(December 4, 2018 at 2:33 am)Fake Messiah Wrote: But that argument fails because then God also needs a cause and if God "doesn't need a cause" -as theists insist- then there is no reason to think universe didn't need a cause, so there you go DEBUNKED.
If someone were to claim that "everything needs a cause," then your objection here would make sense. It's likely that some people who don't understand the real First Cause argument would foolishly claim such a thing.
It's worthwhile noting, though, that if there is a wildly obvious objection to an argument made by a serious philosopher, it most likely has been anticipated and answered by that philosopher long ago. That is the case with the objection you make here.
The First Cause argument does NOT say that everything has a cause. It says that anything which has been caused must have been caused by something else, because a thing cannot be the cause of itself.
If you are comfortable with an infinite regress, in which everything is caused by something essentially prior, then there doesn't need to be a first cause.
If you don't like the thought of an infinite regress, however, then there at some point has to be a cause which caused all the caused things. And since in this version the regress can't be infinite, the final cause in the chain must not have a cause. (And there are arguments against an infinite regress, but those are separate.)
As always, this argument merely points to a cause. To show that this cause is anything like the Christian God requires separate arguments. And, as I point out a lot, the cause in this argument is not a temporal cause, existing prior in time to other things. It is prior in the sense of an essential sequence of causes. I explained the difference in an earlier post. Or you can look at the Stanford Encyclopedia entry on the Cosmological Argument.
