by Kenn Barry

In April 1985, Kenn Barry — a researcher at NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California — posted this essay to the Usenet newsgroup net.religion as part of an ongoing discussion of the "First Cause" argument for God's existence. It stands apart from the surrounding debate for its unusual combination of personal spiritual autobiography and honest scientific engagement: Barry doesn't pretend to arrive at God, but he maps with precision what science cannot reach.

The Cosmological Argument (or "First Cause" argument) holds that every effect has a cause, that the series of causes cannot extend infinitely backwards, and that therefore a first, uncaused cause must exist — which many identify with God. The argument is associated with Aristotle, al-Kindi, Aquinas, and Leibniz, though critiques of it go back just as far. Barry's version neither endorses nor dismisses the argument; instead he uses it to delineate the boundary of the physical and the metaphysical.

There has been some discussion of the "First Cause" argument for the existence of God recently, but I think it has missed the real essence of the issue.

When I was 13, and experiencing my first doubts about the validity of the religious teachings I had absorbed as a child, the First Cause argument became the last refuge of my religious belief; a Godless universe seemed to have no way to get going.

This attitude lasted for perhaps 4–5 months, at which time I saw the flaw that many here on the net have pointed out, that God does not solve the First Cause paradox, only pushes it back one level (what caused God, instead of what caused the universe). At that point, I became agnostic.

But the paradox remains unsolved. We have strong scientific evidence that the universe has not existed forever; it seems to have begun some few billion years ago (estimates change frequently, but it's maybe ~20 billion). This fact should make those who believe that all of reality can be encompassed in a very strict cause-and-effect system uncomfortable. Either at least one uncaused event has, indeed, occurred (the universe began), or cause-and-effect's validity must be pushed back before the universe began, and something must be hypothesized that caused the universe to begin. But either answer shows that a strict cause-and-effect explanation of reality is inadequate. If the universe has not always existed, you must have either a first, uncaused event, or an infinite regression of causes which reach past the physical universe to a metaphysical before-the-universe.

There is a similar limit one reaches to the cause-and-effect paradigm when one looks into the world of the subatomic particles, as Michael Ellis pointed out in his interesting article. Just as cause-and-effect demands an infinity of time to avoid the First Cause paradox, so it would need an infinite regression of ever-more-fundamental particles to explain the workings of the universe as we know it to be. But quantum physics holds that there is no infinite regress; instead there is a size limit below which the law of cause-and-effect no longer applies (I am of course oversimplifying, here). Individual events are truly random, and all rules are statistical in nature.

So, the solution to the paradox? Simply to recognize that the domain of the cause-and-effect principle, while very large, is ultimately local, not universal. It cannot explain the motion of subatomic particles, and it cannot explain the origin of the universe, for it is local to that universe, and cannot be applied to a framework larger than the universe, such as any framework which speaks of the universe having "begun."

There is mystery here. There is metaphysics, in that these questions go beyond the defined domain of physics, the 20-billion year old universe we all know and love. Whether anything answering the description of God has a role in all this remains an unanswered question, but it seems clear we must go beyond the local rules that apply within the universe (and only at the macroscopic level even there) when attempting to deal with the origin of that universe. I suspect that claiming to know anything about this may be unjustifiable arrogance, but such claims are made as frequently by materialists as by the religious. The assumptions of the materialists are perhaps more minimal, and may therefore seem more reasonable, but they're still assumptions, and some of them, like cause-and-effect, are looking a bit shaky.

"The universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we CAN imagine."

Colophon

Written by Kenn Barry, NASA-Ames Research Center, Mountain View, California, and posted to the Usenet newsgroup net.religion on April 21, 1985. Original Message-ID: [email protected].

The attribution of the closing quotation is uncertain — Barry attributed it to Sir James Jeans; David Harwood of the University of Maryland replied that it was more likely J.B.S. Haldane, the founder of mathematical genetics and a writer of religious essays.

Preserved from the Usenet archive for the Good Work Library by the New Tianmu Anglican Church, 2026.

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