Does the Universe Really Need a Cause?

FRANK: Have you had people persist in trying to say, “I'm just agnostic at the beginning; I don't think that it necessarily entails this spaceless, timeless, immaterial cause.”

DR. CRAIG: Yes, but on a different basis. What they would deny is that the causal principle can be applied to the universe as a whole, and that therefore there doesn't need to be any cause of the universe. It's not that there is one but we don't know its nature; it's that there doesn't need to be one. And I think that these people tend to be very scientistic in their thinking rather than philosophical. They think of the causal principle as a sort of physical principle, akin to, say, the laws of ideal gases, or the laws of thermodynamics, that only apply in and to the universe. They don't understand that the causal principle is a metaphysical principle that applies to being as such, and that therefore if the universe came into being, it's metaphysically impossible that being could arise from non-being. There has to be some sort of transcendent being that gives being to the universe and brings it into existence. So there's just a fundamental category mistake on the part of these folks in thinking of the causal principle as akin to a law of nature rather than to a first principle of metaphysics.