Rational Agnostic
Well-Known Member
The cosmological argument for the existence of god has many variations, but all of them boil down to something like this (or very similar): "everything in the universe has a cause, therefore the universe had a cause." Yet even if every component (object, event, etc.) in the universe has a cause, this does not logically imply that the *set* consisting of every component in the universe (the universe itself) has a cause, anymore than the fact that every human has a mother would imply that the human race has a mother (in the same literal sense of the word). The point is that even if it is true that everything in the universe must have a cause, the universe itself need not have a cause. We cannot base our assumptions about the *set* of all things based on observations of the properties of individual things in the set, since even if the properties hold true for all elements in the set, they need not hold true for the set itself.