(September 8, 2021 at 9:54 am)Klorophyll Wrote: I am not sure what you're driving at exactly. The premise "The universe began to exist" is supported by modern cosmology, namely the BB. Although it doesn't completely preclude an eternal universe, the data we have about the observable universe suggests that there had to be a beggining and eventually some end.
The other premise "Whatever begins to exist has a cause of its existence" is simply the causality principle. Feel free to reject the causality principle, if you're willing to go that far to dodge God's existence.
Causality may be faulty. It requires space and time and current quantum-mechanics to exist. What happened "before" the Big Bang? I don't know. There might have been a cause, but we have no way to model either space or time.
It may be that the past is eternal, or we don't even understand time (it could've been created in the Big Bang). There may be a multiverse, and this was one Big Bang among many.
I find it unlikely that there is a "first cause", but if there was, I believe it would be the most simple thing imaginable. The universe shows us that the complex emerges from the simple.