First Premiss: Everything that Begins to Exist Has a Cause of Its Existence

Abstract

We may now return to a consideration of our first premiss, that everything that begins to exist has a cause of its existence. The phrase ‘cause of its existence’ needs clarification. Here I do not mean sustaining or conserving cause, but creating cause. We are not looking here for any continual ground of being, but for something that brings about the inception of existence of another thing. Applied to the universe, we are asking, was the beginning of the universe caused or uncaused? In this book I do not propose to construct an elaborate defence of this first premiss. Not only do considerations of time and space (in their practical, not philosophical, sense!) preclude such, but I think it to be somewhat unnecessary as well. For the first premiss is so intuitively obvious, especially when applied to the universe, that probably no one in his right mind really believes it to be false. Even Hume himself confessed that his academic denial of the principle’s demonstrability could not eradicate his belief that it was nonetheless true.¹⁴⁶ Indeed the idea that anything, especially the whole universe, could pop into existence uncaused is so repugnant that most thinkers intuitively recognise that the universe’s beginning to exist entirely uncaused out of nothing is incapable of sincere affirmation.