Is Everything an Effect?
"Is everything that IS, an effect?"
Think about that question for a moment. We have a law, very fundamental to science and indeed to rational thought itself, which we call the Law of Causality (or Law of Cause and Effect). According to this law, all effects have causes.
Does is follow that everything must have a cause? One might think so. After all, one of the persistent objections of atheists to the "First Cause" argument (e.g., that God is the "First Cause" of the universe) is "OK, what was the cause for God?" Even the mathematician/logician Bertrand Russell fell into this trap. There can be no First Cause, such a person reasons, because something would have to have preceded and caused it!
Now let me ask a simple question: What is the cause for the law of causality?
Hmmm. If the law of causality really exists, it must have a cause just like anything else. But here we have a dilemma. Wouldn't the source for the law of causality precede the law and thus not have been subject to it? How can we avoid a paradox?
The error in the objection mentioned above lies in a subtle misdefinition of the law of causality. The law states:
All EFFECTS have Causes,
not:
EVERYTHING has a Cause.
In other words, anything that is not an effect need not have a cause! We'll call these entities self-existent. But can and do self-existent entities exist? I think logic requires that the answer be yes, that at least one self-existent entity must exist.
The question I asked above about the source of causality demands it. Either causality was brought into existence as an effect, or it is itself self-existent. If the latter, we have an example of a self-existent, uncaused, real thing. In this case, causality "just is." There's no "reason" for it.
The alternative is to consider that causality was itself brought into being. The cause for causality must then be a self-existent entity not subject to causality. The objection to the First Cause argument for God is therefore invalid, because it is predicated upon an impossible, paradoxical misdefinition of causality.
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