Aron Ra on The cosmological argument
Aron Ra rejects the cosmological argument as an argument from ignorance that replaces one mystery with a bigger one.
Aron Ra's treatment of the cosmological argument is characteristically blunt. He views it as a dressed-up argument from ignorance: 'I don't know what caused the universe, therefore God.' The argument, he argues, explains nothing — it merely assigns a label to our ignorance and declares the problem solved.
Ra emphasises that the argument's conclusion — 'the universe has a cause' — does not entail anything about the nature of that cause. To leap from an abstract first cause to the God of Christianity requires a chain of unsupported assumptions about the cause's nature, intentions, and identity. The cosmological argument provides none of these.
He is particularly critical of the special pleading involved in exempting God from the causal chain. If everything needs a cause, God needs a cause. If God doesn't need a cause, the universe doesn't need one either. The argument refutes itself.
“If everything has to have a cause, then your God needs a cause too. If your God doesn't need a cause, then neither does the universe. Either way, you've got nothing.”