The Principle Of Causality Defended: Whatever Begins To Exist Has A Cause

The Christian Philosopher Episode 29: The Principle Of Causality - Whatever Begins To Exist Has A Cause

I have been doing a series of videos on how to prove that the world was created, and I covered 4 arguments to show that the universe began to exist.

SO IF THE UNIVERSE BEGAN TO EXIST, IT SEEMS LIKE IT MUST HAVE BEEN CAUSED

This is a very common sense intuition that nearly all of us have (at least those of us who are honest and not trying to avoid believing in God)

This has been called in philosophy THE PRINCIPLE OF CAUSALITY -
Whatever begins to exist has a cause

And it seems clearly obvious to most people

Things dont’ just pop into existence without some cause

Most philosophers in both the East and the West have taken this principle as obviously true and not in need of proof.

But there have been a minority of philosophers who want to call it into question - is it really true that things that come into existence need a cause? How do we know that? How can we prove that statement?

Personally I myself became VERY INTERESTED in this question - so much so that I did my doctoral work in philosophy on this question and have written an entire book on this topic - St Thomas Aquinas And The Principle Of Sufficient Reason - where I defend this principle of causality along with some others.

Of course I’m not going to go into all of those arguments here in this video

But what I do want to do is offer a brief defense of this principle here and if you want more you can check out that book.

Again this is the principle I want to argue is true:

WHATEVER BEGINS TO EXIST HAS A CAUSE
How do we know this.

I think we can offer at least three defenses of this version of the principle of causality

The Argument From Intuition
The Argument From Inductive Reasoning
The Argument From The Principle of Sufficient Reason

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