Religion: My problem with the first cause argument

I'm going to do my usual thing and talk about how awesome my life is (apart from being dirt poor) before i get into the main meat of the post. Yesterday I was conscripted into a nice little family outing with my two older sisters, their friends and of course my adorable niece and nephew. We spent the day at Seaworld, it was fun, but I guess as you get older amusement parks seem less and less fun.

Mostly my older sister took care of my niece which consisted of having to sit with her on the merry-go-round all day. I spent the day accompanying my nephew on all the exciting rides he could barely go on and then cheering him up after being told he was too short for some of the rides. The highlight of the day was high ropes course with maybe the dolphin show coming a close second (I think I shall have to do a post on how humans treat dolphins at some stage).

My neice's souvenir from seaworld, which I kidnapped from her room.

The high ropes scared me. I was shuddering in fear the whole way through. I was there accompanying my young and therefore too-short-to-go-on-the-course-unaccompanied nephew which meant that any 50m high tightrope he walked, I had to do too. If he was scared he certainly didn't show it, he just kept walking rickety rope after rickety rope.

It was a fun day and I came back exhausted. Which is interesting because this next topic is not quite so fun but equally exhausting.

Why does the universe exist in the state it is in? Every effect must have a cause, ergo the universe must have a cause... 


So what caused the universe? Well, duh, it's god. Who else could have done it? It would have had to have been a god!

This little argument is called the first cause argument. At first it seems like a solid argument for the existence of god. That is until we start applying the same logic to god:

So what caused god's existence? God himself must have a cause otherwise he wouldn't exist? Did another god create god? If so then where did the other god come from, who created HIM?

To which christians and theists alike will claim "ah but God exists outside of time!"

That is a contrived statement. It sounds like absolute bullshit. Big-Banging atheists are just as bad (as opposed to gang-banging atheists who seem quite "gansta"). You ask them what caused the big bang and they will not know. They will claim that the question is ludicrous because time did not exist before the big bang.

Another contrived answer. All events must have causes! Even the popping into existence of time itself!. At this point in the discussion, quantum mechanics, fresh from repairing physicist Bob's old quantum will say that causality didn't exist in the big bang. Quantum mechanics does my head in with the rusty old ratchet he uses to fix singularities in black holes.

Now the scientific community ain't all that bad with respect to this conundrum. There are a few hero phsyicists, vainly trying to prove/disprove string theory so that their explanation of "universal membranes colliding together to create big bangs" will solve this puzzle.

Sound confusing, doesn't it? It isn't as bad as you think though...
The premise is that if a universe can be imagined as a big rubber sheet with gravity creating dints in it then what happens if there are two or more universes in close proximity with each other? What happens if their gravitic dints touch each other? The answer is a big bang. Thus the universe has a cause.

I hope string theorists have success with proving their hypothesis, because  right now the unexplained first cause conundrum is the biggest concept leveling the playing field between Theism and Atheism.