Why I Am Not a Christian

You know, of course, that the Catholic Church has laid it down as a dogma that the existence of God can be proved by unaided reason. That is a somewhat curious dogma, but it is one of their dogmas. They had to introduce it because at one time the Freethinkers People who form their opinions on the basis of reason rather than tradition or authority adopted the habit of saying that there were such and such arguments which mere reason might urge against the existence of God, but of course they knew as a matter of faith that God did exist. The arguments and the reasons were set out at great length, and the Catholic Church felt that they must stop it. Therefore, they laid it down that the existence of God can be proved by unaided reason, and they had to set up what they considered were arguments to prove it. There are, of course, a number of them, but I shall take only a few.

THE FIRST CAUSE ARGUMENT

Perhaps the simplest and easiest to understand is the argument of the First Cause. It is maintained that everything we see in this world has a cause, and as you go back in the chain of causes further and further, you must come to a First Cause, and to that First Cause, you give the name of God. That argument, I suppose, does not carry very much weight nowadays, because, in the first place, "cause" is not quite what it used to be. The philosophers and the men of science have been examining the concept of cause, and it has not anything like the vitality that it used to have.