Dear Egg,
Nobody thinks a baby just… showed up.
When a new life arrives, we don’t stand around scratching our heads wondering whether it appeared out of thin air. We don’t assume it popped into existence for no reason at all. We know better. We know it came from somewhere. We know it was caused. Created. Set in motion by things that existed before it.
That instinct runs deep.
Everywhere we look, we see chains. This led to that. That caused this. One event pushed the next, and the next, and the next. We may not know all the details, but we’re confident about the structure. Things don’t just happen. They come from something.
So when someone asks, “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?” we smile, because we know what the question is really poking at. Not poultry, but causation. Origins. Beginnings.
The cosmological argument starts right there, with that very ordinary intuition:
Everything that begins to exist has a cause.
Not a controversial claim. Not a mystical one. Just the way we already understand the world to work.
And the universe, inconveniently, appears to have begun.
Whether we talk about the Big Bang, cosmic expansion, or the limits of time itself, we seem to run into the same wall: there was a point at which this whole thing wasn’t yet in motion. A moment before the first domino fell. A first “something” that kicked everything else into gear.
And that’s where the argument takes its turn.
Because if everything in the universe is caused by something else within the universe, then the universe itself can’t be the ultimate cause. You can’t explain the whole chain by pointing to one of its links. Eventually, the explanation has to step outside the system.
So the argument says: there must be a first cause. An uncaused cause. Something that didn’t need to be pushed because it was the push.
And whatever that first cause is… that’s what we mean when we say “God.”
Notice what this argument does not try to prove.
It doesn’t prove a personality.
It doesn’t prove intentions.
It doesn’t prove commandments, miracles, or ongoing intervention.
This “God” could be as impersonal as gravity. As momentary as the Big Bang. A single act that set the universe in motion and then never showed up again. That idea fits perfectly with deism, the view that God was the spark, not the supervisor.
The cosmological argument isn’t interested in who God is.
It’s interested in whether the chain can exist without a beginning.
And it concludes that it can’t.
So, dear Egg, we thank you for the reminder:
Things don’t just appear.
Chains don’t hang in midair.
Somewhere, something had to go first.
And then we turn, once again, to the reader.
If the universe requires a first cause…
What do you think that cause would have to be like?
Timeless?
Powerful?
Necessary?
Impersonal?
Conscious?
Brief?
Eternal?
And at what point does calling it “God” start to feel like a name… rather than an explanation?
Causally yours,
~ The Radical Left