Richard Dawkins on The cosmological argument
Dawkins dismisses the cosmological argument as a logical regress that explains nothing, since God would also need a cause.
Dawkins's treatment of the cosmological argument focuses on what he sees as its fatal flaw: the arbitrary exemption of God from the very causal principle the argument invokes. If everything that exists must have a cause, then God must have a cause. If God can exist without a cause, then so can the universe. Either way, the argument fails to establish what it claims.
He is less interested in the philosophical subtleties of the argument — distinctions between contingent and necessary beings, or the difference between temporal and ontological causation — than in the rhetorical move he sees at its heart: a demand for explanation that conveniently stops at God. Dawkins views this as intellectual dishonesty dressed up as philosophy.
In debates, Dawkins typically concedes that the origin of the universe is a genuine mystery — but insists that 'I don't know' is a more honest answer than 'God did it,' and that science has a better track record of eventually answering hard questions than theology does.
“To say that God is the answer to the question of the origin of the universe is to commit the most elementary logical fallacy: it explains nothing, because the explanation itself needs explaining.”