, "what exists in order that the earth and its atmosphere exist?" And pretty soon we're down to atoms and their parts, and then the fundamental laws of nature. That's where science stops, because it says that the fundamental laws of nature just are, with no further cause. 

As far as I can tell, it was alchemist, Bible critic, and physicist Isaac Newton who changed metaphysics so as to allow this sort of "it just is" argument -- a brute fact -- to end the causal chain. First Cause arguments wish to ask what holds these brute facts in existence as well. 

As for the rest of your post, perhaps it must be clarified that Hatcher's proof was meant to provide a cut-and-dried deduction of the existence of a minimal concept (ie. a "universal uncaused cause") from a set of self-evident and empirically grounded axioms. While the proof doesn't tackle the fuller characterizations of God, there is at least little logical doubt that something akin to this minimalist understanding of a "God" is entirely believable and plausible as a distinct entity that has an existence, though perhaps little relation to what religious folks these days think of as a personal God.

Likewise, many people object to First Cause arguments because such arguments don't prove that the God of the Bible has the characteristics which (they assume) he is supposed to have. But as you rightly point out, First Cause arguments only attempt to demonstrate a first cause, and anything more than that demands different arguments. 

I really don't know why people who have been posting on atheist sites for years haven't learned this yet.

Re Thomists, if they are against the chain of causality argument as you suggest, then they are against Aquinas, as that is his first cause argument, ie that everything must have a cause, therefore god (and don't ask about god's cause). This is because Aquinas restated Kalaam for a christian audience.