Since belief in God is independent of rational arguments about whether or not God exists, such arguments, however interesting — and I do find them interesting, otherwise I would not have bothered reading your article — possess little relevance for contemporary believers. They may matter to non-believers in that a person may decide not to believe on the basis of logical arguments. It is also the case that first cause arguments mattered more in the days before the discovery of the Big Bang. Yet you are doing something much more interesting though in arguing that first cause arguments can’t support atheism either, that is, if I read you correctly.
Getting back to the Big Bang, the latest thought on that, assuming that I read Ethan Siegel correctly, is that the math is pointing to the notion that the Big Bang was not the beginning, in fact that it could not have been the beginning. Rather, it came from something, or happened within the context of something. We do not now know, and perhaps may never know¹, what.
The situation is similar to that of the study of the very small, in that things roll out mathematically in ways that offend our notions of what is possible, leading to the “shut up and calculate” school of thought in quantum mechanics. It is as if we are bumping up against the mind of God and finding that math is the only way in.
As it happens, I’m a believer for whom it doesn’t make a lot of difference whether God existed prior to the universe, came into existence along with the universe, or along the the Milky Way galaxy, or along with our solar system, or even just along with the earth. Maybe God evolved into being along with Homo Sapiens sapiens. In any case, I still attend church — that is, I did, before the pandemic — solemnly partaking of the Eucharist. I’ll get back to it when my church re-opens. Thankfully we are not among those churches in an unwise hurry to do so. I prefer waiting and at the same time preserving the lives of my fellow parishioners, especially the older ones — oh wait, I turn 70 in less than a week.
When I want to explore these issues, along with the equally intractable problem of free will, I usually turn to fiction and even humor. Not that these efforts get an overwhelming number of reads.
¹ I’d better watch it here. Dostoevsky has something to say in this regard: “…it is contemptible and senseless to suppose that some laws of nature man will never understand”
