God As Grounding Cause

[Edwardo Piet]

Read Spinoza if you're really stuck on the PSR. The only attribute required for a first cause is that it is itself uncaused (or perhaps self-caused). It is erroneous to think that a first cause needs any other attributes than that.

The only attribute required for a first cause is that it itself is uncaused. Self-causation is incoherent. The idea of something causing itself would appear to violate the law of identity, the most fundamental law of logic.

And as for the silliness of a self-causation Friedrich Nietzsche said the following on that matter:

The desire for "freedom of will" in the superlative, metaphysical sense, such as still holds sway, unfortunately, in the minds of the half-educated, the desire to bear the entire and ultimate responsibility for one's actions oneself, and to absolve God, the world, ancestors, chance, and society therefrom, involves nothing less than to be precisely this causa sui, and, with more than Munchausen daring, to pull oneself up into existence by the hair, out of the slough of nothingness.

The absurdly incoherent notion of self-causation is what would be required for libertarian free will to be possible.

@ the OP

It's interesting to discuss causation and Aristotle's four causes. What is not so interesting is to have people speak of a first cause and then illogically jump from that to the idea of that first cause being a god.