Proving the Existence of a First Cause

[Muhammad Rizvi]

Perhaps you could explain why the first cause, if a first cause is necessary, needs to be a super powered djinn...and why it does not need a cause itself.

As for why the first cause does not need a cause, if you read the aforementioned commandment of causality carefully, it says: "We must believe that every entity or occurrence has a cause, unless we have a good reason to believe that a particular entity or occurrence does not have a cause." The impossibility of an infinite causal regress serves as a good reason to believe that this particular entity, which is the first cause, does not have a cause. Therefore, the first cause does not violate our belief in the commandment. Even if we did not put the additional condition in the commandment initially, we can still say that our line of reasoning ultimately forces us to go back and slightly modify our articulation of the initial commandment (to add the bolded condition). There is no good reason to hesitate with such acts of modification. In fact, openness to such modification is a praiseworthy intellectual quality, and it is the opposite of stubbornness. It should be noted, however, that one should modify only as much as reason makes it necessary. There is no need to get rid of the entire commandment, and doing so would be highly problematic, in light of the aforementioned examples from al-Sadr's book.