The Only Adequate Cause

We live in a cause-effect universe: Every effect must have a cause—yea, an adequate or sufficient cause—to explain it. A wrist-watch implies a watch-maker. A house implies a designer and builder. The computer on which I am composing these words required great intelligence, skill, and power to conceive, design, and build.

If I said that a monkey built my watch, a two-year-old child designed and built his parents’ house, or my computer resulted from a huge explosion in an electronics parts warehouse, you would immediately know that I was being facetious or that I was delusional. I would be suggesting causes, but not causes that are adequate or sufficient to explain these respective effects. When related to the beginning of the material universe, the cause-effect principle is referred to as “the law of causality”and is an essential part of the “Cosmological Argument” regarding origins.

The cause-effect rule is axiomatic, admitted by all observant and rational people. It is so self-evident it needs no further proof. Those who deny the existence of God—as the Bible reveals and describes Him—must explain how a universe, incomparably more complicated than anything men can invent and build, came into being. Their glib explanation, that unintelligent forces/matter coincided without design or planning, and the vast universe (of which the earth is but a tiny speck) “just happened,” is not only woefully inadequate—it is unworthy of rational, intelligent men.

We and our universe are either (1) eternal (i.e., we have always existed) or (2) in some way and at some time, we and the universe had a beginning. An overabundance of evidence exists to prove that the physical universe (of which we are a part) is depleting, decaying, and wearing out. Contrariwise,that which is eternal is necessarily self-existent and cannot change or decay. We and all other physical things thus had a beginning point and a cause of beginning, which implies “something” or “someone” which/who had no beginning, but has always existed.

We (1) created ourselves, (2) began by some cosmic accident/chance, or (3) an adequate Cause designed and created us. If we made ourselves, we had to exist before we existed. Only fools would so argue. Did we just“happen” by some inexplicable “accident”? Accident is not an adequate cause even for a paperclip, yet atheists and evolutionists have nothing better to offer for the existence of the universe. Objective, reasonable minds understand that our vast physical universe demands the existence of an adequate Cause.

The Bible sets forth the only adequate Cause in God—The eternal (i.e., without beginning or ending), self-existent, omniwise, omniscient, and omnipotent One. “For every house is builded by someone; but he that built all things is God” (Heb. 3:4). How can any rational person disagree with David’s exclamation: “The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God” (Psa. 14:1)? ---Dub McClish, The Scripturecache.com

---Mike Riley, Gospel Snippets