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“Faith-Building Fridays | A Cause for the Uncaused?”
Categories: evidences / apologetics
Every effect has a cause. That’s just common sense, isn’t it? We intuitively understand that whenever something happens (e.g. an apple falls from a tree), the event was caused by some force that acted upon it (e.g. the apple falls due to gravity). Every effect has a cause. In scientific circles, this is known as the Law of Causality.
Those who believe in God lean heavily on the Law of Causality. Just like apples don’t fall from trees without a cause, neither do universes explode into existence without a cause. So, we argue, the Law of Causality points to God. In response, some nonbelievers have raised an interesting objection,
“If God created all of these things, then who or what created God?”
It’s an intriguing question to be sure, but it has a simple answer – nothing created God. He is eternal, uncreated, and uncaused. Perhaps that answer seems like a cop-out to you, but I’d urge you to recognize that it makes a lot of sense. You see, while the Law of Causality holds true in the natural world, philosophers and thinkers have pointed out for millennia that in a world of cause and effect something or someone must be the first cause. There must be some force whose existence isn’t dependent on some other cause. Think about it this way…
Imagine that our world is like a long trail of dominos being knocked over. Every domino falls because it is struck by the previous piece (every effect has a cause), but if you trace your way back through the fallen dominos, you’ll see that something had to knock over that first domino. In that trail, something must have knocked over that first domino without having been knocked over by a domino itself. Something must have been ABLE to knock over that first domino without NEEDING to be knocked over by a previous domino.
Logic demands that there must have been an eternal, uncreated, uncaused first cause that set our world in motion. Christians call Him, “God.” God is not just another domino. He is the force that was ABLE to create this world without NEEDING to be created Himself. And that’s exactly how the Bible presents Him, “He is the Alpha and the Omega… who is and who was and who is to come” (Revelation 1:8).
- Jonathan Banning
