Generate text that refutes this claim: Everything that begins to exist must have a cause. Since the Universe began to exist it must be caused:  Every human, every being, every object in the Universe is a finite and contingent being. These all have causes, yet a causal chain cannot be infinitely long. Humans are born, stars form from gases, even the Universe had a beginning 4.3 billion years ago. Nothing in the Universe causes itself. In order to escape the logical impossibility of the infinite causality loop it is necessary to posit the existence of an uncaused cause. This cause exists outside of the Universe, as it is cause of the Universe. [1] Without a creator, the Universe is a logical absurdity. Atheism cannot provide an alternative explanation to a creator, and thus fails quite literally from the beginning.  [1] Craig, William Lane. 1979. The Kalam Cosmological Argument. London: MacMillan.
y epistemology religion church faith religion general god morality secularism
If everything has a cause, then so too must the creator. Trying to place the deity outside of the spatio-temporal realm of the Universe is not a good argument, as nothing can be said meaningfully about what is “outside” the Universe, since we cannot observe or detect it. [1] Furthermore, saying God, or a creator, is uncaused and always existed is a poor argument because again this cannot be verified in any meaningful way. Irrespective of these problems, however, the argument falls down because it presupposes that the Universe has a cause, which is not necessarily the case. The very notion of causation is built into a temporal understanding of physics, which may not have been the case in the “pre-Universe”. Atheism can survive in the presence of science, theism cannot. If theism cannot survive, then neither can the agnostic middle ground based on the plausibility of theism.  [1] Mackie, J. L. 1982. The Miracle of Theism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.