Scenario #1: A homicide
detective is investigating a murder. He begins his search for the murderer at
the end result of the action (i.e. the crime scene). He uses blood splatter
evidence to trace the trajectory of the bullet. He finds the bullet and
analyzes the firing pattern to determine the gun it was fired from, etc.,
working his way back to the murderer (watch any episode of CSI to see this in
action).
Explanation:
Scenario #1: In this
scenario, a major assumption that the homicide detective makes is the belief
that every action has a cause that precedes it, and thus the series of events
leading to the murder can be reconstructed and traced back to the originator of
the crime, i.e., the first cause of the murder. Whether that is an affair, or
money, or abuse as a child, whatever it is, there is the assumption that
something (or some-things) happened. And that something(s) set in motion a
chain of causal events that led ultimately to the resulting action, i.e. the
murder.
This basic premise can
be taken even further, because everything that exists in the universe can be
traced down the chain of causality all the way to the beginning; one event
causes another, which causes another, which causes another, ad infinitum. In
other words, the whole universe is a vast, interlocking chain of things that
come into existence because other things cause them to be. Our murderer would
not be here to murder anyone without billions of causes, from the marriages of
his parents and their parents all the way back through the development of the
first protein molecule to the cooling of the galaxies and the Big Bang.
Everything that comes
into existence must either exist by itself (i.e. by its
own essence or nature), called an Independent Being, or it must exist because
of something else (it was brought into existence/caused), called a
Dependent Being. If it is an Independent Being and exists by its own
essence/nature, then its being-ness is sufficient to explain its own existence,
and it cannot have been created because that would mean it was caused to exist
by something else, and thus it exists eternally. It cannot not have these
qualities and still exist as an Independent Being, just as a triangle cannot
not have three sides and still be a triangle.
If, on the other hand,
something is a Dependent Being and exists not by its own essence, then it needs
a cause, a reason outside itself for its existence. Dependent Beings cannot
cause themselves. They are dependent on their causes. But does the universe as
a whole have a cause? Is there a First Cause, an uncaused cause of the whole
chain of causality in the universe? If not, then there is an infinite regress
of causes, with no first link in the great cosmic chain. If so, then there is
an eternal, necessary, independent, self-explanatory being with nothing above
it, before it, or supporting it. It would have to explain itself as well as
everything else, for if it needed something else as its explanation, its
reason, its cause, then it would not be the first and uncaused cause. Such a
being would have to be God. If we can prove there is such a First Cause, we
will have proved there is a God.
Why must there be a
First Cause? If, as previously mentioned, the universe contains only Dependent
Beings, then the whole universe is unexplained without a First Cause. If there
is no First Cause, each particular thing in the universe is explained in the
short run by some other thing, but nothing is explained in the long run, and
the universe as a whole is not explained. If there is no First Cause, then the
universe is like a train moving without an engine. Each car's motion is
explained proximately by the motion of the car in front of it: the caboose
moves because the boxcar pulls it, the boxcar moves because the cattle car
pulls it, etc. But if there is no engine to pull the first car and the whole
train, the train cars cannot move of their own accord. The universe as a whole
existing wholly independent of some First Cause is like a train moving without
an engine.
Therefore, the universe
must have a First Cause, since everything that exists in the universe is dependent (not in its nature sufficient to explain its own existence), and that cause must be an Independent Being. If there
is no Independent Being, then the whole chain of causality in the whole of the
universe is dependent on nothing and could not exist. But it does exist.
Therefore there is a First Cause, that First Cause is itself uncaused and must
then be an Independent Being, and this Independent Being is necessarily eternal
and explained and justified wholly by its own being-ness, i.e. God.
