Russel On First Causes: A Cause for Correction

The classic and I think most formidable argument for God’s existence is the argument from first Cause. Bertrand Russell would describe it otherwise: groundless and fallacious (link to article). He tells us how the argument goes, and how it goes wrong. “Everything we see in this world has a cause, and as you go back in the chain of causes further and further you must come to a First Cause, and to that First Cause you give the name of God.” This regression, which is the engine of the argument, is also its demise—if everything needs a cause, then so does God. But, “if there can be anything without a cause, it may just as well be the world as God, so that there cannot be any validity in that argument.” And so the first cause argument goes wrong.

But I think the real, or at least the first, error lies in Russell’s construal of the argument. There’s two schools of the cosmological (first cause) argument—the Kalam and the falsafa. The former seeks a cause for the beginning of the universe, the second, a cause for its sheer (non-necessary) existence. When you conflate these two, like Russell has done, you get fallacy. You end up saying everything needs a (external) cause (a part of the contingency argument’s first premise), but in the next breath, when you have come to God, that there is something which doesn’t need a (external) cause (an admission of the Kalam cosmological argument). But does that mean the cosmological argument is itself flawed?

Russell says, “[the] argument, I suppose, does not carry very much weight nowadays, because, in the first place, cause is not quite what it used to be.” Ironically, it is the proper conception of causality that secures the validity of the argument.

The Kalam argument does not hold that everything has a cause. It holds only that those things that have a beginning have a cause for their beginning. The question, “Who made God” is properly dismissed by answering “no one.” The Kalam argument only holds that beginning things, such as the universe, need causes, not beginningless things such as God. Russell himself agrees!—“the idea that things must have a beginning is really due to the poverty of our imagination.” But if God can be without beginning (“cause”), why not quit early and say the universe is beginningless? “If there can be anything without a cause, it may just as well be the
world as God…” But is the universe really an equal substitute for God in matters of eternal existence? In a bout of redundancy, Russell states there is no “reason why [the world] should not have always existed,” and “no reason to suppose that the world had a beginning at all.” And even if it did begin, “there is no reason why the world could not have come into being without a cause.”

But if saying “there are no reasons for ____” demolishes an argument, let me be the first to say—“there is reason.” And so, I have re-established the cosmological argument.