FIRST CAUSE
According to Professor Russell, the concept of a First Cause maintains:
1. Everything we see in this world has a cause.
2. If you go back far enough, you reach a first cause, and that First Cause you give the name God.
To Bertrand this line of reasoning had the fallacy:
“If everything must have a cause then God must have a cause.
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.”
Fortunately, Russell’s proposed hypothesis can be scientifically (i.e. experimentally) tested.
First, the validity of the First Cause argument is based on the following premise:
“The ‘First Cause’– by itself (whatever or whoever it is) – can account for what we see.”
This implies that not all things make for a sufficient ‘First Cause’.
For example, the author of this treatise is too small to be a suitable ‘First Cause’
for the creation of the known universe.
Second, it is presumed (for the purposes of this essay) that Bertrand’s term ‘the world’
can be used interchangeable with the term ‘natural processes’, or known ‘natural laws’.
To test Russell’s assertion, let us start with the question,
“Is the world, or the known laws of nature, all by itself, sufficient to explain what we see?”
To take a specific example, “Are the known laws of nature, by themselves, sufficient to explain how Life came into being?”
We start with another Question: “When this author’s body (or the reader’s, or even a bacteria) dies, what will happen to it?”
What do the experiments, and everyone’s experience, reveal?
Answer. As empirically verified, every organic body decomposes, once it dies.
The only unanswered questions are:
1. How will it decompose*?
2. How long will it take to decompose?
This leads to a second question,
“If dead bodies always decompose into smaller molecules, then what assembled the original smaller molecules into a living entity?” Wishful thinking**?
The known laws of nature, scientifically speaking, only show death and decay***. They do not show the creation of life.
The obstacles to the ‘spontaneous generation of life’ are more than what the known laws of Nature ‘can do on their own’.
Therefore the ‘world’ or ‘natural processes’ are insufficient First Causes, because it cannot create Life by itself.
We can now ask, “Is a supernatural God a sufficient First Cause?”
We know that intelligent beings can create systems. Furthermore, more complex systems require greater intelligence**** .
Lastly, it also takes a certain amount of desire (will) to dig all the materials out of the ground, and fabricate/assemble it into a system.
An omniscient and omnipotent God is all knowing, and all powerful.
He has the will, and the ability to design and make complex living cells, even when natural laws ‘want’ to decompose them.
God is therefore a valid ‘First Cause’ for life, and the universe, whereas ‘the world’ is not.
This is the evidence that everyone knows. This is why the Psalmist said, ‘The fool has said in his heart, there is no God.’
Bertrand Russell erred***** when he did not sufficiently consider the obstacles facing his proposal, “If there can be anything without a cause, it may just as well be the world.”
* E.g. Digestion, cremation, simple disintegration, etc.
** ‘What about the Miller-Urey/amino acid experiments?’ The Miller-Urey/amino acid experiments produced protein precursors, not actual living bodies. This is the difference between making bricks, and making a mile high sky-scraper from the bricks. Actually, the problems are bigger than this simplified analogy. Therefore, the amino acid experiment does not support Russell’s proposal, as no life formed with this experiment.
*** Russell acknowledged this decay in the section ARGUMENT BY DESIGN. Unfortunately, he did not recognize the implications of this decay.
**** The idiom ‘rocket science’ implies that it takes the smartest people to make the most complex systems. If we wanted to, we could do experiments that would show a correlation between ‘intelligence’ and the complexity of a system.
***** If anyone maintains that ‘the world’ is a sufficient First Cause, in the face of the experimental evidence, then we must ask if some underlying philosophy, or attitude (and not empirical evidence and methodology) drives this reluctance/refusal to acknowledge the truth.