Ebon: Unmoved Mover

If the flaw of the ontological argument is circularity, the fallacy of the cosmological argument is special pleading. Namely, it asserts without good reason that everything except God needs a cause. But why should this be? If anything can exist without a cause, we could just as well conclude that it is the universe itself that is uncaused, existing eternally and giving rise to all other cause and effect. This hypothesis has just as much explanatory power as the hypothesis that God created the universe, and it is more parsimonious, requiring fewer additional assumptions. Therefore, all other things being equal, it is to be preferred.

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Even if we accept this argument's logic, all it proves is that there was a first cause. It does not prove that this first cause still exists today; it does not prove that this first cause has any interest in or awareness of human beings; it does not prove that this first cause is omnipotent or omniscient or benevolent. It does not even prove that the first cause is conscious or a person. An atheist could accept this entire chain of logic and then posit that the first cause was a purely natural phenomenon.

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Next, premise 4 holds that anything that begins to exist has a cause of its existence. But we already know that this is not true. Strange as it seems, science has discovered some natural objects that come into being uncaused. One such class of object is called virtual particles. According to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, the product of energy and time must always be greater than a certain constant; therefore, as we examine apparently empty space over shorter and shorter time scales, we discover increasingly violent, and increasingly brief, fluctuations of energy. Since energy is equivalent to matter by E = mc², on time scales that are sufficiently short these fluctuations can be so violent as to create actual particles that exist for only a fleeting instant before returning to nothingness. These particles are not merely a hypothetical construct: they produce detectable effects that can be, and have been, experimentally measured. However, there is literally no specific cause of their existence. Nor is this phenomenon merely an inconsequential anomaly. Some physicists have proposed hypotheses in which a similar phenomenon, under the right circumstances, could have given rise to our universe.

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