The first problem is the premise that everything has a cause.
That’s because it’s the wrong premise.
The premise is that everything
physical has a beginning.
You reach that result from inductive reasoning, i.e. everything I see has a cause, therefore everything must have a cause. You can look at a tree and say it came from a seed, and that a baby came from a sperm and an egg, or that the Grand Canyon was carved by wind and water. But we don’t see and have never seen something from nothing, only changes in form. Even quantum particles winking in and out in what we like to think of as empty space are formed of existing energy, not out of nothing. That something could be created out of nothing is beyond our power of inductive reasoning, because we’ve never seen a single example, let alone enough to make generalizations about whether such an event would have a cause. So despite being presented as the product of inductive reasoning, the premise is not really justified by inductive reasoning.
You’ve made a good observation… but followed it to a bad conclusion. It boils down to “because nothing we can observe fails to have come from something else, and no evidence exists that anything physical and created has ever failed to have come from something else… therefore we cannot conclude that all physical, created things come from something else.” That’s just weak logic. At the very least, we can conclude that there is no evidence to the contrary in the universe that physical things fail to have been created from something else.
Second, even if you accept the premise, the “solution” of a first mover is no solution at all, it simply says there must be something that doesn’t have a cause and we’ll call that the first mover, or god. The problem is that if the premise is true, there could be no such being because such a being would have to be without a cause.
Again, your premise needs to be firmed up: you’re being a bit too casual in your expression. The solution is that, since the observation leads to infinite regress, and there cannot be an infinite regress in the physical world, there must be a start to that chain – and that start is something
that does not exist as a part of the physical world. The ‘first mover’ works not because he’s part of the chain – but because God is separate from the chain and fundamentally different from creation. The fact that God isn’t part of the chain (but rather, that He merely kicks off the chain) is the reason that the argument works.
Those of us who don’t believe remain unconvinced because the argument is ultimately unconvincing.
That’s because you’re mis-stating the argument.
Those people who accept the argument already believe in god before hand.
I’m failing to see the value of this statement. Conversely, I can claim that those who reject the argument already reject belief in God beforehand. See? It doesn’t really say anything about the merits of the argument.
As a tool for conversion it’s a failure.
I’m not sure it’s a ‘tool for conversion’, but rather, a logical argument that’s valuable for discussion. No one can force a person to come to belief in God; no one can force a person to relinquish their barriers to belief. Rather, we can discuss why belief in God makes sense, and provide assertions for you to consider.
